Magi Mike’s Blog

A research abstract at PhysOrg.com tells us:

Researchers have long been fascinated by the secrets of Ramet Rahel, located on a hilltop above modern-day Jerusalem. The site of the only known palace dating back to the kingdom of Biblical Judah, digs have also revealed a luxurious ancient garden with an advanced irrigation system.

The rest of the review shows that this summary statement is wrong. The garden and palace are not from the time of the “biblical kingdom of Judah”, which ended with the Babylonian conquest in 586 BC, but from the Persian period which must have been at least fifty years later, and was more likely 200 years later in the fourth century BC.

The evidence is provided by the nature of the irrigation systems which were like those the Persians were noted for constructing, the exotic plants in the garden which came from Persia and further east, and C14 dating will have left little room for doubt. When it comes to the bible, there is no such thing as lying.

The truth is that the biblical kingdom of Judah is largely fictitious. Little of its scriptural history has ever been found confirmed in the ground, and much of what has, like the claim here, is false or misreported. The evidence as opposed to the myth suggests the kingdom of Judah existed just 150 years—from about 730 BC to 586 BC—as a rump of the previous kingdom of Israel, and a puppet of the Assyrians. It was left poor and uncolonized by the Babylonians, and was not resettled as soon as the Persians took control, as the myth makes out, but much later probably in response to a rebellion in the fifth century that required a Persian punitive expedition to Jerusalem. It is after this that the palace and garden described in this work flourished.

How Darius II founded Judaism is explained in detail at the main askwhy website.

David Cameron, British Tory Prime Minister, in a speech to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, said, “Britain is a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so”, thereby proving that he either hasn’t a clue about what Britain is like outside his own narrow circle of rich boys, or he is trying to get Britain to go the way of the US, trying to foment sectarian squabbling to detract attention from the greed of his own class and the incompetence of his own government.

Lecturing Church of England clergy in Oxford, he claimed that Britain is in a “moral collapse” requiring a “return to Christian values” and condemned “passive tolerance” of immoral behaviour, in, for example, the summer riots, Islamic extremism, City excess and Westminster scandals. Well the balance here is admirably fair, but what about his own response. He’s been the ruler of the UK for the last two years, and, even if his knowledge of working people’s lives is negligible, he ought to have the knowledge and the power to sort out his own lot, the banking and financial sectors and the feeble opportunists who become MPs these days for their own aggrandizement and not through any idea of community service.

Cameron argues that the King James translation of the Bible is responsible for much of the English we have used in the last 400 years, something that few would disagree with, although its influence was forced home through periods of intense Protestant sectarianism, and the witch hunts, leaving people with little choice but to toe the line and be devout little Calvinists, Anglicans or Methodists, or suffer unpleasant consequences. Besides that, he thinks our politics have been steeped in the bible too. Well certainly all that Protestant intoleration and indoctrination shaped the growth of capitalism, and the British Parliamentary system, but it takes quite a bit of one-eyedness to see how this springs from the teaching of Christ—it being almost diametrically opposite to his teaching—although material wealth, and by implication greed, is deemed as God given in the Jewish religion from which Christianity emerged. Even so, rich Jews had a sacred duty to leave something for the poor. But those like Philip Green, the chain store owner—along with his wife who lives in the tax haven of Monaco, accumulators of around £4 billion—considers his duty to be to evade the payment of around £200 million a year to the British exchequer. And is Cameron’s fondness for invading Arab countries anything to do with morality, or just greed driven opportunism like that of his predecessor, Tony Blair?

Cameron pleads that he is not attacking members of other religions—and none—by claiming Britain is a Christian country, but merely that “the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today”. It would take a clever man to be able to say which parts of the bible have had the dominant effect on anyone’s morals in the last 400 years. The Christian bible, supposedly centred on the person of Christ, considered by Christians to have been God incarnate, teaches that the poor are blessed and the rich have as much chance as a camel getting through the eye of a needle of entering into God’s presence. Instead they have always taught the same pseudo-mystery as the ancient dying and rising gods like Adonis and Attis—merely by dying and rising up again, we are saved from future death, just as the world renovates itself from death every year.

So Pauline Christianity requires no morals at all. Salvation is assured by faith in the myth. Christ required Christians to be moral. He explicitly tells the rich that they cannot remain rich and be saved. The whole purpose of Christian life is service of other people. That is what we should all do—it is the purpose of society—and not waste our talents on exploiting those who are less fortunate and less talented than us, for personal gain. It is something that Cameron, if he chose, could give a lead on. Ha! That is not the morality he means. He is coming from the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, which demanded obedience of the law. That is Christianity to him, and it is selectively applied—it applies to poor jobless rioters, but not to bloated financiers who do nothing useful but electronically shipping junk bonds hither and thither, getting bonuses for every pointless criminal transaction.

Cameron thinks faith is neither a “necessary nor sufficient condition for morality”but could be a “helpful prod in the right direction”. That might be so as long as he knows what the right direction is, but he evidently does not know it, or he does not know the direction indicated by the God of the Christians, though he professes to be one. Cameron continues:

Whether you look at the riots last summer, the financial crash and the expenses scandal, or the ongoing terrorist threat from Islamist extremists around the world, one thing is clear—moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

And:

The absence of any real accountability, or moral code, allowed some bankers and politicians to behave with scant regard for the rest of society. And when it comes to fighting violent extremism, the almost fearful passive tolerance of religious extremism that has allowed segregated communities to behave in ways that run completely counter to our values has not contained that extremism but allowed it to grow and prosper.

At first glance, it looks deceptively fair, but again, the buck stops with him—he is the one to whom everyone is accountable in a modern secular society. He as leader of the Queen’s government has had the authority to act where his newly promoted moral stance could have an obvious effect, in the city of London, and in taxing the rich proportionately to their wealth so that “we are indeed all in it together” as leaders like him keep chanting, and redistributing the money in this manner in the tried and tested way—by stimulating the base of the economy, creating jobs in essential public works as J M Keynes showed.

If his audience are to be willing to distinguish right from wrong, then he should show them that he can, by rectifying the imbalance of wealth in the country. He has no intention of doing any such thing. While showboating about not agreeing with the Euro Zone countries, he continues supporting city bankers and his own bloated capitalist interests, glorying in the praise of the media barons whose sole purpose is to confuse and indoctrinate the ordinary person.

Needless to say, despite his new found interest in the value of Christianity to Britain, he was less insistent about its place in his personal life. He admitted to the flock of CofE shepherds he was a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian” who, while he would stand up for the values and principles of his faith, was “full of doubts and, like many, constantly grappling with the difficult questions when it comes to some of the big theological issues”. He means that he is not going to accept the codswallop of heaven and hell, and therefore has no worries about his failure to practice what the incarnated Christian God taught, except vaguely, of course.

