Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Month: January 2015

NT Lesson 4 (Jesus: Early ministry)

25 January 2015 / / 2 Comments

“Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord”

Matthew 3–4; John 1:35–51

LDS manual: here

Reading

For this reading, Jesus is getting started on his ministry. He’s about 30 years old, which means that for the last 18 years, he’s been doing things that Christians have tried hard to hush up. (Mormons aren’t the only ones who can sanitise a history, you know.)

This lesson covers the following:

  • Baptism of Jesus
  • The temptation of Jesus
  • The marriage at Cana
  • Driving the money-changers from the tample

Main ideas for this lesson

John the Baptist

John the Baptist is a prophet from the Old Testament tradition. Those guys were great. They’d get naked and prophesy, they’d cook bread on a fire made from their own dung. John would have fit right in; he wears hairy clothes, and eats locusts and honey.

So John baptises Jesus, and then God speaks from heaven, and the Holy Ghost comes down in Bird Mode.

Matt. 3:16 And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him:
3:17 And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

But Jesus is not unique in that regard. The same thing happened to Robert Plant. God was a huge Zep fan back in the day.

Little known fact: Space Moose was also there.

(Disclaimer: No one should read Space Moose comics. They are terribly offensive and weird.)

This experience seems to have made quite an impression on John,

John 1:36 And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God!

but later on when he’s in prison, he doesn’t seem so sure. He sends a couple of his disciples to ask Jesus if he really is the Lamb of God.

Matt. 11:2 Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples,
11:3 And said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?

I’ve heard people explain this away by saying that John knew Jesus was the Messiah, but he wanted his disciples to meet Jesus in person. That’s a bit silly; lots of people met Jesus, and not everyone was into him. Actually, people went hot and cold on Jesus in amazingly short periods of time, depending on where in the story we are. But more on that later.

Temptation

There’s something interesting here: Satan, who hasn’t been seen since Job, is back, and he’s here to tempt Jesus three times, for a few minutes. This is in contrast to the rest of us, who Satan is apparently working on more or less full time.

There’s a contradiction in the two versions of this story. Notice the verse numbers. The two parts of the story are flipped.

Matthew 4:5–10 Luke 4:5–12
Satan takes Jesus to the top of the temple 4:5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,
4:6 And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
4:7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.		 4:9 And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence:
4:10 For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee:
4:11 And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
4:12 And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
Satan takes Jesus to the top of the mountain 4:8 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;
4:9 And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
4:10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.		 4:5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
4:6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.
4:7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

The supposed existence of Satan in the world is a bit of a puzzle. What in the world is Satan doing roaming about? As parents, we try as hard as we can to reduce our children’s exposure to harm. God’s just the opposite; he’s like, “Go for it, Satan!”

Why is God allowing this? Apparently it’s so that we can have agency. He is truly a kind and wise creator.

Actually, Satan isn’t all bad. He was really just trying to help.

Turning water into wine

At a wedding in Cana — plot twist: apostle Orson Hyde taught that the wedding was Jesus’ own! — Jesus performs his first conjuring trick / miracle: turning water into wine. That’s kind of an old one. Dionysus was supposed to have done it, and devotees of Sai Baba say he once turned water into petrol. (One would suppose that with that power, it might be incumbent on one to solve problems related to the world energy supply, but I digress.)

Wine: Was it just grape juice?

With the Mormon prohibition on alcohol, members have a hard time accepting that Jesus drank wine. Some go so far as to insist that the ‘wine’ Jesus drank at various periods was nothing but non-alcoholic grape juice.

I remember this bit from a terrible book called Day of Defense (PDF), which was handed around my mission, and was my introduction to proof-texting and quote-mining. Such legalistic line-by-line cherry-picking — done not to find out what’s true, but solely to establish one’s own pre-conceived view — is the stock in trade for so much apologetics. It was this approach that helped me to see that religious reasoning was not an honest way of getting answers to questions, for which I’m very grateful.

Here’s what Day of Defense says about wine:

The wine used in the Lord’s Supper was nothing more than grape juice, or as the scriptures stated it “fruit of the vine”.

Womp womp. As discussed in this Reddit thread, grape juice starts to ferment almost immediately, and it wasn’t until 1869 that Thomas Welch figured out how to pasteurise grape juice to stop the fermentation. Unfermented grape juice wouldn’t have been possible in Jesus’ day.

