Religion is how man has convinced himself that there are clear and simple answers to the unknowable complexity of life; he is, unfortunately, dead wrong.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion. - Steven Weinberg

In the First Century of the Common Era, (CE) there arose a remarkable religious leader who taught a worship of one true God and said that the older worship had been replaced by works of charity and piety in the one God and the shunning of enmity and hatred for love of all. His mother was told he would be remarkable before his birth and his birth was attended by supernatural beings. He worked miracles of goodness, casting out demons, healing the sick, even raising the dead. His exemplary life led his followers to proclaim him the son of God even though he himself said he was a son of man. Accused of sedition by Rome, he was arrested. After his death, his disciples attested he had risen from the dead, appeared to them alive, then ascended to Heaven. I hope we all recognize this great man, Apollonius of Tyana.

That was fun. I could hear the eyes popping from here. Who? Yep, this holy man we should all know was Apollonius of Tyana and you can read his story in Flavius Philostratus’s book, Life of Apollonius. It is one of those enigmas of history that one fable, Jesus of Nazareth, comes to be accepted as history and another fable, Apollonius of Tyana, is consigned to the trash bin of history. These two fables really are equally beautiful, equally moral, and equally fictitious. What is instructive about the little story is how myths come to surround religious leaders. After all, if you are a follower of Apollonius or Jesus, you want to make sure your guy sounds better than their guy. There you are in the agora, people gathered around and this charlatan, the other guy is always the charlatan, says his guy was the son of God. Well, then, so was your guy and even more your guy went straight to heaven, and raised the dead, and etc. During credulous days the stories grow. Completely understandable and completely made up.

That the Gospels were written as fiction is acknowledged by the author of John, “Those here written have been recorded that you may hold the faith that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and through this faith you may possess life by his name.” My emphasis. John writes nothing about being a true history or facts, his emphasis is faith. What is faith? Assertion of truth without evidence or despite contrary evidence. John is letting you know up front his Gospel was written as myth! Not history. Faith is an assertion of truth with no facts to support it. If John had facts he wouldn't have said the reader needed faith. I've never seen a historian start out his book; you need faith to read my book. You don’t need faith to know Caesar ran the Roman Empire. That was a fact. You don’t need faith to know the 300 Spartans died at Thermopylae. That is history. An author needs your faith when he doesn’t have facts to support his story. History deals with facts, religion with myths.

What is Christianity? It is a religion based on a written series of works: Gospels, Acts, letters, and an Apocalypse. We know the four Gospels were not written by the named authors as the Apostles named were illiterate speakers of Aramaic and the gospels were written in Koine Greek. None of the Gospels actually claim to be eyewitness accounts. In other words they are made up and we know where they got many of their stories, and they aren't about a man who was God. The author of Acts was also the author of Luke. The majority of the New Testament are letters, called epistles, by Paul, another non-eyewitness. But six of those are disputed and modern scholars believe they were written by others claiming to be Paul, that is, they are forgeries. And last is the Apocalypse of John which makes me wonder what sort of drugs were available in Judea at the time.

So we have a bunch of made up and borrowed stories not written by eyewitnesses, the first five books, letters of dubious authorship, many are out right frauds, and a drug induced fantasy. That is what Christianity is based on. I'm sorry, but that doesn't give me much confidence.

I have on occasion, tweaked people who have unreasoned faith and are too serious about it. I have always attempted to keep such tweaking friendly and humorous if possible. Unfortunately, there are groups of the religious out there who have a humorless belief and dogmatic insistence that reminds me of the more militant variations of Islam, mindless fanatics in other words.

What really bothers me about these fanatics is how they claim the only possible truth when their 'truth' is an assertion without facts. Really? They know the truth and everyone else in the world is an idiot because we have the facts on our side. As Michel de Montaigne wrote, "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know." The truth is religion deals with things we least know and can least know: what happens after death, how was the world created, what is the nature of the soul. The truth is Man can never be certain about any of these questions until we can stand outside the Universe as an observer. Voltaire was right, certainty about these mystical questions is absurd. Once something becomes knowable, it becomes a science and moves outside the sphere of religion. Astrology becomes Astronomy. Alchemy becomes Chemistry. If we can ever factually answer any of these questions they will be part of our science and we will all know the same answer, instead of the way it is in religion where everyone has a different answer and none of them are right, yet all claim absolute certainty.

What amazes me is the breakdown of all logical thought that occurs in religious belief. In order to believe in Christianity the believer has to be unquestionably sure that all other religions are absolutely wrong just as he believes Christianity is unconditionally right. And how do all of these other religions convince people they are right? Through faith. So, the believer has to know that faith leads to everyone else being absolutely wrong but utterly certain. What is the next inevitable question? If all of those others, 100% of them, all reach the absolutely wrong conclusion through faith, what makes a Christian's method different? The answer, nothing. Then logically, a Christian believer, if he believes all these other religions are wrong when belief is reached through faith, should conclude that reaching Christian certainty through faith is a flawed method. Do they? Of course not. My faith is right and yours is wrong. And we can't get anywhere from there as there are no facts on either side to use to make a valid judgment, just blind faith.

It drives me crazy when these Christians claim all morality comes from God and atheists can't be moral. Really? How about these examples of the Christian God's morals:
Sex slaves allowed Exodus 21:8
Virgins are war booty Numbers 31:18
Incest okay: Adam and Eve's children would have interbred, if you are God's favorite it's not a problem, Abraham and Sarah were half-siblings, Lot's daughters got him 'drunk,' and had sons by him whom God made founders of nations. Genesis various I've always had a problem with this one. If you are really that drunk you don't know who is what, you couldn't get an erection. Pretend to be drunk and bang the daughters, oh yeah. That naughty Lot...
If a brother dies childless it is the surviving brother's duty to impregnate his brother's wife. Onan was stuck dead for refusing to do this. Genesis 38:8-10 That's right, killed for not shagging his sister-in-law.
A girl who is raped can be sold to the rapist which removes the stain from her Father. Deuteronomy 22:28-29Glad the Christian God is more concerned with the Father's reputation than the girl who is now property of her rapist.

I keep hearing these same sanctimonious fools who claim to have a monopoly on truth, but no facts, saying America is a Christian country. Really! Here is a fact. Several of the Founding Fathers were anything but believing Christians as we’ll see. Another fact. America is a country for everyone, not just fundamentalists. Peter Berger of Boston University argues, "Modernity is not necessarily secularizing; it is necessarily pluralizing. Modernity is characterized by an increasing plurality, within the same society, of different beliefs, values, and worldviews." But if the fanatics are going to demand we be a Christian country then we have the right to see why we should believe in this Christian myth. So let’s look at this thing called Christianity and whether or not it passes the test of veracity. Let's look at the facts. As Joe Friday said, Just the facts.

Is it true?

The key question: Is it true? It might take a little bit to answer that. The first question to ask, did a man named Jesus, called the Christ, actually live? This is a real question. For a millennia you could be burned at the stake for even asking that question. Although there isn’t a lot of factual support many people think he did. That isn’t based on anything in the Bible which I will show to be a fable, or novel, not a history to be relied upon, but rather from citations in Josephus, Antiquities. In the Antiquities Book 18.3.3, “At this time, there appeared Jesus, a wise man, he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure.” And again in Book 20, Chap 9, “… and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James…” There are many other mentions of a person named Jesus, a common name, but these are apparently other men not called the Christ. So these two citations in a real history book support the contention Jesus was a real man, a teacher, had followers who called him the Christ, and these might be the only reliable evidence that he existed.

