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Who Lies Sleeping?

Personal Introduction by Dr M D Magee 2

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

Jewish Myth
New Testament
The Fashion for Dying Gods

Abstract

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.

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.