Born of a woman

One small phrase from the bible has been the source of rumblings among scholars for nearly two milliennia.  Galatians 4:4, which refers to the birth of Jesus, is the problem.

"... born of woman, born under the Law"

Which phrase bothers you most?  Being born under the law doesn't have an immediately obvious meaning.  Apparently it means that Jesus was a Jew, but theologians get into all sorts of tangles about that.  Who can tell what the implications might be - and few of us would care anyway.  Theologians make their living by arguing about these things.

For me the first phrase was the interesting one.  Why would anyone bother to tell us how someone was born?  The involvement of his mother (when her virginity is not the point of interest) could hardly be a subject that anyone would ever wonder about. 

Or could it?

Perhaps this is a sign that some others believed that he had not been born in the usual way.  You might doubt this, but there is a potential culprit available in the person of Marcion.  (See Who was the Marcion that Hitch referred to so often)  Marcion taught that Jesus did not get born like the rest of us but that he was sent down from heaven.  Jesus still became human flesh, but he had nothing to do with the God of the Old Testament.  Given the unbelievability of the rest of the Jesus story I find that a perfectly consistent point of view, for what that is worth.

Marcionite thinking sheds a lot of light on the text of the bible (see Christianity's Albatross), as early Christians had to spend a lot of effort and time suppressing that particular heresy (along with all the others). 

The world would be very different if they had failed.

God so loved the world . . .

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16 (NIV)

Anyone who has grown up in a christian tradition can't help recognising those few words.  Our reaction to the words is a bit less predictable.  For me they used to have the comforting feeling of familiarity.  After that I started to wonder what they really meant.  Nowadays I find them quite risible - even pathetic.

Let's set aside the problem of the lack of evidence for an historical Jesus outside the (hardly un-biased) bible itself.  Don't even consider whether God exists, or which particular version of the Christian God he might be.  It doesn't matter.

What matters is the claim itself.  Omniscient God had made a mistake at the very beginning of the Old Testament, and through some totally inexplicable mechanism had contaminated humanity with something mysterious called 'Original Sin'.  Omnipotent God (the same person - although there are three of them in the one person of course) couldn't think of any way to fix this mistake other than to send his son (one of the three parts of himself) to Earth to be tortured and killed in some kind of scapegoat ritual.  He loved the world so much that he gave up his own son (one third of himself) for this reason.

But he didn't, did he?

If you think about it for a few moments, the very most charitable version of the story is that he lent his son (or part of himself) to the world for a few decades, then let him be killed for reasons that hardly make any sense and let him remain dead for a few days.  During that time he might have visited hell, but it is hardly likely that the devil was totally in control of that little interlude.  Then he resurrected him(self) and in due course whisked him(self) safely back up to heaven.

Being omniscient he knew all along that things were going to pan out this way.

So how much did God really love the world? 

Not as much as you would think!

Dinner with believers

Inviting a group of 'believers' for dinner is always interesting.  This evening there were three visitors - all nice folks - invited by Mrs PE who is firmly on their side of the fence.

In these situations, it is only a matter of time before something triggers me into refuting a comment that they make to comfort each other.  This evening the first one related to the doubt that a non-believer could ever truly forgive.  The clinching comment was that the word 'forgiveness' has been misappropriated by the secular community.  This seemed to be an ideal opportunity to strike.

Armed with a good catalogue of stories about altruism among the great apes, and challenging my guest about the use of the term 'misappropriation', I gently but assertively suggested that it might be the other way round.  He did at least have the decency to admit that he didn't actually have any evidence for his original claim, and kept retreating into the refuge of semantics.  Fortunately his wife - sensible lady - then pounced on him too. 

A later discussion about the meaning of the term 'secularism' demonstrated that they regard it as a threat to Christianity too.  When will they learn that secularists are not attacking Christians but only defending the right of everyone not to be bullied by any particular religion?

