Scripture Explained

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In truth, when the Lord said, ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,’ he meant by taking his gospel to them and speaking the truth unto them in love. This, after all, is the highest form of love: sharing the Good News of Jesus. For surely there is no way we can really love someone who opposes us. Therefore this cannot be what the saviour meant when he commanded us to love our enemies. Evidently, he made use of hyperbole to encourage us in our daily journey with him by making salvation known to those whose sin will only lead them unto Hell. There comes a point nonetheless when we must recognise that there are many enemies who will not accept the Word. These we must oppose, denigrate and condemn as the Holy Spirit directs. Does not scripture itself expect as much?   

When the saviour declared that we can’t serve God and money, he again spoke metaphorically. He did not mean the wealthy cannot enter the Kingdom of God. No, what he refers to is priorities. It is perfectly possible to be wealthy and a follower of Jesus so long as we put Jesus first. Where in the world would we be if we had to give away our money and possessions?

When the saviour commanded us to sell all we have to provide for the poor, he did not mean in this world which stands already condemned. Rather, he speaks in metaphor and refers to the emptying of our very selves to better follow him.

When the saviour said we must take up our crosses to follow him even unto death, he likewise spake metaphorically. He loves each according to that which he is able to bear and seeks to bless those who loves him. He speaks here therefore of our dedication to him. He encourages us to ‘die’ to our selves so that we might allow him to transform us into new creations worthy of himself.

When the Scriptures says we become new creations, it does not mean literally nor that it will happen in the twinkling of an eye. No, rather it refers to our being a ‘work in progress’. The Lord of miracle and all creation does not wish to impose on our free will by transforming us instantly. Instead, he seeks to test and purify us in a long almost imperceptible process. Only in heaven will we attain perfection.

When the saviour promised that the End of the Age was nigh for those who stood before him, he did not mean it was nigh for those who stood before him. No, for this was a secret message, a mystery, for those who would worship him in what would be, for those who stood before him, the distant future. What he meant was that when the time was right, when diverse conditions had been met – some of which would only be made known after our Lord’s time on Earth – the Son of Man would descend from the heavens to inaugurate the final judgement and the Kingdom of God.

When the scriptures declare that the Kingdom of God is intended for here on Earth, it speaks only metaphorically, for God promises those who have been saved by the power of Jesus’s blood that they will live forever with him in Heaven itself. This is a mystery known only to those who exegete the Bible correctly and ignore the plain and literal meaning of what it says.

So this, brethren, is how to deal with scripture. You need only apply one simple rule as you read it: if it appears to make demands of you, it is not actually doing so. It is either metaphor, hyperbole or both and must not be taken literally. On the other hand, when scripture is not making demands of you, everything, however unlikely it seems, is real, true and factual.

He who has ears, let him hear.

Ramifications

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I started writing this blog as a way of working out just what it was I’d believed prior to my realisation there was no God. While this ‘revelation’ caused the whole Christian edifice to collapse, I still had a lot of conditioning to deal with. I had been taught over the years that, like every other human being, I was worthless without God/Jesus. I needed first to regain some self-worth.

I had hang-ups too about how I spent my time and money. The cult had assured me that God was obsessively interested in how I used both. Did my use of my time and money further his kingdom? Was I using my time wisely? Tithing? Giving my money to alleviate suffering? I knew buying CDs and comic books didn’t really fit the bill, but I sinfully persisted in spending my hard-earned cash on them, when I had any to spare after taking care of my family and giving to the church and charity. Then the guilt! How could I be so thoughtless, so selfish? I had let God down badly (specially if I’d bought some of the devil’s music.)

The guilt was self-induced of course. I think I have a personality type that is prone to feeling guilty – it’s been the predominant emotion of my life – but the Christianity I encountered exacerbated it. I still struggle with guilt, not over any great ‘sin’ but in terms of how much I help others and whether my use of my money is self-indulgent and wasteful.

