Divinity of Doubt

4 Many Christians claim that God, in fact, does perform miracles today, such as in cases where, they say, through prayer someone was supposedly cured of an incurable cancer. But this, of course, is not persuasive because what allegedly happened may be attributable to physiological causes about which we are unaware. Or the person never really had cancer. Or the cancer was in remission. Or there is something else we don’t know, such as something about our physical system that the current state of medical science has yet to learn. As has been said, when God, through prayer, starts regrowing amputated limbs, that will be something to take notice of.

Is it just a prodigious coincidence, one that has no anomalies in its pattern, that the supposed spectacular miracles of the Old and New Testaments occurred to people who, before the miracle happened to which they attested, already believed in miracles, and were living in an ancient time when people were immersed in mythology, mysticism, the supernatural, and grinding (through no fault of their own) ignorance? And that these so-called miracles declined through the years in direct proportion to the enlightenment of man? To the point where today, most people—I’m excepting the Catholic church, which continues to declare from time to time that a miracle cure took place, most notably by the intercession of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, France, where a fourteen-year-old girl claimed to have seen an apparition of Mary in a cave in 1858—dismiss professed miracles out of hand as being either nonexistent (from innocent imagination or from deception by charlatans such as “faith healers”), or traceable to natural phenomena? That we have learned that no one can pull a rabbit out of the hat when there is no rabbit in the hat?

The alleged miracles of Jesus would add a tad more weight to the matter of his divinity if only he, in history, was reported to have performed any miracles. But miracles before, during, and after the time of Jesus (see the Book of Acts for miracles by Jesus’ disciples, to whom he gave the power to perform them; see also Mark 16:17–18) were a dime a dozen. I mean, even the miracle of miracles, Jesus’ resurrection, is nothing to talk about. Indeed, in Matthew 27:52–53, when Jesus “gave up his spirit” (i.e., died) on the cross, “at that moment . . . the earth shook, rocks split apart, and tombs opened. The bodies of many godly men and women who had died were raised from the dead after Jesus’ resurrection. [As indicated, Matthew first has them rising from the dead at the moment of Christ’s death.] They left the cemetery, went into the holy city of Jerusalem and appeared to many people.”

What diminishes the weight of the miracles of Jesus even more is that most of them were rooted in ancient mythology long preceding the time of Jesus. For example, Jesus’ resurrection reportedly occurred on the third day (Sunday) following his crucifixion on Friday (Mark 16:9). Jesus himself played into an already common mythology of a third-day resurrection. In Matthew 12:40, Jesus says, “For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights [Jonah 1:15–17 and 2:10], so I, the Son of Man, will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.” But as if this were not bad enough, we learn that the whale and the three days fable goes all the way back before Jonah to ancient Greek mythology. It seems that a whale had his devouring eye on Hesione, the daughter of Laomedon, king of Troy, when Hercules, the son of the Greek god Zeus, rescued her. Recalling the fable, Bernard de Montfaucon, an eighteenth-century French Benedictine monk and scholar, writes, “Hercules was also swallowed by the whale that was watching Hesione, where he remained three days in his belly before he came out bald-pated after his sojourn there.”

What I’m saying is that if Christianity must have its miracles, which end up deceiving man, it should have the common decency to show some originality.

In Voltaire’s Miracles and Idolatry, he writes that the daughters of Anius (the son of the Greek and Roman god Apollo) could change whatever they wanted into wheat, wine, or oil. Aesculapius, the ancient Roman god of medicine and healing, brought Hippolytus, son of the mythical Athenian hero Theus, back to life from death. (In the Old Testament, the prophet Elisha beat Jesus’ act with Lazarus to the punch by raising the son of a wealthy woman from the dead [2 Kings 4:8, 17–20, and 32–35].) Indeed, to presage the virgin birth of Jesus, in Roman mythology Romulus and his twin brother, Remus, were born of a virgin and Mars, the god of war.

Even the involvement of deities in the impregnation of women (the Holy Ghost with Mary) is not new. Alcmene, the mother of Hercules, is believed to have been impregnated by the Greek god Zeus, the supreme god of the ancient Greeks. One observation about the position of atheists should be made. They like to argue that there cannot be miracles for the simple reason that there cannot be deviations from or exceptions to the immutable laws of nature. But one should be careful not to extend principles beyond the limits of their logic. Atheists, by this argument, are thereby assuming the nonexistence of God. If there is a God, and if he created not only the universe but also the laws of nature that guide it, then it is not unreasonable to believe that humans could pray to him, asking him for something that would necessitate the suspension, in a given case, of the law of nature he created, and that he would possess the power to answer their prayer. However, this argument still doesn’t account for the reality that miracles all happened millenniums ago. Did God like the prayers of earlier peoples more than those of today?

A coda to this discussion is that even if we were to assume the existence of miracles, that would only allow us to say they are unexplained by science. The next step up would be for us to infer the existence of something supernatural as being the cause. We could do this without too loud a complaint from the voices of reason. But is it not an unwarranted inference to take the next step and say that this “something supernatural” has to be a God who created the universe? That is, anything that cannot be explained by science can only be explained by the existence of God? Although this conclusion may, perchance, be true, is this not an enormous leap? For instance, if someone were to tell you that at the same time a twin experienced great pain when he was beaten up by a young bunch of thugs, his identical twin, thousands of miles away, felt a sudden severe pain in his body, would it be intelligent for you to say, “that proves there is a God who created the universe”? I think not.

1 Indeed, the entire New Testament was written in Greek, the main literary language of the educated elite in the Mediterranean world at that time, reflecting the Hellenistic influence, extending into the era of the Roman Empire, following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the entire region in the fourth century B.C. In addition, the educated man and the common man spoke their native tongue, in the case of Jews this being Hebrew or Aramaic, the latter the language of Jesus.

As opposed to the New Testament, which was translated from Greek into many languages, the books of the Old Testament, the Hebrew bible, were written in Hebrew. The first translation, among many, was into Greek in the third century B.C. and is called the Septuagint. Another early translation, in A.D. 405, was into Latin, called the Vulgate. The most important English translations of the bible from the Vulgate are the King James Version (Protestant) published in England in 1611, and the Rheims Douai Bible (Catholic), the Old Testament of which was first published in Rheims, France, in 1582, the New Testament in Douai, France, in 1609–1610.

2 However, the first known writing about Jesus may have been as early as eighteen to nineteen years after his death in A.D. 33 by the first Christian writer, Paul. Scholars agree that the epistles (letters) of Paul (all became books of the New Testament, e.g., his letter to the Romans, his two letters to the Corinthians) were written starting around A.D. 51–52, with his first letter being to the Thessalonians and continuing during the 50s and into the early 60s of the first century.

Although Paul was not one of the original twelve apostles and never saw Jesus (except, he maintained, the risen Jesus after Jesus’ crucifixion when Paul had his epiphany on the way to Damascus [Acts 9:3–8]; and indeed, before his epiphany he was a dedicated persecutor of Christians), he became, by almost all accounts, the most important apostle of all, eventually being executed in Rome for his impassioned advocacy of the divinity of Jesus and his teaching. Even though Paul wrote none of the gospels, with his thirteen epistles (his authorship has been questioned on a few) he wrote more of the New Testament’s twenty-seven books than any other follower of Jesus (i.e., any other person), and he is considered by most to be, next to Jesus, the second most important (and to some, most controversial, because they believe he was a power-seeking opportunist who wrote too much about himself and rarely actually spoke in his epistles about Jesus’ life) figure in the history of Christianity, some going so far as to maintain that it was he, not Jesus, who was the founder of Christianity.

3 Because of John’s advanced age, some have suggested that the story about John and John the Elder may have been about one and the same person, though second-century theologian Papias clearly distinguished between the two. And Papias is almost surely correct. In the three epistles of John in the New Testament (1, 2, and 3 John), 2 John and 3 John, both of which are very brief, clearly say, unlike 1 John, that they are from John the Elder. Moreover, in 3 John 1:9, John the Elder writes that he was “ignored” by one of the leaders of the church. If John the Elder were the apostle John, this would have been inconceivable, as the twelve apostles in the early church were widely venerated as the very foundation of the church. (See Revelation 21:14.)

4 The authorship and authenticity of the gospels have been the subject of debate for centuries, and unfortunately no one is in a position to speak with authority on the matter. Perhaps the closest to authority we’ll ever be able to have is Eusebius (A.D. 265–340), the bishop of Caesarea (315–340) in Palestine. There were earlier Christian writers (most of whom elders or “fathers” of the early church) who wrote about the primitive church before Eusebius: Papias, the first major one, around A.D. 135, whose work, except for fragments, is lost, and who, along with Polycarp, a later martyr, was believed to be a disciple of the apostle John; Origen, an intellectual giant of the early church who was more a philosopher and theologian than a historian, whose extremely prolific work, for the most part, has not survived; Irenaeus, whose celebrated Adversus Haereses is mostly a refutation of the Gnostics;^aa Clement of Rome, only two of whose letters survive; and Tertullian, much more of a theologian than a historian, who eventually broke with the early church and joined a heretical Christian sect called the Montanists.

However, it is generally acknowledged that Eusebius, a Christian theologian and historian, in around A.D. 320 wrote the first scholarly work on the early church—his seminal History of the Church (modern title, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus)—and he is often referred to as the “father of ecclesiastical history.” Reading Eusebius, one sees his scholarship in the cautious, very spare words he employs, always acknowledging, where applicable, the absence of sufficient evidence to form a firm conclusion.

Eusebius says that “the whole time of our Savior’s ministry is proved not to embrace four entire years,” that Jesus, “not very long after the commencement of his public ministry, elected the twelve, whom he called Apostles by way of eminence over the rest of his disciples.” Eusebius says that Jesus appointed “seventy others beside these, whom he sent, two and two, before him into every place and city whither he himself was about to go.” (Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus, [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1977], 40).

On the gospels, Eusebius wrote that Mark was “the companion of Peter.” He notes that Peter, in his epistle from Rome, indicates that Mark, whom he affectionately referred to as “my son,” was in Rome with him (1 Peter 5:13). Eusebius said that after Peter was executed in Rome, those who had heard “the power and splendor” of his orations in churches and elsewhere “persevered in every variety of entreaties to solicit Mark to leave them a monument in writing of the doctrine orally communicated” to them by Peter, adding that they did this “until they had prevailed with the man.” Eusebius says that “this account is given by Clement, whose testimony is corroborated by Papias, bishop of Hierapolis” (Eusebius, 64–65).

If this account is true, this would seem to weaken the accuracy, though not necessarily the essence, of Mark’s gospel in that unless divinely inspired, Mark was only recalling Peter’s words, as opposed to Peter working with Mark on the gospel, as John, some say, did with his scribe, John the Elder. And when you weaken Mark, you weaken Matthew and Luke because it is clear that a good part of their gospels, which followed Mark’s,^ab were based on the gospel of Mark, many of their passages being virtually identical to his. The three gospels are referred to as the synoptic (Greek for “seen together”) gospels because they are very similar in their outline and content. The gospel of John is not laid out in the same structure as the synoptic gospels and contains events and parables not in the other three. It is also the only gospel in which Jesus sometimes calls himself the “Son of God.”

Eusebius refers to Luke, the only Gentile among all the New Testament authors, as being “born at Antioch [in Syria] and by profession a physician, being for the most part connected with Paul, and familiarly acquainted with the rest of the apostles.” Luke was with Paul in Rome (2 Timothy 4:11), and Eusebius seems to be satisfied with the authority of the gospel of Luke, Luke himself referring in Luke 1:1–2 to the “events transmitted to us by the original eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Eusebius, 84–85).

Eusebius notes that of the twelve apostles and seventy disciples as well as “many others” who had seen and heard Jesus, “Matthew and John are the only ones who have left us recorded comments, and even they, tradition says, undertook it from necessity.” He explains that Matthew first proclaimed his gospel orally to the people of Palestine, and only “on the point of going to other nations, committed it to writing” so that the Palestinians would have it in his absence (Eusebius, 108).^ac

Eusebius said John wrote his gospel (he doesn’t mention any John the Elder) only because when the three previously written gospels, “having been distributed among all,” were “handed to him, they say he admitted them, giving his testimony to their truth,” but said they were “wanting in the narrative account of the things done by Christ, [including] the first of his deeds, and at the commencement of the gospel,” so he felt the necessity to fill in the gaps with his gospel (Eusebius, 108).^ad

Additionally, since the gospel of John, like all twenty-seven books of the New Testament, was written in Greek, and Greek was the literary language only of the educated elite among the Jews, this strongly militates against John being the actual, quill-in-hand writer of his gospel. Acts 4:13 speaks of John, as well as Peter, being “uneducated men of no standing.” In the language of the time, the word “uneducated” meant illiterate, being unable to read or write, which the vast majority of people during this period were. In view of this, it can be said, almost by definition, that all twenty-seven books of the New Testament had to have been written by writers who not only spoke Greek but also, because of the quality of their prose, were very literate.

