Tag Archives: Mark

Falling By The Wayside

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Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity was short lived. Those who trumpeted his being ‘saved by the blood if the lamb’* in 1979 were strangely silent about his leaving the faith in 1982.

Didn’t Jesus say this sort of thing would happen? Sure he did. In Mark 4:1-20 he warns that not everyone who heard ‘the word’ about the coming of the Kingdom of God would take it to heart. He dressed it up as a story about a sower who scattered seed willy-nilly so that most of it was wasted. Some fell by the wayside, some in shallow soil, some the birds carried away. Only a fraction of the message took hold, and those who in whom it did endured.

It’s as if Jesus knew in advance that many of those who heard his message once he’d gone would lack the resolve to persist in ’the way’. Or did he? Isn’t it more likely that by the time Mark wrote his gospel, 40 years after the cult had got underway, there were may who’d given up on the idea that the Messiah was soon going to come through the clouds to inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. They had abandoned such a ridiculous notion and had left the cult behind.

How then to explain such a destabilising and unexpected course of events? Wouldn’t the Saviour have known this would happen? Of course. And so the parable of the Sower was invented to ensure it looked that way.

The writers of the fourth gospel try a different tack by having Jesus pray for unity (John 17:20-23) which of course they wouldn’t have had to do if there wasn’t already disunity. We know there was division in the early church because Paul and the authors of Hebrews and 1 John (2:!9) write about it. Hence the sticking-plaster solutions to the problem in the gospels – the parable of the Sower and Jesus’ unity prayer. It surely couldn’t be ‘the word’ itself that was the problem. No, it had to be the shallowness and flightiness of those who heard it. Or maybe, as Paul suggests, it was simply that God hadn’t chosen them, back at the dawn of time, to be part of his glee club. They were deluded if they thought so. Nevertheless, they needed a means of letting God and Jesus off the hook.

Bob Dylan and those like him in the centuries that followed didn’t stand a chance with this kind of reverse-engineered thinking. 

*Dylan’s own words in his song ‘Saved’ (1980)

Racism? What Would Jesus Do?

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

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

Many of Jesus’ admonishments were written by cultists anticipating the end of the age for members of their own group; they were all too happy to lash out at those who weren’t part of it. Hence, the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7:24–37 whom Jesus calls a ‘dog’, dogs being unclean in Judaism. This woman would have had a paler complexion than Jesus, who would not be the fair Caucasian he’s often portrayed as being. His name-calling is racist; it is only the woman’s pluckiness that persuades him to respond to her pleas.

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

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

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

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

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

Like a Virgin. Or Not

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To arrive at the nativity story most of us grew up with and which your kids and grandkids might well be performing this Christmas (mine are), the one with a stable, shepherds and wise-men, involves some cunning sleight of hand, not to mention a liberal dollop of invention.

The biblical ‘account’ of the story is spread across two gospels, Matthew and Luke. Mark hadn’t heard of it when he wrote his gospel so you won’t find it there. In fact, Mark’s Jesus doesn’t become God’s son until his baptism. Paul, writing earlier still, thinks God adopts Jesus only at his resurrection. Paul has no knowledge either of the nativity myth. John has no time for it: his Jesus is an eternal being who has existed with God from the beginning.

For Matthew, however, Jesus comes into existence when the Holy Spirit impregnates a virgin. Luke likes the idea and so copies it into his gospel. And now we have a problem: the idea that a virgin will bear the Messiah is lifted from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scripture, which renders Isaiah 7:14 as –

Therefore YHWH himself will give you a sign: the virgin (almah) will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word almah, meaning ‘young woman’, is translated as virgin. However, the word for virgin in Hebrew is betulah, an entirely different word. Isaiah 7:14 is not a prophecy that a virgin will bear a son: only that a young woman will do so; in other words, a commonplace event. Matthew allowed himself to be misled: in his eagerness to find prophecies of Jesus in Jewish scriptures, he alighted on a mistranslation. He wrote his story accordingly, riffing freely on the error. Luke picked up on it a decade later, adding his own embellishments.

