Part 7 (2/2)
In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ first tells us not to judge anyone, but then advises us to determine who are ”dogs” and ”swine,” so we don't give them what is holy and throw our ”pearls” before them. (Mt 7:6) How are we to decide who or what are swine, if we can't judge anyone? Isn't p.r.o.nouncing people ”dogs” and ”swine” judgmental?
In the pericope of the mission of the 12, in Matthew (10:10) and Luke (9:3) Jesus is quoted as telling his disciples not to take a staff with them, but Mark (6:8) relates Jesus as charging them to take a staff. Obviously, one of these accounts is wrong, unless Jesus changed his mind from one second to the next.
Yet another contradiction and implausibility occurs when Christ is pressed by the Pharisees and scribes for a ”sign” that he is the messiah, in Matthew (12:38-39; 16:1-4) and Luke (11:28). Jesus replies none will be given but the ”sign of Jonah”-that is, being dead and resurrected in three days.2 Providing a contradiction, Mark reports Jesus as denying the Jewish authorities and others any sign: ”...no sign shall be given to this generation.” (Mk 18:12) In any
event, at this point in the story Jesus had already displayed constant miracles, wonders and signs that should have sufficed to convince even the most skeptical, if it all really happened. Like many others, this pericope seems contrived and artificial.
Christ first tells his followers to hate their mother and father but later exhorts them to honor their mother and father (Mt 15:4). How can we do both?
Another contradiction appears at Mark 10:35, where it is not their mother, as in Matthew (20:20), but James and John, the sons of Zebedee, themselves who ask to sit at Jesus's right hand. Which is it?
When at Mark 12:32 Jesus is depicted as saying that no one knows when the Second Coming will be, not even himself, but only the Father, Christ appears to be saying that he himself is not the omniscient Lord. Geisler's apology for this evident contradiction is that there were times when Jesus was G.o.d and times when he was not: ”We must distinguish between what Jesus knew as G.o.d (everything) and what He knew as man. As G.o.d, Jesus was omniscient (all-knowing), but as man He was limited in His knowledge.”1 These remarks seem to be stating that Jesus turns off his omniscience at various times. If Christ is omnipotent, however, he can turn his omniscience back on whenever he wants, so it must be a question of him desiring not to be all knowing. Why would G.o.d play such a strange game with himself and with us? When do we know if Christ is speaking from his limited human knowledge and when he is speaking as G.o.d? If he doesn't know the time of his own coming, because he is a man, what else did he not know during his advent on Earth? Couldn't Jesus have made mistakes because of his limited knowledge?
Regarding the scriptures at Genesis 49:11 and Zechariah 9:9 about the ”a.s.s and colt” that were supposedly fulfilled in Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Mark (11:1-7), Luke (19:29-35) and John (12:12-16) sensibly omit one of the animals, since Christ could hardly have ridden two a.s.ses. Matthew (21:1-7), on the other hand, depicts Jesus as riding on two a.s.ses, leaving one to wonder where was the Holy Spirit to guide the evangelists, and why, if they were recording eyewitness accounts, rather than relying on a purported ”prophecy,” would they not know whether or not Jesus took and rode one or two a.s.ses? It would be honest and logical to ask whether or not the evangelists made an error, thus demonstrating that the Bible is not ”inerrant.” What this problem also strongly suggests is that, rather than depicting an actual event that he had witnessed, Matthew-who is nevertheless claimed to have been an eyewitness-simply cut and paste scriptures supposedly having to do with the coming messiah.
One more inconsistency occurs in the commonly held idea that Jesus was a ”political rebel” fighting against the vested interests of both Judea and Rome. Despite this ”freedom fighter” notion, Christ tells the people to give Caesar their tax money, to ”turn the other cheek” when struck, as well as not to resist evil! ”Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's?” (Mt 22:21) Is this really something a ”political rebel” or ”freedom fighter” would declare?
