The Bible: Myth or Revisionist Propaganda?

I'm a frequent critic of Christofascists, biblical literalists and the politicians who prostitute themselves to them.  Some readers - and some friends - say I am too harsh, especially when I comment on articles that question, gasp, the horror, whether or not Christ even existed.  A piece in Newsweek has prompted outraged among the "godly folk" by taking a good look at the truth about the Bible and its sketchy origins.  While they mutter about sacrilege, attacks on Christians, the real unspoken issue may be that these folks have possible lived their lives based on myth and/or revisionist lies.  The take away, for me, is that no serious minded person should take the supposed claims of the Bible very seriously and that those who do deserve little of no deference. Here are some highlights from the piece which deserves a full read:

They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation.

They are God’s frauds, cafeteria Christians who pick and choose which Bible verses they heed with less care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch. They are joined by religious rationalizers—fundamentalists who, unable to find Scripture supporting their biases and beliefs, twist phrases and modify translations to prove they are honoring the Bible’s words.

This is no longer a matter of personal or private faith. With politicians, social leaders and even some clergy invoking a book they seem to have never read and whose phrases they don’t understand, America is being besieged by Biblical illiteracy. 

The Bible is not the book many American fundamentalists and political opportunists think it is, or more precisely, what they want it to be. Their lack of knowledge about the Bible is well established.  

The Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, found in 2012 that evangelicals accepted the attitudes and beliefs of the Pharisees—religious leaders depicted throughout the New Testament as opposing Christ and his message—more than they accepted the teachings of Jesus.

Newsweek’s exploration here of the Bible’s history and meaning is not intended to advance a particular theology or debate the existence of God. Rather, it is designed to shine a light on a book that has been abused by people who claim to revere it but don’t read it, in the process creating misery for others.   When the illiteracy of self-proclaimed Biblical literalists leads parents to banish children from their homes, when it sets neighbor against neighbor, when it engenders hate and condemnation, when it impedes science and undermines intellectual advancement, the topic has become too important for Americans to ignore, whether they are deeply devout or tepidly faithful, believers or atheists.

This examination—based in large part on the works of scores of theologians and scholars, some of which dates back centuries—is a review of the Bible’s history and a recounting of its words.

At best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times. About 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament.  . . . . The first books of the Old Testament were written 1,000 years before that. In other words, some 1,500 years passed between the day the first biblical author put stick to clay and when the books that would become the New Testament were chosen.

[I]n the past 100 years or so, tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, dating back centuries. And what biblical scholars now know is that later versions of the books differ significantly from earlier ones—in fact, even copies from the same time periods differ from each other.

Scribes added whole sections of the New Testament, and removed words and sentences that contradicted emerging orthodox beliefs.  Take one of the most famous tales from the New Testament, which starts in John 7:53. A group of Pharisees and others bring a woman caught committing adultery to Jesus. Under Mosaic Law—the laws of Moses handed down in the Old Testament—she must be stoned to death. The Pharisees ask Jesus whether the woman should be released or killed . . . . .

Unfortunately, John didn’t write it. Scribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages. It does not appear in any of the three other Gospels or in any of the early Greek versions of John. Even if the Gospel of John is an infallible telling of the history of Jesus’s ministry, the event simply never happened.

[T]he earliest versions of Mark stop at 16:8.  . . . . .  The 12 verses that follow in modern Bibles—Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and the Disciples and then ascending to Heaven—are not there. A significant moment that would be hard to forget, one would think.

The same is true for other critical portions of the Bible, such as 1 John 5:7 (“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”); Luke 22:20 (“Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you”); and Luke 24:51 (“And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”).  

Then comes the problem of accurate translation. Many words in New Testament Greek don’t have clear English equivalents. Sentence structure, idioms, stylistic differences—all of these are challenges when converting versions of the New Testament books into English. And this can’t be solved with a Berlitz course: Koiné is ancient Greek and not spoken anymore. This is why English translations differ, with many having been revised to reflect the views and guesses of the modern translators. . . . . In other words, religious convictions determined translation choices.

In other words, with a little translational trickery, a fundamental tenet of Christianity—that Jesus is God—was reinforced in the Bible, even in places where it directly contradicts the rest of the verse.

[W]here does the clear declaration of God and Jesus as part of a triumvirate appear in the Greek manuscripts?  Nowhere. And in that deception lies a story of mass killings.

Christians are believed to have massacred more followers of Jesus than any other group or nation.  Those who believed in the Trinity butchered Christians who didn’t. Groups who believed Jesus was two entities—God and man—killed those who thought Jesus was merely flesh and blood.  . . . .  Indeed, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, groups adopted radically conflicting writings about the details of his life and the meaning of his ministry, and murdered those who disagreed.

