The Holy Bible Isn’t Wholly Reliable

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Some folks tell us that they believe in God because they have been convinced by the story of Jesus given in the New Testament. And some say that they believe in God because they have been convinced that the Quran could have come only from a supernatural source. Let’s take a look at the New Testament in this chapter and the Quran in the next. We’ve already seen in Chapter 3 that the Old Testament (the Tanakh) cannot be relied upon.

C.S. Lewis and other Christian writers appeal to the argument that the only possible way to explain the origin of Christianity is to accept that Jesus was the Son of God, and therefore that there is a God. And some who are not prepared to rest on this argument will still maintain that the New Testament reports of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are so difficult to explain without supposing God’s intervention that the New Testament makes the hypothesis of God’s existence seriously worth considering.

There are two atheist replies to this line of argument:

1. The historical evidence does not favor the theory that the four canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) could be even roughly accurate accounts of events that really occurred.

2. Even if these accounts were roughly accurate, they are not completely dependable, so it doesn’t follow that there has to be a God.

The Bible tells us that there is a God, and tells us various things about his doings, his opinions on sundry matters, and his often erratic emotional states. If what the Bible says is invariably true, then there is a God.

Some Christians claim that the Bible is ‘the Word of God’ and totally without error. This view is called ‘inerrantism’. It’s practically equivalent to what is now usually called ‘fundamentalism’. Christians who are not fundamentalists usually accept that there are errors in the Bible, but argue that parts of it are reliable as history, and that therefore we know that Jesus did exist, was born of a virgin, turned water into wine, and rose from the dead.

Inerrantism is still a major force within Protestant Christianity and within American culture. The prefaces to the most popular editions of the Bible contain statements by the translators that they accept inerrantism. Students at fundamentalist colleges such as Moody Bible Institute are obliged to sign a declaration to the effect that they accept every word of the Bible as truth.

Many people who are not biblical inerrantists over-rate the New Testament’s historical reliability, and many of the arguments I will now present against inerrantism are also good arguments against excessive reliance on the New Testament as a human product, an ordinary source of historical evidence. By arguing against the inerrantist view, I will sometimes also incidentally be arguing against the broader view that the New Testament gives us reliable historical information upon which we can build a case for Jesus being the son of God, and therefore, for the existence of God.

There’s No Reason to Suppose the Bible Is Infallible

Why should we suppose that the Bible is completely without error? Some people quote the Bible to this effect. This is obviously circular. I could easily insert a statement in this book, announcing that everything stated in Atheism Explained is true. If everything in Atheism Explained were true, then that statement would be true. But if you’re wondering whether everything in this book is true, it wouldn’t help you to have that statement, because if any one thing stated in Atheism Explained is false, then that statement would also have to be false; it would be just one more false statement in this book. There’s no reason to accept a book’s own assertion that everything in it is true, unless you already accept that everything in the book is true, in which case you don’t need that assertion.

Nonetheless, I’ve persuaded the publisher of this book to put an announcement on the copyright page, solemnly declaring that everything in this book is true.⁴³

Nowhere in the Bible is there any assertion that everything stated in the Bible is true. This just has to be correct, for the simple reason that no one writing any part of the Bible was aware that eventually a collection of writings would be made by the church, called ‘the Bible’, and would include this person’s contribution.

Even if we suppose that some New Testament writers were miraculously aware of the future, this does not mean that they would write about entities which had not yet come into existence. If there’s one thing that’s obvious to anyone familiar with the New Testament, it is that many parts of it were written in response to immediate and narrow circumstances, and were written within the framework of knowledge of the immediate readers. None of those readers knew of an entity corresponding to what we now call ‘the Bible’, which was compiled a couple of centuries after the latest portions of the New Testament had been written.

The text most often cited in this connection is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” What did this writer mean by “scripture”? 2 Timothy is one of the latest of New Testament books, but still, the writer was probably unaware of quite a number that would be included in the Christian Bible over two centuries later. When 2 Timothy was written, the Old Testament canon had only very recently been determined by Jewish rabbis, but its definite authority was not immediately accepted by Jews or Christians; this would take some centuries. Early Christians did extend the notion of ‘scripture’ to recent Christian writings. But the author of 2 Timothy might have counted many books as “scripture” which would eventually be excluded from the Christian Bible (including some that have been lost), and not counted many books that would be included. Early Christian writers (even counting only those later judged to be orthodox) sometimes deny the status of ‘scripture’ to documents that ended up being included, and ascribe this status to others that ended up excluded.

The issue of the New Testament canon has never really been resolved by Protestants. Luther and Zwingli (and Calvin, though he was a bit less committal) wanted to drop several books from the New Testament, but eventually Protestants came to accept, more or less by inertia, the same books as the Catholic New Testament. Today most Protestants are surprised to learn that this was an issue in the Reformation.

At any rate, the author of 2 Timothy does not say that all scripture is guaranteed not to contain any error. He merely says that it is inspired by God and is profitable in several enumerated ways. Protestants have for centuries revered Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and would certainly claim that it is inspired by God and profitable in just those enumerated ways, but they would be horrified at any suggestion that Pilgrim’s Progress is guaranteed inerrant (or that it has the status of scripture). So the Christian Bible (unlike the Quran or the Book of Mormon) does not claim for itself that it is free of error.

