Truth
Thoughts about Religion, Science, and Faith
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 6 March 2009
Abstract
Pious Lies
The story underlying the Christian religion is 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.
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.
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. It should be clearer today than it ever was that 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.
Not until Albert Schweitzer (1906) did scholars generally recognised that the obvious was true. If the gospels had any historical value at all, their central figure was in the apocalyptic Jewish tradition. Christians were never pleased with this revelation. After all over a hundred years before Schweitzer, Reimarus had declared Jesus a revolutionary, but that had been ignored. After limply acknowledging Schweitzer for a hundred years they wanted to return to the sagacious old mendicant teacher, kind to children, that they preferred. They are now carrying on in this vein even though the main background to Jewish apocalyptism has been found in the Scrolls of the Dead Sea. Yet simple mendicant country teachers are not the stuff of history. Sages have to have a political role of some sort to be noticed. Scholars failed to consider the political factors of the time that necessitated the involvement of Jesus. Once the political circumstances are understood, the reason for pious lying becomes obvious and the gospels can be explained.
Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm. At any rate, they hold this about the Communist faith. What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith”. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.Lord Russell
