Tag Archives: Jesus

Flourishing

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The solution to all our problems is to return to God.

How many times have we been told this recently? It seems here in the UK that hardly a week goes by without a new book, report or high-profile article appearing advocating a return to ‘Christian values’ or acknowledging Something Greater Than Ourselves (invariably the Christian God). This, it invariably assures us, is the only way to bring us back to our senses and solve all our problems. Even previously atheist/agnostic writers – Richard Dawkins, Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, Jordan Peterson, Aaran Hirsi Ali and Russell Brand (how’d he get in here?) – suggest that Christianity must be revived to prevent the vacuum created by its decline from being filled by the less humane Islam.

I’ve written about this fallacy before – here and here – so won’t go over the same ground again. Instead, I want to highlight a recent report, The Global Flourishing Study, carried out by Harvard University and funded primarily by the Templeton Foundation. Alarm bells! The Templeton Foundation is a religious organisation, so already the study’s conclusions are thrown into question. What were participants asked? What was their background? What bias did the questions convey?

Not surprisingly then, the study concluded that many people in the world are not flourishing and that those who are, are flourishing – surprise, surprise – largely as a result of religion:

Religious service attendance was one of the factors most consistently associated with present or subsequent wellbeing, across countries and across outcomes.

Religious groups have leapt on the conclusions as evidence that humans need God to live fulfilling lives. The key word here, however, is ‘attendance’. The study itself acknowledges that human community – being with other, like-minded people with a common interest or cause – is a significant aspect of the resulting flourishing. But we knew this already so maybe the $43.4 million spent on the study might have been better spent: feeding the hungry, perhaps? An earlier 2017 study also by Harvard was headlined:

Harvard study, almost 80 years old, has proved that embracing community helps us live longer, and be happier.

Numerous other recent studies have reached this same conclusion (see here, here, and here for more).

The god factor injected into Harvard’s more recent study to satisfy the Templeton Foundation and its affiliates is further complicated by the fact that there isn’t only one god involved in making us all feel jollier. There are currently thousands in use throughout the world (the internet is unable to provide an actual figure, however approximate). Thus, those who congregate in the mosque to praise Allah enjoy the same ‘flourishing’ as those who meet at the synagogue to worship Yahweh. Likewise, those who come together to worship Brahman experience the same benefits as those who gather to praise Jesus. Not because any one of the gods in question is the real one – they can’t all be – but because the participants are worshipping and serving together, collectively as a community. That is where the ‘blessing’ comes from. The innumerable gods involved are incidental. Indeed, each is dismissed, if not held in contempt, by the adherents of the others.

In the end then, what enables us to flourish and live longer healthier lives is company – human company. This doesn’t require a church, mosque, synagogue or temple. There are other, superstition-free ways: time spent with family; volunteering with others; joining a drama/bridge/walking/sports/writing/LGBT (worked for me) /whatever-you’re-interested-in group. The song from Funny Girl gets it right: ‘people who need people are the luckiest people in the world’. Of course other people can be frustrating (present company excepted) but unlike the gods they’re real and provide the companionship, fellowship and company we need to thrive. As ever, no God required.

Jesus outside the New Testament

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So what about other 1st century writing? Doesn’t this provide extra-biblical evidence for an historical Jesus?

The Jewish historian Josephus wrote his Jewish Antiquities around 93/94CE. In the section known as the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’, he appears to talk about Jesus in glowing terms:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.

I’m not here going into great detail about why many scholars believe this to be an interpolation; suffice to say they do. A later Christian added the entire passage in the middle of an account Josephus is relating about Pontius Pilate that has nothing to do with Jesus. It employs language and a style alien to anything else Josephus wrote and appears to be a rewrite of the appearances of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35. None of it is testimony to any Earthly Jesus.

Josephus’ apparent second reference to Jesus is in a later section of Jewish Antiquities. There he relates a story about the execution of a certain James who happens to have a brother called Jesus. Unfortunately, despite the two names corresponding to gospel characters, the two are, as the context makes clear, two entirely different people. This James is a Jewish High Priest who, Josephus mentions incidentally, had a sibling called Jesus. They lived at a later time. Unfortunately, at some point, a scribe or someone else added the phrase, ‘called Christ’ after the second mention of this Jesus. This may have been accidental when a marginal note (who wrote it and why?) was transferred to the main text. This Jesus is not remotely ‘the Christ’.

Josephus, therefore, tells us nothing about Jesus, neither as a celestial super-being nor as a real person. 

