Bible Stories E-Book

Gavin Evans

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 522

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Beginning with the rise of modern Pentecostalism before tracking back 2,500-years, author and academic Gavin Evans traces the history of the Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In this book he explores the New Testament, Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an. Delving into recent archaeological research, Bible Stories presents evidence that tales such as those of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and also Moses, Joshua and the Exodus, were entirely mythological. Robust interrogation of the evidence allows Evans to go further still, casting doubt on the Jesus story and arguing that even if he did exist as an historical figure, we know next to nothing about him. As well as examining these key religious texts, Bible Stories also holds modern atheism to account - critiquing the work of some of its most ardent advocates, Evans rejects a militant approach and makes a compelling argument for a softer, more tolerant atheism.

Leseprobe

Also by Gavin Evans

White Supremacy: From Eugenics to Great ReplacementSkin Deep: Dispelling the Science of Race

 

 

Published in 2025 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-183773-232-6 ebook: 978-183773-233-3

Text copyright © 2025 Gavin Evans

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

Appointed GPSR EU Representative: Easy Access System Europe Oü, 16879218Address: Mustamäe tee 50, 10621, Tallinn, EstoniaContact Details: [email protected], [phone]

To Margie Orford, who has helped me in so many ways and has given so much added meaning to my life.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1Introduction: the religious balance sheet

Chapter 2Like a mighty wind

Chapter 3Giants, leviathans and talking donkeys

Chapter 4Archaeology and the Old Testament story

Chapter 5The making of the New Testament

Chapter 6Did Jesus exist?

Chapter 7The gospel truth

Chapter 8The unsung gospels

Chapter 9Paul: the founder of Christianity

Chapter 10Constantine and the Holy Trinity

Chapter 11Mary, Mary quite contrary

Chapter 12The penitent prostitute

Chapter 13Heaven and the halfway house

Chapter 14A brief history of Hell

Chapter 15Raptures and revelations

Chapter 16Two Zionisms

Chapter 17The Bible and the Qur’an

Chapter 18Beyond the Bible: the case for a softer atheism

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

PREFACE

My memories of God began in Diep River, Cape Town, from the age of two when my brother and I would be taken from our cottage alongside the church to hear my clergyman father in action.

Bruce was born Jewish, the son of Roy, a tall motor racing driver who had fought in the First World War, and Lili, a short, intellectual woman, whose family were steeped in Zionism (her Polish-born mother was a founder member of South Africa’s first Zionist organisation). Roy died of lung cancer when Bruce was a child, so his mother was his main influence and she was an atheist, as he was until he met my ‘born-again’ Danish-South African mother, prompting an overnight conversion and a mission to save souls. He still called himself Jewish, retained his ardent Zionism, used Yiddish phrases, but he was convinced Jesus was the Messiah.

Before I was five, my mother read us C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and we didn’t need telling that the lion was Jesus and the witch was Satan. Our parents told stories about this lion, and there were more at Sunday School, sermons at church, lessons in Bible Class, talks about him in the Christian Union at school and at Christian holiday camps and youth groups, along with nightly bedtime Bible readings, helped along by Scripture Union booklets and private prayers to the one who was a special friend.

At the age of eight, I asked Jesus to be my ‘personal saviour’ when I attended a Youth Fellowship camp with my brother and father. I ‘invited Jesus into my life’ and was ‘born again’, but didn’t feel different afterwards and didn’t tell anyone – which I later attributed to an emotional dead zone prompted in part by the peculiarities of my upbringing, with a mother whose love was remote. So, I kept quiet about this new thing, and when I had momentary flashes of doubt, they were quashed by citing to myself 1 Corinthians 3:19: ‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.’ The one who knew all was Jesus. He knew our ‘every secret thing’. He’d once walked the earth but now lived in heaven. He could intervene in our physical world, but only sometimes, when our prayers coincided with his unfathomable will.

So, Jesus was at the core of a magical realm that felt real – black magic from the devil, white magic from God, who was at the apex of it all with Jesus alongside him (who was also part of God) and his Holy Spirit blowing his will like a mighty wind wherever needed. On the other side, with his base in hell, was Satan, the fallen angel, and all his hellish minion of demons and ghosts intent on spreading evil and plotting our demise. Then there was us – whom God so loved that he gave us his son to die a hideously painful death so that our souls could be saved, with the rider that we could only be with him if we accepted Jesus as our personal saviour – otherwise our souls belonged to Satan and we would go to hell for eternity, which is why we had a duty to bring others to Jesus, away from the clutches of the devil.

Satan-Devil-Lucifer-hell loomed large. When I was ten, I caught the flu: my temperature soared, I became delirious and thought I was being sentenced to an eternity in hell and that no one could save me. It happened again during a bout of tick-bite fever soon after – I was bound for hell and there was nothing my mother could do to keep me from this destiny, separated from the love of Jesus for eternity. I cried tears of despair. Heaven, cocooned in God’s love, never felt thrilling, but fear of hell was enough to keep me in line.

The high point in all this fervour came when I was thirteen and visiting a ‘Jesus People’ coffee bar with my brother and a friend. We were coaxed by an older lad, who told us we needed to be ‘baptized in the Holy Spirit’. So, we followed him to cushioned-covered room where he began praying in ‘tongues’. He instructed us to follow suit, and so we, too, began babbling away, convinced we’d been given this mystery language by the Holy Spirit, although, again, I felt emotionally numb.

It began to fracture in my mid-teens. First, like so many, I had conflict with my father over authority and independence, and once, when he started punching me after losing his rag, it boiled over. Finally, aged seventeen, on an aeroplane to Rio, en route to Texas where I would spend a year as an exchange student, I informed God in a little prayer that I was taking a break, and with that all the lurking doubts I had had about the Christian story rose to the surface. The ties that bound me to God were like synapses connecting my brain ever since birth, and it took the severing of parental power and the disembodiment of being in a tube above the clouds to find the will to break them. I needed the physical gap with my father before I could find the emotional and mental gap, the freedom and the courage, to make my move.

