REVIVAL OR RESURRECTION?-Mirza Tahir Ahmad

                                                   REVIVAL OR RESURRECTION ?

                  From "Christianity, A Journey From Facts To Fiction."- Mirza Tahir Ahmad

The scenario of Jesus’ revival from the dead presents many problems. Some of them have already been discussed in the previous chapter. Now we turn to other elements and complexities.

What we have in view is the nature of the ‘mind’ of Jesus, prior to the Crucifixion and after his revival from the dead. His mind was brought to life again, after a loss of function for three days and nights. The question is, what actually happens to the brain at the time of death? On one point at least there is a consensus among both the Christian and the non-Christian medical experts: if the brain remains dead for more than a few minutes, it is dead and gone forever. As soon as the blood supply ceases, it begins to disintegrate.

If Jesus died during the Crucifixion it can only mean that his heart ceased functioning and stopped supplying blood to his brain, and that his brain died soon after. So his entire life support system must have stopped to operate or he could not have been declared dead. That being so we are faced with a very intriguing problem in relation to the understanding of the life and death of Jesus Christ.

The death of Jesus Christ, as has been demonstrated, would mean a final departure of his astral body, or soul as we may call it, from the physical cage of his human body. If so, his revival would have to mean the return of the same astral body to the same physical body that it had left behind three days earlier. Such a return of the soul would restart the clock of physical life and set it ticking once again. For such a thing to happen, the disintegrated and dead brain cells would have come to life suddenly and the chemical processes of rapid decay would have been reversed entirely. This involves an enormous problem and will ever remain a challenge for the Christian biochemists to resolve. Describing the reversal of the entire chemical processes of decay within the central nervous system is beyond the reach of the farthest stretches of scientist’s imagination. If it ever happened it would be a miracle indeed, defying science and making a mockery of the laws made by God Himself, but a miracle that would still fail to solve the problem at hand.

Such a revival would mean not just the revival of the cells of the central nervous system, but actually their synthesis. Even if the same cells were reconstructed and brought to life exactly as they were before, they would, in fact, be a new set of cells devoid of any previous memory. They would have to be re- manufactured, complete with all the data relevant to the life of Jesus that was wiped out of his brain after the death of his mind.

Life, as we know it, comprises of a consciousness that is filled with information held by billions of neurons within the brain. That information is then subdivided into far more complicated and interrelated bits of computerised information received from each of the five senses. If that data is wiped out, life itself would be wiped out. Therefore, the revival of the brain of Jesus would mean the construction and the manufacture of a new brain computer with a completely new set of software. This complexity also relates to the chemistry of the rest of the body of Jesus Christ. To revive the body, a colossal chemical reconstruction process will have to be put into operation after retrieving all the material lost in the process of decay. With such a great miracle having taken place the question would arise as to who is revived and with what effect? Is it the man in Jesus or is it the god in him? This is why we are emphasising the importance of understanding the person of Jesus.

Whenever Jesus is known to have faltered and failed to exhibit his superpowers as the Son of God, Christians take refuge in the claim that he faltered as a man and not as a god. So we have every right to question and to clearly define which part in him was man and which was god. The faltering of the man in Jesus requires a human mind as a separate entity to that of the god in him. When the brain was revived it was the human element in Jesus which was revived because the ‘Divine’ entity of Jesus did not require a material brain to support him. For the ‘Divine’ entity it only worked as a receptacle during his previous sojourn on earth; as in the case of a spiritual medium. Hence the revival of Jesus would only implicate the revival of the man in him, without which the return of his spirit to the same body is rendered impossible.

If this scenario is not acceptable then we will face another grave problem of attributing to Jesus during his earthly life two independent minds, one of man and another that of god. The two cohabiting the same space but otherwise unrelated and independent. If so, the revival issue will have to be re-examined so that its true nature is clearly understood. In this scenario, one does not have to conceive of the essential reconstruction of the human brain to provide a seat for the human mind, we need only to imagine Jesus revisiting a skull filled with the decaying remains of the brain of his former human host.

The deeper we look into this problem more problems raise their heads at every newly probed level. Man’s mind requires a brain as a tool of his thought process. As far as the functions of the physical body are concerned, if we believe that the mind is a separate entity which lives by itself, then it would imply that the mind and the soul are the same thing. By whatever name we refer to it, whether we call it mind or soul, it may be considered as capable of living separately even when its relationship with the human brain is severed. But if they are required to govern the human body or to be influenced by what goes on in their physical realms then there has to be a profound bondage between the mind and the brain, or the soul and the brain, otherwise they simply cannot influence, motivate or control physical, mental or sentimental processes in man. Perhaps this is not debatable.

From this we are led to another serious problem; does the so-called Divine Son need to control a body through a brain? and does he depend on a physical brain for his thought processes? If he transcends all human limitations and if he has an independent system of thought processes, unique to him, with no parallel in the entire universe of his creation, then the return of the soul of God to the human body along with that of the mind of man reconstructs a bizarre situation of a dual personality with two conflicting thought processes, because it is impossible for the human mind and the human soul to be completely at one with the mind of God and His being. There would be a constant variation between the two thought processes with very irritating clashes of brain waves. Such a case would be fit to be treated by a superhuman psychiatrist. A new type of spiritual schizophrenia perhaps.

Having said that, let us reconstruct the entire scenario from a different angle. After studying Christianity at some depth I have come to the conclusion that there is confusion prevailing in the understanding of some terms and their application, without fully understanding their implications, to situations where they do not actually apply. Christian ideology is densely befogged with such confusion and misapplied terminology. ‘Revival’ is one term and ‘Resurrection’ is another, and both have different meanings. So far, we have intentionally used the term ‘revival’ when discussing the possibility of Jesus coming to life again. As we have clearly seen from the previous discussion ‘revival’ means the return of all vital functions of the human body after death. But ‘resurrection’ is a completely different phenomenon.

Unfortunately, the Christian church, all over the world, has been responsible for creating confusion in Christian minds by misusing these terms by swapping one with the other; or at least by attributing the meaning of one to the other. Most Christians understand the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the springing to life once again of his human body which he had abandoned at the moment of his so-called death. Of course we disagree with this and retain our right to describe it as a state of deep coma and not death.

If correctly understood and applied, the resurrection of Jesus cannot mean the return of his soul to the same human body which it had deserted at the moment of death. The term ‘resurrection’ only means the creation of a new astral body. Such a body is spiritual in nature and works as a sort of crucible for a rarefied soul within. It is created for the eternal continuation of life after death. Some call it a sidereal body or astral body and some call it athma. Whatever name you give it the essential meaning remains the same; resurrection applies to the creation of a new body for the soul which is ethereal in nature and not, we repeat, not, the return of the soul to the same disintegrated human body which it left previously.

St. Paul has spoken at length in exactly these terms about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He believed in the resurrection of not only Jesus but the resurrection in general of all those who die and are deemed fit by God to be given a new existence and a new form of life. The personality of the soul remains the same but its abode is changed. According to St. Paul, this is a general phenomenon which has to be accepted, otherwise there would be no meaning left in Christianity or religion.

St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians must be studied in depth because they are central to the issue. They leave no room for doubt in my mind at least, that whenever he spoke of Jesus having been seen alive after the Crucifixion he spoke clearly and without ambiguity of his resurrection and resurrection alone, and it never crossed his mind that the soul of Jesus had returned to his mortal body and that he was resuscitated from death in ordinary physical terms. If my understanding of St. Paul is not acceptable to some Christian theologians they will have to admit that St. Paul glaringly contradicted himself because at least in some of his accounts of Jesus’ new life he leaves no shadow of doubt that he understood Jesus’ new life to be the resurrection and not revival of the human body in which his soul is said to have been caged.