Neither does Isaiah 7:14 suggest the child being talked about will be the Messiah, nor that he will appear hundreds of years in the future. As subsequent verses make transparently clear, a short period of time is all that is suggested; no more than a few years:

He (the child) will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. YHWH will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah – he will bring the king of Assyria (Isaiah 7:15-17).

These are all events contemporaneous with the writing of this part of Isaiah. All that is being said is that a young woman will become pregnant and produce a child in the near future. Even before this child properly knows right from wrong, YHWH will bring Israel’s enemies down upon it. (Because he’s such a caring God.)

None of this has anything to do with a virgin becoming pregnant, nothing to do with a Messiah, nothing to do with Jesus. It is not a prophecy about him, even if Matthew persuaded himself it was. Shamefully, almost all modern ‘translations’ of Isaiah retain ‘virgin’, when they know perfectly well it is not the word used, and that the context neither supports it’s use nor makes it necessary. They do so to maintain the lie that Isaiah 7:14 is about Jesus and to give credibility to Matthew and Luke’s ridiculous fiction that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’ by being born of a virgin. It’s a deception that will be repeated in church services around the world over the next couple of weeks.

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.

The Lyin’, Cheatin’ Book

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

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

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

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

The Case of Plagiarised Essays and the Missing Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Origins of Evil

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Where does evil come from? The Billy Graham Organisation knows:

…the Bible does reveal two important truths about where evil comes from. First… evil comes from the Evil One — that is, from Satan… Satan is a powerful spiritual being who is absolutely opposed to God, and is far stronger than most of us realize. He isn’t equal with God, but is totally evil, and repeatedly works against God. Jesus called him “a murderer from the beginning…. a liar and the father of lies”.

No, not really. Evil is not a supernatural being cavorting around an unseen, undetectable spiritual realm while inflicting havoc on our reality (see here). Satan is not the embodiment of all evil for the simple expedient he and his minions do not exist.

What else does the Bible have to say about the origin of evil? Fake Paul in 1 Timothy 6: 9-10 claims that ‘…the love of money is the root of all evil’. He goes on to say, ’while some coveted after (money), they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows,’ which sounds suspiciously like a snipe at early Christians who refused to hand over their worldly goods to the cult.

Now, while greed and avarice can undoubtedly lead to wickedness, the love of money is not the root of all evil. Vindictiveness, spite, fear, ignorance, stupidity, hatred, lust for power, sexual lust, jealousy, coveting another’s property or territory, religious beliefs and deceit (take note, fake Paul): all can, and do, lead to evil.

Let’s give the Bible one last chance.

The author of Mark’s gospel has Jesus say:

What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man (Mark 7:20-23 NKJV).

While ‘Mark’ is talking about ritual purity in this bizarre mix of low-level immorality, religious offences and actual wickedness, he nails it as far as the source of evil is concerned. It emanates from human beings, most often, from men. While women are also capable of committing evil acts, and children too sometimes, most are perpetrated by men. 

It’s not easy finding evidence for this online, where misogynistic, religionist have taken over, claiming women are more evil than men on account of Eve eating the forbidden fruit. They also argue that women are more evil because they ‘hold a grudge longer’. However, a little digging dispels this ridiculous notion. Consider:

Are most dictators men or women? (Men, almost exclusively);

Are most genocidal acts initiated and carried out by men or women? (Men, almost exclusively)

Are most murderers men or women? (Men: 98% of murder convictions are of men);

Are most rapists men or women? (Men; 99% of convictions are of men);

Are rape gang members men or women? (Men, almost exclusively);

Are most child abusers men or women? (Men make up 88% of perpetrators);

Are most school shootings carried out by males or females? (Males, on a ratio of 145:4);

Are most terrorists men or women? (Men, on a ratio of 5:1);

Are most crime lords, drug barons and death-cult leaders men or women? (You already know the answer…)

Are most victims of sexual abuse male or female? (Female: 1 in 5 compared with 1 in 7 males)

Almost all malicious and unnecessary infliction of harm on others, nearly every evil act ever committed has been and is committed primarily by men. Only a small number are carried out by women. However, just because most evil is committed by men, not all men are evil. More than this, most human beings don’t commit ‘evil’. Neither do most Christians, though there does seem to be an inordinate number who are prepared to sexually abuse others. Nonetheless, many are happy to blame Satan for what evil there is, including their own. Attributing human evil to a malevolent fantasy figure is a duplicitous attempt to evade both responsibility and culpability.