If Eusebius is correct in these accounts, is there not a real problem with the whole theory of the words of the gospels being inspired by God? Peter made no effort to write a gospel, and per Eusebius, Mark had to be pressured into telling Peter’s story in Mark’s gospel. And Matthew and John wrote theirs out of necessity. If Jesus was divine, wouldn’t he have wanted his ministry and message to be delivered to the people of the world? Yet, per Eusebius, he apparently didn’t make his desire known to at least three out of the four (we don’t know about Luke) authors of the gospels. It should be noted, however, that Jesus told his followers that he was coming back soon, within the lifetime of those he was speaking to (Matthew 16:27–28). And his followers believed him (e.g., James 5:8). So the argument could be made that his disciples didn’t feel a pressing need to record his life for posterity.

Another point that militates against the conclusion that the four gospels, as well as the entire bible, were divinely inspired is that nowhere is it inferable from the chapters and verses of the gospels that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had any feeling or sense that what they were writing was inspired. If they did (as, for instance, their suddenly remembering something they were sure they had forgotten), wouldn’t they probably have made a point of saying this, somewhere, in their gospels? Christianity asks Christians to believe that the gospels were divinely inspired when the very authors of these gospels indicate no such thing.^ae

On the other hand, although the four gospels all are well written, the prose doesn’t sparkle with silver-tongued oratory and forever memorable phrases until it changes from the third person (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) to Jesus speaking with a towering eloquence and power. One wonders if the writers of the gospels, whoever they were, could turn the magic off and on like a light switch if something wasn’t special here.

5 However, it may not be justified to automatically assume that the scribes through the years who made copies of copies of the original gospels did not recognize the historical importance of their work and irresponsibly embellished or deleted scriptural language to fit their fancy or predilection before passing the gospels on to others. If we can use the Old Testament as a possible indicator of the accuracy of the New Testament gospels, we all know about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the first of which was found in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd boy in a cave on a hillside by the western shores of the Dead Sea near the ruins of what was once the village of Qumran in Jordan. Through 1956, archaeologists discovered in eleven Qumran caves some 900 biblical scrolls, commentaries, prayers, rituals, and codes of conduct, as well as many more manuscript fragments, stored in pottery jars, much of which were copies or fragments of every book of the Old Testament except the book of Esther. Breaking a silence of more than nineteen centuries, the discovered scrolls were part of a library placed there by a small, highly ascetic, and moral Jewish religious sect known as the Essenes (not mentioned, as were their larger rivals the Pharisees and Sadducees, in the New Testament; Jewish historian Josephus calls the Essenes “the most virtuous men on earth”), who are believed to have flourished between around 170 B.C. to A.D. 68. It is notable that the scrolls do not differ materially at all from later copies of Old Testament books.

Perhaps the most famous scroll found near Qumran is the complete book of Isaiah, after Moses the Old Testament’s most famous prophet. Dated around 100 B.C., it is one of the oldest copies of a bible book in existence. Prior to it, the oldest copy of Isaiah known to be in existence was dated around A.D. 900, which was a thousand years later. Yet biblical scholar Dave Hunt, in his book Defense of Faith, writes that a comparison of the two scrolls reveals only “a few spelling variations, some stylistic changes, and a rare word here and there that had either been left out or added but did not change the meaning of the text.” This, of course, is quite impressive.

As if the historical record is not cloudy enough, biblical scholars speak of The Sayings Gospel Q. The Q was taken from a German word, Quelle, which means “source.” The hypothesis of Q originated with nineteenth-century German biblical scholar C. H. Weisse in his Die evangelische Geschichte und philosophisch Bearbeitet in 1838. The Q gospel is believed to have been lost in the second century, with no surviving copies. Hence, no one has ever seen it, and no one knows who might have authored it. John Shelby Spong, in his book Jesus for the Non-Religious , says that Q’s “presumed existence results from an inference born out of the study of both [the gospels of] Matthew and Luke. Scholars universally assert that Mark was the primary source underlying both these gospels. Matthew used about 90 percent of Mark in his work; Luke, a little bit less, perhaps 50 percent. . . . However, it is obvious that in addition to that dependence on Mark, Matthew and Luke have a second source in common, for there are non-Marcan passages in the two gospels that are identical (or nearly so) in content.” This occurs in the sayings (aphorisms) of Jesus, such as love your enemies; judge not and you won’t be judged; everyone who asks, receives; if struck on one cheek, offer the other; give to everyone who begs. Biblical scholars, Spong says, believe that this collection of Jesus’ sayings is the Q gospel that was written after Mark (since Mark did not rely on them) but sometime before Matthew and Luke.

That there actually was a Q gospel of Jesus’ sayings (Q is believed to have contained nothing more about Jesus) is lent credibility by the Coptic (an ancient Egyptian language) gospel of Thomas. This gospel, unlike Q, is in existence. Believed by some to be the gospel of the apostle Thomas, others believe it to be the gospel of Jesus’ twin brother (though there is no scriptural evidence to support a twin brother of Jesus) because the author identified himself as “Didymus [twin in Greek] Judas [Jesus had a brother named Judas] Thomas [twin in Aramaic].” Many others believe the true author was neither.

The gospel was discovered in 1945 among thirteen leather-bound volumes written on papyrus (called by some a “Gnostic library” because most of the fifty-two writings in the volumes were by Gnostic Christians, though there isn’t too much about the very temperate gospel of Thomas that bears resemblance to the harsh and heretical Gnostics of early Christianity) inside a large earthenware jar found by a peasant digging for fertilizer near Naj (usually spelled Nag) Hammadi, an Egyptian village on the Nile. The gospel is a collection of 114 of the purported “sayings” of Jesus, affirmation that there actually were such collections, as Q is believed to have been, of the sayings of Jesus circulating in the first century.

At least half of the sayings in the gospel of Thomas sound just like Jesus and, in fact, are in the synoptic gospels, though not in the gospel of John. But there are too many sayings that the early Christian church did not feel were in harmony with the known Jesus, and this is one of the main reasons that the gospel was not included among the canonical gospels of the New Testament. (The term “canon of Christian scripture” refers to the books of the Old and New Testament, all of which were included there because the councils of bishops of the Catholic church in the fourth century (Councils of Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397) determined they met their ecclesiastical standards of being genuine—with respect to the New Testament, authored by a direct disciple of Jesus or someone who was very close to a disciple, and being in general consonance with already established Christian orthodoxy.)

But in one sense, the gospel of Thomas is much more like the Jesus we would expect, not the Jesus of the four canonical gospels. In the 114 sayings in Thomas (actually, with 42 separate sayings in subdivisions, 156), nowhere is there the Jesus who said that those who did not believe in him would be condemned to hell (e.g., Mark 16:16), the antithesis of a benevolent, merciful God. And a major emphasis in Thomas is on self-awareness, and with it, a kingdom of heaven right here on earth, not “in the sky” after our death (e.g., see sayings 3a, 18a, and 113), which, though far-out, is not quite as unrealistic and unbelievable as the heaven (up above in the sky) and hell of traditional Christianity.

The gospel of Thomas, by the way, is one (though the most important one) of more than twenty-five so-called apocryphal books of the bible: certain books written during the period of the Old Testament (e.g., 3 and 4 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, Psalm 151) and New Testament (e.g., gospels of Thomas, Mary, Philip) that are considered books of uncertain authenticity, or merely legendary, and hence not canonical. However, some of these books are considered canonical (called deuterocanonical) by the Catholic church and are in the Catholic bible but are considered apocryphal by Protestants and are not in their bible. They are the seven Old Testament books of Tobit, Baruch, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, and 1 and 2 Maccabees.

Pushing the gospel of Thomas in apocryphal fame is the Gnostic gospel of Judas, portions of a fourth-century copy of which surfaced sometime in 1983 near Beni Masah in Egypt. It has received a lot of media attention primarily because of its main allegation that Judas did not betray Jesus, as the New Testament and history have him doing. The gospel of Judas depicts Judas as only “betraying” Jesus because Jesus asked him to, so that he, Jesus, could die on the cross for our sins and fulfill prophecy (Isaiah 53:8). (The gospel of Judas suggests that Jesus taught the true gospel, the Gnostic one, only to Judas, not the other apostles.)

Because we have much evidence that Jesus consciously sought to fulfill Old Testament prophecies (see discussion in main text), this is not an improbable story on its face. Moreover, at the Last Supper (Passover meal), Jesus told his apostles that “one of you will betray me” (John 13:21, Luke 22:21). In John 13:24–27, when Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus replied, “It is the one to whom I give the bread dipped in the sauce.” When Jesus dipped the bread, he gave it to Judas. As soon as Judas had eaten the bread, “Satan entered into him. Then Jesus told Judas, ‘Hurry. Do it now.’” If Jesus weren’t Jesus, this would tend to confirm the allegation in the gospel of Judas. But under Christian theology, being Jesus (God), he was omniscient. So he would already know what Judas was going to do without Jesus’ having told Judas to do it. In any event, virtually conclusive evidence that Jesus was truly betrayed and Judas was not simply following his command is when Jesus said at the Last Supper, “How terrible it will be for my betrayer. Far better for him if he had never been born” (Mark 14:21). Nonetheless, John 13:24 is at least some evidence that the allegation in the gospel of Judas is true.

However, one doesn’t have to go too far beneath the epidermis to see that nothing else about the gospel of Judas and its allegation hold up well at all. For one thing, Judas committed suicide the morning after he “betrayed” Jesus (Matthew 27:1–5). So we know it would have been physically impossible for Judas to have written “his” gospel within that period or even to have conveyed its thirty-one pages of contents (in dialogue, not narrated form, between Jesus and Judas and the other apostles) to a third-party scribe. Indeed, the gospel of Judas doesn’t even claim to have been written by Judas, but supposedly by Gnostic followers of Jesus in the first or second century. And we know this to be true because Irenaeus (A.D. 130–202), in his Adversus Haereses in the second century, refers to a “Gospel of Judas” as being “fictional history.” The conclusion of fiction makes sense since how in the world would these Gnostics have the faintest idea of what went on between Jesus and Judas?

Much more importantly, the allegation itself makes little sense. Quite apart from the fact that, if true, Judas would thereby be making Jesus out to be either a liar or not omniscient (as indicated, Jesus told his apostles at the Last Supper that one of them would betray him), if Judas didn’t, in fact, betray Jesus and merely carried out Jesus’ wish or instruction, what reason would he have had to commit suicide? Suicide fits betrayal. It does not wear well with following the wish or instruction of the leader you had followed and thought was divine.

Actually, the whole story, it seems to me, stretches credulity. For three years Jesus practiced his ministry openly in Galilee and Judea. He appeared before thousands of people and was already on the radar screens of the Pharisees and Sadducees, who personally confronted him. At the time of the “betrayal,” Jesus, in broad daylight, was seen with his followers in Jerusalem, a city with a population believed to be around only 25 to 30,000 people at the time, and he publicly entered Jerusalem astride a donkey. Indeed, Jesus himself told the mob who arrested him, “Why didn’t you arrest me in the [Jerusalem] temple? I was there every day” (Luke 22:53). Indeed, on one visit to the temple, Jesus created a very big scene when he saw money changers there. He chased them all out of the temple after scattering their coins on the floor and turning over their tables. “Don’t turn my Father’s house into a marketplace,” he said (John 2:14–16; Mark 11:15–17). Since Jesus’ enemies knew exactly who he was and he wasn’t in hiding, why would they have needed Judas to kiss Jesus to identify him (Luke 22:47, Matthew 26:48)? The tale, from the get-go, simply does not have the ring of truth to it.

1 Although Protestant minister and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in one of his sermons, used an obvious non sequitur to state this reality, and weakened it efurther by being only half-right (unless he believed that God deliberately caused the Holocaust and all the horrors of history), he said, “If God is all-powerful he must be the creator of evil as well as of good.”

2 Of course, one answer among others (e.g., God doesn’t exist, or if he does, he isn’t all-good) is that the story about Moses and his people and the pharaoh is a bad point of comparison because it may never have happened. For instance, although the bible records that en route from Egypt to Israel, Jews gathered at Kadesh in the Sinai desert “for a long time…; thirty-eight years” (Deuteronomy 1:46; 2:14), “the site at Kadesh was excavated extensively and to our great surprise there was nothing there . . . earlier than the 10th century [A.D.],” Ben-Gurion University archaeologist Eliezer Oren reported to the media (Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 12, 1988).

Edwin M. Yamauchi, professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, writes that “two dates for the Exodus have been proposed: an early date of about 1440 B.C.E., and a late date of about 1270. No definitive archaeological evidence confirms the traditional southern route through the Sinai Peninsula or the location of Mount Sinai” (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 51). On April 2, 2007, Dr. Zahi Hawaas, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, told a bus full of journalists who had gathered at an archaeological site at North Sinai, Egypt, that the story of the Exodus was “really” just “a myth,” and that nothing had ever surfaced to confirm it (New York Times, April 3, 2007).

3 The most famous paradox about God (assuming there is a God) is whether he can make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it. As the thinking goes, if he can, then he is not omnipotent because there is something he cannot do, lift the stone. But if he cannot make such a stone, then he also is not omnipotent. Because omnipotence is believed to be a necessary attribute of the Judeo-Christian god, some atheists believe that the stone example alone is proof of the nonexistence of God. But just as God cannot do self-contradictory things (see examples in main text), he obviously cannot be self-contradictory things (e.g., he cannot be black and white at the same time). In a similar vein, he can make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it. But it cannot be stated that he is not omnipotent because he cannot lift it. He cannot have the power to make a stone he cannot lift, and at the same time have the power to lift it.

