Conclusions

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So what do we see when we arrange the books of the New Testament in chronological order?

  1. In all probability, Jesus was first experienced in visions experienced by a few Jewish zealots looking for the arrival of the Messiah. His name – Yeshua – is symbolic and means ‘The Lord is Salvation’.

  2. These visions led to ‘revelations’ that convinced these zealots that the Messiah would soon arrive on the Earth to set God’s plans in motion.

  3. A small number of Jews were convinced of the veracity of these claims and sought to spread the message that the Messiah/Jesus was soon to arrive on Earth.

  4. A few years later, a Hellenized Jew who called himself Paul, argued that the Messiah – ‘Christ’ in Greek – had died in the heavenly realm and been raised from the dead by God. His sacrifice, Paul insisted, was a propitiation for human sin, both Jew and Gentile.

  5. Also according to Paul, the Christ’s arrival would trigger the resurrection of the dead, prophesied in Daniel 12:1-3 and Isaiah 26:19-20, the final judgement (Daniel 7:22) and the establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth, governed by God’s Chosen (Daniel 7:27). Regrettably, he drew most of these conclusion from a book, Daniel, now known to be fake.

  6. Paul ‘proved’ that the Messiah-figure he’d seen in his visions really was the Messiah prophesied in Jewish scripture by quoting from them extensively.

  7. Soon after Paul died, the original group of visionaries, who had had their differences with Paul, were all but wiped out when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

  8. Around the same time, an unknown cultist took it upon himself to write an allegorical history of the Christ’s activities. He based this allegory on Paul’s teaching about the Christ as well as events from Jewish scripture. He set his story in Galilee some forty years earlier and has his fictional Christ, Jesus, prophesy the arrival on Earth of the real Messiah whom he calls the Son of Man, after Daniel 7:13-14.

  9. Two other cultists set about altering and improving this original history. One re-establishes the Christ’s Jewish credentials, and extending references to and allegorising aspects of Jewish scripture.

  10. A completely imaginary history of the early cult was created by one of these writers, smoothing over the differences between the beliefs of the earliest visionaries and Paul.

  11. Other writers, including some pretending to be the late Paul, continue to write of Jesus the Christ as a celestial saviour.

  12. A fourth history of the Christ was created, this time providing Jesus with a bodily resurrection (contrary to Paul) and discarding some of the cult’s earlier beliefs, the imminence of God’s kingdom on Earth included. The authors of this account imply that dead believers will awaken to new life in heaven (John 14:2)

  13. The idea that the Messiah will arrive imminently was, however, kept alive by other writers. One anticipated the Christ would soon purge the world of evil-doers and bring a holy, bejewelled Jerusalem down to Earth.

  14. Others soon abandoned the idea that any of this would happen soon. The arrival of the Christ was postponed indefinitely.

  15. The notion the Son of Man/Messiah/Jesus had yet to appear was also dropped as the church adopted the allegorical gospels as real history. It began to expel those who disputed the gospels’ veracity and denied that Jesus was the Christ incarnate.

  16. While the term is not used in the New Testament the Christ’s delayed arrival was, from the early second century, thought of as a second coming.

  17. The church, once well established went on to embellish doctrine, adding the Triune God; eternal life in Heaven; the elevation of Mary and the saints; the New Testament as the Word of God and the infallibility of the Bible as a whole. Some of these were, and are, in direct contradiction of the beliefs of the earliest Christians.

  18. Believers today, if they read the New Testament at all, take its traditional order at face value, which distorts the evolution of its ideas. They allow their preachers to smooth over what now appear to be random contradictions (hermeneutics).

  19. Today’s Christians believe primarily in the heavenly Christ, who forgives their sins and guides their lives from Heaven. They also hold on to the belief that he was manifested as a human, and vociferously oppose the idea he was and is only an imagined supernatural being.

  20. At the same time they prioritise Paul’s teaching about him over anything he is made to say in the gospels .

That how I see it anyway. The more time I spend looking at the New Testament books in their correct order, as well as what this reveals about the beliefs of early Christians, the more I’m driven to these conclusions. They’re the only ones that make sense of all that we find in their writings. I realise this is contentious. Mythicism is not widely accepted but it is the only position that explains the recorded facts as we have them. The original Jesus was seen (in the mind of the first visionaries and by many later) as a heavenly Messiah. While the gospels were generally accepted as historical many decades after they were written, they are anomalies in the expression of the early faith. They can only be seen as allegories of the living, dying and rising of a cosmic saviour, a sequence not uncommon in the mythologies of the ancient world.

