Tag Archives: Paul

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.

 

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 25: Unbelievers are going to Hell!

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Spoiler alert: No, they’re not.

 

HellIt’s always nice when the local fellowship keeps in touch.

There’s good news and bad news. First, the good news: Hell doesn’t exist. You can’t go to a place that doesn’t exist.

 

Next, the bad news; you’re not going to survive your death. Sorry to break it to you like this, but there it is: no-one survives death. Once the physical, chemical and electrical processes in your brain cease then so do you, because that’s what you’re made of. That self you have a sense of – your soul if you want to call it that – is entirely dependent on those electro-chemical processes. It doesn’t exist independently from them. You cease to be once the brain dies and begins to deteriorate*. Everyone who has ever lived and died, including true believers down the ages – from Jesus, Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to Augustine, Bede, Wilberforce and C. S. Lewis – have all ceased to be, dissipated and obliterated forever, along with their physical brains and bodies.

 

And why, dear Christian, would you want to survive death? What makes you think that the bundle of petty concerns, loves and hates, neuroses, reactions and habits that you call ‘you’, merit long-term survival? Because that odd little collection of impulses is what you’re talking about when you say you are going to live forever. You may regard yourself as changed into some sort of reflection of Christ, but it’s your essential self that you desperately, and arrogantly, hope will enjoy eternal life. It won’t – and why should it?

 

So, there’s no you to survive and no Hell, or Heaven, for you to go to. The Bible doesn’t offer Heaven – see my previous posts here and here – but it does talk about Hell. It’s the place the Unrighteous go when the Righteous™ take over the earth (albeit it in the first century). According to Jesus in Mark 7.20-23, the Unrighteous are people like murderers, thieves and the proud, while Paul includes other ‘undesirables’ like homosexuals (1 Corinthians 6.9). This isn’t nearly enough for today’s Christians though**. They want everyone except themselves to be sent to Hell. So if you’re not ‘saved’ according to their magic formula, then you’re certain to go there. Never mind if you’re not a murderer or proud or gay. That’s where the God of Love is going to send you, to be tormented forever.

 

And where is Hell? Jesus seems to think it’s in the heart of the Earth (Matthew 12.40) and invariably those threatened with Hell go ‘down’ to it. The wingnut who wrote Revelation also implies it’s in the Earth (9.2). You’d think, that being the case, we would have found it by now. But we haven’t because, of course, it doesn’t exist. And you’re not going. And there won’t be a ‘you’ to go in any case.

 

So don’t waste any time worrying about it or letting Christians persuade you Hell is a real place. Live your one and only life in the here and now as best you can. Enjoy it. It’s not a rehearsal for a better place, and certainly not for a far worse one.

 

Notes:

* In The Lazarus Effect, Dr Sam Parnia relates instances of people being revived up to an hour after death, but only in specific circumstances, when the brain remains undamaged. Any longer than an hour and it’s not possible. Such revivals are extreme forms of the rebooting your brain does every morning after sleep; the brain itself and all its neuro-connections must still be capable of functioning for you to be you again after sleep or even apparent death.

 

** Yes, I acknowledge some Christians don’t accept Hell. American pastor, Rob Bell, suggests in Love Wins that Hell doesn’t make ‘a very good story’, and that God will save everybody. All Hell was let loose in the resulting backlash from true, Bible-believing Christians; a response that was extreme, brutal and frequently sanctimonious. How dare Bell contradict God’s Word, Holy Scripture? Surely he deserves to go to Hell for that.

 

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 23: Jesus shows us how to live

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Doctor

Was JC a great moral teacher?

No, the best things he said – do unto others, love your neighbour – had already been said eons before he came along. Some of the other stuff he came out with was ridiculously impractical – give away all you have; live only for today; turn the other cheek – that his followers have been unable to do from day one.

Did what he said about God turn out to be right?

No. He said God would establish his Kingdom on Earth while the disciples were still alive.

Did he commit himself to long-term responsibility for others and their needs?

Another no.

Did he experience the infirmities and difficulties of old age?

Nope.

Did he suffer from any of the serious illnesses we mere mortals are prone to?

Apparently not.

Did he give over his entire life to raising children or taking care of elderly relatives?

Not that we know of.

Did he have to work each day to earn a living?

No. He sponged off gullible female fans (Luke 8.1-3).

Did he have any understanding of science and of how the world works?

Erm, no. He thought people became ill because of sin and demon possession and that Heaven was in the sky.

