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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Book Available About Christianity's True Origins, September 2, 2001
There are many books that have been written about Christianity and the Bible, but Andrew D. Benson's *The Origins of Christianity and the Bible* is hands down the best I have read. The big difference between other books and Benson's is that this one backs up everything it says with proof in the form of ancient quotations, authoritative sources or the Bible itself. The author's strategy is simple: provide tremendous amounts of information without attacking anyone's beliefs and let the conclusions take care of themselves. And the only conclusion that one can rationally draw after reading this book is that the Bible, far from being the "inspired, inerrant word of God," is a book that reflects the attitudes, opinions, prejudices, and yes, the God, of its authors. Benson shows comparisons between ancient Canaanite writings about the God El (a word which is translated "God" over 200 times in the Hebrew Bible-Strong's number 410) and the Bible's descriptions of the Hebrew God Yahweh ("the LORD" in most English Bibles). Benson also demonstrates how New Testament authors took Old Testament passages out of context to further their agendas. And rather than just pointing out Bible contradictions, Benson explains why the contradictions occur-e.g. because of editing or differing oral traditions. Every serious student of the Bible-from Christians and Jews to atheists and agnostics-should own this book. Quite simply, it is the best available.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CHALLENGE YOUR BELIEFS: Read, Reason, Research, Reflect!, August 2, 2005
Ask a typical Christian (whether layman or church leader) to describe the derivative influences of Attis, Mithras, Tammuz, Bacchus, Dionysus, Osiris, Krishna, Orpheus, Adonis, Hercules, Pythagoras, the Book of Enoch and the writings of Philo of Alexandria on the tradition of Christ and you will get a blank stare. Have them consider the roll of the Mystery Religions on the outer- and inner- meaning of the compiled New Testament and they will shrug their shoulders. Query them regarding the influences of earlier Babylonian myths on the construction of the Judeo-Christian Creation and Flood accounts (e.g., the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh ) or the theological importance of the Ugaritic texts, the Armana tablets, the Nag Hammadi library, et al, and you might as well be speaking a foreign language. Such obvious influences are something not readily available or taught in conservative Christian seminaries and colleges, and it is no small wonder. Local heroes and gods, all of who predate Christianity between 100 to 2,500 years, bear more than a striking resemblance to the supposedly unique and factual story of Jesus the Christ. By calling attention to such influences, the seminaries and bible colleges would risk upsetting the status quo, tipping the applecart, and planting seeds of doubt and uncertainty in the church leaders of tomorrow. For the sake of tradition Instructors keep their silence or pretend the long and inflectional histories of these sacrificial god-men do not exist. When confronted with the facts, rarely, occasionally, some fundamentalist Instructors may argue that Satan created these earlier versions of dying-resurrecting saviors as a way to confuse the people, an argument so ludicrous as to be beyond the pale of logic and common sense. Which is more probable? That a diabolical being created religious myths of false Christs hundreds of years before the birth of the `real' Christ knowing what the real Christ would say and do with the sole purpose of confusing rationalists and skeptics, or that the story of Jesus was supplemented and evolved from older myths and stories of emergent god-men? Which is the simpler explanation by-way-of Occam's Razor? A cosmic supernatural drama with human beings at the center of the tale, or human invention and political interference? Assenting to the diabolical argument, how can we ever be sure the Jesus story itself isn't false, constructed by this same Satan to confuse acceptance of the real Christ who is yet to come, perhaps the true-blue Jewish Messiah? If we can't trust the evidence of the past (and, no, compiled books of magical tales do not qualify as uncontestable evidence), then all knowledge in the present is tenuous and suspect.
But we can trust the past, if only we are courageous enough to look there. Fundamentalists who deny the full spectrum of the past are in turn painting over the colors of the present with shades black and white. Considering the history of Israel at the time of Jesus without examining the extensive history and religious customs of Assyria, Babylon, Canaan, Phrygia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy would be like writing a dissertation on the American Revolutionary War and only giving a passing reference to the French or British. It could be done, of course, but it would be so lop-sided and revisionist as to be outside the pale of honest inquiry. And yet it is with this very singularity of purpose that Christian fundamentalists use only the bible and a select few documents to reference their supernatural cause (the oft-quoted Josephus comes to mind, never mind the hotly contested interpolations in both the Testimonium Flavianum and The Jewish Antiquities ).
