An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXIV - Sola Scriptura

In the previous installment I brought up the concept of Apostolic Succession and how it related to the canon of scripture, i.e. the standard that determined what constituted The Bible. 

For centuries the leadership of the dominant Christian organization, the Catholic Church, insisted that the common people couldn't be trusted to even read The Bible, let alone understand it. They reserved that privilege for themselves, not permitting Bibles to be printed in any language except Latin, a language which no one spoke any longer. People were executed for translating The Bible into the local vernacular. Things changed when the Protestant Reformation started in the Sixteenth Century. The ostensive goals of the Reformation were twofold: to facilitate translation of The Bible into the local vernaculars — English, German, etc., — and to promote the idea that it was the text of The Bible itself, scripture alone, (sola scriptura) and not church hierarchy, that determined Christian doctrine and practice. On the first point it was successful, on the second, it's a mixed record. 

There's a belief among many people that "the patriarchy", or King James, or some other conspiracy, "changed" The Bible in order to advance their own viewpoints and prejudices. There's some truth in that, but only some,  it's not that simple. For several hundred years there was no "The Bible". As I discussed in the article about Other Christianities, there were several competing versions of Christianity as Jesus' message spread throughout the Roman world and beyond. Each of these "Christianities" developed their own leadership hierarchy, including the group that evolved into the Catholic/Orthodox Church. (I use the term "Catholic/Orthodox because it was centuries before the Eastern and Western Churches split from each other) They each thought (or at least claimed) that they were the only ones who had faithfully passed on Jesus' teachings. In some cities the different sects competed for members, in others one Christianity predominated. One, the Catholic/Orthodox Church, got big and widespread enough, and was the dominant form of Christianity in the two capitols of the Roman Empire, Rome and Constantinople. 

Most of these sects, as far as we know, wrote gospels, epistles, treatises, apocalypses, and maybe even graphic novels, to bolster their version of what Jesus taught. Most of them were attributed to the original apostles since claiming such authorship tended to make them appear more authoritative. A lot of them, including the writings that made their way into The Bible, contain rebuttals of competing doctrines and attacks against competing prophets and teachers. Some writings couldn't definitively be traced back to any specific group, but were used more broadly. It wasn't until Marcion, the founder of one of the Christianities that has not survived until present day, put together his own canon of scripture that the dominant group attempted their own. 

Marcion's canon contained one gospel, The Gospel of the Lord, an edited and shortened version of the Gospel of Luke. It also contained edited versions of ten of the Pauline Epistles: Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans, First and Second Thessalonians, Laodiceans (which may have been Ephesians under a different name), Colossians, Philemon and Philippians. But not Hebrews, Titus, or First and Second Timothy, which are all considered forgeries. Catholic/Orthodox leaders had over time begun to use most of the books that now make up The Bible, but it wasn't until 393 CE that the current 27 book canon was made official, although the Codex Vaticanus, which was printed in 350 CE, already had the complete canon. From that point on, other than the books that we know as the Apocrypha, nothing was removed from The Bible. (The Apocryphal books were removed from the Old Testament) And that's the way it remained for another 1200 years. 

Were some books "taken out" that espoused ideas like the equality of women or fringe ideas about spirituality? No, because there wasn't anything to take them out of yet — The Bible did not yet exist. However it's indisputable that the Catholic/Orthodox Church Councils made deliberate decisions to exclude from the canon writings that they didn't think aligned with the doctrines that had evolved over three centuries. 

This is where Apostolic Succession comes in. Somebody had to decide which writings were to be considered holy writ. There was nothing to prevent anyone from writing their own version of "the Gospel", and slapping the name of one of the Twelve Apostles on it, or forging Paul's name on an epistle. The leaders of the Catholic/Orthodox Church came up with the doctrine of Apostolic Succession to address this problem. Apostolic Succession assumes that the teachings of Jesus were faithfully transmitted to his immediate circle of followers, The Twelve Apostles, who accurately passed it on to their successors, who then conveyed it to their successors, replicating this in every generation. This, Church leadership maintained, gave them the ability to articulate doctrine and to decide which writings best reflected that doctrine. Since there were so many competing and contradictory "scriptures" circulating they made the executive decision on what was in and what was out. 

Now we finally get to sola scriptura. 

The Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformation, as I mentioned earlier, had two main goals. Translating The Bible into the languages of the people was accomplished. But the reason for that was so that Christians would no longer be dependent upon church leaders, upon priests and popes, to tell them what The Bible said, to decide for everybody what God's will was. In theory, it succeeded at that as well. (A third aspect was the fact that European monarchs now had the option of disentangling themselves from The Catholic Church) But did it really succeed, at least in the way the reformers thought?

Indisputably we have The Bible available in virtually every language on Earth. Any literate person can pick it up and read it. Bible study aids are available to assist with comparison with the original languages. No one has to depend on the priests and popes. But do we really rely upon sola scriptura, scripture alone? I would argue that we don't. Foundational to my opinion is that the scriptura that we have available to us has been filtered through, first, the people who wrote the gospels and epistles in the first place. The very earliest is the first Pauline Epistle to the Thessalonians, written around 20 years after Jesus' death. You could argue, I suppose that Paul and the anonymous and pseudonymous authors of the rest of the New Testament were inspired by God, but as an agnostic, I don't buy it. It's their opinion. Next, the men who decided what writings would comprise The Bible are an additional filter. Who knows if they left out inspired writings or included fraudulent ones? And modern day Protestants might be surprised that the scripture that they should alone depend on was decided upon by the Catholic Church, the very church which they think is unbiblical! During Luther's time there was spirited debate about whether several canonical books should be removed. It is well known among biblical scholars that several of the epistles attributed to Paul are in fact forgeries and were written by an unknown author or authors. It's not a secret that copyists made changes to the originals. Translators, no matter how diligent, add another layer of doubt. How can we say whether what we have today faithfully represents the originals, or even if those originals represent the hypothetical "God's will"?

We can't. 

The whole concept of sola scriptura is based on the false assumption that we can easily determine what God wanted to get across if only we could read it ourselves in an accurate translation.  Even if we assume that what we have is an accurate translation of a faithful reproduction of original texts that themselves represent the only written information that God intended humans to have, it certainly isn't clear throughout. If that were so, there wouldn't be so many different interpretations based on the same text? 

