It’s a bankrupt chapter: no verifiable history, but cult promotion
For centuries Christian clergy have pushed the claim that the gospels are authentic accounts of Jesus—indeed, that these accounts were divinely inspired. At the same time, they have commonly not pressured their devout congregants to read, reread, and carefully, critically study these documents. Because they know very well that the gospels abound in flaws and contradictions—which means that they also abound in theological problems.
Indeed, not one episode in the gospels—not a single word of Jesus-script—can be verified. This can be so very difficult to grasp when the devout have been assured since they were toddlers that these documents were dictated by god himself to the authors. But try to get a grip on reality: other religions have claimed exactly the same thing about their scriptures and dogmas—yet those claims are flatly rejected by devout Christians, who also disagree on which Christian interpretations of the gospels are correct. For us to take the Christian claims seriously—yes, I must continually press this point—we ask that the devout provide reliable, verifiable, objective evidence to support the belief that their scripture is divinely inspired.
The certainty that a religious book was dictated by an unseen deity is actually a form of magical thinking. There is no way to prove the claim, but—who cares! —it was a magical event. Case closed.
But if we are expected to take the gospels seriously as authentic accounts, we would need to see the rigorous disciplines that historians follow. Take a look at any modern biography, at any modern description of an historical era: the ends of these books have dozens of pages of notes on the sources used: letters, diaries, newspaper quotes that were researched in libraries and archives. Because real historians don’t rely on their imaginations or inspiration. They base their accounts on verifiable facts.
The gospel authors simply did not know how to do that, or grasp why it was necessary. The gospel of Mark was the first written, probably at least forty years after the death of Jesus, and we have no idea who the author was. Nor do we have any idea where he got his information. All of the gospel authors wrote to promote the Jesus-cult, in their own ways. Just carefully compare the gospel of Mark with the gospel of John: the differences and contradictions are so easy to spot.
The first question to ask when reading any chapter of Mark is this: How can we know if it’s true? Christian apologists insist that the stories are based on reliable oral tradition or eyewitness reports, but that is wishful thinking, speculation. There is no data whatever to prove these suggestions. The gospel authors created stories and Jesus-script to promote the holy hero of the cult, decades after his supposed career as an itinerate preacher.
The clergy and the devout don’t seem to realize that this is a crisis that puts their faith is jeopardy. A sweeping exposure of the gospels as myth/fiction can be found in a giant chapter of Richard Carrier’s book, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, that is Chapter 10, pp. 387-509. It includes four sections, the mythologies of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. In his conclusion Carrier states bluntly that the gospel authors are
“…mythographers; novelists; propagandists. They are deliberately inventing what they present in their texts. And they are doing it for a reason (even if we can’t always discern what that is). The Gospels simply must be approached as such. We have to stop thinking we can use them as historical sources.” (p. 509)
In July 2024, Carrier published an essay titled, All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark, in which he clearly makes the case that history played a minor role—if any at all—in the creation of this gospel.
Chapter 11 of Mark opens with the story of Jesus sending two of his disciples to a nearby village to find a colt that no one had ever sat on. They bring it back to Jesus—after getting permission to take it—and he sits on it for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When Matthew copied this episode, he included a quote from Zechariah, “Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9) Matthew took this literally, and depicts Jesus riding on both! The author of John’s gospel reduced this story to a bare minimum: the says that Jesus found a donkey and sat upon it. (John 12:14)
But Mark was the originator of this story, and we’d like to know where he got his information. Was someone taking notes as Jesus told the two disciples to go look for the colt? How and where would such a record have been kept—to be retrieved by an author forty years later? Moreover, would the Roman authorities have allowed the spectacle of a holy hero being welcomed with the chanting of “Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming”? (Mark 11:10)
Perhaps the most famous episode in Mark 11 is the so-called cleansing of the temple by Jesus, vv. 15-17 (King James Version):
“…Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught, saying unto them, ‘Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves.’”