Christopher Hitchens thinks Jesus was a real man, not God, but real because of the effort and contradictions in the Gospels about Jesus. So much of the Gospels are childishly contradictory in order to make Jesus fit into Old Testament stories of the Messiah. The funniest is in the birth narrative where Jesus of Nazareth has to be born in Bethlehem and this ridiculous story of a census, which never happened, is created to get him there, to agree to the Old Testament statement that the Messiah would be born of the House of David. If Jesus wasn’t a real person, why go to all the trouble of making this up. Just have him born in Bethlehem of Bethlehem parents. That the writers of the Gospels went to so much trouble, seems to me to only make sense if Jesus was a real person who needed to be shoehorned into the stories because he didn’t fit in real life. If the stories are borrowed from myths that were circulating at the time, and we have historic evidence of those myths, then the shoehorning of the Jesus myth into the Hebrew myths would explain this as well.

Not everyone finds the historical case for Jesus persuasive at all. Dr. Richard Carrier has researched the historical record and concluded Jesus did not exist. See his Youtube presentation Why I Think Jesus Didn't Exist. It is about an hour and somewhat academic. But if he is right the whole question becomes moot and the New Testament has as much factual veracity as Aesop's Fables, that is none. End of discussion. If this stark statement bothers you, don't worry. Using accepted Biblical scholarship from the past century and a half by mainstream Christian theologians we're going to get to basically the same place - it's all a fable. We'll just be a little less stark about it.

The Jesus stories do not match historical reality. Three examples are the Slaughter of the Innocents, Pilot trying to get Jesus the safety, and The trial before the Sanhedrin. None of those gospel accounts match historical facts. They are implausible and destroy any connection of the Gospels to reality. They are myth.

We have several historical references which show the fluidity of the myth. The Talmud has Jesus living 100 years earlier. Iraneus, the Christian Father, had Jesus living to 50 and being crucified by the Emperor Claudius. How could contemporaneous writers have gotten the dates so wildly wrong if there was a real man? They wouldn't and we are left with the myth.

Josephus tells the story of Jesus Ben-Ananias who told of the coming destruction of Jerusalem, was tried before the Sanhedrin, turned over to the Roman procurator, Albinus in this case, and was flogged. Sound familiar? Does this look like the story Mark 'borrowed' to finish his myth up?

Unfortunately, as historians point out, the translations of Josephus are in question. Like virtually anything to do with Jesus, later Christian copyists changed the original words of books as they copied them to agree with their theology. For instance, in the Greek and Latin versions of Josephus, the phrase, “...at the suggestion of the principal men among us,” has been inserted in the story of the trial before Pilate when in a Syriac version, which wouldn’t have been amended by Christians, it reads, “Pilate condemned him to death.” The later Christians were always blaming the Jewish leaders for Jesus getting nailed up but the Syriac version makes much more historic sense and is more likely to be original, the Romans killed Jesus because he was a political troublemaker, not for his religion. As discussed in more detail later, crucifixion was reserved for political crimes against the state, a punishment Pilate would have pronounced, not local religious disputes which the Romans didn’t care about. The Christian copyists also changed the phrase in their copies of Josephus book, “...he was said to be Christ,” to “...he was Christ,” in their versions. Josephus, a Jew, would not have said Jesus was Christ since he wouldn't have believed that to be true. That the reference to Jesus exists in all the translations probably means the stories were widely circulating and they were about a character called the Christ by some of his followers. But this brief discussion shows how hard it is to rely on any writings, changed and amended as they were for a thousand years by Christians to support the Orthodox theology. To understand the Gospels, to find out who was this man, Jesus, we have to strip away the accretions of myth and try to get back to the original story, difficult as that is.

To give some examples on why it is difficult to get back to the real story, here are examples of how later scribes changed passages that didn't agree with their theology. Luke tells the only story of Jesus as a boy. In it, the family has visited Jerusalem. When they leave they don't notice Jesus has stayed behind. Yep, they leave town without their kid. Good parents. They search for three days before finding him in the temple. Mary is right pissed and says to Jesus, "Your father and I have been looking for you." Joseph was his 'father?' What about the virgin birth, the Annunciation, the Angel, all those Christmas pageants? Some later scribe noticed this little discrepancy and wanting those wonderful pageants changed the passage to read 'We have been looking for you' and that's the version that made it into the King James translation, but the earlier manuscripts all show the earlier, and historically correct, wording, Joseph was the father of Jesus and Mary knew it. No angel, no Annunciation.

Matthew has a passage where Jesus is ranting about how the world was about to end, and says, "No one, not the angels, nor even the Son, but only the Father knows when it will end." That became a problem for later Christians who thought Jesus was divine himself, the Father and Son were co-equal in that whole Trinity nonsense. How could Jesus be Divine and not know? So a scribe changed the passage by leaving out, "...nor even the Son." Bingo, he got rid of that embarrassing passage and Jesus is part of an absurd Trinity despite his clear words to the contrary. Why did Jesus use the term, the Son of God? The Jews at this time believed all holy men were Sons of God, not divine, but Holy. He wasn't claiming to be divine, he was claiming to be Holy.

You know that wonderful story in John where Jesus forgives the woman taken in adultery and says he who is without sin cast the first stone? Great story isn't it. The problem is it isn't in any manuscript until the 12th Century. Oops. So much for this perfect changeless truth.

The idea of the Trinity only appears in one place in the Bible. Too bad it wasn't in any version until the 15th Century. The first time it appears in any Bible is in a printed version. Even that late people were changing passages to support orthodoxy. This fiction too, made it into the King James version.

What is the real story?

Properly understood, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. — Isaac Asimov

Modern mainstream Seminaries, Protestant and Catholic, teach the Bible in a Historical Critical method by stripping away all of the fables and myths instead of the 'devotional' method you get in Sunday school or Fundamentalist seminaries. Some theologians have said that we shouldn’t pry into the history of Christ. Our current understanding of the Bible is enough. This is the 'The Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it,' thinking. But what if you don't know what the Bible originally said? It has always astounded me that a scholar doesn't want to know what actually happened or what was actually meant by the author but I can understand why they say that; when you find out the facts, the fables become obvious and hard to believe. There are hundreds of books out on the subject. Make sure you get a work by an objective scholar, not someone who ignores facts that conflict with his beliefs. Bart Ehrman’s book on the Historical Jesus is easy to read as well as objective and therefore recommended.

Modern Biblical scholars acknowledge that the Gospels are fiction. Ernst Käsemann wrote, “We may say that today the battle is over, not perhaps as yet in the arena of church life, but certainly in the field of theological science. It has ended in the defeat of the concept of miracle…” Modern Biblical scholars know that all of the miracle stories are fiction, legends written in a more credulous age. Burton Mack wrote, "These stories (in Mark) look like reports of miracles typical of the Greco-Roman age. Hundreds have been collected for comparison, and the genre is exactly the same..." If Christian scholars know the Bible miracle stories are all fiction what then is the difference between the Gospels and Apollonius or even Aesop's Fables? Nothing. And if the miraculous signs from God are all fiction what is left to make you believe this man Jesus was God? The obvious answer is, nothing. This might be the reason Jesus himself never claimed divinity and why people who actually knew him never claimed him to be divine, that claim was left for a later writers to make up. This 'silence' of Jesus about his divinity has troubled believers and led to a theory called the Messianic Secret, that Jesus followers knew he was the Messiah but Jesus didn't want anyone to know. We all knew he was God, but shh, don't tell anyone. Like you could keep such a thing secret. This modern theory is just as made up and makes as little sense as the rest of the Gospels.

