The New Testament is not Inspired

 
The Church regards a book allegedly created by God through men as infallible on faith and morals. That book is the Bible and its words though not dictated by God all the time (though there are many examples of dictation) are regarded as being the same as God's words. Even those who deny verbal dictation hold that even if the Bible is not all the words of God its words in practice amount to the same thing as being God's actual words and that this is God's teaching.

GULLIBLE IN PROPHECY

The interpretation of a religious text is a doctrine. Yet the New Testament perverted Old Testament texts and their meaning to make them and committed the cardinal sin of selecting sentences out of context to make these prophecies seem to have been predicting Jesus.
 
The Old Testament used in the New Testament where the latter gets the prophecies from was the inferior Greek translation called the Septuagint. They should have used the original Hebrew and would have if they had cared more for honesty than propaganda.
 
The apostles are alleged to have died for what they believed was the word of God and that it was God’s revelation that Jesus was alive. And then we find that the gospellers made no effort to get the text of the scriptures they allegedly revered exactly right. When they could not do that though there were plenty of Jewish scholars and experts around the alleged testimony of the apostles in blood does not stand for much.

A passage that has nothing to do with the massacre of the innocents was perverted into a prophecy of it by the author of the gospel of Matthew (2). When the writers cannot even be trusted with the meaning of a few words how can they be trusted with the meaning of the word of God or of Jesus?

All the gospellers read the Old Testament and plucked verses out of it that they wanted us to think were predictions that God made about Jesus. Matthew said that the prophet said that Jesus would be a Nazarene or native of Nazareth not even knowing that there was no such prophecy in the Old Testament.

The gospel writers exploited Old Testament texts to trick people into thinking that Jesus and his deeds were foreseen by the power of God by the prophets long ago. When God said he would bring his son, meaning the people of Israel, out of Egypt (Hosea 11) Matthew wrested it out of context to make it seem to refer to Jesus being brought out of Egypt (2). As if God would forecast an event so insignificant and obscure and badly substantiated. The Holy Family were in hiding so who could prove that they came out of Egypt? It is like somebody claiming that an old document forecasts who his best friend will be. A lot of the time it is only your word that your best friend is really considered by you to be your best friend. Their abuse of the Old Testament substantiates that their imaginations or their deceiving hearts were in control and not their reason.

It is credulity to hold that God will make prophecies that are easy to fulfil. That is an unnecessary miracle and Jesus did not believe in those. Then anybody could have set themselves up as Messiahs if absurd wonders were deemed acceptable. It was easy, far too easy, for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey to seem to fulfil Zechariah. Yet that was the reason he got on the donkey and rode it into the city according to the gospel of Matthew (21:4,5) and John (12:14,15). It is no use to object that there were lots of other prophecies as well that made it harder for one had to fulfil them all to be the Messiah. You cannot even be sure that they all refer to the same person. Take Isaiah 40 which is supposed to be about the Baptist. These words can be applied to Christ and Elijah coming back just before the end of the world which is a better fit.
 
The matter was so complex that if Jesus had been an honest man he would have welcomed the praise of the scholars if there were any and not that of the people when he went into Jerusalem to fulfil prophecy.

NT CONTRADICTIONS
 
Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible by John W. Haley claims that there are no contradictions or errors in the Bible. Needless to say, it is only the contradictions he can handle or thinks he can handle that he deals with. The real ones are conveniently ignored. For instance, he does not try to explain away Jesus’ error when he argued that Satan could not cast out Satan for Satan could do that under certain conditions. Or Jesus’ error when he said that God saying he was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob proved the resurrection.

Some contradictions are followed by outrageously warped attempts to reconcile them.

Luke slandered the Samaritans when he said they opposed Jesus (9:52,53) and he did not make an exception of the village John said received him favourably. It is slander for he did not exclude them. Obviously, Luke did contradict John contrary to page 358 for he would not have deliberately slandered the village. Luke knew only too well how people like to tar groups they don’t like with the one brush. Luke didn’t have a copy of John’s gospel so Christians have no right saying that Luke and John agree but Luke just had an exception to John’s general statement.

Page 386, Haley contends that there is no conflict between the records which give different numbers of the appearances of the risen Jesus for they do not mention them all. That would be true if the gospels were not written to function as evidence for the divine authority of Jesus Christ. They say that miracles were to be signs for the world and then they deny it by leaving out most of Jesus’ post-resurrection miracles. A complete contradiction. It’s as bad as writing about the history of your village and not mentioning that Ronald Reagan visited it.

Page 330, Matthew 13 tells us that one day Jesus spoke to the crowd only in parables and then it says this was to fulfil scripture and yet the Sermon on the Mount which was his main and paramount teaching engagement has few parables. The problem is that Jesus would have to use parables nearly all the time to be a good match for the prophecy for all preachers use parables sometimes – and you would certainly expect his masterpiece the Sermon on the Mount to be full of parables for it was his big event. So we have a contradiction.
 
