Tag Archives: revelations

Do You See What I See?

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Christianity with its visions of God, angels and resurrected god-men, is not distinctive. It emerged from a culture in which such epiphanies were commonplace and highly esteemed. Appearances of deities, other supernatural beings and dead people were valued as genuine encounters with a reality on the other side of this mortal life. Paul was a Hellenised Jew and a Roman citizen (if Acts 17 can be believed); it was perfectly natural for him and his contemporaries to see and hear things that weren’t there.

Not only was the fledging Christ-cult influenced by the superstitious culture around it, but was born too of Judaism, itself awash with visions, apparitions and revelations. How could the new religion fail to be when its originators existed in such a milieu. One or other of these ‘visionaries’ believed they’d seen a resurrected Jesus. Of course they did. This is how gods manifested themselves then; everyone knew it. There were even those who hadn’t really had any inner-visions but wanted to be regarded as mystics themselves so would pretend they too had had direct contact with the deities.

The human mind has always been susceptible to illusions, to the potency of dreams and to misinterpreting what is going on around it. It’s also prone to a spot of fantasising now and then. This propensity didn’t cease once Christianity established itself. Muhammed claimed to have been visited by angels who revealed new truths about the nature of God – not least a change in name.

In the 19th century, a young farmer, Joseph Smith, living during a widespread and particularly intense religious revival, imagined (or pretended) he’d been visited by God and Jesus. Later, he said he’d been visited by a hitherto unknown angel with the unlikely name of Moroni. The result of course was multiple wives for Smith and the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Sufficient numbers of people believed Smith’s cockamamie stories about his alleged visions to commit to Mormonism. Smith wasn’t alone; others had visions of deities, including but not restricted to the Big Two, Jesus and his Father God. Hundreds recently saw the Virgin Mary hovering above New York City. They couldn’t all be wrong could they? Of course not, but they were all be deluded. Just like Joshua Mhlakela whom Jesus appeared to and told him the date of the Rapture was 22nd September, or possibly the 23rd, then with ‘billion percent’ certainty 7th October. Or maybe 8th…

This is how religions are made, changed and adopted: on a bed of illusory sand. If we need any further evidence that such experiences are illusory, created by the mind itself, then consider this: each time God, his angels or his Son appear in the religion-soaked brains of mystics and fraudsters, they reveal a message at odds with that revealed to previous visionaries. Each revelation has to be different of course. There would be no reason for such ‘visits’ otherwise.

Hence Abraham (or his script writer) imagining YHWH promising an eternal covenant and a new land.

Moses (or his script-writer) claiming YHWH had issued new laws while at the time commanding the slaughter of tribal enemies.

Cephas thinking he’d seen a risen Jesus who may or may not have told him of the imminent the End of the Age.

Jesus himself reportedly talking with his ‘Father’ about the necessity of his execution.

Paul flying to heaven so that Jesus could explain in great detail a new covenant, negating the original ‘eternal’ covenant with Abraham.

John of Patmos envisaging Jesus coming to Earth to slaughter the enemies he purportedly instructed his followers to love. (And Christians claim the Bible presents a unified message!)

All of these are manifestations of, and within, the minds of fantasists. Such manifestations are a naturally occurring malfunction of the brain.

And so it continues. Beware anyone who claims to have seen or heard from a deity of any sort. They, like their biblical counterparts, are deluded and almost certainly ill.

Mystic Revelations

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What do the three ‘great’ Abrahamic religions have in common?

They all started with visions, hallucinations, dreams and mystic revelations. They’re not only based on these but owe their very existence to encounters with the supernatural that took place entirely within people’s heads. This of course is if they happened at all; many of these encounters with angels and God’s revelations take place in stories that have all the characteristics of myth or legend. Even so, they reveal much about the primitive state of mind (still around today) that believed God frequently revealed himself to, and in the minds of, chosen individuals.

First, the grand-daddy of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism: 

When Abram was 99 years old, YHWH appeared to him. He said to Abram, “I am El Shadday. Live in my presence with integrity. I will give you my promise, and I will give you very many descendants.” Immediately, Abram bowed with his face touching the ground, and again Elohim spoke to him, My promise is still with you. You will become the father of many nations. So your name will no longer be Abram [Exalted Father] but Abraham [Father of Many] because I have made you a father of many nations. I will give you many descendants. Many nations and kings will come from you. I will make my promise to you and your descendants for generations to come as an everlasting promise. I will be your Elohim and the God of your descendants. (Genesis 17)

Then Moses:

The Angel of YHWH appeared to (Moses) in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed.

Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.”