Despite now having no truck with the idea of sin (which is a worthless religious concept) I do sometimes catch myself worrying that I’ll be made to suffer in the next life (which doesn’t exist either) for who I am and my ‘lifestyle’ in this world. Completely irrational, I know, but the conditioning runs deep. It hasn’t been fully rooted out yet.

On the plus side, I can now see the Bible for what it is: a collection of stories, those in the so-called New Testament designed, as they declare quite openly, to promote the beliefs of the ancient Jesus-cult.

I realised that in an ocean of myth, legend and invention I had been taught to regard the gospels as an island of historical fact. Yet two of them are prefaced with patent fantasy – the incompatible nativity stories – and conclude with equally incompatible resurrection and ascension narratives. Yet I was expected to trust that everything in between these make-believe beginnings and endings – the miracles, the visions, the speeches, the fulfilled prophecy, the false promises and unlikely new prophecies – were all somehow factual and true.

No longer gullible, I came to see this as a preposterous expectation. Sandwiched between fantasy and illusion the gospels are all myth and legend. It’s pointless to argue, as apologists do – and quite a few sceptical scholars too – that we can discern the real Jesus among the invention:

that we can make something worth considering out of the discrepant resurrection appearances;

that because one or two historical figures are written into the story it must therefore be historical throughout;

that we can sift the factual wheat from the metaphorical chaff;

that there is a kernel to the tales that can be teased out from the fantastical accretions;

that contradictions can be explained (away) and by sleight of hand made compatible;

that somehow believing all of this fantasy material can ensure eternal life.

None of these things can be done, any more than they can with the legendary tales of Romulus, Buddha and King Arthur. Legends, are legends are legends. Stories are stories are stories.

Would I have been happier never to have been a Christian, never to have committed my life to Jesus? Almost certainly. But we are all where we are. Christianity and I have a history. It’s probably left me scarred, and perhaps you too. At least I escaped it to live my life as I needed to, even if I am still working my way through its legacy.

God and the Domino Effect

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Once free of belief in God, everything that follows collapses.

No God means –

   No divinely inspired scripture, no sin, no salvation, no need of salvation, no repentance or divine forgiveness (and no need of these things either), no grace.

   No supernatural, no heaven or hell, no Satan, angels or demons, no Holy Spirit, no effective prayer, no miracles, no judgement, no eternal life.

  No Son of God, no God Incarnate, no prophecy, no atonement, and, most significantly, no resurrection. 

According to the Bible, God resurrected Jesus (Romans 6:4; Galatians 1:1; Acts 2:22 etc). Therefore, no God = no resurrection.

So, where did all these ideas that, once God ceases to exist, fall like dominoes? Answer: the only place ideas ever come from: the human mind. Everything ever associated with gods, and with YHWH (Old and New versions) is entirely human invention. This is the only logical, rational conclusion.

  Paul’s vision of what he took to be the Risen Christ and his consequent theology: the product of a tortured imagination.

  The resurrection appearances supposedly experienced by Cephas and others: within their own heads (grief-induced hallucinations, dreams, trances, emotional agitation). Or: an emotional response to some natural phenomenon such as bright lights.

  The stories of Jesus that these visions inspired: invented by creative writers imaginatively applying ‘prophecy’ imagined by earlier writers.

  If he existed, Jesus’ Messiah complex: worked up entirely within his own religion-soaked brain.

  His conclusion that the end of the age was nigh and that he would be king of the new order (assuming he really did think this): the result of wishful thinking, all in his imagination.

Subsequent additions to the Christian experience: the Trinity, guesswork about the Messiah’s delayed return, the panoply of saints, heresy, blasphemy, ‘God’s standards’, the inerrancy of scripture, apologetics and, coming full circle, conversion experiences. All creations of the human imagination and emotions.

With no actual God, this is the only viable explanation of the phenomenon that is religion. Human beings did it.

 

Deconversion

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In the late 1980s I reach a crisis point in my life. I pray for God’s guidance . I pray for wisdom. I don’t pray to ask him to resolve the situation (not of my making). The heavens, however, are as brass. I begin to entertain the idea that rather than God ignoring me or expecting me to sort the problem (which eventually led to me having a breakdown) he might not – gasp – exist! I had gone from being someone who heard God speaking clearly in my head – telling me I should ‘witness’ to some ‘lost’ soul or other – to someone contemplating whether I’d imagined it all.

