AW! Epistles
From Jerry
Abstract
Sunday, 22 August 2004
You’ve obviously put a lot of thought into your article about why the scriptures of the Jewish and Christian faith are obviously not historically accurate. I admire the research, time and effort you have undertaken to prove your point. I don’t wholly disagree with your conclusions. However, you state in your essay, “The scriptures however claim to be historical, and so invite us to criticize them.” I have read the scriptures, Old Testament, New Testament as well as more commentaries and meditations than I care to recall, but the most intruiging thing about the scriptures is how Jesus, the Messiah of Isreal defines the Jewish scriptures (and by implication how the Jews of the day used the scripture). He says in the Gospel of John, Chapter 5, verse 39, “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.” Jesus tells us two things in this one sentence. First that even the Jews did not use the scriptures as a history book, they used it to figure out how to have eternal life. Secondly, Jesus told them their use of scripture for that purpose was wrong and that all they should find in scriptures is revelation of Him.
So I agree with you that the Old Testament is likely not historically accurate, but I disagree with you that is claims to be historically accurate. There are, however, those that claim to be religious leaders who will stick their fingers in their ears and scream if you tell them otherwise, but they are not the final authority on scripture. I believe God is the final authority on scripture and His Son our mediator.
To begin with your final statement, how do you get to consult God as the final authority on scripture, or His Son, if you have to go through Him to God, as Jesus apparently boasted in John’s gospel? Since God and his mediating Son are mythical beings, there is no way they can be consulted other than through the mediation of some crook or maniac who claims to have contact with them.
What about the historicity of the scriptures. Whatever you say, they are presented as history presuming to show God’s intervention in humanity. Christians depend upon it because the Son is supposedly the sacrificial victim for the sins of Adam, and if Adam is not historical, then the Son sacrificed his life for no good reason. They purport to show how God placed His Chosen People in the promised land, via the travels of Abraham and then the Exodus of Moses. they purport to show that God gave the Israelites an immutable law, called the Law of Moses, a law which, though God given and immutable, and declared so by the Son, has been utterly rejected by Christians—except, of course, the bits they still like. They claim that a brutal warlord called Joshua, invaded the land of innocent people called Canaanites and mercilessly murdered many of them, preserving only the young girls for the use of the conquerors! They claim that another merciless and unprincipled warlord called David, took Jerusalem from its previous owners, and began to build a mythical empire in the Near East. They claim the his son was a hugely powerful and rich emperor of this mythical empire, these kings being still considered by Jews and Christians to be historical figures. They then go into a partly historical account of the tribulations of Israel, and its successor, Judah, albeit in imagination run in parallel, citing certain historically known kings of Assyria and Persia to make it seem true. A series of prophets make predictions about the future during this period. How is this not meant to be a history, whatever other information if might be thought to contain.
Now the scriptures might not claim to be historically accurate, but Christians are in a bind when they admit otherwise. That is why there are fundamentalist who defend the literal truth of the bible. If it is not literally true, any intelligent person will want to know what parts of it are false. That is a huge test of faith, and one that few Christians are willing to admit. The Jewish scriptures before Omri are essentially mythical. Much of the Christian gospels were written decades, many decades in the case of John, after the events they describe. A broad outline of the events seems common, but detailed sayings of Jesus, especially those that appear in only one single gospel cannot be relied upon. Several prominent ones are obvious insertions of the later Church. Who then should believe any of it, except that the Romans killed a man for challenging the authority of the Emperor, a capital crime?
If you have a message from God or His mediator that contradicts this then tell me what it is and how you received it.
It is painfully obvious from your reply that your are angry. Perhaps you are angry at God, or those that claim to be religious leaders or, even at yourself. (That statement may have made you angry.) But to your points: “To begin with your final statement, how do you get to consult God as the final authority on scripture, or His Son, if you have to go through Him to God, as Jesus apparently boasted in John’s gospel?” Because no man can see the face of God and live. The best glimpse any man got of God is Moses, and all he got to see is the backside of God while he was hiding in a crack in the mountain. (There are a lot of really good jokes you can insert here.)
