Abstract

There’s a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 09 July 2006

Lying

Marcus Aurelius, no Christian but a Stoic emperor of Rome, told us that sin could be by omission as well as commission. Lying can be by telling a direct untruth or by not telling the complete truth. Christians who are the master liars of all time do both, and do it without a qualm because they believe it is required by God that they tell lies as long as they uphold their weary faith. It is belief they have entertained since the outset. The earliest gospel has the new Christian God telling his disciples that they did not need to worry about what they said. God would put the right words into their mouths (Mt 10:19). And, of course, all things are possible for those who believe (Mk 9:23), and so even falshood can become truth. Since their own God said these things, they can do nothing but believe it.

Strange then that when their own God condemns wealth and clearly says in several places that rich men cannot get into heaven, whereas the poor are blessed automatically by their poverty, the Christians look away. It does not matter that their new God said these things because they do not fancy the idea of giving everything to the poor in order to follow Jesus. Like a certain rich man, it is too hard, but are they bothered? Not a bit! They are told by their pastors who themselves are rich, own TV stations and vote Republican that it is all right to be rich as long as they give generously of their wealth to Christian pastors. In short, they are hypocrites to a man, and woman!

But to return to the subject—lying. The internet is chock-a-block with utterly deceitful articles by Christians purporting to uphold the bible and the “truths”—understand the opposite—of the religion against supposed distractors. Quite often what is written is not an out-and-out lie, though sometimes it is, and sometimes the nature of the falsehood is debateable itself. So, they are not sins of commission so much as sins of omission. They do not necessarily tell a lie, they are just economical with the truth. One way in which this is achieved is by saying something that was claimed once but now is no longer held. You will see how the nature of the falsehood is debateable. Strictly speaking, in the light of modern knowledge, it is a lie, but once it was thought to be true, and Christians hang on to the old thoughts better than most people who would rather be up-to-date.

A character called Matt Perman is a case in point. In a short article called Historical Evidence for the Bible, he assures his readers that there is some by quoting old opinions based on the old lies of a previous generation of Jewish and Christian liars. Perhaps, in this way, they can pretend that the lies are not theirs, but they ought to be aware that knowledge does not stand still, except biblical knowledge fixed in a fossilized book. Perman ought to know that when he cites an author writing in 1940 that he ought to check the reference in case it is no longer true. He cites Sir Frederick Kenyon on the New Testament that “no fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading”. Who can say whether it is true or not? Christians will not agree with each other on what is fundamental, otherwise there would be no need for the 30,000 Christian sects that there are.

The Poverty Lie

Nor will they agree on what is disputed and what is not. Is the question of Christ’s teaching about poverty disputed or not? If it is not disputed then are most US pastors and all US millionaire Christians doomed to hell fire? Or does the Christian faith in the lie extend to denying that what Christ plainly said, he must have meant? After all, he was God, they tell us! If Christians today seriously think that Jesus imagined wealthy men could get to heaven, then why did he say otherwise? The pastors lie that he did not say it anyway. That is a big and remarkable lie that Christians must believe merely because it suits them.

Any reading of the gospels tells you that the new Christian god said a camel would get through the eye of a needle before a rich man would get into heaven. The meaning is indisputable. Camels cannot get through the eyes of needles as if they were threads of cotton. It is impossible. Rich men therefore cannot get to heaven. It is more impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God because the camel can get through the eye of a needle easier (Mt 19:24). The Christian explains it away by God being able to do anything. Nothing is impossible with God, or rather his vicars on earth, especially making the son of God into a liar. If this is an example of a reading that is not disputed, then it is only because all Christians agree on making Christ into a liar. If it is true that a rich man can only get into heaven when a camel manages the miracle of going through the eye of a needle, then rich men will have to wait a long time for their deck chair in the balmy place. They will have to roast awhile first. If it is not true then we have unquestionable proof that the bible is false, and that Christians are spreading lies in pretending it is true.

Inerrancy

Perman begins by stating that there must be evidence to support the belief that the bible is the inerrant and infallible word of God, as it claims (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21), adding that “just because something claims to be the word of God does not make it true”. It sounds promising, but we know that he is going to find what he sets out to test, because he is a Christian, and the other side of the coin is that if he fails to do it, then the bible is shown to be fallible and in error. His first finding then is:

External evidence from both archaeology and non-Christian writers confirms that the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—is a trustworthy historical document.