At Nicaea, rules were adopted regarding the proper positions for prayer on Sundays—standing, not kneeling; nothing was said of the Jewish Sabbath or Saturday. Many theologians and Christian historians believe that it was at this moment, to satisfy Constantine and his commitment to his empire’s many sun worshippers, that the Holy Sabbath was moved by one day, contradicting the clear words of what ultimately became the Bible.  . . . . .  Constantine sided with those who believed Jesus was both God and man, so a statement of belief, called the Nicene Creed, was composed to proclaim that. Those who refused to sign the statement were banished. Others were slaughtered. After they had returned home and were far from Rome, some who signed the document later sent letters to Constantine saying they had only done so out of fear for their lives. 

About 50 years later, in A.D. 381, the Romans held another meeting, this time in Constantinople. There, a new agreement was reached—Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Nicene Creed was rewritten, and those who refused to sign the statement were banished, and another wholesale slaughter began, this time of those who rejected the Trinity, a concept that is nowhere in the original Greek manuscripts and is often contradicted by it.

None of this is meant to demean the Bible, but all of it is fact. Christians angered by these facts should be angry with the Bible, not the messenger.

The declaration in 1 Timothy—as recounted in the Living Bible, the New American Standard Bible, the New International Version Bible and others—could not be more clear: Those who “practice homosexuality” will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the translation there is odd, in part because the word homosexual didn’t even exist until more than 1,800 years after when 1 Timothy was supposed to have been written. So how did it get into the New Testament? Simple: The editors of these modern Bibles just made it up. Like so many translators and scribes before them, they had a religious conviction, something they wanted to say that wasn’t stated clearly enough in the original for their tastes. And so they manipulated sentences to reinforce their convictions.

The original Bible verse in Koiné used ἀρσενοκοῖται for what has been translated as “homosexual.” For the Latin Bible, it was as masculorum concubitores. The King James Version translated that as “them that defile themselves with mankind.” Perhaps that means men who engage in sex with other men, perhaps not.  The next thing to check here is whether 1 Timothy was based on a forgery. And the answer to that is a resounding yes. 

There is more which deserves a full read.  Again, the take away?   Those who believe in the Bible as inerrant or that it is the "word of God" are engaged in either deliberate self-delusion, suffer from shocking ignorance, or merely want to believe in fairy tales and myths.  What's even more sad is that so many lives have been damaged or lost based on supposed belief in a book that isn't much more that frequently manipulated fiction.  Belief in the Bible and its supposed strictures have no place in public policy or the civil laws.

Did Historical Jesus Ever Really Exist?

The folks at the Washington Post best brace themselves for spittle flecked rants from the "godly folk" who will no doubt take great offense at a story that raises the relevant question of whether the Jesus of the New Testament ever existed.  If not, Christianity's already damaged story line (e.g., the human genome project says Adam and Eve never existed) virtually collapses.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity – which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources – which they also fail to identify. Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein.

The methods traditionally used to tease out rare nuggets of truth from the Gospels are dubious. The criterion of embarrassment says that if a section would be embarrassing for the author, it is more likely authentic. Unfortunately, given the diverse nature of Christianity and Judaism back then (things have not changed all that much), and the anonymity of the authors, it is impossible to determine what truly would be embarrassing or counter-intuitive, let alone if that might not serve some evangelistic purpose.

The criterion of Aramaic context is similarly unhelpful. Jesus and his closest followers were surely not the only Aramaic-speakers in first-century Judea. The criterion of multiple independent attestation can also hardly be used properly here, given that the sources clearly are not independent.

Paul’s Epistles, written earlier than the Gospels, give us no reason to dogmatically declare Jesus must have existed. Avoiding Jesus’ earthly events and teachings, even when the latter could have bolstered his own claims, Paul only describes his “Heavenly Jesus.” Even when discussing what appear to be the resurrection and the last supper, his only stated sources are his direct revelations from the Lord, and his indirect revelations from the Old Testament. In fact, Paul actually rules out human sources (see Galatians 1:11-12).

Also important are the sources we don’t have. There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased. Little can be gleaned from the few non-Biblical and non-Christian sources, with only Roman scholar Josephus and historian Tacitus having any reasonable claim to be writing about Jesus within 100 years of his life. And even those sparse accounts are shrouded in controversy, with disagreements over what parts have obviously been changed by Christian scribes (the manuscripts were preserved by Christians), the fact that both these authors were born after Jesus died (they would thus have probably received this information from Christians), and the oddity that centuries go by before Christian apologists start referencing them.

