Tag Archives: John of Patmos

Where are those stories?

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

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

It has to be one or the other. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’

 

Revealing the Truth of John’s Revelation

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The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw – that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near… “Look, he is coming with the clouds,” and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”; and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”
So shall it be! Amen…

On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.” I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands…

So begins the Book of Revelation, written by a fanatic identifying as John (think Steven Anderson) who finds himself on the island of Patmos ‘because of the gospel’, with an account of the imminent end of the world (1:3 ‘the time is near’ and 1:7 ‘even those who pierced him’ will see him.)

What follows is a disturbing and disturbed account of what the Earth could soon expect when Jesus descended from the heavens to wreak vengeance on sinful human kind.

John claims the scenario he’s about to describe was given to him by an angel who got it from the Lord Jesus Christ, who in turn received it from God himself (1:1). Or perhaps the angel and Jesus Christ are one and the same. Did John regard Jesus Christ as an angel, the ‘messenger’ of God (the literal translation of the Greek angelos)?

I’ve often wondered about this ’revealed’ business. Paul too talks about having Jesus ‘revealed’ in him (Galatians 1:16). What exactly are Paul and John talking about? John says he ‘saw’ (1:2) all that he’s about to describe in the next twenty-two tedious chapters, as if this ‘revealing’ is some sort of vision or hallucination. Given the complexity of what he then describes, this seems to me highly unlikely. He ‘sees’ in his mind’s eye god’s throne, attendant angels, the four horsemen, the opening of seven seals, the destruction of the world, the annihilation of most of mankind, the descent from heaven of the holy city, the intricate details of the construction of this city… read the book for yourself for even more. Even dreams are not this detailed or vivid.

I’m not convinced Paul saw the resurrected Jesus as a figure in front of him (or as a bright light or some other quasi-physical manifestation.) What Paul and John did when ecstatic with religious fervour – what John describes as being ‘in the Spirit’ – was concoct an explanation for the way they were feeling; Paul persuaded himself he’d seen a resurrected God-man and worked out over time what this might mean. He then attributed this thinking to his God and his divine influence. John under persecution (it’s generally accepted his being on Patmos ‘because of the gospel’ (1:9) was as punishment for being a public nuisance) fomented a doomsday scenario for those who persecuted him and the divine elevation of those who believed like he did, and attributed this to spiritual beings. The scenario was not revealed instantaneously to him by a supernatural agent; again, it was something developed over time – hence the quotations from other sources (1:7) – in an aggrieved fanatic’s head.

Revelation is a calculated literary construct, like the gospels themselves, devised and refined over time. John ‘saw’ none of it, nor did he ‘hear’ an actual disembodied voice telling him about living room furniture (1:12’s lampstands). No higher power ‘revealed’ any of it to him. On the contrary, he devised it himself, working out every aspect in his head. Either he was deluded enough to think he was actually being fed revenge-porn by an angelic Jesus or he cynically, deliberately attributed it to him.

There was not then, as there is not now, a heavenly Jesus who spoke to susceptible mortals here on Earth. The savage, avenging Jesus that John of Patmos creates from his own anger, bitterness and sense of persecution bears little relation to the other versions of the character in Paul and in the gospels (as Ehrman demonstrates in Armageddon). Revelation’s savage, slaughtering Jesus is at least the sixth manifestation of the character proffered in the New Testament. John demonstrates just how easy it was, and is, to invent one’s own version of a supposedly unchanging character (Hebrews 13:8; Revelation 1:8) and make him do, at least in your imagination, just what you want him to do.

The End of Days

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A friend of mine was recently given the book The Dragon’s Prophecy: Israel, the Dark Resurrection and the End of Days by Jonathan Cahn. My friend, already concerned about the state of the world, said how much the book had disturbed her. She had become convinced that the time we live in had been predicted in the Bible, in Revelation in particular. ‘It’s all there in the Bible,’ she said to me. ‘It’s all happening just as it says.’

I tried to reassure her that Revelation was written by someone who, 2000 years ago, believed that the situation then couldn’t get any worse, what with the Roman occupation, the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecution of Christians (as the writer saw it.) This, together with his belief that the Lord would soon be coming on the clouds (Revelation 1:7), convinced him he was living in the world’s last days. I told my friend that because of the mess the world is in today (and when is it not a mess?) the book of Revelation resonates with some people; a voice from the past echoing down the ages. In no way, however, was it written about today.

My friend was unconvinced so I took it upon myself to read The Dragon’s Prophecy. Coincidentally, I had just begun to read Bart D. Ehrman’s Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End, dealing with the same concerns. The comparison between the two books couldn’t be more striking.

Ehrman’s is a measured analysis of Revelation and other ‘prophetic’ books of the Bible. He demonstrates from the outset that Revelation was written for believers of the late first/early second century and that its symbolism represents individuals and events of that time. John of Patmos, whoever he may have been (a cult leader, Ehrman suggests) expected, like most early Christians, that the End was going to materialise soon, in the first or early second century, emphatically not in the 21st.

Ehrman warns that ‘professional prophecy writers’ (he doesn’t name Cahn) think ‘the way to use the Bible is to assemble the pieces to reveal the big picture, which until now no one has seen before’ (p17). He’s right. This is precisely what they do. In his book, Cahn promises ‘to put together the pieces of the mystery’ (p11) and claims ‘We (sic) will now begin assembling the pieces of the puzzle’ (p36). He then proceeds to jump around the Bible like a grasshopper on steroids. He’s one of the ‘prophets’ who, as Ehrman puts it, sees the Bible as ‘a great jigsaw puzzle with one piece hidden in this place, one in another and yet a third somewhere else’ (p17).