I happened to chance upon a website by an historian who turned out to be one of the varieties of fundamentalist right wing authoritarian Christians, one Nathan Albright. The page was a review of a book critical of Christianity, so this “historian” gave it a very bad notice. I have no idea what this book was otherwise about or whether it was any good, but what interested me was what this blogger’s review revealed about himself. So I put a comment on the page saying that his own views seemed shockingly confused for a Christian historian. He kept speaking of “biblical law”, so I asked him whether he meant the law of Moses, asking what relevance that had to a Christian, expecting him to say something about its relevance to the way Jesus must have thought, having been raised as a pious Jew, but not expecting a Christian to consider the Mosaic law valid since God incarnated on earth, as Christians are supposed to believe.

He also spoke of “biblical punishments”, a curious concept, I thought since the right to punish was God’s own right, according to Christ, and the punishments prescribed in the Old Testament were diametrically opposed to anything that the God of love could have required His earthly slaves to practice. I continued:

Is the bible God? Are you God to know just what punishments God might choose to mete out? Christ makes a firm point that it is not for us to judge, and for what it is worth 1 Peter says we ought not even to revile others. If you think the laws of the Jews still reproduced in the Old Testament are as important as the lessons delivered by the Christian incarnated God, uttered from his own lips, then you should be a Jew not a Christian. Your whole emphasis on law is wrong. Christ teaches personal morality. When that is right, there is no need for law. So while you refer to the book’s author as being “so incoherent and self-contradictory”, you should be aware that you are no different.

In his further criticisms, he seemed particularly occupied by the author’s opinions of the Gnostics, and a strong desire to distance Christianity from Gnosticism, so I turned to this, and persisted with some other phrases that concerned him:

While it might be true that Gnostics were not Christians, there is much in the New Testament that is gnostic showing that early Christians took some ideas from the Gnostics, and in the confusion of the earliest Christian centuries there was much hybridizing between local churches and sects. In any case, Gnosticism and Judaism both had Persian roots, and Christianity itself incorporates many concepts of the Persian religion, including that of the Saviour (Persian, Saoshyant). You also seem to dislike the author’s alleged “left agenda”. What constitutes a “left agenda”? It is of some interest in the world right now, with protests everywhere in the world at the way the social contract has been torn up so that most people can be left destitute while a few have so much it would take a lifetime to give away. For that indeed was what Christ, your own God, told you to do, and inasmuch as that is an egalitarian measure, it counts as being left wing, doesn’t it? No Christian can leave most of the population of the world destitute while enjoying the life of Riley themselves. Certainly “obedience” is a quality that the rich value in the poor, but did the Good God grant us free will so that we have to be uncritically obedient to “our betters”? Indeed can it seriously be argued that a Good God will punish us for not obeying Him, even though he apparently gave us that very right?

Amusingly, he reviled the writer for “choosing for herself which selective quotation she wants to make”. To which I commented:

Coming from a Christian, who pointedly cites several selected quotations, some from the Jewish scriptures, not the Christian ones, to suit his own interpretation, it looks like a spoof.

The inadvertant spoofiness of the writer revealed itself several times later, because he was evidently a perfect example of Christ’s parable about the mote and the beam. He was utterly blind to his own failings, failings that he saw in spades in others though he himself was the one who had them in spades.

The rest of the exchange went as follows. I concluded my initial comment thus:

Christ taught morality and morals are those practices we adopt to make living together agreeable. That is the meaning of Christian love, the attention the Good Samaritan paid to the accosted Jew—concern, kindness, care, attention, help, benevolence, protection—and the meaning of his being a Samaritan is that he was considered an enemy by Jews. I expect that can be written off, by a Christian so-called, as left wing too.

Your knowledge of God’s law and biblical history appears shockingly weak, let me provide you some information of where you woefully fall short.

You are spoofing us again, surely. You say you are a Christian and an historian, so your Christianity takes precedent over your history. That is the reason why there is no such thing as a “Christian scholar”. Christianity is antithetical to scholarship. What of history? You say my history falls woefully short, but yours is simply woeful.

The concept of a savior or deliverer is not borrowed from Mithratic Persian religion as you falsely claim, but was present in biblical religion from the earliest times (see Genesis 3:16-17).

What is the relevance of this citation to the precedence of Persian or Jewish religions?

Do you, allegedly a historian think Genesis was written in “the earliest times”? Genesis is most unlikely to be even the oldest book in the bible? As an historian you go on evidence, don’t you? What is your evidence for believing Genesis was written in the earliest times? No one could write at all in the earliest times, and the earliest evidence for recording data comes from Mesopotamia, not Palestine. Some of the myths of Sumer and Babylon are recorded in Genesis, myths like “the Flood”, but no serious historian considers them historical. They are old myths, and they have been copied from the early civilizations of Mesopotamia which preceded the Jews and Judaism by at least a millennium. The bible itself reports the beginning of Judaism, considering it as a return from exile, actually a deportation of people from Mesopotamia, during the Persian period! The law was then read out to them by Ezra in a foreign tongue. So the bible was compiled after this event. Judaism is therefore later than, and dependent on, the concepts of Persian religion.

You assume that the Jewish scriptures and Christian scriptures are different, following after the Marcionite heresy. This is a mistaken assumption.

It is not an assumption as anyone who can read can confirm for themselves. If they are the same, if not in fact, in meaning, then what was the point of Christ? Just a human sacrifice? Now you cite Paul (2 Timothy 4:16-17), but you mean to cite chapter 3. If Paul wrote the pastoral epistles, he plainly referred only to the scripture then extant, what Christians call the Old Testament, so his mention of “all scripture” seemed to allow for other scriptures that did not gain entry to the Jewish canon. As Paul was considerably influenced by the Gnostics that you despise so much, he might have even meant some of the Gnostic writings. He certainly could not have meant by it “what would be called both the Old Testament and the New Testament by most Christians”, at a time when the New Testament did not exist. If these epistles are post Pauline works, as seems more likely, they could have been written when some at least of the New Testament already existed, but then the Church was obviously plugging its New Testaments—the gospels in particular—in addition to those the Jews and the early Christians knew, mainly the Jewish scriptures written in Greek, the Septuagint, which are incidentally, the oldest Jewish scriptures known.

Therefore, a quotation from Mosaic law is fully applicable for Christians today (though to be interpreted through the lenses of Christianity to be sure).

Your own failing as a Christian is emphasized here in what you add as an incidental comment. If God appeared on earth to do more than to be sacrificed as an atonement, then Christ’s teaching must have been meant to supersede or at least correct the previous law. Parts of the gospels suggest he did intend that, and many Christians throughout the history of Christendom have believed it. Christ himself, however, as a devout Jew, denied it. Yet he introduced an entirely new emphasis on love and poverty that are not obvious in the Jewish scriptures. If you as a Christian are to follow the line you are preaching, your passing parenthesis is crucially important to Christianity, for the whole point of love, to Christ, God to Christians, is that the Mosaic law has to be read with loving intent. If there is no such reading available, then love should prevail. No modern Christian, even sincere ones, would consider much of Leviticus as being even remotely applicable today, and have no qualms about ignoring it. Yet some of Christ’s own teachings are restatements of some Levitical laws. Christians, for example, have to be perfect like their father in heaven, but most of them consider it too hard even though Christ himself said it as a paraphrase of Leviticus. That, they ought to aim to do, as Christians, but do not, and murdering people whether witches or homosexuals or adulterers, and so on, are not at all loving and ought to be rejected by Christians with barely a thought about it. It is easier to believe what Christ himself plainly taught than to go back uncritically to the Mosaic laws. If you are a Jew, then fine, stick by Moses, but to be a Christian you ought to stick by Christ. In neither case would you stick by Paul, as almost all Christians do, even to the exclusion of God Himself, in the shape of Christ.