Why do some Christians think the whole Bible is free of error? Here we come to an ironic oddity. Typically, the people who take this view are evangelical Protestants, who reject the authority of any human institution, including any visible church, and rely on ‘the Bible’. However, the New Testament did not exist prior to the Christian church. The New Testament did not create the church; the church created the New Testament. The history is very complicated, but roughly, the New Testament was put together in the fourth century from a range of existing writings, by church councils and by the opinions of influential bishops. They selected according to consensus from among the most highly respected documents, but the selection would not have been the same if it had been done fifty years earlier or fifty years later. Nor would it have been the same if one of the other major sects of Christianity had obtained the patronage of the Emperor.

So the evangelical Protestant who upholds Biblical inerrantism has to face the question: were these early councils and bishops guaranteed to be free from error? If not, then they could have made mistakes. But if they were inerrant, then presumably all earlier church councils were inerrant. And in that case, the question arises: at what point in history did church councils cease to be inerrant? Protestant arguments against the infallibility of the Pope are weaker than they look, because Papal infallibility is, just like Biblical infallibility, something ultimately decided by church councils. They are both forms of church infallibility, since both Pope and scripture are ultimately accepted because they were once authorized by the church.

Did God Dictate the Bible Word for Word?

Muslims usually claim that the Quran was dictated to Muhammad, word for word, by Jibril, acting on God’s orders. This cannot be true of the Bible, because we can easily see that the various authors of the books of the Bible have different personalities and different interests.

The different books of the New Testament vary in their prose styles: some display a more educated form of Greek than others, some have more ‘semitisms’ (Jewish-derived turns of phrase) than others. If all these New Testament books were dictated word for word by God, why would they be in different literary styles? And does anyone really think that (to pick just one example) God dictated to the writer of 2 Timothy the words: “I have sent Tychicus to Ephesus. When you come, bring along the traveling cloak I left at Troas with Carpus . . .” (4:12-13). And would God himself, dictating word for word, quote from popular Greek stories and poems of the period?⁴⁴

On that point, it would have been quite a jape for God to have quoted instead from, say, a Chinese novel written a hundred years later (that is, in the future). But nowhere in the Bible is there a single piece of factual information that might have been unknown to the purely human authors at the time of writing; no author of any part of the Bible had any idea that there existed such a place as China. There are innumerable facts of nature which the ancient Hebrews and the early Christians did not know, but which would have been of immense interest to them, sometimes even of practical use, and none of these is ever let slip in the Bible:

• Plagues are often caused by fleas biting rats and then biting people.

• The alternation of day and night is caused by the Earth spinning.

• There is a cold region to the south as well as one to the north.

• The tug of the Moon’s attraction causes the tides.

• The heart is a pump which makes blood circulate around the body.

• Diseases like leprosy are caused by tiny living organisms too small to be seen.

• All the materials found on Earth were generated inside stars.

And hundreds of similar items. Not once does the Bible divulge any factual knowledge unknown to people in the communities where it was composed. The Bible is a very large and varied compilation, and if it really were dictated word for word by a well-informed supernatural being, this absence of a single item of superior factual knowledge would be in need of a special explanation.

For all these reasons, Christian theologians, even fundamentalist ones, don’t usually claim that God dictated the Bible word for word. What they claim is that God protected the various authors of the assorted books of the Bible from error. (Catholics make a similar claim about the Pope’s ex cathedra pronouncements.) These authors wrote in their own literary styles, expressing their own interests and personalities, and according to the limitations of their own knowledge, yet God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, intervened just enough to exclude anything that would be false. God modestly confined his own authorial role to that of Very Scrupulous Fact-Checker.

Puzzles about Inerrantism

Christians often argue both that the New Testament is inerrant and that the writers of the gospels were people who knew Jesus and were writing from personal experience. These Christians don’t always realize that if the first claim is true, the second is largely irrelevant.

Many memoirs, even entirely sincere ones, are rife with inaccuracies, and even the most accurate accounts usually have a sprinkling of mistakes. The mistakes multiply the greater the lapse of time between the events described and writing them down, and the gospels were written at the very least thirty years after the events they describe. No historian would assume that Caesar’s or Napoléon’s memoirs are inerrant. If the gospels are inerrant, this absolutely requires miraculous intervention by God. As regards inerrancy, the gospels could have been written last week in Kazakhstan, and it would make no difference. It is thus pointless to try to show that the gospels are eye-witness accounts by participants, if what you actually want to conclude is that the gospels are inerrant.

This is especially true because the gospels describe many things which no one who might have written them could have witnessed. No human individual (except Mary) could have witnessed that Mary was a virgin, or (except Jesus) what Jesus said to Satan in the wilderness, and it’s extraordinarily unlikely that any Aramaic-speaking companion of Jesus could have witnessed what Herod said to the wise men or what Pilate’s wife communicated to Pilate.

There’s another puzzle. If the gospels are guaranteed to be inerrant then the omniscient God read every word before publication and intervened to eliminate the mistakes which would naturally creep into any ordinary document. Why didn’t he also eliminate all the worst sources of misunderstanding? God would have known that the major impact of these documents would be on millions of people living thousands of years after the immediate audience of the first and second centuries C.E. Surely then, he would have helpfully removed obscurities or ambiguities, let alone apparent contradictions and glaring omissions. If the concept of the Trinity, for example, is so important, then why is it never explicitly stated in the New Testament? From the simple fact that the New Testament documents are written within the intellectual horizons of their time and place of composition, and are filled with obscurities and ambiguities, we can reasonably deduce that they are not guaranteed by God to be inerrant.⁴⁵

The standard Christian line is that the biblical authors adjusted what they were writing to the level of understanding of their immediate readership. This just won’t do. Much of the missing information would have placed no unusual burden on the understanding of those first readers and would have been enormously helpful both to them and to later readers. There is exactly one simple and satisfying explanation: whoever was responsible for the contents of the Bible did not possess this information.

