Amazing Bible Facts

What listening to critical scholarship podcasts over the years has taught me

In my previous post, I mentioned the study of religion. One of the things I’ve been doing lately is listening to podcasts and reading books about what’s been called “textual criticism” of the Bible.

After a few years of absorbing this stuff, I thought I’d share the twelve most interesting and eye-opening things I’ve learned over the years from listening to these sources.

Now, it’s important to note that I am NOT an expert in any of these topics. I’m merely passing along what I’ve heard and read from others, so if you have an issue, take it up with the original scholars, not with me. For a lot of this, I’m going from memory, so I expect there will be errors, and there will comments telling me exactly what I got wrong. But I expect that from people who know far more about this stuff than I do.

1. Ancient Israel was not monotheistic.

The preponderance of evidence indicates that the ancient Israelites were not true monotheists, which is defined as the belief that there is only one, single god and no others. Instead, they were initially polytheists who acknowledged the existence of other gods, and then gradually transitioned into the exclusive worship of their own god, known as YHWH (usually transliterated as Yahweh), whom they asserted was the most supreme and most potent of all the gods.

Religious scholars refer to this as henotheism—the worship of a single, supreme god that does not deny the existence or possible existence of other deities that may or may not be worshiped. From there, Israelite religion gradually enforced the worship of one single God, ruthlessly suppressing all other form of worship—sometimes violently. This is known as monolatry. But throughout the Old Testament, there are many signs that the followers of Yahweh did not regard him as the only god. As Robert Wright writes in “The Evolution of God”:

…even Israelites who didn’t worship gods other than Yahweh still believed in their existence. Early affirmations of devotion to Yahweh don’t single him out for being the only god, just for being the best god for the Israelites, the one you should worship. That ancient hymn to Yahweh, “man of war,” asks this question: “Who is like thee, O LORD, among the gods?” Indeed, the Bible sometimes mentions other gods matter-of-factly. In the book of Numbers, for example, where the Moabites are conquered, it says that their god Chemosh “has made his sons fugitives, and his daughters captives.”

And when the Bible doesn’t note the existence of other gods, it may imply as much. The scriptures warn Israelites not to “serve other gods and bow down to them” lest “the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you.” Would the Bible’s authors (here and elsewhere) have warned against “serving” other gods if those gods didn’t even exist? And would Yahweh have declared himself “a jealous god” if there were no other gods to be jealous of? Apparently God himself didn’t start life as a monotheist. Even God’s most famous demand for devotion—”You shall have no other gods before me,” as he puts it in Exodus—hardly excludes the existence of other gods.

In other words, before Israelite religion denied the existence of all gods other than Yahweh, it went through a phase of granting their existence but condemning their worship (by Israelites, at least; if the Moabites wanted to worship Chemosh, that was their business). In technical terms, Israelite religion reached monotheism only after a period of “monolatry”—exclusive devotion to one god without denying the existence of others. (pp. 104-105)

Israelite religious beliefs seem to have been born out of the frothing religious milieu of the ancient Near East rather than something that suddenly sprang, fully formed, out of nowhere. There appear to be three major currents: The northern tradition of worship, centered around the Caananite storm god El and/or Baal and the northern city of Ugarit and other Caananite coastal cities; a southern tradition centered on the exclusive worship of the war god Yahweh among desert nomads (desert dwellers are more likely to be monotheists according to anthropologists), and Egyptian religious ideas from its priesthood imported into Sinai and southern Canaan.

Monotheism—the belief in the existence of only one, single divinity—comes quite late to Judaism, historically. Many scholars have cited an influence of Zoroastrianism as a catalyst for this change, while other scholars disagree. Other scholars have posited an Egyptian influence from the religious reforms of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Scholars have noted similarities between “The Great Hymn to the Aten” and Psalm 104.

I need not go into more detail, as this excellent article describes so well the formation of how the religion of ancient Israel came into existence:

How the God of Israel Was Born. An easy read and definitely worth your time.