Around the same time as Josephus’s Antiquities, the document now known now as 1 Clement appeared. Thought to have been written circa 95CE (though Carrier thinks it might be as early as 65), 1 Clement appears to quote gospel Jesus:

(Be) especially mindful of the words of the Lord Jesus which He spoke teaching us meekness and long-suffering. For thus He spoke: ‘Be merciful, that you may obtain mercy; forgive, that it may be forgiven to you; as you do, so shall it be done unto you; as you judge, so shall you be judged; as you are kind, so shall kindness be shown to you; with what measure you measure, with the same it shall be measured to you.’

Certainly this sounds like the things Jesus is reported as saying in the gospels, Matthew in particular. Nevertheless, it is not identical to anything Jesus does say there. These words sound suspiciously like an exposition of the behaviour the early cult expected of its members (though didn’t always experience, 1 Clement addressing this very issue). Similar words had already been put into the mouth of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel allegory. Of course if Carrier is right with his dating, Matthew might easily have appropriated them from 1 Clement itself. Whichever it is, they could as easily have been ‘spoken’ by an imaginary saviour in heaven than from a man who had lived on Earth several decades earlier.

Outside of these ‘words of the Lord Jesus’, every other reference in 1 Clement is to the Jewish scriptures. Its author makes all of his points using the scriptures, even when a reference to Jesus’ teaching, miracles or parables would be far more apposite. Like almost all of the New Testament writers, Clement appears not to know any of these details. When he addresses suffering, he uses Peter and Paul’s deaths as his examples, not Jesus’ crucifixion, which gets no mention at all.

Clement’s ‘Lord Jesus’ is, like that of Paul and other New Testament writers, a supernatural superman, whose existence is exclusively proven by ‘prophecies’ in ancient scripture.

And that’s it. No first century writer outside the Bible tells us anything about an Earthly Jesus. Those who appear to mention him, do so only briefly and offer no information about his life. The majority of first-century writing about Jesus then, both inside and outside the Bible, speak only of a mythical Christ who had cultic followers.

We’ll take look at some early 2nd century documentation next time.

You can already guess what this offers though, can’t you.

James, brother of the Lord

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Let’s take a look at some of the problems that need to be addressed in recognising that Jesus the Christ was always a mythical being.

The first is, that despite the vast majority of what Paul writes talking about Jesus only as a divine super-being seen in visions and worked out through ‘revelations’, there are a couple of instances where he appears to be alluding to a real person.

The first is Galatians 1:19, where, in this literal translation, Paul refers to ‘James, the brother of the Lord’:

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to make acquaintance with Cephas and I remained with him days fifteen. Other, however, of the apostles none I saw if not James the brother of the Lord (‘adelphon’). In what now I write to you, behold before God, I lie not!

In context, Paul is asserting that his knowledge of ‘the Lord’ comes directly from the Lord himself in visions and revelations and ‘not from any man’ (Galatians 1:12) He did not, he asserts here, meet with Cephas and James until 3 years after his conversion. (His insistence he is not lying is curious, wouldn’t you say?)

His mention of James, ‘the brother of the Lord’ is potentially a problem for those who see Jesus as primarily a mythical figure. Richard Carrier accepts that the reference is an indicator in favour of historicity. However he goes on to say that Paul, Cephas, James and all fledgling Christians,

were brothers because they were at baptism the adopted sons of God. Literally. Paul explicitly says that. And this made them all brothers of the Lord Jesus. Again, Paul explicitly says that.

He explicitly says these things in Galatians 4:3-7 and Romans 8:15-17 respectively. Undoubtedly the term ‘brother of the Lord’ could refer to the fact that all Christians are brothers of the Lord through adoption. But then why is Cephas not also referred to as a brother of the Lord? Carrier demonstrates that Paul distinguishes between Apostles, who by definition have, like himself, had the risen Christ revealed to them (in other words have imagined they’ve seen him in their own heads) and those who haven’t. These less fortunate individuals, however well placed in the cult hierarchy, are, like all Christians, brothers of the Lord. Paul uses the term in this sense frequently, for example in 1 Corinthians 1:26 & 16:20; Romans 10:1 and 1 Thessalonians 1:4. He also calls his fellow Jews ‘brethren’ in Romans 9:3. His strange construction that he saw Cephas and ‘none other of the apostles, if not James’, does not imply he saw James as an apostle.

Nor does Paul say James is ‘the Lord’s brother’, which implies a familial connection. The Greek quite clearly employs the phrase ‘the brother of’, which suggests a looser, cultic connection; James is one of the adopted brotherhood.

