What is Christian morality? Part 11

roadsign for the soul - words words words

5:44-48 ....I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. You’ll then become children of your Father in the heavens. [God] causes the sun to rise on both the bad and the good, and sends rain on both the just and the unjust. Tell me, if you love those who love you, why should you be commended for that? Even the toll collectors do as much, don’t they? And if you greet only your friends, what have you done that is exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, don’t they? To sum up, you are to be unstinting in your generosity in the way your heavenly Father’s generosity is unstinting [see also Luke 6:27-28, Luke 6:34-35].

I’ve always liked the maxim that we should be judged not on how we treat our friends but on how we treat our enemies, but I never associated it with Jesus, I thought it was La Rochefoucauld or someone. The point being that it’s common sense – of course we treat our friends well, of course it’s therefore a good idea to work on our treatment of our enemies, or strangers. To work on your generosity is always good advice, and many ‘sages’ throughout history have given it.

Of course there’s a paradox here. If you really managed to love your enemies they wouldn’t be your enemies – or would they? The renowned antitheist Christopher Hitchens has a real go at the ‘love your enemies’ injunction, calling it suicidal, amongst other choice epithets, and he certainly has a point, but, looking at the phrase in context, we can find a more sympathetic interpretation. Jesus really does seem to be trying to get people to extend the range of their generosity, to consider whether there are good, or good enough reasons to consider certain people our enemies. Often when we make a decision that person x is our enemy, or is a ‘bad’ person, we shut down on them, refusing to listen, referring to our earlier decision. Jesus is arguably saying nothing more than this, that we shouldn’t be too hasty in our judgements, and that we shouldn’t revile people for being different.

On the other hand, if we look at the actual language used, Jesus does seem pretty decisive himself about good people and evil people. This heightens the paradox. Should we really love evil people?

The phrase ‘love your enemies’ has a somewhat similar logical form to the paradoxical phrase coined by the French anarchist Proudhon, ‘Property is theft’. Such phrases have a momentary cleverness, but are soon shown to chase their own tails or to disappear up their own arseholes. To say that property is theft is to legitimise theft and to illegitimise property – both sides of the equation are diminished to the point of meaninglessness. There’s a similar problem with ‘love your enemies’, for if you love your enemies equally with your friends – if you love everyone equally, then the term ‘love’ ceases to have any real meaning, not to mention the terms ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. So why would Jesus have said this? Well, why did Proudhon say property is theft? My favoured response is a rather boring one. They were both only human, they sometimes preferred the flashy to the deep, they didn’t think things through.

Returning to Hitchens’ comment that this philosophy is ‘suicidal’ – this is based on an entrenched attitude about enemies. Our enemies will always be our enemies, they cannot be otherwise. It reflects a kind of evolutionary perspective, where the word ‘enemy’ is synonymous with ‘predator’, someone who threatens our very existence, someone we must either avoid or overcome. It doesn’t seem very useful to love your predator. Indeed it seems suicidal, as Hitchens claims. Better to know your predators, to work out their weaknesses, and to build on your own strengths in combating them.

We humans are inordinately good at that of course, to the point that we have no predators, outside of our own species, to be afraid of. We ourselves have become the most deadly and efficient predators on the planet. Our realisation of this is causing us to rethink notions of predator and prey, and even enemies and friends. A subtle Christian might try to convince us that Jesus anticipated all this with ‘love your enemies’. He was a god, after all. But this would just be another example of seeking other-worldly sources for our own ever-changing and increasingly nuanced view of ourselves. We invest ancient moral statements with all the subtleties that we have gleaned from the intervening years. We do this all the time.

6:3-4 ...when you give to charity, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so your acts of charity may remain hidden. And your Father, who has an eye for the hidden, will applaud you.

Of course it’s impossible to keep your charitable or any other acts hidden from yourself, but the Jesus Seminar has a collective view that Jesus loved such paradoxical remarks. The idea, clearly, is that you shouldn’t do good works for the applause of others, but this is completely undermined by the claim that God will applaud you – thus assuming we still need applause to be charitable. Perhaps, though this is the moral message of Christianity in a nutshell. God will reward you for your good works. Is this the moral foundation of western civilization?

This sort of advice – don’t pray in public but in private, where God, who sees all that’s hidden, will applaud you, and forgive the failings of others because then God will forgive your failings – continues for several more verses. It of course captures the essence of all religious morality, that there are spirits or deities who are consumingly interested in human moral activities, who see clearly the good and bad in everyone and are able to dispense a proper and absolute justice at the end of things. It’s what you might call the ‘constant surveillance’ approach to morality. God’s cctv cameras are everywhere, get used to it and act accordingly.

What is Christian morality? Part 10

Obama disobeys Jesus

5:21-22 As you know, our ancestors were told, ‘You must not kill’ and ‘Whoever kills will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you: those who are angry with a companion will be brought before a tribunal. And those who say to a companion, ‘You moron,’ will be subject to the sentence of the court. And whoever says, ‘You idiot,’ deserves the fires of Gehenna.

Considering that Jesus himself got a bit shirty with his companion-disciples at times, especially in Mark’s version of events, this condemnation of ill-temper sounds a bit rough. I mean, if you can’t call your mate a moron, where’s the fun in life?

By the way, the term ‘Gehenna’, so much more evocative than ‘hell’, refers to a spot outside Jerusalem where the town’s rubbish was routinely burnt, along with the bodies of crims and the carcases of animals. Some of course dispute such a lowly truth, but they would, wouldn’t they?

5:23-24 So, even if you happen to be offering your gift at the altar and recall that your friend has some claim against you, leave your gift there at the altar. First go and be reconciled with your friend, and only then return and offer your gift.

For those who value friendship, this is a ‘nice’ piece of advice. It also seems typical of Jesus to value substance over form [unless I’m simply creating the Jesus I prefer], and to cock a snook at rigorous and traditional religious practice. Anyway, it’s one of the few of Jesus’s adjurations with which I would wholeheartedly concur.

5:27-28 As you know, we once were told, ‘You are not to commit adultery.’ But I tell you: Those who leer at a woman and desire her have already committed adultery with her in their hearts.