Outnumbered four to one, I felt that I defended my position adequately, although not expertly.  It would be nice to imagine that something I said might sow the seeds of questioning and doubt, but I know it won't.

I'm sure they will come to dinner again.

Noah, Abraham and morality

An anonymous but interesting friend left a comment yesterday on my post "Things Christians Say, Part 5: Just go out and kill!".

They said:

It is also funny to note that both Noah and Abraham were mentioned as righteous before "god" revealed himself to them...so this righteousness preceded god visiting them and making himself known...that destroys the argument that knowing right and wrong are impossible without god, also god himself did not want Adam and Eve to know what right and wrong were, so he is clearly anti morality..

I like that way of thinking (even if not the punctuation). 

God doesn't seem entirely consistent in his approach.

I expect that there will be religious apologists who disagree.

Creationist science . . . or is it?

Over lunch last week I found myself in an interesting debate with a gentle and progressive Muslim friend and a gentle and polite Christian friend.  I'm hoping both of them will continue to debate in such an open way, and that our full and frank debate did not offend them.

I must write about part of the discussion.

It was about the battle between supporters of Intelligent Design (ID) and the supporters of the Theory of Evolution.  My Christian friend put the point that both sides accuse each other of 'not being scientific' and that they should drop this argument and move to the evidence.  When I complained that this was a reasonable point of view from the point of view of evolution he asked me how I would define science.

In my own amateur way I said that science was the process whereby someone develops an idea into a hypothesis which can then be compared with the evidence from the world around us, and as confidence was developed that there was a good level of agreement the hypothesis might develop into the status of a Theory.  Ultimately when the evidence is overwhelming then the Theory might reach the coveted state of becoming a Law.  (I should have added the question of falsifiability.)

He agreed.

I added that ID specifically doesn't do this.  It looks for evidence and then tries to fit a hypothesis to it retrospectively.  He disagreed.

So I asked him where the hypothesis for ID might be, and I was amazed to hear that his answer was that the bible is the hypothesis.

I pointed out that the bible is not exactly self-consistent and offered the evidence of the two versions of the creation story in Genesis and was told that they were not very different in the grand scheme of things.   I disagree about that.  See for yourself that the whole thing is in a different order in the second version. The first is Genesis 1:1-2:3, and the second is Genesis 2:4-25.)

So which of us is correct?

• Can the bible be offered rationally as an hypothesis for Intelligent Design?
• Does ID truly follow the scientific method or does it just try to use convenient parts of scientific methods to pick selective holes in evolution without offering a complete counter-proposal?

Thinking about the topic further since our discussion I would also ask:

• Is ID falsifiable?  If the bible is its hypothesis then I would suggest that it is self-falsifying.
• Which point of view indulges in more ad hominem attacks?  Evolutionists rarely call their opponents names (although sometimes the word creotards has come up in discussion) whereas the ID lobby never fails to use terms like 'Darwinist' (which they consider pejorative), 'neo-Darwinist' (which is clearly more so) and worse?

I maintain that ID is not science in the real sense of the word.

Turn the other cheek

Another of the paradoxical teachings of Jesus today . . .

"Turn the other cheek" Christians are implored.  Whatever you do, don't fight back when you are assaulted by a fellow human.  Forgive them and move on - whether you're still standing or not, of course!

But the same doesn't apply to trees.  If a tree doesn't bear fruit, cut it down and burn it.

Is this as inconsistent as it seems?  It is hard to say, but perhaps the implication is that the tree is diseased and it should be treated in this way in order to prevent the disease spreading.

Or is there another explanation?

I long since stopped expecting the bible to be self-consistent though.

Christ myth: some inconsistencies

"Truth is not hard to kill but a lie well told is immortal" - - Mark Twain

I know that it might be hard to accept that the stories of the life of Jesus are merely myths, but many people claim exactly that.  One of their starting points is the inconsistencies in the bible's own accounts of the life of Jesus.  Another is the suggestion that the bible was written so long after the time of the supposed events that it can't possibly be accurate - which after all is consistent with what we actually see.

