MAY 2008

Who wrote the Bible? The answer is fascinating: no one knows. That’s the God’s (!) truth. No one has a clue. Fundamentalists will quote individual words (which are translations of translations) and pore over them as if they were somehow sacred. But the books of the Bible were chosen arbitrarily and are impossible to date accurately. Most are impossible to date at all, unless you consider referring to 3,000 years ago, plus or minus a few centuries, as dating! How did this come to be? How did the most “holy” book in the world end up as a mish-mash? The answer is really simple. The very fallible, agenda-pursuing humans who patched it together, voted on it. True story.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a tiger by the toe;
If he hollers, let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe!

That little ditty echoed throughout my childhood. Those words were regarded as near sacred in determining who gets to roll the dice first in Monopoly or who is “it” in tag or who gets to be Flash Gordon while playing outside. When you’re young enough you have not yet figured out how the counting will end. After all, it depends on how many people are being counted and who starts the counting. So it seems random and haphazard and for the children using the method it is. And that is precisely how the “holy” Bible was ultimately put together—eeny, meey, etc. What is wrong with this picture?

It wasn’t until 325 A.D. that serious consideration was given to the hundreds of manuscripts available for inclusion in the Bible. That’s your first red flag right there. This was over three centuries since the supposed birth of Jesus. Why so long? Shouldn’t “divine” revelation be as quick and easy as “poofing” something into existence on an I Dream of Jeannie TV episode? Apparently not. In 312 A.D. the Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision about a cross in the sky and took that to mean he would win the next day’s battle. He won. So obviously Christianity was true. That was his thought process. I am not making this up. So, in 325, he called the thousand (or so) Christian bishops to attend what came to be knows as the First Council of Nicaea, in order to put together some sort of organized Christian book. Anywhere from 250 to 318 people attended. No one knows. Accounts differ. Another red flag.

There were hundreds of documents, letters and gospels available for inclusion in this brand-new Bible, all of them considered important by someone. One attendee was Eusebius of Nicodemia who was not only a Christian bishop but the patriarch of Constantinople. He was an important guy and Constantine relied on him to help organize this massive undertaking. Just one problem: Eusebius was an adherent of “Arianism” which was the doctrine that held that Jesus was created with divine attributes but was not himself fully divine. The fur flew over this one. End result: The First Council of Constantinople in 381 ruled that Arianism was out. Full divinity was in. Naturally Jesus also appeared briefly as fully human, which leaves the problem of human problems: hunger, pimples, snoring (?), dandruff, insect bites, constipation and all else human. Did Jesus have pimples? But that’s another story.

Keep in mind that four centuries had passed before anyone could decide what God was actually trying to “reveal” to humans. Four centuries is a long time in any history of any kind. In this case it’s ridiculous. God’s “guiding hand” would seem to have had suffered from tremors of some sort.

Left Behind

Unlike the science fiction story of the same name, the “left behind” books and epistles, which might have been included in the Bible, are never explained. Why they were left out should be not only important but self-evident to today’s theologians; but it is not. The theologians on Banned from the Bible (see: Sources) breezily write that question off as if it were less than a mere nuisance. Well, religionists, it could not be more important. To worship and live your whole life based on a single book, and not care who wrote the book or when or why, means you’re either (a) naïve or (b) stupid or (c) both.

Here are a very few examples of some of those books left behind. A few of the names may be vaguely familiar: The Gospel of Thomas, which told stories of Jesus as an infant and a child. In this telling Jesus was a bit of a brat and it’s tricky to try to imagine a divine brat. But then it’s even trickier to imagine a divine dirty diaper. The Book of Enoch is not just gratuitously violent, but features “angels” coming “down” to earth to have sexual intercourse with human females. The result of this sexual frolicking? Giants! I am not making this up either. The Lives of Adam and Eve chronicles many details of their stay in the Garden of Eden and their various sins. In this case Eve is more of a bitch than in the well-known version. She succumbs to Satan twice! But in both accounts neither Adam nor Eve notices that they have any genitals until after they sin. One wonders how they urinated up until then.

Then there’s the dreaded The Gospel According to Mary. This tells a very different story about Mary Magdalene than the one that has been handed down over the centuries. Far from being a prostitute, the Mary in this Gospel is smart, independent and, much more important, the recipient of exclusive, important “teachings” from Jesus. One of the theologians featured on Banned nonchalantly referred to this independent, intelligent woman as not being acceptable for The Bible, as if we should all understand that. Hello? I at least don’t “get it.” (The Koran accepts a lot of the Old Testament as true, and reveres Mary a great deal. But that’s a story for another time.) The men who compiled the Bible could not accept the idea that Jesus would entrust his precious teachings to a woman. Women in the Bible are either virgins or whores. There is no in between.

