An Agnostic's Look at Another "Sacred Scripture" - Part XXIVa - The Quran

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XV

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIV (The Old Testament aka The Hebrew Scriptures)

The Hebrew Bible consists of three major parts: The Law, The Prophets, and the Writings (or Other Writings). There are, of course, unofficial subdivisions — The Major Prophets and Minor Prophets (distinguished not by the importance of their messages, but by the length of their books), the Books of Poetry and the Books of History. Christians consider the Tanakh, which they call the Old Testament, part of one unified revelation with what they call the New Testament. 

One Jewish view is that the whole of the Tanakh is divinely inspired, although there are different opinions among different strains of Judaism regarding that. There is little if any parts of it that contain dialog unambiguously from God however. In contrast it's a collection of books mostly about God, prayers to God, praises of God, as well as warning to the people who reject God. Christians, at least conservative, fundamentalist Christians, believe that both the Old and New Testaments are inspired by God and contain no internal contradictions. Christians in general assign to the Old Testament the same level of divine inspiration (or lack thereof) that they assign to the New Testament. and consider it an integral part of their scriptures. 

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

Following the creation myth, Genesis follows up with the beginning of the "origin of the people" story, starting with Abraham and his immediate family and following up with the escape from slavery in Egypt and the conquest of "The Promised Land". There is no historical evidence that any of it happened or that any of the people in these stories existed. Although it's not at all surprising that an insignificant  pastoral clan wouldn't attract anyone's attention — why would there be any evidence of their existence outside religious texts? But, like all national origin stories it doesn't have to stand up to scrutiny. At some point someone wrote down what had been heard from oral tradition. Or more than one someone. 

Biblical scholars have long established that, contrary to being written by Moses, as tradition claimed, the Torah (The Law) showed signs of being written by at least four sources. They were initially called JEPD, for Jehovist (where God is called Yahweh, sometimes mistranslated as Jehovah), Elohist (where God is called Elohim), Priestly (for the laws regarding the priesthood in Leviticus) and Deuteronomist (for the largely separate Book of Deuteronomy — a second stating of The Law). This has led to identification of numerous other subdivisions, with the conclusion being that far from being a unified history of the creation and of the origins of the Jewish people, it is a collection of various versions that a later editor put together. You can see this even in early Genesis where there are two divergent versions of the creation of humans and divergent accounts of the Flood. 

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

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

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

Not all early Christians agreed about what that connection or continuity between Judaism and Christianity was. Some viewed Christianity as just the next step in Jewish religion, others saw a complete break. The prevailing view was that the Tanakh was the Old Testament that had been supplanted by the new. The reason that this became the prevailing view was how Roman authorities, and indeed Roman society viewed new things. Things that were new, including religions, were looked upon with suspicion; institutions that had an ancient pedigree were revered. Christianity was a new religion, but they got around that inconvenient fact by tying it to the more ancient Jewish religion. Not every Christian sect agreed with this. Marcion in particular taught that the God of the Old Testament was an inferior, and even evil god, while the God of Jesus was the true God. Various groups of Gnostics had similar beliefs. In order to make this tie more plausible, various Jewish scriptures were interpreted as hints about Jesus the Messiah ( much to the surprise of any Jew) "proving" that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Old Testament. 

How to reconcile the differences between how God is portrayed in the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Gospels? For most of Christian history no one seriously tried. In a future article I will discuss Dispensationalism, a popular attempt at harmonizing both sets of scriptures.  

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIVa

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIII (More Alleged Prophecy)

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

Let's say I'm going to write a chapter in my biography about someone I met in 1994. I'm writing in 2026. In my hypothetical biography I "quote" my subject as saying that the World Trade Center towers will each be hit by an airplane on September 11, 2001. Amazing! How did he know that? Let's further speculate that my biography is quoted by several other authors and eventually it becomes "common knowledge" that my subject prophesied the 9-11 attacks seven years before they happened. I'm sure you see the problem. Since I wrote my biography after the allegedly prophesied events it's obvious that I inserted words into my putative prophet's mouth based on my own knowledge of events in my own past. 

