Not only is the Genesis account an unsatisfactory explanation of how our world situation came to be the way it is, but theologically, it, and large portions of the Old Testament are a blatant contradiction of other portions of the Bible and especially the New Testament. I John 4:8 tells us that “God is love” or in essense that God is the personification of love. The Apostle Paul in I Cor 13:4-7 defines Love in these words:
“ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (New International Version UK).
Even the Old Testament in Proverbs 10:12 tells us that “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all sins.” And yet Lev 17:11 tells us that “it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.” Likewise in the New Testament Heb 9:22 tells us that “without the shedding of blood thee is no remission of sins.” So which is it ?
If love “covers all sins” rather than blood, then why did Yahweh require thousands of animal sacrifices yearly and why did God The Father of the New Testament require a human sacrifice in the form of Jesus in order to forgive the sins of Adam and Eve and mankind? Why could he not have just forgiven Adam and Eve ? And why condemn the children for the sins of their parents? And if according to the Apostle Paul, Love “ does not envy” and “is not easily angered” and “keeps no record of wrongs”, then why did Yahweh say: “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” ? Exodus 20:5. Jesus in Matt 18:22 tells us that we should forgive ou brothers up to seventy seven times, yet his Father could not forgive Adam and Eve once ?
These are not trivial contradictions. They call into question the entire nature of God. Is He a God of Love and a God worthy of devotion or is He a tyrant who gives us free will on the one hand while at the same time warning us that the penalty for exercising that free will is death and destruction ? Can God just forgive and forget as his son instructs us to do? Or can He only be appeased by blood? And yet these teachings are the basis for at least three of the world’s major religions.
Is it any wonder that these three religions have never been able to effectively co-exist and have in fact been the main source of much of the suffering and strife experienced by millions over the last two thousand years. Is it any wonder that these kind of teachings continue to inspire and be the basis for terrorism and war down to this very day; each of them looking upon the others as infidels ? Like Father, like son. They are incapable of forgiving and forgetting; incapable of compromise; they are only appeased by revenge and the outpouring of blood.
And yet while inseparably linked by their concepts of “The Fall of Man”, each of these religions claims to be distinctly and uniquely the “Chosen People” to the detriment of the other two. And of course all three see other religions which do not share their commonality as definitely beyond the pale, they see those worshipers as pagans and infidels. Judaism, Islam and Christianity all claim to be based on a unique revelation direct from God and that they are distinct from other religions in their rites and practices which God imparted directly to them.
The Jews and Moslems claim circumcision as a unique rite imparted to them by God through the patriarch Abraham to set them aside as holy and consecrated to God and unique from all other men. Yet archeological findings reveal that circumcision was practiced by the priestly classes of Egypt and by African tribes way before the days of Abraham. The Jews took great pride in their Ark of the Covenant, the small wooden shrine which was carried with poles by the Levite priests and which contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments. But arks of similar design containing statues of deities were carried in procession by the Egyptian priests long before Aaron fashioned the Ark of the Covenant. Likewise the rituals surrounding animal sacrifice and purification practiced by the Israelites were not all that different from those of their surrounding neighbors, the Egyptians and Babylonians.
The Jews claim to be the first practitioners of monotheism, but that is also untrue as we know that monotheism was first practiced in Egypt under the reign of Pharoah Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) and his Queen, Nefertiti long before Moses or the captivity of the Jews in Egypt. Many of the psalms written by Akhenaten centuries before the Exodus are identical to psalms purportedly written by King David at a time much later in history. The Epoch of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian account of the Great Flood predates the Genesis account of the Flood of Noah by many centuries and those writings exist in stone and can be dated as do the ancient Egyptian texts and are far earlier than any of the Biblical writings, existing copies of which only date back to the period of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews in the sixth century BC. So one can be justified in wondering, is Judaism the result of a direct revelation of God to the Hebrew patriarchs or merely a creation of a much later date by Jewish scribes and scholars during their captivity in Babylon and based partly on the monotheism of Akhenaten and the rituals and ancient writings of their captors, the Babylonians? I find it odd that the Israelites, who felt justified in practicing genocide in the name of God on their neighbors, the Canaanites and Phillistines due to those people’s practice of child sacrifice, include in their scriptures a laudatory account of their patriarch Abraham in the act of sacrificing his own son Isaac, who but for the grace of God would have ended up as a burnt offering. See Genesis 22:1-12.
