The New Testament: Brought to You by Writers with Creative, Delusional Imaginations

Champions of theology, not history and fact

I have this fantasy: that (1) suddenly all devout churchgoers will become obsessed with studying the Bible, especially the New Testament, and that (2) they will also be gifted with critical thinking skills. Of course, this would be a nightmare for the clergy, who don’t want to be pestered with hard questions about so much in the Bible: “How does this possibly make sense?” “Why would Jesus have said such a thing?” “Is this really what our god is like?” For centuries, the clergy have promoted an idealized version of Jesus and his god, based on carefully chosen feel-good verses. All that would come to an end if the laity took Bible study seriously, and really applied their minds. So much really bad stuff is in full view.

 
Of course, there are major tools for helping with careful, thoughtful Bible study, but the laity seem to be largely unaware of the vast scope of academia devoted to Bible analysis. Thousands upon thousands of devout scholars have written books, doctoral dissertations, articles for Bible journals—all designed to explain, as favorably as possible, what the Bible says and means. But there have been secular scholars as well—those who are not believers—who have devoted considerable time and energy to exploring and explaining the supposedly sacred texts; they are not bound by the obligations of faith to disguise the bad stuff. We can see that the Bible is its own worst enemy.
 
Go ahead, devout Christians, just read the gospels to grasp what I mean! One tool to help with that is Robert Conner’s 2018 book, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story (195 pages). His writing style is conversational, highly accessible, and his mastery of the scholarship is clear as well. The title of the book is a major clue that this is dangerous territory. The resurrection of Jesus is the most vital Christian belief. Everything hangs on this claim, as the apostle Paul bragged in Romans 10:9: “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” That is, you will escape death. That’s the product/promise of so many religions. 
 
But the gospel resurrection stories do not withstand careful scrutiny. In fact, there is considerable confusion when we compare the four gospel accounts of the first Easter morning. The longest resurrection story is found in Luke 24, about the risen Jesus appearing to two disciples who were walking to Emmaus. This is found only in Luke, by the way. Since Luke copied so much of his gospel from Mark, perhaps he got the idea for this narrative from two verses (vv.12-13) found in the long ending of Mark 16—added to the gospel by an unknown author (just as the author of Mark is also unknown): “After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.”
 
This is exactly what the author of Luke decided would make another good resurrection episode. We read in Luke 24 that resurrected Jesus appeared to two disciples walking toward the village of Emmaus. But they don’t recognize him, even though they engage in intense conversation—and Jesus scolds them for not understanding scripture. This is another opportunity for Luke to pitch propaganda for the Jesus cult: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory? Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” (vv. 26-27) The Jesus cult promoters scoured the Old Testament for verses they would argue applied to their lord.
 
The two disciples invite their new companion to dine with them, and at the instant that he breaks bread and blesses it, he vanishes. Disappears! Conner notes that ghosts in ancient lore who manifest themselves are often unrecognized, and they also vanish without a trace. Right away, the two disciples head back to Jerusalem to report this event to the others. And who suddenly showed up? “While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’  They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” (vv. 36-37) 
 
Conner offers these insights:
 
“That the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke are fictional concoctions motivated by apologetic intent is widely recognized in mainstream New Testament studies. I would argue that the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, particularly in Luke and John, are also amalgamations fabricated from widely known and readily available cultural lore available to the gospel writers.”
 
“Every essential feature of the resurrection stories—sudden appearance and disappearance, the fear and confusion of witnesses, the empty tomb and tokens found within it, speaking, eating, and drinking as proof of life, tangible presence, the brevity of the appearances, the display of pre-mortem wounds, encouraging and admonishing—is also found in contemporary Greco-Roman ghost stories. Luke, writing a minimum of fifty years after the events of Jesus’ life, had a rich cultural repertory of legends and popular ghost lore from which to construct the details of his resurrection narratives as well as an abundance of motive to do so.”
 
Of course, devout Christian scholars try oh so very hard to convince themselves and others that the gospel resurrection stories are reliable histories. But the criteria for writing accurate history are missing: the gospel authors never cite their sources, never quote letters, diaries, transcripts to back up their claims—which would be essential to be taken seriously—since they wrote decades after the death of Jesus. 
 
Conner also points out:
 
“Apologist scholars have proposed a number of supposedly objective criteria by which the resurrection stories can be positively judged as representing historical fact, but as [Hector] Avalos points out in a devastating critique (The End of Biblical Studies, pp. 191-194), the very same criteria could be applied with positive results to full-bodied apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Oddly enough, no evangelical scholars seem to take such sightings seriously although many hundreds of witnesses over the course of centuries have testified to the reality of such appearances.”
 

But defense of the resurrection stories goes on and on in Christian academia, as Conner bluntly noted in a post on this blog in September 2017: “The Evangelical Resurrection Industrial Complex (ERIC) has churned out scores of scholarly tomes, hundreds of erudite disquisions in scholarly journals, dissertations and commentaries, as well as debates and conferences beyond numbering, and the tsunami of dishonest verbiage shows no sign of receding.” 
 
If Christian laity decided to study the gospels, fully committed to critical thinking, there is so much more, beyond the flimsy resurrection stories, that would prompt them to realize that ancient superstitions saturate the gospels. Conner discusses these beliefs in the opening chapters of his book. In Mark 1 we read that god shouted from the sky; in Mark 9 he speaks from water vapor (i.e., a cloud)—and becomes known as a powerful exorcist; in Matthew 25:52-53 we find the claim that, at the moment Jesus died, many people came alive in their tombs, and then on Easter morning toured Jerusalem; in Luke, as we have seen, Jesus vanished the moment he was recognized at the Emmaus supper; in John’s gospel (6:53-58) we find the assurance that eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood will guarantee access to eternal life. 
 
Of course, devout folks who have been indoctrinated to believe that holy communion—whether considered symbolically (Protestants) or literally (Catholics)—is an important, vital part of piety don’t notice that there is a high quotient of magical thinking here. Robert Conner has pointed out what should be obvious: “The line between magic and religion is imperceptible.”
 
 
 
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 two books, 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, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now 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.