4 The great irony is that if the notion of people being automatons is a negative one, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists appear to be automatons much more than nonbelievers do. Though I have found many Evangelicals to be decent people, it is not uncommon for them to be almost completely one-dimensional characters who connect God, as the transcendent figure, to every event in their lives, be it birth, death, and everything in between, including everyday living. Christ, if you listen to them, infuses everything they do. For instance, when they get married they say that God brought them together and the two will spend their lives together “serving the Lord.”

The further automaton feature about them is the look of tranquility on their faces. They found the truth, and the truth is Jesus. It’s the very uniform look of the true believer, one I noticed for the first time way back in 1969 when I first met two members of Charles Manson’s family in Death Valley, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sandra Good. I wrote about them in Helter Skelter, the book I coauthored with Curt Gentry on the Manson murder case. “I was immediately struck by their expression,” I wrote. “They seemed to radiate inner contentment. Nothing seemed to faze them. They smiled almost continuously, no matter what was said. For them all the questions had been answered. There was no need to search anymore, because they had found the truth. And their truth was ‘Charlie [Manson] is love.’ . . . There was a sameness about them that was much stronger than their individuality. . . . They reminded me less of human beings than Barbie dolls.”

I’m not suggesting that all Evangelicals have this look about them, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Evangelicals are bad people, like Manson’s followers were, but there very definitely is a common denominator between them—they’re both true believers, only worshipping different gods. I’ll say this: Evangelicals should find a better word than “automatons” to use when they are trumpeting the value of having evil as well as good in the world. Many of them remind me of an automaton far more than atheists do, whom I would never think to characterize that way. Autonomous? Yes. Automatons? No.

5 Some Jewish scholars (e.g., Steven A. Fisdel), knowing there is no scriptural support for free will in the Hebrew bible, argue that the Israelites agreeing to live up to their end of covenants with God, such as those with Noah and Abraham and the one with Moses at Mount Sinai (where, in return for God’s promise to lead them safely to Canaan and destroy their enemies, they promised to follow all of his commandments [Exodus 23:20–23; 24:3, 7]), proves free will in that the Israelites had a choice to agree or disagree with the terms of the covenants, and they chose to agree. But how does this prove free will any more than one deciding to go to a movie or not, cross the street or not, speak or remain silent, vote for one person rather than another, buy a car or not? It doesn’t. The aforementioned argument of Jewish scholars presupposes free will. The issue is not the fact that with knowledge of the options, one chose to do B over A, but whether one’s choice of B resulted from free will, or was foreordained by God (“Whatever good or evil people may practice, their efforts result in the execution of God’s judgments,” John Calvin said; see also Ephesians 1–11), or, as most prominently argued by famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow, man’s acts result from “two things only, his heredity and his environment.”

We can know that Darrow, though perhaps in part right, is not right in the certainty in which he spoke since children with the same heredity and background end up having wildly divergent personalities and character. Indeed, to a lesser extent, twins coming out of the same womb at the same time and growing up in the same environment often have different personalities and emotional makeups. So there has to be something that each human is born with that distinguishes one person from another. Is it the psyche, the mind? Or is it, as Christianity believes, the soul? (But are the psyche and the soul one and the same? My old Random House dictionary—my Webster’s dictionary agrees—defines psyche as “the human soul or mind.”) You might just as well talk to your local grocer as to a learned scholar or philosopher for a definitive answer as to what this “thing” is because no one knows. My daughter Wendy, a registered nurse and a poet, has a subtle mind. She believes that whether we call this unknown thing a soul or something else, it exists and it is not the mind. She asked me once what colors I disliked the most. I said probably purple, with pink second. She then asked me if someone paid me $2 million, could I get my mind to change the way I feel about these two colors? The obvious answer, at least for me, is no. Things like our tastes, desires, personality, she said, as others have, are who we are as human beings, and our mind cannot change these realities. And this fact, she argues, militates against the existence of free will.

It has to be noted that although it is a subject rarely discussed, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the doctrine of free will, which is embraced by Protestantism, and the Protestant doctrine that one can only achieve salvation through faith in Jesus. This is so because the former implies that man has some say, by his conduct and decisions, in whether he is saved, whereas the latter suggests that only through man’s faith in Jesus and God’s grace can we achieve salvation.

The great irony is that when modern-day Protestants proclaim free will, as they always do, how many of them realize that they are preaching against the position of the founder of Protestantism, Marin Luther? My guess is less than 10 percent, if that. Luther, in his magnum opus, De Servo Arbitrio (Latin for “On the Enslaved Will”), which he wrote in 1525 in response to the position of his theological opponent, Desiderius Erasmus, in the latter’s short book, Diatribe, made it very clear that he does not believe in free will. He says that “God foreknows and wills all things … He foresees, purposes [intends], and does all things according to His own eternal and infallible will.” This, Luther says, “knocks ‘free-will’ flat, and utterly shatters it.” By that, Luther says, he does not mean that man has no free will, just that his will is free only to the extent of doing “the will of God;” that man himself “can do no good” except through “God’s grace.” That “free will without God’s grace is not free.” Luther speaks of “the immutable will of God on the one hand, and the impotence of our corrupt will on the other” (Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will [modern edition of De Servo Arbitrio. Revell Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1952], 80–81, 83, 104–105, 107).

Taken to its logical conclusion, when Luther says that God “wills all things,” this would seem to include saying that even one’s faith in Jesus, which Luther says is necessary for salvation, has to be bestowed on us by God through his grace. (Admittedly, this is precisely what Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians, 2:8.) And the logical extension of this is to say that whether we go to heaven or not has absolutely nothing to do with us, and everything to do with God’s whim. No wonder modern-day Protestantism (or at least the small percent who know) deliberately ignores Luther in this matter, and most Protestants embrace something akin to Arminianism, the doctrine (similar to that of Erasmus) of the Dutch Protestant theologian Jacobus Arminius, who believed man is saved by God’s grace and man’s free will in accepting it by faith. Thus, the Protestant term “justification by faith.”

6 But if an omniscient God, from the dawn of time, already had foreknowledge of everything to come, does that not make free will an illusion? Not necessarily. It would in the sense that, by definition, foreknowledge of an event means that the event will happen, has to happen. If it didn’t happen, then one could not have had foreknowledge of it. But foreknowledge is not necessarily synonymous with predestination. Predestination suggests, as Protestant theologian John Calvin maintained, that God has willed all future events (shades of Martin Luther—see previous endnote), Calvin even saying that God “elected” who would be saved and who, regardless of the life he led, would not. Although, being omnipotent, God would surely have such power to will all future events, it does not follow that he chose to do so. It is not paradoxical to say that being all-powerful includes the power to limit one’s power, which, if there is an omnipotent God, he may have done. God’s foreknowledge, then, can mean nothing more than God permitting us to make choices but knowing what choices we’re going to make. (Obviously, his permitting us to make choices in no way exonerates God of putting people on earth who he knows, because of their choices, are going to end up in hell.) In any event, society has no choice but to operate on the postulate of free will. If it did not, and believed instead that everything we do is willed by a higher being, no one would be responsible for his criminal conduct since he had no choice but to do what he did, and hence, lacked mens rea (criminal intent), a necessary element of the corpus delicti of every true crime. The result would be a completely lawless society, with no punishment as a deterrent to crime.

However, this reasoning hasn’t stopped the Shariah, Islamic law, from severely punishing all criminal offenders even though the Qur’an, upon which, along with tradition, the Shariah is largely based, seems to go in the direction of saying that Allah not only had foreknowledge of everything but predestined it. Sura 87:2 says, “The Lord has created and balanced all things and has fixed their destinies and guided them.” Sura 9:51 reads, “By no means can anything befall us but what God has destined for us.”

1 Dawkins was parroting what one frequently hears that “it is impossible to prove a negative.” But this, of course, is pure myth. In many situations in life it is very easy. For instance, in a criminal case where a defendant says he did not and could not have committed the crime, say a robbery or burglary, because he was somewhere else at the time, the prosecutor routinely proves the negative (that he was not somewhere else) by establishing through witnesses, fingerprints, DNA, or sometimes even film that he did commit the crime and was not where he said he was at the time it happened.

2 How close to certainty is Dawkins in his disbelief in God? In an April 11, 2008, appearance on comedian Bill Maher’s television show, Dawkins said that out of seven, he was a six on the atheism scale. Somewhat surprised, Maher asked “Why are you only a six? Why aren’t you a seven?” “As a scientist,” Dawkins replied, “I can’t definitely commit to anything, including that there are no fairies.” To laughter from Maher and the audience, Dawkins added, “I can’t say I know there are no pink unicorns either, so maybe I’m a six point nine”—that is, Dawkins knows there’s no God.

But wouldn’t Dawkins and other like-minded atheists have to be all-knowing to know there is no God, i.e., wouldn’t they have to have as much knowledge as Christians say God has to know there is no God? And because all rational people know that their store of knowledge is very limited, oftentimes even about the most mundane things in life, for them to say they know that God, the greatest mystery of all, doesn’t exist is, of course, foolish.

It should be noted that in atheist literature, two types of atheism are frequently explored, positive and negative atheism. The former can be exemplified by statements like “God does not exist” or “There is no God.” It is the least common of the two atheisms. Annie Besant, in her 1887 book, Why I Do Not Believe in God, defined negative atheism, the most common type, as “without God,” and exemplified by the statement “I do not believe in God.” Dawkins comes very close to saying that God does not exist and therefore would have to be characterized more as a positive atheist.

3 Not only doesn’t Dawkins tell his readers that Darwin was not an atheist; he actually goes out of his way to strongly suggest the opposite, that he was an atheist. In responding to the argument of Christian apologists that many great scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Galileo were theists, Dawkins writes that some theistic apologists “even add the name of Darwin, about whom persistent, but demonstrably false rumors of a deathbed conversion [obviously, from atheism to theism] continually come around like a bad smell.” He goes on to write that “even before Darwin, not everybody was a believer [i.e., Darwin wasn’t the first great scientific mind to be a nonbeliever or atheist. There were great minds who were atheists before him]. And some distinguished scientists went on believing [in God] after Darwin.” Dawkins is nothing if not amazing.

4 Remarkably, the central argument of Dawkins’ book, one that made him renowned as the world’s preeminent atheist, isn’t even his argument, although the unmistakable thrust of his book is that it is, and he makes no clear effort to disabuse his readers of this notion. Although there was a poorly articulated allusion to the argument in Scottish philosopher David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), this cockamamie argument was first unambiguously set forth not by Dawkins but by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The celebrated English poet and thinker wrote in an 1814 essay, A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialogue, that “from the fitness of the Universe . . . you infer the necessity of an intelligent Creator. But if the fitness of the Universe, to produce certain effects, be conspicuous and evident, how much more exquisite fitness . . . must exist in the author of this Universe?” Shelley goes on to say that the likelihood of such a being “is absurd.” Dawkins makes no reference to Shelley in his book, and the nature of his two very weak and short offhand references to Hume (one quoting someone else referring to Hume) could in no way inform his readers that the main argument of his book was not his own.

With respect to Shelley, it’s not as if Dawkins also doesn’t quote others for the source of arguments he used, because he does do this generously throughout his book. But not on the central argument of his book, the one, above all, he should have. And it would be difficult to argue that Dawkins may not have been aware of Shelley’s writing on this issue. Virtually all highly literate Brits, as Dawkins is, have read all of Shelley, particularly since, dying very young (1792–1822), his output was small. I mean, if I’ve read the essay by Shelley, a writer who is not really part of my indigenous literary culture, then surely Dawkins has.

It should be noted that unless the matter is too insignificant for attribution, or many have said the same or similar thing, authors routinely acknowledge the source of even less important arguments than the “central” argument of their book.

1 Though we know that the earth is billions of years old, in fairness to the creationists it should be noted that the obviously erroneous position of creationists that the earth (and universe) is only 6,000 years old did not result from their pulling the number 6,000 out of a hat. One James Ussher, the Church of England archbishop of Armagh (Northern Ireland today), proposed in 1650 that God created the world and mankind about 4,000 years before the birth of Jesus. (With the 2,000 and some years since, modern creationists have their 6,000 years.) Ussher reached his 4,000 years by adding up the so-called begats from genealogical lists in the bible (Adam beget Seth, Seth beget Enosh, and so on; see, for example, Genesis 5, 10, and 36) and from events (e.g., the reigns of the various kings of Israel).

Creationists also note the symmetry between the six days that Genesis says God took to create the universe and 6,000 years, and also that six days in the bible is not the same as we know six days to be, citing the New Testament verse “A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day” (2 Peter 3:8). And here I was so impressed that God created everything in just six days. If it took him 6,000 years, I’m not that impressed anymore.

2 While we’re talking about evolving from monkeys instead of God creating us, Christians can’t possibly be thinking when they repeat over and over again the inanity that “God created man in his own image.” (Genesis 1:27 adds, “God patterned man after himself.”) If God, in fact, did create man in his own image, given that we know how pathetic, weak, and morally defective man is, what does that say about who God is? If we’re compassionate, shouldn’t we feel sorry for him?

3 Tests in mirrors have shown that apes, elephants, and dolphins are the only known mammals other than man who are capable of physical self-awareness.