What is most amazing about belief doctrine is that you can approach it in any one of ten thousand ways and find enough information on a single track alone to raise nagging doubts as to its legitimacy. Approach it on a second track, or a third, or a fourth, or any one of the other ten thousand angles and each of these should give reason to pause. When taken together, these ten thousand unique approaches reveal a preponderance of information and cogent evidence so overwhelming as to make the continued embrace of said doctrine impossible to the rational believer (after twenty-five years of honest inquiry, I can no more return to believing in the "legitimacy" of Christian doctrine than I could return to believing in the legitimacy of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny; to do so would be evidence of a denial so ingrained and pathological as to require years of psychological and medicinal treatment).
In light of these available paths of information, how can the believer persist in his or her acceptance of supernatural religious doctrine? It's rather simple:
(1) by persisting in the assumption of the validity of religious text at the offset, through
(2) a complete lack of knowledge of the ten thousand different avenues of inquiry (whether traveled separately or as a whole) that could invalidate religious texts and contradict church teachings.
Why don't most believers know about these ten thousand avenues of inquiry? Because 98% of their church leaders don't know about them, since such things are not typically part of the curriculum or openly discussed in conservative seminaries and bible colleges. Conservative colleges have explicit and unyielding agendas that do not take kindly to deviation outside the "box" (or circle ) of faith of what they consider unquestionable (even infallible ) church doctrine. As such, the plurality of parallels to Jesus in ancient world mythology and the primitive unconscious, astrological speculation, ethical and reform innovations of the time, Jewish scriptural precedent, pagan salvation cults, legendary hero-worship, popular philosophy and literature, creation myths, flood myths, all feed into compiled Christianity-not to mention the fact that alternative interpretations, authorial and textual criticisms, apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings, revisionist apologetics, deconstructionist dissection, early church history and politics, et al, are not things conservative bible colleges and seminaries readily offer for consideration, especially since these present the very real risk of an inclusive rejection of church doctrine. No, conservative seminaries and bible colleges cannot allow future church leaders to roam the halls armed like liberal renegades with something as potentially destructive as contrary explanations. And so from generation to generation the conservative religious leaders of tomorrow are taught just enough to maintain the status quo, groomed to analyze and preach and argue only what's been safely nestled inside their "box." In time the world of evidence outside the box is forgotten, ancient myths, primitive customs, pre-existing savior stories, until even conservative professors and deans are no longer acquainted with the sheer bulk and magnitude of what they are not teaching, of what they do not know, having themselves never been taught in a long succession of scheduled silence.
It's not that the churches and seminaries are consciously lying to their wards-it's just that they don't know enough to deliver all the facts or even imagine where and how and what those facts might be. And so it continues from generation to generation in seeming and stultifying perpetuity. The traditions are transmitted safely without second-thought or a care in the world.
What about the 2% of church leaders who have become aware of the ten thousand avenues of inquiry, who are privy to the mostly undisclosed facts (undisclosed at least in organized religious circles)? Some of these are preaching in liberal churches (e.g., Unitarian, Universalist, Free Christian), some are teaching in liberal colleges or universities, some are still ministering in fundamentalist churches and are just now having a crisis of faith, while some have left the church altogether, no longer able to reconcile what they now know with the fuzzy assumptions of supernatural validity.
Despite what some apologists might have you believe, many atheists and agnostics had their beginnings in conservative churches, but their search for truth took them outside the box, beyond the deliberate circle of faith, driven by a dedicated passion for truth that became more important than trying to preserve a system of beliefs based on faith, silence, selective information (or outright misinformation), and the miraculous rescinding of natural law (I myself attended a conservative bible college and on track to become an ordained minister until I could no longer reconcile what I had discovered through private study to what I had been taught, or not taught, in the classroom curriculum). Anyone can talk about modern-day miracles-deaf ears made to hear, blind eyes made to see, crippled limbs made strong and whole, prophecies fulfilled, the dead brought back to life, etc. Talk is cheap after all, and hearsay cheaper. But where are the benefactors of these miracles when the fundamentalists are asked for evidence? Wherein lays verifiable and/or medical proof? One claimant should be enough to silence the rationalists and skeptics. Just one. But one, it seems, may be one too many. Unless an occurrence of miraculous intercession can be verified and confirmed, naturalistic explanations must need prevail.
