Tag Archives: Matthew

Christianity’s Greatest Failures. And at Number One, it’s….

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The Return!

Or rather, the absence of any Return and everything that was supposed to go with it.

If Jesus had returned when the breakaway Jewish cult were sure he would, we would be living in a very different world. The Final Judgement and the establishment of the Kingdom of God would have happened 2000 years ago. The Earth as we know it would have been destroyed and reconstructed and the righteous dead resurrected to live in the Kingdom, worshipping Jesus all day long.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but none of this happened. According to evangelicals there’s still time (but not much). According to apologists Jesus’ return wasn’t meant to happen two millennia ago. That’s not, they tell us, what the early cultists believed.

To take either of these positions is to deny the evidence of the New Testament. Those who wrote its books believed the heavenly Christ would appear or be revealed very soon. That is, in the first century, in their lifetimes, while current conditions prevailed (specifically the Roman occupation.) Christians can deny this as much as they like but to do so they have to ignore so much that’s clearly and repeatedly stated in the New Testament. Let’s take a look at some of this evidence:

1. First is the innumerable references to the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus appearing soon, first century time, to bring about the restoration of the world, the final judgement and God’s Kingdom on Earth. References like –

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. (Why is Paul telling the Thessalonians this if he doesn’t mean they’ll experience these things? Why does the Lord give him this word to pass onto them if none of it would be happening for thousands of years?)

1 THEsSALONIAnS 5:23

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Again, Paul is addressing church members in Thessalonica, not self-obsessed Christians 2000 years later.)

1 CORINTHIANS 1:7

So that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ (Paul doesn’t think to mention they’ll be waiting 2000 years? That’s because he had no concept they would be.)

MARK 9:1

And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.” (Couldn’t be plainer, could it. But there are those who argue the kingdom of God did arrive soon after in the form of the church. That’s a disappointingly poor heavenly Kingdom, don’t you think?)

MARK13:26-31

…people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens…. when you see these things happening (the destruction of Jerusalem), you know that it is near, right at the door. Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. (Not you ‘will’ know: you know already, present tense. That’s the cult’s inner circle he’s talking to. Jesus says The Son of Man will return in the time-frame of their 1st century generation.)

MARK 14:62

Jesus said, “… you (the Roman authorities) will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

MATTHEW 24:44

Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. (The ‘you’ being the audience for this gospel or, if you want to insist Jesus really existed, the people right in front of him whom he was addressing.)

MATTHEW 24:42

Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming (what day: he’s measuring it in days, not millennia. 2000 years is a long time for his audience to stay awake.)

JAMES 5:7

Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. (James couldn’t possibly be expecting the audience in front of him to ‘be patient’ for 2000 years!)

JOHN 5:28-29

…an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life…

HEBREWS 10: 25-25

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (It. Was. Expected. Soon.)

HEBREWS10:37

For, “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay (ditto.)

1 PETER 4:7

The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers.

REVELATION 1:7

Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.

REVELATION 3:11

I am coming soon. Hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. (Soon is not by any stretch of the imagination, 2000 years in the future. And no, a thousand years is not like a day to God, despite the forger of 1 Timothy’s excuses.)

REVELATION 22:12

Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done.

REVELATION 22:20

He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

(That’s enough. I’m fed up cutting and pasting, and you’re probably fed up reading these quotations. Well done getting this far.)

Moving on, there’s –

2. The evidence the earliest Christians believed the Messiah would soon appear to put their world to rights that’s embedded in the culture-bound parables. These are the little homilies that begin ‘the Kingdom of God is like…’ It’s like first-century virgins with oil lamps, farmers scattering seed by hand and travelling on donkeys as it turns out. These are stories written for a first century audience for whom they were familiar, daily features of their lives. Their creators wanted to convey the fact, as they saw it, that the Son of Man would soon erupt into the world as they knew it, donkeys and oil lamps included. They were not created for a 21st century audience.