2. Our earliest Biblical texts are actually quite late, historically.

Many people might naïvely think that, since the Bible describes events which happened thousands of years ago, the manuscripts we have must date that far back. I certainly thought that way.

But it turns out that’s not true. In fact, they come from much later.

The Septuagint is a translation of the ancient Hebrew scriptures into Greek. According to the legend, seventy-two scholars (seven from each of the twelve tribes of Israel) journeyed to Egypt to translate the Hebrew scriptures from Biblical Hebrew into Koine (that is, common) Greek. The first five books of what Christians today call the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) were translated in the third century BCE, while the rest of the Old Testament is thought to have been completed later around the second century B.C.E.

This Greek translation of the Bible, according to Biblical scholars, was the version apparently used by many of the authors of the New Testament. It turns out that many of the authors of the New Testament didn’t even know Biblical Hebrew! Many diaspora Jews spoke only Greek, just as American Jews today, unless they are religious experts, speak only English, or European Jews spoke only Yiddish, aside from a few prayers and religious terms.

This is illustrated by the Isaiah prophecy (Isaiah 7:14), which seems to indicate that the Messiah will be born of a virgin. The confusion stems from the fact that in many languages the words for “virgin” (i.e. never had sex, which theoretically can apply to both men and women) is the same as that for “young woman.” Other languages make a distinction between the two. Biblical Hebrew makes a distinction, and the word used in the passage is the Hebrew word for “young woman,” or possibly “bride” (‘almâh).

However, by the first century, the Greek word, which originally stood for both, had acquired the meaning of “virgin” (parthenos, as in the Parthenon, the shrine to Athena Parthenos). Thus, if you were reading the scriptures in Greek, it would look like Isaiah is prophesying a virgin giving birth to a son, when in reality what it actually says is that a young woman will conceive and give birth to a child (which makes a lot more sense). That’s right, the virgin birth was never prophesied at all! And if you read the entire passage in its context, it has nothing at all to do with the Messiah, but rather predicts when a siege will be lifted.

Several versions of the Septuagint survive. One of the oldest is exactly where you would expect it to be—the Vatican (the Vatican Codex, or Codex Vaticanus). This dates from the third century C.E. In the twentieth century, an even older version was accidentally discovered in a library in a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. This is known as the Codex Sinaiticus (codex being the term for a book consisting of bound manuscripts, as opposed to a scroll), which dates from the late second century.

These two are the oldest complete books of the Bible (we have earlier fragments), which contain the Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, which was originally composed in Greek. That means, remarkably, that the oldest complete versions of the Old Testament comes from several centuries after the life of Jesus in a language they were not originally written in (with one exception we’ll get to in a bit). The oldest text in the original Hebrew, remarkably, comes from around 1000 C.E.—thousands of years after the events they depict. This is known as the Leningrad Codex, and is in the Russian archives. It is a Masoretic text. The Masorites were Jewish scribes who lived primarily in Galilee during the medieval period who developed methods of copying the scriptures with extremely high fidelity. They also developed ways of signifying vowels. The Aleppo codex is earlier, from 900 C.E., but is not complete. These Masoretic texts are considered to be the most authoritative versions of the Hebrew Bible, but they differ from the Septuagint in some areas.

This was upended by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. These were copies of the Hebrew scriptures created by an apocalyptic cult living near the Dead Sea known as the Essenes. They copied the scriptures and hid them away in pots in caves near the Dead Sea. These scrolls date from the first century C.E. are are roughly contemporaneous with the life of Christ. That makes them the oldest copies of the Hebrew scriptures—of the Old Testament—ever found. There are over 1,000 different manuscripts.

The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls is seen by many as the most significant event in the history of Biblical studies. Perhaps the most remarkable scroll among them is the Isaiah scroll, which contains the complete book of Isaiah. Remarkably, the Isaiah scroll is identical to the Masoretic texts from a thousand years later! Christian apologists sometime use this is a proof that the Bible has been transmitted down to us perfectly. What they don’t mention is that the Isaiah scroll is still around 700 years after scholars believe the text was originally composed. Additionally, there are differences between the other scrolls and Masoretic texts. Jeremiah, for example, is 1/6 shorter in the Septuagint, indicating that it was added to at some point between the Septuagint translation and the time of Christ. Samuel and Kings are also different in the Septuagint.