I recognise too that there may well be other problems with this position, which I’ll get to soon.

The New New Testament: part 3

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Following the fourth gospel is the epistle of Jude, written at the end of the first century. It is certainly not by a brother of Jesus, despite this traditional attribution. Rather, it addresses false teaching in the Christian community of its day. It makes its points with reference to characters in Jewish scriptures and even mentions the apostles (those who had visions of Jesus) but knows nothing about an earthly Jesus. Parts of Jude are lifted wholesale into the later forgery of 2 Peter.

And then… another made up Jesus! This time the avenging angel of Revelation. I’ve written about Revelation recently so won’t repeat it all here. Suffice to say, this revealing is completely within a disturbed cultist’s head. He wants to see those who oppose the cult to suffer at the hands of his the Messiah who sweeps down from heaven determined to wipe out unbelievers and set the chosen few up as rulers of a reformed Earth. This Jesus seems to have forgotten he once told people to love their neighbours, pray for those who persecuted them, humble themselves, give all they had to the poor etc etc. Revelation Jesus has no time for this sorta shit! Of course, he’s no more real than any of the gospel Jesuses. He’s simply another made-up version, ‘revealed’, or so his creator would have us think, from Heaven. Revelation is chockful of symbolism – The Whore of Babylon, the Number of the Beast, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb etc – all of it applicable to the time when it was written. It has no bearing on anything after that time and doesn’t, despite sloppy interpretations, feature ‘the Anti-Christ’.

The letters of John were all probably written by the same person. This is not the John credited with creating the fourth gospel nor Revelation’s nut-job. This John, or whatever he was really called, is concerned with divisions within his community, chiefly those caused by a group who denied that Jesus was the Christ (1 John 2:22). They were literally anti-Christ. This is where the term occurs in the New Testament and it doesn’t refer to a future madman who will crush Christians in his attempt to rule the world. It seems likely that John’s anti-Christs believed Jesus did not visit Earth as a flesh and blood human being. They were perhaps the last remnants of those Christians who, like Paul and most of the preceding New Testament letter writers, held that Jesus was a divine being, active only in Heaven. With these epistles then, written around CE 100, we turn a corner. Belief in the symbolic Jesus depicted in the gospels as a real man, has become the orthodoxy. It took some time to get here.

And chronologically, that’s about it. There are four forged books left, making the properly ordered New Testament end, not with a bang but a whimper. While 1 & 2 Timothy and 2 Peter claim to be written by Paul and Peter respectively their late date rules this out. 1 Timothy provides the infamous line that women should remain silent in church and obey their husbands at all times. 2 Peter has all the nonsense about a day being the same as a thousand years in God’s eyes. Its duplicitous author argues that God is delaying bringing punishment to the world so that more people might be saved. Evidently he lacks any mathematical understanding. You would think at this point the cultists would have realised that the cultists of the previous century, so certain of the Lord’s imminent arrival had got it disastrously wrong. But no. They reinterpreted their ‘revelations’ and prophecies so that instead of his arrival being ‘at hand’ it was now set to happen at any time in the future, even thousands of years ahead.

Christianity was all but dead at this point. It simply refused to admit it.

The New New Testament: part 2

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We’re up to Hebrews in our new, chronological New Testament. The authors of Hebrews contend that their salvation was first ‘announced by the Lord’ and confirmed by those who ‘heard him’. This is not necessarily evidence of an earthly Jesus. Their declaration could equally refer to a cosmic Christ who, as he did with others, provided internal ‘revelations’, just as there are those today who claim Christ speaks to them in their heads. Hebrews’ authors say as much when they claim their faith has been confirmed by spiritual experiences such as ‘signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will’ (Hebrews 2: 3-4). They go on to announce that the New Covenant initiated by the new Moses – Jesus – is in every way superior to the Old Covenant and that he is the new, sinless high priest. Bizarre doesn’t doesn’t begin to describe it.

Hebrews contains the only example in the New Testament of a prediction of Jesus’ second coming: ‘so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him’ (9:28). Hebrews, however, regards the Christ only as a supernatural high priest, operating in the heavenly realms. This second appearance then can only refer to this character, who is not conceived as having had any existence here on Earth.