First century Judea was a strategically important region from the Roman point of view and it is particularly well documented by plenty of writers.  The surprising thing is that the writers of the bible got things so wrong.  Here are a few of the inconsistencies that make the Jesus myth so difficult to believe:

• Caesar did not tax the world in the time of Quirinius.  The first such tax was imposed in 74CE.
• Quirinius and Herod did not overlap.
• There is no archaeological evidence that Nazareth existed at the beginning of the first century, but did it did exist by the end (when the gospels were written).  
• The term Nazarene did not imply coming from Nazereth, so if he actually existed the mythical Jesus might have been a 'Nazarene'.
• It is very unlikely that the slaughter of the innocents occurred.  Herod made a lot of enemies who then catalogued his misdeeds in every detail but they never mentioned this slaughter.  Anyway this story is only found in one of the gospels, Matthew, and is a clear redaction of the Moses story anyway.
• The ministry of Jesus is not found described in any documents other than the bible for about a century - which is much too late to count as contemporaneous evidence.
• The triumphant entry into Jerusalem is described differently in each of the gospels, but nobody else records it, including those who were known to have been there at the time.
• The accounts of the trials of Jesus are different in all the gospels and they were not recorded elsewhere.
• The various versions of the crucifixion in the gospels are incompatible in almost every detail.  The synoptic gospels have it starting at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Passover, but John has it on the day before.  All four say it was Friday.
• The crucifixion darkness was not recorded by anyone else, and neither were the ripping of the temple veil nor the earthquakes.  The mass resurrection in Jerusalem also appears to have gone unnoticed.
• The resurrection was originally only mentioned in Luke and Acts.  The account in Mark was probably added later and John doesn't bother with this trivial detail.

Given this amount of inconsistency in the story, how can anyone actually believe it.

On a charge of perjury, doesn't the bible indict itself?

Jesus died today . . . or did he?

Jesus died this day, one unidentified year, a couple of millennia ago.  It was Good Friday.

Or did he?  I would say "of course not"!

Surprisingly serene - Reni's view of the crucifixion from Wikimedia

Did the crucifixion actually occur?  If (for today) we assume that it did, might it have been on a Thursday instead of Friday?  After all that would be more consistent with the biblical account of him being in the grave for three days and three nights.  Many believe that this fits better with the accounts of the short time that Jesus is supposed to have spent in Jerusalem too . . . as described in the bible.

Of course it would be nice to have some independent, contemporaneous, eye-witness accounts of this important part of history, but oddly enough none are to be found in spite of all the miraculous events that were going on around the city.  Isn't it rather surprising that nobody else mentions the crucifixion darkness, the ripping of the temple veil, and the miraculous resurrection of so many dead bodies.

The gospels aren't exactly clearly about the story either - surprise surprise!  They have a variety of timelines and nobody has yet found a consistent explanation of the accounts of the four canonical gospels as far as I know.  That is, consistent from a rational point of view, at least!

As Christians wallow in the self-pity that they traditionally feel on Good Friday, isn't it time to start to ask whether the story might just be a myth told by members of a cult that only wrote it down many decades later? 

Isn't this just bronze-age scape-goating updated to iron-age myth, or is it something that is actually sensible or useful?

Small point of pedantry: I have always found it surprising that Christianity has an instrument of torture as its primary symbol but it is even stranger to see pictures like the one above where the barbarity and suffering are thinly disguised as something serene and beautiful.

Things Christians say, part 47: Atheists have no reason to live

A (more-or-less) weekly series (although there was a pause for a while) of responses to the things Christians say to atheists, based on the video reproduced here on 30th January 2012.  The aim is to tackle one every weekend, to give both a moderate, polite response to each question ('Piano'), followed by a more forceful rebuttal of the same question ('Forte'). 

