The Wholly Bobble
(say it aloud...)
“The Bible is rubbish.” John W Loftus, author; ‘Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity’
“It’s (Mark’s Gospel’s) all just one, big, made-up story, a parable of parables, which if taken literally will ensure your damnation, and only if understood symbolically can you be saved.”
Richard Carrier, Ph.D., ‘Jesus From Outer Space; 2020
‘God is not the author of confusion.’ Paul (1 Corinthians 14:33)
‘…can you think of a single book that has caused more confusion than the Bible?’ Dan Barker (OXFORD UNION SOCIETY)
“Moses, Aaron 'n Abraham; They're all a waste of time…”
Frank Zappa, ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’,
My position on the Bible is that it is one of the worst written tellings of myth ever put to paper. It's distorted, ignorant, and nonsensical and is without a cogent back-story of any substance.
The back-story is crucial to a decent myth; what JRR Tolkien called the 'distant horizons' of the tale. The Biblical 'accounts' can't be taken any more seriously than one does the Marvel Universe and certainly less seriously than Tolkien's own Legendarium.
The Bible is a hodge-podge of non-sequiturs stupidity scattered amongst heinous, atrocious acts of murder, pillage, rape and destruction and flavored with goofy contradictory 'morals' based on subservience and total devotion to an ill-defined, jealous and wrathful god.
If it must be assumed by Believers that the human writers of the Bible were guided by god, then it must be contended that god is an idiot. For an all-knowing supreme intelligence, 'god' didn't seem to understand his own story and couldn't relate it for properly or in an appropriate era wherein the story could be verified and substantiated.
A word of note: Isn’t it curious that the god of the Bible waited hundreds of thousands of years, (millennia!) through countless empires (e.g. Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, etc.) until the Hebrews appeared before revealing his ‘Holy Word’? Isn’t it odd that ‘god’ didn’t give instruction to those proto-humans who came before homo sapiens? And isn’t it odd that ‘god’ didn’t give instructions to the ‘brainiacs’ of the Greeks or the Romans or the Babylonians or India or China? More mysterious ways? Talk about ‘ineffable’, eh?
Isn’t it odd that an all-knowing, all-powerful god would deem to reveal his/its plan, nature and laws in oral tradition and thence in texts written in obscure and dying languages only to be copied, altered, edited, amended and interpolated throughout the centuries and would not protected his/its ‘holy word’ from the ravages of time, war, political unrest and religious fanaticism so that only a few scraps, at best, might survive?
(Not of course - to be clear - that such an entity as ‘god’ ever existed and not that any of the text on the surviving scraps were ‘inspired’ by such an entity.)
Discussed in this section will the ‘errancy’ of the Bible and the fact that little can or should be taken from the Bible as fact. There are facts contained within the canonical books of the Bible, of course. The Bobble has been called ‘historic fiction’ in that there are bits of authenticated historic elements woven into the Bible stories. There was a place called Jerusalem, for instance, but the stories, themselves, written within the ‘Bobble’ are guff and blather.
Let’s begin with the general nature of the texts we refer to as the Bible. To start with, the Bible was written for the most part, anonymously. It is only from Church tradition that names such as Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul are attributed to books of the Bible. Next, each sect of Jewish faith (there were many, by the way…) had their own versions of the what Christians call the Old Testament’. Jewish scholars, it should be noted, didn’t determine a canon until the 2nd century CE.
The Christians had a multitude of various sects, as well; each of which had their own version of the ‘New Testament’ as well as the Old. Entire texts referenced by Paul, Irenaeus and Clement do not now exist. Justin Martyr documented a whole slew of such texts which disappeared from the Jewish Bible but which he swore were extant in his own version of the Scriptures. Origen Adamantius of Alexandria, an early Christian scholar, ascetic, and theologian, later commented on this sort of thing – the varieties of utilized and accepted Scriptures - being commonplace. As will be stated later in this section, the books of Christian Bible weren’t determined or ‘canonized’ until about 500 CE! In other words, there was no canonical Bible until centuries after the end of the Jesus narrative. Citing the inerrancy of the Bible is akin to writing a message on Jello, then sending it through the mail and citing what comes back to you in the morning post as inerrant.