The left-wing agenda I am referring to is a hostility to authority.

So Christ was not hostile to authority, even though he took a whip to people going about their lawful business in the temple court, tipping up their tables and scattering their animals and birds. Come on, historian. Take off the Christian blinkers. Christ was hanged as a man opposed to Roman authority. That very act of rampaging through the temple was a criminal act under Roman law. Indeed, it was the very act of defying authority, and that was a capital crime.

It would include the support of those revolutionaries against social order,

…except in the case when God is doing it, eh?

You are at liberty to peruse my blogs myself, though you will find much reference to biblical law that troubles you as an antinomian.

Perhaps I shall, but you are spoofing again, for you are, as I have noted just now, like all Christians, an antinomian when the nomos does not suit you.

You say I am very mistaken on some aspects of historical analysis yet you, as an historian, still use Justin Martyr’s absurd excuse (ca 150 AD) for Christian practice mimicking that of extant religions—it was all Satan’s doing. I take it that Satan is that terribly powerful wicked God that Christians believe is responsible for evil in the world. A bit like Ahriman, the evil Persian God. In fact, just like Ahriman! Yet Christians abhor the Persian religion as being dualist, unlike “monotheistic” Christianity. And what about the Jewish scriptures, which you tell us teaches the same as Christ did? There in Isaiah, the Good God admits he is responsible for evil. The truth is that both religions stem from the Persian one, but in the post Persian age of growing monotheism tried unsuccessfully to eliminate Satan. He is too valuable an excuse for criminality for Christians to let go of.

Genesis is a far older text than anything in the Persian or Gnostic religious traditions.

I have disputed this, so offer me some proof.

I suggest you take some remedial biblical history to improve your own weak understanding.

Spoof, hilarious! Where do you get it all? You are the historian, and supposedly a Christian, but you need more than remedial work. Your root and branch comprehension is that of a bible thumping fundamentalist. One of the first things historians must do is question their sources. You cannot do it. The bible is your God, which is why you keep referring to biblical law.

Like most Gnostics, your virulent hatred of Judaism and biblical law leads you astray because it causes you to reject true apostolic Christianity.

What persuades you that I am a Gnostic and hate Judaism? Your credentials as a historian are in tatters. You haven’t a clue what impartial means. You have your own conclusions ready before you begin. But then, that is typically Christian.

As a part-Levite and part-Jew who was circumcised on the eighth day and who keeps the biblical sabbath laws, food laws, and other laws as part of my Christian beliefs, I have no qualms with being considered a one-house Messianic Jew, though I myself was raised in a Christian background.

Ah, so you are a Jew, and not a Christian at all.

You must consider Christ a Jew rather than a Christian (for the two great commandments of personal morality you claim belief in, “Honor God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your spirit” and “love your neighbor as yourself”, spring directly from the Mosaic law, specifically Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

Indeed, but what Jesus did that was novel and crucial was to link the two inseparably. He was asked for the greatest commandment and gave these two! It identifies every human being as meriting the love of God Himself. Christ was a man but was God too. The whole point of Christianity is that people must be treated as if they were God, for inasmuch as Christ is God, God could be any man and every man. Any Christian knows this, especially any Christian who has read his New Testament as far as Matthew 25:31-46. Apparently few have, or have not understood what they read, in two millennia.

Matthew, Acts, and the letters of the New Testament (especially Romans, Hebrews, James, and Revelation) are full of quotations and obvious references to Old Testament law being valid and applicable to Christians.

You are a historian but seem not to know, as I have already said, that there were no Christian scriptures until these people had written them, so all they could cite as scripture were the Jewish scriptures. Moreover, all the first Christians, not just Christ were Jews, so what else would they use other than the Jewish holy books. If Christianity was merely a form of Judaism, then why did the two religions ever split? Why did Jews reject Christ as the messiah, and still do? Christianity began as a Jewish heresy, and those Jews who tried to do as you seem to want to do, keep Jewish while being Christian, were rejected by the gentile Churches as Judaizers. The real Christians were the Ebionites. Perhaps you are trying to be one of these, but they rightly rejected Paul as a scoundrel out for himself.

Paul himself used an obscure Mosaic law about not muzzling oxen while they tread the field twice to justify Christians paying tithes and offerings to support the New Testament ministry.

Thank you. Paul was the first TV evangelist!

When you meet your maker in judgment, you can at least say you were warned.

Warned by a tribe of crooks and perverts who have consistently in the history of Christendom, all bar a few exceptions who did try, practiced the opposite of Christian teaching. Come on! You claim to be a historian. Try reading a little of the vile history of Christianity instead of biblical mythology.

The fundamentalist Christian historian did reply again to the comments I made in the preceding exchange, but ended with a warning that I was treading on his toes, so I began my replies to him on that warning.

In view of your curiously defensive attitude, I had better start at the end of your last reply to me, to give you a chance to delete my further comments before you read them.

I should note that my blog (like the Bible) has moral rules that include no insulting of Christianity or blasphemy. You are therefore in violation of my laws on my realm. Take heed to yourself. If you wish to continue conversing on this blog you will obey my rules. Is that simple enough for you to understand?

It seems to me that obeying your rules means agreeing with your own particular delusions. Anything critical immediately offends your delicate sensitivities. Well, as you say, this is your blog, and you did not even have to publish my initial comments, which you plainly found distasteful, from the tenor of your replies. I have understood throughout that you are the master here, and can delete whatever you do not like. It may be fine for your ego, but it is an admission that you cannot argue your corner. As a Christian apologist, you admit failure. Now is the chance for you to delete the rest of may reply, but, never fear, I shall not waste it.

The historian posted this reply up to this point then terminated the correspondence without posting the rest by adding the following note right here:

Editor: No, forbidding others to speak on a forum or editing/deleting their posts is not a sign that one cannot argue, only that one does not wish to cast pearls before swine, encourage internet trolls (such as you are), or to engage in pointless debate with fools. Nonetheless, since you accurately understood that you were offensive both in the tone and in the content of your messages, why did you not show some wisdom and moderate that tone if you wished to have a genuine discussion? I suppose you’ll have to answer that question for yourself.

Mr Albright persist in his psychological projection to the very end, conscious of offensiveness in my posts, but apparently as polite as saint himself! If an internet troll means arguing with nonsense, then I have no choice but to accept the insult, while wishing there were a lot more of us. Albright added to his editorial the following short “reply”.

Isn’t this much better? Perhaps you should stick to #OWS blogs where people like your nonsense.

So it is plain enough what his politics are. For anyone interested in all this, the points of my reply that he chose to omit continued as follows.

