The Bible Doesn't Exist: A Thought Experiment

[Webster]

Medium: The Bible Doesn't Exist

Shelby Bennett Hanson - 29 Oct. 2022
--Okay, obviously the Bible exists. Number one bestseller since bestsellers. If you’re reading this you probably own or have owned a copy yourself. If you’re like me, you’ve got a dozen in different versions and languages (most of which you never actually use). You’ve memorized chunks of it. Maybe you’ve even formally studied it. But I’m not being facetious when I say: the Bible isn’t actually real. And if we as Christians can truly re-grasp that reality, I believe we’ll return our focus to the true essentials of Christianity. I believe the entire Christian religion could return to its roots: grounded, wise, transformative, rebelling against hypocrisy and abuse of power, defined by love of God and neighbor.

What do I mean, “the Bible isn’t real?” It’s not a new idea. I mean that “the Bible” is a construct. If that makes sense already, you don’t have to keep reading! But if I’m sounding crazy, heretical or interesting, maybe we could keep exploring the idea together. We can start at the beginning of sorts, back in the time of Jesus.

We’re in Israel-Palestine, the first century, somewhere around the year 33 CE. Rome is in charge, the Jews are feeling deeply oppressed, there is no such thing as Christianity. Every sabbath — and throughout the week — Jews gather around the Scriptures that have been growing over the past millennia or two. If they are in a synagogue, a rabbi reads aloud from one of their scrolls in their religious language of Hebrew. Their synagogue probably has only a handful of scrolls, which are expensive to make. A scroll of the Torah (which in English we call Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the Psalms, and a few others (perhaps Daniel, or Judges, or Proverbs) might be all their local synagogue owns. But they are familiar with far more scriptures and stories, passed on through oral tradition, or shared by rabbis passing through. At home, no one possesses written scripture. They recite what they can, and retell what they have memorized, maintaining the structure and message but allowing the stories to morph and adapt.

First-century rabbis and scholars of the Jews’ scriptures are familiar with not just their scriptures, but also with the ever-growing body of literature called “midrash.” In midrash, rabbis write their interpretations of the texts, and more rabbis write their expansions, and more rabbis write about those rabbis’ interpretations and expansions. The Jewish scriptures are truly alive: changing in bits and pieces over centuries to reflect the concerns and circumstances the Jews encounter.

Then, Jesus the Jew comes on the scene. Almost before he is known, he is gone. He wrote nothing.

Over the next twenty to thirty years, the number of his followers slowly grows, gathering around themes of love and care for the poor, repeating teachings that a friend of a friend of a friend heard from the rabbi Jesus years ago. Some people start to write down the most common teachings circulating in the early movement of Jesus followers so that they can be shared. A couple decades after Jesus, Paul becomes influential and writes helpful letters to a number of churches. A bit after that, an author collects the most common teachings of Jesus and stories about him and compiles them into a narrative biography, called a gospel. In the next decade or two, more letters are written, more gospels are compiled.

By the beginning of the second century, Christian literature is growing rapidly, nearly entirely in Greek, the trade language of the day. Christians are multiplying across the Roman Empire, as is persecution. Many Christians are sacrificing their lives for the rabbi whose teachings were passed onto them through stories and occasional circulating texts. Some closely follow the teachings of Paul; some have never heard of Paul. Some follow the leadership of James; some have never heard of James’ letter. Some find comfort in the text called the Shepherd of Hermas, some never hear of it. Some have never read any of the three gospels (one more about to be written). None of these Christians have ever encountered a Bible, because there is not one.

Then, in the fourth century, everything changes. Roman Emperor Constantine becomes a Christian and begins to formalize the religion. Christian leaders become powerful figures, and they begin to use that power to formally reject “heretical” groups and texts. Leaders develop lists of Christian texts they consider commonly accepted, universally applicable, and written by an apostle (usually). These texts — though the lists differ between leaders — became the rule by which other sects and texts can be evaluated. Leaders hotly debate the relevance and authority of many texts, such as Revelation. One of the earliest collections of Christian texts we have today is known as Codex Siniaticus, which contains the books of the New Testament we’re familiar with, as well as the texts of the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. Over the centuries, the list of authoritative Christian texts becomes more and more similar.

