Christianity
Personal Introduction by Dr M D Magee
Abstract
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
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.
Jewish Myth
Christians are told by their lying tutors and priests that the bible tells a story that goes back to the beginning of time and was first set down by Moses around 1400 BC. No one now believes it. Moses is supposed to have written the five books of the Pentateuch but they consistently refer to him in the third person and include an account of his own death. Was Moses resurrected so that he could write or finish his books? Scholars hold that the Pentateuch did not achieve its final form until well after the “exile”, though it was based on some earlier sources. It was created from a number of different sources by unknown editors. The bible is therefore not as ancient a book as the preachers make out. Though it draws upon older material, it was written in its present form around 100 BC.
Among the earliest parts of the Old Testament are the creation and flood myths, of which two of each are present in Genesis. They have their origins in earlier Babylonian and Sumerian myths, as everyone now knows except Christian teachers. These older myths did not relate to the Hebrew God, Yehouah, now considered to be God, but to other gods now considered to be devils. So why is God, the Hebrew god, Yehouah, taking stories from earlier idols. Idolatry is or was a sin, according to Jews and Christians.
The content of the books of Kings and Chronicles goes back to about 1000 BC, although again it was re-written around the second century BC. The best that can be said is that the bible contains material that is ascribable to Hebrew tradition and no other going back to about 1000 BC. Not counting apocryphal books, Daniel, written during the reign of the Greek king Antiochus IV, around 167 BC, is the latest.
Christian Sunday school types also like to impress their impressionable charges by claiming the bible was written by over 40 authors including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars and so on. The truth—which is known to any Christian preacher unless he is a Martian—is that no one knows who the authors of these books were. The books of the Bible are anonymous, being named simply after the main character and even when the author is named, any honest person would have to consider the practice that was common in those days of writing pseudepigraphs, or books under the name of a famous person to give them credibility. Certainly Christian scholars are well aware of the practice and even earn their living looking into the practice financed by famous US universities willing to endow such relatively pointless work.
The book of Daniel is a pseudepigraph. The author pretends he is the Daniel of Ezekiel 14:14, 14:20 and 28:3, writing about 550 BC, but scholars, including Christian ones, are agreed it was written in 167 BC, 400 years later. Parts of it were written in Aramaic not Hebrew suggesting a time when Aramaic was being used instead of Hebrew and therefore a late date. We cannot apply modern standards to the author of Daniel and say he forged the book, because it was quite acceptable to do this, but modern Christians who still pretend that the book was written in the Babylonian exile and tell their Sunday school classes so, are just lying to little children who have no way of judging.
Moses, Peter, Amos, Joshua, Nehemiah, Daniel, Luke, Solomon, Matthew and Paul are claimed by some Christian liars as as authors of the Biblical books. None of these can be substantiated. Some of Paul’s epistles might have been written by him but they might have been pseudepigraphs written a hundred years later. Nehemiah was long thought to have been genuine but not now. The gospels are anonymous. Their ascription to Jesus’s disciples and their aides is a later Church tradition. There is no hard evidence that Moses, Joshua or Solomon are even real people.
While the later reigns of the kings, from the Assyrian captivity of the Northern Kingdom, down to the Babylonian captivity of the Southern Kingdom, are fairly well attested by external sources, the earlier Kings are not. Obscure references possibly to David have been found but their interpretation is doubtful, and Solomon and Saul are not mentioned in any archaeological monuments yet found. Most scholars are concluding that Saul, David and Solomon are mythological figures, not historical ones.
There are religious texts written before the earliest parts of the Old Testament. The Rig Veda dates from before 1000 BC, possibly as early as 1500 BC, making it probably older than the surmised Old Testament sources. Likewise, the Hindu Upanishads date from sometime between 1400 and 800 BC, again as old as the Old Testament sources. The Hindu scriptures are a vast body of literature, which include such epic poems as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, including the Bhagavad-Gita as a later insertion.
The collection and writing of the Hindu scriptures continued well into the Christian era, about 500 AD, giving them a span longer than the bible. If Christian preachers want to make something of ancient works collected over a long time, why do they chose the bible rather than the holy books of the Indian sub-continent? The answer, in case anyone remains puzzled, is that Christian priests and preachers will use any ploy to impress children and the gullible, and persuade them that their particular choice of god is the only one worth reading. To do this, they have always felt that any deception and any lie is forgivable as long as it is to enlarge their own god’s empire of captives.