What at first seemed like a possibility began over time to feel more like a probability. I borrowed books from my local library written not by evangelical authors but by secular scholars (if bishops can be regarded as such) – John Robinson’s Honest to God, Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician Resurrection: Myth or Reality? John Shelby Spong’s A Bishop’s Search for the Origins of Christianity, and later still Bart Ehrman’s many books.

I began a journey of discovery, exploring what it was I had believed when a committed Christian. Irrationally perhaps, I clung to a belief in God longer than I did other aspects of Christianity. After all, God is kind of generic and could conceivably exist and operate independently of Christianity. I reasoned that God must, by definition, be superior to the anthropomorphic concepts of the Bible. I held on to this idea of a generic God for another decade or so. It gave me a sort of comfort, I suppose. I was aware he wasn’t compatible with all the Jesus stuff I’d once believed. Would a god who created the universe really require a human sacrifice to make peace with his own creation? It seemed unlikely.

My friendly but distant god sat comfortably in the back of my mind while I got on happily with life without him and without thinking about him very much either. Until one day, walking home from work, I suddenly wondered why I was bothering. Why was I sustaining the idea of a god? Any god: generic, biblical or comfort blanket. I didn’t need to. I didn’t need him (nor, if we pretend he really exists, he me.) Everything about life, the universe and everything was, in any case, more than adequately explained by science, evolution, astronomy, psychology (in which I have a qualification). In something like a revelation, I realised that no God existed. Not the YHWH variations in the Bible and not my nicer version of him. In that instant I stopped believing in God, god and gods. One second I was a believer (of sorts), the next I wasn’t.

It was liberating. I didn’t have to work out what God was really about, didn’t have to please him, ask his forgiveness, seek his grace, or any of the other convoluted nonsense that goes along with ‘him’.

  • Was this revelation as emotional as my original conversion? I don’t think so. It was the culmination of years of thinking, reading and challenging myself. My ultimate deconversion from god-belief was a rational process.

It had repercussions of course, which I’ll deal with next time. In the meantime, how does my deconversion compare with yours, those of you who’ve had the good fortune to have one?

 

Conversion

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I’d be interested to know, of those of you who are no longer Christians, what led you to become one in the first place.

It seems to me there are thousands of websites, books that argue philosophically for the validity of Christianity, present their evidence for the resurrection and generally take an intellectual approach to promoting the faith.

I’d be very surprised if this ‘evidence’, which is poor at best, and Christians’ philosophical arguments lead anyone to Jesus/God/faith.

My own experience is that conversion is an emotional experience. As a teen I listened to speaker after speaker at the YMCA I attended tell me how their sins had been forgiven and how getting to knew Jesus had given them a great sense of peace and purpose. I originally went along to the YM, as we called it, to meet friends, play table–tennis and drink coffee while listening to the juke-box. I had no idea I was a sinner nor that I needed forgiven but I liked the enthusiasm – they said it was ‘joy’ – that the speakers conveyed. I thought too I could maybe do with a sense of purpose though I was, as a fifteen year old, quite happy drifting along relatively aimlessly.

The persistent drip feed of what Jesus could do for me (and others) was persuasive. It sowed the seed, as the Christian cliché has it. It took a lively young American evangelist from Arthur Blessitt ministries to convict me. Jesus had turned his life around and he was on his way to heaven. Denying Jesus, he said, was to crucify him all over again. So I prayed the sinner’s prayer and gave my life to Jesus too.

Nowhere in any of this was there anything philosophical, no ’proof’ of the resurrection, no explanation of how the Bible was the Word of God. All the talks were appeals to emotion – how I could feel forgiven, how I could know love, joy and peace, how I could live forever after I died, up there with God in heaven.