Was he interested in anything but his own futile ‘mission’?

Yet another no.

Apart from his last few days did he know suffering, the everyday frustrations of life or the daily struggle to make ends meet?

Not so’s you’d notice.

Did he, in short, know anything of the life as it was lived and is lived by ordinary people?

Emphatically not.

There was nothing marvellous about Jesus. He was out of touch with ordinary people and at loggerheads with those cleverer than he was. He was a failed prophet who was turned into a supernatural being by those who came along afterwards – mainly Paul, who’d never met him – and is worshipped today by those who ignore most of what he said.

 

 

Proof that God is real?

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Thor

Christians – can you prove God exists? J. Lee Grady of Charisma magazine thinks he can and offers ‘7 Things That Prove God Is Real’. Leaving aside the fact that it shouldn’t be necessary to prove God is real – the God of the universe, Creator of Heaven and Earth, Father of Mankind should be more… apparent, shouldn’t he? – what are Mr Grady’s incredible proofs? Glad you asked. You can read the full article here, but to cut a long story short, they are:

Babies, thunderstorms, flowers, the Bible, the global spread of Christianity, Jesus and a personal friendship with God.

I hope you’re convinced. I know I am.

Problem is, all of these things are also evidence that God doesn’t exist.

Babies: Babies are miracles, according to Lee. We’ve evolved to find human babies cute and appealing even when they’re yelling, pooping and spewing – it helps us nurture them. But they’re not miracles; nearly 37,000 are born every day. What’s more, over a million of them die every year on the day they’re born. Which might just suggest God is not real at all.

Thunderstorms: Mr Grady says that because storms are powerful they put him in mind of God. This, however, is not proof of anything. Unless of course it’s Thor, god of thunder in Norse mythology and star of Marvel Comics. Is this who you mean, Lee?

Flowers: Lee says flowers are proof of God because they’re pretty. He seems to be unaware that their appearance is the result of natural selection; it has developed in order to attract insects and birds who then unwittingly assist in the plant’s reproduction. Yes, flowers are pleasing to the human eye as well, but their job is emphatically not ‘to simply make the world beautiful’, as Lee claims. They are evidence of evolution, not of a flower-arranging god.

The Bible: Lee trots out the false assertion that the Bible, in spite of having numerous authors over thousands of years, presents a consistent message. It doesn’t. There are, for example, at least nine different ways of being saved expressed by writers in the New Testament (some of whom, including the one Lee quotes, are forgers) – and they lived within a few decades of each other! A book cobbled together more than 300 years after the supposed main event, by men – not God – with a vested interest in its success, is not proof of the divine.

The global spread of Christianity: Human beings have worked hard throughout the ages to spread their own particular version of Christianity – often converting others on pain of death. There are today over 34,000 Christian groups, sects and cults, which is ‘proof’ that there is no one Mastermind behind it all. Other religions spread too, so perhaps that’s evidence their God is real as well (or instead), and so do diseases. The spread of an idea only illustrates human preoccupation with that idea.

Jesus: Really? His broken promises, failed prophecies, impossible morality and shabby treatment of those who didn’t buy into his mission somehow ‘prove God’? Maybe Lee means that Christ proves God. But ‘the Christ’ is an invention of Paul’s and has little to do with the man Jesus. In any case, one mythical figure does not prove another. Unless it’s Thor, of course, whose existence definitely proves there’s an Odin.

A personal friendship with God: What goes on in Lee’s head doesn’t prove anything, never mind the existence of God. A person’s feelings are subjective, solipsistic and entirely unverifiable. Thinking he’s got a relationship with God doesn’t mean that he has. Unlike my friendship with Thor. That’s really real.

So, seven proofs of God that are no proof at all. Anyone else care to take a turn?

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 17: You get saved by being washed in the blood of the lamb (Romans 5.9 etc)

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Sermon

Not according to Jesus you don’t. And you’d think he being the Son of God – not to mention ‘the lamb’ in question – he’d be in a position to know. So how does Jesus say you find salvation? No magic formula for him; no quick-fix like the one Paul invents after Jesus’ death.

So how does Jesus reckon you get right with God? For once, he couldn’t be clearer:

If you want to receive God’s forgiveness, first you have to give it:

For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matthew 6.14)

If you want to avoid God’s judgement… then don’t judge others:

Judge not that you be not judged. For with the judgement you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. (Matthew 7.1-2)

If you want God to show you mercy, first show mercy yourself:

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. (Matthew 5.7)

If you want to experience God’s riches and blessings, first you have to be generous yourself:

Give and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back. (Luke 6.38)

If you want God to show you compassion, first be compassionate yourself:

The King will say to those at his right hand… I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me… Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord when did we see the hungry and feed thee or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee?… And the King will answer them, Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’.

