Tag Archives: Paul

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 29: The Resurrection Can’t Be Disproved

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Or can it?Burial

The resurrection can’t be disproved, or so says a Christian on Bob Seidensticker’s Cross Examined blog. If it could be, the commenter tells us, he would abandon his Christian faith. Of course it isn’t up to sceptics to disprove the resurrection, or any other of religion’s fantastic claims. It’s up to those making them to demonstrate their veracity, just as it would be for me to prove I keep an invisible pink unicorn in my garage. There would be no obligation on anyone else to disprove it.

That being said, the resurrection is rather easy to refute. First, let’s qualify what we mean by the term, or rather what Christians usually mean by it: that Jesus rose from the dead in or as the same body that had, a couple of days earlier, died on the cross. There are, it’s true, some liberal Christians who find this such a preposterous idea that they concede the resurrection happened only in some sort of metaphorical fashion. They’re probably right, so our truck is not with these particular believers, even if their evangelical brethren take them to task for their apostasy. No, we are refuting the idea that Jesus rose physically from the grave, fully alive again, after spending slightly under two days completely and entirely dead.

Here’s how we can know this didn’t happen:
1. There’s only one eye-witness account of the resurrected Jesus, and that’s Paul’s (in Galatians 1.11-12 and 1 Corinthians 9.1 & 15.45; I’ve covered this more fully here.) And what does he ‘see’? Not a resurrected body, just a beam of light and a voice, both in his own head as the text makes clear (the Greek states baldly his experience was ‘within’ him). His resurrected Jesus is therefore a vision or an hallucination or an epileptic event. It is most emphatically not an encounter with an actual man returned from the dead.

So much for our only eye-witness. What about the others?

There are no others:

2. All the other resurrection accounts were written, third, fourth, fifth hand, some 40-70 years after the supposed event, so they’re not exactly reliable. They are, in fact, positively unreliable. In these accounts, Jesus is unrecognisable to those who knew him; he walks through walls; disappears at will and beams up into the sky.

I’m sure it won’t escape your attention that these are not something a flesh-and-blood body can do. They are not, as a result, descriptions of real experiences and belong, like Paul’s inner experience, to the realm of fantasy/visions/hallucination. Paul himself was of the view that others’ experiences of the ‘risen Christ’ were exactly the same as his own (1 Corinthians 15.6-8).

Not only this, the gospel accounts of these visions were embellished between the time they occurred (if they did) and their being recorded many years later by different groups of interested parties. They were also significantly tampered with. For example, Mark’s gospel originally had no resurrection appearances; these were added later – possibly 40 years later – 80 after the events they supposedly describe.

And so we come to the most conclusive of the arguments against the resurrection:

3. The dead stay dead. Always, with no exceptions. Once the brain is dead it cannot be revived – certainly not 40 hours after it is extinguished. “Ah, but wait!” say Christians, “Jesus was (the Son of) God so the normal laws of nature don’t apply. He is the one true exception.” But this is special pleading based on circular reasoning: Jesus rose from the dead because he was (the Son of) God. How do we know he was (the Son of) God? Because he rose from the dead. As such, it’s no proof at all – even if, in Romans 1.14, Paul seems to think it is. The man Jesus died and then… he stayed dead.

There are other reasons that lend support to the fact that the resurrection did not happen (for example, all the noise about an empty tomb, which is nothing more than a distracting sleight of hand. So what? What does an empty tomb prove? Certainly not a resurrection.) These three, however, are sufficient evidence that Jesus didn’t physically rise from the dead – and without the resurrection, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:13-19, Christianity falls apart:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile…

How right he was.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to take my invisible pink unicorn for a walk.

What Christians Believe: Part One

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A very special guest post by Thea Lojan.

PilateThe Creed

I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to share my testimony with you and give you an idea of what I and millions of other Christians believe. We call this the Apostles’ Creed and it goes like this:

I believe in one God. Actually no… three. Three Gods. One really, but he’s like three, a buy-one-get-two-free kind of God. Yes, okay, he says he’s the one and only God back in the Old Testament, but that’s before he knew he was really three. This doesn’t make him/them anything like those collections of ancient Greek Gods, though, because he’s still only one God really. That’s what’s called the Trinity and I hope I’ve made it clear for you .