On so many different subjects Christians disagree, all the while urging those with whom they disagree to "just read the Bible". 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXV

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXIII - Other Christianities

What most Christians don't realize is that despite what the Book of Acts might suggest the early Christian Church wasn't A Christian Church, but was a patchwork of numerous Christian Churches, or more descriptively, multiple Christianities. 

Consider the scenario. Evan assuming that the Gospels accurately describe the scope of Jesus' following, i.e. an inner circle of twelve (minus one) men, an outer circle of seventy and an unknown number of men and women of varying levels of commitment — if they truly believed what Jesus was preaching, they too believed that the world was coming to an end. Not at some nebulous time in the future, but before the people around them started dying off! If they were driven to continue Jesus' mission, they'd be attempting to get as many of their fellow Jews living right so that they could enter the Kingdom of God. (Yup. "Fellow Jews". You read that right, there is little indication that Jesus was preaching to the Gentiles.) The last thing that any of Jesus' followers would be trying to do was to start an organization, a church. 

Nonetheless, that's what happened.

It's indisputable that something ostensibly based on the teachings of Jesus spread around the Roman Empire and even bordering nations within a very short period of time. How closely what got spread around adhered to what Jesus was teaching isn't so clear. 

There are several pieces of evidence that there were competing versions of Christianity in the first century following Jesus' death. Firstly there's the evidence within the scriptures that we have. Throughout the epistles there's repeated references to false prophets, false teachers, people preaching "another Jesus" and even those being labeled "antichrist". These weren't pagans, weren't satanists, they were other Christians who happened to have a different opinion about what Jesus taught and the meaning of those teachings, including what they were supposed to do about them. Then there's the testimony of Paul, who is very clear that he had doctrinal disagreements with other Christians, including Peter. We also have clear historical evidence of self-described Christian movements. The most well known and longest lasting were the Marcionites. Their founder, Marcion, taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus were two separate entities, with the Old Testament God being an inferior, if not evil, entity. He also rejected all the Gospels except for Luke. His movement survived for several centuries as a rival to the Orthodox/Catholic Church. (The Catholics, or Roman Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox were one church through the first millennium, even if there were internal disagreements) Even in the Gospels, there is a difference between the Jesus being presented in the synoptics versus the Gospel of John, and differences in emphasis among the synoptics.

It's not surprising that there was disagreement. It would be surprising if there were not. Jesus operated in a backwater of the Roman Empire. Even in the more urban areas communication was far from instantaneous. Christian communities, even in the same province would be virtually isolated, with only occasional communication with others. Jesus' teachings would have spread exclusively by word of mouth in the early decades before epistles and gospels came to be written and passed around. Not only would transmission of "the Word" resembled a modern game of telephone, but as nature abhors a vacuum, so does human nature. Charismatic local leaders would have put their own spin on Jesus' words. 

One competing Christianity is the sect we know as the Ebionites. These were Christians who saw themselves as followers of Jesus who retained their Jewishness. In the writings that have come down to us they were opposed by Paul, who insisted that one did not need to follow Jewish law in order to be a Christian. Earlier I mentioned Marcion. There were also numerous sects of Christian Gnostics who held any number of beliefs that we today might consider bizarre. Or anti-Biblical. But who wrote the Bible?

One of things that every group of the various Christianities claimed was that their beliefs were passed down from Jesus' original apostles. By the time the competition among the various sects came to a head, all the originals were safely dead and could no longer be consulted. That didn't stop gospels and epistles from being produced with the names of The Twelve tacked on to them. In addition to the books of the New Testament that we know from our Bibles, there were dozens of gospels, epistles and apocalypses being passed around. There was no standard. Different sects used different writings. There was no effective central authority to decide which were legitimate and which weren't. 

But eventually a central authority arose. Even though the Catholic Church claims that there is an unbroken chain through Jesus to his apostles to their successors up through modern day. It's more likely in my opinion that what became the Catholic and Orthodox Churches coalesced slowly over several centuries until they became the dominant sect of the various Christianities. When Constantine the Great legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire there were still competing sects: the previously mentioned Marcionites and Gnostics, and the Arians in northern and western Europe. A sect called the Nestorians found refuge in the Persian Empire. The Monophysites flourished in Syria. The Catholic/Orthodox however, emerged as the dominant among the various types of Christianity. Their power, backed by the Empire, enabled them to claim to be the one, true, church, and label competitors as heretics. 

Not long after the consolidation of power, the Catholic/Orthodox hierarchy saw the need to establish which writings were authorized — what constituted the canon of scripture. Related to this was the doctrine of Apostolic Succession. The Catholic/Orthodox leadership maintained that they were the successors of the original apostles and that right doctrine had been transmitted from one generation to the next through that unbroken lineage. This succession was both literal — doctrine was passed down, and spiritual — they inherited the spiritual authority of their predecessors. Referring to this authority, they decided what writings were authentic and which were not, destroying many of the alternate scriptures, although some copies survived into modern times. 

The process was somewhat circular. The Bible, once established, was what the winning contestant in the Church competition supposedly was based upon, but what constituted that Bible, was what the winners decided would be in it. More on this in a future article: Sola Scriptura.

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXIV

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXII - Translations

Translating the Bible from the language in which it was written isn't anything new. During the Third Century BCE a translation of the Jewish scriptures was made from Hebrew into Greek since many Jews, especially those of the Diaspora, no longer spoke or were able to read Hebrew. Aramaic or Greek were the everyday languages of most Jews of that era. This translation came to be referred to as The Septuagint. This was the version of the Old Testament that the writers of the New Testament were familiar with. Old Testament quotes typically adhere more closely to the Septuagint than to the Hebrew. 

The New Testament was originally written in Greek. Although there are some who maintain that parts of it were first written in Aramaic, this position doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. While Aramaic was the common tongue among Jews in Judaea, Syria, and other parts of what we now call the Middle East, Gentiles, as well as many Jews, employed Greek as the lingua franca. 

After Christianity was legalized in the Fourth Century CE, Latin translations were made, culminating in St. Jerome's Vulgate. ("Vulgate" means "common" in Latin). This incrementally became the official Bible of Western European Christianity. The Douay-Rheims translation was an English translation made from the Latin Vulgate in the late 1500's. 