There is also The Book of Jubilees sometimes called The Little Genesis. It tells the entire story of the creation of the world up through Moses. And there is The Gospel of James that tells of the Virgin Mary’s mother being conceived immaculately. There is also The Gospel of Nicodemus. And so on. There are scores of what are called the “Gnostic” gospels which were considered a threat by the early Church Fathers, and these were strictly forbidden. They were too mystical and spoke of individual revelations and referred to a Good God and a Bad God. Yes, like the Wizard of Oz. After all, the Gnostics asked, how could a Good God have created sin and hell? Good question.

Why were these and hundreds of other documents discarded? Well, they just did not pass the smell test with the Church Fathers, all of whom, remember, were mere mortals. One example of a banned idea was that one of Adam’s and Eve’s sons, Seth, married his sister. (How could it be otherwise, though, unless he married his own mother?) But such deletions are completely arbitrary and subject to whims and certainly should not be acknowledged as the inspired word of an all-powerful God.

Pick a Letter, Any Letter

The Bible is made up of what scholars now refer to as four distinct documents, all written in wildly different eras. (There are divergent documents within those documents, but that’s another long story.) Anyway, these accounts are referred to by letters—J, E, P and D. We’ll only look at a couple of examples of why they are all, according to the initials I would assign, complete BS. Consider the biblical story (stories) of Creation.

The “J” and “E” documents offer separate and differing accounts of Creation. And they differ dramatically. Yet both versions were woven together, even though they are contradictory, and they made the final cut so to speak. That is why the Bible contains a very confusing Creation Story. The “J” text is estimated to have been written approximately, very approximately, in the ninth century B.C. and the “E” document around the eighth century B.C. In one version plants are created first, then animals and then humans. In the other, a male human is created, then plants, then animals and only after every last ferret and worm had been created, God created female humans. Shoving male chauvinism aside for the moment, which is hard to do when talking about the Bible, which version is correct? They can’t both be right! Doesn’t anyone care about this glaring mistake?

Then of course there’s The Flood. Here “J” and “P” are combined leading to a thoroughly impossible scenario. One account has Noah gathering up animals two by two, and immediately after that he is gathering them up seven by seven. What the hell is that all about? Am I the only one to have read the Bible and noticed these things? How can anyone sweep such discrepancies under the rug and carry on blithely as if everything were just peachy fine? Actually it is anything but.

A Date by Any Other Name…

…might be a fig. Be that as it may, when were all these biblical books written? Well, who knows? Who cares? Today’s scholars can only use the known, that is historical reigning Roman Emperors as a reference in determining dates. So, since the Bible clearly and unambiguously claims that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the King, then he, Jesus, had to have been born no later than 4 B.C. What a delicious irony! Jesus could only have been born a minimum of four years before the birth of Jesus. After you stop laughing though, consider the import of this paradox. If the early Church Fathers were plainly wrong about the date of the birth of the Savior of the World, which led to our truly meaningless but now necessary calendar, what else in the Bible is incorrect? Today’s believers seem oblivious to such concerns.

But shouldn’t all of this be important? Shouldn’t all Jews and Christians and Muslims be a bit more concerned about the truth of the Bible stories? It seems to me that if you’re going to kill people for breaking the rules in a book, you ought to have a reliable rule book. If you’re going to teach people how to achieve salvation after death, your story backing up that idea should be crystal clear. Jesus was said to have died by crucifixion. Then he supposedly rose from the dead. I think we’d all agree that this is a rather Big Deal. So, the story of that resurrection, which is told not once but repeatedly in the New Testament, should be coherent and crystal clear, right? Well, guess again. From my first book, “In God We Trust: But Which One?”—

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To illustrate just how confusing the Gospels are regarding the resurrection of Jesus, I tried to write a simple story of what happened on that first Easter Day, using only the Gospels as sources. This is what I came up with: When the sun had risen or when it was still dark, we’re not sure which, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, or Mary Magdalene, the mother of James, and Salome, or Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and some other women, or just Mary Magdalene, we’re not sure who, went to visit Jesus’ tomb. They came to bring spices to anoint the body, or the body had already been spiced and they just came to take a look, we’re not sure which. When they (she) arrived they encountered one angel sitting on the stone, or one young man sitting inside the tomb on the right, or two men standing inside, or two angels, each sitting on one end of the funeral bed, we’re not sure which.