Christian theology, if it wasn’t drilled into kids unformed minds as serious, the whole thing would be laughable. How people can listen to the nonsense that passes for theology in Christianity without giggling like fools I really don’t know. We are all guilty of Original Sin because Eve, a character in a fairy tale, ate an apple? Really? And this spiteful God, like a four year old having a tantrum, has had it in for everyone since then? Really? Because a fairy tale woman ate a fairy tale apple? How can you not laugh? Oh yes, He was actually three Gods but only one. Three is one. Really? As Thomas Jefferson, the great man of reason said, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.” So according to one Founding Father Christian theology should be ridiculed. So much for Jefferson thinking America is a Christian country.

Seriously… These same Christian fanatics constantly invoke their freedom of religion for this ridiculous fairy tale while denying the same to others. Now Christians want to be able to choose not to obey any law they ‘FEEL DEEPLY’ doesn’t agree with their interpretation of the Bible. And we already know from history how those Christians ‘interpreted’ the Bible to deny all rights to Negros. Now they want a free hand to do anything. To quote Roger Taney, “Negros have no rights the White man was bound to respect.” Good Christian values there.

Freedom of Religion is equally Freedom FROM Religion. The American constitution declares a separation of religion from the state. We are not only not a Christian country; we are a religiously neutral country. In 1779, as Virginia’s governor, Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill to guarantee legal equality for citizens of all religions — including those who wanted no religion. It was around then that Jefferson famously wrote, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.” Since we are speaking of Jefferson this is what he really thought on this topic:

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” btw, Biblical scholars now agree the virgin birth is a fable. Jefferson was just ahead of his time. or;

“The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster cruel vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging three headed beast-like god one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.” I'll skip the rather indelicate but obvious question of my Christian readers. or;

“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature.” or;

“Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies.” and;

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." Somehow, I just don't think that our Founding Father was a believing Christian or that he helped found America to be a "Christian Nation."

Wow, now this doesn’t mean Jefferson didn’t believe in God, he did. He was a Pantheist, which most people today would call an atheist even though that isn't technically correct. He knew the Bible was a collection of clap trap fables of no redeeming value, and later Biblical scholarship has shown he was right. In fact, Jefferson took a razor to his copy of the Gospels and cut out all of the nonsense, miracles, and supernatural leaving a book of Jesus moral teachings, which of course has no interest to people. Like Horror movies, it is the supernatural that grabs attention and the authors of the Gospels were quite aware of that as they created these miracle stories.

Now wait a minute. I remember Jefferson cites God in his most famous writings so he must have meant the personal Christian God, right? No, not at all. This reminds me of another great thinker who has frequently been misunderstood when he said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” He must have meant the Judeo-Christian God, right? This is what Einstein said about that, “I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me that can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal.” Facts, not faith. I am certain Jefferson would have agreed with Einstein. But this is a diametrically different concept of the Creator than the malicious vengeful God of the Bible. So different it almost shouldn’t be the same word.

I almost feel I should stop right here. Jefferson and Einstein have summed it up quite well. But I fear most people have no idea why Jefferson and Einstein could apply rational thought to the Christian myths and come to the conclusions they did. So for those who have only heard the myth side of the story, here is the rest of the story.

Why do we know the early Christians made up these stories? At that time, there were lots of Gods running around, the so called Mystery Religions. As mentioned earlier all those religions had miracles happening left and right. The early Christians had to compete for followers. Their God had to be as great as all of the other Gods running around then. So, they read the Jewish holy books and reinterpreted the old stories to support their version of history, the coming of the Christ in the person of Jesus as God. Isaiah was a particularly rich ground for such revisionist history. Isaiah says, “The eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the dead will hear. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart.” And he also said, "The dead shall rise.” Now remember Isaiah never said this had happened, but hoped it would. So the author of Matthew, reading this and thinking, it must be Jesus he was predicting rewrote Isaiah to say, 'Jesus answered, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life…”' And you have a miracle, created by the writer cribbing from Isaiah, to compete for new followers against all of the other religions competing for followers. Jesus does miracles, just like Apollonius.

Another example of creating from older sources is the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem as mentioned earlier. The writers knew he was actually from Nazareth, a fact. But they never let a fact stand in the way of a good miracle story. In Micah there is a prophecy that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem. So Matthew and Luke make up a whole story about how Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It is a re-writing of the Old Testament stories to support the early Christians attempts to prove their new God was great and powerful and had been predicted 500 years earlier, a fable. We can see they are fables by comparing them in detail. They almost never agree in the details, other than Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Both authors took that idea and made up a story. Almost every Miracle story has been traced back to a passage in the Old Testament that was rewritten into the New Testament. One of the reasons why scholars are sure is the Gospels were written by Greek speakers is their wording of the miracle stories can be traced back to the Greek version of the Bible, the Septuagint. These aren’t stories that would have been told by Jesus' Aramaic speaking followers.

Another problem with the Bethlehem story, the census in 6 AD mentioned in Luke did not include Galilee, where Nazareth is located. So Jesus family wouldn't have had to be counted in the census. The whole thing is made up and doesn't match any of the facts that we know to be true. No wonder Käsemann and Mack can so confidently say, all those miracle stories are baloney.

One miraculous example of the borrowing from the Septuagint resulted from a translation error in which the myth of the Virgin birth is created. The author of Matthew read Isaiah in Greek where it says, “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel,” from the Greek Septuagint. But this turns out to have been a mistranslation of the original Hebrew. In the original Hebrew, it is a young woman who conceives, Hebrew alma, there is a different Hebrew word for virgin. I guess the Hebrews realized not every young woman is a virgin. In the Septuagint it is rendered by the translator as the Greek word parthenos, virgin, so Matthew dutifully creates a Virgin Birth story to ‘prove’ the earlier prophecy is correct. But it was just a mistranslation in the Greek version, the Septuagint. I hope you are beginning to see why serious scholars of the Bible have come to say that the miracle stories are fiction.

Another example of translation errors is that Jesus would never have said Peter was the rock upon which he would found a church. This is a play on words in Greek; Petra is the Greek word for rock. Jesus spoke Aramaic and that play on words wouldn’t make sense. Since the Gospels were written by Greek speakers who didn’t know Jesus real teachings in Aramaic, and frankly didn’t care what he actually said, they could and did make up stories, like Jesus founding this new church on Peter. They read a Greek version of the Bible which they re-imagined into miracle stories in support of their new God. This passage used by later theologians to make the Pope supreme head of the Christian church is obviously a made up play on words from a mistranslation and cannot have actually been said by the Aramaic speaking Jesus. But such is all Christian theology, moonbeams and mistranslations. The truth is Jesus never founded a new church and he didn’t make Peter the head of it. Don’t take my word for it, read Gospel Fictions by Randel Helms available on Amazon. It is a short easy read and amply supports why modern scholars know the stories are fiction.

But the Bible is the word of God and the authors were guided by God and so it must be absolutely true. Really? Actually, the Bible is filled with irreconcilable contradictions. He doesn’t even know when he was born, or his son was born, or something was born, since the Abracadabra of the Trinity theology makes such questions nonsensical, at least as Thomas Jefferson sees it. Who or what was born? Let’s see how perfect the Bible really is.

To start off, let’s examine the actual text of this Divine book, perfect as it comes from God. The truth of course is just the opposite. The Bible is flawed and contradictory. As early as the Third Century St. Augustine was writing that the hoi polloi, you and me, shouldn’t be allowed to read the Bible as we couldn’t properly understand it. All of the contradictions and nonsense needed to be ‘explained’ to the common folks by the priests who would be taught the proper interpretation. For instance, St. Augustine said that no one could actually believe the world was created in six days, we know better than that, so things like the creation stories, there are two different myths, one the Jews got from the Babylonians and the one they made up, have to be explained to people.