4 None of this should cause one to overlook the incredible similarities these precious little creatures bear to human beings, having virtually all of the same emotions. We know they love deeply, and many are capable of great loyalty. They experience fear, happiness, insecurity, anger, in some, even jealousy. They enjoy eating, having sex, and playing, even having toys. They bleed like us when they are cut, they procreate (the female becoming pregnant and even nurturing her babies), and, unbelievably, just like humans, they all have different personalities. My God, they even sneeze and yawn like us and dream and snore in their sleep. This is why the terrible cruelty toward these wonderful creatures that exists far too much in our society is so unforgiveable.

I’m probably off base here, but even though I know that murder, in its legal definition, is the “unlawful killing of a human being” with malice aforethought, and animals aren’t human beings, because they are so very similar to human beings in their feelings and emotions, and because they are alive and have beating hearts like we do, and because they, like us, desperately want to live, isn’t shooting and killing an animal like a sweet and innocent deer just for sport something akin to murder?

1 As indicated in the main text discussion of atheist author Richard Dawkins, the argument of intelligent design is also prominently used when the universe is not being discussed, but as a refutation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution—that human biological structures such as DNA, and living organs like the eye, are so extremely complex that they must have been the work of an intelligent designer, the chance mutations of evolution being incapable of producing something of such startling complexity. The scientific community has for the most part been disdainfully dismissive of this argument, a representative observation being that the theory of intelligent design is nothing but “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.”

After Daniel v. Waters, 515 F.2d 485 (1975), held that a law in Tennessee—the state that first dealt with the issue in the famous Scopes trial in 1925—providing for the teaching of creationism in public schools was violative of the establishment clause (separation of church and state) of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and was not entitled to “equal time” with the teaching of evolution, creationists went beyond Genesis with some scientific arguments and came back with what they called “creation science.” But the U.S. Supreme Court, dealing with a Louisiana statute that mandated that creation science be taught in public schools if evolution was, ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) that it, too, violated the First Amendment. The creationists next removed all references to Genesis and the word “creation” in a proposed public school textbook in Dover, Pennsylvania, and came up with “intelligent design,” but in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 707 (2005), the court ruled that intelligent design was just another way of saying creationism, that it was not science, and hence that it would violate the establishment clause if it were taught along with evolution in public schools. The federal judge, an appointee of President George W. Bush, also made a finding that Dover school board members had lied under oath to conceal their religious agenda.

2 Another argument for God, the ontological argument, is one whose faulty carpentry will soon be evident to you. It is believed to have first been postulated in the eleventh century by St. Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm writes in his short treatise Proslogium (following his first treatise, Monologium) that God is “omnipotent, compassionate, just, wise, good, eternal, everywhere. [He] lacks nothing.” In other words, God is perfect; or as Anselm put it in awkward syntax, “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Anselm went on to say that if “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one than which a greater being can be conceived. But obviously, this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and the reality.”

In addition to the obvious straw man Anselm sets up (“if that, than which nothing . . .”) and the just as obvious non sequitur of his conclusion (If I conceive of a perfect basketball player, one that no one can be better than, does that mean that such a player exists?), there is a more serious defect to Anselm’s reasoning that makes it remarkable it survived beyond the time it took for the ink to dry on his words. The courtroom handles inanities like this that are stated in the form of a question by the well-recognized objection, “The question assumes a fact in issue (or assumes a fact not in evidence).” In other words, here, the question to be resolved is whether or not there is a God. You can’t start your discussion of this issue by asserting “God is perfect” because to do so assumes the very fact (that God exists) that is in issue.

3 Where do we end up if we assert the probability that there is no intelligent life on any body other than earth in the universe? Since it makes no sense that out of the trillions of heavenly bodies in space, the laws of nature were such that only earth was hospitable to life, this is one piece of circumstantial evidence that goes in the direction of there being a supernatural being (God) who created us for some reason unknown to us, perhaps as a laboratory in which to conduct an experiment. (But being omniscient, wouldn’t he already know the result of the experiment?)

If not that, a problem with the Christian belief that God created the universe is that does it not presuppose—in fact, require—that of the billions of planets like ours in the universe, either ours is the only one that God, for no apparent reason, decided to put intelligent life on, or the only one of other hospitable planets whose inhabitants had a sinful nature that required God to have his son die for their sins?

4 The argument of intelligent design, though generally not thought to be of ancient origin, goes at least back to Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), who said, “The world functions according to some deliberate design.” It was also articulated in the 45 B.C. book De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) by Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the three books of theological dialogue by Cicero. “The constellations are so accurately spaced out that their vast and ordered array clearly displays the skill of a divine creator” (De Natura Deorum, 2:110). “On seeing the regular motions of the heaven and the fixed order of the stars and the accurate interconnection and interrelating of all things, who would deny that these things possess any rational design, and maintain that [this] phenomena takes place by chance?” (2:97). The great Voltaire, calling De Natura Deorum “perhaps the best book of all antiquity,” thought enough of the argument to say, “The universe impresses me. I cannot help but balk to think that there should be no clockmaker for such a clock.”

5 Although if God created the universe, I do wonder what he did with his time before he did it. Doodle? Just like I wonder what scientists mean when they say the “universe is finite” and “expanding” because of the big bang. The words “finite” and “expanding” necessarily mean that at any given point in time there’s an end to the universe. But if so, what’s at the end of the universe? Certainly not a fence or wall. An invisible line? But if so, what’s on the other side?

6 Whatever the answer to this conundrum is, it certainly is not that given by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1788 treatise Critique of Pure Reason. Kant writes, “This [question] is incorrect because the causal principle concerns only what begins to exist, and God never began to exist, but is eternal.” But how could a supposedly great mind like Kant’s utter something so off base? The whole argument of first cause is to prove the logic of the conclusion that there is a God. You don’t do this by assuming the existence of God, the very thing sought to be proved. Because this is so obvious, was there something wrong with Kant?

The first time I began to wonder if Kant was not, shall we say, quite right was when he insisted that all lies were morally wrong and never permissible, even in situations of imminent peril. But not only are lies absolutely necessary in some circumstances (During wartime, Churchill said, “the truth has to be protected by a bodyguard of lies”), but also sometimes lying is the only moral thing to do. Imagine German SS agents knocking on the door of a residence in Berlin in the late 1930s and asking a young Jew the whereabouts of his parents, who are in hiding. Kantian ethics would apparently dictate that the only moral thing for the lad to do was tell the SS the truth. Perhaps the very pejorative word “lie” should be reserved only for deliberately telling a falsehood to someone who is entitled to the truth.

7 Indeed, if God created the universe, would not the law of cause and effect, among all other laws, have also been created by him? And if so, would it not follow that he would have the concomitant power to void or render inapplicable what he created as it applied to himself?

1 Although traditional, rabbinic Judaism still clings tenaciously to the belief that Moses is the author of Genesis as well as the other four books of the Torah, it is holding both ends of the rope in the water on this matter, with most biblical scholars recognizing the reality that the authorship of all five books of the Torah (called Pentateuch in Greek) is unknown and most likely forever will be. David J. A. Clines, professor of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield, England, writes, “The overwhelming tendency in biblical scholarship has been to explain the origin of the Pentateuch as the outcome of a process of compilation of various documents from different periods [and hence, different authors] in Israelite history” (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 580).

Although there were several earlier scholars and theologians who, starting in the seventeenth century, began to enunciate and expand upon this belief in their writings (e.g., Thomas Hobbes, Jean Astruc, Baruch Spinoza, Richard Simon, and Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette), the first one to publish a comprehensive study of the theory was German theologian Julius Wellhausen. In his 1876 book, Die Komposition des Hexateuch (The Composition of the Hexateuch, which is the Pentateuch plus the Book of Joshua), a book that has not been translated into English, he set forth his theory of four sources for the Torah, none of whom was Moses.^af

Called the “Documentary Hypothesis,” the four “documents” (actually believed to be texts in narrative form) are called J ( Jehovist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomy), and P (Priestly), dating from the ninth, eighth, sixth, and fifth centuries B.C., respectively. Believed to come from different eras of Jewish history and, as indicated, with different, multiple authors, the documents were in many cases contrasting accounts of events in that history, and hence, had to be edited by redactors who put the Pentateuch into the present form before the canon of the Torah was formalized in the fifth century B.C. (The canon of the Prophets followed in the third century B.C., and the remaining books of the Hebrew bible, the Hagiographa, in around A.D. 90.) The letters J, E, D, and P are scholarly shorthand for the unknown authors of the documents, named because of signature references in their writing. For example, in the E, or Elohist, document, the author used the more personal Hebrew name for Yahweh, Elohim, and Elohist is derived from Elohim. The P, or Priestly, source came by its name because the document stressed Jewish ritual and religious observance, from which the inference was drawn that the authors of the document were probably Jewish priests. (The term “rabbi” didn’t come into use until the first century A.D.)

But these biblical scholars, though they deserve to be commended for their work, which has resulted in conclusions more likely to be true then those of Judeo tradition (e.g., does it make sense that Moses would write two contradictory stories of creation? See Genesis 1 and 2. On the other hand, where was the editing by redactors here?), and though they sensibly never claimed divine authorship for their unknown Torah authors, in the last analysis are merely clothing the same almost assuredly apocryphal story of God and his personal relationship with the Jewish people in more academically respectable garb.

The biggest weakness in the Documentary Hypothesis by far is that its entire ethos is inference. The proponents of this theory speak about the four documents as if they exist and they have seen them. But they exist only by way of scholarly analysis and inference. The proponents thus far have failed to produce one page (original or copy) or even one snippet of a page of any of the so-called J, E, D, or P documents. So we cannot be 100 percent sure that they ever existed.

1 Per the publisher of the books, Tyndale, 71 percent of the readers are primarily from the South, followed by those from the Midwest. Only 6 percent are from the Northeast.

2 Now, these faithful believe, as St. Augustine wrote in his treatise Faith and Works, that if you accept Christ as your savior, “good works will follow.” But notwithstanding what is implied in 1 John 5:18, nowhere do they say that if you accept Jesus into your life you will never sin again, that you will lead the life of a saint. Because of this reality, the common assertion by most Protestants and born-again Christians that “once saved always saved,” i.e., once you accept Jesus into your life you are saved (which suggests that it is irrelevant what you do thereafter) is a meaningless statement that cannot be supported even in theory. Or scripturally. 2 Peter 2:20–22 says that “when people escape from the wicked ways of the world by learning about our Lord and Savoir Jesus Christ, and then get tangled up with sin again, they are worse off than before.” (See also, Hebrews 6:4–6; Luke 8:13–14.)

3 Actually, a smaller percentage of more moderate Evangelicals, including Billy Graham, has in recent years at least allowed the possibility that those who don’t accept Jesus as their savior (because they have never read or heard the gospel of Jesus and do not know of him) might still reach heaven. But these moderates are still so harsh and restrictive that those who do not know of Jesus aren’t too much better off. A nonbeliever in Jesus can reach heaven, they say, only if he recognizes the existence of God—for instance, through nature—and submits to him (not Jesus, whom he does not know) as his only salvation. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, unbelievably, say, “Everyone knows of God because of the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Those who reject that natural revelation will reject Jesus, too.” Graham says that since God has “spoken through his universe, men and women are without excuse for not believing in him.”

1 For those who think that maybe only Jesus’ spirit, not his body, was resurrected, and that all his disciples and others saw was an apparition or ghost of Jesus, they are unfamiliar with the bible. Jesus himself, confronting his originally skeptical disciples, said to them, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). Jesus talked to his disciples, let them touch his wounds, ate with them. (See Luke 24:35–43; Matthew 28:9; Mark 16:14–19; John 20:19–29 and 21:4–12; Acts 1:3–4; and John 1:1.)

2 As is obvious, the main value of Josephus’ paragraph in determining the historicity of Jesus is that he was not a Christian. But as has been pointed out by several anti-Christian scholars, one of the biggest problems with his account is that although Christian writers of the second and third centuries wrote prolifically about Jesus, none that we know of mentioned the all-important reference to Jesus by Josephus until Eusebius, around A.D. 320, wrote his History of the Church. So even though Josephus’ work, Antiquities, was the most important secular book about the Jewish people written up to that point, and obviously was read by religious scholars of that era, almost three centuries went by (around 287 years) before any Christian writer, all of whom were seeking to promote the health and advancement of Christianity, saw fit to quote Josephus’ celebrated reference to Jesus, a reference, again, so consequential because it came from a non-Christian writer.^ag This naturally raises questions about whether the original Antiquities (only copies have survived) even contained the reference, and has caused these anti-Christian authors to allege that Josephus’ reference to Jesus was a fraudulent invention by Christianity.

This is not an automatically invalid argument on its face. However, it could be argued in rebuttal that because the early Christian writers treated the existence of Jesus as a fait accompli (as opposed to what some writers today maintain), they may have felt no need to mention Josephus’ reference to Jesus, Jesus’ existence not being an issue at the time. In reading, just for an example, Tertullian’s (A.D. 160–220) essay Prayer, I have to say I would have found it odd to see a reference to Josephus and his paragraph. To these early Christian writers it would have seemed as uncalled for and inappropriate as quoting authority for the existence of the sun.

There is one thing, however, that stands out in Josephus’ paragraph like a sore thumb: the “ten thousand” other wonderful things about Jesus. The number is so wrong, extravagantly so (even if one believes everything in the bible, such as all the fulfillments of prophecies (44) and miracles (37) of Jesus, the number would probably not be in excess of one hundred), that it sounds more like it came from the equivalent of a modern-day flack who was just getting started as a press agent and was enthusiastically trying to promote his client, than from a very careful, scholarly historian, as we know Josephus was.