Atheists have no reason to live

Piano

In some ways you have hit the nail directly on the head.  Atheists would tend to say that they are not here for a reason; that nothing is pre-ordained; that there is no divine being who has directed the forces of good and evil (however incompetently).  But that is not to say that we don't like to be here and don't want to work for the benefit of the world or for future generations.

A lot of atheists are humanists.  In my own case, I still can't quite decide whether I am or not.  I do happen to be a strong secularist.  That means that I'm happy for you to worship whatever mythical being you like as long as it does affect my life.

That, for me, is a reason to live (even if I have no others).  I want to make it possible for other atheists to live without the threat of organised religion.  In many parts of the world that is a dream that will not be reached for many decades.

***

Forte

That kind of statement is hardly worthy of a response.  It is not exactly well defined; not clear and transparent what it really means.

And of course this is a typical hallmark of organised religion.  Its proponents like to keep things vague and transcendental for all sorts of reasons - none of them good! 


Last episode: Atheists are responsible for all the world's ills
Next: How can there be goodness without a measure to judge it by?

The fall of Tyre - but it didn't happen!

Quite rightly, it was pointed out to me in the comments on my recent post  Ezekiel's surprising bread recipe, that I might not have been entirely fair to the book of Ezekiel.

'Baking bread with dung' could conceivably be imagined to mean that the dung was the fuel for the fire, rather than an ingredient of the bread.  I might point out that human dung probably doesn't burn very well, whereas the dung of herbivores would be a better fuel. 

However, in order to do justice to the book of Ezekiel I will mention one of its other famous problems.

Much of chapter 26 is devoted to the devastation of the coastal city of Tyre.  God seemed to be rather biassed against it and there is a long description about what he plans for the city.  In fact, the destruction was not planned for some vague and generic time in the future.  It was to be at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.

But it didn't happen!  Tyre is still there and was never destroyed as the bible predicted.

Biblical infallibility is again shown to be wrong!

The surprising origins of YEC - 'The Genesis Flood'

Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is a surprisingly recent phenomenon!  Yes - I know that some of the old arguments are based on the work of Archbishop James Ussher, but Ussher's ridiculous literal calculation had gone out of favour long ago.  Christianity had settled into an acceptance that science had the answers to some of the questions about the universe and his claim about the creation happening 'on the night preceding Sunday 23rd October, 4004 BC(E)' is risible for many reasons.  Presumably that was 'the night' in Greenwich Mean time?  But GMT was not a concept that had been formulated at the time.  Perhaps it was in Local Time at Armagh in Northern Ireland - or perhaps during 'the night' somewhere more holy - like Mecca or Jerusalem?  Anyway, how could there have been a night preceding the creation? 

But all that changed in 1961 when a book called "The Genesis Flood" was published.  Interestingly, the original publishers, Moody Press, pulled out when they found out about the actual contents, but the company that stepped in, Reformed Publishing Company, found itself very fortunate!  They sold 200,000 copies over the next 25 years, and started a powerful movement in some otherwise civilise and rational countries..

The authors, John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris set the cat among the pigeons, and they are widely blamed for re-starting the YEC movement.  Fundamentalist home-schoolers refer to this 'scholarly work' in order to justify to their children that their claims are true - which of course they are not.  How can the children be protected from such lies though?

One of the worries of the original publishers was that the accepted (but still bonkers) traditions of Day Age Creationism and Gap Theory Creationism were threatened.  Indeed they should have been worried because neither of those points of view remain as prevalent as they used to be, especially outside USA.

So where does that leave us?  The rational scientific world has been downgraded especially in USA, and people who believe in science when they board a plane lose their faith in it when it comes to estimating the age of the Earth.

So now we are stuck with the pseudo-scientific claims of people like 'The Discovery Institute' who propagate YEC and Intelligent Design.  Thank goodness that some people keep an eye on their activities and report what they are up to!

The Rocks Don't Lie - Noah and other floods

This week's episode of the popular and increasingly informative podcast Skepticality featured an interesting interview with a geomorphologist, David Montgomery, (Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington), about how his work led him to write his latest book The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood.