Furthermore, Paul does not say James is the brother of ‘Jesus’ as Bart D. Ehrman falsely assumes. Paul says James is ‘the brother of the Lord’, ‘the Lord’ being the term he uses when referring to the heavenly saviour who was been ‘revealed’ to him. There’s no reason to suppose that Paul means anything other than this when he calls James the brother of the Lord. Again, what he is actually saying is, ‘I saw James, he of the brotherhood of our Heavenly Saviour.’ The term ‘brother’ for a fellow (male) Christian persists, in this very same way, in the present day.

I am not of the view, therefore, that Paul’s use of the term for James undercuts the likelihood that Jesus was then, as he is now, a mythical heavenly being.

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 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.

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.

Live Backwards

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I wanted in this post to think about the source(s) of evil, given it cannot be supernatural. However, defining evil isn’t as straightforward as I anticipated. The Oxford English Dictionary offers ‘Profoundly immoral and wicked’ while Merriam Webster goes for ‘morally reprehensible: sinful, wicked.’ Other dictionaries also mention both immorality and wickedness, replacing one concept in need of explanation with two. ‘Wicked’, it seems to me, is synonymous with evil, which doesn’t get us any closer to defining it. There are problems with ‘immorality’ too, as what constitutes immorality is frequently culturally determined.

Evangelicals, for example, regard same-sex relationships as immoral (so that’s me told) as is sex outside marriage. When I was involved in the church, dancing, drinking and listening to rock music (with all its backward messages!) were anathema. In some countries today many of these behaviours attract the attention of so-called morality police and are punishable by death (how moral is that!) Then there are those who fail to keep their word. Within months of being elected, the UK government under Keir Starmer has reneged on almost every promise they made prior to the election. Everyone expects politicians to lie so perhaps allowing ourselves to be duped by them means they’re not entirely responsible. Let’s not forget too that for some, eating meat is immoral, as is using fossil fuels. Our eating meat and our burning fossil fuels, that is.

So, are the practitioners of such relatively low-level, and disputed immoral acts – being gay, having non-marital sex, drinking and dancing, lying, using oil, eating meat – actually evil? Are women who have abortions, and the people who carry them out, evil? Of course not. It’s debatable whether some of these behaviours are immoral to begin with, but even if they are, immorality does not always equate with evil. I would argue that while all truly evil acts must, by definition, be immoral, not all (supposed) immorality is evil. Somehow personal immorality lacks the scale and awful consequences of true evil.

The Sanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is much nearer the mark when it comes to defining evil:

Evil must involve harm, and it must be serious enough to damage its victims’ capacity to function normally… Furthermore, the harm must be unjustified…

I’ll adapt and paraphrase this as ‘the malicious and unnecessary inflicting of harm on others’ to give us a working definition of evil.

So, who qualifies? Hitler obviously. Putin certainly. Other oppressive regimes. Murderers. Hamas. Child abusers. The gangs who have raped very young girls in numerous UK cities. How about the God of the Old Testament? He orders the cruel deaths of Israel’s enemies (Deuteronomy 7), promotes the smashing of babies’ heads against rocks (Psalm 137:9) and orders the taking of prison-of-war virgins as sex slaves (Numbers 31: 17-18). Later, Jesus – like father, like son – relishes the opportunity to put his enemies to the sword (Luke 19:27) and orders those who don’t believe in him be consigned to hell where they’ll be tortured forever (Matthew 25: 41-46). This is evil by any definition.

So, given there isn’t a God nor a heavenly Jesus, from where does evil originate? I’ll get to that, at last, in the next post.

It’s the End!

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AI shows how it’s done. Arrange your elements carefully, and – hey, presto! – Jesus appears!

I’ve reached the end! The end of Jonathan Cahn’s The Dragon Prophecy that is. He has me convinced: the end of the age and the world itself, is just around the corner. He looks around the world, particularly the Middle East, sees the state it’s in and dives into the scriptures to uncover the prophecies that presage present day events. He then reveals how, collectively, these scriptures accurately describe the state of the world today following Hamas’s invasion of Israel on 7th October 2023.

Had he collected these passages prior to 7th October, would they have accurately foretold the events of that day? They should’ve done if that’s what they are really about. So where was this expose before 7th October? Where were the books, by Cahn or anyone else, revealing how the Bible predicted in detail, events that still lay in the future? Predicatbly (pun intended), they don’t exist. Cahn’s The Serpent’s Prophecy could only be written with hindsight, after the events, 7th October 2023 in particular, that he’s decided fulfil biblical prophecy. The prescience of these ancient scriptures is only apparent, to Cahn if no-one else, in retrospect.