Around the same time as Hebrews appeared, a senior cultist was writing to a group of Jewish Christians to remind them that faith alone isn’t enough for salvation. It must, James says, translate into improved behaviour. This runs contrary to Paul’s teaching which is that faith alone is sufficient. The letter mentions Jesus only twice (James 1:1 and 2:1) as ‘Lord Jesus, the Christ’. When reminding its readers to love their neighbour as themselves it doesn’t, as we might expect, tell them that this is because Jesus said so. Rather, it quotes from Jewish ‘scripture’; Leviticus 18:19 to be precise. An incongruous thing to do if, as some insist, the James in question was Jesus’ half-brother. In fact, the author makes no claim to have known Jesus and tells us nothing about him. He doesn’t make any reference to the teaching, miracles or activities attributed to Jesus in the first three gospels. Instead, he refers to him 11 times as ‘the Lord’ and tells his readers to be patient because ‘the coming of the Lord is at hand’ (James 5:8). Note what this is saying: the coming of the Lord is not a second coming or a return. And his arrival is ‘at hand’ (εγγύς, ‘engus’), meaning real soon, first century time.

Then, when you thought we’d never get to it, along comes a fourth gospel. Its authors revise the Jesus character and everything about him in this late entry. This Jesus speaks differently about different things. He’s fixated on himself, fully aware he’s a celestial being, completely in control of events, directing the entire story. The gospel introduces a new sidekick too, Jesus’ gay lover ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. This is possibly Lazarus, first introduced as a character in a parable in Luke 16:19-31 ‘John’, not Jesus, brings this symbolic character to life in the fourth gospel referring to him as the one the Lord loves (John 1:3). The previous three gospels know nothing of him as a real person.

John goes on to change the day of the crucifixion, to Thursday, because it fits his forced symbolism, and goes overboard in portraying the resurrection as a physical one, Jesus displaying his wounds and inviting the disciples to poke about in them. Preposterous grotesquery that, together with John’s unique resurrection accounts, the other gospel authors somehow missed. Were they not part of the much vaunted oral tradition when they wrote? Did they not know of it from Q? As commanding as John’s Jesus is, he is a very much a literary creation, of the ‘what if our celestial Christ had lived on Earth?’ type. But then again, aren’t they all?  

The New New Testament

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With the New Testament books in their traditional sequence, it’s easy to conclude that there was first a remarkable individual who travelled around Galilee proclaiming the arrival of his Father God’s kingdom on Earth. He demonstrated great wisdom and compassion before being crucified by the Romans at the behest of the Jewish authorities. The first four books of the existing New Testament tell us so; that all of this happened first and all that follows occurred afterwards as a consequence of the events the gospels describe.

But, put the gospels where they belong in the chronological arrangement of the New Testament, and the events of the gospels do not happen first. Paul does:

I acknowledge that in putting the books in their correct order in my previous post, I cheated when I made the first the work of the very earliest cultists. No such book exists (no, it’s not Q and even if it were, we don’t have it). The earliest Christian beliefs are largely lost to us. All we know is that some individuals had visions of the Messiah. Paul tells us so in 1 Corinthians 15:5:

He (first) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

These visions undoubtedly mark the beginnings of the cult. It later finds a convert in the Hellenized Jew Paul who had his own vision(s). That these are visions and not an encounter with an actual person is clear from Paul’s declarations in Galatians 1:15-17 and 2 Corinthians 12. He stresses in Galatians that what he knows of the Messiah (‘Christ’ in Greek) comes not from any human source but from what this Christ has revealed to him in his own head: the revelations he’s fond of referring to. These, he says, showed him the importance of the Christ’s sacrifice, the crucifixion being the only Jesus event he’s interested in. Nowhere in his seven letters (1 Thessalonians to Philippians) does he mention anything a Galilean said, did or had done to him, apart from the crucifixion, which is mentioned without any historical detail. Paul’s interpretation of the crucifixion is devoid of Romans, the Sanhedrin, Gethsemane, Judas, Pilate, the scourging and cross carrying, Golgotha, the centurion, grieving disciples and empty tomb. Paul appears not to know anything specific about the event he obsesses over. Who can blame him when these details had yet to be invented?

Paul also has it revealed to him, or so he says, that this heavenly saviour will soon be coming down to the Earth to raise the dead, rescue the faithful who yet live and usher in God’s new golden age (1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Thessalonians 4:16). It is an idea that permeates the rest of the New Testament writings.  

Paul’s faith, then, rests entirely on his visions/revelations. When proving that they really were of Jesus the Christ, he does so by repeatedly citing Jewish scriptures, never by referring to a particular saying, miracle or healing of an earthly Jesus. Paul’s Christ is a cosmic Superman who is raised from the dead as a ‘life giving spirit’ (1 Corinthians 15.46). (I’ve written about this on numerous occasions, including this post, so won’t reiterate all the details here.)

