What Christians Don’t Know ~ by CJ Werleman
CJ Werleman is a guest contributor to DailyAtheist.net
In ‘God Hates You. Hate Him Back’ I address the issue of Bible literacy, or lack thereof, in America. For many Christians, however, I don’t believe, in their mind at least, that knowing that Saul was the first king of Israel, or that Achan attempted to launder the spoils of Jericho’s annihilation to be of critical importance to their faith.
What should ,and in many instances does, trouble Christians is the following, and hence we should point these facts out to those friends and family that try to recruit us into the Jesus family:
1. The Gospels were not four of the twelve Disciples.
a) Simply we do not know who Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were. We do know, however, that none of the four met Jesus, or met anyone who met Jesus.
b) The earliest Gospel written is Mark, who penned his biography of Jesus at least a generation after the date of the crucifixion.
c) The Gospels did not write or speak the same language as Jesus. They wrote in Greek, and based on some geographical errors within the New Testament, we can assume they never lived in the Palestine region.
d) Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic. Further, they were most probably all illiterate. (Even a passage in Acts suggests so) It is estimated that somewhere between 5-10% of the Roman Empire were able to read or write during the first century AD. Literacy confined to the wealthy elite, who had the resources and time to afford an education. Jesus’ disciples, however, were peasant class Jews that herded sheep, fished, or kicked down doors on behalf of the Roman tax department.
Therefore, it is historically naive to believe that Jesus’ disciples could not only read or write Aramaic but then also in Greek too.
2. We have none of the original manuscripts of the Bible.
It’s an incredibly ignorant and foolhardy statement to claim that the Bible is the inspired or much less inerrant word of God when we don’t know what God or Jesus ever actually said. Moreover, we don’t even have copies of the manuscripts. Nor do we have copies of the copies. In some instances the earliest manuscripts we have are dated to the fourth or fifth centuries. The number of scribes hands, when the scribe business was not yet a profession until 400 AD, the copies passed is staggering.
3. The total number of New Testament manuscripts we have is 2,700
This is the equivalent of 100 copies of each book of the New Testament. Within these 2,700 versions there are a total of more than 400,000 errors, contradictions, discrepancies, omissions, and admissions. (*400,000 is estimated by Bruce Metzger. One of the most acclaimed Biblical scholars of modern times)
4. Jesus had no intention of starting a new religion
Jesus was a Jew. Born and raised by Jewish parents. Observed all the Jewish holidays. Praised the Jewish God of the Old Testament. Jesus loved everything Jewy about being a Jew.
Most significantly he endorsed Mosaic law to it’s full extent, and demanded that his followers even observe the law better than the priests:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”(Matthew 5:17-20)
But then comes along Saint Paul, like the Gospels he too never met Jesus, and says that the law no longer need apply. And in fact he says, in Romans, that observation of the Law will only hinder passage into Heaven. Moreover, Jesus would have rolled in his grave had he learnt that Paul started this new religion, Christianity, via preaching to non-Jews. It was Jesus that said, “I am here only for the lost sheep of Israel.”
5. Jesus did not know the reason for his death.
Refer to Mark where Jesus is rejected by all, abandoned by his disciples, denied three times by his closest buddy, rejected by the Jews condemned by the Romans, mocked by passersby and the other men crucified next to him.During his final hours of life he feels utterly and hopelessly abandoned not only by his colleagues but also by God. “Father why have you forsaken me?” Hardly the words of a man at ease with the meaning of his pending fate!
Now compare the above to Luke whereby Jesus is at peace and look forward to his inevitable death. He is not even mocked by his fellow condemned criminals, and even replies, “Truly I will tell you today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:42-43) This is a man who is sure in the reason of his death, and at ease that God is watching over him. In Luke, his final words are said to be, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”. A far cry from, “Why have you forsaken me?”
These just a few facts well known by scholars and theologians but shielded from your average Sunday church goer.
CJ Werleman
Author ‘God Hates You. Hate Him Back’ (Making Sense of the Bible)
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Do you have a published reference for point 3? It looks like it would be quite handy.
RAmen.
Interesting post. Anyone familiar with Bart Ehrmann will no doubt recognise much of it. There is some truth, and some half-truth there, however, and I think it's worth separating the facts from the opinions masquerading as facts.
(my reply is too long for one comment it seems(
I realise CJ is talking about Americans, and so I can't know if the average American pew-sitter would think the the four Gospels were all written by Disciples, nor whether the average American preacher / theologian 'shields' this or any of the points from them. I can't say I've ever heard anyone suggest the writers were all Disciples, though. At any rate, this is partly true – the four were certainly not all Disciples.
It's interesting that you assert that we do not know who these guys are, yet you claim to know about them and what they didn't do. We do in fact know some details about those four guys. The Gospel of Mark (like all of the synoptics) is anonymous, but the attribution of authorship to Mark, Peter's translator is traced back to the C2nd. There is early manuscript evidence attributing the Gospel of Matthew to him, and also an early tradition of attestation, though there is considerable debate these days as to the identitiy of Matthew as an apostle, generally stemming from the Markian reliance. Luke, who's gospel forms Vol. 1 of his Gospel-Acts box-set, was a travelling companion of Paul. While there also exists some Markian and 'Q' priority, the consensus of scholars is that Luke wrote both the Gospel and Acts. There is significant debate regarding John's Gospel (which is also technically anonymous). Once again, the tradition of attestation dates from the first decade of the C2nd, and there is some apparently autobiographical information, but also some writing that indicates a third party. A strong argument is made by some that it was written by the disciples of John on his testimony. The early, historic attestation – unquestioned until the C18th is certainly not to be easily dismissed. At the very least, the assertion that we 'don't know' is highly questionable, and the assertion that it was not based on eyewitness testimony is historically false.
