RELIGION: Part Five

by Nick Wormley

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here.

If the truth and reality of the Christian religion were to be decided by a court hearing, the judge would immediately rule that there is no case to answer, because there is no satisfactory evidence to be considered by the jury. The Bible would not be admissible as evidence, because the judge would rule that it is extreme hearsay. There is no tangible evidence that could stand up in any court run along normal legal lines in any modern, civilized, democratic country.

How Old is the New Testament?

The New Testament was written by unknown authors decades after the events they purport to describe. We don’t know where, when or who they were. There are no first edition copies, and there must definitely have been a great many opportunities for the religious testimony to have been tampered with by the time that the first known surviving Gospel and epistle texts were written down on paper/parchment.

We do not have St Paul’s letters or the Four Gospels. What does exist today are a number of ancient documents which are claimed to be early copies of these Biblical Books. The oldest are perhaps ten or 12 tiny fragments from papyrus sheets that have disintegrated with great age. At least four of them probably date, according to experts’ estimates, from some time during the Second century. They preserve, at Oxford University and in the Rylands Collection of Manchester, a few words that are recognisable as coming from the Gospels of John and Matthew. There is also a scrap of similar age with a few words on it from the Book of Revelation in Cairo.

Several other such fragment bits of ancient Gospel pages have been dated to the Second or Third Centuries AD.

A damaged, but nearly complete, book of St Paul’s main Epistles has been estimated to date, by scholarly study of writing and grammatical style, to maybe somewhere between about 150AD to 250AD. I think this is probably the oldest-surviving “good copy” of a chunk of the New Testament.

The oldest surviving complete New Testament text was written in the 4th Century, maybe 300 years after the Jesus and Apostles stories began.

Non-Biblical writings from great antiquity include mentions and passing references to Jesus and later church and evangelistic activities by several ancient Roman writers, the Jewish historian Josephus, and early Christian Church Fathers in the time of the Roman empire. Once again though, we do not possess any of their writings. What exist today are mostly medieval manuscripts, probably written by monks in monasteries somewhere in Europe, claiming to be copies of these ancient writers’ works, 800 or even 1,000 years after they penned them. They probably are, but I think it would be gullible and naive to unquestioningly accept them as definitely fully-accurate transcripts of the originals. Could they really have been passed on absolutely intact and unaltered by all of the activities and turmoils of history over such a long time span? How many times might they have been re-copied, allowing the possibility of mistakes and editing?

These things cannot be known and none of this, even if all added together, amounts to a water-tight block of evidence for Christianity being real. To propose that it does is based on assumptions that the manuscripts we have are exact, precise, short-hand/tape-recording/microphone-to-a-computer device accurate, word-for-word copies of supposed First Century original writings. They might be, but there is no proof of that. Any lawyer would tell you that supposed copies  from decades or centuries later are not strong enough to present in our court hearing as evidence that meets an essential legal standard. The judge would not allow it, because the jury would be trying to peer at the facts through a fog, of indeterminable density.

When I was training to be a young local newspaper reporter, 50 years ago, one of the first lessons that was drummed into us was: “Never assume. If in doubt, find out. If you can’t, leave it out.” There was good reason for this instruction. Appearances can sometimes be deceptive and facts turn out to be not what we expected.

Finally, the greatest question is: “Does what ancient people might, collectively, over hundreds of years, have written in what eventually was cobbled together to become a book, prove (against science, logic, reason and intelligence) that God exists? In my judgement, no it doesn’t.

Case dismissed.

I wish I could say that atheists no longer need to be arguing with religious people about whether God exists and whether any particular religion is the one, true, real version.

To even hold such a debate – and allow it to keep running into the mid 21st Century – suggests that belief in religions is of equal factual merit to non-belief. It isn’t.

Unfortunately we aren’t quite at that stage yet, but our species is emerging from the swamp of myth.

The naturally-evolved animal Homo Sapiens should now grow up, forget all about mythological religions invented in times of great ignorance, and progress forward into a sensible, intelligent, age of reality and scientific understanding, consigning ancient past fiction to history.

We don’t need to prove that God does not exist. The onus for that is on religious believers to prove there is a God, and they can’t, because there is no reasonable evidence for it of any kind. There is no such thing as intangible evidence, perhaps based, supposedly, on sublime art, emotionally-inspiring poetry and ‘inner knowledge’.

Neither do we need to lose love, kindness, goodness and forgiveness in that process. Religions do not hold any monopoly or superiority over defining what constitutes morality.

My guess is that, in a few hundred years time, if the World is still here then, perhaps none of the religions in existence today will have any supporters. I expect (and hope!) that all of them will have long vanished and been forgotten by good, intelligent, sensible people of the future. We are on the way!

I don’t know whether readers might be familiar with this video, but I feel it is simply common sense:

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