Something unexpected happened – the very thing that failed to occur when I was ‘born-again’ and ‘baptised in the spirit’ and had sung those hallelujah choruses in those youth groups. I experienced an epiphany, an overwhelming sense of relief. My eyes seemed to open, and I began to process all those latent thoughts that I’d been pushing aside.

At first, I settled on the absurdities of the beliefs I’d held for seventeen years, homing in on a series of infantile questions that had been lurking: When did we humans get souls? If Adam and Eve were the first, what of the cavemen before: no souls? And if we’re born into sin and the wages of sin are death, and the only route to salvation is Jesus, what of the rainforest people who have never heard of this? Do they go to hell? If not, surely it’s better to let everyone be a rainforest person by not telling them, so no one incurs the risk of saying no to Jesus? And why did this invisible magic man in the sky reckon his son dying was enough to cancel all our sins? And if Jesus was without sin, did he never get jealous, selfish, bad-tempered? What did he do with his sexual desire? If nothing, how could he be called human – the word made flesh? And why is it so important for God to get all this praise? He must think a lot of himself. And how do we know the Bible really is the word of God – who decided that?

For several years after this I called myself an agnostic and went nowhere near the Bible, perhaps a little afraid that it would beckon me back to the fold. But when I was 25, I was detained without trial for my anti-apartheid activity and held in a cell in Johannesburg prison. I was alone but established a communication system with regular prisoners on the floor below, sending packets of cigarettes in a pillowcase lowered with sheets tied together, and they would send me books. First to arrive was a book on Biblical archaeology, which, although written by a Christian, expressed doubt about the veracity of the Old Testament tales, including the exodus from Egypt. It was the first time I had read anything that questioned the basis of the Bible story I inherited, with its insistence that the Bible reflected real history and was all true and the word of God.

But the real surprise came in reading the Old Testament itself, with its tales of giants, leviathans, 900-year-old men, talking donkeys and so much more. Rather to my surprise, it seemed to resemble Greek legend rather than real history. And when I got through the Old Testament and onto the gospels, the first thing I noticed was that Matthew and Mark had different people listed as Joseph’s forebears.

When I was released, I left with a spark of a renewed fascination in the Bible – but this time not as the word of God but rather as a series of tales drawn from older faiths and blended with contemporary cultures to create something wonderfully alluring. This interest never waned, and four decades on this book is the result.

It starts with a glimpse at the state of Christianity today, focusing on its fastest-growing limb, Pentecostal evangelicalism. From there I move on to what I discovered in that detention cell in 1985 – the Old Testament story, which prompted the questions: who wrote it, why and when? I go on to consider whether Jesus existed as an historical figure, and, if he did, how much we really know about him, which leads to a deeper dive into the gospels, including those that never made the canonical cut. I also take a close look at some of the starring figures in the New Testament, the ‘virgin Mary’, ‘Mary Magdaline’ and the ‘apostle’ Paul.

As a child I feared hell and wondered whether I would really enjoy an eternity in heaven, so I devote two chapters to these destinations and another to contemporary evangelical Christian beliefs about the end of times with its rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, Second Coming and millennium of Christ’s rule. I also consider how this rapidly growing version of Christianity has come to the same conclusions about what is needed in Israel as that held by the most fervent Judea-and-Samaria Zionists, and how both religions, and their scriptures, had a profound influence on the content of the Qur’an.

In researching this book, I read and re-read the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur’an several times and devoured literally hundreds of books, academic (and other) articles on its subject matter. I also interviewed historians of the ancient world and discussed the content with intellectuals from a range of disciplines. There is a great deal of academic debate about many of the issues raised in these pages, but the perspectives of most of those whose ideas I canvassed is that scripture does not reflect history, or at least that the two frequently part ways.

My reading revealed that among the 56 per cent of the world’s population who describe themselves as adherents of the Abrahamic religions, most retain a literal version of their founder stories. In other words, they have similar beliefs on their scriptures to the ones I inherited growing up – that their words are God’s words and reflect real history. Within all three faiths, fundamentalist understandings of scripture are on the rise. So, much of the content of this book challenges the perceptions that are integral to evangelical Christianity in particular.

In the last chapter, I go beyond the scriptures and consider their common premise of a creator god and from there to the notion of the supernatural and argue the case against theism and deism. But although I no longer believe in a god, I have no evangelical fervour about my atheism and recognise that faith in a higher power helps many people through their lives.

What I am pushing against, however, is the view of scripture that it not only reflects truth but that all of its stories, claims and prescriptions are beyond dispute and that believers are bound to follow them, rather than that it is a blend of history and mythology that offers a guide for living (a view held by some more liberal believers).

Over the past few millennia, people’s ideas have changed about so much that affects how we live our lives, starting with morality, democracy, science and the cosmos, and more specifically our ideas on women, children, gay people and animals. There is danger in obeying the instructions of books written by men living between 2,150 and 2,750 years ago (Old Testament), 1,700 and 1,975 years ago (New Testament) and 1,400 years ago (Qur’an).

My hope is that this book will help to draw at least a few believers away from a literalist clinging to chapter and verse that has prompted so much brutality over the centuries, and continues to damage the lives of individuals, communities and nations today.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS BALANCE SHEET

If we peruse the history of Christianity, it would be all too easy to conclude it was one giant misstep for humankind.

Most religions have had their share of atrocities and abominable behaviour, but none can quite match the record of 2,000 years of the faith that started as a small Judaic sect known as The Way and went on to become the global institution of Christianity. So, it is worth extracting some sinful items from its tightly packed closet.

