There was the Gospel of Mary
Magdalene, the Gospel of Simon Peter, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of
Barnabas. One sect of Christianity—the Gnostics—believed that the disciple
Thomas was not only Jesus’s twin brother but also the founder of churches
across Asia. Christianity was in chaos in its early days, with some sects
declaring the others heretics. And then, in the early 300s, Emperor Constantine
of Rome declared he had become follower of Jesus, ended his empire’s
persecution of Christians and set out to reconcile the disputes among the
sects. Constantine was a brutal sociopath who murdered his eldest son, decapitated
his brother-in-law and killed his wife by boiling her alive, and that was
after
he proclaimed that he had converted from worshipping the sun god to being a
Christian. Yet he also changed the course of Christian history, ultimately
influencing which books made it into the New Testament.
By that point, the primary disputes centered on whether Jesus was God—the
followers of a priest named Arius said no, that God created Jesus. But the
Bishop of Alexander said yes, that Jesus had existed throughout all eternity.
The dispute raged on in the streets of Constantinople, with
everyone—shopkeepers, bakers and tradesmen—arguing about which view was right.
Constantine, in a reflection of his shallow understanding of theology, was
annoyed that what he considered a minor dispute was causing such turmoil, and
feared that it weaken him politically. So he decided to force an agreement on
the question.
Cody Walsh, 18, (left) and Eric Hoglund, 21 (center)
dance and sing during the opening musical act of the non-denominational prayer
and fasting event, entitled "The Response" at Reliant Stadium August
6, 2011 in Houston. Brandon Thibodeaux/Getty
Constantine convened a meeting in the lakeside town of Nicaea. Invitations
were sent around the world to bishops and leaders of various sects, although
not all of them. The group included the educated and the illiterate, zealots
and hermits. Constantine arrived wearing jewels and gold on his scarlet robe
and pearls on his crown, eager to discuss the true essence of a poor carpenter
who had died 300 years before.
Things that are today accepted without much thought were adopted or
reinforced at Nicaea. For example, the Old Testament was clear in declaring
that God rested on the seventh day, making it the Sabbath. The seventh day of
the week is Saturday, the day of Jewish worship and rest. (Jesus himself
invoked the holiness of the Jewish Sabbath.) The word Sunday does not appear in
the Bible, either as the Sabbath or anything else. But four years before
Nicaea, Constantine declared Sunday as a day of rest in honor of the sun god.
At Nicaea, rules were adopted regarding the proper positions for prayer on
Sundays—standing, not kneeling; nothing was said of the Jewish Sabbath or
Saturday. Many theologians and Christian historians believe that it was at this
moment, to satisfy Constantine and his commitment to his empire’s many sun
worshippers, that the Holy Sabbath was moved by one day, contradicting the
clear words of what ultimately became the Bible. And while the Bible mentioned
nothing about the day of Jesus’s birth, the birth of the sun god was celebrated
on December 25 in Rome; Christian historians of the 12th century wrote that it
was the pagan holiday that led to the designation of that date for Christmas.
The majority of the time at Nicaea was spent debating whether Jesus was a
man who was the son of God, as Arius proclaimed, or God himself, as the church
hierarchy maintained. The followers of Arius marshaled evidence from the
letters of Paul and other Christian writings. In the Gospel of Mark, speaking
of the Second Coming, Jesus said, “But of that day and that hour knoweth no
man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”
In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he wrote that “there is but one God,
the Father…and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.” In his letter to Timothy,
Paul wrote, “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the
man Christ Jesus.”
Paul’s writings are consistent in his reference to God as one being and
Jesus as his son. Same with the Gospel of Matthew, where Peter tells Jesus that
he is the “Son of the living God” and Jesus responds that “Flesh and blood hath
not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.’’ Jesus even
called out to God as his “Father” as he was dying on the cross.
But Constantine sided with those who believed Jesus was both God and man,
so a statement of belief, called the Nicene Creed, was composed to proclaim
that. Those who refused to sign the statement were banished. Others were
slaughtered. After they had returned home and were far from Rome, some who
signed the document later sent letters to Constantine saying they had only done
so out of fear for their lives.