By the year 1534, Martin Luther made the most recent change in texts, moving nearly a dozen texts out of the Old Testament and into a sub-category called “the apocrypha.” He felt that these texts were “not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.” He similarly felt that Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation were “disputed” books and placed them at the end of the New Testament to emphasize his hesitation.

A few centuries later, in the present day, somehow evangelical Christianity has come to live and die by the belief that the Bible is unchanging, infallible, and essential.

So when I say that the Bible doesn’t exist, what I mean is that “the Bible” is a term we use to refer to a collection that has begun, formed, changed, and shifted gradually over two millennia. There is no holy book given by God. The earliest Christians would have known that better than anyone, and they still boldly claimed Christ, living and dying after his example. There was no divine stamp of approval of these texts at any point. Inspiration was not a criteria for which books were gathered into the canon. Instead, there is a community of people — global and historical — who have written texts, read texts, shared texts, destroyed texts, memorized texts, edited texts, grouped texts, rejected texts, and treasured texts.

The Bible doesn’t exist. That means statements like these no longer make any sense:

--“The Bible teaches _____.” Some scriptures may teach that, some may teach something else, some may not address it at all.
--“Biblical ____.” Whether it be “worldview,” or “womanhood,” or “marriage,” or “finances,” or “leadership,” there is essentially no single philosophy taught by every text now in the Bible. There was no Bible. Jesus never taught anyone anything was “biblical.”
--“The Bible says ____.” John may say that, or Proverbs. Or Paul or Peter.

Etc.

We live in an era where the Bible is used to authoritatively end conversations, questions, and trajectories. Women are held back from leadership because of “the Bible.” Scientific theories contradict “the Bible.” A few decades ago, desegregation was considered against “the Bible.” But if the Bible doesn’t exist, if scriptures are cherished but not blindly submitted to, we are free. Yes, terrifyingly free, perhaps. Free to make a world that is beautiful by using scripture, and also by using our minds, reason, experience, intuitions, and collective wisdom. Will that kind of human-guided future be straightforward? Absolutely not. It would be far easier to have a divine instruction manual. But there is none.

When I first started honestly studying the history of the Bible, I was terrified; I felt like my faith was crumbling with each realization I made. I felt like I’d been lied to by the book I so deeply loved. But slowly, I’ve recognized that the texts never lied to me. The texts are still real, historical, meaningful, informative, and transformative. The lies came later, when I was told the texts were a perfect, infallible, and unchanging unit. It might seem like I’m angrily ripping the Bible into pieces. On the contrary, I care more deeply about these scriptures than ever. That’s why I’m writing, hoping to recover these sacred texts for what they are: human history, ancient wisdom, and some of the most beautiful teachings of love the world has ever seen.

 

[duskpire]

More like an unproven mythology no one has any evidence for. The bible is a claim, not evidence.

It is sometimes claimed that Jewish writings hostile to Christianity prove that the ancient Jews knew of Jesus and that such writings prove the historicity of the man Jesus. But in fact, Jewish writings prove no such thing, as L. Gordon Rylands’ book Did Jesus Ever Live? pointed out nearly seventy years ago:

…all the knowledge which the Rabbis had of Jesus was obtained by them from the Gospels. Seeing that Jews, even in the present more critical age, take it for granted that the figure of a real man stands behind the Gospel narrative, one need not be surprised if, in the second century, Jews did not think of questioning that assumption. It is certain, however, that some did question it. For Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, “ye follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for yourselves.” “If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown.”
That the writers of the Talmud [4th-5th centuries CE, FRZ] had no independent knowledge of Jesus is proved by the fact that they confounded him with two different men neither of whom can have been he. Evidently no other Jesus with whom they could identify the Gospel Jesus was known to them. One of these, Jesus ben Pandira, reputed a wonder-worker, is said to have been stoned to death and then hung on a tree on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (106-79 BC) at Jerusalem. The other, Jesus ben Stada, whose date is uncertain, but who may have lived in the first third of the second century CE, is also said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda. There may be some confusion here; but it is plain that the Rabbis had no knowledge of Jesus apart from what they had read in the Gospels.Citation 11

Although Christian apologists have listed a number of ancient historians who allegedly were witnesses to the existence of Jesus, the only two that consistently are cited are Josephus, a Pharisee, and Tacitus, a pagan. Since Josephus was born in the year 37 CE, and Tacitus was born in 55, neither could have been an eye-witness of Jesus, who supposedly was crucified in 30 CE. So we could really end our article here. But someone might claim that these historians nevertheless had access to reliable sources, now lost, which recorded the existence and execution of our friend JC. So it is desirable that we take a look at these two supposed witnesses.