Haley says Jesus only used parables on the day we are told about in Matthew 13. But would Matthew have thought that Jesus using parables that day was a fulfilment of prophecy? That God would predict something so mundane as somebody using parables for a day? Matthew said in the chapter that Jesus fulfilled the prophecy but he did not hint that the prophecy meant only one day of parables. Matthew said that Jesus only taught the people in parables. One would expect the Sermon on the Mount to be entirely parables if the prophecy which is not a prophecy at all - but only a line from a song - referred to some great teacher on his big teaching day.

If Jesus strictly warned and commanded that nobody be told that the daughter of Jairus was cured by him (Mark 5:43) then what are the gospellers doing telling it? They never said they got permission which is a very important thing. At least if they did, it would be at least a bit more probable that they wrote what they wrote with Jesus’ blessing and approval – but there is no commonsense in them. They were not trustworthy people at all and so we should take their miracle stories with a pinch of salt.
 
If Jesus was afraid of being inundated with people looking for healing and the curious and that was why he wanted silence then he couldn’t cure them all with a wave of his hand and was as impotent as our modern faith-healers. The healings then he worked were just coincidence and luck. He knew that many of the people he healed did not have the things wrong with them they thought they had but something less serious and something that they could recover from quickly.
 
If Jesus wanted to be discreet to get peace when he cured the daughter of Jairus then what about the fact that he already had a reputation before that (Mark 1)? If Jesus really wanted to be discreet then why didn’t he cure the girl at a distance? Matthew 9 has Jesus putting a large crowd out of the way before the cure obviously because he didn’t want to cure her in front of them for they would tell. You don’t warn and command a big crowd to be discreet for they won’t be. In Matthew, the story is broadcast all over the place and Jesus never says that he minds it being told. The gospel accidentally has Jesus as a fraud who pretended to want nobody to know while he made sure and hoped they would know!

In Mark, Jesus is told that the girl is about to die (5:23) but in Matthew 9:18 the same person tells him that she is dead in this verse which is parallel to Mark for the words and account are nearly the same so it is the exact same incident not two separate ones as the untruthful Christian contradiction solvers would try to make out.

In Mark 10:46-52, Jesus heals the blind man Bartimeaus leaving Jericho. But in Luke 18:35 he is coming into the town when he cures the blind man. Christians say there were two separate incidents but both stories which are nearly identical are located at the same time so that is implausible.

The Case For Christ replies that there was a Jericho but it was in four different sections like a broken up town (page 131) so Jesus did go from Jericho to Jericho. But Mark would not have written that Jesus was coming out of Jericho but would have said that Jesus was in Jericho. Not only is that clearer it would have been only fair considering his readers were not Palestinians. And why did Luke follow the version in Mark so closely and change it if it was all the same as The Case For Christ says?

There are geographical contradictions in the gospels. In Matthew, offers of discipleship were made after Jesus and the disciples crossed or were about to cross to the other side of the lake (8:18-22) but in Luke they were made after hospitality had been refused to Christ in a Samaritan village 9:51-62 on their way to Jerusalem.

Matthew had Mark’s gospel in front of him yet he contradicted Mark about the time when he cursed a fig tree. Mark says that Jesus did it before he put the traders out of the Temple (11:12,15). But Matthew claims that it was the next day (21:12-22). Errors like that mean that the miracle was not checked out properly and is probably exaggeration.

In all three synoptic gospels, it is said that in front of Jesus, the Jews were afraid to say that John’s rite of baptism of repentance was from God or man-made so they said they didn’t know what its origin was. The gospels say that they couldn’t say God for they didn’t believe in it. That is untrue for nobody knows what another believes unless they tell and they didn’t. The gospels allege that they dared not say it was merely human for they were afraid of the people who regarded John as a true prophet. How could they have been scared of the people when the people accepted Jesus’ judgment of them as hypocrites? (Matthew 23; 4:24). And why would they have been afraid of a few bystanders? Why would they fear the people’s criticism when they did not treat their idol Jesus right? The New Testament is exaggerating. And what was the harm in saying John’s baptism was a human invention for the scriptures never authorised it and the people never used John as a new source of scripture? Human inventions can lead to God. John never said that his baptism was a revelation from God. If the Jews were so bad then why didn’t they lie and say they did believe in it even if they said they did not believe in it when John was alive but believe it now? They were supposed to be hypocrites. Why could the Jewish leaders not believe the baptism was of divine origin – what harm would it do – many of the Jewish leaders had been baptised by John? The story is a pile of lies. What other mistakes were made that we do not know about? Perhaps some detail is missing in the resurrection account that would prove there was no miracle in it.