There’s also –

3. The extreme morality espoused by Jesus; evidence the early cult believed the end and new beginning were nigh. They have Jesus proclaim a morality that can only be realised in the short term. Wealth and possessions are of no value in a world about to end; self preservation of no matter; prioritising family of no concern. Debasing one’s self in the service of others; selling your possessions – what good will they be anyway in the world to come? – and giving all your money to the poor; forgiving repeatedly; helping the sick, the naked and the imprisoned: these are what matter in a world that is going to end soon. These demands, unsustainable in the long term, are the treasures to lay up in heaven in a world that is soon to end. With this kind of morality, you can be part of heaven’s imminent arrival on Earth.

The evidence is clear: the early Christians, including those whose writing ended up in the New Testament, believed the Christ was coming to the Earth very soon. None of them knew exactly when but they were convinced it was imminent. And they were wrong.

Those who have predicted his coming in the intervening years were all wrong too. Those who tell us today that he’s about to appear are equally wrong. The promise or threat of Jesus appearing in the clouds and all that goes with it, is the greatest failure of the faith. Didn’t happen, won’t happen. It’s a fantasy generated by ancient zealots and sustained by deluded souls in denial of the evidence to this day.

Whatever excuses evangelicals and apologist try to make, the non-return (or first time arrival) of the Son of Man, Messiah or Christ is Christianity’s most monumental failure. 

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 2. Morality

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And straight in at number 2, it’s Christianity’s Failed Morality!

  • Premier Christian News presents what Christianity is all about! Super-hero Jesus! He’s part of the X-Men (you know, the cross and all that)! Maybe The Tragic Trinity. Perhaps just a cheap Superman knockoff.

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What has this to do with Christian morality? Well, nothing, which is the point.

We need, so the Right tells us, to return to Christian morality in the West. It seems to me they know as little about Christian morality as Christian News does. All they seem to have in mind is something to do with family, being nice and kind and going to church.

I’ve really no objection to any of these ideals. If people want to waste their time going to church, that’s their right. But what is the ‘Christian morality’ they want us to ‘return to’? The Christian morality espoused by Jesus?

Not really.

Jesus is often credited, by those who’ve never actually read the gospels, with being an advocate of some sort of Universal Love. He wasn’t, of course; his cultish creators portray him as frequently abrasive, dismissive and exclusionary. His, or rather their, morality is far more radical, far more impractical and, let’s face it, far more antithetical to the family, marriage and society in general. He’s not all that enthusiastic about being nice and kind either.

  • He places adulation of himself above – stratospherically above – ordinary family allegiances. He sees commitment to the cult as far more important than any family ties (Luke 14:26).
  • He regards marriage as a distraction from working towards the Kingdom (Matthew 19:12).
  • He tells his disciples to shake the dust from their feet when people are not receptive to the cult’s message (Matthew 10:14). He seems to think this would show the world what undesirables they were.
  • He would really like to kill his ‘enemies’ (Luke 19:27).

In his latest book, Loving Thy Stranger, which I’ve just started reading, Bart D. Ehrman makes the case that what is startling and novel about Jesus’ morality is its expansion beyond family and community. He is the first, according to Ehrman, to promote a morality that encompasses the stranger and the alien. While of course Ehrman is attempting to show how right on and relevant he is in addressing a hot contemporary issue – immigration – he credits Jesus with too much.

The ancient world prior to the advent of Christianity had rules about the generous treatment of strangers, even if it didn’t always apply them.

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself (Leviticus 19:34).

There are numerous other verses just like this in the Old Testament, while the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis is about the maltreatment of strangers and the divine wrath that followed. There are also many verses about taking care of the poor. The theme is not unique to Jesus, nor indeed the scriptures. What is, is the extremes to which Jesus took the morality of the Jewish scriptures.

