T he work of rereading the Old Testament is sometimes tiring but always necessary, because

as one proceeds there begin to occur some sinister premonitions. Abraham—another ancestor

of all monotheism—is ready to make a human sacrifice of his own firstborn. And a rumor comes

that “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son.” Gradually, these two myths begin to converge. It’s

needful to bear this in mind when coming to the New Testament, because if you pick up any of

the four Gospels and read them at random, it will not be long before you learn that such and

such an action or saying, attributed to Jesus, was done so that an ancient prophecy should

come true. (Speaking of the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, riding astride a donkey, Matthew says

in his chapter 21, verse 4, “All of this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the

prophet.” The reference is probably to Zechariah 9:9, where it is said that when the Messiah

comes he will be riding on an ass. The Jews are still awaiting this arrival and the Christians claim

it has already taken place!) If it should seem odd that an action should be deliberately

performed in order that a foretelling be vindicated, that is because it is odd. And it is necessarily

odd because, just like the Old Testament, the “New” one is also a work of crude carpentry,

hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make

things come out right. For concision, I shall again defer to a finer writer than myself and quote

what H. L. Mencken irrefutably says in his Treatise on the Gods:

The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation

of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but

others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show

unmistakable signs of having been tampered with.

Both Paine and Mencken, who put themselves for different reasons to an honest effort to

read the texts, have been borne out by later biblical scholarship, much of it first embarked upon

to show that the texts were still relevant. But this argument takes place over the heads of those

to whom the “Good Book” is all that is required. (One recalls the governor of Texas who, asked if

the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that “if English was good enough for Jesus,

then it’s good enough for me.” Rightly are the simple so called.)

In 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist

and ham actor named Mel Gibson. Mr. Gibson adheres to a crackpot and schismatic Catholic

sect consisting mainly of himself and of his even more thuggish father, and has stated that it is

a pity that his own dear wife is going to hell because she does not accept the correct

sacraments. (This foul doom he calmly describes as “a statement from the chair.”) The doctrine

of his own sect is explicitly anti-Semitic, and the movie sought tirelessly to lay the blame for the

Crucifixion upon the Jews. In spite of this obvious bigotry, which did lead to criticism from some

more cautious Christians, The Passion of the Christ was opportunistically employed by many

“mainstream” churches as a box-office recruiting tool. At one of the ecumenical prepublicityevents which he sponsored, Mr. Gibson defended his filmic farrago—which is also an exercise in

sadomasochistic homoeroticism starring a talentless lead actor who was apparently born in

Iceland or Minnesota—as being based on the reports of “eyewitnesses.” At the time, I thought it

extraordinary that a multimillion-dollar hit could be openly based on such a patently fraudulent

claim, but nobody seemed to turn a hair. Even Jewish authorities were largely silent. But then,

some of them wanted to dampen down this old argument, which for centuries had led to Easter

pogroms against the “Christ-killing Jews.” (It was not until two decades after the Second World

War that the Vatican formally withdrew the charge of “deicide” against the Jewish people as a

whole.) And the truth is that the Jews used to claim credit for the Crucifixion. Maimonides

described the punishment of the detestable Nazarene heretic as one of the greatest

achievements of the Jewish elders, insisted that the name Jesus never be mentioned except

when accompanied by a curse, and announced that his punishment was to be boiled in

excrement for all eternity. What a good Catholic Maimonides would have made!

However, he fell into the same error as do the Christians, in assuming that the four Gospels

were in any sense a historical record. Their multiple authors—none of whom published anything

until many decades after the Crucifixion—cannot agree on anything of importance. Matthew

and Luke cannot concur on the Virgin Birth or the genealogy of Jesus. They flatly contradict

each other on the “Flight into Egypt,” Matthew saying that Joseph was “warned in a dream” to

make an immediate escape and Luke saying that all three stayed in Bethlehem until Mary’s

“purification according to the laws of Moses,” which would make it forty days, and then went

back to Nazareth via Jerusalem. (Incidentally, if the dash to Egypt to conceal a child from

Herod’s infanticide campaign has any truth to it, then Hollywood and many, many Christian

iconographers have been deceiving us. It would have been very difficult to take a blond, blue

eyed baby to the Nile delta without attracting rather than avoiding attention.)