About 50 years later, in A.D. 381, the Romans held another meeting, this
time in Constantinople. There, a new agreement was reached—Jesus wasn’t two, he
was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Nicene Creed was rewritten, and
those who refused to sign the statement were banished, and another wholesale
slaughter began, this time of those who rejected the Trinity, a concept that is
nowhere in the original Greek manuscripts and is often contradicted by it.
To this day, congregants in Christian churches at Sunday services worldwide
recite the Nicene Creed, which serves as affirmation of their belief in the
Trinity. It is doubtful many of them know the words they utter are not from the
Bible, and were the cause of so much bloodshed. (Some modern Christians attempt
to use the Gospel of John to justify the Trinity—even though it doesn’t
explicitly mention it—but they are relying on bad translations of the Greek and
sentences inserted by scribes.)
To understand how what we call the Bible was made, you must see how the
beliefs that became part of Christian orthodoxy were pushed into it by the Holy
Roman Empire. By the fifth century, the political and theological councils
voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New
Testament. With the power of Rome behind them, the practitioners of this
proclaimed orthodoxy wiped out other sects and tried to destroy every copy of
their Gospels and other writings.
And recall that they were already working from a fundamentally flawed
document. Errors and revisions by copyists had been written in by the fifth
century, and several books of the New Testament, including some attributed to
Paul, are now considered forgeries perpetrated by famous figures in
Christianity to bolster their theological arguments. It is small wonder, then, that
there are so many contradictions in the New Testament. Some of those
contradictions are trivial, but some create huge problems for evangelicals
insisting they are living by the word of God.
Members of the Westboro
Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., stage a protest outside the non-denominational
prayer and fasting event, entitled "The Response" at Reliant Stadium,
Aug. 6, 2011 in Houston. Brandon Thibodeaux/Getty
No Three Kings?
To illustrate how even seemingly trivial contradictions can have profound
consequences, let’s recount the story of Christmas.
Jesus was born in a house in Bethlehem. His father, Joseph, had been
planning to divorce Mary until he dreamed that she’d conceived a child through
the Holy Spirit. No wise men showed up for the birth, and no brilliant star
shone overhead. Joseph and his family then fled to Egypt, where they remained
for years. Later, they returned to Israel, hoping to live in Judea, but that
proved problematic, so they settled in a small town called Nazareth.
Not the version you are familiar with? No angel appearing to Mary? Not born
in a manger? No one saying there was no room at the inn? No gold, frankincense
or myrrh? Fleeing to Egypt? First living in Nazareth when Jesus was a child,
not before he was born?
You may not recognize this version, but it is a story of Jesus’s birth
found in the Gospels. Two Gospels—Matthew and Luke—tell the story of when Jesus
was born, but in quite different ways. Contradictions abound. In creating the
familiar Christmas tale, Christians took a little bit of one story, mixed it
with a little bit of the other and ignored all of the contradictions in the
two. The version recounted above does the same; it uses parts of those stories
from the two Gospels that are usually ignored. So there are two blended
versions and two Gospel versions. Take your pick.
There are also deep, logical flaws here that should be apparent to anyone
giving the Bible a close read. Many Christians read the Old Testament as having
several prophecies that the Messiah will be a descendant of David, a towering
biblical figure who was the second ruler of the Kingdom of Israel. And both
Matthew and Luke offer that proof—both trace Jesus’s lineage to his father
Joseph and from there back to David.
Except…Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father. Jesus is the son of God, remember?
Moreover, the genealogies recounted in the two Gospels are different, each
identifying different men as Joseph’s father and grandfather. Mary, the mother
of Jesus, can be the only parent with a bloodline to David, but neither Gospel
makes any mention of that.
The stories in the four Gospels of Jesus’s death and resurrection differ as
well. When brought before Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks
only two words and is never declared innocent. In the Gospel of John, Jesus
engages in extended conversations with Pilate, who repeatedly proclaims this
Jewish prisoner to be innocent and deserving of release. (The Book of John was
the last to be written and came at a time when gentiles in Rome were gaining
dramatically more influence over Christianity; that explains why the Romans are
largely absolved from responsibility for Jesus’s death and blame instead is
pointed toward the Jews. That has been one of the key bases for centuries of
anti-Semitism.)