The sharp reader, obviously not a Christian, will notice immediately that this statement differs by an infinite degree from the original claim. The claim is that the bible is infallible and inerrant. Being trustworthy is not the same unless the trust is meant to be absolute. Catherine Cookson might tell stories about her background as a child and young woman that are trustworthy—they give a generally accurate account of the conditions of the time of which she was writing—but they are not true. If the bible is believed to be inerrant, then any error that is shown in it invalidates the claim. It might still be generally trustworthy, but it is not inerrant.

We know now for certain, having found part of a monument concerning Pontius Pilate that he was the Prefect of Judaea not the Procurator. That is a minor error that can hardly be considered to stop the bible from being otherwise trustworthy. The trouble for Christian fundamentalists is that it is nevertheless an historical error which proves the bible is not inerrant. It is impossible to claim, knowing it was wrong in that minor instance, that it is inerrant, and therefore must be believed in all other matters. It still might be broadly trustworthy, but that is quite different from being inerrant. Once the inerrancy idea is lost, then Christians have no reason to continue in persisting that obviously silly claims in the bible must be true. The most obvious of them is that a man returned from death back into life. It is easier to believe that his friends who reported it were themselves in error in making the claim. But lots of absurd claims in the Old Testament can also be dismissed such as Noah’s three mile deep world wide flood, and the earth being formed in six days only 6000 years ago.

Archaeology

This is now the twenty first century, but, in evidence, Perman cites a 1959 publication of Nelson Glueck, a rabbi who liked to dig holes in Israel about fifty years ago. Apparently, Glueck wrote that it could be said “categorically” that archaeological has never contradicted a biblical reference. It is doubtful that it was true even all those years ago, but it is not true now. Pilate was a Prefect not merely a Procurator. It is perhaps not what Glueck meant since he was a Jewish pastor, not a Christian, but archaeology has indeed contradicted the bible.

It is, needless to say, a rare event when archaeology can say something so clearly. Most archeology is not about written texts but about objects and traces. Glueck knew he was on pretty safe grounds making his claim. Even so, the story that archaeology tells about the people that lived in the Palestinian hills from the beginning of the Iron Age to the coming of the Persians is quite different from the biblical tale. The bible tells a religious story of Jews who were from time immemorial committed to a single god mainly called Yehouah. The archaeology tells us that the real people were like the ones described as the enemies of God in the bible—the Canaanites, who worshipped idols, and even goddesses. Moreover, they did not worship at only one temple in Jerusalem, and the temples they did worship in showed no signs of being the temple of a single god. Multiple altars and sacred objects were found in different rooms and situations, all of which can only sensibly be explained if the people worshipped more than one god. Goddesses too, because lots of statuettes of goddesses have been found. They worshipped standing stones too, forbidden in the Jewish scriptures.

Indeed, there is little in the bible itself that gets any confirmation in the ground. Ziony Zevit, the prominent Israeli archaeologist, is honest enough to call his detailed textbook on the archaeology of Israel, The Religions of Ancient Israel, using the plural quite deliberately. Monotheism had not been invented when the bible claims it was. That is a pretty large error for an inerrant book.

The shoddiness of Perman’s argument is proven by his having to cite one Josh McDowell, a blatant Christian faker. McDowell wrote some apologetic books in the seventies of the last century, remarkable for their undisguised tendentiousnous. Essentially he pulled together a load of arguments and statements of varying validity and quality to support Christianity and published them as Evidence that Demands a Verdict. The verdict is that it is baloney, but, of course, that is unacceptable for Christians. There only ever was one verdict, and that does not depend on evidence at all, as Christians always brag. The books are therefore confidence tricks for simple people who cannot understand evidence anyway. What does McDowell say that Perman finds as quotable historic evidence:

After personally trying to shatter the historicity and validity of the Scriptures, I have come to the conclusion that they are historically trustworthy.

Perman does what McDowell taught him to do, or so it seems. McDowell’s books are full of quotations of other Christian apologists, so Perman, a Christian apologist quotes McDowell, another Christian apologist. How many liars quoting each other does it take to make a truth? They never do, so the answer is none. Again, though, the argument is not the one in question. There is no need to “shatter” the historicity of the Jewish scriptures to show them as fallible. As soon as any historical truth is found to be wrong in the bible, then it is not inerrant. McDowell seem to have found that nothing about the bible is questionable. He has therefore not tried too hard in this attempt to “shatter” the truth of the book, has he? So, he was lying when he said he had.