Written about a decade after Paul’s last letter, we come to the first gospel, which, lo and behold contains an abundance of sayings, miracles and healings of an earthly Jesus. Where did ‘Mark’ get these from? Not from a hitherto unknown document which won’t be posited for almost two millennia (Q); not from an ‘oral tradition’ when the only oral tradition we know of is Paul’s preaching, which doesn’t mention any details about an earthly Jesus.

  • To compound the problem, the first gospel is littered with angels, demons and other supernatural elements (voices from heaven anyone?)
  • It makes extensive use of stories from Jewish scripture, rewriting them and recasting their original protagonists with Jesus in their place.
  • It has him utter teaching that ‘astonishes’ those around him, when much of it is lifted directly from Jewish scriptures and would have been familiar to his listeners.
  • It makes him address the issues of the church as they existed around 70CE when the gospel was written and reflects the rules of the cult at that time.
  • It relies heavily on metaphor and allegory.
  • It has Jesus promise that the Son of Man will soon arrive on Earth to sort out its problems. This is Paul’s teaching about the imminent arrival of the Saviour through the clouds, dressed up in jargon from the book of Daniel. While apologists assume the Son of Man character is Jesus himself, promising his own future return, it evidently is not (it is rather, as I demonstrate here, a metaphor for the Jewish nation). What we have in Mark then, is a fictionalised Jesus predicting the appearance of the ‘real’ Christ from Heaven, just as Paul does.    

Mark’s gospel is most certainly not history nor an accurate record of the activities and teaching of a real human being. It is, as I’ve demonstrated before, fiction, from start to finish.

Following Mark in our chronological New Testament are two forged letters, purportedly by Paul (2 Thessalonians) and Peter (1 Peter) but actually by two different, anonymous authors. In them we’re back to hearing about a celestial Christ not an earthly Jesus. Earthly Jesus doesn’t get a mention despite the fact that one of the letters is supposedly by Peter, the fisherman who trailed around Galilee with Jesus for three years – allegedly – and witnessed his resurrection appearances. You think he’d have mentioned some of this in the letter. But no. Not a word.

And then two more gospels, both of which make extensive use of the first. ‘Matthew’ uses 80% of ‘Mark’ and adds some extra material of his own, including a birth narrative that is pure fantasy (including a magic dream and wandering star) and several new miracles. Where does this extra material (the so-called M source) come from? Some theologians speculate that again it’s from an oral tradition (the same hypothetical tradition used in Mark or a different one? Certainly not one known by Paul.) Even if so, we have no way of knowing whether it is reliable nor who originally reported it. It could just as easily have been invented by the anonymous creator of Matthew’s gospel. In fact, Matthew’s gospel is demonstrably a literary construct that plagiarises and embellishes Mark with more symbolic parallels – with Moses in particular – from Jewish scriptures. The stories of the resurrection are constructed in precisely this way.

Luke’s gospel is open to the same criticism. Where did his extra material (L) come from and why was it unknown to Paul and the creators of the two forgeries that preceded it? The obvious conclusion is that ‘Luke’ also made stuff up.

Here’s the problem with the synoptic gospels (those that carry the names of Mark, Matthew and Luke.) They appear in the midst of a sea of writing that knows nothing of an earthly Jesus and speaks only of a supernatural Superman. Yet we’re expected to believe that in the middle of this sea of myth and fantasy, the three gospels are an island of factual information about a real person. We’re required to accept that the synoptic gospels are reliable, factual, historical accounts of Jesus’ life on Earth. Apparently the gospel authors are the only ones who know the truth about his earthly existence while Paul and other writers evidently did not (or couldn’t care less about it) despite living and writing closer to Jesus’ supposed lifetime.

This is not the only problem. Even if the information about Jesus contained in the gospels was derived from an oral tradition, a hypothetical sayings gospel (‘Q’) or other lost sources (M & L) this would not make it any more reliable. It is just as likely to have been invented.

The next book of our chronological NT, the Acts of the Apostles was written by the same anonymous author as the third gospel. This story of the early days of the cult includes: a Jesus who beams up into the sky; visions; dreams; magic hankies and imaginary table cloths; angels; supernatural murders: miracle earthquakes and characters re-enacting events from Odyssey and the Jewish book of Jubilees. It gets Paul’s itinerary and theology wrong, smooths over his disputes with the pillars of the Jerusalem church and invents speeches for both him and various support characters. History it is not.