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me… Truly I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it not to me’. (Matthew 25.34-46)

That’s right, Jesus sees being saved as a ‘measure for measure’ arrangement and uses that exact term repeatedly in order to get the message across. According to the ‘Son of God’, you get what you give. And, what’s more, his death has nothing to do with it. He starts preaching his ‘gospel’ message long before he’s crucified (Mark 1.14) and it most definitely doesn’t include any mystical piggy-backing on a death that hasn’t happened yet in order to gain God’s favour. Even Matthew, Mark and Luke don’t add it to their stories of Jesus, even though they wrote them after he died and after Paul’s invention of his magic salvation formula.

Jesus’ ‘measure-for measure’ gospel is very different from Paul’s – the two are incompatible in fact, though Christians refuse to see this. Jesus’ gospel is practical and moral: the way to God’s heart, he says, is through treating others, even those who might despise us, with kindness and compassion.

This, though, is too hard for Christians. They find Paul’s spiritualised, self-centred version of salvation much more to their taste.

Why God is always a no-show

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Peter&Paul

* And he should know; he wrote it in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, 5:23 and elsewhere.

When Jesus thought his world had got into such a bad way, he felt sure God would intervene and turn things around. But God didn’t and Jesus was executed instead.

When St Paul became convinced things couldn’t go on as they were, he told everyone that God was going to send Jesus back to Earth to sort it all out. But God didn’t and Paul was executed instead.

When people were accused of witchcraft in the middle ages, they waited for God to intervene and save them. But God was a no-show, again, and 100,000 were tortured or killed as a result.

When millions of Jews were taken to concentration camps in the second world war, they too prayed for God to save them. Once more, he failed to make an appearance and instead over six million men, women and children were exterminated by the Nazis.

When right-wing Christians today complain that the world has abandoned God (because, you know, gay marriage) they feel sure that God will intervene to judge us all and put things ‘right’. So far, he’s conspicuous by his absence.

God is always a no-show, despite the pleas of his followers, despite the earnest belief of his alleged son, despite the plight of his chosen people, despite those today who claim to know his will. Could this be because he has no existence outside the imaginations of human beings?

It surely could; a being that has failed to show himself throughout the history of mankind is a being that doesn’t exist.

Notes:

1) Jesus says God will intervene: Matthew 24:27, 30-31, 34, Luke 21:27-28 etc.

2) Witchcraft figures from An Atheist’s History of Belief:Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention by Matthew Kneale, p198

3) While I’ve linked one site that reflects modern Christian belief, there are thousands more of the same sort. Google ‘God will judge America’ for an unhealthy sample.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 8: Atheists can never be moral or happy

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moral

Christians regularly exercise these dishonest sound-bytes; here, here and here, for example.

There’s no need to argue with them. All we need to do is look at the evidence:

Good, moral atheists

Immoral Christians

Happy atheists

Miserable Christians

(click all of the above for examples)

If it’s true that only those with a direct line to God can be good and happy, then we shouldn’t see any of these categories. Christians should be supremely happy all, or at least most, of the time – St Paul says that believers are characterised by love, joy, peace, kindness and generosity (Galatians 5.22) – but they’re not. They should be moral and good all the time too – after all, Jesus commands them to be ‘perfect’ and tells them how to achieve it (Matthew 5.43-48) – but they’re not.

According to Christians moral, happy atheists shouldn’t exist. And yet they do. Christians, when they achieve it, are only good and only happy because they think God is watching over their shoulder. When atheists are good and happy it’s because they can be.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 5: The resurrection is well attested

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PsychHere’s a question for you. How many first-hand, eye-witness reports do we have of the resurrection of Jesus?

Thousands? Christians would like you to think so.

Hundreds? St Paul tells us he’s heard this is the case (1 Corinthians 15.6).