All the rationalisation came later, like it always does. Psychologists tell us that the intuitive part of the brain makes decisions ahead of the rational part, which seeks to catch up afterwards, supply the reasons why the decision we’ve made is a good one. We’ve all done it when we’ve bought that item we don’t really need and have justified it all the way home. Religious conversion follows this pattern.

The thinking mind only becomes involved afterwards, hence ‘post hoc rationalisation’. We then become complicit in our own indoctrination: Bible study (both group and individual), listening to sermons, learning from more mature Christians, worship (all those song and hymn lyrics reinforcing the mumbo jumbo), reading Christian books, immersing ourselves in the complexities of the religion. This is how it’s always been. As Paul puts in 1 Corinthians 3:2, we move from milk to meat as we delve further into ‘the mysteries of Christ’. Or, more accurately, we become more deeply indoctrinated.

But all of this comes later. The emotional experience is first, as it was for Paul, C S. Lewis (who described it as being ‘surprised by joy’), George W. Bush and millions of other converts. In my Christian days, I personally ‘led people to the Lord’, by ‘sharing my testimony’ (I’ve still got the jargon!) and can assure you, those involved felt the Holy Spirit with a profound intensely. Only kidding. They became pretty emotional.

I know of no-one who became a Christian by assessing the evidence for the resurrection, reading Paul’s theobabble or analysing the central claims of Christianity. I suppose there might be some who, like Lee Strobel, insist they ‘came to faith’ this way. But faith and rational analysis are incompatible. When the writer of Hebrews (11:1) says: ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’ he is oblivious to the fact that there isn’t any ‘evidence’ of unseen spiritual ‘things’. There are only our own feelings and emotional confirmation bias.

So that’s how it was it for me. How was it for you?

Next time I’ll take a look at the deconversion process.

Should Sceptics* Comment on Christian Sites?

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This post was written for Bruce Gerencser’s blog last month. In case you missed it there (What? You don’t read Bruce’s blog?) here it is again in slightly amended form.

Is it ever reasonable for non-believers to comment on Christian blog sites? I know Bruce compares it with turning up at a church service and arguing with the preacher, and a recent comment on Debunking Christianity described it as ‘bad manners’. But are there circumstances where it’s reasonable to do it?

Can I suggest a couple of scenarios where it might be? I should declare first that I rarely comment on Christian sites – I have a life to live, after all – and have, I’d guess, done so no more than a dozen times in the past three or four years. This hasn’t been to promote atheism, but to counter the ignorance and intolerance of some Evangelical sites.

So here are my thoughts on when it’s okay to stray over to the dark side and engage with its denizens. First is when True Believers arrive on this site and tell me, usually in no uncertain terms, where I’m wrong. This is often for the same few reasons that are directed at other sceptic bloggers: I don’t know the Bible well enough; I misinterpret it; I don’t know Jesus the way they do; I was never really a Christian. Having batted these ad hominems around for a while, some commenters decide there’s nothing for it but to recommend posts of their own. They provide links to their blogsites that will set me and you, my reader, straight. Now and then (but not always) I’ll take a look at and, if appropriate, comment on what they’ve written. After all, they have specifically invited me round to their place; I haven’t gate-crashed, they wanted me to visit so they could enlighten me. I have, as a result, the right to reply, to let them know they haven’t. I don’t, if I can help it, argue theology or push any particular ideology, but I have been moved to point out that the Bible is open to multiple interpretations and theirs (or, I suspect, their minister’s) involves a considerable degree of cherry-picking to make it compatible with their orthodoxy. Of course, they have the right, and the means, not to publish my comment if it upsets them too much.