This is a tough one, but we can always rationalize our way out of it. In fact, it’s quite easy. Committing any crime in your heart is vastly removed from actually doing it. Murder is an obvious example. And we don’t punish anyone by law for anything they do ‘in their heart’, for very good reason. I wouldn’t like to guess how many women I’ve ‘committed adultery with’ [I prefer to think of it in fruitier terms] in my heart. Far more than in my bed, sadly. This whole business of thought-criminality is one that should be wholly rejected in my view – and generally it has been. Whether this remark has impacted on western morality, I can’t say. The thing is that lusting after someone who ‘belongs’ to someone, or who is happily devoted to someone else, or who doesn’t know you from a bar of soap, or who actively dislikes you, brings with it a sense of guilt as a matter of course, you feel you are imposing, though since you can convince yourself you’re not imposing that much, the guilt is minimalized and even lends a certain piquancy to the thoughts. Anyway, better a lustful thought than a murderous one. And of course the world of advertising and celebrity culture relies on lust and desire rather heavily – and a surer thing to rely on can hardly be found. I know of at least one female acquaintance who lusts after Barak Obama. Good luck to them I say. Anyway, Jesus just points out that lusting after someone is ‘adultery of the heart’, but he doesn’t call it a sin. Just don’t look at the tenth commandment.

5 33-37 Again, as you know, our ancestors were told, ‘You must not break an oath,’ and ‘Oaths sworn in the name of God must be kept.’ But I tell you: Don’t swear at all. Don’t invoke heaven, because it is the throne of God, and don’t invoke earth, because it is God’s footstool, and don’t invoke Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great king .You shouldn’t swear by your head either, since you aren’t able to turn a single hair either white or black. Rather, your responses should be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Anything that goes beyond this is inspired by the evil one.

Here’s another example of remarks attributed to Jesus that have been ignored by cherry-picking sermonizers down through the ages – though there have been Christians sects, modelled on a return to ‘the true word of Christ’, who have refused to take oaths for religious reasons [e.g. the Waldensians]. And how could any Christian argue with them? In fact, considering the last line here, there’s not much wiggle room for true believers – if you take an oath on the holy book, or on anything, you’re infected by Satan. How could the vast majority of Christians have gotten it so wrong for so many centuries? More positively, Jesus’s message here is that you should just tell the truth and make no fuss about it. Another example of his preference for substance over ritualistic form. Again, not very Catholic.

5: 38-42 As you know, we once were told, ‘An eye for an eye’ and ‘A tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you: Don’t react violently against the one who is evil: when someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other as well. When someone wants to sue you for you shirt, let that person have your coat along with it. Further, when anyone conscripts you for one mile, go an extra mile. Give to the one who begs from you; and don’t turn away the one who tries to borrow from you [see also Luke 6:29-30, Luke 6:34-35].

The scholars of the Jesus Seminar were pretty well unanimous in their conviction that these words about turning the other cheek, offering your coat as well as your shirt, and walking the extra mile, were the authentic words of Jesus. This is quite unusual, they’re generally an admirably sceptical lot. They usually reach such consensus when the words are very striking and paradoxical, when they contain no elements that could be attributed to the struggling, persecuted and sometimes paranoid early Christian community, when they make no exaggerated claims for Jesus himself, when they don’t go on about the Last Days, etc. Of course, I’m a little sceptical myself about whether a ‘real’ Jesus can ever be revealed by the careful removal of what are calculated to be the gospel writers’ innumerable additions and modifications, but the argument for their version of Jesus as a framer of paradoxes and phrases that stick in the mind, creating an oral tradition before the gospel writers got to them and half-mangled them, seems plausible enough. As to the ethical significance of these teachings, certainly they’ve been much sermonised, but few have actually followed Jesus’s advice here. They are much honoured and much ignored ideals. Is that what Christian morality is all about?

Perhaps more importantly, there’s an unhelpful vagueness and lack of detail and context about this advice, which is typical of all Jesus’s pronouncements. What’s meant by ‘the one who is evil’? Someone who annoys us? Someone who steals all our money and murders our children? No distinctions are made. We all know that sometimes turning the other cheek or going the extra mile is precisely the most effective response to mean-spirited or cruel behaviour, but not always, as some people are far less easily shamed than others. Of course, sermonisers often provide the detail and context the gospels lack, but they pull it from their own experience, not from Christ.

What is Christian morality? Part 9

the good irenic stuff

Matthew

4:1-4 Then Jesus was guided into the wilderness by the spirit to be put to the test by the devil. And after he had fasted ‘forty days and forty nights,’ he was famished. And the tester confronted him and said, ‘To prove you’re God’s son, order these stones to turn to bread.’ He responded, ‘It is written, “Human beings are not to live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of God’s mouth.’ [see also Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-4]

This testing is very briefly referred to in Mark, but Jesus’s response here doesn’t help us that much. The first part is a commonplace, but the second part is the real issue. God doesn’t talk to us much, though some Christians might disagree. In any case, priests talk to us a lot more. Interesting to find that God has a mouth – Jesus should know. Of course he originally said it in Aramaic, but I notice that the word is used in all translations, so it’s the beginning of a picture. We also have ‘the eyes of the lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth’ [2 Chronicles 16:9], so the guy’s starting to look almost human. I’d be willing to bet though that his mouth is much bigger than any of ours.

5:3-10 Congratulations to the poor in spirit! Heaven’s domain belongs to them. Congratulations to those who grieve! They will be consoled. Congratulations to the gentle! They will inherit the earth. Congratulations to those who hunger and thirst for justice! They will have a feast. Congratulations to the merciful! They will have mercy. Congratulations to those with undefiled hearts! They will see God. Congratulations to those who work for peace! They will be known as God’s children. Congratulations to those who have suffered persecution for the sake of justice! Heaven’s domain belongs to them [see also Luke 6:20-21, Luke 6:24-25].

These are the first words of the sermon on the mount, the good oil. There’s little here to be objected to, except perhaps that it seems to offer rewards only in the next world, or some future world. The term ‘poor in spirit’ might suggest ‘mean-spirited’ or even ‘not very bright’ to a modern reader, but I’m assured that it simply means ‘poor’, which again suggests that Jesus just didn’t like the rich much. For the rest Jesus puts himself squarely on the side of those who suffer or are likely to suffer – the gentle, the merciful, the peacemakers. Of course you could argue that these are the people most easily exploited by false prophets. Why would someone like Jesus go around offering a bright future to those already satisfied with their lot? I’m quite mystified myself as to what he’s up to.

Of course, being poor is not a sign of morality, nor is being in a state of grief. The best spin we can put on it is that he’s setting an example. We all should love the poor, and the grieving, and the gentle and so forth. Is this the foundation of Christian morality, the moral underpinning of Western civilization? If it weren’t for a lot of people becoming convinced that Jesus was a god, I doubt if these words would’ve rung down through the ages. Many similar sentiments have been expressed before and since – for example, scholars have pointed out that Matthew 5:5 [on the gentle] is a reworking of Psalms 37:11.