And who went to anoint Jesus in his tomb? In Matthew, it was Mary and
another woman named Mary, and an angel met them there. In Mark, it was Mary
Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, and a young man met them. In
John, it was Mary alone; no one met her. As told in Matthew, the disciples go
to Galilee after the Crucifixion and see Jesus ascend to heaven; in Acts,
written by Luke, the disciples stay in Jerusalem and see Jesus ascend from
there.
Some of the contradictions are conflicts between what evangelicals consider
absolute and what Jesus actually said. For example, evangelicals are always
talking about family values. But to Jesus, family was an impediment to reaching
God. In the Gospel of Matthew, he states, “And every one that hath forsaken
houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or
lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit
everlasting life.”
Then there is what many fundamentalist Christians hold to be the most
important of all elements of the Bible: the Second Coming of Christ and the end
of the world. What modern evangelicals want to believe cannot be reconciled
with the Bible. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says of the Apocalypse, “This
generation shall not pass, till all these things be done”—in other words, the
people alive in his time would see the end of the world. Paul in 1 Corinthians
is even clearer; he states, “The time is short.” He then instructs other
Christians, given that the end is coming, to live as if they had no wives, and,
if they buy things, to treat them as if they were not their own. Some
evangelicals counter these clear words by quoting 2 Peter as saying that, for
God, one day is like 1,000 years.
Two problems: That does nothing to counter what either Jesus or Paul said.
And even in ancient times, many Christian leaders proclaimed 2 Peter to be a
forgery, an opinion almost universally shared by biblical scholars today.
None of this is meant to demean the Bible, but all of it is fact.
Christians angered by these facts should be angry with the Bible, not the
messenger.
God Wrestling Dragons
The next time someone tells you the biblical story of Creation is true, ask
that person, “Which one?”
Few of the Christian faithful seem to know the Bible contains multiple
creation stories. The first appears on Page 1, Genesis 1, so that is the
version most people tend to embrace. However, it isn’t hard to find the second
version: It’s Genesis 2, which usually starts on the same page. Genesis 1
begins with the words “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the
earth”; Genesis 2 starts with “This is the account of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.”
Careful readers have long known that the two stories contradict each other.
Genesis 1 begins with expanses of water that God separates, creating the earth
between them. Genesis 2 describes a world without enough water, which is then
introduced. Vegetation exists before the sun and the stars in Genesis 1; it’s
the other way around in Genesis 2. In Genesis 1, man is created after plants
and animals; in Genesis 2, plants and animals come after man. In Genesis 1,
Adam and Eve are created together; in Genesis 2, Eve is created out of Adam’s
rib.
This is nothing unusual for the Old Testament. In fact, even though many
evangelical Christians insist that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old
Testament (including Deuteronomy, which talks about Moses having died and been
buried), biblical scholars have concluded that two Jewish sects wrote many of
the books. Each prepared its version of Old Testament, and the two were joined
together without any attempt to reconcile the many contradictions.
These duplications are known as “doublets.” “In most cases,” says Richard
Elliott Friedman, a biblical scholar at the University of Georgia, “one of the
versions of the doublet story would refer to the deity by the divine name
Yahweh, and the other version of the story would refer to the deity simply as God.”
Once the different narratives appearing in the Bible were divided by the word
they used to reference God, other terms and characteristics turned up
repeatedly in one or the other group. “This tended to support the hypothesis
that someone had taken two different old source documents, cut them up and
woven them together” in the first five books of the Old Testament, Friedman
says.
The doublets make reading the Old Testament the literary equivalent of a
hall of mirrors. Take the Genesis story of Noah and the flood. In Genesis 6,
God tells Noah to build an ark and load it with animals, and “Noah did
everything just as God commanded him.” Then, in Genesis 7, God again tells Noah
to load the ark with animals, and “Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.”
Under the first set of instructions, Noah was to bring two of every kind of
creature onto the ark. But the directions changed the second time, with Noah
told to bring seven of every kind of clean animal and two of every kind of
unclean animal.