Dozens? All those folk mentioned in the gospels, surely…

The answer is one. We have one first-hand, eye-witness report of the resurrected Christ. It’s St Paul’s own which he mentions, in passing, only three times. A total of six verses cover the allegedly most important event in history. Here they are:

Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (1 Corinthians 9:1)

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Corinthians 15:8)

The Gospel preached by me is not of human origin. For I did not receive it from a human being, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ… When he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles. (Galatians 1: 11-12 & 15-16)

And that’s it. That’s Paul’s own account of his seeing the risen Lord. It hardly compares with the high drama of the Acts account, where on the road to Damascus, Paul is blinded by light and has a conversation with Jesus. But that story was written forty years after the supposed event, twenty after Paul’s death, by someone else. What’s more, it is recounted differently each time it’s told (in Acts chapters 9, 22 and 26). It’s not first-hand, it’s not eye-witness and it’s certainly not reliable.

What about the gospel accounts then? Don’t Mary Magdalene, Peter and others see the risen Jesus? Well, no, not in the earliest gospel, Mark, where, in the oldest versions, there are no resurrection appearances at all. The other three gospels have them, but these were written 50 to 90 years after Jesus lived and they contradict each other significantly. You can decide whether his makes them reliable or not, but they certainly weren’t written by the people involved, nor by eye-witnesses.

So, Paul’s account is the only first-hand report we have.

Let’s take a closer look at it.

Even in the heavily reworked versions in Acts, what Paul encounters is not a physical Jesus, a man in a resurrected body, but light from the sky and a disembodied voice, which, depending on which of the Acts account you rely on, no-one else present sees or hears. Paul himself doesn’t even know what he is experiencing – certainly not a recognisable human figure – until the light tells him ‘who’ it is.

There is no difference between Paul’s experience of a light purportedly from heaven and an event that occurred in its entirety – as far as it occurred at all – in Paul’s head. The original Greek of Galatians 1.15-16 makes absolutely clear that this is where it took place: while English translations say that the risen Christ revealed himself to Paul, the original Greek has Paul’s initial experience of the Christ take place in him. Paul, then, admits only to an inner vision of ‘a life-giving spirit’ (1 Corinthians 15.45) and nowhere does he claim that he encountered an extrinsic, embodied Jesus. Nor does the writer of Acts, however much he embroiders Paul’s experience, make the claim for him. The risen Lord, if he’s become anything, is not a resurrected body but a spiritual being made of light.

So, the only witness to the resurrected Jesus who has left us an account – six extremely sketchy verses in his letters – didn’t see the risen Jesus in physical form at all. He experienced an hallucination, or, as he puts it, a ‘revelation’. The resurrected Christ, in our earliest and only eye-witness report, is no more than a vision within a person’s head.

And from this, all else followed.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 4: Heaven Awaits

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Heaven2Quite a few Christians are now following this blog and I’d like to issue them with a challenge: show me where Jesus or the gospel writers or St Paul or any of the New Testament authors promise you that you’ll go to Heaven when you die.

Because, you see, the Bible doesn’t make any such promise.

Jesus was adamant that ‘the righteous’ (he’s not even talking about Christians!) would soon transfer into God’s new Kingdom on Earth. When you say the Lord’s prayer, Christians, this is exactly what you’re asking for: ‘Thy Kingdom come – on Earth as it is Heaven.’ As the former bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, puts it, ‘at no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, “Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven.” It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation’… in the first century, we might add.

Paul, with a version of Christianity that bears little resemblance to Jesus’ own, doesn’t teach that the believer will go to heaven either. In attempting to explain why the Kingdom is late in arriving – so late, in fact, that Christians were dying without seeing it – he invents the idea that the deceased will be woken up by Jesus when he returns to Earth (1 Thessalonians 4.14-16. And yes, he really did make up as he went along).

And after Paul? It was becoming increasingly apparent to later Christians that Jesus really wasn’t coming back any time soon. So they invented the idea that they would go to be with him. As Bart Ehrman puts it ‘with the passage of time, the apocalyptic notion of the resurrection of the body becomes transformed into the doctrine of the immortality of the soul’. But this is not what Jesus himself promised – and you’d think as ‘the Son of God’ he’d have known how it all worked – it’s not what St Paul taught and it’s not even what the trippy writer of Revelation claims. He too insists that everything is going to happen here on a recreated Earth (Revelation 21).

So the choice for you today, Christians, is whether you believe ‘God’s Word’ where, for once,  Jesus and Paul say much the same thing, or you go along with those later, post-biblical believers with their altogether different idea of what happens when we die.

Of course, you opt for the latter – even you have doubts that the Kingdom will come at this late stage – instead of facing the fact that when we die, we are just that: dead.

Ehrman D. Bart (2009) Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions of the Bible. Harper Collins: New York, page 266.