Anyway, the Bible has people calling Jesus a ‘wine-bibber‘, which seems unlikely in the absence of wine.

Activity for readers stuck in a real Gospel Doctrine class: See if anyone tries the ‘grape juice gambit’. Do they resist the facts when you point them out? Put your experiences in comments!

Flipping tables in the temple

I always liked the story of Jesus driving out the money-changers.

John 2:13 And the Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2:14 And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:
2:15 And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables;
2:16 And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.

It puts a new spin on an old acronym. Who would Jesus lash?

On the other hand, it doesn’t make him much of a “job creator“.

Additional lesson ideas

40 days and 40 nights = Hebrew idiom for “a long time”?

There are a lot of examples of things happening for “40 days and 40 nights”, including the Flood and the starvation of Jesus. The repeated appearance of this number, combined with the fact that it’s not really possible to survive 40 days without water, has made people suppose that “40 days and 40 nights” is some kind of idiom for “a long time”. I haven’t found anything conclusive, although some writers agree.

At a late stage in my deconversion, I was talking to one of the counsellors in the Stake Presidency — a good guy, BTW — and he told me that he thought it was just an idiom. I must have assumed that everyone was as literal-minded about the scriptures as I was, because this came as kind of a surprise to me.

“Doesn’t this weaken the claims of the Bible for you?” I asked.

“The Holy Ghost tells me what to believe,” he replied.

Partial credit to him, I guess, for moderating the amount of nonsense he was willing to swallow, but it seemed to me — both then and now — that if one is willing to take this view, it makes the job of understanding the scriptures well-nigh impossible. Everyone can have their own view because every every every detail can be understood multiple ways. God is the author of confusion.

Jesus abuses his mum

Jesus has this bad habit of giving his mother some sass. Here he is at the wedding of Cana.

John 2:3 And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.
2:4 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.

Joseph Smith tries to save the situation, unconvincingly.

“What wilt thou have me do for thee? that will I do” (Joseph Smith Translation, John 2:4)

The LDS manual has this under the heading: “Jesus shows respect and love for his mother”. Way to turn it around, chaps. But no, Jesus is being kind of a dick again.

NT Lesson 3 (Jesus: The Early Years)

18 January 2015 / / 1 Comment

“Unto You Is Born … a Saviour”

Luke 2; Matthew 2

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show continuity problems and historical errors in the New Testament text, and to highlight the importance of extra-biblical corroboration.

Reading

This lesson is about the birth of Jesus, which is a bit of a shame, because Christmas was like three and a half weeks ago, and now here we are again. I guess adjusting the LDS lesson schedule back about a month would be unworkable, but still.

Anyway, last week we saw how Mark was the first gospel written, and the writers of Matthew and Luke were sourcing (read: copying) it for their version. That’s why they agree with each other when they’re copying him, and they don’t when they’re not. Well, for this lesson, Mark is silent on all this stuff, so Matthew and Luke are basically free-styling. What wacky hijinx will they get up to this week?

We all know the story: Jesus is born — do I have time for one more Mary joke?

shepherds are visited by angels

and wise men from the East give Jesus gifts.

Here’s a table for the events in this reading. Notice the lack of overlap.

The census and tax, Jesus is born Luke 2:1–7
Shepherds see angels Luke 2:8–20
Jesus presented at the temple Luke 2:21–38
Visit of the wise men Matthew 2:1–12
Flight into Egypt, Herod kills male children Matthew 2:13–23
Jesus’ life up to age 12
Jesus teaching in the temple Luke 2:39–52

Let’s take some of these in detail.

Main ideas for this lesson

In preparing this lesson, I drew from an article I read many years ago in Sunstone magazine. It was “Away in a Manger” by Stephen E. Thompson (PDF). It’s this week’s required reading.

Sunstone? Yes, I was one of those people who liked to — according to Neal Maxwell — “cast off on intellectual and behavioral bungee cords in search of new sensations”. Hey, what’s the problem? It’s not like anything I find is going to prove the gospel wrong, right? Well, in this article, good old TBM me found some surprising facts about the story of the nativity, along with some great ways to tell if a historical document is telling it like it is.

Was there ever a census?

Luke says that Joseph and Mary had to get to Bethlehem because of taxation, a census, or what have you.