In the Catholic drawer we have two centuries of massacring Muslims in the Crusades (plus Orthodox Christians in Byzantium and Gnostic Christians in Languedoc) and several centuries of torture and execution of ‘heretics’ in the ‘Holy Inquisition’; their wealth grabbing sale of indulgences and the persecution of those who opposed it; their role in the genocide committed by the Conquistadors and others in the Americas; their collaboration with fascism (starting in 1929 when Pius XI called Mussolini ‘the leader sent by providence’, urging Catholics to vote fascist), which included assisting Nazi war criminals’ escape to Latin America, where they backed dictators. The massacre in the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 was carried out by a Catholic militia founded by a Nazi supporter. Hutu priests, nuns and bishops participated in the genocide of 600,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s with the complicity of parts of the French Catholic establishment. We could add to the dirty washing the Magdalene Laundries for ‘fallen’ Irish women whose babies were taken from them, the paedophile priest scandals that devastated the lives of tens of thousands of boys and girls, and the millions of girls forced into unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease by their ban on contraception.

Protestants have had less time, but their drawer is also full. Luther’s anti-Semitism had a profound impact on Germany, all the way to the Nazis who embraced his view on Jews whom he called the ‘devil’s people’ and ‘envenomed worms’, saying they should die, their synagogues should be burnt, their property seized and their homes smashed up. Calvin ran Geneva like the totalitarian he was, advocating the execution of heretics. Cromwell’s anti-Catholicism prompted him to invade Ireland, causing the deaths of a quarter of a million. James Joyce alluded to this in Ulysses: ‘What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the Bible text “God is love” pasted round the mouth of his canon?’, one of his characters asks. This was a prelude to 350 years of discrimination, violence and seizure of Catholic land. More recently, the Dutch Reformed Church provided the theological underpinning for apartheid, and American Protestants were behind Jim Crow.

In the shared Catholic/Protestant drawer, we have three centuries of witch burnings, participation in slavery, colonial conquest and genocide. More recently, we could include their assaults on people’s right to choose on homosexuality and abortion.

Orthodox Christians are not immune. Sticking to the twentieth century, we could dwell on their collusion with Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the right-wing military junta in Greece, the Serbian Orthodox Christian bombardment of Catholics in Croatia and the shelling and shooting of the mainly Muslim population of Sarajevo and other parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, including the massacre of 8,000-plus Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. This ethnic cleansing was backed by Greek and Russian Orthodox bishops and clergy. More recently, we have seen the Russian Orthodox Church backing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Church of the East supplied a quarter of the troops of the Mongol Empire, which plundered Eurasia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, displacing populations and spreading terror, panic and plague, including the Black Death. Estimates of the numbers killed in battles, sieges and massacres, and through their spread of disease, range between 20 and 60 million. Many of its leaders were Christians. In several tribes the religion was Christianity. Genghis Khan’s sons took Christian wives and his grandson was Christian. When the Mongols invaded Baghdad in 1258, most people were massacred but Christians were spared.

Put it together and we have quite a record of Christian ‘sin’, a record that no other religion can quite match (though several have tried). For tens of millions of people over the last 2,000 years, Christianity has brought little but pain, anguish and death. It has been a zone of hatred and intolerance from those on top and, so often, terror for those below.

And yet, and yet, and yet …

For the last 250 years, parts of the church have sided with the angels. Christians took a lead in the anti-slavery movement (although more were cheerleaders for slavery). Others helped form the first trade unions and were at the heart of campaigns for social justice. In Latin America, Catholic priests who took ‘an option for the poor’ and preached liberation theology were murdered for opposing dictators, while Protestant pastors helped lead the American civil rights struggle. In South Africa, Desmond Tutu was just one of hundreds of clergy who led from the front in the anti-apartheid struggle, as did many Imams, while those raised as Orthodox Jews played a disproportionate role within the white contingent of the anti-apartheid movement.

At an individual level, faith can give people a sense of purpose in life. Part of that might be to help the poor and oppressed as part of a supportive community, which can make people become kinder, more generous, less selfish. Some really do change their ways by reading the Bible or the Qur’an and being part of religious communities, reflecting on their motives and leading more examined lives. It can help to make them less materialistic and less discriminatory.

It is said that most of the world’s charitable giving comes from believers, often from churches, mosques, temples, synagogues and religious organisations. For some religions, there is an obligation to give – zakat in Islam, tzedakah in Judaism, and the tithe in Christianity. But for many religious people it flows from within, from the understanding of the need to help the poor, bereft and displaced, which they learn of from within their faith. For many religious-based charities this goes way beyond serving people of their own faith.

One example is the Muslim-led South African NGO ‘Gift of the Givers’, which since 1992 has offered disaster relief throughout South Africa and also in Gaza, Bosnia, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Nepal and many other countries, distributing more than $200 million in aid and helping to rebuild houses, women’s centres, nursery schools and distributing food and medical equipment. The charity was founded by a medical doctor, Imitiaz Ismail Sooliman, who said his instructions from his Sufi Turkish spiritual teacher were to ‘serve all people, of all races, religions, colours and classes, of any geographical location and of any political affiliation’ and to ‘serve them unconditionally – you will not expect anything in return’.1 He’s a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, but his charity does not appear to favour Muslim victims or to proselytise in any way.

This might sound like an argument for religious faith, but it’s not. It is an argument for embracing the possible value of religious belief even if one doesn’t share it. Appreciation for the positive role played by faith is unlikely to edge one back if one has abandoned belief. It can’t be retrieved by convenience or approval, nor can it be found that way. And it is worth acknowledging that by not believing we may lose a good deal – including the hope of seeing our loved ones again after death.

But there are also substantial dividends of a life unshackled by fear or hope of the everlasting. One benefit of ceasing to believe is that it frees us from the crutch of living for the future, nudging us to live in the present, in the here and now, and to appreciate that the purpose of living – the meaning of life – is to live.

What follows over the next seventeen chapters is not an attempt to excoriate or ridicule or undermine religious belief, but rather to understand it – and, in particular, how, why and when the Abrahamic scriptures emerged, and also to understand the belief systems that these scriptures prompted.

This book’s purpose is therefore not to dissuade anyone of their belief in God. Instead, its aim is to show that these scriptures were the works of flawed men who were creatures of their time and were not inspired by divine forces.