Anyway, I believe in one God and in two others besides, creator, or creators, of Heaven and Earth. Yes, he/they definitely did this even though scientists think the universe was created billions of years before the Bible says it was and that God probably wasn’t even involved. But these scientists are all anti-Christian, that’s why they say that. If you have faith you know that of course God was involved. Other people who are also anti-Christian just out of spite say that if God made the Earth and all that is in it therein, then he must’ve made parasites and poisonous bugs and harmful bacteria and disease. But I’ve an answer to all that. Just don’t think about it.

And I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. Yes definitely this, even though Jesus says he’s not really anything like God’s son in three of the eye-witness accounts of his life in God’s Word. I expect he was just a bit muddled when he said this, being away from home and down here instead of up in Heaven with his Heavenly Father. He probably meant to say he was God’s son because it’d be too weird if he really was God’s Son and didn’t know it. We should be grateful to those people who came after him who realised exactly who he was.

And then there’s that bit somewhere about him being ‘begotten not made, of one substance with the father’, or something, which I think means he was more than God’s son. That he was, like, God himself. You’d think he’d remember that, wouldn’t you, when he was down here on Earth. What confuses me though is, if he was God, then who was he praying to all those times? I can’t get my head round that. But anyway, it’s a good job there were even more people who came after him who knew better than him and could tell he really was God.

He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. Well, you’ve got to believe this haven’t you, even though some people say ‘virgin’ should really just say ‘young woman’. A young woman might or might not be a virgin, especially if she wasn’t a Christian to begin with. It does make me wonder that if she was pregnant then it’s more than likely Mary wasn’t a virgin, ’cause we all know how babies get made. Still, if God’s Word says it was the ‘Holy Spirit’ that was the father then that’s what we should believe. If you want to know more about the Holy Spirit that can make people pregnant, well, we’ll get to it soon.

He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was dead and was buried. He descended into hell and on the third day he rose again. I think a bit got missed out here – all the stuff Jesus said and did in between being born and suffering under Pontius Pilate. Isn’t that important? You bet it is. Pontius Pilate, by the way, was a Roman perculator who worked for Julius Caesar. I can’t find anything about Jesus ‘descending into hell’ in my Bible but I suppose it must be right. I definitely believe though that after three days and nights in the tomb he rose again from the dead. I mean, that’s a really important bit. I know he wasn’t in the tomb for a full three days and nights, even though he said he would be, but a day and a half is close enough. I guess that’s why we say ‘on the third day’ instead; it sounds like three days when it was only a day and half. But, you know, Friday night till Sunday morning – it’s legit to say ‘on the third day’.

And we know he rose from the dead because Saint Paul said so – he saw him himself, in person. Well, not exactly in person but in his head. He was like an amazing flash of light in Paul’s head, a bit like an epileptic event, except, you know, like really real. And then other people started seeing him but not in their heads, as a real person, but one who could walk through walls and disappear if he felt like it. Totally real. Amazing.

I’ll be back next time to tell you what else Christians believe. In the meantime, keep praising the Lord!

 

 

Thea was talking about the Apostles’ Creed, though she also mentions the Nicene Creed. The Apostles’ Creed was created prior to 390CE and the Nicene Creed in 325, both quite a bit after Jesus’ lifetime. Three hundred years after, in fact.

Oh, and Pontius Pilate was a Roman procurator or prefect during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.

Jesus or Paul?

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Nicodemus

Jesus is asked a few times in the gospels about how a person can find eternal life – like that’s the most obvious things to ask a travelling snake-oil salesman. Maybe it is, I don’t know. It was in the first century anyway, if the gospels are to be believed.

Jesus gives a variety of answers in the three earliest gospels: in Matthew 19.17 it’s ‘keep the commandments’ – those terrible, brutal laws I talked about last time. In Mark 12.30-31 he says the way to eternal life is to love God with all your heart and soul, and your neighbour as yourself. In other places he tells his audience that if you want to be forgiven by God then first you must forgive others (Matthew 6.14); if you want God’s compassion then first you must be compassionate (Matthew 25:31-46); if you don’t want to be judged, then you shouldn’t judge others (Luke 6.37).

