More Fallout - Jesus Said To Them "My Wife

I have followed with amusement the reactions of the "godly Christan" crowd and the professional Christian set in particular to the news coverage on the 4th century papyrus fragment of a Coptic text that includes Jesus saying the words, "My wife..."   Many of these folks are incensed and claim that the fragment is a fraud and forgery, etc.  The real issue in my view is that conservative Christians - especially those who claim the deeply flawed Bible is inerrant -  simply cannot tolerate ANYTHING that suggests that their neat check the box off the list belief system might not be true.  It simply terrifies them to distraction.  Any student of early Church history knows the maxim that "the winner gets to write the history" and that the factions in early Christianity diligently worked to wipe out all texts and communities (yes, godly Christians murdered these "heretics") that failed to adhere to the official story line that ultimately came to be dictated from Rome.     Andrew Sullivan has some reflections on the controversy.  Here are some highlights:

At every turn, King emphasizes merely that the papyrus teaches us about the diversity of views in early Christianity, rather than "proving" Jesus had a wife. An example from the Q&A she provides:

...this fragment does not provide evidence that Jesus was married. The comparatively late date of this Coptic papyrus (a fourth century CE copy of a gospel probably written in Greek in the second half of the second century)
argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus. Nor is there any reliable historical evidence to support the claim that he was not married, even though Christian tradition has long held that position. The oldest and most reliable evidence is entirely silent about Jesus's marital status.
The first claims that Jesus was not married are attested only in the late second century CE, so if the Gospel of Jesus's Wife was also composed in the second century CE, it does provide evidence, however, that the whole question about Jesus's marital status arose as part of the debates about sexuality and marriage that took place among early Christians at that time. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better to marry or to be celibate, but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began using Jesus's marital status to support their different positions. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married, but now the Gospel of Jesus's Wife shows that some Christians claimed Jesus was married, probably already in the late second century.

I am not that interested in whether Jesus was married or celibate. But I am interested in the way in which a patriarchal, male-only hierarchy, which has been exposed as a conspiracy to commit and then cover up child-rape still excludes half of humanity from true equality in a church based on Jesus' teachings. Jesus clearly saw women as total equals, trespassed over gender lines constantly, and told all of us to become like little children if we are to live in God's full love. Paul told us that there is "neither male nor female" in Christ's vision of our equality on His love.

These little moments - and this is a tiny one - help open that reality to the light: that the message and truth of Jesus is tragically being obscured by some of the Pharisees of our time.

We will likely never know the real truth about Christ because his message has been changed, corrupted and perverted by those who sought to use it to enhance their own power, control of others and personal wealthy (e.g., Joel Osteen is a modern day example).  I do think, however, it is safe to assume that the truth is not what the Vatican and far right Christians claim it to be. 

More Evidence that the Bible is Not Inerrant

The majority of the main arguments and sources of hate against LGBT individuals for the most part trace to one document - the Bible. A book that the anti-gay Christianists claim is "inerrant" and "the inspired word of God." The truth, of course ,is something very different. And, as biblical scholarship progresses, the supposed reliability of the Bible as "the word of God" becomes increasingly shaky if not totally destroyed. The reality thus becomes that over the centuries untold thousands - if not millions - have died over differences arising from a book that is a man made work with little or nothing inerrant about it. That's not to say that the basic Gospel message is not a moral guide to live by. Merely that the Old Testament and the New Testament passages that relied on precepts from the Old Testament should be afforded little or no credence. The News Observer has an article that looks at ongoing research on the Bible's evolution that confirms the Bible quoted today by the Bible beater set is far different than the original not to mention the one from the time period of Christ. Here are some highlights:

JERUSALEM -- A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: the sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.

An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.

Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies - publishing the authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, and tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia. And it has evolved, despite deeply held beliefs to the contrary.

For many Jews and Christians, religion dictates that the words of the Bible in the original Hebrew are divine, unaltered and unalterable. For Orthodox Jews, the accuracy is considered so inviolable that if a synagogue's Torah scroll is found to have a minute error in a single letter, the entire scroll is unusable.

But the ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.

Bible Project scholars have spent years combing through manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek translations on papyrus from Egypt, a printed Bible from 1525 Venice, parchment books in handwritten Hebrew, the Samaritan Torah, and scrolls in Aramaic and Latin.

Those who build their worldview on the Bible are likely building their world on sand or out of a deck of cards because what they claim to be the inerrant truth is anything but.

Christianity in Crisis - Faith versus Reality

I talk about religion frequently for several reasons. The most obvious one is that religion is the entire underlying cause for all of the disparagement and hatred directed towards members of the LGBT community. Time and time again the Bible is cited as the authority upon which we are cursed and hated. The Koran likewise condemns homoseual acts on its face. Without these writings, acceptance of LGBT individuals would likely be much diffferent. Indeed, in previous times same sex relations were common. One need only think of Greece, Roman and the Persian Empire for examples of this reality.

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The other reason I write on the subject of religion is because the world seems more and more at a crossroads where one must either accept objective truth and reality or engage in the equivalent of a self-applied lobotomy in order to blindly follow fundamentalist religious dogma. If you will, a struggle between modernity and superstition. In both the case of the Bible and the Koran they are the products of the work of failable men yet are held up by fundamentalist extremists as inerrant. Like it or not both are infused with the limited knowledge of the period in which they were written and/or compiled and are also colored by the particualr agenda of the authors. Increasingly, research and discovery of previously lost sources make the argument for inerrancy ridiculous on its face.

