An Agnostic's Look at Another "Sacred Scripture"

Taking a detour from my exposition on my view of The Bible to take a look at a devout Muslim's favorite book, the Quran. Not so much the theology of the Quran, but whether anything about it, or the life of Muhammed can be considered historical. I know considerably less about Muhammed and the Quran than I do about Christianity and The Bible, so this post will be considerably shorter than my normal exposition.

Most people, probably even a lot of Muslims, believe that Muhammed wrote the Quran, whatever they believe about the "truth" it. Even those who know that Muhammed was illiterate believe that he at least dictated it. They assume that this gives it a reliability that the Gospels, written a generation after Jesus lived, don't have. But this reflects a misunderstanding of how the Quran came to be written. None of the Quran was written during Muhammed's lifetime. His various followers would repeat what they remembered about his preaching, different people would be supposedly entrusted with different sections. I think you could see where this could be a problem. How do you guarantee that Muhammed's word are remembered correctly. Short answer? You can't. 

After his death his successors as leaders realized that, with some of the original adherents dying off, mainly due to the continual wars they were waging, they needed to have things written down. At that time "the Quran" was a scattering of remembrances by followers and scribblings on palm leaves and stones. So the caliph ordered that all the various written scraps be gathered together, and authorized a committee to sift through them as well as the many oral accounts to put together a definitive version. They were tasked with "monitoring the text" and resolving discrepancies - when they were done the caliph ordered that all other versions, personal copies etc. be destroyed. In that sense they were a step or two ahead of the Christians. The Muslims had a central authority who could require such a move, and they were smart enough to have competing versions destroyed. They did not have to deal with the multiplicity of letters, gospels, epistles, apocalypses and acts of every Tom, Dick and Harry nor the fact that most copying in the early decades was done by untrained copyists, many of whom had their own agenda. Once the authorized version was done, it stayed that way for centuries. 

There is a scholarly consensus, even among non-Muslims, that Muhammed was an historical person, although there are minority theories that he is a mythical figure. There is also broad agreement apart from Islamic scholars that we know almost nothing about him. There is disagreement, even among Muslims, regarding the dates during which he lived. But just as I can believe that there was a real person upon which the Jesus of the Bible was based, there can certainly be a real Muhammed upon who legends and hagiographies accreted. As an agnostic I can surely disbelieve the story that he received the Quran from an angel. 

It has often been said that Islam, and its prophet Muhammed, emerged in the "full light of history", suggesting that the historical basis of Islam is somehow more dependable and concrete than other religions. It is true that many of the actions of the Arab armies are historically attested. There is no doubt that Arab armies first subjugated the various tribes of the Arabian peninsula and soon after, Persia, Syria, Palestine and North Africa. Roman sources confirm that these Arab armies existed. Why have I been putting "Arabs" in italics? While there is no doubt that these were Arabs, there is little to confirm that it was Muslim religious fervor that motivated these armies, at least not initially. Wars were fought almost continually in the seventh century C.E. - there was almost non-stop conflict between the Roman Empire (especially the eastern remnant at Constantinople) and the various Persian Empires. Peripheral nations and tribes took their shot at the big boys and sometimes succeeded. That's how the Western Roman Empire eventually fell - it was defeated by "barbarians" who existed on the borders and were able to capitalize on Rome's weaknesses. The Arabs were another of those peripheral "barbarians", this time to the east. After consolidating their power in Arabia, they were able to pick off the border regions of the Eastern Roman Empire. These were provinces that had often been the battleground for Roman-Persian conflict, and now the Arabs moved in. It's not too difficult to imagine political and economic power being the main impetus and religion being retconned into the narrative as the caliphate started to become stretched thin and more non-Arab peoples became part of it. At any rate, eventually the struggle between Rome and the Caliphate became characterized as Christianity versus Islam. 

In the end, it's neither more nor less a man-made construct than any other religion, despite its claim to an historical basis.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIV

The Hebrew Bible consists of three major parts: The Law, The Prophets, and the Writings (or Other Writings). There are, of course, unofficial subdivisions - The Major Prophets and Minor Prophets (distinguished not by the importance of their messages, but by the length of their books), the Books of Poetry and the Books of History. Christians consider the Tanakh, which they call the Old Testament, part of one unified revelation. The traditional Jewish position is that the whole of the Tanakh is divinely inspired, yet there is little if any parts of it that contain dialog unambiguously from God. In contrast it's a collection of books about God, prayers to God, praises of God, as well as warning to the people who reject God. Christians, at least conservative, fundamentalist Christians, believe that both the Old and New Testaments are inspired by God and contain no internal contradictions. (For the rest of this post I will be referring to what the Christians call the Old Testament as The Tanakh)

All people have a creation myth and all people have origin or founding legends and the Jewish people are no exception. In general creation myths come about in pre-scientific times and tell a story "explaining" how the world and its people came to be. They don't have to make sense in any kind of logical, let alone scientific, way, but usually contain an underlying moral message. The Biblical creation story can be found in the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. God creates the world, the sun, the moon and the stars out of nothing. (I personally prefer the Norse creation myth where things are created out of the body parts of gods who themselves somehow sprung from primordial cows.) God then populates the world with animals and plants, and finally, humans. Humans disobey and there are consequences. Generations pass by without incident until God gets fed up and kills off all but one family - more consequences. Again, this is a creation myth, a story like any other story, yet religious absolutists insist on viewing it as fact. 

Following the creation myth, Genesis follows up with the beginning of the "origin of the people" story, starting with Abraham and his immediate family and following up with the escape from slavery in Egypt and the conquest of "The Promised Land". There is no historical evidence that any of it happened or that any of the people in these stories existed. Although it's not at all surprising that an insignificant  pastoral clan would attract anyone's attention. But, like all national origin stories it doesn't have to stand up to scrutiny. At some point someone wrote down what he had heard from oral tradition. Or more than one someone. Biblical scholars have long established that, contrary to being written by Moses, as tradition claimed, the Torah (The Law) showed signs of being written by at least four sources. They were initially called JEPD, for Jehovist (where God is called Yahweh, sometimes mistranslated as Jehovah), Elohist (where God is called Elohim), Priestly (for the laws regarding the priesthood in Leviticus) and Deuteronomist (for the largely separate Book of Deuteronomy - a second stating of The Law). This has led to identification of numerous other subdivisions, with the conclusion being that far from being a unified history of the creation and of the origins of the Jewish people, it is a collection of various versions that a later editor put together. You can see this even in early Genesis where there are two divergent versions of the creation of humans and contradictory accounts of the Flood. 

The national origin accounts continue in the Books of Joshua and Judges (after break to enumerate the various laws, commandments and prohibitions mainly in Leviticus and Deuteronomy) which purport to document how the Twelve Tribes conquered Canaan - again with many contradictions. The Book of Ruth serves as an end to the "Judges", i.e. pre-monarchy, period with the Books of I & II Samuel, I & II Kings and I & II Chronicles (Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are all one book each in the Tanakh, but have been divided in the Greek translation and hence the Christian Bible) presented as a history of the monarchy beginning with Saul, David and Solomon and continuing through the destruction of the Kingdoms and the reign of the Persian Cyrus the Great. There are other books on various topics: Job, on the question of suffering; Esther, the story of a Jewish Queen in the Persian court; the books of "poetry", including Psalms and Proverbs; and finally the prophets - variations on a theme of "get your shit together!". 

As an agnostic I have no reason to believe that these creation myths, national foundation legends, genealogies and tales of divine favor are any more true than the myths and legends of any other culture. It is in the best interests of both fundamentalist Christians and nationalistic Israelis and their allies to view these Biblical stories as true however. For Christians it provides an ancient pedigree to their own  beliefs; for some Israelis it supports their belief that the modern nation of Israel is not merely the creation of the United Nations or a "colonizing entity", but the fulfillment of promises from God to his people. This is the explicit rationale for the Israeli Jewish Settlers who have been moving into the West Bank, ostensibly Palestinian land. 

There is a story in The Bible about the Judean King Josiah who, in II Chronicles was said to have banned the worship of Baal and other gods throughout his kingdom and renovated the Temple. Some workmen supposedly found, hidden in The Temple, "The Book of The Law". There's scholarly disagreement about what this was, but my opinion is that Josiah, or his priests, had created the Torah, which had not previously existed, making a big deal about "finding" it, using it to justify Josiah's reforms. There's a lot of evidence that the religion of the Jewish people was a creation of the late monarchy period and the post-exile leadership among those who retuned to their former land. There's kernel of truth in Biblical accounts, but also much retroactive myth-building. But a major point that most Christians choose to overlook is that the Tanakh was not written for Christians, but for Jews. It was not meant for the Romans, the Greeks, the Hittites or the Americans. The only point of connection is that Jesus, the apocalyptic prophet of the End Times, was Jewish. 

Not all early Christians agreed about what that connection or continuity between Judaism and Christianity was. Some viewed Christianity as just the next step in Jewish religion, others saw a complete break. The prevailing view was that the Tanakh was the Old Testament that had been supplanted by the new. Hints about Jesus the Messiah (i.e. the Christ) could be found throughout the Jewish scriptures, much to the surprise of any Jew.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIII

But all those Old Testament prophecies came true! That's the proof!

Let's say I'm going to write about someone I met in 1994. I'm writing in 2003. In my hypothetical biography I "quote" my subject as saying that the World Trade Center towers will each be hit by an airplane on September 11, 2001. Amazing! How did he know that? Let's further speculate that my biography is quoted by several other authors and eventually it becomes "common knowledge" that my subject prophesied the 9-11 attacks seven years before they happened. I'm sure you see the problem. Since I wrote my biography after the allegedly prophesied events it's obvious that I inserted words into my putative prophets mouth based on my own knowledge of events in my own past. 

Or take another scenario. Maybe my subject actually did make a statement that was interpreted as predicting the 9-11 attacks. His prediction was along the lines of: "From the heat of the day the adversary will fly upon the king and humble him, incurring his wrath". Of course "the heat of the day" refers to the Middle Eastern, "desert" origin of the hijackers, the king is obviously the United States and the incurred wrath after being humbled can only refer to the Iraq and Afghan wars...right? Of course not! A statement composed of nonsense is twisted to fit what the listener wants to believe. 

Quite Nostradamusesque. 

Both scenarios roughly describe prophecy fulfillment in The Bible. 

Prophecy in the Gospels is mostly referring to Old Testament prophecies about Jesus that supposedly came true. One prediction that Jesus made about the future was that the Temple would be destroyed. But us it really a prediction when the person who wrote the "prediction" wrote it after the Temple had been destroyed? Even the scattered references that Jesus makes in the Gospels to his own death and resurrection that are very specific as to how long he will be in the grave were written down a generation after the events supposedly happened. Funny how no one focusses on Jesus' prophecy that the world would end and God would initiate the Kingdom of Heaven before the current generation passed away. Which didn't happen. Twenty years later Paul evidently thought the same thing and incrementally adjusted his views on the subject throughout his career. 

Scattered throughout the New Testament are references to things that were done "so that the prophecy might be fulfilled".  As I've stated before, I believe that a person existed upon whom the Gospels is based, "Jesus", and that there is a core of truth to be found in the four Gospel accounts, but that by the time the Gospels were being written myths and legends had arisen around Jesus' life and message. Some of these came about because early Christians were scouring the Old Testament looking for hints that prefigured Jesus' life in the ancient texts. Sometimes they found something that seemed to match a fact of Jesus' life in greater or lesser detail, in other cases "facts" were invented in order to match a given prophecy. Some of them are based on mistranslations or misunderstandings of what the relevant passage was saying. 

One prophecy, from Isaiah, is quoted as saying that the Lord will give a sign, a virgin will give birth and his name will be called Immanuel. There's quite a lot about this passage that debunks the idea that Isaiah was talking about the messiah being born of a virgin or that any of it referred to Jesus. Firstly, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew is quoting from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament that was available during this time period. (Most Old Testament quotes in the New Testament use the Septuagint wording, rather than the Hebrew) The Greek word in Isaiah is parthenos, which means "virgin", but the original Hebrew word is almah, which could refer to a virgin, but simply means "young woman". The second significant issue with using this verse as a prophecy of Jesus' birth is that it does not indicate anywhere in the text that it is referring to the future messiah, let alone specifically to Jesus. The verse says only that the birth of a child will be a sign. A sign of what? Subsequent verses say that before this child is old enough to differentiate good from evil both kingdoms, Judah and Israel, will be "laid waste". It further indicates who the foreign powers that will do the wasting will be. There's a few possibilities for how this verse came to be associated with Jesus. One is that there was by the time Matthew was written stories circulating that Jesus' literal father was God. By the time Matthew was written the idea that Jesus was the Son of God had well established itself. Christians, maybe even "Matthew" himself, dug up this passage in Isaiah to show how this "virgin birth" was predestined. Or, the Isaiah verse was noticed first, and the whole virgin birth scenario was created in order to make it look as if a prophecy had been fulfilled. At the very least, the alleged event, Jesus' virgin birth, was not prophesied, and at worst was cobbled together based on a mistranslation from Hebrew to Greek. Not to mention that he never, in his lifetime, called "Immanuel". 

How about the prophecy that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Micah 5:2 mentions that one will go forth from "Bethlehem Ephrathah" and will be a a "ruler in Israel". This one at least has indications that it might be referring to the future messiah. But was Jesus a "ruler in Israel"? Sure, he said (or his biographers said) that he would be, but 2000 years on we're still waiting, aren't we? It's not impossible, or even improbable, that "Matthew" knew about this passage in Micah and created the whole story of Bethlehem, throwing in the census to provide a pretext for Mary and Joseph to be there. (Kind of an implausible pretext - what possible reason would there be for people to return to a village their ancestors had lived in a thousand years previously?) Some commentators speculate that the verse is not referring to the messiah's literal birthplace, but to his descent from King David, who according to the Books of Samuel, was from Bethlehem. And speaking of descent from King David - we all noticed that the two genealogies are different, right?

Some of these prophesies are so generic that they could apply to anyone, here are 47 of the more popular ones. If you're a believer, these will convince you that everything about Jesus was predicted thousands of years before his birth, if you're an agnostic, or a disbeliever, you'll scratch your head wondering how this would convince anyone. 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XII

How did The Bible become The Bible? Did a committee of early Christians get together, divide up the responsibilities of what to cover? "Paul, we need you to cover some of the doctrinal issues, and address the fact that Jesus hasn't come back yet; James, your assignment is to balance up Paul's focus on faith with an alternate focus on works; John, lay off the magic mushrooms for a bit and write up an end of the world scenario, and Matthew, Mark & Luke, can you guys do some biographies, and damn it, keep it consistent we don't want a bunch of contradictions". No, as we've seen, a number of Christians took it upon themselves to write letters to other Christians, pen biographies of Jesus, compose "apocalypses" describing the end times or the heavenly realm, or just put together a little something to let people know that those other guys weren't "real" Christians. There was an incredible number of these writings circulating around Christian communities. Different churches favored different books and for three centuries there was no widely agreed-upon canon (i.e. the authorized, divinely-inspired collection of books of The Bible). 

One of the reasons there was no consensus canon of the New Testament was that for the first three centuries, and possibly after, there was no central authority. The various cities and regions operated more or less autonomously. As a virtually illegal sect, Christians weren't building big, beautiful buildings, but were meetings in homes, likely led by whomever owned the house they were meeting in. Eventually leadership became institutionalized and overseers (the title "bishop" comes from the Greek episkopos - i.e. "one who watches over") came to hold authority over whole cities. In the early days there was a many varieties of Christian. The previous installment listed a few "heresies regarding Jesus' nature, but there were many more regarding the purpose of his death and the kind of life a Christian should be living. Local leaders early on attempted to define Christian doctrine, meeting in councils to reach consensus. Eventually that consensus began to resemble the main doctrines of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the minority opinions were pushed out and suppressed. As Christianity became legalized and preferred, not only did Roman Empire-wide councils become easier to hold, but the Bishops of the main cities of the Empire as well as cities important to the early Church, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria in Egypt, viewed themselves as "leaders of leaders" and attempted to exercise authority over the assemblage of bishops. Finally there was something close to a central authority and and the work of deciding what would be considered divinely inspired began. 

Occasionally you'll hear talk about some nefarious plot to "take out" offensive books from The Bible, to remove anything that elevated women for example. The other day I heard somebody talking about how the Emperor Constantine edited the Bible at the Council of Nicaea to conform it to his beliefs. None of that is true. There was nothing to "take out" of The Bible because there wasn't a Bible! There were decades of arguments about what was to be considered inspired "scripture". Some books that most of us have never heard of, like The Shepherd of Hermas, and the Didache were in the running for years while others that are in our Bible, like I & II Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, I & II Peter, all three Epistles of John and Jude were all considered to be not in The Bible. The book current day fundamentalists love so much, Revelation, was a long shot and was the last one to be canonized. Centuries later Martin Luther re-examined some of the canonical books and had his doubts about some of them. 

One of the doctrines of the early Church that horrifies Protestants is Apostolic Succession, the doctrine that Jesus passed on to his apostles his spiritual authority and his true teachings and that the apostles in turn passed those things on to their successors, who passed it on to their successors all the way to the present. The reason a Protestant would be horrified is that the core doctrine of the Protestant Reformation was "scripture alone", that the opinions of Church leaders must be subordinate to the Bible. Remember that in those early days not only was there no Bible, but there were dozens of competing "scriptures". Somebody had to decide what Gospels were the Gospels, what Epistles were the Epistles etc. In order to have a unified Christian Church somebody had to take the bull by the horns, claim the authority to decide (whether that authority was real or not) what The Bible would be. As it is there are numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in what we have, imagine if all those apocryphal books were held as equal to the canonized books and there was no "written in stone" scripture? We think that we have a confusing multitude of denominations now? Christianity would never have survived without a central hierarchy. 

Christians today like to believe that today's Bible was without controversy accepted by the early Christians, that its divine source was obvious while the apocryphal books were just as obviously not inspired. 

The real story is a lot messier.

  
 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XI

This particular post will be less about what's in The Bible and more about how third and fourth century (and later) theologians attempted to reconcile the inconsistencies and contradictions about Jesus' nature in The Bible. 

By the Second Century it was already established among the vast majority of Christians that Jesus was God. But in what sense was he God? That's where the debates and the branding of other theologians as heretics comes in. The Gospels also make very clear that Jesus was a man, but in what sense was he human? How did his humanity and divinity coexist in one person? Was he half God and half man? Was he God who just appeared to be a man? Was he a man who was "promoted" to Godhood? I want to make clear that the Gospels and Epistles do not make any of this clear. And the answers that eventually led to the doctrine of The Trinity were by no means self-evident. Assumptions made by theologians were just as often based on what they thought was common sense or to avoid infelicitous outcomes. Here are a few of the possible "solutions" to the nature of Jesus that eventually were deemed heresies:

• Adoptionism stated that Jesus did not pre-exist before his birth but was "adopted" as the Son of God at his Baptism (or resurrection, or Ascension)  due to his perfect, sinless life. His reward was resurrection and adoption into "the Godhead". This was put to rest around 200CE, but it seems to me that it has solid scriptural basis. 
• Docetism adherents believed that Jesus only appeared to have a physical human form. They believed that matter was inherently evil and therefore God couldn't have had a physical body. 
• Apollinarianism stated that, although Jesus had a physical, human body, his "nature", or mind, was wholly divine.
• Arianism has been latched onto by modern day non-Trinitarians to support their belief that the early Christians were not Trinitarians. Arius didn't teach that Jesus was not God, but that Jesus, God the Son, was created first by God the Father and that the rest of the universe was then created by the Son. The main difference between Arianism and the version of Trinitarianism that the majority of theologians were adhering to was that the Trinitarians believed that the Son and the Father were "co-eternal", i.e. there was never a time when the Son did not exist, while the Arians taught that the Father pre-existed the Son. This dispute was what spurred the Council of Nicaea. Arians for hundreds of years constituted the majority of Christians outside of Rome and Byzantium. It effectively died out when Charlemagne accepted Catholic Christianity. 
• Nestorianism was a branch of early Christianity wherein their founder Nestorius taught that Mary gave birth only to Jesus' human nature. They argued about the term "Mother of God", preferring the title "Mother of Christ".  Nestorius' followers fled persecution relocating to the Persian Empire where they further developed the idea that Jesus, although one person, had both a human and a divine nature.  Nestorians flourished under the Persians and Nestorian churches continued to exist even after the Muslim conquest of Persia. 
• Monophysites believed that Jesus had only one nature - that his humanity was absorbed by his divine nature. They were the majority in the border regions of the Eastern Roman Empire and had competing bishops and patriarchs when the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and the surrounding area. 
• Monothelitism was a response to Monophysitism, holding that Jesus had two natures, human and divine, but one "will" - divine. 
• Sabellianism teaches that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and the same, but are different modes or expressions of a unitary God.

Eventually the doctrine of The Trinity emerged with earlier understandings later being branded as heretical. In it Jesus is described as fully God and fully human as regards both his nature and his will, not half God/half human, not a human who was "promoted" to God. As "God the Son" he existed for as long as God the Father existed and was somehow begotten while having always been begotten. The three "persons" of The Trinity are all equally God, yet distinct. It's complicated, and I doubt that many Christians understand the explanations that their theologians came up with. 

Non-Christians and non-Trinitarian Christians sometimes mock the belief, wondering who Jesus was talking to when he prayed to God, among other things. But do any supernatural religious beliefs make any sense? 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part X

In the previous installment I touched upon the change in focus forced upon the followers of Jesus when he was killed, rather than becoming the God-anointed conqueror. As I have pointed out previously, the New Testament is not one seamless narrative, but the work of multiple authors that differ not only in perspective, but were penned at different points in time. Because of this one can see an evolution in the way Jesus' nature was viewed by his followers. 

One of the titles bestowed upon Jesus was "Son of God". While now we interpret that literally - son, a child, a first generation descendent - but the phrase had long held a figurative meaning by Jesus' time. In Genesis and Job the term "Sons of God" apparently refers to angels. The King of Israel is "The Son of God" as is Israel itself at times. The earliest traditions that were enshrined in the Gospels indicate that Jesus became the Son of God. At first it was upon his supposed resurrection as a reward for his faithfulness to God. Later the honor was bestowed on him at his baptism; still later at his birth as seen in Matthew and ultimately, as claimed in John, he was a pre-existing Son of God even before his birth. Running parallel to the evolving timeline of the sonship of Jesus there was a steady change in what being "The Son of God" meant. It went from being a great honor, like the ancient kings received, to a semi-divine status like an angel, to divine status in the same category as God, to being equal with God in authority, to being identical with God. (I recommend How Jesus Became God by Dr. Bart Ehrman for the long version with citations and appropriately placed commas). 

Of course, since these incremental changes in perception are all recorded in different places in the Gospels and Epistles, what we are left with is a lot of inconsistencies. I'll leave it to another installment to review some of the attempts by theologians to resolve these inconsistencies, but I'll change lanes for a bit to discuss why there are even any inconsistencies to address.

There is a misconception, not only among Christians, but among society in general, that Christianity was a united entity with recognized leaders and organization from Jesus' death onwards. The Catholics maintain that this entity "The Church" was led by Peter the Apostle and his successors, later known as The Popes. The Eastern Orthodox disagreed about the primacy of the Bishops of Rome (the popes) but otherwise agreed that there was a continuity from Jesus to his apostles, to their followers and on to their day. Protestants and other offshoots mostly attempted to reform The Church or return it to its First century roots, but didn't dispute the commonly held belief of a united early church. Even among modern day skeptics there is a belief that a monolithic early Christian Church "edited" The Bible so it would reflect their prejudices and/or political leanings. In fact it was a chaotic collection of competing versions of Christianity with central control only emerging gradually. 

There was no group tasked with maintaining the integrity of the different Gospels, epistles and tracts being copied and recopied and spread around. Nothing prevented copyists, who were usually not professional scribes, from making errors in transcription or from making intentional alterations. This was in addition to the divergent points of view contained in the original writings. Pseudonymity (signing the name of another, more prominent name to one's own writing) was common since acceptance of a Gospel was based almost exclusively on who supposedly wrote it, not whether it made any sense. Several of the epistles attributed to Paul were almost certainly not written by him, including Ephesians, Colossians and both epistles to Timothy. There is no evidence that any of the four canonical Gospels were written by the men whose names are on them. Different regions had their favorites and several writings that are now considered apocryphal were once considered on par with what is now considered scripture. By the time there was a central authority that could have decided what was scripture and what wasn't, all that they did decide was which books would be included in the official canon of scripture without any attempt to harmonize among the various books. An exception to this was Marcion. The leader of an alternate strain of Christianity, Marcion was the first to put together a "canon" of scripture. His "New Testament" included the Gospel of Luke and the (heavily edited) epistles of Paul. It was mainly as a response to him that the group that became the Catholic Church compiled its own list, which we still have today. 

It was only after this point that theologians began to attempt to harmonize the various fragments and make sense of the competing narratives, focusing mainly on the nature of Jesus, eventually formulating the doctrine of The Trinity.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part IX

One of the core tenets Christianity is that Jesus is God. But one of the things that you can definitely depend on among Christians and non-Christians alike is that no one really understands what that means and anyone who thinks that they do undoubtedly understands it differently than the theologians who put the doctrine together piece by piece over the course of a couple of centuries. What? Theologians "put it together"! It's right there in The Bible. Except that it isn't. There are statements where it seems clear that Jesus is God (Thomas' cry of "My Lord and my God being the clearest), some that seem to suggest it and some that flat out contradict the idea. Early Christians had to reconcile the contradictions and they way they did it was to create the idea of the Trinity. But the reasons that contradictions even exist was that there were disagreements among earlier Christians regarding who Jesus was. Different Gospel writers had different viewpoints, were writing to different audiences, and had different levels of understanding. Add to that the role of generations of copyists inserting their own ideas into the Gospels, "correcting" unclear passages, or those that contradicted what they believed was the truth. 

The New Testament is not a puzzle, with pieces strewn across the writings of various authors that can be pieced together to come up with the truth, but those various authors all had their own points of view which often are at variance with each other. Which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. Any group of people, present at the same event, will remember the details differently. With the Gospels we don't even have different eye witnesses disagreeing, we have authors who put together their narratives based on a couple of generations of oral traditions, legendary accretions and myth building. Outside of the "works" based messages attributed to Jesus, as well as his predictions of a coming apocalypse, I believe that anything in The Bible purporting to describe the purpose of his death or his divine nature was added to the record by later followers in order to make sense of events that manifestly didn't make sense. 

Why did Jesus have to die? Was it as the perfect sacrifice to erase the collective sin of mankind inherited from Adam and Eve? Was it to "pay the price" for sin? (The wages of sin is death) Was it to prove that he was a true prophet, since Israel allegedly usually killed its prophets? Was it so he could be resurrected in order to defeat death? Was is to be an example to mankind to show how he was willing to go as far as to be killed in order to do God's will? You can find hints of all these reasonings in The Bible, including reading into Old Testament passages that are reinterpreted to supposedly prophecy his birth, life and death. My view is that Jesus didn't think he was going to killed, he thought God would usher in the end of the world with Jesus himself playing a key role (yes I know there are verses suggesting he knew - I'm reasonably sure these were words put in his mouth by later tradition). It's obvious even from the Gospels that his followers did not expect that he would be killed and that he wouldn't be a  conquering military leader. His followers must have been shocked at how things turned out.

We've seen how, even in modern times, predictions failing to come through seldom dissuade the committed from their path of belief. How many "prophets", even in our lifetime, have predicted the end of the world, or, even in the realm of politics, that Donald Trump would be restored to the presidency sometime in 2021. Explanations need to be made to fit the new reality into the old predictions.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VIII

You may have noticed that these posts are not scholarly works. I don't go into exhaustive detail or cite sources. Other people have done a much better job than I have ever done in putting together a coherent view of The Bible from the point of view of someone who doesn't consider it God's Word. I strongly recommend the works of Dr. Bart Ehrman who has written such works as Misquoting Jesus, Lost Christianities, Heaven and Hell, and How Jesus Became God among many others. 

Before I continue with my opinions of The Bible, especially the Gospels and Epistles, from an agnostic viewpoint, let me give you a brief tour of how my opinion of The Bible has changed in my lifetime. The blog series "So, You Want to Join a Cult" covers most of this ground:  

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

I grew up in an Irish-Catholic family on the very edge of New York City in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly Catholic, mostly Irish and Italian. There were a few Protestant churches, and there was a significant Jewish presence, but Catholicism was very much the default in this neighborhood, dominated by two Catholic parishes, St. Pius X and St. Claire's. We went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic grade school. As was usual with lay Catholics, at least in that era, we didn't trouble to much about doctrine or theology and left that stuff to the priests. I was familiar with the broad outlines of the Gospels and the major themes of the Old Testament, but really didn't think about religion at all. It was like the air - it was just there.

In my teens I visited some local Protestant churches. While I noticed some differences in the services, the broad outline was the same, or at least seemed that way. More to satisfy my curiosity than anything else I studied non-Christian religions, but it was more of an intellectual study and never really took. 

When I was fourteen I worked as a clerk in a financial firm in the financial district of lower Manhattan. There I encountered a variety of street corner preachers and began to hear about some of the beliefs of Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity such as "the rapture" and the concept of becoming "born again". Still no changes in my overall belief system, but I was starting to entertain some serious challenges to my worldview. During my freshman year of college I encountered The Way.  I eventually became convinced this group was a cult (again, see the link to Part I of "So, You Want to Join a Cult"), not so much their , beliefs but their practices. Their theology was for the most part similar to the strain of Evangelical Protestantism known as dispensationalism. Their claim to fame in theological terms was that, unlike almost all Christians, they did not believe that The Bible supports the belief that Jesus was God. A slightly less controversial position (although not unheard of) was that upon death you did not proceed to heaven or hell (or purgatory for Catholics) but were in a kind of sleep until the "return of Christ". 

What attracted me to this group was that they appeared methodical in their study of The Bible and were able to cite specific verses to support all of their beliefs. I was with this group from 1978-2001, with a hiatus in the 90's and was very much a true believer. I believed that The Bible, in its original texts, was divinely inspired by God. The Way taught that, utilizing certain commonsense methods, one could easily determine God's will - The Bible, they taught, interpreted itself. 

In 2000 the (married) top leader had been expelled after conducting an affair with a married woman. This caused me to question, not The Bible itself, but some of the things that this particular leader had been teaching that, to put it mildly, were "out there". I compiled a long list of things where the leader's teachings were at odds with what the founder of The Way had taught. My questioning got me kicked out of the group. 

I became aware of many offshoots from the original group that had split off during the leadership crisis that accompanied the founder's death in the late 80's. Despite all of them using the same "keys to interpretation" in their understanding of The Bible they were coming up with wildly differing conclusions. I started to see that even the founder's theology didn't really stand up to the self-interpreting Bible model and that his own conclusions were his own and not necessarily the only possible conclusions to be made utilizing the "keys to interpretation". I briefly considered returning to mainstream Christianity, but it didn't take long to see that no one had a reliable grasp of "The Truth" and even though most denominations believed that they were right and everyone else was wrong, they were all using the same Bible to come to different conclusions. 

It was at that point that I determined that there was no objective reason to elevate The Bible and Christianity over any other system of belief. This didn't mean that I had decided that it was definitely wrong, but that there wasn't any reason to assume that it was right either. I wasn't mad at God (something I was accused of), I just wasn't convinced that he existed, and if he did, at least not necessarily in the form that Christianity claimed he did. 

This is the path that I have walked that got me to the point where I see The Bible as just another book. At best a collection of books and letters and essays and pamphlets outlining men's opinions about God, the world, Jesus and morality. 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VII

There's a lot different ways to look at The Bible. There's the view that it's inerrant and infallible. That view can be applied to the originals (which no longer exist) or can be extended to the modern texts. It can be viewed as allegorical and metaphorical. It can be  viewed literally. It can be viewed as containing historical accuracy, or that the historical sections are not as important as the theological lessons being taught. Protestants say they believe in sola scriptura, while Catholics believe that the scriptures must be mediated by Church leaders. Various churches claim to understand what The Bible "really" means and encourage or browbeat others to "just read The Bible". 

For a book that so many believe is self-explanatory and will reveal its truths if you simply read it, there are certainly a myriad of opinions about what it actually means. True believers (a term which I am using disparagingly) will accuse those who interpret it differently of simply being wrong, or more pointedly, as "not Christians" or actually being inspired by Satan. They look to an idyllic time, recorded in The Acts of The Apostles, where there was a clear, bright line between the truth and lies, between orthodoxy and heresy. When the difference between those who "opposed Paul" or those who the early church branded as heretics and those who adhered to The Bible was as clear as day. 

Except back in those days there was no Bible.

Yes, parts of what became the New Testament were circulating around, and the Tanakh, in its original Hebrew as well as the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, was long established, but the concept of a unified collection of writings that would be consider scripture on par with the Jewish scriptures was an idea whose time had not yet arrived. In addition, there was broad disagreement among Christians regarding a whole range of beliefs about the nature of Jesus, about what his death (and resurrection) accomplished, about how Christians should behave, whether non-Jews could become Christians, the afterlife, the resurrection, the Kingdom of God and anything else that you can imagine. 

All of those people were Christians and they all believed that they were following the teachings handed down from Jesus through his apostles. It was this disagreement that caused, not only contradictions and variances between the different books of the New Testament but contradictions and variances within some of the books. Part of this was the consequence of nothing being written down for years and possibly decades (we don't know what writings predated the ones we have) and oral traditions developing among the different followers of Jesus. Keep in mind that there was no central authority as we understand it today for many decades - plenty of time for competing opinions to grow roots and accumulate adherents. The belief that Jesus' teachings were passed down unchanged from him to his apostles to their followers in an unbroken chain is a myth. We know for certain of several distinct "Christianities" that existed in the early centuries after Jesus that were eventually defeated or subsumed by what became the Catholic Church. Even then there were arguments among the leaders and theologians of a supposedly united church. These differences, and the majority response to them, contributed to what became "canon of scripture". If you know what to look for you can see where certain passages were written as a response to these "other Christianities", as well as changes to the text for similar reasons. 

Major early divisions among Christians included Ebionites, who believed that a convert to Christianity must follow Jewish Law and practice; Marcionites, a sect that viewed the God of the Old Testament as a different and inferior God than the God of Jesus in the New Testament; and various types of Gnostics. Marcionite Churches competed successfully with Orthodox/Catholic Churches, lasting at least into the fifth century with its ideas surviving in various forms for centuries longer. Divisions even within what became Catholic Christianity centered around the nature of Jesus. Was he a mortal man? Was he actually raised physically from the dead? Or was it a "spiritual" resurrection? Was he God? If so, in what sense was he God? (I'll be addressing the permutations of Christology in another post). These disagreements manifested themselves in the contradictions in the New Testament. 

One way I look at the books of the New Testament, in addition to being biographies and pastoral letters, is similar to political pamphlets, pushing their own agenda and refuting those of their opponents. And we have even some coherence because the minority, or losing, theologies were branded heresies and their writings (mostly) destroyed.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VI

A quick look at the New Testament and we see that it starts with the four Gospels, followed by The Acts of The Apostles, then the Epistles of Paul, a few other epistles and the big scary Book of Revelation. It's more or less chronological - Gospels, Acts, Epistles. But the books were not written in the same order as the events that they chronicle. The first book written was I Thessalonians, dated 15-20 years after Jesus' ministry. Galatians, I & II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians were all written before the very first Gospel was written, 35-40 years after Jesus' time. (But do not appear in the Bible in the order in which they are believed to be written) All this information from Paul was being passed around before anyone thought that anything resembling a biography of Jesus would be a good idea.  

In a previous post I mentioned that I thought that it was likely that Jesus existed, not that everything said about him was true, but that a person on whom the Gospels was based existed. I believe that the existence of Paul is even more of an historical certainty - unlike Jesus we have contemporary documents - actually written (or at least dictated) by Paul. At some point I'll discuss the conclusion by many Biblical scholars that not everything attributed to Paul was written by him. 

I Thessalonians, a letter from Paul to the church in Thessalonica that he had founded some time previously, was mainly concerned with details of Jesus' future return. People among his followers had died and there as concern that maybe Jesus wasn't coming back as promised. Paul tells them not to worry about it, when the resurrection takes place, the dead will rise first. What is interesting is that in this epistle, as in all the others, there is little to no mention of any details of Jesus' life or of his actual teachings. Presumably the Christians of Thessalonica already knew those details (or some version of the oral traditions). Galatians, written around the same time, is a little different. He's arguing against a group whose views we don't know for sure, and is making the case that non-Jews are just as able to become Christians as are Jews. No details about Jesus' life there either. For some reason, in the approximately 20 years between Jesus' death and Paul's epistles, the emphasis had changed from the works-based teachings of Jesus to the "believing" that Paul wrote about. 

As discussed previously, it is my view that Jesus was an Apocalyptic Prophet, i.e. he was preaching that the world as we knew it was soon to end, brought about by God's intervention. God would then establish his kingdom in which Jesus believed that he would be a key figure. Jesus believed that this would happen soon. He preached that to "enter the kingdom" one had to completely reject the things of the world, including riches, personal attachments and even family. But that didn't happen. By Paul's time Christians were reaching the end of their lives and passing away; the survivors were concerned that they would miss out on the establishment of the kingdom of God if they weren't alive when it came about. At this time it was not at  all a consensus view that there was a life after death and believers were getting concerned that they would miss the boat if the died before the divine intervention. Christians were well aware that one of Jesus' central doctrines was that "The End" very literally "Was Near", and like hundreds of prophets through the next two millennia, he was wrong. I Thessalonians is the first attempt in canon to explain away the discrepancy between what Jesus said and what was happening (or not happening). 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part V

It is important to first understand the society during Biblical times. 

Around the eighth century BCE, according to the Tanakh, the Jewish people were divided into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. Around 720 BCE Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and deported most of the inhabitants while subjugating the southern kingdom of Judah as a vassal kingdom. Around 150 years later the Neo-Babylonian Empire defeated Judah and there ceased to be an independent Jewish state until the brief interregnum of the Hasmonaeans. At the time of Jesus the Romans had taken over Judea via the client kingdom of the Herod family. Many Jews were extremely unhappy with being under the thumb of yet another foreign nation, especially after independence was still within living memory. 

The religious environment was tied closely to the political. After centuries of military defeats and rule by foreigners, after the destruction of their temple, and things generally just not going their way, a fatalistic view took hold: apocalypticism. The apocalyptic view was that it was futile to try to change the world through human efforts; that the world itself was under the power of evil and that the only way things were going to change was if God directly intervened and overthrew the existing order and ushered in a "Kingdom of God".  There were various strains of apocalypticism during this time, with characters such as "The Son of Man" and "The Messiah", references to reestablishing the Davidic monarchy and descriptions of what the "End of Days" would be like. This was the milieu in which Jesus lived and preached. If you read the Gospels like an historian it's fairly obvious that this is what Jesus preached as well. 

If you focus on the actions that Jesus told people that they needed to do to gain the "Kingdom of Heaven" (or "Kingdom of God", or sometimes simply "The Kingdom") it was very clear that it was the actions, and not believing in him, or accepting him, that got you into the Kingdom. I'm aware that there are sections that focus on believing in order to attain eternal life. A good case can be made that the later Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, represent a later development among the Christian Church, and were not what the historical Jesus taught. What Jesus taught was that pretty soon, within the lifetime of those he was preaching to, God would intervene in the world, throw down the kingdoms of the world, and establish God's kingdom on Earth. His comments about rejecting family, rejecting worldly goods, and especially riches makes sense in this context. It made no sense to to plan for the long term because he didn't think there would be a long term. He wasn't out to make the world a better place, because he didn't think "the world" was going to be around long enough to be made better. He gave instructions to his followers to change their ways so that they would make the cut when the Godly New World Order came to pass. Anyone who didn't straighten up and fly right would be outside gnashing their teeth before getting vaporized by destroying fire. 

Did I mention that he thought that this would happen soon?

This doesn't mean that loving your neighbor and living the way Jesus told people to live isn't a good thing, but the reason Jesus gave for living that way turned out to be mistaken. God didn't overthrow the kingdoms of the world and establish his kingdom within Jesus' generation...or ever. Jesus was wrong.

Oops.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part IV

In the first installment of "An Agnostic's Look at The Bible" I discussed the proposition that the Gospels were historical documents and how this position would surprise many people. The counter-argument that there are no contemporary references to Jesus, or that the Gospels were written 40-70 years after his ministry, or that there are contradictions, or that the writers had an agenda is somewhat irrelevant. Not because we should accept everything that's in the New Testament at face value, but that the problems that skeptics often identify are not uncommon. Many of our historical records were written well after the events that they describe and are often written at the behest of a ruler who wanted his bona fides polished up a bit. But looking at the Bible the way an historian would enables us to sift through it and take a reasonable stab at what really happened. 

To view The Bible as an historical document, or more accurately, as a collection of historical documents, one must reject the assumption that it is perfect and internally consistent. A theologian, or a believer, will attempt to harmonize contradictory sections. For example, all the Gospels describes two criminals crucified with Jesus. In two Gospels, both revile Jesus as they are dying; while in another Gospel, only one does so. One explanation that I have seen suggests that there were actually four crucified with him in two pairs. In one pair both reviled him, in the second pair, only one. A similar "solution" explains why the various descriptions of Peter's three denials differ so much from each other - easy! SIX denials! In no Gospel are there more than two criminals or three denials mentioned, yet in order to make them fit we are to believe that "what really happened" can only be deduced by taking bits and pieces from different sources. It becomes more problematic when the discrepancies are between doctrinal extremes, like when Jesus declares that no man has seen God at any time and in another place that anyone who has seen him has seen the Father. I'll be writing about the evolution of the Trinity in a later edition - a textbook example of attempts at harmonization gone wild!

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that even after the Gospels were written they were subject to copyists' errors. Some were honest mistakes, but others (this really surprises some people) were the result of attempts to make the scriptures fit the predominant theology of the day. How to find out what was originally written, and even if what was originally written reflects what the historical Jesus really said or did is not a job for the fainthearted. The fact that the first Gospel that is included in The Bible, Mark, was written around forty years after the events that it purportedly describes suggests that the author (nowhere in "Mark" does the author claim to be the person in the Acts of the Apostles named Mark, nor does he claim that he is any other Mark. It's anonymous) got his information either from other written sources, or from oral traditions, possibly even some eyewitness testimony. Assume that the basics of the Gospel accounts are true, i.e. Jesus was an itinerant preacher who attracted a following, offended the authorities and was executed, and that some of his followers at least believed that he rose from the dead. If so it is natural that both stories and legends would be passed along by his followers and that no contemporary written records would have been made since his earliest followers were likely illiterate. It was only later, as Christianity spread due to the missionary efforts of Paul and others, that the desire to create written records arose. 

After Mark, others wrote their versions of the life and mission of Jesus. Three others were included in the New Testament, two of them, Matthew and Luke without a doubt used Mark as source material. There is evidence that they both used a second source, which Biblical scholars call "Q", as well. The Gospel of John seems to have developed independently of the other three. Others survived but are viewed as apocryphal and still others have been lost and no trace of them survives. If we do not assume, as a believer would, that the four Gospels were inspired by God, and are therefore inerrant and consistent with each other, then it would be natural to expect inconsistencies and discrepancies, or even errors. Histories, while usually written by the winners, will also reflect the differing priorities and agendas of the writers and their intended audience. A modern history book about the American Civil War written by a Confederate sympathizer would look different than one written by a proponent of Critical Race Theory. Even in 2023 what happened on January 6, 2021 is described in wildly different terms depending on one's political orientation. It should be no surprise therefore when individual books of The Bible do not agree with one another. They have been written by different people who may have had different ideas about who Jesus was, what his ministry was about, what was the purpose of his death. There are passages in the Gospels that seem to have the purpose of addressing or debunking positions that differ from the author's. Every book has its own agenda, which seeks to advance the author's view of what is orthodox and what is heretical. 

We should expect differences, not be surprised by them.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part III

Recently a Jewish friend commented about Christians stealing her book. She was, of course, the way the Tanakh (Hebrew term for what Christians call the Old Testament) had been coopted by Christians and how sections were reinterpreted to fit with real or legendary aspects of Jesus' life. Prophecies, according to the writers of the Gospels, foretelling Jesus' ministry. 

An agnostic reading of the Tanakh will reveal the surprising fact that prophesy is pretty thin on the ground throughout the Tanakh. "Agnostic" insofar as setting aside what we think we know about prophecies of the Messiah. An apt example is Isaiah 7:14 (KJV) "Therefore the LORD himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel". Most Christians, or even non-Christians living in a majority-Christian culture, will recognize this verse as the supposed prophecy that was fulfilled in  Matthew 1:23 (KJV) - which an angel tells Joseph after he found out his wife-to-be was pregnant without his assistance: "Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, "God with us". There are a number of things wrong with this. Nobody, as far as The Bible records, ever called Jesus Immanuel. The second thing is that the word that is translated from the Hebrew as "virgin",  almah, means "young woman". It could refer to a virgin, who were typically young women, but apparently no one in pre-Christian Judaism interpreted the word as virgin. Thirdly, if you read the context, it is referring, not to a future messiah, but to a contemporary event - the loss of "both their kings" (Isaiah 7:16) - referring to both Israel (the Northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom). It's a prophecy to Ahaz, King of Judah, that both he and the King of Israel will be dead before the child Immanuel is old enough to discern good from evil. Additional confusion arises due to the tendency of some of the Gospel writers to use the Septuagint Greek translation of the Tanakh, where almah translated into Greek as parthenos, which means "virgin. The Gospels are full of examples. 

One of the things about so-called prophecies is they're easy to fake. Look at the virgin birth prophecy that I unrolled in the previous paragraph. Nowhere else in the Gospels or anywhere else in the New Testament is Jesus' alleged virgin birth brought up. I'll be discussing the evolution of the concept of Jesus as the son of God, as well as God The Son in a later installment, but as an agnostic I'm skeptical of any supernatural claims -  virgin birth is one of those. It's easy to imagine a Gospel writer scouring the Tanakh looking for promising passages that can double as prophecies. "Ooh, look, this Greek Old Testament (and the Gospel writers were without a doubt Greek-speaking) mentions a virgin conceiving a child - claiming good ol' Jesus was born of a virgin ought to polish up his divine credentials!" Pile on references to Bethlehem in Micah and Egypt in Hosea and you have an unlikely tale of a pregnant woman hiking all the way to another district for a census because their distant ancestors came from there and fleeing to Egypt. A skeptic would wonder whether these stories in the Gospels actually happened, or they were put together in order to make these older passages were actually prophecies. 

As I said in Part Two, the Tanakh was written to and for a specific people, the Hebrews/Israelites/Judeans/Jews. Despite Jesus' Jewishness and Christianity originating in the capitol of Judea, Jerusalem, it very quickly became a separate religion with no real continuity with Judaism. The early Christians included the Tanakh as part of their scriptures to wash away the taint of newness that was problematic not only among the Jewish population, but among mainstream Roman society. The Torah and the rest of the Tanakh became, in Christian hands, starting with the writers of the New Testament merely a run-up and prelude to the main event - Jesus' life.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part II

Back when I was involved in a Christian-esque cult, we used to sign a green card when we registered for its foundational, introductory class. The card listed a number of supposed benefits of this class - one of them was "explains apparent Bible contradictions". We believed, as do most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, that the Bible is inerrant, i.e. it contained no errors, and therefore couldn't contain any contradictions. So what seemed like a contradiction was really our own lack of understanding or a mistranslation. Lack of understanding might include lack of knowledge of the customs of the Biblical era and milieu, it could be that the meaning of English words had changed since the Bible version that we were reading had been published, or we hadn't properly looked at the immediate and remote context. The cult that I was in had some interesting ways of harmonizing it all, but if you are familiar with the evolution of the doctrine of the Trinity, it wasn't too unusual. If you are going to insist that the Bible is without error and internally consistent that's what you're going to have to do. There are parts that blatantly contradict each other. There are parts that seem to describe Jesus in one way and other sections paint him with an entirely different brush. To make it all fit, including the Old Testament, a lot of mental gymnastics will have to be involved. 

If you read the Bible, not as "a" book, but as a collection of books, which it undeniably is, then the need to explain away contradictions disappears. Or at least the need becomes less urgent. 

Most of the New Testament is credited to the Apostle Paul, while the Old Testament has a more diverse cast. What Christians call the Old Testament can be divided in a number of ways. There's the torah, the Law, the first five books; there's the prophets; and there's the other writings which include books of alleged history as well as "poetic" books like Psalms and Proverbs. The first five books are traditionally credited to Moses, Psalms to King David, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes & The Song of Solomon to King Solomon. The various books of the prophets usually are considered eponymous. Various others round out the team. 

The first book, is called Genesis by Christians, or Bereshith in Hebrew.  Although it is included as part of "The Law", it actually is comprised of a creation myth and a legendary account of the origins of the people of Israel. This is not unusual, most cultures have, or had, creation myths and legends about the foundation of their nations. Within Genesis you'll find many of what we think of as "Bible stories": Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Noah's Ark, Abraham almost sacrificing his son, Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt and finally Joseph and his family's sojourn in Egypt. It is self-evidently a book written to a for a specific tribal group, the Hebrews. Most of the Hebrew Bible does not read as universally applicable either. So how did it become part of the holy book of the Christians?

Things were a bit jumbled in Christianity's early days. 

Although Jesus in the Gospels quotes the Old Testament, and refers to "the scriptures", and his follower Paul does the same, some Christians noted that there was a stark difference in how God was portrayed between the Old and New Testaments, almost as if they weren't the same God. Some went beyond the "as if" and declared unambiguously that they weren't the same entity. Marcion was the most well known and influential of these. He completely rejected the entire Old Testament as being about an evil God of this world, while Jesus represented the "true" God. He was the first to compile a "canon of scripture" which viewed Paul as the ultimate authority. His "New Testament" included the epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Luke, all heavily edited to remove theology that Marcion did not approve of. Although later condemned as a heretic, Marcionite Christian churches at one time outnumbered Orthodox/Catholic churches. Christianity could have very easily become a brand new thing, totally divorced from the culture and religion from which it sprang. 

But during Christianity's early days there was a bias toward religions that were "ancient" and a suspicion, if not an outright prohibition, of new religious movements. Christianity got around this by claiming the Old Testament as its own. Sections of it were reinterpreted as prophesies of the Messiah in ways that would have (and did) surprise Jews then (and now). By piggybacking this new faith on the ancient religion of the Jews, the Christians could have the best of both worlds.