Luke 2:1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
2:2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
2:3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

Did such a census take place? Wikipedia says it’s a bit of a problem.

This passage has long been considered problematic by Biblical scholars, since it places the birth of Jesus around the time of the census in 6/7, whereas both this Gospel and the Gospel of Matthew, which makes no mention of the census, indicate a birth in the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE, at least ten years earlier.

In other words, Jesus would have had to have been born twice — before 4 BCE for Herod, and again after 6 CE to catch the census — for the story to fit. The versions don’t line up.

Thompson flatly states:

This is not possible. There is no recorded empire-wide census of all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire under Augustus. There were three censuses under Augustus, but of Roman citizens only. Further, Quirinius became legate of Syria in 6 C.E., but Herod died in 4 B.C.E., years before Quirinius assumed office. Also, a Roman census did not require people to register in their ancestral cities, and it seems unlikely that a very pregnant Mary would have voluntarily chosen to make the trip.

Did Herod kill babies?

The story about Herod (alive again — perhaps Zombie Herod) ordering all the male children to be killed is a very sad story.

Matthew 2:16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.

Even though it did give rise to the Coventry Carol, one of my favourite Christmas songs.

It’s actually my favourite song about killing children, period, although this one is a close second.

But did it really happen? The great news is: probably not. And the reason we think this is that no other historian corroborates it. From Thompson:

Herod’s slaughter of the male children two years old and under (Matt 2:16) is an act of enormous cruelty, but it was apparently quickly forgotten. There is no mention of it in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus, even though he went to great lengths to describe Herod’s terrible acts. It is more likely that the evangelist created this event.

And that Matthew modeled it after the story of the king of Egypt trying to kill baby Moses. Oh, Matthew! Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of his crazy stories.

Lack of corroboration from non-biblical sources is a huge problem for the Bible, and one we’re going to return to again and again.

As for me, the idea that a biblical story could simply not have happened, and that this could be verified by history — well, it rocked my world. And this realisation made it possible for me to take the scriptures less and less seriously, until finally I could be free of them altogether.

Thompson’s conclusion is this:

The Infancy narratives may tell us little accurate historical information about Jesus, but they do tell us one very important thing about him: “he was such an extraordinary person that these kinds of stories were told about him.“

This may be true, but so what? People tell extraordinary stories about Paul Bunyan, who didn’t exist, or John Henry, who might have. Fiction is instructive and enjoyable, but if the story of Jesus isn’t literally true, it obliterates Christianity’s claims about the Resurrection and the destiny of humankind.

Furthermore, the church teaches Jesus’ story as literally true. Nowhere in the manual is there presented any doubt as to the veracity of the story. Missionaries don’t say “We have a wonderful fictional story to tell you.” So if the story doesn’t appear to be true — and it brings harm to people who believe it — then maybe it’s time to look for a better one.

An update: Redditor ‘byniumhart’ has informed me that the problems don’t stop here, and links to a great resource showing loads of problems with the Christianity myth. As if to put the whole thing to bed, there’s no evidence that Bethlehem was even inhabited during the range of time the whole ‘birth of Jesus’ thing was supposed to be going on. Could this story be any more implausible? Yes, and we’ll see how in future lessons.

Additional lesson ideas

Peace on earth, goodwill for whom?

We all know this saying from the angels:

Luke 2:14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Sounds very jolly and Christmassy, doesn’t it? Except that biblical scholar Richard Carrier gives a slightly different take on it. He points out that in older versions of this text, this scripture was written with an extra letter σ (sigma), which gives quite a different meaning: “peace on earth for men whom God pleases”.

He elaborates:

Scribal errors are also a problem little dealt-with by any church authority…. Perhaps one of my favorite examples, with which I will close, is the famous King James line “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:14), which even still gets repeated in nativity plays, “peace on earth, and good will toward men,” and is treated as an example of the ultimate moral nobility of Christianity. But not until recent times was it discovered that a scribe long ago had failed to record a single letter (a sigma, “s”) at the end of this line. The Latin Vulgate Bible, translated late in the 4th century, copied from a correct edition and thus has also preserved the original meaning, which is now correctly reconstructed in more recent Bible translations: “peace on earth toward men of goodwill,” which is not as noble–since it does not wish peace on anyone else–and it is perhaps even less noble still, since the same phrase more likely means “peace on earth toward men [who enjoy God’s] goodwill,” in other words peace only for those whom God likes. All from a single mistake of one letter.