The Gospel according to Luke states that the miraculous birth occurred in a year when the

Emperor Caesar Augustus ordered a census for the purpose of taxation, and that this happened

at a time when Herod reigned in Judaea and Quirinius was governor of Syria. That is the closest

to a triangulation of historical dating that any biblical writer even attempts. But Herod died four

years “BC,” and during his rulership the governor of Syria was not Quirinius. There is no mention

of any Augustan census by any Roman historian, but the Jewish chronicler Josephus mentions

one that did occur—without the onerous requirement for people to return to their places of

birth, and six years after the birth of Jesus is supposed to have taken place. This is, all of it, quite

evidently a garbled and oral-based reconstruction undertaken some considerable time after the

“fact.” The scribes cannot even agree on the mythical elements: they disagree wildly about the

Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery of Judas, and Peter’s haunting

“denial.” Most astonishingly, they cannot converge on a common account of the Crucifixion or

the Resurrection. Thus, the one interpretation that we simply have to discard is the one that

claims divine warrant for all four of them. The book on which Matthew and Luke may possibly

have been based, known speculatively to scholars as “Q,” has been lost forever, which seems

distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have “inspired” it.

Sixty years ago, at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, a trove of neglected “Gospels” was discovered

near a very ancient Coptic Christian site. These scrolls were of the same period and provenance

as many of the subsequently canonical and “authorized” Gospels, and have long gone under the

collective name of “Gnostic.” This was the title given them by a certain Irenaeus, an early church

father who placed them under a ban as heretical. They include the “Gospels” or narratives of

marginal but significant figures in the accepted “New” Testament, such as “Doubting Thomas”

and Mary Magdalene. They now also include the Gospel of Judas, known for centuries to have

existed but now brought to light and published by the National Geographic Society in the spring

of 2006.The book is chiefly spiritualist drivel, as one might expect, but it offers a version of “events”

that is fractionally more credible than the official account. For one thing, it maintains as do its

partner texts that the supposed god of the “Old” Testament is the one to be avoided, a ghastly

emanation from sick minds. (This makes it easy to see why it was so firmly banned and

denounced: orthodox Christianity is nothing if it is not a vindication and completion of that evil

story.) Judas attends the final Passover meal, as usual, but departs from the customary script.

When Jesus appears to pity his other disciples for knowing so little about what is at stake, his

rogue follower boldly says that he believes he knows what the difficulty is. “I know who you are

and where you have come from,” he tells the leader. “You are from the immortal realm of

Barbelo.” This “Barbelo” is not a god but a heavenly destination, a motherland beyond the stars.

Jesus comes from this celestial realm, but is not the son of any Mosaic god. Instead, he is an

avatar of Seth, the third and little-known son of Adam. He is the one who will show the Sethians

the way home. Recognizing that Judas is at least a minor adept of this cult, Jesus takes him to

one side and awards him the special mission of helping him shed his fleshly form and thus return

heavenward. He also promises to show him the stars that will enable Judas to follow on.

Deranged science fiction though this is, it makes infinitely more sense than the everlasting

curse placed on Judas for doing what somebody had to do, in this otherwise pedantically

arranged chronicle of a death foretold. It also makes infinitely more sense than blaming the

Jews for all eternity. For a long time, there was incandescent debate over which of the

“Gospels” should be regarded as divinely inspired. Some argued for these and some for others,

and many a life was horribly lost on the proposition. Nobody dared say that they were all man

inscribed long after the supposed drama was over, and the “Revelation” of Saint John seems to

have squeezed into the canon because of its author’s (rather ordinary) name. But as Jorge Luis

Borges put it, had the Alexandrian Gnostics won the day, some later Dante would have drawn us

a hypnotically beautiful word-picture of the wonders of “Barbelo.” This concept I might choose

to call “the Borges shale”: the verve and imagination needed to visualize a cross section of

evolutionary branches and bushes, with the extraordinary but real possibility that a different

stem or line (or tune or poem) had predominated in the labyrinth. Great ceilings and steeples

and hymns, he might have added, would have consecrated it, and skilled torturers would have

worked for days on those who doubted the truth of Barbelo: beginning with the fingernails and

working their way ingeniously toward the testicles, the vagina, the eyes, and the viscera.