You say I “have no sense of balance” because I do not narrate the good things of Christianity besides the bad. Well I have noted several times that your own attitude comes over as a spoof, because you are utterly blind to your own biases. Here is another instance. If I must balance my selecting the bad aspects of Christianity with the good ones, then why don’t you, as a scholar, have the same duty to balance your rosy tinted presentation of Christianity with the blood and burnt flesh of the real history of it. It would be a violation of your laws, master. But your laws are a reflexion of Christianity as a whole, unbalanced and tendentious. No doubt you see your own role and duty to be to apologize for your beliefs. Well, I see mine as rectifying your unbalanced view. If that makes me “unfit to be a scholar or a gentleman”, then that is your view, but I submit that I am thereby the better Christian, because Christ was here to rectify what He as God perceived had gone wrong in His plan. You are the Caiaphas or the Pontius Pilate. Christ was a reformer, if not indeed a revolutionary, but you cannot abide any contradiction.

You refer to Christians scholars naming Harrison, Kitchen and Albright. The Harrison I know of is not the one you mention, but Kitchen and Albright were so biased and indeed bent that whenever they opine about anything impinging on Christianity or Judaism, they are hardly worth reading. Albright did a lot of damage with his archaeological tinkering over many decades, not least a faulty pottery sequence that misdates everything to suit the mythical chronology of the bible. Kitchen should stick to Egyptology.

There is internal textual evidence that Genesis springs from very old times, including its reference to a river that dried up about 3500 BC and its use of “and these are the generations” to divide its contents into cuneiform tablets kept generation after generation.

Genesis is a collection of stories, from Mesopotamia, as I have already said. Mesopotamia is where writing was developed and in its advanced form of lettering it became cuneiform. You are therefore accepting that much of this book’s content is Sumerian, Akkadian or Babylonian, the culture being essentially unchanging over tens of centuries.

“The evidence for Genesis’ considerable antiquity” you think is conclusive is not even valid. On your reasoning, the Last days of Pompeii must have been written in the first century AD, because it records an event of that time, but we all know it was written in the last century of the second millennium, almost 2000 years later. No historian will simply accept the internal contents of any source as being concrete evidence of its date. All history is falsely dated on that criterion. So, if Genesis is genuinely ancient, as you claim, it is not Jewish, and if it is not genuinely ancient, it could be Jewish, but simply records copies of some ancient tales from elsewhere. In the main we know what they are because the same tales have been found, dated variously because they were narrated repeatedly over many centuries as religious myths, in the valleys of the two rivers where they were set down originally.

Abraham and his family were descended from Mesopotamian society.

Abraham and his family was a story, an allegory in all likelihood of the event called by Jews the “return from exile”. The Nuzi tablets record laws pertaining to the ANE over millennia, so useless for dating any particular event. The Hittite treaties indeed show “the Bible’s covenant formula”, but again you use a treaty format that remained in use for over a thousand years in the ANE to date a particular time in that interval that suits you. Note too, that if the covenant was a treaty format, it was a covenant between two powers on earth, the Jews and the Persians, at the time of Ezra (a Persian) not the imaginary Moses. Does God lack originality that he has to use a treaty formula for his holy covenant?

Again, I am a scholar, and you’re just a troll.

Projecting again, Spoofer!

You are following the wrong scholars when you say that Judaism began after the exile. After all, the return from the exile merely restored the temple that had existed some time before.

Evidence, please? There is none! The so called Second Temple is the first Jewish one, even if a temple preceded it. The Deuteronomic history was written as a foundation history of the Jewish Temple State centered on Jerusalem, called Yehud. Most of it is fiction, the rest is loosely based on Assyrian king lists in the hands of the Persians. Its purpose is plainly to intimidate the Jews. Be obedient and they will multiply and prosper, fail to be obedient and they will be destroyed, and will be lucky if a righteous remnant remains living. That theme is the purpose of the history. There is no evidence for a state of Judah until just before Samaria was destroyed by the Assyrians, and incorporated into the empire. Judah remained as a rump puppet state, lasting independently only for a few decades. It was repopulated by colonists from Persia, who came with instructions to start a new religion.

You say I and people like me try to minimize the bible, and you say that because you have coined it, being biblical maximalists. The ones like me whom you call minimalists are actually doing what you are supposed to do wearing your historian’s hat. Find the truth, based on evidence and not merely on the myths in a tendentious ancient religious story book.

Since the Bible extends well into the second and third millennium BC, it is far before the Persian religion.

You have shown that some of the stories in the Genesis go back to ancient Mesopotamia, and I concur with that, but tell me how that is evidence that the bible was written then, any more than Bulwer Lytton was a contemporary of Pliny the Elder.

[The Persian religion] had its Satanic-inspired reformation in the seventh and sixth century BC.

I see you are now bragging that you are a personal friend of Satan, otherwise how would you know that little gem, Mr Historian?

If you wish to be a scholar, seek out scholarship.

Tee hee! Spoofer!

You falsely claim that Paul was influenced by the Gnostics. Far from it. His words were twisted by the gnostics (yourself included) to be hostile to the law (see 2—Peter 3:15-16).

Why do you, a so-called historian, keep citing valueless anonymous works as evidence? Even when you get the citation right, they rarely do what you claim. Where in this citation is the word “Gnostic”? As a fundamentalist, you will imagine that this is Peter the Rock speaking, but no scholar believes it is. You say Paul was a trained Pharisee on his own say so. That is not wise for a historian, especially a Jewish or semi-Jewish one, as modern Pharisees (scholarly rabbis) with few exceptions cannot see any such training in Paul, and his defection into anti-Semitism and self aggrandisement does not say a lot for Pharisees, if this claim is true. God, incidentally, in his earthly incarnation as Christ, seemed to disdain, if not detest, the Pharisees, so it is hard to understand why Christ’s supposed followers should defect into the arms of a supposed Pharisee called Saul of Tarsus. Tarsus was, of course, a cosmopolitan merchant city and a center of pagan religions, like that of Attis, the dying and rising god.

You cite Acts in defence of Paul’s acceptance of the law while being a Christian, yet the instance you cite is one that belies your claim. The Jews from Asia, a place where Paul had been active, so they knew his reputation directly, rioted against him because he had been violating the law. He had to agree to a Nazarite vow to try to appease them, but it didn’t. Elswhere he admits it or is ambiguous, and becomes increasingly anti-Semitic, the first self-hating Jew maybe?

You additionally claim that he believed in numerous nonbiblical scriptures.

No, I made no such explicit claim. Read what I said again. I am referring to scriptures which did not enter the Jewish canon, like the Enoch books, which you note yourself were Gnostic.

Jude himself quoted Gnostic works against the gnostics.

Quite so, and he quoted from Enoch favorably as scripture against those of whom he disapproved.

Now you say the Hebrew scriptures were a fixed canon after “about 440-420 AD”. You mean BC, but you are wrong even so. The Rabbis meeting at Jamnia in the first century AD fixed the canon. Before then, the Torah was definite, of course, the Prophets mostly, and the Writings quite flexibly.

Again, I’m sure your lack of belief in predictive prophecy lead you to reject historians like Joesephus.

I must admit I never knew Josephus was a prophet.