Is that supposed to be a problem?
That they wrote in the lingua franca is no problem at all. I'm guessing the 'geographical error' you refer to is the easily resolvable scenario of the pigs in Mark 5? At any rate – knowing who Mark and Luke were (at the very least) deals with this issue.
Jesus was a Rabbi, and is reported to have read from the scrolls at the synagogue, but that's really beside the point, for Mark and Luke to be educated is not a problem. Matthew, even if we assume that he was the author, was a tax collector, so must have been at least semi-literate. But even so, there's no reason why they could not have dictated something.
Again.. not aware of any Christians who don't know this.
You do realise the Christian doctrine of inspiration and inerrency refers to the autographs, right?
Considering that the extant manuscripts of most major ancient texts date from anywhere between 750yrs (Pliny's History) 900-1000yrs (Caesar's Gallic Wars) to 1300yrs (Herodotus' History) – that the earliest complete New Testament manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus are both from the mid C4th seem positively early. The Chester Beatty Papyri from 200AD contains large portions of the NT, and most of the NT could be reconstructed from the 32k or so citations of the early 'fathers' prior to the council of Nicea.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, as there are between 5000-6000 complete or fragments of the New Testament, 10000 Latin manucsripts, and over 9000 in other ancient languages. (The oldest fragment btw dates from 125AD). There are around 50 complete manuscripts, the earliest, as I've said, from the mid C4th – compared with Caesar's Gallic War's, which we saw dates from the C10th, of which there are only 10.
While the figure of 400k discrepancies is reasonable, it is less significant that it appears, for the vast bulk of these discrepancies are insignificant: misspelling, different word order (which makes no difference in Greek), duplicated lines or missed words. Bart Ehrman (who likewise promotes the 400k number) writes:
Metzger himself assigned the letters A, B, C or D to variants to indicate the degree of certainty, and writes:
Some conservative scholars put the accuracy at 99.5%.
So while (most of) the figures quoted here are correct, the implication drawn from them by CJ is misguided and out of touch with the consensus of scholarship. That is, the data may be accurate, but the inference drawn is not.
Nor is the assumption that pew-sitters are oblivious to this; a quick look in the footnotes of any modern translation of the bible will tell you when significant variants happen.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your comments. Very well thought out, and without ad hominem attacks.
I relish discussing religion, particularly Christianity, and thus I relish this friendly debate.
I will try to be as brief as I possibly can be with my retort:
1. We don't know who any of the Gospels were. What we can do is use process of elimination, and the available evidence to at least paint of picture of who they may have been. We know they were not rural peasants from Galilee due to their literacy, not only in Greek but also somewhat fluent in Hebrew.
You write, "Luke.. was a travelling companion of Paul. "
There is no evidence to support this fact. Moreover, if Paul's epistles were the only documents we had of Jesus, we would know only that he was a Jew, born a natural birth, was crucified, and that his death had great significance but no details of his ascension or resurrection. If Luke were a companion of Paul then you must answer the question, why does Paul seem absolutely oblivious to every event of Jesus' life as reported by the Gospels?
Furthermore, Paul makes no mention of Jesus having any disciples, which you would think Luke would have at least mentioned in passing. In fact Paul acknowledges that he may have had some unknown followers but dismisses their relevancy:
"And from those who were reputed to be something (what they were makes no difference to me;
God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who were of repute added nothing to me; but on the
contrary…(those) who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of
fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised; only they would have
us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do." —Gal 2: 6–10
2. My statement regarding inerrancy was, admittedly, poor worded. I am aware that claims of inerrancy apply only to that of the original manuscripts. My point being that it is false logic to presume the originals the inerrant word of God when we have no idea what the originals actually said.
Your claim of 99.5% accuracy, in regards to errors, is one that only scholars with a fundamentalist axe to grind assert. It's a nice way of saying that most errors were purely innocent spelling, eye-slips, spacial mistakes. This is certainly not the case. Many changes made by scribes were theological in nature. This fact even troubled one of the founding fathers of the Church, Origen, who wrote:
"The difference among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please."
3. My number of 2,700 is the total number of Greek new testament manuscripts.
4. No argument
5. The reason for Jesus' death is not just an evangelical matter. It cuts to the core of irreconcilable discrepancies between the Gospels.
Anyway, food for thought.
Kind regards
CJ Werleman
CJ, that 99.5% accuracy that you stated, “is one that only scholars with a fundamentalist axe to grind assert” going on to state that, “Many changes made by scribes were theological in nature” did what to the overall theme of the Holy Bible?
Also, what do you say is the overall theme is of the Holy Bible?
CJ, being the self proclaimed Bible expert you say you are, why have you not answered my questions?
If I had a dollar for each time I came here… Incredible writing.