Personal Introduction by Dr M D Magee 1
Christian doctrine is… presented as having such unique authority that it must have been made in heaven rather than being the work of thinkers and negotiators, in particular periods in church history, and therefore open to historical criticism and the problems of cultural relativism.John Bowden, SCM
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, July 19, 1999
Abstract
Scholarly Integrity
Certain readers of the bible, namely theologians, masquerade as historians.
I have been interested in the origins of Christianity since the mid 1950s when I was a schoolboy and the discovery of the Scrolls by the Dead Sea had stimulated interest in biblical studies. My father had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and had to spend a year in hospital, eventually having a lung removed before he recovered. Being of Irish immigrant descent, he had been brought up as a Catholic but, having met and fallen in love with a stubborn Protestant women, he had declined to bring up his children as Catholics and had fallen out with the church. In the TB sanatorium, no doubt conscious of his own mortality and having lots of spare time, he took to exploring various religious alternatives, none of which he found satisfactory. During his explorations however he read various books that examined the historical origins of Christianity. Amongst them were King Jesus, the didactic novel by Robert Graves, The Nazarene Gospel Restored by Graves and Podro, The Other Side of the Story by Rupert Furneaux and a book about the liberal Babylonian Rabbi, Hillel, the title of which I have forgotten.
When I cycled the seventeen miles to Ilkley to visit him each Saturday, he would tell me about his week’s explorations and we would discuss them. It was sufficient to ease his conscience about his split with the church but naturally when he recovered, as a working man, he found less time to continue his studies and his interest waned. I too found myself doing school examinations and eventually entering university to study sciences and my interest also waned. It remained but in attenuated form and I would still read popular books about Christian origins from time to time.
When I retired from government service the chance arose for me to follow these long suspended interests and that is how I came to write these books.
My discoveries astonished me. They seemed so obvious that they quickly led me to doubt the integrity of scholars in the field of biblical scholarship. Trained as a scientist, I looked for rational answers to the questions that arose, but biblical scholars seek to confirm their religious outlook. Experts in biblical studies are usually religious people, whether Christian or Jewish. Those who have no interest in religion turn to physics, molecular biology, music or literature. Though religious people might well opt for any of these subjects too, non-religious students rarely opt for religious studies.
The result is that, whereas normal endeavours of life are practised by a cross section of society in respect of religious views, religious studies are the field of religiously inclined people almost exclusively. So, in biblical studies, a subject that professes to be scientific—nowadays at any rate—the normal checks and balances that allow science to progress do not apply. I speak generally knowing that there are some who try hard to be objective but for most it is either too difficult or they are so indoctrinated in religious belief they do not want to try.
Religious experts are consequently far from a fair sample of society. They are biased towards the beliefs they have grown up with and unlikely to question their basic tenets. Quite the reverse, though they profess to be scientific, they are really apologists for their religious view. When astonishing hypotheses are published which cast doubt on the accepted views of the religious experts they will be ignored. This allows biblical scholars to continue in well-paid careers raking over the same muddy spoil and coming to false conclusions forever. Sometimes the same happens in science but there, new discoveries cannot be ignored for long. Science is too big and scientists too diverse for an important discovery to be ignored. What some group would prefer to go away, another group find is just the link or breakthrough they have been waiting for. Essentially biblical research is monolithic. Everyone wants to confirm God’s plan. No one wants to have their lifelong beliefs destroyed.
Strong pressures have always existed for biblical scholars to maintain the status quo—their peers who value the sinecures they have, their own careers within this orthodoxy, their belief that Christians are saintly people and do not tell lies except to glory God and their conviction that they could not have been wrong all their lives and the church wrong for two thousand years.
The key to it all is honesty. Sincere Christians are honest people but Christians since the beginning of their religion have not thought it dishonest to tell a lie—when Christianity benefits! This pious lying has become so accepted since the introduction of state education, with its religious emphasis on Christianity, that not only does no one now think it unusual, few people recognise it.
Truth
The starting point for the Christians was Jesus the Nazarene who is perhaps the most influential person who has ever lived, even though, in scientific historical terms, little is known about him. Whether this is the power of God at work or the astonishing credulity of human beings is the moot point. The authorised accounts, the gospels, suggest that he was active for between one and three years, and within only two generations of the crucifixion, a Christian group, the Docetists, attracted converts saying Jesus had never lived at all, except as a phantom.