Another argument that Perman produces is this:

Archaeology has confirmed countless passages which had been rejected by critics as unhistorical or contrary to known facts.

Archaeology and Bible History, Joseph Free (1969)

Countless? Omission, commission, and exaggerration—hype—another method Christians use. When proper scholars, as opposed to the Christian bent ones—who regrettably still swarm around, especially the internet, in thick clouds—had the courage and confidence to examine the bible without having to fear being burnt alive, they found a lot of dubious things in it. Later, some of these were tested and shown to have been true, and it is in this sense that Joseph Free is correct that passages once “rejected” by critics were confirmed. Christians do not want to accept that the critics are not being perversely destructive about the bible, they are trying to learn—to be scholarly—something Christians cannot understand because they do not need scholarship in their way of thinking. They already know everything worth knowing. They believe it is in the bible, true or not.

No one says the bible is entirely false or even a half or a third false. The critics are saying that no one knows, except God, if you wish, what in it is false and what is true until it has been tested against the evidence of established history and archaeology. This testing is a scientific pursuit. It is the job of the scientist to test things, and all scholarship ultimately has to be scientific, or it is not scholarly. The point about any test is that it must have a possible successful outcome, and it must have a possible failed outcome. So, when the evidence is used to test the bible, the bible has to succeed against it and be shown to be true, or fail and be shown to be false.

Joseph Free is therefore correct that many of the questioned biblical passages have been upheld in the tests. What he is wrong about is the implication that the critics were being malicious in not believing the bible anyway. They were simply doing the job of testing it to see whether it was true. What matters here is whether the bible is ever false not whether most of it is true. The question is its infallibility. Only one failed test means it is not inerrant, so Perman’s citation of Free on this is quite irrelevant and deliberately misleading. If 99 points out of 100 are tested and prove to be correct but one is wrong, then the bible is not inerrant. Make that one in a thousand or a myriad and the bible is still not infallible. When we know that one point of it is false then it is impossible to be certain that anything else not yet confirmed as true is true. Do Christians understand this?

Straw Men

Perman comes out with some questions about the validity of the bible that look like straw men rather than any real criticism. It is another Christian ploy to allow them to seem to defeat in argument their critics. A straw man is a supposed argument set up merely to be easily knocked down to give victory to the one who put it up in the first place—the Christian apologist. We read:

Some scholars once said that Moses couldn’t have written the first five books of the Bible (as the Bible says) because writing was largely unknown in his day.

The pseud will use footnotes to make his dribble look scholarly, and so far Perman has given references for his citations, old though they are, but here we get nothing. Who were this minority of scholars? Just one would do. Anyway, let us accept what Perman says. When could these scholars have believed such a thing as that writing was unknown in ancient Egypt? Well, not in the last 200 years because Champollion translated the Egyptian hieroglyphs almost 200 years ago, and scholars obviously knew they were a form of writing long before that. So this accusation is utter nonsense—something that could not have been true in the last 200 years. It is a straw man simply set up to be knocked down for the gullible sheep who are able to believe such lies.

What is true is that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, certainly as they are now—and to have been always inerrant that must be how they were written—because Moses records his own death in them. Moreover, the record of it (Dt 34:6) says that no one knows the place of his burial “to this day”, showing that someone other than Moses was writing it long after Moses had died. It seems to be pretty clear proof that if the bible says that Moses had written the Pentateuch and then makes it quite plain that he had not written at least the end part of it, then it is not infallible. It is fallible.

Perman gives us something similar but with some foundation in fact when he says:

Critics used to say that the biblical description of the Hittite Empire was wrong because the Hittite Empire (they thought) didn’t even exist!

Scholars, again almost 200 years ago in the early part of the nineteenth century, began to wonder whether the mention of the Hittites as a great power equivalent to the Egyptians was not a romanticisation, since the Hittites in the scriptures all seemed to be Jews. But the archaeology of the nineteenth century, 150 years ago, revealed them in hieroglyphs and in cuneiform writings. Then in 1906, 100 years ago, the seat of the Hittites was found in central Turkey. So, scholars have not been arguing about the Hittites for at least 100 years. What they did continue to argue about was who the Hittites in the bible were, because they were obviously not the same people as the ones who lived in Turkey. Biblical Hittites seemed to be Jews or like Jews, and lived among them or not far off, and mainly had Jewish names. Now, scholars agree that the remnants of the Hittite empire left people in Syria who once had been Hittites but who had gradually assimilated, but out of some characteristic were still called Hittites.