Jesus is particularly fond of this kind of measure-for-measure salvation; it’s the lynch-pin of his good news – do unto others as you would have God do unto you. And almost every time he mentions it, he connects it with the Law and commandments.

Never does he say, anywhere in the gospels, that if you want to gain eternal life, or find favour with God, or be saved, then what you have to do is believe in the redemptive power of his own imminent death. Even when he could have done so, when he could have worked a little bit of Christian dogma into his teaching, he doesn’t. And that’s strange really, when you consider that Paul’s brand of Christianity – the one that’s come down to us today – is built entirely on the idea that the death and resurrection of Christ is the only thing can save us from God’s wrath.

Paul’s alternative gospel, which is expounded in Romans and summarised in Galatians 3.10-13, goes something like this:

Paul looks at the old Jewish Law and says, ‘actually it’s impossible. None of us can keep it. We’re all under a death sentence for some tiny infringement of it, because any and all infringements lead to the death penalty. But,’ he goes on, ‘Christ has taken that penalty for us by dying in our place. So although the law demands we should die and then suffer for eternity, we won’t, because he died for us. Then he rose again, just as those who believe in him will.’ That last bit – about believers rising from the dead – really doesn’t follow from his premise that the Law is impossible, but this is Paul talking, a man with only a passing acquaintance with logic. He doesn’t, either, have any evidence that Jesus took the penalty for the rest of humankind – he made that bit up too.

And that, in a nutshell – I do mean nut shell – is Paul’s ‘good news’. It bears no relation to the good news that Jesus preaches in the synoptic gospels. Admittedly, the Jesus who wanders his way through the first three gospels is for the most part a pre-death Jesus. You could argue, as a result, that he wouldn’t talk about redemption through his death before it had happened… but then again, why not? He talks about all sorts of other things he thinks are going to happen after he dies and rises again; he’s going to return pretty damn soon in a blaze of glory, through the clouds with an army of angels; heaven and earth are going to pass away; God is going to unleash his kingdom on the new earth.

But in spite of these mad speculations, he doesn’t mention even once in the synoptic gospels that people can be saved merely by accepting that he has paid – or will pay – the penalty for their infringements of the law, their sins if you will. Never. All the more odd when you consider that Mark, Matthew and Luke were putting their gospels together long after Paul preached his particular brand of salvation. Yet they don’t put this message into Jesus’ mouth, nor do they add it to the narrative.

It’s just not there.

So… were the gospel writers not aware of it? If they did know of it, was it that they didn’t like it? Did they know, in fact, that Paul’s formula didn’t square with what Jesus himself had said, or what they at least believed he’d said?

Whatever it was, the result is there are two conflicting versions of the ‘good news’ in the New Testament: Paul’s and Jesus’. One is easier than the other; in Paul’s plan all you have to do is believe. The other is difficult (and if we’re honest, really only designed for Jesus’ fellow Jews); it entails things like forgiving repeatedly, showing compassion, putting others first, turning the other cheek and, especially, following the six hundred and odd commandments that make up the Law.

So guess which one Christians today prefer.

Here’s a clue: it’s not Jesus’ gospel – the one without the magical incantation but with the barbaric Jewish law. But if, as Christians believe, Jesus was the Son of God – maybe even God himself – then why do they always accept Paul’s reinterpretation over and above everything their Lord said? Why do they disregard all that Jesus demands of those who would follow him, and take instead Paul’s easy path?

In the end, though, what Jesus and Paul (as well as the gospel writers and different factions of the early church) are in dispute about is the highly improbable and the absolutely impossible. It doesn’t matter whether they thought you could gain ‘eternal life’ by obeying the commandments or by letting someone else take your punishment for you; humans do not live forever. Just because a zealous first-century preacher thought they could does not make it so. Just because a different fanatic from roughly the same time believed it doesn’t make it happen either. There’s no evidence any human has ever, after this brief earthly existence, gone on to live forever. Equally, there’s no evidence that a deity exists, so those rules that are so important, in different ways, to Jesus and Paul can’t have originated with him. They’re man-made too.