In the case of Josephus, whose Antiquities of the Jews was written in 93 CE, about the same time as the gospels, we find him saying some things quite impossible for a good Pharisee to have said:

About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.Citation 12

Now no loyal Pharisee would say Jesus had been the Messiah. That Josephus could report that Jesus had been restored to life “on the third day” and not be convinced by this astonishing bit of information is beyond belief. Worse yet is the fact that the story of Jesus is intrusive in Josephus’ narrative and can be seen to be an interpolation even in an English translation of the Greek text. Right after the wondrous passage quoted above, Josephus goes on to say, “About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder…” Josephus had previously been talking about awful things Pilate had done to the Jews in general, and one can easily understand why an interpolator would have chosen this particular spot. But his ineptitude in not changing the wording of the bordering text left a “literary seam” (what rhetoricians might term aporia) that sticks out like a pimpled nose.

The fact that Josephus was not convinced by this or any other Christian claim is clear from the statement of the church father Origen (ca. 185-ca. 154 CE) – who dealt extensively with Josephus – that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, i.e., as “the Christ.” Moreover, the disputed passage was never cited by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria (ca.150-ca. 215 CE), who certainly would have made use of such ammunition had he had it!

The first person to make mention of this obviously forged interpolation into the text of Josephus’ history was the church father Eusebius, in 324 CE. It is quite likely that Eusebius himself did some of the forging. As late as 891, Photius in his Bibliotheca, which devoted three “Codices” to the works of Josephus, shows no awareness of the passage whatsoever even though he reviews the sections of the Antiquities in which one would expect the disputed passage to be found. Clearly, the testimonial was absent from his copy of Antiquities of the Jews.Citation 13 The question can probably be laid to rest by noting that as late as the sixteenth century, according to Rylands,Citation 14 a scholar named Vossius had a manuscript of Josephus from which the passage was wanting.

Apologists, as they grasp for ever more slender straws with which to support their historical Jesus, point out that the passage quoted above is not the only mention of Jesus made by Josephus. In Bk. 20, Ch. 9, §1 of Antiquities of the Jews one also finds the following statement in surviving manuscripts:

Ananus… convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned.

It must be admitted that this passage does not intrude into the text as does the one previously quoted. In fact, it is very well integrated into Josephus’ story. That it has been modified from whatever Josephus’ source may have said (remember, here too, Josephus could not have been an eye-witness) is nevertheless extremely probable. The crucial word in this passage is the name James (Jacob in Greek and Hebrew). It is very possible that this very common name was in Josephus’ source material. It might even have been a reference to James the Just, a first-century character we have good reason to believe indeed existed. Because he appears to have born the title Brother of the Lord,Note H it would have been natural to relate him to the Jesus character. It is quite possible that Josephus actually referred to a James “the Brother of the Lord,” and this was changed by Christian copyists (remember that although Josephus was a Jew, his text was preserved only by Christians!) to “Brother of Jesus” – adding then for good measure “who was called Christ.”

According to William Benjamin Smith’s skeptical classic Ecce Deus,Citation 15 there are still some manuscripts of Josephus which contain the quoted passages, but the passages are absent in other manuscripts – showing that such interpolation had already been taking place before the time of Origen but did not ever succeed in supplanting the original text universally.

Pagan Authors Before considering the alleged witness of Pagan authors, it is worth noting some of the things that we should find recorded in their histories if the biblical stories are in fact true. One passage from Matthew should suffice to point out the significance of the silence of secular writers:

Matt. 27:45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour… Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. 51. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; 52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, 53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection [exposed for 3 days?], and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

Wouldn’t the Greeks and Romans have noticed – and recorded – such darkness occurring at a time of the month when a solar eclipse was impossible? Wouldn’t someone have remembered – and recorded – the name of at least one of those “saints” who climbed out of the grave and went wandering downtown in the mall? If Jesus did anything of significance at all, wouldn’t someone have noticed? If he didn’t do anything significant, how could he have stimulated the formation of a new religion?

