New Testament commands Credulity 

 
The New Testament is the centre of Christianity. Christianity depends on it to learn about Jesus. Without it Jesus would be worse than a legend. But  the fact is, the New Testament is no better than a non-existent New Testament.
 
We must remember that the gospels report that Jesus exercised a lot of pressure on his audience and disciples.
 
He taught that if they stopped believing in him they would be on God's rubbish heap, Hell, to suffer for all eternity.
 
He said that anybody who suspected that Satan was behind any of his miracles was blaspheming the Holy Spirit and there would be no forgiveness for them in this life or the next.
 
In that kind of atmosphere, the witnesses of Jesus would have not just been biased in his defence but totally biased. It was the right cauldron to cook up a legend such as the resurrection of Jesus in. There has never been one as good since. The apostles (see Galatians 1) put curses called the anathema and the handing over to Satan on those who contradicted them. Jesus accused his critics of being completely bad (Matthew 12:34) - no room for loving the sinner and hating the sin if there is no good in the person at all! This was incitement to hatred.
 
In a pre-scientific age and with all those threats, how can we be confident in the truth of the New Testament?

GULLIBILITY COMMAND IN THE NT
 
Did the gospel writers and epistles want us to leave our brains outside the room when their drivel is being read to us?

The gospels
 
According to the New Testament, Jesus’ healing work was meant to be a sign that he was of God. Nearly all of his healing works could have been natural events even if you do accept the Bible as infallible. When the gospellers picked signs that could have been natural or done by divine providence the natural way that proves they had scant regard for the truth. They wanted us to be the same.

The way Jesus and the New Testament both make the Law of Moses their main justification for their claims and even go as far as to say that Jesus’ resurrection is nothing without the Law even if people see him rising (Luke 16:31). But if you go to the excellent Galatians@kscable.com you will see that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Law of Moses existed before it was “found” in 621 BC while there was repair work being done in the Jerusalem Temple. A prophetess consulted to verify the book said that God told her the book was his word and immediately its laws were put into effect by the king, Josiah. The book was found by the scribe Hilkiah and many believe that he was the real author or could have found a book and altered it. A book that makes such serious demands as the Law should have had a better start-off than that and the Bible itself says that this was the way the Law came out though it naturally does not hint that Hilkiah wrote the Law or revised it. We cannot take it too seriously when that is the case. But Jesus did not let that stop him putting the Law at the fore. Anyway, in those days where were textual critics and archaeologists who could have a chance of giving evidence that the Law of Moses was authentic? They wouldn’t come until the twentieth century. It was credulity to believe in the Law even if it had been well known before 621 BC. A book that has to be verified as the word of God by an obscure prophetess who could have been any old crank is plainly not the word of God at all. When it comes down to it, she is the one who is believed in more than it!

Men who had doubts and knew that doubt was no sin and still went on to forbid it are hardly worth listening to when they gave us tall stories. The Bible writers and the apostles were these men. So was Jesus if he lived.

John, the fourth gospeller, reveals his desire to make us credulous when he interprets Jesus’ allegedly saving a dying boy from death but not completely from his illness (4:51-54) as a sign. What may be a coincidence is no sign. John writes stuff that is different from the other gospels and he firmly approves of the rule that one witness is not enough and yet he is the only witness to his version being correct! John was the one that stated that Jesus said that if Jesus is his own witness his testimony cannot be true for he is speaking for himself (John 5:31). So John is speaking for himself and his witness is untrue. If you believe in him at all believe that.

If Matthew believed that Joseph’s dream about an angel was a real vision and not just a dream that happened to be right (2) Matthew was commanding us to be credulous and so he cannot be trusted with his other miracle stories, the greater ones such as the resurrection. Jesus was the one who said that if you cannot trust anyone in small you cannot trust them in big things either.

Mark was treated by Matthew and Luke as a reliable information source though he said that Jesus’ return as judge would be totally unexpected to ensure that believing people would be ready at all times and then said that certain events that believers would observe would have to take place before Jesus could come back! (13).

The gospellers knew from the Law that it did not teach life after death and yet they said that Jesus told the world that when God called himself the God of three dead prophets he said that it meant they were alive somehow (Matthew 22:32).

If they had been unbiased and objective and mature they would not have made these blunders. If they had been these three things at least two of them would have been written by independent and religiously disinterested sources so that we could be sure they are verified properly by unbiased people. Unbiased people means people who are biased towards the truth and they certainly were not those kind of people.

Jesus telling us to love God with all our minds and praising the man who gave him an intelligent answer praises only what God calls intelligence. It really praises God’s thinking and not ours. Our thinking cannot be trusted.
 
Reason is to be and is ignored in religion whenever it conflicts with any doctrine. Even when we were told to test the spirits, prove all things and to answer anybody who wants to know why we have hope in us it only means we must use God’s reasoning even in defiance of our own. The paradoxes of the Christian faith prove that we are expected to do that.

Peter and John
 
The author of 2 Peter pronounced Paul’s wacky writings to be scripture. And he knew that Paul claimed to write for simple people and intended to and still there were things that were hard to understand. That should have showed him that Paul was no more inspired than he was.

John could be mental for he says that all who find no sin in themselves are deluding themselves (1 John 1).

John told the people he wrote to that he needed to warn them about heretics. And then he told them that they needed no teacher to protect them from the false teachers for the spirit inside them was guiding them into all the truth! (2). He was not saying all you need to tell you about the faith is the spirit for he would not be writing then but he is saying the spirit guides you to know that the apostolic doctrine is true. He is as good as saying there is no evidence but only an alleged testimony from God that is in reality little more than a feeling. This is the testimony from the divine that all religions say they have and they all contradict and excommunicate each other!

Revelation – the ultimate farce
 
The Book of Revelation is truly awful. Only a nutter would accept it as the word of God like its author may have done.

Its symbolism is often impenetrable making it no good. God would not make such a mistake. What sense do lines like, “And the four living creatures, individually having six wings, were full of eyes all over and within [underneath their wings]” make? This is from Revelation 4:8. Without any evidence, these beasts are supposed by Christians to be the gospels! The Revelation claims it can be understood by the public which is why it commanded that it must be published for the fulfilment of the prophecies in it is near (22:10). When that rubbish is in the Bible that is an insult to better works that should have been in it.

Conclusion

It is the vice of gullibility to accept that Jesus existed or rose from the dead on the basis of the early Christian writings or to declare that he must have for these writings are God’s word. This was the very vice that created them whether it was in its authors or in the audience or both.