During the Protestant Reformation emphasis was placed individual reading of the Bible, thus English (and other non-Latin) language versions began to be made. There were several English versions, but the most well-known is the King James Version (KJV). The KJV was not translated from the Latin version, but from Greek texts. A myth has proliferated that King James influenced the theology of the KJV, or that "parts were changed", or "taken out" to strengthen a patriarchal or anti-feminist viewpoint. Firstly, King James was not a theologian, nor did he have any theological aspirations. He did instruct the translators to adhere to Church of England structure and theology. This would be reflected, for example, in the word episcopos being translated as "bishop", rather than "overseer", among other things. The actual translation was done by several teams of translators who were experts in Biblical Greek. There is no evidence that there was any wholesale changing or deletions of sections in order to diminish the role of women, or to make any major theological revision. Whatever perceived theological problems surfaced had always been there. 

The KJV was revised regularly, mostly updating spelling and syntax, as it was originally written at the very beginning of the Early Modern period of the English language. Around the turn of the 19^th Century wholesale revisions started to be produced. The KJV translators, while using Greek manuscripts to compose their translations, relied on a small number of manuscripts that in retrospect were not very reliable. By 1900 there were a greater number of Greek manuscripts to work from and newer versions employed these manuscripts in addition to those used by the KJV team. Greek manuscript editions known as "critical manuscripts" were composed, producing Greek New Testaments that compared various readings. Not only were there better manuscripts to work from, but the knowledge of Biblical Greek had improved over three centuries, as had the understanding of cultural references that might not be obvious from a literal translation. KJV contained many English words and expressions that had changed their meaning since it had been first published, in addition to Greek idioms. The newer versions endeavored to make the language of the Bible more accessible and understandable. A modern translation is likely as "accurate" as can be reasonably expected. 

What a translation, any translation, doesn't do, is wave away the contradictions and discrepancies. They're all still there, they're just rendered in modern vernacular. Even if we can be reasonably sure that we have Greek texts that reflect what was in the originally composed gospels, epistles and apocalypses, that doesn't make any of it true. It just means that we probably have texts that don't vary much from the earliest versions and that the translations are as accurate as they're going to get. 

What we've got is a pretty well preserved version of documents considering that they were written almost 2,000 years ago. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXIII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXI - Jesus Thought the World Was About To End

In a previous article Part V - The Milieu of the Gospels and Apocalypticism, I touched on what the culture of Judaea was during the time Jesus was supposed to have lived. I also touched on Apocalypticism. 

Eschatology is the genre of theology that deals with a belief that at some point the world will end and attempts to describe what that end will look like. Apocalypticism is a strain of eschatology which maintains the end of the world, or the age is imminent. Jesus, based on what is attributed to him in the Gospels, preached that the end of the world as he knew it was coming to an end, ushering in a new age under the rule of God and his representatives. Everything he did and said was in service of getting people to act right, to get themselves worthy of entering the soon-to-be inaugurated Kingdom of God. He wasn't trying to change society, because he believed that pretty soon there wouldn't be a society. He wasn't thinking long term because he didn't think there'd be a long term. He wasn't fighting the government or the religious establishment (other than pointing out their hypocrisy) because they were irrelevant — they'd soon be gone. But he was wrong — the world didn't end within Jesus' generation. (And still hasn't)

It could be argued that much about Jesus' message could still be applied by anyone today wanting to live "a good life" despite Jesus being wrong about the end of the world. "Love thy neighbor" sounds good, who could argue with that? The Sermon on the Mount (and the very similar Sermon on the Plain) lay out some pretty good guidelines for living a "Christian" life. Many Christians, attempting to keep their more dominionistic coreligionists at arms length, have taken to styling themselves "Jesus Followers", but is that what they are doing? 

Since Jesus believed that the end of the world was coming soon, the last thing he would have been worried about was improving society. He wasn't even concerned about personal relationships, note how he says how his followers must hate their parents, siblings, and spouses. I'm sure there's Christians who explain all that away, but that's what the man said. What about the part about selling all your possessions and giving it all to the poor? These things make sense in the context of the world as we know it ending just around the corner. If making nice with people who are against what Jesus is preaching is going to get you evicted from the Kingdom of God, is it worth it? Especially since the society in which these relationships function is soon going away for good. And why would you need riches? I submit that very few people are doing those things, even those who have taken vows of poverty aren't living in a van down by the river. So what Jesus are Christians following?

People tend to view Jesus through the lens of their own priorities. He wasn't a socialist, he wasn't an advocate for equal rights, he wasn't a feminist, he wasn't any of the things that the Christian Nationalists emphasize either. He was a guy who was convinced that the world was going to end and that God was taking over. He told people that they all had better get their lives right or they're going to miss the boat. 

After a while Christians realized that the world hadn't ended, Jesus hadn't come back and we hadn't met him in the air. Lots of hot theological air was expelled attempting to reconcile Jesus' preaching with the reality on the ground. That's for another day. Anyway, most of what he said is a pretty good way to live. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XX - Dispensationalism

Many Christians would take issue with the fact that the Bible contradicts itself, not to mention historical and archeological records. Many others simply ignore the contradictions — or don't know about them because they don't read the Bible. But from the very early days of Christianity theologians have been aware of contradictions and discrepancies and attempted to reconcile them. (I'm mainly dealing with how Christian theologians addressed inconsistencies, I am not very familiar with how Jewish scholars may have approached issues in the Jewish scriptures).

The question of the nature of Jesus Christ — was he God, or was he a man? — caused a lot of ink to be spilled in the first centuries of Christianity. Even when they thought they had an answer (he's both!) the minutia of how he could be both, as well as the ramifications of the various theories, occupied Christian leaders for centuries, when it could be argued that they certainly had better things to do. 

The problem that the Church Fathers identified was that there were sections of the gospels and epistles that very clearly indicated that Jesus was a man, a very holy man, a special man, but a man —  not God. There were also other verses which just as clearly came down on the side of Jesus being God. These second century scholars had a choice: they could ignore the question and focus what Jesus preached and encourage people to follow his example and live their life as he taught; they could decide that Jesus being a man made more sense and interpret the verses that suggested that he was also God in that light; or place their bets on Christ's divinity and interpret the verses that said otherwise in that light. What they did was decide that Jesus was man and God. They argued interminably about the details, but ended up with the conclusion that he was fully God and fully man. (The nuances of that stance take up fat volumes — check it out some time). They created a theological edifice to explain away a contradiction — a Christology which cannot be found in any actual book of the Bible. 

