The End of Christianity (15 page)

12) That although it's claimed God got the attention of Abraham, Moses, the Egyptian Pharaoh, Gideon, Mary the mother of Jesus, Joseph, doubting Thomas, and Saul on the Damascus Road (who became Paul), there is no objective evidence he's trying to get the attention of the billions of people who don't believe. Doing so did not abrogate their freedom, so why doesn't he do this more often? In fact, Christians are much more concerned than God is that nonbelievers are converted. Just compare the lengths to which Christians will go in order to convert nonbelievers, with a God who has the means to convert anyone and yet does nothing detectable to help them. I don't even have to say in advance what it would take for me to believe. God should already know. But he just doesn't do it. If nothing else, God could snap his fingers and simply take away enough of my critical thinking skills so that I wouldn't need evidence to believe. He could make me gullible enough so I would believe just like others do.

13) That God's punishments are good, right, and just, even though it means sinners are thrust into a surprisingly dangerous world, and in death will be blindsided by an eternal punishment in hell, which is Christianity's most damnable doctrine. Modern societies use humane punishments rather than the barbaric ones of the past, which were the basis for human conceptions of God's punishments. People do not really know their choices will send them to an eternal punishment in hell. For to the degree we knew this, we wouldn't sin. The probability that we would not “sin” is inversely proportional to the evidence that there is an eternal punishment in hell when we die (i.e., the more evidence there is a hell, then the less we would “sin”), and there just isn't enough of it to make us refrain from doing so, as the whole world proves daily.

14) That the God of the Bible is real and good, even though the Bible contains things that democratic, free, loving people would all abhor, like slavery (Lev. 25:44–46), the denigration of women (Gen. 3:16), capital punishment for adultery, homosexuality, cursing a parent, or working on the Sabbath day (Exod. 21; Lev. 20; Deut. 22), and the utter denial of religious freedom and speech (Exod. 20:3–11).
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What we find in the Bible is simply not something we would expect from a perfectly good, intelligent God.
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15) That ex-Christians like me were never Christians, even though we believed and trusted in God for salvation. Let me get this straight, okay? God supposedly promised that if we believe we'll be saved, and yet he never kept his promise—that he never saved us even though we believed? Such logic as this is the logic of a delusion, as is Christianity itself.

There is no doubt in my mind. Christianity is wildly improbable.

by Dr. Hector Avalos
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T
he only mission of biblical studies should be to end biblical studies as we know them. This chapter will explain why I have come to such a conclusion. For our purposes, we can summarize our plea to end biblical studies as we know them with two main premises:

1. Modern biblical scholarship has demonstrated that the Bible is the product of cultures whose values and beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of our world are no longer held to be relevant, even by most Christians and Jews.

2. Paradoxically, despite the recognition of such irrelevance, the profession of academic biblical studies still centers on maintaining the illusion of relevance by a variety of scholarly disciplines whose methods and conclusions are often philosophically flawed (e.g., translation, textual criticism, archaeology, history, and biblical theology).

The first premise acknowledges that we have indeed discovered much new information about the Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the enormous archaeological treasures found in the ancient Near East in the last 150 years or so have set the Bible more firmly in its original cultural context. However, it is those very discoveries that show that the Bible is irrelevant insofar as it is part of a world radically dissimilar to ours in its conception of the cosmos, the supernatural, and the human sense of morality.

“Irrelevant” here refers to a biblical concept or practice that is no longer viewed as valuable, applicable, and/or ethical. Thus, whereas most Americans today regard genocide as contemptible, that was not the case in many biblical texts. In fact, Michael Coogan, a widely respected biblical scholar, admits that some biblical practices are so objectionable today that churches try to hide parts of the Bible from their members. As Coogan phrases it:

Conspicuously absent from lectionaries are most or all of such books as Joshua, with its violent extermination of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan at divine command, or Judges, with its horrifying narratives of patriarchy and sexual assault in chapters 11 and 19—to say nothing of the Song of Solomon, with its charged eroticism, or of Job, with its radical challenge to the dominant biblical view of a just and caring God.
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Likewise, our modern medical establishment has discarded the supernatural explanations for illness found in the Bible, rendering such explanations irrelevant. Here are some more examples of scientific and scholarly “discoveries” that provide further evidence of the Bible's irrelevance:

• Though modern science has demonstrated otherwise, some biblical authors held that the universe was created in only six days.
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• Despite the weight that theologians place on the words and deeds of the great figures in the Bible (Abraham, Moses, and David), research indicates that these figures are not as “historical” as once thought.
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• There is no independent evidence for the life or teachings of Jesus in the first century CE, which means that most modern Christians are not even following Jesus’ teachings.
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• Biblical authors generally believed that women were subordinate to men.
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Even when many persons in the modern world still hold to biblical ideas (e.g., creationism), it is partly because academic biblical scholars are not sufficiently vocal about undermining outdated biblical beliefs. Instead, such scholars concentrate on maintaining the value of the biblical text in modern society.

A case in point is an article written by Daniel J. Estes in
Bibliotheca Sacra
, a prestigious evangelical Christian journal.
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Estes, too, is worried about irrelevancy; he has even developed a “scale” to measure the relevance of biblical teachings. Something close to the zero side would be considered obsolete, whereas something at ten would be considered a directive that Christians must still follow.

He then provides the example of the law of first fruits in Deuteronomy 26:1–11, which commands Israelites to go to a location chosen by Yahweh to provide the priest with the first yields of their agricultural season. Estes would rank this close to the zero side of the scale (obsolete precepts) because, among other things, most modern Christians no longer are farmers, nor do they recognize a central location that Yahweh has chosen.

Estes recognizes that “[n]one of these specific items has a precise equivalent in the identity and experience of Christian believers today…. Many of the Old Testament legal prescriptions are in this category, including, for example, the dietary regulations.”
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When pressed to find examples of “total continuity” between the original biblical audience and today's Christian audience, Estes admits that “[i]ndisputable examples of total continuity between the two audiences are relatively rare.”
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John Bright, regarded as one of the most outstanding American biblical scholars of the last century, reflected a similar sentiment regarding the sabbatical and jubilee years in Leviticus 25, when he remarked that “the regulations described therein are obviously so little applicable to the modern situation that a preacher might be pardoned if he told himself that the passage contains no relevant message for his people whatever.”
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In fact, if we were to go verse by verse, I suspect that 99 percent of the Bible would not even be missed, as it reflects many practices, injunctions, and ideas not much more applicable than Leviticus 25.

Our second major premise is that despite this admission of irrelevance, the profession of academic biblical scholarship paradoxically and self-servingly promotes the illusion of relevance. The maintenance of this illusion is intended to make believers think that they have “the Bible” when all they really have is a book constructed by modern elite scholars. So even if 99.9 percent of modern Christians said that the Bible was relevant to them, such relevance is based on their illusory assumption that modern versions do reflect the original “Bible” to some extent.
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Promoting the illusion of relevance serves to justify the very existence of the profession of biblical scholarship, and not much more.

Our argument is that there is really nothing in the entire book Christians call “the Bible” that is any more relevant than anything else written in the ancient world. Mine is a frank secular humanist view of biblical studies. Biblical studies as we know them should end. We should now treat the Bible as the alien document it is, with no more importance than the other works of literature we ignore every day. Biblical studies should be geared toward helping humanity wean itself off of the Bible and toward terminating its authority completely in the modern world. Focus then could shift to the thousands of other ancient texts still untranslated and unread. One day, the Bible might even be viewed as one of the curiosities of a tragic bibliolatrous age, when dependence on a text brought untold misery and stood as an obstacle to human progress. We might then study the Bible as a lesson in why human beings should never again privilege any book to this extent.

I maintain that the main subdisciplines of biblical studies have succeeded in demonstrating that the Bible is the product of cultures whose values and beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of our world are no longer held to be relevant, even by most Christians and Jews. These subdisciplines include translation, textual criticism, biblical history and archaeology, historical Jesus studies, literary criticism, and biblical theology.

TRANSLATIONS

Insofar as the general public is concerned, nothing maintains the relevance of the Bible more than translations. According to one estimate, by the year 2000, the Bible had been translated into more than two thousand languages.
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If it were not for the translations that made the Bible accessible to countless millions of people over the centuries, it would probably have been forgotten.