Immediately after Acts, we’re back to forgeries: Colossians and Ephesians, the latter being a composite of other Pauline letters and Colossians itself. We’re also back to the supernatural Jesus who makes salvation known through revelation. The two people who created these letters masquerading as Paul appear to have no knowledge of an Earthly Jesus. Had they not read any of the synoptic gospels? Did they not know any of the oral traditions or Q? Do they not care about all the supposedly factual information about Jesus that by this point was in wider circulation? Evidently not. They were interested only in promoting a celestial being, the Christ Jesus.

We’ll see more of this as we move on to the remaining books of the chronological New Testament, next time.

*It’s a trick question. Neither is any sense real.

More of The New Testament In The Right Order

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Last time we got up to Colossians and Ephesians in our quest to put the New Testament’s books in chronological order. Let’s press on.

Next we come to two curios: the book of Hebrews and the letter of James. The former is a treatise of the Messiah’s activities and ultimate sacrifice in the heavenly realm that draws heavily on Jewish scriptures. Yet again, the authors of this book seem not to know anything about an earthly Jesus. James’ letter is a refutation of Paul’s justification by faith alone, asserting that ‘good works’ are essential for salvation. James could be anybody; it is unlikely he was Jesus’ brother or the early leader of the Jesus cult. Whoever he was he makes no reference to anything the earthly Jesus said or did.

Another gospel makes itself known. The writers of the fourth gospel evidently felt that Jesus needed a complete makeover. Taking the basic outline of its predecessors, the gospel according to John reimagines Jesus as an ethereal super-being who bears no relation to the earlier versions of the character. There is nothing historical about this Jesus. Or, if there is, there can be nothing historical about his previous incarnations. While it’s possible the community who concocted this gospel were devotees of John, one of the original pillars, it’s unlikely the man himself had a hand in creating it.

The fourth gospel introduces a character absent from the previous three: ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. It suggests this fictional and hitherto unknown character is witness to the events the gospel describes. It stands to reason that a fictional character is not a reliable source of evidence. Gone are all references to the Messiah coming to Earth imminently to initiate the kingdom, replaced by the first intimations of eternal life in heaven. After the Messiah’s failure to appear, the cultists that the fourth gospel was created for needed to hear a different promise.

Our new New Testament rounds off with the Book of Revelation (circa 96 CE), the Johannine letters (circa 100) and another batch of forgeries. Revelation, written around 96 CE, is revenge porn designed to show what would happen when The Christ descended from the heavens to wreak havoc on those who failed to believe in him. Apart from exposing the disturbed mind of its author there is nothing historical about the book. Like those that precede it, it depicts a made-up Jesus, this time in the guise of an avenging angel. Revelation was very nearly omitted from the existing New Testament but serves as testimony to the venomous nature of some early Christian thought.

The Johannine letters were almost certainly not written by the disciple John, nor by the author(s) of the fourth gospel. They deal with a rift in one of the cult’s communities caused by some of its members denying that Jesus appeared in the flesh. The epistles tells us nothing about any earthly Jesus but do indicate that there were still those in the late first century who believed he was entirely a supernatural being.

Finally, the remaining forgeries. These are interesting insofar as they indicate the state of the church towards the end of the first century and beginning of the second. They tell us nothing about Jesus other than he is a heavenly figure. 1 Timothy warns Christians not to be deceived by the ‘myth and endless geneaologies’ that were then in circulation, a description that sounds suspiciously like Matthew and Luke’s gospels. 2 Timothy includes the famous assertion that ‘all scripture is God-breathed’. This can only be referring to the Jewish scriptures (the Old Testament) because of their supposed prophecies of the Messiah. There was at this point no Christian scriptures and no evidence that the letters of Paul, the four gospels or any other Christian literature had acquired such elevated status.

So there we have it: the New Testament in the right order. What this tells us about the emergence of Christianity, the beliefs of the early cultists and whether their beliefs included a Jesus who had visited Earth, we’ll consider next time. Bet you can’t wait.

