Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, November 14, 1999

The Slippery Christ

The history of Christianity is remarkable for many things, not least for the resilience of the faith despite vast historical changes, the “infinite variety” of the forms it can take and the changing ways in which, over the last 20 centuries men and women have seen Jesus, and worshipped him as “the Christ”.

The roots for this saga are the four gospels, our chief source of direct information about Jesus. These, however, are always tendentious, often contradictory and sometimes demonstrably wrong. According to medieval scholar and Christian, Jaroslav Pelikan (Jesus through the Ages, Yale University Press, 1985), the Jesus they yield “resembles a set of paintings more closely than a photograph”. Since people see in them what they want, a mirror might be a more accurate analogy. Believers always convince themselves that they—and usually they alone—have come face to face with the “true” Jesus.

People have offered a bewildering variety of pictures of Jesus, including the cosmic Christ, creator of the universe; the Christ crucified of the medieval world; the mystic “bridegroom of the soul”; Christ as the prototype of the Renaissance “universal man” or the Enlightenment’s “teachet of reason” and the modern resurgence of Christ the liberator.

Even so, his story becomes rather thin in the modern era when the Jesus of history began to dethrone the Christs of faith. A liberal, western European Christian of today is likely to be chary of the Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, not because he was an awful tyrant who murdered his wife and was so hated by the population of Rome he had to move his capital to a different city, but because he obtained the throne with God’s supposed help in sending the miracle of a cross in the heavens saying “Conquer by this”.

Today’s Christian is certain that the essential message of Jesus was not to go around conquering in his name but that we should love one another. The biblical scholar, C H Dodd, was less sure. He pointed out that, in the gospels, Jesus is credited with few sayings about love for one’s fellow men, and what he does say would have been commonplace among first century Pharisaic Jews. The urgency of his message was elsewhere.

The Jesus that emerged from the historical work was a Jew of his time—a time when the Jews were in rebellion against the foreign oppressors, the Romans. Jesus was an Essene who expected from the signs of the times the literal coming of the Kingdom of God in the lifetime of those whom he addressed. He called upon Jews to repent, and to make ready for this divine intervention in which, as the signs multiplied, he saw himself as playing the role of liberator or the earthly saviour of the Jews. If he did his part and the Jews repented, then God would respond by sending the angel Michael and his heavenly armies to defeat the Satanic Romans and join heaven and earth together as a home for the righteous.

But the events he prophesied did not come to pass. Instead, he endured the ignominy of the Roman crucifixion. Within the movement which sprang up after this death a process or metamorphosis took place by which the proclaimer became the proclaimed, the rebel was acclaimed as God, and the Christs of faith began to rise, like bad odours, from the corpse of the Jesus of history. In the quest for the historical Jesus there are more bad odours generated by Christian scholars than feasible pictures, but Christians do not mind, as long as the exasperated doubter gives up the quest and remains within the fold of the believing flock.

Three Quests

It is fashionable these days to speak of three “quests” for the historical Jesus, though, of course, there has only ever been one quest, and it will continue while the supernatural Jesus is claimed by Christians to be historical. Honest people, some of them Christians, consider research on the historical Jesus as demanded by historical inquiry and the need to reach an adequate theology. But usually Christians say they are concerned with a living Jesus not a historical one. One apologist argues:

If the expression the real Jesus is used at all, it should not refer to a historically reconstructed Jesus. Such a Jesus is not “real” in any sense, except as a product of scholarly imagination. The Christian’s claim to experience the “real Jesus” in the present, on the basis of religious experience and conviction, can be challenged on a number of fronts (religious, theological, moral), but not historically.

The quest for the historical Jesus is therefore valueless to evangelical Christians whose beliefs do not depend on historical facts. Interest in the historical Jesus signifies a failure of faith. For them, ignorance is bliss.

It always has been for most Christians because no priest or preacher wants to spill the gravy boat and no punter wants to lose the fantasy of their imaginary friend, Jesus. Belief in him is a form of MPD, and should be treated in the same way—by psychiatry. The reason is that the Christian Jesus is obviously not historical. It will be impossible ever to get a consensus on what the life of the historical Jesus was, because no Christian will accept history, so the quest will be an eternal merry-go-round.