It is possible to argue that Jesus indeed never lived but was invented to explain the origins of the belief in a cosmic person called Christ. Yet the gospel stories are not conducive to the idea that the earthly life of Jesus was invented because to have been crucified was a liability to the gentile bishops. It must therefore have been what they had and had no choice about accepting. What they could do was pretend that the stories about Jesus had been confused by their tellers in the confusion of the times. So, we can assume that Jesus did exist, that he was a man of inspiring deeds and a religions leader, that he was crucified, that his followers believed he had risen from the dead and was intending to return to earth in glory.
Beginning in Sunday school or in the religious instruction classroom, worthy Christians embellish arguable stories about Jesus as if they were true. No teacher of infants and juniors stops to consider what truth there is in what they themselves know about the founder of their religion and they then compound the felony by painting astonishing fairy tales based on their own conceptions and not on any evidence. None of it matters to Christian teachers who know they are doing God’s work. Psychologically they are telling lies believing it to be God’s truth put into their hearts. Jesus himself justified it when he instructed his disciples in Matthew 10:19:
Take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.
It differs from having God’s conviction that heretics should burn at the stake only in degree. A mass religious delusion has been created and given social approval. If some pious lie fits the delusion then it is all right by God and society.
There are Christian books purporting to tell the childhood of Jesus, but no one can truthfully say anything positive about Jesus’s childhood. These books seem like novels but their writers, if they claim anything, say they are writing inspired or spiritual history. Novels can be quite instructive and they are intended to be entertaining. A novel can indeed be inspiring but, however inspiring it is, it is not history. Do we “believe in” novels? Christians certainly believe in the inspiration of the spirit or the Holy Ghost. But even the inspired gospels contradict each other interminably. The Christian will consider such pious works of imagination as “God’s Truth”, if it does not contradict the mass delusion of our age. If it does, it will be ignored or decried, according to its importance.
Biblical scholars equally build themselves reputations by writing fantasies called doctoral dissertations about a few sentences of some ancient epistle, the significance of the prophet Elijah at the Transfiguration or whether Jesus ascended to heaven after a few days or forty days. Such contributions to knowledge are no different from discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a needle, the example always quoted of how enlightened we now are compared with the middle ages.
All of it is dryly accepted nowadays by Christian and secularist alike. The pious dishonesty underlying Christian belief pervades society to the extent that editors, historians, scientists and literary reviewers accept it and excuse it as tradition, if they find an excuse necessary. Practising Christians in the UK now comprise about a twentieth of the population, but every newspaper will have a “Faith” column devoted to Christian speculations. New Agers, Pagans, Witches, Druids and even Moslems and Hindus do not get this coverage yet together there are more of them than there are Christians. Most people believe in no religion, though many have the habit of answering the question, “What religion are you?” by saying, “Christian”. They run their lives with no recourse to Christianity at all. This is pious dishonesty writ small. It is a legacy of the time when any answer to this question other than “Christian” would have meant a roasting over burning faggots. Or perhaps, like the Romans, people are chary about offending a god.
Religious people will counter me by saying I am being deliberately iconoclastic. I hope I am. I find it hard to believe that, in the modern world, people still believe fairy tales, but the fact that I do not believe them makes me a less biased observer than the experts. Christians have over the years been doing what the modern apologists still do, although with rather greater vigour. Much of the evidence they did not like, they destroyed and the rest of it they altered or obfuscated. That makes it hard, today to get at the truth, and the loss of positive evidence makes speculation essential.
John Bowden, who is an intelligent and liberal Christian, and the chief executive of the SCM, speaks in his valuable book, Jesus: the Unanswered Questions, SCM, 1988, of his “passionate concern for the truth of things and what I would dare to call the love of the God of Truth”. It illustrates something about the psychology of Christians. This one is concerned for truth, but truth is too abstract for him, and he finds the need to personify it into the “God of Truth” for him to really love it! Christian have to personify abstractions to make them real to them and therefore important enough to bother about, and they must have the authority of a god behind something for it to count. Why cannot the Reverend Bowden train his Christian readers to value virtuous abstractions like truth for their own sake. Without the supernatural floss they might actually get more of a response in this modern age.
Pious Lies
I was surprised to find the story underlying the Christian religion not hard to discern once it is read critically and with information from other sources. This latter is the stumbling block for most people. Few people even read the gospels these days but those that do have no comparative historical standards to position the tale they are reading. The standards exist and are just the ones that ought now to be taught whenever the gospel stories are taught—but are not. We have always had Josephus, the Romano-Jewish historian, Philo, the expatriate Jewish philosopher, the Christian fathers and the Talmud but now we also have the Dead Sea Scrolls. These have proved such a severe embarrassment to the biblical experts that accusations have been made that their translation and publication have been deliberately delayed by Christian and Jewish authorities scared that their flocks might get sceptical. It is true that it has taken fifty years for the full corpus of the scroll fragments to be released to the general public, but everyone, Christian and critic alike, tries to save face by finding excuses for the absurd delay.