Oh, and, of course, the chapters and versus were added much, much later.

Great uncial codices (Wikipedia)

3. Many of the stories in the Bible have earlier precedents in the ancient Near East.

This isn’t really news to me—I had already known about the Epic of Gilgamesh for some time. That story contains a flood myth strikingly similar to that of Noah recorded in the Bible. But that’s not the only flood myth from Western Asia. There is a partial Sumerian text, and several others as well.

Christian apologists will use this to claim that the Noah story is true, and all the other versions copied from it but got the details wrong. But the problem is that these stories were discovered on clay tablets that date to thousands of years before our earliest copies of the Bible, as we learned in the point above.

That wasn’t the only influence. Assyriologists—scholars of the ancient Near East—have noted similarities between treaties made by Near Eastern kings and their conquered subjects, and the language God uses to talk to his followers in the Bible. One prominent example is the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon: Compare The Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon and Deuteronomy 5:7 (Intertextual Bible)

Stories that the authors of the Bible borrowed from other cultures and religions (Threads)

4. The writers of the gospels all cribbed from each other and from other sources.

The four canonical gospels are generally divided into the first three gospels, and John. The first three are very similar, tell a lot of the same stories, are more or less theologically similar. More astonishingly, they crib from each other word for word, indicating that the authors copied directly from each other. For this reason, these are known as the synoptic gospels, meaning “seeing together.” John, however, is very different. It has a very different Christology, and is the only gospel which clearly makes claims to the divinity of Jesus. John also has Jesus giving long, wordy speeches about his true nature, rather than the others where Jesus teaches mainly through parables and short, direct statements.

Most scholars now believe that Mark was the earliest gospel. It’s believed, then, that Matthew and Luke copied from Mark while adding their own original material which they got from somewhere else. These lost materials are designated ‘M’ and ‘L’ by Bible scholars (I’ll let you guess which is which). There is also a lost list of Jesus’s sayings hypothesized by Bible scholars known as ‘Q’ (for Quelle, the German word for “source,” not related to the conspiracy theory).

The fact that these four books are really all we have about the life of Jesus—whom the entire religion is based on—is pretty extraordinary when you think about it. By the way, the attributions of the four canonical Gospels come from much later via tradition. We don’t actually know who wrote them. Only two are actual disciples, while the other two are scribes associated with Peter and Paul. In some cases, it’s pretty obvious that the person whom the Gospel is attributed to is not the one who actually wrote it.

This video goes into detail. I recommend watching it at 1.5 speed (24 minutes):

5. There are a lot of additional Gospels besides the four in the Bible.

The four canonical Gospels (from God Spell, meaning “good news” in Old English) were not the only ones written. We’ve since discovered all sorts of additional gospels in many different places. There are at least thirty-nine texts about Jesus which are not in the Bible. Some of these were even known to early Christians. The most famous of these today are Gnostic gospels—the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas—but those are not the only ones. There are also several infancy gospels allegedly describing Jesus’s early childhood.

Wikipedia has a list of these gospels: List of gospels (Wikipedia)

These are also stories about Jesus, so why didn’t they make it into the Bible? Good question. A lot of these are regarded as what we would call today “fan fiction.” But it does force us to confront which stories are true and which are not (see the final point).

6. Jesus himself never claimed to be God.

This one is quite a mind-blower. The divinity of Jesus is simply taken as a fundamental cornerstone of Christianity. How could it not be in the Bible?

According the critical scholars of the Bible dating back to Albert Schweitzer, who wrote The Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1906, Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. Apocalypticism¹ was a movement within Judaism which believed that the world was coming to an end, and God’s Kingdom would soon be restored on earth. Jesus was not alone in this belief. We’ve already mentioned the Essenes, the scribes who copied the Dead Sea Scrolls. There’s also the mysterious John the Baptist, whose relationship to Jesus is somewhat ambiguous. At one point in the gospels John baptizes Jesus, which is strange if you think Jesus is literally God. Typically the more spiritually senior person is the one doing the baptizing².