Getting Things in the Right Order

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It’s difficult to find the probable chronology of the New Testament online. The Christians have taken over, many insisting the order of the books as we have them today is correct. I’ll work from one originally devised by Bart D. Ehrman in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction (accessed here). While there are apologists who insist improbably on earlier dates and scholars who argue for later ones, there is general consensus amongst scholars for the order of the books as they’re shown here:

The first book of our reordered New Testament, if we had it, would describe the visions of Cephas, and possibly others, who believed they’d seen the heavenly Jewish Messiah. Apparently, this envisioned Messiah told them he was coming to the Earth real soon to usher in God’s kingdom. This is all we know of the beliefs of these original Christians and we know it only from Paul. They themselves left no writing of their own. And why would they? The Messiah had appeared to them (in their heads), which could only mean he’d be coming to the Earth imminently. It was all too urgent to bother writing a treatise about it. It was going to happen any day!

Paul opposed these early Jewish cultists over their very concept of the Messiah. After his own visions converted him to a belief in Jesus, he profoundly disagreed with them over their insistence that the Messiah was coming from Heaven to rescue only his own people, the Jews. They held, as Paul did not, that Jewish rites and traditions must therefore be maintained. These ‘so-called pillars of the church’ as Paul snidely calls them in Galatians 2, were probably wiped out when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and most of its inhabitants in 70 CE.

Following this representation of pre-Pauline cultists, our reordered New Testament would next have Paul’s letters. Written between 49 and 59 CE or thereabouts, the letters derive from the visions Paul claimed he’d had of the Jewish Messiah and what he thought these meant: his so-called revelations from the Lord. He decided the Messiah had made the ultimate sacrifice in order to offer salvation to all people, not just Jews. While the letters in chronological order reveal Paul’s evolving theology they have nothing to say about a human Jesus who wandered around Galilee a couple of decades earlier. Either Paul knew nothing about this character or he didn’t care about him. Or there was no earthly Jesus for him to know about. Paul boasts several times that he devised all of he knew about ‘the Christ, Jesus’ from his visions and subsequent contemplation.

The first gospel (‘Mark’) was written circa 70 CE. Whoever created it transplanted Paul’s Heavenly Messiah into a geographical and historical context. He structured his story around Paul’s ideas, predictions about the Messiah from Jewish scripture and sayings from those same scriptures. He also incorporated cult beliefs and rules from his own time. The original ‘so- called pillars of the church’ he cast as Paul viewed them – as boneheaded disciples who failed to understand the significance of what they were experiencing. He didn’t, curiously, include any resurrection appearances.

Next comes the second letter to the cult in Thessalonica and the first of the letters supposedly by Peter. Both are considered to be forgeries for all the reasons Ehrman discusses here and here.

2 Thessalonians concentrates on the vengeance Jesus will wreak on those who have rejected him. Like in the real Paul’s letters, there’s nothing about any historical Jesus. 2 Thessalonians and 1 Peter demonstrate that possibly as early as 70 CE, cultists were happily making stuff up and passing it off as written by cult heroes (who’d also made stuff up.)

Matthew, Luke and Acts follow. Again, these books were written anonymously only acquiring their traditional attribution many years later. Matthew takes 80% of Mark, adds some material of his own derived from the Jewish scriptures, and presents his new gospel as the definitive account of the Jewish Messiah’s time on Earth. Matthew’s gospel takes the use of allegory and metaphor that he’s picked up from Mark to extremes.

Luke likewise plagiarises Mark, adds some Matthew (though he’s not keen on Matthew’s Jewish emphasis so eliminates it) and creates material of his own based on Paul and Josephus. 

Buoyed by the success of his story, Luke ploughs straight on into an account of the early church and Paul’s doings. There are multiple problems with Acts, not least that Paul’s theology in the book is nothing like that of the real Paul. It is not history but a fabrication, reworking parts of older stories, such as the Odyssey, in several places.

A couple more forgeries follow: Colossians and Ephesians, both written between 80 -100 CE, long after Paul’s death in 64/65 CE. The two books make no mention of an earthly Jesus, despite at least three accounts of his supposed life that were, by the time Colossians and Ephesians were written, in circulation among the various sects of the new cult. Instead, Jesus is depicted as a heavenly super-being. Because they’re forgeries, they really don’t belong in our new New Testament; they muddle Paul’s already muddled thinking.

Well, we’re only half way through and I figure we all need a break. We’ll pick up on the second half of Putting The New Testament In The Right Order next time.

The Lyin’, Cheatin’ Book

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The Bible is a lyin’, cheatin’ book. And no, that isn’t the title of a long lost country song. The Bible was compiled by men who allowed themselves to be deceived and who were more than willing, perhaps unwittingly (to give them the benefit of the doubt), to dupe others. They included letters claiming to be by Paul and Peter that we know were not. They took the imaginary history of the early church, Acts, at face value, and the invented stories about Jesus – the gospels – as historical. They put them together in a way that made it look as if the gospels were written first, followed by Acts, Paul’s letters and the bulk of the forgeries. Paul’s letters they arranged, not in any sequential or thematic way, but from longest to shortest.

