Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 30 - December 1, 2024
Outside the boundaries of pious thinking, many readers have concluded that the Bible presents shoddy morality in too many of its pages. After all, God didn’t step in to scold Lot, or his daughters.
With the first three commandments, we come face-to-face with a God who needs to be worshiped — in humans we call this narcissism.
These edicts are in line with the idea that God is jealous, a concept that derives from an era when tribal gods fought for territory and status.
If God wanted to pass on words of wisdom for human conduct, the last six commandments are a good beginning. But human lawmakers of the ancient Near East had come up with these guidelines well before Moses is purported to have received the tablets from Yahweh God on Mt. Sinai. People had already figured out that social stability is enhanced if individuals don’t kill, steal, and commit adultery.
instead of the existing first three commandments included the following three substitutes. Thou shalt not engage in war, tribe against tribe, nation against nation, race against race. War is abhorrent to the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not enslave other human beings; thou shalt not own slaves, neither shall thy relatives or employees own slaves. Slavery is an abomination to the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not hate, mistreat or malign other human beings because of the color of their skin. Can there be much disagreement that humanity would have fared much better with these three commandments at the
...more
this prediction in Mark 13 is a failed prophecy — a prophecy with a date attached that didn’t happen.
Add it to the very long list of unfulfilled promisse and prophecies
And here’s the crucial line: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air.”14 Paul expected to be alive himself when it happened.
Psalm 90:4, “For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.”17 Of course it was later Christians who landed on this text to make excuses for Paul. Yet, despite quoting a lot of Old Testament passages in his letters, Paul doesn’t mention Psalm 90:4 in his discussion of Jesus’s arrival.
There is no original Bible, anywhere. None of the original manuscripts of any of the books of the Bible have survived. How’s that for divine carelessness?
I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by scribes — sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals. We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.19
Why couldn’t God have preserved the original words of scripture, if he’d been able “to inspire them in the first place”?
God did not in fact want to preserve the words for us, Ehrman figured, since we don’t have them. And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words. In short, my study of the New Testament, and my investigations into the manuscripts that contain it, led to a radical rethinking of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change for me.
However, few of those who sat in Billy’s audiences, few of those who gaze reverently at the Bible on the altar every Sunday at church, realize that the richly bound, revered book isn’t the real thing. It is instead, the Processed Word of God.
Translators are commonly conservative theologians who have their own agendas, and who start their work with the conviction that the Bible is the Word of God. There have been blatant, egregious distortions. It’s no exaggeration to say that no modern copy of the Bible is the real thing.
The pious can claim that they are guided by the Holy Spirit as an aid to understanding, but “Holy Spirit” is as much a faith assumption as is “Word of God.” Hence, more arguing in circles, more guesswork. If the Holy Spirit has been playing any role, it’s been a very indecisive one. The interpretation of scripture has flown off in all directions. Jews and Christians, Catholics and Protestants, conservatives and liberals — to name just six broad categories — have been deeply divided on the meaning of important passages of scripture. And yet all — except for the likely exception of Jewish
...more
How can anyone claim the Holy Spirit is actually real given this fact? It is completely ludicrous
One thing religious fanatics have in common: They are certain they know what God is telling them to do.
And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.
Jesus is a complete asshole. Did he reimburse the pig farmer? 2000 pigs is someones livelihood people probably starved because of this stupid, negligent act.
You may have read it multiple times and thought, “Isn’t it wonderful how Jesus healed this anguished individual.” But what about the more literal minded Bible reader, who — even in this modern day — decides that demons are real and mental health care isn’t? For such a person, this passage is dangerous. Wouldn’t the God of the Universe know this?
But not every reader sees this command from Jesus as hyperbole. In 2004, a 21-year-old Texas man murdered his wife and children then plucked out his own eye after he was put in jail. He then quoted the passage above. A judge ordered the man to be evaluated by a mental health professional.
Bible believers have an easy defense here: This passage is no longer included in modern translations. But even that defense underscores the ongoing challenge of identifying the Bible as the Word of God when we consider that the snake-handling passage appeared in English translations of the Bible for about 1,900 years.
Grant’s analysis in his book, St. Paul. He calls Paul’s letters: …vividly varied and lively, but unrounded, unarranged, and muddled, making their points not by any orderly procedure but by a series of hammer-blow contrasts and antitheses. Paul is far too impulsive and enthusiastic to standardize his terms or arrange his material. He is often ambiguous — with results that have reverberated down the centuries. And he commits flagrant self-contradictions, which caused Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, among many others, the deepest anxiety.29
Making the problem worse is Paul’s “blend of Jewish thought with Greek expression — a forcible bringing together of two alien cultures.” Grant says, “it has always been possible to take widely differing views of what he intended to say.”30
Christian and secular thinkers have been agonizing over Paul’s meanings for centuries. Obviously, this can be good philosophical exercise, but it’s something else entirely to argue that the Word of God is within our grasp when we approach the writings of Paul. Many of his writings must be disqualified because they are virtually impossible to untangle.
God gave up on them? Gossips, haughty people, and rebellious children deserve to die? Some Christians may think this is okay, but I know many do not.
Why did God provide his word in a form that people cannot easily understand? Why isn’t God’s word more transparent? Paul’s Letter to the Romans is one of the charter documents of the Christian faith, yet most lay people find it an uphill battle to get through it and grasp its meaning. Scholars spend years trying to figure it out. Couldn’t God have found a better author, or given Paul more assistance?