It gets stranger. In Genesis 7:7-12, Noah and his family board the ark, and
the flood begins. Then, in the very next verse, Genesis 7:13, Noah and his
family board the ark again, and the flood begins a second time. The water
flooded the earth for 40 days (Genesis 7:17), or 150 days (Genesis 7:24). But
Noah and his family stayed on the ark for a year (Genesis 8:13).
Even well-known stories have contradictory versions. As every child knows,
David killed Goliath; it’s right there in 1 Samuel 17:50. But don’t tell those
children to read 2 Samuel 21:19 unless you want them to get really confused.
There, it says in many versions of the Bible that Elhanan killed Goliath. Other
Bibles, though, fixed that to make it coincide with the words in 1 Chronicles,
were Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath.
These conflicting accounts are only serious matters because evangelicals
insist the Old Testament is a valid means of debunking science. But as these
example show, the Bible can’t stop debunking itself.
In fact, the Bible has three creation models, and some experts maintain
there are four. In addition to the two in Genesis, there is one referenced in
the Books of Isaiah, Psalms and Job. In this version, the world is created in
the aftermath of a great battle between God and what theologians say is a
dragon in the waters called Rahab. And Rahab is not the only mythical creature
that either coexisted with God or was created by him. God plays with a sea
monster named Leviathan. Unicorns appear in the King James Bible (although that
wasn’t the correct translation of the mythical creature’s Hebrew name). There
are fiery serpents and flying serpents and cockatrices—a two-legged dragon with
a rooster’s head (that word was later changed to “viper” in some
English-language Bibles). And in Exodus, magicians who work for the Pharaoh of
Egypt are able to change staffs into snakes and water into blood. In Genesis,
the “Sons of God” marry the “daughters of man” and have children; the “sons of
God” are angels, as is made clear in the Books of Job and Psalms.
Evangelicals cite Genesis to challenge the science taught in classrooms,
but don’t like to talk about those Old Testament books with monsters and magic.
Workers paste a public
service announcement over a billboard with an anti-homosexuality message on Bay
Street in Staten Island, N.Y., on March 8, 2000. The controversial billboard,
with a quotation from the Bible, was paid for by an undisclosed party and was
covered over by the billboard company after complaints.
The declaration in 1 Timothy—as recounted in the Living Bible, the New
American Standard Bible, the New International Version Bible and others—could
not be more clear: Those who “practice homosexuality” will not inherit the
Kingdom of God. But the translation there is odd, in part because the word homosexual
didn’t even exist until more than 1,800 years after when 1 Timothy was
supposed to have been written. So how did it get into the New Testament?
Simple: The editors of these modern Bibles just made it up. Like so many
translators and scribes before them, they had a religious conviction, something
they wanted to say that wasn’t stated clearly enough in the original for their
tastes. And so they manipulated sentences to reinforce their convictions.
The original Bible verse in Koiné used ἀρσενοκοῖται for what has been translated as “homosexual.” For the Latin Bible, it
was as masculorum concubitores. The King James Version translated that
as “them that defile themselves with mankind.” Perhaps that means men who
engage in sex with other men, perhaps not.
The next thing to check here is whether 1 Timothy was based on a forgery.
And the answer to that is a resounding yes. In 1807, a German scholar named
Friedrich Schleiermacher published a letter observing that 1 Timothy used
arguments that clashed with other letters written by Paul. Moreover, 1 Timothy
attacks false teachings, but they are not the types of teachings prevalent when
Paul was writing—instead, they are more akin to the beliefs of the Gnostics, a
sect that did not exist until long after Paul’s death. And at times, whoever
wrote this letter uses the same words as Paul but means something completely
different by them. Most biblical scholars agree that Paul did not write 1
Timothy.
But suppose for a moment that 1 Timothy was written by Paul, and that
“defile themselves” does refer to homosexuality. In that case, evangelical
Christians and biblical literalists still have a lot of trouble on their hands.