Christian experts have others tacks available lest anyone should begin to think the Scrolls have any meaning for Christian interpretation. While suspending the publication of the Scrolls themselves, they publish books highlighting the reasons why the sect of the Scrolls have nothing in common with Christianity other than what would be expected of contemporaries living in the same place.
Do not believe it! The story of the founder of Christianity can be told in considerable detail from the New Testament, the traditional sources and the fresh information we have from the Scrolls. This is history not faith and it fits into the known history of the times. Christians might protest that we already know all we need to know about Jesus from the gospels. That is just what I was saying above about Christian experts. They believe they have had the story since the first century when it happened, and all that needed clearing up were some confusions which had been accidentally introduced. The truth is that the confusions are not just incidental. They are many and widespread throughout the story.
History is taken from contemporary written sources or later accounts. The problem immediately arises that public records are those which the authorities approve. It has been summarised as: History is written by the victorious. Victors do not give objective accounts of their beaten enemies. Caesar gives a distorted account of the Druids. For Nixon, the Vietnamesse were only Gooks—subhumans. Official sources often ignore or give distorted images of whatever they do not like. Yet careful study can reveal what the archivists and official historians have sought to conceal.
The Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, is not an haphazard compilation of ancient histories collated by God’s will as many believe. It was the official history of the theocracy of Judaea—ruled by the second temple priesthood not by God. The Pentateuch, the Jewish Torah, in particular was produced by Judaean priests sponsored by their Persian masters as the official law-book of the new Jewish puppet of the Persian Empire. Few Judaeans then were literate but in illiterate countries the oral tradition is strong. The indigenous Jews would still have been familiar with the old tales and especially those who followed older non-Yehouist religions for which the traditional stories had mythological value. For these reasons among others, the priests wanted to incorporate the essence of the old tales, albeit suitably altered to fit new notions brought from Babylon. The old story of Israel’s liberation from bondage in Egypt was rewritten to climax in the unification of Israel under David and then Solomon who set up the priesthood which, blessed by God, continued to the time of the founders of the second temple—descendants of Zadok, would you believe? Today historians doubt that the glorious kingdom of Solomon ever existed.
The New Testament is similar. Central to the ideas herein is that the gentile Christian bishops did not tell the truth but deliberately obscured it. Pious lying is not simply an “aberration” of Christianity, it is its very foundation. These original pious lies were not merely whims of over enthusiastic converts but were deliberate deceptions needed to refute the stories about the real Jesus that people were bringing back from Palestine. There never was a Jesus of faith until the first Christians invented him by telling pious lies about another Jesus—the Jesus of history. Again the oral tradition was strong and could neither be ignored nor denied because too many people were telling the truth. In the lead up to the Jewish War and its aftermath, many Jews left Palestine to join their brothers in the wider empire. They knew the story of Jesus the Nazarene and told it freely. It was a different story from that of the first gentile bishops. The bishops had a problem.
They could not simply deny the stories because there were too many of them and they came from different people. Simple denial would have seemed unreasonable, making liars of everyone ariving from the east. They had to refute them by pious lying. The tack of the bishops was to claim that the storytellers were confused and mistaken. Their stories were true but in the context of the War and the jealousies of the Jewish Pharisees, they had been garbled. Of course, they had not, but the bishops then deliberately garbled them! They simply changed a few details of the stories and recast them in a more favourable light.
The flocks were reassured. Such distortions would arise as stories were passed on. They probably played games like the game of consequences just as we do, and could accept that the stories had been given the wrong interpretation in the light of bad feeling. The enemies of Jesus had propagated these tales in the first place to mislead the innocent storytellers.
Old habits die hard. Once the habit of pious lying had started it spread rapidly. Eventually the church had to call a halt to the burgeoning number of increasingly fantastic gospels that were being written under the name of Gnosticism. They picked out the versions that they preferred and started the New Testament canon. All other pious works were rejected. The point of gospel interpretation therefore is to see how a gospel pericope could be reconstructed into something feasible rather than the fantasies invented by the bishops to make Jesus into a superman or even a god.
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Moses and Exodus