Jesus did claim to be the Messiah. However, the Messiah was in no way or sense a divine figure within the Jewish tradition at the time of Jesus, nor in Jewish religion today. Judaism and Islam both have messiah figures, and, indeed, several people have been identified with, or claimed to be, the Messiah in both of these religions. However, this was not a claim to divinity in either of these monotheistic traditions, which would have been considered sacrilege.

Instead, the Messiah was a powerful, non-divine, earthly figure. Messiah is an anglicization of the Hebrew word for “anointed one” (Christ is an anglicization of the Greek word for the same). Being anointed meant that you were a king, as all of the kings of ancient Israel were anointed to signify their appointment by God. Jesus believed that he and his disciples would rule over the heavenly kingdom to come that God was about to establish on earth. This is why it was so important to repent and to keep the commandments. When God returned, he would raise the dead and pass judgement on humanity, where the good would be rewarded and the wicked punished (about which, more below). But, while the Messiah was chosen by God, he was not, in any sense, God himself.

Only later, when Jesus became seen as a divine figure, was the office of Messiah elevated to become a form of God in Christianity, and Christianity alone. Furthermore, the Messiah was changed from a powerful earthy ruler to a figure whose mission was to suffer and die for the sins of the world. This was a retroactive change among Christians, and was decidedly at variance with how the Messiah was seen by Jews in the time of Jesus, what was indicated in the scriptures, and probably at variance with how Jesus saw himself.

The synoptic Gospels do not have Jesus claiming to be God at any point, certainly not the one and only God of the Hebrew Bible. As noted, he does claim to be the Messiah at points, as well as the Son of Man—another mysterious figure who appears to be a kind of divine judge. But nowhere does he claim true divinity in the synoptic gospels.

It is only in the gospel of John—the chronologically latest gospel—that there are a number of cryptic statements which seem to signify that Jesus is a kind of divine figure associated with the Hebrew God of the Old Testament. “Before Abraham was, I am,” declares Jesus at one point. “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” he says at another. The opening of John has passages which correlate Jesus to the “Word made flesh,” and claims that this “Word” dates from the beginning of time. Mysterious statements like these are said to certify that Jesus is a divine being, but in reality, when you look closely at the original Greek, even this is not so straightforward. I don’t have room to discuss why these statements have a certain ambiguity to them, but I would refer you to this episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast (39 minutes):

The elevation of Jesus to divine status is discussed at length in Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God. In it, he claims that concept of apotheosis—of mortals becoming gods—has just as much to do with Greco-Roman ideas as it does with Jewish ones. Ehrman discusses these ideas with Alex O’Connor, below (22 minutes):

5. There is no heaven or hell in the Old Testament (or in Jesus’s teachings).

Heaven and hell certainly play an outsized role in Christianity today, especially in the harsh, fire-and-brimstone version of Christianity popular in the United States. But did you know that Jesus theology itself had no concept of an afterlife?

This may seem strange. Surely Jesus talked about heaven and hell.

But, in fact, the Old Testament does not have a clear vision of an afterlife. It appears that life is basically correlated with breath (as we noted last time), and when breath leaves the body, the body dies. That is, when you cease breathing, you die—you do not have an immaterial, non-corporeal “soul” separate from your body, nor do you go to some other place. When the breath departs, your body returns to dust. The Old Testament refers to a place called Sheol, which means simply the “grave” or the “tomb,” and is not an eternal afterlife, certainly not heaven or hell as we understand it. And Sheol sounds like a place people definitely wanted to avoid!

Ancient Israelite visions of the afterlife are confusing and ambiguous. The patriarch Enoch “walked with God,” which is normally taken to mean that he did not suffer a physical death (Why? Nobody knows). The prophet Elijah is taken up in chariot of fire whirlwind to “heaven,” but it is unclear what this refers to. King Saul enlists the aid of a necromancer to consult the prophet Samuel on the eve of a decisive battle with his enemies, which presumably means Samuel goes “somewhere” after death. But that’s about it. There is no notion of a last judgement, nor is there eternal conscious torment or reward clearly described anywhere in the Old Testament.