Following are some of the relevant passages which speak for themselves:

By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. (Corinthians 1,6:14)

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised un-perishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. (Ibid 15:42–44)

For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ (Ibid 15:52:54)

We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (Corinthians 2,5:8)

The problem which remains to be resolved arises out of St. Paul’s reference to the early Christians account of how Jesus was seen alive in his body soon after the Crucifixion. If St. Paul understood Jesus to have been resurrected, he could be right of course and his personal ‘vision’ of Jesus or communion with him could be explained in terms of resurrection like the visiting soul of a dead person from the other world, acquiring an apparition very much like its form and shape prior to death. But there seems to be confusion over the mixing up of two types of evidence. Firstly we need to consider the early evidence of his disciples and of those who loved and revered him, although they might not have been formally initiated into Christianity. That evidence must have been misunderstood by St. Paul because it clearly speaks of Jesus in his human form with a corporeal body that cannot be interpreted as resurrection.

To prove this, one has only to refer to the episode of Jesus surprising some of his disciples:

They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence. (Luke 24:37–43)

This episode categorically rules out the idea of resurrection and speaks of Jesus wanting to demonstrate clearly that he was the same person in the same human body and not a ghost; nor someone no longer dependant on food for survival. This further shows that the early Christians were speaking of two different things. Whenever they spoke of Jesus’ revival from the dead and were confronted by the sceptical regarding the sheer absurdity of the idea, they took refuge in the notion of resurrection which could be philosophically and logically explained. Corinthians 1 in particular, presents an excellent opportunity to study the dilemma of putting one’s feet in two different boats.

Finally returning to the evidence of the early Christian’s encounters with Jesus Christ, we are left with no option but to believe that the Jesus who appeared soon after the Crucifixion to many of his disciples and friends, who spoke to them, who accompanied them and moved gradually away from the scene of the Crucifixion, mostly under the cover of night was certainly not a resurrected person but one who could only be taken as a person who was either physically revived from the dead or one who never died but was miraculously recovered from a state of near death. So near, indeed, to death, that his state could be compared to the state of Jonah in the belly of the fish. We have no doubt in our minds that this latter option is the only acceptable one.

To make it easier for Christians to understand our point of view I will present a similar hypothetical case. The same story is repeated in real life today. An attempt is made to kill someone by crucifying him and he is supposed to be dead as a result. Afterwards, the same person is seen moving about by some of his close associates. They also observe that his physical body visibly carries the marks of crucifixion. He is then recaptured by the Law and presented to a court of justice with a demand from the prosecution that as he had somehow escaped death in the first attempt so to consummate the sentence passed against him, he must be crucified once again. That man then defends himself by postulating that he most certainly had died once; hence the purpose of law was indeed achieved and now that he had risen from the dead by a special decree of God so the past judgement of condemnation could not be re-executed for the reason that he was enjoying a completely new lease of life in which he had committed no offence against the law. If the court accepts this plea, obviously he would not be punished again for a crime for which he had already paid his dues.

If such an incident were to happen in a court of law in a Christian country with a Christian judge and a Christian jury, what verdict would the reader suggest they would or should pass? If the plea of the person under trial is to be rejected and he is condemned to be hanged again, on what grounds would it be justified?

Evidently, any sane judge, Christian or non-Christian, and any jury made up of sane people would not even remotely entertain the plea that having died once the accused had come to life again. Such a verdict has no parochial, religious, racial or ethnic bias. It is universal in nature and no man in command of his sanity can think of a verdict other than this. Hence the universal consensus of human intellect would reject the plea of ‘revival’, and will only pass a verdict of ‘survival’ from death. That is exactly what happened in the case Jesus Christ. It was neither a case of revival, nor of resurrection, but simply as common sense would have it, a clear case of survival.

The coming to life of the dead body of Jesus is so essential to Christianity that one has to investigate the real reasons behind it. Apparently there is no logic in the entire episode. Why should a so-called Son of God, having been once delivered from his human cage, ever choose to return to it? And how could it be taken as proof beyond doubt that he had actually died and had then come to life again? This aspect has already been considered at some length and I am not attempting to emphasize the same point, but I wish to draw the reader’s attention to another vital relevant question.

Why did such an absurd idea take root in Christian theology, and gradually in a few centuries after Jesus, grow into one of the pillars of Christian belief, without which the whole edifice of Christian theology would collapse? We will try to project ourselves into the minds of the early Christians who faced an almost insoluble dilemma and begin to reconstruct the circumstances in which Christianity was given a shape different from its reality. This way perhaps it will be easier for us to understand, in depth, the making and unmaking of Christianity. The hard fact which must be brought into sharp focus is simply this: If Jesus, peace be upon him, did actually die upon the cross then in the eyes of the Jewish people he would clearly appear to be an imposter.

Vitriolic Language Against Holy People

As referred to earlier, the scriptures had predicted that any false claimant who attributed anything to God which He had not said, would hang upon the tree. Therefore the death of Jesus upon the cross would be tantamount to the death of Christianity. That is why authentic Jewish religious literature is full of their gloatings about Jesus’ death upon the cross. He was considered to have been proved false, beyond a shadow of doubt, by his contemporary Jewish adversaries on the basis of that particular Biblical verdict.

The early Christians had to suffer all this despite their personal knowledge and despite possessing irrevocable evidence to the effect that Jesus was alive and that he had not died upon the cross as boasted by the Jews. They had themselves treated his wounds. They had seen him recover miraculously from a deep state of coma in which his body was delivered to them, and had seen him with their own eyes, not in the form of an apparition or a ghost, but in the same frail human body which had suffered so much for the sake of truth and had yet miraculously survived death. They talked with him, ate with him and had seen him moving step by step, night after night in utter secrecy away from the scene of the Crucifixion.

Ascension

The subject of the Ascension of Jesus Christ is untouched by St. Matthew and St. John in their Gospels. The lack of mention of such an important event leaves one wondering as to why.

The only two synoptic Gospels which mention the Ascension are Mark2 and Luke3. However, recent scientific and scholarly investigations have proved that the accounts contained in both these Gospels are later interpolations. These verses were non-existent in the original texts.

Codex Siniaticus dates from the 4th century and remains the oldest near complete text of the Old and New Testament. It stands witness to the fact that the said verses in both Mark and Luke were not included in the authentic original versions but were certainly added by some scribe on his own initiative much later. In the Codex Siniaticus the Gospel of Mark ends at chapter 16 verse 8. This fact is now acknowledged in some modern Bible editions as well4. Also, the Gospel of Luke (24:15) in Codex Siniaticus, does not contain the words ‘Carried up to heaven’.

According to the textual critic C.S.C. Williams, if these omissions in the Codex Siniaticus are correct, there is no reference at all, to the Ascension in the original text of the Gospels5.

Even Jehovah’s Witnesses who are some of the most vehement proponents of Jesus’ ‘Sonship’ and his ascent to God the Father, had to admit ultimately that the verses in Mark and Luke are additions without a foundation in the original texts6.

What Happened to Jesus’ Body?

A closer critical examination from the point of view of common sense and logic reveals further absurdities inherent in the episodes of the Crucifixion and Ascension as presented by the Christians of today. As far as the question of Jesus’ return to his human body is concerned, enough has been said. We only want to add to the issue of what might have happened to that body when Jesus finally ascended, if he ever did.