In any case, according to true believers Satan’s main occupation is sowing the seeds of doubt in the minds of Christians, in an attempt to lead them away from Jesus (2 Corinthians 11:30). Satan is, when all is said and done, a pretty hopeless prop, not ‘a powerful spiritual being’ but an enfeebled metaphor for the evil that some humans engender.

Afterthought:

Where does goodness come from? That too is human. All compassion, kindness, consideration, empathy, helpfulness, love, joy and peace come from us.

Or not, as the case may be.

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.

Speaking in Tongues

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I used to be so uncomfortable in prayer meetings that I attended back when I was a true believer when someone would start praying in tongues. It usually went something like alaluboolubamuba repeated over and over again, like a babbling brook. Babbling is what it was. In the churches I experienced it in, there was rarely any interpretation of the tongues as Paul instructed there should be. Even when someone was led by the Spirit to pipe up, what the speaker in tongues had said in gobbledegook was standard praise stuff: ‘Thank you Jesus for your wonderful mercies. Praise you for all you have done for us. Alleluia! Praise you’ etc, etc. And who were we, the others present, to say it wasn’t? Some would add their own Amens to the interpretation, adding credence to the meaningless phenomenon. The Spirit at work indeed.

Speaking in tongues, glossolalia, seems to have afflicted the cult in Corinth in particular. Paul addresses it in his first letter to the church there, and nowhere else. He doesn’t seem to know what to make of it. He feels unable to say that it’s merely a few people getting carried away (because that’s pretty much what all early Christian worship was) and can’t say it’s not the Spirit moving them to babble when that’s what the church was claiming. So he fudges it, claims he speaks in tongues more than anyone else (why do I hear Donald Trump in this boast?) and makes a few stipulations:

Only speak in tongues if there’s an interpreter present. (What happens if you get the urge the Spirit moves you when there’s no interpreter around?)

Glossolalia is ‘uttering mysteries’ in the Spirit that no-one can understand (so how can they be translated/interpreted by someone else?)

You shouldn’t speak in tongues all at the same time. It’s unseemly.

Use tongues only in private (according to the great know-it-all apostle, tongues are of the spirit and are merely a way of praising God. Tongues then are God praising God: what a narcissist he is! Other than this, Paul concludes they’re not much good.)

Interestingly, at no time does Paul suggest or acknowledge that some of the tongues manifesting themselves are other languages – real languages as opposed to unintelligible babbling. In fact he makes much of the fact that no-one understands what is said. It’s left to Luke to elevate linguistic nonsense to miracle status. In Acts 2:4-12, he has the disciples speak in real foreign languages after the Holy Spirit takes hold of them. Those around are ‘amazed’ (aren’t they always?) that they can suddenly hear the gospel message in their own tongue. Luke labours the point that, conveniently, there were men from ‘every nation under heaven’ present to verify the use of multiple languages by otherwise uneducated fishermen. Far more likely is that Luke, aware of the outbreak of babbling in at least one early church, shaped what he’d heard into what he thought was a more credible account. In other words he made up the story of the disciples spontaneously becoming fluently multi-lingual.

Later still, the unknown writer who invented the longer ending of Mark decided to mention the tongues phenomenon in the prophecies he invented for Jesus. In Mark 16:17 he has Jesus promise that those who believe in him would miraculously speak in ‘other languages’. How many times has this happened in the ensuing two millennia? I’d put money on there only ever having been sporadic outbreaks of meaningless babbling, such as that which I experienced. 