We start with how the followers of these flawed men helped to ensure that their faith expanded across the globe and continues to do this today.

_____________

1.‘Stronger Together: Gift of the Givers & Capitec Give Back’, The Insider SA, 10 March 2023.

Chapter 2

LIKE A MIGHTY WIND

Over the past 2,000 years, Christianity has sometimes expanded at the point of a spear or a gun, often through the diktat of an emperor or king. It has also grown through the pressure of cultural and familial osmosis. But to assume it has all been compulsion of one form or another would be to miss a significant element in its survival, reproduction and expansion: the desire to spread its message far and wide, to appeal to the hearts, minds and emotions of unbelievers and to win converts.

Evangelism has always been part of the Christian package, ever since the days of Paul. Spreading the gospel and bringing others to faith is an essential of Protestantism in particular, made possible by the invention of the printing press that prompted the distribution of the Bible in people’s own languages.

The version promoted by evangelicals is that every word of the Old and New Testaments was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Their evangelism is drawn from verses imploring disciples to spread the Word. In the closing section of Mark (perhaps written as late as the fourth century), the writer reports the supposed words of Jesus: ‘And he said to them: “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”’ Matthew’sJesus tells them: ‘And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.’ By then, according to Paul’s letter to the Romans, paraphrasing Isaiah, ‘every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall give praise to God’.

Much of the Catholic Church was no less literalist, even if some of its doctrines differed. It too evangelised through missionaries who followed in the wake of colonial conquerors or prepared the way for them (as did Protestant missionaries). They set up missions and churches and built schools to win converts, some based on the saying of the sixteenth-century Jesuit founder St. Ignatius Loyola: ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man’ – an ominous sentiment given the centuries of paedophile abuse that followed, including among Jesuits.

Protestant evangelism goes back to Luther with his promotion of the word of God in the vernacular. The idea was to strip Christianity back to its fundamentals from the days of Paul and the gospel writers. Their focus was on personal faith in Jesus rather than it being mediated through the church and its priests and saints. The branches of early Protestantism – Lutheranism, Calvinism and Protestant Anglicanism – had in common this idea that only the books and letters within the New and Old Testament canons were reliable, with the gospels given heightened significance, their words taken as instructions.

Protestant denominations sent out missionaries to convert the heathens in the colonies, and there were also waves of evangelism at home. George Eliot’s 1856 novel Adam Bede, written about the rural England of 1799, features a young Methodist preacher, Dinah Morris, based on Eliot’s own aunt. Dinah preaches in a style familiar to anyone who has attended a ‘born-again’ rally, beginning her open-air sermon by engaging her audience: ‘Dear friends. Let us pray for a blessing.’ She addresses God theatrically: ‘Speak to them, Lord; open their ears to my message; bring their sins to their mind and make them thirst for that salvation which Thou art ready to give.’ And off she goes, giving her testimony before telling them of the love of Jesus, his agony on the cross, and, finally, the conversion appeal: ‘Dear friends, come and take this blessedness; it is offered to you; it is the good news that Jesus came to preach to the poor.’2

But it was in the United States that revivalist preaching found its most fertile territory, partly because the Protestant dissenters, from the Mayflower onwards, forged their version of Christianity from scratch without fear of the Vatican (aided by a ban on immigration from Catholic countries). Biblical literalism was baked into the fabric of this emerging nation.

In the early days, Puritanism was leavened by intellectual aspiration, particularly among the Quakers, prompting the establishment of Harvard and Yale. But a less cerebral version can be traced to the First Great Awakening in the 1730s. It spread through Britain and its colonies, including the American settlements. There was a lull followed by a second wave at the end of century (captured by Eliot) and an even more aggressive wave following the Civil War.

They railed against contextual theology, liberalism, women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. As former slave and anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass wrote in 1845: ‘We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus … The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together.’3

At the forefront of this ‘Great Awakening’ were the Baptists, who had first sunk American roots in 1638, establishing the practice of adult baptism by immersion after conversion (rather than what they considered to be ‘unscriptural’ baptism of children). The Baptists grew rapidly in each of these revivals, particularly during the nineteenth century, but they split over slavery (in 1845), with the Southern Baptists supporting it, for which they only apologised 150 years later.

The rise of Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism is the main growth wing of contemporary Christianity – the part of the church that is expanding, attracting new converts and drawing older ones to their fold. It is also the prime proponent of the view that the Bible is the unerring word of God, to be taken literally, a view they share with Baptists, evangelical Anglicans and some other Protestants.

Pentecostals also share with Baptists the idea that salvation comes through individuals accepting Jesus as ‘personal saviour’ by ‘inviting’ him into their lives, followed by immersive baptism. And like most Baptists they embrace the end-of-times sequence of Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, Second Coming, millennium of Jesus’ rule on earth, and expect all this to start soon. But the Pentecostals introduced a unique element to their arsenal: the idea of the further post-conversion step of being ‘baptised in the Holy Spirit’.

This they drew from the Pentecost story in Acts whose writertells of the resurrected Jesus addressing his disciples: ‘For John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’ Later he reminds them: ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.’ Soon after, Jesus is ‘lifted up and a cloud took him out of their sight’, after which a pair of men in white robes reassure them that Jesus will return ‘in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’. When they’re huddled together in an upstairs room, ‘suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.’ These ‘uneducated and ordinary men’ then head off to preach the Good News and Peter is given another gift, healing a man lame from birth. Other mentions of tongues and healings appear in the letters of Paul.

The nineteenth-century revivalist wave saw Wesleyans within the ‘Holiness Movement’, some Baptists and other Protestants like the evangelist D. L. Moody, deciding that spiritual gifts and miracle working would return in the last days. They talked of ‘baptism in the Spirit’ as distinct from conversion. After converts were ‘born-again’, they could be regenerated in the spirit through a spiritual baptism. ‘Gifts of the spirit’ would follow. So, there were three stages: first, baptism into the body of Christ (salvation through conversion); second, water baptism by immersion; third, baptism in the Spirit (not required for salvation but strongly recommended).