Contrary to what so many fundamentalists believe, outside of the emphasis on
the Ten Commandments, sins aren’t ranked. The New Testament doesn’t proclaim
homosexuality the most heinous of all sins. No, every sin is equal in its
significance to God. In 1 Timothy, Paul, or whoever wrote it, condemns the
disobedient, liars and drunks. In other words, for evangelicals who want to use
this book of the Bible to condemn homosexuality, most frat boys in America are
committing sins on par with being gay. But you rarely hear about parents
banishing their kids for getting trashed on Saturday night.
Now let’s talk about how 1 Timothy deals with women. U.S. Representative
Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican, slammed gay people as bullies last
March for opposing legislation that would have allowed Arizona businesses to
discriminate against same-sex couples. Well, according to the Bible, Bachmann
should shut up and sit down. In fact, every female politician who insists the
New Testament is the inerrant word of God needs to resign immediately or admit
that she is a hypocrite.
That’s because 1 Timothy is one of the most virulently anti-woman books of
the New Testament, something else that sets it apart from other letters by
Paul. In the King James Version, it says women must dress modestly, can’t
embroider their hair, can’t wear pearls or gold and have to stay silent.
Moreover, they can’t hold any position of authority over men and aren’t even
allowed to be teachers—meaning, if they truly believe the Bible is the inerrant
word of God, women like Bachmann can’t be in politics. In fact, while 1 Timothy
has just one parenthetical clause that can be interpreted as being about
homosexuality, it contains six verses on the shortcomings of women and the
limitations on what they are allowed to do.
Many Christians point to other parts of the New Testament when denouncing
homosexuality. Romans, another letter attributed to Paul, is a popular choice.
In the King James Bible, it condemns men who lust in their hearts for each
other, a translation that holds up pretty well when compared with the earliest
Greek versions. And scholars agree that Romans is a real letter written by
Paul.
700 Club co-host Pat Robertson speaks at a press
conference, Feb. 3, 1998, at the CBN studio in Virginia Beach, Va., about the
impending execution of Karla Faye Tucker, who was put to death later that night
in Texas. Bill
Tiernam/The Virginian-Pilot/AP
In other words, Romans is real Gospel,
and what it has to say can’t be questioned by those who call themselves
biblical literalists. Which means televangelist Pat Robertson should prepare
himself for an eternity in hell. On his television show The 700 Club,
Robertson recently went on a tirade about Barack Obama and, as he is wont to
do, prayed for help. “God, we need the angels! We need your help!” Robertson
said. “We need to do something, to pray to be delivered from this president.”
And with that, Pat Robertson sinned. Because in Romans—so often used to
condemn homosexuality—there is a much longer series of verses about how the
righteous are supposed to behave toward people in government authority. It
shows up in Romans 13:1-2, which in the International Standard Bible says, “The
existing authorities have been established by God, so that whoever resists the
authorities opposes what God has established, and those who resist will bring
judgment on themselves.”
So yes, there is one verse in Romans about homosexuality…and there are
eight verses condemning those who criticize the government. In other words, all
fundamentalist Christians who decry Obama have sinned as much as they believe
gay people have.
It doesn’t end there. In the same section of Romans that is arguably
addressing homosexuality, Paul also condemns debating (all of Congress is
damned?), being prideful, disobeying parents and deceiving people (yes, all of
Congress is damned.) There is no bold print or underlining for the section
dealing with homosexuality—Paul treats it as something as sinful as pride or
debate.
The story is the same in the last New Testament verse cited by
fundamentalists who scorn homosexuals. Again, it is a letter from Paul, called
1 Corinthians. The translation is good, and the experts believe it was written
by him. But fundamentalists who rely on this better stay out of court—Paul
condemns bringing lawsuits, at least against other Christians. Adultery, being
greedy, lying—all of these are declared as sins on par with homosexuality.
Of course, there are plenty of fundamentalist Christians who have no idea
where references to homosexuality are in the New Testament, much less what the
surrounding verses say. And so they always fall back on Leviticus, the Old
Testament book loaded with dos and don’ts. They seem to have the words
memorized about it being an abomination for a man to lie with a man as he does
with a woman. And every time they make that argument, they demonstrate that
they know next to nothing about the New Testament.
