Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion
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200 CE) actually wrote a whole book telling his audience how to distinguish his
work from forgeries. Even among the early Christians such practice was frowned
upon. The church father Tertullian (ca. 160-ca. 225) told the story of how the
forger of 3 Corinthians, a Christian presbyter, was duly convicted by the
ecclesiastical authority for composing this letter and falsely attributing it to
Paul.93
As Bart Ehrman pointed out in his recent book, 7esus Interrupted,94 the
ancients, used words such as pseudon (a lie) and nothon (a bastard child) to
describe forgeries. Pseudepigraphy was not considered "okay" by the ancients
and anyone who wrote such a piece of work must have been aware of the
morally repugnant nature of what he was doing. Yet the works of such people as
these made it into the NT. We end this section on an ironical note. One of the
most commonly used passages by evangelicals to "prove" biblical inspiration is
this one: "Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16).
Yet this passage is almost certainly the work of a forger.
CONCLUSIONS
Let's recap what modern scholars have found. The Bible is filled with so many
diametrically opposite viewpoints that if they were present in a human being we
would probably label that person bipolar or, even worse, schizophrenic. We have
seen that the pillars of biblical archaeology-the Patriarchal Narratives, the
Exodus, and the Conquest-events once thought to have been historical, are now
shown to be made up almost completely of myths and legends. In the NT we
find that critical historical research has relegated the nativity accounts in
Matthew and Luke to the realm of myths, legends, and fairy tales. Prophecy, far
from being strong evidence for the divine authority of the Bible, is actually an
Achilles' heel. The Bible contains prophecies that were faked (i.e., made after the
fact) and prophecies that failed. We also find that the verse most often used by
evangelicals to support their doctrine of biblical inerrancy, 2 Timothy 3:16,
comes from the pen of a forger.
The Bible cannot be considered inspired by God in any meaningful sense at
all.
ADDENDUM: THE LIBERALS AND THE BIBLE
I have argued that the evangelical belief in biblical inspiration cannot be
defended in the light of modern scholarship. However, there are many Christians
who are not evangelicals, members of the mainline Protestant churches, such as
Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist churches, who do not accept the evangelical
position. These churches subscribe to some forms of liberal-modernist theology.
Liberal or modernist theologians would happily admit to all of the findings
mentioned in this chapter but would dismiss them as "insignificant" objections to
their faith. Yet, strange as it may seem to the average person, these theologians
still consider themselves Christians.
Liberal modernist theology has its roots in the Enlightenment-an intellectual
movement that started in the eighteenth century-which placed reason above all
else. The skepticism of philosophers such as David Hume (1711-1776) and to a
certain extent, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) presented many difficulties for
Christian theologians. Even more troubling to theology than philosophy was
natural philosophy, or, as it eventually became known, science. The Copernican
revolution, which showed that the sun, not the earth, was the center upon which
everything in the thenknown universe revolves, took away the earth's, and thus
man's, place from the center of the universe. It became harder to believe how
man could be the crowning glory of creation when he is placed in an
insignificant corner of the universe.' The plight of the theologians continued to
pile up in the nineteenth century. The publishing of Charles Darwin's (1809-
1882) treatise on evolution, On The Origin of Species (1859), meant that science
had gone one step further against the theologian. The theory of evolution
presented by Darwin showed that man is an evolved animal, no more and no
less. If evolution is true, and the evidence marshaled by Darwin in his book is
compelling, then Genesis is false; far from being created in God's image,
humankind bore all the marks of an animal ancestry.
Within Christendom, the development of biblical criticism, especially in its
"higher" form, began to show that the Bible was not a unique document (as
we've shown). Christian theology bifurcated into fundamentalist/ conservatism
on one side and liberal/modernism on the other.96 While the fundamentalist side
rejected the assured results of science and biblical criticism, the liberal side
embraced them and subsequently reinvented their Christian faith. Thus the
liberals did not reach their position by abstruse theological reasoning. Instead
they were forced into it by external circumstances-the findings of science,
comparative religions, enlightenment philosophies, and textual and historical
criticism.
The position of the liberals on the Bible can be divided into two broad, not
necessarily mutually exclusive, positions. The first is that the biblical myths
convey symbolic truths, as expressed in a report published by the Anglican
Church Commission on Christian Doctrine in 1938: "Statements affirming
particular facts may be found to have value as pictorial expressions of spiritual
truths, even though the supposed facts themselves did not actually happen. In
that case such statements must be called symbolically true ... It is not therefore
of necessity illegitimate to accept and affirm particular clauses in the Creeds
while understanding them in this symbolic sense." 97 This report, probably on
purpose, never made it clear which clauses of the Anglican creeds were to be
understood in this symbolic sense.
The second position asserts that the Bible, while being fallible, is in general
the inspired word of God, as Carl Lofmark summed up the views of liberal R. P.