Nonbelief in Barbelo would, correspondingly, have been an unfailing sign that one had no

morals at all.

The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate

living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been “Christians,” since they

were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had

no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master’s announcements. (There is

scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the

founder of a church, either.)

Notwithstanding all that, the jumbled “Old” Testament prophecies indicate that the Messiah

will be born in the city of David, which seems indeed to have been Bethlehem. However, Jesus’s

parents were apparently from Nazareth and if they had a child he was most probably delivered

in that town. Thus a huge amount of fabrication—concerning Augustus, Herod, and Quirinius—is

involved in confecting the census tale and moving the nativity scene to Bethlehem (where, by

the way, no “stable” is ever mentioned). But why do this at all, since a much easier fabrication

would have had him born in Bethlehem in the first place, without any needless to-do? The very

attempts to bend and stretch the story may be inverse proof that someone of later significance

was indeed born, so that in retrospect, and to fulfill the prophecies, the evidence had to be

massaged to some extent. But then even my attempt to be fair and open-minded in this case issubverted by the Gospel of John, which seems to suggest that Jesus was neither born in

Bethlehem nor descended from King David. If the apostles do not know or cannot agree, of

what use is my analysis? In any case, if his royal lineage is something to brag and prophesy

about, why the insistence elsewhere on apparently lowly birth? Almost all religions from

Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the

poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address

themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.

The contradictions and illiteracies of the New Testament have filled up many books by

eminent scholars, and have never been explained by any Christian authority except in the

feeblest terms of “metaphor” and “a Christ of faith.” This feebleness derives from the fact that

until recently, Christians could simply burn or silence anybody who asked any inconvenient

questions. The Gospels are useful, however, in re-demonstrating the same point as their

predecessor volumes, which is that religion is man-made. “The law was given by Moses,” says

Saint John, “but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” Saint Matthew tries for the same effect,

basing everything on a verse or two from the prophet Isaiah which told King Ahaz, almost eight

centuries before the still unfixed date of the birth of Jesus, that “the Lord shall give you a sign; a

virgin will conceive and bear a son.” This encouraged Ahaz to believe that he would be given

victory over his enemies (which in the result, even if you take his story as historical narrative, he

was not). The picture is even further altered when we know that the word translated as “virgin,”

namely almah, means only “a young woman.” In any case, parthenogenesis is not possible for

human mammals, and even if this law were to be relaxed in just one case, it would not prove

that the resulting infant had any divine power. Thus, and as usual, religion arouses suspicion by

trying to prove too much. By reverse analogy, the Sermon on the Mount replicates Moses on

Mount Sinai, and the nondescript disciples stand in for the Jews who followed Moses wherever

he went, and thus prophecy is fulfilled for anyone who doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that the

story is being “reverse-engineered,” as we might now say. In a short passage of only one Gospel

(seized upon by the Jew-baiting Mel Gibson) the rabbis are made to echo god on Sinai and

actually to call for the guilt in the blood of Jesus to descend upon all their subsequent

generations: a demand that, even if it were to be made, lay well beyond their right, or their

power.

But the case of the Virgin Birth is the easiest possible proof that humans were involved in the

manufacture of a legend. Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions

that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she

makes an appearance, as Jewish mothers will, to ask or to see how he is getting on. She herself

appears to have no memory of the Archangel Gabriel’s visitation, or of the swarm of angels,

both telling her that she is the mother of god. In all accounts, everything that her son does

comes to her as a complete surprise, if not a shock. What can he be doing talking to rabbis in

the temple? What’s he saying when he curtly reminds her that he’s on his father’s business? One

might have expected a stronger maternal memory, especially from someone who had

undergone the experience, alone among all women, of discovering herself pregnant without

having undergone the notorious preconditions for that happy state. Luke even makes a telling

slip at one point, speaking of the “parents of Jesus” when he refers only to Joseph and Mary as

they visit the temple for her purification and are hailed by the old man Simeon who pronounces

his wonderful Nunc dimittis, which (another of my old chapel favorites) may also be an intended

echo of Moses glimpsing the Promised Land only in extreme old age.