So what do the mainstream (and non-Christian) scholars say about all this? Surprisingly very little – of substance anyway. Only Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey have thoroughly attempted to prove Jesus’ historical existence in recent times. Their most decisive point? The Gospels can generally be trusted – after we ignore the many, many bits that are untrustworthy – because of the hypothetical (i.e. non-existent) sources behind them. Who produced these hypothetical sources? When? What did they say? Were they reliable? Were they intended to be accurate historical portrayals, enlightening allegories, or entertaining fictions?

Ehrman and Casey can’t tell you – and neither can any New Testament scholar. Given the poor state of the existing sources, and the atrocious methods used by mainstream Biblical historians, the matter will likely never be resolved. In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable.

In terms of historical fact, the Jesus story has no more documented support that the stories of the Olympian gods, the Egyptian goddess Isis or the middle eastern god Mithras.  Wanting a story to be true, in short, does not somehow magically make it true.

Who Was Jesus - Did He Exist

As we now head into the Christmas season holidays, an article in The Daily Beast looks at the question of who was Jesus.  Not in the sense of the Jesus of the Gospels, but in terms of did he exist and, if he did, who was he.  Past posts on this blog have looked at the fact that much of the Jesus storyline of death and resurrection was not new in the 1st Century.  The Egyptian cult of Isis - which had spread across the Roman Empire had a similar theme with the death and resurrection of Osiris.  And the cult of the Persian god Mithra likewise had parallels.  With so much energy put into Christianity for good and for bad (today's conservative Christians exemplify the bad), it is worth pondering who was Jesus.  Here are article excerpts:

Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don’t measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and—outside of this material—there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him. In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.

This presents biographers with a problem. What can you base his reality on, unless you take it on faith?

The work of recent Christian scholars comes in every size and shape, with few common assumptions. Jesus may variously be regarded as a wandering magician or a Mediterranean peasant, a radical revolutionary (a Zealot) or a mystic or a radical Jew or, indeed, the long-awaited Messiah. Arguments can be mustered from the evidence to support all kinds of theories about his identity and true nature.

Plenty of fairly literal-minded Christians believe simply in the gospel truth. But even among these groups, there are severe differences. Some fundamentalist groups see him as a kind of avenging angel, ready to hurl into the flames of hell those who refuse to “believe.” Countless milder versions of this Jesus exist, including the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Son of Man who, like that shining figure in the Hebrew Book of Daniel, stands before God in our place. As ever, it depends on which verses in the Bible you happen to quote, building a theology on those select references, ignoring any verses that contradict your vision.

One of the great theologians of the twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann, famously said in 1935: “I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.” He understood that the gospels were hardly straightforward biographical accounts but quasi-mythical tales that reflected views of Jesus put forward by various Christian communities in the decades after his death.

[A] lot has changed since Bultmann made that dire pronouncement. A lot of archaeological work has been done in the Middle East, and we have much clearer ideas about what ancient Palestine looked liked. . . . . And yet, we still can’t say that much about Jesus, as a man.

In writing about Jesus, as in my new biography I like to use the word mythos, the Greek word for a story with symbolic contours. This story has both literal heft and poetic levels of association.

So who is Jesus? For me, he’s the central character in the greatest story ever told. It’s a story about a gradually realizing kingdom that lies inside of us. He encouraged us to enter the wider mind of God through attachment to his teaching and example, but he left only one commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” It’s quite simple, this message, but it’s enough.

In the end, there is no proof that Jesus really existed.  As for this single commandment, the commandment is seemingly unknown to today's far right Christians and "family values" organizations that claim to be "Christian." Fear, the embrace of ignorance and hatred of others are the pillars of their belief system.  If Jesus did exist, I suspected he'd be sicked by the behavior of his most vocal followers. 

What Do We Actually Know About Jesus' Birth? Not Much

I by no means want to be the Grinch at the holiday season, but as one who values true and accurate history, much of what we hear this time of year from both pulpits and the media about the Christmas story is nothing more than fabrications and embellishment of the two contradictory nativity accounts in the New Testament - nativity accounts that themselves are subject to question from a purely historical perspective.  Professor Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and  a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus, has a piece in Newsweek that underscores the dubious nature of much of what is taken as fact by the public and Bible thumping Christianists.  Here are some excerpts about both the flaws in the Gospel accounts and other aspects of the Christmas story that were fabricated out of thin air over the centuries:

[T]here are Gospels about Jesus that have come down to us from the ancient world, which present information at odds with widely held views.