  • So it’s not enough just to help the poor: you must sell all you have and give the proceeds to them (Matthew 19:21). Jesus would sneer, I’m sure, at soup kitchens and charity drives.
  • It’s not enough, then, to give to charity or volunteer: you should regularly visit the sick and the imprisoned, clothe those without clothes (how you’ll manage this when you’ve sold everything is not explained), and welcome every stranger and outcast into your home. Not the state, not the church but you: you must do this to ensure your eternal life (Matthew 34-40).
  • It’s not enough to be kind; you must give to anyone who begs and lend to everyone who wants to borrow from you (Matthew 5:42).
  • It’s not enough to give to all who ask of you: you must go well beyond what they demand, to the point of giving them the shirt off your back (Matthew 5:40).
  • It’s not enough to be nice: you should put others before yourself and become a slave to all (Mark 9.35).
  • It’s not enough to tolerate being put upon: you should ask for more of the same abuse (Matthew 5: 38-42).
  • It’s not enough to welcome more maltreatment: you must love those dishing it out. Not just forgive them, not just pray for them (though that too) but love them (Matthew 5: 43-45).
  • It’s not enough to honour your parents and take care of your children: your allegiances is not to them but rather to unrelated people who happen to believe the same as you (Matthew 12: 46-50).
  • It’s not enough to be sexually responsible: if you can’t stop having lustful thoughts or playing with yourself you must gouge out your eye and cut off your right hand. Hyperbole perhaps (or perhaps not), but nonetheless Jesus demands you take drastic measures (Matthew 5: 27-30).
  • It’s not enough to marry, stay faithful and only have sex in the missionary position: Jesus prefers you don’t marry at all (Matthew 19: 10-12). Nobody’s going to want you anyway when you’ve poked out your eye and amputated your own hand.
  • It’s not enough to live by this morality: you must show the world that you do (Matthew 5: 14-16). Producing silly memes and making a nuisance of yourself on street corners (and calling that love) doesn’t cut it.
  • It’s not enough to be nice: you must be as perfect as God himself (Matthew 5: 48)

There’s more, of course, of this same extreme, unreasonable morality espoused by Jesus. He and his creators had what they felt were good reasons for promoting it, as we’ll see next time. My point here is that it’s so radical, so extreme as to be impractical and unworkable, which is why no-one has ever managed to live by it. Not even those people Don will tell us about, yet again, who build hospitals in Africa. Jesus’ moral demands go far, far beyond this, which is why Christians are compelled to explain them away, along with their own failure to comply with them. (Cue: ‘they’re hyperbole and/or metaphor’ and ‘we Christians are a work in progress.’)

But it’s not so much that believers fail; it’s that the morality they’re supposed to live by is impossible. It is that which fails, and always has.

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 3. The Prophecies

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Jesus fulfilled somewhere in the region of 350 prophecies from the Jewish scriptures. Or so many desperate Christians tell us. The mere mention of something – anything – in the Old Testament that might be stretched far beyond its original meaning to apply to Jesus is interpreted as pointing to him. I’ve looked at many of these non-prophecies and supposed foreshadowing episodes before (here and here, for example), so let me make mention of another. John 5:24-29 is, according to newtestamentchristians.com, the fulfilment of Job 19:23-27, which goes as follows:

Oh, that my words were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever! I know that my redeemer[ lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me! If you say, ‘How we will hound him, since the root of the trouble lies in him,’ you should fear the sword yourselves; for wrath will bring punishment by the sword, and then you will know that there is judgment.

And here’s John 5:24-29:

Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.

According to newtestamentchristians.com, the Job passage presages the John in predicting the resurrection. Specifically, the passage from the fourth gospel shows how the Job prophecy has been realised. But the Job is not a prophecy. Just because it is supposedly fulfilled by the fourth gospel doesn’t make it one. To say it does is tautological; A proves B proves A. The author of Job was reflecting his character’s anguish at the trials and tribulations he had been through with the God-approved inflictions that had befallen him. The passage might also be symbolic of the trials the Jews had also suffered according to their mythic history. It had, and has, nothing to do with Jesus. You have to read a lot into it to see any connection between the two (they both mention judgement and the fact a redeemer lives, but that’s it).

