The Book We Would Expect

I've dedicated one post to figuring out what world we would expect given the Christian God, and another to what God we would expect given the world we live in. But there are other elements of religion that we can examine using this method as well. For example, the way in which God interacts with us in most of the major religions: holy books. Given what we know about the world, and assuming a classical Christian God—omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and so on—would we expect him to give us the Bible, or something else entirely?

No Book At All?
Well, to start with, we wouldn't necessarily predict that God would communicate via the written word. This is especially true of ancient times, when reproductions were done by scribes who made mistakes and inserted their own biases into the text. Books are also relatively easy to forge: we do have methods for detecting forgeries (and the Bible has quite a few), but in principle all you have to do to avoid being caught is put the right words in the right order.

If God wants us to understand him, the best form of communication is one that would be direct, inimitable, and empirically verifiable. This could be as blunt and straightforward as appearing in the sky at regular intervals and proclaiming his commands in a booming voice for the world to hear. Christians at this point often object that this would conflict with our ability to choose or reject God, but to advocate this position is to deny the possibility of misotheism—and besides, as I've argued before, the Christian God doesn't care about free will.

In any case, let's assume for the sake of argument that God would communicate using a book. What would we expect from this holiest of holy tomes? Certainly we would expect God to distribute it universally, to all peoples and in all languages. If this information is so important, there's no sense in giving it only to a select few and waiting centuries for it to slowly spread across cultural barriers. We also wouldn't necessarily expect God to use humans to write it—and if he did, he would presumably find a way to make the canonization process simple and obvious, not seemingly arbitrary and mired in church politics.

And what of the actual content of the book? Well...

A Book of Clarity
I've noted in the past that while reliable methods of truth-finding like science tend to converge on an answer, religion tends to diverge into countless opposing dogmas. But it doesn't have to be this way: God could avoid most of the religious schisms and bloodshed by producing a book of maximal clarity. A benevolent God would communicate his message using unambiguous, easily understandable language—especially the parts of his message that are most important. For example, given the stakes involved in eternal salvation, we might expect God to devote a section of the book to describing, with pinpoint precision, exactly what he wants from us. If we don't start with the Bible, we would never predict the tangle of vague, scattered instructions that it provides.

This book, we might assume, would lay out plainly the answers to all the important issues God wants us to know about. For example, is abortion murder? For all the scathing condemnation from fundamentalists, the Bible never explicitly says a word on the issue, and may even suggest the opposite. Where do people who die without hearing the gospel end up? That's something that could affect billions of people, but since the Bible is silent on it, Christians' positions on the topic are all over the map. Perhaps God intends, for some reason, to keep certain issues a mystery—but even if that's the case, there's nothing to stop him from stating that intent outright.

That doesn't mean we'd expect everything in this book to be completely literal. Sometimes metaphor can be a useful tool for getting one's point across. But there's no apparent downside to denoting what's metaphorical and what isn't. When God does use metaphor, we'd expect him to be perfectly clear about that fact. We would not predict a book that begins with a completely inaccurate account of the creation of the universe—one that not only isn't labeled as allegory, but is treated as literal by other parts of the book, and offers no hint as to what its lesson might be.

An artist's depiction of Genesis.

Another aspect of clarity is applicability to the target audience. We would expect God's message to be applicable to all of us, not just a specific culture at a specific time. There are two ways God could accomplish this: he could use his book only to impart ideas that apply to everyone, or he could create multiple versions of his book, removing certain sections when they're no longer relevant. Ancient law, for instance, could be archived for reference, but there's little reason to include outdated material in newer editions.

A Book of Insight
If God expects us to accept a book as his divine word, it would need to stand out as something unlikely to have a human origin. One way to do this would be to offer predictions of the future or scientific insights that couldn't have been known at the time. Describing heliocentrism, evolution, germ theory or relativity many centuries before their discovery would go a long way toward getting the skeptics to sit up and take notice—and would greatly benefit humanity to boot. Describing specific future wars or natural disasters would have the same effect. Although apologist claim that the Bible does meet these expectations, the examples they use are dubious at best.

Given a benevolent God, we would also predict his book to be provide perfect insights in the realm of morality. At a time when various tribes and nations murdered each other freely, we might expect a strong denouncement of unprovoked killing. At a time when one man owning another was normal, we'd predict that God would state unequivocally that slavery is wrong. At a time when societies were patriarchal and women were treated as inferior, we'd look for God to establish once and for all that men and women are equal. Yet in the Bible we find God sanctioning or even endorsing all of these backward moral values.

A Book of Perfection
If God is absolutely perfect, it would be natural to assume his communication with us to be flawless as well. There are no benefits to allowing errors into the text, and multiple drawbacks: Every internal or external contradiction is not only another possible cause for confusion, but also another reason for skeptics to believe the book is not of divine origin. Of course, we see so many such conflicts in the Bible that we have websites dedicated to documenting them all.

We would also expect a book that originates from a single being to contain a thematically unified message. It could certainly tackle a variety of subjects, and even use different methods of delivery (poetry, prophecy, parables and so on) to get different concepts across. But what we would never expect to find are sections with ideas that clash starkly with one another—for instance, John and the Synoptic gospels, or the noble love described in 1 Corinthians 13 and the depraved, barbaric fury of Jeremiah 19:9.

