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 One of the most attention getting statements that I have read in recent years is there are indeed historical documents regarding the life of Jesus Christ...the four gospels.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 Of course they're not historical documents, they're religious texts!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. 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!

Part II