And that’s just one mistake that we know about.

How many wise men were there?

Many people have the idea that there were specifically three wise men, probably because of this film.

In fact, as clever people in real Gospel Doctrine classes never tire of pointing out, the Bible never specifies the number of wise men.

So how many wise men were there? None, the whole thing’s made up.

Presentation of Jesus at the temple

Besides The Life of Brian, this reading has one more great work of art based on it: Rachmaninov’s “Ныне отпущаеши” (“Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart”), which is a setting of the text of Simeon’s blessing. Turn it up, y’all.

Jesus, being kind of a dick

Luke 2 tells about how Puberty Jesus went missing for three days. His parents must have been frantic. They finally found him in the temple. His response to his parents is classically adolescent.

Luke 2:46 And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions.
2:47 And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. 2:48 And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.
2:49 And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?

This is the first recorded instance of the mortal Jesus being kind of a dick. But it won’t be the last. 

NT Lesson 2 (Mary)

11 January 2015 / / Comments Off on NT Lesson 2 (Mary)

“My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord”

Luke 1; Matthew 1

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To explain why the gospel accounts are not reliable, and to remind readers that God is pretty much a rapist.

Reading

We’re starting to dip our toes into the origin story of Christianity here. However, as we’ll see, there are reasons to think that the story has been contaminated by earlier texts, as well as popular notions about gods, virgins, and the sex between them.

Main ideas for this lesson

The where and when of the Gospels

As a believer, I had a rather naïve view of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). I always thought that they were each written by a single author, more or less at the time of the events they described. You know, plus or minus a few months.

I should have known better, especially after reading these words from Luke:

Luke 1:1 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,
1:2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;
1:3 It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,
1:4 That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

Notice that the writer of Luke says that at this point in history, many people have written their own histories of Jesus. In writing his version, Luke is just mopping up.

So when were these accounts of Jesus written?

To answer this question, let’s start with this video featuring Matt Dillahunty, answering a question from a caller.

Ask: What points does Matt make?
Answers:

  • The Gospels were written decades after the events they discuss
  • Conservative scholars habitually date the Gospels early
  • It’s not a debate we even need to get into because even if someone had written the gospels down at the time, it wouldn’t mean that the events actually happened.

In the video, Matt mentions this site, earlychristianwritings.com (which is not offline; it’s still going strong).

Class activity: Browse the front page of earlychristianwritings.com. Which books came before the first gospels?
Answer: Most of the Pauline epistles. It’s almost as though the effort for the first half of the century went into administration, and putting the story of Jesus into writing was an afterthought. This is striking to me, because we’re eventually going to see the same pattern for Joseph Smith’s “First Vision”, which didn’t seem to be a part of early church mythology, and didn’t see a coherent write-up until much later.

Ask: According to the website, when do the four gospels appear?
Answers:

  • Matthew: 80–100 CE
  • Mark: 65–80 CE
  • Luke: 80–130 CE
  • John: 90–120 CE

Wikipedia’s page on the gospels doesn’t differ significantly on timing. (Notice that Mark is the first gospel to be written. Current thinking has it that whoever wrote Matthew and Luke were copying from Mark. Check out the Wikipedia page for Mark, in particular the Two-Source Hypothesis.)

That’s right; it’s possible that the gospels could have been written down a full century after the events they were describing. How reliable does this make them?

Stories can grow up very quickly. As I write this, the Islamist attack on the cartoonists of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo is still news, and predictably, conspiracy theories have already grown up around the event. In the last decade and a half, the body of ideas known as 9/11 Trutherism has grown up, reached a kind of apex, and dwindled back down to background levels. It doesn’t take long for these movements to coalesce.

So when we read these gospels, it’s important to remember that these documents were not written by eyewitnesses in any traditional sense. The writers had time to confabulate, and borrow whatever legends were current among the people. Christianity had a long time to get its origin story straight.

Is eyewitness testimony reliable?

Luke also says that he is an eyewitness of the events in the Gospels.

Luke 1:2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;

For many Christians I’ve talked to, this is the key to the whole thing. The gospels were written by eyewitnesses who saw the whole thing, and for them this is very convincing.

But eyewitness accounts are not all they’re cracked up to be. Here’s Sam Harris explaining why.

