Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament (7 page)
Read Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
Martin Goodman, in his book
Rome & Jerusalem
, examines the spread of Christian influence through the Roman Empire, writes:
“
Jesus lived and died in Galilee and Judaea in the first half of the first century CE. That this fact is one of the few which can be asserted with any certainty about the founding figure of the Christian Church is the result not of a paucity of ancient stories about Jesus but of contradictions between multifarious tales which abounded among his followers in the two centuries after his death, as they tried to extract religious meaning from his life and teachings. The story of a remarkable individual put to death in Jerusalem but retaining great power and resurrection was elaborated and altered by the pious over succeeding generations.”
What do we know of the respective Gospel identities? Well, we know they were highly educated Greek speaking authors. Who were Jesus’ disciples? They were peasant class, illiterate, Aramaic speaking goat herders and fishermen. At the start of the first century, it is estimated that less than 10% of the Roman Empire could read or write, and the vast majority of those that could, could do so only at a very rudimentary level i.e. the extent of their ability was to pen ‘my name is Bob’ and ‘damn, that Cleopatra chick is hot’.
The skill of reading and writing was a privilege of the wealthy elite, the upper classes, who had the resources to pay for an education. They also had plenty of time up their sleeves, as their every whim was taken care of by their slaves. Furthermore, aside from clearly not being of the underclass, which Jesus was said to have attracted, the Gospel authors were as ignorant of Palestinian geography as they were of Jewish customs. Therefore, it is most likely that the Gospels wrote about Jesus on the back porch of their respective Athens or Roman villas as they enjoyed a selection of the very finest Tuscan wines.
If we recall Chapter one, we discussed how the stories of Jesus passed by word of mouth in its early days, using Bart D Ehrman’s illustration of a ‘word of mouth religion’ of fairytales and myths. From there, what we have in the four Gospels, are four guys that started to put these campfire stories of mythology and lore to paper.
Presumably, Mark, whoever he was, heard the verbal story of how Jesus healed a man with leprosy, became suitably impressed then wrote about it. He started collecting all of these fanciful stories along the way until he had what he regarded as a complete picture of who Jesus was.
The question now is; did Matthew and Luke write down the stories, in the same manner as Mark, which they heard around the campfire while toasting marshmallows? If the answer is yes, then you are getting close to having three independent records of Jesus’ life, notwithstanding the fact that their stories would still be based on little more than hearsay. Unfortunately for Christianity, however, the answer is a resounding NO! Matthew and Luke did not write independent of Mark, they in fact copied from Mark, but then added stories and verses to suit their own motives, theology, tradition and respective culture.
The Gospel of Mark was written more or less in 70 AD, thirty-five years after Jesus’ death. Many years later Matthew and Luke plagiarized from Mark, added their own spin with some additional external sources, which scholars identify respectively as ‘Q’ (Matthew) and ‘L’ (Luke), thrown in for good measure. Thus, Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the ‘Synoptic Gospels’. Synoptic meaning ‘seeing together’ or with the same eye.
John, however, just shoots from the hip and distances himself from the other three in so many theological ways. He goes as far as to say that Jesus is God, which is ultimately why John has become the favorite Gospel for conservative nut-bag Christians today. Yes, I’m looking at you John 3:16 sign carrying guy. Many of the most revered and most celebrated stories are unique to John i.e. the woman taken into adultery, the raising of Lazarus, the seven signs, the water into wine, and the healing of a man born blind. Such gratuity, such embellishment, such fairytale hopefulness!
Essentially, the biographical picture of Jesus is drawn from, in the most, Mark’s gospel, who merely recorded the things he heard about Jesus. As an exercise you should read the Gospel of Mark aloud using a stopwatch to time your effort. What you will discover is this: you can, more or less, read the entire book in less than two hours. That’s it! A two-hour monologue of the most famous man in history is, effectively, all that we have.
While Matthew and Luke add their own respective ‘flavor’ (which actually tastes a lot like an evening of bad decisions), often giving varying reasons for events with added mythology on top of Mark’s stories, the similarities remain obvious even to a casual reader. In my first book,
God Hates You, Hate Him Back
, I showed the main stories of the four Gospels side by side, providing the reader with a comparative analysis and birds-eye view.
John’s gospel, however, is its own unique barrel of monkeys! A majority of the stories found in the Gospel of John are not found in the other three, and likewise, the stories found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke are not found in John. Effectively, all four Gospels do their best, with a rear view mirror, to make things appear in harmony. Which I’m sure would have worked if humanity had stayed the rabble of poor cretins who were satisfied by the apparent ‘truthiness’ of the stories in the first place.
In regards to this, I do enjoy Christopher Hitchen’s snarky take:
“
...just like the Old Testament, the ‘New’ one is also a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right.”
As we will review in later chapters, the variances in content are stark, and the discrepancies breathtaking. Furthermore, Paul makes very little mention of Jesus’ life, as he concerns himself mostly on the death and resurrection; what Jesus’ death means; and preparation for the second coming.
The thorns in the side of faith don’t stop here, however. Further muddying the waters is the fact we do not have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible. The originals are lost. We don’t know when and we don’t know by whom. What we have are copies of the copies. In some instances, the copies we have are twentieth generation copies. We have to bear in mind that 2,000 years ago there were no Kinkos, mass media, book publishers, or printing press. If someone wrote a book there’d only be one copy. That is until someone else thought the book was worth a read and they’d, in turn, make their own copy. Let me illustrate.