When confronted by the question as to what happened to the body of Jesus Christ, it is suggested by some Christians that as he ascended to his heavenly Father his carnal body disintegrated and disappeared in a glow. This raises a fundamental question. If the departure of Jesus from the human body was to result in such an explosive event, why did it not happen at the instant of his first reported death? The only reference we have in the Bible to Jesus’ death, is when he was still hanging on the cross and in the words of St. Matthew ‘he gave up the ghost’. Apparently nothing else happened other then a smooth departure of the soul from the body. Are we to assume that he did not die upon the cross after all, because if he had left the body, it should have exploded in a similar fashion even then. Why did it only happen the second time Jesus left his body? Under the circumstances only two avenues are open to proceed further.

1. That the person of Jesus did not remain eternally confined to the human body after his soul returned to it and that during his ascent he cast away his human body and ascended purely as a spirit of God.

This is neither supported by facts nor is it concievable because that would lead into a blind alley of believing that Jesus died twice. The first time on the cross and the second time on Ascension.

2. That he remained confined within the human shell eternally.

This cannot be accepted because it is utterly repulsive and inconsistent with the dignity and majesty of the image of God.

On the other hand, we have a point of view of common sence; ‘It would be a mistake to understand Jesus’ ascension as a sort of ancient space trip, and heaven as a place beyond the sun, moon and the galaxies.’ The truth is neither here nor there7. The concoction of such a bizarre story, therefore, could only have been motivated by the insoluble dilemma that the Christians faced during the nascent period of Christianity. When Jesus disappeared from view, naturally the question would have been raised as to what happened to him. The early Christians could not have resolved the quandary by openly professing that as he had never died so there was no question of a body being left behind and that his body had in fact gone along with him during the course of his migration. In this way the problem of the disappearance of the body could have been easily resolved. But this confession was impossible to make. Those who would have dared to admit that Jesus was seen alive and gradually moving away from Judea faced the peril of being condemned by the Roman Law as an accessory to the crime of escape from justice.

To seek refuge in the concoction of a story like the ascent of Jesus to heaven offered a safer option, however bizzare the idea. Yet of course it would involve indulgence in falsehood. We must pay our tribute to the integrity of the early disciples who despite this predicament did not seek refuge in a false statement. All writers of the Gospels chose to remain silent on this issue rather than take refuge behind a smoke screen of misstatements. No doubt they must have suffered the jeering of their adversaries but they chose to suffer in silence.

Mysterious silence on the part of those who knew the inside story must have been largely responsible for sowing the seeds of doubt in the minds of Christians of later generations. They must have wondered: why, after the soul of Jesus Christ had departed, was there no mention of his body being left behind? Where had it gone and what had happened to it? Why did the soul of Christ return to the same body if it ever did? These vital but unanswered questions could have given birth to other questions. If revival meant returning to the same body, what must have happened to Jesus Christ after the second term of his imprisonment in the carnal human frame? Did he eternally remain locked up in that body, never to be released again?

On the other hand if the soul of Jesus once again departed from the same body then was that revival temporary or permanent? If he did not remain locked in it then what happened to his body after his second death? Where was it buried and is there any mention of it in any archives or chronicles?

It seems that these questions, even if not raised earlier, must have been raised during the later centuries when intense philosophical exercises concerning the mystery of Christ and all about him were witnessed widely among Christian theologians. It appears that some unscrupulous scribe tried to wriggle out of this by interpolating the last twelve verses in the Gospel of St. Mark and falsely attributed to him the statement that Jesus was last seen ascending to heaven in the same body.

The hands of concoction did not spare the Gospel of Luke either, where the clever insertion of the words ‘and he was carried up to heaven’ in 24:51 served the purpose of the interpolator. In this way he put to rest the queries once and for all. At least one mystery of Christian dogma was thus resolved. But alas, at what cost? At the cost of the noble facts relating to the real holy image of Jesus Christ. The fact of Christ was thus sacrificed on the altar of fiction. From then on, Christianity continued to proceed unabated and unchecked in the journey of its transformation from facts to fiction.

We know for certain that the Jews were unhappy and disturbed at not finding the body of Jesus Christ8. They wanted to be sure of Jesus’ death and for that they needed the universally acceptable proof of death, that is, the presence of a dead body. Their complaint, lodged with Pilate, evidently displays their uneasiness about its potential disappearance9.

The real and simple answer, however, lay in the fact that as Christ had not died in the manner that was believed so the question of a missing body was totally irrelevent, and in keeping with his promise he must have left Judea in search of the lost sheep of the House of Israel. Obviously he could not be seen again.

By following the probable route of the migration of Israeli tribes one can safely assume that he must have travelled through Afghanistan on his way to Kashmir and other parts of India where the presence of Israeli tribes was reported.

There is strong historical evidence that the peoples of both Afghanistan and Kashmir have stemmed from migrant Jewish tribes. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad revealed that Jesus ultimately died and was buried in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Survival Cases

For those who still find it difficult to believe that the scenario of Jesus having been delivered alive from the cross is too far-fetched and unacceptable, we draw their attention to the fact that in the light of known and recorded history of man’s survival in extremely hazardous situations, the case of Jesus, as we have presented it, is neither bizarre nor impossible to accept. Many medically reported and verified cases of near death present a host of evidence in favour of the survival of people in almost impossible situations.

A well documented case of a maharajah of a small state of pre-partition India is worthy of mention. He was subjected to a similar near impossible situation in which he had few chances of survival. The maharajah in question was poisened by his wife and while his body was being cremated with the fires well lit, a violent storm suddenly appeared. Ultimately he not only escaped death but after a long legal battle was reinstated to his throne. The story runs like this:

Ramendra Narayan Roy, the Kumar of the Bhowal Estate with headquarters of the Court of Wards at Joydevpur, was alleged to have been poisoned and subsequently declared dead and placed for cremation at the burning ghat in May, 1909. Circumstances suggested that his wife was a principal player in the attempted murder. A heavy thunder burst before the completion of the cremation caused the party responsible for burning the dead-body to hurriedly return, leaving the dead body. The rain caused the fire to extinguish. A group of sadhus (Hindu hermits) who were passing by noticed that the man was alive. He was thus rescued. Next day when it was discovered by the conspirators that the body had disappeared, they had another body cremated to make Kumar’s death look like a fact.

The sadhus who had saved him then took him from place to place. The near death experience had caused the Kumar to lose his memory but he regained it gradually and visited Joydevpur twelve years later. The familiar surroundings of his home town caused him to regain his memory entirely. When the Kumar filed a civil suit to recover the estate from the Court of Wards as the genuine heir and owner of Bhowal Estate, his wife and some others contested it. A court case was then bitterly fought between the two parties. More than one thousand people gave evidence in favour of the Kumar and four hundred in support of his wife. The actual matter being contested was regarding the identity of Kumar as according to common knowledge he had died twelve years ago.

The case was won by the Kumar after he identified some marks on the body of his wife which only a husband could have known. His estate was then restored to him.

Hundreds of thousands of similar cases might have gone completely unreported. Thanks to modern medical facilities and media coverage, hundreds of similar cases are being reported and recorded. If all this is plausible in cases of ordinary people from all classes of society and from all sorts of religious moral backgrounds, why could it not be posssible in the case of Jesus.

If any one has the chance of surviving in challenging and almost impossible situations, Jesus indeed stands a greater chance because of the special circumstance surrounding him. Strangely enough, however, the sceptics dismiss the suggestion that Jesus did survive the attempted murder by crucifixion. Yet they would readily believe a far more unrealistic, bizarre and unnatural tale of his revival from absolute death. A death which lasted full three days and nights according to them.

The field of medical research has also taken interest in the phenomenon of near death. A study was carried out where seventy eight reports of near death experiences were examined. In eighty percent of the cases medical personnel were present during or immediately after these experiences. Interestingly, Forty-one percent of the subjects reported that they had been considered dead during the near death experience.