There Are No Independent Sources for the Story of Jesus

The claims of Christianity about Jesus arise entirely out of the traditions of the early church. The New Testament itself is a product, not the originating source, of those traditions. Without exception, all information about Jesus comes from those traditions and from later non-Christian accounts which were most likely derived from those traditions.

We know of Jesus only from what Christians, members of a small and insignificant religious cult, were saying about him some decades after the supposed date of his death—and what they were saying was not uniform and was continually evolving.

• In 112 C.E., Pliny the Younger, governor of the Roman province of Bithynia-Pontus, wrote a letter to the emperor Trajan, mentioning that there were Christians in his province who had been gathering before dawn to sing praises “to Christ as if to a god.” Eighty years after the supposed date of the crucifixion, this is the earliest Roman reference to Christians, and it tells us nothing about the life of Jesus, not even whether Pliny had heard the name ‘Jesus’.

• About the same time, or perhaps a few years later, the historian Tacitus, in his Annals of Imperial Rome, says that the emperor Nero had put the blame for the great fire in Rome onto “a class of men loathed for their views, whom the crowd termed Christians.” Tacitus adds that “Christ” had been executed by Pontius Pilate. (Tacitus felt he had to explain to his readers what Christians were: he did not expect them to know this already.) Some Christians speculate that Tacitus might have checked this story of the origin of Christianity against Roman records, but this is not so. In Tacitus’s day, as in that of the gospel writers, a governor like Pilate would have been referred to as “procurator,” which is how the gospels and Tacitus refer to him. In fact, we now know that Pilate’s actual title was the earlier one of “prefect.” Tacitus was repeating the story of their origin told by Christians themselves, a story put together by Christians outside Palestine some years after the supposed date of the crucifixion of Jesus.⁴⁶

• There are two references to Jesus in surviving copies of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus was a Romanized (and very pro-Roman) Jewish scholar. These two mentions both look like interpolations by later Christian scribes. One of them is clearly such: it could only have been written by an enthusiastic Christian, which we know that Josephus was not. This passage is missing from an early table of contents of the Antiquities, and does not begin to be cited by Christian writers until the fourth century.⁴⁷ At any rate, Josephus’s Antiquities was most likely written in the 90s C.E. So it’s too late to be an independent source: if Josephus had included references to Jesus, he could have gotten these from what Christians were saying. Josephus provides no independent testimony to the existence of Jesus, much less to any particulars about Jesus.

• There are references to Jesus in the Talmud. These are too late to constitute independent evidence. The earliest references to Jesus in the Talmud are early second-century at the earliest. The Talmud states that Jesus’s father was a Roman soldier, but Christians shouldn’t let this worry them, as the Talmud references to Jesus are just too late to have any historical significance, and are simply gossipy Jewish responses to the claims of the growing Christian movement.

Fundamentalist authors routinely cite several ancient writers as corroborating the gospel accounts of Jesus. But most of these writers are just too late. By around 70 C.E., some among the varied sects of Christians were claiming that Jesus had been crucified under Pilate around the early 30s C.E. As the Christian sects grew, non-Christians would hear this story, and would have no reason to question it, just as numerous Christians would later fail to question the main outlines of the legendary biography of Muhammad related by Muslims.

Some of the ancient writers appealed to do not provide any definite information about Jesus at all. For example, fundamentalist authors dealing with this topic routinely mention Thallus, a historian alleged to have written around C.E. 52, as testifying to the miraculous darkness at the time of the crucifixion (Strobel 1998, pp. 110-11). No writing of Thallus has survived, but we have a comment by the third-century Christian writer Julius Africanus, that Thallus was mistaken in attributing a period of darkness to an eclipse. There’s no decisive indication that Thallus mentioned the crucifixion, or even mentioned Jesus at all, or had even heard of Jesus. Perhaps Africanus found a reference to an eclipse in Thallus, assumed it to be about the crucifixion darkness, and made his pious comment accordingly. Anyway, there’s also no good evidence that Thallus wrote as early as 52 C.E.; he could have written as much as a century later.⁴⁸ If Thallus did mention Jesus, we cannot say that he wrote early enough not to have derived whatever he might have said from Christian sources.

How did educated Roman pagans react to the Christians’ historical claims? At first the Christians were too few and too contemptible to merit any rebuttals, but when Christianity had grown to become conspicuous, educated Romans retorted that the Christian stories about Jesus were just made up.

We Don’t Know Who Wrote the Gospels

It’s commonly supposed, even by many non-fundamentalists, that two of the four canonical gospels were written by companions of Jesus.

We don’t know who wrote the four New Testament gospels. They were originally anonymous. Their names were added by later church tradition. I’m going to refer to the gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and to their authors as ‘Mathew, ‘Mark’, ‘Luke’, and ‘John’. But we don’t know their real names or anything about them except what we can deduce from the texts and from later church tradition. Even the developing tradition did not claim that Mark or Luke were written by eye-witnesses; the tradition claimed that ‘Mark’ had gotten his story from Peter.