Finally, if God didn't provide this book in all languages as I suggested above, we'd at least expect the translation process to be perfectly guided. It would make little sense for him to create a perfect message to humanity and then not bother to preserve it for the vast majority of his audience. While translations can't always be exact, God could easily have made the process smoother in a number of ways (for instance, miraculously preserving the original manuscripts). In the same vein, only a handful of translations should be needed in any given language, not hundreds of oft-conflicting versions.

A Surprising Book
So what can we say about the book we would expect God to hand down to humanity? Insofar as we would expect a book from him at all, we would expect that book to be...

• Universally distributed
• Easily authenticated
• Optimally translated

And in terms of content, it would be...

• Maximally clear
• Thorough in tackling important issues
• Applicable to all cultures
• Prophetic and scientifically insightful
• Perfectly moral
• Internally and externally consistent
• Thematically unified

Once again, the predictions we make are completely in conflict with what we find in the Bible (and with all other holy books, for that matter). How strange that God would communicate with us in a manner that's so contrary to our expectations!

Apologists might look at this list of predictions and say that the Bible lines up with nearly all of them, but I've already provided the counterexamples. What I'm interested in is their excuses for the predictions that even they must admit the Bible has failed to meet. Why is the Bible silent on some vital issues and less than perfectly clear on others? Why did God allow its canonization to be so muddled, its early distribution so limited? I'd love some real answers, although past experience tells me that any I receive will be remarkably unsatisfying.

Errancy.org

The Skeptic's Annotated Bible is a great resource for Bible contradictions, but as I've mentioned, it's a bit shallow, and it lumps all the problems together without letting any stand out. Errancy.org is a resource that addresses both those issues.

Two characteristics set this site apart. First, it categorizes Bible problems as either Weak, Minor or Serious. This allows readers to focus on those cases that have no plausible inerrantist explanation. You may not always agree with the author's assessment—I think he sometimes errs too much on the side of caution, and some problems are bigger than he thinks they are—but perusing the problems labelled "Serious" should make all but the most obstinate fundies think twice about their position. For instance, I have yet to see a single decent explanation for the failed prophecy that Tyre would be permanently destroyed.

Pictured: Biblical errancy in a nutshell.

The second great thing about the site is that it actually addresses the apologists' explanations for these conflicting passages head on. And that doesn't mean the author refutes them every time: sometimes he points out the obvious gaps in their reasoning, while in other cases he acknowledges that they could be right. It's a refreshingly honest approach—one that apologists themselves would never dream of taking—and in the end, it only makes the serious cases that much more serious.

True, the site does have drawbacks of its own: it only deals with a few dozen contradictions instead of the thousands supplied by the SAB, and the author is a layman rather than an expert in biblical studies. But all it takes is one irrefutable conflict to bring down inerrancy, and plenty of these issues come down to common sense and solid reasoning instead of a deep knowledge of ancient Greek.

Errancy.org isn't perfect, but like the SAB, it's a great starting part for learning about contradictions in the Bible. Their two strategies are completely different, but ultimately both lead to the same conclusion: the Bible is demonstrably not a book that's divinely free from error.

'Tis the Season

Ah, Christmas. A time to give celebrate friends and family, love and generosity... and uh... something else. What was it again? Oh, I know! It's the perfect time to reflect upon the birth of Jesus—specifically, the remarkable number of problems with his birth narratives. In fact, there are so many that I'll only be giving a brief overview rather than going through them in detail.

The Contradictions
To any unbiased observer reading Matthew 1:18-2:23 and Luke 1:26-2:40, it's patently obvious that they're two completely different, incompatible stories of Jesus' birth. Here's a summary of the two versions:

Leaving aside the fact that the stories differ on almost every point, there are basically two direct contradictions. First, Matthew strongly implies that Mary and Joseph's hometown was Bethlehem, while Luke states that it was Nazareth. I went into this problem in more detail in a previous post. Second, Luke has them going directly from Bethlehem to Nazareth, while Matthew has Jesus' family fleeing from Bethlehem to Egypt. Errancy.org has more on this.

The Prophecies
The birth narratives deal with quite a few alleged prophecies of Jesus. The first is Micah 5:2, which predicts that a savior would come from Bethlehem. Since Jesus was thought to have grown up in Nazareth, Matthew and Luke came up with different, conflicting ways to resolve this difficulty. But Micah 5:2 is referring to a tribe, not a town, and said savior was also supposed to defeat the Assyrians.

The birth narratives feature a virgin birth due to a misinterpretation of Isaiah 7:14, which appears to say someone will be born of a virgin. But the word translated "virgin" is more likely to mean "young woman," and the prophecy was already supposed to be fulfilled by Isaiah 8:3-4. The same verse also prophesies that "they shall call his name Immanuel," but there's no indication that Jesus was ever actually called by that name.

The gospel of Matthew is particularly big on attempting to fulfill prophecies. Matthew 2:23 says that Jesus' upbringing in Nazareth fulfills a prophecy saying "he shall be called a Nazarene," but no such prophecy appears anywhere in the Old Testament. Matthew 2:15 explains the flight to Egypt as a fulfillment of Hosea 11, which says, "Out of Egypt I called my Son." Yet looking at the original context, we instead see...

"When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my Son. As they called them, so they went from them; they sacrificed to the Baals, and burned incense to carved images."

Not only is it not a prophecy of Jesus, but it's not a prophecy at all.

Culture and History
I want to quickly cover a few more points. First, some argue that Herod's massacre of the Bethlehem newborns didn't happen because it wasn't recorded by the meticulous historian Josephus, who recorded myriad other atrocities of Herod. Apologists reply that Bethlehem was so small that this would have been a minor event that Josephus may not have felt was significant enough to write about. I don't have enough information to conclude who's right one way or the other.

