Men with Pens are Apt to Amend

     Nothing said here is intended to weaken anyone’s faith in God.  However, it is definitely intended to weaken your faith in any “holy” book as your sole guide to God’s will for your life.  God is able to speak to your heart just as he spoke to the heart of the author of whichever “holy” book you happen to use.  My intent is to show that the relatively new, dangerous, blasphemous, divisive doctrine of the literal, verbal, God-breathed, inspiration of the Bible which (in its present form) dates back to the protestant reformation needs to be set aside, and is not necessary for anyone’s spiritual journey to God.  Such a foolish and blasphemous belief leads to radical fundamentalism and extreme fanaticism.  This is the driving force behind the current wave of international terrorism.  There will always be religious terrorists as long as there are people who believe any single book from any world religion is the only source of God’s word and will.  Humanity must get past this immature foolishness or perish.  God does not write.  He has never written.  He speaks to the heart of people who are in tune with him.  People who love and serve others, regardless of what they believe, are in tune with him.  Only people write, and then other people change what was written; and then other people change it some more.     

    I humbly admit that it is very difficult, if not completely impossible, to determine exactly what Jesus said.  The Jesus Seminar, established in 1985 with 30 scholars has now grown to more than 200 scholars who meet twice each year to brainstorm available research material and try to determine what Jesus of Nazareth really said.  Their work is ongoing.  You can see how daunting the task of determining what the message of Jesus really is.   These scholars have been working all these years and continue their search today.  In the opening remarks of the first Jesus Seminar in March 1985 founder Robert Funk said, “Our basic plan is simple. We intend to examine every fragment of the traditions attached to the name of Jesus in order to determine what he really said—not his literal words, perhaps, but the substance and style of his utterances. We are in quest of his voice, insofar as it can be distinguished from many other voices also preserved in the tradition. We are prepared to bring to bear everything we know and can learn about the form and content, about the formation and transmission, of aphorisms and parables, dialogues and debates, attributed or attributable to Jesus, in order to carry out our task.”

     I have spent a great deal of time reading and re-reading the four gospels of the New Testament.  If my understanding of the message of Jesus is remotely correct, then the message of Jesus, and the message of organized Christianity are very different.  In the end, I found that I could follow the Single Way that Jesus followed or I could follow “Christianity.”  One excludes the other.  I chose the path of Jesus, because my heart told me to.  To my knowledge I have studied every major religion of the world and in my heart none compare to the simplicity and goodness of the Single Way that Jesus followed.  I believe the Gospel of Mark is the most reliable story of the ministry of Jesus, although it too has errors, and I believe the Gospel of John is the least reliable, as I will explain later.  Yet practically all the information we have about Jesus of Nazareth comes from the New Testament.  (The early Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus in his Antiquities of the Jews but practically all scholars believe the mention is a latter addition to his work.)  Fundamentalist and most Evangelical Christian Churches claim that the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments are the verbally inspired, actual, literal, God-breathed, words of God.  They argue that every letter and every syllable, and even the punctuation marks, are ordained by Almighty God.  However, when their apologists are pinned down by any honest student of the New Testament regarding some obvious discrepancy they will revise the above claim with a counter claim, “Well the books of the Bible were verbally inspired in their original copies (often referred to as autographs).”  Of course this is like saying, “The path to God is revealed on the dark side of the moon.”  We don’t have access to the dark side of the moon – nor do we have a single original autograph of a single book of the Bible.  We don’t even have a second or third generation copy of a single book of the Bible.  The sad truth (that your minister won’t tell you) is that by the time in history that we do have several copies of any single book of the Bible, no two of the existing copies agree with one another.   If we were meant to consider the book as the very word of God, surely God would have preserved the original documents!  Further, if the ancient believers actually thought the words were the literal words of God, wouldn’t they have taken better care of them and always copied them exactly?  Would they have added things and taken things away when they thought they could improve the text or better support their theological position?

