Excerpt #8 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Bible’s New Testament Is Fiction
What would result if students learned Bible history and the history of ancient Christianity in an unbiased setting?
A student might be exposed to Gerald R. Larue, professor emeritus of biblical history and archeology at the University of Southern California, who, as chairperson of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, wrote: “The bulk of the New Testament material is fiction. Birth stories, miracle stories, resurrection stories abounded in that time period. The early Christian writers simply adapted current hero stories to Jesus, producing a legendary figure, a faith symbol, around whom an entire belief system was to emerge.”
“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” – Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
The Reverend Charles Kannengiesser, a professor of theology at Notre Dame University, agrees that many of the stories in the Bible about Jesus were tales commonly applied to then contemporary mythical figures and heroes: “They were stock stories told to convertpeople to Jesus.”
Kerry Temple, former managing editor of Notre Dame Magazine noted that “tales of virgin births, divine heroes, and miracle workers were relatively common 2000 years ago and simply did not mean what they do to us today.”
At Yale Divinity School, my New Testament professor lecturing on the Gospels pointed out that “the Gospels are not history; they are proclamations of faith . . . The traditions were malleable . . . The stories were told in different ways to serve different purposes . . . The traditions were shaped as they were passed on . . . The writers were making adaptations to further their aims and goals . . . The authenticity of the stories is very debatable.”
These kinds of revelations are common to all religions and are not what fundamentalists would like students to learn.
Fundamentalists would not be anxious for students to learn that authors of dozens of books and scores of footnoted articles argue that “the Gospel stories of the empty tomb and Jesus’ postresurrection appearances are fictions devised long after his death to justify claims of his divinity.”
German New Testament scholar Gerd Ludemann, a visiting professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School, was quoted as saying the Resurrection is “an empty formula” that must be rejected by anyone holding a “scientific world view”. Even the most orthodox Scripture scholars recognize that “Jesus’ resurrection and its aftermath are fraught with special problems for the historian.”