In fact, as far as Paul and the gospels are concerned, this is pretty much the reverse of the order in which they came into being. Of the documentation that made it into the New Testament, Paul’s genuine letters were first, starting with 1 Thessalonians in the late 50s and ending with Philippians in the early 60s. Only after Paul was dead did the first gospel appear (circa 70 CE), the anonymous account later attributed to ‘Mark’. After yet two more attempts to get the Jesus story right, came Acts, the notoriously inaccurate account of the early days of the cult and Paul’s adventures lifted from other sources. The fourth gospel followed much later, between 90 – 100 CE. Written by a sect of the late first century it offered a complete reimagining of the Jesus story. Along the way, numerous forgeries appeared as well as the lunacy that is Revelation, written circa 96 CE.

What would happen if we rearranged the books of the New Testament so they followed the order in which they were written? It would make them less duplicitous for a start and would also give us a more realistic picture of how Christianity arose. We would still be lacking a picture of what the earliest cultists believed prior to Paul but we can make a rough guess of what that might have been from what he says about those who preceded him.

We’ll do this next time and see what the newly ordered New Testament tells us about early Christian beliefs.

I Don’t Count

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I don’t count. You don’t count. Not if, like me you’re an ordinary person quietly getting on with life, perhaps working to support your loved ones or maybe retired now, drawing the pension you’ve paid into all your life and paying your taxes. You don’t count. I don’t count.

Politicians only become interested in you, and then only as a statistic, when election time rolls round. They see us, in the UK at least, as a cash cow, needed only to fund not merely those services that are necessary to a functioning society but also for every other ill-thought-through scheme they devise.

When Labour – the equivalent of the Democrats in the States – came to power last year they suddenly ‘discovered’ that the previous Tory (Republican) government had left them with a £22 billion debt. A number of financial institutions disputed this figure and the government produced no concrete evidence for it. Nonetheless, they took immediate action, shelving most of their pre-election promises until the debt could be repaid. To this end, our politicians, being among the most unproductive members of society, cut out an enormous amount of government waste and immediately cancelled projects of no benefit to the British people. The Spectator magazine estimated that they saved in the region of £200 billion this way. They were quids in!

Except they did nothing of the sort. What they did was keep up their prolific spending, turning to their cash cow – the British tax-payer – to milk it for even more money by increasing taxes all round. Particularly hard hit were high earners (which I am not), the lower paid, businesses and farmers.

A disputed debt, created solely by politicians (much of it by unnecessarily locking down for two years), now has to be paid for by those who had nothing to do with its creation. As if this weren’t bad enough, the new UK government has extended its control of its people by –

  • Deciding what can and can’t be said online and elsewhere (a new, so-called Islamophobic blasphemy law is currently being considered);
  • Encouraging police to investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’, while ignoring burglaries and shoplifting ‘incidents’;
  • Restricting how much of our own money we can give away to family and friends before the government helps itself to a massive slice;
  • Freezing tax thresholds, meaning individuals will start to pay tax at lower levels of income;
  • Making taxpayers pay for schemes and projects with no proven track record (carbon capture, net zero);
  • Permitting local councils to increase council taxes, some above the legal limit, for fewer services. (Almost a quarter of council tax collected is spent on ‘unjustifiably generous’ staff pensions.)
  • Allowing government agencies access to private bank accounts in order to determine whether benefit recipients are lying about their income (powers that are set to be extended in 2029);
  • Making tax payers fund mass immigration, which successive governments have failed to control.
  • Requisitioning farm land in order to build more houses. In a second blow to farmers, paying them less than the market value. The government seems hell-bent on destroying food production in the UK.
  • Expecting tax-payers to pay Mauritius between £9 billion and £18 billion to take a tiny island in the Indian Ocean off our hands (though Trump might prevent the handover). 

Also under consideration is a two-tier justice system offering greater lenience to those from minorities. Should penalties for criminal acts be determined by ethnicity?

None of this makes us North Korea, but it certainly doesn’t feel like we’re  living in a Western democracy. What happened to government of the people for the people? Why is there growing resentment in the UK that government is now something that is done to the electorate? Beware legislation that is ‘for your own good’ because it never is.

