Alea iacta est

In the Beginning, Man Created God, Part IX

Previously on "YHWH's Excellent Adventure"

Part 1: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In which we learn that YHWH wasn't the first god to want to be alone.

Part 2: YHWH rules, Chemosh drools! In which we learn most of Biblical history was pulled out of King Josiah's backside.

Part 3: By the Rivers of Babylon. In which the Hebrews crib most of their afterlife from the Persians.

Part 4: Alex the Kid in Hellenic World. In which Alexander the Great conquers the known world and everyone learns to love, Greek-style.

Interlude: Danny Boy, the Lions, the Lions are calling. In which Daniel becomes a Prophet despite not knowing the first things about his own surroundings.

Part 5: I ♥ MACCABEES. In which the flame of cosmopolitan Hellenism is snuffed out by religious fundamentalists.

Part 6: Quacks, Kooks and Loons of the Roman Empire. In which we see that the early Roman Empire was a utopia for two bit religious frauds and crazy cults.

Part 7: Would the real Messiah Please Stand Up? - In which we began to example just how much we really know about Jesus.

Up next...

Part 8: The Greatest Story Ever Made Up

In our last installment we've seen that the Pauline Epistles actually predate the Gospels in what they say about Jesus, and that what they say is limited and sketchy. Basically, if all we had of the New Testaments were the undisputed Epistles of Paul of Tarsus, all we would know about this "Jesus" character would be the following

• Jesus had a supper on the night he was betrayed (1 Corinthians)
• Jesus died by crucifixion (1 Corinthians and Philippians)
• Jesus was raised from the dead (Philippians)
• Jesus was a Jew of the line of David (Romans)

As you can see, there's a few things the modern reader would see as missing. No mention of virgin births, of flights into Egypt, of Bethlehem or Nazareth, of twelve disciples or of Judas the betrayer or of empty tombs or a myriad of other details. So where the heck does that stuff all come from?

Well, as everyone knows, to get the full picture of the amazing life of Jesus Christ, you apparently have to turn to the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Unfortunately those same gospels are about as reliable on the topic of Jesus as a book by Dan Brown. Let's go through them from oldest Gospel to most recent, and examine each in detail.

Above: As you can see, the Gospels were written by a man, a lion, a bull, and Sam the Eagle.

All of the Gospels were written well after the Epistles of Paul. Despite Matthew appearing first in the Bible, it is more likely Mark was written first, followed by Luke and Matthew (it is debated which of those was earliest) and then, way later, John.

Luke and Matthew share a lot of detail. Most of this comes from Mark, but there is some, in particular dialogue from Jesus, that is common to Matthew and Luke but not to Mark. Hence scholars have developed the concept of the hypothetical "Q" Gospel, which is now lost. Some anti-Trinitarian Christian traditions, including Islam, have seized on this, claiming it to be evidence of the original, "pure" Gospel which later authors changed, but hypothetical "Q", if it indeed existed, was more likely a collection of quotes, sayings and parables with no narrative structure, and would likely tell us absolutely nothing about Jesus as a real, historical figure.

Mark
Written c. 70 AD.

Mark is the shortest and least bat-shit of the Gospels. If any of them are even close to the true story of Jesus, it would be Mark, but even it has its share of silliness. Like all Gospels, no author is indicated anywhere in the text, but tradition assigns it as the work of one "John Mark", supposedly an assistant of Simon Peter's, and was written in Rome. It certainly betrays a few Latin-inspired phrases as well as an ignorance of Galilean geography, which does seem to suggest a Roman writer.

The Gospel itself tells us nothing of Jesus' birth or conception, indeed, Jesus is already a grown man when the Gospel begins. There's no indication that being God's "son" in this Gospel refers to an actual physical sense, indeed it seems to more indicate an Adoptionist view that Jesus became God's son via his baptism by John the Baptist.

As I stated in an earlier post, the baptism of Jesus by John may be one of the only truly reliable parts of the Gospels, since it became such an embarrassment to later Christians that their God was baptised by an inferior man that they tried to downplay it. (It doesn't even appear in the Gospel of John, for instance, and is subtly modified in the other two Gospels).

In Mark the story is Jesus is baptised, he is tempted by the Devil for 40 days and 40 nights, collects some disciples, gives some speeches, including telling people to obey the laws of Moses, heals some beggars, enters Jerusalem, is betrayed by Judas, sentenced by Pilate and then crucified, dies and is placed in a tomb.

I deliberately left out the empty tomb and resurrection, since the oldest manuscripts of Mark all end at Mark 16:8 - the last twelve verses from the modern Bible do not exist in these fourth century versions, hence it ends with:

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.