New Testament
The books of the New Testament range from about 50 AD for the letters of Paul, to 150 AD for some of the other letters. So, the Christian bible covers works from about 1100 years of history, though the Old Testament was really written in the second century BC and the New Testament from about 50 to 150 AD. It is false, therefore, as Christian teachers persistently do, to claim that the bible was written over a period of thousands of years prior to the gospel evangelists completing the message.
Christian schoolteachers also tell their little ones that the bible is full of harmony despite its many authors over thousands of years and the difficult matters they had to deal with. It is another outright lie. That the ideas in the bible evolved is plain from the bible itself, although the chronology has been mixed up. The Hebrew idea of death originally had no concept of heaven and hell. This is plain in the scriptures. Sexual promiscuity is another example. The patriarchs and kings David and Solomon were outrageous in their promiscuity, and the law of Moses even contained provisions relating to inheritance for the children of multiple wives (Dt 21:15-17), but Jesus says that a man and a woman should cleave together as one (Mk 10:6-12). How is this harmonious?
Even more damning of this lie is that Jesus supposedly abrogated part of the law of Moses (Mk 7:5-9) all of which had been obligatory for the whole of the Jewish scripture. Paul the apostle makes it clear that the whole of the law is abrogated (Gal 2:16) for Christians. And even more so yet, the just and loving God of the New Testament (1 Jn 4:8, 2 Peter 3:9, Jas 1:17) commanding the Israelites to massacre men, women, children and infants of the Amelekites. There are so many more that a great part of Christian “scholarship” is trying to find ingenious ways of harmonizing these discrepancies:
- 2 Kings 4:32-37—A dead child is raised (well before the time of Jesus).
- Matthew 9:18-25, John 11:38-44—Two dead persons are raised (by Jesus himself).
- Acts 26:23—Jesus was the first to rise from the dead.
- Matthew 7:21—Not everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
- Acts 2:21, Romans 10:13—Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
- Acts—2:39 Those God calls to himself will be saved.
- Matthew 7:24, Luke 10:36-37, Romans 2:6, 13, James 2:24—We are justified by works, not by faith.
- John 3:16, Romans 3:20-26, Ephesians 2:8-9, Galatians 2:16—We are justified by faith, not by works.
It is not surprising that Christianity is composed of over thirty thousand sects, all of which can affirm their particular interpretation of Faith with explicit biblical proof texts, precisely because the bible is such a mass of contradictions, any of which can be quoted to establish different points of view.
The Book of Mormon is studied, read and believed by millions of people despite being known as an amateurish fake. Mormons accept it as true despite evidence it is a fake. Mormons plainly lack the capacity of rational thought, but they are only unusual in that they believe a recent fake. Christians believe a fraudulent book completed almost 2000 years ago but known to be a hotch-potch of incompatible ideas. It does not matter. They just take what they want or what they are taught to take from it and ignore the rest, inconsistencies and all. Christians too lack the capacity for rational thought, but most of them are badly educated, simple and superstitious peasants. What does that make their sophisticated preachers and ministers with their university educations or their radio stations?
The Fashion for Dying Gods
So, pious lying was the foundation of Christianity, going back to its origins in the Roman Empire and explaining many of the puzzles of the New Testament. Why though did this strange new religion, built on a supposedly real figure who had to be hidden to be acceptable, spread at all? The answer was that there was a religious vacuum in the Roman Empire. When the Roman Republic became an Empire, the people became absorbed with unusual events, with the supernatural and with mysteries. Even sophisticated people became less rational. The native Romans did not build mythologies like the Greeks and the Egyptians but instead had the simple idea of spirits—everything had its spirit or “numen”, a power for good or ill. A man had a spirit called his “genius” and a woman’s was called her “juno”. The home and the hearth had their own spirits, important to the happiness of family life.
The spirits of men or women of power and influence were favoured by Greeks and later by Romans in the cult of heroes. They said Orpheus and Hercules were once living men just as the Egyptians thought that Osiris and Isis were the original rulers of Egypt. If they were, a complex of myths and legends were attributed to them after they died until they became fully-fledged gods.