He gathers disparate verses together to demonstrate how they do indeed predict current events. He omits many that don’t, even though they too appear to prophesy the future. He does this because they don’t fit the picture he’s trying to create: his interpretation of events in Israel and the significance he wants ascribed to them.

Cahn disingenuously forces unrelated verses to work together, like pieces from different jigsaw puzzles, to create a picture that loosely and disjointedly conforms with and thereby confirms his own conclusions. 

The culmination of The Dragon’s Prophecy is that the time is right and the stage set for Christ’s ‘return’. Cahn advises his readers to surrender to him before he comes though the clouds to do unspeakable things to them. While none of the ‘prophecies’ he’s pressed into service have ever been fulfilled and are certainly not being now, this one must surely be the greatest of the Bible’s failed prophecies.

Does all of this sound familiar? It should. Starting with Paul and the gospel writers, numerous hacks have pulled together biblical prophecies to show how events of their times fulfil the conditions for Christ’s return.

More than this, the gospels were created in exactly the same way that Cahn creates his end-of-the-world scenario. Mark, Matthew and Luke, ruthlessly plundered ancient Jewish scripture to show how their suffering Messiah (whether real or not) was predicted there. Significantly, no-one prior to the early days of the Christian cult believed that these particular scriptures foresaw a suffering Messiah who would die for the sins of his people before coming back to life. The scriptures could only be made to do so in retrospect. After some claimed to have seen the risen Jesus, early cultists began to scour the scriptures for passages – how many they had to ignore or misinterpret! – that could be made to create a loose, disjointed picture of their super-hero. It’s how Paul attempted to persuade others that Jesus was the Messiah (1 Corinthians 15:3,4 etc).

So Cahn is doing nothing new, finding a ready audience for his particular sleight of hand.

When A Child Is Born… Supernaturally

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To what extent are the conflicting nativity stories in Matthew and Luke historical? That depends on whether or not you believe in the supernatural.

There is no evidence of a supernatural realm nor the beings who are said to inhabit it: God, heavenly Jesus, the Holy Spirit, angels and those they are constantly at war with: Satan and his demonic hordes. It is not as Jonathan Cahn describes it in The Serpent’s Prophecy:

Behind the perceivable realm lies another, beyond our ability to measure or quantify. Behind the history of this world lies another, unrecorded, unrecited, unknown. And behind that which moves and transforms the world lie unseen forces, causes, agents, undying and primeval (p3).

Cahn cannot possibly know any of this, any more than fake-Paul could when he wrote Ephesians 2,000 years ago (6:12). A reality that exists above and beyond nature – the meaning of supernatural – that is ‘unseen’, undetectable and ‘unknown’ is one that doesn’t exist, except in the imagination of a few fantasists.

Yet the supernatural is the basis of Christianity. Without it, its agents, as Cahn calls them, could not have interacted with the only reality there is. The Holy Spirit could not have impregnated Mary; angels could not have materialised to announce Jesus’s birth to a group of credulous shepherds; a divine being could not have communicated through dreams with Joseph and the Magi; a magic star could not have been manoeuvred into place over Jesus’ house. Most significantly, a non-existent God could not have sent his ‘son’ into this world.

It is futile to argue whether Matthew or Luke’s nativity narrative is the more historically accurate. Nor is there any point in trying to harmonise the two accounts. Neither is historical: the involvement of the supernatural rules out their being factual.

The inclusion of the supernatural in everything that follows is also fatal to claims made for the gospels’ historicity. The clues are there in the text: God’s pronouncements from the sky; the inexplicable miracles and healings; the presence of angels, demons and Satan; the dead rising; visions, prayers and prophecies. These tell us that what we’re dealing with is fantasy material. The creators of the gospels and other books of the New Testament had no more evidence than Cahn does that secretive super-beings existed, even if they did take them for granted. God and his interventions no more exist than Santa Claus and his magical Christmas deliveries.

Paul tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 8:11). But there is no God, so he didn’t. There was no supernatural resurrection and without a resurrection there were no encounters, like those in the gospels, with a reanimated body.

Remove the supernatural from the Jesus story and there’s nothing left. Some wise advice lifted from Jewish scripture perhaps, plus a few cult rules, but that’s all. Paul’s experience of the risen Christ, like that of Cephas before him (described nowhere in the New Testament but allegorised in the gospels) and John of Patmos after him, were as Paul himself says, a ‘revealing’ in their own heads.

I hope none of this spoils Christmas for you. The Nativity isn’t a bad story, indeed it’s quite beautiful in places. But it is not historical. Like much in gospel Jesus’ life, and the resurrection itself, it is a fantasy generated by irrational and superstitious minds.

A very happy Christmas to both my readers.