Love your neighbor as yourself.Jesus on attitude to others, Matthew 22:39Personal Introduction by Dr M D Magee 3
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, 1999Abstract
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.
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!
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Moses and Exodus