But Romans were open minded about religion in a way which we cannot understand, partly because they were indifferent to blasphemy. They were tolerant of religious differences and came to enjoy novelty. Those who derided a god were foolish but Romans did not take personal offence if the god was their own—gods could look after themselves. They did not need a feeble mortal to defend them, indeed it was absurd for a mortal to take up cudgels to defend a god. Romans sincerely believed that the gods were sensitive, petulant, and ready to intervene in human lives. If a man offended a god then the poor fellow had better watch out—he’d find his luck was out, or worse. Romans did worry that angry gods might respond indiscriminately and innocent bystanders might suffer. If a republican Roman thought he had angered a god, he would often commit suicide rather than invite a divine response that might destroy his city or ravage it with plague. A general fear of divine anger not blasphemy invited Roman displeasure with those who taunted gods.
Religious tolerance meant they could freely admit and copy other people’s religions. They were impressed by ancient history, and first adopted the Greek gods and then Oriental ones. Native Roman religion was worthy and pious but totally this worldly. It paid no attention to an after life because Romans at first had no thoughts of survival of the personality. On death, Romans simply joined the “Good People” (no singular). By the end of the republic Roman religion had ceased to be a religion. Its festivals had become occasions of state ceremony. Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, had formed the Empire. The population was getting more cosmopolitan, culture more varied and the old religion less attuned to the needs of worshippers. People felt dissatisfied and sought novelty in eastern ceremonial, the spectacular and the supernatural. In our chronological reckoning, it was a millennium and similar madnesses have followed each thousand years ever since.
Foreign gods interested the Romans because they had powerful spirits and a long history. The worshippers wanted to improve their fortune by having a god walking beside them. Astrology became increasingly popular and the idea that gods lived beyond the stars, probably introduced from the Persians via Babylonia and developed by Plato. The stars reflected the actions of the gods and enabled diviners to tell the future, but people sought a way of compelling the gods to help them. Theurgy, magic that made the gods to do the will of the practitioner, became fashionable. Meticulous observation of ritual had always been essential to getting the gods’ favour. Eventually the popular imagination was captured by the idea that the gods loved mankind and sought only to help them—they were saviours!
The idea was not new. It had begun beyond the Roman Empire in the countries of the Middle East. Dying and rising gods were known in Egypt, Babylonia, Syria, Phoenicia, Persia, India. Marduk or Tammuz, the Babylonian God, was to come to earth as a saviour. Saoshyant was the saviour of the Persian religion and Krishna in India had the same role. The Egyptians as early as 2200 BC expected Osiris, a saviour described as the “shepherd of his people who shall gather together his scattered flocks and in whom there is no sin”. Most often these were dying gods who had originally signified the annual death and revival of vegetation with the seasons. Like the withering vegetation they disappeared into the underworld where dwelt the dead—they died—then when the onset of summer was signalled at the spring equinox, the god was born again to fertilise the crops and stimulate the reproductive cycle. In Crete, an empty tomb was displayed as the “Tomb of Zeus”. Epimenides, the Cretan philosopher wrote in the sixth century BC:
A grave have they fashioned for thee, O Zeus, highest and greatest—the Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons. But thou art not dead, for to eternity thou livest and standest, for in thee we live and move and have our being.
This poem is cited twice in the New Testament by Paul, in Titus 1:12 and Acts 17:28. The site was latterly marked by a chapel to the Lord Christ!
Professor H Gunkel traced Babylonian myths in the imagery of Genesis and Revelationin his book Creation and Chaos. Gunkel sees in the background of the “Servant of the Lord” in Deutero-Isaiah, the figure of the dying and the rising god, adopted for Judaism.
Arriving from the east, these religions became common in the east of the Empire then spread west to become popular throughout. Today in an equivalent desire for novelty, we find people taking to Buddhism, Druidism, Wicca, Taoism and even extra-terrestrial religions like Raelism and the disastrous Heaven’s Gate. Then Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus and Prometheus all were introduced to Rome as new gods and worshipped as divine victims whose resurrection offered salvation for their mourning followers.