As Christians around the world now prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth, it is worth considering that much of the “common knowledge” about the babe in Bethlehem cannot be found in any scriptural authority, but is either a modern myth or based on Gospel accounts from outside the sacred bounds of Christian Scripture. Some obvious examples: nowhere does the Bible indicate what year Jesus came into the world, or that he was born on Dec. 25; it does not place an ox and an ass in his manger; it does not say that it was 3 (as opposed to 7 or 12) wise men who visited him.

For many centuries, most Christians garnered their information about the birth of Jesus not from the New Testament but from popular writings that were not officially considered Scripture. One of the best known of these books is called the “Proto-Gospel of James,” composed probably in the late second century, a century after the canonical Gospels, and accordingly, far less likely that they contain anything like historically accurate information. But Christians throughout the Middle Ages were rarely interested in historical accuracy; they loved stories and reveled in their meaning, especially stories having anything to do with the appearance of the Son of God in the world.

This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.  .  .   .  .  it will be widely welcomed—not only among Catholics but also, one might suspect, among conservative Christians of whatever stripe, for its affirmation of the Gospel accounts not only as theologically valuable but also as historically accurate.

The book will not be as well cherished, however, among those who are less interested in affirming the narratives of Scripture than in knowing what actually happened in the past. And there is indeed a very wide swath of scholars—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, and others—who have a very different view of the accounts of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament and who realize that there are problems with the traditional stories as they are recounted for us in Matthew and Luke, the only two Gospels that contain infancy narratives.

For centuries scholars have recognized that the birth narratives of the New Testament are historically problematic. For one thing, the two accounts—the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two chapters of Luke—are strikingly different from one another, in ways that appear irreconcilable. To start with, they both give genealogies of Jesus’ father, Joseph (it’s an interesting question why they do so, since in neither account is Jesus a blood relative of Joseph), but they are different genealogies: he is said to have a different father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather, and so on.

[T]hey are doing so [providing a genealogy] because they both want to relate Jesus to the ancestral line of the Jewish patriarchs, but neither of them has access to the kind of reliable data they need for the task. So they have provided genealogies that have been invented for the purpose and that, as a result, are necessarily at odds with each other. And that is just the opening gambit. The discrepancies occur repeatedly throughout the chapters.

Moreover, both accounts contain contradictions with the known facts of history. Just take Luke as an example. Only in this Gospel do Joseph and Mary make a trip from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to register for a census when “the whole world” had to be enrolled under Caesar Augustus. The whole world? Luke must mean “the whole Roman Empire.” But even that cannot be right, historically. We have good documentation about the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there never was a census of his entire empire. Let alone one in which people had to register in their ancestral home. In this account Joseph and Mary need to register in Bethlehem (which is why Jesus is born there) because Joseph is descended from King David, who came from Bethlehem. But David lived a thousand years earlier. Is everyone in the entire Roman Empire returning to their ancestral home from a thousand years earlier?

This is not a story based on historical fact. It is a narrative designed to show how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem—whence the Messiah was to come—when everyone knew in fact that he came from Nazareth.

There are other kinds of implausibility in the accounts—leaving aside the much-debated question of the virgin birth itself. In Matthew, for example, the wise men follow the star to Bethlehem, where it stops over the house where Jesus is (why, by the way, is Jesus’ family living in a house, if they just came to register for a census?). How is it that a star—or any celestial body—can lead anyone to a particular town? And how can it then stop over a particular house?

[T]hese Gospel sources, whatever else they are, are not historically reliable descriptions of what really happened when Jesus was born. 

These are books that meant to declare religious truths, not historical facts. For believers who think that truth must, necessarily, be based on history, that probably will not be good news at all.

In sum, we know little or nothing about the real fact of Jesus' birth - assuming he even existed.  Yet the Christianists demand that all of us take the Bible as the literal truth, ignoring the major historical problems that plague the Gospel accounts.  Equally bad is that they similarly demand that the writings of ignorant nomads who possessed less knowledge about the earth, solar system, and universe, not to mention medicine and biology and physiology, than most America eighth graders be regarded as the inerrant truth.   Believing that the Bible is the inerrant truth and that it must be taken literally is, in my opinion, tantamount to confessing that one is an idiot as the chart below illustrates.

Click image to enlarge

I believe that there is a creator or some sort.  I simply no longer believe that the Bible tells us the truth about that creator.  Most of the New Testament was written as a propaganda piece to further the fledgling Christian religion.  As is still the case with the Vatican today, the accurate historical truth is never allowed to get in the way of the agenda for power, control and earthly wealth.