St. Augustine was certainly right about that since here we are 1,800 years later with crazy creationists believing the Earth was created in six days and is six thousand years old. Augustine was right about letting the uncritical believers read the Bible, because these fanatics who profess the Bible as absolute truth don’t seem to understand even the very first Christians knew it couldn’t be read that way. Even then they could see all of the contradictions and nonsense. Priests had to interpret these stories so people could understand the proper theology. I just wish someone in charge of crazy Christians would explain to Creationists that the world wasn't created in six days and their own Saint said so 1,800 years ago. As for the Bible being the absolute truth, Voltaire said it best, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” But people seem to prefer being comfortably absurd.

In the beginning, the Bible starts with two contradictory stories of Creation; two stories that disagree in many facts. If you read the two creation myths that start the Bible you come across difference after difference. If this is truly an infallible perfect book, why the different stories? Scholars mostly agree there two or three sources were used when the Editor wrote what we now call Genesis. One story is based on a Hebrew desire to promote their God above all others. The second story, first in the Bible, was written after the Israelites had been in the Babylonian captivity and has elements of Babylonian myth integrated into the story.

In the first myth, the stages of creation are separated into six days. The earth is covered in water. God commands the waters covering the earth to separate, forming land and sea. God creates man and woman (both unnamed) together from the dust, then tells them to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. God gives the man and woman dominion over the earth. There is no Garden of Eden where the man and woman must remain or a snake to tempt them. There are no geographical references at all. The animals of the sea and air are created on Thursday, while the animals of the land, including man, are created on Friday.

In contrast, the second myth does not mention any separation of time periods. The earth is dry. The Lord, coming from a different source the story uses a different word, has not caused it to rain yet. He then causes water to spring up from beneath the earth. The Lord creates Adam, then creates Eve from Adam's rib, no dust here. Adam and Eve are not told to be fruitful and multiply. The Lord does not give man dominion. The Garden of Eden first appears here along with that snake. Names of the rivers and lands near the Garden of Eden are included. Man is created before any plants are even created, let alone any animals to eat them. So much for God dictating one perfect and true story. As is typical for most people's understanding of the Bible these two contradictory tales are mushed together to 'create' the story in most folks heads. Man is given dominion from one tale and the Garden and Eve's temptation from the other. Just pick and choose the parts you like and ignore the parts that are nonsensical or contradictory and can't both be true.

Then there is the story of the Ark where it says that God had Noah take one pair of every animal. "You are to bring two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you." Genesis 6:19. But in Genesis 7:2-3 it says, "Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth." Which contradictory passage is the true and absolute word of God? And how did Noah know which were clean since that wasn't told to the Jews until Moses brought the law down to earth. And how in the hell did that poor pair (seven pairs?) of tree sloths walk to South America? Or how did the Australians, kangaroo, koala, and platypus, hop, crawl, and wade back home from the desert mountaintop of Iraq? Or the penguin(s) make it back to the Antarctic from said desert? And how did Noah feed these millions and millions of animals. Do you know how much food 14 elephants would eat in 40 days? And who cleaned the hold or were they all standing hip deep in elephant dung? Once you really think about how this could be true, the absurdity of the Noah story boggles the mind if you check it against reality. And just for fun, how big was that Ark? 137 meters, by 23 meters by 13 meters high. That is half the size of a soccer pitch (7,140 square meters versus 3,151 square meters). Picture in your mind a Soccer pitch, now cut it in half and put seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean animal and how soon did you run out of room? Was that really big enough to hold the 1,145,000 million species, 2 or 7 of each, estimated to live on the earth? And how did Noah load that many animals in the days allowed? You couldn’t run that many animals up the ramp in the allowed time. 2,290,000 animal in 48 hours? That’s 13 animals a second non-stop for 48 hours.

Let’s be scientific about it. Here’s the math. The Earth has a radius of 6,371 km. That makes the Earth’s current volume V1=6731(4/3)pi r3 or 1,083,286,916,845,cubic kilometers. Now if we take the amount of water needed to increase the level of the seas to cover all the mountains in the world, we’d need the this formula V2=(6731+8.85)(4/3)pi r3, the height of Everest is 8.85 km, or 1,087,727,260,882. The difference is 4,050,344,067 cubic kilometers, That is three time more water that is currently in the entire world, 1,360,000,000. Where did all that water come from? Where in God’s name did it go? In order for the world to be covered in this much water it needed to rain 8,710 inches per day over every square inch of the world. Really? Please child…

These are just examples of the myths, just a selection from the Old Testament. If the Old Testament is flawed it must be the New Testament when Jesus came to fix everything that he had screwed up as his own Father that is perfect. God the Father isn't perfect and Jesus, the Son, who is perfect had to come fix things up. Okay, I get it. Boy, does that make sense. Not so fast. The Gospels are full of contradictions and made up stories. When was Jesus born? We get two dates. In Matthew, he was born during the Roman Empire wide census when Herod was king. In the story everyone had to return to the place of their forbearers a thousand years earlier. Try to imagine everyone in the world trying to go back to where your ancestors came from a thousand years ago. Ludicrous. Plus we have the Roman records to know it didn't happen. Matthew invented this anecdote in his fable to prove Jesus was descended from King David. Nice story but not true. In Luke's version Jesus was born during the Roman census when Quirinius was the Roman governor. The problem, Herod was dead before Quirinius showed up. One census was in 8 BCE the other in 6 CE, fourteen years apart. Damn, that virgin had some miraculous labor, fourteen years. It must have been her mythical intact hymen that kept the baby Jesus in for fourteen years. Now those Renaissance paintings of the Baby Jesus sitting with a smile waving benedictions make sense. He was 14 when he was finally born!

We can see the tales grow from Old Testament fables into Gospel miracles. In Mark the story of Jesus calming the sea is a straight forward borrowing. Mark's use of the Greek epstimesen for rebuke, the same word as in the Jonah story, is an example of this borrowing. Matthew then rewrote this story to align it more closely to the Greek original using many of the same words as were used in the Septuagint, also showing how this was pulled from the older story and dusted off, and made a story of Jesus. As for walking on water, the author used the language of Job 9:8, peripaton epi tes thalasses to describe this miracle. Remember, for the early Christians, they believed the Old Testament foretold the story of Jesus. So stealing, um, being inspired by the old stories and creating these miracle stories seemed fine. They wanted to convince people to believe in this new God and throwing in a few miracles helped.

This use of the Old Testament by early Christian authors is clearly shown in the Epistle of Barnabas. Barnabas was considered part of the New Testament well into the 4th Century. It is included in the oldest copy of the whole New Testament we have, the Codex Sinaiticus. God changed his perfect unchanging mind after 300 years and dropped Barnabus. In Barnabus, the author argues that the entire Old Testament is not a story of the Jewish people, but it is a foreshadowing of the arrival of Jesus. The whole thing. The Jews just didn't understand it was all about the arrival of a carpenter in a backwater town of no importance. The logic in Barnabus is amazing (amazingly abysmal, for instance the Old Testament prohibition on certain foods is reinterpreted as warnings against certain behaviors, e.g. the prohibition against eating weasel meat actually meant don't have oral sex because weasels copulate with their mouth.) Weird, but that's how far the early Christians went in reinterpreting the Jewish bible to be all about Jesus.

Mark’s Gospel is concerned with showing Jesus as the Son of God, that is the Messiah, and certainly not God himself. It ends with the Roman guard saying, “Truly, this man was the son of God.” In the Jewish tradition, the reigning King was anointed the ‘Son of God,’ not God but his earthly son. Since Mark was still influenced by the apocalyptic vision of Jesus, the coming of the Messiah to kill off the Romans and set up the Earthly Kingdom of God, headed as in past Jewish kingdoms by the Son of God, Jesus, informed his whole gospel. Mark found his inspiration for this story in God’s statement to Nathan, “I will be his father, and he shall be my son” about Solomon. Mark takes that and at Jesus baptism, has God say, “Thou art my son.” And bang, we have a wonderful story created out of thin air and the older Biblical tradition.