A fundamental conflict in the New Testament—arguably the most important one
in the Bible—centers on whether the Laws of Moses were supplanted by the
crucifixion of Christ. The basic tension there was that Paul led a church in
Antioch where he attempted to bring gentiles into Christianity by espousing a
liberal interpretation of the requirements to follow the Laws of
Moses—circumcision, eating kosher food and other rules spelled out in the Old
Testament. Hundreds of miles away, disciples of Jesus and his brother James
headed a church in Jerusalem. When they heard about the goings-on in Antioch, a
debate ensued: Did gentiles have to become Jews first (like Jesus) and follow
Mosaic Law before they could be accepted as Christians?
Some of the original disciples said yes, an opinion that seems to find
support in words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “Do not think
that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets....” The author of Matthew made
it clear that Christians must keep Mosaic Law like the most religious Jews, in
order to achieve salvation. But Paul, particularly in Galatians and Romans,
says a person’s salvation is won by his or her faith in Christ’s death and
resurrection—nothing more. Those who try to follow Mosaic Law, Paul believed,
risked losing salvation.
In other words, Orthodox Jews who follow Mosaic Law can use Leviticus to
condemn homosexuality without being hypocrites. But fundamentalist Christians
must choose: They can either follow Mosaic Law by keeping kosher, being
circumcised, never wearing clothes made of two types of thread and the like. Or
they can accept that finding salvation in the Resurrection of Christ means that
Leviticus is off the table.
Which raises one final problem for fundamentalists eager to condemn
homosexuals or anyone else: If they accept the writings of Paul and believe all
people are sinners, then salvation is found in belief in Christ and the
Resurrection. For everyone. There are no exceptions in the Bible for sins that
evangelicals really don’t like.
So apparently, God doesn’t need the help of fundamentalists in determining
what should be done in the afterlife with the prideful, the greedy, the
debaters or even those homosexuals. Which could well be why Jesus cautioned his
followers against judging others while ignoring their own sins. In fact, he had
a specific word for people obsessed with the sins of others. He called them
hypocrites.
Members of the Pentecostal Church of God, a faith healing sect,
surround a woman who has "Got the Spirit" as a man holds a snake
above her head in Evarts, Ky. on Aug. 22, 1944. AP
They Haven’t a Prayer
In August 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry hosted a massive prayer rally in
Houston at what was then known as Reliant Stadium, where the city’s
pro-football team plays. Joined by 30,000 fellow Christians, Perry stepped to a
podium, his face projected on a giant screen behind him. He closed his eyes,
bowed his head and boomed out a long prayer asking God to make America a better
place. His fellow believers stood, kneeled, cried and yelled, “Amen.”
Recently, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal announced he would be holding his
massive prayer rally at a sports arena in Baton Rouge. More than 100,000
evangelical pastors have been invited.
Jesus would have been horrified. At least, that’s what the Bible says.
It is one of the most incomprehensible contradictions between the behavior
of evangelicals and the explicit words of the Bible. Prayer shows—and there is
really no other word for these—are held every week. If they are not at sports
arenas with Republican presidential hopefuls, they are on Sunday morning
television shows at mega-churches holding tens of thousands of the faithful.
They raise their arms and sway, crying and pleading in prayer.
But Jesus specifically preached against this at the Sermon on the Mount,
the longest piece of teaching by him in the New Testament. Specifically, as
recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus spoke of those who made large public
displays of their own religiosity. In fact, performance prayer events closely
mimic the depictions in early Christian texts of prayer services held by the
Pharisees and Sadducees, two of the largest religious movements in Judea during
Jesus’s life. And throughout the Gospels, Jesus condemns these groups using
heated language, with part of his anger targeted at their public prayer.
While the words in the King James Bible might be a bit confusing because it
is not written in modern English, the New Revised Standard Version is a good
substitute here. In it, Jesus is quoted as saying “Beware of practicing your
piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward
from your Father in heaven.”
But Jesus says much more, specifically cautioning against the kind of
public performance prayer that has become all the rage among evangelicals of
late. The verse in Matthew continues quoting Jesus, who says, “Whenever you
pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the
synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly
I tell you, they have received their reward.”