It is no coincidence that, at this very time of change, yet another religion arose in the east in which a god died for the sins of mankind. Pious lying added a sense of realism to the event because, the confused travellers who told the true story confirmed that it had really happened even though they had mixed up the details. The new religion was therefore a religion of a god who really had died and there were people who confirmed it—the story told until this day by Christians. Furthermore, it was a religion that began with an ancient book of prophecy which proved that the god, called the Messiah, was expected. This was the holy book of the Jews—the Jewish scriptures—purloined from them by the first bishops to give their new religion a bogus history.
Finally, Christianity sprouted out of the Jewish community in the Roman world. The bishops had a ready made market for their new religion in the many Romans who had attached themselves to the Jewish religion but were scared to be circumcised—a serious operation for a grown man—as the Jewish religion required. Even more Roman women had attached themselves to the Jewish faith because they had no such worry. At the time of Jesus, Jews constituted as many as ten percent of the population of the eastern part of the Roman Empire—the part that had been part of the earlier Persian empire. Jesus confined his mission in Judaea to Jews, and the first Christians were Jewish. The new religion offered itself as Judaism for gentiles and inevitably had early success.
Gospels
There is no need to suppose that the original followers of Jesus were other than sincere in their belief that he had risen from the dead. They did not tell lies themselves. The lies were told by the gentile bishops a few decades later when the Hellenized Jewish believers in Jesus had told some aspects of the story in the Roman empire away from Judaea.
All scholars, Christians and critics, accept that the gospels were not written as history but to persuade their readers to believe the claims of the church. They are admitting the gospels are not necessarily true. Put bluntly, they contain lies, but they are lies intended to convince people Jesus was the divine saviour, so Christians believe they are acceptable lies. Let the question of the historicity of the gospels be asked and Christians admit to pious lying.
The gospels were not all written at the same time and by independent authors. Few experts disagree that Mark was written first and John last. Matthew and Luke both used Mark extensively, but had other sources too, one at least of which was a collection of wise sayings attributed to Jesus called the Logia—or sometimes just Q. The later these works are, the more suspect they are. The Logia is probably the earliest constituent of the gospels but we do not have it. We have to deduce it from Matthew, Mark and Luke. The earliest text we have in its own right is Mark. Mark is therefore likely to contain the gospel message in its least elaborated form.
Where the other gospels expanded upon Mark, they might be drawing on the same tradition and adding to our understanding of it, but such elaborations have to be considered with care. John’s gospel is too late and elaborated to be a reliable source. Christians refer to the author of John as the “Theologian”, which should be sufficient for us to distrust it. Theologians invented pious lies and have made a profession out of elaborating them. If we infer something from Mark or other sources like Josephus or the Dead Sea Scrolls and find support in John’s gospel all well and good.
One more point. No scholar will deny that the books of the New Testament have been repeatedly edited. The aim of each editor was to make the story more convincing for potential believers—to add more pious lies to the glory of God. When additions have been made, sometimes it is obvious because the theology or Christology is too advanced for the time being described and the passage can be disregarded. Often we notice a phrase or a whole passage that puzzles us because it does not fit the character of the Christian Jesus. Such passages must be due to editors failing to rewrite or to scratch out the original. No editor would add in a passage that contradicts the Christ of Faith. It follows that they must apply to the Jesus of History.
The narratives of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were a sort of anti-history—expressions of faith in the crucified and resurrected Christ. The gullible gentile converts had been persuaded that a god had died and been resurrected because the world was soon to be renewed under the direct rule of God. They believed it, converted and waited for the angelic host. Nothing happened but stories began to emerge that their dying and resurrected god was really a Jewish bandit. The bishops suddenly found themselves with a large number of cracks to paper over. They invented excuse after excuse, explanation after explanation, and must have been amazed that many of their flocks believed their excuses.
Previously the new god had had no history. It did not matter because his return would explain all. The need to explain the stories that came from Palestine rapidly gave the new god a history, and beginning with Mark, it was written down as the gospels. Though they are not historically true, Christian scholars suspended their reason and, taking Jesus to be divine, accepted the New Testament accounts as God’s Truth. They were false historically but nevertheless true! Some scholars were more honest and rejected all the supernatural events as embellishments. They used the form critical method to judge what was true and what not. Eventually scholars like Bultman and the more recent Jesus Seminar almost totally rejected the gospels as history. They left themselves with only a few of the sayings of Jesus as genuine tradition but the actual context of the sayings was considered irretrievably lost, thus leaving huge gaps for scholarly speculative theses—provided they did not threaten the Christian consensus.