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

Quite Nostradamusesque. 

Both scenarios roughly describe prophecy fulfillment in The Bible. 

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

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

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

How about the prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Micah 5:2 mentions that one will go forth from "Bethlehem Ephrathah" and will be a a "ruler in Israel". This one at least has indications that it might be referring to the future Messiah. But was Jesus a "ruler in Israel"? Sure, he said (or his biographers said) that he would be, but 2,000 years on we're still waiting, aren't we? It's not impossible, or even improbable, that "Matthew" knew about this passage in Micah and created the whole story of Bethlehem, throwing in the census to provide a pretext for Mary and Joseph to be there. (Kind of an implausible pretext — what possible reason would there be for people to return to a village their ancestors had lived in a thousand years previously?) Some commentators speculate that the verse is not referring to the Messiah's literal birthplace, but to his descent from King David, who according to the Books of Samuel, was from Bethlehem. And speaking of descent from King David — we all noticed that the two genealogies are different, didn't we?

Some of these prophesies are so generic that they could apply to anyone, here are 47 of the more popular ones. Not to mention that no one thought that most of these verses referred to a future Messiah when they were written or later during the time described in the Gospels. If you're a believer, these will convince you that everything about Jesus was predicted thousands of years before his birth, if you're an agnostic, or a disbeliever, you'll scratch your head wondering how this would convince anyone. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIV

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XII (Revelation Decided By Committee)

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

One of the reasons there was no consensus canon of the New Testament was that for the first three centuries, and possibly after, there was no universally recognized central authority. The various cities and regions operated more or less autonomously. As a virtually illegal sect, Christians weren't building big, beautiful buildings, but were meeting in homes, likely led by whomever owned the house they were meeting in. Eventually leadership became institutionalized and overseers (the title "bishop" comes from the Greek episkopos — i.e. "one who watches over") came to hold authority over whole cities. 

In the early days there were many varieties of Christians. The previous installment listed a few "heresies" regarding Jesus' nature, but there were many more regarding the purpose of his death and the kind of life a Christian should be living. Local leaders early on attempted to define Christian doctrine, meeting in councils to reach consensus. Eventually that consensus began to resemble the main doctrines of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the minority opinions were pushed out and suppressed. As Christianity became legalized and preferred, not only did Empire-wide councils become easier to hold, but the Bishops of the main cities of the Empire as well as cities important to the early Church, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria in Egypt, viewed themselves as "leaders of leaders" and attempted to exercise authority over the assemblage of bishops. Finally there was something close to a central authority and the work of deciding what would be considered divinely inspired began. 

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

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

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

The real story is a lot messier. Divine inspiration was bestowed by committee. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XI (Those Pesky Heretics)

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

By the Second Century it had already been an  established belief among the vast majority of Christians that Jesus was God. The view of what "The Son of God" meant evolved in Christianity's early days. 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  God himself — "God the Son". 

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

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

Despite these theories being labelled as heresies, they were put forth by theologians, within the mainstream at the time, as good faith efforts to untangle inconsistencies and contradictions. None of this involved large scale adding or subtracting to the canon of scripture, although there are some minor insertions, like the Trinitarian formula in the epistle of  I John. All these various stabs at consistency were interpretations of what had already been written. 

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

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

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XII

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 didn't become the God-anointed conqueror, but rather was killed. 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". We now 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 called "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, and since it is unclear to anyone other than a PhD Biblical scholar what the timeline of the various writings is, what we are left with is a lot of apparent inconsistencies. The institutional church does not acknowledge that there was an evolution in how Jesus' nature was viewed and written about, but instead attempted to harmonize or ignore it. 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 but otherwise agreed that there was a continuity from Jesus to his apostles, to their followers and on to the present. 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. Even when Constantine The Great imposed political unity, there were factions that lived on, as well as so-called heresies that regularly sprung up.

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 often 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 textual 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.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part X