Christianity
Introduction to the Gospels—Examination and Belief
Abstract
Vitually none of the modern translations [of the New Testament] can be trusted to bear the weight that is put on them.John Bowden, SCM
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, December 01, 1998
Belief
In the western world, most of us are brought up as Christians. Christianity distinguishes itself from other monotheistic religions in its devotion to a divine being who, it is claimed, appeared at a known time and place in history and whose life and teachings are accurately known because they were recorded by people alive at the time.
Christianity teaches that its founder, Jesus of Nazareth, fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament, the holy scriptures of the Jews, which narrate the unfolding of God’s plan for his chosen people, originally the Jews but, from the advent of Jesus, the whole human race. Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, the saviour promised by God, a divine being, one of the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. As the Son of God, he was incarnated on earth, was crucified to atone for the sins of humanity, was resurrected as proof of his divinity and ascended into heaven. Because humanity’s sins have been forgiven by the sacrifice of the Son of God, salvation and eternal life await for those who believe it—those who have faith.
The principal form of Christian worship is the mass or holy communion in which worshippers achieve communion with God by consuming consecrated wine and bread which miraculously is the blood and body of the crucified god. The holy book of Christianity, the bible, consists of a version of the scriptures of the Jewish religion added to which are four gospels describing the ministry of Jesus on earth, the Acts of the Apostles (mainly of Paul, the evangelist), letters of some of the apostles of Christ, again mainly Paul, and an apocalypse.
The gospels describe the human sacrifice of the incarnate God and include a core of teaching broadly expressed as love thy neighbour. Christianity has several holy days—the principal ones being the supposed anniversaries of Jesus’s death, resurrection and birth—and has adopted Sunday as its sabbath.
These are the essentials of Christianity, a religion which today holds the hearts and minds of over a thousand million people—many in the most advanced countries of the world. Christians, even in these cultured societies, really believe that Jesus was the absolute god who came to earth as a man, and this is a fact of history. But is it?
Many other gods were thought by their devotees to have been historical people who wandered around doing good deeds—Orpheus and Hercules, for example—yet most people do not now believe they existed. Why do we consider worshippers of Hercules to be insane but worshippers of Jesus inspired? The clergy teach that all gods are myths other than their own but what makes the Christian god an exception to the rule? Who could believe a book published today that abounded in miracles? If the holy book of another religion had miracles comparable to those in the gospels, would a Christian believe it? Why are events as remarkable as miracles recorded only in some gospels and not in others? If anyone today claimed to be a Son of God, we should consider them to be deluded or a charlatan, and our skepticism would be justified. Yet because we are brought up to it, we accept it without question of a man whose followers proclaimed him a god around 2000 years ago.
Even S Augustine admitted, “I should not believe in the gospels if I had not the authority of the church for so doing”. A saint he may be but his argument is circular, for he admits without this special authority, it would not be possible to believe the gospels, yet, if the gospel story is not to be believed, what special authority has the church? If the gospels were not the foundation of our own religion we would find them preposterous and would not comprehend how anyone could believe such nonsense. And, if our faith is greater than S Augustine’s and we do not need the authority of the church to accept the gospels as God-given truth, how do we explain the many contradictions in them? Why is God so confusing—or confused?
Can we be sure the Son of God of the gospels is not an illusion or a fraud? Could we be gullible dupes whose ethical base is a confidence trick? For Christians such questions are impertinent. Christianity is genuine. It is the only genuine religion. All others are heathen. Pagan! Christians have sufficient proof—their belief! Celsus, an early critic of Christianity, said the Christians do not examine but believe. Is it credible that highly educated, worldly people today will not examine but simply believe? It is credible! They do—just believe!
These difficulties arise because Christian beliefs are built upon the fallible testimony of men, but they include the belief that the original testimonies, fallible as they are, are the infallible testimony of God. Some Christians seeking rationality, struggling with the knowledge that men wrote the accounts they revere, resolve their doubts by claiming they were inspired by God, or by an aspect of Him—the Holy Ghost. Though written by men they are still infallible. The bible is the holy book. The gospels can be nothing other than true: they are the gospel truth—the word of God himself.
Examination
Those a little more skeptical might wonder why God leaves the reporting of his incarnation on earth to disciples who are terminally stupid and succeed in botching up the story, when he could have rendered it accurately himself during his sojourn here. Or, he could have sent an angel to reveal it inscribed on tablets of gold. Why didn’t he do something obviously infallible and save a lot of trouble?