A very large plot hole in the Bible is the stark difference between how God is portrayed in the Old Testament and the New Testament. (Other than the Apocalypse of John [Revelation] which reverts back to the wrathful, vengeful God imagery). In the 1800's there arose a theological position called "dispensationalism" which attempted to explain the differences. But long before that, Marcion, a Second Century Christian, came up with his own solution. Marcion took a blunt force approach to Biblical criticism and simply threw out the parts he thought made no sense. Observing that the vengeful God of the Old Testament bore no resemblance to the God of the Gospels he concluded that they were different gods. In Marcion's view, the Old Testament God was evil, while the New Testament God of Jesus was the "true" God, the good God. He threw out the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John and the non-Pauline epistles and heavily edited what was left. Say what you want, but Marcion took care of those pesky contradictions!

Nineteenth Century dispensationalists eschewed Marcion's approach. Rather than relegating the Old Testament God to second deity status, they arranged history as outlined in the Bible into a number of "dispensations". A dispensation, according to them, was a time period where God dealt with humanity in different ways from the other time periods. One group that I was involved with called them "administrations". There were usually seven of these time periods, although I have seen eight listed as well. Since these dispensations were the opinions and interpretations of the theologians who came up with them, there were difference ways to divide them up. Here are a few ways that people have attempted to assign the breaks in these divisions:

• Innocence/Original Paradise/Garden of Eden — Adam and Eve before eating from the Tree of Knowledge
• Conscience — after "The Fall" — no rules, people followed their own conscience, ended with The Flood
• Human Government — From Noah to Abraham
• Promise — starts with Abraham and indicates God dealing with one specific group of people — ends with Moses
• For some, the previous three are grouped together, sometimes called "patriarchal"
• Law — the giving of the Law to Israel — different interpretations on when it ended
• Christ's Ministry — not all recognized this as separate — some interpretations ended the Law at Jesus' resurrection, some at the beginning of his ministry, some at the ascension, other at the end of The Acts of the Apostles. The Christ Dispensation likewise had differing opinions on it's scope, or even if it is a separate time period
• Grace — this started whenever either the Law or Christ dispensation ended and includes the present day. 
• Tribulation — starts with the rapture and includes all the horrors of the Book of Revelation
• Millennial — ends with Christ's return to defeat The Beast and The Devil and initiates the Thousand Year reign of Christ on Earth
• Some combine the previous two
• Paradise — establishment of God's eternal kingdom on earth 

Despite there being disagreements among dispensationalists on where these divisions should begin and end, the concept does have its own logic. There's no question that God acts differently throughout different time periods as outlined in the Bible. But there are no bright lines delineating changes in God's rules — if there were, there would be no disagreement among the various advocates of dispensationalism. This is the problem with viewing the Bible as an inerrant and divinely inspired, it's impossible to accept that there are errors, discrepancies and contradictions and one has to sometimes tie oneself into knots to explain them away and make it make sense.

(I have gone back to Dispensationalism in Part XXVI, where I expand upon it's implications regarding the so-called rapture and Zionism. I'll repost that in the near future)

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXI

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIX - No True Scotsman

In my previous "Agnostic's Look at The Bible", Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian, I discussed the phenomena of Christians deciding that other Christians weren't "real" Christians based on doctrinal disagreements. In this week's installment I'll look at how Christians behaving badly are dismissed by other Christians as "Not True Christians".

The classic example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, from whence it derives its name, is this: McBeth claims that a Scotsman will invariably eat haggis regularly. McDuff replies that he's a Scotsman and he never eats haggis. McBeth retorts "Well then, you're not a true Scotsman". The "No True Scotsman" fallacy is a species of circular reasoning where the premise is redefined to exclude any inconvenient deviations and contradictions. This is a pretty common fallacy employed by Christians who by and large adhere to the "love thy neighbor" ethos against coreligionists who don't. When someone points out the horrible behavior of a group of Christians, you can be sure that someone will claim that "they're not really Christians because true Christians wouldn't act like that". 

Of course, Love Thy Neighbor Christians will argue that they're not the ones deciding who are true Christians and who aren't, God has set the standards in The Bible. The trouble with that, as I have pointed out many times in this series, is that the Bible isn't clear or unambiguous in what it has to say. In addition, "Christian" is as much a cultural identifier as a set of religious doctrines and behaviors. Anyone who says they're a Christian is a Christian. One might argue whether a particular Christian is living up to some perceived Biblical standard, but that doesn't make them Not A Christian, any more than abstaining from haggis makes an Edinburgh native whose roots go back many generations Not A  Scotsman.  

This doesn't mean that the Love Thy Neighbor Christians don't have a good reason to be embarrassed by the antics of their bigoted, hateful brethren. Like a family of cops who have that one sibling who just got out of prison, they think they're making them look bad. Guilt by association. But these hypothetical cops don't claim that their ex-con brother isn't their brother. But Christians are trying to boost their godliness average by eliminating their more embarrassing brethren from the statistics. 

This is by no means a Christians-only phenomena. Fundamentalist Muslims who require their women to wear a hijab look down on the Muslims who don't as not true Muslims and the burqa-wearing sects are sure the rest of the Muslim world are just as damned as Christians and Jews, maybe more so. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are pretty judgmental about their Conservative and Reform branches — some don't recognize weddings officiated by non-Orthodox rabbis. Heck, I've even encountered this tendency among Pagans! But since Christians are the power wielding majority in this country, this is whom I'm focusing on. 

The truth is, that between Fundamentalist Evangelicals, Conservative Traditional Catholics, Mega Church Pastors and the like, cultural Christians who identify as right wing conservatives and espouse beliefs largely divorced from the Love Thy Neighbor morality are likely the majority of self-identified Christians in the United States. You can't just pretend they're not the face of 21st Century Christianity. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XX

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVIII - Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian

Growing up I didn't think too much about other Christians or what they believed, or whether they were "real" Christians. I was raised in the Catholic Church, which definitely teaches that it's the "One True Church", but it wasn't something that came up in everyday conversation. In my teens I became aware of the Protestant Churches in my neighborhood and attended their services out of curiosity. This disturbed my parents, but I didn't detect anything very much different. It wasn't until I got involved in The Way that I was exposed to the idea that some Christians didn't think some other Christians were...Christians.