Nevertheless, the quests have led to a good idea of who the historic Jesus was, for rational historically minded people, and broadly it was the very first Jesus offered by Reimarus, who is considered to have initiated the “first” quest, the second having been launched by Bultmann and those of his era, and the third or modern quest having been founded in the seventies with Jewish scholars and some skeptical Christians prominent, and heavily dependent on the hypothetical pre-Christian document called “Q”.

The primary sources are still the four gospels. The hypothesis that makes best sense of the relations among the gospels is that Matthew and Luke independently used Mark and another source Q. John is seen as essentially independent of the others, of little historical worth and that overlaid with mythology. No gospel writers witnessed the events they describe. The gospel of John is not narrative, it is only Christology. The biblical quest for the historical Jesus is confined to the three synoptic gospels. The narratives, in the three synoptic gospels, add up to only thirty-one days of Jesus’s life, and his ministry lasted about a year and a half. This is not much of a base for a history of Jesus.

Historical Evidence

Little external evidence supports the biblical evidence of the historicity of Jesus, but this is true of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. No archeological evidence has been unearthed for the Mount Sinai where Moses was said to have received the Ten Commandments; none for the flight from Egypt by the Israelites; none for a battle of Jericho where the walls could not have come tumbling down because the town had no walls at that time; none for the military conquest of Canaan, none for David, Solomon, and so on. The Christian scriptures are equally unreliable history.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Dead Sea Scrolls have revealed to anyone not besotted by the lies of Christian “revelation” the true source of the beliefs of Jesus. The scrolls not only revealed a diverse Judaism which freely employed dualism more familiar to us from the language of earlier Mazdaism and later gnosticism, but also they alerted us to diversities in understanding Torah. They have also stimulated new attention to the works of Josephus and Philo. Nevertheless, we still have lacunae to fill, and have to make judgements where there are gaps, and this is where the Christians are able to obfuscate.

An analogy is this. The Romans are on one bank of the Rhine. A little later, they are on the other bank. How did they get there? The true answer is, if that is all we know, we cannot say for sure how they got over the river. Nevertheless, if someone said the river parted and they were able to cross dryshod, we would say they were insane. Yet that would be the Christian answer. The historian would boringly say that the Romans built a bridge, or used boats, both feasible answers. That a miracle happened is not.

In the quest for the historical Jesus, the theologians come up with a mass of unfeasible answers just to leave the faithful saying: “I might as well believe what I’ve always believed, that the waters parted”. So we get Christian scholars coming up with theories:

• the Germans pretended to be Romans,
• the Romans walked under the river,
• they went via the Behring strait,
• they stood on the backs of whales,
• they tunnelled under,
• they did it by mirrors,
• they flew over,
• aliens took them over,
• they were not Romans but were Vikings, and so on.

Plenty of Jesuses can be imagined but few of them meet the criteria of feasible history and most can be discounted.

First Quest

The first historical quest of a Jesus unadulterated by theological mud came out of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. It aimed to use the Jesus of history as an ally in the struggle against the tyranny of church dogma and power in setting belief and practice. The first to undertake a scientific investigation was the German orientalist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) who wrote a 4,000 page manuscript titled The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples. Gotthold Lessing published it posthumously in 1774, Reimarus like Copernicus being worried by the consequences, but it received little attention until Strauss published his own famous work fifty years later.

Reimarus saw in Jesus of Nazareth a Jewish messianic revolutionary whose failure led his followers to steal his body and create a new story of Jesus based on aspects of Jewish messianism. The Christian religion did not grow out of the teaching of Jesus. It emerged new from these failed expectations.

His major points were:

• We should draw an absolute distinction between the writings of the later church and what Jesus might have said.
• Jesus spoke as a Jew—Christian readings cannot be attributed to him.
• Jesus performed no miracles.
• He was a man not a god.
• His notion of the Kingdom of God was the messianic expectation of Jews at the time.

Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-1792) wrote a fictitious life of Jesus but one with clever insights. Jesus was reared by the Essenes and studied Plato and Aristotle under Greek teachers. He performed no miracles, and in later life became a senior brother of the Essenes. He learned that he must die, like Socrates, and Luke and Nicodemus plotted how to bring this about. They rescued Jesus from the tomb and Luke’s medicine brought Jesus to health. After a few physical appearances, mentioned in scripture, Jesus retired to the Essene community where he died in old age.

In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) published a two volume life of Jesus, revised in 1839, and again in 1864. Strauss argued that one needed to unravel the historical Jesus from the overlaid myths and miracle stories of the evangelists. He concluded that:

• None of the gospel writers was a witness of the events they discussed. Their accounts were second hand.
• Every story prior to Jesus’s baptism is a fabrication.
• The story of Jesus calling twelve disciples is not historical.
• None of the miracles happened.
• The gospel of John is a complete fabrication.

Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) wrote a life of Jesus in which he concluded:

• Matthew and Luke copied from Mark and added nothing new to the story. Jesus’s life rests on one person who was not a witness.
• The gospel of John contains no historical material at all.
• The birth stories are literary inventions.
• All the writings of Paul are fictitious.
• The Jews did not expect a Messiah and Jesus did not claim to be one.

The Frenchman, Joseph Ernest Renan (1823-1892), followed with his Vie de Jésus in 1860 in which he romanticised Jesus as a great moral teacher, but no more. His Life of Jesus emphasised the unhistorical gospel of John which prompted Albert Schweitzer to comment:

There is scarcely any other work on the subject which so abounds in lapses of bad taste… It is Christian art in the worst sense of the term… There is insincerity in the book from beginning to end.

Martin Kähler, in The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, 1896, concluded that a biography of Jesus was impossible. He argued that as the Jesus of history was inseparable from the Christ of faith and yet since the New Testament mainly concerns itself with the latter as does the church—and it is this Christ that has influenced history, scholars should only be interested in the Christ of faith. He concluded:

I regard the entire Life of Jesus movement as a blind alley.

At the turn of the 20th century Heinrich Julius Holtzman developed the theory of Mark’s priority as the first gospel of the synoptics and argued that we can know the historical Jesus by unravelling the connexions and borrowings between the gospels. He firmly denied that it was:

…possible to describe the historical figure of the one from whom Christianity derives its very name and existence in such a way as to satisfy all just claims of scrupulous historical critical investigation.

Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer published his The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906. He reviewed and exposed the fallibility of the previous lives of Jesus and the problem of whether anything could be safely known about him. He found previous questors had fashioned Jesus according to their own worldview. The initial questors were rationalists trying to discredit traditional Christian teaching. Counter quests were Christian theologians hoping to to fend off the criticism by building from theological bricks a “real Jesus”. The result of the latter was a Jesus whose message of a “spiritual kingdom” was that of nineteenth century German Protestantism.

This was a hugely important discovery for Christians who ever since have been able to say that any historical Jesus is merely a reflexion of its author’s prejudices and can be discounted. It seems that any Christian version is not a product of prejudice and must be accepted. Schweitzer concluded:

• Jesus was an eschatological Jewish leader, convinced the world was in the End Time, who tried and failed in a mistaken mission to bring in the kingdom of God. No one had properly recognised this.
• The quests had been fruitless.
• There is no history of Jesus that can be discovered, and:

  “In the last resort this book can only express the misgivings about the historical Jesus as depicted by modern theology. There is nothing more negative than the results of the critical study of the life of Jesus”.

Nineteenth century research into the so-called “Pseudepigrapha” of the Hebrew Bible, had revealed new insights into Palestinian Judaism—a prominent trend had been apocalyptic. The teachings and activity of Jesus could not be honestly examined without reference to Jewish eschatology. The recognition of Jesus’s “thoroughgoing eschatology” is Schweitzer’s unassailable contribution to scholarship. He upheld Johannes Weiss who had convincingly shown, in The Preaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God, that Jesus taught pure eschatology.

No modern Christian commentator likes to think about it, because it answers too much. Schweitzer himself hated the idea but, unlike modern Christian “scholars” he did not try to escape from his honest conclusions. Jesus was a first century Jewish leader intent on seeing in the cosmic victory of God over evil. This Jesus is foreign to Christians, as Schweitzer knew:

The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma.