When it comes to Jesus, it appears that he held similar views. Apocalypticism saw a world where evil people succeeded and were elevated to high positions while the good, poor, and decent folk were exploited and crushed underfoot (thank God we don’t live in a world like that today). To resolve this problem, they believed that God would return to establish His kingdom on earth and judge the living and the dead. But God’s kingdom was not some ethereal place in another dimension, or up in the sky. It was right here, on earth. And God would raise the dead, physically, right here on earth by breathing life back into them. It turns out that Beslinda Carlyle was right—ooh, heaven is a place on earth.

Incidentally, this “resurrection of the dead” is still attested to every Sunday when Christians recite the Nicene Creed, which includes it. That seems at odds with the idea of heaven as the place of eternal reward, and the soul being rewarded or punished in the afterlife rather than the body/breath/soul combination. Why would the dead need to be raised if they are already in heaven or hell? Yet this contradiction is never thought about by most Christians.

The living and the dead would be judged, according to Jesus. The good and righteous would be rewarded by sitting at the right hand of God. Meanwhile the wicked would by punished by being cast into the fire. Here Jesus used the term “Gehenna” which refers to the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem. This is incorrectly translated as “hell.” But when they are cast into the fire, they are burned up and destroyed, not tormented for all eternity. There is no indication of that in the text. In other words, they are cast out forever from God’s Kingdom and cease to exist.

In fact, the Christian visions of Heaven and Hell comes not from the teachings of Jesus, but primarily from a couple of books which did not make it into the New Testament. They are The Apocalypse of Peter (which almost did make it into the New Testament), and the later Apocalypse of Paul, as well as the Book of Revelation. These books were influenced more by Greco-Roman ideas about the afterlife than by Jewish ones. In Greco-Roman philosophy, the “soul” was separate from the body. It was a kind of “shadow,” which could exist in some state after the body had disintegrated. These shadows dwelt under the earth in places like Hades, Elysium or Tartarus. In The Odyssey, Odysseus journeys to the underworld to consult Tiresias. Virgil also features a trip to the underworld for Aeneas to meet his father. These voyages to the underworld are known as katabasis and are what influenced later books like The Apocalypse of Peter, which in turn influenced Dante’s Inferno.

8. Some of Saint Paul’s letters are forgeries.

Paul’s letters form the majority of the New Testament. There are more words written by the Apostle Paul than there are from Jesus himself!

Bible scholars put Paul’s letters into three categories. There are the genuine letters of Paul. These are the ones almost certainly written by the apostle himself. Then there are the disputed epistles. These are ones that scholars disagree over, including Colossians, Ephesians, and Second Thessalonians. Then there are the spurious letters. These are pretty much universally believed NOT to have been written by the apostle Paul, which include what are known as the Pastoral Epistles: First and Second Timothy and Titus. Even fairly conservative Christian acknowledge this.

Funnily enough, many passages that express what many see as misogynistic views come these spurious texts, including the infamous passage which forbids women from having authority over men. First Timothy 2:12 says, But I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” Who ‘I’ actually is we don’t know. It was some anonymous person, but it certainly wasn’t St. Paul. So why is it such a big deal?

9 There are more copying errors than there are words in the entire Bible.

Back in the early 1700s, an English scholar at Oxford University named John Mill (not to be confused with John Stuart Mill), went through and chronicled all the differences between various manuscripts of the Bible. He stopped counting after 30,000.

Since his time, we have discovered an order of magnitude more manuscripts than he had at his disposal—over five thousand. Therefore, when you count up all the discrepancies today, it is a massive number. It is such a massive number that it’s virtually unknown. As Bart Ehrman puts it in his books (quoting his mentor Bruce Metzger), there are more differences between the various manuscripts than there are words in the entire Bible! These are known as textual variants.