Evidently he chose not to, and a Christian would say we cannot be expected to understand. Yet, according to Genesis, God made us in his own image, endowing us with brains. It would be unreasonable to believe he does not expect us to use them. Quite the reverse. Having given us brains He must expect us to use them, and, if necessary, uncover false doctrine. The Christian scholar, Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, pleads that the basis of Christianity demands historical and critical study—its piety depends upon it. If Christian faith rests upon a particular event in history, those who refuse to investigate it honestly must betray a lack of that faith, for they dare not risk discovering they are mistaken!
Perhaps the origins of Christianity are not what they seem. Perhaps cautionary tales that circulated among oppressed and ignorant people came to be believed. Could Roman slaves and housewives be expected to understand what motivated the Jewish nation in its plight?—that Jesus was not what the church is now compelled to teach, lest it should destroy its own foundation?
It is hard to be dispassionate about the bible when we have been taught to revere it all our lives, and our systems of beliefs seem to depend upon it. The gospels have such authority in our society that most people, practising Christians or otherwise—like S Augustine—believe that they are absolutely or essentially true. Jews and Christians are indignant when anyone suggests that the authors of the scriptures were lying. ”Can saints and prophets, guided by God through the Holy Spirit lie? Outrageous! Of course they don not lie!” They presume the biblical authors were upright and honest people because they believe. What they read of these authors—the bible—is why they believe! They refuse to examine the many problems especially of chronology in the biblical texts, and even if they are obliged to consider them, they will dismiss them as Satanic temptations.
Christian commentators have carefully steered away from accepting anything in the gospels as allegorical or metaphoric. Rudolf Bultmann spoke despisingly of ”mere metaphors or ciphers.” He did not know how close he was. The gospels are indeed ciphers, rather crudely done, not very finely done as Barabara Thiering claims, yet with the same idea at root perhaps. The idea of the Essenes was that the scriptures were allegorical and properly deciphered contained God’s absolute truth, so the heirs of the Essenes, the gentile bishops, thought the gospels could be written as crude allegory to hide their real nature, and still be God’s truth.
Modern bishops fear that by accepting the gospels as allegorical, the historical Jesus will be immediately vaporized into myth. In fact, the myth is immediately condensed into history. The mind of the allegorist is flying on magic carpets, walking on water and seeing bodies rise fronm the dead, and what they write is not history. The allegorist has made real history symbolic, so reading the symbols as the real history is plainly wrong. The symbols must be interpreted properly. Allegory is the enemy of gospel exegesis based on the historical assumption. It is an assumption, because it has no corroborating evidence. That it was set in first century Jerusalem is not evidence that the allegory is history. The whole of the Christology of Jesus also depends on his historicity, but the wrong christology must emerge if the allegorical Jesus is taken to be the historical one.
E J Tinsley, a professor of theology at Leeds University says ”biblical literature is a structure of myths, images and metaphors thrown up and conditioned by a particular series of historical events.” So, all biblical commentary is allegorical interpretation. What we have in the gospels is a story about a movement against the puppet king of Galilee and then against the Roman Prefect of Judaea, but deliberately allegorized to disguise the underlying sedition, which would have been quite unacceptable to the Romans. In case no one noticed, Christianity was unnacceptable to the Roman authorities anyway, and remained so for 300 years, but over that time, the allegory fooled enough ordinary people that it was a true history of an innocent and misunderstood man, that the religion eventually became institutionalized as the state religion. Thereafter, the allegory was institutionalized as history! Any counter evidence was carefully destroyed or suitably edited.
That the parables of Jesus require decoding is implied by the refrain: ”He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”
In the parable of the sower, the harvest is unnaturaly large. Even the lowest, 30 fold is hugely optimistic. A typical yield would have been eight times. The harvest is therefore an allegorical benefit of unimaginable value. The details of the lost sowings are also allegorical. Yet C H Dodd in Parables of the Kingdom says Jesus ”did not feel the need for making up artificial illustrations for the truths he wished to teach.” Professor Matthew Black thought the parables were allegories and said of Dodd that he ”managed to get the benefit of allegory while denying that it is allegory.”
In the Unmerciful Servant (Mt 18:23-35), the servant owed 10,000 talents! Each talent is 10,000 denarii, the pay of a day labourer. A days pay today, for the poorest labourer would be at least £25. So this servant owed over two billion pounds or 4 billion dollars. He was a rich servant, by any standards. The debt is unimaginably huge! The tribute of Galilee and Peraea (Herod Antipas’s kingdom) in 4 BC , according to Josephus was 200 talents. The parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, the Great Feast (Mt 22:1-13), The Ten Virgins (Mt 25:1-12) are all unnatural and unrealistic.