The following is a transcription of a discussion between Richard Carrier, (PhD. in ancient history from Columbia University) and Seth Andrews, former Christian preacher, author and broadcaster. In conversation, Carrier touches upon some of the vagaries and variety of the letters of Saul/Paul and the books of the New Testament. If such a lack of standard was assigned to journalism, one would place little credence in the reporting.
Dr. Carrier: The Gospels we have – the canonical Gospels - were probably written between 70 and about 120 or 130 AD. We can’t really get any more precise than that.
All the other Gospels copy from Mark, in one way or another. Even the Gospel of John occasionally uses material from Mark – just not verbatim.
Seth Andrews: “Can we verify the author of any single book at any time?”
Carrier: “In the New Testament, certainly there are seven letters written by Paul that most scholars believe were actually written by Paul and were written in the 50s AD. Beyond that we’re not really sure. The other epistles, some of them were forgeries we’re pretty sure, the others that we’re not sure were forgeries, we don’t know whether the name attached to them is the name of the author, or not, or the name that was invented for it. And even if it’s the name of the author, we don’t know which person that is. For example, there’s an epistle from James in the ‘NT’ but it doesn’t explain which James that is, so we don’t actually know which one we’re talking about there, and similarly with other authors.”
“The Gospels don’t say who they were written by at all. The only Gospel that even mentions a witness or having a source, for example, or even mentions a specific source as a person is the Gospel of John, and that person is the so-called ‘Beloved Disciple’ - which John doesn’t even explicitly name – and the authors of John (and that’s plural: authors) say that ‘we got our information from this guy’, right? So, they don’t even name him explicitly, but this ‘guy’, they’re talking about is a character that appears nowhere in the story in any of the other Gospels, he’s been inserted into the story of the previous Gospels by the authors of ‘John’, so he seems to be an invented character; it’s an invented source.”
“There’s an author by the name of Alan Cameron who wrote a book on Greek mythography. And he doesn’t talk about this case in particular but he talks about other examples where in Greek mythography, it was very popular to invent sources; even naming them. So, this is a common thing in mythology; to invent the source and say ‘Hey! I got this information from this guy. And he was really there!’ and y’know, that kind of thing…”
“So, we know that this was a trend, so I don’t think we can even trust that. But even that – and again, John does not (garbled) name this guy – and I think when you analyze the text who they mean is ‘Lazarus’, who is an invented character for reasons that I’ve talk about in other venues before. He was invented by John to argue against the fictional Lazarus that Jesus talks about in Luke.”
“And so, here we have really the Gospel of John is written by a couple of… a plurality of authors, who don’t identify who they are, who say that they’re reading some other book that we don’t have, by this other disciple, who they don’t name except to suggest that he’s Lazarus, who is a fictional character.
So, that gives an idea…”
“The book of Luke and Acts (as one unit) …We have two versions of that. One of which is almost 20% longer than the other, so, they have different material in them.”
Here’s a bit more of the bollocks that is taken as ‘god’s holy word’: The Nephilim are known in the Bible as great warriors and biblical giants; the hybrid sons of fallen angels! (see Ezekiel 32:27 and Numbers 13:33). Genesis 6:1–4 tells the readers that the Nephilim (which means ‘fallen ones’) were the product of copulation between the divine, angelic beings (i.e. sons of god) and human women (i.e. the daughters of Adam). One will too often find photographs of the skeletal remains of giants found in remote locations which are offered by Believers as ‘proof’ that giants existed and thus ‘prove’ that the Nephilim were real and thence the Bible is a source of ‘Truth’!
Say what? Divine beings? The sons of god? Hold the phone! Wasn’t Jesus the one, true son of god? Another bit of mystery from the mysterious ways of god? How ineffable!
What balderdash!
Other balderdash such as the Creation Myth, the Garden of Eden, the Noachian flood, the Exodus and so on has been refuted time and again by archeologists, biologists, cosmologists and secular scholars. All to little avail as concerns True Believers. (sigh)
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