Instead, Jesus says the truly righteous should pray alone and in secret, in
a room with the door shut. “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you,’’
Jesus is quoted as saying.
Indeed, in the dozens of discussions in the Bible about prayer, the vast
majority focus on God’s ability to know what a person wants. In the New
Testament, it is often portrayed as a deeply personal affair, with prayers
uttered in prison cells to a God who stays alongside the oppressed.
Moreover, babbling on as Rick Perry and so many like him have about faith
and country and the blessings of America runs counter to everything that Jesus
says about prayer in the Bible. “When you are praying, do not heap up empty
phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of
their many words,’’ Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew. “Do not be like them,
for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
Because God knows what someone needs without being asked, there is no
reason for long, convoluted prayers. Therefore, Jesus says in both Matthew and
Luke, people who wish to pray should only say the Lord’s Prayer. Of course,
there is the problem that the Lord’s Prayer cited in those two Gospels comes in
two versions, so Christians have to choose one or the other.
It seems almost a miracle that those who effortlessly transform Paul’s
statement about “them that defile themselves with mankind” into “homosexual”
can ignore the clear, simple words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. What’s
most amazing is that, unlike so many questions about the Bible, the
instructions on how and where to pray are not only not contradicted; they are
reinforced time and again.
The closest Jesus came to public prayer in the Bible was when he was
feeding thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish. This story is
recounted in each of the Gospels, and each time, Jesus is depicted as either
giving thanks to God or looking to heaven and blessing the food. But he is also
depicted as praying in all four Gospels, and each time, Jesus does so after
heading off to be alone.
Some evangelicals have attempted to explain away this contradiction between
the words of the Bible in Matthew and modern public prayer performances by
saying Jesus condemned only mass prayer, when the people doing it had made that
choice just to be seen. But with governors projected on giant, high-definition
televisions, with thousands packed into sports stadiums weeping and waving,
with thousands more doing their prayers on TV at mega-churches, it’s hard to
see what possible reason might exist other than to be seen. God, the Bible
makes clear, didn’t need anyone to drive to a football stadium so he could hear
them.
Which leads to an obvious question: Why don’t more Christians oppose prayer
in school? If these people truly believe that the Bible is the Word of God,
then their children should be taught the Lord’s Prayer, brought to their rooms
and allowed to pray alone.
That answer doesn’t lend itself to big protests or angry calls for
impeaching judges. But it does follow the instructions from the Gospels. And
isn’t that supposed to be the point?
Judge Not
So why study the Bible at all? Since it’s loaded with contradictions and
translation errors and wasn’t written by witnesses and includes words added by
unknown scribes to inject Church orthodoxy, should it just be abandoned?
No. This examination is not an attack on the Bible or Christianity.
Instead, Christians seeking greater understanding of their religion should view
it as an attempt to save the Bible from the ignorance, hatred and bias that has
been heaped upon it. If Christians truly want to treat the New Testament as the
foundation of the religion, they have to know it. Too many of them seem to read
John Grisham novels with greater care than they apply to the book they consider
to be the most important document in the world.
But the history, complexities and actual words of the Bible can’t be
ignored just to line it up with what people want to believe, based
simply on what friends and family and ministers tell them. Nowhere in the
Gospels or Acts of Epistles or Apocalypses does the New Testament say it is the
inerrant word of God. It couldn’t—the people who authored each section had no
idea they were composing the Christian Bible, and they were long dead before
what they wrote was voted by members of political and theological committees to
be the New Testament.
The Bible is a very human book. It was written, assembled, copied and
translated by people. That explains the flaws, the contradictions, and the
theological disagreements in its pages. Once that is understood, it is possible
to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek
manuscripts, which are the bad translations, and what one book says in
comparison to another, and then try to discern the message for yourself.
And embrace what modern Bible experts know to be the true sections of the
New Testament. Jesus said, Don’t judge. He condemned those who pointed out the
faults of others while ignoring their own. And he proclaimed, “Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”
That’s a good place to start.
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