So, with no God and no eternal life, Jesus and Paul might as well have been discussing whether the tooth fairy wears a pink dress or a green dress. What does it matter when she doesn’t exist?

How much more were they wrong about?

How long you got?

Christian love… but not so’s you’d notice

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Church2Today, the world commemorated the relief of Auschwitz seventy years ago, following the murders of millions of Jews, homosexuals and gypsies.

Also today, Christian pastor James Manning said Islamic militants are justified in executing gay people. Another man of God, Ben Carson, implied that Christian bakers might want to add poison to wedding cakes they are ‘forced’ to make for same-sex couples. And just before Christmas, pastor Stephen Anderson said gay people should be exterminated as the means of eradicating AIDS.

Whatever happened to ‘do not kill’? You know, the sixth of the much vaunted ten commandments that believers think should be displayed in public places so that the world might become a better place. I guess it’s far easier to display the commandments than it is to obey them.

What happened too to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’? This doesn’t – big surprise, Christians – mean endlessly pointing out others’ ‘sin’ while relentlessly banging on about ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ like we’ve never heard of him before. Though again, I guess that sort of ‘love’ is a lot easier than actively caring for other people, regardless of their beliefs, values or sexuality, as much as you care for yourself. That, after all, is the whole point of the story of the Good Samaritan; the Samaritans were despised by the Jews of Jesus’ day in much the same way that homosexuals are despised by many of the righteous today. Yet it is a Samaritan whom Jesus makes the epitome of sacrificial neighbourly-love in his story. Still, what did he know?

And really, that’s my beef with Christianity. It just doesn’t work. Believing in Jesus, following him, as he insists you must, to the point of death doesn’t make you a better person. It doesn’t make you loving if you’re not already. Doesn’t make you meet the demands of the very one you claim was God on Earth. It certainly doesn’t make you more compassionate or even more intelligent, as the men of God above more than amply demonstrate.

So what use is it?

 

 

 

Answers to this year’s all-new Christmas Quiz

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saving-christmas-posterGod save us all from this, this Christmas time.

1. Where does the word ‘Christmas’ come from?
The answer is b, the name comes from the Catholic Mass held on the supposed date of Jesus’ birth. So all you anti-Catholic Christians need to find a new name for it fast.

2. When was Christ born?
a) is the answer here: Christ wasn’t born. Maybe Jesus was, but ‘the Christ’ is an invention of later Christians (Paul, for example, in Romans 8.3 and John’s gospel, written up to a century after Jesus lived.) The Christ is a mythic, supernatural being who’s always existed. He bears little relation to the itinerant Jewish preacher Yeshua who wasn’t born on 25th December or in the year 0.

3. Which gospel writers didn’t think the nativity story worth including in their accounts?
Mark and John (b & c) don’t bother including it. Did they not know it? The two gospels that do have bits of the story – Luke and Matthew – contradict each other.

4. How well attested are the events surrounding the birth in historical documents of the time?
a) Not at all. You’d have thought the Romans, who were pretty good at keeping records (lots of which have survived) would have noted Herod’s massacre of little boys or the appearance of a new, magic star in the sky – they were, after all, a superstitious lot. Not even Josephus, who, in the late first century, acknowledges the existence of Christians, sees fit to mention any of it.

5. Following the miraculous events of Jesus’ birth, what did Mary do?
According to Luke 2.19, she treasured them in her heart. However, the answer is c) because only a few verses further on, she hasn’t a clue about what her son is up to (Luke 2.48). Later still, she is part of the family’s efforts to ‘restrain him’ (Mark 3.21 & 31). Why, on these occasions, doesn’t she recall his miraculous beginning and think, ‘oh yes, I remember now. He behaves like a lunatic because he’s the son of the Most High.’ She certainly didn’t write down the details of his miraculous birth for later use in the gospels. No-one did. On account of them not really happening. Just sayin’.

6. How many times does Jesus refer to his miraculous birth?
a) Never. Strange that.

7. How many times does the rest of the New Testament refer to Jesus’ miraculous birth?
c) Never, even more strangely. Evidently the story hadn’t been invented when the rest of the New Testament was written.