Likewise one can ask the question, is Christianity so unique as to be clearly the result of a direct revelation of God through his son, Jesus or is it merely a compilation of faiths extant during the first century in Israel and other areas along the trade routes which connected to Israel? No one is saying here that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist, there is historical evidence that he did. But were his teachings so unique and revolutionary or were many of them in existance before and during his time on earth? We know for a fact that the Essene community which existed in the land of Israel prior to and during the preaching tours of Jesus taught basically the same concepts of purity, piety, forgiveness and brotherhood that Jesus taught because we now have their writings which were discovered in the 1950’s. Other facets of what make up our current belief system of who Jesus was, but which he did not clearly state himself during his lifetime and were attributed to him after his death may well have come from other earlier sources.
The Vatican was built upon the grounds previously devoted to the worship of Mithra, one of the greatest gods of ancient Persia. His worship began around 600BC and flourished until the 2nd century AD throughout a large portion of the ancient world. The entire Messianic idea originated in ancient Persia and this is where the Jewish and Christian concepts of a Savior came from. Mithra was considered a great traveling teacher and master. He had twelve companions and performed miracles. He was called “the good shephered”, “the way, the truth and the light”’”redeemer”, “savior” and was considered the mediator between God and men. He was identified with both the lion and the lamb, as was the “Lion of the Tribe of Judah” and the “Lamb of God, Jesus. His ceremonies included a sort of baptism to remove sins, anointing, and a sacred meal of bread and water, while a consecrated wine, believed to possess wonderful power played a prominent part according to the International Encyclopedia.
Profesor Franz Cumont of the University of Ghent wrote that the worshippers of Mithra “held Sunday sacred, and celebrated the birth of the Sun on the 25th of December.” He added that they believed in a Heaven inhabited by beatified ones and a Hell peopled by demons. They believed in the immortality of the soul, in a last judgement and in a resurrection of the dead and upon a final conflagration of the universe. (“The Mysteries of Mithras”, pp 190,191).
In the catacombs at Rome was preserved a relic of the old Mithraic worship. It was a picture of the infant Mithra seated in the lap of his virgin mother, while on their knees before him were Persian Magi adoring him and offering gifts. This is not unlike carvings in the Temple of Karnak in Egypt picturing the young infant god Horus, seated on the lap of his virgin mother Isis. Mithra was purportedly buried in a tomb and after three days he rose again. His resurrection was celebrated yearly. Mithra had his principal festival on what was later to become Easter, at which time he was resurrected. His sacred day was Sunday, “the Lord’s Day” and his religion had a Eucharist or “Lord’s Supper”.
Now is this all merely coincidence or are we seeing here a pattern used by the Church long after the death of Jesus and his apostles for the metamorphosis of Jesus from merely an enlightened itinerant teacher to the Son of God? Let’s face it, most of what is taught by the institutional Church of today, far more than what can be found in the gospels, was assembled at the time of Constantine in the fourth century AD including the present Bible canon or list of which sacred writings, of which there were thousands, were to be considered what we now call the Bible. Out of those thousands of writings only 66 were selected to make up the Bible. Is it possible that Emperor Constantine, who saw an opportunity to unite his vast empire through creating a powerful State Religion, engineered which writings and teachings would be acceptable and which would not ? which writings would support the divinity of Jesus and which would not ? And we must not forget St. Helena, the mother of Constantine who was the real star of the time. She went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and came back with enough pieces of the True Cross and enough True Nails to build a small condominium complex. She also found Mary’s kitchen table, the Veil of Veronica and the original manger from Bethlehem after all of those items had been lost for three hundred years. She even located all of the original holy sites like the room where Jesus ate the Last Supper, even though Jerusalem had been burnt and sacked by the Romans some three hundred years earlier and there had undoubtedly been some reconstruction during the intervening years.
And is this also why the vast numbers of scrolls which were discovered in the mid 20th century, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hamadi writings have only recently been translated and released to the general public more than fifty years after their discovery? Were Israeli and Christian authorities doing all within their power to keep those writings from the general public out of fear that they might somehow contradict rabbinical and Church teachings?
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