Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament (3 page)

If we return again to the Sermon on the Mount of Olives, a continuance of his speech, the part where Jesus promises a heavenly return before the then current generation would need to make a bucket list, Jesus warns:

False prophets, huh? Ok, Jesus we will keep an eye out for them when they come. Wait! I think we found our false prophet, ladies and gentleman. Possibly, a further reason as to why the Jews were less than impressed with Jesus, and let’s face it, they were well adept in the prophet business, having identified sixteen of them in the Old Testament from Isaiah to Malachi. Thus, we can presume they knew a prophet when they saw one. Possibly, even better than they can spot a real estate opportunity in lower Manhattan. Thus we can presume that Jesus was as impressive to the Jews as a white man showering in a Jamaican gym.

Further illuminating, is the fact that John makes no reference to the promise of Jesus’ second coming in his gospel account. Ask yourself, why? Well, the glaringly obvious reason is the Gospel of John was written, approximately, in 100 AD, which is almost two generations after Jesus had died! As such, this promise would have made little sense, as the original generation was, by that time, in a state of heavy decomposition.

This is why the Apostle John went to such extraordinary lengths to promote the idea of Jesus’ supposed divinity. In doing so, he purposely distanced himself from the Synoptic Gospels, by claiming that Jesus was, in fact, God in the flesh. Obviously, when your unique selling point has been scuttled as a consequence of being an obvious fallacy, a new doctrine of divine hope has to be packaged with a pretty new divine ribbon, which is effectively what John did.

Moreover, Jesus’ promise to return, “before the current generation would pass” is not the only time Jesus sells his followers up the proverbial river in the New Testament. Unfortunately, for the two billion plus Christians of the world, there are multiple examples, including:

The above passage is Jesus speaking to his apostles; he tells them that he will return before they are able to spread the word throughout all of the cities in Israel. Well, the word has now spread throughout all of Israel, and Jesus is yet to return. (Try to find a Jew in Jerusalem that hasn’t at least heard of Jesus. I dare you)

Matthew writes that the Pharisees and teachers of the Law approach Jesus, asking for a sign to prove that he is who he says he is. Jesus responds sharply:

Jesus, effectively, is telling the Pharisees that the only sign he will give is his resurrection three days after he his dead. Did they, the Pharisees, see this as a sign and a reason to convert? No, and why would they; Jesus was adept only as a reciprocating big talker. Only Jesus’ disciples, allegedly, saw it. But it was not Jesus’ disciples asking for a sign, it was the Pharisees, the Pharisees living in the then present generation, therefore we can strike this down as another false promise.

Now, as the baseball-loving guy that I am, I’m tempted to just say, “Jesus, three strikes buddy, you’re outta here!” But then again, that wouldn’t make for a very entertaining book, now, would it? And we’ve still got so much more of Jesus’ personality, which lays unread by the mostly scripturally and historically ignorant masses of Christianity.

We’ll delve later into the ill-tempered nature of Jesus, but one such example that invokes the ire of ‘meek n mild’ Jesus is the scene between him and the Pharisees and Jewish elders. Jesus lets fly with further promises and prophecies during this barbed exchange:

Ooh, did that give you goose bumps, too?

Now, during the time of Jesus, the town of Nineveh had ceased to exist for nearly 600 years. The former city was nothing but a sand pit. This prophecy states that the dead shall rise in judgment with this generation. Exactly which generation was he referring to? Specifically, those Jesus referred to as a, ‘wicked and adulterous generation’. And who was seeking the sign? The Pharisees. That was the generation he was referring to, that was the generation he was speaking to. Generation has a very special and specific meaning in the original Greek, and cannot possibly refer to a future generation in any tense that could be translated as ‘this generation’.

Later in Matthew, Jesus is before the Sanhedrin. The Jewish elders had assembled to find evidence that they could pin on Jesus so as to expedite a death sentence for blasphemy against him. The High Priest said to Jesus, “I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” Jesus replies:

Ooh, goose bumps again!

In this instance, Jesus is talking directly to the High Priest. He has promised him that he shall see this happen. Well, the high priest has been dead almost 2,000 years, and therefore we have our fifth deception.