Because we live, supposedly, in an enlightened age (the September 11th events in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania may suggest otherwise), we are free to examine our beliefs prior to invoking the assumption of validity (where such assumption is renamed "faith" by religious traditions). What is the best way to approach this? By beginning your inquiries by not assuming at the offset that a religious text is true (or infallible, inerrant, or divinely inspired) simply because the text itself claims to be true (or infallible, inerrant, or divinely inspired), you enforce a neutrality neither predetermined nor indoctrinated by religious assumption, tradition, or cultural prejudice. An assumption of truth (or infallibility, inerrancy, divine inspiration) at the offset will twist and distort every examination and argument following to fit and prove the assumption. If you know the Bible is the Word of God only because you can quote from it to prove it the Word of God, or quote prophecies from it to prove prophecies are fulfilled, or quote supernatural events to prove the supernatural, or quote third-person witnesses from it to prove witnesses existed, everything you're quoting is based on the assumption that what you're quoting is valid and true. The Muslim can assume the same thing about the Koran, the Latter-day Saint about the Book of Mormon, the Hindu about the Upanishads, etc. The ability to quote does not automatically herald truth. What is quoted must stand up to concentrated scrutiny, to reason, the mechanics of the real world, the historical perspective and influences of the time, etc, and without supernatural assumptions going in. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Simply quoting the source to prove the source is an assumption bordering on a distinct and perverse pathology.
It is not enough to simply parrot what you believe by way of creed or article of faith or to merely recite without comprehension the often error-prone English translation of long disused languages. Each religion is but a small piece in a very large and intricate puzzle, and the fundamentalists, in refusing to look at the other pieces, even unaware that many other pieces exist, miss out on celebrating the larger diorama that comes with hard work and diligence and industry and exploratory knowledge. And yet it is these very fundamentalists who believe they know god's will, god's plan, and god's design for mankind simply by assuming the validity of their one piece of the puzzle while refusing to acknowledge all the other pieces scattered about the table.
Still, when it comes to religion, ideology, or claims of the paranormal, a great many people will happily avoid making any serious inquiries or exploring critical evidence in order to entertain beliefs that are wholly unfounded, misguided, or outright impossible. They can readily tell you who and what they believe, they just can't tell you how or why, the implication being that the object of belief has become more important than the motive impelling belief, a compulsion that somehow overrides one's sincere obligation to confirm claims beyond surreptitious sidestepping or the disregard of physical reality.
While people may be loathe in admitting that their beliefs are motivated, it is only because the physiological and psychological kinetics of the belief process go unrecognized or are deliberately neglected. This is certainly understandable, given human nature. Harboring a belief is easy. It's effortless. It requires no exertion and urges no proof. Simple acknowledgment is all it takes and you're free to believe any outrageous thing you'd like. Truth seeking, as I've said before, is a different beast entirely. Seeking truth is hard work. It takes time. It takes energy. It takes a lifelong commitment. And above all else, it runs the risk of dismantling cherished beliefs while demanding a keen and piercing mindful honesty. Unless you're willing to be honest with yourself and admit your own biases and prejudices, hopes and wishes, phobias and fears, assumptions, preconceptions, ignorance and inexperience, you are not seeking truth but only ways to continue serving and preserving your own insulated belief system. To a truth-seeker this simply will not do, having conceded striving and suffering after truth a more irresistible vocation then working to perpetuate those creature comforts awarded by untested belief. For the sake of truth, the seeker is willing to sacrifice it all, even those placating promises of eternal life, and embrace the undying fires of hell. If God exists and condemns critical thinking and rational inquiry as immoral and ungodly, then the truth-seeker has no other recourse than to find a haven in hell, if not a heaven.
Andrew Benson's book is a great introduction to begin research in this field, but be forewarned. There are so many paths that will open up due to this research that you will find yourself looking down ten thousand other avenues of inquiry. Are you prepared to do the work, begin the journey, take that first step? It all matters on how dedicated you are in discovering truth as to merely fortifying your subjective beliefs.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Concise, thorough, excellent, September 6, 2001
ORIGINS is extremely well-researched and thoroughly documented, perhaps the most accessible and in-depth study of Scripture available. It is a delight to read and an excellent reference that anyone interested in Christian theology ought to have in his/her personal library. I highly recommend this book. I should like to have written it myself.
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by Timothy Freke
by Bart D. Ehrman