Perhaps the authors of John detected an allusion to resurrection in general and then ‘reimagined’ it as applying to Jesus. Perhaps it’s only today’s Christians who do it. Either way, this is how gospel Jesus came to be created: he’s an amalgam of ‘prophecies’, incidents and characters from Jewish scripture. Nothing he does or says is historical or even original; it can all be found in the Old Testament (and in the case of Mark’s gospel, in Paul too). This isn’t because Jesus miraculously and supernaturally fulfilled 350 prophecies as he lived, died and revived. It’s because he was written that way. Everything he did while he supposedly lived, everything surrounding his death and certainly everything about his resurrection is recreated from Old Testament episodes and Paul’s ramblings about his heavenly Messiah. To see it otherwise, is to fall for the trick and succumb to the illusion. As the Religious Studies Center puts it:

What becomes clear from these varied techniques for using scripture is that the earlier Old Testament scriptures were an important resource from which to draw upon in the creation of what would become new or additional scripture, the New Testament. It also becomes evident that these scriptures were read, recited, and known well enough by the listeners and readers to use as support and authority for their teachings (my emphasis).

The New Testament shows us repeatedly that this is the case:

Mark 4: 11-12 (quoting Isaiah 6:9-10): Jesus told them, ‘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!”’’

Matthew 16: 13-17: Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. (Wasn’t Jesus ‘flesh and blood’ at this point? And weren’t ‘the people’ not far off the mark in equating JC with the ancient prophets? Fictional Jesus also stresses that Peter is a descendant of Jonah, another hint we’re dealing with revamping of older characters.)

Matthew 17: 2-3, 6-7: Jesus was transfigured before (the disciples). His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus… They fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

Acts 1:3: After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.(That’s ’proofs’ from scripture: what else could it be?)

Acts 18:28: …(Paul) vigorously refuted his Jewish opponents in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Messiah. (Not from Jesus’ amazing life, feats or resurrection?)

Hebrews: Every quote attributed to Jesus is lifted from Jewish scripture. (eg: Hebrews 2:12-13), likewise Revelation.

1 and 2 Peter quote nothing but Jewish scripture when talking about Jesus (this supposedly from a man who supposedly knew Jesus in the flesh.)

So no, Jesus doesn’t fulfil the innumerable ‘prophecies’ Christians claim. He was just written that way.

Strike up another big fail.

Christianity’s Greatest Failures

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It was a very strong field, but I’ve finally narrowed down Christianity’s greatest failures to a shortlist of four.

Coming in at number 4, it’s…

The Resurrection.

Yes, you’d expect this to be at number one, central as it is to Christianity. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19, if Christ has not been raised then believers are to be pitied. But this depends on how he’s defining ‘risen’.

Paul didn’t seem to know anything about an actual person who had risen physically from the dead a decade or so before he thought he’d seen him. Paul’s Christ is a heavenly being who may only have existed for him in the spiritual realm where his Christ lived, was sacrificed and then rose again. Here’s 1 Corinthians where, in typical Pauline theobabble, he suggests just that:

The first man (Adam) was of the dust of the earth; the second man (Jesus) is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.  I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

So it’s possible to believe in the resurrection of a spiritual being which doesn’t entail an actual ‘earthly’ body dying beforehand. Indeed there are Christians today who believe this. Even though they might cling to the idea of a man Jesus who experienced an earthly existence, they don’t see the need for Jesus to have risen bodily from the dead. After all, ‘flesh and blood’ cannot inherit the Kingdom. For these believers, Jesus was reanimated in a spiritual sense. As Dr John Shepherd of the Anglican Centre in Rome put it in 2019:

The Resurrection of Jesus ought not to be seen in physical terms, but as a new spiritual reality. It is important for Christians to be set free from the idea that the Resurrection was an extraordinary physical event which restored to life Jesus’ original earthly body…

Jesus’ early followers felt His presence after His death as strongly as if it were a physical presence and incorporated this sense of a resurrection experience into their gospel accounts. But they’re not historical records as we understand them. They are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human lives…

Jesus lived … as a transformed spiritual reality.

 

Indeed the early gospels themselves suggest this. Matthew and Luke’s risen Jesus is ephemeral, never quite tangible and not always recognisable. He materialises and vanishes at will while passing through walls and locked doors. This spirit spends a lot of time (Acts 17:3) explaining to others how he’s really the resurrected Messiah, presumably by citing scriptures that point to a dying and rising Messiah (though as we’ll see later, none do). Would his followers and associates really need this reassurance if he had risen physically from the grave? It hardly seems likely. They’d know him surely and be convinced by his miraculous return alone that he was who he said he was.

