Yes, DO THINK about it: study and research it ceaselessly!
At the Methodist church I attended as a child in rural northern Indiana, every Sunday service began with a cherished hymn with these lyrics—as the choir walked down the middle aisle:
“Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty! God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!”
(This hymn was written by Reginald Heber, 1783 -1826)
Given this weekly drama and performance (which paled in comparison to what the Catholics were doing on the other side of town), I can recall only one moment when doubt passed briefly through my mind: how do we know there’s really anything there? But this doubt quickly vanished. How could my mother, the minister, and everyone around me be wrong? Indeed my mother was very devout—but was by no means a fundamentalist. She read voraciously, e.g., history, biography, and when I was a teenager, she bought the 12-volume Interpreter’s Bible, a product of Protestant scholarship. I read it too, and she even allowed me to take it with me when I went away to college. So very early on I came to understand that so much of the Bible cannot be taken literally.
Even so, by the time I’d finished college, I had decided to go to seminary to become a minister. It was in seminary that I discovered major flaws in Christian theology; by the time I finished my PhD in Biblical Studies, my faith—belief in a god—had evaporated completely. I had been ordained and served as pastor at two Methodist parishes, but I gave up my ordination, and left the ministry.
That’s why I urge the devout to think about what they’ve been taught by their church since they were toddlers. Indeed they should study and research the basic religious beliefs they’ve been coached to hold dear. It is especially crucial that they study the context in which Christianity was born.
I recently read an excellent explanation of this context, posted by Dr. Richard C. Miller on his Facebook page. Here it is—the entire piece:
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
The problem Christian apologetics never begins to solve: Why should the Gospels be exempted from the way we read virtually every other collection of supernatural tales from antiquity?
Their pages teem with the familiar furniture of ancient mythology—divine conception, prophetic dreams, angels and demons, miraculous healings, exorcisms, supernatural feedings, command of nature, heavenly voices, transfiguration, resurrection, postmortem appearances, ascension, divine enthronement. These were not strange categories suddenly introduced by Christianity. They belonged to the well-trodden mythological repertoire of the Mediterranean world. Yet when we encounter such stories surrounding Pythagoras, Asclepius, Heracles, Romulus, Apollonius, or countless other extraordinary figures, nobody feels obligated to demonstrate that the marvel occurred. We study what the stories tell us about the people who produced and indulged belief in them.
Consider Asclepius. Antiquity remembered him as a wondrous healer who suffered a violent death and entered divine existence. For centuries afterward, worshippers reported encounters with him as a living deity who appeared, spoke, administered treatments, and healed. The healing sanctuaries accumulated testimonies. Aelius Aristides even left extensive first-person accounts of his own experiences of Asclepius. Yet nobody looks at this impressive testimonial tradition and concludes: “Well, clearly Asclepius really appeared.” We immediately understand the elementary historical distinction between evidence that ancient people experienced and proclaimed their god and evidence that their god objectively materialized before them.
We understand this distinction perfectly—right up until someone opens a New Testament.
Therein lies the great exemption. Suddenly sacred legend becomes “eyewitness testimony.” Epiphany becomes “appearance evidence.” Fulfillment narrative becomes “divine prophecy.” Cult legends become “historical data.” Resurrection and ascension cease being recognizable mythological tropes and become extraordinary events for which the historian is asked to find an explanation. But changing the proper names cannot change the epistemology.
If tales of gods, miracles, divine sons, supernatural appearances, ascensions to heaven, and immortalized returns from death are evidence of human mythmaking everywhere else, one cannot simply declare the Christian specimens evidence that the mythology literally happened. That is not historical method. It is special pleading, a flagrant historiological fallacy privileging “holy” texts.
So here is the test we now place before every Christian apologist: remove the word “Jesus.” Remove “Matthew,” “Paul,” and “Peter.” Remove the sacred labels. Apply exactly the same tropological analysis and evidentiary standards you would apply to Asclepius, Pythagoras, Romulus, Apollonius et al. Then tell us what remains.
Christianity does not get to pull several pages from humanity’s vast encyclopedia mythologica, stamp HISTORY across them, and call the exemption an argument.
End of the Miller explanation of context.
Also see his book, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge Studies in Religion).
Now add to this Richard Carrier’s 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. In this impressive article, Carrier describes in considerable detail nine other religions in the ancient world that believed in dying-and-rising gods. There are many differences among them, but even so, here are plenty of ideas that were borrowed and absorbed into Christian theology.
There are a couple of other realities that the devout choose to ignore—simply do not want to pay any attention to them.
The fractured nature of Christianity itself.
There are now well more than 30,000 different brands of the faith. That is, Christians disagree about what is Christianity and what isn’t. Even in the small village that I grew up in, there were four different brands: one Catholic and three Protestant. In major towns and cities there are far more. On their way to their own churches, the devout might drive by many other denominations—and wouldn’t entertain the idea of visiting these other churches to explore what’s going on inside them. Occasionally the clergy of these various brands might hold services to demonstrate Christian “unity”—but that’s a fiction, a coverup for the fractured nature of Christian belief. The failure to agree on the basics of faith and practice is a scandal.
Was Jesus a real historical person—or a mythical one?
Truly, this is an item that enthusiastic believers don’t want to investigate or think about. Jesus wasn’t real? How can anyone dare to suggest such a thing? After all, the devout will brag and proclaim that they feel Jesus “in their hearts”. But that’s evidence for what they’re feeling—what they were taught to feel since they were children. Which has nothing whatever to do with the historical problems that Bible scholars have been struggling with for quite some time now. The folklore, superstition, and magical thinking that dominate the gospels make it so very hard to determine what really happened—indeed, if there was a real Jesus. Maybe he was real, but fell far short of the stories that were told about him.
The opening statement of one my websites, The Cure-for-Christianity Library, includes this paragraph:
“…the Jesus question has been removed from the exclusive domain of Bible scholars and ecclesiastical functionaries. Most New Testament scholars have been, and remain, committed to the Jesus faith. These are the folks who, in the words of one observer, “…still write books manufacturing and manicuring Jesus to look like they do.” Secular observers decided that this biased community could no longer be trusted to provide honest answers on who and what Jesus was. So you will find plenty of titles on this list by secular analysts who have opened up Jesus studies as never before—and exposed its faulty methodologies and conclusions, e.g., Richard Carrier, Earl Doherty, David Fitzgerald, Raphael Lataster, Robert Price, R. G. Price.”
So, devout believers in Jesus, there’s lots of homework to be done. Do THINK about how Christian belief originated: study and research this ceaselessly.
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.
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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