I'm not talking about one Christian judging another Christian's behavior as unchristian, but the characterization of another Christian denomination as being fundamentally outside what the Bible would define as Christian. Not just labeling fringe denominations as cults, but other "regular" denominations. This is a doctrinal thing, not behavioral. 

I've written much about The Way's cultishness, but their attitudes about how one would define a "true" Christian was right in line with conservative Protestant thinking. The thinking that fueled the engine of the European religious wars of the 1600 and 1700's definitely hadn't completely gone away. Catholics viewed Protestants as deluded schismatics and Protestants viewed Catholics as Mary worshipping Papists. In the nineties my ex-wife and I were home schooling our children and purchased some textbooks from a Christian book publisher. I clearly remember the description in a history textbook of Catholics as a "false religion". 

I mostly hear these accusations of Christians not being real Christians mostly in a political context. Supporters of both major presidential parties are sure that no real Christian could truly support the other candidate. Abortion is a major theme in this flinging of heretical epithets, but even something as ordinary as clapping back at hecklers becomes "evidence" that a candidate hates Christians. In the political realm it's not so much suspect doctrine that gets one viewed as outside the pale, but the assumption that God is without a doubt on one side. 

This is not something new. The New Testament Epistles are full of references to "false teachers" who are accused of leading people astray and even being diabolic influences. Who are these allegedly false teachers? They weren't pagan priests or Jewish rabbis, they were other Christian leaders! Of course, since history is written by the victors, we don't see much of what the other factions of Christians in the First Century had to say, but you can bet that they were writing the same things about the eventual authors of the epistles that the epistle writers were saying about them. Even beyond the era when The Bible was written there was a constant battle among different factions of Christians to decide what the truth was. There was a constantly evolving opinion about various topics about which the Bible was unclear. Why? Because the Bible was unclear.

And other than politicians disingenuously promoting themselves as the only Christian alternative, the reason that regular Christians can confidently conclude that what they believe is the truth while other people are deluded fools or shills for Satan is that the Bible is (1) Unclear (2) Internally contradictory and (3) Not a concise doctrinal statement. The Bible is not a manifesto laying out a clear statement of beliefs and clarifying all manner of moral and practical conundrums, it is a loose collection of biographies (which contradict each other) and letters addressing behavioral problems in specific places. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. In order to make sense out of it a Christian is required to cherry pick, ignore the contradictions and parts that they don't like and interpret the ambiguous sections in a way that props up their own morality. Then decide that any other view is not just wrong, but inspired by The Devil. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVII - Christianity as a Cultural Identity

With the recent focus on the (White) Christian Nationalist Movement and its connection to right wing politics, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was a recent development. Christians completely ignoring the Gospel message in favor of an us vs. them mindset? We need to get back to Christians acting Christian...right? Not so fast. 

Even going back to the days of Constantine the Great, people have always identified as Christians without having even a passing familiarity with The Bible. 

There's little objective information about Christianity in its first hundred years, but by the time Christianity became a recognized religion and later the official religion, it's evident that people were Christians because that's what everyone else in their culture was. Christian identity was inseparable from Roman identity. This tendency became more pronounced as the Arab Muslim Caliphate became a threat to the Empire's existence. Even within Christendom, the Western Europeans identified as Catholics and the Byzantines identified as Orthodox, both as intrinsic parts of who they were. (There were also the Arians in the West and the Monophysites in the East)

Christianity splintered (more) in the 1500's with the Protestant Reformation as different varieties of Christianity multiplied. But for the most part, individuals' religion was determined by their rulers and there were Catholic nations, Lutheran nations, Calvinist nations, all warring among themselves for various reasons. As time went by there was more choice among various denominations, but for the most part the umbrella identity of "Christian" persisted. I'm not suggesting there weren't sincere Christians throughout all of these eras, or that no one studied the text of the Bible or lived lives according the teachings of Jesus, but that being a Christian wasn't something that you decided to become, but something that you were.

People my age remember that one of the bloodiest religious conflicts of our lives was not in Israel or the Middle East, and didn't involve radical Muslims, but was the Catholic-Protestant Troubles in Northern Ireland. For many reasons economic and political divisions broke along religious lines. The poorer Northern Irish, who favored union with the Republic of Ireland in the south tended to be Catholic, while those who wanted to remain part of the U.K. and were of higher economic status, tended to be  Protestant. There's a lot of reasons for why this split developed, but people didn't spend a lot of time thinking about which version of Christianity they followed, it was just who they were. 

Even in my own youth, my neighborhood was made up of mostly Catholics, children or grandchildren of immigrants from Catholic countries. There wasn't violence or strife between Catholics and the few Protestants, but it was almost unthinkable that one would convert from one to another. Being Catholic was what you were. My own generation was a bit more fluid. The so-called Jesus Movement was making inroads, and young people were more willing than previous generations to explore other traditions or join new religious groups. When I decided to ditch Catholicism and join The Way, (which was, as far as they knew, Christian) my parents' reaction was similar to how I imagine it would have been if I had announced that I had embraced Satanism. Milder, but still disapproving, were their reactions when my brother married an Episcopalian or when my niece was married in a non-church ceremony. In all of these cases, most people, no matter what denomination they identified as, would be hard pressed to articulate how their religion was substantially different that the other guys' faith. 

My point in bringing up these examples, is that identifying as Christian without any connection to actual Christian theology or principles is nothing new, it has a long history. Today's White Christian Nationalists are part of a long history of weaponizing religion and using it to "other" those they don't like. They have allies in Congress and in the courts. The Supreme Court majority has deferred to Christians in First Amendment cases and their doctrine of shaping opinions based on whether similar laws existed historically should scare anyone who believes that government should be neutral with respect to religion. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XVIII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVI - Agreeing to Disagree...Or Not

One of the problems in looking to the Bible as a rulebook on how to live life is that it's not arranged in any easy-to-access order. There's no index, it's not arranged by subject matter and there seems to be a lot of areas that simply aren't covered. The true believers will tell you that's because it's not supposed to be accessible to the disbelievers, but that if you have the Holy Spirit within you, understanding will flow naturally.