It is the consensus of mainstream Bible scholars that Mark was written after the destruction of the Temple in 70CE—and we have no idea where the author lived. It would seem that he wasn’t aware of the size of the temple, and how little impact one man with a temper could have. Richard Carrier has described the situation:
“Of course, that scene is hardly believable: the temple grounds were enormous, occupying many acres (the temple as a whole occupied nearly forty acres, and a large portion of that, at least ten acres, was devoted to public space), extensively populated (there would have been hundreds of merchants and moneychangers there), and heavily guarded by an armed force deployed to prevent just this sort of thing. They would have killed Jesus on the spot.” On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 431-432.
But Mark was promoting the cult’s holy hero who thrived on drama and miracles.
Before and after the cleansing of the temple, we find Jesus’ encounter with a fig tree, which he curses because it has no ripe figs—no surprise because it was not the season for ripe figs. The next day the disciples noticed that the tree had withered—the curse had worked. This provides the opportunity for Jesus to champion prayer. Here we find more totally unrealistic cult promotion:
“And Jesus answered saying to them, ‘Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.’” (vv. 22-24)
Verse 25 adds a warning: “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions.” In the process of manuscript copying and recopying, a scribe added another warning, verse 26: “But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father who is in heaven forgive your transgressions.”
There has been considerable speculation about this fig tree business: might it be a metaphor for the destruction of the temple itself? Chapter 13 is heavily focused on that calamity.
The final section of chapter 11 is verses 27-33, in which religious leaders challenge Jesus: from what authority does his teaching derive? He throws a question back at them, about whether or not John the Baptist should have been taken seriously. They decline to answer—and Jesus refuses to respond to their question. Which is strange indeed, since the primary message of Mark’s gospel is that Jesus’ mission is to proclaim that the kingdom of his god is about to arrive. Why shut up about it at that point? Perhaps because it was only the members of the cult who were privileged to know.
There is far too much in this chapter that fails the test of history, and pushes cult fantasy and propaganda.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
· Guessing About God (2023),
· Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available.
· Everything You Need to Know About Prayer But May Not Want to Admit (2025)
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
For centuries Christian clergy have pushed the claim that the gospels are authentic accounts of Jesus—indeed, that these accounts were divinely inspired. At the same time, they have commonly not pressured their devout congregants to read, reread, and carefully, critically study these documents. Because they know very well that the gospels abound in flaws and contradictions—which means that they also abound in theological problems.
Indeed, not one episode in the gospels—not a single word of Jesus-script—can be verified. This can be so very difficult to grasp when the devout have been assured since they were toddlers that these documents were dictated by god himself to the authors. But try to get a grip on reality: other religions have claimed exactly the same thing about their scriptures and dogmas—yet those claims are flatly rejected by devout Christians, who also disagree on which Christian interpretations of the gospels are correct. For us to take the Christian claims seriously—yes, I must continually press this point—we ask that the devout provide reliable, verifiable, objective evidence to support the belief that their scripture is divinely inspired.
The certainty that a religious book was dictated by an unseen deity is actually a form of magical thinking. There is no way to prove the claim, but—who cares! —it was a magical event. Case closed.
But if we are expected to take the gospels seriously as authentic accounts, we would need to see the rigorous disciplines that historians follow. Take a look at any modern biography, at any modern description of an historical era: the ends of these books have dozens of pages of notes on the sources used: letters, diaries, newspaper quotes that were researched in libraries and archives. Because real historians don’t rely on their imaginations or inspiration. They base their accounts on verifiable facts.
The gospel authors simply did not know how to do that, or grasp why it was necessary. The gospel of Mark was the first written, probably at least forty years after the death of Jesus, and we have no idea who the author was. Nor do we have any idea where he got his information. All of the gospel authors wrote to promote the Jesus-cult, in their own ways. Just carefully compare the gospel of Mark with the gospel of John: the differences and contradictions are so easy to spot.