     Not only do we not have a single original copy of any book of the New Testament but we know beyond any doubt whatsoever that some things were added (and probably taken away) from the originals.  For instance there is a Pentecostal denomination located in the Appalachian Mountains that believes true Christians will pick up deadly serpents and drink deadly poison and it will not harm them.  They practice their strange faith to this day.  Many people in these small Appalachian Mountain Churches that practice this belief have died over the years while handling deadly copperheads, moccasins, and rattlesnakes.  Some have died after drinking deadly strychnine.   They base this belief on verses 17 and 18 of chapter 16 in the Gospel of Mark, “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”   This idea does not appear in any other place in the New Testament.  And it does not appear in the Gospel of Mark either – at least not the first Gospel of Mark.  The oldest copies of the Gospel of Mark that we have; the Sinaitic Syriac version from around 370 AD and the older Vatican version from around 325 AD both indicate that the Gospel of Mark ended with verse 8 of chapter 16.  Evidently verses 9 – 20 were added by some later scribe who obviously did not believe that the original Gospel of Mark was the literal words of God, and it needed a more exciting ending!  It is sad that people have actually died because they believed these last verses of Mark were God’s commandment to them!

     There are other additions as well.  The story of the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John 7:53 -8:11, while beautiful and compassionate, and very much like something Jesus might do, is not found in the earliest preserved manuscripts of John’s Gospel.  I John 5:7,8 is one of the major scriptures used to validate the doctrine of the Trinity, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.  And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water and the blood: and these three agree in one.” However, the words underlined in the above passage, called the Comma Johanneum, were not in the earliest manuscripts.  They are omitted from many new translations today.

     I don’t believe that any of the Gospel writers expected anyone to ever accept their words as the literal words of God.  I believe each one would gasp in horror if they knew that millions of people had accepted this blasphemous assumption.  Only two of the writers of the four Gospels, if we accept the conservative view, were even eyewitnesses to any of the ministry of Jesus - John and Matthew.  And of those two, John wrote his Gospel over 50 years after the actual events.  By the time John wrote his gospel, Jerusalem had been destroyed for over twenty years, and Paul’s version of Christianity (discussed later) was the majority opinion in the Christian communities of the world.  When Jerusalem was destroyed, John moved to Ephesus, a church founded by Paul who placed his personal disciple Timothy in charge as minister.  (Acts 18:19-28; 19:1, 17-20; 20:16)  Paul’s theological influence on John is obvious and undisputed by most unbiased scholars.  John’s portrait of Jesus is Pauline throughout.  John’s book is so drastically different from the other three Gospels and so obviously affected by the theology of Paul that it is almost as though he was writing about someone else entirely.  The dialogs he reports are curiously different and reflect an obvious bias toward early Pauline theology.  In my mind, though it is truly beautiful, it is the least reliable of any of the Gospels.  By the time John wrote his Gospel, Jesus was no longer an itinerant Jewish Rabbi pointing people to the Heavenly Father; but a literal God, pointing people to himself.  Even the introduction to the Gospel of John in the Roman Catholic Study Bible declares that John’s Gospel has evidently modified the actual events to reflect early Church doctrine.  It is hard to believe that anyone could possibly remember dialog verbatim over 50 years after the words were spoken.  Yet it is John’s Gospel – and only John’s Gospel - that contains the verse that lays the foundation for all Evangelical Fundamentalist Christianity – “… except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God!” (John 3:3).