8. When did Christians first start celebrating Christmas?
a) hundreds of years later.

9. Which of these Christmas traditions originate in the Bible?
None of them. Despite what Kirk Cameron might think, Christmas trees, kissing under the mistletoe and giving presents all have pagan origins. The giving of gifts did not come about because the wise men did it first. The tradition pre-dates Christianity.

10. Which of these groups has benefited the most from Jesus’ birth?
Yes, you’re right; none of them. Not women, not black people and not LGBT people. Christianity has a history of oppressing all three groups.

Speaking of which…
11. What does Pastor Steven Anderson want for Christmas?
c) he’d like to see the execution of all homosexuals so that AIDS – which, as far as the reverend understands it (I use the term loosely) only gay people get – might be wiped out. Peace and joy to you too, Stevie.

12. How will Christians celebrate Christmas this year?
The answer is a, b and c: by fighting the War On Christmas, putting the Christ back into Christmas and by telling us that Jesus is the Reason for the Season. Just like they do every year. As you can see, Kirk Cameron’s disaster of a movie, Saving Christmas, has two of these blessed clichés on its promotional poster alone.

So how did you do?
If you scored –
between 10-12: well done. Betcha don’t believe in Santa Claus either.
Between 7-10: your cynicism needs a little work. Order my book for Christmas – it’ll help.
Between 4-6: oh dear. You’re new around here, aren’t you. There’s hope for you though, so stick around. Oh yeah, and order my book for Christmas – it’ll definitely help.
Between 1-3: Like Christmas, you are in need of saving, my friend. May the scales fall from your eyes this holiday period. Amen.

Banned from the Kingdom of God

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PaulHere’s ‘Saint’ Paul’s list of those who won’t be allowed in God’s Kingdom:

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6. 9-10)

We can do better than that though. Who else could we add? How about the self-righteous? The converted? The born-again? The saved? Fundamentalists? Evangelicals? Evangelists? Ministers, bishops and popes? Christians of all stripes and persuasion? Will they all make it into the Kingdom?

No, they won’t. Not one of them will enter the magic Kingdom.

Why not?

Jesus, Paul and other New Testament writers were sure that the Kingdom of God would be arriving on the Earth soon. That’s ‘soon’ as in their own time, 2000 years ago*, and, as you’ll have noticed, the Kingdom, promised in the past for the past, never arrived. It’s not going to now either; neither Jesus nor Paul thought their fantasy was going to materialise some time in the distant future.

More than this, both were wrong that God was preparing to establish a heavenly kingdom on Earth at all. They were religious fanatics caught up in the religious zeitgeist of their day, religion being all they had to explain life, the universe and everything. Their interpretation was wrong on so many levels – but they were stuck with it. And so, when so much seemed unjust, unfair and unreasonable to them, Jesus in particular felt sure the only solution was for God to intervene to set things right; the meek would inherit the Earth, those last would be first and the first last. It was a dream, a vain hope, a complete invention. Not only did the Kingdom not arrive when Jesus and Paul said it would, it was never going to. There was no God waiting in the wings to make everything better.

So don’t worry if you’re gay or you like sex with more than one partner or you drink a bit too much or you’ve not been as honest as you might have been. You won’t be part of the Kingdom of God, to be sure, but that won’t be because of your sexuality or your morals or your ‘lifestyle’. You won’t be part of the Kingdom because it isn’t real. You’ll be in good company though – those who love the Lord won’t be getting in either. They’re just as far from Jesus and Paul’s land of make-believe, their special magic club, as you are.

 

* See Matthew 24:27, 30-31, 34; Luke 21:27-28, 33-34; Matthew 16:27-28; Matthew 19.28; 1 Corinthians 15.51-52; 1 Thessalonians 4.15-17; 1 John 2:17-181 and Peter 4.7 for predictions by Jesus, Paul and other NT writers that the Kingdom was coming real soon.

Idiotic Stuff Jesus Said 6: The ‘I Am’ sayings

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CampLet’s be clear from the outset here; Jesus never actually made any of the seven ‘I am’ claims put into his mouth in John’s gospel. You know the ones: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’, ‘I am the True Vine’, ‘the Good Shepherd’, ‘the Light of the World’ and so on. So it is a little unfair to lump them with all the idiotic things it’s more likely Jesus did say (see previous posts.)