Then there's the Census of Quirinius, which is a massive problem for inerrantists. Here's a summary from Richard Carrier:

The Gospel of Luke claims (2:1-2) that Jesus was born during a census that we know from the historian Josephus took place after Herod the Great died, and after his successor, Archelaus, was deposed. But Matthew claims (2:1-3) that Jesus was born when Herod the Great was still alive--possibly two years before he died (2:7-16). Other elements of their stories also contradict each other. Since Josephus precisely dates the census to 6 A.D. and Herod's death to 4 B.C., and the sequence is indisputable, Luke and Matthew contradict each other.

Finally, there's the Star of Bethlehem, which the Magi follow to Bethlehem. It's described as a real astronomical event—a star that rises in the east just as any star would—yet astronomers have not identified any event that matches its description, and it's unclear how a star could be situated directly above a particular building in a particular town. More importantly, the Magi's interpretation of the star is a form of astrology, which as Adam Lee points out is harshly condemned by the Bible. In fact, the very word "magos" literally means "astrologer." When the author of Matthew has a supposedly demonic power directing the Magi to worship Jesus, it's pretty clear that he's not on the same page as the rest of Christianity.

Conclusion
The birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are completely different and contain at least two major direct contradictions. At least four alleged prophecies either are not prophecies at all or are not fulfilled by Jesus. And there are multiple details that conflict with history or even Christianity itself. The birth narratives alone are more than enough to show that the Bible cannot be the inerrant word of God.

Born from Above

Born-again Christians generally insist that the Bible is completely accurate, including its accounts of Jesus' life. But as Bart Ehrman explains in his book Jesus, Interrupted, the origin of the very term "born again" shows this belief to be false.

This term originates from a passage in John 3, where Jesus tells a Pharisee named Nicodemus that people can't enter heaven without first being born anothen—that is, born from above. However, in addition to "from above," the Greek word anothen can also mean "again," and this is the sense in which Nicodemus understands Jesus' words. The fact that Nicodemus mistakenly thinks that Jesus means "born again" explains his response:

"How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"

Had Nicodemus realized that Jesus meant people must be "born from above," he wouldn't have responded this way. He would have understood that Jesus meant a spiritual rebirth rather than a physical one. So what's the problem? Why is this misunderstanding such a big deal? Simple: anothen is a Greek word, but Jesus and Nicodemus would have been speaking Aramaic. The "again/from above" double meaning doesn't exist in Aramaic, so the sequence of events described in John simply would not have happened.

Could it be that Jesus actually said "born again" in Aramaic, and the writer of John just happened to use a word that also meant "from above"? Nope. The other three times he uses anothen—including once just a few verses later—the "from above" meaning is unambiguous. And Thayer's Lexicon says the word is "often used of things which come from heaven, or from God as dwelling in heaven," which suits this context too perfectly to be a coincidence. So if this conversation took place, Jesus would have used an Aramaic equivalent of "born from above."

So how did Nicodemus manage to misinterpret his words so spectacularly? Well, he didn't. The author of John fabricated the story, not realizing that the double meaning would be impossible in Jesus' native tongue. According to the NET Bible, "the author uses the technique of the 'misunderstood question' often to bring out a particularly important point: Jesus says something which is misunderstood by...someone else, which then gives Jesus the opportunity to explain more fully and in more detail what he really meant."

To resolve this problem, apologists must argue not only that this well-educated Pharisee was an idiot who couldn't understand that being "born from above" would be a spiritual birth and not a physical reemergence from the womb, but that the translation into Greek created the "again/from above" double meaning purely by chance. I have an alternative for them: stop struggling. Relax. Let it go. Realize that your mental acrobatics are futile, and accept that the Bible is not a reliable record of Jesus' life—or of most other things, for that matter. It may be upsetting at first, but once you've unchained yourself from this ancient book for a while, you'll probably feel a lot better. At least, I do.

A Tale of Three Centurions

Or maybe it's just one.
Or is it two?

In the previous post I reimagined the tale of Jesus healing the centurion's servant. However, before I set out to write my own version I had to think carefully about which gospel account I wanted to use as my reference. Why? Because the accounts contain details that are outright contradictory.

Reading Matthew 8:5-13, one finds that the events are fairly straightforward: the centurion walks up to Jesus and begs him to heal the servant, and Jesus, impressed with the man's faith, happily complies. There's absolutely no suggestion that things might have been any different. But the same story in Luke has some very noticeable changes:

"So when he [the centurion] heard about Jesus, he sent elders of the Jews to Him, pleading with Him to come and heal his servant. ...Then Jesus went with them. And when He was already not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to Him, saying to Him, 'Lord, do not trouble Yourself, for I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof.' " (v. 3, 5)

Whatever happened to the centurion? He doesn't interact with Jesus at any point, instead choosing to send not one but two waves of intermediaries: first "elders of the Jews" and later "friends." It should be plain to anyone that these two stories cannot be accurately describing one set of events.

As always, the apologists make some creative attempts to rescue these irreconcilable passages. In this case, the reply is that in ancient times, subordinates were considered to be mere extensions of those in power, so sending a representative was virtually the same as being there. I don't buy it: the centurion sends his own friends rather than some lowly underlings, and I doubt that people of any era would so casually misattribute a series of interactions this extended and complex. But it's moot even if the apologists are right, because they completely ignore the other big inconsistency: Matthew has Jesus healing the servant on the spot, while in Luke he first walks almost all the way to the centurion's house.