And falsely claim that Daniel was written in the second century BC because it would have been otherwise impossible for your puny and corrupted mind to understand how the various Ptolemeic and Seleucid kings could be written of ahead of time.

You are very good on “puny and corrupted minds”, aren’t you, Nathan? Paragraphs follow in which you preach to someone in your imagination, so mean nothing to me.

Evil exists as a corruption of good. It is not dualist because evil does not have an independent existence except upon a corruption of the original order.

That is what the Persian religion says.

Satan is not the equal of God.

And yet God chooses to let him off the leash. From where most of us stand, unaffected by your ability to persuade yourself of anything at all, Satan looks to be God’s equal. And, as I said, he is a great convenience for Christians who want to plead their failings are not their fault. In any event, he is a supernatural being, like the angels, demons, saints, etc, of which there are millions. So much for the boast of monotheism.

God is responsible for evil, but is not evil Himself.

Is He then perfectly good? Can something evil come out of something supposedly perfectly good?

The Persian religion falsely has an Ahura Mazda in a conflict with an equal evil god, an idea that is blasphemous in biblical religion, where Satan is a rebellious servant whose fate and end are already decided and merely await consummation. Again, your lack of understanding leads you astray.

Curious, I thought I introduced the idea of Persian dualism to this discussion. And, of course, in the interest of balance, the biblical contention that the wicked Satan is a slave under instruction from the Good God is blasphemous in the Persian religion.

I believe that the Bible is the very inspired Word of God, and the only credible source for learning about Him. Clearly you do not. The fact that you speak foolishly about what you do not understand pardons my speaking (as Paul did) as a fool to those who are foolish. But I will not cast my pearls before swine.

According to the Rabbis, even the pearls of God are tarnished in an imperfect world, something you cannot get, and when you speak of my not understanding, be frank, you mean not accepting your entirely subjective and therefore unverifiable interpretations. The bible, even if it had been sent directly from heaven by angelic messenger, would be imperfect once it was opened on this earth. In fact, the inspiration of God is supposed to be via the Holy Ghost acting upon men, and men themselves are imperfect beings, so the Word is not going to be as so remarkably accurate as you think by the time they have pondered and written, then translated. The evidence offered by people not prone to subjectivity, but skilled in history and science, is that biblical history is very flawed indeed. You will stick by your subjective views but history and science have to aim for objectivity to be valuable. That might mean opposing absolutely some false idea. That is what I try to do, and you, if you are a historian, ought to.

Mr Albright had run out of ideas, so refused to reply to the troll!

Two members of The Economics Society at Lehigh, Anjan Gupta and Dan Maryanovich, run a blog, Centives, a collection of interesting economics studies like the New York Times bestseller, Freakanomics. One post was entitled, How Much Does It Cost to Go to Hogwarts?, one of a series which include also whether law school is worth the price of admission, and the economics of movie theater popcorn.

The authors found that a year at Hogwarts costs approximately $42,752, assuming the price includes tuition, based upon the average cost of England’s top boarding schools (so called “public schools”!) as well as estimated costs for all the items detailed in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, such things as robes, a plain pointed hat, dragon hide gloves and a winter cloak.

After just a few short days online, the blog had more than 18,000 page views and more than 400 re-tweets.

From our point of view, it is interesting. Only very rich people can afford to send their kids to train as witches and wizards, and those people purport to be Fundamentalist or at least Evangelical Christians. But they are just the ones who have tried to use their money and media connexions to run down the Harry Potter series as the stuff of the Devil. If they really believe this, they will not be sending any of their kids to Hogwarts.

One has to conclude that Hogwarts has no chance of opening a branch in the USA. So all the Fundamentalists, Evangelicals and other Right Wing Authoritarians opposed to Harry Potter must be campaigning to stop other people from enjoying a little magic or witchcraft. It is what we can expect of them. They regard it as their right to tell others what to do.

On the other hand, maybe, as followers of Leon Strauss, the founder of Neoconservatism and called by some a “Nazi Jew”, the rich Republicans are only pretending to be Christians for the sake of the ones in the electorate they want to gull into supporting them. Really, they are paying for their kids to get into Hogwarts so that they will have the skills and powers to keep the unwashed masses under control when the revolution comes! Only they have the money to pay the fees so that there is no chance anyone from the working class, or even from the middle classes concerned about whether they will be able to keep their jobs—in other words, the upper working classes!—will ever be admitted into the posh school for wizards.

Hogwarts is a rich man’s exclusive school not a truly public school. So today’s witches and wizards must be rich Republicans. Why then don’t their Christians followers kick them out as the real Satanists instead of harping on about liberals, who are only trying their best to do what Christ would have done?

We are always reading that Americans are religious—more religious than the people of other industrialized countries. Two in five Americans say they regularly attend church services. 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God, and over 70 percent know that God exists. The simple story obtained by believing self reported religosity was rather obviously contrasted by the empty churches in parts of many cities. Then C Kirk Hadaway, director of research at the Episcopal Church, estimated that actual church attendances for Protestants and Catholics are approximately half of those reported.

Shankar Vedantam has pointed out that asking people whether they attend church is an unreliable way of getting religious answers. Instead of asking about church attendance, it is better to ask people to describe exactly how they spent their time on a typical sunday. This way, Philip Brenner, of the University of Michigan, found that the US and Canada both over reported religious attendance. It turns out that Americans are no more religious than people in other developed countries. The tendency to exaggerate church attendance made the US and Canada seem different. Actually, Americans attended church about as often as Italians and Slovenians, and a little more than the British and Germans.

So what is different about them is that they want others to think they are more religious than they are. They are much more stereotyped, because religion in the USA is still falsely considered a measure of people’s worth. Young people today might think it more important to know how many Facebook “friends” you have—you must be a good person to have a thousand Facebook “friends”. Equally, for many Americans, you must be a good person to attend church so regularly.

In other industrialized nations in the twentieth century this notion eroded because the majority realized church attendance was too often hypocritical, not sincere, the very thing that most Americans failed to notice. Americans continued to feel obliged to show they were religious. They still fear that unless they affirm their religiosity—such as by regular church attendance—they will be seen as less of a person than otherwise. Moreover, when you are in reality a villain, you have even more incentive to beef up your church attendance record! Therein lies the hypocrisy.

Jerry Newcombe of Coral Ministries, a TV God Channel, is a frequent guest commentator on The Christian Post blog. We have to admire him for taking the rise out of Harold Camping’s prophesy that the Judgement Day is nigh, on 21 May as a matter of fact. So hurry, you Christians, repent! The admiration is because Camping is another TV Christian pundit, and it is unusual, but pleasant to see the somewhat more serious Christians critizing the lunatic fringe of Christianity. The article is amusingly titled:

Do I think Judgment Day is coming on May 21? Well, let’s talk it over on May 22.

It raises something more important than whether God allows mortal men to know when He has planned Judgement Day to be. It is whether Christ himself prophesied the Judgement, and, if so, when. Naturally Christians say he did not make any such prophesy, but wait:

When ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors. This generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass away. But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.

This is extracted from Mark 13:29-33. Sure enough no one except God the Father knows when the time of the End of the World will be. Not even the Son knows the time. But Jesus knows the people he is addressing will see it. So, he is actually prophesying the end of the world during that generation—the generation of the audience before him.