Professor Tinsley saw long ago that the ”mission of Jesus had been allegorized” in the gospels, ”to make it contemporary,” he believed. ”To make them acceptable,” is the truth.
Jacob Neusner in Rabbinic Literature and the New Testament. What We Cannot Show We Do Not Know, criticises Christians for:
- failing carefully and critically to analyse the literary and historical traits of every pericope adduced as evidence;
- assumping that things happened exactly as the sources allege;
- using anachronistic or inappropriate analogies and the introduction of irrelevant issues.
In short, Christian belief boils down to:
What you do not know,
You do not have to show.
Just say… and it is so.
It is obviously quite impossible to reason with such people although Jews, pace Neusner, are scarcely any different. ”Belief” is irreconcilable with reason. Rational people must want to examine the origins of their beliefs and show that they are well founded. They must be sufficiently curious to wish to examine the relevant Christian texts to justify and confirm their views. They must be willing to look at the books of the New Testament in their human and historical context, accepting that, if God inspired their composition, it would shine through. Equally, if it does not, they must be willing to accept the Christian holy books are merely the work of men wilfully or misguidedly duping their fellows. Would God want us to believe it if it were not true?
Pilate asked: “What is truth?” Whatever we accept as the truth of Christian origins, there is sure to be a deeper truth waiting to be discovered. Why should anyone fear it? My purpose here is to offer the Christian story from the viewpoint of a skeptic—to show that it is possible to interpret the facts offered to us by the early Christian writers in a non-mystical, non-supernatural way, and thereby recover from the Christian gospels the remnants of historical truth.
But the gospels themselves offer serious problems to any rational interpretation.
Christian “Scholars”
Modern Christian ”scholars” apparently only want to tackle easy problems—in other words, anything that is not a problem. This is the meaning of ”scholar” applied to a Christian student of the bible. They do not want to risk discovering something that might rock the holy boat. They want to be free to bibble to their heart’s content secure in the knowledge that their scholarly peers will approve—so long as they do not actually try to discover any truths about biblical history or myth.
These ”scholars” like to place tags of disapproval upon anyone who really tries to formulate serious, testable theses about the New Testament. The long accepted theory is the ”Two Document” theory that the synoptic gospels were based on Mark’s gospel and another work, now lost, called Q. This theory superseded an earlier theory called the ”Griesbach Hypothesis”.
Now, no one imagines that the synoptic gospel writers took their sources, whatever they were, wrote and handed to the general public the final version of their gospels—the ones we can read today. Christians might like to think that God inspired the writing of gospels, so the process was quite straightforward, but no objective scholar ever believed this. The gospels have obviously been changed frequently by deliberating editing or by copying errors since they were first written, and it is not even clear that the gospels of Mark and Luke even existed in an agreed form at first. There is good reason for thinking that both could have existed initally as a draft form (proto-Mark and proto-Luke) and this was worked up by many hands into the books we now have. A similar scheme applies too to Matthew which was originally not at all like the gospel we now have but was a collection of sayings, perhaps a version of the document called ”Q.” This was cobined with Mark, to give a fuller, richer and more polished gospel and this was edited by many editors before it reached the modern form.
Plainly, at a time when books were not easily made, earlier drafts might have been kept in circulation even though they were strictly superseded by a later version. So,though the authors of Matthew and Luke drew on Mark and ”Q,” neither Mark nor Q might have been the latest version. Not long afterwards, incomplete versions of all three synoptic gospels might have been around, and some editors might have transferred stories from one to the other for the sake of harmony.
None of this detracts from the basic thesis that the synoptics are composed of Mark and Q, but suggest the process was not simple. Yet, Christian ”scholars” disparage the ”Two Document” thesis as ”simplistic,” a deliberate implication that those who accept it—unlike the sophisticated ”scholars,” Christian ones—are simple. Christian scholars are intent on doing what they have successfully but dishonestly done for millennia—muddying the waters as soon as proper scholars begin to clear them a little. These clever Christians tell the simpletons that the Two Document hypothesis cannot account for the complexities of the gospel texts. They are playing to the gallery of their own gullible followers who will guffaw at the slight on the critics—God 1 - the Devil 0. Christian mainliners preserve their fix against the nasty thought police who want to dissuade them from their addiction and, instead, hand out a little truth in pure, unsanctified needles. The truth is that those who paint the absurd picture of the Two Document hypothesis are its detracters, and, like all drug dealers, it is for their usual self-seeking and dishonest reasons.