Then there is the extraordinary matter of Mary’s large brood. Matthew informs us (13:55–57)

that there were four brothers of Jesus, and some sisters also. In the Gospel of James, which is

not canonical but not disowned either, we have the account by Jesus’s brother of that same

name, who was evidently very active in religious circles at the same period. Arguably, Marycould have “conceived” as a virgo intacta and delivered a baby, which would certainly have

made her to that extent less intact. But how did she go on producing children, by the man

Joseph who only exists in reported speech, and thus make the holy family so large that

“eyewitnesses” kept remarking on it?

In order to resolve this near-unmentionable and near-sexual dilemma, reverse-engineering is

again applied, this time much more recently than the frantic early church councils that decided

which Gospels were “synoptic” and which were “apocryphal.” It is determined that Mary herself

(of whose birth there is absolutely no account in any holy book) must have had a prior

“Immaculate Conception” that rendered her essentially stainless. And it is further determined

that, since the wage of sin is death and she cannot possibly have sinned, she cannot have died.

Hence the dogma of the “Assumption,” which asserts out of thin air that thin air is the medium

through which she went to heaven while avoiding the grave. It is of interest to note the dates of

these magnificently ingenious edicts. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was

announced or discovered by Rome in 1852, and the dogma of the Assumption in 1950. To say

that something is “man-made” is not always to say that it is stupid. These heroic rescue

attempts deserve some credit, even as we watch the leaky original vessel sink without trace.

But, “inspired” though the church’s resolution may be, it would insult the deity to claim that such

inspiration was in any way divine.

JUST AS THE SCRIPT of the Old Testament is riddled with dreams and with astrology (the sun

standing still so that Joshua can complete his massacre at a site that has never been located),

so the Christian bible is full of star-predictions (notably the one over Bethlehem) and witch

doctors and sorcerers. Many of the sayings and deeds of Jesus are innocuous, most especially

the “beatitudes” which express such fanciful wish-thinking about the meek and the

peacemakers. But many are unintelligible and show a belief in magic, several are absurd and

show a primitive attitude to agriculture (this extends to all mentions of plowing and sowing, and

all allusions to mustard or fig trees), and many are on the face of it flat-out immoral. The

analogy of humans to lilies, for instance, suggests—along with many other injunctions—that

things like thrift, innovation, family life, and so forth are a sheer waste of time. (“Take no

thought for the morrow.”) This is why some of the Gospels, canonical and apocryphal, report

people (including his family members) saying at the time that they thought Jesus must be mad.

There were also those who noticed that he was often a rather rigid Jewish sectarian: in Matthew

15:21–28 we read of his contempt for a Canaanite woman who implored his aid for an exorcism

and was brusquely told that he would not waste his energy on a non-Jew. (His disciples, and the

persistence of the woman, eventually persuaded him to unbend, and to cast out the non-devil.)

In my opinion, an idiosyncratic story like this is another oblique reason for thinking that some

such personality may at some time have lived. There were many deranged prophets roaming

Palestine at the time, but this one reportedly believed himself, at least some of the time, to be

god or the son of god. And that has made all the difference. Make just two assumptions: that he

believed this and that he also promised his followers that he would reveal his kingdom before

they came to the end of their own lives, and all but one or two of his gnomic remarks make

some kind of sense. This point was never put more frankly than by C. S. Lewis (who has recently

reemerged as the most popular Christian apologist) in his Mere Christianity. He happens to be

speaking about the claim of Jesus to take sins on himself:

Now, unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all

understand how a man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toes and I

forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man,

himself unrobbed and untrodden-on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on

other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description

we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins wereforgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly

injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person

chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if he really was the God whose laws

are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not

God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by

any other character in history.

It will be noticed that Lewis assumes on no firm evidence whatever that Jesus actually was a

“character in history,” but let that pass. He deserves some credit for accepting the logic and

morality of what he has just stated. To those who argue that Jesus may have been a great

moral teacher without being divine (of whom the deist Thomas Jefferson incidentally claimed to

be one), Lewis has this stinging riposte:

That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of

things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a

level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You

must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman and

something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a

demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any

patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to

us. He did not intend to.