5:11-12 Congratulations to you when they denounce you and persecute you and spread malicious gossip about you because of me. Rejoice and be glad! Your compensation is great in heaven. Recall that this is how they persecuted the prophets who preceded you [see also Luke 6:22-23, Luke6:26].

Most scholars of the Jesus Seminar would argue that when persecution is the subject, it’s the early Christian community speaking, not Jesus himself. This seems fair enough, but there are obvious problems with always attributing the less palatable, or simply less memorable and striking remarks to the gospel writers rather than to Jesus, as it involves working from a pre-conceived notion of Jesus’s brilliance, or consistency, or particular orientation. If we accept, however, as Christians are expected to do, that every word attributed to Jesus in the gospels was actually spoken by him, then we must accept a contradictory and often confusing ‘teacher’, one more concerned with the political events of his time than with providing an ideal of human behaviour for all time, as well as one subject to moods and variations. The more human, the less ideal and worthy of imitation.

5:13-16 You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its zing, how will it be made salty? It then has no further use than to be thrown out and stomped on. You are the light of the world. A city sitting on top of a mountain can’t be concealed. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket but on a lampstand, where it sheds light for everyone in the house. That’s how your light is to shine in the presence of others, so they can see your good deeds and acclaim your Father in the heavens [see also Mark 4:21, Mark 9:50, Luke 8:16, Luke 11:33, Luke 14:34-35].

We continue the sermon on the mountain, which isn’t just about morality but, as in the above passage, also about ‘rallying the troops’. Passages such as this tend to be slated home to Jesus rather than the gospel writers [by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar] because they contain memorable imagery, but unless you think being a member of some elite [or being told you are] makes you a morally better person, I can’t think how such exhortations might contribute to right conduct.

5:20 Let me tell you: unless your religion goes beyond that of the scholars and Pharisees, you won’t set foot in Heaven’s domain.

Here, the term ‘religion’ is virtually synonymous with ‘morality’. In the verses preceding this sentence, Jesus exhorts his hearers to follow Judaic law and the wisdom of the prophets – a ‘back to basics’ approach which is always popular. Jesus would surely have turned Protestant had he lived long enough.

What is Christian morality? Part 8

12:28-31 And one of the scholars approached when he heard them arguing, and because he saw how skilfully Jesus answered them, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ Jesus answered: ‘The first is, “Hear, Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord, and you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul [and all your mind] and with all your energy.” The second is this: “You are to love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ [see also Matt 22:34-40, Luke 10:25-29]

Both of these ‘most important commandments’ can be found in the Old Testament [Deut 6:4-5, Lev 19:18]. The first reiterates what is evident throughout the earlier scriptures, that God is a jealous god, who demands lots of attention and lots of worship. The second is something of a commonplace. Some scholars have suggested that Jesus, or ‘Mark’, was merely echoing the teaching of the famous Rabbi Hillel, an exact contemporary of Jesus. Challenged by some wag to teach him the whole of the Torah while he [the wag] stood on one foot, Hillel provided a version of the golden rule: ‘What you find hateful do not do to another. This is the whole of the law. Everything else is commentary. Now go learn that.’

Some have argued that ‘neighbour’ here means only Jewish neighbours [certainly it does seem to mean this in Leviticus]. That’s to say, it was a call to Jewish solidarity. I don’t think so. To give him his due, Jesus seems genuinely to have reached out beyond his own community. This, I think, is brought out more clearly in the famous sermon in Matthew, as well as some important passages in Luke.

12:38-40 During the course of his teaching he would say: ‘Look out for the scholars who like to parade around in long robes, and insist on being addressed properly in the marketplaces, and prefer important seats in the synagogues and the best couches at banquets. They are the ones who prey on widows and their families, and recite long prayers just to put on airs. These people will get a stiff sentence!’ [see also Matt 23:5-7, Luke 11:43, Luke 20:45-47].

These remarks may have been directed at the Pharisees or other Jewish functionaries, who might’ve been compensating for their lack of any real power under the Romans by doing dress-ups and bumping up the pomp and circumstance, much as the Catholic Church does these days. The final comment about divine justice sounds more like retribution [and wishful thinking] to me.

12:43-44 ‘I swear to you, this poor widow has contributed more than all those who dropped something into the collection box! After all, they were all donating out of their surplus, whereas she, out of her poverty, was contributing all she had, her entire livelihood! [see also Luke 21:3-4].

This observation by Jesus is of course pleasing, but hardly original. As scholars have pointed out, they can be found in rabbinical, Buddhist and ancient Greek texts, and people make the same observations every day, for example on the disproportionate burden upon the poor of a flat tax, without needing to invoke Jesus or Christianity.

That’s about it for Mark, moral-wise. What follows is a passage known as ‘the little apocalypse’, in which Jesus, or ‘Mark’, gives his account of the last days. This is followed by an account of Jesus’s arrest, trial, execution and resurrection. Of course many Christians have drawn sustenance from a description of Jesus’s stoicism through these events, but it’s hard to see how his behaviour provides us with any specific moral guidelines. The stoicism of heroic figures in adversity was of course a commonplace long before Jesus came along, and it’s hard to see how the gospel writers would’ve gotten away with depicting him in any other way. Also, if we take the view that the gospel writers were inheritors of the eyewitness accounts of the disciples, it’s worth noting that the disciples dispersed after Jesus’s arrest, and they certainly weren’t eyewitnesses to his demeanour and remarks during his trial, supposing there was one. That part of the story is as mythical as the accounts of his birth.

Before going on to Matthew I should say that the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, though often divided among themselves, generally take only a fraction of the above [and following] sayings of Jesus to be authentic. Most of the sayings they believe to be the creation of the early Christian community, given a twist by the particular preoccupations and character of the particular gospel writer. For example, Mark seems to emphasise the weakness and obtuseness of the disciples, and often has Jesus castigating them for not listening, for not ‘getting it’, and for being concerned for their own status [eg Mark 10:35-41]. Matthew has a near-obsessive tendency to tie Jesus’s sayings and doings to Old Testament prophecies, for obvious reasons. Luke, generally assumed to be a non-Jewish author, emphasises good works and broader sympathies, as in the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son parables, whereas John, or the Christian community writing under John’s name, is primarily concerned with Jesus’s status as ‘saviour’. All the gospel writers are, of course, concerned to make claims for the significance of Jesus that he is unlikely to have made for himself. I haven’t been so concerned myself to separate an ‘authentic’ Jesus from a constructed one, partly because I’m sceptical about this being possible, but mainly because I’m looking at the impact upon Western moral praxis of every remark and action attributed to Jesus in the canonical gospels, regardless of their authenticity. In other words, I’m assuming that throughout the history of Christendom, until very recently, everything attributed to Jesus in the New Testament was taken as gospel.