The bible is right and wrong about the Hittites. There was a powerful Hittite empire about the time Moses was supposed to be leading two million Israelites through a desiccated desert for forty years, but a millennium later they were no more, except for some people who had retained the name, but otherwise seemed like Jews. The truth is more complicated than Christians like it to be but simple people need simple explanations, and the simple explanations are all they will believe. It is why they are so easily led, why they are fodder for demagogues and propagandists, and why they are so dangerous.

Daniel

Archaeological and linguistic evidence is increasingly pointing to a sixth-century BC date for the book of Daniel, in spite of the many critics who attempt to late-date Daniel and make it a prophecy after the detailed events it predicts.

This is simply false. It is a direct lie. Daniel is certainly a second century BC pseudepigraph and the only ones who think otherwise are fundamentalist Christians who refuse to accept that the bible is not entirely what it seems. Even the ancient scholar Porphyry in the fourth century knew Daniel was not authentic, so it is not a matter of any sophisticated techniques to realize it. Modern commentaries on the bible, that base themselves on scholarship and so do not assume some unproven stance on the Jewish scriptures, are all agreed on the date. It is 164 BC, 400 years after the time it pretends to be describing.

Commentaries like the Oxford Companion to the Bible, the Oxford Dictionary of it, and the Lutterworth Dictionary all tell the truth, but the Evangelical ones often miss out the scholarship, prefering another Christian tactic—if something is disagreeable, pretend it does not exist. It has been a standard Christian tactic for centuries and used by Protestants and Catholics alike. Indeed, both branches of western Christianity have been quite willing to make it true by destroying what they did not like, both people and books. Calvin, who thought himself godly but was a megalomanic dictator in Geneva, had Servetus burned at the stake for exposing the Institutes as being contrary to the bible, and only three editions of Servetus’s book Christianismi Restitutio escaped the flames (L and N Goldstone, Out of the Flames). Though it was written 500 years ago, there is no translation anywhere on the web of the Restoration of Christianity, even, so far as can be seen, on Unitarian websites, Servetus, unlike Calvin, being fervently opposed to the Trinity as a Catholic invention of the fourth century, utterly unfounded in scripture.

New Testament

Turning to the New testament, Perman cites someone called Gary Habermas that within 110 years of Christ’s crucifixion, approximately eighteen non-Christian sources mention more than…

…one hundred facts, beliefs, and teachings from the life of Christ and early Christendom, mention almost every major detail of Jesus’ life, including miracles, the Resurrection, and His claims to deity.

Is this meant to be remarkable? Within fifty years of the death of Faust, a vast mythology had been written about him. Will Christians therefore turn to Faust instead of Christ?

From the title of Perman’s article, this is to be taken as historical evidence for the bible, yet he says these 18 sources were 110 years after the death of Jesus. It means they were sixty years as a minimum after the publication of the first gospel, Mark’s, and thirty years as a minimum after the publication of Matthew and Luke. Besides that, the Christians followed a Jewish bandit who had been crucified and so they were considered as rather like Al Qaida is today—they were a potentially terrorist organization, and all of the 18 sources were not flattering to the Christians. So, nothing in the sources could be taken to confirm independently what was in the New Testament, because any of them could have read it, and be reiterating what was in it, or what the Christians who were being arrested for subversion were themselves saying. Of course, the sheep are not expected to think, so these 18 sources will be taken to be objective proofs of the visit to earth of a Son of God. That is what Perman hopes. It is yet another trick.

Sticking to the New Testament, Perman now cites the words of Sir William Ramsay, “one of the greatest archeologists to ever live”, who said the author of Luke “made no mistakes in references to 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 islands”. It really is hard to accept how easily impressed Christians are. What is more interesting in this context, as argued above, is not what Luke gets right, impressive as it might seem, but what he gets wrong. Did he get anything wrong, because, if he did, then Luke is not inerrant, and nor is the bible. Then again, if Ramsay is keen to cite Luke as being singularly accurate in his geography, what is he implying about the other three evangelists? The implication is that Luke is better than the others, and that means they make mistakes. What are the mistakes, then? That is what matters to the inerrancy of the bible. Turn to any bible commentary, and, if Luke is considered particularly accurate, Mark is considered particularly inaccurate in its geography. So here the apologist is being as dishonest as ever. He cites only what suits him, ignoring what does not. It is lying by omission.