Since Schweitzer recognised that Jesus was an eschatologist, and his words must only have been an interim ethic which had nothing to offer us, he abandoned devotional for practical Christianity, as a medical doctor in Africa.

Nineteenth century scholars concluded that a Jesus who would curse fig trees, claim to be the only begotten Son, and pretend to perform miracles, was psychologically sick. Albert Schweitzer wrote The Psychiatric Study of Jesus to refute these claims that Jesus was mentally unbalanced and that if he were alive today, he would be institutionalized.

Eschatology, involving ideas of the last judgment, resurrection, and supernatural deliverance of the elect from temporal earthly existence, though nominally Christian, has been lost in fairy tale ideas like that of “the Rapture” based upon Thessalonians. In the first century Jewish milieu, the concept was one of a cosmic battle. Many features of the early church, whether reconstructed from the gospels or Paul, only make sense against the background of eschatological expectation: resurrection, the gift of the Spirit (meals, baptism), and the continuing anticipation of God’s imminent intervention. The earliest community beliefs also could not be honestly disconnected entirely from the beliefs of Jesus and his disciples before Easter.

Rudolf Bultmann

In his treatment of the historical Jesus, Jesus and the Word, in 1920, Rudolf Bultmann thought it a happy conclusion that:

We can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary.

What can be known by examining Jewish tradition of the time is Jesus’s message, his “word”, the coming of the Kingdom of God, a “miraculous eschatological event”, but one that has to be interpreted existentially: “the Kingdom of God is a power which, although it is entirely future, wholly determines the present… because it now compels man to decision”. Bultmann concluded:

• The Christian proclamation (kerygma) will never be confirmed by historical investigation.
• Since the message is in the myth, the gospel of John is the preferred one.
• The historical quest is impossible, irrelevant, and illegitimate.

For Bultmann, a scholarly “quest of the historical Jesus” is impossible and theologically illegitimate because it substitutes worldly proof for faith. The simple fact of the Christ event—that God acted—sufficed. In The New Testament and Mythology he concludes:

The Christian life does not consist in developing the individual personality, in the improvement of society, or in making the world a better place. The Christian life means turning away from the world.

Is it surprising the world is a mess when it is run by people of this teeth grittingly irresponsible philosophy? Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, Christ the Center, (1960) concluded that, if we did find an historical Jesus, it would show that Christian faith had been an illusion. The world thereby might be saved.

Karl Barth preferred not to participate in the quest for the historical Jesus. Barth with Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann and others accepted Kähler’s conclusion that faith could not depend on the historical Christ, about whom nothing could be known. He agreed with Bonhoeffer that nothing in historical investigation could add anything to faith. At most, such analysis might tell us what others thought Jesus was like. But Barth was an alien as far as the natural world was concerned. The natural world was irrelevant to him because only Christ was important and Christianity was the “end of all religion”. If that is so, it only is because it will be the end of humanity. We should take this as the severest warning to us, not the ultimate accolade that Christians suppose it to be.

Hyam Maccoby concluded:

The school of “form criticism”, of which Rudolf Bultmann became the leading exponent, denied that there was any underlying historical layer in the New Testament at all, since the narrative framework was merely a device for linking together items which served various functions in the life of the Church of the late first century and second century.

This intensified scepticism served a pious purpose, for, by removing Jesus from historical enquiry, it was possible to prevent him from assuming too Jewish an outline. Instead of defending the traditional Jesus by attempting to reassert the editorial standpoint of the Gospels (a trap into which nineteenth-century apologists had fallen) it was now possible to defend an orthodox standpoint through the ultra-scepticism of declaring the quest for the historical Jesus to be impossible. All the evidence of Jesus’ Jewishness in the Gospels could simply be ascribed to a phase of “re-Judaization” in the history of the Church.

This too served a Church function. Though the historical Jesus was beyond a historical approach, he could still be reverently guessed at through faith, and the guess generally made was that he must have had some affinity with the doctrines at which the Church eventually arrived. So, by a tour de force, the ultra-sceptics found themselves thankfully back at square one.

Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker Paul and the Invention of Christianity

Ernst Troeltsch

Ernst Troeltsch saw the historical method of analysis as having three essential features: probability, analogy and correlation. Historians cannot deal in certainties. They discover events with a degree of probability attached to their likelihood. The probability of an event has to be judged by analogy with such a similar event occurring today, in times we know, are familiar with and have some estimatable degree of attestation. By analogy, it looks impossible that anything like 600,000 able-bodied men left Egypt in the Exodus.

Correlation is the principle that events influence each other. Nothing occurs in isolation and the likelihood of an event occurring has to be judged in the knowledge that it can be influenced by other events. The inhabitants of the hill country of Palestine had no knowledge of an Evil Spirit until after they had been colonised by the Persians who already had an Evil Spirit in their cosmogony. From the rule of correlation it is idle for Christian or Jewish theologians to claim that Jews invented the concept independently.

Troeltsch says it is invalid to place all emphasis on one event to the exclusion of others because all relevant events have to be judged equally by the same set of rules. Christianity cannot be judged only on its own claims about itself but in the wider context of human history. The dogmatic viewpoint of traditional Christianity violates all this, because it divorces a fixed set of events entirely from their realistic setting. Its pronouncements are absolute, being the Word of God and so they too are utterly divorced from any historical situation. Christian authority stems from its very falseness in historical terms—it is separated from history in practice despite the claimed historical setting of the mythical stories.

Its appeal is to the supernatural, the sphere of the human imagination, not history. Salvation history is supernatural history, and Troeltsch shows that it is therefore not history at all but romance based upon loyalty to a church or purely subjective inner experiences. Even Rudolf Bultmann said that it was impossible to believe in demons and spirits, while using electrical appliances and modern medicines, as Christians are expected to. History is like the fruit of a real tree but salvation history is like the fruit of a tree drawn on a piece of paper. The latter can be made to look wonderful but will not feed anyone. Troeltsch’s ideas help us to distinguish the two, should we have trouble.

The only justification for the doctrinal basis of Christian tradition would seem to be miracle… for only such a belief can save it from being a contingent part of the ongoing fabric of history.

John Bowden

Critics of Troeltsch accuse him of not knowing what to do with a miracle if one happened because his method rules them out. The point about a miracle is not that it is unique—all events are unique, even the most trivial—but that it cannot happen in Nature without God’s intervention. Spectacular single events, such as someone surviving a severe fire or fall are not miracles although they are called miracles in popular usage. A miracle simply cannot happen. It has zero probability of occurring. It is its impossibility that makes it a miracle.

A virgin birth would admittedly be pretty miraculous, though scientists might be able to think of a peculiar set of natural circumstances that could lead to one. Nevertheless, it is so miraculous that few scholars and many ordinary Christian believers do not think there ever was a virgin birth. A genuinely dead and already decaying man being resurrected would certainly be a miracle by any standards, and it therefore forms the basis of Christian faith, but it is such a poorly attested miracle that it is much more likely that the witnesses are deluded, mistaken or crooks than that the event happened. Only by eliminating the likely possibilities can the miracle be given credence. As it stands, it has none to anyone except those who will believe despite the evidence.

None of the “miracles” in the bible are well attested unless the miracle of the bible being the very word of God is true. If it is, then believers have to explain why everything that can be learnt by scholarship about the bible shows it to be the manufacture and composition of human beings, and is full of just the errors and contradictions that a human work copied by hand for many generations would contain. In brief, if God produced a miraculous book, why did he not ensure that it was miraculously distributed without errors? Christians believe the New Testament because they are Christians, not the other way around.

A New Quest

In 1953, one of Bultmann’s students, Ernst Käsemann, in a famous address to the annual gathering of the “old Marburgers” (the Bultmann school), declared the Lord of the Church could not have had no historical existence or he would have been completely mythological! Interest in the historical Jesus was theologically valid, after all, and he set in motion the “New Quest of the Historical Jesus”, based on scholarly investigation, and recognising that the kerygma of the church emerged from an eschatological message.

