Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament (2 page)
Read Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
We will examine all of these in due course, and as such - the New Testament’s inerrancy will dissolve before your very eyes… a magic trick I’ve been practicing for some time. Thus for now, I will leave you with my favorite religious joke, one which sums up the contradictory and flawed basis for this faith quite expertly:
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, “Stop! Don’t do it!”
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Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!”
He said, “Like what?”
I said, “Well, are you religious or atheist?”
He said, “Religious.”
I said, “Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?”
He said, “Christian.”
I said, “Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?”
He said, “Protestant.”
I said, Me too! Are your Episcopalian or Baptist?
He said, “Baptist!”
I said, “Wow! Me too! Are your Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord? He said, Baptist Church of God!”
I said, “Me too! Are your Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?”
He said, “Reformed Baptist Church of God!”
I said, “Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?”
He said, “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!”
I said, “Die, heretic scum!” and pushed him off.
A final word, in regards to the title, some may believe it is unnecessarily harsh at first glance, but I hope to clarify my reasoning for the choice in chapter one, and hopefully you too will believe the title deserving. If you’re a Christian, however, and still believe it’s too blasphemous, well, according to your faith, you have no choice but to forgive me anyway.
CJ Werleman www.cjwerleman.com
It was CS Lewis who wrote, in
Mere Christianity
, that Jesus had to have been either a liar, a lunatic or Lord. Thus becoming one of the most famous quotes used by both sides of the theological debate. The passage referred to is:
“
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Ultimately, CS Lewis made the leap from reason into faith and accepted the presupposition that Jesus had to have been God himself. His next chapter begins with:
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We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said, or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.”
How he made that personal decision is not for me to speculate. I can only assume he did not read the same Bible that I have before me, for Jesus proved unequivocally to be a lying merchant of false hope and irrefutably a false prophet. Now, the only defense we can lay before Jesus, for his numerous false promises, is that indeed he was a self-deluded madman, to borrow Lewis’ term once again. Is that too harsh? Am I over-reaching? Well, let’s see. The dictionary defines megalomania as:
A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence. An obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions.
Hmm smells like Jesus, doesn’t it? My favorite philosopher of all time is Bertrand Russell, and as a matter of fact I have a poster of him positioned near my desk, which doesn’t make me gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that, famously quipped:
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The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.”
Feared rather than loved, huh? Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “I have come not to bring peace, but a sword”? Or, how about the following little promise, one that demonstrates eternal suffering, in that oh so special Jesus homo-erotic way:
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As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:38-42 NIV)
The intense and somewhat comical examination of the New Testament will leave you with the understanding, and of this I have no doubt, that Jesus was indeed a liar and a lunatic. And certainly far from the Lord - C.S Lewis would have you believe. Well, possibly the moniker of Lord of the Lies, the Dean of Deceit, the Duke of Delusion would be more apt.
So, what of the lies, then? Certainly, there are varying degrees of lies or mistruths. For example, if Jesus had have promised his disciples, “Alright lads, listen up for a moment. At 7pm tonight I will be at the Temple to trial run my ‘Rabbi and a Jebusite walk into a bar’ joke. I will meet you guys there” Now, if Jesus got distracted with his messianic chores, or if he fell asleep on the massage table at the Bethlehem Fun Palace, thus missing his 7pm rendezvous with his small band of followers, then we can pass that off as either a little white lie, or more appropriately a scheduling mishap. Moreover, Jesus’ mishap, in this example, would have caused his band of dress wearing men little inconvenience.
Possibly, Simon missed his poker game, and Andy, his happy hour shots at the Tyre Tool Shed, but ultimately very little physical or emotional suffering would have been incurred. Hence, Jesus may be forgiven in the aforementioned hypothetical circumstance.
Problem is though; we can find numerous examples in the Bible that give us reason to vilify Jesus on the charge of deceit causing harm. In fact, we can point to an irrefutable case in which Jesus not only misrepresented himself, because he really believed himself to be God, but one that undoubtedly would have caused great suffering to his original band of brothers. But let’s first set the scene. Jesus gives the following as part of his long-winded diatribe atop the Mount of Olives:
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Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:25-27 NIV)
“Give no thought for the morrow” is the central philosophy of Jesus’ teachings. It’s olde English for “Don’t worry about tomorrow, because I’ve got that shit covered”. Effectively, Jesus is telling us that we need not concern ourselves with thrift, investment, child care, sowing crops, diet, and health. Now, why would he preach such a seemingly, on the surface, absurd life message? Well, the answer to that question comes just a few chapters later in the Book of Matthew, whereby Jesus describes to his disciples what the pending end of times will look like:
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Immediately after the distress of those days, ‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.” (Matthew 24:29 NIV)
Terrifying stuff, huh? But not to worry, our hero will arrive, and because of his unconditional love for us, (unconditional, that is, unless you have been naughty little Jew) he will escort the righteous to heaven:
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At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory.” (Matthew 24:30 NIV)
The earth’s final days will climax with the appearance of a rabbi Jew riding a fluffy white cloud over the skies of Manhattan? Ok, the Bible doesn’t give the locale for the prophecy of his return (tough shit for the Mormons who believe he will return to Missouri) but Jesus certainly gives us a date for the promised apocalypse:
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I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. “ (Matthew 24:34 NIV)
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Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.” (Mark 9:1)
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Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.” (Luke 21:32)
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Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34)
There is your smoking gun, people! The slam-dunking of your false prophet! The gunman on the grassy knoll just shot Jesus down. Booya!
As you can see, Jesus promised his followers in no uncertain terms that not only will he return, but he will also take God’s children to the kingdom of Heaven before his contemporaries would experience death. With the date of Jesus’ death more or less 35 AD, and a generation being no more than an additional forty years, this meant he repeatedly promised his second coming and salvation to all believers prior to the year 75 AD. Well, the year is now 2010, and with no sign of Jesus riding said cloud in the night’s sky, he is 1965 years late on his bullshit promise and his early followers, the ones who abandoned their life’s desires, their physical and financial health, lay where they fell, buried in the dirt. His true believers would’ve died with nothing and gone nowhere…
Bertrand Russell put it ever so eloquently in a speech given in 1929, when he said:
“
When Jesus said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively wise.”
We, today, have the luxury of passing this off with numerous nuanced theories but what we can’t nuance away is the fact that his teaching, ‘Don’t worry for tomorrow’, would have brought great misery on not only his followers but the founding or early members of the Christian church, as established throughout the Mediterranean by Saint Paul.
Keeping in mind that Paul makes mention of Jesus’ promise no less than thirty times throughout his letters to the early Christian churches, as a means of rallying the faithful. In fact, the second coming is a central component of Paul’s recruitment pitch, “Look, here ye at this new religion we’ve started. There was this Jewish dude named Jesus. Well, anyway, he walked on water, fed 5,000 people with two sardines, and his spirit flew into heaven three days after he was executed.”
Naturally, a common question from his mostly non-Jewish audience would have been, “If we join, what’s in it for us?” To which Paul offered, “Umm, He will return from Heaven to Earth, and we believers will all be given eternal life. Are you with me?” It’s a hell of a promise.
With passing time, the founding fathers of the Christian church started to become anxious, as evident by Paul’s letters, that the shot clock on forty years (generation) was running down. This anxiety caused many of the early followers of Paul to panic that with their aging, and the term of a full generation approaching, death would precede them witnessing the second coming. Paul responds to their concerns in his Epistle 1 Thessalonians:
