An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part X (Short Musings On How Jesus Became God)

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 the nation of Israel itself at times. The earliest traditions that were enshrined in the Gospels indicate that Jesus became the Son of God. Initially it was theorized that upon his supposed resurrection he was made the Son of God as a reward for his faithfulness to God. Later the theology changed with the honor being bestowed on him at his baptism; still later at his birth as seen in Matthew and ultimately, as claimed in John, he was viewed as the 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. A lot of Christological ink has been spilled trying to make sense of how Jesus could be both God and man. (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.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XI

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part IX (Who Is This Jesus Guy Anyway?)

One of the core tenets mainstream Christianity is that Jesus Christ 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 understand 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, isn't it? Except that it isn't. There are statements where it seems clear that Jesus is God, some that merely 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, which nowhere appears in the Bible. 

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" passages that were unclear, or just 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, despite being treated that way in Bible studies all across the world. The various authors all had their own points of view which they laid out in their writings with no intention of harmonizing their theology with that of other writers.  And the different writings often were 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? Was it to prove that he was a true prophet, since Israel 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 theories in The Bible, including in Old Testament passages that are reinterpreted to supposedly prophesy his birth, life, death and purported resurrection. 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 would 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.

I'll look at the evolving perception within Christianity regarding Jesus' nature in the next installment. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part X

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VIII (Why I Believe - Or Disbelieve - As I Do)

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 heartily 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:  So, You Want To Join A Cult

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 know much about the details of 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 simply 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. On my lunch break I encountered a variety of street corner preachers who clustered around the Federal Building across from the New York Stock Exchange and began to hear about some of the beliefs of Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity such as "the rapture" and the concept of becoming "born again", which we Catholics never heard about. 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.  Eventually I became convinced that this group was a cult, not so much due to their beliefs, but because of 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, all you had to do was read it without preconceived notions. 

In 2000 the (married) top leader had been expelled after conducting an affair with a married woman that she alleged was nonconsensual. 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" in the context of what the group's main teachings were. I reasoned that someone who didn't have the sense to keep his pants on couldn't expect anyone to trust his interpretation of scripture. 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 necessarily 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. Not a perfect, handed-down-from-heaven, infallible, document. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part IX

So, You Want To Join a Cult - Part XI

In August 1979, I was on the cusp of a major change in my life. I was about to ratchet up my Way involvement by moving into a Way Home, but what was going on in the wider Way World?

In an earlier installment I laid out why, in my view, people stayed in cults:

1. What the cult is telling you, on some level, seems to make sense
2. You feel like you belong to something greater than yourself
3. Outside pressure serves only to confirm the "us against them" narrative the cult has been promoting
4. The perceived benefits outweigh any problems
5. People don't like to admit that they're wrong

The second item listed, "You feel like you belong to something greater than yourself", can be looked at in two ways. One view is that you feel that you're on a mission, that you're actually accomplishing something; the other aspect is a veneer of legitimacy. One way to look like you're legitimate is to build up an organization. 

In the early days of of The Way, Wierwille ran a shoestring operation. Starting in 1953 he taught his Power For Abundant Living (PFAL) classes, ran Sunday services at his home and had a loose network of people who were interested in what he had to say. He left the church where he was pastor and incorporated as "The Way" in 1957 *. Through the late fifties and most of the sixties The Way continued as a purely local phenomenon in Northwest Ohio. Few would have ever heard of Wierwille and The Way if things had continued on this path. In Part IV I discussed some of the steps in The Way's expansion. 

 In the late sixties there was an explosion of new religious groups, as well as many young people who, dissatisfied with the status quo, gathered together in informal groups, teaching each other the gospel and attempting to live communally as they imagined the legendary early Christians did. One of these groups, running an ad hoc Christian charitable organization and group home in San Francisco, attracted Wierwille's attention. He travelled to San Francisco and met with them. Eventually they formed a partnership: they provided the youth and the energy, he provided the organized theology. It was at this point that things took off. The people from the San Francisco group home started spreading Wierwille's take on Christianity with an enthusiasm that had not been present when PFAL was just another self-improvement class, albeit Bible-based. Two affiliated independent organizations sprung up, The Way West in California and The Way East in Upstate New York. These groups coordinated the running of PFAL classes in their areas and served as a loose connection to Wierwille. Drawing upon the pool of enthusiastic PFAL graduates, Wierwille established an outreach program, the World Over the World (WOW) Ambassadors and a leadership training program, The Way Corps, the formation of the latter could be considered the foundation of cultishness in The Way. 

The first Way Corps group came together in 1969, but was disbanded after some unspecified failure. A second group came to Ohio in 1970 and became the core of Wierwille's committed followers. Early in the seventies, Wierwille, backed by some of his Way Corps, staged a takeover of both The Way West and The Way East, folding their organizations into the framework of The Way Inc, now styled The Way International. Initially graduates of The Way Corps either worked in various capacities at "International Headquarters" (Wierwille's farm), or went out "in the field" to oversee areas that were seeing a lot of new PFAL grads. Occasionally Way Corps graduates engaged in secular pursuits in addition to their Way responsibilities. The Bible fellowships, later known as "twigs" largely operated independently. Each year, the number of people entering Way Corps training grew, from a dozen in each of the first two groups, to around 600 in the sixth group. Property was purchased in Emporia Kansas and Rome City Indiana to facilitate the growing number of Corps trainees. 

The growing number of new people, and the increasing scope of the Way Corps training required a business structure. Money was pouring in from tithes, and class fees, and expenses for their properties, publications and the framework required for training hundreds of people increased as well. The number of staff members increased. Parallel to the business side, a hierarchy on the spiritual side sprung up. Twig leaders reported to Branch leaders, who in turn reported to Area or Limb (state) leaders, who answered to a regional overseer and ultimately to the Trunk (national) leader. 

Numerical growth of Way Corps grads meant that more local fellowships were being run by Way Corps rather than local people with leadership skills. In the early seventies, the increase in the number of PFAL grads and the spread of local fellowships resulted in things being pretty independent on the local level. There might be a Corps grad as a state or regional coordinator, but regular folks were for the most part rising up to coordinate fellowships and branches without any formal training. As Way Corps grads began to filter down to area and branch levels, and finally to twig (local) fellowship levels, the level of centralized control changed the nature of the local Bible fellowships. The nature of that control I will address in a later installment, but suffice it to say that the framework for control was steadily building and was largely in place by the late seventies.

The Way, in around ten years, had accomplished two things: they had built their little operation into a truly international, worldwide, organization and had extended their influence and control directly into people's lives through the Way Corps. The former gave it the patina of respectability, and the latter gave it a lever to influence the everyday life of its adherents. The Way had hit this dual pinnacle right around the time I got involved. It's organization and hierarchy indicated to me that it wasn't a fly-by-night assemblage of do-gooders, but a structured group that had put down roots. I felt safe getting involved in it. 

By this time I had been drawn in by several factors. What I was being told made sense, at least to me;  the outside pressure served to confirm the "us against them" narrative; and I felt like I belonged to something greater than myself, both in a sense of accomplishment and belonging to an established organization. In later years I would come to believe that the perceived benefits outweigh any problems, but in the upcoming year I would become one of the people who don't like to admit that they're wrong.

 And that pattern of ignoring red flags would continue for a long, long time. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XII

* The Way hagiography later retconned the founding of The Way as October 1942, when Wierwille started a local radio program

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VII (The New Testament - A Collection of Religious Pamphlets)

There's a lot different ways that people 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. Typically those who hold the "inerrant and infallible" position believe that there are translation errors that once corrected will reveal what was in the original. 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, scripture alone, 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" as if its message was self-evident. 

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, not to mention disagreements about what it actually says. "True believers" will accuse those who interpret it differently of simply being wrong, or more pointedly, as "not Christians" or even being inspired by Satan. They look to an mythical idyllic time, written down 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. But nothing written down and there was no central authority to ensure there was uniformity of belief. Even in the documents that eventually made it into the Bible there are indications, sometimes quite explicit, that not all Christians believed or taught the same thing. 

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.  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. 

An article of faith among many people is that at some point in the history of Christianity certain books, or selections within books, were "taken out" of The Bible. Each of the books that eventually made it into the Bible, as well as the many that did not, all had their separate history. The authors of each book each had their own spin on what Jesus' message was, what stories confirmed that message, as well as Jesus' nature, salvation, sin, you name it. Since they were spread by believers manually writing out each manuscript, errors crept in. Some deviation from the originals occurred simply due to human error, some due to the copyist making changes by "correcting" what they thought were previous errors, and others due to intentional changes made in order to insert the copyist's opinion in the text. 

Eventually the leaders of the faction that became the Catholic Church*  decided that they needed an approved list of books that would make up the "canon of scripture". It went through several permutations before assuming the form we have today in the fourth century.** A number of books that had been in circulation were not included in the newly formed Bible, many of them are lost to history, but some survived in whole or in part. So, while no books were removed, definite decisions were made regarding what would be included. 

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. The minority, or losing, theologies were branded heresies and their writings (mostly) destroyed. History is written by the victors. In the case of Christianity, the victors were the faction that became the Catholic Church. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part VIII

* The churches known as "orthodox" at this time were not separate from the Catholic Church centered in Rome

** There were a number of books in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that were included as part of Catholic Bibles, these apocryphal, or deuterocanonical, books were not included in Protestant Bibles post-Reformation.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VI (So, Just When IS The End of The World Scheduled?)

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. 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. 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 actually written by him. 

One of the most striking differences between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christianity that Paul writes about is that Jesus, according to his biographers, was mostly concerned with how people acted, while Paul was mostly focussed on what people believed about Jesus. 

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. He preached that to "enter the kingdom" one had to completely reject the things of the world, including riches, personal attachments and even family. People's actions were of paramount importance. Jesus believed that this would happen soon. 

But that didn't happen. 

One of the subjects covered in I Thessalonians, a letter from Paul to the church in Thessalonica, was the details of Jesus' future return. People among his followers had died and other Christians were worried that maybe Jesus wasn't coming back as promised. Those still among the living were concerned that their loved ones had missed out on the establishment of the kingdom of God. And that that, if they weren't alive when it came about, they themselves wouldn't make it into the brave new world. It's important to note that beliefs about the afterlife have evolved over the centuries. Resurrection in the Judea of this era was more of a national resurrection, i.e. Israel would be reestablished a kingdom. Ideas about how this would affect individuals, i.e. an end days judgement and resurrection of people depended on what sect you identified with. Sadducees, for example, did not believe in a resurrection of individuals at all. 

At this point in Church history, none of the writings that would come to be included in the canon of scripture had been written yet, let alone available for people to read. So there wasn't yet a doctrinal standard to which they could refer to for answers. Paul tells them not to worry about it, when the resurrection takes place, the dead will rise first. This is the first attempt in canon to explain away the discrepancy between what Jesus said and what was happening (or not happening). Jesus was pretty clear that The End would take place within the lifetime of his generation; Paul is, like so many "prophets" after him, trying to explain why what had been so confidently predicted wasn't happening. But at this point Paul still believes that the resurrection will take place pretty soon. He's just calming down those who are worried that they'll die before the good stuff happens. Eventually he changes his mind. 

Paul was human, just like everyone else. As he got older and his own death stared him in the face, he wasn't so sure. In the Epistle to the Philippians, he writes: "To live is Christ and to die is gain" and in II Corinthians "..would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord" indicating that a Christian would be in the presence of Jesus Christ upon death. He wouldn't be the first person to change their mind about death as their own approached. But I Thessalonians is still in the Bible, with the description of the dead rising and the living levitating into the sky. An agnostic like myself views that as a contradiction. Some Christians hold to one and ignore the other, others explain away the version of afterlife that they don't like. Still others combine the two, with Christians being temporarily in the presence of God after death and being raised up bodily later to be judged. 

But still, 2000 years later, Christians are still waiting for Jesus to come back and get them, and he still fails to do so.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part VII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part V (The Milieu of the Gospels and Apocalypticism)

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.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part VI

Workin' Man - Part XI - Consultants, Management Time and The Answer Man, Oh My

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

I have learned over the decades to be extremely suspicious of consultants. They generally don't know as much as they think that they do, they make extravagant promises and make sure to feed you enough information to keep you interested and willing to keep bringing them back. I don't recall the name of this consultant, but what he was pitching was process improvement. In general I think process improvement is a good idea. In short, what it involves is looking at your the way you do things for anything that is superfluous and analyzing the steps and handoffs involved. Are there steps that are unnecessary or don't add value? Is it generating paper that doesn't go anywhere? Are unnecessary people involved? 

The program started off with a weekend retreat at Mahoney State Park attended by representatives from all of the company's divisions. We were supposed to hash out a plan to implement a process improvement program, based on guidance from the consultant. What we came up with was a grass roots, from the bottom up, methodology for  implementing change in the company. According to the plan, a core group of people would go around to all the departments, interview the staff, and map out the processes involved in their jobs. Once this was all done, a team of any four people could implement a change to any department after putting together a detailed plan. Coaches, who had undergone training by the consultant, who be available to guide and advise the change teams. So far do good. Or so we thought. 

The problems started right away. The unionized sections of the company refused to participate. Other areas like the reporters didn't have a specific procedure that they followed, at least not one that could be reduced to simple steps. I was one of the coaches, and stayed busy training teams on how to implement change according to the program. But more problems cropped up when teams that had no real understanding of how divisions of the company worked were making changes to those divisions without the permission, or even the input, of the affected managers. I don't remember anything actually getting done. Ever. Eventually the Publisher (newspaper-speak for CEO) got tired of the whole thing and fired the consultant. My skepticism of consultants continues to this day. 

I was one of those people who volunteered for everything. And got volunteered for everything. One of the more fun things that I signed up for was being on staff for the Omaha World-Herald carrier newsletter. Every month I wrote an article called "The Answer Man". My non de plume was Dlarehd L. Rowahamo - which is Omaha World-Herald spelled backwards. The premise was that Dlarehd was either from another planet, or perhaps another dimension or timeline, and didn't quite understand what was going on. He constantly got things backwards, but ended up covering things that needed to be covered, like sales contests and changes in subscription price, in a humorous manner. The first few issues were a battle to stop the editors from spell checking me, since I made up a lot of words! 

I was once involved in a seminar where the facilitator was trying to demonstrate the value of consensus in putting together a mission statement, rather than simply a vote of the majority. My thinking was that the bigger the group, the less likely it is that consensus could be achieved. So during this consensus building exercise, I decided that I would be a contrarian and refuse to agree to the nascent consensus. The moderator tried to negotiate with me, but I dug in my heels and wouldn't agree to anything. Was I being a jerk? Absolutely, but I also effectively debunked his idea of the inevitability of consensus. I believe they abandoned consensus and decided to outvote me! 

One of the things I learned participating in all of those committees was that there is an ideal number of people on a committee. Too few and you get groupthink; too many and you never come to a conclusion. Once a committee gets too big the best thing that can be done is break it up into subcommittees. Have that subcommittee do the work of crafting a plan, then present it to the larger group and have them vote on it. 

There were a lot of other projects and committees that I volunteered for, but despite all the work I was putting into these activities that were adjacent to my regular job description, they weren't really valued by management. Every year State Circulation had an annual meeting where awards were given out for outstanding achievement. There were cash awards given out in conjunction with these recognitions as well. One particular year I was sure I'd be recognized for something like team player, (for which there was an award) or for all the committees I was recruited for. Every award, like every other year, went to the sales reps whose sales went up the most. I had an epiphany. I realized that I was spending hours upon hours every week on projects that simply weren't valued and resulted in no reward or even recognition. Not even a pat on the back. The next day I resigned from every single committee and program that I was involved in and spent my time on the things that would bring me recognition, and more importantly, more money!

The most interesting thing I was involved in was an 18-month management training course. At least part of it was interesting. Honestly I can't remember most of what they covered, but we would be at training two-three days a week a couple of times a month. One class that stood out was one where we were supposed learn how to let go of our stress and to relax by means of guided meditation. I didn't get much out of it, but one of my fellow trainees fell asleep and was snoring loudly. I guess he was relaxed!

 The part that I learned the most from, and have carried to this day, was a week-long class called Managing Management Time. I had taken my share of time management courses before, including one that was a thinly disguised front for a company selling pocket calendars. (This was well before the days when everyone had a multi-purpose supercomputer in their pocket) Managing Management Time was a theory of management that I had never heard before. The premise was that management was a skill like any other, and separate from the skills of the people that were being managed, the ranks of whom the manager had presumably arrived from. The time management tips were really corollaries to spending your time as a manager, not just another one of the guys. One of the main nuggets of wisdom was the saying "The job of a manger is not to do things, but to get things done.  The course covered a lot of the management fallacies. One was the "Pride of Craft" fallacy, where a new manager was so attached to her pre-management job, that she would spend a large portion of her work week doing the job that she had just been promoted out of. This was in addition to all the new management responsibilities. This was why many new managers end up working 60-70 hour weeks! Other topics included the responsibility of a manager to train his subordinates to do their jobs independently, instead of micromanaging them; and knowing what things were actually her responsibility - knowing who the "monkey" belonged to! A piece of practical advice included procrastination: if nobody follows up on that task you were given, it probably wasn't that important! The main nugget of wisdom was that there was management time and vocational time. As managers we were being paid to manage, not to do the tasks that we were paying other people to do. Your subordinates might think you were a cool guy for getting your hands dirty working side by side with them, and occasionally that might serve as a morale builder, but it wasn't your job. I still have the book from this class on my bookshelf and have applied the principles consistently over the years. 

As I mentioned in the previous installment, after my demotion, my old manager Dave was once again my manager. He was much easier to work with this time around. Maybe he had mellowed with experience. Maybe he was thankful he had a veteran like myself on his team. Whatever the reason, it was considerably better this time around. After I had been back in my old district for a while, Dave decided to make a change. Dodge County, which included the city of Fremont, had recently been detached from its district in Region 4 and added to our region. Fremont had two busy distributorships as well as a number of large motor routes, both seven-day and Sunday only, as well as routes in all of the smaller towns. Dave asked me if I would consider taking over that district, along with a decent raise. I agreed. On my first Sunday in the county Dave and I both were out delivering papers in a blizzard! I also had my first visit to South Dakota when I was assigned to convert all the vending machines in the  South Dakota border counties to new settings after a price change. 

Outside of Dodge County, things were changing in State Circulation. A lot of the managers who had been in charge were leaving the company. The last several State Circulation Managers had risen through the ranks within the newspaper, but one by one they were being promoted into Metro, transferred to one of our subsidiaries, or leaving the company altogether. The new State Manager was from outside the company and had already brought in a few of his friends from his previous newspaper as Region Managers. Like many new executives, he was keen to shake things up and make changes. He and Dave did not get along. The friction got so bad that Dave eventually resigned. It was funny - after Dave left a lot of the other sales reps asked me if I was worried since "my buddy" had left, not realizing that Dave and I were far from "buddies"! 

Jerry, the new Region Manager had come from our competitor, The Lincoln Journal-Star. He convinced me to transfer districts again, this time back to the Lincoln Office as the Single Copy Manager. (Single Copy encompassed all sales other than home delivery, i.e. vending machines, stores and school sales) This time around I also had some responsibility for single copy throughout all regions of the state.  This involved putting together an inventory of every rack in the state (outside of the Omaha metro area) and ordering and delivering new racks when needed. I conducting training classes on rack repair and changing pricing mechanisms. It was amazing how many sales reps had no idea where the racks were in their districts or in what shape they were in. In dealing with the Region Manager and his sales reps in the Western Nebraska Region I also got a taste of how small town Nebraskans viewed people from the urban areas - with barely concealed disdain. I remember trying to get an address for a storage facility in Kearney so I could deliver some new racks and being told that this wasn't the big city, we don't have addresses out here. (Spoiler: there was an address)

Around this time, in order to pay off my credit card debt I took a part-time job working the night stocking crew at the Super Saver on Cornhusker Highway. I'll discuss that job more in a future article. I got the job because one of the guys who worked on my crew at Food 4 Less was a manager there. He introduced me to his Store Director whose only question was "Can you work nights?" - I was hired. 

As Single Copy Manager I was always looking for ways to sell more papers. I hustled around town looking for new locations for racks, and worked on maximizing the number of papers in each location, paying attention to sales and returns. On Husker Football Game Days we rented a parking stall at the old Greyhound Station and parked a pickup truck there full of papers. We sold a paper-spirit card combo for the price of a paper (then 25¢) which counted as paid circulation. The big win was when I convinced downtown restaurants to commit to paying for hundreds of papers at a reduced rate that I would give away at the stadium with a map to the restaurant stapled to the sports section. We did this for every Lincoln sporting event and it was a great success. My circulation numbers skyrocketed. Since increased circulation was one of the things that our bonus was based on, I was making some extra money!

Like at many places, when you succeed, you're expected to keep succeeding. In an industry where a 2% increase was almost unheard of (I used to say exceeding 2% will result in a temple being built, devoted to your worship) I achieved a 20% annual increase in paid circulation. The company set my goal the following year for another 20%. I achieved a only 10% increase (still, 30% greater than 2 years previously) but received no bonus, even though sales reps with 1% and 2% increases did. I was extremely unhappy. By this time, there was a new State Circulation Manager (again), this time a transplant from the Lincoln Journal Star who Jerry didn't get along with, so I got a new, new boss, a guy named Kevin. Kevin was able to get me a salary increase, (no bonus recalculation though) but I thought it was a case of too little, too late, and resigned to take a management job with Super Saver. This meant that I needed to quit my part-time job with Super Saver and get a new part-time job to pay off my debt. I took a part-time job with the Omaha World-Herald!

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part IV (Inconsistencies)

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. Or if it happened at all. 

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, while the second does not. 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 got his information either from other written sources, or from oral traditions. 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 consensus 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 2025 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.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part V

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part III (Prophecy...Or Is It?)

Recently a Jewish friend commented about Christians stealing her book. She was, of course, referring to the way the Tanakh (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. According to the writers of the Gospels, the Tanakh was full of prophecies, foretelling Jesus' ministry. 

An objective reading of the Tanakh will reveal the surprising fact that actual prophesy is pretty thin on the ground throughout. 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 referenced 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 (or his name) Emmanuel. 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 Emmanuel 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 Hebrew almah is translated into Greek as parthenos, which does mean "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 Septuagint 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 seem like 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 what they considered the main event - Jesus' life.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part IV

Columbus Day

Look, I'm not going to quibble about whether we can call Columbus stumbling across the Americas a "discovery" or not. However, I think that asserting that "Columbus didn't discover anything; there were already people here" is the wrong argument to make.

The Europeans didn't know it was there, so from their point of view, they discovered someplace that they didn't already know about. Whatever the previous landings by Vikings or the Irish accomplished, it didn't dawn on Europeans, especially not seagoing explorers and traders, that there were two huge continents in between Europe's western shores and the east shores of Asia. Of course, initially he had no idea what he had found, and didn't actually find the mainland (Central America) until his fourth voyage. 

The history of humankind is one long slog of the weak being conquered by he strong, or at least those with superior war-making technology subduing those with inferior defensive capabilities. This wasn't a brand new development by Europeans in the 1500s, but describes the expansion of the Roman Empire, the spread of the Caliphate, the dominance of the Huns and Mongols, China's imperial footprint, not to mention thousands of smaller polities jumping on any advantage, no matter how insignificant, to swallow up their neighbors. Even among the peoples that the Europeans colonized, wars of conquest, retribution or plunder were not unheard of, and in certain regions were a way of life. This is why I'm not comfortable with the term "stolen" when describing the European (and later American) nations taking over lands that were already occupied. It's no more accurate than labelling the Saxons defeating the Britons, the Normans in turn defeating the Saxons, the Franks absorbing the Gauls and all the other displacements, as stolen land, when it's just another in a long line of the powerful conquering the weaker groups. Conquest happens. 

The key difference is that in the fifteenth century the various European kingdoms looked at each other somewhat as peers. There were still wars of expansion, and the wars of religion were just around the corner, but a king who looked with lust upon his neighbor's natural resources still viewed the subjects of the neighboring kingdom as people. All of the various European nations, kingdoms and empires were on par technologically, were all the same religion and were broadly similar culturally. Upon encountering people who were not as advanced technologically, and whom had never heard of Christianity, the Europeans looked down on these nations, tribes and peoples in the Americas and Africa as savages, not even worthy of consideration. Europeans might steal produce from an indigenous tribe, or kill someone, or rape a woman, or even encroach on land that belonged to the tribe, but would be absolutely flabbergasted that the natives would retaliate, and act as if they were the aggrieved party. Even with the millions of people already living in the Americas, there was undoubtedly still plenty of land on which the Europeans could settle, if they only respected the rights of those who were here first. But the Europeans wanted it all. 

I'm not even sure that it was a racial animus as we understand the term today. The history of "whiteness" is long and complicated and calls for a whole 'nother blog post, but as a concept and identifier, no one would think of themselves as "white" for another 150-200 years. Europeans were certainly aware of people whose skin was darker than theirs, contact with south-of-Sahara Africa went back to Roman times, as well as with what we now Eurocentrically call the Middle East. Even within Europe the pale blond far northern Scandinavians and the darker Italians and Spaniards around the Mediterranean are opposite ends of a continuum of skin tone. No, the reason Europeans looked own upon the people they encountered in the Americas was their perceived level of civilization. To the Europeans they lacked any of the technological "advancements" that were common in Europe (such as gunpowder & steel swords), they didn't have cities (at least they didn't encounter any early on), their culture didn't seem to acknowledge individual ownership of land, and they weren't Christians...fair game!

Spreading Christianity was a major pretext for the European invasion. Conversion of the "heathens" to Christianity had been a goal of since the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Now they had a whole new continent (two!) in which to "spread the Gospel". 

Eventually, the concept of "whiteness" took hold. The Europeans were "White", the American natives were Red, the Africans were Black. They were "other", and "other" meant inferior. Of course they were viewed as inferior, no high technology, and more importantly, no Jesus. Why were they so technologically and spiritually inferior? They weren't white, and white equaled superior in their minds; everything else was inferior. Everything that followed: land grabs, forced conversions and assimilation, sequestration on reservations, breaking treaties - it now all went back to the belief in the racial inferiority of the natives. 

What if Columbus hadn't made it to the islands off North America? What would have changed? Probably little. Someone was going to eventually bump into the large landmass in between Europe and Asia. From all accounts Columbus was a horrible person, but he was a man of his time and very little would have changed if another captain had found America first. The kingdoms in Europe would have still been run by the same people who would look down on the inhabitants. Whiteness would have still emerged as a construct that resulted in White Supremacy and racism. 

No matter. From the point of view of the descendants of the people that Columbus and other early colonizers encountered, the coming of Columbus was a horrible tragedy, the beginning of centuries of genocide and the wiping out of culture. Not a day to celebrate. 

At least not to celebrate Columbus.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part II (Inerrancy & Canon of Scripture)

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, sometimes bending the words into a metaphorical pretzel to get it all to fit, 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 outside the Gospels 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 god. 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 Marcionite Christianity was later condemned as a heresy, 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 Roman cultural 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. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part III

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part I

One of the criticisms of the Bible that is tossed about is that there's no proof that any of it happened, or that there's no contemporaneous confirmation of its contents. One of the most attention getting statements that I have read in recent years is there are indeed historical documents regarding the life of Jesus Christ...the four gospels. To those of us with a non-religious orientation that statement sounds ridiculous. Of course they're not historical documents, they're religious texts! The people who wrote them had an agenda! Yes, both of those statements are true, the gospels are religious texts and they were written by people with an agenda. We've all heard the saying "History is written by the victors", which is just a different way of saying that history is written by people with an agenda...always. 

Over the last few years I listened to a few history-themed podcasts - the history of Rome, of Byzantium, of the successive Persian Empires. In each of them I was struck by how often the only information that we have about an event was written decades or generations after the event took place. How there are often gaps in lists of rulers that can only be filled in by speculation. How the only contemporaneous documentation of an era has been long lost and all we have are fragments by historians quoting earlier historians. While there are exceptions, for the most part ancient historians were employed by their rulers to make them look good, or to make the ruler's opponents look bad. Or it was a citizen of the winning side wanting to paint his people in glory. Or maybe it was the losing side trying to depict their people as something other than abject losers. Yes. They had an agenda.  

The writers of the Gospels had an agenda too, which doesn't make them any better or worse than any other writings from that time period. The first of the surviving Gospels, "Mark" was most likely written around 70 C.E., i.e, around 40 years after Jesus' ministry. This gap in time is brought up a lot to disparage the authenticity of the Gospels, but it was not unusual, especially since it is likely Jesus' early followers were illiterate or at least not educated enough to put together a narrative like you see in any of the Gospels. It's also apparent that, since they believed that God would be imminently intervening in human events, there was no reason to write anything down for future generations that they didn't think would exist. So a written account during or immediately following Jesus' life would not be expected. The utter lack of any originals of the Gospels or even the epistles, or even any copies dating any earlier than hundreds of years after Jesus' life is also cited as problematic, yet you'd be hard pressed to find an original edition of any of the classical writings, or any writings that have as many extant manuscripts as does the Bible. 

Historians will examine any historical document to determine, not only its authenticity, but to discover any biases that the author had; they also have a number of ways to test the reliability of the claims made in any history, any ancient biography. Unless one is of the opinion that The Bible is the "revealed Word of God", inspired by God Himself, it makes sense to subject The Bible to the same scrutiny that any other historical document would be. 

For most people, however, The Bible is an either-or proposition. Either it's God's Word delivered via prophets of God to His people, or it's a book of fables with no truth in it whatsoever. (Of course there are intermediate positions - some believers admit that some passages in The Bible may be metaphorical while some disbelievers accept that there's some decent morals and ethics in it.) 

In this series I take the position that there is good reason to accept that there was an historical Jesus that the New Testament was based upon, but that not only are there contradictions regarding him among the different books, but that Jesus wasn't who most people think he was. I'll be touching on the milieu in which Jesus lived, the Jewish scriptures that he was taught, contradictions between how the Gospels differ from the message of Paul in his epistles, how how it all morphed into "The Church". 

And off we go!

Go to Part II

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part X

Years after I left The Way my parents claimed that I had, in some unspecified manner, changed after I had become involved. In some respects they were correct. I was no longer devoted to Catholicism, but not because I had rejected God and the Bible, but because I believed that Catholicism didn't represent God and the Bible as closely as The Way did. For years I had been searching for deeper meaning and for "proof" that Christianity was "The Truth". 

The signs were all there - my visitations to local churches, my curiosity about non-Christian religions, my questioning that wasn't satisfied with vague appeals to authority. I had even visited my pastor, looking for a rebuttal to what The Way was claiming. His only response was an appeal to two thousand years of tradition. His non-answer was what initially drove me to commit to taking the Power For Abundant Living (PFAL) foundational class. 

The truth is, most religious people have only a surface understanding of the doctrinal details of  their religion and are ill-prepared to counter specific and enthusiastic challenges to their beliefs. Looking back from the vantage point of 45 years in the future, I realize that the "research" presented by The Way was, for the most part, pretty shoddy and its conclusions were often based on tenuous connections and misunderstandings of Greek and Hebrew grammar. But at the time, the only people that I knew who were even attempting to make sense of Biblical contradictions were the people of The Way. 

As my third "ministry year" in The Way began in August 1979 (Way years went from August to August) several influences flowed together to cause me to become more involved and more committed to The Way. My parents were becoming more hostile to my involvement in The Way, especially since I had stopped attending church. The community also had become overtly hostile to any group that they considered a cult in the wake of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Deprogrammers were more open about their practices and often had the cooperation of local police departments. Outside attacks generate, in general, one of two responses. One is to to disassociate oneself from the group that is attacked out of fear. Persecution has the effect of weeding out those who aren't committed. The second variety of response is a strengthening of the resolve of those who choose to stay. That's the effect that it had on me. The leadership of The Way encouraged that mindset. People who left "tripped out", they were weak. Those of us who stood strong were in the same league as the apostles who persevered in the face of opposition. Being the focus of persecution made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something for God. 

A second influence was the example of some of the "believers" around me. During Way year 1978-79 several of the people that I knew set up "Way Homes" that were the focus of outreach in their neighborhoods. Groups of Way folks were travelling to Ohio, Kansas or Indiana (Way headquarters and the locations of Way Corps training) to take "The Advanced Class". During the previous year I had "witnessed" to my childhood friend Joe. Joe took the PFAL class and at Rock of Ages in 1979 was sent to Fremont Nebraska as a WOW Ambassador. Others whom I knew entered Way Corps training. There was a lot of peer pressure to step up and "do something for God"; seeing people around me make greater commitments than I was making pushed me to "do something for God". What I decided to do was move into a Way Home. 

The Way Home concept was a stepping stone to greater involvement. You were part of an organized program, but weren't locked in for a set period of time, like the WOW Ambassador program or the Way Corps training. One person was designated by area leadership as the Way Home Coordinator. The household members decided among themselves how to handle their finances, how to divide up chores and when to schedule Twig Fellowships or witness in the neighborhood. Most Way Home members worked whatever jobs they chose, or attended school. The expectation was that the Way Home would be a hub of Way activity in the neighborhood and the members would focus much of their free time on bringing in new people and running PFAL classes, along with weekly fellowships. 

The Queens Village Way Home, where I went to live in late August 1979 had been operational the previous year, but all the residents were moving out and the landlord was happy to transfer the lease to a new group. There were four of us that would move in during August 1979: In addition to me there was Bernie, an electrician in his forties who was in the same PFAL class as I was in March 1978. He was designated the leader by higher-up leadership; Wanda & Beverly were both new PFAL grads. I was still attending Baruch College in the evenings and working at E.F. Hutton, the stock broker, as a clerk during the day. It was my first experience living somewhere other than under my parents' roof, but since I hadn't changed jobs and was still in school, there was some continuity with my previous life. 

But before long, there would be some major disruptions. 

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XI

Workin' Man - Part X - More Ups and Downs, Promotions and Demotions

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

After being demoted I was back to Southeast Nebraska, District 55. At least I hadn't been fired and I was in an area that I was familiar with. 

Not long after this the State Circulation Manager transferred to another newspaper and we got a new boss, who as I would find out, didn't care about the whole Grand Island debacle. For a while I kept my head down, but I had a few bumps in the road. In my previous time as a sales rep I was pretty lucky, I was always able to fill an open route without having to go out and deliver it myself. Finally the odds caught up to me. One of my Sunday Only motor route carriers was quitting. He gave plenty of notice, but I was unable to find a replacement before his last day. I had driven around with him in the daylight, and he had given me a set of directions. But the world looks a lot different in the middle of the night. It must also be emphasized that in those days the 911 addresses for rural homes had not been implemented yet, every addresses was a Rural Route and a Box Number. Other than the highways, no roads had signs, so unless you had a great sense of direction, you didn't know where you were. So, without a replacement I had to deliver the route myself. It should have taken around four hours. It seemed like the directions were accurate. I was able to move along pretty steadily for a couple of hours until  I ran into a problem. The roads weren't lining up with the directions. There were "T" intersections where roads should have gone through, minimum maintenance instead of gravel and the like. I traced my route backwards on the directions and realized that about an hour previously I had missed the words "make a U-turn" and had been going in the wrong direction and delivering to the wrong houses for about an hour. I attempted to backtrack, but ended up even more lost, and by this time I didn't have many papers left to deliver to the correct houses, even if I did manage to retrace my steps back to where I made the error. So I went home and waited for the phone calls...there were many! The old carrier was also getting calls. I knew this when he left a message on my answering machine, screaming "Do your job, do your job, do your damn job!"

The Lincoln/Lancaster County Circulation Office had always operated as a separate region, with a manager and two sales reps, but the corporate office decided to combine the office with the southeast Nebraska region. I ended up transferring into the Lincoln district. The location had been designed with three offices, each accessible from a hallway which ran from a receptionist's desk up front to a bullpen for carriers and bundle haulers in the back. At some point it was decided that a fourth office was needed, so they split one of the three office in half, with the new office accessible only by going through one of the other offices. That was my office. The good part of this arrangement was that anyone walking down the hallway couldn't see me - didn't even know I was there, so I was able to work in peace. 