With all kinds of gadgetry at their disposal, if medical experts can pronounce a living person dead, how reliable would be the testimony of an anxious observer who saw Jesus losing consciousness and from this deduced that he had died? Furthermore after seeing him again, to draw the conclusion, that he was revived from death is totally unjustified.

SIN AND ATONEMENT-MirzaTahir Ahmad

                                                          SIN AND ATONEMENT

                    From "Christianity, A Journey From Facts To Fiction"- Mirza Tahir Ahmad

Now we turn to the second very important article of Christian faith. I must clarify however that all Christians do not believe exactly in what follows. Even some Church leaders have deviated from the stiff dogmatic attitude of the Church. Even so, the philosophy of ‘Sin and Atonement’ is a fundamental principle of orthodox Christian faith.

The first component of the Christian understanding of Sin and Atonement is that God is just, and exercises natural justice. He does not forgive sins without exacting retribution; as it would be against the dictates of absolute justice. It is this particular attribute of God that makes necessary the Christian version of atonement.

The second component is that man is sinful because Adam and Eve sinned. As a result their progeny began to inherit sin, as if it was infused into their genes and, ever since, all children of Adam are born congenital sinners.

The third component of this dogma is that a sinful person cannot atone for another person’s sins; only a sinless person can do so. Based on this, it becomes evident why, according to Christian understanding, no prophet of God, however good or near perfection he may have been, could have cleansed the mankind of sin or was able to rid them of it and its consequences. Being a son of Adam, he could not have escaped the element of congenital sin with which he was born.

This is a simple outline of the entire doctrine. Here is the solution advanced by Christian theologists.

The Atonement of Mankind

To solve this apparently unsolvable problem, God conceived an ingenious plan. It is not clear as to whether he consulted his ‘Son’ or if they both conceived the plan simultaneously or even if it was entirely the idea of the ‘Son’, and then accepted by God the Father. The features of this plan unfolded at the time of Christ as follows. Two thousand years ago the ‘Son of God’, who literally shared eternity with Him, was born to a human mother. As the ‘Son of God’, he combined within him the perfect traits of a human being as well as those of God the Father. Next we are told that a pious and chaste lady by the name of Mary, was chosen to be the mother of the ‘Son of God’. She conceived Jesus in partnership with God. In that respect, being a literal ‘Son of God’, Jesus was born without sin, yet somehow he retained his human character and entity. Thus he volunteered himself to take the burden of the entire sin of those of mankind who would believe in him and accept him as their saviour. By this clever device, it is claimed, God did not have to compromise His eternal attribute of absolute justice.

Remember that according to this modus operandi, man would not go unpunished, however sinful he may be. God would still be able to exact retribution from the sinful without compromising His sense of justice. The only difference between this and the previous position, which was responsible for this dramatic change, is the fact that it would be Jesus who would be punished and not the sinful sons and daughters of Adam. It would be the sacrifice of Jesus which would ultimately be instrumental in atoning for the sins of the children of Adam.

However strange and bizarre this logic may seem to be, this is exactly what is professed to have happened. Jesus volunteered himself and was consequently punished for the sins he had never committed.

The Sin of Adam and Eve

Let us re-examine the story of Adam from the beginning. Not a single step in the above doctrine can be accepted by human conscience and logic.

Firstly, we have the idea that because Adam and Eve sinned, so their progeny became genetically and eternally polluted with sin. In contrast to this, the science of genetics reveals that human thoughts and actions, be they good or bad, even if persistently adhered to during the entire lifetime of a person, cannot be transferred to and encoded into the genetic system of human reproduction. A lifespan is too short a period to play any role in bringing about such profound changes. Even the vices of a people, generation after generation, or good deeds for that matter, cannot be transferred to the progeny as genetic characters. Perhaps millions of years are required for etching human genes with new characteristics.

Not only this, even if by a most absurd and unacceptable extension of one’s imagination one could conceive of such a bizarre happening, the contrary will have to be accepted by the same logic. This would mean that if a sinful person repented and came out clean at the end of the day, then that act should also be recorded in the genetic system; effectively cancelling out the effect of the previous sin. Scientifically this may not happen, but certainly there is far more logic in this balanced picture than imagining that it is only the propensity to sin which can be genetically encoded and not the disposition to do good.

Secondly, by attempting to resolve the problem of Adam by proposing that sin is genetically transferred to the future generations of Adam, all that has been achieved is the total demolition of the very foundation on which the Christian doctrine of ‘Sin and Atonement’ is based. If God is absolutely Just, then where is the sense of justice in eternally condemning the entire progeny of Adam and Eve for the transient sin they committed and repented? A sin for which they themselves were heavily punished and driven out of heaven in such disgrace. What manner of justice would it be for God, who even after having more than punished Adam and Eve for their personal sins, still did not have His passion of revenge abated until He had condemned the entire human race to a helpless degradation of being born as congenital sinners? What chance did the children of Adam have to escape sin? If parents make a mistake why should their innocent children suffer for that mistake eternally?

That being so, again what distorted sense of justice does God claim to possess and to enjoy, to punish a people who are designed to act sinfully, however much they abhor sin? Sin is made a part and parcel of their mechanism. There is no chance any more for a child of Adam to remain innocent. If sin was a crime, then logic demands that it should be a crime of the Creator and not that of the creation. In that case, what justice could require the punishment of the innocent, for the crimes of the perpetrator?

How different from the Christian understanding of sin and its consequences is the proclamation of the Holy Quran, which says:

No one can bear the burden of another. (35:19)

God requires not of any one that which is beyond his capacity. (2:287)

Compared to the Christian concept of Sin and Atonement these declarations of the Holy Quran are pure music to the soul.

Let us now turn to the Biblical account of what actually happened at the time of the sin of Adam and Eve and the consequences that ensued the punishment. According to Genesis, God accepted their apology only partially and an eternal punishment was meted out to them, prescribed as follows:

To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.’

To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it were you taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’ (Genesis 3:16–19)

Mankind existed long before Adam and Eve came to be born. Western scientists themselves discovered the remains of many a prehistoric man and labelled them under different distinctive titles. Neanderthal man is perhaps the most widely known of them. They lived between 100,000 to 35,000 years ago, mostly in the regions of Europe, Near East and Central Asia. A carcass of a fully developed human being has been discovered, who happened to roam the earth about 29,000 years before Adam and Eve are known to have begun their short lived sojourn in paradise. At that time, human beings were physically just like us and lived in Europe, Africa and Asia, and later during the Ice Age they spread to the Americas as well. Again in Australia, the authentic cultural history of Aborigines is traceable up to 40,000 years ago.

Compared to these relatively recent times, a skeleton of a female from Hedar in Ethiopia has been discovered which is 2.9 million years old. Now according to the Biblical chronology, Adam and Eve lived around six thousand years ago. One may look back in wonderment at the reported history of human beings, or Homo Sapiens as they are titled in scientific jargon.

Human Suffering Continues

Having read the Biblical account of how Adam and Eve were punished, one cannot help wondering if the pain and throes of labour were unknown to woman until the beginning of the era of Adam and Eve. A scientist will be hard to come by, who believes in such fantasies. Again, we have plenty of irrefutable evidence that man, long before Adam and Eve, had occupied all the continents of the world, even remote Pacific islands and had always laboured hard to survive. Therefore, to say that Adam and Eve were the first to commit a sin and because of that, painful child birth was ordained as punishment, is totally proven wrong by the study of life. Even animals, who are much lower in the order of life, give birth in pain. If one watches a cow giving birth to a calf, her suffering seems similar to the pain of a human female. Many such animals, we know, inhabited the earth millions and millions of years before Adam and Eve.