Well, I asked you a simple question but get meaningless waffle in reply. You assert that no man can face God and live, although a man called Moses did it! That was all right, though, because God only exposed his backside! Your reading of the bible, though, is faulty. What about Jacob? “And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved (Gen 32:30)”. Jacob also bragged to Esau that seeing his face was just like his experiences of seeing the face of God! Moreover, although Isaiah was concerned for his life, he did not die either, when he had seen God, “I am undone… for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts (Isa 6:5)”. God appears to Adam walking in the garden (Gen 3:8), and there are many other occasions when God just appears as if He was an ordinary man, as He did to Abraham, “And the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day (Gen 18:1)”. The Psalmist, like Jacob, braggs about seeing God’s face, “As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness (Psalms 17:15)”. How do you explain all this with your biblical assertion that the bible itself repeatedly refutes? I dwell on this simply to show that, like Christians in general, you are a spouter who spouts the bible expecting gullible sheep to believe your every word, when much of it, if not most, is sheer lies.
It is through spiritual rebirth that the old self dies and is born again in Christ, and not through our life, but Christ’s that we can see and know God.
This is the peak of the waffle. It means nothing. The much overused word “spiritual” means nothing, because it means anything mysterious that the user cares to use it as. Any sort of rebirth, if it were to happen, ought to be mysterious enough, but to emphasise it, frauds always call it a “spiritual rebirth”, so it is really mysterious. What it is is entirely commonplace in cattle country!
“Since God and his mediating Son are mythical beings, there is no way they can be consulted other than through the mediation of some crook or maniac who claims to have contact with them.” Jeremiah (Jer 31:31) the prophet says that a time will come when the Law of God is written on men’s hearts. This is repeated in numerous verses in the letters of the apostles. We have this knowledge already seeded in us. It is when we abandon ourselves and Christ is resurrected in us that the seed of truth is revealed.
More waffle, and with deceit added in. The law of God meant by Jeremiah was the Mosaic law that Christians reject except for some particularly reactionary bits that they like to keep. They like to keep bits about adultery and homosexuality, but hate the idea of food taboos and circumcision. These latter are not trivial matters as Christians seem to think, if they take their God’s own words seriously: “He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant (Gen 13-14).” Now, if God was not kidding in these two verses of Genesis, He is telling all of you Christians who are uncircumcised that you will never be saved despite your smug thoughts. You have broken God’s own everlasting covenant with Him. You will doubtless retort that God broke the everlasting covenant when He appeared in the form of His own Son, abrogating the law of Moses. That too is false because the Son repeatedly emphasises the law in the New Testament. You just pick out what you like in the supposedly Holy Bible, and ignore what does not suit you. The law is not written anywhere in the anatomy of any Christian. Perhaps you had better begin to take Jeremiah the prophet more seriously.
“What about the historicity of the scriptures. Whatever you say, they are presented as history presuming to show God’s intervention in humanity.” Well, maybe it would be better posited as man’s intervention with God’s will. And if that is the case, the whole of the Old Testament is revealing the inadequacy of man to reach God, and man’s reliance on a messiah for reconciliation with God.
So, God is an almighty bully? He lets humanity have free will, so that He can take umbrage and unpleasant reparations against them for doing what they want and not what He wants. The messiah has been and gone 2000 years ago, Christians say, but yet most of the world has never heard of him, has heard of him and rejects him, or some have joined only to find those who can believe such fairy tales are immature and intolerable to live with, so they leave.
“Christians depend upon it because the Son is supposedly the sacrificial victim for the sins of Adam, and if Adam is not historical, then the Son sacrificed his life for no good reason. They purport to show how God placed His Chosen People in the promised land, via the travels of Abraham and then the Exodus of Moses. They purport to show that God gave the Israelites and imutable law, called the Law of Moses, a law which , though God given and immutable, and declared so by the Son, has been utterly rejected by Christians—except, of course, the bits they still like.” No man on earth today is capable of keeping the 613 laws ennumerated in the Torah. The reason no man can keep the Law is because the temple made by the hands of man was destroyed almost 2,000 years ago. And that is historical fact. There are no more men on the face of the earth that can support a claim to be a Levite, or a Jew for that matter. They have not been able to for over 1,000 years. Judaism is but a shell of itself at the time of Christ.
Well, Christians do understand some historical facts, then. What you do not understand is that only certain of the laws were sacerdotal practices meant as directions for temple sacrifice. Most of the law is not to do with such matters, as Christians prove by picking out some of them and keeping them, even though the law can no longer, it seems, be practised.
The Law, however, is a spiritual law, not a physical one.
If it is not physical, why do so many Christians try to impose upon others the bits they like to retain? If God directs everyone not to kill, in the Ten Commandments, why does the same God repeatedly tell people to kill those who violate certain laws, even though, God, if anyone, must have known these were spiritual laws and not meant to be physically applied? The whole of it illustrates Christian hypocrisy.