Starting at 3:14.

Consider Christianity. The entire doctrine is predicated on the idea that the Gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is why people believe Jesus was the son of God, divine, etc. This textual claim is problematic because everyone acknowledges that the gospels followed Jesus’ ministry by decades and there is no extra-biblical account of his miracles. But the truth is quite a bit worse than that. The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus, this still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred.

Well, why not? Well, the problem is that firsthand reports of miracles are quite common, even in the 21st century. I have met literally hundreds at this point of Western-educated men and women that think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus. Now, I actually remain open to evidence of such powers. But the fact is that people who tell these stories desperately want to believe them. All, to my knowledge, lack the kind of corroborating evidence we should require before believing that nature’s laws have been abrogated this way. And people who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes. But it remains a fact that yogis and mystics are said to be walking on water, and raising the dead, and flying without the aid of technology. Materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future. Right now, in fact all of these powers have been assigned to Satya Sai Baba the South Indian guru, by an uncountable number of eyewitnesses. But he even claims to have been born of a virgin, which is not all that uncommon a claim in the history of religion.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has done decades of research investigating the reliability of memory. A famous experiment showed how language can influence our memories of events we’ve seen.

In this experiment, participants watched a video of a car crash. They were then asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they (smashed / collided / bumped / hit / contacted) each other?” Some subjects got the version of the question with the word ‘hit’, others ‘smashed’, and so on. What Loftus found was that the subjects’ estimates of the cars’ speed depended on the verb they’d heard — contacted v hit, for example.

Loftus also found that when people were asked the ‘smashed’ version of the question, they were more likely to imagine that they’d seen broken glass, when there was none.

These experiments and others should serve as a caution to us when people come with ‘eyewitness testimony’. People can be mistaken, people can be wrong, and people can lie. And when the stories don’t even come from eyewitnesses, but are written decades after the fact — as is the case with the gospels – this gives us even less reason to believe the extraordinary claims therein.

Female consent is not a high priority for God

The worrying thing about the story of Jesus’ conception is that Mary’s consent is not required. It starts when as angel informs Mary that God’s going to do her:

Luke 1:30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.
1:31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.

Valerie Tarico writes a great piece in the IEET called It’s Not Rape If He’s a God — Or Thinks He Is. She gives a laundry list of gods who have had sex with human women (allegedly), and comments:

But these encounters between beautiful young women and gods have one thing in common. None of them has freely given female consent as a part of the narrative. (Luke’s Mary assents after being not asked but told by a powerful supernatural being what is going to happen to her, and she responds with language emphasizing the power differential. “Behold the bond slave of the Lord: be it done to me . . .”)

Who needs consent, freely given? If he’s a god, she’s got to want it, right? That is how the stories play out.

Yes, it is, and this should bother us a lot more than it does. The low priority assigned to female consent goes hand in hand with other ways in which Christianity promotes rape culture. This includes the cult of modesty so prevalent in Mormonism; young women are encouraged to take responsibility for the sexual thoughts of young men — don’t become walking pornography. How will Mormonism (or Christianity) ever be able to encourage men to take consent seriously, when their god is running around boffing teens? How can sexual abuse be addressed, when there’s a sexual relationship with a huge power differential written right into Christianity’s origin story? It starts here.

Additional lesson ideas

Born of a virgin?

Christians find justification for the virgin birth story in the alleged prophecy of Isaiah:

Isa. 7:14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Let’s ignore the fact that Jesus was never called Immanuel in the NT. The real problem is the mistranslation of the Hebrew word almah ‘young woman’ as ‘virgin’. Paul, writing before the gospels, doesn’t mention a virgin birth, and this might mean that the idea hadn’t taken yet. The book of Matthew contains the first reference to this notion, but Matthew’s a bit of an outlier. Other books don’t make reference to a virgin birth — check our Bart Ehrman’s blog and Valerie Tarico’s article in Alternet for some interesting explanations for this.

Did God have sex with Mary?

Mormons seem to have settled on a peculiar angle on Jesus’ conception: that God and Mary knocked boots. Or at least, this is a point that non-Mormon Christians seemed eager to dredge up with me as a missionary. I was always open to the possibility myself, not being particularly sex-negative. If you go with the Mormon idea that God is a literal man of humanoid form, white skin, about 6’2″, with a godly dong, then godly sex is not out of the question. On the other hand, I thought the question bespoke a kind of inappropriate curiosity.