The Two Document hypothesis successfully explains most of the perceived relations between the synoptic gospels, and more successfully than rival theories, but problems remain. The explanation will never be known because it lies long ago, but there are no problems that cannot be solved on the basis of the Two Document hypothesis followed by editorial attempts at harmonisation. The reason that Christians do not like the Two Document hypothesis is that it reduces the evidence of Jesus to Mark’s gospel which lacks the dead Jesus walking around with holes in his hands, feet, head and side, showing them off to everyone he can find.
The Gospels
As rational people we might wish to discover what we can about the origin of Christianity from the evidence, but not much evidence remains other than the works long ago categorized by Christian bishops as canonical, which is to say those which they deemed acceptable for general consumption. Most evidence deemed unacceptable has been destroyed. Not simply lost, decayed or despoiled by the ravages of time but destroyed by the Christians themselves! Anything that has not been destroyed has been savaged by early Christian editors until it is difficult to know what was original and what has been interpolated or re-written.
Most Christians who are not theologians do not realize this. They do not realize that the gospels were not written as accurate records for the archives but purely to persuade people to believe. They were not written as historical documents but to recruit converts, just as modern holiday brochures are written to persuade people to spend their money. Like the exaggerated colours of the brochures, gospel stories could be mainly hype, and gentle Jesus simply a glossy picture to attract new punters!
Nor are the earliest Christian records those which appear first in the New Testament, the gospels, but some of Paul’s epistles. The earliest of Paul’s epistles may have been written only a few decades after the crucifixion, in about 52 AD. But Paul’s letters tell us almost nothing about Jesus, the person. Indeed the absence of detail about the life of the founder of Christianity by his most important apostle seems astonishing.
Paul can say very little about Jesus:
- he was a Jew of the line of David—Paul knew of no divine impregnation—and was the first of many children;
- he started the tradition of the Eucharist;
- he was crucified;
- he rose from the dead on the third day;
- he appeared to various people after his resurrection, including a multitude;
- he had died before Paul was converted and Paul never met him.
Paul overcame the last impediment by claiming a superior way of knowing Jesus—supernaturally! Paul apparently was a medium. From time to time he would fall into a trance and have visions of the risen Jesus telling him where the chosen apostles were going wrong!
Paul uses very little of the life or teaching of Jesus because he did not know it and thought it irrelevant anyway. Paul was preaching his own message. For Paul a belief in the risen Christ was all that was needed for salvation. Whatever Jesus thought while he lived simply did not matter to Paul, and Paul could not know what was attributed by the church to Christ later. These are the reasons why much of the teaching of Jesus seems mysterious, and even contradict Christianity as it has come to us via Paul. If you believe in the risen Christ, you are saved so what does it matter what Jesus taught?
Nor do Paul’s epistles refer to written accounts of the life of Jesus. If they existed, it is inconceivable that Paul would never have quoted from them when it suited him. We can safely conclude that the gospels did not exist in documentary form when Paul wrote his letters. Paul’s epistles were written around 50-60 AD whereas the earliest narrative gospels are from around 60-90 AD. Paul had no gospels but at some stage the gospel writers or editors discovered Paul. They could make use of Paul’s teaching and also incorporate the theory and practice of the church as it had evolved in the years following the death of Jesus.
Why was it not until about 30 years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death in 33 AD that the earliest written accounts of his mission appeared?
The Jewish disciples of Jesus, the Nazarenes, considered the second coming—in Greek, parousia—and the end of the world as imminent and regarded it as a pointless exercise to record the events of Jesus’s life. For the same reason the apostles—preachers not writers—practised an oral tradition rather than any written one. Being Jewish, the apostle’s teachings initially were transmitted orally in Aramaic, the Jewish vernacular of the time, a semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic. The dominant themes of the early church were the passion, the resurrection and the impending return of the messiah. Whatever the apostles knew about these, they would have told. They would have been less interested in events preceding the week of the passion. Nor would they have been too concerned about any peripheral teaching of the fledgling god. The first Christians were not expecting to have to teach teachers.
Only as time passed and the second coming did not arrive did those who retained their faith decide to write down details of the passion, and then other details of Christ’s life and thought. The original oral tradition of the Nazarenes became a written tradition. Accounts in the form we now have them were years later still. By then the stories had been told many times, the tellers of the stories, missionaries, had dispersed to many lands, and the stories had become stylized and idealized.