Ehrman is quick to note that the vast majority of these textual variants have no effect whatsoever on the underlying theology or the meaning of the passage. But that’s not true for all of them. Occasionally, some of them do matter. In any case, one is forced to wonder how the Word of God, which is supposedly inerrant, has so many transcription mistakes.

In a short paper entitled Persistent Problems Confronting Bible Translators, Metzger describes the nature of some of the transcription errors:

It is understandable that mistakes can arise from inattentiveness brought on by weariness. For example instead of the correct reading, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand?” (Mark 4:21, RSV), several important manuscripts read “under the stand.”

This is obviously a scribal error in repeating the preposition “under” in the third phrase. Sometimes a scribe’s error of judgment works havoc with the text. One of the most atrocious blunders of this kind is in the minuscule Greek manuscript no. 109, dated to the 14th century. This manuscript of the four Gospels was transcribed from a copy that must have had Luke’s genealogy of Jesus (3:23-38) in two columns of 28 lines in each. Instead of transcribing the text by following the columns in succession, the scribe of MS 109 copied the genealogy by following the lines across the two columns.

In addition to such transcriptional blunders, which can usually be detected and corrected, occasionally a scribe deliberately introduced into the copy a change that seems to clarify the sense or eliminate a difficulty. For example the older manuscripts of Mark 1:2-3 attribute to the Prophet Isaiah the evangelist’s composite quotation from both Malachi and Isaiah, whereas later manuscripts (followed by the King James translators of 1611) read, “As it is written in the prophets,” an obvious amelioration of the earlier text.

As someone who transcribes a lot of stuff for this blog (including this entry), I can vouch for the fact that transcription errors are very easy to make.

There are also late additions to the text. The story of the woman taken in adultery (“Let he has no sin…”) in the book of John shows up quite late. Only in the fourth century does it start showing up in manuscripts, and it was originally in Luke. This indicated that it is probably a later story about Jesus inserted into the text (but a memorable one). And Mark originally ended on a cliffhanger before a more satisfactory ending was later inserted into the manuscripts.

10. The Bible says nothing about abortion, and its views about homosexuality are not straightforward.

While these are the all-consuming obsessions of Christians today, at least in the United States, the Bible itself is less clear.

The term “abortion” does not appear in the Bible, or even “infanticide.” Jesus’s teaching itself is silent on the issue. The Old Testament appears to view children, including the unborn, as a type of property, proscribing a different penalty for inducing a miscarriage than for killing a fully-born person. Full personhood was considered to be later in the pregnancy, when the breath came. There is also a passage in Numbers where a woman who is suspected of falling pregnant by another man is compelled to undergo a trial by drinking a potion which could induce a spontaneous miscarriage (if she’s guilty). Some have argued that this makes the Bible pro abortion, but this may be taking it too far.

As for homosexuality, the Old Testament does condemn it. But the condemnation comes with a huge list of prescriptive rules that Christians do not follow today, from circumcision, to eschewing pork and shellfish, to tattoos, to not wearing clothing with two different types of cloth, and many others. Why are some rules to be strictly followed while others are discarded arbitrarily? And the destruction of Sodom, which is seen as a punishment for homosexuality, is really an interpretation of the text. In reality, it does not specify what the “wickedness” of Sodom was, and it may be violating the laws of hospitality more than anything to do with homosexuality. Lot’s wife is punished for simply looking behind her.

In one of Paul’s letters, he does appear to condemn homosexuals as one of those who will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the word he uses in Greek is coined by him (a portmanteau of ‘male’ and ‘bed’) whose meaning is ambiguous, perhaps a male prostitute (although it is usually translated as homosexual or sodomite). But he goes on to list several others who will not inherit the Kingdom including thieves, the covetous, drunkards, idolaters, fornicators and adulterers, which would seem to also exclude many Christians as well, including nearly all anti-gay megachurch pastors.

11. The Bible is an anthology.

Because it sits in between two covers, we treat the Bible as a single, unified whole. We believe it is one text, and therefore it speaks with one authoritative voice and must be consistent throughout.

