Musings from an Atheist Theologian

As a Christmas/Hanukkah present of sorts, I'm going to dust off this blog to demonstrate how and why reading the New Testament through a Jewish lens is important. If you've read your Christian Bible, you've heard of the wedding at Cana. Maybe your pastor or priest called it the marriage at Cana, or the wedding/marriage feast at Cana, but whatever it was called, you know the story. It's all there in the second chapter of the Gospel of John: Jesus, his mother, and his disciples are invited to a wedding; his mother notices they're out of wine; Jesus delivers a sign of his divinity by turning water into wine at her request. Biblical scholars and archaeologists debate everything from where Cana was* to what the beverage was**. But there's another phenomenon which, in my experience to date, no theologian is immune to. This is best described by Johannes Lehmann (as translated by Michael Heron) in his 1971 book The Jesus Report: The Rabbi J. Revealed by the Dead Sea Sc

(Or, "A Tale of Four Tombs") Tomb #1 A certain tradition holds that on one's way from Tzfat in upper Galilee toward the North to the village of Ein al-Zeitun, passing a carob tree, you will find buried a Jewish rabbi, under a pile of stones pointing toward Jerusalem. I like to think that the oldest of his brothers, who went on to lead his followers, followed him to the bitter end, bore witness to his execution, and was then faced with a quandary when a wealthy follower unexpectedly procured the body. He doesn't belong in the family tomb... he doesn't belong to one  family anymore. But neither does the body belong in a stone monument like that of other rabbis... he was never supposed to die.  "...behold, he goeth before you into Galilee..."  Yes -- he'd want to be in his special place of refuge in the mountains back home, the place he would go alone to pray. Those who love him will remember where he is laid. Tomb #2 Another tradition places this same

NOTE: This Interlude, previously sitting in my drafts, was intended to be posted to coincide with the holiday season. I apologize for its belatedness, and can assure you that this will not affect the release schedule outlined in "New Year, New Plans." Oh, Christmastide. There are a lot of images that each of us associates with this magical time of the year. Mine are grounded in growing up in New England and what I would see during winter as I did: ice skating. Trees. Filthy snow. Cold wet feet. Shoppers. Lovers. Assholes. Most Christians, be they fundamentalist or mainstream, naturally come with a Sunday school-appropriate image of the holiday's origins. Elizabeth Cunningham aptly summarizes it in the opening lines of her magnificent  Daughter of the Shining Isles  (sorry, Monkfish Book Publishing, this will always be the title of The Maeve Chronicles ' first installment for me): You have all heard of his birth in Bethlehem in a stable [...] You know the story of the

Hello, readers! (And by readers, I mean, like, maybe two or three people, tops.) As of last week, we have entered the Year of Your Lord 2023, and this is typically a time when people write about all the big stuff they're gonna do in the future. "New year, new me" is the most popular turn of phrase related to this phenomenon. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "future" (apparently a noun, according to the confusing rules of the English language) in several ways. The blanket definition basically says that the future is the indefinite time yet to come or something that will happen during that time. Your humble author has had plans for the future many times in his life. Each time, they were different. Some goals were loftier than others, and some were just plain unrealistic. To him, and no doubt to many, the future is a constantly changing animal. There's always hope that there will be mostly good things and fewer bad things, but that's the ot

First of all, a quick refresher from the end of Part 1: If the story of the birth of Jesus has any truth to it, and if he really was the result of Mary getting pregnant without Joseph's help, then it stands to reason that somebody had to be the daddy. Being an atheist, I rule out the presence of God, so the question is obvious: is there another candidate? It turns out that the answer is not uncomplicated, but there is a clear possibility. More than that, we may even have an artifact of the gentleman in question.  But as we did before, we must establish some points of fact upfront related to this post's topic. Sex outside of marriage was frowned upon even more strongly than in today's fundamentalist Christianity.  To be blunt in my choice of examples, women were called whores just for getting divorced. (An echo of this exists even in Jesus' own Sermon on the Mount, where divorce for any reason other than marital unfaithfulness is considered blameworthy.) This was a pat

"Let's start at the very beginning, a fine place to start," to paraphrase  The Sound of Music : the so-called virgin birth. To be more specific, we must establish some points of fact upfront that are related to the topic of this post. Isaiah's prophecy was never about a virgin birth.  The whole thing came from a snafu when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek (the famous Septuagint, so called either because 70 scholars participated in its translation or the work only took 70 days from start to finish -- pick the tradition you like) for the benefit of the large Jewish population in Egypt, then the intellectual center of the known world, who no longer spoke or read Hebrew. The passage we now know as Isaiah 7:14, with the three verses following, is entirely symbolic and intended as a prophecy of Israel's future. But leaving aside its actual meaning to its intended audience as opposed to the Christian interpretation, there's another little problem. G

Before I go deep diving into the biography of the one called Jesus, I want to take a little side trip to one of the more complicated destinations in Christian literature. Indulge me, if you will. No two ways about it: the last book of the New Testament is bonkers. Full-tilt, bull goose loony. My pals at Red Star Ministry aptly -- and accurately -- referred to it as "a clusterfuck of symbols with no real connection to anything material." Most Christians politely ignore it, even the Catholic Church, except of course for fundamentalist (typically right-wing) nut jobs who view it -- and tout it, frequently -- as a blueprint for how Christ will come back someday and vindicate their every prejudice, whim, and act of seething hatred. I'm not here to speculate about the origin. Anyone who has used "magic" mushrooms or "psychedelic" drugs such as LSD or peyote can instantly recognize the content of Revelation for what it is: John of Patmos appears to have had t

First things first: my identity is not crucial. If you've reached this blog, it's because I told you it existed, and I thank you both for your interest in my writing and your silence about my identity. (Much of what I say in this space will be controversial and may meet with much vitriol from religious communities who believe that the subject matter is blasphemous, which is not my intent, and my working relationship with these communities could suffer as a result of knowing I wrote it. Again: thank you for not outing me.) Given the URL, a self-appointed descriptor on numerous occasions, I want you to know the perspective from which I speculate about the historical basis for the New Testament. (And while we're on that subject... it's okay that you know that perspective, and what may influence it. You should ask that from anyone who writes about this topic. You should know all about my predispositions. You have the right to know everything about me that can affect my thi