There are parts of the Law that are no longer relevant, in a physical sense, as outlined by the apostles in the letters of Paul, Peter, John, James and Jude. The parts that are no longer relevant include the sacrificial and ceremonial laws and include the practice of circumcision.
So, although your own God, in His manifestation as the Son, states as clearly as it is possible that “one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled (Mt 5:18)”, you prefer to believe the word of mere mortals, and not only mortals but ones with a vested interest in making their religion acceptable to gentiles who could not possibly have accepted such a strict way of life as that prescribed by Moses. Again it proves Christian cherry picking, that it started early in the life of Christianity, and that Christians continue in their hypocrisy.
Other laws like sexual impurity, dealings with property and the other civil laws are in fact still on the books in many nations whose roots are from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions. The laws dealing with the times set apart for the Lord unfortunately have been discarded by many mainline Christian religions. I believe these feasts and set apart times are a beautiful revelation of Christ. The Torah was but a shadow of the ultimate fulfillment of the Law, Christ.
Most laws concerning these matters—theft, commerce, social relations, and so on—long precede any of these laws. It shows that the law of Moses, Christian and Moslem laws are all derivative, and, in cases of social affairs, that should be matters for individuals and their own conscience, the older laws were altogether more humane.
“They claim that a brutal warlord called Joshua, invaded the land of innocent people called Canaanites and mercilessly murdered many of them, preserving only the young girls for the use of the conquerors! They claim that another merciless and unprincipled warlord called David, took Jerusalem from its previous owners, and began to build a mythical empire in the Near East. They claim the his son was a hugely powerful and rich emperor of this mythical empire, these kings being still considered by Jews and Christians to be historical figures. They then go into a partly historical account of the tribulations of Israel, and its successor, Judah, albeit in imagination run in parallel, citing certain historically known kings of Assyria and Persia to make it see true. A series of prophets make predictions about the future during this period. How is this not meant to be a history, whatever other information if might be thought to contain.” As I mentioned in my previous email, while Scriptures may present themselves on one level as history, they may or may not be historical. But they are certainly true.
Are you explaining to other Christians, who plainly need this tutorial much more than I do, that the bible is not historical, and how they should therefore go about properly extracting the truth from them? Mr Bush and the meretriciously Christian Republican administration of the US for example.
Jesus taught us how to understand scripture, and he taught in that way too, through parable. And while the parables Jesus used may or may not have been true, they taught truth.
Hang on! You just said in adjoining sentences that Jesus taught us how to understand scripture, which might not be historical, by parables, and then that the parables might not be true themselves. In the land of the liars, does the man who says, “I lie”, lie or not? Your explanation of the hidden meaning of the bible, condemns it and Christians like yourself, who purport to be using what is untrue to explain it.
In the same way, the stories of the Bible may or may not be based on some true story from past, but they teach the truth. Do you really think there was a snake and an apple in the Garden of Eden? No. The story is allegory. Did the exodus really occur? Maybe. But the important truth is that we all experience that journey spiritually. Did the tribes of Israel really brutally destroy the tribes of the Canaanites? Who knows, but the elimination of those things which the tribes of Canaan represented from our spiritual lives is necessary for our relationship with God. Were David and Solomon as great as they are portrayed in the Bible? I don’t have any clue, but I do know that they represent the prosperity of those that follow God’s will as and the utter ruin that comes when we don’t.
If these are your explanations, the original unbelievable legends were better. Interpreting stories is a great way of evading them. Allegories have an unknown meaning and any meaning at all can be attributed to them. Perhaps Christians prefer certain ones, but there is no way you or anyone else, Christians or infidel, could know an interpretation is right. It is the central art of priestcraft, and the reason why religion exists. Even then, your are demonstrably wrong about Solomon, if your own humble and poor God was right. Of course, this man, the Son, dies in utter ruin for his efforts. Is this then the main allegory of Christianity. Do not do what this Son did, whatever you do choose to do!
“If it is not literally true, any intelligent person will want to know what parts of it are false.” As I said earlier, sciptures may not be literally true, but they certainly reveal the truth. And you are right. Anyone who claims that every word of Scripture is literally true will ultimately fall into the trap of not recognizing the spiritual truth within.
You are again being evasive. What bits are true and what bits are just there to fool the reader into thinking it is merely history? Moreover, why should God want to make His message of salvation so difficult, and a veritable confidence trickster’s dream?