Not exactly a stirring call to arms for early Christians if you go into a tomb, find no body, and some guy says Jesus has risen, yet neither you nor your comrades ever see him again, is it? Some scholars believe the early version of Mark, when combined with Paul's letters indicate Christians believed in a purely spiritual resurrection of Jesus, and that the resurrection of a "body" (ie Jesus wandering around after his resurrection inviting people to poke their fingers in his festering corpse) is a later theological development that required some scribe to make an addition to the Gospel of Mark.

Mark is also notable for including portions that don't portray Jesus as all that great - for instance, Jesus' family remarking that Jesus is mad, Jesus taking two attempts to heal a man, and then a totally bizarre and random bit where a naked man runs away from Jesus. Later gospels also eliminate instances of friction and disrespect between Jesus and his disciples, and instances in Mark where Jesus appears to be ignorant of certain facts are smoothed over or eliminated.

In short, the Jesus in Mark is still quite a human figure.

Never mind, more Gospels were to come, and the tale would grow in the telling.

Luke
Written c. 85 AD.

The traditional author of this Gospel is held to be Luke, a good buddy of the aforementioned Paul of Tarsus, and a Greek doctor. Unlike earlier accounts of Jesus, Luke clearly means to place Jesus as a real person in a specific place and time, and ties him to many historical events. Unfortunately he sometimes tries too hard at this, and ends up looking silly. Luke the Evangelist is often depicted as a bull, which I think is appropriate, since his Gospel contains mostly bullshit, just as you'd expect from a bovine-authored work.

Unlike Mark, Luke gives us all the goss about Jesus' birth. We begin with a long, tedious geneology that links Jesus not just to King David, but all the way up to Adam. By the way, if you want to know how the 6,000 year old age of the Earth was calculated, look no further than here. If you total up the ages of everyone in Luke's geneology you get 4,000 years. Add that to the amount of years from Jesus to us, and voila!

Luke also claims that John the Baptist's mother, Elizabeth, is a cousin to Jesus' mother, Mary. Holy convenient coincidences, Batman! No other Gospel writer even mentions this important fact (and it would be important if Jesus was a second cousin to John the Baptist) but there is a good reason for this bullshit. Since Liz is of the Tribe of Levi (and hence Mary too), that means Jesus has both royal and priestly descent, perfect for a Priest-King Messiah who is destined to reign over a new Israel!

Except for one thing. Luke completely ruins his careful genealogy, the one which he gives Joseph's ancestry all the way back to Adam, by announcing that Jesus is not Joseph's son after all - but rather conceived by the Holy Spirit. Which means, of course, that Jesus has no Davidic descent, hence not qualified to be the Messiah and, incidentally, contradicting one of the few details provided about Jesus in Paul's letters. Probably one indication that Jesus wasn't God's literal "son" in the earliest Christian traditions, and that the story Luke tried to write was polluted with inventive theology.

Above: Joseph the Carpenter, the Bible's favourite butt-monkey and probably the only man in history to be cuckolded by a frigging Ghost.

Luke also places Jesus birth in Bethlehem, ostensibly to fulfill a Old Testament prophecy (which, as you will see later, isn't really a prophecy), and so, to get Jesus there, using the pretext of the Census of Cyrenius in 6 AD. He has Joseph take his pregnant wife to Bethlehem, give birth to Jesus in a stable, visited by shepherds, and then departing back to Galilee to grow into a man, before embarking on his preaching.

Again he is baptised by John (Luke gives the specific year, 29 AD), again he preaches around the land, collecting disciples, and entering Jerusalem, again he is betrayed, arrested, tried, crucified and dies, before being buried in the tomb. More so than in Mark, Luke clearly goes about absolving Romans of blame for Jesus' death, and seems to be blaming the Jewish establishment. This is the beginning of Christianity severing its ties with Judaism and becoming part of the Greco-Roman sphere. It also expands the post-resurrection appearances, with multiple people seeing Jesus (though some of them apparently don't recognise their friend. If they don't believe it, why should we?)

A lot of the historical details of Luke's gospel seems taken directly from Josephus, a 1st century Jew who ingratiated himself with the Roman overlords. Once you put his work against Luke's, the parallels seem remarkable.

Luke later wrote a sequel to his Gospel, called Acts, which puffs up his good buddy Paul to a ludicrous degree.

Matthew
Written c. 90 AD.

The Gospel of Matthew is particularly beloved by biblical literalists. I don't know why, its a truly terrible piece of work, filled with more contradictions than probably any other bit of the Bible. It's probably due to the "prophetic" nature of it.

Whoever wrote Matthew (and it was not the Apostle of the same name) really, really, really wanted to prove that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah prophesised in the Old Testament, and so went about showing how Jesus fulfilled them all. But, apparently even fulfilling genuine Messiah prophecies wasn't enough for Matthew, so he strip-mined the Old Testament for anything even vaguely resembling a prophecy, even if some of them were only psalms and proverbs with no prophetic intent at all.