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Gays - because our existence and refusal to be silenced by Christianists - terrify the religious extremists because if the Bible is wrong about us, then the whole house of cards begins to crumble in the minds of our enemies. Their whole artifical world begins to collapse and they hate us intensely for it. Andrew Sullivan looks at this divergency between fact/reality and religious fundamentalism in what I believe is a good summation of the battle:
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[I]n order to study history and maintain one's beliefs, you either have to: 1) deny the facts; 2) develop some system of progressive revelation that encompasses God's guiding hand over history; or 3) revert into some type of mysticism.
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Christianity is in crisis - and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe. I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists - of total papal or Biblical authority - because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves.
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No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have - copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories - are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later.
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[T]he solid architecture of the faith we inherited has been exposed more thoroughly in the last few decades than ever before. There is no single authoritative text, written by one God, word for word true. There is a much more complicated series of writings designed by many men, . .
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The same, I think, is true of the papacy as an alternative to Biblical literalism. . . . I do not see how the limits and flaws of such total authoritarianism could have been more thoroughly illuminated than in the recent sex abuse scandal. When the man whose authority rests on being the vicar of Christ on earth consigns children to rape rather than tarnish the image of the church, he simply has no moral authority left. Yes, his position deserves respect. But its claims to absolute authority have fallen prey to the human arc of what Lord Acton called "absolute corruption".
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Yes, this intellectual sifting is hard and troubling to faith; yes, it may end with more mystery than clarity. But if our faith is to be true, it must rest on something more than denial of reality. It must rest on being the greatest experience of reality.

Finding A New Christian Faith

As I have mentioned in prior posts about overcoming one's internalized homophobia, if you have been raised in a gay-hating religious denomination (such as the Roman Catholic Church), it is essential that you (1) leave that denomination, and (2) educate yourself on the truth about the Bible and the fact that it is NOT the inerrant word of God. This latter endeavor requires that one read and study legitimate books and articles on the history of the Bible and discover that a number of books of the Bible are likely forgeries and that politics and power struggles shaped the final form of the Christian Bible far more than any alleged interaction by the Holy Spirit. One of the many authors whose works I read in my educational process were books by Bart Ehrman . CNN has a new article that looks at Erhman and his works - which are most definitely not on the approved reading list of Kool-Aid drinking Christianists. Here are some highlights from the CNN article:

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Just so you know, Bart Ehrman says he's not the anti-Christ. He says he's not trying to destroy your faith. He's not trying to bash the Bible. And, though his mother no longer talks to him about religion, Ehrman says some of his best friends are Christian. Ehrman, a best-selling author and a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a biblical sleuth whose investigations make some people very angry.
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In Ehrman's latest book, "Jesus, Interrupted," he concludes: Doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus and heaven and hell are not based on anything Jesus or his earlier followers said. At least 19 of the 27 books in the New Testament are forgeries. Believing the Bible is infallible is not a condition for being a Christian.

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Ehrman's claims have found an audience, and controversy. . . Yet Ehrman's popularity also may be due to a larger trend. The books of people like Elaine Pagels, author of "The Gnostic Gospels," and Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons," resonate with people who believe there are parts of the Bible that the church left on history's editing floor. Some scholarly critics say Ehrman is saying nothing new.

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Ehrman says that no one accepts everything in the Bible. Everyone picks and chooses . He cites some New Testament's references to the role of women in church as an example. . . . Ehrman backs his arguments with a deep knowledge of the culture and history of the New Testament world. He's written 20 books on early Christianity and is an authority on ancient manuscripts used to translate the Bible.

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His claims, though, take on some of Christianity's most sacred tenets, like the resurrection of Jesus. Ehrman says he doesn't think the resurrection took place. There's no proof Jesus physically rose from the dead, and the resurrection stories contradict one another, he says.

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Ehrman once had a different attitude toward the Bible. . . . . But Ehrman says he began to develop doubts about the infallibility of the Bible after attending Princeton Theological Seminary to become a college Bible professor. . . . Ehrman says he later became an agnostic because he couldn't find the answer to another question: How could there be a God when there is so much suffering in the world? An agnostic is one who disclaims any knowledge of God, but does not deny the possibility of God's existence. Today, Ehrman describes himself as a "happy agnostic."

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Whether it's his family, critics or students, Ehrman says he has a better handle on why he is so threatening to so many people -- some Christians worry they will make the same decision he has. "I changed my mind," he says. "My students find me more dangerous that way. I really do know what they're talking about when they stake out an evangelical position." He says he doesn't believe the followers of Jesus saw their master bodily rise from the dead, but something else.

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I still consider myself a Christian, but I hardly believe that Bible is inerrant. Any serious student of history who understands the history of the early Christian period and the Roman Empire cannot help but realize that the compilation of the Bible was based on far more that strict theology: politics and power struggles within the Empire and the early Church likely had more influence than an honest focus on Christ and his actual teachings. I highly recommend Erhman's books.