To earn ones livelihood with labour is common to man, but not distinctive at all. Women also labour for their earnings and livelihood. Before that, every specie of life earns its livelihood through labour. This fact is the key motivator in the evolution of life. The struggle for existence is perhaps the very first distinctive mark of life which separates it from the world of the inanimate. It is a natural phenomenon, with nothing whatsoever to do with sin.

Again, if this be the punishment prescribed as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin, then one wonders what would happen after Atonement? If Jesus Christ atoned for the sins of the sinful human beings, was the punishment prescribed for the Sin abolished after the Crucifixion? Did those who believed in Jesus Christ as the ‘Son of God’, if they were women, cease to have painful childbirth? Did the believing men start earning their livelihood without exerting manual labour? Did the propensity to sin cease to pass on to the future generations and innocent children started being given birth to? If the answer to all of these questions were to be ‘yes,’ then of course there would be some justification in seriously contemplating the Christian philosophy of Sin and Atonement. But Alas, the answer to all these questions are no, no and no. If nothing seems to have changed since the Crucifixion, both in the Christian and non-Christian worlds, then what would be the meaning of Atonement?

Even after Jesus Christ the sense of common justice continues to dictate to human beings all over the world that if any person commits a sin, punishment of that sin has to be given to that person alone and to none else. Every man and woman must suffer the consequences of their sins by themselves. Children are always born innocent. If this is not the truth then God’s attribute of Justice is thrown overboard.

We as Muslims believe that all divine books are based on eternal truth and none can make any claims contrary to that. When we come across inconsistencies and contradictions in any so called divinely revealed book, our attitude is not that of total denial and rejection but that of cautious and sympathetic examination. Most of the statements of the Old Testament and the New Testament, which we find at variance with the truth of nature, we either try to reconcile by reading some underlying cryptic or metaphoric message, or reject part of the text as the work of human hands rather than that of God. While Christianity itself was true, it could not have contained any distortions, unacceptable facts or beliefs giving a lie to nature. That is why we started not with the textual examination but with the fundamentals themselves, which through centuries of consensus have become indisputable components of Christian philosophy. Rudimentary among them are the Christian understanding of Sin and Atonement. I would much rather believe that someone, somewhere during the history of Christianity, misunderstood things and tried to interpret them in the light of his knowledge and misled the following generations because of that.

Inherited Sin

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that Adam and Eve sinned literally as described in the Old Testament, and were duly punished. As the story goes, the punishment was handed out not only to them but to their entire progeny. Once that punishment was prescribed and delivered, why was there the need for any other punishment at all? Once a sin has been punished, it is done with. Once a judgement has been passed, no one has the right to continuously add more and more punishments. In the case of Adam and Eve it is not only that they were severely reprimanded and if anything more than punished for the sin they had committed, but also the nature of the punishment which was extended to their progeny in itself is highly questionable. Of that we have said enough. What we are attempting to point to is a far more heinous violation of absolute justice. To be punished continuously for the sins of our forefathers is one thing but to be compelled to continue to sin as a consequence of one’s forefather’s error is simply abominable.

Let us get down to the hard realities of human experience and try to understand the Christian philosophy of crime and punishment in relation to our everyday experience. Let us suppose a judgement is passed against a criminal, which is far too severe and harsh in proportion to the crime committed. That could, of course, lead to loud and severe condemnation of such a gross disproportionate penalty by every sensible man. In view of this, we find it very difficult to believe that the penalty imposed on Adam for his sin, came from a Just God. It is not just a case of an out of proportion penalty. It is a penalty, that according to the Christian understanding of God’s conduct, outlived the life span of Adam and Eve and was extended generation after generation to their progeny. For the progeny to suffer for the punishment of their parents is actually an extension of the violation of justice beyond its ultimate limits. But we are not talking of that either. If we had the misfortune to observe a judgement passed by any contemporary judge, making it compulsory for the children, grand children and great grand children, etc. of a criminal to be coerced by law to continue to sin and commit crimes and be punished accordingly till eternity then what would be the reaction of contemporary society, which has acquired a universal sense of justice through civilisation?

In the fifth century, Augustine the Bishop of Hippo, was involved in a confrontation with the Pelagian movement, concerning the controversy of the nature of the fall of Adam and Eve. He proclaimed the Pelagian movement as being heretical because it taught that Adam’s sin affected only himself and not the human race as a whole; that every individual is born free of sin and is capable in his own power of living a sinless life and that there had even been persons who had succeeded in doing so.

Those in the right were labeled as heretics. Day was denounced as night and night as day. Heresy is truth and truth heresy.

The Transfer of Sin

Let us now re-examine the theme that God does not forgive the sinful without punishing them because it is against His sense of justice. One is horrified to realise that for century after century Christians have believed in something which is most certainly beyond the grasp of the human intellect and contrary to human conscience. How on earth, or heaven for that matter, could God forgive a sinful person merely because an innocent person has volunteered himself to take the punishment instead? The moment God does so, He violates the very fundamental principles of justice. A sinful person must suffer for his sins. In short, a multitude of complex human problems would arise if the punishment is transferred to someone else.

It is argued by Christian theologians that such a transfer of punishment does not violate any principle of justice, because of the voluntary acceptance by the innocent person of the other person’s punishment. What would you say in the case of a debtor, they ask, who is overloaded with debts beyond his capacity to pay and some God fearing philanthropist decides to relieve him of his burden by paying his entire debts on his behalf? Our answer would be that indeed we would loudly applaud such an act of immense generosity, kindness and sacrifice. But what would be the reaction of the person who confronts us with such a question, if the debt payable runs into trillions of pounds sterling and there steps forward a philanthropist who takes out a penny from his pocket, demanding that all that is due to the debtor should be cancelled out against that kindly penny offered as a substitute for that debt. What we have in the case of Jesus Christ offering himself to be punished, for the sins of all humanity, is far more grotesquely unproportionate. Again, it is not only one debtor or all the debtors of one single generation, but we are talking about billions of born and unborn defaulters extending up to Doomsday.

But that is not all. To conceive of crime as only a debtor who owes money to someone else is the most naive definition of sin that I have ever come across. This scenario which has been presented deserves to occupy our attention a little longer before we turn to some other aspects of crime and punishment.

Let us consider the case of a debtor called A, who owes a hundred thousand pounds to person B. If a rich philanthropist, in full command of his senses, seriously and genuinely wants to relieve the debtor of his burden, the common law would require him to pay to B all that person A owed him. But suppose the hypothetical philanthropist steps forward with the plea that person A should be absolved of his responsibility of payment to person B and instead he himself should be beaten up a little bit or imprisoned for three days and nights at the most, in his place. If it really happened in real life it would be a treat to watch the horrified faces of the astounded judge and the confounded poor creditor B. But the philanthropist has yet to complete his plea for clemency. He would further stipulate: ‘O my lord, that is not all I want in return for my sacrifice. I require all the debtors of the entire kingdom alive today or to be born until the end of time to be absolved of their dues in return for my suffering of three days and nights.’ At this point one’s mind boggles.

How one wishes to propose to God, the Just God, that at least those who had been robbed of the fruits of their labour, or of the savings of their lives should have been compensated to some degree at least. But the Christian God, it seems, is far more kind and clement to the criminal than to the innocent who suffer at the hands of the criminal. A strange sense of justice indeed which results in the forgiveness of robbers, usurpers, the abusers of children, the torturers of the innocent and the perpetrators of all sorts of beastly crimes against humanity, provided that they believe in Jesus Christ in their dying moments. What of the incalculable debt they owe to their tormented victims. A few moments of Jesus in hell seem sufficient to purge them of their long lives of unpunished heinous guilt, generation after generation.