Most of Matthew's depiction of Jesus' infancy is even more fictional than Luke's, and merely exists as a way to shoe-horn another "fulfilled prophecy" into his work. Herod's slaughter of children, the holy family fleeing to Egypt, the Wise Men from the east - for Matthew "Based on a true story!" is used as loosely as it is in Hollywood.

Like Luke, Matthew says Jesus is the Son of God (again, literally) and then proceeds to give us a pointless genealogy for Jesus' fake father Joseph. To further the hilarity, this genealogy is totally different to Luke, even disagreeing on the name of Joseph's father. The last person in common with the two lines of descent is King David.

Unfortunately, by tying Jesus's birth to the reign of Herod the Great, this means Jesus must be born before Herod's death...before 2 BC. As you can see, that's 8 years different to the date Luke gave. Never mind...

Matthew's zeal to fulfill prophecies, real or imagined, leads him into one of the most unintentionally hilarious parts of the Bible. An actual genuine Messiah prophecy has the Messiah entering Jerusalem riding a donkey. In the original Hebrew, the mention of the animal is repeated, a common rhetorical in Hebrew writings that add's emphasis. The Gospel writers generally understood this.

All except Matthew. Unlike the other evangelists, Matthew has Jesus ride into Jerusalem on not one, but two donkeys - like some sort of rodeo stunt rider.

Above: As the good book says: "Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass." (Matt 21:5)

The silliness doesn't stop there, with Matthew juxtaposing Jesus' death and resurrection with undead Jewish patriarchs roaming around Jerusalem (presumably moaning "Braaaaaains!"), earthquakes, world-spanning darkness, the Temple curtain being torn and many other things that leads the reader to feel that he's suddenly started reading the script for a Michael Bay movie.

And that's not a good feeling.

John
Written c. 100 AD

By the time John (not the disciple, obviously, since he'd be long dead) wrote this Gospel, Jesus had been fully transformed into a divine being. No longer is he the son of the carpenter from Galilee - he's now the divine Logos, fully co-existent with God from the beginning of time, and only temporarily incarnate in flesh so he can go hang himself for some complex reason that only God himself understands.

Since women and babies are understandably disgusting thing, John skips over the nativity, and has Jesus first pop up at a wedding, performing the now famous "water into wine" trick. Who wouldn't love a wedding guest who could do that? And it's comforting that God doesn't see promoting boozing as a frivolous use of his miraculous powers.

If the other Gospels are unreliable, then this one is a complete fiction. It divests most of the parables, exorcisms and narrative structure of the other three and has its own plot and purpose. In the first three Jesus' message is the focus of them. Now, its Jesus himself. Where in the others Jesus and his disciples seem a bit befuddled over what eventually happens, here Jesus fully knows he is will die and come back to life, and freely tells his disciples such (which makes their own later behaviour even more befuddling. How many other holy books make God's closest followers to be such morons?)

The Gospel of John also turns the Anti-Semitism dial up to 11, and suddenly the Jews are to blame for everything. Jesus rants and raves about them to a surprising extent for someone who is...uh...Jewish himself (at least on his mother's side).

John has the most developed post-resurrection story, including the infamous "Doubting Thomas" story. Scholars believe this was placed in here purely to discredit a gnostic sect who claimed to have been founded by Thomas. (They probably used the Gospel of Thomas which may have predated at least three, if not all four, of the canonical gospels.) Jesus, ever the showman, lets a disbelieving Thomas poke his semi-decayed body wounds and once again the reader is impressed with how a semi-ignorant 1st century Jewish skeptic is allowed such proof, yet we living thousands of years later should just shut up and believe what's written.

Thomas is believed by Indian Christians to have founded their local Christian tradition so, if you've been poked by any Indians lately, that may explain it.

The portion in John about the women discovering the empty tomb also shows how the story of Jesus grew as each person retold the story.

• In Mark, we are told that the women find one man waiting at the tomb
• In Luke, it is suddenly two men
• In Matthew we have one angel
• For John, it is now two angels

It's lucky we didn't end up with hundreds of Gospels in the Bible, or the last one would probably have the women met at the tomb by two billion angels and a thousand trillion men.

Above: Can any of you thousands of people tell me what happened to the dead body that was here?

John ends rather abruptly, with the author telling us that there was so much extra shit he wanted to write about Jesus, but he doesn't have the time or space to tell us.

Well, thanks a lot for risking our soul on account of your own laziness, mate.

Coming up:

Part 9: Speaking in Tongues

Posted by Quentin George at August 23, 2008 06:39 PM