To me, this problem with the paragraph is also exacerbated by the fact that in the extant Antiquities, the one paragraph reference to Jesus (Antiquities, 535) does not seem to fit the context, giving further support for the contention that it was inserted by early Christians after Josephus died in A.D. 100. The paragraph that precedes the reference to Jesus concerns Pilate killing “a great number” of Jews who had protested against his use of “sacred money” (presumably Jewish religious money) to bring a “current of water to Jerusalem.” The next paragraph is the Jesus paragraph. Then the following paragraph reads, “About the same time, also, another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder.” This paragraph flows much better from the paragraph before the Jesus paragraph than it does from the Jesus paragraph. I did not read Josephus’ 578-page Antiquities of the Jews (pages 29–603 of the 1,055-page The Life and Works of Flavius Josephus), a book of small print. But in spending around three hours reading portions of it of interest to me here and there, I did not see any similar examples of such a glaringly disjointed flow in his writing.

Another question has to be asked about the lone Jesus paragraph in Josephus’ Antiquities. Since Josephus, who was Jewish and a Pharisee, started his meticulous and thorough history of the Jews with Genesis and proceeded up to the date of his book’s publication in A.D. 93 (thereby covering the entire period of the life of Jesus), and since the life of Jesus was so important to Christianity that it takes up the entire New Testament, and since Josephus, although being born four years after Jesus’ crucifixion, was, per his brief autobiography, The Life of Flavius Josephus, born, raised, and lived the first thirty years of his life in Jerusalem (he spent most of the remainder of his life in Rome following the failure of the Jewish revolt against the Roman empire in the late 60s A.D., during which he was a Jewish general in Galilee), why would the spectacular and momentous nature of Jesus’ life not cause him to write far more than one solitary paragraph in his long history of the Jews?

It wasn’t as if Jesus was merely an itinerant preacher who drew the attention only of those small groups he spoke to. To the contrary, per the New Testament Jesus was a phenomenon whose message suggested he was the messiah and whose miracles of healing attracted the intense notice and scrutiny of all of Palestine. In Mark 3:7–8 it is written, “Jesus and his disciples went out to the lake, followed by a huge crowd from all over Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, from east of the Jordan River, and even from as far away as Tyre and Sidon. The news about his miracles had spread far and wide, and vast numbers of people came to see him for themselves.” (See also Luke 5:15.) How many? Well, for instance, we’re told there was one crowd of 5,000 (Matthew 14:21), another of 4,000 (Matthew 15:38). As a percentage of the population back then, wouldn’t that be the equivalent of several hundred thousand people today? Mark 6:56 says that “wherever Jesus went—in villages and cities and out on the farms—they laid the sick in the market plazas and streets” for Jesus to heal them.

And it wasn’t just the masses who came from everywhere to see Jesus. Jesus’ suggestion that he was the messiah drew the attention and ire of almost the entire Jewish religious establishment. Speaking of a day that “Jesus was teaching” in Galilee, Luke (5:17) wrote that “Pharisees and teachers of religious law showed up, it seemed, from every village in all of Galilee and Judea as well as Jerusalem.” Mark 6:14 says, “Herod Antipas, the king, soon heard about Jesus, because people everywhere were talking about him.”

The question is, How is it that Josephus, particularly back then when the oral tradition of communication was a hundred times more prevalent than today and the area of Jesus’ ministry involved was so small (from Nazareth in Galilee to Jerusalem in Judea is only around seventy-five miles by the way the crow flies), would not know all about Jesus and his enormous impact on the Jews of his time? And if he did, why in the world would he devote only one paragraph in his 578-page history of the Jews to Jesus? I mean, in Josephus’ companion volume on Jewish history, War of the Jews, he wrote much more about another Jesus who idiotically walked around the city of Jerusalem day and night for several years crying out, “Woe, woe, to Jerusalem, and to its people and to the holy house,” until a stone thrown at him struck and killed him, finally silencing his cry. Are we to believe that this Jesus was worth more than four times the space as the story of Jesus of Nazareth, upon which the entire New Testament is based? It just doesn’t make sense.

Another Jesus, identified by Josephus as the “eldest of the high priests next to Ananus,” got up on a tower and spoke to the Idumeans (Edomites) who had come to Jerusalem at the request for assistance of a radical Jewish sect called the Zealots, who claimed the Jewish leadership in the city was about to betray the city into the hands of the Romans, and Jesus told the Idumeans that this was a lie. Josephus set forth, word for word, Jesus’ entire speech, almost fifteen times as many words as Josephus’ paragraph on the life of Jesus, the founder of Christianity.

And these are just references to two other men named Jesus in Josephus’ history of the Jews. Throughout Antiquities, he spends much more time on very obscure figures than on Jesus of Nazareth. For instance, he spends pages talking about Helena, the queen of Adiabene, a small Assyrian kingdom in Mesopotamia, and her son Izates, who became its king.

In leaving this issue, I can only say that although the Jesus paragraph in Josephus may be as clean as a hound’s tooth, in my opinion there is something strange about it. And if, indeed, the Jesus paragraph was inserted at a later time, the considerable implications are too obvious to state.

3 In A.D. 112, a Roman writer and administrator, Pliny the Younger, nephew of Pliny the Elder (author of the thirty-seven-volume Natural History), referred, in a letter to Roman emperor Trajan that was included in his book of letters titled Letters, to followers of a “Christ, whom they worship as a God.”

4 On the other hand, the bible says that God created man “in his own image,” and we all know that Christians believe that God is “all-perfect,” which theoretically should make all of us, as many have pointed out, perfect, too. Yet we are also told that God sees us all as sinners. And Christians agree. “God is pure and perfect,” they say, so perfect that “no greater being can be conceived by our thoughts,” but “we are all sinners.” I don’t get it. What am I missing here?

5 Easily one of the biggest misconceptions among Christian laypeople is what the term “immaculate conception” means. Many believe it refers to the virgin birth of Jesus, but I remember from way back in my catechism classes that it instead refers to the Catholic belief that the Virgin Mary was the only human ever born without original sin on her soul. Her soul was sanctified by grace from the beginning and never stained. Although nothing in the scriptures expressly says this, in 1854 Pope Pius IX declared it to be so and cited two bible passages, perhaps the strongest of which is in the gospel of Luke that he said helped him infer this. The angel Gabriel said to Mary, “Hail, favored woman, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28, 30). It is believed that Pius was also influenced by the principal Catholic (and Christian) belief that Mary gave birth to Jesus, and hence, God would have likely spared her original sin.

6 In an article in Mensa Magazine in 2002 (Mensa is the international organization of very bright people whose members have to have an IQ at or above the ninety-eighth percentile in standardized IQ tests), Paul Bell writes, “Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one’s intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one’s intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious.”

7 The notion of Jesus’ descent into hell has little biblical support. Of several references, including Jesus saying, “I will be in the heart of the earth for three days” (Matthew 12:40), which is virtually no support at all, the only two that seem to have any substance are 1 Peter 3:19, where it is written that after Jesus suffered physical death, “he went and preached to the spirits in prison,” and Revelation 1:18, where Jesus said, “I am the living one who died. . . . And I hold the keys to death and the grave,” the grave in the Greek translation of the bible being Hades, or hell.

Despite the tenuousness of the notion, the words “descended into hell” (after he was crucified and buried and before he rose from the dead) actually appear in the Apostles Creed, one of the very most important prayers in the Catholic church, a prayer that dates back to around A.D. 500, yet traditionally is attributed to the twelve apostles.

8 C. S. Lewis, in a homespun way that has seduced millions of people into buying his books and recommending them to others, has a modus operandi of comparing apples to oranges throughout his entire book Mere Christianity, and the gullible reader thinks he’s comparing apples to other apples. His style is to take a nonsensical Christian belief that no one understands, including himself; use fuzzy, circular reasoning to try to explain it; and then close his sale with his Christian buyers by speaking to them in a language they all understand, which is supposed to explain the ludicrous Christian belief. For instance, as previously indicated, Christianity believes that God is divided into three persons, the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Ghost. Yet these three persons are only one. Say what? Lewis understands how this can be. “In God’s dimension,” he says, “you find a being who is three persons while remaining one being [now for the language everyone understands], just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.” Brilliant sounding, but pure drivel. Lewis speaks of the Son and the Holy Spirit being God. But a side of a cube is not a cube. It’s a side that could just as well be a side of a piece of wood, box, loaf of bread, or book. He gets by with this terribly defective reasoning throughout much of his book.

9 How soon did Jesus mean? Very soon. Indeed, in Matthew 16:27–28 he said, concerning his returning to “judge all people” (Judgment Day), “I assure you that some of you standing here right now will not die before you see me, the Son of Man, coming in my Kingdom.” (See also Mark 9:1, Mark 13:30 [“this generation”], and Luke 9:27.) James 5:8 proclaims, “The coming of the Lord is at hand.” This poses what would seem to be an insurmountable problem for bible Fundamentalists (creationists). To get around the fact that science has proved that the world is billions of years old when they say it is only 6,000 (some say 10,000) years old, they argue that 6,000 years in biblical time is not the same as we know 6,000 years to be, or that the earth was created in such a way that it erroneously gives the appearance of being much, much older than it actually is. But how can they get around Jesus saying he was going to return during the lives of many of those living during his time?

Not to worry. At least one (but not “many”), per legend, is still alive. In John 21:19–22 Jesus told Peter to follow him. When Peter turned around and saw John lagging behind, he asked Jesus, “What about him?” whereupon Jesus replied, “If I want him to tarry until I return, what is that to thee?” For centuries, the belief among some was that John must not have died and was wandering the earth waiting for the second coming of Christ. But it was the consensus of too many that John had, in fact, died in Epheseus, after living into his nineties. In the thirteenth century, after several other candidates for the Wandering Jew had failed to catch on, the enduring story of a Jewish shopkeeper—who, legend (not the New Testament) has it, pushed Jesus and told him to walk faster as he carried his cross in agony past his shop, causing Jesus to level a curse at him, “I will go, but you will tarry till I return”—emerged in Europe, where it became very popular.

Eventually, the legend spread throughout the globe, being memorialized in many plays, poems, novels, and even movies, up to and including the twentieth century (e.g., Wilson Tucker’s 1959 novel The Planet Earth, in which the Wandering Jew is the last man on earth alive, and the 1948 Italian movie L’Ebreo Errante , starring Vittorio Gassman). Indeed, and as can be expected, several men through the centuries have steadfastly claimed to be the Wandering Jew. Although the story has slight variations, the basic theme is that the Wandering Jew is very tired of living and desperately wants to die, but he either keeps getting older or remains the same age. Even his many attempts to kill himself, including walking into raging fires, have proved unsuccessful. It seems only the Lord, when he returns, can end his hell on earth.

1 On this issue of who Jesus was, divine or not, we can’t ignore the fact that Jesus’ disciples, convinced of his divinity, dedicated their lives after he was gone to preaching his gospel in the countries of the ancient world (known today as the Middle East), even as far as Rome, and to throngs they knew would scorn and abuse them. Many of them, including Peter, Paul, and Jesus’ brother, James, who became known as James the Just, paid for their evangelism with their lives, suffering brutal execution. Why would all of them be willing to risk their lives and become martyrs if they were not certain of the truth of what they were preaching?

In a similar vein, the Jewish elders in Jerusalem claimed after Jesus’ purported resurrection that the tomb in which Jesus had been buried was now empty because Jesus’ disciples came in the middle of the night while the Roman guards were sleeping and stole his body (Matthew 28:11–15), presumably so they could deceive people into believing that Jesus had risen from the dead. But if this were true, why would Jesus’ followers, knowing the fraud they had perpetrated, and now knowing that Jesus was not divine, have been willing to continue to preach his gospel, gladly accepting persecution and severe physical punishment,^ah even death, over something they knew to be a lie?

But one has to also ask why Jesus, after his purported resurrection, would walk around in apparent disguise (Mark 16:12, Luke 24:13–16), choosing to show himself only to his disciples (1 Corinthians 15:6–8), not to his many hostile unbelievers, such as the members of the Sanhedrin who found him guilty of blasphemy and said he must die (Matthew 26:65–66)? Saul of Tarsus (Paul) cannot be considered to be an exception to his not appearing to his nonbelievers since Jesus only appeared to him as a “brilliant light from heaven” and a voice, not in his body (Acts 9:3–6). And even if Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:7, was not referring to the apostle James but to Jesus’ own brother James, who at one time was an unbeliever, Jesus appearing to his brother would hardly qualify as a good exception. If Jesus had shown himself to his hostile unbelievers, wouldn’t that have been proof of his divinity and done more to further his ministry on earth than anything else?

Before we leave this matter, there can be no question that the credibility of the New Testament’s assertion that Jesus rose form the dead (Matthew 28:1–7) is diminished by its usually overlooked additional assertion that at the moment Jesus died on the cross many ordinary, non-divine “men and women who had died were raised from the dead. They left the cemetery, went into the holy city of Jerusalem and appeared to many people” (Matthew 27:51–53).