Let’s say, for example, that in 100 AD I wrote a book titled
How to Make Love like Tiger Woods.
My neighbor sees my book resting on the coffee table and decides that he too would like to get on the Tiger program and asks if he can have a copy. I oblige, but the question becomes - how do we make a copy with no printers, as was the case with Rome 1,900 years ago?
The only way is for him to make a hand written copy of my book, the original. Subsequently, for the next two months my neighbor spends his evenings writing his copy of my book. BUT do you think his copy will be identical to mine? Well, most likely not. He may not think the chapter titled ‘
Don’t Give Your Home Phone Number to Randoms’
to be relevant to his situation, thus he omits that. He may also not be comfortable with my liberal use of the word ‘fuck’, because I am known to use ‘fuck’ as a punctuation mark. Thus, he omits all the fucks. And a few other changes here and a few changes there, and maybe the addition of one or two of his own chapters. So, now we have two copies of
How to Make Love Like Tiger.
But while being similar the two are far from being identical.
We move on. Let’s say my neighbor’s boss wants to improve his success rate away from home, like Tiger. He now makes a copy of my neighbor’s copy, his copy a variation of my original. With his omissions here, and his own additions there, we now have three copies all unalike or unique in their own way. And it goes on and goes on and goes on.
Despite my fifth grade sense of humor, or lack thereof, this is an excellent illustration of how we came to possess the copies that we have some 2,000 years down the track. This understanding really foils the claim that the Bible is the word of God. How can it be so when we don’t really have any bloody idea what the original word of God was?
The wonderful HL Mencken writes in his book The Treatise on the Gods:
“
The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having being tampered with.”
Nothing supports Mencken’s assertion better than the story of how it is that we have the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. The KJV was compiled only 400 years ago in 1611, a full fifteen hundred years after the Gospels and Paul had penned their respective original works. Despite a Texas Governor’s loopy quip during a Gubernatorial debate, the original manuscripts of the Bible were not written in English. They weren’t, just trust me on this!
The New Testament manuscripts were written in Greek but the very first published edition of the Greek New Testament was not produced until 1522. Some crazy Dutch dude by the name of Erasmus took seven years to compile
Edito Princeps
, meaning first published edition. It is from Erasmus writings that the writers/translators of the King James Version used to pen what many American fundamentalist Christians believe is the inerrant word of God.
Now, here’s where it gets shaky. Where did Erasmus get his manuscript copies of the gospels and epistles? Did they fall from heaven? Of course they didn’t. The simple truth, the clog wearing Erasmus threw both legs over the back of his pony and galloped to Basel, Switzerland, the land of dark chocolate, the home of Roman Polanski, and even darker porn.
Anyway, when Erasmus got to the Swiss city did he find a treasure trove of original manuscripts? No, he didn’t. What he got there was just a bunch of medieval versions. As matter of fact, he copied from a 12
th
century copy of the gospels. Do you have any idea how many copies of copies and how many sets of scribes’ hands the translations got polluted by before the guy who wrote his copy in the 12
th
century? The mind boggles.
Further, the version of the gospels that Erasmus used contained the respective stories of the woman taken in adultery (‘Cast the first stone’) in John, and the last twelve verses of Mark. These passages were never originally included in the gospels. In other words, these were stories added on down the line by anonymous writers with their own theological, traditional and cultural motives.
Once again, the above is not a contentious issue as Biblical scholars are unanimously in agreement that the original New Testament manuscripts are lost to us. Your pastor that was a former drug addict or used car salesman, who now preaches the ‘Good Word’ to you on Sunday’s in between choruses of uber cool (but seriously gay) Christian rock music may tell you otherwise, but he’s wrong. And ignorant. And ugly. Also, he’s sleeping with your wife.
A majority of church leaders are not trained in textual criticism, let alone understand the authenticity issues as they relate to manuscript transmission. Hell, even Wikipedia makes the following statement:
“
In attempting to determine the original text of the New Testament books, some modern textual critics have identified sections as probably not original. In modern translations of the Bible, the results of textual criticism have led to certain verses being left out or marked as not original. These possible later additions include the following:
-The ending of Mark
-The story in John of the woman taken in adultery,
Most bibles have footnotes to indicate areas that have disputed source documents. Bible commentaries also discuss these, sometimes in great detail.”
The variances amongst the copies; that is, the evidently obvious changes - both big and small - that were made to the Jesus narrative troubled the founding fathers of the Church, so much so that Origen once complained:
“
The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.”
This is a breathtaking admission from the early Church. Admirable but not as humorous as Origen’s retort to Celsus:
“
Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its characters to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticism.”
There you have it in black and white, my peeps. Not only are the respective third hand accounts of Jesus tampered with, but we’ve also discovered that this religion was started for the simpletons of the Roman Empire - for the purpose of reunification (control). A kind of theology for dummies, if you will. Sure, some smart people joined the ranks along the way such as Augustine and Aquinos, who, by the way, demanded all heretics be burnt to a stake. But it would appear the lure of an afterlife is a hard offer to resist no matter how high your intelligence quotient. It was on this promise that Christianity began to flourish.