So when YHWH saw that he turned aside to look, Elohim called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3)

Notice how the inner voice goes from being that of ‘the angel of YHWH’ to YHWH himself (or one of his aliases). The entire scenario is preposterous of course, as is the Abraham episode before it. I’ve omitted the other occasions YHWH is said to appear to Abraham, including the infamous Genesis 22, where YHWH instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son. These stories are legends written, created from whole cloth, centuries after Abraham purportedly lived. He, like the later Moses, is almost certainly mythical, a character created to represent the beginnings of the Jewish faith. Even his names are symbolic. In truth, no one knows how Judaism began.

Onto Christianity:

The angel said to (Mary), “Don’t be afraid, Mary; God has shown you his grace. Listen! You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of King David, his ancestor. He will rule over the people of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end.” (Luke 1)

Did this happen? If you believe angels exist then possibly, but we know they do not. We also know that this is myth. However, Luke wanted his readers to know that Jesus’ birth was miraculous so invented a story in which Mary encounters a heavenly being. The gospel writer anchors the divinity of Jesus to an implausible event which at best can only be a young woman’s vision (though it most certainly isn’t.)

The same is true of the resurrection appearances. Here’s Matthew 28:1-8:

Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said.”

More angels (they multiply in later gospels); again at best, though still highly improbable, the angel(s), if seen at all, can only be a vision or an hallucination (or mistaken identity.)

Onto the only first hand account of an encounter with the divine that the bible includes, Paul’s:

God was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles… I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. (Galatians 1)

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a man was caught up to the third heaven. And I know how such a man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, God knows— was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which a man is not permitted to speak. (2 Corinthians)

This is all there is. This is the extent Paul talks about his heavenly encounters. In Galatians he admits that God revealing whatever it was he revealed was ‘in’ him, that is, in his own head. The bizarre tale he relates in 2 Corinthians reads like an hallucination (Paul says he doesn’t know whether it was in the body or out of it) which is all it could’ve been; there is no paradise or ‘third heaven’.

And finally, there’s Mohammed:

… while I was sleeping last night, the keys of the treasures of the earth were brought to me till they were put in my hand.”… 

The angel came to him and asked him to read. The Prophet replied, “I do not know how to read. The Prophet added, “The angel caught me (forcefully) and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it any more. (Sahih Bukhari 6998)

Encounters with heavenly beings in dreams, ‘revelations’, visions, hallucinations and invented stories: these are central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The religions would not exist without them. Written as myth long after they supposedly occurred or referred to obliquely by those who claim to have experienced them, they are the products of fevered pre-scientific minds.

Post-script: I’ve searched in vain for Darwin’s admission that an angel revealed the process of evolution to him. I can only find his collection of evidence, his scientific observations and his careful analysis of his findings. Likewise Mendeleev who calculated the existence of elements that were at the time unknown. Likewise Crick, Watson and Franklin who discovered the structure of DNA. Strangely, none of these people relied on visions, dreams or divine revelations in uncovering truths about reality.

The Great Resurrection Scam

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Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.  For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 (circa AD 49-51)

Paul said that because Jesus died and rose from the dead others would too. How does this follow?

He also claimed that all a person had to do to be sure of a spiritual resurrection was to believe that Jesus had already risen (1 Corinthians 15:20, AD 53-54), How did he know this? Almost certainly it came to him in one of his visions and his subsequent ‘revelations’ (‘the Lord’s word’ as he puts it in the letter to the Thessalonian sect).

Possibly, though less likely, he learnt it from the Christians he persecuted prior to his conversion. If so, where did they get the idea from? That the cult members in Thessalonica had to ask Paul what would happen to those who had passed away suggests this wasn’t a significant concern prior to this point. Paul and other early believers thought the Messiah/Son of Man was going to appear within their lifetimes (‘we who are still alive’ etc). It was only when cultists started dying off in noticeable numbers, and the Lord remained a no-show, that it started to become an issue. Paul had to make something up. And make it up he did.

Did Jesus exist? A rethink.

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Who determined the rules for the early Jesus cult? Jesus himself or the members of the cult? What does the evidence suggest? They all appear in documents written between 40 and 90 years after Jesus died. Either they survived from the moment the words left his lips, remembered accurately by generations of believers or they were included in the gospels by the cult communities that created them.

I’ve written before about how much of the Bible was written backwards (so to speak) and the gospel’s cult rules look likely to have been developed in just this way. The cult members had, by the time the gospels came to written, established these rules for their communities. They had shaped a Jesus that suited their purposes; it has long been recognised that the creators of Matthew’s, Luke’s and even John’s gospel took Mark’s account and amended it significantly. Their depiction of Jesus, his teaching and the resurrection are amended to reflect their particular beliefs and community rules. How do we know this?