The first question to ask when reading any chapter of Mark is this: How can we know if it’s true? Christian apologists insist that the stories are based on reliable oral tradition or eyewitness reports, but that is wishful thinking, speculation. There is no data whatever to prove these suggestions. The gospel authors created stories and Jesus-script to promote the holy hero of the cult, decades after his supposed career as an itinerate preacher.
The clergy and the devout don’t seem to realize that this is a crisis that puts their faith is jeopardy. A sweeping exposure of the gospels as myth/fiction can be found in a giant chapter of Richard Carrier’s book, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, that is Chapter 10, pp. 387-509. It includes four sections, the mythologies of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. In his conclusion Carrier states bluntly that the gospel authors are
“…mythographers; novelists; propagandists. They are deliberately inventing what they present in their texts. And they are doing it for a reason (even if we can’t always discern what that is). The Gospels simply must be approached as such. We have to stop thinking we can use them as historical sources.” (p. 509)
In July 2024, Carrier published an essay titled, All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark, in which he clearly makes the case that history played a minor role—if any at all—in the creation of this gospel.
Chapter 11 of Mark opens with the story of Jesus sending two of his disciples to a nearby village to find a colt that no one had ever sat on. They bring it back to Jesus—after getting permission to take it—and he sits on it for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When Matthew copied this episode, he included a quote from Zechariah, “Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9) Matthew took this literally, and depicts Jesus riding on both! The author of John’s gospel reduced this story to a bare minimum: the says that Jesus found a donkey and sat upon it. (John 12:14)
But Mark was the originator of this story, and we’d like to know where he got his information. Was someone taking notes as Jesus told the two disciples to go look for the colt? How and where would such a record have been kept—to be retrieved by an author forty years later? Moreover, would the Roman authorities have allowed the spectacle of a holy hero being welcomed with the chanting of “Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming”? (Mark 11:10)
Perhaps the most famous episode in Mark 11 is the so-called cleansing of the temple by Jesus, vv. 15-17 (King James Version):
“…Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught, saying unto them, ‘Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves.’”
It is the consensus of mainstream Bible scholars that Mark was written after the destruction of the Temple in 70CE—and we have no idea where the author lived. It would seem that he wasn’t aware of the size of the temple, and how little impact one man with a temper could have. Richard Carrier has described the situation:
“Of course, that scene is hardly believable: the temple grounds were enormous, occupying many acres (the temple as a whole occupied nearly forty acres, and a large portion of that, at least ten acres, was devoted to public space), extensively populated (there would have been hundreds of merchants and moneychangers there), and heavily guarded by an armed force deployed to prevent just this sort of thing. They would have killed Jesus on the spot.” On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 431-432.
But Mark was promoting the cult’s holy hero who thrived on drama and miracles.
Before and after the cleansing of the temple, we find Jesus’ encounter with a fig tree, which he curses because it has no ripe figs—no surprise because it was not the season for ripe figs. The next day the disciples noticed that the tree had withered—the curse had worked. This provides the opportunity for Jesus to champion prayer. Here we find more totally unrealistic cult promotion:
“And Jesus answered saying to them, ‘Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.’” (vv. 22-24)
Verse 25 adds a warning: “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions.” In the process of manuscript copying and recopying, a scribe added another warning, verse 26: “But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father who is in heaven forgive your transgressions.”
There has been considerable speculation about this fig tree business: might it be a metaphor for the destruction of the temple itself? Chapter 13 is heavily focused on that calamity.
The final section of chapter 11 is verses 27-33, in which religious leaders challenge Jesus: from what authority does his teaching derive? He throws a question back at them, about whether or not John the Baptist should have been taken seriously. They decline to answer—and Jesus refuses to respond to their question. Which is strange indeed, since the primary message of Mark’s gospel is that Jesus’ mission is to proclaim that the kingdom of his god is about to arrive. Why shut up about it at that point? Perhaps because it was only the members of the cult who were privileged to know.
There is far too much in this chapter that fails the test of history, and pushes cult fantasy and propaganda.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
· Guessing About God (2023),
· Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available.
· Everything You Need to Know About Prayer But May Not Want to Admit (2025)
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
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