At the very start of his gospel, ‘Luke’ explains how he came by the information contained in it. He states that “many” have written narratives, that the narratives originated with eye-witnesses, and that he has investigated these narratives. He does not claim that he witnessed any of the events himself, or that he had personally talked with any eye-witnesses, and he surely would have claimed either of these had they been true.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain many identical or near-identical phrases and sentences. For this reason they are called ‘the synoptic gospels’, ‘synoptic’ meaning ‘seen together’. If you put passages from these three documents side by side, you can see that the wordings are too similar to be coincidental. This cannot be reconciled with testimony by three independent eye-witnesses (any court of law would conclude as much). Some Christians have suggested that the very similar wordings arose because the words of Jesus would have been especially revered and memorized, but this is incorrect: there are more verbal similarities in the narrative than in the words of Jesus, and the words of Jesus are particularly prone to be adapted by each writer in accordance with his own peculiar ideological outlook.

Independent eye-witnesses will often state details differently, while their stories more or less cohere. The similarities in Matthew, Mark, and Luke are not like this. They often differ on important essentials, while containing precisely the same, or only very slightly different, verbal formulas. These verbal similarities did not arise because the three writers got together and concocted their accounts in cahoots—for then they would have ironed out the embarrassing discrepancies.⁴⁹

The similarities must have arisen either because one of them drew upon another, and then a third drew upon one or both of the first two, or because two of them were drawing independently upon one of them. There’s considerable evidence to indicate—and the great majority of scholars, even fundamentalists, now believe—that Mark is the earliest and was used by ‘Matthew’ and ‘Luke’. ‘Matthew and ‘Luke’, working independently of each other, had Mark in front of them as they wrote. They also had another document, now lost, which scholars call ‘Q’. Q can be partly reconstructed from the passages in both Matthew and Luke which are not in Mark.

‘Mark’ was ignorant of elementary facts about Palestine,⁵⁰ and it’s doubtful that he had ever been there. He is writing for a predominantly gentile audience and seems to be a gentile himself. Possibly all four gospels were written in Anatolia (Asia Minor, or what is now the non-European part of Turkey but was then Greek-speaking), though Rome and Alexandria are also possible. Matthew, Luke, and John were written after 70 C.E. (when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans). Mark may also have been written after the destruction of Jerusalem, though some scholars date it as early as 65 C.E.

Another piece of evidence against the ‘companion of Jesus’ theory is the way in which each of the gospel writers imposes his own doctrinal outlook upon the material. There are several examples of this, and I will here mention only the most striking: the Messianic Secret in Mark. In Mark, Jesus repeatedly instructs his disciples to keep his words secret. This is virtually an obsession of ‘Mark’, and of Mark’s Jesus. There’s none of this secretiveness in the other three gospels, while several of their anecdotes contradict it. Associated with this, the incredibly slow-witted disciples in Mark never grasp who Jesus is, despite being told repeatedly, while in John the disciples always understand this instantly, without any trouble. Did Jesus continually urge secrecy upon his uncomprehending disciples or did he not? It’s plainly ridiculous to suppose that he did and yet ‘Matthew’ and ‘John’ never thought it worth a mention, if ‘Matthew’ and ‘John’ had been personally close to the events they describe. And in that case, ‘Mark’, the earliest gospel-writer, must have described an entire theme of Jesus’s ministry which had no factual basis.

If ‘Matthew’ had been among the twelve closest followers of Jesus, then why would he have so closely reproduced passages from Mark, whose author, everyone agrees, was not one of the twelve? If you are an eye-witness, do you give an account of what you have witnessed by copying out, with occasional elaborations and additions, parts of an account by a non-eyewitness?

As we read Mark, we notice that it is largely a string of brief anecdotes, in which the transition from one anecdote to the next is made by way of a similar phrase in both anecdotes, often a phrase not crucial to the substance, like the segues between the separate sketches in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Biblical scholars have called these transitions ‘catchword connections’. From a close study of Mark, we can infer that ‘Mark’ was stringing together what were originally separate anecdotes, which must have circulated by word of mouth.

Attempts to Harmonize the Gospels with History

Luke tells us that Jesus was born when Herod was king and when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Yet historical evidence tells us that Herod was never king at the same time that Quirinius was governor of Syria. Quirinius became governor of Syria some time after Herod’s death in 4 B.C.E. A trival point, certainly, but still, one of numerous little problems for those who think that the New Testament is inerrant.

We can respond to this discrepancy in at least three ways. The most straightforward is that ‘Luke’ made a mistake, but this contradicts inerrancy. Another is that the remark about Quirinius was not by ‘Luke’ at all, but was added by a scribe. This is possible but unhelpful. Any sentence in the Bible might have originated as a scribal insertion. We just don’t have the originals.

We can simply assume that our version of Luke is correct and try to reconcile the historical evidence with the literal words of ‘Luke’. This means that we have decided to treat Luke entirely differently from how we would normally treat a historical source. How might it be done? Christian scholars have come up with various solutions, including the theory that Quirinius was also governor of Syria earlier, though no record of this has survived (except for the remark in Luke). Fundamentalist Christian scholars are experts at this kind of job, which they have to perform hundreds of times over, because they feel they need to cling to the inerrancy of the Bible.

Isaac Asimov pointed out a parallel from the world of Sherlock Holmes devotees.⁵¹ Some enthusiastic Sherlockians try to excavate ‘the real facts’ about Sherlock Holmes by puzzling over every little clue in the writings of Conan Doyle—their ‘canon’, or as they call it, ‘the Conan’. (This is just an amusing pastime, of course.) The first name of Holmes’s companion and memorialist Dr. Watson is clearly given several times as ‘John’. Yet there is one passage where his wife refers to him as “James.” A contradiction? Perhaps the Conan made a mistake?

