In Part #2 we are going to consider what the bible authors might have been trying to accomplish when they wrote their books.
Paul
was the first writer, but he had never met Jesus and he had nothing
much to offer - no sayings of Jesus; no miracles; no personal details of
any kind. As far as Paul was concerned, Jesus was some sort of
airy-fairy character from the distant past who had died for the sins of
all mankind, and promised to one day return and take his followers back
up to heaven where they would live in peace for evermore.
Many
years later, it became clear to the Christians that Jesus was not going
to return anytime soon and they began to wonder just who was this
Jesus? Where did he come from? What did he say? What did he do? When did
he do it?
Faced
with all these questions, the gospel writers felt obligated to provide
some answers but, like Paul before them, they had never met Jesus and
didn't really know much about him - so they made stuff up!
Mark
started off slow. He didn't have much information about the actual life
of Jesus (not even the circumstances of his birth) but he collected all
the rumours that were going around at the time (mainly rumours of
miracles performed by Jesus) and put them together in the very first
gospel.
Ten
years later Matthew copied most of the gospel of Mark but he fabricated some
additional information and, for the first time ever,
Christians began to hear about the 'human' Jesus; his family; his
friends; and his associates. Matthew also changed some of the bits of
Mark that he didn't agree with, and exaggerated other parts to make them sound even more spectacular than the way Mark had
described them.
Luke
did much the same: He copied most of Mark's stories, added more
information about the life of Jesus and his family, changed the bits of Mark that he
didn't like, and exaggerated other stories.
By
the time the gospel of John was written, almost all of the original
Christians were dead and there were no eyewitnesses left to dispute any of the
stories told about Jesus. For this reason, instead of writing about a fairly ordinary 'human' Jesus,
John decided to spice things up a bit and elevated Jesus to the same level as God
himself. "I and the Father are one" he has Jesus say in John 10:30.
Because the authors were operating independently they had no chance to collaborate and, as we discovered in part #1, a large number of contradictions crept into the New Testament. For
several hundred years none of these discrepancies (deliberate lies
actually) were of any consequence because the different groups of
Christians remained separate from each other. The Marcionites, for
example, were totally unfazed by the contradictions in the gospels because (apart from a few teachings that come from the gospel of Luke) they did not accept the gospels. They concentrated solely upon the letters of Paul and regarded the gospel writers as heretics!
By
about the third century AD, however, the various church leaders decided it was time to get the books into some
sort of order. The trouble was that as soon as they tried to put all
the books together in a single canon, the lies and discrepancies became
glaringly obvious. Even worse, the different church leaders who had been using
those books were unwilling to have anything changed. The followers of
Matthew insisted that Joseph was the son of Heli while the followers of
Luke insisted Joseph was the son of Jacob. Neither side was prepared to
give an inch and the contradictions remained.
It
took a while, but eventually the leaders of the various factions came
up with the idea of putting the books together in a fashion
that made it almost impossible for their uneducated followers to easily see the lies, discrepancies, and contradictions.
- First came Matthew because his gospel contained details of almost every aspect of Jesus' life from his birth to his death. It really was a good starting point.
- It was no good putting Luke next to Matthew, however, because they contradicted each other far too often.
- So the church leaders inserted Mark straight after Matthew because it said very little about the early life of Jesus and therefore did not contradict Matthew in any noticeable way.
- Then, by the time the non-scholars had finished reading Mark, they would have forgotten the details in Matthew and thus fail to notice the discrepancies with Luke - so Luke came after Mark.
- There was a lot of debate about John, but Christians with gnostic roots insisted that it must be included, so it was. It contained heaps of dopey stories about Jesus existing since time began, and being as one with God, but such tales seemed to add romance to the saga, and most people were able to accept them as exciting hyperbole if not actual truth.
- After John the church leaders added the book of Acts written by Luke. It had quite a bit to say about the early church and the teachings of Paul, so the priests figured it would serve as a nice segue into the letters of Paul.
- Then came the letters of Paul which said practically nothing about the life of Jesus - but that was good because that meant they didn't contradict anything in the gospels.
- Next there were a few items like the letters from John, Jude, and James. They didn't say much about Jesus, but lots of people already knew about those letters, so they were tacked on towards the end of the New Testament.
- And finally there was the idiot book of Revelation. The arguments went on for decades but eventually the preachers with the biggest sticks won the battle and the whole silly nonsense was included as part of the canon.
And now that they had hidden most of the obvious contradictions in the New Testament, the preachers came up with a brand new idea that ensured their uneducated followers would never discover the lies contained in the holy scriptures: They suggested that Christians should not read the bible on their own, but they should have it read to them by a preacher from the pulpit! And that enabled the church leaders to pick and choose which bits of the story were read out during the church service. The leaders could simply skip over each contradiction as it appeared and the mugs in the pews would never know!
Not everybody agreed with that rule however, and many people did read the bible. They argued about it and fought over it until finally the church leaders invented yet another rule. The mugs in the pews were no longer entitled to an education and only monks, priests, and privileged laity were permitted to learn how to read and write. (That, by the way, was the beginning of The Dark Ages.)
Those two rules protected the church for more than a thousand years until the
invention of the printing press when ordinary Christians finally had the
chance to own and read a copy of the bible in their own language. The
church leaders didn't give up easily however. Anyone who made the bible
available to the hoi-poloi was declared a heretic and sentenced to
death! William Tyndale, for example, published a copy of the New
Testament in 1534 and he was executed for heresy in 1536. (And he wasn't the only one.)
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