Richard Carrier, the so-called mythicist (he actually says there’s a 1 in 3 possibility of the historicity of Jesus; figures as mythologised as Jesus rarely existed in fact) demonstrates how Mark’s gospel is an allegorical story based on Paul’s teaching. Mark created a well constructed narrative designed, literally, to flesh out the spiritual being that Paul imagined he’d seen in his visions. Using Jewish and pagan myths to structure it, he incorporates Paul’s visions and ‘revelations’ to create his Jesus story. To take one example, Paul relates in 1 Corinthians 11.23-25 how his celestial Christ told him in person (i.e. in his head) how his sacrifice of himself should be celebrated: with bread and wine. Mark turns this into an actual meal supposedly shared between Jesus and his early followers: the Last Supper.

Subsequent gospel writers took Mark’s allegory and amended it both to suit their needs and to correct what they perceived as Mark’s shortcomings. In the process they ‘fleshed out’ still further the figure at the centre of Paul’s (and others’) visions and Mark’s story based on them. Most significantly, they added increasingly elaborate resurrection appearances; it is significant Mark’s gospel has none, as if he knew Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t a physical event but a visionary one exactly as Paul describes.

It seems indisputable that the gospels were written this way (though there are, naturally, those who do dispute it.) None of the gospels rely on a hypothetical oral tradition, which, if it existed, would be extremely unreliable over 50 or so years (the time between Jesus’ supposed ministry and the writing of Matthew’s gospel), nor do they depend on the equally hypothetical Q. In any case, Q, if it existed, was a book of sayings, not a narrative account. Significantly, no copies of what must surely would have been a precious document have survived.

No, Mark made up the story of Jesus based on Paul’s visions (we know others had similar visions before Paul; he tells us so in 1 Corinthians 15.1-8). We know too that subsequent gospel writers built on Mark, adding what suited them, including their particular sect’s rules. What better endorsement of these rules than to have the object of their worship seeming to issue them himself? It’s highly unlikely he did anything of the sort. In 1991 the Jesus Seminar determined, controversially, that only about 20% of the words in the gospels could be attributed to an historical Jesus. All of the rest is made up and put retrospectively into his mouth. (The Seminar nevertheless concluded that Jesus existed.)

From the small amount of Jesus’ teaching that might be attributed to an historical Jesus, to the way the gospels were created, what can be known about a ‘real’ Jesus – what he said and did – grows increasingly small. All we are left with is a ghost of a figure. And isn’t this precisely what Paul claimed he and others had seen?

I’m rethinking my position and I’m coming to the conclusion, based on how the gospels were written, especially the way Mark allegorised Paul’s visions and teachings, that the likelihood of an historical Jesus is slim. Carrier has an abundance of evidence to support his proposal of a 1 in 3 chance that Jesus existed. Certainly the Jesus(es) of the gospels did not exist; they’re all made up. It now seems to me there’s no real, historical Jesus behind any of them. 
 

In which Paul takes a trip to the third heaven

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In the New Testament, there are:

8 or more supernatural ‘visions’;

18 or so ‘appearances’ of angels;

about 6 significant dreams, through which God talks to people;

a dozen apparitions of dead people and

at least 3 significant ‘revelations’, in which individuals sense God in their heads (Paul, Jesus and John of Patmos).

The man who is largely responsible for Christianity as we know it, Paul, alludes only briefly to his magical conversion to the faith, describing it as ‘in’ his head in Galatians 1.16. It’s up to the writer of Acts to elaborate and embroider this non-event. Paul does, however, give rather more detail about another hallucination he has, in 2 Corinthians 12.1-4. To avoid boasting, he says boastfully, he refers to himself in the third person:

I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to gain, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of it I do not know, but God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or out of it I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to Paradise. The things he heard were too sacred for words, things that man is not permitted to tell.

This is evidently a psychotic episode; seeing things that are not there, experiencing events that are not happening. Paul himself admits he doesn’t know whether it was a real experience, nor does he know if he was in his body or not (definitely in it, just out of his mind.) He heard, he says, things he can’t possibly repeat, which makes you wonder why he bothers mentioning the whole bizarre episode in the first place: ‘I had this fantastic experience, unlike anything I’ve experienced before – but I can’t tell you a thing about it.’ It sounds like a dream he’s having trouble remembering or, like, man, a really freaky hallucinogenic trip.

From psychotic episodes like this – his conversion is another one – Paul spins his entire theology. Yes, the faith of Christians everywhere is founded on the hallucinations of a first century nutcase visionary.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve better things to do with my life than base it on the dreams and visions of a psychotic who lived 2000 years ago.