What is Christian morality - part 7

lashings of Jesus

11:15-19 They come to Jerusalem. And he went into the temple and began chasing the vendors and shoppers out of the temple area, and he turned the bankers’ tables upside down, along with the chairs of the pigeon merchants, and he wouldn’t even let anyone carry a container through the temple area. Then he started teaching and would say to them: ‘Don’t the scriptures say, ‘My house is to be regarded as a house of prayer for all peoples’? – but you have turned it into a ‘hideout for crooks’!’ [see also Matt 21:12-13, Luke 19:45-46, John 2:13-17].

This passage is indicative of Jesus’s adopted role as an unorthodox, reforming rabbi. Clearly, he’s committed to the Judaic religion and wishes to purify it of these course elements. The dark mutterings of the scholars after this event are enough to reveal the danger Jesus was getting into with his uncompromising stance.

Of course there’s an issue around the violence of this episode. It’s dealt with perfunctorily by the gospel writers, but in John an interesting detail is mentioned – he made a whip out of rope and drove them all out of the temple area... [John 2:15]. The pre-meditated decision to fashion a whip suggests more than just a sudden fit of pique. We will never know of course, but there’s surely a hint here of a deliberately confrontational nature. And how does this apparent defence of the orthodox use of the temple fit with Jesus’s unorthodoxy as regards the Sabbath and handwashing? It’s a mystery.

I’m sorry that none of this specifically relates to any unique Christian morality, but I’m afraid there just isn’t that much meat to pick at.

12:1-8 The parable of the leased vineyard [see also Matt 21:33-39, Luke 20:9-15]

This is an interesting and tragic story, repeated in Matthew and Luke, but it’s hard to draw any clear moral from it, other than ‘watch who you lease your vineyard to’.

A farmer leases his vineyard to some other farmers before going abroad. Later he sends a slave to collect his share of the harvest. They beat him up and send him away with nothing. So he sends another, and the same thing happens. Next time he sends someone the person is killed. He sends more slaves, and they’re all either beaten or killed. Finally he sends his beloved son, thinking this time some respect will be shown, but they kill him, hoping that, with the heir out of the way, they will inherit the vineyard.

Of course the story almost begs for an allegorical interpretation, with Jesus as the beloved son, in which case the moral might be that we humans are ungrateful sods, never satisfied with what the good lord gives us, ready to kill for more. It would also have prophetic implications, and you know how these gospellers love a prophecy. Of course, there’s also the possibility that Jesus was simply telling a hard luck story about a guy he knew.

The parable is immediately followed by a question and answer from Jesus: What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come in person, and do away with those farmers, and give the vineyard to someone else. Here we seem to be moving very much into allegorical territory, with the vineyard representing ‘God’s imperial domain’. Moral: if you do bad, no domain for you. Jesus follows this up with a verse [22] from psalm 118: A stone that the builders rejected has ended up as the keystone. It was the Lord’s doing and is something you admire. Presumably this means that God is full of surprises, he moves in mysterious ways, but always ends up making the right decisions. So just follow God. I’m not sure if this helps much for human decision-making.

12:13-17 And they send some of the Pharisees and the Herodians to him to trap him with a riddle. They come and say to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are honest and impartial, because you pay no attention to appearances, but instead you teach God’s way forthrightly. Is it permissible to pay the poll tax to the Roman emperor or not? Should we pay or should we not pay?’ But he saw through their trap, and said to them, “Why do you provoke me like this? Let me have a look at a coin.’ They handed him a silver coin, and he says to them, ‘Whose picture is this? Whose name is on it?’ They replied, ‘The emperor’s.’ Jesus said to them: ‘Pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and God what belongs to God!’ And they were dumbfounded at him [see also Matt 22:15-22, Luke 20:19-26].

Let me give some background to this famous episode. The Romans imposed a special tax on the Jews, which no other colonized peoples had to pay. This might seem discriminatory, but what the Jews received in return was the right to worship their own god. Generally, the Romans expected, as a matter of course, that defeated peoples would adopt the Roman gods as their own, as a symbol of their subjection. No doubt they turned a blind eye to what these people did in the privacy of their homes, as long as they displayed fealty to the Roman gods in public. But the Romans met surprising resistance from the Jews. Not that they were in any way a military threat, but they simply refused to betray their own god, who, as we know, was particularly jealous of other gods, inveighing against them as false idols. The Jews’ attitude was – kill us all if you like, but no way are we going to bow down to those gods. The Romans had no desire to inflict a massacre; it would cause bad blood among other subject nations, and might cost more than a few Roman lives. So they hit upon the idea of a special tax – a win-win situation.

Of course, as is the way with these things, not all Jews were satisfied with this solution. The more radical Jews urged defiance of the Roman authorities and their tax-collecting Jewish proxies [hence the low esteem in which tax collectors are held in the gospels]. Among these radicals were the Essenes, of Dead Sea Scroll fame. They’ve been described as the Taliban of the period [replete with their own cave hideouts], and it’s even been argued that Jesus was one of them, but that he turned his back on them to take a more populist, but also more idiosyncratic, middle line, as represented by this particular story. The Pharisees and Herodians, essentially collaborators, were spying on Jesus and testing him to see where he stood politically. Jesus’s response has been hailed as a prime example of wily evasiveness, while also, of course, carrying an anti-materialist message. Some have also interpreted the message as anti-political, or at least apolitical. It’s an important issue, as the separation of church and state is often defended by the citing of this passage, though I would argue that this separation doctrine, which is only a couple of centuries old, arose out of bitter experience in Europe – for example, the incredibly brutal Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, as well as the English Revolution, in which the insistence upon the divine right of kings meant that a questioning of the ruler’s authority entailed a disobedience to God. Jesus becomes a useful ally in the development of such a doctrine, but the fact remains that his words are ambiguous.

what is Christian morality? Part 4

Jesus and the mythology of family

3:31-35 Then his mother and his brothers arrive. While still outside, they send in and ask for him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they say to him, ‘Look, your mother and your brothers [and sisters] are outside looking for you.’ In response he says to them: ‘My mother and brothers – who ever are they?’ And looking right at those seated around him in a circle, he says, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does God’s will, that’s my brother and sister and mother!’ [see also Matt 12:46-50, Luke 8:19-21; for other negative remarks about family, see Matt 10:35-37, Luke 12:52-53, Luke 14:26]

This story seems to reveal some family tensions, but the message is clear enough. Of course, it’s not one we associate with modern Christianity. Rather, we associate it with new cults, which Christianity once was – in fact we’ve got a snapshot here of the cult before it became Christianity. The cult becomes the new Family – if others in your family don’t want to join the cult, abandon them and join your new brothers and sisters under God, or the new Messiah, or whoever. Many new cult leaders don’t get on with their own families. Jesus’s family thought he was mad [Mark 3:21], and he very likely felt the need to be clear of them in order to be taken seriously. One can sympathise, but it does raise doubts about the traditional family values theme of conservative Christianity. Such values may or may not be Christian, but they weren’t affirmed by Jesus in this passage. One has always to remember that Jesus himself was never a Christian, though Christianity may have derived from him.