A Sherlockian scholar reconciled the seeming discrepancy in the following way. Watson’s name is given as John H. Watson. H. could stand for ‘Hamish’, which is the Scottish Gaelic form of ‘James’. So the inerrancy of the Conan is preserved—at the cost of the outrageous implausibility that Watson’s wife might be disposed to address him by his middle name translated out of the Gaelic (when the originally Gaelic form is domesticated in English and is never customarily translated into English).

Gospel Events which Never Happened

The New Testament gospels contain assertions of fact which are contrary to the historical evidence.

Matthew (2:16-18) claims that King Herod, hearing from the Wise Men that a ‘king of the Jews’ had been born, had all baby boys under two years old in and around Bethlehem killed. If such an event had happened, it would have been recorded. Josephus, who did not conceal his distaste for Herod, listed his atrocities, some of them much milder than this one. There’s absolutely no historical trace of such an occurrence (except for the report in Matthew). Anyone who knows the Bible might guess that this yarn was suggested by Exodus 1:15-22, the tale of Pharoah’s slaughter of baby boys, hoping to kill the infant Moses.

There’s a story in Luke 2:1 that Augustus Caesar ordered a census of the entire Roman empire. Because of this imperial decree, Jesus’s parents had to go to Bethlehem. This story may have arisen because there was a tradition linking Jesus with Nazareth, but if Jesus was to be identified as the Messiah, it would be more appropriate for him to have been born in Bethlehem, birthplace of the legendary King David.

There’s no evidence of any imperial census at the appropriate date. A Roman census did not mean that residents of a town had to leave and travel to another town where their ancestors had supposedly lived. This would have caused a catastrophic upheaval in economic life every time there was a census, and such an upheaval would have been mentioned in documents. And there could have been no Roman census in Herod’s kingdom, which was not yet a directly-governed part of the empire. Attempts by some Christian scholars to reconcile Luke’s account with historical reality are criticized by Father Raymond Brown in his outstanding study of the birth of Jesus.⁵²

A More Skeptical View

The bulk of what I have said above would be accepted by the great majority of New Testament scholars—and remember that these are mostly theologians by background and training, with a strong commitment to Christianity (or at least, the warm afterglow of such a commitment). However, in my view we should be even more skeptical of the New Testament story than these scholars typically are.

Bart Ehrman voices the consensus view when he claims that despite all the uncertainties and legendary elements in the New Testament, we can be sure of a number of basic facts about Jesus: that he did exist historically, that he was crucified, that he had siblings, and so forth. Ehrman’s argument is that we should accept New Testament claims about Jesus when these are stated in the earliest documents, and when they run counter to the interests of the people who recorded them.

However, for its first century or two the Christian movement was a small, obscure, passionately motivated religious grouping—what journalists would now call ‘a dangerous and manipulative cult’. It was also a movement divided into factions or sects with some beliefs that were opposed and incompatible. Its members had visionary or mystical experiences which were accepted as reliable sources of factual knowledge, and some of which became incorporated into the evolving doctrines of the movement.

The possibility that there might be historically unfounded stories in circulation among the members of such a religious movement becomes greater when we take into account the total destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in C.E. 70. After that date, Christianity grew mainly outside Palestine and quickly recruited Greek-speaking gentiles who had no first-hand knowledge of events in Palestine. The earliest Christian groups in Palestine itself were quite likely wiped out or scattered. We do not know how they would have reacted if they had been able to read Mark; perhaps they would have dismissed this document as an astounding farrago of nonsense.

These are all rather general considerations. But there’s one startling fact which should make us cautious about assuming that the gospels give much in the way of reliable information about the life of Jesus: most of the key claims about the events of Jesus’s life are missing from the earliest Christian documents.

The genuine letters of Paul, and other letters not by Paul but almost equally early,⁵³ describe a Christ who was crucified and resurrected at some indeterminate historical time, which does not appear to have been recent. According to Paul, Jesus was a supernatural being, more than human but not claimed by Paul to be God, who took on human form and lived a totally obscure life. There is no mention of: a miraculous birth, Christ preaching (anything at all), Christ working miracles, Christ being in Jerusalem, or associated in any way with Pilate or Herod, Christ being Galilean, or associated with Nazareth or Bethlehem. Paul’s obscure Jesus is difficult to reconcile with the gospel figure who performed spectacular miracles and had a popular following. And Paul never attributes any statements to Jesus, despite the fact that he is involved in controversies with other Christians where such quotations would have been very relevant, if he had known them. For example, Paul argues that it’s no longer necessary to follow the Jewish law, but doesn’t cite Jesus’s defense of sabbath-breaking or his declaration that all foods are clean. It seems most likely that Paul did not know that there was a report of Jesus making these remarks, which were later to turn up in the gospels, or if he did know of them, considered them a new and false invention by a rival and spurious sect.

The Evidence for Jesus and Socrates

Confronted by the historical unreliability of the New Testament, fundamentalist Christians often respond with the following argument: ⁵⁴

The period between the time of Socrates and Plato and our oldest copies of written accounts of them is thirteen hundred years. The period between the life of Jesus and our oldest copies of written accounts is less than one hundred years (or three hundred, if we mean complete documents rather than fragments). Yet no historian doubts the reality of Socrates and Plato!

The implication is that we can place more credence on what is written in the canonical gospels than we can in the accounts of Socrates and Plato. This argument is at best confused and misleading. If we’re thinking about the dating of ancient documents and their copies, there are two distinct time periods to consider:

1. The period between the events described and the composition of the originals of the documents;

2. The period between the composition of the original documents and the oldest copies which have survived.

The fundamentalist argument talks about #2, whereas what matters most is #1.