How convenient. 

Of course, I'm one of those disbelievers, and this series is about how I, an agnostic, look at the Bible. I don't believe that it was dictated, or even inspired, by God, or any other permutation of the idea that it's "The Truth". I'm just looking at it like I'd look at any other piece of literature. Viewed in that light, it's confusing. 

One of the sources of confusion is the dichotomy between the "Old Testament", aka The Hebrew or Jewish scriptures, and the "New Testament", aka the Gospels and the Epistles. The Old Testament is without question written for the Jewish people. The New Testament is more universal in who it's apparently intended for. The Old Testament describes God in starkly different terms than does most of the New Testament. Most Christians ignore this difference, pretending that it's not there. Although there is a subset of Christian theology called dispensationalism which explains the difference by theorizing that God has different "dispensations", or administrations, where the rules of the game change. It's obvious that the institution of the Law of Moses changed the ground rules that existed before, and that Jesus' life, death and resurrection represented a further change. The Book of Revelation is without question a different milieu than the world as we know it, ending with a still different new Heaven and Earth. Dispensationalists can be thanked (or blamed) for the popular belief in "the rapture". An early Christian movement, founded by Marcion, believed that the differences were so great that the Old Testament God was a different God than the God of Jesus; not only different, but evil. So it comes down to either explaining away the differences in a pretzel-like manner, or just ignoring them. 

Another dichotomy in the New Testament is between the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. Jesus was primarily concerned with action, while Paul was mainly concerned with belief. Even though each of the four Gospels has a different emphasis, and even contradict each other, Jesus isn't telling people to simply believe, he's always talking about how one should behave oneself. Paul on the other hand, while he does touch on a few things to do and not do, it's all in the head — it's believing in Jesus, believing that he was raised from the dead and so on. 

The epistles of Paul are not an instruction manual on how to be a Christian, they're mostly in the form of letters addressing specific problems that various church communities were having. There's not a lot of internal inconsistency within the Pauline letters, but there's no definitive listing of doctrine and practice. The Catholic/Orthodox traditions tell their people to not worry about it, the leaders will tell you how to act and think. The Protestant traditions do that too, while maintaining the illusion that their people can see what the Bible teaches for themselves...as long as it agrees with what the leaders say it means. For any doctrinal position it's typical to jump from section to section and book to book putting together a supposedly coherent position, because you usually won't find it clearly delineated in any one place. 

What about the Ten Commandments? Isn't that a list telling us how to act? Yes and no. Yes, in that it's a list in the Bible. No — for several reasons. If we're taking the dispensationalist position that the Old Testament was for the Jews and not written to The Church, why would we pay it any attention? If we are supposed to heed the "Ten Commandments", why not the other hundreds of commandments? Like the ones involving dietary and grooming rules. Or the ones that allow slavery or that a woman marry her rapist. Quite a quandary. But what most people do not realize that no matter what position you take, there are two contradictory versions of the Ten Commandments (or Ten Words) in the Book of Exodus:

https://contradictionsinthebible.com/2-ten-commandments/

Ten Commandments (Ex 20:1-17)

1. I am Yahweh your god; you shall not have other gods before my face!

2. You shall not make for yourself a statue or an image.

3. You shall not swear falsely by the name Yahweh, your god

4. Remember the Sabbath day.

5. Honor your father and your mother.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

10. You shall not covet you neighbor’s house.

 Ten Commandments (Ex 34:14-26)

1. You shall not bow down to another god; for Yahweh is a jealous god!

2. You shall not make molten gods for yourself.

3. You shall observe the festival of Unleavened bread.

4. You shall redeem every first born of your sons!

5. You shall observe the Sabbath.

6. You shall make a festival of Weeks.

7. Three times a year every male shall appear before Yahweh, god of Israel.

8. You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice on leavened bread.

9. You shall bring the firstfruits of your land to the house of Yahweh your god.

10. You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.

So, which version do you want to follow? Or post in your classrooms? 

In addition to the fact that there are two distinct and clearly contradictory versions of The Ten Commandments right there in the text of the Bible, the way that the first, more popular version, is interpreted varies depending on the church tradition or denomination, there are eight distinct traditions or versions which divide the seven verses in Exodus differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments

1. Septuagint
2. Reformed Protestantism
3. Ashburnham Pentateuch
4. Talmud
5. Samaritan Pentateuch
6. Augustine
7. Roman Catholicism
8. Lutherans

"I am the Lord your God"

One tradition lists this as the First Commandment

Seven combine it with "You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me" as the First Commandment, the remaining tradition separate them into the First and Second Commandments

Four traditions combine it with "You Shall Not Have False Idols"  or "Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee a Graven Image" as the first commandment

The other three call "You Shall Not Have False Idols"  or "Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee a Graven Image" the second commandment.

The next few are called the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th if all the previous commandments are combined into the First;  3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th if not

"You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain" is third/second commandment
 
"Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy" is the fourth/third commandment

"Honor Thy Father and Mother" is the fifth/fourth commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Kill" is the sixth/fifth, although one version counts it as the eighth commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" is the seventh/sixth commandment, although since one source reverses this and the previous command, it is 3 for seventh and 5 for sixth

"Thou Shalt Not Steal" is eighth/seventh commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor" is ninth/eighth

The next three commandments are all combined into one commandment as either the Ninth Commandment in one tradition; or as the Tenth Commandment in 4. Three traditions split them up as follows:

A. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House" One combines this one with "B" as the Ninth Commandment; Two combine this one with "B" and "D" as the Tenth Commandment

B. "Thou Shalt Not Desire Thy Neighbor's House" One combines this one with "A" as the Ninth Commandment; Two combine this one with "A" and "D" as the Tenth Commandment

C. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife" One combines this one with "D" as the Tenth Commandment; Two list this as the Ninth Commandment, not combined with others

D. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff"  One combines this one with "C" as the Tenth Commandment; Two combine this one with "A" and "B" as the Tenth Commandment

The one exception adds "You Shall Set Up These Stones, Which I Command You Today, on Mount Argarizem" and combines all the "covets" as the ninth commandment