Second, Facebook’s algorithm – and that of other social media sites presumably — is fond of finding extreme Christian sites to add to my much-neglected page. Invariably I delete these and tell the algorithm I want to see fewer posts of this sort. It complies for a short while before it decides I really do need to know that Jesus is my friend or that I’m headed straight to hell. (Honestly, you write a few articles that mention Jesus and God and the entire Internet thinks you want to be cosy up with JC.) Now and then, and rather more frequently than I’d prefer, the nuttier sites that pop up announce that atheists have no basis for morality and are shaking their collective fist at God who’s feeling mighty wrathful about it. Alternatively, these sites find the need to headline the scourge of homosexuality, which likewise is bringing the Western world, and more specifically America, to the verge of destruction. Now I happen to be both an atheist and a homosexual (I don’t have any trouble with this word despite its use by some as a slur). I feel that, as sites disparaging either atheists, gays, or both have intruded on my FB page, it is again perfectly appropriate for me to respond, which, every few years, I do. Prejudiced, ill-informed, hateful opinions about me and my kind, be they atheist or gay, need to be challenged. These bloggers’ claims that their anti-atheist, anti-LGBT rhetoric is a ‘ministry’ or a demonstration of love are disingenuous. They’re nothing of the sort.

So I suggest to these bloggers that they are wrong. I like, also, to remind them that their Saviour commands them to love their neighbours as themselves and to love and pray for their enemies, to which they invariably reply, ‘even the devil can quote scripture’. I have been known to point out too that Jesus expects them to feed the hungry, help the needy and care for those less fortunate, and that sitting at a computer for hours on end, trashing non-believers and ‘sodomites’ (I do object to that one) isn’t what he had in mind.

Am I wasting my time? Almost certainly, but I can’t stand by as ‘loving’ Christians judge me, and others like me, as fit only for hell – and sometimes for more worrying, tangible fates in the real world.

Commenting on Christian blogs is not always for the faint-hearted, nor is it something I’d advocate. Many don’t even allow comments, so certain are they that they’re right (or perhaps they’re just fearful of contradiction; faith is, after all, a very fragile thing). Occasionally, however – a couple of times a year – I feel compelled to counter their attacks on others.

What do you think?

*British spelling, of course

Whatever Happened To Pontius Pilate?

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While indisputably a real person, we know only a little about Pontius Pilate, primarily from Philo, writing circa 41CE, and also Josephus (writing 75-79CE). Pilate was appointed as prefect, or governor, of Judea in 26CE and after ten years of insensitive and brutal control was, according to Philo, recalled to Rome in 36 ‘to stand trial for cruelty and oppression, particularly on the charge that he had executed men without proper trial.’ (On the Embassy to Gaius)

Described by Philo as having ‘an inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition’, Pilate was not the kind of man who would entertain in his private residence those marked out for crucifixion, nor one who would feel remorse at the execution of thieves, insurrectionists and general trouble makers. It is likely he had hundreds if not thousands of them crucified during his time as prefect.

Would a man known for ‘his venality, his violence, his thievery, his assaults, his abusive behaviour, his frequent executions of untried prisoners and his endless savage ferocity’ (Philo), have a prisoner over for a chat about the nuances of the meaning of Truth? Almost certainly not.

Would he have suffered mental anguish because he might be about to execute an innocent man? Absolutely not.

Would he have symbolically washed his hands to ease his conscience? He would not.

Would he have offered a rabble the chance to free Jesus or the bandit Barabbas? Again, absolutely not. There was no such ‘tradition’ and the episode is clearly symbolic.

If Jesus was crucified ‘under Pontius Pilate’, the Prefect himself would, in all probability, not have been aware of it. Jesus would have been one more seditionist among many. Nor would Pilate have granted a member of the Sanhedrin, unrelated to the crucified criminal, the right to remove his corpse from a cross to give it a decent burial in compliance with Jewish ritual. Pilate was known for his insensitivity to such niceties.

Jesus’ encounters with Pilate in the gospels are so entirely implausible they can only be fictional. The two would never have met. Even if they had, none of the gospel writers would have known the details of their exchanges, different in each gospel. In all of them, the cruel and savage Pilate behaves entirely out of character.