Punishment Continues to be Meted Out

Let us now consider a different, more serious, category of crime, the consequences of which human nature simply cannot accept to be transferable. For instance, someone mercilessly abuses a child and even rapes and murders it. Human sensibilities would no doubt be violated to an unbearable degree. Suppose such a person continues to cause similar and greater suffering all around him without ever being caught and brought to justice. Having lived his life of crime unpunished by human hands, death closes in upon him but he determines to elude even the greater punishment of the Judgement Day and suddenly decides, at last, to have faith in Jesus Christ as his saviour. Would all his sins suddenly melt into nothingness and would he be left to glide into the other world free of sin like a new born babe? Perhaps such a one who defers his belief in Jesus till the time of death proves to be much wiser than the one who does so earlier in life. There always remained for the latter a danger of committing sins after belief and falling prey to the devils designs and insinuations. Why not wait till death is close upon you giving the devil little chance and time to rob you of your faith in Jesus? A free life of crime and pleasure, here on earth, and a rebirth in an eternal state of redemption is no mean bargain indeed.

Is this the wisdom of justice that the Christians attribute to God? Such a sense of justice or such a God himself is totally unacceptable to human conscience, which He Himself created, without, alas, being able to discriminate right from wrong.

Looking at the same question in the light of human experience and human understanding, one has every right to denounce this philosophy to be meaningless and without foundation. It has no reality or substance. Human experience teaches us that it is always the prerogative of those who suffer at the hands of others, to forgive or not to forgive. Sometimes governments, to celebrate a day of national rejoicing or for other reasons, may declare an amnesty to criminals without discrimination. But that does not in itself justify the act of pardoning those who have done some irreparable harm and caused perpetual suffering to their fellow innocent citizens. It should be remembered that if the act of indiscriminate pardon at the hands of a government can by any measure be justified and if this is not considered by Christian theologians as a violation of the sense of justice then why do they not extend the same courtesy to God and concede to Him the right of forgiveness as and when He so pleases? After all, He is the Supreme Sovereign, the Creator and Master of everything. If He pardons anyone for any crime that may have been committed against fellow beings, the Supreme Master has the unlimited power to compensate the aggrieved so generously as to make him perfectly satisfied with His decision. That being so where is the need for the sacrifice of His innocent ‘Son’? This in itself constitutes a mockery of justice. We are born attuned to the attributes of God. He so declares in the Holy Bible:

Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in our likeness.’ (Genesis 1:26)

This tenet, common to both Christian and Muslims alike, requires that human conscience is the best reflective mirror of God’s conduct in a given situation. It is a matter of every day experience with us that many a times we forgive without having violated the sense of justice in the least. If we are wronged personally, then in respect of the crime committed against us we can go to any length in forgiveness. If a child hurts his parents by being disobedient or by causing damage to some precious household article, or by earning them a bad name; he has sinned against them. His parents may forgive him without their conscience pricking them or blaming them for having violated the sense of justice. But if their child destroys the property of their neighbour, or injures the child of another person, how could they decide to forgive the child for causing suffering to others? It would be deemed an act of injustice even according to their own consciences if they did so.

Crime and punishment have the same relationship as cause and effect, and they have to be proportionate to some degree. This aspect of the relationship between crime and punishment has already been discussed at some length with regards to financial misconduct of one man against another. The same argument applies with greater severity to other crimes like injuring, maiming or murdering innocent citizens or violating their honour in any manner. The greater the enormity of the crime, the more severe one would expect the nature and extent of punishment to be. If God can forgive all and sundry, as I do believe that He and only He can, then the question of Atonement in exchange for punishing an innocent person does not come into play at all. If, however, it is a question of the transference of one criminal’s punishment to another innocent person who has opted for such a measure, then justice would most certainly demand that the punishment must be transferred in its entirety to the other person, without decreasing or diluting it to any degree. Again of that we have already said enough.

Do the Christians believe that this dictate of justice was applied in the case of Jesus the ‘Son’ by God the Father? If so, it means that all the punishment due to all the criminals of the Christian world born at the time of Christ or ever afterwards till Judgement Day was amassed, concentrated and brought to an infernal intensity of such a degree that the suffering of Jesus Christ for merely three days and nights equalled the torture of all the punishment which the above mentioned sinners had earned or were to earn till that last day. If so, no Christian should ever be punished on earth by any Christian government. Otherwise, that would be tantamount to an act of gross injustice. All that the courts of law should do after reaching the verdict of guilty would be to ask the Christian criminal to pray to Jesus the ‘Son’ to save him. And the matter should be rested and brought to a close there and then. It would simply be a case of book transfer of criminal’s account to that of Jesus Christ.

For the sake of illustration let us bring the United States of America into sharper focus and zoom in on the state of crime there. The crimes of mugging and murder are so widespread that it is difficult to keep a count of them. Once I remember in New York, I tuned in to a radio station which was devoted entirely to the reporting of capital crime. It was a most horrifying experience. It was so painful that half an hour was the maximum I could take it, no more. Almost every five minutes a new murder was committed in America and was reported, sometimes with grisly coverage by reporters who were actually witnessing the very murder in progress. It is not our intention to present a detailed picture of crime in America, but it is a matter of common knowledge that today America stands among the foremost in the list of countries where of all sorts of crime are rampant; particularly in larger cities such as Chicago, New York and Washington. In New York, mugging is common place along with the maiming of innocent citizens who dare to resist it. This daily occurrence creates a most obnoxious picture of mutilation and murder for paltry gains.

Leaving aside for the moment, the rising trend of crime throughout the world, in the case of America alone, one cannot fail to wonder about the relationship between the Christian concept of Sin and Atonement with the crimes committed daily. However much removed they may be from Christian value in their practice, at least this much goes to their credit that they do believe in the Christian doctrine of Sin and Redemption and also in Christ as their saviour—alas—to what avail. The majority of the criminals in America, of course, are so-called Christians. Though Muslims and others are no exception. Just because all such criminals who belong to Christianity and believe in the reported voluntary sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the sake of the believing sinners, would they all be pardoned by God? If so in what way? Ultimately, a sizeable percentage from among them may get caught and get punished by the law of the land, but still a large number would either remain unapprehended or may only be punished for a part of the crimes which they may have committed over many years.

What would Christianity offer to those who are punished by law and what would it promise those who remain unapprehended here on earth? Will both be punished to varying degrees or will they be punished indiscriminately?

Another dilemma relating to a criminal’s redemption because of his belief in Jesus Christ arises out of a less clear and undefined situation. If, for instance, a Christian commits a crime against an innocent non-Christian victim, he would be forgiven of course because of the blessings of his faith in Jesus. The punishment of his crime will then be transferred to the account of Jesus instead. But what would be the profit and loss statement of the poor innocent non-Christian victim. Poor Jesus and the poor victim, both being punished for a crime they did not commit.

One’s faculties are confounded if we try to imagine the enormity of all the crimes ever committed by humanity since the dawn of Christianity till the time when the sun of existence sets on human life. Have all these crimes been transferred to the account of Jesus Christ, peace and blessing of Allah be upon him? Have all these sins been accounted for in the small space of three days and three nights that Jesus is supposed to have suffered? Still one keeps on wondering, how could the vast sea of criminals so intensely embittered by the deadly poison of crime be sweetened and cleansed entirely of the effects of their crimes by the mere act of their believing in Jesus. Again, one’s thoughts are carried back to the remote past, when poor Adam and Eve so naively committed their first crime only because they were very cunningly duped and ensnared by Satan. Why was their sin not also washed clean? Did they not have faith in God? Was it a minor act of goodness to have faith in God the Father and was it their fault anyway that they had never been told of a ‘Son’ living eternally with God the Father? Why did not the ‘Divine Son’ take pity on them and beseech God the Father to punish him for their crimes instead? How one wishes that had happened, it might have been so much easier to be punished only for that one single faltering moment on the part of Adam and Eve. The entire story of humanity would certainly have been rewritten in the book of fate. A heavenly earth would have been created instead and Adam and Eve would not have been banished eternally from heaven, along with the untold number of their unhappy progeny. Jesus alone would have been banished from heaven merely for three days and three nights and that would have been that. Sadly, neither God the Father nor Jesus, thought of this. Look how Jesus’ holy lovable reality is unfortunately transformed into a bizarre and unbelievable myth.