C. Hanson and A. T. Hanson:
They recognized that the Bible contains errors and cannot be divinely
inspired, that its world view is "prescientific" and its accounts of history
mainly myths, legend, or fiction, that its miracles never happened and that
parts of it are unedifying if not disgusting.... They agree that the Bible text
is unreliable and the original words (including the words of Jesus) have
often been altered. Yet they still believe that the Bible's "general drift" or
"impression" is a "true witness to the nature of God." The unedifying texts
are "balanced" by others, which reveal the truth. Deep significance is not
found everywhere in the Bible, but only in its "high spots."... This approach
is eclectic: they select from the Bible those passages which they find
edifying and construct from those passages their own impression of the
Bible's "general drift," while rejecting the bulk of what the Bible contains.
Only the better parts are a true witness to the nature and purpose of God.98
The first problem to note is that if modern liberals are right about the Bible, then
most Christians have failed to understand God's true message throughout church
history until recent time. Put in this way, the liberal position sounds smug and
pretentious.
The second problem is that the question remains as to which passages are to
be taken literally and which are to be taken symbolically. If the intent of the
biblical authors is rejected by the method of selection, then this leaves the door
wide open for selecting which passages should be symbolic and which should
not. Thirdly, how are those passages to be interpreted symbolically? There is no
guide or generally accepted method of symbolic interpretation. How does one
know which symbolic interpretation is correct? Fourthly, just because the stories
are defined as symbolic by the liberals, it does not mean that the issue of the
criterion of truth has been successfully avoided. What happens when two liberal
theologians come up with two mutually exclusive symbolic truths from the same
biblical passage? And finally, many socalled interpretations of the symbolic
truths of the Bible are actually devoid of any cognitive meaning.
Take for instance an Ascension Day sermon written for an English newspaper
by an Anglican bishop: "[The ascension of Jesus is] not a primitive essay in
astrophysics, but the symbol of creative intuition ... into the abiding significance
of Jesus and his place in the destiny of man. It might be called a pictorial
presentation of the earliest creed, Jesus is Lord ... Creed and scripture are saying
in their own language that here is something final and decisive, the truth and the
meaning of man's life and destiny-truth not in theory but in a person-life in its
ultimate quality, that is God's life."99 From what he said only one thing is clear:
the good bishop does not believe that the ascension story is to be taken literally.
Apart from this, it is very difficult to fathom what it is he is trying to say and
how what he is trying to say is derived from that story told in three verses in
Acts, if it is not grounded in an actual historical event. While we can forgive the
author of Acts for his lack of knowledge of astrophysics, it is hard to know what
to do with the bishop.
As for the "take some and leave some" approach to the Bible, the central
question remains: if some parts of the Bible are false or unacceptable, what
guarantee do we have that the other parts are true, or are of any special value?
Thus the moment one admits that some parts of the Bible are untrue or
unacceptable, the position of the Bible as the inspired word of God becomes
very difficult to objectively defend.
Take for instance this passage from American liberal theologian Leslie
Weatherhead: "[W] hen Jesus is reported as consigning to everlasting torture
those who displease him or do not `believe' what he says, I know in my heart
that there is something wrong somewhere. Either he is misrepresented or
misunderstood.... So I put his alleged saying in my mental drawer awaiting
farther light. By the judgment of the court within my own breast.. .1 reject such
sayings."loo The question here is simple: if he could use his own judgment to
accept and reject biblical passages, why rely on the Bible at all?
This leads us into the liberal theologians' views of Jesus. It is obvious that
since the late nineteenth century these theologians have ceased to believe that the
main events of the Gospels are historical, especially the virgin birth, the
associated nativity stories, the miracles, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The
liberals trip all over themselves trying to avoid saying the actual truth: if the
bodily resurrection of Yesus is not historical then traditional Christianity, in any
form, is no longer valid. This is the skeptic's position, of course. But the liberals
added that the resurrection is to be understood in a different sense, but just
exactly what sense is not clear. Their writings contain so much garbled speech
that it is difficult to even see if they agree with one another. Most of the liberal
interpretation involves accepting the resurrection as some kind of internal
revelation of the disciples. This experience, they proclaim, is what really
matters, not the actual historical fact of resurrection. But why should it, we ask?
Why should the visions or dreams of a few ill-educated, first-century Galilean
peasants be of any significance and be treated any differently from others all
over the world and throughout history? Because it is about Jesus? But take away
the historical claims about his supposed supernatural powers, his miracles, and
his bodily resurrection, and what do we have? A first-century, xenophobic,
ignorant Galilean peasant who thought the world was going to end (as Loftus
proves in chapter 12). If this is so, why not just dispense with it altogether? It's
high time they did. As Hector Avalos has argued very effectively in The End of
Biblical Studies, it's time that biblical studies as we know them should end.
