Bible: not written by God or Jesus

I’m sorry God but I don’t believe the Bible is such an important book for Christianity. The modern bible used by Christians contains the Old Testament so they’re holding onto some Jewish beliefs but not in the same way the Jewish people consider the Old Testament. Then Christians add in Jesus and Paul’s New Testament support of some of the old ways and they’ve got a messiah, a huge book, and an insurance policy to get into heaven.

God and Jesus wrote zero books of the Bible. Zero. While plenty of Christians claim the Bible is the “divine word of God”, it’s rather curious that God and Jesus didn’t contribute even a jot and tittle. Even just a single hieroglyphic on a special occasion. In the gospel of John, though, Jesus reportedly wrote in the dirt with his finger. What did he write? Nobody knows! Nobody recorded it. Can you believe that? Here’s a guy wandering around committing religious heresy and demonstrating miraculous things. He finally writes something down and everyone just wanders away leaving the message to be scuffed upon the sand. Why tell us that Jesus wrote on the ground at all if you’re not going to tell us what he wrote? Not happy, John! A bad decision made by John, in my opinion, but there we have it. Can’t go back and fix it now.

There are also the language differences between the historical period of the Bible and the progression of language overall. Hebrew, in the era of that day, did not contain vowels or punctuation. Earliest Greek manuscripts were written without spaces and all in capitals. Starting a sentence with a capital letter commenced in the 13th century but was not consistently applied until the 16th century. English language didn’t start using the apostrophe until the 16th century. At the same time as the church’s formal structure was evolving, Cardinal Stephen Langton divided the New Testament into today’s modern standard arrangement of chapters and the Old Testament followed soon after. These language conventions leave a lot of latitude for interpretive error over a long period of time. It would seem to highlight why the Bible is not ideally suited for a literary style of interpretation especially for those self-appointed Pastors who’ve simply given themselves the title without the education.

Plenty of the people teaching the Bible, the most influential book in history, have no qualifications whatsoever. I am not a theologian so I’m sure a religious academic could pull apart anything I write, but that is entirely my point. Anyone can preach the Bible and claim they’re led by God. There’s no formal qualification required to call yourself a Pastor. I could wake up one morning and start a church. I could call myself Pastor Karen and preach whatever sermon I choose.

Look at the denominations of Western Christianity: Catholic; Anglican; Uniting; Baptist; Presbyterian; Mormon; Lutheran; Jehovah’s Witness; Pentecostal; etc.  Many of these denominations do not agree with each other on many things. Hillsong, as a Pentecostal church, believe that speaking in tongues is vital as part of knowing the Holy Spirit. In a Catholic or Anglican church, it would be very unlikely to witness anyone speaking in tongues. All these denominations fall under the Christian umbrella although they disagree on so much, especially biblical interpretation.

So given the Christians can’t agree on biblical interpretation, settle back and let’s freely meander through the hills of blasphemy. I may be stoned for it or not, given whichever group of Christians you believe.

Let’s start with the Old Testament which is inherently the Jewish manifesto for living a good life as a Jew. Their focus of the Old Testament is contrary to the Christians’ narrative culminating in the prophesied arrival of Jesus in the New Testament. The order of books in the, that is the Hebrew Bible, has a different order of the books appearing in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. The books relating to a Christian’s prophetic belief in Jesus are actually placed after the Torah (the book of Moses) in the Hebrew Bible as a commentary on those events. So current Western Christianity is a Judeo-Christianity embracing some commonality with Judaism but only loosely following the Jewish beliefs in the Old Testament. That creates significant confusion on the interpretation of the Old Testament. Which religion is going to claim they’re correct or declare they might have made some monumental error in the last few thousand years?

Then there’s the New Testament. Most people have heard of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John which are the gospels talking about the life of Jesus. Matthew, Mark & Luke are all pretty similar so it’s thought they might have been written from stories rather than firsthand and they basically copied each other. Matthew might have been there, but it’s uncertain. The gospel of John was initially written in Greek. It is also known that John was illiterate, uneducated and didn’t speak Greek. So, um, how was the Gospel according to John written at all? I have no explanation for that. The theologians can discuss that.

The New Testament also included a writer named Paul, formerly known as Saul. Saul/Paul is attributed with writing thirteen, or perhaps fourteen, books in the New Testament with a total of twenty-seven books. Saul had a chequered past, and I use that term mildly. He was a religious extremist who persecuted and killed people failing to adhere to his religion. Let’s apply the life choices of Saul with the equivalent in the modern life: Charles “Tex” Watson. Tex was a member of the Manson Family and was convicted of the murder of seven people. Not a terribly nice guy by community’s benchmark. In 1975, Tex converted to Christianity and, in 1981, became an ordained minister. Now, call me cynical but I’m not going to be attending Tex Watson’s church. I just can’t be sure there’s nothing broken in Tex’s head. Strangely, that caution and rationality is not applied to Saul of Tarsus who converted to Christianity and started many churches. Saul/Paul has the same murderous history as Tex Watson, maybe worse. Yet Christians the world over give Paul’s writings the same ordination as if they were from Jesus. Why? I don’t understand it. It’s a one-sided conversation anyway. The books attributed to Paul are letters to churches in response to letters he’d received; there’s no recording of the outgoing letters so we are largely clueless as to any context whatsoever.

In Paul’s defense, according to my father, nobody could write about love the way Paul did without having experienced it himself. OK, but it still doesn’t say there wasn’t something broken in Paul’s head. Paul applied the same fervour to starting churches as he’d applied to previously murdering Christians. There’s a reasonable chance of carrying significant emotional baggage into the churches he started and that continues to this very day. The New Testament has its “Paul-ine Gospels” that contribute just as much, if not more, to modern Christianity than Jesus. Paul and Tex: two peas in a pod yet one has been canonised.