This is a good place to reflect on all Jesus’s remarks about family. Of these, probably the most shocking is the one in Luke 14:26: If any come to me and do not hate their own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – they cannot be my disciples. Seems fairly clear-cut. In order to be a follower of Jesus – what was later called a Christian -you have to hate every member of your family, as well as yourself. I wonder why this passage isn’t more well-known? On the basis of this passage alone, one would surely have to conclude that Jesus was completely opposed to ‘traditional family values’. Or was he just having a little joke?

In Matthew 10:35-37 [and similarly in Luke 12:52-53] Jesus claims that he has come to bring conflict rather than peace, and especially conflict within families: I have come to pit a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A person’s enemies are members of the same household. Jesus is by no means a family man. It’s unlikely that even the most ingenious sermonisers could spin that one around. For example, you won’t find much in the way of off-setting positive remarks about family to cherry-pick [but see Mark 7:9-13 below]. Clearly, ‘family values’ conservatism does not derive from the teachings of Jesus, it just thinks it does.

4:3-8 The parable of the sower.

This is the first recorded parable of the canonical gospels, repeated in Matthew 13:3-8 and Luke 8:5-8. I won’t quote it in full here, nor will I comment on the lengthy explanation of it that follows [Mark 4:13-21]. The story, well-known enough, is about a farmer’s seed falling in four different places; by the path [eaten by birds], on rocky ground [it sprouted quickly but couldn’t take deep root and was burned off by the sun], among thorns [where it couldn’t compete and bore no fruit] and in good deep soil [where it thrived and bore fruit]. Jesus’s explanation reveals, or strongly suggests, that he’s talking about his message – i.e. God’s imperial rule. In some people it will take root, in some not. In the broadest sense it’s about receptivity to ideas, but I don’t think there’s any great ethical dimension to this.

4:24-25 And he went on to say to them: ‘Pay attention to what you hear! The standard you apply will be the standard applied to you, and then some. In fact, to those who have, more will be given, and from those who don’t have, even what they do have will be taken away!’ [see also Matt 7:2, Matt 13:12, Matt 25:29, Luke 6:38, Luke 8:18, Luke 19:26]

This is another troubling passage, oft-repeated, which would require some sermonising work, to make it ‘obvious’ that Jesus isn’t talking of material possessions here, he’s probably talking of, say, holy spirit. If you have lots of holy spirit inside you, you’ll be given more, come God’s imperial rule. If you haven’t enough, what you do have will be taken away – perhaps to render you fit for eternal damnation. Clearly, those with lots of the holy stuff inside them are morally superior to those with little, but this doesn’t offer us much in the way of moral guidance.

7:5-13 the Pharisees and the scholars start questioning him: ‘Why don’t your disciples live up to the tradition of the elders, instead of eating bread with defiled hands?’ And he answered them, ‘How accurately Isaiah depicted you phonies when he wrote: This people honors me with their lips, but their heart stays far away from me. Their worship is empty, because they insist on teachings that are human commandments. You have set aside God’s commandment and hold fast to human tradition!’ Or he would say to them, ‘How expert you’ve become at putting aside God’s commandment to establish your own tradition. For instance Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ and ‘Those who curse their father or mother will surely die.’ ‘But you say, If people say to their father or mother, “Whatever I might have spent to support you is korban”’ [which means ‘consecrated to God’], you no longer let those persons do anything for their father or mother. So you end up invalidating God’s word with your own tradition, which you then perpetuate. And you do all kinds of other things like that!’ [see also Matt 15:1-9]

This passage provides an interesting example of Jesus as unorthodox rabbi. Certainly Jesus in this gospel spends far more time arguing with the traditionalists over ritual matters [as well as exorcising demons and performing miracles] than he does pontificating on real moral issues.

It’s worth noting though that, in this dispute with the Pharisees, Jesus picks out the ‘honour your parents’ commandment as being defiled by them. The basic idea is that the Pharisaic notion of ‘korban’, consecrating certain goods to God, allows those goods to be subtracted from whatever is owed to the devotee’s parents. Whether or not Jesus’s accusation is correct, he seems to have forgotten that he himself has refused to even recognize his own mother. I’m sure Socrates would never have been so glaringly inconsistent.

What is Christian morality? Part 1

Here is the first 1000 words or so of my essay on this subject [unfinished as yet].


You hear it endlessly, and not just from Christians. Christianity provides the ethical bedrock of western civilization. I’ve never been convinced, but how can it be proven or disproven?

Well, the first thing to do is to define terms. So what exactly is Christian morality?

I can think of three definitions, each one more expansive than the last.

1. It is any morality that can be derived from the teachings of Jesus - the Sermon on the Mount, the parables and other incidental remarks, found in the gospels.
2. It’s any morality that can be derived from the Bible in general – the Decalogue, the proverbs and psalms – but particularly the New Testament [the teachings of Paul and the other epistle writers as well as Jesus].
3. It’s all of the above plus any morality that can be derived from any teacher, from Augustine of Hippo to Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil, whose thinking is inspired by Christianity - including all the sermons of all the parish priests throughout Christendom and beyond throughout the last two millennia.

The trouble with this nest of definitions is that each one’s not only more expansive, but also more diffuse and, arguably, more untenable. For example, as many observers have mentioned, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Christian sermons and commentaries tend to track changes in our moral outlook. The fire and brimstone sermons, so common in the nineteenth century, and so powerfully rendered in James Joyce’s goodbye-to-all-that novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are long gone, and we now have ‘eco-Christianity’, as well as a Christianity celebrating multiculturalism and diversity and inter-faith dialogue, and we have female and gay clerics in some denominations. These are developments that secularists would argue, pretty convincingly, are driven by forces external to Christianity, but many Christians argue, also pretty convincingly to some people, that it’s a return to ‘real’ Christianity, that Christianity has always been about environmentalism [who urged us to consider the lilies?], embracing all cultures [like the good Samaritan] and ways of life [fisher folk, beggars, tax collectors, laundresses].