The church today continues to be confused about tongues. Some claim that ‘the gifts of the Spirit’, of which tongues are a part, no longer manifest themselves among believers. It’s a neat way to consign bizarre behaviour to the dumpster of history, but alas, it’s unscriptural. Nowhere does Paul suggest tongues and the other gifts of the Spirit would have a sell-by date before the Lord’s coming. Admittedly, he thought the Lord would be coming real soon. Only then, not before, would tongues and the other gifts of the Spirit ‘pass away’.

Other churches today are open to the possibility of tongues. Some even claim that the Spirit does indeed enable believers to launch fluently into languages, complete with correct syntax and vocabulary, that they don’t actually know. We can be sure there would be evidence of this online if it really occurred. There isn’t. 

Others are happy to go along with the unintelligible babbling, preferably with an interpreter who makes stuff up is also led by the Spirit to make sense of the mumbo jumbo.

Some abandon all restraint, with entire congregations babbling at the same time. Paul’s rules be damned!

And they wonder why we don’t take them seriously. As Paul himself warned:

If the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and inquirers or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? (1 Corinthians 14:23)

They surely will.

Have any of you encountered speaking in tongues? What did your church make of it?

And now, the Conclusion

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It’s a game you can play all day.

  • First, choose a story – any story – from the gospels.
  • Look for all the metaphors in the story.
  • Note its allegorical elements.
  • Find either the myth from Jewish scripture and/or the part of Paul’s fantasy that the story is based on.
  • Read the story in light of these insights.

Once you’ve done this a few times – which you can, literally, till Kingdom come – you’ll realise that all the stories in the gospels are literary inventions. Stories that are replete with metaphor, reliant on earlier mythical sources and that read like allegory would be considered, in any other context, to be fiction.

And what will you conclude from this?

That just because the stories are from the gospels doesn’t grant them a free pass. Stories that fulfil all the criteria of fiction, as the gospel stories do, are elsewhere considered to be fiction: think Romulus, the non-canonical gospels, King Arthur, the Book of Mormon, the Chronicles of Narnia. So why not here?

That calling the stories ‘pericopes’, in an attempt to elevate their status, merely disguises the fact they are just stories.

You’d acknowledge that History, as in the recording of past events, is not written as allegory. It doesn’t depend on metaphor and symbolism to reveal hidden meanings. Historians reject or are highly sceptical of any accounts that depend on such literary techniques. They usually conclude these are not history, whatever else they might be.

You could, I suppose, try arguing that history in ancient times wasn’t the discipline it is now and did indeed incorporate elements from fiction. But you’d be wrong. Historical accounts of the first century have survived and do not confuse historical fact, however interpreted, with fiction. Writing that relies on allegory and hidden meanings is not considered to be history. You would then have to concede that the gospel narratives do not qualify as history. You would then be in agreement with the majority of scholars who think this.

Then you’d ask, why? Why, if Jesus was such an incredible guy, did so much have to be made up about him? You could, I guess, argue that an itinerant first-century preacher successfully manipulated events so that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’, complied, at least in Mark, with Paul’s (future) teaching and managed to make himself some sort of living breathing metaphor. Or you could conclude, applying Occam’s razor, that the stories are simply made up. And if you did, you’d be agreeing with Mark when he reveals that ‘everything is in parables’ (Mark 4:11).

You’d then ask yourself: if the miracles, the healings, the profundities, hyperbole, nativity tales, angels, demons, zombies, the transfiguration and much else besides are all fiction, then why not too the resurrection? Is it one of only a few episodes in the gospels – the crucifixion is often cited as another – that isn’t fiction? Is it the one of only a few stories in that’s factual and true? The empty tomb, the angels, the sightings by Mary, the disciples and Thomas, the fish breakfast, the ascension: are these historical when everything else is not? You’d have to ask on what criteria you were salvaging this particular story as historical when all that precedes it patently is not.

Then you’d have to start wondering if there really was a Jesus. The versions of him who appear in the gospels are constructs, characters created from metaphor, Old Testament stories and the teaching of the early Christian cult. If there really was a man who trailed around Palestine with an apocalyptic message, he is long gone. Indeed, he had vanished by the time the stories about him that we know as the gospels came to be written.