A Jewish generation is 40 years, but even if he meant it to be the lifetime of those present, it has certainly passed now, 2000 years later. And the world is still with us! In fact, no student of the gospels could fail to notice that Christ was obviously waiting for the angelic host in the Garden of Gethsemane, though it has been edited out, except for a reference to angels. He did not know when the angels would burst forth from the Mount of Olives, but he had come to believe it would be during that Passover. At dawn, he realized he was mistaken and resigned himself to dying as a false prophet, as the law of Deuteronomy specified.

The Christianity pages on the AskWhy! main website treats it all more fully.

Steve Cornell, a senior pastor of Millersville Bible Church in Millersville, Pa, wrote in The Washington Times a short column telling God what he means in respect of murder and punishing it. It is curious that every Christian knows what the bible means, and it is God’s holy word, is it not? so what God means. The unseemly celebrations at the death of a man, albeit a man considered to be responsible for multiple deaths, Osama Bin Laden, is perfectly Christian. Pastor Cornell says that it is the bible that tells us to execute murderers, and joy is the appropriate response, after all Proverbs says so:

It is joy to the just to do judgment, but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.

Proverbs 21:15

Quite a number of passages in the Jewish scriptures approve of death for murder, and there are some, too, in the Christian appendix to the Jewish scriptures, the New Testament, but none of them are uttered by Christ, the Christian God incarnated, excepting one occasion when he is simply citing the scriptures to make a point about Pharisaic hypocrisy.

Deuteronomy 19:21 and Exodus 21:24 require application of the lex talionis “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. It would, it seems, perfectly well justify the assassination of Bin Laden, but who, in the civilized western world nowadays, would consider such a barbaric form of justice as just? We read that Iranian judges wish to apply the Sharia Law to a man who threw a strong acid into the face of a woman who had spurned his proposals of marriage. It is the self same lex talionis, literally in this case an “eye for an eye”, because the acid burnt the womans face horribly and destroyed her eyes. The judges, having found the man guilty, have ruled that the woman can pour a similar acid into the culprit’s eyes, thereby doing to him what he had done to her. Western newspapers are shocked and horrified that the Moslem bogeymen can do anything so barbaric, yet the Jewish and Christian bible has exactly this same law, repeated for emphasis.

More to the point is that the law was to be applied, according to the Jewish scriptures, justly! The crime had to be heard before God, meaning his judges, in those days the temple priests. The Iranian acid thrower was arraigned before judges, and the case proved. Osama Bin Laden was summarily shot, and only then was a DNA sample taken to prove that they had shot the right man. It seems they had, although there is doubt about how they were able to be so sure without his own DNA having been taken before hand to compare with that of the dead man, or DNA from his father and mother, or several brothers and sisters instead. We read that only samples from a couple of half siblings was available. In any case, had the man been shown not to be Bin Laden, then what? The body was quickly disposed of at sea, and no photos of the victim are to be released. The fact is that we cannot be sure the right man was killed, and the procedure is flawed indefensibly because, even if he was, he could easily not have been! The alleged Bin Laden was not given the chance of a trial, and due process had not been followed. It was not justice, whatever this supposedly Christian pastor claims (a “just punishment” by a human government) with his barbaric biblical citations at hand.

No this pastor even thinks that today governmental “roles” have expanded beyond “national boundaries”. Would that be all governments, or just the biggest and most powerful? If it is the role of all governments to expand its powers overseas, does that mean some country, perhaps Iraq, or Aghanistan, or Libya or Pakistan, can rightfully demand that Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama be accused of illegally murdering their nationals, in some cases many thousands of them, and demand that the guilty men be brought before the International Court of Justice for their crimes? They would, at least be getting a fair trial, which is more than Bin Laden got, and more importantly, more than all those many thousands of mainly innocent women, children and eldery folk in those foreign countries got in lex talionis vengeance. Yes indeed Reverend Cornell:

Neighborly love compels people of goodwill to act on behalf of helpless victims of international crime.

It does not mean they should be the criminals! The Christian pastor, has noticed that Christ’s rule of loving your enemies is not easily reconcilable with killing them. Here, as usual, the Christian is happy to revise the bible, despite its inerrancy, and not only that, he is happy to correct the impression that the incarnate God of the Christians gave while he spent his brief life on earth. Cornell knows God’s brain! He is not speaking of loving lawbreakers, nor of the appropriate response to it by rulers:

If applied to criminal justice, it would rule out all punishment and contradict the God ordained role of government to punish evildoers (1 Peter 2:14).

The “good” pastor cites here a passage, from the letter attributed to Peter which may be genuine, as if Peter is setting out a universal concession to governments to punish criminals, and even murderers. He is doing no such thing. He is telling the Christians who will be venturing into the wider Roman emperor to be Christians, even though there are people who will use their powers against them, given the chance. The Christian missionaries were to be Christians, that is follow the example and teachings of Christ, loving others, and not to react or provoke retaliation. They were not to give rulers and governors, magistrates, and so on, the chance to punish them.

Peter is not giving these officials any God given right to do anything. He says Christians have to obey these officials “for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13), because “it is God’s will that by doing right you will silence the ignorance of foolish men” (1 Peter 2:15). The foolish men are the rulers and their officials whom Peter prophesies—as Christ did, according to the gospels stories—will use their authority to try to silence Christ’s message of love. If Jesus had been teaching that Christians must obey their rulers, then he would have been justifying his own punishment by the Romans, and the acts of Caiaphas and the Jews. He had been acclaimed as king of the Jews, so it was right to punish him under the law as a traitor to the emperor, and right to turn him in.

Minister Cornell thinks the state is not bound by the morality of the individual person, and so can murder without it being criminal, so the state ought not to be accused of “killing” Bin Laden. Rulers of states cannot be criminals! So any man who manages to get into the position of ruler can murder people because when enemies are “killed” by the state, it is not murder—it is the execution of a murderer. It is the reasoning of tyrants everywhere. Gaddafi is not a murderer—he executes murderers because he represents the state of Libya. Saddam killed no one in Iraq, but executed them because they were murderers, and he it was who was the state of Iraq.

According to this principle, the USA had no reason to “kill” them for they were not murderers but executioners as the leaders of independent states. So for Cornell it is right that the Christian leaders of the USA can take it upon themselves to decide what is murder and what is execution. The USA only executes, but other people are murderers and can be executed by the world’s policeman, the USA.

If the USA claims the right to dispense international justice unilaterally, Americans must recognize that there is no legal principle involved. The principle being used is “might is right”. To be consistent, what applies to the goose applies too to the gander, the uncontested bully in the yard can kick whoever he likes, but can hardly be surprised when occasionally he gets kicked back.

Apparently Bin Laden thought the USA were a mass of murderers, because as a democracy, they had elected their chosen rulers who had the right to execute those whom they deemed murderers abroad. He declared the people of the USA as murderers and determined to execute them, and succeeded in executing some. Well, he was not a ruler of a state, and so he was a plain muderer, if 9/11 is indeed what he had aimed to do. He claimed in several videos released after the atrocity that he had had nothing to do with it, and the evidence was that a bunch of mainly Saudi Arabians did it.