I’ve known Christians who ‘shop around’ for priests who give sermons they approve of. In fact, I’m sure this is commonplace. If you’re a liberal, you’ll just be annoyed by a conservative anti-gay sermon. The priest just hasn’t absorbed the message of Jesus correctly, so then you’ll find a parish where the message is right. Sometimes the message will be so liberal that the priest will be in trouble with the higher church authorities, and, if he’s Catholic, excommunication might be in the air, and heresy, and heroism, and martyrdom. The embattled priest will collect a loyal flock of followers, he will take his stand for true Christianity, he might even hint that this is where Jesus Christ himself stood against the Pharisees, and what could possibly be more Christian than that?

It does seem, on the face of it, that the life and teaching of Jesus, with his emphasis on the meek, on children, on the poor, his generally positive attitude to women, and his emphasis on faith over strict ritual observance and tradition, offers more to the left side of politics than the right, so it might seem strange that, especially in the US, it’s the other side that’s making the most fuss about Christian values. What the Christian right seems to be emphasising is ‘traditional family values’, including a puritanical attitude towards sex, regular church attendance, hard work, clean living, and a spreading of the gospel message [the message being no sex outside marriage, regular church attendance, hard work and clean living, etc]. I just wonder if this was what Jesus, or the gospel writers who put the words into his mouth, were really on about.

I think it’s undoubtedly true that, since the rise to power of Christianity, a huge volume of ethical claims and pronouncements have been made in its name. Indeed, until a couple of centuries ago, just about every ethical pronouncement – with the notable exception of those made by a handful of secular philosophers like Spinoza and Hume – was made in the name of the Judaeo-Christian god and his son, the other and same Judaeo-Christian god.

However, this doesn’t mean that Christianity forms the bedrock of our ethics, because I strongly suspect that, had Christianity never risen to power, the volume of ethical pronouncements made over the past millennium or two would’ve been about the same, and their quality would’ve been about the same too, only they would’ve been made in the name of other gods and other religions, or maybe they would’ve been made in the ethicists’ own name, as with the ethics of Aristotle or the moral letters of Seneca or the essays of Montaigne. What Christianity did, through Catholicism, and the later Protestant sects who largely kept the Catholic model, was to provide a structure and a building program which encouraged people to congregate at particular designated sites to listen to sermons and homilies from more or less wise and charismatic characters. This provided them with an ethical education and a sense of community and solidarity – not to mention a focus for networking, deals and gossip.

What I’m suggesting is that Christianity was always a vague, catch-all term, allowing people to come together and celebrate and reinforce their conservative or liberal views, pat each other on the back, and selectively quote scriptural stuff to each other. It’s this vagueness that is the key to its success. Jesus, insofar as his teachings have been paid any mind at all, was a man for all seasons, but above all he has become a symbol of positivity – kindness, charity, forgiveness, love. Who can turn their backs on such grand themes? Only evil people, surely. And we can all work out the details for ourselves.

In this essay I was hoping to try to separate the accretions – the sermons, the infinite commentaries and elaborations, and the myth-making – from the actual words and deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Sounds simple, and no doubt it has been attempted many times before, but immediately difficulties arise. For a start, the four canonical gospels were written in Koine Greek [though even this has been contested – some argue for a missing ur-text, perhaps written in Hebrew]. The first, and perhaps only, language of Jesus was probably Aramaic – though some disagree. So how much has been lost or distorted in translation? Jesus may [or may not] have died in the mid thirties CE, while the first extant gospel was [probably] that of Mark, written about 70CE [a date which is the centre of a great storm of contestation].

Each of the gospel texts is stylistically unique, and there are contradictions amongst them, as well as different emphases. Further, there are other gospel texts to be considered, most notably Thomas. How reliable is this text? Why was it excluded from the canon? Should it simply be ignored because, not having been included in the canon, it has had little impact on the subsequent development of Christianity?

religion and moi

Here is my introduction to the book, first draft.

Religion has always been a troubling phenomenon for me. I can't recall it ever holding any attraction, or any sense of reality, though that is probably a false memory, as many researchers are now saying that religion and childhood go together like fish and chips. If not official religion, then its general territory - magic, monsters and coming alive again after being snuffed out by cops, Indians, assorted bad guys or the afore-mentioned monsters. Of course I marvellled at Superman and fantasised flying faster than bullets on errands for attractive schoolmates, but the god I heard about at Sunday School was nothing but a source of irritation. I felt ashamed of the gullibility and self-deception of my elders, and the questions I posed, without ever vocalising, were much the same as those of the young Christopher Hitchens; why would a perfect being want to be worshipped and praised by his creations? Wouldn't he be as squirmily embarrassed as I was by all this fawning? Okay, that was making the mistake of thinking the god was just like me only more super, but surely by worshipping him and singing to him and dedicating buildings and babies to him, they too were making assumptions about his nature, or at least how he preferred to be treated, and these assumptions actually made him all the less attractive, as someone totally insatiable, never entirely appeased, never satisfied, like the most nightmarish of parents. He was far more remote and less believable than Superman, who, like us, had gone through childhood and survived his parents and looked sexy even in his ridiculous outfit [well, okay, unlike most of us] – in fact he was the most reassuringly human of extra-terrestrials

It seemed so patently made-up and yet, as I glanced about at the adults during the Sunday service, they all seemed to believe so fervently. It seemed to make such a difference to them. I didn't get it at all. Even if their god existed, which I could never concede, what would be the point of sitting around, swaying and chanting and smiling and fervently believing?

I wondered what they believed when they were in the throes of believing. Or what they were thinking at least. Were they thinking, He exists, wow he really exists, wow, I mean I just can't get over it, and he created us all, and me especially, I mean I know i'm nothing special but to me I am, and it's all because of him, I can just never thank him enough, or praise him or... I just wonder if he notices how impressed I am with him, because I really really am, but maybe I'm not showing it enough, though he sees everything, but maybe he wants me to smile more, to sing louder, to spread the word, I'm not spreading the word enough, I'm keeping it to myself, that's selfish, that's a sin, PRAISE THE LORD!...