(4 of 8 combine all 3 "covets" into #10, 3 combine 2 of them in various ways)

Even though there are actually fifteen commandments, (if you count every one that at least one tradition considers a separate commandment), the Bible, just before the listing, specifically calls them ten commandments (or words, sayings, or matters), but does not clearly delineate where one "commandment" ends and another begins. Maybe whoever wrote it thought it would be obvious, or that it was unimportant. Here they are separated out and listed in order:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me
3. You Shall Not Have False Idols
4. You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain
5. Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy
6. Honor Thy Father and Mother
7. Thou Shalt Not Kill
8. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery
9. Thou Shalt Not Steal
10. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor
11. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House
12. Thou Shalt Not Desire Thy Neighbor's House
13. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife
14. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff
15. You Shall Set Up These Stones, Which I Command You Today, on Mount Argarizem

Periodically there are legal disputes about posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses and in government buildings. The rationale being that the commandments are all basic moral/ethical stuff and no one should have any problem with them, even if they did originate in a religious book. There are some problems with that position. Some of them are hardcore religious and not just "do unto others..." stuff.

The first three to five, depending on how you're counting, address who you should be worshipping, when you should do it, and how you should talk about the god who is the object of this worship. For anyone who worships a god different from the god of the bible, this is not something that they they would want to do and it certainly shouldn't be displayed in a government setting. If you think that the whole world, or at least the whole country, consists entirely of Christians and Jews (and depending on how you view Allah, Muslims), then you might have no problem with this. But that's not the reality — there's a large number of people who worship or honor different gods (or no gods at all), in addition there's that pesky First Amendment.

The "covet" prohibitions are also problematic. Most people would agree in theory that these are things that you shouldn't do, but when you get down to it they are prohibitions against thought, not actions. So once again, this comes down to strictly religious rules, not anything that could or should be encoded into secular law.

Honoring your parents (unless your parents are evil bastards), no stealing, lying, killing or cheating on your spouse...I'll give you those. The Five Commandments sounds okay.

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XVII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XV (What Difference Does It Make If it's True Or Not?)

If Jesus didn't really exist, would it make a difference? It depends on who you ask.

Some might say that as long as you follow what most of us think of as Jesus' teachings, it wouldn't matter at all. As long as you're on track with loving God and your neighbor, feeding the poor, treating others as you want to be treated, you're good to go (to heaven that is). Those in the "doesn't matter" camp maintain that it's his teachings that are important, and that those teachings are just as important if they were put together by fiction writers than if the Biblical Jesus was an historical person who is accurately portrayed in the Gospels. 

Other, more literal-minded Christians hold the opposite view: that if Jesus, as presented to us in the Bible, didn't exist, then there is no point to life...and they certainly aren't saved. To them, Jesus wasn't just some guy who spouted self-help advice, but The Son of God who died for us. Without getting into the nuances of what specifically the death and resurrection of Jesus meant to the writers of the Bible (and it's not precisely the same from one author to the next) suffice it say that his death and subsequent not being dead accomplished something that wouldn't have been accomplished just by preaching sermons on the mount or multiplying bread and fish or walking in water. Or so many Christians believe. Not that most of them could actually explain it. 

There's a metaphysical aspect to Jesus in the minds of the true believers that goes beyond what he is reported to have preached about in his alleged time on earth. By believing in him you get a free trip to heaven when you die. Although there's disagreement about just what "believing in him" involved: "confessing that God raised him from the dead" or "accepting him as Lord" are two that I have heard. You get Holy Spirit within according to some. In short, for a lot of people it matters very much whether Jesus existed — it's literally a matter of (eternal) life and death. 

As someone who now views Christianity, Judaism and the Bible from the outside it just doesn't matter to me — it's nothing more than an intellectual exercise to speculate upon the likelihood that there was an historical person upon whom the Biblical Jesus was based. Some of what he taught was definitely words to live by. Yes, just some. Jesus, as presented to us in the Gospels, was very much a believer that the world was ending in the short term. As such, he was very much concerned with people as individuals  getting their acts together so that they would be worthy to enter the soon-to-be-established Kingdom of God. He was not concerned at all with family ties — he even told his potential followers that they had to reject (many versions use the word "hate") their parents and family to be his disciples. Not to mention his admonitions to followers to jettison all worldly riches. What do you need a bank account for if the world is about to end? 

There are good arguments on both sides of the "did Jesus exist?" argument. There are some, also on both sides that I reject, and why:

Arguments against a historical Jesus:

• The Romans kept scrupulous records of all legal proceedings and there is no record of Jesus' trial and execution
• This is a myth. The Romans in some jurisdictions, like Egypt, kept voluminous records, which still exist because the papyrus was preserved in a dry environment, but there is a lack of evidence for similar records in Roman Judea. There's no Roman records of Jesus' trial because there were no records of anyone's trials, especially not someone who would have been considered a run-of-the-mill insurrectionist. 
• There are no contemporary references to Jesus. Even the first Gospel wasn't written until at least 40 years after his purported death.  
• Very few historical records from Classical times were contemporary. Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars is a notable exception. There are dozens of Roman emperors for whom we have no reference to them in their lifetimes. For some, we're not entirely sure if anything that was written about them is true. Lack of references during or immediately after his life are perfectly normal for that time period.
• The qualities ascribed to Jesus mirror the lives and missions of many other gods and saviors in the Mediterranean and Levant, including Osiris and Mithra.
• It would take too long to quote and debunk all of these comparisons, which crop up around Easter and Christmas each year, but in general they make false comparisons and misrepresent the stories around some of the other pagan deities. 
• Debunking aspects of the Bible don't necessarily eliminate the possibility that a "Jesus" lived and preached and was executed in Judea around the beginning of the common era and that myths and legends attached themselves to him

Arguments for the existence of a historical Jesus: 

• "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" is more an argument in support of the objective truth of what Jesus is reported to have said in the gospels rather than a strict argument in favor of his existence. It also ignores the alternative, that he was simply mistaken.
• Would the Apostles have risked everything, even their lives, for a myth? 
• To be persuaded by this argument you have to assume that everything written about the Twelve Apostles in the Acts of The Apostles was true. Acts, like the Gospels, was written to tell a certain story and is no more verifiable than are the Gospels. The existence of the specific twelve men known as The Apostles is as difficult to verify as the existence of Jesus himself. The names, even, are inconsistent from one Gospel to the next.
• Even assuming that the apostles and other, later, followers of Jesus risked martyrdom, this is a weak argument for the historiography of Jesus. There are many, many examples of people going to their deaths for beliefs that were demonstrably false. I'm sure Christians would consider Islam false, yet there's no shortage of Muslims who have died for it over the centuries.
• References in Josephus, Tacitus and others.
• None of these were eyewitness accounts. Most are referring to Christians, not Christ.
• Even assuming that an historical person on whom the Gospels is based existed, there is no evidence that the miraculous works ascribed to him happened.