THE SONSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST-Mirza Tahir Ahmad

                               THE SONSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST FROM THE BOOK

                     "Christianity, A Journey From Facts To Fiction." by Mirza Tahir Ahmad

The ‘Father-Son’ relationship between God and Jesus Christ is central to Christianity. Let us first try to understand what is the meaning of being a literal son. When we concentrate on the meaning of being a literal son to a literal father, things begin to appear which force us to revise our opinion of Jesus’ ‘sonship’. What is a son? During the period when science had not yet developed and discovered how a child is born, this question could only be vaguely answered. Ancient people thought it quite possible for God to have a son through human birth. It was a belief prevalent in almost all pagan societies in different parts of the world. Greek mythology abounds with such tales and Hindu mythology does not lag far behind either. For the so-called gods to have sons and daughters, as many as they pleased, was in fact never seriously challenged by human reason. But now science has developed to a stage where the process of human birth has been described in greater detail than ever before. This issue has become very complicated and those who still believe that literal sons and daughters can be born to God have very serious problems to resolve and some very difficult questions to answer.

The Scientific Basis of Parenthood

First of all, let me remind you that the mother and father participate equally in producing a child. The cells of human beings contain 46 chromosomes, which carry the genes or character bearing threads of life. The ovum of a human mother possesses only 23 of the 46 chromosomes, which is half the number found in each man and woman. When the mother’s ovum is ready and available for insemination, the other half of the chromosomes which it lacks, is provided by the male sperm, which then enters and fertilizes it. This is the design of God, otherwise, the number of chromosomes would begin to double with every generation. As a result the second generation would have 92 chromosomes; humans would soon be transformed into giants and the entire process of growth would run amok. God has so beautifully planned and designed the phenomenon of the survival of species that at productive levels of regenerative cells, chromosomes are halved in number. The mother’s ovum contains 23 chromosomes and so does the father’s sperm. As such, one can reasonably expect half the characters bearing genes of the child to be provided by the female and half by the male partner. This is the meaning of a literal son. There is no other definition of being a literal son which can be ascribed to any human birth. There are variations in the methodology of course, but there are no exceptions to the rules and principles just explained.

Focusing our attention on the birth of Jesus, let us build a scenario about what might have happened in his case. The first possibility, which can be scientifically considered, is that Mary’s unfertilized ovum provided the 23 chromosomes as the mother’s share in the forming of the embryo. That being so, the question would arise as to how the ovum was fertilized and where did the remaining 23 essential chromosomes come from? It is impossible to suggest that Jesus’ cells had only 23 chromosomes. No human child can be born alive with even 45 chromosomes. Even if a human being was deprived of a single chromosome out of the 46 necessary for the making of all human beings, the result would be something chaotic, if there was anything at all. Scientifically, Mary could not provide the 46 chromosomes alone, 23 had to come from somewhere else.

If God is the father then that presents several options. One; God also has the same chromosomes that humans have, and these must have been transferred somehow to the uterus of Mary. That is unbelievable and unacceptable; if God has the chromosomes of human beings it means he is no longer God. So as a consequence of belief in Jesus as the literal ‘Son’ of God, even the divinity of the Father is jeopardised.

The second possibility is that God created the extra chromosomes as a supernatural phenomenon of creation. In other words, they did not actually belong to the person of God, but were created miraculously. This would automatically lead us to reject Jesus’ relationship to God as one of child and father, and would result in the all embracing relationship of the Universe to God, that is, the relationship of every created being to its Creator.

Is a Literal Son of God Possible?

Evidently therefore, literal sonship of God is impossible because a literal son must have half the character of his father and half the character of his mother. So another problem surfaces, the son would be half man and half god. But those who believe in the literal sonship, claim and emphasise that Christ was a perfect man and a perfect god.

If the chromosomes were half the required number then we are not left with any problem, no child would be born anyway. Suppose it did happen, that child would only be half a man. Not to mention the missing twenty-three full chromosomes, even a single defective gene within one chromosome can play havoc with a child born with such a congenital defect. He could be blind, limbless, deaf and dumb. The dangers attendant to such a mishap are unlimited. One should be realistic; it is impossible to conceive God as possessing any chromosomes, human or otherwise.

Therefore, with the personal physical contribution of God having been ruled out, if a son were born to Mary with only the human character bearing genes possessed by her ovum, whatever the outcome, he would certainly not be the ‘Son’ of God. At best you can describe that freak of nature as half a man and no more. If the reproductive organs of Mary were like any other female and still the ovum were to fertilize somehow by itself, the maximum one can expect is the creation of something with only half the human characters. It is abominable to call that something the ‘Son’ of God.

So how was Christ born? We understand that research on the subject of single mother birth without the participation of a male is being carried out in many advanced countries of the world. But so far human knowledge is only at a stage where scientific research has not yet advanced to such a level where positive irrefutable evidence of virgin births in human beings can be produced. However, all sorts of possibilities remain open.

At lower orders of life two phenomena are scientifically well established: Parthenogenesis and Hermaphroditism. As such, the miraculous birth of Jesus, to Mary, can be understood to belong to some similar natural but very rare phenomenon, the peripheries of which are not yet fully fathomed by man.

Here follow brief descriptions of the phenomena of Parthenogenesis and Hermaphroditism. Readers interested in a more scientific treatment of the subject matter, based upon current understanding, may refer to Appendix II.

Parthenogenesis

This is the asexual development of a female ovum into an individual, without the aid of a male agent. It is observed among many lower forms of life such as aphids and also fish. There is also evidence that parthenogenesis can be a successful strategy among lizards living under low and unpredictable rainfall conditions. In laboratory conditions, mice and rabbit embryos have been developed parthenogenetically to a stage equivalent to halfway through pregnancy, but have then been aborted. In recent study, human embryos could be activated occasionally by parthenogenesis using calcium ionophore as a catalyst. Such research raises the prospect that some early human pregnancy losses may have involved the parthenogenetic activation of the embryo.

Hermaphroditism

This term applies when organs of both sexes are present within a single female and the chromosomes show both male and female characters aligned side by side. Laboratory tests have revealed cases such as that of a hermaphrodite rabbit which, at one stage, served several females and sired more than 250 young of both sexes, while at another stage, became pregnant in isolation and gave birth to seven healthy young of both sexes. When autopsied, it showed two functional ovaries and two infertile testes while in a pregnant condition. Recent studies suggest that such a phenomenon is possible, rarely, among humans also.

Jesus the Son of God?

There are many other problems with the Christian understanding of Jesus, his nature and his relationship with God. From further critical and analytical study of Christian doctrine, what emerges is that there is a ‘Son of God’, who possesses the characteristics of a perfect man and also that of a perfect god. However, remember that even according to the Christian doctrine the Father is not exactly like the ‘Son’. The Father God, is a perfect God and not a perfect man, while the ‘Son’ is both a perfect man and a perfect god. In that case these are two separate personalities with different characteristics.