Reverend Cornell is ultimately correct that society has the right to protect itself, to preserve itself. In primitive times, those who took advantage of others for selfish reasons could be expelled from the tribe. Even in relatively recent times, they could be exiled. Now it is no longer possible to expel people, so instead they have to be confined to prison. Even murderers do not have to be killed, confinement is worse. But whatever the crime, they must have the right to defend themselves, and the state has to have ways to ensure it has the person responsible for the crime. The proper way to elicit the truth is by a trial.

In the US, the greedy are richly rewarded, and reward others for defending them, not least right wing clerics. So, the “good” Christian for whom killing is a grievous sin, tells us:

The death penalty is needed to protect civilized society.

Without it we descend into “barbaric anarchy”. Strange then that the USA seems to be descending into barbaric anarchy despite widespread judicial murder, and is rapidly loosing every bit of respect it once had in the world.

US Christians ought not to cherry pick what they like in the bible while leaving aside what they do not like, meaning almost everything that their own God taught. They are not interested in morality or justice, the principle of “might is right” appeals to all religions too. Christians want to rule the USA, and will do and say whatever they think will help them in their goal. That is why the USA is no Christian nation. It is ruled by greedy liars, and it is hard to comprehend how any supposedly moral God can sanctify liars, or be expected to, especially by so-called believers. No society can be built on lies, and it certainly cannot stand on lies.

The USA has become a lying state, a greedy state, an immoral state, not because it lacks Christianity but because it is deluded into thinking that it is a Christian nation, deluded by its lying, greedy, immoral pastors. Society has to protect itself from lying, greedy, and immoral people because morality is what keeps society worth living in. Already the USA is becoming horrible to live in for too many of its people. It is horribly divided between two tribes, one beguiled by greed and immorality while imagining they are Christians. Pastors like Cornell pander to this ignorance for their own aggrandizement. Cornell is a Christian who loves people so much that he believes in one of the most primitive forms of law there is—an eye for an eye—the savage principle that is enshrined in Sharia Law. Do the pastor’s congregation realize it.

Let’s not confuse history with propaganda.

John Fea, Messiah College, Grantham, PA

The Republican Party mythmakers (more bluntly, liars)—Glen Beck and the “Reverend” David Barton, allegedly the historian of Christian America—pretend that the founding fathers of the US constitution founded a Christian Nation rather than a nation in which church and state was specifically separate, and so open to people of all faiths, or none. Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus explains this in a videoed talk with illustrative clips, and several other informative videos too.

Many Europeans struggled to understand the celebrations in the streets of New York and Washington at the news that Bin Laden had been assassinated by US Navy Seals—special operation marines. According to Reuters, European happiness was tempered by emerging details showing he was unarmed when shot dead. Among those registering a mild discomfort over it were one or two, literally, Christians! These few were willing to open their mouths and say that the killing of an unarmed man is morally wrong, however wicked press and politicians consider him to have been. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the 80-million strong Anglican Communion, is the latest to say the killing of an unarmed Osama bin Laden left him feeling “very uncomfortable”. In response to a direct question, the Archbishop told reporters at a press briefing:

I think that the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done in those circumstances. I don’t know the full details any more than anyone else does. But I do believe that in such circumstances when we are faced with someone who was manifestly a “war criminal” as you might say in terms of the atrocities inflicted, it is important that justice is seen to be observed.

A spokesman for the Most Rev Michael Cote, bishop of Norwich, said the bishop “fully supports” that view. The US account of a 40 minute gun battle has changed to spokespeople saying only one of the five people killed had been armed. US television network NBC, citing more recent official press releases, said four of the five, including bin Laden himself, were unarmed and never fired a shot.

The Rt Rev Nick Baines, Bishop of Bradford, warned on his blog that “jubilation on the streets” would not be very helpful. He added:

The lesson for the West must surely be to adopt policies around the world which are “right” and promote justice… and not simply use wealth and military power to promote our own political or economic expediency. I remember well covering the original Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, during which Bin Laden was deemed someone to support… We might reflect that vengeance isn’t necessarily the same as justice

It is only the enemies of civilization who exult at a summary execution. Dr Tom Wright, the former bishop of Durham, who is now a professor at St Andrews University, went further. He suggested that America had engaged in “vigilante actions” by invading a sovereign country, and was operating “outside the law”. “The US has to learn that it is not the world’s policeman”, and he might have added, judge, jury and executioner.

The Rt Rev Alan Wilson, the Bishop of Buckingham, wrote in a Facebook posting that Bin Laden was “better put on trial as a criminal than killed in a way that some will call martyrdom”. And it was not just the Anglicans, often thought by Americans to be too liberal. A Vatican spokesman, the Rev Federico Lombardi, said that while Bin Laden was responsible for “spreading division and hatred amongst the people, causing the death of countless of people, and of instrumentalizing religion for this end”, a Christian never rejoices in the face of a man’s death. Not that Bin Laden was willing to admit any of this in his first few videos released after 9/11. He denied it, and only in the later videos, thought by some authorities, including terrorism experts, to have been US fakes did he gloat over it.

Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, said:

It doesn’t look like they made any effort to take him alive. They should have. It looks more and more like an assassination. So yes, it concerns me. They didn’t want to see the rule of law being followed and Bin Laden put on trial. He was a war criminal and should have been put on trial. People are dying in that part of the world to establish the rule of law and human rights. Going in and shooting him undermines the whole of that purpose. A lot of people are using “justice” as a euphemism for “revenge”. It’s absolutely wrong.

Mind you, Christina Odone, sometime editor of the Catholic Herald and now an authoritarian commentator for the London Telegraph, thinks it is all right to celebrate a summary execution when the victim is a terrorist leader and not any other unarmed man:

Shooting Osama, even if he was naked and vulnerable as a baby, was an act of deliverance. No doubt there.

She does not seem to remember that Jesus Christ was summarily executed by Pontius Pilate at the instigation of “the Jews” , acording to her Holy Word, and Christians ever since have presented it as a terrible injustice. The Romans, the Americans of their day, did not think so. Part of the purpose of trials is to ensure that such mistakes do not happen! Presumably, the Christian thinks there must be a lesson there somewhere, presumably one taught by God Himself. But even she said she recoiled at the gloating that Americans went in for, following the news of Osama’s killing. That was un-Christian and unhelpful.

In Germany, Siegfried Kauder, a senior member of parliament in the ruling conservative Christian Democratic Union criticised Angela Merkel’s statement that she was glad that killing Bin Laden was successful:

I wouldn’t have used those words. That is a vengeful way of thinking that one shouldn’t have. That’s medieval. A random killing is not permitted according to international agreements. If one concludes that Bin Laden was no longer active—running al Qaida operations around the world—the killing could be seen as random.

Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper also expressed misgivings about the legality of the killing. Heribert Prantl, a senior editor at the newspaper wrote:

Which law covers the execution of bin Laden? US law requires trials before death penalties are carried out. Executions are forbidden in countries based on rule of law. Martial law doesn’t cover the US operation either. The decision to kill the godfather of terror was political.