These created stories bring issues of credibility. The Star of Bethlehem leading the wise men is an example. How can a star point out a particular house? Go out some night and pick a star, then watch. As the Earth rotates the star moves across the sky. It starts on one side and moves to the other side of the sky before disappearing. Now try following a star across a barren landscape and see where you end up. Since we know many ancient peoples watched the stars closely someone would have noticed a weird star which sat in one place. No mention, of course, because it never happened. It makes a nice Christmas story though.

This brings up the rest of the story, the killing off of the Jewish baby boys in Matthew. One thing we know about the Romans is that they are the first bureaucrats. They recorded everything. They also taxed everyone. One thing they wouldn’t have allowed was killing off a generation of taxpayers and if someone had, it would be in the Roman records. Not a peep. Not in Josephus who told every bit of dirt on Herod he could find. Not anywhere. Also the reign of Augustus had very good records which we have access to. There never was an empire wide census where everyone had to go back to their ancestral homes. Never. There were tax censuses conducted to determine who had to pay how much, but that would have been just an Israeli census. Any facts we have, contradict the story and no facts support it. The only possible explanation, the Gospel story is a complete fabrication to make it a better story.

This leads to the Flight to Egypt. If there wasn’t a mass killing would the family have fled to Egypt? No, which is why in the other Gospel story the family goes straight back home. And you can keep following story after story with all of the contradictions. Why create this story when it wasn’t true. Because the facts of Jesus' life don’t fit the Messiah stories from the Old Testament as the later followers of Jesus understood them. The writers looked to the older books for proof that Jesus was the Messiah. So the author of Matthew read in Hosea 11.1 “…and out of Egypt I called my son.” The simple explanation the quote refers to the Exodus is ignored and the author made up a whole story to ‘prove’ that Jesus was the person mentioned in the earlier stories. Made up but so what. You must keep in mind that the Gospels were not written as history, they were written as religious propaganda, to move people to their new god. Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar has said that both Luke's and Matthew's birth and infancy accounts are fabrications. Really? The problem is so is the rest of the Bible. As Twain said, upwards of a thousand lies. Too bad Twain so undercounted the lies. Wonderful fables but as much truth as Aesop's. And I don't see anybody older than four worshiping Aesop.

Skip ahead to the end of the story. Jesus last supper was on Passover. No it wasn’t, it was the night before. Big deal, right? Who cares what day it was? The important thing is he died for our sins. Those original sins we got from the fairy tale woman eating a fairy tale apple in the contradictory story. For one thing it shows how imperfect the Bible is in recounting the stories and the Bible cannot be read as perfect or even as history. For another, it shows the Author of John, the anti-Jewish Gospel, cared enough to purposefully change the story. Why? Modern scholars believe that the author of John was part of a Christian Jesus group that was expelled from the main body of Jews. So they had a reason to be anti-Jewish even though they were Jews! When you understand that there wasn’t a single Christian community, but scores of them, contending with each other as well as Mystery religions like Apollonius, ‘Our stories are right and yours are wrong,’ you begin to see why none of the stories can be trusted to be a record what actually happened. Each Christian group made up its own history to fit its beliefs and combat others. In John's version, Jesus was killed at the same time as the lambs were being ritually slaughtered in preparation for Passover. So, Jesus, the lamb of God, is sacrificed. Beautiful little story and completely made up.

This particular conflict is a key one, between the Jewish followers of Jesus and the heathen Greeks that Paul was trying to convert to Christians. The argument was whether Jesus was an observant Jew. He said he was, quite plainly. He said he was here to uphold Moses’ law. The Greeks didn’t want him to be quite so Jewish, so they moved the last supper date. Those Greeks weren’t going to cut off part of their penis just to be Christian, No way! The observant Jews kept the story on the Seder. Little details but oh so telling on the variability of the ‘truth’ of what has come down to us. These little details have had large consequences in how these stories are interpreted. It makes a great difference if Jesus thought the Law still held or if he had abandoned the Law. This particular conflict was because the Greek Christians didn’t want to cut off their foreskins.

The birth of Christianity as a separate religion instead of a form of Judaism was when Paul of Tarsus was riding along, fell off his horse, hit his head on a rock, and had an hallucination in which he saw Jesus risen from the dead. He tried to figure this out. Reasoning backwards with his scrambled brains, he concluded, Jesus must still be alive, since I saw him. So he must have been risen from the dead by God. So God must think he is special. He must be the Messiah, and Bang we have the birth of a new religion, Christianity. All from a rock to the skull. Today, we would have given him some pain killers and done an MRI to figure out why he was hallucinating. Paul didn't tell the stories about Jesus that he got from the followers of Jesus, like James, Jesus brother, which is why the real followers kicked Paul out. Nor did Paul tell miracle stories as most were created after his death. He got his interpretation from his hallucinations. That gives me confidence.

There are several excellent sites that show a comparison of the Resurrection stories; I say stories, multiple, because none of them actually tell the same story. So much for God knowing what happened and telling the authors the ‘facts.’ It happened after dawn, no it happened while still dark; nope it happened at exactly nine in the morning or exactly at noon the day before. There were three women who went to the tomb, no, just one, no two. The stone covered the entrance, no it had been moved, no an angel appeared to roll it away for the women. There was a man there, no two men, no an angel. Jesus was inside, no, it was empty, no, he appeared after the women entered, but only to Mary, or to all. I think I’ve made the point. Read a side by side comparison of the Gospel stories and you’ll see why serious scholars know they have to be fictional.

One thing that most scholars now agree on is that all of the post crucifixion stories are myth. Again, the facts get it the way. The facts historically are that crucifixion was an extreme form of punishment for the Romans, and a political act. When the Romans crucified someone, they meant it. The Romans did not allow the bodies to be removed and buried. Pilate was a brutal overseer and used punishment liberally. Not once was anyone allowed to take down the body. Nope, it was allowed to rot as a warning to other potential troublemakers, don't mess with Rome. Then the bones were tossed into the garbage, which is where Golgotha, the hill of skulls, got its name.

The best of these made up Passion stories didn't even make the cut because it was suspected of having Gnostic leanings sort of like being suspected today of having Gay leanings. In the Gospel written by Peter, of course it was written by Peter because it says so, When Jesus comes forth from the tomb, the Cross follows him out, miraculously appearing from the tomb and talks. Why would they bury the cross with a dead guy? Now there's a real miracle. Too bad it didn't make it. I can't see why they rejected that miracle and accepted so many others...

You can find these side by side comparisons. Look for horizontal readings of the Gospels. Some will even include additional columns like Paul or Acts since some of the same stories appear there, also different in facts, meanings, and interpretation. As of this writing, the University of Toronto has a wonderful parallel Gospels page where you can mix and match various combinations. For a start, go to the end of the Gospels and see how different the stories really are. Toronto's Parallel Gospels

If you are thinking, this can't be right because it isn't what you were taught. Then read, the truth shall set you free. Check my bibliography at the end. Both Burton Mack and Bart Ehrman are highly respected biblical scholars and are as objective as can be. Their books are available on Amazon.