2 Jesus had four brothers—James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3). He also had sisters (Mark 6:3), although nowhere in the New Testament are their names or number given. The brother of Jesus who is mentioned the most in Christianity is James (not one of the twelve apostles [Matthew 4:21 and 10:2–3]). James is believed to be the author of the epistle of James in the New Testament. He became the first bishop of the early Christian church in Jerusalem (Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, 75, 470), and as indicated earlier, ultimately died a martyr’s death. Many Christian scholars deduce from this that James, once skeptical of his brother’s divinity, must have been won over by his awareness of Jesus’ resurrection for him to have become a church leader and die for his belief. See also, Acts 1:14, 15:13, 21:18; Josephus, Antiquities, 598; and 1 Corinthians 15:7, although from the context in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul may have been referring to the apostle James, not Jesus’ brother, when he says that Jesus “was seen by James and later by all the apostles,” which could be read to mean James being one of the twelve, and “all” referring to the rest of the apostles. But this is not clear here, as it is in Galatians 1:19, where Paul refers to the James in that case as the brother of Jesus.

With respect to the brothers and sisters of Jesus, it is Catholic dogma that Jesus’ mother, Mary, was a virgin not only when she gave birth to Jesus, but always. As early as the fourth century, “ever-virgin” was a popular name for Jesus’ mother, and at the Council of Trent in 1555 Pope Paul IV reaffirmed the church’s long-standing belief in the dogma by declaring that Mary was a virgin “before [the] birth [of Jesus], during birth, and forever after birth.” But this is not a certainty at all under the bible. Matthew 1:25 states, “[Mary] remained a virgin until her son was born,” which could suggest she did not remain a virgin, as Pope Paul IV declared, “forever after.” And Luke 2:7 says that Jesus was Mary’s “first child,” the strongest (though not only) implication being that Mary had subsequent children with Joseph.

If we accept that Catholic dogma is correct, how can we account for the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus? One way is to assume that Joseph, Jesus’ foster father, fathered them before he married Mary. Hence, they would be Jesus’ halfbrothers and sisters. Indeed, at the time of Jesus, Greek-speaking Jews used the Greek words adelphos and adelphi (the words that appeared in the New Testament) not only for a blood brother and sister, but also for a half-brother and halfsister as well as a nephew, niece, and cousin. This latter possibility is least likely for James, however, who is referred to several times in the New Testament as Jesus’ “brother” and in the writings of early Christian scholars like Eusebius as “the brother of our Lord.”

A footnote to all of this is the reference in the gospel of Mark to a “Mary,” who, along with Mary Magdalene (about whom, by the way, there is no suggestions in the New Testament that she was a prostitute), was present at the crucifixion and burial of Jesus on Friday and came to the tomb of Jesus on Sunday morning and found it to be empty, an angel telling them that Jesus had risen from the dead (Matthew 27:56, 61, 28:1, 5–6). Some have speculated that she was Jesus’ mother, Mary, but this is very unlikely. Although she is identified as the “mother of James and Joseph” (Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40), and we know from the bible that Jesus had two brothers with the same names, this would appear to only be a coincidence, as everything else indicates she was not Jesus’ mother, and therefore James and Joseph referred to a different James and Joseph, two very common names at that time in Palestine. Jesus also had two brothers in addition to James and Joseph—Judas and Simon (Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3). So why would they say that “Mary” was only the mother of James and Joseph? Additionally, if Mark and Matthew were referring to Jesus’ mother, it is highly improbable that they would mention Mary Magdalene’s name before Mary, who was the mother, they believed, of Jesus (Mark 15:40, Matthew 27:56). Most importantly by far, if the Mary whom Matthew and Mark referred to was Jesus’ mother, it is almost inconceivable that they would not refer to her as such, referring to her instead as the mother of James and Joseph. Moreover, Mark also identifies this Mary along with Mary Magdalene and Salome (who was also present at the crucifixion) as “followers of Jesus” (Mark 15:40–41). It is extremely unlikely he would refer to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as just a “follower” of Jesus. See also Matthew 27:61, where Matthew refers to Mary as “the other Mary” (i.e., other than Mary Magdalene), a characterization he would not be expected to use if he were referring to Jesus’ mother.

Who was this “other Mary”? The only reference to the identity of the third Mary (i.e., in addition to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene) at the crucifixion or the tomb is in John 19:25 where it is written: “Standing near the cross were Jesus’ mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary (the wife of Clopas), and Mary Magdalene.” But unless the word sister was, as indicated earlier, being used here to include half-sisters as well as nieces and cousins, it seems very unlikely that the parents of Jesus’ mother, Mary, would name two of their children Mary.

3 On the subject of who Jesus was, although Jesus left no ambiguity that he came from God, his father in heaven (e.g., “my Father in heaven” [Matthew 16:17]), he repeatedly referred to himself (eighty-one times), particularly in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as the “Son of Man.” The term “Son of Man” appears several times in the Hebrew bible, mostly in the Book of Ezekiel (e.g., Ezekiel 2:1), where the prophet says God, in a vision Ezekiel had, called him the son of man. However, from the context, Jewish scholars believe that God clearly was not referring to the divinity of Ezekiel, but merely “a man within the created order” of man whom he was using to convey messages to the people of Israel. But nowhere in the New Testament are we told what Jesus meant by this term, and most biblical scholars see it, do a double take, then move on, although there is a body of literature on the meaning and derivation of the term, none of which is satisfying (e.g., see C. C. Caragounis, The Son of Man, [Tubingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1979]; J. Fitzmyer, “The NT Title ‘Son of Man’ Philologically Considered,” in A Wandering Aramaean: Collected Aramaic Essays, [Missoula, Missouri: Scholars Press, 1979]).

Let’s take a look at a recent take on the issue by the chairman of the Department of Religion at a major eastern university (whose name, to avoid embarrassing him, I will not mention). Remarkably, he says that in some bible passages when Jesus used the words “Son of Man,” he “does not appear to be speaking about himself” but about a “cosmic judge” whom “God” will send down “from heaven” on Judgment Day and “who will overthrow the forces of evil . . . and judge all the living and the dead” here on earth. But in the first place, this is a nonissue since in the synoptic gospels, Jesus, over and over and over again says, “I, the Son of Man” (e.g., Matthew 9:6, 16:27, and 19:28; Mark 8:38, 10:33, and 14:21; Luke 6:5, 9:22, and 18:8; John 3:13, etc.). On those few occasions when he doesn’t say the word “I” before “the Son of Man,” it is nearly always obvious from the context he is speaking about himself (e.g., Luke 17:22 and 18:31–33). So there is nothing to even discuss since Jesus couldn’t have made it any clearer that he, not someone else, was the Son of Man, that there were not two sons of man.

But let’s give the professor his due. Apparently, even though the scriptural verses explicitly say that “God” or “the Lord” will judge us on Judgment Day (e.g., Ecclesiastes 3:17, l Corinthians 4:5, 2 Peter 3:10, Revelation 20:11–15), this biblical scholar came up with a verse in Daniel that he says, without evidence to support his claim, refers to a son of man other than Jesus, a biblical passage that, in effect, overrules all that everything else in the bible says about this matter. In Daniel 7:13, the Hebrew prophet writes that he had a vision of “someone who looked like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven” down to earth; apparently, per the professor, not to rule the world, as Daniel says in 7:14, but to destroy God’s enemies and pass judgment on man. So if we’re to believe this professor, this vision was not of the Lord Jesus Christ. But not only, as indicated, did Jesus routinely refer to himself as the Son of Man, at Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin in the high priest’s home after his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus specifically said it was he who would be “coming with the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 26:64), a clear reference, by Jesus, to Daniel’s vision, the cherished vision in Daniel upon which the professor based his whole bizarre theory. So the learned professor apparently feels that either Jesus was lying in Matthew 26:64, or he was simply wrong.

And Daniel also wasn’t speaking of Jesus’ father, God, since it is God, per the professor, who will send this son of man to earth. And the professor never suggests that this son of man was the Holy Ghost. So whom was Daniel referring to? If we’re to believe the professor, by definition he had to be referring to a fourth, yes, a fourth entity. Someone who, in the entire bible, we can find only in Daniel’s vision. And he is the one who is going to destroy all of God’s enemies and judge all of us on Judgment Day. And I repeat. This professor is the head of the Department of Religion at his university.

I’ve never read any adequate explanation for this curious phrase, Son of Man, one of which was that “the absence of an definition or explanation in the Gospels may imply that the term was so well known to Jesus’ contemporaries that any such explanation would be superfluous.” Whatever the explanation, it should be noted that, although the literal meaning of the words is that Jesus came from the loins of man, not from God, the context in which he used these words makes it clear that he did not believe he came from a mere mortal, but from God (e.g., “If a person is ashamed of me and my message in these adulterous and sinful days, I, the Son of Man, will be ashamed of that person when I return in the glory of my Father with the holy angels” [Mark 8:38]. “In the future, you will see me, the Son of Man, sitting at God’s right hand” [Matthew 26:64]).

Although we cannot say with any degree of assurance why Jesus used the puzzling words “Son of Man,” one possibility to consider is that he deliberately used this term as a nonincriminating substitute for Son of God. Although he would not lie and deny his divinity if he was asked (John 18:33 and 36–37), perhaps he did not want to advertise who he was to the hostile Pharisees and Sadducees of Judea and Galilee, not wanting to provoke them into killing him before he felt he had completed his public ministry of preaching the word of God. When he asked Peter, “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then said, “You are blessed, Simon [Peter], because my Father in heaven has revealed this to you.” But then he sternly warned Peter and his other disciples not to tell anyone that he was the messiah (Matthew 16:15–17, 20; see also Mark 3:11–12).

But this is indeed peculiar since Jesus’ entire ministry could only convey the message that he was the messiah. If he was the Son of God (which, in addition to the Son of Man, he also proclaimed he was [“I am the Son of God” he told the Jewish leaders in the temple in John 10:36]), performed miracles, and fulfilled Old Testament prophecies, who else could he have been but the messiah? Yet for the most part he was evasive. When the Jews in the temple said to him, “If you are the messiah, tell us plainly,” he answered, “I have already told you, and you don’t believe me. The proof is what I do in the name of my Father” (John 10:24–25). However, Jesus explicitly told the Samaritan woman, “I am the Messiah” (John 4:26). When Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus replied, “Yes, it is as you say” (Matthew 27:11). “I was born for that purpose. And I came to bring the truth to the world” (John 18:33, 37). There is no confusion or ambiguity in the words of the New Testament that Jesus was the messiah. It remains a mystery, however, why he called himself the Son of Man, calling himself this much more than he called himself the Son of God.

1 Atheists consistently attack the four gospels, the historical foundation of Christianity, citing some contradictions among the gospels as proof to them that, as Richard Dawkins says, “the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened.” Christopher Hitchens says it is an error to believe that the gospels are “in any sense a historical record” because their authors “cannot agree on anything of importance.” (This is flat-out wrong.) Although these inconsistencies and contradictions are good circumstantial evidence that the bible is not divinely inspired (Why would God have any reason to inspire a biblical author to contradict another biblical author? Moreover, two contradictory accounts cannot both be correct. At least one has to be wrong, and how could an all-perfect God even be capable of inspiring anything that is wrong?), they are not good evidence, in my view, that the gospels are not authentic. Indeed, as I will point out, they are circumstantial evidence of the precise opposite—their authenticity.

But first, these are just a few of many other gospel contradictions. Right off the bat, the ancestors from that part of the genealogy of Jesus starting with David down to Joseph (How is Joseph, only Jesus’ foster father, listed as an ancestor—one from whom one is descended—of Jesus and a part of Jesus’ genealogy, which deals with genes and heredity?) are dramatically different between Matthew 1:6–16 and Luke 3:23–32. Matthew lists twenty-eight generations, whereas Luke has forty-three. Perhaps worse yet, other than David and Joseph, I could find only six ancestors (Eliakim, Shealtiel, Amos, Zerubbabel, Elieser, and Judah) who appear in both genealogies (although the spellings on a few others were close and could have been referring to the same person). None of the other ancestors do.

The gospels of Matthew (2:1) and Luke (2:4–7) say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but the gospel of John (7:41–42) suggests that he was not. Mark is silent on this matter. With respect to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew (5:1) says that Jesus went up the mountainside with his disciples to teach them by way of the Beatitudes, but Luke (6:12, 17) says that Jesus gave the Beatitudes on level ground after he had come down from the mountain. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus drives out the merchants from the Jerusalem temple near the end of his ministry (Luke 19:45), but in John this occurs near the very beginning (2:13–16). After the resurrection, Matthew 28:16, and John 21:1 say that Jesus met his disciples in Galilee, but in Luke 24:33, 36, he met them in Jerusalem.

There are many more such contradictions. But the reality is that on the main points and essential story of Jesus’ life, the gospels are remarkably consistent. And the contradictions, almost all in the details, not only are normal but they very definitely give the gospels strength and credibility, showing they weren’t written by one person or edited to fit an agenda, which, by my lights, actually makes them more supportive than subversive of each other. If all of the gospels agreed with each other on everything, this would affect their credibility inasmuch as such conformity, we know from human experience, would be abnormal. For instance, we know that eyewitnesses to the same event will very often differ, sometimes markedly, in their recollections. Five people witness an automobile accident. From their respective reports, it’s startling to see the differences in what they think they saw. And that’s when the report is prepared within days thereafter, not several decades later.

I wouldn’t have had whatever success I’ve had in the courtroom if juries wouldn’t convict defendants unless every prosecution witness I called to the stand to testify to an event described it in the same way, right down to all the details.