But if there’s one thing critical scholars emphasize, it’s that the Bible is not univocal. It does not speak with one, clear, unified voice, nor should it. It is, in fact, an anthology of many different books by different authors with many different perspectives—even differing on their theological beliefs at times. We would not expect an anthology of the best short stories or poems to all be consistent and speak with the same voice, for example. And this anthology was written over hundreds of years.

Nowhere in the Bible itself does it claim to speak with one, unified voice, nor does the text itself claim to be inerrant. Those qualities are imposed on the text by Christians for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with what’s in the Bible itself.

12. The Bible is filled with contradictions

The Bible contradicts other spiritual traditions, but it also contradicts itself. Even the day of the Crucifixion is not consistent. In Mark, Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples and institutes the Lord’s Supper by telling them to eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him. But in John, he gives no instructions to prepare the meal, and washes his disciples’ feet instead of instituting the Lord’s supper. But, most strikingly, in Mark he is arrested, tried and crucified the morning after the Passover meal is consumed, while in John he is arrested and tried a day earlier on the Day of Preparation for Passover at noon.

Bart Ehrman notes this contradiction in his book, “Jesus, Interrupted”:

Noon? On the Day of Preparation for the Passover? The day the lambs were slaughtered? How can that be? In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus lived through that day, had his disciples prepare the Passover meal, and ate it with them before being arrested, taken to jail for the night, tried the next morning, and executed at nine o-clock A.M. on the Passover day. But not in John. In John, Jesus dies a day earlier, on the Day of Preparation for Passover, sometime after noon…

And so the contradiction stands: in Mark, Jesus eats the Passover meal (Thursday night) and is crucified the following morning. In John, Jesus does not eat the Passover meal but is crucified on the day before the Passover meal was to be eaten. Moreover, in Mark, Jesus is nailed to the cross at nine in the morning; in John, he is not condemned until noon, and then he is taken out and crucified. (pp. 26-27)

This is hardly the only contradiction. Not only is Jesus’s death full of contradictions, so is his birth³, which is recorded in only two of the four Gospels:

The differences between the [birth, i.e. Christmas] accounts are quite striking. Virtually everything said in Matthew is missing from Luke and all the stories in Luke are missing from Matthew. Matthew mentions dreams that come to Joseph that are absent in Luke; Luke mentions angelic visions to Elizabeth and Mary that are absent in Matthew. Matthew has the wise men, the slaughter of the children by Herod, the flight to Egypt, the Holy Family bypassing Judea to return to Nazareth—all missing from Luke. Luke has the birth of John the Baptist, the census of Caesar, the trip to Bethlehem, the manger and the inn, the shepherds, the circumcision, the presentation in the Temple, and the return home immediately afterward—all of them missing from Matthew.

Now it may be that Matthew is telling some of the story and Luke is telling the rest of it, so that we are justified every December in combining the two accounts into a Christmas pageant where you get both the shepherds and the wise men, both the trip from Nazareth and the flight to Egypt. The problem is that when you start looking at the accounts closely, there are not only differences but also discrepancies that appear difficult if not impossible to reconcile… (p. 31)

There are many other contradictions, but I think you get the picture. These contradictions tend to be washed away, rationalized, or simply ignored by Christians, who need the text to be consistent for ideological reasons. But that is an imposition on the text which Bible scholars warn us away from (per number 11, above).

So there you have twelve (get it?) of what I think are the most interesting revelations from several years of listening to this kind of material. Hopefully I didn’t screw it up too badly.

1. From the Greek meaning a “revealing” or an “unveiling” of something.

2. There is a group called the Mandaeans who follow John the Baptist as the final prophet rather than Jesus.

3. In fact, everything about the Christmas story is probably made up. The idea that you needed to go back to your ancestral home for a Roman census is just not true. The flight to Egypt probably comes from a misreading of Hosea 11:1. We would certainly know if all the newborn children in Palestine were slaughtered at some point. Even the “inn” is a mistranslation—it was probably the lower floor of a house where animals are often kept. And how do follow a star to someone’s house (it’s usually depicted as some kind of flashlight in media). The oldest gospel, Mark, has no birth narrative. Sorry to ruin Christmas!