And if you are thinking, this couldn't all just be made up, I invite you to read one of the Gnostic works like the Gospel of Thomas and see just how different it is and it was written about the same time. Each Christian group was making up their own stories. It strains credulity to think all these Christian groups made up those other 40 Gospels while the orthodox group somehow was perfect in transmission of only true facts. Please! The Gospel of Thomas was written by Didymus Judas Thomas the twin brother of Jesus. Like all of the Gospels, scholars don't believe it was actually written by the named person. I think it interesting that Jesus had a twin brother. A very unique virgin birth, one twin from a virgin the other twin not a virgin birth.

One really BIG problem with the idea of the perfection of the bible is the question, who wrote it and which one? What do I mean, which one, there is only one, the King James Version. Right?

First, we have different books in the Bible. The Jews have 24 books, the Protestants 39, the Catholics 46, and the Eastern Orthodox have 51. Which is right, which is the perfect one handed down straight from God?

Apparently, God wasn’t very meticulous about leaving his original divine revelations in existence. Unlike the Mormon God who put his thoughts down on gold, until Joseph Smith lost them in a poker game or something, the Christian God didn't write down any of his words. He left it to everyone to make up as they saw fit. We don't even have any of those first manuscripts which might have been written by actual witnesses. In fact, we don't have copies of the copies of the copies, etc. Remember these books were copied by hand, a laborious and boring task, by untrained copyists. No wonder so many changes filtered into the texts. In addition, since there were many different Christian groups some changes were made on purpose to support a sect's theology. This went on for hundreds of years. Imagine that child's game, Telephone, where a story goes around a circle and comes back unrecognizable in just minutes, what would happen in four hundred years?

The scholar John Mill, no apparent relation of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, published a Greek New Testament in 1707 that showed 30,000 different available readings from only 100 manuscripts at his disposal. He was accused of trying to destroy Christianity by pointing out the truth. (Frankly, I think people were right. Once you accept the truth about Christianity there isn't anything to believe in.) We now have over 57,000 different manuscripts available and contemporary scholars believe there are between 300,000 and 400,000 different versions of the New Testament. That is more different versions of the New Testament than there are words in it. Since we don’t have any original documents, or copies, or copies of the copies, etc., we have no idea which of these 400,000 variations is the perfect one. Bart Ehrman’s discussion of the problem of knowing what the Bible did originally say. Frankly, it boggles the mind that someone could imagine that if 400,000 different versions have come down to us that there could be one 'perfect' version.

Who then wrote the Bible? I can say easily based on all of the problems and inconsistencies, God didn't. It is impossible to believe that God performed the miracle of direct inspiration of the authors then did nothing to preserve his Word and let it be completely jumbled in a generation or two. Who did write the Bible then? We don't know. We do know pretty well it wasn't who said they did. Moses did not write the Pentateuch. As Genesis was written after the Babylonian captivity so it could not have been written by Moses. First Timothy wasn't written by Paul, even though the author claimed it had been. Scholars reject that claim based on careful semantic analysis. It is a fraud. None of the Gospels were written by the illiterate Aramaic speaking Apostles, as they were written in Greek. So who wrote the Bible? No one knows?

This is an example of the irony of most Christians’ beliefs. They have no idea of the facts about real biblical scholarship, they only have the stories they were raised with and scholars agree those stories are myths. Scholars know what we have isn't 'true' and more that we have no idea at all what the original texts actually said. But most church goers have no idea of that. They really believe the KJV is perfect. They sit around in Bible study groups with a bunch of other true believers and they tell each other how perfect this all is, Amen.

Really? Since the bible is perfect then we must accept what Jesus himself said rather than the later commentators. So let’s look at what Jesus actually said or as close as we can get with our admittedly corrupted text. And later copyists have changed what he said from his quite plain meaning when it contradicts a later theology.

One example is the Roman Church’s Mariolatry which drives many Protestants crazy. During the Middle Ages Mary become virtually a second, (no wait, we have the Trinity so she became a fourth divine figure, but the Trinity is one so let's stick with a second figure, it is confusing) she became a divine figure to worship. Theologians had to justify this and so they created stories and ideas. One idea was the perpetual virginity of Mary to show her sinless nature. First we have a virgin birth that was a simple translation error but now we get she never had sex. Wow, poor Joseph. Only a Christian priest would believe that if a woman ever had sex to have children she was now tainted, so Mary must never have had sex to be perfect. In order to justify this created idea, the Roman theologians denied the plain meaning of what Jesus had said when he talked about his brothers and sister. Josephus mentions Jesus brother, James. He plainly had siblings which would have meant Mary had lots of sex. Nope, the theologians changed the meaning to; Jesus was speaking of his spiritual brothers and sisters. Mary never had sex. Hogwash. The plain meaning in there and is supported by objective sources like Josephus. Jesus had siblings and Mary had sex.

This has been done to other plain statements by Jesus. Let’s look at other quite plain statements by Jesus. Jesus rejected the idea he was a God and plainly said he was a man. You can’t get any plainer than he did. It is quite apparent Jesus didn’t think he was part of any abracadabra of a Trinity. This whole ridiculous idea of a Trinity was created because there were some Christians who believed Jesus was a man fulfilling Jewish law, the Ebionites. Another group, the adoptionists, who believed God ‘adopted’ Jesus when he was baptized. Some who believed he was a man who was deified and raised to heaven only once he was crucified. And another group, the Marcionites, said Jesus was purely a God and therefore did not actually suffer and die since it would be impossible to kill God, a salient point. How do you kill God? A special holly stake through the heart? There was the group, we don't even have a name for this group, that the author of John belonged to, a Jewish group excluded from the Jewish community because of their belief in two Gods and bitter therefore. And finally, the Gnostics, who said Jesus was a sage come down from Heaven to give those with the divine spark the knowledge of how to escape the physical universe, sort of a Buddha Nirvana Christianity. So the theologians of another group, we can call them the proto-orthodox since their teachings became the orthodox when their particular brand of Christianity was sanctified by Constantine, came up with this Trinity to combat these ‘other’ Christians on both sides, he was a man and he was a God at the same time, Ridiculous. But trying to fight so many different theologies is difficult and the orthodox theology got way twisted around. But these theologians had their say. The Bible only contains 4 of the 40 or so Gospels that we know were written by the various followers of Jesus. 4 of 40? That's all that made the cut? What if the Truth is in those other 36 Gospels? If you have ever tried to figure out what the heck the Nicene Creed is all about, this is it, an attempt to deny the beliefs of all of these other groups of Christians. Of course he was a man. If he was God he would have known it and not said he was a man. End of discussion, except if you are a theologian and make up any idea you want and throw out all those books you don't agree with. This is why St. Augustine didn't want the hoi polloi reading the Bible. You couldn't understand this stuff. You would think that Jesus meant what he said and you might read the wrong books.

Jesus prognostication skills weren't very good; I mean if he was a god. At one point he says he will not drink wine again until the coming of the Kingdom of God. He also told his followers it would arrive in their own lifetime. Not so fast. Background - during Jesus lifetime, Israel was under the control of the Romans and a continuous rebellious strain of Millennialism, the belief that the Jewish Messiah would appear and kill all the Romans and set up the kingdom of God, that is a Kingdom of and for Jews under their Jewish God, was rampant. This is what Jesus was referring to. Not some mystical Heaven above. This was to be a real Kingdom on Earth. This is also what got Jesus killed. The Romans used different punishments for different crimes. Crucifixion was reserved for crimes against the state, treason. If Jesus got himself nailed to a cross it was because the Romans found his preaching of the coming Millennium as dangerous to the Roman state, i.e. Jesus preached the imminent demise of the Empire not some airy fairy Heaven above which the Romans wouldn’t have cared about. Apparently, Jesus was a better rabble rouser than an odds maker for God's Kingdom in Israel never appeared and Jesus didn't live to see it and have that glass of wine.