     Both Mark and Luke wrote Gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus but neither ever heard Jesus teach as far as we can tell.  More precisely, Luke plainly did not intend for his Gospel to receive wide circulation because it was a personal letter to a Greek acquaintance of his.  “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them to us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you in order most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou has been instructed.”  (Luke 1:1-4). [Underline emphasis mine.]  For some strange reason, Luke’s account has a completely different genealogy of Jesus than the one given by the Matthew.  (Compare Matthew 1:1-17 with Luke 3:23-38.)  Matthew traces Jesus’ lineage through David’s son Solomon while Luke traces Jesus lineage through David’s son Nathan.  If you read Matthew’s account, there appear to be fewer generations from David to Jesus than Luke’s account.  Matthew says Jacob was Joseph’s father while Luke says that Heli was Joseph’s father.  Matthew was written prior to Luke and from the verses above it appears that Luke (who was not an eyewitness) read other works to write his own version of the Gospel of Jesus.  Luke was an educated medical doctor and would have been thorough in his investigation of the genealogy of Jesus.  It is hard to believe that he would not have read Matthew’s (an Apostle and eyewitness) account of Jesus’ genealogy.  Apparently other sources he read made him disagree with Matthew’s account – an obvious indication that Luke did not accept Matthew as the verbal word of God, nor did he intend for his work to ever be considered the word of God. Both genealogies are included to prove Jesus to be a descendent of David, a requirement for the Messiah, and both are equally worthless for that purpose if Jesus was born of a virgin, because they trace Joseph’s lineage, and not Mary’s.  And finally, Luke was an apologist for, and biographer of Paul and his teachings and his account would have reflected this.  Luke would have naturally included in his work the teachings of Jesus as interpreted by Paul, his teacher and companion.

     The Gospels were written several years after the circulation of most of Paul’s letters which had redefined the teachings of Jesus as we shall soon see.   In the years when the four Gospels included in the New Testament were written, there were many gospel accounts circulating. There was the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and even the Gospel of Judas Iscariot!  None, including the four in the New Testament, were considered sacred or were called the word of God.  Paul’s widely circulated letters had set the groundwork for the way early Christianity would be perceived.  Copyists of all the various gospel accounts made corrections and amplifications to the originals that they felt clarified the text.  The popularity of Paul’s interpretations makes it highly likely that his explanation of Jesus and his teachings would have been inserted repeatedly as copyists duplicated the originals.  

     I am giving fundamentalists and evangelicals the benefit of the doubt and taking their position that the four Gospels were written by the actual men whose name they bear.  This is a minority view among serious critics of the New Testament. It was common during the period when the New Testament was written, for obscure authors to pen their work anonymously and claim the author to be someone of repute and importance. This gave their work greater circulation and importance. It was a deceptive, yet common, practice among early Christian writers.  Using the view of Gospel authorship, however, Mark would have been a very small child when Jesus was engaged in ministry.  If he was an eyewitness (which is very doubtful) to the ministry of Jesus when he was a small child, it is not likely that he would have remembered enough to write an accurate account later.  Some have argued that while Mark was not a disciple of Jesus, and not an eyewitness, he was later a close personal aid to Simon Peter and wrote down the things he heard from Peter.  Some even say that Peter himself read Mark’s Gospel and approved of its circulation.  However two prominent early church fathers, Clement and Irenaeus, both said that Peter neither approved nor disapproved Mark’s Gospel.  Neither quoted it extensively and both seemed concerned that the Gospel of Mark was a product of the early alleged heretical group known as the Gnostics.

     In the final analysis, I don’t believe any of the Gospel writers ever believed nor intended for their stories to be taken as the literal word of God.  If they did, why didn’t they just say so?  Furthermore, in any modern court of law, as a matter of acceptable testimony, both Mark and Luke would be dismissed as hearsay testimony.  Neither were eyewitnesses of the words and works of Jesus’ ministry.  In addition, John would be dismissed because of the incredible amount of time that passed from the occurrence of the events and his recording of the events.  You might say that the statute of limitations had long run out for John to be an effective witness.  That leaves only Matthew as an early writer and eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus and any honest scholar of that Gospel will admit to various differences in the surviving copies of Matthew. Since Matthew obviously copied many passages from Mark – some word for word, we must conclude that the real Apostle Matthew did not write the Gospel, or he had long forgotten it and copied Mark’s work.