Much of the Christian gospels were written decades, many decades in the case of John, after the events they describe. There is a substantial amount of recent scholarship that places the Gospel of John in the first century, perhaps as early as 50-60 A.D. The Gospel of Mark and Matthew as early as 35-40 A.D.
Here we go again. Blatant Christian lying. The ploy is always to assert some dogma and expect the sheep to believe it without evidence. You say you have recent scholarship, and it is substantial. Why then are you coy about it? Could it be that there is no such evidence that is not rejected by all scholars of repute and clung to only by pathetic creatures anxious to hold on to any lie to uphold their faith, and to use it to impose it on others. You will find a page called the Jesus Papyrus, after the name that the crooked Christians plugging it called it, on my website. Try reading it.
“Who then should believe any of it, except that the Romans killed a man for challenging the authority of the Emperor, a capital crime?” I am fairly certain, the Romans “washed their hands” of the whole incident and accomodated the Jewish temple authority. So I don’t believe that is true.
There is no Roman legal procedure that allows a Roman governor to “wash his hands” of his responsibility. If you think carefully, you will recall that hand washing was a Jewish custom, a ritual cleansing before eating. The incident appears only in Matthew, agreed by biblical scholars to be the most Jewish gospel, written by a Jew for Jews to read! The author of the gospel has given Pilate, a Roman, a Jewish let off. It suits Christians who wanted to blame the Jews for killing a Jewish God. In another gospel, Pilate, far from washing his hands of the matter, insists that Jesus be properly labelled on the cross as being a pretender to the kingdom of the Jews! Your understanding of your own holy book is frail, but that is typically Christian. If they read it critically, their faith would end up as full of holes as the book is.
“If you have a message from God or His mediator that contradicts this then tell me what it is and how you received it.” I have received a message from God that contradicts this, but not one of those voices out of the clouds kind of messages. The Bible reveals His message. His complete revelation is within the words of scripture. In fact there are three variations identified in Scripture of how man can receive the revelation of God. The first is as Abraham received it, by trying all different kinds of things before he came to realize the futility of his actions. Secondly, Isaac received an instantaneous revelation of God. Thirdly, Jacob had to wrestle with the fact that he was the snake, the anti-christ, before he could receive the revelation of God. The Torah is the complete revelation of the mystery of God and His messiah, the Writings and the Prophets testify to that revelation and the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament tell of the fulfillment of that revelation.
Hang on! Hang on! There you go again! You have said above that the history of the scriptures is not true, or cannot be assumed to be true, but now you are assuming it. You told me above it was allegory, but now you are reading it as proper narrative. I do not know about snakes, my friend, but you Christians are slipperier than eels. Characters described as slippery are rarely good. You are like all Christians in thinking that any jumble of incoherent and contradictory statements concerning Christianity will automatically be made true by God. If you believe this you are deranged, and if you do not, you are dishonest. Typical.
“A broad outline of the events seems common, but detailed sayings of Jesus, especially those that appear in only one single gospel cannot be relied upon.” If you come to understand that the Word was in the beginning (Genesis) and that Word is Christ, then even the sayings that were only recorded once in the Gospels were recorded in the Torah, Writings or Prophets, through the Word. And so, even the once recorded sayings of Jesus in the Gospels were not the only recorded instance of that saying by the spirit of Christ.
Please do not confuse Christ with those that take the name of Christ. Even Jesus said many would come to Him proclaiming all that they had done in His name (as Christians), but that He would not know them. I hope your illness wanes, but if it doesn’t, know that all is perfect in Christ.
Bearing in mind what I just wrote, and what you have said above about the scriptures being allegorical, you have utterly lost me. Again you are taking the bible literally when you argue, when it suits you, that it is allegory. Perhaps I am mistaken, but John’s gospel tells you that the Son, whose story it is about to relate, was the Word and from the very beginning it was with God. It is to identify the Son with God from the Creation. John is the latest gospel written around a hundred years after Jesus, and long after any original Nazarenes could complain about misrepresentation. John had already deified the Roman rebel who died at the hands of the occupying power. That is how Gods are made.
Finally, how can you be certain that Jesus was not an imposter claiming to be a false Christ. He died the death of a false prophet, and indeed his main prophecy has proved false until this day—the world is still not God’s kingdom. Moreover the God of the Jewish scriptures was adamant that only He and no one else, man or God, was the Saviour. Did God change His mind, a few centuries later, and appear as a man, breaking his own commandment. Christianity is foolish, and, unfortunately, it boasts of it.
