Sorry about the delay in replying, despite the holiday I am still really busy here, I will get round to replying to your other posts as well, I haven’t forgotten about them.
How does this insight into the Gospel help you in your daily life?
I suppose the big difference today is the intellectual freedom.
But at my initial recognition of the Gospels as false history and Jesus not being who I thought He was I was genuinely stunned. I had been a xian for the best part of 20 years but I had never really questioned the Bible at all, I just took it, as many people do, as being the Word of God and the information within was more or less accurate. As a child I even believed the Noah narratives, but I think I recognized quite soon that this could not be an accurate historical event. But I was torn, when almost every piece of text you research turns out to be untrue then what you have believed to be true for a long time is difficult to let go of, especially when it is in regard to your faith, something that is central to your very being.
Does it make you more wary of confidence tricks, for example, and less likely to be hypnotized by recursive pseudo-logic?
What it made me more wary of was the invention of history by humans, and not only in regard to the Bible. It does equip you with the necessary tools to investigate historical events from a more or less objective viewpoint. I know complete objectivity is impossible, but one of the good things about going to uni is that your research skills are honed, lecturers do help you to recognize where you have not given a balanced approach. So, one of the main things it has done is to allow me to step back from any historical text and scrutinise it carefully, look at the supporting evidence, and then come to a conclusion that I find plausible and supportable.
When I initially decided to investigate the Bible I did not have the qualifications or the finances to be able to go to uni, so my initial research was a little bit limited in regard to sources. But I had decided at the age of 20 (for various personal reasons) to look at the Bible from a fresh perspective. I had decided that I was taking a fresh look at this collection of texts and it was not going to receive any special position, it was going to be treated like any other text.
One of the first things that surprised me was that every single Gospel is anonymous, and every single Old Testament book we have is also anonymous! I know this is no big deal now, but at the time I had not criticized the Bible in any way at all, it was not to be questioned. Other things followed, such as the out of context ‘prophecies’ the huge amount of contradictions, the reworking of many of the texts, the removal of books that had been included in earlier Bibles, the obvious failure of Jesus to keep the promises He made in the NT, such as the imminent kingdom. Although my initial research was very basic, when I eventually went to uni a whole new world of research was opened up, and it became so much clearer that I had made the correct decision.
I did much prefer studying the OT at uni, I found the NT to be very boring in comparison. I’ve always been into Egyptian history and archaeology and I have been lucky enough to study these subjects at uni too. What does become clear pretty quickly is that the Bible was not recording accurate history, and that is not really a problem for me now as most nations were recording exaggerated or false histories. What the recognition that the Gospel authors were recording false history and manipulating the OT did do was to awaken me to the wonderful area of the psyche of the authors in the distant past. It is so clear that whoever wrote the Gospels wrote them with the intention of changing the social and political world that they lived in, they were not interested in recording an accurate past they were interested in promoting Jesus as the catalyst to change. I find it interesting that when Jesus was supposed to have been performing all the works credited to Him by the Gospel authors He was able to be completely invisible in the historical record, no one else even knew He was there. Now given the remarkable events associated with His life I find that a bit too difficult to swallow. A 3 hour eclipse, the dead walking the streets, thousands upon thousands following Him and not a single contemporary account! Not even the Gospels are contemporary.
But it is the easiest thing in the world to sit with a collection of scriptures and invent a history about a human that fitted what the Jewish nation were waiting on. The Messiah had to be from David, let’s make a genealogy up for Him, and they invented several. The messiah had to be born in Bethlehem (although that may not be what Micah 5:2 is saying), so how do they get this Nazareth woman to Bethlehem, they invent a fictional census. The list goes on and on, and I wont bore you as I’m sure you’ve heard most of them before.
But there comes a time when a person has to say that enough is enough, any reasonable person surely has a limit to the intellectual contortions required to believe that Jesus was the messiah. The constant pathetic excuses, so childish and nave, should really not be required if Jesus was who the Gospels say He was. We should not have this ambiguity all the time about almost every single reference to Jesus. The non-stop contradictions, the historical inaccuracies, the ‘well when he said black He actually meant white’ reinterpretations that the gullible swallow up with glee are not a good basis upon which to base a faith.
Does it improve your social and ethical relationship with others, and if so, in what way?
I does make things a bit awkward at times, especially when I have been employed as a tutor at the Uni of Glasgow and I am currently teaching Religious, Moral, and Philosophical Studies at a high school in Scotland. My atheism does go down well with a lot of students and a lot of their parents, they see it as a refreshing approach to a subject that traditionally was not one that students looked forward to.
I do a lot to help others and I feel that this is more honest than anything I ever done as a xian as I am doing it out of caring for others and not from expecting a wee reward from God when I die.
I would say that I am slowly drifting away from my theology research at the moment, it does get repetitive, and once my archaeology masters is complete I may move into something in that area. Ideally a job that combines theology/archaeology would be desirable, perhaps on the origins of ancient Israel, but I will wait and see how things work out.
So, the value of the Gospel for me is that by studying them it demonstrates the ingenuity of man, the ability that man has to manipulate others into believing almost anything. It certainly helps a lot when investigating any historical event as you always have at the back of your mind that if the Gospel writers can invent a messiah then every other historical account cannot be taken at face value either. Everything has to be examined on its own merits, and no historical text should be given any different treatment regardless of what you would like it to say.
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