Jesus promised his disciples, repeatedly, that prayer works:

However, we know with scientific certainty that nothing quite has the failure rate of prayer, unless, of course, God hates amputees. Every day, tens of thousands of Christians claim that they’ve been the beneficiaries of Jesus’ miraculous intervention. Whether the believer received the job promotion, finished first in his math’s exam, or finally snared the girl of his dreams. They prayed for their goal and they received. Thus strengthening their belief in the Lord Almighty. But what of the ‘other’ guy, a Christian too, that missed out on the girl? Did God like him less? Does God show favor? This is what we in the ‘I’m smarter than a prayerful Christian’ game; call “confirmation bias.” But according to the Bible, God doesn’t play favorites:

Of course, this is contradiction to the book of Genesis whereby God favored Abel over Cain, but that’s a whole another story. Let’s return to the failure of prayer.

Holding a microscope to the effectiveness of prayer we can make the following conclusion, if prayer works then God hates people who have lost a limb, or who were born without a full set of arms or legs. This hypothesis is so robust that one atheist website posted a US$100,000 reward for any proof that demonstrates God has restored the limb of an amputee via prayer. Quite tellingly, in the more than two years this challenge has stood, not one religious believer has stepped forward to claim the reward money. Who me, surprised? Also, considering that there are more than 50,000 new amputees courtesy of the violent and bloody conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overwhelming majority of which claim to be Christians, there should be no shortage of takers for an easy few extra bucks. Alas, the prize remains unclaimed.

The amputee question allows us to critically analyze the effectiveness of prayer, and the results are not in the favor of the ‘big guy’. The result of applying this blowtorch is that it eliminates the two clouds of uncertainty related to prayer; ambiguity and coincidence.

A clever hypothetical scenario put forward by one particular website, WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com, illustrates this brilliantly:

Let’s imagine that your doctor has diagnosed you with an aggressive form of bowel cancer. You opt to take the chemotherapy that your doctor has recommended. As this god-awful remedy of radiation exposure begins you are naturally terrified at the prospect that the number of your days on earth are dramatically falling.

Assuming you are a Christian, you begin to pray to God or Jesus to circumvent all natural laws and enact some divine intervention. So, you pray your ass off, morning and night, before, during and after surgery that your heavenly father will spare you an early visit to the grave… even though, as a Christian, you’re taught to believe that you’ll go to heaven in the end anyway (I never quite understood why Christians were so afraid of death). I digress.

A few months after the chemotherapy treatment has concluded, your doctor is delighted to tell you that the cancer has gone into remission and that all signs of the life threatening disease have now vanished. Naturally, you give thanks to God for heeding your prayers and your conviction and faith in Jesus is stronger than ever before. Praise the Lord!

But how do we objectively rationalize the above scenario? What saved you from seemingly imminent doom? Well, there are several possibilities. Was it the surgery? The radiation therapy, maybe? How about your body’s natural defenses? Or, was it that God circumvented all natural laws in order to directly treat your bowel cancer (but won’t lift a finger for the millions living with famine and disease in Africa)?

On the surface the answer to this question seems ambiguous. God may have miraculously cured your disease, as many Christians would believe. But if we presume God is fiction then it had have been one or a combination of the chemotherapy, surgery and/or your natural immune system that cured you.

There is only one way to remove coincidence of prayer from this scenario and that is to eliminate ambiguity. In an unambiguous situation, there is no potential for coincidence and because there is no ambiguity we can actually ‘know’ whether God is answering the prayer or not. The examination of amputees allows us to completely remove all ambiguity, and in doing so, creating an unambiguous situation where we can see with our own eyes that prayer never ever works.

Therefore, we can be sure that whenever a believer has proclaimed instances of miraculous healing through prayer we can be certain that the possibility of coincidence was present. What we find is that whenever we create an unambiguous situation like this and look at the results of prayer, prayer never works. God never answers prayers if there is no possibility of coincidence.

In returning to CS Lewis’ remarks once more, we can conclude that if Jesus lied, as evidently he did, then he cannot be Lord, by process of elimination. Therefore by his standard, Jesus was a liar and a lunatic. ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’

There is your title…

Now let us move forth and pull apart the fabric of Christianity, thread by thread, using the Gospels and Saint Paul as our collaborators. This will be easier than you think, and oh so much fun.

What I’m about to write in capital letters may come as a big surprise to you, especially if your theological or Bible study is limited to singing a few sweet psalms on Sundays. So brace yourself for a little mind-shift:

Did I just blow your mind? It did for me when I first discovered this fact, a fact that is openly (seemingly proudly) displayed in the scriptures. And I didn’t have to search some obscure ancient conspiracy documents to uncover this, it’s in black and white, written right there in the Holy book.