It worried me. I felt rather contemptuous of these swaying, smiling chanting elders, even as a young boy, but I also felt intimidated. I didn't know how to deal with such conviction, and of course I still don't. The sense of intimidation is heightened of course when there's a congregation of them. I've never attended personally to feel the love, but I'm thinking of masses of shining-faced believers in massive modern evangelical churches, chanting and stomping and halelujaing, presumably in gratitude for believing, and also masses of bobbing madrassa students and streetloads of breast-beating Iraqi men chanting something about Allah. I don't wonder so much then about what they might be thinking, as the whole impetus appears to be about unthinking, submitting to some kind of chain of basic believing being.

So, in the following, I want to put some pressure on all this believing, and to consider the alternatives. I want to look here and there at the history of religious belief and unbelief, and to wonder about the future. I doubt if I'll come to any earth-shattering conclusions, but I feel it's one of the most important issues to try to get our heads around, as the gap between believers and unbelievers widens, and exasperations grow.

Not that this will necessarily be a bridge-building exercise! Partly it will be my attempt to come to terms with the intimidating nature of relentless religious belief. I've no idea, honestly, as I write this, what the outcome will be.

the soul of the white ant

I remember a dog-eared paperback on the shelves of my first bohemian inner-city residence, shared with a book-collecting bowerbird of an art student. It was called The Soul of the White Ant, by one Eugene Marais. I never read it, or even looked into it, though its title somehow encapsulated for me something of the new life I was entering, mad and unexpected, surrealistic and romantic. It would probably have been better for me to have read the book.
For its South African author was a strange and tortured genius, a bewitching story-teller who loved and was beloved of children, a drug addict and a suicide. Above all though, he had transformed himself, for a time, into a painstaking, patient and insightful observer and recorder of the lives of termites and baboons. Mr Darwin, I feel sure, would've been proud to make his acquaintance.
All of this I've only recently discovered, and it's not the subject of this piece, more's the pity. The book's title has long symbolized for me the weirdness of the religious, and particularly Christian, notion of the soul. I've heard that some Buddhists claim that every living thing, prokaryotic or eukaryotic, has a soul, which transmigrates in the process of reincarnation. If you've led an exemplary life as a bug or a germ, you will migrate to a higher form next time, maybe a booby or a red panda. It sounds pleasant, as anything does if you put it the right way. I've probably got this Buddhist teaching quite wrong, but in any case it seems problematic to me to impose morality on the life of a bacterium. Then again, how much more problematic must it be to impose morality on the life of a human being.
Be that as it may, Christians are supposed to believe in the soul as a specifically human apparatus. As such, it has taken something of a battering since the theory of evolution by natural selection has gained wide acceptance [among the intelligentsia]. Those Buddhists and others who believe in a soul for every organism have at least the advantage of consistency.
The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church has generally been quite woolly in its response to evolution, while all the time insisting that its god, formally known as Yahweh, now called God, created everything. If you don't accept this, you're anathema. Now of course this doesn't necessarily pit the HRCAC against evolution, even though it's highly unlikely, and possibly impossible, that the Darwin-Wallace theory would ever have been developed by a Christian. The HRCAC can simply say that God created evolution, and let's see you prove otherwise.
Unfortunately for Christians, though, they have to have to believe what they believe through a set of sacred texts called the Bible, written by God apparently through various scribes.* We find there no hint of evolution or natural selection, not to mention fossils, dinosaurs, plate tectonics, other galaxies, black holes or anti-matter. What it does say is that God created humans in his image.

*Why god chose this method, rather than just writing the stuff himself, is one of those mysteries that form the backbone of religion. After all, he wrote the ten commandments in his own hand, on two stone tablets, now lost to posterity, and I can't help but feel that to lose one such tablet was unfortunate, but to lose two was downright carelessness. To think how much the divine handwriting might've fetched at Sotheby's is surely to bring the spiritual and material world together in the most delightful way.

Anita Bryant lives, but fades

The real Harvey milk

After watching the film Milk recently, an inspiring and tragic story which will hopefully reach a lot of young people and affect their thinking about the rights and treatment of homosexuals, I wondered about the arch-enemy of the tale, Anita Bryant, a former small-time singer driven, presumably by conscience, to campaign against the horrors of homosexuality.
The fact is that Bryant's campaign turned out to be a rather less than successful career move. Initial successes in the late sixties led to a galvanization and mobilization of the opposition. A campaign to boycott Florida orange juice, because Bryant featured in commercials for the drink, led to her losing the contract, and her singing career stalled because of the polarization of opinion around her. Later she came to regret the extremity of some of her anti-homosexual remarks, though one wonders if this was simply an acknowledgment of tactical errors, for in spite of her many setbacks, she still lends her name to churchy arguments against the so-called gay agenda.
It seems that, in spite of the noisiness of religious conservatives, especially during the Bush years, homosexuals continue to make more gains than losses, in spite of the passing of proposition eight, outlawing gay marriage, in California recently. Many of Bryant's legal victories have since been overturned, and I'm confident that as people learn more about the realities of human behaviour, and the dead hand of religion is gradually loosened, homosexual relations, of every formal and informal type imaginable, will be accepted and enjoyed as enriching the tapestry of social life.

the compatibility issue

Is science compatible with religion? It's a very popular question currently, not only directly but in an indirect way, with so many believers of an intellectual persuasion employing scientific techniques, or at least the language associated with them, to render their beliefs more persuasive to themselves and others. It's surely a great compliment to science that so many modern believers feel the need to invoke it in the interest of their beliefs - though it should be noted that this tendency hasn't spread to Islam to any significant degree. Though there are obviously only two possible answers to my initial question, there are two opposed perspective from which each of these two answers can be given. The two answers are of course yes and no, and the two perspectives are the religious and the scientific. From these we arrive at four possible positions:

[1] religious compatibilism - this is the official position of most of the established Christian churches, though whether it is tenable is another matter. There's also the question of whether this compatibilism is sincere, or an alliance of convenience with an untamable adversary.
[2] religious incompatibilism - the least interesting position intellectually, but also by far the most popular, given that the vast majority of the human population know nothing or very little about science, and of that majority almost all of them are religious and take their religion very seriously.
[3] scientific compatibilism - a position taken by some scientists, who claim that science and religion operate in mutually exclusive spheres, so that they can do their stuff harmoniously, presumably by completely ignoring each other. [Most, and perhaps by definition all, religious scientists are compatibilists, due to the primacy of their religious beliefs].
[4] scientific incompatibilism - to my mind, the only coherent position.

getting the message through

one of John the Baptist's hangouts, yawn yawn

Societies change, and rapidly, and we’re reluctant to acknowledge this. A child wants her parents to stay together, to be happy with each other, as they have been. She wants to go on attending the same school and not to have to deal with different routines, different teachers, the loss of established and loved playmates. If a particular religion and its congregation and rituals are regular routines for her and woven though her family and social life, she’ll be most reluctant to deny that religion. Has it not sustained the family and community that has sustained her? The word denial is vital here, for it carries so much more weight than any intellectual skepticism can convey. Questioning the truth of a faith can come at an incalculable cost to our social being. It’s hardly surprising that many people would never even consider such a questioning, for they would see no meaningful existence at all without that faith.