While no records survive of any trials conducted by any prefect of the area (because there were none in the first place?) it is perhaps surprising that details of Jesus’s trial were not preserved, when only a few days later, reports that he had returned from the dead began to circulate. Yet, say apologists, this is one of the few indisputable, ‘minimal’ facts we know about the historical Jesus: ‘he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ It’s there in both the Nicene creed (325CE) and the so-called Apostles’ creed (circa 341). Yet Paul, writing close to the time of Pilate’s supposed involvement, doesn’t mention him, ever. When he’s not blaming ‘the Jews’ for Jesus’ death (forgetting he is a Jew himself) Paul is insisting demonic powers are responsible:

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age (‘Archons of this Aeon’), who are being destroyed. But we speak God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory and which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Corinthians 2:6-8)

While Paul doesn’t refer to either Pilate or the Romans in his teaching about the crucifixion, he does refer to the latter in his letter to believers in Rome itself. in Romans 13 he tells them they must obey Roman authority because God himself has put it in place. What an incongruous, unreasonable directive if the Romans had indeed been responsible for the execution of the Messiah.

The only other mention of Pilate outside the gospels is in 1 Timothy, which was not written by Paul but forged long after Mark had written the Prefect into his gospel as the embodiment of Paul’s demonic powers. (Mark’s gospel is in fact awash with demons, not to mention Satan himself. It’s essentially an allegory of their defeat at the hands of the Messiah.) 1 Timothy 6:13 merely repeats a tradition developed from Mark’s gospel that Jesus made ‘a good confession’ in front of Pilate. 

The ‘fact’ that Pilate had Jesus executed is therefore poorly attested. Mark is the first to mention it, circa 70CE, and we know Matthew and Luke lifted their timelines and much of their detail from Mark. A growing number of scholars think John also relied on Mark for the general outline of his gospel. It is likely therefore there is only one source for Pilate’s involvement in Jesus’ death: Mark.

Outside the Bible, there is no evidence that Pilate was responsible. Josephus’s Testimonium Flavianum is widely accepted as an interpolation (i.e. later Christian tampering) and Tacitus’ mention of Pilate is far too late (c. 116CE) to be an independent source.* There is therefore no contemporaneous, independent, reliable evidence that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. That myth came later and then only from Mark.

Legend has it that Pilate either killed himself in 37CE on the orders of Caligula or retired and faded into obscurity. Whichever it was, would he, in his last days, have regretted his excessive cruelty? Would he have suffered remorse for executing an innocent man? Would he even have remembered? It all seems so unlikely.

*See chapter 3 of Michael Alter’s The Resurrection and Its Apologetics, 2024)

Homelander created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Image of Antony Starr from Amazon Prime’s The Boys.

Whatever Happened to Yeshua bar Yosef?

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What happened to the real Jesus? The itinerant Jew who trudged around Palestine with a small group of followers, preaching who knows what. How to survive the imminent end of the world perhaps. His name wasn’t really Jesus. That’s a Hellenised version of the Jewish name Yeshua: Ἰησοῦς’ pronounced ‘Yay-soos’, which means (suspiciously) ‘YHWH is salvation’. The bar Yosef part means son of Joseph, not son of God. Whatever he was about, this Yeshua was crucified by the Romans and soon after his death, one or two of his friends convinced themselves they’d seen him alive again. Or so the story goes.

The earliest information we have about Yeshua includes very little of what we now think we know of him. The crucifixion/resurrection are the only parts of the story that interest Paul, and then only because he thinks he too has seen the risen Yeshua inside his own head. But this Yeshua, whom Paul does indeed call Jesus, is no itinerant preacher. Paul seems unaware of any of his story, his parables, aphorisms or miracles. Instead he consistently describes Jesus as a heavenly being who speaks to him through ‘revelation’, explaining in convoluted terms how his death leads to salvation. This Jesus, now with appended ‘Christ’, Greek for Messiah, is an amalgam of elements from mystery religions, resurrection myths and Paul’s own fanciful ideas. He is hard to reconcile with a real man who walked the Earth years earlier.

Verdict: Paul’s celestial Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. Paul’s Christ never existed.