No, the risen Jesus of the New Testament is a spirit that the religiously disposed saw in their heads, as Paul did (Galatians 1:15-16), or imagined they’d had a visit from. They then convinced themselves he was the resurrected Messiah by searching through the scriptures for confirmation, and believing they’d found it. The New Testament is awash with people doing just this. Such a Jesus didn’t need to have an earthly existence as a human. That would come later with the allegories that are the gospels.

The Christians who today believe in a spiritually risen Jesus are closer to the beliefs of the earliest Christians than those who think he resurrected physically from the grave. That bodily resurrection fails any test we might apply to it: there is no historical, scientific or rational basis for it. Safe to say, it didn’t happen.

The resurrection as most Christians now proclaim it is an emphatic Fail.

Virgin Oil

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Dennis and I happened to find ourselves in the German city of Bremen recently where we visited the cathedral of St Peter. Apart from having a chapel in the keller of the church that looked suspiciously like an ancient Mithraic temple, the cathedral seemed particularly fond of the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, with sculptures of them on its walls.

The early church was obsessed with Jesus coming real soon to kick start the final judgement and inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. Evangelists like Paul had told them so. The guarantee runs through all of his letters and presumably the rival preachers he mentions promised it too. The problem was that after a few decades of Jesus being a no show, some early converts had grown restless. How do we know this? Because later New Testament writers spend a great deal of time addressing the problem of Jesus’ failure to appear. The author of 2 Peter (3:8) comes up with the wholly unconvincing argument that with God a thousand years is like a day and he is giving more people the chance to repent. But this just doesn’t work as I explain here. In any case, 2 Peter is, like Jesus himself, late (most scholars place it in the early 2nd century).

The same issue concerns the writers who come between Paul and the forger of 2 Peter. The gospel writers were keenly aware of the frustration some in the early cult were feeling over Jesus’ late arrival. We know this was the case because the synoptic gospels are littered with parables and stories about why, forty years after cultists had begun looking to the skies for his appearance, Jesus still hadn’t arrived (see for example, Matthew 16.27-28; 24.27, 30-31, 34; Luke 21:27-28, 33-34 etc). Neither will you find any support in the New Testament for Jesus’ arrival being a ‘return’ or ‘second coming’. 

This is where the Wise and Foolish virgins come in. The parable is put into Jesus’ mouth in Matthew 25: 1-13. It’s a very peculiar tale, based on the idea that ‘the groom’ is about to marry ten young girls:

‘At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.

The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out. “No,” they replied, “there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.”

But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. Later the others also came. “Lord, Lord,” they said, “open the door for us!” But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.” Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

Is gospel Jesus really endorsing marriage to multiple wives? He seems to be and certainly Mormon sects have taken him at his word. Whether he is or not, the point of the parable is to admonish those who are not prepared for the arrival of ‘the groom’ who has been ‘delayed’. Those who keep watching, however, are praised for their diligence and faithfulness. The groom is clearly intended to be Jesus; the foolish virgins those who have given up expecting him and the wise virgins those who still anticipate his arrival, symbolised by their keeping their lamps lit.

When the groom does finally show up in the story, he takes the wise girls into his wedding banquet (I think we know what that means) and locks out the foolish ones. When they bang on the door to be let in, he claims he’s never known them and shuts then out forever.

What a lesson for those who had begun to doubt that Jesus was going to come soon! What a promise to those who faithfully watched for him! The reward would soon be theirs.

Except of course it wasn’t. As we know, Jesus did not arrive when Paul, the early cultists and then the gospel writers believed he would. Mark, Matthew and Luke, while acknowledging that Jesus was ‘delayed’ nevertheless anticipated his arrival soon: ‘just a little while longer,’ they keep saying. ‘Keep watching’.

But it wasn’t to be. The foolish virgins, it turns out, weren’t as foolish as we’ve been led to believe.