I am not choosing a straw man here: Lewis is the main chosen propaganda vehicle for

Christianity in our time. And nor am I accepting his rather wild supernatural categories, such as

devil and demon. Least of all do I accept his reasoning, which is so pathetic as to defy

description and which takes his two false alternatives as exclusive antitheses, and then uses

them to fashion a crude non sequitur (“Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a

lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I

have to accept the view that He was and is God.”). However, I do credit him with honesty and

with some courage. Either the Gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is

essentially a fraud and perhaps an immoral one at that. Well, it can be stated with certainty,

and on their own evidence, that the Gospels are most certainly not literal truth. This means that

many of the “sayings” and teachings of Jesus are hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay, which

helps explain their garbled and contradictory nature. The most glaring of these, at least in

retrospect and certainly from the believers’ point of view, concern the imminence of his second

coming and his complete indifference to the founding of any temporal church. The logia or

reported speeches are repeatedly cited, by bishops of the early church who wished that they

had been present at the time but were not, as eagerly solicited thirdhand commentaries. Let me

give a conspicuous example. Many years after C. S. Lewis had gone to his reward, a very serious

young man named Bart Ehrman began to examine his own fundamentalist assumptions. He had

attended the two most eminent Christian fundamentalist academies in the United States, and

was considered by the faithful to be among their champions. Fluent in Greek and Hebrew (he is

now holder of a chair in religious studies), he eventually could not quite reconcile his faith with

his scholarship. He was astonished to find that some of the best-known Jesus stories were

scribbled into the canon long after the fact, and that this was true of perhaps the best-known of

them all.

This story is the celebrated one about the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3–11). Who has

not heard or read of how the Jewish Pharisees, skilled in casuistry, dragged this poor woman

before Jesus and demanded to know if he agreed with the Mosaic punishment of stoning her to

death? If he did not, he violated the law. If he did, he made nonsense of his own preachings. One

easily pictures the squalid zeal with which they pounced upon the woman. And the calm reply

(after writing upon the ground)—“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone ather”—has entered our literature and our consciousness.

This episode is even celebrated on celluloid. It makes a flashback appearance in Mel Gibson’s

travesty, and it is a lovely moment in David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, where Lara goes to the priest in

her extremity and is asked what Jesus said to the fallen woman. “Go, and sin no more,” is her

reply. “And did she, child?” asks the priest fiercely. “I don’t know, Father.” “Nobody knows,”

responds the priest, unhelpfully in the circumstances.

Nobody, indeed, does know. Long before I read Ehrman, I had some questions of my own. If

the New Testament is supposed to vindicate Moses, why are the gruesome laws of the

Pentateuch to be undermined? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the killing of

witches may seem brutish and stupid, but if only non-sinners have the right to punish, then how

could an imperfect society ever determine how to prosecute offenders? We should all be

hypocrites. And what authority did Jesus have to “forgive”? Presumably, at least one wife or

husband somewhere in the city felt cheated and outraged. Is Christianity, then, sheer sexual

permissiveness? If so, it has been gravely misunderstood ever since. And what was being written

on the ground? Nobody knows, again. Furthermore, the story says that after the Pharisees and

the crowd had melted away (presumably from embarrassment), nobody was left except Jesus

and the woman. In that case, who is the narrator of what he said to her? For all that, I thought it

a fine enough story.

Professor Ehrman goes further. He asks some more obvious questions. If the woman was

“taken in adultery,” which means in flagrante delicto, then where is her male partner? Mosaic

law, adumbrated in Leviticus, makes it clear that both must undergo the stoning. I suddenly

realized that the core of the story’s charm is that of the shivering lonely girl, hissed at and

dragged away by a crowd of sex-starved fanatics, and finally encountering a friendly face. As

to the writing in the dust, Ehrman mentions an old tradition which postulates that Jesus was

scrawling the known transgressions of others present, thus leading to blushing and shuffling

and eventually to hasty departure. I find I love this idea, even if it would mean a level of worldly

curiosity and prurience (and foresight) on his part that raises its own difficulties.

Overarching all this is the shocking fact that, as Ehrman concedes:

The story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing

style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories

immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that

are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not

originally part of the Gospel.

I have again selected my source on the basis of “evidence against interest”: in other words

from someone whose original scholarly and intellectual journey was not at all intended to

challenge holy writ. The case for biblical consistency or authenticity or “inspiration” has been in

tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research,

and thus no “revelation” can be derived from that quarter. So, then, let the advocates and

partisans of religion rely on faith alone, and let them be brave enough to admit that this is what

they are doing.