The dating of the original composition of a document can be estimated by a number of methods, one of which is various clues the words in the document may give about the circumstances in which it was written, another is the dates at which other writers show that they know about the document. The dating of the earliest surviving copies can also be estimated by various methods, one being the style of calligraphy used by scribes.

The value of documents as historical evidence can be enhanced if documents by different people with different axes to grind agree on certain facts. The earliest documents referring to the life of Jesus are by Paul and others in the 50s C.E., about twenty years after alleged events in the life of Jesus described later in the gospels. However these letters say amazingly little about Jesus’s life and they do not give the impression of recalling historical events within living memory.⁵⁵ The fuller accounts in the gospels are somewhere between fifteen and forty years later (thirty-five to sixty years after the events described), and now some very detailed stories appear. This follows the usual pattern documented by folklorists: legends become more elaborate and detailed, more concrete and specific, over time. First there’s a legend, then it acquires names, dates, and places.

The accounts of Socrates were written by different people with different outlooks. Socrates is described in one way by Plato, in another way by Aristophanes, and in yet another by Xenophon. All three of these were people who lived in Athens at the time when Socrates was teaching. All of these people also wrote much that had nothing to do with Socrates and has been independently corroborated. Several other eye-witness accounts of Socrates have not survived but are quoted by later writers. Aristotle arrived in Athens a few years after Socrates’s death and had conversations with people who had known him.

Think how different it would be if Athens had been destroyed within forty years of Socrates’s death, and if all the first accounts of Socrates had appeared thirty years after that, by people outside Attica, writing in a language other than Greek.⁵⁶ Also think how different it would be if a Church of Socrates had existed, struggling over the ‘correct’ view of Socrates, which they continually improvised as the spirit moved them, and striving to stamp out statements of deviant views.

There is much about Socrates which remains obscure and controversial. Plato puts elaborate arguments into Socrates’s mouth. Whether Socrates ever said anything close to these, or whether Plato used Socrates as a convenient mouthpiece for his own quite different ideas, is still something on which scholars do not quite agree, though they tend more to the latter view. Aristophanes presents Socrates as an atheist, whereas Plato presents him as a believer in some kind of deity.

The period between the original composition of a document and the earliest surviving copies (Period #2.) is generally much less important than the period between the events described and the original composition (Period #1).

For example, everyone agrees that the books of the Tanakh (the Old Testament) were written centuries before the books of the New Testament, yet the earliest copies we have of some New Testament books are earlier than the earliest copies we have of some Old Testament books. This was true of all the books of the Old Testament prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which began to be unearthed in 1947. A copy of the book of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a thousand years earlier than the earliest copy available prior to the 1950s!

We can see, then, that:

1. The historical existence of Jesus is not as well supported by documentary evidence as the historical existence of Socrates.

2. Details of the actual life and opinions of Socrates are extremely uncertain.

3. Details of the actual life and opinions of Jesus are even more uncertain than details of the life and opinions of Socrates.

What If the Gospels Were Roughly Accurate?

Let’s now suppose, contrary to a mass of detailed evidence, that the four canonical gospels were written by people who were close to the events they report. Let’s grant for the sake of argument what we know to be untrue: that these gospels are generally reliable in broad outline. We would still have to correct them where they contradict each other or where they contradict well-attested historical facts, but then certain reported events which now seem not worth troubling with would appear to have some appreciable probability of having actually happened.

For comparison, suppose that we had no contemporary accounts of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but that in the 1930s (twenty years after the date of the sinking), a few brief reports appeared mentioning the bare fact that the Titanic had sunk, without specifying the date or the location, with a couple of other facts, such as the collision with an iceberg. Then, fifteen to twenty more years on, around 1950, four accounts were penned by purported Titanic survivors, each with a different point of view, but agreeing on a number of specific claims.

I generously take the case of an actual historical event, and with even more abundant generosity, I grant that, unlike the case of the gospels, these four accounts themselves claimed to be by eye-witnesses and, again unlike the gospels, we had no good reasons for discounting any such possibility. By our supposition, no other accounts of the Titanic survived, and all subsequent accounts were based on the ones just mentioned. No physical or other evidence, apart from these accounts just mentioned, ever came to light that the Titanic had even so much as been built in the first place.

Now if, for example, all four of these accounts stated that the ship broke in two before it sank, we would not judge it to be conclusively proved that the ship did break in two before it sank, but we would certainly judge this to be quite likely true, if not contradicted by physical or other evidence. On the other hand, if all four of them stated that before the ship sank, the heavens opened and a great booming voice from the sky said that everyone on board was going to heaven, we would be no more inclined to accept this than we are to accept the reality of the Angels of Mons.⁵⁷ To accept it as fact would be irresponsible sloppiness, despite the existence of four eye-witness statements to that effect.

If, then, the New Testament gospels were written by individuals close to the events described, this would not by any means be proof that any particular thing claimed by all four of them were true. But it would strengthen the case for viewing any such thing as very likely true.

Thus, in these hypothetical circumstances, we should no doubt view it as very likely that there was a man called Jesus (Yeshua) who hailed from Galilee, who was known as an itinerant preacher and miracle worker, who said some things approximating some of the sayings reported of him, who was received with acclamation by crowds in the street when he arrived in Jerusalem, who was executed by crucifixion, and whose followers, some years after his death, began to put about stories that he had risen from the dead. I can’t accept any of this as likely on the evidence we actually have, but all of it would be accepted as quite likely under the hypothetical circumstances mentioned.

