Be sure to Click LIKE at the bottom of this article, and share it everywhere!! By Craig Andresen – The National Patriot and Right Side Patriots – Commentary

Belief is defined as: “an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. Trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something. Something that is accepted, considered to be true, or held as an opinion : something believed. an individual’s religious or political beliefs. especially : a tenet or body of tenets held by a group.”

Belief, by its very nature requires a degree of uncertainty in that certainty requires proof while belief requires faith in the absence of proof. So, what is faith? Faith is defined as: “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.”

It would be remiss not to mention that while belief and faith can be disproven by scientific fact, scientific fact cannot be disproven by belief and faith, but before some reading this get too upset, allow me to point out that in some cases, scientific fact has disproven belief and faith in ways that lend credence to some of the stories contained in the Bible.

For instance, it was a long-held belief that places like Nazareth, where the Bible says Jesus grew up in the New Testament, and Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament were fictional until archaeologists dug the remains of those ancient towns out of the ground, and the town of Bethlehem, where the Bible says Jesus was born may well be the wrong Bethlehem, as a second town of Bethlehem has recently been discovered much closer to Nazareth,  and thus more likely to have been the place to which Mary and Joseph traveled.

That of course, if true, would make the venerated Church of the Nativity a matter of belief and faith rather than a place of fact.

There is not a single religion upheld by mankind that does not require a combination of belief and faith as religion itself is a man-made exercise in both. Christianity is no exception.

While there are plenty of Christians who bristle at the notion that the Bible wasn’t written by the hand of God, it is nothing but the belief or faith that it was, not the proof of it that leads many to demand that others believe as they do or they are surely on their way to hell, and by the way, the notion of a heaven or hell are also matters of belief or faith, and not of proof.

There are those who insist that every word in the Bible is 100% true, but they must ignore certain facts in order to hold that belief. In the Old Testament, for instance, there are glaring contradictions. Some examples of those contradictions can be found in the story of Noah. In one passage, the Bible says Noah took two of every animal onto the ark, while a different passage says he took two of some animals, and fourteen of others. One passage tells of the rain lasting 40 days and 40 nights, while another mentions 150 days.

If every word in the Bible is 100% true, there would be no such discrepancies.

In the new Testament, only two books provide an account of the birth of Jesus…Mathew and Luke…and the accounts have some striking differences. Again, if every word in the Bible is 100% true, there would be no differences in such accounts.

Further, were the Bible actually written by the hand of God, it would contain absolutely no discrepancies or differences…it would be 100% consistent throughout, and it isn’t.

Given those facts, why are there Christians today, in the 21^st century, who demand that the Bible as written is 100% true, and why do they demand that it be taken literally, word for word? Because it is how they have been conditioned to believe, and that aspect of the Christian faith, or belief is nothing new.

Early Christians were much more flexible in their interpretation of the Bible’s texts. There is a very good reason for that. In the early days of Christianity there were several versions of the stories, both oral and written than there are today, and depending on which story early Christians were told or read, they developed differing interpretations of those stories. We know this thanks to a Catholic bishop named Fortunatianus who lived in the mid 4^th century and studied how biblical texts were viewed differently in the early  Greek vs Latin Christian churches.

Hugh Houghton, Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing in the UK says, “An exclusive focus on literal interpretation is a modern phenomenon, because that’s not the way ancient Christians read the Bible.” Houghton goes on to say “The mid-15th century invention of the printing press made copies much more identical, and inspired a sense of the exactness of the printed form of the Bible, which was alien to the first 1,500 years of Christianity.”

So, for the first 1,500 years of Christianity, the stories told of Jesus were told orally, or in some cases written by various people from various regions and would have been told using various interpretations while stories from the Old Testament would have been told orally for many centuries before being written in much the same manner, differing from region to region and via various interpretations. In the years leading up to the invention of the printing press, it was politicians, kings and rulers who, through many differing translations from and into many different languages made the political decisions as to which stories, which books and which versions of them would be contained in the Bibles from their own regions.

Those translations, by the way, led to mistakes as is apt to happen when translating something that may well have been previously translated several times by different people. For instance, while the translations most are familiar with today list the Red Sea as the place Moses crossed to escape the Egyptians, going as far back in as close to original texts as possible, while scientifically tracking the most likely route taken by Moses and using a combination of satellite and LIDAR imaging to peel back centuries of time, it was most likely the Reed Sea, not the mistranslated Red Sea where Moses made his and his people’s escape.

So, Jesus. Was he real? Most likely, he was a real person as we have more than just the New Testament as sources for his existence. There are writings going all the way back to the 1^st century Gnostics, some of whom regarded Jesus as the bodily incarnation of God, and others who downplayed that interpretation, focusing instead on the good deeds and teaching of a mere mortal man. There are also references to Jesus, or Christus by both Jewish and Roman historians from the 1^st century like Flavius Josephus, and Roman senator and historian Tacitus…neither being a fan of early Christianity.