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 Anunciation: A Ghost Story for Advent

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The Nativity in Matthew and Luke begins long before Jesus’ birth. Matthew introduces Mary and Joseph once the former has been impregnated with The Holy Sperm. He doesn’t go into any detail about how this happened, he just drops in, in Matt 1:18, that the deed is done. Mary has had sex with a ghost.

This isn’t good enough for Luke though, who after reading Matthew’s tall tale, decides it needs some expansion. A lot of expansion, in fact. He takes the story back to before Mary’s non-consensual encounter with the Holy Spirit and picks on Elizabeth and Zechariah, an elderly couple well past the age of having kids. All the same, they do enjoy a tumble in the sack every now and then, and the Lord – ever the voyeur – decides he’ll bless one such union with fruitfulness. (There is much wrong with the details of this unbelievable yarn, some of which I consider here; I won’t reiterate them now for fear of awakening any amateur theologians who might be lurking here in the wings.)

Suffice to say, Luke – for it is he, lest we forget, who is making this stuff up – decides that Elizabeth is a long lost cousin of Mary’s, like in one of those soaps where long lost relatives pop up all the time, usually to no good end. In this particular episode, however, all goes well and Mary visits Elizabeth, whose baby is, in a strange twist of fate, destined to be John the Baptist from the earlier two gospels. In this story his embryonic self jumps for joy inside his mother once he realises his uterine Saviour has come to visit.

But were getting ahead of ourselves. First Mary has to go through the rigmarole of getting pregnant. Obviously as a good Catholic girl she can’t have sex with her betrothed prior to their wedding and just when she’s considering when that might be, an angel appears unto her. It’s Gabriel who has quite a bit to do in the Nativity story as a whole. As angels do, he annunciates to Mary all about the pregnancy part of the plot and she acquiesces to the Lord getting her with child by magically transferring his seed into her womb. I’m guessing it was by magic. It’s possible some sort of actual rumpy-pumpy occurred but Luke delicately passes over the intimate parts. As apparently the Holy Spirit does too.

Mary is so overjoyed to be pregnant before her 13th birthday that she bursts into song on the spot and spontaneously produces a hymn based on the Psalms and the future teaching of the baby she has only just conceived. It’s hard to believe that no actual time travel was involved. It is instead, a miracle, as her impromptu ditty flourishes into the literary masterpiece now known as The Magnificat, which is not, it turns out, a feline super-hero. Fortunately, she can remember it all, word for word, decades later when Luke decides he needs to invent record it. Honestly, the whole thing puts Cole Porter to shame.

You’d think then Mary would dash off to tell her betrothed, Joseph, the wonderful news that she is pregnant without his or any other man’s assistance, but Luke makes no mention of it. Luckily, it’s covered by Matthew, where an angel drops in on Joseph, a person of great gullibility faith. On hearing what the angel has to say, he swallows the story hook, line and stinker.

Then it’s back to where we came in. Mary’s sets off down the road to see the cousin, the wonderful bearer of John. She pitches up there for three whole months, perhaps to avoid Joseph, who, it turns out, was not as gullible as she thought.

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Honestly, this is really what happened. Would I lie to you? No, but someone would, and did. We’ll see what else he has in store in his over-worked imagination, next time.

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PS. Don, I know you like indulging in a bit of biblical exegesis. If you’d like to borrow this totally respectful effort for your blog, get in touch and we’ll work something out.

But Some Doubted

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We know that all the accounts of the resurrection appearances are inconsistent, incompatible with each other and read like visions or hallucinations. If that’s not enough there are two aspects of the stories that are delivered almost as asides that give the game away.

Matthew 28:17 records that

…the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

Meanwhile, in a completely different set of resurrection appearances, Acts 1:3 claims that

After his suffering, (Jesus) presented himself to (his chosen apostles) and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.

These verses from Matthew and Acts are almost always overlooked by true believers. In the Matthew passage we have a number of the eleven remaining disciples doubting that what they were experiencing was the resurrected Jesus. That’s the same disciples whom the gospel tells us trailed round the countryside with him listening to him as he regularly predicted his death and resurrection. Yet when the resurrection happened (spoiler: it didn’t really) they doubted that what they were seeing was Jesus.