The messengers either told the women not to be afraid, since Jesus had risen from the dead, or they asked one woman why she was crying, we’re not sure which. The women either told no one about it, or they told all eleven of Jesus’ disciples about it, we’re not sure which. Mary, Jesus’ mother, first saw her resurrected son before she went to see the disciples, or after, we’re not sure which. When Mary returned from the tomb, she either knew Jesus had been resurrected, or she did not know he had been resurrected, we’re not sure which. Jesus could be touched after his resurrection, or he could not be touched after his resurrection, we’re not sure which.

After appearing to the women, Jesus next appeared either to his eleven disciples, or to two disciples in the country, or to two disciples in Emmaus, or to ten disciples, or to Peter and then to Jesus’ twelve disciples, we’re not sure which. Of course by this time Judas was dead so that there could only be eleven disciples, unless they had gained one since the crucifixion, in which case he was never named or referred to in any way. (Judas died either by falling down and having his “bowels gush out” or by hanging himself, we’re not sure which.) After his resurrection, Jesus first appeared to his disciples on a mountain in Galilee, or in Emmaus, or in Jerusalem (seventy-five or so miles from Galilee), we’re not sure which. The disciples marched (must have been “quick-time”) back and forth between Jerusalem and Galilee, walking a hundred and fifty miles in one day.

Jesus ascended into heaven the same day that he rose from the dead, or he stayed on earth for at least eight days more, or for at least forty days more, we’re not sure which. Or he may possibly not have ascended at all, since Matthew and John make no mention of this astonishing event. If he did ascend, he did it from near Jerusalem, or from Bethany, or from the Mount of Olives, we’re not sure which. I think it’s safe to say that the above account is muddled at best, and ridiculous at worst. Thus far, though, no one has been able to write a more coherent account, including Christians who have challenged me on this point.

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In Christopher Hitchens’s book, God Is Not Great, he writes, “You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination.” He was talking about the Koran, but I think it is the perfect analogy for the creation of the Bible. (More about Hitchens at a later date.)

The New Testament’s book of Titus offers a clear admonition: “But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain.” (Titus 3:9) Hmmm. I take that to mean, “Believe because we say so!” Sometimes you have to say that to a seven-year-old, but to adults? It is insulting and condescending and it just plain doesn’t work. Nor does the admonition in 2 Tim 3:16: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine….” Or not. I believe I have made a convincing “or not” case.

For a primitive, ignorant people, most of whom can barely write their names in the ground with a stick, yes, the Bible works. As a divinely inspired book by an almighty God, intended for all peoples in all eras all over the planet, it sucks. The Bible contains more contradictions than can be counted. The rules to live by that are offered are silly or cruel or both. To think that the United States of America, in the 21st century, will not balk at electing a President who will claim adherence to this Bronze Age writing with its Stone Age thinking, is more than a little frightening. We Americans, who consider ourselves modern and enlightened, are still enslaved by this barbaric book. We can only wonder why the rest of the industrial world has passed us by on this one. What is wrong with us?

Cut & Paste

So, in the end, how was the Bible put together? Cut and paste. When it comes to something as important as the Word of God, I guess it’s a show of hands all around, is it? Kind of like voting for who gets to be hall monitor in the third grade. The only problem is that the Bible seems a tad more important. Let’s see: hall monitor, eternity in hell. Yes, I’d say they really shouldn’t utilize the same selection process. How many people know that the Bible is the product of this random, haphazard method? I’d estimate almost none. Those who do know about it, but still believe it is the Word of God, will say that God was the driving force in those votes. Say what? What kind of absurd arrangement is that? If you are God, why not hand down your holy words, accurately, and one time only, and call it a day? Why allow your book to take centuries to be cobbled together, suffer at the hands of hundreds of translators, copyists and editors, and end up mangled as a result? Don’t forget we’re supposedly talking about the holiest of holy books ever to grace the face of the planet. Yet it’s a confusing, contradictory, repetitive mess. Is God incapable of simple dictation? That sounds unlikely if God is supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing and infallible. On the other hand…

If the Bible were strictly a work of very fallible humans; and those humans spent centuries passing on myths and fables mostly by word of mouth; and after a couple thousand years of this someone finally slapped those words onto paper after the printing press had been invented; well, you’d end up with a confusing, contradictory, repetitive mess. Which of course is what we have today.

I have made up none of this rambling Bible history. But the Church Fathers made it all up. It is an indiscriminate, chaotic jumble of archaic, rambling nonsense. And never forget how it came into being:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Choose some books, then make them grow;
If they’re lies, who has to know?
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe!

© 2008 Judith Hayes