Jesus says he came not with peace but with a sword, but then he tells Peter to put away his sword, because ”he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” Which is it, a sword or no sword? This latter pa.s.sage is odd also for the reason that no one but John (18:10)-held by most to be the latest of the gospels-names the person who used a sword to cut off the slave's ear. The other evangelists call the armed individual ”one of those who were with Jesus” (Mt 26:51); ”one of those who stood by” (Mk 14:47); and ”one of them” (Lk 22:50). This lack of naming the person with the weapon is all the more strange in Mark, since he is presented traditionally as ”Peter's interpreter” and would thus know if the individual in question was Peter, as was a.s.serted by John. This fact confirms the unreal air of the gospels that indicates their having been written long after and far away from the purported events related in the story. Moreover, does it seem realistic that ”Peter” could cut off the ear of the high priest's servant and not be arrested, especially since the authorities were looking for excuses to destroy Jesus and his following?
At Matthew 28:18, Jesus tells his disciples that he will be with them until the ”end of the age/world”-or, aion in the original Greek, which also means ”for ever.” Earlier, in Matthew 26, Christ admonishes his followers not to worry about the cost of the ointment rubbed into his feet, saying that his disciples would always have the poor but would not always have him, their Lord. Aren't these two statements contradictory, that Christ will be with them forever but he would not be with them always? Geisler's apology for this apparent contradiction is that Jesus's admonition regarding him not being with his disciples refers to his physical presence, while his eternal presence is spiritual.1 But, why doesn't Jesus just stay with us always, physically as well? Why this cat-and-mouse game where we have to guess whether Christ is really with us? Also, if Jesus is the omniscient and omnipotent Lord of the universe, knowing fully well about the poor, why doesn't he just put an end to poverty?
A number of other contradictions and inconsistencies appear within the gospels, including Jesus commanding his followers to bother not with the Gentiles, but only with the ”lost sheep of Israel”; yet, at the end, after his resurrection, Christ exhorts his disciples to go to ”all the nations.” Throughout the gospels Jesus is quite adamant that he has only come for Israel-why is this mission altered suddenly and dramatically in the end? Did the omniscient Lord profoundly change the reason for his mission all of a sudden?
These factual discrepancies are not simply disagreements in doctrine or dogma that can be smoothed over by theology and philosophizing. These are incongruities in supposed facts of what purportedly happened historically on Earth. No other subject in history is treated in this haphazard and kid-gloves manner, which is to accept glaring contradictions and obvious errors of fact that would otherwise be corrected by studious historians finding an accurate path. Because there exists no such accurate path, historians remain left to create countless supplemental books trying to find the ”real Jesus,” nevertheless largely based on these diverging and flawed texts. Unfortunately, it does not serve a civilization well to function in this less-than-honest manner. In fact, a case could be made showing that a problem of this magnitude is at the root of many of society's ills. Again, instead of engaging in mental gymnastics to reconcile the numerous problems, should we not simply ask whether or not the evangelists and later scribes made mistakes, because they were writing fictionalized accounts?
Errors in Time and Place.
In addition to the many problems already noted are several others concerning anachronisms and erroneous gospel topography or geographical locations. Some of the towns mentioned in the New Testament have never been found to exist in the historical or archaeological record, and still others are evidently plucked from the Old Testament, such that their names are outdated and were not in use at the time the gospel drama supposedly took place.1 Indeed, the gospel story is anachronistically set in a time that had been long gone by the beginning of the first century, depicting, for example, archaic agriculture, and giving an impression of a vast wilderness full of sheep and shepherds, when in fact much of the small, 90-mile-long area of Palestine in question was already well developed and densely urbanized in the first century of the common era. In fact, the population of Palestine overall during this period was an estimated 500,000 to 1.5 million. Moreover, it has been evinced that Mark in particular reveals an evident ignorance of the Palestinian topography and geography, indicating the evangelist did not live there and may have never even visited the nation he is writing about. Upon inspection, the same can be said about the other evangelists as well, although apologetics waves away this a.s.sertion by using some suspect arguments.
Quirinius's Census?
