What Your Preacher Didn’t Tell You

… and you will know the truth
and the truth will make you free.
– John 8:32

What your preacher didn’t tell you is this: Christianity as we know it was a Medieval invention. Christian dogma conflicts with historical and scientific facts. It also directly and strongly contradicts what Jesus himself taught. He didn’t believe that he was divine or that he or anybody else was bound for heaven. Although he was mistaken, he expected to become an earthly king. I intend to support these assertions with his own words. The Bible itself is my primary source, so at any time you doubt my position, I encourage you to look up the passages I cite and judge for yourself

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The Plan

Many books about Bible history are either so pedantic or so narrow in scope that they can leave the uninitiated reader bewildered. My primary aim in this book is to present some basics on Bible history in a straightforward manner so that uninitiated readers can discern the fundamental truths – that the Bible is a mix of myths, distorted history, and conflicting messages, and that the precepts of modern Christian dogma conflict with what Jesus himself taught. Most people are unaware of Bible history. I’m referring not just to the history in the Bible, but also to the history of the Bible – the events surrounding its creation.

This may be a challenging read. All I ask is that you try to consider the evidence that I present without forming “knee-jerk” responses based on preconceived notions. That’s a pretty tall order. If you’re a Christian, you’ve had years of careful indoctrination in one view of the Bible. Much of that indoctrination took place before you were old enough to question it rationally. The dogma was inculcated via rote memorization – through rhythmic recitation, songs, and participation in various reinforcement rituals. You began committing Biblical text to memory before you could understand what it meant.

A great deal of the information that I’ll cover is based on research by Bible historians – who are frequently clergymen. In general, they set out to understand the Bible better, not to discredit it. They study its source documents in their original languages in order to decipher their meanings and to discover the circumstances in which they were written. So, even if you don’t accept my conclusions, you might find this book to be an interesting read. Despite what fundamentalists believe, the Bible isn’t a single narrative dictated by God to the prophets. The history of its development is actually quite well documented. Here are a few irrefutable facts about the Bible:

• Its contents were selected and edited by Medieval Europeans.
• Nearly all of it was written long after the events it purports to describe.
• The text was frequently modified, sometimes for political reasons.
• Nothing in it is completely reliable.
• A great deal of it is absolutely false.

Medieval scribes copied manuscripts by hand. Over time, this resulted in many thousands of discrepancies.1 Most were typographical errors, but some were intentional insertions, deletions, and alterations of profound theological significance. Because of this, many Bible historians devote their careers to determining the chronological order in which the surviving documents were created in order to find the original meanings. In addition to mistranslations and alterations to existing documents, many of the Bible’s books are outright forgeries, as Bart Ehrman has demonstrated.2 The problems are major. Here, for example, are a few terms and concepts that were mistranslated or abused – in at least some cases, intentionally:

Ancient Hebrews were originally polytheistic. They didn’t believe that the male god Yahweh was the only god. They believed that he was their god, the one whom they were to worship above all others. Indeed, Yahweh once shared heaven with a queen, Asherah, who is mentioned about 40 times in the Old Testament, but generally in an unfavorable light because of an ongoing dispute between the official Hebrew monotheists and the polytheistic commoners over the last few centuries BC. Dozens of gods are mentioned by name in the Old Testament (as the table below shows), but not to dispute their existence. The ancient Hebrew word Elohim was both singular and plural and represented both genders. It was translated into English as “God” to represent the single male god, Yahweh.

The combined term “Yahweh Elohim” basically meant “the god Yahweh,” but it was mistranslated as “the Lord God.” The ancient Hebrew name “Yahweh” referred to a single male god. It was translated into English as “the Lord” and is routinely conflated with “Elohim.” In practice, Christian preachers maintain the illusion that “the Lord” and “God” are synonymous.

The term “Adam” was interpreted to mean an individual human male, but it really referred to mankind in general. The term “ben adam” meant “son of man.” It was misconstrued as a title for Jesus himself (“the Son of Man”), but it can refer to any man or all men or mankind in general. This error and many others were facilitated by the lack of capital letters in the ancient Greek alphabet.

The synonymous terms “Kingdom of God” and “Kingdom of Heaven” were conflated with heaven itself, but, in fact, they unambiguously referred to a future physical kingdom here on earth. When “Gehenna” was translated into Greek, “Hades” was substituted. Actually, Hades was a mythical Greek underworld whereas Gehenna was a very real place outside of Jerusalem. The Old English concept of Hell (netherworld) was utterly foreign to Jesus and his followers, but it was substituted for the Hebrew Sheol – the abode of the dead (essentially, the grave).

The Greek “khristos,” which became the English “Christ” meant “anointed.” Ancient Hebrew priests anointed kings to assert Yahweh‘s approval – not to suggest that their kings were divine. Furthermore, “khristos” and, subsequently, “Christ,” were substituted for the Hebrew “Messiah” (a long-awaited earthly king).

What Bible historians do resembles detective work. No original documents have been found. None. The oldest available texts are altered copies of altered copies – often in tattered fragments. If you want to pinpoint a document’s date, you can study contextual properties such as characteristics of the language and references to geography and events. For example, if a passage mentions a country by name and you know when that country was founded, then you can readily infer that the document was written after that date. If it refers to a particular king, then it was written after that king took the throne. If you have access to multiple copies of a document that contain variations in text, you can determine their relative ages and authenticity by examining their differences.

Although the core of my argument is based on the Bible, some of the information I’ll cover comes from archaeology, history, and the sciences. I intend to present some of the most conspicuous evidence against religious dogma in general and Christianity in particular because it is the prevalent religion here in the United States and the one most familiar to me (I was raised Lutheran). There’s nothing particularly novel about the evidence I’m going to present. It has been thoroughly documented. My aim is to assemble a smattering of information from many diverse disciplines into a broad case against the legitimacy of religious dogma.