By the way, I have to touch on this priceless remark from Jim Estabrook at Apologetics Press:

"One must also admit that it is possible Matthew and Luke wrote about two separate accounts."

After indignantly arguing for two lengthy paragraphs that the two accounts are absolutely consistent, he spins on a dime and insists that it's possible that they refer to completely different events. Sure, Jim. It's possible that there were two faith-filled centurions who desperately wanted Jesus to heal their sick servants, and who were too humble to let Jesus enter their houses, and who used the exact same metaphor about the commanding of soldiers. It's possible. But to actually use this as a serious argument merely underscores how crude, how intellectually desolate, how pitifully detached from reality your apologetics truly are.

Speaking of separate accounts, I still haven't addressed the third version of the centurion story: John's. This time, though, there are some radical differences between the accounts: Jesus is in Cana instead of Capernaum, the centurion is instead called a nobleman, the servant has become a son, and the "nobleman" doesn't display the impressive faith that he does in the other versions. So why call them the same story at all? Well, look at the similarities:

• A powerful man approaches Jesus begging for help.
• Someone this man cares about is at home with a grave illness.
• The ill person and/or the encounter with Jesus is in Capernaum.
• Jesus heals just by saying the word rather than visiting the home.
• The ill person is specifically said to be cured "that same hour."

This is far too big a coincidence for John's account to be separate, but it's also far too different to even try to reconcile with the others. Anyone who isn't consumed with religious bias can see what's going on here. Stories about Jesus were passed along through oral tradition, changing dramatically along the way. The author of John had heard a substantially different version of the centurion story than the authors of Matthew and Luke, and each author may have tweaked the details to suit their own purposes. The takeaway point is that the gospel accounts of Jesus' deeds are not consistent, they are not factual, and they certainly bear no mark of divine guidance.

Men Like Trees Walking

Read the following little-known story about one of Jesus' miracles and see if you notice anything odd:

"Then He came to Bethsaida; and they brought a blind man to Him, and begged Him to touch him. So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town. And when He had spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything.

And he looked up and said, 'I see men like trees, walking.'

Then He put His hands on his eyes again and made him look up. And he was restored and saw everyone clearly. Then He sent him away to his house, saying, 'Neither go into the town, nor tell anyone in the town.' " (Mark 8:22-26)

Jesus spits on the man's eyes, which only partially restores his sight, and then he lays hands on him again, which finally heals him completely. Jesus heals dozens of people in the gospels, but this is the only case where he fails on the first try. Why should the perfect Son of God need two tries to heal a man? I have no idea—and as it turns out, I'm not the only one.

A useful visualization.

Matthew, Mark and Luke are collectively called the "synoptic gospels," and they contain much of the same material, sometimes even word for word. This is because the writers of Matthew and Luke both used material from Mark. In fact, only 3% of the content in the gospel of Mark is not used in either Matthew or Luke—and this passage is part of that tiny percentage.

For the few passages in Mark that contain completely unique content, the reason for their omission from Matthew and Luke is often quite evident. In one, Mark 3:20-21, those around Jesus think he's out of his mind—a rather embarrassing detail that the later authors would be eager to get rid of. The reason for removing the Parable of the Growing Seed is less clear; perhaps they thought its message was more muddled than that of the similar yet better-crafted Parable of the Sower. Finally there's the "Long Ending" of Mark, which is widely thought to be a forgery that was added later.

So it's no big surprise, then, that both of the later synoptic authors made a deliberate decision to remove the "blind man of Bethsaida" story from their gospels, while using all of the material surrounding it. They realized that this passage is totally inconsistent with the power that Jesus displays in the other gospel tales. Jesus making mistakes wasn't a big deal for the earliest Christians, who saw him merely as a messianic prophet. But as Jesus became increasingly exalted in Christianity (see my Jesus, Interrupted posts for more on that), the gospel writers were compelled to modify their stories accordingly. So went the very human process of editing a very human book.

JI: Reconstructing Faith

The final chapter of Jesus, Interrupted asks the question, "Is faith possible despite the undeniable problems with the Bible?" In answering this, Ehrman takes a largely conciliatory stance toward Christianity—one that I for the most part disagree with, for a few reasons.

Ehrman starts out by saying that he can sympathize with those Christians who say that despite its various contradictions, forgeries and differing opinions, the Bible is still an inspired, divine book. In fact, this was Ehrman's own belief for many years: he became a liberal Christian before losing his faith entirely due to the problem of evil. He thinks that acknowledging the Bible's problems can lead to "a more intelligent and thoughtful faith."

It's certainly true that such a view would be more in line with reality than the demonstrably false view that the Bible is unified and error-free. But I think that the liberal Christian merely trades one kind of absurdity for another. Such people are forced to believe that an all-knowing, all-powerful überbeing who wants desperately for us to know and understand him... is a flat-out terrible communicator. If the Christian God exists, there is no question that he could have done a better job of getting his message across than he has with the Bible. Even if he didn't want to warp the free will of the biblical writers and translators by guiding their hands, he could simply have changed the copies after they were made. Is this is too demanding? When we're talking about a God who can perform any task effortlessly, I think not.

Ehrman also suggests that the Bible may still be useful to Christians as something they can apply to their daily lives (while taking into account its historical context). He says that for a long time the claims of Christianity "resonated with me extremely well." In particular, he admired the message behind Jesus' selfless sacrifice and found encouragement in the eventual triumph of life over death.

