What Your Preacher Didn’T Tell You: That You Really Ought to Know

By John Winsor

What your preacher didnt tell you is this: Christianity was a Medieval invention that contradicts what Jesus taught. He didnt believe that he was divine or that anybody was bound for heaven. Winsor quotes the Bible itself to explain how preachers obfuscate its meaning.

Followers are deceived by tricks such as the conflation of terms that are not synonymous. Son of Man referred to mankind in general, not to Jesus. Kingdom of Heaven referred to a future earthly kingdom that Jesus hoped to rule, not to Heaven itself. His own prayer asks Yahweh to establish it and make life "on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10). Jesus thought it would come very soon: you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the son of man comes (Matthew 10:23). He expected Yahweh to bring people to the kingdom in clouds with great power and glory (Mark 13:26).

Fundamentalists falsely assert that there is no wall of separation between Church and State. They create de facto religious tests and poison our public discourse. Christian dogma conflicts with historical and scientific facts and even with Biblical text. Its interference in politics undermines our ability to seek real-world solutions to real-world problems. Preachers often claim that the Bibles text is too complicated for lay people to understand, but if youre armed with the clues in this book, it is fairly straightforward reading. If you have questions about the Bible, Christianity, and how they relate to modern science and American democracy, youll find real answers here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462057283

John Winsor

John Winsor is not a Bible historian, but he has read a great deal of what they’ve written. Much of it is pedantic and can baffle the uninitiated. He has distilled it into a straightforward argument against religion in general and Christianity in particular. Historians do the tedious work of studying the trees, but Winsor presents the forest in a way that, just maybe, only a layman can and your preacher certainly never will.

Book preview

Contents

PREFACE

THE PLAN

RIVAL SECTS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

IN THE BEGINNING

THE TRANSITION OF COVENANTS

FIRST CENTURY JUDEA

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ME

REWORKING THE MESSAGE

DOGMA AND POWER

DOGMA AND SCIENCE

PATTERNS—

REAL AND IMAGINARY

THE SOUL—THEN AND NOW

OBEDIENCE AND FAITH

FAITH HEALING AND MIRACLES

THE REAL SOURCE OF MORALITY

WHY RELIGION PERSISTS

RELIGION VERSUS DEMOCRACY

THE FOUNDING FATHERS

RELIGION AND POLITICS TODAY

ZIONISTS

GETTING PAST GODS

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

. . . and you will know the truth

and the truth will make you free.

—John 8:32

What your preacher didn’t tell you is this: Christianity as we know it was a Medieval invention. Christian dogma conflicts with historical and scientific facts. It also directly and strongly contradicts what Jesus himself taught. He didn’t believe that he was divine or that he or anybody else was bound for heaven. Although he was mistaken, he expected to become an earthly king. I intend to support these assertions with his own words. The Bible itself is my primary source, so at any time you doubt my position, I encourage you to look up the passages I cite and judge for yourself.

PREFACE

As a boy, I attended church and Sunday school. I was an altar boy and a member of the children’s choir. I hadn’t actually formulated my own beliefs. I simply behaved as the people around me expected. However, I was curious and, like many people, I pondered some of the more obvious Biblical puzzles—like how a just a merciful God could inflict natural disasters on people who had done nothing wrong, how people could be sent to heaven or hell based on their beliefs when they were taught what to believe, where Cain and Abel—sons of the only parents on earth—found wives, how we knew that we were right and those who practiced other religions were wrong, and so forth.

Over time, my list of questions grew, so I did something that most Christians never do: I read the Bible—not just the cherry-picked passages that preachers routinely quote, but also the ones that are neglected in sermons—and I discovered more and more contradictions and absurd propositions. In undergraduate school, I debated religion with my fellow students—not merely to be contrary but to persuade. I learned that even very bright believers simply can’t or won’t rationally address some questions. Like many nonbelievers (and very few believers), I continued to study the Bible and its history. What I discovered was a tale of deceit and treachery and greed—a power struggle among priests and kings that began hundreds of years before Jesus was born and continues to this day. One of the most important lessons I learned is that modern Christianity isn’t based on what Jesus actually taught or believed.