How do we know he didn’t say them? Lots of reasons. Firstly, they’re not in the other three gospels all of which were written earlier than John’s, and are therefore closer to the time Jesus lived (though the earliest, Mark’s gospel, was probably put together thirty to forty years after Jesus lived.) If Jesus had really made all those grand ‘I am’ claims, wouldn’t the other gospel writers have recorded them too? Yet none of them mentions even one.

Secondly, in the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – Jesus has a different message from the one given to him in John’s gospel. The earlier gospels have Jesus talk about himself only very rarely. Instead, he goes on at length about the coming of the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) and how y’all better get ready for it ’cause it’s a-coming soon. Was he wrong about that one! On the odd occasion he does refer to himself in the synoptic gospels, he often does it in a sort of coded way, calling himself ‘the son of man’. He hardly ever uses ‘I’, let alone makes grandiose claims about himself.

Thirdly, all three of the synoptic gospels rely on earlier sources, now lost to us, and none of those has Jesus make ‘I am’ statements either. How do we know? Because, again, they’re not there in any of the three accounts – Matthew, Mark or Luke – that are built up from them. Significantly, one of these sources is an early record of Jesus’ sayings; that’s a ‘sayings gospel’ that doesn’t relate any ‘I am’ sayings.

Fourthly, John’s gospel is late – at least sixty years after JC’s death and also after Paul’s supernatural Christianity had gained a foothold among the gullible. The Jesus of John’s gospel is a reworked version, more in-line with the ‘Christ’ that Paul preached and much less like the Jewish peasant who had lived and preached the Kingdom of God. Despite what Christians claim, John’s gospel is not another eye-witness report (none of the gospels is) that differs only in minor details from the other three accounts. It is total reworking of the story, with its central figure transformed into a sort of divine Superman, and the idea of the coming Kingdom relegated to a single mention. This change of agenda renders the fourth gospel utterly unreliable as an historical record of anything the earthly Jesus might have said.

Fifthly, Christians claim John’s gospel differs from the others because in it Jesus reveals special, secret truths about himself to ‘the disciple whom he loved’, traditionally the John whom the gospel is named after. But again, the problem with this explanation is that the synoptic gospels don’t mention Jesus favouring one particular disciple over the others (unless it’s Simon Peter). In these, John, a loud, brash fisherman, plays only a minor role. Why don’t the synoptics refer to the special, more intimate relationship that John’s gospel refers to? Largely because there wasn’t one – not until the fourth gospel came to be written and ‘John’, who led the community that produced it, wanted to bump up his part.

So, idiotic as it would have been for an itinerant Jewish preacher and ‘prophet’, whose mission ended in failure, to make these claims about himself, Jesus never did. He didn’t say he was ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’. Or ‘the Vine’. Or ‘the Good Shepherd’. These are claims made for him long after he lived, by people who were persuaded by a snake-oil salesman that a God-man had mystically ‘saved’ them. They ‘re-imagined’ Jesus, sayings and all, to fit their idea of what he must have been like – and John’s gospel was born.

Its Jesus, if he was being honest, should really have said, ‘I Am… nothing but Pure Invention.’

Idiotic Stuff Jesus Said 4: Rivers Of Living Water

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Or more precisely: Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them (John 7.38).

WoundMe: What does this even mean, this ‘rivers of living water’ stuff?

Christian: It’s a metaphor. Jesus means it symbolically.

Me: Symbolically, how? A metaphor for what exactly?

Christian: The wonderful life-giving message that is the gospel.

Me: Which gospel? Jesus’s or Paul’s?

Christian: Oh, you’re splitting hairs. They’re one and the same.

Me: They most certainly aren’t, but we’ll let that pass for now. So by ‘living waters’ you mean that death-obsessed, rag-bag of negativity that fails to deliver in any way? (See all previous posts).

Christian: Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but when one is reborn of the Spirit, then this wonderful feeling takes hold of you. That’s what we mean by ‘living waters’.

Me: I see. So all it comes down to is how good it makes you feel inside. ‘Living waters’ is just a metaphor for feeling good.