There is an interesting little comment by Jesus during his trial before the High Priest. In Mark’s account, Mark was the first gospel written, and the one in which Jesus is most portrayed as a man, Jesus declares that the High Priest will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and the coming of the clouds of Heaven. This accords completely with the idea that Jesus believed in the coming apocalypse of the Messiah in his own lifetime to establish the Jewish Kingdom. Since that didn’t happen, Luke writing later and knowing it never happened changes Jesus answer saying nothing about the High Priest being alive to see the coming and has Jesus claim the title of Messiah for himself, “I am, and from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” No coming Apocalypse. This changes everything. But why doesn’t the earlier version in Mark say it? Like so much in the Gospels, the stories are changed to fit what has happened when Jesus prophecies of the coming of the Messiah and his apocalypse didn't come true.

So, by his own statements, quite plain and simple, Jesus was a man who expected the Jewish Messiah to come to earth and kill off the Romans and restore the Kingdom of Israel as a separate country, the Kingdom of God for Jews in his own lifetime. Obviously, if Jesus wasn’t going to drink any wine till He came, Jesus expected to still be alive when the Messiah appeared, which means Jesus knew he wasn’t the Messiah. For the Jews, including Jesus, the Messiah was not God, a blasphemy, but a man who would serve God by killing all the Romans.

At this point I can imagine some of you saying, Okay so the Bible isn’t perfect but it still is telling the story of Jesus, who could have been God. Maybe so. Maybe the plain reading of what Jesus said really is the complex abracadabra of the theologians. Or maybe not. So could Flavius Philostratus book about Apollonius be true, and there is no reason to think the Bible is any truer than Flavius’s book. They are equally fictional. So I want to step back and take a wider look apart from the ‘problem' of factuality already discussed. Who needs the facts when you have faith?

One thing that most people fail to see is that the Gospels were written by different people with radically different views. We don't have four Gospels telling one story. We have four Gospels telling four different stories to support four different beliefs. Actually we have forty different Gospels but those have been suppressed.

People don't really compare the Gospels to each other. For example, the two Gospels, Matthew and John were both supposedly written by the Apostles who knew Jesus on a day to day basis. Why then are they so different?

Matthew is the ‘Jewish’ gospel, that is it shows Jesus as a man, there is never a claim of divinity in the book, for he is a man who is teaching that we need to uphold the Jewish law in every particular, “For truly I tell you, until Heaven and Earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law…” That is pretty straight forward. Jesus is a Jew teaching the Torah. In Matthew, Jesus says, "But about that day or hour no one knows." That isn't a divine God who would know, that is a man trying to understand God. Jesus is born of a woman, Jesus teaches in parables, he is present at miracles, miracles which happen because of the strong faith of the afflicted, faith causes the miracle not Jesus, and he teaches the coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth, a Jewish Kingdom.

In John's Gospel, written after the Romans destroyed the Temple and killing off any hope of the Messiah coming to kill the Romans, everything is changed. Jesus has become the incarnate Word of God who has existed since time began, Jesus is identified as God, Jesus teaches by many ‘I am’ sayings, never by parables and in John he never performs miracles but instead ‘signs’ which bring faith to his followers. In John, miracles lead to faith rather than the reverse. All of the teachings in Matthew are missing from John as is all of the teaching in John missing from Matthew. If the two works weren’t together in one binder one could imagine that Matthew is speaking of the man Jesus while John is speaking of the God Apollonius, I mean of the God Jesus.

It is from John we get the only claim of Jesus as God in the Gospels. None of the early traditions or the synoptic Gospels makes that claim. It seems likely if Jesus had gone around claiming to be God the other three Gospels would have been full of these 'I am' sayings. If Jesus claimed to be divine it seems strange that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all fail to say anything about it. So where, some eighty years later, did all of these ‘I am’ sayings in John come from? They were created to ‘prove’ John’s theological argument, just as he said he was doing in his introduction. There here are written to give you the faith... Not truth, the faith.

By the way, why am I arguing the words of Matthew and not John as the most likely to be true to what Jesus actually said? Good question. Scholars have realized that much of the gospels have been changed over time to agree with the orthodox theology. When they find a passage like the one in Matthew above, they reason, an orthodox scribe would be unlikely to change Jesus words to be 'wrong', e.g. unorthodox, so those sayings are most likely to have come from Jesus actual words. Matthew's quotes, being not orthodox, are more likely to go back to the source.

How could these two books supposedly both by eye witnesses be so different? The obvious answer is correct. They aren’t by two eyewitnesses. Matthew was obviously written by a Jewish follower of Jesus and was written closely enough after Jesus death that the hope of a Messiah bringing the Kingdom of God was still possible. John was written later when all of the first generation was dead and the Romans had sacked Jerusalem and so the teachings had to be re-imagined since they weren’t coming true. The only way for this later author of John to make sense of the teachings was to believe in a different type of Kingdom of God and he therefore changed all of Jesus’ teachings to fit this very different sort of view. Two books with two completely different and irreconcilable views. Supposedly, both were written by God’s inspiration. I guess this is another ‘you need faith’ moment. There sure are a lot of those.

Whether you look at a line by line comparison or look at a higher level view of the inconsistencies and contradictions it is impossible to rationally accept the historical truth of the Gospels. More importantly, it completely blows apart the whole ‘The Bible is perfect and the absolute word of God,’ argument. And it absolutely undercuts the whole, ‘We know the truth and you don’t,’ of the Fundamentalist fanatics. Next time one of them pulls out that line ask them when Jesus was born, 8 BCE or 6 CE? And ask politely, you don’t understand was he born twice 14 years apart or was it a 14 year labor, this perfect book. You will probably have to explain it to a fundamentalist since they don't actually know the Bible, only the myths.

These contradictions in facts are a problem for the 'Perfect Bible' group. They solve it by saying it isn't so. For instance, when Jesus went postal in the Temple, Mark’s Gospel says it happened a week before his arrest. It becomes part of the Crucifixion story. John’s gospel says it happened three years earlier. The only way to reconcile this is say it happened twice. How likely is that? Not at all. The real problem is that in doing this the Perfect Bible folks have created a different Bible that simply doesn’t exist in reality. It doesn’t happen twice in any gospel. You have to mentally create a different bible, somehow smushing together all these conflicting stories for that to be true; you have to mentally create a bible that doesn’t actually exist, a mental construct, rather than the real Bible. The 'truth' has to be there was a tradition of Jesus going postal in the Temple and each author used it as he saw fit to make his own story better. Just good fiction writing.

The real problem is when you can’t even create this imaginary Bible to explain away the contradictions. Mark very clearly says that Jesus was crucified on the Passover, specifying the day he was arrested as the Day of Preparation for Passover and that he was crucified the next day after the trial before Pilate. John, the anti-Jewish Gospel, moves this a day earlier. John specifies Jesus was crucified at noon on the Day of Preparation for Passover. Both texts are very clear and straightforward. You can't even pretend these somehow mean the same thing or that Jesus was crucified twice. These changes aren't superficial or unimportant. They are crucial to the theology of the authors, what they are trying to say in their stories. They simply have completely contradictory facts for contradictory theologies.