Groups of Christians prayed for this experience, anticipating that like the disciples they’d receive such gifts. ‘Talking in tongues’ spread rapidly, along with a belief that this outpouring of the Spirit would revive the church throughout the world. This heralded the arrival of the Pentecostal movement, which split from the established Protestant denominations.

For an all-too brief spell, white and black Americans broke with convention by worshipping together, particularly in Los Angeles where the African American preacher William Seymour spread the Pentecostal message, starting what soon became known as the ‘Azusa Street revival’ in 1906. Over the next three years, thousands of converts began speaking in tongues and engaging in ecstatic worship in his assembly. However, it didn’t take long for racism to outmuscle ecstasy, and the movement split into white and black branches. The former included what became the largest of the Pentecostal denominations, the Assemblies of God, formed in 1914 by white Pentecostals who objected to black leaders.

In the early days of this anti-establishment movement, women were also prominent as lay leaders, pastors and missionaries, based on the belief that baptism in the spirit gave special powers that weren’t restricted to men. One was Elder Lucy Smith, an African American pastor and faith healer, who, in 1920, founded Chicago’s Langley Avenue All Nations Pentecostal Church, which had 3,000 members. Another was Sister Aimee (Aimie Semple McPherson), a Canadian evangelist and healer who founded the Four-Square Gospel church (also known as the ‘Full Gospel’ church) in 1923. And even later Pentecostal women were prominent, including Kathryn Kuhlman, who became perhaps the best-known ‘healer’ in America, holding mass healing and conversion crusades from the 1940s until her death in 1978.

But here, too, more traditional views prevailed. Verses from 1 Timothy on women’s subservience were cited, with the Pentecostal denominations opposing women in political or household leadership and requiring them to dress in a ‘feminine’ way, although most allowed women to speak, prophesise and heal in church, and in some cases to play leadership roles – the idea being that messages via the Holy Spirit took precedence.

Graduates of the Azusa Street awakening spread their message abroad, starting with Africa – Liberia in the north and South Africa in the south (where the American missionaries, who had experienced a racially integrated Los Angeles assembly, insisted on segregation). They extended their reach to south and central America, winning converts from the Catholics, and to India and elsewhere in Asia, Europe and Australia. The early missionaries assumed they wouldn’t have to learn new languages because the Holy Spirit would give them the required ‘tongues’, but they were soon forced to reconsider.

It spread most rapidly within poorer communities perhaps because the ecstasy of ‘Spirit-based’ worship was a release from the grind of poverty. In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, set in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl in the 1920s, the baptism experience of Uncle John is described after the ‘Holy Sperit’ touched him: ‘Why he got to plungin’ and jumpin’. Jumped over a feeny bush as big as a piana. Over he’d jump, an’ back he’d jump, howlin’ like a dog-wolf in moon time. Well, Pa seen him ’an Pa, he figgers he’s the bes’ Jesus-jumper in these parts.’4

Among black Pentecostals it also represented a return to the past, with the slave-imported spirit-world traditions of transcendent worship finding their way into their services.

However, those from the Assemblies of God tended to frown on the extremity of those further down the chain, which included the handling of poisonous snakes (based on the belief that the Lord would protect them from their venom).

By the mid-1970s, baptism in the spirit was no longer restricted to Pentecostal denominations. Through the ‘Charismatic movement’ it spread to other Protestant denominations, and even to parts of the Catholic Church.

Today, Pentecostal churches are the fastest-expanding component of Christianity, with close to 300 million followers – 44 per cent based in Africa, 37 per cent in the Americas and 16 per cent in Asia and the Pacific. Their prime areas of advance are sub-Saharan Africa and South America. Even within the broad church Anglican community, the charismatic evangelicalism promoted through the Alpha courses is the growth zone within a declining base.

Pentecostals joined Catholics and Baptists in campaigning against abortion and homosexuality and in favour of traditional roles for women and ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ approaches to discipline. These beliefs helped herd their white American component to the political right. Exit polls in 2016 and 2024 showed 81 per cent of white evangelicals supported Trump. His stand against abortion was seen as more significant than his personal morals.

Pentecostals have also played a significant role in leading evangelicals back to a pre-scientific belief that the world was created in a literal six days – to the point where the contrary view (that ‘day’ meant ‘period of time’) is seen as relativist, liberal and non-Biblical. In some American evangelical churches, acceptance of a six-day creation is viewed as an article of faith.

This has been bubbling away ever since Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin had their papers about evolution through natural selection read at the Linnean Society in London in 1858, after which evolutionary ideas came to the fore in public life, prompting fierce resistance among evangelicals in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The most publicised example was the 1925 ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’. A Tennessee teacher was accused of breaking the ban on teaching evolution in state schools. His trial pitted a conservative politician, William Jennings Bryan, who believed the Bible trumped human knowledge, against a famous liberal lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who queried Bryan’s idea that the world started in 4004 BCE before interrogating his belief that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish, that Joshua made the sun stand still and Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Darrow read the passage where God cursed the serpent to remain on its belly and eat dust. Bryan said this really happened, so Darrow enquired: ‘Have you any idea how the snake went before that time? Do you know whether he walked on his tail – or not?’5 Bryan flew into a rage, the court was adjourned and the jury found against the teacher, fining him $100, later overturned on a technicality.

Publicity from the trial ridiculed Bryan’s beliefs, yet American evangelicals have hardly moved in the century since, with six-day creationism rallying over the last few decades, pumped by Pentecostals. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 40 per cent of all Americans believed God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago, including 56 per cent of Protestants.

Such ideas seem to open people to other unscientific beliefs, which may help explain the overlap between evangelicals and conspiracy theories. During the Covid pandemic, there were regular social media posts from Christian ‘influencers’ linking the vaccine with the devil, even claiming that masks resembled the ‘Mark of the Beast’. A 2021 Washington Post-ABC poll found that 44 per cent of American white evangelicals said they would not get vaccinated.