Christian: Oh, no, it’s more than that. It’s the Love that compels us to share the good news with others – that’s really what Jesus means by rivers of living waters.

Me: So banging on about hell and how the world is doomed (because, you know, gay people) and how only you know the Truth, is letting your love flow, is it? Is that what we see on sites like this, and this and this? Living waters of love? Or running sores of bile?

Christian: Well, those sites and those people aren’t representative of true Christians.

Me: That’s funny. They say the same about you.

Christian: Now you’re being unfair.

Me: And what’s more, there’s no reference to ‘rivers of living water’ flowing inside people anywhere else in ‘Scripture’. That’s another bit of made-up nonsense.

Christian: Oh, no, you’re mistaken about that. You must be. Jesus wouldn’t get a thing like that wrong.

Me: You know, maybe none of you have rivers of living water sloshing around inside you. Maybe this is just another of those idiotic things Jesus said, or was made to say about a hundred years after he lived, that means absolutely nothing at all.

Christian: Ma! He’s persecuting me.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 26.2: The Bible is the Word of God

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WritingRight on cue, after my post on the Bible as ‘the Word of God’, Mike Ratcliff over at the intense Possessing the Treasure, posted his own item on the forged 2 Timothy 3.16-17, using it to show how the Bible is truly God’s Word.

You should know that Mike will not be contradicted in any way. You’re wasting your time posting a comment about his ‘exegesis’ of biblical texts because his musings – and there are many, many of them – are without any sort of error. Mike doesn’t make mistakes! He explains in his post how the Bible is ‘inspired, infallible and inerrant’. Many evangelical Christians hold this view of the Bible, which is as mistaken as it is idolatrous.

Infallible literally means ‘incapable of failure’ and ‘trustworthy’, but as I’ve attempted to show in many of my previous posts, the Bible fails in all sorts of ways:

It fails as science. It claims light existed before the sun was created; it claims the sun goes round the Earth, which it thinks is the centre of the universe. It has no idea about the order in which life-forms developed; no idea about evolution; no idea about life-forms that cannot be seen with the naked eye. It describes insects as having four legs and gives animals the power of speech.

It fails morally. It endorses slavery, polygamy, rape, incest, genocide and cruelty to both animal and human life. It denigrates women, children, the disabled and gay people. It prescribes brutal and barbaric punishments for those who infringe its petty laws.

It fails in its promises and prophecies. None of its promises ‘work’, none of its prophecies have come true (except those made after the event they’re meant to be predicting.)

Can something that fails so spectacularly and consistently be considered trustworthy? Yes, say Christians like Mike. No, says anyone capable of a little elementary reasoning.

Inerrant means incapable of error. As if the errors in the ‘failure’ category aren’t enough, the Bible is littered with mistakes and contradictions. The gospels, for example, all have different visitors to the tomb of the supposedly risen Jesus. These visitors are all met by different strangers – one man, two men, angels and their dog, Spot. More importantly, the New Testament can’t decide how a person is saved. Paul’s formula is radically different from Jesus’, and different again from the message Luke puts into his mouth in Acts. In total, there are eight different and conflicting ways to find salvation in the New Testament*.

Inspired literally means ‘breathed out’; Mike Ratcliff and others insist that the Bible is ‘breathed out’ by God. Apparently, he ‘breathed out’ his confused, contradictory message into and through fallible tribesmen, and first-century hallucinatory zealots, causing the former to exaggerate their own importance and success and the latter to create those eight different routes to salvation. He didn’t, however, see fit to give them a clear picture of who Jesus actually was, nor a precise formulation of the so-called Trinity (that fanciful nonsense had to be worked out much later), nor of what would happen to believers after death. He did, though, inspire forgeries and fakes like 2 Timothy and left it forty to a hundred years to prompt four individuals who had never met Jesus to write the muddled tales of his adventures on Earth. He didn’t think it important to preserve the originals of any of the manuscripts he’d inspired, nor did he take steps to prevent them from being altered both deliberately and accidentally throughout the ensuing years**. Perhaps he ‘breathed out’ the alterations and errors too.