True believers tend to assume that their preachers’ words are divinely inspired and, therefore, above reproach—even though preachers routinely disagree with one another. This is because parishioners have been trained to regard gullibility on religious issues as faith, which is supposedly a virtue. Fundamentalists generally vote for politicians who invoke God’s name and advocate policies that their preachers also support—even when those policies are strongly at odds with what Jesus himself taught. Ever since the late Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority, religion has insinuated itself more and more into American politics and the impact has poisoned our public discourse. Because this trend undermines our national discourse, I decided that it was time to respond. This book is my response. If I fail to persuade you that Christianity is false, I hope at least to make it clear that this trend is insidious.

I’m not a Bible historian, but I’ve read and understood a great deal of what real Bible historians have written. Much of it is rather pedantic and can be baffling for uninitiated readers. So, I decided to write a more straightforward (though less scholarly) argument against religion in general and Christianity in particular. Bible historians do the tedious work of studying the trees, but I intend to present the forest in a way that, just maybe, only a layman can and your preacher certainly never will.

THE PLAN

Many books about Bible history are either so pedantic or so narrow in scope that they can leave the uninitiated reader bewildered. My primary aim in this book is to present some basics on Bible history in a straightforward manner so that uninitiated readers can discern the fundamental truths—that the Bible is a mix of myths, distorted history, and conflicting messages, and that the precepts of modern Christian dogma conflict with what Jesus himself taught. Most people are unaware of Bible history. I’m referring not just to the history in the Bible, but also to the history of the Bible—the events surrounding its creation.

This may be a challenging read. All I ask is that you try to consider the evidence that I present without forming knee-jerk responses based on preconceived notions. That’s a pretty tall order. If you’re a Christian, you’ve had years of careful indoctrination in one view of the Bible. Much of that indoctrination took place before you were old enough to question it rationally. The dogma was inculcated via rote memorization—through rhythmic recitation, songs, and participation in various reinforcement rituals. You began committing Biblical text to memory before you could understand what it meant.

A great deal of the information that I’ll cover is based on research by Bible historians—who are frequently clergymen. In general, they set out to understand the Bible better, not to discredit it. They study its source documents in their original languages in order to decipher their meanings and to discover the circumstances in which they were written. So, even if you don’t accept my conclusions, you might find this book to be an interesting read. Despite what fundamentalists believe, the Bible isn’t a single narrative dictated by God to the prophets. The history of its development is actually quite well documented. Here are a few irrefutable facts about the Bible:

• Its contents were selected and edited by Medieval Europeans.

• Nearly all of it was written long after the events it purports to describe.

• The text was frequently modified, sometimes for political reasons.

• Nothing in it is completely reliable.

• A great deal of it is absolutely false.

Medieval scribes copied manuscripts by hand. Over time, this resulted in many thousands of discrepancies.1 Most were typographical errors, but some were intentional insertions, deletions, and alterations of profound theological significance. Because of this, many Bible historians devote their careers to determining the chronological order in which the surviving documents were created in order to find the original meanings. In addition to mistranslations and alterations to existing documents, many of the Bible’s books are outright forgeries, as Bart Ehrman has demonstrated.2 The problems are major. In the next few paragraphs, for example, are a few terms and concepts that were mistranslated or abused—in at least some cases, intentionally.

Ancient Hebrews were originally polytheistic. They didn’t believe that the male god Yahweh was the only god. They believed that he was their god, the one whom they were to worship above all others. Indeed, Yahweh once shared heaven with a queen, Asherah, who is mentioned about 40 times in the Old Testament, but generally in an unfavorable light because of an ongoing dispute between the official Hebrew monotheists and the polytheistic commoners over the last few centuries BC. Dozens of gods are mentioned by name in the Old Testament (as the table below shows), but not to dispute their existence. The ancient Hebrew word Elohim was both singular and plural and represented both genders. It was translated into English as God to represent the single male god, Yahweh.

