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2. There were HUNDREDS of texts regarded from time to time as holy Jewish or Christian writings, but the Bible as we know it was chosen by St Jerome about 400 AD. It contains 71 books and is still the basis of the Catholic Bible. The Protestant Bible has 5 fewer books because the reformers regarded these as unworthy of being called scripture.
3 As it stands, the Bible is a mishmash of poetry,
history, legend, myth, philosophy, ethics, prophecy, parable and superstition.
Good and bad, beautiful and ugly, savagery and tenderness, are inextricably
bound up in its pages.
4. Many of the people and events it relates are
unsupported by external evidence. There is no outside corroboration for Adam,
Eve, Noah and the Flood, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, the
Exodus. Saul, David, Solomon and even Jesus Christ himself. They are all
unsupported legends.
5. Its Song of Songs is a collection of erotic
poetry; its book of Jonah questions the very practice of prophecy which
is so central to much of the Old testament; its set of laws in Exodus,
Leviticus and Deuteronomy contradict one another; its book of Ecclesiastes
seems to have slipped in by mistake since it rejects life after death and man's
special place in creation (3. 18-21; 9. 5-6) and its book of Joshua is
nothing less than a warrant for genocide.
6. A basic CONTRADICTION exists between its two
volumes. The Old Testament reports the successful military campaigns of a
warlike tribe in the service of a WARLIKE GOD; whereas the New Testament seems
to preach, at least in places, a message of peace. In the one, the message is
clearly an eye for an eye, in the other it is the turned cheek.
7. It offers two contradictory stories of creation in Genesis.
The first story in Genesis 1. 2,4 and the second story in 2. 5 - 3 .24 tell of
two different creations, both of which cannot be true because their details
contradict one another. Man, beasts and plants are created in two different
sequences, and man and woman are made in two different ways. In the first, it is
plants (third day), then beasts (fifth day), then man (sixth day). In the second
account, man is created before vegetation. We now know that these accounts were
written by two different people, and that the first was written about 200 years
AFTER the second.
8. The Gospels offer CONTRADICTORY accounts of the
birth of Jesus (see Who was Jesus Anyway?).
9. The Gospels offer CONTRADICTORY accounts of the
ancestry of Jesus (see Who was Jesus Anyway?).
10. The New Testament also presents differing
resurrection stories (see Who was Jesus Anyway?).
So this is the book which many Christians believe is the unerring word of God. This is the book which is stamped as God's word by act of the British Parliament. This is the book which is forced into the hands of children in our schools. This is the book which is used as a kind of fetish for swearing upon in our Courts Of Law. And this is the book for which we are still liable to imprisonment for bringing into 'disbelief and contempt'.
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