How can this be? Did he not look himself, as in the other tall-tales of his reappearance? Was he so changed he was unrecognisable? If so, how did anybody recognise him? That’s the trouble with visions and apparitions: they’re just not clear or convincing.

Luke, meanwhile, extends the time that Jesus spends with his followers from a day or so in his gospel to 40 days in Acts. This is when Jesus offers the ’many convincing proofs’ that he is the Messiah and has survived death. This really makes no sense at all. As I asked in a previous post (slightly edited here) –

By ‘many convincing proofs’: what does this mean? That he had to prove he’d come back to life? Couldn’t his old chums see that for themselves? Couldn’t they recognise the man with whom they’d spent the last three years (allegedly)? Or if they could, weren’t they convinced he’d returned from the dead so that he felt the need to prove it? And how did he prove it? With a death certificate? By letting them poke his holes? And this took forty days?

Isn’t it more likely they were subject to group hysteria and some sort of hallucination (they’d had hallucinations before – see Matthew 17:1-9) and they then had to convince each other that what they’d experienced was really Jesus?

This is what was really going on: it took those who’d hallucinated seeing the heavenly Messiah a significant amount of time (what ‘40 days’ actually means) to concoct what they thought proved their visions were real. Like Paul (perhaps copying him), they found this ‘proof’ in the ‘prophecies’ of Jewish scripture.

This is the ‘many convincing proofs’ Luke refers to. No resurrected god-man spent 40 days offering evidence from scripture that he was really back from the dead. The visionaries themselves came up with it. Unfortunately for them, relying on shaky exegesis and misapplied passages from ancient texts is no proof at all.

Try telling that to Paul and the gospel writers though. All of Christianity rests on the visions of a few and the ‘many convincing proofs’ from scripture that persuaded them that what they’d experienced was really the Messiah, manifested in all his glory.

We’re talking a faith built on sand indeed. No wonder those sensible early disciples doubted every part of it.

Dear Christian…

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I’m seriously considering converting but need some help figuring what I should believe. Can any Christians out there help me out?

1. As a Christian, what will happen when I die? Will I –

a) Go immediately to heaven like my pastor says;

b) Go into suspended animation until Christ’s coming and the final judgement, as it says in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-16;

c) Just cease to exist like my atheist friends tell me?

2. Can you clear up for me how long was Jesus in the grave?

a) Was it about 36 hours (Friday evening till early Sunday morning);

b) Three whole days like he predicts in Matthew 12:40;

c) Was he not really in the grave but down in hell like it says in the Apostles’ Creed?

3. Where can I find information in Paul’s letters about

a) Jesus’ miraculous birth;

b) Jesus’ parables, teaching and miracles;

c) The Empty Tomb?

4. How often did Paul refer to Jesus’ second coming?

a) In all of his letters

b) 2 or 3 times

c) Never

5. Can you tell me how often Jesus referred to his second coming? Was it –

a) Once or twice;

b) Frequently;

c) Never because it was someone called the Son of Man who was going to come?

6. Can you clear up my confusion about when Paul says the Messiah will be coming to the Earth? Is it –

a) While Paul was still alive;

b) Thousands of years later;

c) Any day now?

7. When did Jesus say this Son of Man would be coming to the Earth?

a) He didn’t

b) Thousands of years in the future

c) While those he was talking to were still alive

8. What is the Word of God? I’ve heard the term used for –

a) The Bible

b) The Church

c) Jesus

9. Help me out: which was written first?

a) Mark’s gospel

b) Acts of the Apostles

c) Paul’s letters

10. Can you clarify what it’s referring to when the Bible talks about ‘the Scriptures’?

a) Ancient Jewish writings;

b) The whole of the Bible as we now know it;

c) The New Testament.

11. How does the New Testament writers prove Jesus was the Messiah?

a) By claiming the scriptures predicted he would be;

b) By pointing to his miracles;

c) By quoting things he said

12. How would Jesus want me to spend my time?

a) By witnessing to atheists on the internet;

b) By worshipping him;

c) By feeding the hungry, healing the sick and helping the weak

(I know which I’d prefer.)