You can listen to Episode #203 at read the show notes here. Montgomery talked about flood myths worldwide, and how Christians use the existence of these myths in so many cultures as evidence that a global flood really happened.  However, he notes that some of them pre-date the time of the Old Testament significantly (as I have mentioned before in my series of blog posts about the flood, starting here.

He added some facts that I hadn't come across before.  Apparently flood myths tend to be tailored to the environment of the cultures which propagate them.  It is not too surprising to find that those who live on the Pacific coast of the Americas describe floods that sound very much like tsunamis, whereas others sound more like overflowing rivers.

I was also interested to hear that the resurgence of biblical creationism that we witness today is a comparatively modern phenomenon.  Even in the early 1800s geologists had completely established that a global flood has never happened and by a century ago, very few people were concerned about the apparent contradictions between science and the bible.  The story of a regional flood that just seemed to the local people to have destroyed the whole world was mainstream Christian teaching.  It is only in the last 50 or 60 years that this topic has become so hotly debated, particularly (but not exclusively) in North America.  The resurgence of Young Earth Creationism can be traced back to a 1961 book by a theologian and an hydraulic engineer, called The Genesis Flood. I might come back to that topic another day soon.

One thing that I did find surprising was that Montgomery described two well-established flood events that could have been the factual origin of the Noah myth.  One was the breach of an ice barrier leading to a devastating flood in the Mesopotamia region, and the other was the filling of the Black Sea through the Bosphorus.  The former seems quite plausible, but the latter less so for one simple reason.  Noah's flood receded after a hundred days or so.  As far as I'm aware, the Black Sea is still there.  However, that is my only criticism of an otherwise excellent interview.

Have a listen to it.  While you are there, listen to the rest of the podcast.  It has a number of regular features contributed by fascinating people and I never miss an episode.  Also check out David's research group online.  Now I'll add another book to my wish list.  I just need to make time to read some of them!

Related posts:
Was the flood the only way?
2 by 2 - but not only 2 of each
Where is all Noah's water now?
Was the Ark big enough?Evidence in the geology - cliffs and varves
Noah's aquaria?
Noah in Islam
Rafts of Baramins
Before Noah came Gilgamesh
Kangaroos - the final evidence against Noah?

Ezekiel's surprising bread recipe

Chapter 4 of the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains a surprising recipe for bread.  It is not exactly the finest bread, but more something designed to help the people survive periods of famine when the normal ingredients of bread could not be found.  Barley has never been favoured for bread for good reasons.

Verses 9 to 12 say this:

4:9	Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.
4:10	And thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it.
4:11	Thou shalt drink also water by measure, the sixth part of an hin: from time to time shalt thou drink.
4:12	And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.

Did you read that carefully enough and see the final ingredient described in verse 12?

Most of the ingredients for the Ezekiel recipe for bread!

Oddly, you can buy the ingredients for Ezekiel 4:9 on Amazon if you want to have a go at the disgusting recipe.  Presumably they were not able to include the final ingredient because you have to see personally that it cometh out of man'

God certainly does inspire the writers of his holy book in mysterious ways.

Why didn't God just start again?

Some people claim that God was planning to start again at various points in the Old Testament, but that something persuaded him not to do the job properly.  The flood was a fiasco and the whole story of Sodom and Gomorra would frankly not have achieved enough.

But all of that was much too late wasn't it?  He had let things go too far.  And yet, omniscient and omni-benevolent God had seen what had happened in the Garden to Eden when there were only two people there.  Obviously he new what was going to happen as history progressed, and that he would end up 'having to' send billions of people to hell for eternal torment.  (Why he still had to do this just because to the irresistable power of 'original sin' anyway is a separate mystery.)

Yet all of that suffering could have been easily avoided if he had just wiped out his (presumably) first attempt, including Adam and Eve and had another try where he didn't put that powerful tree within reach of his favorite creatures.  Surely that course of action would have been for the greater good.