“The list could go on and on,” Perman says, and indeed it could, the list of lies and half truths. Yet what does he conclude?

Since the Bible can be trusted in areas that we can check (its history), then this gives us a reason to trust it in areas that we cannot check (its claims for inspiration).

The bible cannot be trusted in history. There is sufficient of it that is wrong when it is checked to leave anyone intelligent doubtful that anything it says is true unless it is checked. As for this mysterious inspiration being valid, it is an utter non sequitur. If the Christian had a book on Satanism in which all of the history was right, would they take it therefore that Satanism is? Do Calvinists accept Servetus, a man who gave the world accurate geography and discovered the circulation of the blood decades before Harvey because he was right about those. They do not. They stick to Calvin who had him murdered in an unimaginably cruel way—as cruel, if not more cruel, than crucifixion. Most people with any humanity about them as opposed to an imagined godliness would utterly condemn such cruelty as devilish. Not Calvinists. It was God’s work because Calvin did God’s work. Christian belief is selective belief. They believe just what they like and nothing more, whoever says it, God or devil. Of course, most Christians are called by the clergy sheep, and the ordinary Christian happily accepts the name and connotation. They are, by and large innocents. The clergy of whatever Christian sect are not innocent. They are clever, educated manipulators who know the bible is not divine or even inerrant, but they do not want the sheep to know. They depend upon sheep for their standing in society and their comfortable and even generous lifestyles.

Consistency and Prophecy

Perman moves on now to prove the bible is preternaturally consistent, a lie of huge dimensions that Göring would have been proud of. It is such a big lie because it is so obviously a lie from even a shallow reading of the bible. The professional Christians only get away with it because Christians do not read their bibles. Men like Servetus and many others died, in that typically Christian fashion by burning, so that people could read their bibles in their own language, not Latin, and without a priest or preacher telling them what they should understand by it. Now, the US Protestant will not accept the plain truth of the bible, but have to believe the lies that their pastors tell them it means. They make it inerrant to their own satisfaction by explaining away what they do not like, and their flocks actually belief them. There are no contradictions in it, they are told. Well, no one other than a dolt can believe it, and the Christian dolts should read for themselves what the bible says, not the pseudo-explanations that the pastors invent. They will not do it. After all, they are dolts, and if they were not, the pastors would have to find some useful work to do. That would be just too bad.

The ultimate proof of the bible’s divinity is its divine prophecy, the pastors tell us, although many somewhat wiser and more skeptical Christians, professionals too, but marginally more concerned for their souls, have recognized that the Devil is himself capable of all sorts of clever tricks, and why should prophecy not be among them? The main point about prophecy is that it cannot be checked because no one knows when the bible was actually written. Daniel is different. Most of the supposed prophecies of Daniel came true because the author is known to have written the book after the prophecies had actually happened. It is really quite easy for anyone to prophesy in that way, even ordinary Christians. Just write down something that has happened then say you wrote it ten years ago, or whatever date allows it time to have happened.

In the case of Daniel, it is his accurate prophecies compared with his inaccurate ones that lets the scholars know to the year when the book was written. The propehecies in Daniel start to go wrong from Daniel 11:39, corresponding to 164 BC, when it prophesies a load of invasions that never happened. Of course, the pastors never examine the ones that go wrong. They want to impress their sheep with the correct ones, and they are correct because, had it been today, the author would have already seen it on TV, read it in a newspaper or in a history book. The author of Daniel was writing in 164 BC but pretended to be prophesying in Babylon. You can tell Christians this. You can show them the evidence that shows it is true, but they will not believe you. They prefer to believe lies.

Perman says that many of the biblical prophesies only came true after the bible had been finished. Needless to say, he does not give us any examples, simply referring us to McDowell, and plenty of people have shown what a fraud he is. It ought to be plain that any general description of warfare, earthquakes and so on are not prophecies. The books of Nostradamus are full of vague descriptions of supposed events that are meant to happen, and many people think they can see the events in history. Others disagree, and no Christians have so far wanted Nostradamus to be adopted into the bible and made a saint.