Gary Younge, a columnist in the UK Guardian, wrote:

While many nations suffered from Al Qaida’s terrorism and few in the world will mourn Bin Laden’s death, the United States is the only place where it sparked spontaneous outpourings of raucous jubilation.

A C Grayling, an eminent philosopher of London’s Birkbeck College, said:

I have concerns over the fact that it seems Osama bin Laden was shot out of hand rather than arrested and put on trial. The US and its Nato allies are meant to stand for due process in law and proper legal procedures. For no doubt very justifiable, pragmatic reasons, it was just an assassination. If we are going to live by our principles, we should do the tough thing—the harder thing—which is to arrest and put on trial. You don’t just shoot down an unarmed person—that’s what terrorists do and you don’t want to emulate them. There were women and children involved as well. This is the use of force in response to completely unbridled atrocities by Al Qaida. It just shows you Thucydides’s point, which he made over 2,000 years ago, about how our whole moral outlook and behaviour is corrupted if we fight fire with fire and respond in the way that they respond.

Desperately Christian!

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, the Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge, is a metallurgist and materials scientist who claims in a book, The Mystery of the Last Supper, to have solved what F F Bruce once hyped as “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”. The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke say that the Last Supper coincided with Jewish Passover, a Thursday, while John claims it was the day before, a Wednesday. Astronomical data, textual research and the emergence of a miraculously ancient Jewish calendar handed down by none other than Moses have convinced this Cambridge academic that Christ was actually crucified on 1 April, 33 AD—the greatest April Fool’s day of all time.

Humphreys says we can use “science and the gospels hand in hand” to prove that there is no contradiction in the two Last Supper days. His answer is a different calendar, but that is far from a new idea. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls various scholars have realized that the Essenes of Qumran, assuming that the scrolls are theirs, used a solar calendar different from the lunar-solar one used by the Jewish temple authorities. Since there is a mass of evidence that suggests that Christ was an Essene by culture, it seems quite likely that the apparent difference in the day when the Last Supper was held in the Synoptic Gospels and John offered a likely solution to F F Bruce’s thorny problem. Arguments were put forward in The Hidden Jesus, and on the AW! website, addressing questions like these, and the date of the crucifixion—which was actually in 21 AD! Even the pope in 2007, was ready to believe Jesus may have followed the solar calendar of the Qumran community. Humphreys says:

The problem with this is that under that system Passover would have fallen a week later, after both the Last Supper and Christ’s death

It seems that Humphreys knows details of the Essene solar calendar unknown to mortals. But then he is a Christian, and Christians have the gift of sudden certainty! Whatever suits their interpretation of their Christian belief system suddenly becomes certain! The Essene calendar turns out to be no use, so can certainly be discarded, the great scientist has decided. Instead, he suggests for the first time that another calendar was also in use, making three in use simultaneously!

The official Jewish calendar at the time of Jesus’ death seems to have been the one still used by Jews today, a lunar system in which days run from sunset to sunset. This was the calendar brought in by the Persians who colonized Yehud from Babylon in the fifth century BC. Working out quite how the Essenes and the Temple worshipping Jews managed to co-ordinate their lives when they had a calendar each is hard enough, but now a third one has emerged, it is getting rather silly.

Sillier still, Humphreys thinks it was “adapted from Egyptian usage at the time of Moses”. The Book of Exodus in the Old Testament says God instructed Moses and Aaron to start their year at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. Humphreys argues that this system would have been an adaptation of a lunar calendar used by the Egyptians, in which the start of the year was changed to be in the spring, and conveniently it dates Passover in 33 AD to the Wednesday of Holy Week, already decided upon by Humphreys and his chum, Oxford astrophysicist, Graeme Waddington, in 1983. This then identified the date of Jesus’s crucifixion as the morning of Friday, 3 April 33 AD, which has since been widely accepted by Christians. If Jesus died on 3 April, the standard Jewish calendar of 33 AD would have placed his crucifixion on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan. The Passover meal, however, falls on the 15th, supporting John’s account, but not those of the other gospels.

Plainly, this is God at work. It is a miracle. A calendar was handed down in a mythical story by a mythical being around 1300 BC, and suddenly pops up being used by the reincarnated God and his chums in the very week of his death just as he was about to cross into the promised land of God’s kingdom. Who could fail to be a Christian now?

It seems that by choosing the Wednesday of the Passover, Jesus was identifying himself with Moses. He then died on Nisan 14th, just as the Passover lambs were being slain according to the official Jewish calendar as well. Humphreys says with Christian assurance:

These are deep, powerful symbolisms and through the use of this calendar they can be based on objective, historical evidence.

So this is objective historical evidence of a mythical man, the preservation of a calendar over the astonishingly long time of a thousand years by illiterate slaves, who gave rise to a mythical empire, mythical kings, and then disappeared with scarcely a trace for hundreds of years before turning up in Persia! Professor Humphreys is a scientist and ought indeed to be capable of objective work, but he is first and foremost a Christian, a man brought up as a young earth creationist who confessed he was shocked to learn, only at university, that the earth was not young! He was chairman of Christians in Science from 1994-2001, and is associated with the Templeton Foundation.

Of course, all his best chums and coreligionists support him in his skulduggery. Alan Millard of Liverpool University gurgles:

By linking scientific knowledge with biblical study, Colin Humphreys gives a welcome demonstration of a way apparent contradictions in the gospel texts may be reconciled.

That is obviously so, were it true. Another chum and coreligionist, Hugh G M Williamson of Oxford University says these…

…suggestions are likely to have a significant impact both on scholarly appraisal and on the regular Christian appreciation of these climactic events of the faith.

Ah! This is more like it. Nothing here to do with scientific knowledge, objective or historical evidence, just an appreciation of these climactic events of faith.

No doubt professor Humphreys will get a Templeton prize for this, but many things remain puzzling, not least how a mythical being, Moses, was able to devise a calendar that was still in use 1500 years after his nominal lifetime—a double miracle to begin with. What is it about religions that saps people’s brains and sucks away any principles they ought to have had? Didn’t Humphreys think any lessons were worth taking from his discovery that the earth was not 6000 years young, and the author of Genesis was wrong. Christians think it is God, don’t they? Suddenly, they have to help the poor old chap out. He is a bit old, after all!

Science, as yet, has no way of turning myth into objective truth and history, so Humphreys’ theory can only be bunkum. The book, in short, cannot be worth reading. Even so, to help you make up your own mind, here are the chapter headings:

1. Three mysteries of the last week of Jesus
2. Dating the crucifixion – the first clues
3. The problem of the last supper
4. Can we reconstruct the Jewish calendar at the time of Christ?
5. The date of the crucifixion
6. The moon will be turned to blood
7. The Passover puzzle and the calendar of Moses
8. Did Jesus use the solar Passover calendar of Qumran?
9. The date of the last supper: the hidden clue in the synoptic gospels
10. Was the Moses calendar used in Israel at the time of Jesus?
11. The Galilean Passover and the date of the last supper
12. From the last supper to the crucifixion
13. The last days of Jesus: an overview