There are two problems with this. One of these Ehrman acknowledges himself: much of the Christian message is reprehensible, from the mass killings of innocents in the Old Testament, to the denigration of women and homosexuals, to the idea of eternal punishment for the "crime" of unbelief. If liberal Christians are going to live by the Bible, they had better be very careful about which parts they choose. The second problem is that Ehrman never acknowledges that other belief systems may be superior. If we're only following the Bible for its message, why not look into Jainism, Buddhism or some form of humanism? Better yet, why not take the best elements from great thinkers and schools of thought across all of history? Once we decide to start cherry-picking, we might as well be thorough about it.

Ehrman goes on to emphasize the importance of the historical-critical method. In order to understand the Bible, it's imperative that we understand the culture and worldview of the authors. As an example, he mentions Jesus' ascension into heaven and his predicted return, coming down from the clouds. This makes perfect sense for writers of the time, who thought that heaven was literally a place above the sky, but no sense for educated modern readers who know that the vastness of space envelops the earth in all directions.

Or maybe this is how it works?

In his conclusion, Ehrman explains that studying the Bible is important whether it's true or not: it's vitally important within human history, it's revered among over 2 billion Christians worldwide, and it's massively misunderstood. And on this point, I completely agree. What's more, I believe that if all Christians took his advice, carefully and open-mindedly studying the Bible's errors and contentious history, Christianity as we know it would quickly vanish.

JI: Out of Chaos, Canon

Chapter 6 of JI is entitled "How We Got the Bible," and that sums up its contents perfectly. Ehrman begins with a synopsis and defense of his previous work, Misquoting Jesus:

• We only have copies of copies of the New Testament books
• These copies have hundreds of thousands of minor errors
• They also contain major errors and changes which affect our interpretations of Christian doctrines and the authors' intents (e.g. the Comma Johanneum and the Pericope Adulterae weren't part of the original text)
• In some cases, we may never know what the text originally said

Based on this, he asks:

If God didn't properly preserve his words in the Bible, why should we think he inspired them in the first place?

From there, he moves on to a summary of the early church. He points out that, far from being handed down to us from on high, the New Testament is the result of doctrinal battles between several early sects. Here are Ehrman's descriptions of the main groups that made up the early Christian church:

• Ebionites: The Old Testament laws are still in effect; God is strictly a single being; Jesus was human and not divine
• Marcionites: The wrathful OT God and the merciful NT God are separate beings; Jesus was divine and only appeared to be human
• Gnostics: Many divine beings exist; secret knowledge of oneself and the origin of the world is required for salvation; Jesus (human and temporarily inhabited by the divine Christ) came to impart this knowledge
• Proto-Orthodox: God is a single being in three persons; Jesus was fully human and fully divine; his death brought salvation

Christians today see all but the latter of these sects as obviously wrong, but remember, no one had a trusty, authoritative New Testament to go by. Instead, each sect had dozens of books that they used to support their own views. And it's not as though the proto-orthodox sect was granted divine discernment about which books were inspired: they enthusiastically supported the Letter of Barnabus, the Apocalypse of Peter and 3 Corinthians, yet everyone recognizes them as forgeries today. These and other books that didn't make it into the NT are called New Testament apocrypha.

The process of establishing the official NT canon was long and painful. The first known attempt at a canon wasn't until around 170 CE (at best), the precise canon as we know it wasn't even suggested until 367, and it didn't become fully accepted until around 500. So what factors allowed the canon to form? Ehrman describes three tools that the proto-orthodox church used to stifle opposing views:

• The clergy: The proto-orthodox were the only Christian group with a centralized power structure. Church deacons had near-total control the congregation, telling them precisely what beliefs were true and which were heretical.
• The creed: Church leaders eventually settled on a single set of beliefs that had to be held by all congregants, written out in the form of the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed.
• The canon: The creeds were based on canonical holy books. Older books were given higher priority, as were books in widespread use. More importantly, they had to (claim to) be written by an apostle or an apostle's companion, and they had to conform to the proto-orthodox's existing views.

It was a bedrock assumption that the apostles held proto-orthodox views. If a book claiming to be by an apostle didn't hold these views, it was concluded to be a fake. Thus, while the canon was meant to be composed of authentic apostolic texts, the church's reasoning ensured that it would only reconfirm the beliefs they already held—a beautiful example of confirmation bias in action.

So the debate about the NT canon raged on and on, until finally it was settled... nearly five centuries after Jesus' death. This was a messy, human process during which church leaders were more concerned with tradition and conformity than truth. That this particular group emerged with this particular canon is a quirk of history based on factors that have nothing to do with God's guiding hand. Lastly, I'd like to point out that various fragments of the church disagree on the Old Testament canon even today. Why is it that God is so unable to communicate his message to those who earnestly seek him? Could it be because he was never there at all?

Problems with Biblical Prophecy

Christians believe that the Bible contains many instances of fulfilled prophecy, events predicted sometimes centuries in advance that eventually unfolded exactly as described. In fact, the Bible has no more predictive power than the Quran or the Book of Mormon. Its predictions operate on principles that have naturalistic explanations. I'll give a brief overview of them below, then cover some of them more deeply in the future.