One specific instance of apparent biblical error in time and place has been pointed out many times: To wit, the excuse in Luke of the census to place the Holy Family in Bethlehem remains unprecedented, unhistorical and illogical, in that no Roman census required people to return to their cities of birth in order to register, which would be a very costly and nonsensical requirement. The date of the census is also questionable, as Luke claims Jesus was born during the reign of Herod; yet, according to Josephus, Quirinius's census would have occurred after Herod's death, around 6/7 ad/ce, when Quirinius served as governor of Syria. Apologetics contends either that there were two Quiriniuses or that the one Quirinius served an ”earlier tour of duty” 11 years prior to his governors.h.i.+p of Syria and was somehow involved in Augustus's census of 8 bce.1 The evidence for such an a.s.sertion is sketchy at best and non-existent under scrutiny. Christian apologists also argue that an Egyptian papyrus discussing a purported census by Gaius Vibius Maximus in Egypt during the second century provides evidence that Luke's claims are true. However, the text's provenance is unknown, and the terminology cannot be truthfully interpreted to confirm that such a census required people to return to their homelands, if the text is even genuinely from the pertinent era. Even so, a census calling wandering shepherds and nomads to their homes for a head count might make sense, so such an enrollment under these circ.u.mstances is possible, but not as concerns people who are living in settled areas, which const.i.tute the bulk of demographics in the pertinent areas of Palestine at the time. Moreover, a procedure that may have occurred in Egypt is not necessarily applicable to Judea/Palestine.
Regarding Quirinius-or Kyrenios in the Greek, frequently translated as ”Cyrenius”-Dr. Crossan remarks: ...even if Augustus had ordained a complete census of the Roman world, and even if Quirinius had overseen its administration in Archelaus' territories, the Roman custom was to count you in the place of your domicile or work and not in that of your ancestry or birth. That is little more than common sense. Census was for taxation; to record people in their ancestral rather than their occupational locations would have const.i.tuted a bureaucratic nightmare.2 Moreover, the pa.s.sage in Josephus regarding Cyrenius/ Quirinius (Antiquities, XVIII, I, 1) indicates that the census or ”taxation” under him occurred fairly recently after he was sent there by Caesar as governor-having, as Josephus says ”supreme power over the Jews”3-and that the census/ taxation was a new thing at that time, reviled and resisted by the locals. Hence, it would be surprising if Quirinius had been involved in an earlier census, or even a later one, without Josephus mentioning it.
It would not have been too difficult to make such a mistake in the ancient world, so Luke cannot be severely faulted. However, claims of inerrancy for the New Testament truly seem to be more far reflective of stubborn conditioning rather than reality. Moreover, it is possible that Luke took his data from Justin Martyr, who, in his First Apology (34) mentioned the census of Quirinius: Now there is a village in the land of the Jews, thirty-five stadia from Jerusalem, in which Jesus Christ was born, as you can ascertain also from the registers of the taxing made under Cyrenius [Quirinius], your first procurator in Judaea.
In the first place, the t.i.tle of procurator represents an anachronism, as officials in Judea were not deemed such until later in the first century. Secondly, if Martyr had Luke's gospel in front of him, it would be logical and in line with Justin's habit of citing scripture to mention the evangelist's work. Nevertheless, he does not, and we are left looking elsewhere for the origin of the double-census of Quirinius. Could it simply be that Luke made a mistake or based his reportage on someone else's erroneous work, such as Justin Martyr?
Abiathar or Ahimelech?
In another example of an evident error in the New Testament, Mark 2:26 portrays Jesus as saying that the high priest during David's entry into the temple depicted at 1 Samuel 21 was Abiathar, whereas the Old Testament pa.s.sage states that it was Ahimelech, Abiathar's father. Hence, either Jesus is incorrect, which casts doubt on his claim to be the all-knowing Lord, or Mark is wrong, which, again, shows that the New Testament is not inerrant. The apology offered for this verse by Geisler is that Christ refers to the ”days of Abiathar,” which could include the time preceding his appointment as high priest.1 In reality, the Greek for this scripture is epi abiathar tou archiereos. One of the pertinent words here is epi, a preposition that means ”upon,” ”on” or ”at,” as in ”at the time.” The pa.s.sage could be translated as ”at the time of Abiathar the high priest,” clearly indicating that Jesus meant to convey that Abiathar was high priest at the time, a logical conclusion. This sort of sophistry within apologetics is proffered on numerous occasions when the New Testament seems to be incorrect.