It's not as if it had taken him billions of years to do the whole creation job after all.  Another six days of work and he could have rested again, secure in knowledge that fairness had been well served.

But no - instead of that much of the population of the world lives in dread of hell. 

Surely that is evidence enough or substantial underachievement!

Small note:  Yes I know that not all Christians believe in the literal truth of Genesis!

Original Sin and the sins of the fathers!

A C Grayling said:

Compare: a pharmaceutical company tells us that we are all born with a disease that requires that we buy their product all our lives long, and that if we do it will cure us after death.

Christopher Hitchens paraphrased or supplemented this by saying:

God creates us sick and then offers a cure under penalty of eternal torture.

Does anyone have a good counter-argument?  By 'good', I mean something that actually makes sense, and not a silly quotation from C S Lewis or some other patronising preacher.

I would be genuinely interested in hearing a real, well-reasoned explanation about what is good in Christianity's guilt-ridden philosophy of 'original sin'. 

As both of those fine men have pointed out, Christian teaching seems not to be the nice friendly teaching of Jesus that many people expect - love thy neighbour and all that - but a set of stories that are cunningly crafted to terrify believers into submission.  Where is the objective morality that we should all aspire to follow in that message?

It seems to me that the concept of original sin is simply a doctrine of cruelty, thinly disguised as a 'truth', based on obvious mythology and mysteriously inherited by each new generation.  This is in spite of the bible's other teachings that the sins of the fathers shall (only) be visited on the next four or five generations.

Its obvious!  It has been carefully tailored with the aim of subjugation.

The sad thing is that it works on so many innocent people.

A budgie called Onan

When I was at university I had a friend and neighbour who had previously owned a pet budgerigar.

Somehow, it was revealed one day that the budgie had been called Onan.  At the time I hadn't heard of this minor character from the book of Genesis.  If you read about him in this story you can see that the name was chosen by someone with a sense of humour and a good knowledge of the bible.

Just like the budgie, Onan 'spilled his seed on the ground'.

Francesca Stravrakopoulou - Think Week

Of the events that I attended in Oxford Think Week, Saturday afternoon's talk by Professor Francesca Stravrakopoulou was the most interesting, comprehensible and entertaining.  (Peter Atkins was a close contender though!)

She explained how much she loved studying the bible.  As an atheist she claimed that anyone suggesting that the bible should only be studied by religious scholars was doing a disservice to it.

She started with an amusing tale about a conversation with her grandmother who told her that the classical demi-gods, the Greek heroes, were the offspring of a god and a human.  She said "Oh, like Jesus then?"  Apparently though, the suggestion that Jesus is a demi-god doesn't go down well with Christians, and this was the beginning of her rejection of Christianity and fascination with the bible as a human-written book.  After some years of study in Oxford in the minority position of being an atheist in a community of theologians she has risen to the position of Professor of Biblical Studies in Exeter.

From this position she was asked to host a short BBC series called The Bible's Buried Secrets, (e.g. here) which I remember enjoying.  The seemingly controversial claims of the series led to something of a furore.  The BBC was inundated with complaints that it was not appropriate for a series about the bible to be presented by an atheist.  She received a lot of personal hate mail which was rather disturbing, but on balance the 'love mail' was even more disturbing!  She has also been accused of being anti-semitic, anti Israeli, and more amusingly, 'really stupid' because she has read the bible and knows it well but apparently hasn't understood it.  I think she has understood it very well!

Worse still, some have said that she was 'too young-looking', complained about what she was wearing, that she was a woman and worst of all an atheist!  One fellow scholar claimed that she had 'betrayed the guild' and another said that she had 'discussed things on TV that should only be examined in the safety of the lecture theatre'.

She likes to show her students the core and difficult stuff in the bible, like the partly hidden presence of a wife of Yahweh, namely the goddess Asherah.  In particular she is interested in the tension between biblical views and historical realities.

For the remainder of the talk she moved on to the subject of Think Week's theme - namely 'Death'.