The accounts of Jesus that appear decades later attempt to ground Paul’s imaginary being historically and geographically. In this, the gospels are superficially successful but even a cursory analysis reveals serious fault lines. The gospels rely heavily on myth, metaphor and the misapplication of ‘prophecy’, rather than historical fact. They are a form of midrash. The first, written anonymously round about 70CE and later attributed to someone called Mark, is, as today’s TV dramas often say, based on an idea by Paul. It is unlikely it reflects an historical Yeshua. Subsequent gospels, also anonymous but known later as Matthew and Luke, are themselves based on Mark’s, importing its flaws and introducing spurious material of their own. In neither is Jesus the son of Joseph; he’s the son of God, born of a virgin

Verdict: the Jesus of the synoptic gospels is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s a literary construct, a fantasy figure.

When the fourth gospel appears, sixty to seventy years after Yeshua is supposed to have lived, the Jesus character has evolved yet again. John’s supremely confident, egotistical creation equates himself fully with God: ‘I and the Father are one,’ as he puts it. This Jesus bears little relation to Mark’s central character who keeps his mission and identity secret (as well he might as a literary construct created primarily for cult members in the know.)

Verdict: the fourth gospel’s Jesus is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s constructed from the beliefs of later versions of the cult.

By the time of Revelation (95-96CE), Christ has become a Game of Thrones reject, overseeing the destruction of demons, dragons and other non-existent creatures. Any semblance of reality has been left far behind.

Verdict: Revelation’s Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s as imaginary as Paul’s Christ, another fanatic’s ‘vision’.

Can Yeshua bar Yosef be rescued from all these accretions? Can a historical figure be detected beneath the layers of fantasy constructed around him (or the idea of him at least)? The attempts made in the last 150 years suggest not. He is lost for good underneath layers of myth and magic.

Does it matter? Not really. None of his followers today would be interested even if he could be unearthed and resurrected. They are content with the Jesus of imagination: Paul’s, the gospel writers’, the creators of creeds, ministers who interpret the stories about him and their own emotional need. Today’s Christ is an imaginary being, a heavenly superman as unreal as the sky gods who preceded him; a faith-created myth.

Verdict: the Jesus worshipped by today’s Christians isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef either. That character is lost to us. So early did cultists lose sight of him, he may as well have not existed.

Perhaps he didn’t. 

Whatever Happened to Judas Iscariot?

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Even more significant in the gospels than Mary Magdalene is Judas. Like her, he is strangely absent from the rest of the New Testament. Apart from Luke’s ridiculous story of his death in Acts 1:18 – a story that contradicts the one in Matthew 27:5 – he isn’t mentioned anywhere else. You might think that’s to be expected, given he’s the disciple who betrays Jesus in the gospels. His name must have been anathema to early Christians.

We might expect, however, that when Paul is describing the Lord’s Supper for the very first time in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, he might, when he gets to the part where he says ‘on the night he was betrayed’, have mentioned the name of the betrayer. It would seem the natural thing to do. Unfortunately, the word ‘betrayed’ (prodidomi) doesn’t appear in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 or anywhere else in the epistles. The word Paul uses is paradidomi, meaning ‘handed over’, a handing over by spiritual agents (God himself?) not a traitorous human. Judas is in fact absent from Paul’s description of the Lord’s Supper, a revelation he claims to have received directly from the heavenly Jesus, who neglects to include Judas and all the other disciples too. Nor does Paul call the event ‘The Last Supper’; that name would come later. Read 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 for yourself and see. Bart Ehrman also addresses the problem here.

Bizarrely though Judas does turn up, sort of, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, when Paul is quoting a creed thought to originate in the earliest days of the new faith. Because it is considered so early, this creed is greatly valued and frequently cited by apologists. Never mind that it contradicts the later gospel sightings of the Risen Jesus (see the previous post). Here’s what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:5: ‘(Jesus) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.’ Then to the Twelve? What Twelve? As Simon Peter, wasn’t Cephas one of the Twelve to begin with? Maybe they weren’t the same person after all.