Gadarenes, Gerasenes or Gergesenes?
Moreover, the attempt to explain the discrepancies regarding the name of the people where the demoniac is cured, i.e., the Gadarenes, Gerasenes or the Gergesenes, does not account for the fact that in ancient ma.n.u.scripts and in translations of the same gospel the name varies from one to the other. It seems there is a mistake here, by someone a.s.serted to have been infallibly inspired by the Holy Ghost, as it would be difficult to believe that the Holy Ghost did not know which of the terms was correct for the name of these people. Indeed, the infallible Holy Spirit seems to be careless and disorganized, compared to the standards to which we hold our human scholars and scientists today.
The Baptist's Death.
The beheading of John the Baptist presents a problem as well, as at Mark 6:17-29, concerning which Meier remarks, ”The strongly legendary tone of the Marcan story as well as its differences with Josephus' account incline me to the view that the Marcan account contains little of historical worth, even with reference to the historical John.”1 Meier continues to state that there are ”indications that not every word of Mark's narrative can be taken as historically accurate.” He further explains that Mark's a.s.sertion that ”Antipas' second wife, Herodias, had previously been the wife of Antipas' half-brother Philip” represents an ”inaccurate statement” and is ”simply incorrect, as we know from Josephus's Jewish Antiquities.”2 Meier also calls this mistake a ”glaring historical error,” remarking that the efforts by Christian fundamentalists to reconcile this error include an attempt at ”salvation by conflation,” combining two characters into one named ”Herod Philip,” whom Meier deems a ”Herodian poltergeist” who ”never existed outside of the minds of conservative exegetes.”3 Msgr. Meier further states: Similarly, to maintain that Josephus is somehow wrong or confused would be a gratuitous a.s.sumption made to rescue Mark's accuracy at any cost. Josephus shows a much greater knowledge of Herodian genealogy than does Mark.... Indeed, Mark may have made more than one genealogical mistake in this story.... if Mark can be so wrong about the basic familial relations.h.i.+ps that are the driving engine of the plot of his story about John's execution, why should we credit the rest of his story as historical?4 In discussing the ”precise place of John's execution,” about which Mark and Josephus diverge, Meier remarks that there is no reason to doubt Josephus, and he concludes that ”once again Mark is wrong in his presentation.”5 Such remarks as Professor Meier's, found in an 1100-page scholarly work that few laymen will ever read, provide evidence that the patent errancy of the gospels is known and accepted by some within the hallowed halls of higher academia. Additionally, in his commentary about Mark's presentation of John's death, Meier raises the issue of the evangelist's apparent reliance upon not a historical account but on Old Testament narratives of other ”persecuted and martyred prophets,” such as Elijah and ”the folkloric motifs in the Book of Esther.” In discussing the influence of these earlier scenarios upon Mark's narrative, Meier states: These folkloric motifs find parallels in Greco-Roman stories of love, revenge, rash oaths, and women asking for what kings would rather not give, all in the context of royal banquets.1 This last comment suggests that Mark's account is not based on ”historical fact” but on a folkloric motif: To wit, the death of John the Baptist as presented by Mark is fictional or fictionalized at best. Meier further remarks: As we have seen, the story in Mark 6:17-29 is erroneous in key historical matters (i.e., the marital problem that set off the conflict with John, the place of John's imprisonment and execution, and perhaps the ident.i.ty of the daughter) and is suffused with legendary and folkloric traits. Moreover, the links between the accounts of Mark and Josephus exist largely in the mind of the modern exegete.2 In other words, Mark is wrong in several important instances, and those who opine Mark and Josephus to be connected are fantasizing. These remarks rank as a stunning commentary from a biblical scholar and ex-Catholic priest, serving to ill.u.s.trate: 1. Mark's history, like his geography, is not entirely accurate; 2. Mark is wrong, therefore his gospel is not ”inerrant”; 3. Mark's gospel is also therefore suspect as to its historical value; and 4. The other synoptics, if based on Mark's narrative, cannot likewise possibly be deemed ”inerrant,” and are likewise suspect as to their historical value.
Mosaic Authors.h.i.+p?
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