Indeed, the Bible is such a foreign text that translators and scholars become assistants to the reader. The preface to the
New Century Bible
says: “Ancient customs are often unfamiliar to modern readers…so these are clarified either in the text or in a footnote.”
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But even more surprising is the assumption that the relevance of the Bible is best maintained by using translation to hide and distort the original meaning of the text in order to provide the illusion that the information and values conveyed by biblical authors are compatible with those of the modern world.
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There are clear cases where the translators should know that the translation does not correspond to what is found in the biblical texts being translated. This may also mean that significant words are omitted or added, not just mistranslated. In short, Bible translations “lie” to keep the Bible alive.

According to the ethicist Sissela Bok, a lie is “an intentionally deceptive message in the form of a statement.”
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We may say that Bible translations lie when they misrepresent what is actually in an underlying text. Commenting on students who ask why they are often not told of all of the violent and objectionable passages in the Bible, Michael Coogan responds, “In part, the answer is that they [students] could not be trusted to read the Bible: It is a dangerous, even subversive collection.”
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Although Bible translations do not lie in every instance, translators distort scripture with passages they deem to hold meanings that might be considered objectionable. Overall, translators know that the Bible is the product of cultures whose modes of life and thought were very different from ours. In some cases, the Bible's philosophy is so barbaric and violent that it defies explaining why anyone would consider it sacred at all.
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Let me offer just three examples.

Example 1: Politically Correct Polytheism

Our first example deals with polytheism, which most modern Christian readers of the Bible would disdain as idolatry. Most modern readers probably expect that the Bible does not endorse polytheism. Consider the following translation of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 in the New American Bible (NAB), an American Catholic translation:

When the Most High assigned the nations their heritage, when he parceled out the descendants of Adam, He set up the boundaries of the peoples after the number of the sons of God; While the LORD's own portion was Jacob, his hereditary share was Israel.

Most readers will miss the fact that “the Most High” and “the LORD” are two different gods, among many other gods, here. The term translated as “the Most High” is probably the name of a god, pronounced as Elyon, and the term translated as “LORD” corresponds to the Hebrew name we pronounce as Yahweh, ancient Israel's main god. There is evidence these were recognized as two different gods in surrounding cultures, so some scholars have argued that in this passage “the Most High” probably refers to the god “Elyon,” who is here being represented as superior to, and separate from, Yahweh. Yahweh appears to be Elyon's son. Elyon divided up the earth, and Elyon's son, Yahweh (Lord), received the portion of the earth that came to be known as Israel.
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The more obvious case of polytheism is the reference to what the NAB translates as “the sons of God.” In most pantheons of the ancient Near East, the gods were believed to have divine fathers and mothers. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, still preserve the (probably older) reading of “sons of El” or “sons of Elohim.” The “sons of El” would be the gods fathered by the god named El. The fact that ancient editors recognized the polytheistic nature of this expression (“sons of El”) probably led the editors of the standard text (called the Masoretic text) of the Hebrew Bible to change “gods” to “sons of Israel.” Some Greek translations have “angels of God” instead of “sons of El” or “gods.”
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The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), an American multidenominational translation, does adopt the more original polytheistic expression, “according to the number of the gods,” reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, other modern translations still do not fully reflect the polytheism of the passage. Note the following examples from the Revised English Bible (REB), a British ecumenical version, and the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), a British Catholic translation.

REB:
“according to the number of the sons of God.”

NJB:
“according to the number of the children of God.”

Note that the NJB bears a gender-neutral rendition (“children”) instead of the more culturally proper “sons,” who were the main inheritors of land in biblical cultures. Political correctness in the NJB, therefore, also obscures the patriarchal nature of land inheritance in the Bible.

Such distortions are not limited to the Old Testament. Christianity often markets itself as more inclusive and loving than the religion of the Old Testament and Judaism. However, this has required using mistranslations to hide or suppress some of the starker discontinuities between what Jesus taught and what current versions of Christianity want their audiences to think Jesus taught.