And yet, as recently as the 80s, the Gospel Doctrine manual used this quote from Ezra Taft Benson, which stops just short of saying, “They totally did it.”

I am bold to say to you, … Jesus Christ is the Son of God in the most literal sense. The body in which He performed His mission in the flesh was sired by that same Holy Being we worship as God, our Eternal Father. He was not the son of Joseph, nor was He begotten by the Holy Ghost. He is the Son of the Eternal Father!

There you go, folks. God is Jesus’ father in the most sticky, sweaty, slippery sense.

I have a funny memory of teaching this Gospel Doctrine lesson as a missionary (I don’t think that was a normal thing, but I tried to serve where needed), and reading this quote out. I figured at the time that it was a coded reference to coitus divinus, and maybe I wanted to see who knew what was what. Let them who have ears to hear, and all that. And who do you think connected with it? The mission president’s wife. Yep, she caught the reference, and nodded sagely. She was into it. Odd.

If you want to see a list of references from the semi-official Mormon canon, here it is. Caution: Christianity, Web 0.9 design, animated gifs.

Be that as it may, the coital liaison between God and Mary did make for awkward dinner parties.

The idea of gods having sex with human women is incredibly popular throughout history. RationalWiki has a big list. You must admit, it’s a tempting option for a girl in trouble. In the Amazon, a girl has (or had) the option of blaming dolphins who turn into men.

Tribal elder: Who’s the father?
Girl: Um, a dolphin!
Tribal elder: Sounds legit.
Every guy in the tribe: Phew!

There are a number of closely-related cartoons that mine the humour of this situation. Here they are.

 This one’s so popular, it comes in two varieties.

Where’d Joseph get a typewriter, anyway?

This one is my favourite, though.

Now I’m definitely going to hell.

NT Lesson 1 (Jesus)

4 January 2015 / / 1 Comment

“That Ye Might Believe That Jesus Is the Christ”

Isaiah 61:1–3; Joseph Smith Translation, Luke 3:4–11; John 1:1–14; 20:31

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To help readers think critically about the story of Jesus, as well as competing ideas.

Reading

After the insanity of the Old Testament, it’s finally time to study the New Testament. The NT is a fascinating story of sin and redemption, and the start of — oh, dear — yet another major world religion. God, upset that everyone sinned against him, decided not to just forgive everyone like a benevolent deity. Instead, he decided that sending his son — formerly the psychopathic bully Jehovah — down to earth to be tortured and killed would make him feel better about having a relationship with us.

In his wisdom God decided that, rather than getting Jesus to write about himself, it would be a better idea to have his plan communicated by contradictory stories cobbled together from legends, written decades after the events they discuss. This freed Jesus up to perform party tricks for his friends, and these events are recorded in the Gospels.

After spending a weekend dead, Jesus then came back to life

and instructed his apostles to spread the word. Christianity did very poorly among the Jews, who already had a religion. But once the apostles recognised the potential among the heathen, and relaxed the entry requirements, the new religion did quite well. The Acts and the Epistles show how the Apostles (particularly Paul) managed to retool Old Testament scriptures in an effort to get the Christian story straight.

Everyone thinks of the New Testament as the nice one, right? No more God killing people, and it’s all about the lurv. Well, we’re going to see that the New Testament has its share of barbarity and injustice.

It also has:

  • terrible advice
  • scientific inaccuracies
  • rules that believers routinely ignore

and above all, loads of conflicts between the various versions of the myth.

Yes, there are cases of Jesus doing some nice things, but in rather trifling ways for very few people. Normal people can and have done much more to help mankind. A real supernatural being could do better.

Show this video from nonstampcollector.

Ask: What could a supernatural being like Jesus have done to help humanity, but didn’t? How does this make you feel about his priorities?

Main points from the lesson

Did Jesus exist?

Christopher Hitchens articulated the view that there’s no direct evidence outside the Bible for the existence of Jesus.

The idea that Jesus simply didn’t exist is not currently a majority view among bible scholars. This could be because so many bible scholars have been well-disposed toward Christianity, if not Christians themselves. This is changing, with more non-theist scholars taking an interest in the question of Jesus’s existence. One is Richard Carrier, who discusses his views here.