It’s no wonder so many British citizens feel neglected and side-lined by politicians who view them only as a source of income. Can you blame them, and me, for feeling like we don’t count?

The latest, most accurate translation of 2 Corinthians 12:1-5

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I met this bloke down the pub, oh, I dunno, 14 years ago maybe, and he was telling me how he’d taken a wild trip to another dimension. Yes, really. I believed him and so should you. I mean, why would he lie? He said it was absolutely fab and totally mind-blowing. The incredible beings he met in this other dimension told him that once he sobered up got back to reality he’d have to keep schtum about what he’d seen and heard. So really he couldn’t say much about it. Now, I mean, why would he make up stuff like this? He wouldn’t, right? Specially when people would say he was a nutter if he did. So it really happened, right?

Anyway, I promised I’d write it up for him if ever I started a blog, so I did, way back here. Honest to God, even after all that time I could remember what he told me word for word.

I might though have claimed it was me who’d tripped out in the other dimension (a spliff or two can do that to ya) so I’m here to set the record straight.

You do believe me, don’t you?

Your best mate,

Paul

The Case of Plagiarised Essays and the Missing Source

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This is a true story. I was involved. It took place when I was a university tutor and had dozens of student essays to mark at any time. The work of about 120 students were distributed randomly between myself and two colleagues.

On this particular occasion, I had about 40 to assess and about half way through them I came upon an essay from a student whom I’ll call Matty. It wasn’t a particular good essay; it was poorly argued, and was littered with errors, the most glaring of which was the referring to the well known psychologist E. (for Elizabeth) Loftus as a man. I gave it a grade only a little over the pass mark and moved on.

Three or four essays later I reached one by ‘Lucas’. As I started on this submission, I realised I’d read it before. I searched back in the marked pile and pulled out Matty’s work. Sure enough, both essays were pretty much identical. The occasional word had been changed, paragraph breaks altered here and there and some sentences rearranged, but the two pieces of work were essentially the same. Crucially, the second essay used the very same quotations from E. Loftus and again used male pronouns for her when discussing her work.

The university, quite rightly, took plagiarism seriously. I summoned Lucas and Matty to my office and confronted them with their third-rate essays. Both insisted they had not copied. They had, they insisted, worked independently. They hadn’t even seen the other’s work.

‘So,’ I asked, ‘how is it your essays are so similar, identical in many places, and most tellingly, how have you both ‘independently’ managed to attribute the wrong sex to Elizabeth Loftus?’

‘We must have used the same books,’ Lucas offered.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘and which book was it that thought Loftus was a man?’

‘Not sure, ‘ Matty offered, ‘but we could maybe find it for you. Because it definitely did.’

‘Just point it out to me from one of your identical and very thin bibliographies,’ I suggested.

The two scanned down the list of three or four books. ‘Erm, not sure,’ Lucas said.

‘No, it’s not there,’ Matty concluded. ‘I’m not sure which it was.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘when you find it, maybe you can bring the book in to show me.’

They nodded eagerly, believing they’d averted the problem.

‘In the meantime,’ I said, ‘I’m going to fail both of your essays. I’m afraid too I have no choice but to report you to the Academic Standards Board for your plagiarism.’

The boys looked stunned. ‘But we didn’t copy and that book definitely said Mr Loftus was a man.’

‘There’s no book that says she’s a man,’ I said, ‘and you know it. You’re not going to be able to produce the book because it doesn’t exist. One of you made the mistake of thinking she was male and the other simply copied the error. I don’t know which way round it was, but that’s the only reasonable explanation.’

They left dejected. I did report them to the Academic Standards Board. Unbeknown to me, a tutor from a different department had also reported them for plagiarism in the essays they had submitted to him. Both students were eventually expelled for repeated offences.

I recalled the episode while reading Gary Marston’s Escaping Christian Fundamentalism blog about the hypothetical ‘Q’ that some scholars argue existed before Matthew and Luke’s gospels were written. These scholars postulate that both gospel authors lifted the material they have in common, other than that copied from Mark, from ‘Q’. Like my two likely lads, none of them has ever been able to provide evidence for the existence of this mythical document.

The most obvious explanation for the similarities between Matthew and Luke’s non-Markian material is that one of them, probably Luke, cribbed from the other. Like my two plagiarists, Matthew and Luke are without credibility. Whoever came first – probably Matthew – plagiarised from Mark and made up stories that Luke then copied, mistakes and all, and altered to suit his own purposes. If they’d been dishonest students they’d have been expelled long ago.