The concept of hell has only become so widely believed because of Christianity.  Before that time it was believed that you would go to the underworld and you would be united with the ancestors or 'gathered to the ancestors'.  The way that material remains were treated was important.  The very idea that the dead are unclean is a modern one.  In ancient times the period of decomposition was an important part of confirming your place in the underworld, and your bones would have been gathered into an ossuary some time after your death.

Furthermore, death was not regarded as breaking the bond with the living, and rituals were important to maintain this link.  Now we are increasingly segregating the living and dead and she teaches that this is completely different from the ways of ancient people.

In one special case, namely that of Jesus, his resurrection and the lack of a verifiable tomb to venerate diminishes the value of what it is to be human.

Summarising, she emphasised again that biblical texts are incredibly alien to modern eyes, but that, on the other hand, the bible and religions that gave rise to the bible are incredibly important to human society.

I suppose that last claim is a matter of opinion, but it is one that I can respect and not reject out of hand. 

All told, this was the best Think Week event that I attended.  How sad that the audience was only 29 people.  I for one am looking forward to any new TV series involving Francesca's fascinating insights into the bible.

BBC might resist controversy . . . 

Go to Channel 4!

Epimenides brings a paradox to the bible

Those who claim the infallibility of the bible might not have noticed something hidden in the book of Titus.  It is a version of a paradox attributed to a Cretian called Epimenides.  It is said that he made one immortal statement:

"All Cretians are liars."

As the Wikipedia article says, a paradox of self-reference arises when one considers whether it is possible for Epimenides, as a Cretian to have spoken the truth. 

In the book of Titus it appears in this form:

One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.

This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith;
Titus 1: 12-13 (Authorised Version)


So are people from Crete always liars or is this one telling the truth?  When verse 13 says that this witness (evidence) is true, which part is true?  They can't both be true can they.

It seems that the Epimenides Paradox was regarded as a bit of a joke in the first century, and it is surprising to find a joke in the bible, even if when one is quite well hidden from modern eyes.

Off to the Land of Nod

Many of my well educated readers will know this already, but there is a biblical basis to the phrase 'off to the land of nod'.

As far as I remember, there is nothing to suggest that the inhabitants of this mythical land were particularly sleepy, but then again the book of Genesis is hardly notable for the accuracy or believability of the stories that it contains.

Of course this legendary area to the East of the Garden of Eden is where Cain was sent to after he had murdered his brother Abel.  (Genesis 4:16)

In fact, it seems likely that the people who were sent to Nod had a lot of hard work in front of them.  Having been banned form the Garden of Eden they had to start to work hard to survive.

Maybe that is why they were tired?

Pullman's strangest book?

I have read some of the books written by the famous Oxford atheist Philip Pullman before.  His dark materials trilogy was eponymously dark and yet quite compelling.

However, a recently friend lent me a copy of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which has been described as 'provokingly bold'.  (Shouldn't that be 'provocatively bold'?)

I read it. It didn't take long.  Its 245 pages were filled with white space and blank pages abound at the end of chapters.  The words between the white spaces were rather disappointing.

When I started reading I found the style surprising.  This is not a book for children, and yet it is written in a style that seems almost patronising to adults.  I assumed that it must improve as it went on.

Well - it didn't.  It was a ridiculous version of the story of the gospels (of the New Testament) but it seemed to include themes from the other non-canonical gospels.  When I say ridiculous, I mean that it was even more ridiculous than the official gospels!

It tells the story of Jesus and his twin brother, 'Christ'.  A mysterious stranger appears to Christ from time to time, and we are left wondering whether he was an angel or a demon.  However, by the end, Christ was pleased that he would not see the stranger again. 

There are some cynical (but probably justifiable) suggestions about how good stories develop and often get better in the telling.  But apart from that I'm at a loss to explain what the book was meant to achieve.  Maybe I will look for some other reviews and write more about it.

You might infer that it was not my favourite book.