The fall of Tyre to the Babylonians was prophesied by Ezekiel pretending to write his eponymous book Ezekiel in the sixth century BC. The point Perman highlights is that Tyre would be cast into the sea, according to Ezekiel 26:2, which he specifically cites, and someone called Norman Geisler’s explanation of it as a correct prophesy:

This provoked scoffing because, when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Tyre, he left the ruins right where they fell—on the land.

It is proof of the disdain the professional Christians, the shepherds, have for their flocks. There is nothing here that mentions Tyre being cast into the sea in Ezekiel 26:2, which reads:

Son of man, because Tyre has said against Jerusalem, Aha! She is shattered, the doors of the peoples; she has turned to me, I shall be filled, she is laid waste.

Ezek 26:2

The whole passage, which is poetic, says God would cause many nations to go up against the city, as “the sea makes its waves go up”, and then that He would also sweep the dust from her and make her like a bare rock, a spreading place for nets in the middle of the sea. This does not say that “Tyre would be cast into the sea” as Perman, citing Geisler, says it does. It is another straw man set up to be knocked down, in short, a lie. So what is Geisler-Permans’s explanation for the non-prophecy that Tyre would be cast into the sea? It is that Alexander the Great sieged Tyre in the fourth century and built a causeway from the land to the island where the Tyrians were sheltering. So, what had been Tyre, the fill for the causeway, was thrown into the sea to make it, and the supposed prophecy was fulfilled.

But hang on. The Tyrians were sheltering on an island. In fact, Tyre was a city built on an island! It was doubtless the reason Tyrians had become a seagoing nation. They lived in the sea! Look again at the words in Ezekiel. The author deliberately uses the metaphor of the nations coming against Tyre like the waves of the sea that lapped around the island. The outcome would be that the prosperous, inhabited island would become a bare rock, fit only for spreading fishing nets. It has nothing at all to do with being cast into the sea by Alexander the Great or anyone else. The prophecy is that Tyre would become a barren rock.

Did it happen? Well, it obviously did not happen when the Babylonians captured Tyre because 200 years on, as Geisler-Perman admit, Alexander was sieging the city which was still worth sieging. It was still inhabited and prosperous. Well, was it Alexander that made it into a bare rock, then, even if it was not Tyre per se that he threw into the sea to make the causeway? Still wrong. Tyre is mentioned in the gospels as a place that Jesus fled to, so it was still a notable city in Roman times. Even now, it still exists and is not a bare rock, nor can it be. It will not be a bare rock in the midst of the sea for spreading the nets, because Alexander had built a causeway to the land which remained thereafter stopping Tyre from being an island. It silted up and permanently joined Tyre to the mainland. Alexander actually did the opposite of what Geisler-Perman claim. He joined Tyre to the land! So much for another Christian lie.

Why do they do it, and why do people believe all this manifestly false teaching? It is remarkable what people will believe and do to have the assurance of eternal life from a confidence trickster. Here is a prophecy. Christians will not stop lying because they depend upon it too much.

The real interest Christians have in biblical prophecy is that their own new God, Christ, was allegedly prophesied in many books of the Jewish scriptures. They will not allow for the fact that the supposed details of Jesus’s history in the gospels have been deliberately written to make an otherwise anonymous Jewish martyr fulfil them. The gospels were written long after—forty years after—Jesus and most of his band had died or been scattered and forgotten. Only some of the events of his life remained, including his death, and supposed resurrection. So, it was not hard to write details about him that could not be challenged. Even so, some Jews remembered him and challenged some of the details written down by the Christians. This is obvious because some of the gospels have in them obvious refutations of some accusations of lying.

Roman soldiers allegedly guarding a dead man while a revolution was going on or had just ended in the city is fatuous, and has been included to answer those who said the body had been stolen by Nazarene friends. Some of the supposed prophecies have meant that the facts as presented elsewhere had to be manipulated to make the whole seem right. The bible says that Jesus was called Jesus of Nazareth because his home town was Nazareth, so it required a bit of imagination to make him fulfil the supposed prophecy of Micah 5:2 that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Christian have no trouble in believing such a small bit of jiggery-pokery. After all, they then believe that God fathered him, though not in the usual way by means of a penis and a vagina, but by means of a miraculous ray of light and an ear!