Of course I’m convinced that they’re wrong to think that way, but it often seems a useless conviction. It can also be a dangerous one, I’m sure. If ever invited to Kandahar to spread the message of secularism, I’m sure I’d decline.

However, unlike regions deep-dyed in Islam, most regions that have adopted Christianity, particularly European nations, are no longer as deep-dyed as they were. They are the nations of course, most affected by the enlightenment and the scientific methods that have so rapidly transformed human life. And it’s funny how cultures can be like siblings. If one sibling strides out on a particular path, the next sibling will consider, almost as a matter of course, that that pathway has been eternally blocked for her. Many have argued that Islam needs an enlightenment like that sparked by the likes of Galileo and Newton in Western Europe, but it seems that sibling rivalry might prevent this, perhaps indefinitely. Of course, that is to be too monolithic as regards both religious cultures, but there’s no doubt that jealousy, competitiveness and resentment are part of the package of tensions between these cultures. It’s not surprising that the gradual abandonment of mystical explanations and prophecies by one might result in their more fervent appeal to the other. And of course the same goes for the tensions within one culture, such as that most heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian mythos.

The point being that the refusal to adopt the scientific method, and the related urge to see sacred texts as rich in historical and cultural truth beyond enquiry, have many strong forces behind them, including resentment, stubbornness and a need to forge or maintain a distinct identity. These forces aren’t rational – few human impulses are. Ultimately they’re instinctive, as sibling rivalry is instinctive, and they’re about survival and thriving. Ultimately the battle must be along those lines – survival and thriving. We need to present the argument convincingly that the scientific approach provides our best hope in that quest. Not everyone is impervious to the argument, clearly. Science would never have gotten off the ground if that were so. It’s a matter of continuously plugging away, doing fruitful scientific work and advertising and distributing its benefits.

religion's no joke either

your typical Talmud scholar

There are many religions, extant or extinct, all with their supernatural beings and occurrences, their creation stories, their rituals and prohibitions. The most popular one in my part of the world is Christianity. Christians take the male god from the Judaic religion and believe that he had a son who he sent down [or up or across, but it apparently doesn’t matter] to the world [which we might now call the planet Earth] in order to have him killed for our sins. To wash away the sins of every human on our planet, I think. I may not have the story quite right, I don’t really understand the concepts involved, though I’ve read the New Testament a couple of times in different versions. In order to be a Christian you have to accept this son, Jesus, into your life, whether as a friend, a kind of guardian angel or a figure of adoration I’m not quite sure. If you do so you’ll have eternal life, apparently through the release, upon death, of a non-material [or perhaps meta-material] part or aspect of yourself, called the soul, which goes then to a better place, usually called Heaven.

Christians try to live by the teachings of the New Testament, the Gospels in particular. They believe – and I’m generalizing here – that the books of the New Testament, and the whole of the Bible, came from their god, who guided the hands of the scribes who actually physically wrote them. So these books are, in essence, an instruction manual for life presented to all humans by the god who created all life, and who, therefore, must know what he’s talking about.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,[2 Timothy 3:16 NIV]

There are some immediate problems with this belief, especially to those of us brought up with some familiarity with the scientific method, which has been applied not only to such physical phenomena as rocks and bones, but also to historical documents, myths and legends, sites of ancient civilizations and the like. For example, the claim that a god guided the writing of all the books of the Bible is very hard to test scientifically. Further, the writings that we find in the Bible don’t include all the writings referring to the god, who is usually called Yahweh, written in the period. It took a long time for the Bible to come together in the form in which we now know it, and there are still disputes and different versions. The process has been called the canonization of scripture. Just leaving aside the New Testament, the exclusively Christian collection of books [which are nevertheless meaningless without the Old Testament texts and the god depicted therein], the other books, which were canonized by the time Jesus allegedly made his appearance some 2000 years ago, have been divided into three sections, the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. The Jews call the Old Testament texts, collectively, the Tanakh. They order the texts differently from the Christians, but they’re the same texts. The Torah [Hebrew for instruction or teaching], the first five books of the Tanakh [Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – books known collectively by Christians as the Pentateuch], are regarded as the most sacred texts of the Jewish religion. This is already a problem, for me at least, for if all these texts are god-breathed how can some be more sacred than others? Perhaps sacred simply means important; but I doubt it. Jewish teachers and religious leaders [rabbis] have explained this by claiming that the Torah contains all that’s essential; the other Tanakh texts are really just god’s warnings and fulminations brought about by the failure of his people to keep to the Torah.

The scientific method, as mentioned, has been very effectively applied to ancient texts, to determine when they were written, and whether evidence can be found on the ground to support the actuality of the events they describe. It had been claimed for centuries by rabbis that the Torah was written by Moses, one of the principal characters in the texts – even though Moses’s death is described in Deuteronomy. Somewhat in contradiction to this, it’s claimed in the Talmud [a collection of writings on rabbinical law and Jewish custom written long after the Torah] that the Torah was written some two hundred years before the creation of the world, constituting a blueprint for that creation. This seems somehow unlikely. Although the scientific method has been around for quite some time, there has been a great deal of reluctance to allow it to be applied to texts regarded by some as sacred. This was, however, simply a matter of delaying the inevitable. It’s now generally accepted, contra the earlier rabbis, that the Torah and its companion texts were completed during the time of Persian occupation of the holy lands, between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, though some of the writings are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. They certainly were not written by one person. Furthermore, none of the events described in these writings have been backed up by any archeological or other historical findings. Yet despite this complete rout of any historical truth-claims in the Torah, the Jewish religion still persists, as does its highly idiosyncratic outgrowth, Christianity. The apparent  imperviousness of Judeo-Christianity – and I would contend of other religions too - to the scientific method is no joke.

Is it really impervious though?

This is section 2 of part one. It needs a bit of editing down, but I'm happy to keep things moving