This evidence would not lead us to believe that this Jesus was God, or that he had any true and definite connection with God. The miracles reported of Jesus are exactly of the type reported of other miracle workers of the time, even down to minor details.⁵⁸ Being fathered by a god was attributed to notables in the ancient world, and our appraisal of this tale would not be heightened by our knowledge that it is based on a mistranslation of a text in Isaiah. Pronouncements attributed to Jesus never suggest more than mediocre percipience. The notion that he actually came back from the dead is less well corroborated and less likely than that Elvis Presley showed up in supermarkets and laundromats some time after his officially certified death in 1977.

Furthermore, these four documents indicate that Jesus made statements denying any possibility of his equality with God and affirming his status as completely subordinate to God. Other statements, which do indicate his divinity, we would conjecture to be later confabulations by our four witnesses, who would have had thirty to sixty years for their memories to become reshaped by their ongoing religious preoccupations.

Popular and Feeble Arguments from the New Testament Evidence

Here are some terribly weak arguments still regularly voiced by Christians:

1. All arguments about the ‘empty tomb’, such as those in Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone?

We do not know that there was ever any tomb, occupied or empty. We do not know that there was a stone rolled in front of the tomb. We do not know, for instance, that there was ever any such person as Joseph of Arimathea. These are all legends, first reported in surviving documents at least fifty years later than the alleged events (Paul and the other earliest Christian writers say nothing about the circumstances of Jesus’s burial, and the resurrection passages in Mark are not in the earliest versions of Mark, but were added later, as footnotes in most bibles will now tell you). These accounts are good evidence of what a group of Greek-speaking, predominantly gentile cult members outside Palestine believed some time between C.E. 70 and C.E. 100. They are rather thin evidence of anything that actually happened in Jerusalem around C.E. 33.

2. Arguments to the effect that something must have inspired the early Christians, and this could only have been eye-witness evidence of the life, death, and re-appearance of Jesus.

This line of argument under-rates the power of religious commitment. What inspired the Christian martyrs in Communist Russia and China? It was not that they were eye-witnesses to the events of Jesus’s career. Someone told them stories, which they swallowed. Exactly the same could be true of the very first Christian martyrs. As it happens, even the New Testament tells us that the first recorded martyr was Stephen, a recent convert who had not witnessed Jesus in the flesh.

Apologists sometimes say, as though it were historical fact, that people who knew Jesus were prepared to die for the faith. There is no good evidence for any such claim. For example, we may take it as well established that there was an individual called Cephas (Peter), a Christian leader who clashed with Paul over such matters as circumcision, in the 50s.⁵⁹ That this Cephas had earlier personally known Jesus, or that he later went to Rome, became the first pope, and was martyred, is all uncorroborated and dubious legend.

3. Arguments which amount to pointing out that there are highly distinctive features of Christianity.

Of course there are, as there are of other religious movements. Only Scientology, for example (as far as I know), claims that every human soul is potentially near-omnipotent, and only Buddhism (as far as I know) denies the existence of the individual self or soul. The notion that ‘all religions are really saying the same thing’ is popular in New Age quarters, but is difficult to reconcile with any actual knowledge of specific religious doctrines.

Nonetheless, we do not lack for parallels with elements of Christian doctrine. The dying and resurrected god-king and the man born of a virgin mother are both commonplaces of pagan mythology.

4. The argument that if Jesus had not really risen from the dead, the authorities would have produced the body to scotch such rumors.

For at least a century, Christianity was so little known that hardly anyone paid it any attention. Romans knew less about Christianity than you know about the Branch Davidians. The gospels depict a Jesus who had a popular following, but earlier Christian writings such as the letters of Paul depict a Jesus who was totally obscure and died without notice. The gospels’ account of a Jesus hailed by the crowd is probably a legendary elaboration, but even if it were true, the notion that the Roman authorities would go out of their way to rebut the wild claims of a bunch of fringe crackpots is ludicrous. Did the authorities produce the body of Elvis Presley when Elvis was sighted alive after his death? Furthermore, we do not know that anyone was publicly claiming that Jesus had risen from the dead until some years after the supposed date of the crucifixion. Palestine was soon seething with anti-Roman insurrection unrelated to Jesus, and this would have held the authorities’ attention.

5. Arguments that Jesus was either the Son of God or an outrageous imposter (the assumption being that we will not want to call him an outrageous imposter).

In the first place, there are individuals who combine great charisma with willingness to be deceptive, so there’s no reason to rule out Jesus’s possibly being an unscrupulous mountebank. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was one such rogue. However, second, we do not know anything with great confidence about the life of Jesus, so the factual evidence just doesn’t exist to say that he had to be one thing or another. We have only the haziest notion of what the real Jesus said or did. The Jesus of the New Testament gospels is a composite figure, formed of layers of legend. Naturally, some of it might be true, just as some of the claims about Robin Hood or King Arthur might be true, but we can’t be sure if this is the case, and if so, which are the true bits.

6. Arguments that the time elapsed between the events and the accounts of the events is too short to permit of the accounts being false.

Hume cites examples of recent Catholic miracles attested to by numerous credible witnesses, far better attested than anything in the gospels.⁶⁰ Yet these are miracles which no Protestant in Hume’s day, and probably no educated Catholic today, would seriously maintain actually occurred. Today we have numerous new legends being created all the time, for example about the Bermuda Triangle, alien abductions, Area 51, hauntings such as the ‘Amityville Horror’, or about nonexistent Satanic cults,⁶¹ or the complicity of the Bush administration in 9/11. The process of formation of these legends is the same as the formation of the New Testament stories.