An Unchanging Bible?

Permans says there is a last test that will verify the divinity of the bible—the fact that it has not altered in all the years of its existence. What then does he conclude?

The biblical text which we have now is nearly identical to what was originally recorded (for both Old and New Testaments).

Nearly identical? The inerrant bible is only nearly identical? If it is not actually identical, then how is it inerrant. Which of the ones has the error, and if it has continued into later editions, then why is it not being corrected by the fundanentalists inspired, as they say they are, by the holy ghost? The 30,000 different sects of the Christian faith evidently dispute something sufficiently for them to want to set up as separate entities, so all of these Christians must think the bible they read is not being followed properly in some way. Why is this, when the holy ghost is flitting about in broad daylight inspiring everything and everyone who believes to be good and right? If “both the authenticity and general integrity of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established”, according to Sir Frederick Kenyon, then why do so many Christians not accept it as it is? Perman even cites the Dead Sea Scrolls in his defence in yet another utterly indefensible lie:

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from 200 BC to AD 68, included a copy of every Old Testament book except for one. Comparison with the texts of a thousand years later shows little or no variation and change between them.

Again, if it is “little change”, it is still a change. Which of the copies then is the inerrant one, the original or the changed one, and which do the fundamentalists use? In fact this a false. Some of the Dead Sea sect’s books of the bible are very different from the Jewish scriptures propagated by the Jewish Masoretes, and accepted by many as standard. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls actually favour the Greek Old Testament called the Septuagint, and formerly considered to be corrupt. In these instances, it is not the Greek bible that is corrupt but the Jewish one, taking the older versions from Qumran as the new standard now that they have been discovered. A version of Jeremiah at Qumran was quite different, and much shorter, than the standard Masoretic text. Which one is inerrant? Some of the books of Psalms among the Dead Sea Scrolls were utterly different from the biblical ones. In short, the truth is the opposite of what the Christian liar says in his worthless and mendacious article.

The historical evidence shows that the Bible can be trusted.

So the Christian summarises his dissimulation. Some of the historical evidence shows some of the bible is historically correct, and some of it shows the opposite. The bible is not infallible, and its supposed prophecies are often wrong and are bogus when they are right. This is the book that inspires Christians to lie about it until they are blue in the face, and to harrumph about those who criticize it until they are red in the face. In defence of it they say white is black, and black is sky blue pink with yellow dots. In the not so distant past, Christians have murdered critics of this evil book in the most shameful and horrific way. They have learnt nothing from their God dying cruelly except that they can do better.

What is puzzling particularly, besides the power it has to make otherwise worthy people into monsters, is that the book has the power to stop critics from objecting to the excesses that it inspires its sheep and their odious shepherds to practise. Why are there not more people who object to the perpetual lying that Christians use to fool simple gullible uncritical people into accepting the worthless nostrums of this so-called religion? Why does everyone accept that lying is all right for Christians? People begin accepting the worthless medicine and finish up as savages killing others for no good reason.

Explain it!

If there is anything spiritual in this book, the bible, it is not good or holy, it is monstrous and wicked. It is the bible for liars. Christians would better note this citation from Evelin Sullivan’s book, The Concise Book of Lying:

Every time you lie, deceive or cheat, you lose a little bit of your soul.

Few of them can have any soul left to save!

Remember! Apologists Will…

• obfuscate—pretend only those with arcane knowledge can understand their religion
• hold the bible as inerrant and claim it does not mean what it says when it seems to be wrong or contradictory—they reinterpret plain words to mean their opposite
• endlessly cite old refuted positions both for their own case, and against their opponents, sometimes even hundreds of years old
• use fraud and deceit to promote their Christian beliefs, yet accuse critics of Christianity of being dishonest—they are hypocritical
• waffle—they avoid the issues they cannot address because they cannot answer or explain them
• misrepresent critical arguments and positions to seem to be able to defeat them easily—setting up straw men
• falsely cite committed Christians as being authoritative or as honest arbiters of disputed matters
• slur—they introduce irrelevant denigrations of their opponent, using ad hominem arguments
• disregard arguments and even evidence offered against them
• ignore modern scholarship
• use special pleading
• blatantly lie when they run out of answers, and have no compunction about making Christ and God into liars to defend their lies

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History