I held a few positions while there. I spent some time as the office manager, which meant I hired and supervised all the bundle haulers, miss runners and office staff. At first it meant getting middle of the night phone calls from Mike, my dock supervisor, who always thought he needed to permission to handle any kind of problem. Eventually I encouraged him to operate more independently. (See "Minimizing Subordinate-Imposed Time", Part X in the "Managers: series.)

For part of my tenure I was the Single Copy Manager. "Single Copy" refers to non-subscription, non-home delivery sales. It includes vending machines, aka "racks", as well as sales in gas stations, grocery stores and the like. One of the challenges was to maximize sales and minimize returns in the racks. A directive from the Omaha office was to shoot for one unsold paper in each rack every day. The theory was that, with exactly one paper left, no one who wanted a paper would find an empty rack and we would be assured that the maximum number of papers would be sold. A separate goal was that unsold papers would not exceed 20%. The problem with this was that these two goals were mutually exclusive. If there was one unsold paper in every rack, the number of unsold papers would exceed 20%. I was never able to convince upper management that the math didn't math and it was impossible to achieve both goals. 

One of my favorite parts of the job was that I could spend my day in the fresh air, repairing malfunctioning racks, replacing older racks with new ones, or just giving them a good cleanup and polish. Of course, the rack out at Branched Oak received a lot of attention!

After a while, I felt that my stock was going back up and I had recovered from the Grand Island incident. A Regional Sales Manager position was opening up in Region 4, Northeast Nebraska. Dave, my nemesis from years before, was being transferred from there to Region 5, Southeast Nebraska, since Michelle was leaving the company. I applied for the position, figuring it was a longshot. I had previously applied for an open Regional Manager slot in Western Nebraska, but had been turned down, so I was surprised when I was selected. Since I lived in Lincoln, the new position would require a lot of driving, since the region covered a lot of ground - all northeast Nebraska north of the Platte River from the Iowa border to Valentine, including South Dakota border counties. But once again I was walking into a mess that wasn't obvious until I got into the middle of it. 

Omaha World-Herald Regional Managers directly supervised 5-6 sales reps, each one overseeing a district of several counties. Most of my sales reps required very little supervision. Two exemptions were Max, a sixtyish guy who lived in Ord, and the sales rep for the district that included South Sioux City. The South Sioux City district had a lot of turnover and was in the process of converting to office billing when Dave transferred the sales rep from there to an open district in Region 5 - this took place in the short interim after Michelle left, but before I was promoted and Dave was running both Regions. This left me with an open District on Day One. I'll get back to that - let's talk about Max.

Max was then younger then than I am now, but he came across to late thirties me as a curmudgeonly old man. He was one of those guys raised in a rural community who thinks "city folks don't know nothin'". He could be counted upon at every monthly meeting to loudly point out that his (rural) district was different than all the (supposedly) urban districts. The "big cities" he referred to were Fremont, Columbus, Norfolk and South Sioux City. Max also liked to wake up at 6:00 AM and start making phone calls. In the newspaper business, if there was going to be an emergency, it was going to take place well before dawn. If your alarm went off without you having had to go out and deliver a route, the possibility of an emergency had passed. Emergency or not, Max would call me some time between 6:00 and 7:00 AM, usually just to chat. I wasn't much of a morning person in those days, so a call from Max usually interrupted my sleep. After telling him one morning to not call me before 8:00 AM unless it was an emergency, he decided that undermining me would be a good career move. He would call up to the main office, usually the State Circulation Manager's secretary, and tell her that he couldn't get reach me. She would then call me, and I'd pick up. He was constantly going over my head and complaining. But this was just a minor irritant. 

The South Sioux City District didn't have a distributor, just several large motor routes, but some of the problems were similar to what I had encountered in Grand Island. The city and nearby Dakota City were in the process of being converted to office billing. The previous sales rep, under the previous Regional Manager Dave's direction, had taken over the billing, but had not fully turned it over to the central office when he transferred to another district, which I was unaware of. There were, like in Grand Island, a significant number of customers who had not been receiving bills. So, when I hired a new sales rep, he had a mess to deal with. It quickly overwhelmed him. If I had dug a little deeper, asked a few more questions, I might have anticipated the situation and gotten the other sales reps in to help with the billing and conversion. But the depth of the problems caused things to spin out of control quite fast. I had scheduled a meeting with my new sales rep to get an update on his progress. He met me at his door in a dirty t-shirt with a box full of unsent bills with the news that he was quitting with no notice. He also called my boss to let him know what a terrible manager I was. 

Troy, my immediate supervisor, met with me shortly thereafter. He had already communicated a few weeks earlier that he wasn't happy with my performance and that things needed to improve. Things hadn't improved. He gave me three options:

1. Stick with it, but if no improvement in two weeks, I'd be fired
2. Resign, i.e. leave without getting fired
3. Accept a demotion

I knew there was no way to turn it around in two weeks, and I didn't want to start job hunting, so I opted for number three. Troy was gracious about it and allowed me to inform my team of my decision myself. My demotion brought me back briefly to my old area - District 55 - Otoe, Nemaha, Johnson, Pawnee and Richardson Counties. Dave, who I had previously had problems with, was no longer the asshole he had been when I worked for him previously, possibly because he had a bunch of rookies as sales reps and was happy to have someone with experience on his team. 

Before I go on about my third stint as a sales rep in District 55, I want to divert to a few other things I got involved with over the years: the consultant-inspired "grass roots" process improvement initiative, the 18-month management training, and the various things I volunteered for. 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XI