I lean toward the opinion that there was someone upon whom the Jesus of the Gospels was based. He had a loyal cadre of followers who became convinced, for whatever reason, that he was resurrected after being crucified. Stories circulated and were passed by word of mouth and grew in the telling. Different factions had their own ideas about what he taught and what his life and death meant. Eventually people started writing down these stories, some of which have survived to modern times, four of them incorporated into The Bible. These biographies are historical documents and hold as much weight as any other historical document from that age — in other words we consider the source, consider biases and take it all with a grain of salt. I find it unlikely that these myths and legends were created first and only later did his followers insist that he was a real person — I find it much more likely that the myths and legends were pasted onto to the fairly unremarkable life of a real person. 

The existence of the "Apostle" Paul confuses things a bit. By his own admission he never met Jesus "in the flesh". Everything he claims to know about Jesus and God's purpose for Jesus and how Christians should conduct themselves was received in visions. One might suppose that Paul was a faker who attempted to hijack the nascent Christian movement and mold it according to his own views. And many thought just that! In many ways Paul, whose mission was to non-Jews, taught a Christianity that was very different than what was being taught by Jesus' original followers. It certainly differs from what we see in the Gospels. According to Paul's own letters the original apostles were teaching that converting to Judaism was a prerequisite to becoming a Christian, which Paul vehemently opposed. He claimed that it was God's will that pagan converts not be required to conform to Jewish law. 

There is an argument that Paul created the story of Jesus out of thin air — why else would The Twelve had allowed him to become as influential as he did without resisting him? The argument assumes that neither Jesus nor The Twelve existed. I find this argument unpersuasive. Paul refers in his own writings to Peter/Cephas and to James, Jesus' brother as well as to "The Twelve". (Was "The Twelve" a generic reference to a ruling body? Was it literally the twelve guys named in the Gospels? I don't know) So they presumably existed. I don't find it plausible that they created the Jesus character, or that Paul created them just to give himself an antagonist. No, I view Paul as someone who always thought he was the smartest person in the room. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that he had some kind of vision or hallucination and ran with it. So, if there were original followers of Jesus still around, how did he get away with it?

It is an undisputed fact of history that there were multiple varieties of Christianity a generation or two after Jesus' time. We have Paul's testimony in his letters that already 20 years after the crucifixion there were multiple factions. Is it unbelievable that Paul's faction, based as it was on converting the more numerous Gentiles, would outcompete the groups that maintained adherence to Jewish practices, including circumcision and complex dietary laws?  The fact that he never met Jesus and converted before ever meeting a real follower of Jesus (except to persecute them, by his own admission) apparently was no bar to his version of Christianity becoming the seed around which the dominant Catholic/Orthodox churches grew. 

In one of Paul's letters he makes the point that if Jesus didn't really live and die and rise from the dead, then our faith would be in vain. So he at least believed Jesus really existed! A counter argument can be made that Paul, in his epistles, makes no mention of any details of Jesus' life that we later read about in the Gospels (Gospels first appear around 70 CE, Paul began writing around 50 CE) and for that reason was making it all up. Of course, Paul didn't live in Judea or Galilee, but in what we call Asia Minor, modern Turkey. It's not inconceivable that while he was familiar with Christians prior to his conversion, he wasn't in a circle where the oral stories were circulating, or just didn't think the biographical details were all that important compared to the redemptive nature of his  death and supposed resurrection. 

At any rate, there are good arguments pro and con and bad arguments pro and con for the existence of Jesus, or at least someone upon whom the Biblical Jesus was based. However, I long ago found the reasons for going beyond that and accepting the supernatural, spiritual, aspects of the Bible to be unpersuasive. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

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

This post is a follow up to "Who Is This Jesus Guy Anyway?" and "Short Musings On How Jesus Became God" 

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:

• Modalism also called Sabellianism, teaches that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and the same, and are different modes, manifestations, or expressions of a unitary God. When non-theologians attempt to explain the Trinity, this is often the explanation that they come up with. The actual doctrine states that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not similar to a person taking on different roles in life, for example someone who is a manager at work, a parent at home and a softball coach on weekends. The doctrine of the Trinity states that Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while all are God, they are all separate "persons". 
• Monarchism - There are various types of monarchism, they have in common the doctrine that the Son is subordinate to the Father in some fashion
• 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. You can see hints of this in both the Gospels and in Paul's writings. Like with everything connected to Jesus' nature, it's unclear. 
• 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. This belief didn't have much mainstream support, and can be found mostly among the various Gnostic documents. 
• Apollinarianism stated that, although Jesus had a physical, human body, his "nature", or mind, was wholly divine. 
• Monophysites believed that Jesus had only one nature — he started out wholly human, but 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 theological response to Monophysitism, holding that Jesus had two natures, human and divine, but one "will", which was 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. 

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. Every time I see a non-theologian attempt to explain the Trinity using metaphor or some type of comparison, they end up describing one of these heresies!

Non-Christians and non-Trinitarians sometimes mock the belief, wondering who Jesus was talking to when he prayed to God, among other things. Usually they misunderstand what Christians really believe and certainly don't understand the actual doctrine. They don't really believe in three Gods, or a three-headed God. They don't see the verses that affirm that Jesus was separate from God the Father as a contradiction, but simply an affirmation that God the Son is not identical to God the Father. Personally I see the doctrine of The Trinity as an attempt to reconcile contradictions that spurred more contradictions as well as assaults on common sense. The result is that no one really understands it. 

But do any supernatural religious beliefs make any sense? 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XII