Grossly false legends can spring into existence in the twinkling of an eye, and such stories may then be embellished and even transformed as they are passed along over the years.⁶²

Biblical Prophecy Is Always Getting Left Behind

Some Christians, especially Pentecostals and Seventh-Day Adventists, claim that the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy demonstrates the amazing reliability of the Bible. This claim comes in two types: prophecies described in the Bible as having been fulfilled, and Biblical prophecies of events now current or future.

The reported fulfillment of prophecies in the Bible is suspect, because in some cases the prophecies were actually written after the events reportedly prophesied, and in other cases, the events were reshaped to fit the prophecies. The detailed prediction of future events given in Daniel, which presents itself as a prophecy written in the sixth century B.C.E., was actually (according to all but fundamentalist scholars) penned in the second century B.C.E.

The most ludicrous example of a reported event reshaped to fit the supposed prophecy is the Virgin Birth of Jesus. The early Christians outside Palestine were acquainted with the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and were not acquainted with these sources in the original Hebrew or in Aramaic. The Hebrew word ‘almah’ (young woman) was mistranslated as ‘parthenos’ (virgin). Not only is this a mistranslation, but the original text of Isaiah 7:14 is definitely not concerned with any miraculous birth (you can read it for yourself) so that even if the original word had been ‘bethulah’ (virgin), the intended meaning would be clear: ‘a virgin will conceive’ would have to mean ‘a woman who is now a virgin will conceive’, much as we might say ‘One of these MIT undergraduates will one day win the Nobel prize’, without implying that this person will still be an undergraduate when they meet the King of Sweden.

Over the centuries, various Christian groups have made definite predictions, derived from their interpretations of the Bible, of imminent events, most often the return of Jesus. These predictions fall into three categories (non-exclusive categories, for some predictions belong to more than one of them): 1. they are untestable—usually because no time limit is given (for instance: there will be a great end-of-the world battle called Armageddon); 2. they are events which might be predicted on the basis of common sense plus a knowledge of the present; 3. they have turned out to be wrong.

Many times over, the end of the world or the return of Jesus as an Earthly ruler have been predicted for a specified date, and have failed to occur by that date. If we are concerned with events in our own future, any derivation of predictions from the Bible is bound to be tricky and controversial. The European Community was formed by treaty in 1957, with six member nations. In 1981, it expanded to ten members, often referred to as ‘the Ten’. Numerous Christian groups confidently identified this ten-member confederacy with ‘the beast having ten horns’ in Revelation 13 (and Daniel 7:7). The Community later acquired several new members, and currently has twenty-seven. Today, Christian prophecy groups say less about the beast with ten horns, and when they do mention it, try to find new groups of nations which number ten. This kind of thing, interminably repeated, is what Christian prophecy literature amounts to: drawing connections between what is going on now and what is said in the Bible, connections which are then forgotten as the world changes and new connections are made.

The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey, appeared in 1970 and quickly sold tens of millions of copies. It prepared the way for the ‘Left Behind’ literature, fiction and non-fiction books which in aggregate have sold hundreds of millions. Chapter 1 of The Late Great Planet Earth gives examples of the fallibility of non-Evangelical fortune tellers. Chapter 2 repeatedly rams home the message that the way to tell a false prophet from a genuine one is that the genuine prophet’s predictions are fulfilled with absolute accuracy in every detail.

The concerns and expectations of The Late Great Planet Earth are those of 1970. Communism is the great enemy which will grow in power until Armageddon. Russia will invade Israel by sea and China will invade Israel by land. Black Africa will go Communist and help Egypt to attack Israel. Overpopulation will probably—Lindsey hedges slightly on this—lead to terrible famines. The United States will cease to play any important part in world affairs. Its role as leader of the West will be taken by a restored Roman empire (the European Community), and “if the U.S. is still around at that time, it will not be the power it now is” (p. 96).

Lindsey modestly asserts that he is no prophet and that what he is saying is merely taking the Bible at its word. The thing to remember here is that whenever anyone tells you what God is saying, he is telling you what he, according to a theory he has, claims that God is saying. So what sounds like humility is really colossal self-conceit. Lindsey maintain that when Jesus speaks about the fig tree putting out its new leaves (Matthew 24:32), this means the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The generation which witnessed that event will live to see the Rapture and the return of Christ as King of Israel. A generation, in biblical terms, Lindsey assures us, means around forty years. Quite a number of Evangelical Christians, apparently influenced by Lindsey, expected the Rapture in 1988.

In 1980 Lindsey produced The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon. Armageddon is now depicted as just a few years away. Although this book sold well, it was allowed to go out of print, presumably because its failed predictions were so embarrassing, and Lindsey was churning out new prophetic books all the time. He soon decided that a biblical generation was not forty years after all, but one hundred years. Among the events that have to happen before the return of Christ is the building of a third Temple on the site of what is now the Dome of the Rock, and the re-institution of a Jewish priesthood, along with regular animal sacrifices. While stranger things have happened in human history, I would offer high odds against this happening by 2048.

Lindsey’s successive books always make adjustments to keep up with world events, but he has never candidly laid out his numerous failures, much less apologized for them. However Timothy La Haye, co-author of the Left Behind books, has apologized for his prediction that the expected Y2K disaster would provoke the collapse of American society. All these popular exponents of biblical prophecy now make much of militant Islam, which they barely noticed thirty years ago.

You might think that the repeated re-adjustments of prophecy would discourage anyone from trying their hand at it, but I will now make a prediction of my own. Whatever happens in international relations over the next fifty, or one hundred, or one thousand, years, the exponents of biblical prophecy won’t see it coming.