Those Gnostic writings, known as the Gnostic Bible are very important, and quite possibly more reliable than the Bible as we know it today, as they weren’t discovered until 1945, and have never been through the process of various translations from language to language by numerous scribes only to be edited for political purposes by kings and rulers before being disseminated for public consumption. Also important to note, is that while being written by a small group of people cloistered from society in the 1^st century, their interpretation of Jesus is quite different from one writer to the next, meaning there was no consensus, even in a closed-off society regarding the true nature of Jesus.

That Jesus existed is more a matter of document evidence than either physical or archeological evidence and neither physical nor archeological evidence of his existence exists. And why would it? Physical and archeological evidence from antiquity exists only for wealthy, highly placed people of power, and Jesus would have been but a peasant and chances are, he looked much different that popular images try to suggest..

Making the documentary evidence of Jesus more solid is the fact that Tacitus nearly always included a disclaimer of sorts when writing of historical events because of the oral nature of such reports, but in the case of writing about Christus, he included no such disclaimer. To be clear, Tacitus never mentioned Jesus as a son of God nor did he ever mention events attributed to the life of Jesus. He did however write  that Emperor Nero falsely blamed “the persons commonly called Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius.”

Flavius Josephus, the 1^st century Jewish historian however did write about a man “who did surprising deeds” and was condemned to be crucified by Pilate, and of an unlawful execution of a man he named as John, “brother of Jesus-who-is-called-Messiah.”

So, it seems highly likely that Jesus actually lived, and died under Pontius Pilate, but can we take the story of the death and resurrection as told in the gospels as the gospel truth?

No.

Just as with the birth of Jesus as told in Matthew and Luke contains discrepancies, so too do the books of the gospel where the death of Jesus is concerned. For instance, Mark and John provide two different accounts for the time of Jesus’ death (“The third hour” in Mark 15:25, and the “sixth hour” in John 19:14–15) while neither Luke nor Matthew bother to mention a time at all. One would certainly think that such a momentous event would have been totally devoid of conflicting time accounts, and more than worthy of some mention in all four gospels.

Even more momentous that the death of Jesus would have been his resurrection, but even there, the gospels are full of conflicting accounts. From who went to the tomb, to whether or not the stone had already been removed, to what those who were there saw, to what they were told, the gospels provide differing accounts. From what the women who were there did next, to what they were told to do, to how Jesus supposedly appeared to his remaining disciples, again, all differing accounts of what were supposedly the exact same events.

For instance, in Matthew, he says that the disciples immediately went to Galilee to see Jesus for the first time after his resurrection, but Luke says the disciples stayed in Jerusalem the whole time, saw Jesus ascend near its borders, and then stayed in Jerusalem until the day of Pentecost. They can’t both be correct and when one considers all the other conflicting accounts regarding the death and supposed resurrection of Jesus, none of it can be taken as absolute truth, while it lends more than just credence to the idea that none of it was written by the hand of God, as God would have surely stuck to just one version of the story.

Those of belief and faith will no doubt contend that the common thread is that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected, and that the details don’t matter, except the details DO matter if one is interested in getting to the truth.

The King James Bible contains 783,137 words. The original King James Version in 1611 contained 788,280. The New American Standard Version has 782,815 words. The English Standard Version has 757,439 words. The New Revised Standard Bible contains 895,891 words. The New International Bible has 727,969 words. If every word in the Bible was written by the hand of God, and every word in the Bible is 100% true, why then does every different version of the Bible contain a different number of words?

It’s all about varying translations, and varying interpretations with no two versions being the same…just as it has been from the very beginning of the tenets of the man-made religion known as Christianity.

For those still bound and determined to accept, on blind faith that every word in the Bible is 100% true, I’ll leave you with what the Bible itself says about the matter. You’ll find it in Hebrews 11:1 where it says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Belief, “an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists,” and faith, the “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof,” are not bad attributes to embrace unless they are embraced blindly without thought, reason and common sense. Blind faith, devoid of those things is possibly more dangerous than having no faith at all.

Copyright © 2021 Craig Andresen / thenationalpatriot.com all rights reserved

Be sure to Click LIKE below, and share it everywhere!!

************************************************************************************************

For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Diane Sori’s blog The Patriot Factor to read her latest article The Media, Pronouns, and Simple Solutions Ignored

*************************************************************************************************

RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS…LIVE!

Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 4th, from 7-8:30pm EST, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss ‘The Media, Pronouns, and Simple Solutions Ignored’; ‘Why The Gospel Truth Is Anything But’; and important news of the day. Hope you can tune in to RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on https://rspradio1.com. Click ‘LISTEN LIVE’ starting at 6:50 pm EST with show beginning at 7pm EST.