This recent episode of “The Thinking Atheist” has three scholars — Carrier, Fitzgerald, and Price — talking about the issue. Christians often tell me about quotes from Josephus and Tacitus as evidence for Jesus, and these scholars discuss this is the podcast as well. Very entertaining, and worth a listen.

My take: If someone named Jesus existed, it’s okay with me. Evidence for the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth would not necessarily validate the supernatural claims about him. If, however, he didn’t exist, it would obliterate those claims. I really don’t envy the Christian position here. It’s kind of like “heads, they lose; tails, they still don’t really win”.

Was the Jesus story a copy of existing gods?

It’s easy to believe that the story of Jesus was simply a remix of the stories of gods that were floating around in every culture. How could it not be? Human imagination tends to take some predictable forms. Moreover, a story will be more believable if it matches stories that people already accept.

Recently, though, some atheists have made the more direct claim that specific elements of the Jesus story were borrowed from other gods point for point. The movie Zeitgeist is one example. This graphic is a summarisation of some of its claims, but there are other similar ones.

I decided to check how well the accepted facts about these gods matched the graphic, and the short answer is: not great.

Comparisons of this nature tend to use bad sources, accept dubious near-matches (Krishna was killed by an arrow? That’s kind of like crucifixion!), and generally play things fast and loose. We have to be careful about this kind of stuff, and not accept it too uncritically.

Even though the close analysis falls down, some points of comparison do stand up: the virgin (or divine) births, miracles, and resurrections. These are elements of stories that people have told about their gods since there have been gods. It shouldn’t be surprising that they also appear in the Jesus story.

Additional lesson ideas

Doubtful goals of the atonement

This lesson features a scripture from the Joseph Smith “Translation” of Luke, in which Smith puts words into the mouth of John the Baptist. Here are the things the LDS lesson manual says Jesus was to have done.

a. “Take away the sins of the world” (verse 5).

We’ll be discussing this alleged sin-removal in Lesson 25, but for now, I’ll just ask: Why would Jesus die to remove the effects of sin, but without making any effort to prevent sin from happening? It’s a dumb method, and just one reason why this is an incoherent system.

b. “Bring salvation unto the heathen nations” (verse 5).

Christian meddling in indigenous culture has been the source of great injustice as missionaries have interfered with native languages, sexual practices, and social attitudes.

c. “Gather together those who are lost” (verse 5).

It’s condescending to teach that people who aren’t Christians are lost. People probably think I became lost when I left the Church, but I count it as gain. I gained the ability to value my limited life, to love my wonderful wife, and to allow my children to become the people they are, without the destructive and pernicious influence of religion.

d. “Make possible the preaching of the gospel unto the Gentiles” (verse 6).

The spread of Christianity, with its attendant violence, power, and control is one of the saddest stories I can think of.

e. “Be a light unto all who sit in darkness” (verse 7).

Christianity has no special claim to being “a light”. Having been a Latter-day Saint, I now try to live by the light of reason and science, and this works much better.

f. “Bring to pass the resurrection from the dead” (verse 7).

We’re all still waiting on that one. Everyone who has died is still dead.

g. “Administer justice unto all” (verse 9).

Divine justice does not really seem to be a thing.

h. “Convince all the ungodly of their ungodly deeds” (verse 9).

Ah. Now this is one that Christians have worked hard on. There seems to be no shortage of deeds that are classified as “ungodly”, or believers eager to chastise us about them.

One out of eight. That’s above their usual hit rate. Well done, fake John the Baptist.

Is the possessive Jesus’, or Jesus’s?

When I was a kid, I learned a rule about adding apostrophe -s to people whose names end in s, like James or Ross. The rule was: just add an apostrophe, but no extra -s. That worked fine for a while, but then I started noticing the extra s popping up in books. Was there a shift?

It now looks like the rule has indeed shifted. We can use Google’s Ngram Viewer to search massive numbers of books over hundreds of years, and when we do, we see that, while either one is okay, the -s variants are more popular. At least that’s true for James and Charles.

Boris has switched. No idea why. Sparse data, most likely.

But Jesus is a bit of an exception. Notice the continuing popularity of Jesus’, even today. (u/FHL88Work pointed out that Moses follows this pattern as well.)

So what should you do? Unless you’ve got some compelling reason, write Jesus’ instead of Jesus’s. That way, you’ll be in step with the overwhelming majority of writers.

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