Which parts of the bible? Like, Jesus’s birth, or the parts where there are two wholly different accounts of Judas’s death, or where Elijah had 42 children mauled to death by bears, or where God killed the priests under Moses for not offering the right kind of sacrifice, or where God encouraged Jepthah to sacrifice his daughter?

You’ve certainly raised good issues. They do need dealing with.

Not sure what your point is about ‘Jesus birth’ (say more if you want), but the two different accounts of Judas’s death are the kind of thing that give the Bible credibility. The Bible doesn’t read like a ‘fit up job’. It reads like different accounts of eyewitnesses. And that’s the thing about witness testimony – every witness is different. Each occupies a different place and space, so their perspective and the things that interest them will be different. This means that any judge or jury must discern where difference of testimony means contradiction or else separate but complementary elements that fit together.

So, yes, at first blush, there appears to be a contradiction between Acts 1 and Matthew 27. In Acts 1:18 Judas falls down in a field he buys with the tainted silver he’s received for informing on Jesus. His body bursts open in the middle and his bowels gush out. In Matthew 27:5 we’re told that he goes and hangs himself. It seems like a contradiction but it doesn’t need to be.

What happens when a person hangs himself and the body is left in the hot sun day after day? The body goes putrid and falls apart. I’m sure for some of the surrounding community the memorable event would have been the point where the skin burst and the guts poured out. For others, it will be the more objective and total perspective – Judas hung himself.

Regarding Jephthah, you’re absolutely right to highlight this as an awful story and an abhorrent thing. Jephthah’s vow was stupid. But this just illustrates the verdict of the book of Judges that, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6, 21:25). We’re reminded repeatedly that there was no King (18:1; 19:1; 21:25). It was an unruly period.

However, in order to know that the Bible doesn’t necessarily approve – you’ve got to read the story in it’s context. And the Bible does this all the time. We’re shown the actions of people and we have to draw right conclusions from what we know elsewhere (so Lot and his daughters). In this instance both the editorial voice of Judges and the wider teaching of the Bible on keeping vows (eg Deuteronomy 23:21-23, Proverbs 20:25, Ecclesiastes 5:4) condemn the hasty, rash vow. Jephthah was a fool both to make the vow and to keep the vow which bears out the testimony of the editorial voice and verdict that “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” It was a time when people ‘self legislated’ apart from God.

Importantly, at no point does God condone what Jephthah does.

Elisha (not Elijah) will have to answer to God for his actions (2Kings 2:23) as we all will. But before we rush to judgment on him, it’s worth reflecting that he was God’s prophet. He brought the voice of God to the people. To disregard him was to disregard and dishonour God.

Some time ago I heard a British Army man describe how he brought a mobile infantry group to liberate a Nazi concentration camp. It was gripping radio. He described walking amongst bewildered, emaciated Jews and dead corpses. He walked around the back of the camp to see some young German boys with guns shooting and torturing Jewish women in hideous ways that I won’t repeat in this forum. He spoke very calmly about taking out his revolver and shooting them. One tried to run away by climbing a wire fence. Again, he shot him. This story and, more recently, the Jamie Bulger story, shows that sometimes children are so vile that they deserve extreme punishment.

The British soldiers response was completely understandable. These children were dishonouring a person made in the image of God by murder and torture. We understand that. But somehow, we find it less of a problem when a person dishonours God himself. But this should grieve us far more.

We have to remember that God is the one who made the Sun that we can’t even look at with our eyes. He is great and wonderful and deserves to be worshipped in the way He determines – not on our terms. So, whether people are punished in this age for presumption as Nadab and Abihu were for offering unauthorised fire (Leviticus 10:1-4) or the age to come, we all will have to give account before God at the final judgment.

I know this is out of fashion and doesn’t seem particularly cool. But it’s entirely fair. After all, we’re God’s creatures made by him for his own glory.

You know, I saw this ridiculous poster outside a church recently, and as someone who managed to free myself of the brainwashing Christianity imposes on its adherents I found myself getting irate at the sheer audacity of the poster’s message.

Then I literally walked right around the corner and what did I see? A young boy of no more than 10 years busking with a guitar and singing.

He was singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

All is right in the world. This life-destroying mind virus of a religion is dying out and it’s to the benefit of everyone.

Atheism isn’t going to do Christianity in. Indifference is. Christians like to be attacked. It makes them think they are important. What they can’t stand is being yawned at.

I saw a lot of that when I was living in Japan. Most Japanese have as good a knowledge of basic Christian doctrine as many Westerners, but far less than 1% of them actually believe it. When a missionary goes to work on them — I’ve seen this in person — they are polite and perhaps interested, but utterly fail to see the relevance of it all. If they were impolite enough to express their inner thoughts, it would go something like this: “Who cares about your god? We’ve done fine with our own, thanks very much.”

One of the key arguments demonstrating the human scope and entirely human authorship of the Bible is that it remains fixed within the confines of the average human being in a province of the Roman Empire. For Jesus and his poorly or moderately educated contemporaries, Rome was all there was. It was not just the center of the world, it WAS the world. But educated Romans knew that there was another world the same size and level of civilization on the Indian subcontinent, and still another centered in China, and societies far across the seas in the Americas. The Bible is blissfully ignorant of all of this. In particular, at the time of the career of Jesus, there were fifty million people living under the rule of the Han dynasty in China. It was a time of religious turmoil there, the perfect time to introduce a new faith, as a matter of fact. Millennial movements were widespread among the common people, worshiping such deities as a deified Laozi and Xiwangmu, the “Queen Mother of the West” (wonder if the Catholics have ever done anything with that suggestive title?).

And the Christian god ignored them. Rome gets twelve disciples, one of whom, IIRC, later went to India, where he was ignored. China gets bleep-all. The most important news in the history of the world, Christians insist, but it takes SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS to get to China, and even then, is introduced in an obscure and unappealing form mostly followed by foreign residents (Nestorian Christianity).

These undisputable historical facts mean one of two things:
1) God hates the Chinese, or at least doesn’t care about them.
2) The Bible doesn’t mention China, and Jesus’ message and disciples don’t go there, because the Bible is a purely human document, Jesus and the disciples have a purely human message, and so they share in the limitations of the class of people they came from at the time they were born. (Educated Romans knew about China; Palestinian peasants didn’t.)

Of course you could say that god has a mysterious plan. But that’s just your declaration. You could commit any crime imaginable and say it was part of god’s mysterious plan, too.

Hm, no edit function. One slip in my message above — I wasn’t trying to imply the Romans had discovered America:

“….and still another centered in China, and societies far across the seas in the Americas” should of course be, “…. and still another centered in China. There were also societies far across the seas in the Americas.”

The Romans were human with human limitations, and so they didn’t as yet know about the Americas. God doesn’t have that excuse.