Real Truth About Religion: August 2015

Jesus was a false prophet for predicting his end of the world scenario would happen in his generation. Pretty much all it takes to come to this conclusion is reading Jesus’ overview of his end of the world scheme (Mark 13:1-30, Matthew 24:1-34, & Luke 21:5-32 which includes his return with his army of angels to set billions of people on fire) and noting that he says it’s *all* going to happen to his generation (e.g. Mark 13:30, Matthew 24:34, & Luke 21:32).

All. His generation.

You can read it over and over again, and it’s always going to say that. It’s said it for 2,000 years and it’ll say that for 2,000 more. And it’ll still be dead wrong. One would think that’s pretty important. This is a classic paradigm-killing issue all on its own. In light of Jesus’ failed prophecy, if he hadn’t been crucified, Moses certainly would have had us stone him to death (Deuteronomy 18:20-22).
See also: My argument map on the issue.

Almost as important (given the real impact in real people’s lives) is that most of Jesus’ ethics are entangled in the idea that the end is just around the corner. Why does Jesus praise people for leaving their families and selling all of their possessions (Matthew 8:18-22, 19:27-29, Luke 9:57-62, & 14:33), letting people walk all over them rather than trying to solve the problems (Matthew 5:38-42, Luke 6:29-36, Matthew 18:21-22, & Luke 17:3-5), ignoring the imposition of evil governments (Matthew 22:17-21), and why does he so highly recommend not bothering to get married if they can at all help it (Matthew 19:10-12)?

Well, it’s because his followers were supposed to be expecting to be beamed up to the proverbial mothership anytime in the 1st century (see: Mark 9:1, 13:30, Matthew 10:23, 16:28, 23:36, 24:34, Luke 9:27, & 21:32). Completely irresponsible advice to give if the end isn’t actually near, but Jesus clearly taught that the end was near. This makes his teachings largely irrelevant even whilst poor modern Christians may try to circle that square in their practical living.

The reality is that individuals struggle with Jesus’ extremist teachings on their own, verse to verse. Denominations lead large portions of the public to believe we are in the end times still. Congregations are led to ruin with specific predictions of the end times. People quit lucrative jobs, don’t pursue careers in the first place, invest nothing into savings, and squander all sorts of sustainment opportunities because of these teachings and the modern repackagings of them. Many members of the U. S. Congress are infected with some variant of this meme. And the U. S. as partially a result of this general theme from Jesus is largely held back from forming a hardy majority in favor of actually comprehensively acting on things like climate change. In their view the world was *meant* to be destroyed.

This crap is straight from the literary lips of Jesus. Why doesn’t this impact his status as the untouchable golden boy? If he were anyone else it would. One wonders just how fucking irresponsible, wrong, and harmful you have to be in order to get a demerit here? Jesus deserves the dishonorable status of a Harold Camping cult leader for guiding his (initial) flock to ruin, but even many of those who know about this are still trying to salvage some meaningful element of Jesus’ reputation. Why not extend the same misguided courtesy to Camping? As I’ll argue throughout my series, Jesus was way worse than anyone like Camping on all sorts of issues.

Meanwhile, I suggest learning the basic case for showing Jesus was a false prophet. It’s not that complicated and, like every other evil thing about Jesus, is hiding in plain sight in the gospels. Bring it up. Defend it. Learn how to effectively take down the most common of the endless apologetic excuses. And collectively take Jesus’ impeccable reputation down a notch. We warn people about the real Joseph Smith and the real Muhammad presumably to keep them from being seduced by the warmed-over versions of their religions. Do the world a favor and spread the bad news about irresponsible Jesus, the false prophet.

To help in that regard, I highly recommend John Loftus’ chapter 12 in “The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails,” called, “At Best Jesus Was a Failed Apocalyptic Prophet.” Loftus sets the issue up much like I do and does a good job of laying out the goalpost moving that we see spread out over the course of the New Testament documents themselves when the end kept failing to arrive.

It is helpful (and humorous) to understand the convoluted nature of the broader New Testament evidence as we have it. Liberal Christian scholar Thom Stark’s chapter 8 in “The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries To Hide It)” is excellent at laying out the issue and also tackling the most popular modern re-interpretations of Jesus’ failed prophecy (especially N. T. Wright’s partial preterism, as I recall).

I hear Bart Ehrman’s book, “Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium” is also a very good and humorous take on the subject, but I have yet to read it. New Testament scholar Dale Allison in his book, “Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History,” has a very helpful section starting on page 33 that shows tons of evidence (which is not necessarily apparent to a casual reading) that Jesus’ ministry was wrapped up in this apocalypticism. So if you just couldn’t find the evidence of this before, these resources should more than prepare you to see this perverse, pervasive key element in the New Testament tapestry. Also check out the documentary, “Waiting for Armageddon,” if you’d like to see a parade of real people today taking Jesus’ irresponsible apocalypticism super seriously.

This issue is definitely one of the top 3 things you want to bring up when on the topic of Jesus (if you are interested in characterizing Jesus accurately). Along with Jesus being a moral lunatic for wanting to set the vast majority of humanity on fire for all eternity and also for trying to start an oppressive celibacy cult that only tolerated (sexist and heterosexist) marriage as a soon to be outdated convention until the resurrection of the dead. I’ve already covered the moral lunacy one. I’ll get to the Jesus on sex ed bit soon enough. Then I’ll make my way through the rest of Jesus’ shitty teachings.
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2015/08/jesus-was-a-false-prophet-2/#sthash.nPi2ZeSR.dpuf

August 10, 2015 by Ben Schuldt