The Lord’s Prayer as given in Luke (11) omits some of the petitions that are in Matthew’s (6). There is no point in doing this so the famous prayer must have been invented gradually after Jesus’ disappearance assuming he ever lived to be able to vanish! When Matthew must have been hidden in Luke’s time for this to happen one wonders what the dirty big secret was.

When Matthew and Luke and John did not know one another or there is no proof that they did know one another it is stupid to treat them as if they complement one another. John puts the cleansing of the Temple at the start of Jesus’ ministry and the rest put it at the end of it. Despite John’s placing this in a time frame (2:1 which shows he was concerned about chronology and 2:13 gives a time for this event near the start) Christians say either that John was not concerned about chronological order or there were two cleansings of the Temple. Jesus would have been barred from the Temple the first time he did that. He would have spoiled everything for his ministry by behaving that way before he could win over most of the people and get them to understand him. And he would have been hauled before the law. If it was anything but their scriptures Christians would be saying there is a contradiction. When a contradiction is hard to resolve and wild improbable theories have to be devised to solve it there is invariably an atmosphere of artificiality around the enterprise. It is disgusting to argue that the other gospels solve the contradiction with John by showing that it is not chronological for they give a different time layout. You can reconcile almost anything with that logic.
 
CONCLUSION
 
It would be more sensible to hold that some philosophical book of wisdom is divinely inspired than the New Testament. When there are too many problems to solve it shows there is something wrong with any attempt to make the New Testament seem to be unity. The New Testament is an entirely man-made and wacky volume.
 
BOOKS CONSULTED
 
ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES OF THE BIBLE, John W Haley, Whitaker House, Pennsylvania, undated  
BIBLICAL EXEGESIS AND CHURCH DOCTRINE, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1985
CHRIST AND PROTEST, Harry Tennant, Christadelphian Publishing Office, Birmingham, undated
CHRISTIANITY FOR THE TOUGH-MINDED, Editor John Warwick Montgomery, Bethany Fellowship, Minnesota, 1973
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
JESUS AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN THE GOSPELS, Daniel J Grolin, George Ronald, Oxford, 2002
JESUS AND THE FOUR GOSPELS, John Drane, Lion Books, Herts, 1984
JESUS HYPOTHESES, V Messori, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1977
IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO, INVESTIGATING THE TRUTH OF THE BIBLICAL PAST, Matthew Sturgis, Headline Books, London, 2001
NEW AGE BIBLE VERSIONS, GA Riplinger, Bible & Literature Foundation, Tennessee, 1993
THE BIBLE, THE BIOGRAPHY, Karen Armstrong, Atlantic Books, London, 2007
THE BIBLE UNEARTHED, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, Touchstone Books, New York, 2002
THE CASE FOR CHRIST, Lee Strobel, HarperCollins and Zondervan, Michigan, 1998
THE HOLY BIBLE NEW AMERICAN VERSION, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington DC, 1970
THE JESUS EVENT, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York, 1980
THEOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Kittel Gerhard and Friedrich Gerhard, Eerdman’s Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, MI, 1976
THE PASSOVER PLOT, Hugh Schonfield, Element Books, Dorset, 1996
THE UNAUTHORISED VERSION. Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992
THE VIRGINAL CONCEPTION AND BODILY RESURRECTION OF JESUS, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1973

THE WWW

www.truthbeknown.com/historicaljc.htm
The “Historical” Jesus, Acharya S
 
Galatians@kscable.com,
The “Finding of the Law”

www.infidels.org/library/modern/paul_carlson/nt_contradictions.html
New Testament Contradictions, Paul Carlson

www.mindspring.com/~bab5/BIB/lessons.htm
Something’s Fishy: Deception, Secrecy and the Gospel

www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/archive/billings_bd.html
Biblical Discrepancies

www.askwhy.co.uk/awstruth/ChristianCase.html
The Case for Christianity Examined

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/wilkin6.htm
Final Response by Steven Carr to Dr Wilkinson, Can We Believe in Miracles in a Scientific Universe?
This points out how the miracles of Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana which the Christians took for granted as authentic but ascribed them to demons and the pagan miracles for which reliable first hand testimony exists are rejected by Christians who believe in the gospel ones on less evidence.

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm
Miracles and the Book of Mormon by Steven Carr. This argues that the Christians complain about Joseph Smith having copied and plagiarised miracle stories in the Bible to fill out the Book of Mormon while the gospellers did the same and stole Old Testament miracle stories and applied them to Jesus. For example the story of Jesus raising the daughter of Jairus is really just the story of Elisha raising a widow’s son to life from the Second Book of Kings. Even a lot of the wording is a perfect match with the Greek version of the Old Testament story. Carr notes how Christians reject many pagan miracle stories as frauds while accepting the miracles of Jesus on as little or even less evidence.

http://members.aol.com/ckbloomfld/bepart31.html
Biblical Errancy, January 1987, by Dennis McKinsey

www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/indef/4c.html
The Problem of Competing Claims by Richard Carrier