The first and most pervasive problem with alleged biblical prophecies is vagueness. Many events that the Bible predicts are either so mundane that they happen constantly or have no time limit and are bound to happen if we wait long enough—sometimes both. Here are a couple of examples:

• "...scoffers will come in that last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of his coming?'" (2 Peter 3:3-4)
• "And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. ... For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places." (Matthew 24:6-7)

Both of these are predictions about Jesus' return to earth. They sound a lot like events that are happening in modern times, don't they? But here's the thing: they could just as easily apply to pretty much any other point in history. People have been scoffing for a good 1,900 years about the fact that Jesus was supposed to come "quickly"—and rightly so. Likewise, war and natural disasters are a permanent part of human life. Why didn't Jesus instead say, "X years from now, massive earthquakes will occur at locations A, B and C"?

Because he couldn't really predict the future. And when he tried, he failed.

Another example of vague "prophecy" is the alleged phenomenon of scientific foreknowledge. For example, some Christians marvel at Leviticus 17:11's pronouncement that "the life of the flesh is in the blood," saying that ancient people couldn't have known this without divine inspiration. Two problems: First, this would be easy to conclude simply by watching any animal bleed to death. Second, blood isn't even the only part of the body that's essential to life. One could just as easily say "the life of the flesh" is in the lungs, heart or brain.

Speaking of brains, the Bible never mentions them as the center of thought and consciousness—not even once. However, it does contain countless references to thoughts and feelings emanating from the heart and even the kidneys. It seems like if God wanted his book to be scientifically accurate, this might have been an important thing to get straight. Yet in fact, the Bible is chock full of such scientific errors.

Another problem with biblical prophecies is that many of them weren't even meant to be prophecies at all, and in fact mean something very different when put into their proper context. For example, Matthew says that after Jesus' birth, his family took him to hide in Egypt, thereby fulfilling a prophecy that said, "out of Egypt I called My Son." Not bad, right? Well, take a look at the original context:

"When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son. As they called them, so they went from them; they sacrificed to the Baals, and burned incense to the carved images." (Hosea 11:1-2)

Funny, I don't remember Jesus being called Israel or making sacrifices to other gods. That's because he didn't, and this passage in Hosea is about the Israelites escaping from Egypt. Apologists try to spin passages like these as "double fulfillment," happening once in the original context and once at a later date. They can call it whatever they like, but what it amounts to is selectively reading into passages that often were never meant to be prophecies in the first place. Every bit of the Old Testament is a potential case of double fulfillment. With that much source material to work with, how could Jesus not have "fulfilled" some of it purely by chance?

There are two other ways the Bible can outright cheat to make it appear as though prophecies have been fulfilled. First let's take the previous example. Matthew's account of Jesus' flight to Egypt is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible, and directly conflicts with Luke's account. Here's what probably happened. The writer of Matthew is scouring the OT for passages about Jesus and stumbles across one where God mentions Israel as his metaphorical son. Perfect! Just replace Israel with Jesus, make up a story where he must escape to Egypt, and presto! Another prophecy fulfilled.

I'll use the book of Daniel to illustrate the second method of cheating. As it turns out, Daniel makes predictions about various wars and conquests with remarkable accuracy right up until about Daniel 11:39. The book is set as though it was written by Daniel under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II, around 600 BCE. But based on evidence in the text, biblical scholars believe the book was actually written in about 165 BCE, and that the writer tried to pass off the book as older than it really was. The so-called prophecies described events that had already taken place.

Which brings us to our final problem with biblical prophecy: Contrary to what Christians believe, some of the prophecies in the Bible flat-out failed. Everything up through Daniel 11:39 had already happened, but from Daniel 11:40 onwards the writer genuinely does try to make predictions—and of course, absolutely none of them were fulfilled. He prophesies, among other things, that Antiochus Epiphanes would utterly conquer northwest Africa, including Egypt. It never happened. By the Bible's own standard, Daniel was a false prophet and should have been put to death.

As we've seen, there are a host of problems with prophecies in the Bible. Without exception, each one suffers from some combination of vagueness, lack of time limit, lack of indication that they were even meant as prophecy, fabrication of events, forgery produced after an alleged fulfillment, or outright failure. None of these would be present if the Bible was truly the inspired word of God.

The Inerrant Word of George Lucas

People make mistakes. It's not surprising, then, that we find continuity errors, typos and bad information in the works of fiction they create. But fans don't like to admit that these errors exist. It ruins their suspension of disbelief, reminds them that the worlds they so admire don't ultimately align with reality. So what do they do? The less devoted among them simply accept the problems and enjoy their books and movies anyway. But the most fanatical enthusiasts force themselves to come up with an explanation—anything that will ease the cognitive dissonance and let them imagine their world as a cohesive whole.

Case in point: Star Wars. George Lucas, like other human beings, makes mistakes. Here's Han Solo describing his ship in Episode IV: A New Hope:

"You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?...It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs."

Here's the problem: a parsec is equivalent to about 3.26 light years or 19 million miles; it's a measure of distance, not time. It makes no sense to say you got from point A to point B "in less than" a certain distance. Lucas has plainly made a mistake here. Perhaps he was drawn in by the science-fiction quality of the word, or interpreted the "sec" portion to mean "seconds." In any case, there's no getting around this. The Stars Wars canon has been shown to contain errors.

Or has it?

For the real Star Wars fanatics, this anomaly absolutely requires an in-universe explanation. Here's what they came up with. The route of the Kessel Run goes through the Maw, a dangerous cluster of black holes. Slower ships must take a more circuitous route to avoid being sucked in, but the Millennium Falcon is fast enough that it can veer closer to the black holes, thus reducing the overall distance needed to complete the journey.