Critical analysis such as form criticism would allow information about the historial Jesus to be found in the gospels, but criteria were needed to settle the authenticity of Jesus’s sayings. Bultmann had already formulated one such criterion, dubbed by Norman Perrin, “the criterion of dissimilarity”:

The earliest form of a saying we can reach may be regarded as authentic if it can be shown to be dissimilar to characteristic emphases both of ancient Judaism and of the early Church.

Or, “if we are to seek that which is most characteristic of Jesus”, it will be found in the things wherein he differs from Judaism, such things as would be “new and startling to Jewish ears”. The premise that the authentic Jesus was to be found not in his Jewish context but in whatever was different from it, became a typical Christian confusion of true inquiry. Plainly this criterion begs the question, because its underlying assumption—that Jesus was deliberately being different from contemporary Jews—is what Christians want to hear.

About 90 percent of Jesus’s sayings are found in contemporary Jewish teaching, leaving just 10 percent for the real Jesus. Robert W Funk, founded the Jesus Seminar in 1985, calling scholars together to offer an alternative to the fundamentalist pictures of Jesus in American society. Around 200 people have participated to discuss, then vote with beads on historicity. Not much survives and even the Lord’s Prayer goes. The Jesus Seminar agrees that:

…way less than 25 percent of the words attributed to Jesus were his.

In fact, the scholars of the Jesus seminar concluded that 82 percent of the words ascribed to Jesus were not actually spoken by him:

1. The only words in the gospel of Mark were 12:17, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”.
2. The only words in Matthew were: 5:38-39 “Turn the other cheek”. 13:33 The parable of the leaven in the flour. 20:1-15 The parable of the workers in the vineyard. 22:21 “render unto Caesar… “ None of the Sermon on the Mount was accepted, the only part of the Lord’s Prayer were the words “Our Father”, and only three of the beatitudes: the hungry, poor and sad. Omitted were the references to the meek, merciful, pure in heart and peacemakers.
3. In Luke, the scholars accepted: 2:20 “Blessed are the poor, hungry, and sad” 6:27 “love your enemies” 6:29 “turn the other cheek”, “go the second mile” and “give your shirt”. 10:30 the story of the Good Samaritan 11:2 only the word “Father” in the Lord’s prayer. 13:20 the parable of the leaven 16:1 the parable of the shrewd manager.
4. Nothing in the gospel of John was accepted. But the scholars gave credence to the Gospel of Thomas and used it to confirm or deny Jesus’s words.

Donald A Wells explains that the following assumptions were made by the Jesus Seminar to begin its analysis. An assessment is appended to each:

1. The Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke are more reliable than John in separating the legendary and the mythical from the historical Jesus. Agreed.
2. The gospel of Mark is the oldest and Matthew and Luke copied from it. Agreed.
3. The most likely passages are those consistent with an oral rather than a written tradition. Meaningless. All of it is oral tradition.
4. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are assumed to be literary narratives and not history. Meaningless. All writing is literary. He means “fiction” which is too sweeping.
5. It was assumed that Jesus was not an eschatologist (he did not believe in the imminent end of the world). Total nonsense. He plainly was.
6. Since the oldest gospel manuscripts in our possession were written 175 years after the death of Jesus, and since every scholar who copied a manuscript added marginal notes which subsequent scholars commonly added to the body of the text, we ought not put much too emphasis on the particular words. Far too sweeping.
7. The Dead Sea Scrolls are of no help since they were written before the birth of Jesus. Nonsense. They might as well say the Jewish tradition is no help because it was founded before the birth of Jesus. Jesus plainly was an Essene and the Jesus Seminar wants to count the truth out at the start.
8. All the gospels were widely circulated for many years anonymously and were later given authorship names by persons unknown to make them more acceptable. The Church Father, Eusebius, had stated (300 AD) that Christians would not accept a writing as authentic unless it had been written by a famous person. Agreed.
9. Paul’s writings were in circulation long before the first gospel appeared, Paul never read the gospels. Since Paul had never met Jesus, his conjectures cannot be the basis for any facts about Jesus. Agreed.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
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