Cahn opens his argument with a series of bald, unsupported assertions: ‘Behind the perceivable realm lies another, beyond our ability to measure or quantify’ and ‘Behind the history of this world lies another, unrecorded, unrecited (sic), unknown,’ his readers evidently not expected to ask how he knows any of this codswallop. He goes from there to build his argument, such as it is, with a bombardment of ridiculous questions and pseudo-profundities:

What is evil? And how did it come into existence? It is both a mystery and a problem. The mystery is the problem (p9).

Then there are the propositional statements of the ‘If… then we’d expect’ variety. There’s rarely any evidence for the ‘if’ and none at all for the proposed expectation. Here’s the two – rhetorical question and propositional statement – rolled into one: ‘If evil is uncreated, how did it come to exist?’ (p32). Naturally, Cahn is going to answer this question and all the others like it, with a series of unfounded assertions, non-sequiturs and a smattering of unrelated Bible verses.

A central premise of The Dragon’s Prophecy, the dragon being that of Revelation 12:9 and therefore the devil, is ‘the dark resurrection’ of its subtitle. This Cahn explains, pretending the idea comes from the Bible when it doesn’t, is the re-emergence of the Israelites’ old, (extinct) enemies, the Philistines. Like the Israeli nation they too have now been resurrected: as the Palestinians. Under the control of the dragon/devil, they re-enacted on October 7th last year one of the many ancient Philistine attacks recorded in the Bible, only this time with ‘guns and explosives’:

On that October morning, the ancient drama replayed. The resurrected Philistines had again invaded the land, and the resurrected Israelites had again gone into hiding, keeping silent and still in fear of their pursuers (pp99-100).

How do we know this is a replay of an ancient invasion? Because some of those under attack on 7th October went into hiding, just as the Israelites did in 1 Samuel 13:6. As if no other group of besieged civilians hasn’t tried to hide at any other point in history. That and the ‘fact’ there were, according to Cahn, exactly 3,000 invaders on each occasion. Yes, the book really is this bad.

And so, Cahn says, the stage is set for the final battle and the return of Christ who will knock a few heads together, torture and slaughter everyone who isn’t a Christian and set up his faithful followers in a new Jerusalem made of gold and fancy stuff. As Ehrman says, this is indeed what Revelation promises – for the world 2,000 years ago. Ehrman argues that the author of this revenge porn, (he doesn’t use the term: that’s my contribution – you’re welcome) creates a Christ so unlike those of the gospels that he can only be a fiction (aren’t they all?)

Revelation barely made it into the canon and we would all be better off if it hadn’t; certainly my friend would be, and as Ehrman shows, human society and the planet in general would be too. He warns us to read what the Bible actually says, instead of, as Cahn does, forcing it to say what we want it to (to sell books). Irritatingly, Ehrman consistently refers to the Christ’s prophesied appearance on the clouds as his ‘Second Coming’ when the Bible never uses the phrase. Read what it says Bart!

I don’t know whether I’ll finish Dragon’s Prophecy. Its cover blurb boasts that Cahn is a New York Times best seller so clearly there’s an audience for such poorly argued, alarmist nonsense – which is itself alarming. While Bart D. Ehrman has also made the NYT list in the past, Cahn easily outsells him. Nevertheless, I’ve bought my friend a copy of his Armageddon in the hopes it might serve as an antidote to the dire The Dragon’s Prophecy.

In which Paul takes a trip to the third heaven

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In the New Testament, there are:

8 or more supernatural ‘visions’;

18 or so ‘appearances’ of angels;

about 6 significant dreams, through which God talks to people;

a dozen apparitions of dead people and

at least 3 significant ‘revelations’, in which individuals sense God in their heads (Paul, Jesus and John of Patmos).

The man who is largely responsible for Christianity as we know it, Paul, alludes only briefly to his magical conversion to the faith, describing it as ‘in’ his head in Galatians 1.16. It’s up to the writer of Acts to elaborate and embroider this non-event. Paul does, however, give rather more detail about another hallucination he has, in 2 Corinthians 12.1-4. To avoid boasting, he says boastfully, he refers to himself in the third person:

I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to gain, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of it I do not know, but God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or out of it I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to Paradise. The things he heard were too sacred for words, things that man is not permitted to tell.

This is evidently a psychotic episode; seeing things that are not there, experiencing events that are not happening. Paul himself admits he doesn’t know whether it was a real experience, nor does he know if he was in his body or not (definitely in it, just out of his mind.) He heard, he says, things he can’t possibly repeat, which makes you wonder why he bothers mentioning the whole bizarre episode in the first place: ‘I had this fantastic experience, unlike anything I’ve experienced before – but I can’t tell you a thing about it.’ It sounds like a dream he’s having trouble remembering or, like, man, a really freaky hallucinogenic trip.

From psychotic episodes like this – his conversion is another one – Paul spins his entire theology. Yes, the faith of Christians everywhere is founded on the hallucinations of a first century nutcase visionary.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve better things to do with my life than base it on the dreams and visions of a psychotic who lived 2000 years ago.