The real problem with the inspiration argument is though that it is circular; the Bible ‘proves’ God and God proves the Bible.

No, the Bible is not infallible. Nor is it inerrant, nor inspired. It is an all too human creation, fallible and error-ridden. There is greater consistency and style in the works of Shakespeare than there is in the shambolic collection of books cobbled together as the Bible in 397CE. Those who see it as something more, see what they want see and are wilfully blind to its many failings. God’s Word it isn’t.

 

Notes:

* For the eight (at least) salvation plans in the New Testament see my book, Why Christians Don’t Do What Jesus Tells Them To …And What They Believe Instead, chapter 6.

** For errors, alterations and the non-preservation of any original documents see Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible And Why.

 

 

 

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 26.1: The Bible is the Word of God

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IsaiahThe Bible: not so much holy as full of holes.

So much hinges on the fallacy that the Bible is the literal, inerrant Word of God. As the ‘director’ of Christian Voice, Stephen Green, puts it:

We believe the Holy Bible to be the inspired, infallible, written Word of God to whose precepts, given for the good of nations and individuals, all man’s laws must submit.

Try as you might, you will not find the Bible claiming it is the Word of God, capitalised or otherwise. The phrase does appear, without the capital W, but on none of these occasions is the Bible referring to itself.

Christians usually base their conviction that the Bible is the Word of God on a verse in 2 Timothy (3.16):

All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

There are some serious problems with this claim.

Firstly, the ‘scripture’ to which 2 Timothy 3.16 refers cannot be the Bible as we know it today. This was not compiled until about 260 years after these words were written*. At best, the author of 2 Timothy is referring to the first five books of the Bible – the Pentateuch – and maybe, possibly, though we cannot know for certain (you see how tentative it is?) some of the writing he had encountered that was eventually included in the New Testament.

By the same reckoning though, he could equally be referring to books that at one time were considered to be inspired but did not make it into the final 27 books of the New Testament**. This is also why the use of the term ‘the word of God’ in other places in the New Testament cannot be referring to the Bible as a whole. No-one knew when using the phrase in its original context that there was going to be a Bible, let alone one divorced from its Jewish roots.

Secondly, most scholars today are convinced that Paul did not write 2 Timothy, even though it claims that he is its author. There are very good reasons for saying the letter was written between 100-150CE, thirty-six years, at the very least, after Paul’s death in 64CE. In other words, 2 Timothy is a fake, claiming to be written by one person – Paul – when it is in fact the creation of another, taking advantage of the reputation of the more well-known writer.

How far can such a false witness be trusted? Most people in any other context would say not at all. And yet Christians take this forger’s letter to be ‘inspired by God’, just because it says it is. In essence they are saying that God is happy to inspire forgery, and not just in this instance either: none of the ‘pastoral’ letters (1 and 2 Timothy, together with Titus) is written by Paul, even though all of them claim to be. The second letter to the Thessalonians and those to the Ephesians and Colossians are not by him either; 1 and 2 Peter are not by the (illiterate) apostle Peter and the letters of James and Jude, while wanting us to think that they are, are not by Jesus’ brothers***.

In short, and as Bible scholar Bart Ehrman puts it:

Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle — Peter, Paul or James — knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.

Christians do not accept that the Qur’an is the word of God (Allah), nor the book of Mormon, even though both say they are, so why do they take it on trust, from a forged document that was lucky enough to find its way into the New Testament, that it and all other ‘scripture’ is inspired? ‘Faith’, they would tell you; but in this as in many other contexts, it is extremely misguided faith.

 

Notes:

* For the Bible’s late compilation see Charles Freeman (2008) Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, p42

** For non-canonical texts once considered contenders see Bart Ehrman (2009) Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions of the Bible, chapter 4

*** Forgeries in the New Testament are discussed more fully in Ehrman (2011) Forged: Writing in the Name of God – Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are: The pastoral letters – pp96-103; 2 Thessalonians – pp105-108; Ephesians – pp108-112; Colossians – pp112-114; Jude – pp186-188; James – pp192-198. Peter’s illiteracy is noted in the Bible itself (Acts 4.13) and is discussed on pp75-76 of Forged.

UK editions referenced.