More significantly, the Twelve, at least according to the later gospels, originally included Judas. He was one of Jesus’ inner circle. And according to Matthew 27 and Acts 1 he killed himself almost immediately after betraying Jesus. He wasn’t around to see the Resurrected Christ. Yet according to Paul and the early creed all of the Twelve saw Jesus alive again. Either Judas wasn’t one of the Twelve and the gospels are wrong, or he was and he didn’t betray his Master after all, remaining alive for his reappearance. (Just to be clear, the Twelve at the time of the resurrection appearances did not include Judas’s replacement, Matthias (Acts 1:23-26). Matthias doesn’t become one of the Twelve till after Jesus has returned to Heaven (Acts 1: 9).

So, Judas isn’t mentioned as a Jesus’ betrayer by anyone other than the gospel writers, decades after the supposed resurrection. He isn’t mentioned by name at all. The only possible reference to him is in 1 Corinthians 15:5 where he’s still one of the Twelve and sees the resurrected Jesus. It couldn’t be could it, that Mark, reading Paul’s description of the Lord’s supper mistook, or deliberately misinterpreted, the phrase ‘was handed over’ to mean ‘was betrayed’ and constructed his story about the duplicitous Judas accordingly? Why, yes it could.

Conveniently, ‘Judas’ is the Greek form of ‘Judah’, the kingdom of the Jews who, so far as early Christians were concerned, rejected Jesus as the Messiah. Judas is a symbolic character in a literary work, representing those foolish Jews who turned their backs on salvation and so ‘betrayed’ the true Messiah.

Whatever Happened to Mary Magdalene?

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(The risen Jesus) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve (1 Corinthians 15:12)

When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons. (Mark 16:9)

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb… Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. (Matthew 28: 1 & 9)

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance… she turned around and saw Jesus standing there. (John 20: 1 & 14)

Whatever happened to Mary Magdalene? I mean, where did she go? She’s everywhere in the gospels: following Jesus and his entourage around the place, funding his layabout lifestyle (Luke 8:1-3) and being first to see him after he returned from the dead. After that, nothing. Luke doesn’t even bring her back for his sequel and no one else in the New Testament so much as mentions her. When, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lists those who, like him, have had a vision of the risen Christ, she’s conspicuously absent. Mary is the first person to see Jesus resurrected according to three of the four gospels, yet in the far earlier tradition mentioned by Paul, she doesn’t get a look in. Her place is taken by Cephas.

The neglect of Mary Magdalene in early tradition could of course be because she was a woman, and a woman’s testimony, back in those less than enlightened times, was worth far less than a man’s. However, it’s far more likely that whoever created the creed had never heard of her. Why not? Because the gospels didn’t exist when they came up with it. They had no idea that a woman was supposedly the first to see Jesus alive again. As far as they were aware, it was ‘Cephas’ who’d had the first vision of the risen Lord. Yet Peter – assuming he and Cephas are the same person – isn’t the first to see the risen Jesus in any of the gospels.

Mary Magdalene is side-lined like this because when the creed was created, and later still when Paul quotes it in 1 Corinthians 15, the stories about her hadn’t yet been invented. It’s safe to say, she hadn’t been invented.

In fact, Mary Magdalene and most of the rest of the support cast from the (future) gospels aren’t referred to anywhere else in the New Testament. This includes at least eight of the disciples from the slightly differing lists in the gospels, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the angel Gabriel, the Magi, Nicodemus, Lazarus, Martha & Mary, Judas (apart from Luke’s side-splitting story about him in Acts), Barabbas, Joseph of Arimathea and Doubting Thomas. Likewise, fictionalised versions of historical figures with key roles in the gospel stories aren’t referred to either: Herod, Pilate, Caiaphas and John the Baptist(?) are all absent, even from epistles written and forged after the appearance of the gospels’ ‘cunningly devised fables’ (2 Peter 1:16).

Decades after the early creed of 1 Corinthians 15 and Paul’s letters, Mark invented Mary Magdalene, as well as many other characters who appear in his gospel. His allegory then became the basis for the other three canonical gospels, whose authors added their own imaginary characters.

And just as they invented the earthly Jesus’ companions and adversaries, they created too his miracles, teaching, cryptic parables, bodily resurrection and ascension. Mary Magdalene was but one small aspect of their ingenuity.