About details, in an 1846 book (The Testimony of the Evangelists: The Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice) by Simon Greenleaf, a prominent professor of law, the author quotes a Dr. Chalmers as writing, “Had the evangelists been false historians, they would not have committed themselves upon so many particulars. They would not have furnished the vigilant inquirers of that period, on every page of their narrative, so many materials for a cross-examination, which would infallibly have disgraced them.” Greenleaf adds, “There are other internal marks of truth in the narratives of the evangelists.... Among these may be mentioned the nakedness of the narratives; the absence of all parade by the writers about their own integrity, of all anxiety to be believed, or to impress others with a good opinion of themselves or their cause.... [And] there is apparently the most perfect indifference on their part whether they are believed or not.”

There is something else pointing to the credibility of the gospels. Several things in the gospels clearly are not favorable to the authors’ belief that Jesus was the Son of God—that is, the authors weren’t just trying to sell a product. Perhaps the best example is the inclusion in the gospels of Jesus crying out on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), as well as Jesus’s family saying he was “out of his mind” (Mark 3:20–21).

Where I disagree with Greenleaf, who believes the authors of the gospels to be wholly credible, is in his conclusion that Jesus was divine. There are two aspects to credibility. One is whether the declarant is honest. I am satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt, though not beyond all doubt, that the bible is an honest, though not necessarily accurate, record. Does that satisfy the second part of credibility, that what the authors of the gospels say in their writings (Jesus was born of a virgin, the miracles, the resurrection, etc.) is true? No. For that you have to look beyond an author’s honesty and sincerity to whether what he is saying makes sense or is corroborated by other witnesses or evidence. I have had personal contact with true believers, as the disciples of Jesus certainly were, who were sincere but spoke inanities. Charles Manson’s followers, who believed he was the second coming of Christ and the devil all wrapped up into one, believed he could read their minds and was watching them (literally), though he was hundreds of miles away. They also reported that they saw him do things like bring dead birds back to life.

On the issue of sincerity and honesty, many atheists go beyond merely saying that the gospels are not reliable because the four evangelists couldn’t agree on so many things. They suggest that in many places the gospel authors actually fabricated what they wrote. They particularly make this argument with respect to the position of Christianity that the life of Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies, strong evidence for Christians that Jesus was divine.

For example, Micah 5:2 says that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Because Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before Jesus was born, what to do? Richard Dawkins writes, “So how to get [Mary and Joseph] to Bethlehem at the crucial moment [of Jesus’ birth] to fulfill the prophecy?” He goes on to say that Luke fabricated a tale about a census for taxation purposes that took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, a story that was historically inaccurate and “complete nonsense.”

Sam Harris writes about “the numerous strands of Hebrew prophecy that were made to coincide with Jesus’ ministry. The writers of Luke and Matthew, for instance, in seeking to make the life of Jesus conform to Old Testament prophecy, insist . . .” Elsewhere he refers to “the attempts to make the life of Jesus conform to Old Testament prophecy.”

It’s difficult to know where the truth lies here. I say that because, even though I believe, as indicated, that the authors of the gospels were honest, it is also a fact of life that sometimes people who are telling the truth will fudge here and there to make what they are saying more believable. This may or may not have happened in the gospels.

There are more than forty Old Testament prophecies that, according to Christianity, are fulfilled in the New Testament, Isaiah 53 being, to me, the most important and prominent. (See discussion in main text.) Some are too general in nature to be of any real significance (e.g., Genesis 49:10 and Matthew 1:2–16). And some, like Zachariah 11:12 and Matthew 26:15, are in too much of a different context to be meaningful. Even many of the ones that are right on deal with only narrow points (e.g., Zachariah 9:9 and Matthew 21:5).

For some other prophecy fulfillments, see Psalm 41:9 and Matthew 26:47–50; Psalm 22:1 and Mark 15:34; Micah 5:2 and Luke 2:4–7; Isaiah 61:1–2 and Luke 4:18–21; Psalm 69:21 and Matthew 27:34; Psalm 22:16 and Luke 24:39; Psalm 22:18 and Matthew 27:35; Psalm 16:10 and Matthew 28:5–6; Isaiah 53:5 and John 19:34, 37; Jonah 1:17 and Mark 15:42–47 and 16:9; Isaiah 53:9; and Matthew 27:57–60.

2 For those who would add that we don’t even know Jesus’ surname (Christ is the English translation of the word Christos, Greek for messiah or anointed one), the reason is that from the time of Genesis in the bible through and several centuries beyond the time of Jesus, Jews had no family name, only a first name, and to distinguish those with the same first name from each other, they were known by their first name followed by “son [or daughter, father, mother] of ___.” For instance, Seth, son of Adam, Mary, mother of Jesus.

3 When we say the years start with Jesus’ birth, if we’re going to use the English language that necessarily means Jesus was born in the year A.D. 1, the first day of the first year being the day of Jesus’ birth. Yet Matthew 2:7 says that Herod, the king of Judea, was alive at the time of Jesus’ birth, and the year for Herod’s death is always given as 4 B.C. Remarkably, it is frequently said this means Jesus must have been born in 4 B.C. or earlier. (Indeed, since Matthew 2:16 suggests that Herod was still alive at least two years after Jesus’ birth, that means Jesus could have been born as early as 6 B.C.) But this is ridiculous on its face. Since B.C. means before Christ, how could Jesus be born four years before he was born? Likewise, how could Herod die four years before Jesus was born when he was alive when Jesus was born? Because this is an impossibility, I would think the most reasonable inference is that whoever first said Herod died in 4 B.C. made a mistake (or Matthew was mistaken [but see Luke 1:5, 26–31]; or Dionysius Exigius, the Russian monk who in the sixth century calculated the year that Jesus was most likely born, made a mistake), and everyone thereafter just repeated it. I mean, even today, with the best of technology, errors much more significant than the date of death of a Judean king who died 2,000 years ago are routinely made, yet repeated by millions. In any event, this matter is purely academic and is of little importance.

4 Although the God of the Old Testament told Moses, in general terms, that one shouldn’t “seek revenge” (Leviticus 19:18), the specific, at least in law, always takes precedence over the general, and God later tells Moses, “Anyone who injures another person must be dealt with according to the injury inflicted—fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Whatever anyone does to hurt another person must be paid back in kind” (Leviticus 24:19–20).

5 Poor Tolstoy. He unfortunately didn’t know where to look for an answer to the riddle. Just as fortunately, I did: St. Thomas Aquinas, by virtually all accounts the greatest theologian the Catholic church (and, many say, Christianity) has ever produced. Here is his explanation of the church’s holy trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—though three, being one:

Number is twofold, namely, simple or absolute, as two and three and four, and number as existing in things numbered, as two men and two horses. So, if number in God is taken absolutely or abstractly, there is nothing to prevent whole and part from being in Him, and thus number in Him is only in our way of understanding, because number regarded apart from things numbered exists only in the intellect. But if number be taken as it is in the things numbered, in that sense, as existing in creatures, one is part of two, and two of three as one man is part of two men and two of three; but in this way it does not apply to God, because the Father is of the same magnitude as the whole Trinity. (Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 30, Reply to Objection 4, 167–168)

It all makes perfect sense to me now. I had to go all the way to the top of the intellectual hill to get it, but my journey was worth it. (I assume the reader knows I’m being facetious here.)

One common assault on the Christian notion of the trinity, that it has no scriptural foundation and was manufactured by the Catholic church, is correct, but with an asterisk. Although the word “trinity” is not used in the bible, the three members of the trinity are mentioned many times in close proximity to each other, though the bible does not say they are all one (e.g., Matthew 28:19, John 14:15–17, Jude 20–21, and Luke 1:32, 35). However, we do know that Jesus said, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). The first formal statement of the doctrine by the Catholic church was by the General Council (of Catholic bishops) of Constantinople in A.D. 381.

Where there clearly seems to be a problem is in the position of the church that, although the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are distinct (though one), they are, per St. Augustine in The Creed, “co-equal.” (See also The Teachings of Christ: A Catholic Catechism for Adults, edited by Ronald Lawler, Donald W. Wuerl, and Thomas Lawler, Our Sunday Visitor, [Huntington, Indiana, 1976], 181; also, Athanasian Creed, H. Denzinger and A. Schonmetzer, 75.) But although, as indicated, Jesus, the son, said, “The Father and I are one,” for the most part he didn’t seem to agree. He said, “The Father is greater than I am” (John 14:28); that the father is “the only true God” (John 17:3); and he is “My God” (John 20:17). Jesus also said, “No one knows the day or hour when these things [heaven and earth will disappear] will happen, not even the angels in heaven or the Son himself. Only the Father knows” (Mark 13:31–32).

1 One of the very biggest differences between Protestantism and Catholicism is that, as alluded to in the main text, the former believes that only Jesus Christ is infallible, and the bible is the sole source and authority for all teachings and belief, whereas Catholicism does not believe the bible alone is a sufficient guide for salvation, giving equal weight to Catholic tradition, like the seven sacraments and the pronouncements of general councils of the church (twenty-one so far, starting with the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325). These councils are congregations of all the Catholic bishops of the world, convened by the pope, who meet when it is deemed necessary to establish doctrine, interpret scripture, and resolve disputes on matters of faith or morals. These pronouncements by the bishops and the pope are also considered to be infallible.

2 Interestingly, there are bible references that seem to suggest that good works alone will bring salvation. For instance, Romans 2:6–8, perhaps the most sensible verse in the New Testament on salvation, says that on Judgment Day, “God will judge all people according to what they have done. He will give eternal life to those who persist in doing what is good … and will pour out his anger and wrath on those who … practice evil deeds.” Indeed, Jesus himself said several times, mostly in the gospel of Matthew but also in Luke, that on Judgment Day salvation will depend (by implication, solely) on our deeds (Matthew 16:27). Those who performed good deeds during their life will “inherit the kingdom of heaven”^ai and those who did not will receive “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:31–46; Luke 3:24–28). Although this arguably contradicts what Jesus says in Matthew, 10:32–33, it clearly contradicts what John has Jesus saying in John 6:47 that “I assure you, anyone who believes in me already has eternal life.” (See also John 3:16 and 11:25–26; Mark 16:16). If the bible is the word of God, his utterances in these other gospels are still his word, not those of the authors of these other gospels, and hence, cannot be ignored.

It should be noted that references in the bible to salvation being based only on good works are not mentioned by either Protestantism or Catholicism for the simple reason that both, even Catholicism, maintain that faith in Jesus is necessary for salvation.

3 The exact quote from Isaiah 7:14 that Matthew cited was “Look! The virgin [actually, young woman] will conceive a child. She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel—God is with us,” the word “Immanuel” meaning “God is with us” in Hebrew. Note that Mary did not name her son Immanuel, but Jesus. And whatever Isaiah meant by the words “God is with us,” it would not change the fact that Isaiah was not saying the child would be born of a virgin.

Could Immanuel (“God is with us”) be construed to be the equivalent of saying the child was born of a virgin? Or, if not, could the words “God is with us” mean that the son of the young woman was God (Jesus, the son of God, being God under the holy trinity)? When I asked Rabbi Dershowitz about this, he said, “I have never heard that question come up in Jewish or Christian literature. There is no way that one can connect the name Immanuel with the son being born of a virgin, or with the son being God in the form of Jesus. ‘God is with us’ is simply a Jewish expression of faith in God, a belief in God.” He said the expression is routinely prompted by “hundreds of situations,” giving an example of a woman who had great difficulty conceiving and finally having a child. She could say, “God is with us.” The rabbi said that Immanuel is not an uncommon Jewish name, and Jewish parents who name their son Immanuel don’t believe they’ve given birth to God or his son.

4 Prior to the year 1414 (Council of Constance), parishioners used to receive wine with the wafer at Holy Communion.

5 To show just how serious these members of the Catholic church are, Catholics, like others, divorce all the time. But under Catholicism, once a Catholic remarries, he is forbidden from receiving Holy Communion because he is believed to be “living in sin.” What do these Catholics do? Thousands of them through the years have appealed to their archbishop, some even the Vatican, many even hiring lawyers, asking for some special dispensation that would allow them to once again receive Holy Communion. The church, to my knowledge, has always turned them down, allowing them to receive Holy Communion again only if they have their first marriage annulled, an act that engages in the fiction that the marriage (many times for twenty to thirty years with children) never actually took place. Typical grounds for annulment are that one party deceived the other into marriage in some material way, or was unable to consummate the marriage. But it is well known that the church, like a high-heeled lady of the night, will grant an annulment for enough money, or where the party seeking it has enough influence, making a travesty of its sacred sacrament of matrimony, a spiritual contract it maintains is “indissoluble by man” (Catechism, numbers 1611 and 1614).

For instance, it granted one to Frank Sinatra in return, reportedly, for his paying for the construction of a Catholic church in Palm Springs, California. Nancy Sinatra is widely considered by biographers of Sinatra to have been a devoted wife, and she bore Frank three children. But according to the Catholic church, Frank and Nancy, who had been married for twelve years, never had a valid marriage, and hence their three children were born out of wedlock. All to get that new church in Palm Springs.