It kind of makes sense, although it's still a stretch. The dialogue still sounds awkward, and there's just no reason not to express the duration of the journey in terms of time. The black holes may even have been invented just to resolve the error. For Star Wars fans, though, this explanation is good enough; they can continue accepting this universe as internally consistent. And that's fine: it's all in fun, and there's no harm in continuing to suspend disbelief as long as you understand that it's all pretend.

But what about biblical inerrancy, which unlike the previous example has serious effects on reality? Take the fervor for a believable Star Wars universe and multiply it by a thousand. That's the magnitude of motivation Christians have for maintaining the Bible's internal consistency. And like Star Wars fans, they will cling to any ad hoc explanation, any interpretation of language or history that will preserve their dogma. Often their excuses are significantly less convincing than the example above. But when you have such low standards for accepting explanations, inerrancy is no longer an impressive feat. You can apply the same principle to any work of fiction—be it Star Wars films or the Quran—and get the same result.

JI: Paul and the Ignorance of Idolaters

Most of my coverage of Jesus, Interrupted thus far has been of problems within the gospels, so now I want to focus on two differing views within the life and writings of Paul (pp. 95–97). The issue is a fairly simple one, which just makes the discrepancy that much clearer. So, does Paul think that God has overlooked the unbelief of idolaters in the past due to their ignorance of him? Let's look at two passages, starting with a passage from Acts 17:

"Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.' "

Paul tells the people of Athens quite clearly that God has overlooked the past ignorance of those who worshiped idols. While they are now expected to repent and believe in Jesus, they had previously believed in pagan gods because, as Ehrman says, "they simply didn't know any better." And as Paul says to the Athenians, God doesn't blame them for it.

But does Paul really think that? What about the passage in Romans 1 that includes:

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things."

Here Paul takes exactly the opposite viewpoint. God "has shown" himself to them, his "attributes are clearly seen," "they are without excuse," and "they knew God." The discrepancy is threefold, as Ehrman explains:

"Do they worship idols out of ignorance? The "Paul" of Acts says yes, Paul in his own writings says no. Are they responsible for their idolatrous activities? Acts says no, Paul says yes. Does God inflict his wrathful judgment on them in the present as a result? Acts says no, Paul says yes."

So here we have two views of God's relationship with unbelievers that are clearly at odds in multiple ways. Either Paul had hopelessly conflicting opinions on this subject, he was lying to the Athenians to win them over, or the author of Acts fabricated his story. Ehrman takes the latter position, saying that "the real Paul would likely have preached some fire and brimstone to get these people to realize the error of their ways." In any case, this example deals a serious blow to the Christian claim that the Bible is an inerrant and unified work.

JI: John Versus the Synoptics

The third chapter of JI focuses not on specific contradictions, but on deep-seated, large-scale conflicts in viewpoint among New Testament writers. Ehrman dedicates 15 pages just to disparities between John and the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke. (Scholars think Matthew and Luke used Mark and an unknown "Q document" as sources, hence their similarity.) He points out differences in content, differences in emphasis, and differences in Jesus' teachings and miracles.

Here are just some of the important events never mentioned in John:

• Jesus' birth of a virgin in Bethlehem
• His baptism and wilderness temptation
• Preaching that God's kingdom is at hand
• Telling parables of any kind
• Casting out demons
• The Transfiguration
• The Last Supper and crucifixion trial

Instead, we have things like:

• Jesus as the Word of God in human form
• Seven "signs" meant to demonstrate his power
• The washing of the disciples' feet
• Constant statements about himself (e.g. "I am the bread of life")
• Long speeches instead of wise proverbs

Ehrman argues that when Christians lump together various doctrines, they obscure the views of the individual authors. He says:

"The idea that Jesus preexisted his birth and that he was a divine being who became human is found only in the Gospel of John; the idea that he was born of a virgin is found only in Matthew and Luke. ...Mark doesn't say anything about either. The story starts with Jesus as an adult, and Mark gives no indication of the circumstances of his birth. If your only Gospel was Mark—and in the early church, for some Christians it was the only Gospel—you would have no idea that Jesus' birth was unusual in any way, that his mother was a virgin, or that he existed before appearing on earth."

Not only that, but Matthew just says Jesus was a virgin and leaves it at that, mistakenly calling it a fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14. Luke, however, specifically says that Jesus was born of a virgin because he was the Son of God.

Jesus' teachings in Mark also contrast starkly with his teachings as portrayed in John. In Mark, he teaches little about himself, and he never claims to be divine in any way—he's mentioned as the "son of God," but the term had several meanings. Instead Jesus emphasizes a coming apocalypse, and that people should quickly repent before he returns to judge the world. However, in John he says nothing about the kingdom of God approaching, but rather preaches about himself, saying that "I and the Father are one" and "I am the way, the truth and the life." Why this sudden shift in tone? Ehrman explains:

"For many historical critics it makes sense that John, the Gospel that was written last, no longer speaks about the imminent appearance on earth of the Son of Man to sit in judgment on the earth, to usher in the utopian kingdom. In Mark Jesus predicts that the end will come right away, during his own generation, while his disciples are still alive (Mark 9:1; 13:30). By the time John was written, probably from 90 to 95 CE, that earlier generation had died out and most if not all the disciples were already dead. ... What does one do with the teaching about an eternal kingdom here on earth if it never comes? One reinterprets the teaching. The way John reinterprets it is by altering the basic conceptualization."

