Tag Archives: Paul

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.

Jesus Doesn’t Approve of One Man One Woman Marriage

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WeddingWhat does Jesus really have to say about marriage? It’s not what you think.

It is almost impossible to visit a Christian website these days and not find it making pronouncements about gay marriage, same-sex relationships and the ‘evil’ of homosexuality. Some, like Christian Voice, seem to think that the gospel is about nothing else. Elsewhere, Bishop John Quinn of Minnesota, a celibate, single male and thus an expert in matters matrimonial, writes that ‘from the beginning, the church has taught that marriage is a lifetime relationship between one man and one woman… It is a sacrament, instituted by Jesus Christ to provide the special graces that are needed to live according to God’s law and to give birth to the next generation”. Alas, the bishop doesn’t know his Bible, nor his Lord’s teaching. He is not alone in superimposing his own views of marriage on the Bible; it is a common practice among Christians today.

Should you be inclined to do so, you will once again search in vain either for Jesus ‘instituting’ modern marriage or for the early church promoting it. Those who claim he does usually cite Jesus’ apparent endorsement of Genesis 2.24 from Matthew 19.5-6:

“a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

In context, though, Jesus is actually discussing divorce, not marriage, and is making the point that Jewish law permits divorce only because men and women are weak. This prompts the disciples to observe that ‘if such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry’, with which Jesus agrees, adding,

not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can. 

In other words, Jesus thinks it is better to be sexless than to marry, the better to pursue the interests of God’s Kingdom. He emphasises the point in Luke 20.34-35:

Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age [i.e. that of the Kingdom] and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 

This is even less ambiguous in its denigration of marriage; it is for this world only, for those who will not be part of the Kingdom, who will not survive death. Those who live in anticipation of the Kingdom, who would be resurrected from the dead, will have nothing to do with marriage in this life, as in the next. Far from ‘instituting’ marriage as Bishop Quinn claims, Jesus heralds the end of the institution.

The Kingdom, however, didn’t come when Jesus said it would. Newly formed groups of believers found themselves having to decide what to do about marriage in a world that was lasting longer than he’d promised. Consequently, ‘from the beginning’, the early church’s position was that marriage would do if believers couldn’t manage to control their sexual urges. But, Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 7.8-9, it is better to remain celibate and not to marry at all:

to the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.

While it is true Paul assumes any marriage will be between a man and woman, this is hardly the ringing endorsement of marriage we might expect from the assertions of today’s Christians. For Paul, the leaders of the early church and Jesus himself there was no point to marrying when they lived in the end times. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, 7.28-29:

But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none…

Paul is not sanctioning marriage because he anticipated that any marriage could only be short-lived and traumatic; as he goes on to explain in 1 Corinthians 7.32-34, marriage is little more than a distraction from ‘the affairs of the Lord’. He is not therefore promoting ‘life long’ commitment in the sense Bishop Quinn, Christian Voice’s Stephen Green and Christians who don’t know their Bible claim, because those to whom Paul writes are not, in his view, going to continue in their existing lives for very much longer.

Above all, Jesus and Paul are most definitely not establishing rules for marriage for the rest of time, simply because, for them, there was no ‘rest of time’.