The first Christian missionaries, the evangelists and those who preceded them—a church already existed at Rome when Paul arrived there—had founded many Christian churches in the Roman Empire. These different churches produced different holy books. After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD no single church had any special seniority. Some, like the church of Alexandria in Egypt, consisted largely of Jewish Christians who felt better able to understand the teachings of a Jew than the essentially gentile congregations of other churches like that at Rome where the Jewish War had left a bad impression and local Christians were keen to play down the Jewish origins of their religion.
These different congregations saw Jesus in different ways. Jewish converts who did not revert to Judaism, were interested in the thought of Jesus, essentially Jesus the rabbi, and therefore keen on his sayings. The gentile churches including those set up by Paul were interested in the dying and resurrected god and had little interest in Jesus’s life otherwise. Others saw parallels between Jesus and Orpheus or Adonis and it became expedient to write in appropriate stories and parables.
Some Christian historians think different followers of Jesus specialized in different aspects of Jesus’s ministry. One collected parables, another miracles, another passion narratives, and so on. Evidence of this is taken to be the prologue of Luke in which he refers to a number of writers who have established the facts of the religion as handed down by the original eyewitnesses. Luke is admitting he had earlier sources—earlier gospels—but, because they were omitted from the canon, they have since been lost, though fragments are discovered from time to time. It seems likely, however, that if these were systematic collections of any sort then they preceded Jesus. They would have been collections of messianic scriptural prophecies and testimonia which the gospel writers indiscriminately applied to Jesus.
The results of the divers sources and interests of the writers were a number of variant accounts which at first circulated separately in particular communities. Among them were the four gospels or their prototypes which the church later defined as being authoritative but which were evidently not accepted by Christian writers until after 140 AD to judge by citations by early churchmen. The acceptance of the four gospels by the church does not mean they were the most original or the most accurate accounts. It means they were the ones that best suited the growth of the church in its Roman milieu.
For these reasons the four canonical gospels are not reliable. Unauthentic elements were incorporated into them. For example, the personal views of the evangelists were written into the gospels because the translator or scribe had no way of knowing whether something was true or the evangelist’s opinion. They were heavily and clumsily edited by their authors and by later theologians who felt they could be improved in this or that small way. Some gospels, like Luke, are not at all in their original form. They contain anachronisms—confusing Nazarene beliefs with what the church at a later date wanted converts to believe. Matthew 16:18-19, on the role of Peter when Jesus says, “upon this rock I will build my church”, notes a later concern of the church not a concern of Jesus, who believed the world was about to be renewed under the direct rule of God. But no single editor ever had the authority to rewrite all the holy texts to eliminate contradictions. That was to be a boon for the church, allowing it to do as it wished, always able to quote some bit of scripture in justification, but it is also a boon for the inquirer because ad hoc editing leaves inconsistencies that can be revealing.
What editing happened before 140 AD or so, is unknown but considerable. Even after 140 AD variations continued to be introduced because the fourth century codices, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, differ in important respects.
Why, you might ask, are we so fussy about the reliability of the New Testament books? Our oldest copies of Herodotus and Thucydides are only hundreds of years old yet we do not question the accuracy of their every word. And there are many more manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts of the gospels preserved from long ago than of any other book. Surely such fussiness is unwarranted.
The answer is that Herodotus and Thucydides are not the sacred books of millions of people who believe they are the true word of God. The copyists of Herodotus and Thucydides had little reason to alter them, whereas the copyists of the New Testament texts had every reason to alter the holy books to suit church politics and to match its changing dogmata. Deliberate alterations were made to the gospels within only a few years of their being written. Earlier drafts of the gospels are now lost and lost versions could explain some of the puzzles of the connections between the gospels. But even the completed versions were altered in parts by later editors and copyists.
Still, the gospels were written successively and the evolution of theology can be seen from gospel to gospel, Jesus growing, for example, from the modest son of man of Mark into the fully fledged god cast in the eastern saviour mould of John. Jesus’s own message of a personal repentance from sin to join the elect of God and secure entry into the coming kingdom was replaced by Paul’s innovations, redemption from original sin by irrational faith mediated by the power and ritual of the church. The paraphernalia and dogmas of the church were constructed in imitation of rival religions or through political necessity not from any prescriptions of Jesus. When christologically advanced concepts appear in the gospels they were probably inserted by a later editor.
The skeptic therefore takes the view that anything in the Christian scriptures which seems inappropriate or contradicts church doctrine is likely to be a remnant of the original tradition that has escaped editorial correction. An inquirer will examine the culture of first century Palestine and will believe the gospel account when it agrees with the culture of Palestine at that time. Otherwise he will doubt it just as he would doubt the authenticity of a Roman bicycle pump.