Another belief that spread among Pentecostals, promoted by millionaire ‘televangelist’ preachers, is the ‘gospel of prosperity’ – based on the idea that God blesses those he favours while ignoring verses on helping the poor and about rich men going to hell. There have long been preachers eager to make a quick buck out of hellfire messages, but this became more marked during the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, with its promotion of the idea that greed is good, wealth is a signifier of worthiness, and the federal state and its welfare programmes are for the feckless. Televangelists see poverty as a sign of God’s disapproval and wealth as a sign of approval. This prosperity gospel has taken off in the American super-churches, but is also prominent in sub-Saharan Africa, while in Latin America the rise of Pentecostalism serves as a hefty counterweight to the ‘Gospel of the Poor’ tradition of the Catholic Church.

Conversion and the anti-intellectual tradition

Successive waves of evangelical revivalism from the late-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries fostered an anti-intellectual tradition within American Protestantism, which in theological terms might be seen in literalist fundamentalism, apocalyptic tendencies and the anti-science creationism that has long thrived among evangelicals. But it is all too easy for those outside of the evangelical fold to assume those inside it are uneducated people, so tied to their version of the ‘Lord’s Book’ that they refuse to explore any hinterlands.

Reality is more complicated. Some evangelical fundamentalists were scholars. Oxford and Cambridge universities have long been centres of Anglican evangelicalism, pumping out converts who join the ministry. For example, Nicky Gumbel, the charismatic evangelical clergyman who was behind the Alpha courses used in many UK Anglican churches around the world, was ‘converted’ while at Cambridge. In the 1990s there were professors in Bible studies who had emerged from the Plymouth Brethren at Oxford, Cambridge, Sheffield, Liverpool and Queens. And in the evangelical Theological Colleges where young people are trained to become ordinands, most learn ancient Greek and church history, get to know their Bibles inside out, and are taught to debate and engage with ideas, albeit within a tightly defined prism.

An example of someone considered an intellectual within the evangelical fold was the Rugby and Cambridge-educated Anglican minister, theologian and author John Stott, who wrote more than 50 books, most promoting the gospel message. Stott, the learned Anglican evangelical, worked closely with the firebrand American Southern Baptist preacher Billy Graham in promoting the ‘ecumenical movement’ (bringing together evangelicals from different denominations). He encouraged his university-educated followers to help out at Graham’s ‘crusades’ by volunteering to counsel those in the audience who responded to Graham’s alter calls and encouraging them to ‘give their lives to Jesus’.

This marriage of Oxbridge-educated former public schoolboys and their mentor with the premier born-again preacher from the American south made for an interesting blend of traditions, which sometimes meant that eyes needed to be diverted. For instance, it might have escaped their attention that the early crusades of Graham, a Southern Baptist from North Carolina, were racially segregated, though he later integrated them.

Graham backed Richard Nixon over the Catholic John F. Kennedy in 1960 and was heard in the 1972 Nixon Tapes agreeing that Jews had a ‘stranglehold’ over the media, which did not stop him supporting Israel – neither the first nor last time anti-Semitism and pro-Zionism coexisted (though his ally, Stott, was consistently anti-Zionist). Billy also supported the Vietnam and Iraq wars and backed Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, the Mormon Mitt Romney over fellow Protestant Barack Obama, and the ‘pussy grabbing’ Trump over Hillary Clinton.

Yet today, Graham seems anodyne compared with what followed – a man eager to ‘break bread’ with those who had different ideas. This was also the rationale of the ‘Charismatic Movement’, which brought together Catholics, High Church Anglicans, evangelical Anglicans and Pentecostals in praying in tongues and other forms of ecstatic worship, prompting a less dogmatic approach to Christian worship, and sometimes to aspects of theology.

Despite this ecumenical desire to reach across the aisle, which Stott and Graham encouraged, the basic principles of their shared evangelism were, and have remained, steadfast – emerging from a view that all of the Bible is directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and therefore that it can contain no contradictions.

For many, these beliefs come from being raised from childhood with a bedrock certainty about the immutability of Biblical truth. If you follow the parental path, there’s inevitability about choices made. But for others, faith arrives with a conversion experience, one that often starts with a personal crisis, prompting an urge for a different life. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it in his book on conversion, ‘there has to be something there to be converted’. And the born-again experience is all about a desire for certainty of purpose in a future life. Conversion reassures the convert that ‘there is an essential life that one could be leading’.6

It offers a euphoric forgiveness – the slate of sins wiped free – and this euphoria may linger until conscience pricks and the sins of a previous life find their way back, along with some of the behaviours of the past. Further reinforcements of pastural reassurance and prayer are required to stave off back-sliding despair, but like so many reassurances, it has, says Phillips, its ‘own kind of tyranny’. Contrary ideas (such as, for Christians, about Bible history, or more generally, about the nature of God) may be too threatening to contemplate because they unsettle and disrupt the re-assembled sense of self. Rigid certainty takes hold – an anti-intellectual fortress mentality repelling challenge and branding challengers as enemy forces.

Within the ranks of evangelicals are people who, in other areas of life, may be considered genuine thinkers or creators. Some are scientists, medical specialists, professors of history, classics, English and psychology. Some are statesmen. Others are artists and musicians. But they all claim to have been born again, to have ‘asked Jesus’ into their lives, even if they were raised as Christians. Their freethinking usually stops at the door of their Christian belief. The inclination to ask questions, to doubt, to explore intellectually, is frozen within the walls of faith.

Part of that faith is the view that the Bible is seen as entirely true and therefore as entirely consistent, which is why, for example, evangelicals see no problem in marrying prophesies made 700 years apart and conducting their textual gymnastics to fashion their preferred narratives. Because this is so central to their faith, they tend to show little interest in making a serious perusal of how, when and why the books of the Bible were written. Either that or they rely on their own Bible scholars to rework that history to suit their ends. For evangelicals, Biblical literalism is where intellectual enquiry closes down.