The combined term "Yahweh Elohim" basically meant "the god Yahweh, but it was mistranslated as the Lord God. The ancient Hebrew name Yahweh" referred to a single male god. It was translated into English as the Lord and is routinely conflated with "Elohim. In practice, Christian preachers maintain the illusion that the Lord and God" are synonymous.

The term "Adam" was interpreted to mean an individual human male, but it really referred to mankind in general. The term "ben adam" meant son of man. It was misconstrued as a title for Jesus himself (the Son of Man), but it can refer to any man or all men or mankind in general. This error and many others were facilitated by the lack of capital letters in the ancient Greek alphabet.

The synonymous terms "Kingdom of God" and "Kingdom of Heaven" were conflated with heaven itself, but, in fact, they unambiguously referred to a future physical kingdom here on earth. When "Gehenna" was translated into Greek, "Hades" was substituted. Actually, Hades was a mythical Greek underworld whereas Gehenna was a very real place outside of Jerusalem. The Old English concept of Hell (netherworld) was utterly foreign to Jesus and his followers, but it was substituted for the Hebrew Sheol—the abode of the dead (essentially, the grave).

The Greek "khristos," which became the English "Christ" meant anointed. Ancient Hebrew priests anointed kings to assert Yahweh’s approval—not to suggest that their kings were divine. Furthermore, "khristos" and, subsequently, Christ, were substituted for the Hebrew "Messiah" (a long-awaited earthly king).

Figure 1: Gods in the Bible

What Bible historians do resembles detective work. No original documents have been found. None. The oldest available texts are altered copies of altered copies—often in tattered fragments. If you want to pinpoint a document’s date, you can study contextual properties such as characteristics of the language and references to geography and events. For example, if a passage mentions a country by name and you know when that country was founded, then you can readily infer that the document was written after that date. If it refers to a particular king, then it was written after that king took the throne. If you have access to multiple copies of a document that contain variations in text, you can determine their relative ages and authenticity by examining their differences.

Although the core of my argument is based on the Bible, some of the information I’ll cover comes from archaeology, history, and the sciences. I intend to present some of the most conspicuous evidence against religious dogma in general and Christianity in particular because it is the prevalent religion here in the United States and the one most familiar to me (I was raised Lutheran). There’s nothing particularly novel about the evidence I’m going to present. It has been thoroughly documented. My aim is to assemble a smattering of information from many diverse disciplines into a broad case against the legitimacy of religious dogma.

Part One:

Reading the Bible

RIVAL SECTS

Sectarian differences in early Christianity were extreme. Christianity was born into a world full of deities. The many Greek, Roman, Persian, and Egyptian gods were, of course, the most widely known, but local tribes worshipped their own parochial gods as well. People freely recognized a variety of gods—both their own and those of their neighbors. There were gods and goddesses of fertility for bountiful crops and healthy children, of power for victory in war and hunting. There were deities to watch over people in their homes or while traveling in dangerous places, gods of the sea, of wine, of fire, and so forth.

Christianity was born in the age of paganism. This polytheistic inclination is generally viewed now as anti-Christian. In reality, Christianity at the time was anti-pagan. Before the rise of Christianity, people in the Mediterranean region were fairly tolerant regarding alternative forms of worship. With Christianity came the concepts of monotheism (a single, all-powerful god of the universe) and of orthodoxy and heresy (right and wrong thoughts). Christians believed that they were right, so everybody else had to be wrong. They believed that their fate for all eternity rested on right beliefs; however they couldn’t agree on what constituted right beliefs. To illustrate the magnitude of the problem, here are just a few brief sketches of differing views:

• Marcionites differentiated between the Jewish god of vengeance and the Christian god of goodness and justice. Marcion constructed the first Christian canon, which consisted of Luke and ten of Paul’s epistles.