Considering now the supposed evidence of Tacitus, we find that this Roman historian is alleged in 120 CE to have written a passage in his Annals (Bk 15, Ch 44, containing the wild tale of Nero’s persecution of Christians) saying “Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus…” G.A. Wells [p. 16] says of this passage:

[Tacitus wrote] at a time when Christians themselves had come to believe that Jesus had suffered under Pilate. There are three reasons for holding that Tacitus is here simply repeating what Christians had told him. First, he gives Pilate a title, procurator [without saying procurator of what! FRZ], which was current only from the second half of the first century. Had he consulted archives which recorded earlier events, he would surely have found Pilate there designated by his correct title, prefect. Second, Tacitus does not name the executed man Jesus, but uses the title Christ (Messiah) as if it were a proper name. But he could hardly have found in archives a statement such as “the Messiah was executed this morning.” Third, hostile to Christianity as he was, he was surely glad to accept from Christians their own view that Christianity was of recent origin, since the Roman authorities were prepared to tolerate only ancient cults. (The Historical Evidence for Jesus; p.16).

There are further problems with the Tacitus story. Tacitus himself never again alludes to the Neronian persecution of Christians in any of his voluminous writings, and no other Pagan authors know anything of the outrage either. Most significant, however, is that ancient Christian apologists made no use of the story in their propaganda – an unthinkable omission by motivated partisans who were well-read in the works of Tacitus. Clement of Alexandria, who made a profession of collecting just such types of quotations, is ignorant of any Neronian persecution, and even Tertullian, who quotes a great deal from Tacitus, knows nothing of the story. According to Robert Taylor, the author of another freethought classic, the Diegesis (1834), the passage was not known before the fifteenth century, when Tacitus was first published at Venice by Johannes de Spire. Taylor believed de Spire himself to have been the forger.

So much for the evidence purporting to prove that Jesus was an historical figure. We have not, of course, proved that Jesus did not exist. We have only showed that all evidence alleged to support such a claim is without substance. But of course, that is all we need to show. The burden of proof is always on the one who claims that something exists or that something once happened. We have no obligation to try to prove a universal negative.Note J

It will be argued by die-hard believers that all my arguments “from silence” prove nothing and they will quote the aphorism, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” But is the negative evidence I have referred to the same as absence of evidence? It might be instructive to consider how a hypothetical but similar problem might be dealt with in the physical sciences.

Imagine that someone has claimed that the USA had carried out atomic weapons tests on a particular Caribbean island in 1943. Would the lack of reports of mushroom-cloud sightings at the time be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? (Remember, the Caribbean during the war years was under intense surveillance by many different factions.) Would it be necessary to go to the island today to scan its surface for the radioactive contamination that would have to be there if nuclear explosions had taken place there? If indeed, we went there with our Geiger-counters and found no trace of radioactive contamination, would that be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? In this case, what superficially looks like absence of evidence is really negative evidence, and thus legitimately could be construed as evidence of absence. Can the negative evidence adduced above concerning Jesus be very much less compelling?

It would be intellectually satisfying to learn just how it was that the Jesus character condensed out of the religious atmosphere of the first century. But scholars are at work on the problem. The publication of many examples of so-called wisdom literature, along with the materials from the Essene community at Qumran by the Dead Sea and the Gnostic literature from the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, has given us a much more detailed picture of the communal psychopathologies which infested the Eastern Mediterranean world at the turn of the era. It is not unrealistic to expect that we will be able, before long, to reconstruct in reasonable detail the stages by which Jesus came to have a biography.

Did Jesus Exist?

This article written by former Interim President and current member of the Board of Directors Frank Zindler and is reprinted from the Summer 1998 edition of American Atheist magazine. I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption...

www.atheists.org

 

[Webster]

The bible is a claim. Not evidence. A historical fiction with only 139 people who were proven to exist by historians and many who do not.

Tons of archeological evidence/writings/historical events would love to have a word with you, sir.

That said, there's a book I'd love for you to read; it was written by an investigative journalist named Lee Strobel (I'll put the Amazon link here below) who was at one time a staunch (and I mean, staunch) atheist who decided, after his wife's Christian conversion, top investigate the Bible from front to back, using his skills as both a journalist and as a lawyer (technically his law degree from Yale is a Juris Masters/Master of Studies in Law, J.M., and not a Juris Doctor or J.D.) to debunk the Bible. Instead, after a very exhaustive period of research he went from being an atheist to now being a Christian apologist and evangelical pastor.

Amazon product ASIN 0310339553