6 Though Catholicism is quite adept at creating rituals and religious icons out of nothing (e.g., several of their sacraments), it is not 100 percent clear, as Protestants believe, that Catholicism invented purgatory. In 2 Maccabees 12:43–46 (considered to be an apocryphal book by Jews and Protestants but not by Catholics), there is a reference to “praying for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.” Such a place, of course, could neither be heaven or hell. And Matthew 12:32 speaks of the forgiveness of sins “in the world to come,” a reference that implies purgatory, per St. Augustine (De Civitas Dei, xxi, 24).

7 We know that Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest, started the Protestant Reformation in 1517 by denouncing the church’s selling of “indulgences,” including by Pope Julius II and Pope Leo X, to Catholics. The indulgence would shorten their stay, whereas a plenary indulgence would end the stay in purgatory. Rather than reform the church, Luther left it and started the Lutheran church, the first Protestant church. Although the Catholic church formally acknowledged at the time the impropriety of selling indulgences, it continued to believe it had the power, from its spiritual treasury, to dispense them, but the practice fell into sporadic use for centuries. Remarkably, although money is no longer required, many dioceses around the world today are now starting to offer, in exchange for certain prayers or pilgrimages, indulgences to Catholics, which will reduce the time they have to stay at the halfway house. Can you imagine that? The whole notion of purgatory is already glorified madness. And now the church, unbelievably, is popularizing indulgences once again, necessarily saying that it can determine how long you have to spend there before you get to see God in heaven.

8 Although it is not yet a part of church doctrine, in an interview with a German journalist in July of 2010, Pope Benedict said that to counter the transmission of AIDS, “there may be” an exception to the rigid condom rule “perhaps when a male prostitute [infected with the HIV virus] uses a condom.” Though not made clear by the pope, the belief was that he was only referring to sex between males. If so, since sex between males can never result in procreation, Benedict’s tentative relaxing of the no-condom rule is no exception at all to the Catholic church’s position on condoms—that their use is prohibited because they prevent procreation, the only authorized purpose for sexual relations between men and women. However, the pope’s unofficial statement has been widely interpreted as a signal that in the future the Vatican may relax further the church’s prohibition on condom use. In fact, Vatican spokesman Reverend Frederico Lombardi told the media on November 23, 2010, that when he asked the pontiff in a private conversation “if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of masculine over the feminine” with respect to prostitutes infected with the HIV virus, “he said no.” The latter, if formalized into official church doctrine, would be an important change.

9 In partial mitigation, if that’s even possible, of the Catholic church’s conduct in this case, its prosecution, conviction, and sentence of Galileo resulting from the publication of his book was based just as much on Galileo’s violating a written injunction given to him by a church emissary, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, on February 25, 1616, seventeen years earlier, to cease and desist promulgating his view that the earth revolved around the sun. In other words, no prosecution of him was contemplated back then. Galileo had written letters (the most famous of which was his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615) to several people that became public in which he stated his emerging view. In its June 22, 1633, sentence of Galileo, the Inquisition court told Galileo that in February of 1616 “we wanted to treat you with benignity,” but by his later book he had “violated explicitly the injunction given you.”

10 Which is, admittedly, virtually never. The First General Council of the Vatican declared (some say, affirmed) on July 18, 1870, that it was a “dogma divinely revealed” that when a pope “speaks ex cathedra [Latin for “from the chair” or, in this case, the church’s seat of power], that is, when acting in the office of shepherd and teacher of all Christians he defines doctrine concerning faith or morals,” he “is possessed of infallibility.” Since that time over 140 years ago, no pope has spoken ex cathedra except Pope Pius XII on November 1, 1950, saying on that day, “We proclaim, declare, and define it to be a dogma revealed by God that the immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever Virgin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.” This is called the “Assumption of Mary.” It should be noted that there is no reference in the New Testament to such bodily ascension by Mary.

1 As to the latter only, fear of death, I thought something in my late teens or early twenties—I’m sure others must have had a similar thought—that, at least if we limit ourselves to logic, should eliminate fear of death. I must also add that this thought of mine hasn’t helped me personally at all. Logically, death is nothing to be feared because if there is life after death and death is merely a door to another conscious existence, then there is no real death. And if there is no life after death, since the dead have no consciousness and cannot suffer, there is no cause for fear.

2 If anyone would be unable to describe the glory of life, certainly it would be I, whose passion for life is very, very rarely expressed and played out as it is with millions of people, and whose sense of aesthetics is so underdeveloped that I prefer the sight of buildings in a warehouse district, a train coming down the track, a few very old sunlit adobes on a New Mexico hillside, to the finest of paintings and sculpture and, except for the first half minute or so, the most breathtaking of panoramic views. Not only don’t I like things like art, sculpture, and ballet, or even poetry, they actually depress me. I once told an interviewer that if I were given a choice between a day at the Louvre (when there one day with my family, I stared at the Mona Lisa in wonderment, unable to figure out what all the fuss was about) and reading a newspaper in a small, windowless room, it wouldn’t even be a close call. I’d choose the latter.

My only aesthetic interests are music, perhaps the one harmonious thing in an essentially disharmonious world, and reading. And even with reading, unless I’m giving a quote for a book, I am virtually allergic to the most artistic and literary kind, fiction, being constitutionally unable to get past the first paragraph since I know it never happened. I am someone whose main pursuit of happiness throughout my life has been peace of mind, a condition I’ve never achieved, the few moments I thought I possessed it being dissolved by the realization that thousands, at that very moment throughout the world, were enduring great suffering and tragedy.

3 If I were to hazard a guess as to one component of the whole about life that makes it so indescribably precious that it simply cannot be captured in words, I would say it’s the feeling of hope. Not just hope that you win the lottery, or become heavyweight champion of the world, or get elected president of the company by the board of directors, but a woman’s hope she will be able to get the recipe to the great dish she had at a friend’s home, that you’ll be able to get a ticket to tomorrow’s play, that it will stop raining so that you can play golf today, that you can get home in time to watch the game on TV, that your daughter gets a good grade on her test, that your new medication lowers your blood pressure—in broader terms, that things will turn out for the best or improve. This hope, we know, springs eternal in human beings and keeps people going, there being no medicine like hope. There is a Mexican saying, “La esperanza muere al ultimo ,” meaning “Hope dies last.”

The wonder of hope is probably why not only America but, with the notable exception of China, which ridiculed his memory, the whole world mourned the death of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 more than any other public figure in history. Historian Stephen Ambrose said that the unprecedented outpouring of grief over Kennedy’s death was mostly because of “his promise, the hope he held out.” Political commentator James Reston wrote, “What was killed in Dallas was not only the President but the promise. The heart of the Kennedy legend was what might have been. All of this is apparent in the faces of the people who come daily to the grave on the Arlington Hill.” White House correspondent Helen Thomas said that Kennedy’s death “was a transforming moment for America because we lost hope. Every president who succeeded Kennedy—they all had good points and bad points—but the legacy of hope died with him. We never had that sense again that we were moving forward, that we could do things.”

4 Very few things in the bible leapt off the page at me like Genesis 6:3. No one, even those who view the bible as a fable, or at least with a jaundiced eye, can blithely ignore it. Here’s something allegedly from God way back in the first book of the Old Testament whose quaint edict hasn’t changed one whit since then. Although the life expectancy of man has inexorably continued to increase through the centuries with the advances of medical science, man’s life span has remained constant, 120 years. The longest life, on record, that any human has ever lived belonged to Jeanne Calment, a woman from Arles, France, who died at the age of 122, the only known human since the bible to have lived beyond 120 years. (A Japanese man who died in 1986 may have lived to be 120, but during his life his claim of age was disputed.) For two years and 164 days, Calment, who was born on February 21, 1875, snubbed God and his edict, finally succumbing on August 4, 1997, after 44,724 days of life.

When a seemingly random number (120) that could just as well have been 77 or 245 has proved to be the rooftop of our existence, does not this fact at least add a speck (not more) of credibility to the existence of the purported source of the number?

1 When I went looking for proportionality of punishment in Christian literature, the only reference to this issue I could find was in Thomas Aquinas’ thirteenth-century Summa Theologica. Aquinas, referred to by Catholics as “the greatest intellect the Catholic Church has ever known,” buys into proportionality, but only halfway. He says “the degree of intensity in the [afterlife] punishment corresponds to the degree of gravity in the sin; therefore, mortal sins unequal in gravity will receive a punishment unequal in intensity” but, he then adds, “equal in duration.” It is noteworthy that Aquinas does not cite any biblical or church authority for this assertion because there is none. In an earlier discussion on the issue, Aquinas cites perhaps the only vague, arguable allusion to proportionality in the bible, one in the least authoritative and least read (by biblical scholars) book of the bible, the Book of Revelation: “As much as she [the ancient city of Babylon, which had fallen] hath glorified herself and lived in luxury and pleasure, so much torment and sorrow give ye to her” (Revelation 18:7). This seems to be less an enunciation of a doctrine of proportionality than a loose assertion that the people of Babylon would pay dearly for their many sins. The two words “as much” in the Book of Revelation, of all books, cannot even begin to override the many explicit references to eternal damnation in the four gospels, several by Jesus himself, which, with every opportunity, make no reference or even vague allusion to proportionality.^aj

In any event, it seems clear that this was just Aquinas’ common sense speaking to him and what he said is not Catholic or Christian dogma. However, it was at least the voice of reason. But then, as indicated, Aquinas slipped intellectually when he bought completely into disproportionality with this non sequitur: “The punishment of mortal sin is eternal, because one thereby offends God who is infinite” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 2, Supplement to Third Part, Question 99, Article 1 [of 5], Answer, then Reply to Objection 2, [Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., Great Books of the Western World, 1952], 1079–1080). So according to Aquinas, no matter what the mortal sin is, even if it’s not a harmful act against a fellow human, such as consensual sex between adults, because the sin offends God and God is infinite, the sinner will have to suffer infinite torment in hell. Only the intensity of his suffering will be taken into consideration.

Thomas, you’re head and shoulders above your peers on this matter, which isn’t saying much, but you still ended up striking out by being ludicrous.

2 There are several references to the soul in the bible, but none speaks of the immortality of the soul in heaven or hell.^ak For instance, after saying that a fellow human cannot kill your soul, Matthew 10:28 says that “God can destroy both soul and body in hell,” which is the opposite of the immortality of the soul in hell with Satan. Indeed, Ezekiel 18:4 suggests that a sinner’s soul “dies.”

Luke 16:22–24 may be the only place in the bible that clearly refers to the soul going to hell, but the notion of suffering without end (i.e., immortality) is not mentioned. Moreover, nowhere does it say that the rich man’s soul is in hell because of his sins. We only are told he was rich. But although Jesus said it would be extremely difficult for a rich man to get into heaven (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” [Matthew 19:24]), Jesus never said that a rich man is precluded from reaching heaven. So Luke 16:22–24 doesn’t even make too much sense. Further, in Luke 16:23–25, the rich man’s counterpart, the beggar Lazarus, is not in heaven, but down where the rich man is, except he’s being protected from the flames of hell.

Ecclesiastes 12:7 says, but not even in the context of salvation, that “the spirit will return to God who gave it.” (Note that the word “soul” isn’t even used. Indeed, 1 Thessalonians 5:23 [“your whole spirit and soul”] and Hebrews 4:12 [“divides soul and spirit”] speak of the spirit and soul being different.) And again, the notion of immortality is not referred to.

And then there is 1 Corinthians 15:52–53, where it is written that on Judgment Day the “Perishable earthly bodies” of those Christians raised from the dead will be “transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die.” (See also 2 Corinthians 5:2–8.) But ‘heavenly bodies” doesn’t sound too much like a soul. (Remarkably, in The City of God, Saint Augustine maintains that the earthly bodies of those who are saved will return to life and ascend to heaven at the end of time.)

Some say that John 11:25–26, 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17, and Daniel 12:2 suggest that the soul of Christians will be reunited with the body at the end of time, and will ascend to heaven to be with God forevermore. (See also Fifth Lateran Council, A.D. 1513; Danzinger and Shonmetzer, 1440). But none of these citations say this. Either expressly (Daniel) or by implication (John and 1 Thessalonians), they only talk about the body of man, not the soul.

Indeed, either through willful deception or very sloppy scholarship, those Christian writers who maintain that the immortality of the soul is found in holy scripture consistently cite verses that speak of, or imply, the body, not the soul. Their favorite bible reference, in fact, is the resurrection of Jesus, which they claim proves that death is not the end and the soul is immortal. But the bible only says that Jesus’ body was no longer in his tomb (Matthew 28:6, Luke 24:3–6). His body had been resurrected. See also citations they give such as Isaiah 26:19 (“Their bodies will rise again”); Job 19:26 (“In my body I will see God”); and Wisdom 2:23 (“God formed man to be imperishable”). Or, without justification, they infer the soul from language that does not expressly say it, e.g., John 20:36: “By believing in him you will have life,” etc. Although the whole notion of bodily resurrection before Judgment Day at the end of time, with the body living on forever in heaven or hell thereafter, has some biblical support (e.g., see the chapters and verses above; also, Revelation 20:11–15, 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17), it is largely rejected and ignored today by virtually all religious scholars. The sole emphasis is on the soul.

It is very noteworthy that in their recitation of bible references to prove their point, the Christian proponents of immortality of the soul conveniently neglect to mention 1 Timothy 6:16, which says: “God alone has immortality.” Whether body and/or soul, that’s pretty explicit, isn’t it?

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19