Phillips says of this conversion experience that ‘it may be that one of the ways the new makes a name for itself is through the rhetoric of hyperbole.’7 This hyperbole can assume apocalyptic tones. If, through conversion, you come to see the trajectory of the world as going against your sense of right and wrong, and you’ve turned your back on this world, then the idea of imminent punishment for the wicked and reward for the faithful may be welcomed, not least the reassuring prospect of being part of a select group lifted into the air to meet the son of God, while everyone left behind goes through a catastrophic, frightening hell on earth.

But even if the Rapture, Second Coming and thousand years of Christ’s rule is not your pre-occupation, even if you reject six-day creationism and are less drawn to babbling away in ‘tongues’, you may still be inclined to embrace the basic package of evangelicalism: the view that the Bible is the unimpeachable Word of God, literally true in every respect and a book that is alive and speaks to you through its verses.

It is to those verses where we will next turn, starting with the Old Testament.

_____________

2.George Eliot, Adam Bede, Wordsworth Classics, 1997, p 19–22.

3.Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Collins Classic, 2020, p 124.

4.John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin Modern Classics, 2014, p 31.

5.Donald McRae, The Old Devil: Clarence Darrow: The World’s Greatest Trial Lawyer, Simon & Schuster, 2009, pp 219–220.

6.Adam Phillips. On Wanting to Change, Penguin, 2021, p 68.

7.Ibid, p 17.

Chapter 3

GIANTS, LEVIATHANS AND TALKING DONKEYS

If you read Emily Wilson’s magnificent translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, it is worth pausing on her substantial introductory discussions of their context and history. You may be struck by parallels between The Odyssey and Genesis, the first bits of which were written around the time of the Homeric epics. The Odyssey weaves realistic-sounding practical details about ordinary life with fantastical tales about goddesses, witches, cannibals, a mythical river that encircles the world and a land where the spirits of dead heroes live forever. The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible)includes tales of a walking, talking snake, walking, talking gods, half-god giants, 900-year-old men, a woman turned into a pillar of salt, two immaculate conceptions, two bodily ascents into heaven, a talking donkey, a fire-breathing leviathan, a man whose God divides the sea, another whose God could make the sun and moon stand still, and so on.

Parallels can also be found in authorship. It was once thought Moses was the author of Genesis and most of the rest of the Torah. It was also thought that a blind bard called Homer was the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Yet today, most historians of the ancient world believe that neither Moses nor Homer existed as historical figures.

TheIliad, The Odyssey and Genesis were texts based on oral traditions. Recent research suggests the roots of The Iliad and The Odyssey lie in poetic song going back centuries before arriving in written form. Wilson notes that the tenor of the verse shows marks of those oral roots and that its inconsistencies ‘could mark the text’s emergence from multiple different earlier versions’.8 How it happened that these sung stories became Homer’s epic poems is unknown – a folk poet learning to write, an illiterate singer collaborating with scribes? It’s also not clear at what point a written form emerged and how this text evolved.

The same could be asked of Genesis and the rest of the Torah (first five books), and the answers are opaque. We assume that around the time of King Josiah (640–609 BCE) the Hebrew Bible’s books began to take shape. There might eventually have been one scribe who put all the pieces of Genesis together into one reasonably coherent story, but it seems more likely there were many. And the same applies to The Iliad and The Odyssey – the current versions may have had the hand of someone called Homer, but there’s no evidence of that, and it is more likely to be the result of many contributors, emerging in the seventh or eighth century BCE (and by the sixth century BCE both epics had become part of the cultural milieu of Athens).

One more analogy, relating to detail: claims are made on historical veracity based on the specificity of information – the level of detail about, say, Solomon’s temple, and the everyday tales of brutality, drunkenness, jealousy and deceit and war. Yet this is the stuff of storytelling. Every playwright, bard or epic poet knows that if you want your tale to sound authentic, you need detail. If this relates to real places, objects, situations, emotions, so much the better. Homer does this all the time – a mother making a bread-and-cheese lunch for her children, the delight in a hot bath, men playing checkers – and some of his key places are also real, including Troy and Ithaca. So it is with the Bible, and the detail alone gives little clue as to the veracity of the characters or situations.

The Ancient Greeks believed that in days gone by their gods and goddesses walked among the people, just as the Hebrews believed of Yaweh. Those who do well in these tales, like Odysseus, show respect for the gods and goddesses, with regular sacrifices and diligent obedience, just like the Hebrews of the Torah. Those who disobey come to sticky ends in both.

This is not to say that we can draw simple analogies between texts from different parts of the ancient world. One obvious difference between the Torah and Greek epics relates to the reception of these stories. It is possible the Homeric epics were once believed to be real, but by the time they entered the cultural realm of Athens, they were regarded as made-up stories featuring real gods. In contrast, it would seem most recipients of the stories that made up the Torah believed both the historical stories and the gods were real.

Still, the ancient Hebrew legends that led to the Old Testament do have more in common with the myths and tales from other parts of the ancient world than believers are inclined to think. Often, they borrowed from each other. For example, the story of Noah’s flood, which may have been composed as late as the third century BCE, was borrowed from a Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh, written perhaps a thousand years earlier.

The ancient world was full of tales that, over time, grew historical legs. The Roman foundation legend of Romulus and Remus, twin brothers born of the Vestal Virgin Rhea Sylvia (who was raped by the god Mars) and suckled by a wolf, started as mythological, but that did not stop the Romans from believing the surviving twin, Romulus, was an historical figure and the real founder of Rome. Or there is China’s foundation legend of the Yellow Emperor (Gongsun Xuanyuan), known as the Yellow God of the Northern Dipper, a mythical figure credited with moulding China into a centralised state and inventing everything of worth – writing, wheeled carts, bows and arrows. He is also given 111 years in history (2699 to 2588 BCE).