Now, Christian punters mainly believe the Christian bible is infallibly true but biblical scholars think most of it is not true even if they are Christian biblical scholars! They threw out the baby with the bath water, which is perhaps what they intended, because they knew or suspected that Jesus was not really what Christians are taught. Better eliminate Jesus all together as a historical figure and thereby make him impregnable as a religious symbol than to risk it being proved from some alien source that he was not what Christians have always claimed.
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.
I offer the hypothesis presented here knowing that no Christian will take any notice. There is no persuading irrational people as we can tell increasingly at the millennium when bizarre beliefs of all kinds multiply. Those willing to examine a non-mystical explanation of the formation of Christianity through pious lying might find this book satisfying. There is not the least doubt that some Christian scholars know Christianity was built on lies and would willingly allow the Jesus of History to be exposed so that God’s ministers can concentrate on the Jesus of Faith. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.
An Honest Religion
Faith, Tillich argued, is not belief, it is struggling with the questions. Christianity promises joy and peace of mind, and troublesome questions are not part of the Christian prescription. Christians are relieved of mental wrestling by being taught unquestioning belief, and being given ready made answers. Does not the Holy Book say, “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven?” Goodness is equated with innocence, and Christ himself is depicted as a bemused child, innocently trying to be good in a wicked world. This stereotype is urged on believers. As children, their minds are made up for them, and ministers supply pre-packaged values and opinions to do it. Christianity aims to keep its lambs child-like, immature and dependent, the better to shepherd them and fleece them.
Christians are taught to see the guiding hand of God in every circumstance. God teaches them lessons through their fate. He punishes them for wrongdoing and rewards them for doing good. No wonder so many people today are criminals—it is rewarding so cannot be wrong! Christianity, for all its concern with free-will, sees people as puppets, and God is the puppet master. Society and ultimately Nature, not God, punishes people for doing wrong, otherwise peoples’ fates fall within the normal distribution of events—some are fortunate and some are not, but most lives are neither one nor the other.
The bible is mythical, and when that is accepted its values can be examined with more objectivity and relevance to today. Myths giving people ways of living 3000 years ago are not necessarily any good today, and in practice much of the bible, Old and New Testaments, is ignored while other parts are arbitrarily considered unviolable. Jesus plainly tells us as graphically as possible that there would be far more camels than rich men in heaven. Though Jesus related mainly to men and could see no merit in being rich, for Christians it is far more important not to be homosexual than it is not to be rich.
Religion is a kind of aesthetic experience. Worship is the awe we feel at wondrous things like natural vistas, a storm, beauty, great art or the night sky. Religion exploited these emotions, captured natural awe for its unnatural purpose of propagating falsehood. The mystical and numinous were divorced from their source and presented as evidence of a phantasm instead of our feeling of oneness with Nature. Religion is a creation of human imagination, using human experience of the real world not an imaginary world. Our instinct to be awestruck at natural experience has been hijacked by mental vampires called Christian priests and ministers.
Ministers tell us we can have eternal life, and we imagine it is foolish to refuse such an offer. But we pay now and get the goods after we die, when we are in no way fit to complain that we’ve been had. We are persuaded that death is life, and attend God’s house regularly as insurance. Yet, if any minister assures us he is certain of eternal life, he is either deluded or he thinks we are. How can something beyond the reach of the senses be certain? Meanwhile life is a bed of nails for us to endure to prove we merit the reward of eternal life.
An honest religion is needed that emphasises the life we have, not some pig-in-a-poke of a life when life is impossible. Any decent religion should emphasise our human potential here and now, the protection of our world for the future of our children and their children, and whatever of the natural world we can still protect for them! Our purpose is not to hope for some selfish if deluded personal salvation of nuzzling up to Jesus when we are dead, but to promote our own role as saviours—salvation of life here on earth while we are alive as our duty not some empty right because we have been foolish enough to believe impossible stories. We should be the saviours, saving our world for our descendants when we die. Most of all, we get one chance only!
- More about Christian Mythology
- More about Jewish Mythology
- More about Pious Lying
- Questioning belief
- More about science
- More about Mike Magee