It can also be noted as well that the Word of God hasn’t worked very well because it has too often proved to be dangerous. It plays into the hands of authoritarian personalities. It breeds intolerance and arrogance. When Christians have taken it upon themselves to spread the Word, they’ve often done so with brutality.
The anti-abortionist murdered the doctor because “he wanted him to stop doing things the Bible says is wrong, and start doing what the Bible says is right.”
Another flaw in the revelation claim is that the Word of God simply hasn’t worked very well. An “inspired book” that was cobbled together thousands of years ago hasn’t been the kind of success one would expect from the master designer of the Universe.
Indeed, the Bible has been suspiciously ineffective as the instrument of a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient Supreme Being to get vital ideas across to the whole human race. The Bible is anything but clear, even to those who believe in it and have studied it for years.
Apparently, people in Asia thought it weird that they had been kept out of the loop for such a long time. As Christopher Hitchens noted: “One recalls the question that was asked by the Chinese when the first Christian missionaries made their appearance. If God has revealed himself, how is it he has allowed so many centuries to elapse before informing the Chinese?”
Jesus warned that the final days of tribulation were near: ‘Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place.’ But they did not take place, and have not yet.
If the designer of the Cosmos is really trying to get through to us, an ancient book that is unknown or ignored by most of the human race, often bitterly disputed by those who do revere it, hardly seems the way to go.
There are no criteria for determining which words in the Bible derive from the mind of God, as opposed to the mind of the author who wrote the text. There is no way to tell. Period.
The clear promise of a cataclysmic event that would bring worldwide judgment upon humanity and usher in a new rule of God was predicted by Jesus and Paul, who both claimed the event would occur within the lifetimes of some of their listeners/readers. This big promise did not come true.
The Bible contains passages that are obviously outdated and others that can be hazardous to your health if misunderstood and taken too literally. There are passages that are mind-boggling and challenging to interpret for even the most learned theologians.
“Revealed truth” turns out to be an article of faith at best, wishful thinking or hallucination at worst. It does nothing to lift ideas about God out of the realm of speculation and guesswork.
By doing their job so well, generations of biblical scholars — usually devout believers — face the irony that the Bible misses the mark as reliable history, and in some ways, isn’t all that great even morally or spiritually.
The failures of the Bible, the most famous holy book in the world, force us back to the recurring question of this book: How could a deity competent enough to create this Universe — if he/she/it has any interest of being known or listened to — be such a massively poor communicator that we are left GUESSING ABOUT GOD.
But the conviction that Jesus lived a perfect life — despite the complete absence of information about his life from the ages of 13 to 29 — is regarded as gospel truth. And it’s not considered fair game for questioning.
Did God leave out sexuality when Jesus became a man? Christians would rather stare at the sun than think about the sexuality of Jesus.
“Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” That’s from the King James Version, but the New International Version, produced by the conservative Zondervan publishers, removes any hint of intimacy that some modern readers might find jarring, saying “the disciple whom Jesus loved was reclining next to him.” Get that man off Jesus’s bosom!
The great French Jesus scholar Charles Guignebert wrote in 1935: It was not the essence of Jesus that interested the authors of the Gospels, it was the essence of Christ, as their faith pictured him. They were exclusively interested, not in reporting what they know, but in proving what they believe.5
Jesus did lots of things not written about, he says, but what’s written is provided so his readers “...may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”6 This is the agenda of a theologian, not a historian.
For many centuries it was taken for granted that the authors of the Gospels were eyewitnesses to the ministry and teachings of Jesus. Then, about 200 years ago, serious research on the Gospels got underway. In the wake of the Enlightenment, curious thinkers took up the challenge of examining the Gospels as historians would, not as the theologians and preachers do. That’s when things began to fall apart, because it became clear that there were many unanswered questions about the Gospels. There are too many things missing from the four Gospels.
They are confident that the Gospels derive from eyewitnesses, people who knew, saw, and heard Jesus. But there is no evidence for this fond hope, and it is a very thin reed indeed to lean upon.
Who needs evidence when you have faith?
History, as opposed to folklore and novels, cannot be written without contemporaneous documentation. Historians rely on letters, diaries, inscriptions, newspaper accounts, articles, and testimonies written as closely as possible to the events described — and even those must be evaluated critically. In the case of Jesus, we have absolutely no such sources.
One of the reasons that the Gospels were so late in appearing, some 40 to 60 years or more after Jesus died, is that the early Christians had no motivation for writing these things down. If the general thrust of Jesus’s reported message can be trusted, he was sure that the Kingdom of God was going to be ushered in from heaven in the very near future. The early followers of Jesus were expecting him to bring history and Roman oppression to an end — soon!
the apostle Paul was a primary champion of this theology that focused on the massacre of most of humanity at the soon-coming end of the world. Only when the failure of this prophecy became painfully obvious, when Jesus didn’t arrive on the clouds, was the need felt for “memories” of Jesus to be preserved.
Only a wonderful and loving god could wipe out entire continents of people for never hearing of him
In his writings, Paul paid little or no attention to the actions and teachings of Jesus. Hence, his letters appear to contain no memories of the Galilean ministry, let alone quotations, of Jesus.
By the time Jerusalem had been laid waste in 70 CE, there were Christians far afield, in Damascus, Antioch, Greece, and even Rome. But we have no way of knowing if authentic memories of Jesus traveled with those disbursed far and wide. Even if this were the case, how many times and in what ways did the memories of Jesus diverge and become garbled as Christians scattered, time passed, and the stories were told to new converts? How could the stories not have been altered with each retelling?
Play a game of telephone with 6 people and see very simple short phrases get garbled and messed up, but no lets just take it for granted that this didnt happen here.