A last digression because I personally find this one fascinating. In Matthew and Luke there are two tiresome genealogies of Jesus showing in Matthew that Jesus was descended from King David and Abraham While in Luke the lineage goes all the way back to Adam. Why? Most Christians completely miss the importance of this passage. If his followers thought Jesus was conceived in the womb by God such a genealogy through his dad, Joseph, makes no sense. In other words, the tradition that Jesus had a human lineage had to exist because his first followers believed Joseph was his real father. Another nail in the coffin of the myth of the virgin birth. Second, and more important, while Luke is trying to show Jesus was descended from Adam and thereby related to all of us, in Matthew's account he is the descendant of David, the king, a secular ruler. All Jewish priests were Levites, not descended from David. There was an absolute wall between secular ruler and religious leaders by birth. Matthew's genealogy shows he expected Jesus to be a secular ruler, a descendent of David, not a religious leader, a Levite. In other words, in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus wasn't here to found some new religion but to proclaim the coming earthly Kingdom to the Jews. There is no other reason to have such a genealogy from David in Matthew.

Speaking of imperfection, these two genealogies disagree as to whom Jesus was actually descended from before Joseph: in other words, they are made up - fake. Matthew lists 40 names or generations between Jesus and Abraham while Luke lists 55 names or generations. You have to wonder then how someone calculated when the world was created by tracing back when there are two contradictory lines. One could almost say the Bible is perfect - perfectly fake!

This has been just the highlights of a much larger body of work. If you have any questions start with the books I mentioned. Then you can branch out from there. It is a big area and there are many different views as there are scholars. But the consensus is what I've detailed. 'Ignore the facts' fundamentalists are obviously wrong in their approach that uncritical belief and ignoring the facts is the right way. God, whatever that means to you, didn't create an irrational world where ignorance should rule.

Here is the Christian God, Jefferson's beast, in his own words...

1 Samuel 15:3 "Do not spare them; put to the death men and women, children and infants..."

Hosea 13:16 "...their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open." We can see where Charles Manson got his inspiration.

Psalm 137:9 "...he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." The psalms are to be sung to music. Such celestial Christian music to the Lord pleasing sound of baby's skulls being smashed against rocks.

2 Kings 2:23-24 In this passage God sends two bears to rip up and kill 42 kids for making fun of Elisha's bald head. I'm glad I only did that to my gym coach in seventh grade and got a wooden paddle to the ass. To me, the God portrayed in the Bible sounds more like a serial killer.

Let me ask a question of my Christian brothers and sisters who still are hanging on to their beliefs:

Why do we have evil in the world He created?

Is your God willing to prevent evil, but not able to? Then he is not omnipotent and Lucifer is greater.

Is your God able to, but not willing to prevent evil? Then he is Lucifer.

Is your God both willing and able to prevent evil? Then how can we possibly have so much suffering and evil in the world he created?

If he is neither willing nor able, why do you worship him as God?

One of those four is right. Thanks to Epicurus who 2,300 year ago saw the absurdity of a God who hangs around making your life miserable because he can. And yes, I know all of the Theological answers on why evil exists. Frankly, all of that belongs in the garden fertilizing plants. I defy anyone, other than a theologian or lawyer, both are professional con artists, to read Job and tell me, 'Yes, that makes sense to me.' As Jefferson said, "It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus." Like all rational people, this is a question you need to answer in your heart. If you can say, 'Yes, my God is a confused vicious murdering fiend who loves me unconditionally;' you have the right mindset to be a Christian.

The only Christian answer to the above is faith, you must have faith. Faith is the tool of the mountebanks because if they had truth on their side they wouldn’t need faith. The truth shines with its own crystalline purity. When there is no truth only smoke and mirrors then faith is required to cover the odor.

To sum up: 1) The Bible is acknowledged by its own scholars as filled with fables not facts, the book is riddled with inconsistencies and outright deceptions and filled with the most horrible crimes by its own God. 2) The period when the Gospels were written were a time of competing Mystery religions and the claims of the Christians are also made by those other religions and are as likely to be true; the evidence is conclusive - we should judge them all as likely to be true or none at all. 3) We really don't know for certain what the man Jesus really said as it has been changed in thousands of versions over time to fit various theologies, what we can say are most likely his own words are those which deny the orthodox views for why would an orthodox scribe change Jesus words to be non-orthodox, and those words deny his Godhood, he is a man, and he tells us he was trying to uphold the Jewish tradition, not found some new religion, in preparation for an apocalypse which did not come. 4) In so doing he pissed off the Roman governor and got himself killed, his bones scattered on the trash heap. No Resurrection, no Shroud of Turin. 5) Modern biblical scholarship denies the miracles ever happened. They are fiction.

Boy oh boy, reading that summary makes me a believer! NOT!

I'm not in the minority. In the 2011 British Census only 59% of the people self identified as Christian. More revealing is that of that 59% only 32% of them said they believed in Jesus resurrection and only 25% of them believed in the teachings of Christianity. An ongoing study of how many Americans actually attends Christian church found 17.7% go to church, and that number is declining. Just this morning I saw a poll on the Internet, Who is your Favorite Mary? 30% chose the Virgin and 26% chose Mary Poppins, about equal. I think it shows how really un-Christian we are that the Virgin was tied by Mary Poppins. The fables are falling. Get on board with the new rationalists.

In Joseph Ratzinger’s last book on how to understand Jesus he says you should not read the Bible in the Historical Critical method. Maybe he’s right. Only through the Abracadabra of the mountebanks can you reach a ‘higher’ truth. Maybe. But I think history shows that snake oil sellers never have your best interest at heart, they have their best interests at heart. Each person has to decide the importance of facts and rationality in their understanding of what is true.

As one of those idiots who didn't buy the snake oil the Christian theologians are selling, Albert Einstein, wrote in a 1954 letter, “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can change this.”

Honorable, but primitive? Well, he's nicer than I am. I don't see much honorable about the stories and side with Jefferson on that capricious three-headed beast, Yahweh, who orders children's heads bashed against rocks and then boasts about it in song.

All of this above is why I felt compelled to write this. I am sick and tired of the fanatic Christians beating people over the head about their fantasy beliefs. Quit holding up your John 3:16 signs at football games. Do you hold up these signs in your Church? Then quit holding them up at secular football games you idiot. I don’t care about your stupid delusions. You want to believe these obvious fallacies? Fine, but don’t tell me you are perfect and forgiven and I’m going to a non-existent Hell. You aren't perfect or forgiven and all of us are going to Valhalla to fight in Ragnarök before the end of the world. Or better, I’ll be reborn as a Buddhist while you cycle off to Hell. If there is any justice in the world that is what will happen to the Fundamentalists, they'll get exactly what they preached just as Calvin predicted. If I am going to accept that Jesus was a God based on these obvious fairy tales, then I must accept the thousands of other Gods, their stories are just as historically believable, men have worshipped with the same certainty and the hundreds of other afterlives available. So I’ll choose which one I want, thank you very much, and I think I'll choose Astarte, the Goddess of Prostitutes. At least her church provides something useful and fun!

.

A response to one readers comments

Bibliography

Butz, Jeffery. The Brother of Jesus and the lost teachings of Christianity. Rochester:Inner Traditions 2005

Eisenman, Robert. James the Brother of Jesus. New York:Penguin Books, 1997

Ehrman, Bart. After the New Testament, The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers. The Teaching Company lecture series, 2005

Ehrman, Bart. Forged: Writing in the Name of God. NewYork:HarperOne, 2011

Ehrman, Bart. Jesus, Interrupted. Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible. NewYork:Harper Collins, 2009

Ehrman, Bart. Misquoting Jesus, The story behind who changed the Bible and why. NewYork:Harper Collins, 2005

Ehrman, Bart. The New Testament. NewYork:Oxford University Press, 2004

Ehrman, Bart. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. NewYork:Oxford University Press, 1993

Helms, Randel. Gospel Fictions. Amherst:Prometheus Books, 1988

Maccoby, Hyam. The Mythmaker, Paul and the Invention of Christianity. New York:Barnes and Noble Books, 1998

Mack, Burton. Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth Harper Collins:New York, 1995

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