So it is with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua and the rest – as we shall see later in this chapter. Theirs are stories that start in mythology and end up as perceived history.

Old Testament mythology

If you read the Bible cover to cover without the prior presumptions of religious faith, it soon becomes clear how much of it is based in myths and legends.

It starts with the creation of the heavens and earth, which is where the problems begin if you pay attention. Many believers are told by their preachers that there are no contradictions in the Bible (although some say the six ‘days’ of creation are ‘periods of time’, which could be billions of years). You may assume it’s a single narrative, but if you read carefully, you’ll notice two distinct tales. In the six-day version of Genesis 1 an omnipotent God creates ‘humankind in his image … male and female he created them’. But in the one-day Genesis 2 version, a fallible God forms the man from the dust of the ground, then decides his ‘Adam’ needs a helper whom he creates from the man’s rib while asleep. But this more fallible God seems to have it in for Adam’s helper – Eve’s curiosity is the source of the ‘fall of man’.

These versions of God have their own names (footnotes inform you that in Genesis 1 he is ‘Elohim’ and 2 is ‘Yaweh’). You may notice the physical presence of Yaweh, who plants the Garden of Eden and makes Adam and Eve garments from skins. They hide after they eat the forbidden fruit and hear Yaweh walking in the garden. Unlike Elohim, he feels human but with supernatural powers. You may also find it curious that while Adam and Eve are the first people on God’s earth, their two surviving sons, Cain and Seth, find wives in different areas, suggesting others were around.

If you press on, you’ll spot many other inconsistencies, like Noah’s flood which lasts 40 days but then, a few verses on, 150 days. Or one pair of each animal was taken into the arc in chapter six, but seven pairs of the ‘clean’ animals in chapter seven. Or in Exodus, Moses and Aaron are said to be fourth generation descendants of Levi. However, Moses’ general, Joshua, is a twelfth-generation descendant of Levi’s brother, Joseph.

If you started out assuming unerring truth you may also find cause for a self-deprecating smile along the way. When God curses the serpent who tempts Eve, he tells him, ‘Upon your belly you shall go …’, which suggests this talking snake previously had legs. In Genesis 5, you read that Enoch walked with God until ‘he was no more, because God took him’ (up to heaven, presumably). In Genesis 6, you may pause on the bit that says ‘the Nephilim were on earth in those days – and also afterwards’ – the offspring of the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’ who were ‘the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown’. Nephilim were giants. In Genesis 11, we learn the whole world spoke the same language, but they get above their station by building a sky-high tower, prompting God to confuse people by giving them different languages.

Magic features throughout the Old Testament. In Exodus,there’s the story of Moses stretching out his hand over the sea and God dividing it so that the Israelites could escape the Egyptians, and in Joshua, God answers his prayer based on the perception that the sun revolved around the earth: ‘Sun stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped until the nation took vengeance against their enemies.’

Some of God’s servants have special magical gifts. With the prophet Elijah, it’s fire. In competition with the priests of Baal he calls down fire from heaven for his water-drenched sacrifice (then orders the slaughter of 450 Baal priests). He repeats the fire from heaven trick, destroying Ahaziah’s soldiers. Finally, after making a path through the water with his mantle, a chariot of fire separates him from his protégé, Elisha, and he ascends to heaven – in a whirlwind. Meanwhile, a group of small boys jeer at Elisha, saying, ‘Go away baldhead!’ He curses them ‘in the name of the Lord’ who sends two she-bears who maul 42 of them.

Another magical animal is Balaam’s talking donkey in Numbers. Terrified by a sword-bearing angel in the road, the donkey refuses to budge so Balaam beats it. The donkey asks Balaam why. Balaam insults the Donkey, who replies: ‘Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I been in the habit of treating you in this way?’ The Lord then opens Balaam’s eyes, and he sees the angel and Balaam repents.

On the subject of animals, the book of Job devotes nine verses to the strength and power of the Behemoth, whose ‘bones are tubes of bronze’, whose limbs are like ‘bars of iron’ and ‘only its Maker can approach it with a sword’, and then devotes a chapter to the terrors of the fire-breathing Leviathan who terrifies the gods. Another God-chosen animal is the giant fish which swallows the errant prophet Johah who lives in its belly for three days until the Lord orders it to vomit him up. Among evangelicals, there is periodic discussion on the breed of fish involved (that a man could be swallowed whole and survive three days is no problem because all the stories in the Old Testament are taken as truth).

If you collate all this, and still insist on the Bible being literally true in all respects, then you’ll have to believe the world once had just one language and was patrolled by half-god giants who lived to be 900-plus (969 for Enoch’s son Methuselah) until, at the time of Noah, God decided a lifespan of 120 would do and flooded the earth to cleanse his stock – although for the next few generations some reached the 600 range, going down to 175 by the time of Abraham. And that God could make fire-breathing monsters, magical fish and bears and donkeys who speak to their owners, a God who could divide the sea and make the sun stand still.

If, however, you read more widely, dipping into Greek and Babylonian literature. and have doubts, you might conclude that this world is more mythological than historical.

Modern morality and ancient gods

Evangelicals and other Christians who read the Bible literally, including the Old Testament, may embrace the magic as the way God revealed himself to his people in those days, but then they come up against what seems a more profound problem: a supposedly Godly morality that feels deeply immoral to us today. The tricky bits are often explained in terms of God revealing his grace to his people in terms they would understand, eventually leading to the ‘new commandments’ from Jesus, and yet that doesn’t quite cover the vindictiveness of Yaweh and his chosen, which should disturb those raised with the idea that God is Love. He and they seem to be so jealous, cruel, violent and capricious. If, instead, we read these texts without the presumptions of faith, we might consider that their stories of God’s justice and their instructions for everyday living emerged from a world where ideas about rights for women, children, slaves and animals were unheard of. What follows is a few examples that should illustrate why it is not a good idea to absorb its content as unerring truth.