This is accomplished by reimagining the "kingdom of God" as a rebirth "from above" (see John 3:3–6; I'll cover this in a later post) rather than something that will descend to earth.

Finally, we have the miracles of Jesus. In the synoptics, their purpose was to show Jesus' compassion and the arrival of God's kingdom to those who already believed. However, he refuses to do them to make people accept his God-given authority, and he even tells those who have been healed not to spread the word. In fact, the reason Satan tempts Jesus to throw himself off the Temple is because when the angels caught him, his power would be revealed to the many Jews in the vicinity. But in John, revealing his authority is the whole reason Jesus does his signs:

"In John's Gospel, Jesus' spectacular deeds are called signs, not miracles. And they are performed precisely to prove who Jesus is, to convince people to believe in him. Claiming to be the 'Bread of Life,' he performs the sign of the loaves to feed the crowds (John 6); claiming to be the 'Light of the World,' he does the sign of healing the man born blind (John 9); claiming to be the 'Resurrection and the Life,' he does the sign of raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11)."

John's version of Jesus' miracles is summarized perfectly in John 4:48 when he says, "Unless you see signs and miracles, you will not believe," and later John himself states this as his purpose in recording Jesus' signs.

The disparity in outlooks between John and the synoptics could hardly be more obvious. What's remarkable is that a lot of Christians don't even realize that John is particularly different from the other gospels. It just goes to show how much people can miss when they aren't really looking.

JI: The Gospel of Nobody

This topic doesn't appear at any one point in JI, but it's something Ehrman references multiple times in the early chapters. Many Bible contradictions involve stories where source A says event X happened, while source B says event Y happened. Apologists often try to resolve these conflicts by combining the details of the conflicting stories and saying that both events happened. After all, they argue, source A doesn't say event Y didn't happen, nor does source B deny the possibility of event X.

But at times there are major problems with this tactic. First of all, of course each source isn't going to go out of its way to talk about events that didn't happen – that would require the Bible to be written in some bizarre form of legalese. But there are many cases where source A doesn't mention event Y even though it's an integral part of the story. It often seems very strange that A doesn't mention Y... until you consider the possibility that the author of A disagrees with the author of B and doesn't think Y happened at all.*

And second, when apologists try to make the events fit by mashing them together, they often create an entirely new story that none of the original stories agree with. In the case of the four gospels, where this happens quite often, I've dubbed this messy amalgam of fragmented details the "Gospel of Nobody."

On page 7 of JI, Ehrman uses the following contradiction as an example:

"In Mark's Gospel, Jesus tells Peter that he will deny him three times 'before the cock crows twice.' In Matthew's Gospel, he tells him that it will be 'before the cock crows.' Well, which is it—before the cock crows once or twice? ... [Here's one apologist's] solution: Peter actually denied Jesus six times, three times before the cock crowed and three more times before it crowed twice. ... [But] to resolve the tension between the Gospels the interpreter has to write his own Gospel, which is unlike any of the Gospels found in the New Testament. And isn't it a bit absurd to say that, in effect, only "my" Gospel—the one I create from parts of the four in the New Testament—is the right one, and that the others are only partially right?"

There's no one on earth who would think Peter denied Jesus six times after reading Mark or Matthew individually, since neither gospel indicates that he made more than three denials. And if Peter had made six denials, it would surely be important enough to note, so the most likely reason that neither gospel noted six is that neither gospel intends six.

Here's another example. Which women visited the tomb on the morning of the resurrection? Was it:

• Matt.: Mary Magdelene, the other Mary
• Mark: Mary Magdelene, Mary mother of James, Salome
• Luke: Mary Magdelene, Mary mother of James, Joanna, others
• John: Mary Magdelene

Now, based on this an apologist could claim that Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, the other Mary, Salome, Joanna, and possibly others all went to visit Jesus' tomb. But now we have a veritable horde of people, and some of the gospels begin to look quite misleading. What reason did Matthew, Mark and John have for giving no indication that anyone other than those mentioned visited the tomb, when it would have been as simple as adding "and other women"? John is especially dishonest: he implies that Mary Magdelene is making a lone pilgrimage to the tomb. There's no obvious explanation for this phenomenon—except that Matthew, Mark and John don't intend for there to be others tagging along.

Let's look at one last example, which Ehrman describes on page 8. When the women (or woman) visited Jesus' tomb, who did they (or she) see?:

• Matt.: one angel
• Mark: one man
• Luke: two men
• John: two angels

Now admittedly, the men in Mark and Luke are dressed in white robes, so one could plausibly argue that they are meant to be angels. But why would Matthew and Mark both mention only one person when Luke and John say there were two? What possible motive could they have for not having the accurate number? The simplest and best explanation is that Matthew and Mark don't mean for there to be two of them at all.

There are many other examples like this, both in the Gospels and elsewhere. In examining such cases, I think these are the crucial questions to ask:

1. Is the omitted detail integral to the story?
2. Does a "reconstructed" version of the story make the original stories look misleading?
3. Could the omitted detail have been easily added?

I would argue that we should consider cases where the answers to two or all of these questions are "yes" to be contradictions – minor compared to others we can find in the Bible, but contradictions nonetheless.

*Apologists often try to spin such accounts as "complementary." They apparently forget that "the Bible" did not exist in the early church. If a congregation had one gospel and not others, they would not get a "complementary" account, but instead a highly flawed one that ignored crucial events.