NOTES
1. Editor's note: This chapter sums up only a few sections of Paul Tobin's far
more extensive book, The Rejection of Pascal:r Wager-A Skeptic:r Guide to the
Bible and the Historical.7esus (Bedfordshire, England: Authors Online, 2009).
Good summaries of what scholars now widely conclude about the Bible, fully in
accord with Tobin's account, can be found in Israel Finkelstein and Neil
Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology :c New Vision of Ancient Israel
and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001) and Bart
Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
(New York: HarperOne, 2009) (for the OT and NT, respectively). All three
books should be required reading for any actual or prospective Christian.
2. Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans See Them (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
3. See "The Confessions and Letters of Saint Augustin, with a Sketch of His
Life and Work: Letter 82," Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel
.org/ccel/schaff/npnflOl.vii.I.LXXXII.htinl.
4. Robert Price, Inerrant the Wind The Evangelical Crisis of Biblical
Authority (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009) and Beyond Born Again.-
Towards Evangelical Maturity,
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/beyond born
again/index.shtinl.
5. The reader is encouraged to consult the following works for further
information: Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 2007), pp. 37-5 3; Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical
PreacberBecame One of America:c Leading Atheists (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses
Press, 1992), pp. 222-50; Rod Evans and Irwin Berent, Fundamentalism:
Hazards and Heartbreaks (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1988), pp. 89-94; Bruce
Metzger, The Bible in Translation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001),
pp. 140-41; and my own Rejection of Pascal:r Wager, pp. 197-204.
6. On this see Richard Elliott Friedman's two books, Who Wrote the Bible?
(New York: Perennial Library, 1989) and The Bible with Sources Revealed-A
New View into the Five Books of Moses (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco,
2003). Friedman is a premier critical historical scholar and a professor of
Hebrew and comparative literature. He outlines how scholars discovered the
source documents of the Pentateuch when they realized that different accounts
actually come from different sources that the editors of the Pentateuch tried to
cobble together.
7. Randel McGraw Helms, The Bible against Itself Why the Bible Seems to
Contradictltself (Altadena, CA: Millennium Press, 2006).
8. Compare also: Proverbs 1:13-17 versus Ecclesiastes 7:15-17; and Proverbs
1:7 and 2:5 versus Ecclesiastes 7:23 and 8:1, 17-18. See Helms, Bible against
Itself, pp. 60-63.
9. Helms, Bible against Itself, pp. 115-33.
10. C. Dennis McKinsey has written a book of more than five hundred pages
cataloging these errors, The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1995).
11. Some examples: Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 1982), in 476 pages; Norman Geisler and
Thomas Howe, The Big Book of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Books, 1992), in 615 pages; and R. A. Torrey, Difficulties in the Bible (Chicago:
Moody Press 1972), in 159 pages.
12. For example, the book by the German journalist Werner Keller, The Bible
as History (1956), has the subtitle "Archaeology Confirms the Book of Books!"
13. See chapter 4, "Collapse of the Paradigm," in Thomas W. Davis, Shifting
Sands.- The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 2004).
14. Davis, Shifting Sands, p. 145; P. R. S. Moorey, A Century of Biblical
Archaeology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 173-75.
15. Ian Plimer, Telling Lies for God-Reason versus Creationism (Milsons
Point, NSW: Random House Australia, 1994), p. 75.
16. For the full text of the epic of Gilgainesh, see: http://www.ancient
texts.org/library/inesopotainian/gilgainesh/.
17. Cyrus Gordon and Gary Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancient Near East
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 50.
18. Archaeologists have discovered two even earlier versions of flood myths-
the Sumerian epic of Ziusudra (ca. 2600 BCE) and the Akkadian epic of
Atrahasis (ca. 1900 BCE). Together with the epic of Gilgamesh, these myths
involve the gods causing a worldwide flood and a hero who builds an ark to save
himself, his family, and some animals. The epics of Ziusudra and Atrahasis do
not survive in their complete forms and are today extant only in fragments. For a
thorough analysis of the relationship between these various flood myths, see
Jeffrey Tigay's monograph The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
19. See Finkelstein and Silberman, Bible Unearthed, pp. 27-47; Niels Peter
Lemche, Prelude to Israel:r Pasta Background and Beginnings of Israelite
History and Iden tity (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), pp. 12-44; John Van
Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1975); Thomas Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives:
The Quest for the Historical Abraham (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press
International, 2002).
20. Eric Cline, From Eden to Exile-Unraveling the Mysteries of the Bible
(Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007), pp. 56-57; Leinche, Prelude to
Israel:r Past, pp. 39, 62.
21. Finkelstein and Silberman, Bible Unearthed, p. 37.
22. Manfred Barthel, What the Bible Really Says (New York: Wings, 1980),
p. 79; Michael D. Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical World
(London: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 28, 109; Finkelstein and