It should be realised that these characteristics are not transferable. There are characters in certain substances which are transferable. For instance, water can become snow and also vapour, without causing a change in the substance or composition of water. But the sort of differences in the characteristics of God and Christ, where certain characteristics are added to one of them, are irreconcilable. It is not possible for one of them to go through this transformation and still remain indistinguishable from the other. That, again, is a problem and a serious one for that matter, whether Jesus Christ was a perfect god as well as a perfect man. If he was, then he was surely different from the Father who was never a perfect man; not even an imperfect one. What type of relationship was this? Was the ‘Son’ greater than the Father? If this additional character did not make the ‘Son’ greater then it must have been a defect. In that case a defective ‘Son God’ is not only against the claims of Christianity, but is also against the universal understanding of God. How, therefore, could anyone comprehend the paradoxical tenet of Christianity which would have us believe that ‘One in Three’ and ‘Three in One’ are the same thing, with no difference at all. This can only happen when the very foundation of a belief is raised, not on a factual base, but merely on myth.

Yet another problem to be resolved is this: If Jesus became the ‘Son of God’ as a consequence of his birth from Mary’s womb, then what was his position before that? If he was eternally the ‘Son’, without having been born of Mary, why was it necessary to give birth to him in a human form? If it was necessary, then the quality of Son was not eternal; it only became an added characteristic after he was given birth and it disappeared when he rejected the body and returned to heaven. So there are many complexities rising out of a belief which common sense rejects. I invite you again to accept a far more respectable and realistic scenario; that of believing the birth of Jesus Christ to be a special creation brought about by God, having activated some hidden laws of nature. Jesus was the metaphorical son of God, loved by Him in a special way; but a human being all the same. His ‘Son’ status was attached to his character some three hundred years later, to allow his legend to live on—this will be discussed later.

On the question of the nature of the nuptial relationship between God the Father and Mary. This is a question which one loathes to discuss bare thread. Yet in an attempt to understand the intermediary role of Mary between the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’, this is an unavoidable evil.

THE FAITHS OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS

                            The Faiths of the Founding Fathers

                                        By David L. Holmes

Book Description
Publication Date: May 1, 2006

It is not uncommon to hear Christians argue that America was founded as a Christian nation. But how true is this claim?

 In this compact book, David L. Holmes offers a clear, concise and illuminating look at the spiritual beliefs of our founding fathers. He begins with an informative account of the religious culture of the late colonial era, surveying the religious groups in each colony.

 In particular, he sheds light on the various forms of Deism that flourished in America, highlighting the profound influence this intellectual movement had on the founding generation. Holmes then examines the individual beliefs of a variety of men and women who loom large in our national history.

 He finds that some, like Martha Washington, Samuel Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson's daughters, held orthodox Christian views. But many of the most influential figures, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson, James and Dolly Madison, and James Monroe, were believers of a different stripe.

 Respectful of Christianity, they admired the ethics of Jesus, and believed that religion could play a beneficial role in society. But they tended to deny the divinity of Christ, and a few seem to have been agnostic about the very existence of God. Although the founding fathers were religious men, Holmes shows that it was a faith quite unlike the Christianity of today's evangelicals.

Holmes concludes by examining the role of religion in the lives of the presidents since World War II and by reflecting on the evangelical resurgence that helped fuel the reelection of George W. Bush.

An intriguing look at a neglected aspect of our history, the book will appeal to American history buffs as well as to anyone concerned about the role of religion in American culture.

LAWS OF SCIENCE AS OPPOSED TO LAWS OF GOD AS

                          LAWS OF SCIENCE AS OPPOSED TO LAWS OF GOD AS

                                                ENUMERATED IN SCRIPTURE

Deists like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Thomas Paine and many of the founding fathers were so wise because the only truth that they accepted was God's Natural Law which cannot be interpreted or contradicted by anyone. They roundly refused to accept the authority of institutional religion and refused to accept the scriptures of those religions as “The Word of God”. In fact Thomas Paine went out of his way to debunk both the Old and New Testaments in his famous work, “The Age of Reason”.

What are some natural laws?

Due to the gravitational pull of the earth, we have The Law of Gravity and gravity cannot be contradicted. Objects will always fall DOWN or toward the earth. They will never fall UP. They may be projected up, as in the case of a missile, but then that's not their natural state, they are being projected upward by an outside source like a rocket engine.

The law of conservation of mass implies that mass cannot be created or destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space and changed into different types of particles; and that for any chemical process in a closed system, the mass of the reactants must equal the mass of the products.

Likewise, The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed. Therefore the sum of all the energies in the system is a constant.

No matter how many experiments have been conducted, you will never find a contradiction of these laws. This is why they have become known as LAWS of science rather than just theories.

Books are written by men, translated into different languages by men and interpreted by men who usually do not know the author or his original intent. And if a book is written in an ancient language no longer in use, the translation is going to be all the more difficult.

If I wrote you a letter saying: "What a ball I had last night..." How will people 1000 years from now interpret that? Will they think that I threw a dance or will they think that I purchased a ball? Or will they think that I had a good time? If I wrote to you that I am "so drained by being in the presence of psychic vampires", how will that be interpreted 1000 years from now? Will they think that I believed in vampires and spent time with them? Will they think that all psychics are vampires or will they think that I am actually being drained of blood by vampires? Or will they think WHAT I MEANT, that some people drain me mentally and physically and that in 2011 they are commonly termed as "psychic vampires?"

You see, in order to give an accurate translation, the translators would have to know expressions and slang and dialects from 2011; otherwise they will come to wrong conclusions. And just look at how much the English language has changed in a mere 40 years? Now you tell me how translators in 1611 who translated the King James Bible could possibly have known slang and dialects from 500 BC? How accurate do you think their translations could possibly be?

Not only that, but the translators had AN AGENDA, just like the Roman Catholic Church had an agenda when they created their version, the Douay Rheims Version, to translate passages in such a way as to promote and support the King and the Church of England. Likewise, so did the Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church when in the 4th century, they chose which books would be included in the Bible and which would not. The Catholic Church and Constantine only chose books that supported THEIR AGENDA and THEIR SUPREMACY. So how much trust can you put into a book of uncertain origins and which has been translated over and over during the last 2500 years?

You see talking heads on TV all the time trying to interpret what Shakespeare said or what Dante said or what Walt Whitman said. How can they possibly know, not having ever met or spoken with the author? It's all just conjecture and BS. And since God doesn't seem to speak to us directly, even if He WAS responsible for some of the scriptures, how could we ever hope to know what He really meant? Perhaps the scribes just added a little here and deleted a little there to suit their own purposes.

And how much trust can you put in a book of which there are no original copies in existence? We have the Sumerian cuneiform tablets enumerating their religious beliefs going back 5 to 6,000 years and we have the "pyramid texts" inscribed on the inner walls of pyramids and tombs going back some 4000 years, yet we have no copies of either the Ten Commandments nor of the Pentateuch (The Five Books of Moses) any older than from 500 BC. So which came first; the chicken or the egg? Is the Old Testament an original work inspired and written by God or merely a compilation of previously existing myths, stories and religious texts stolen from older religions and presented as new revellation direct from God?

Histories are usually written by the WINNER, not the loser, so they will always have a slant to them and never be objectively honest or true. Histories of the Civil War are markedly different depending on whether the historian was from the North of from the South. They may agree on incontrovertible facts which cannot be denied, like the fact that the South lost, but they will vary widely as to the causes of the war and justifications for the war.

Likewise, "Holy Books" written by the practitioners of one religion will most always contradict and disparage "Holy Books" written by a competitive religion. So who are we to believe? How can we possibly tell which "Holy Book" is "THE Holy Book" and especially when even people who claim the SAME "Holy Book" can't even agree on what IT says? There is no way that I know of in deciding which Holy Book is the real one. All you can do is choose the one you like best, but that won't make it true or the correct choice.

I think that most people simply choose what they were raised with because we don't want to offend our parents and grandparents, and we think that they knew best; but other than that, we really have no scientific or solid basis for making that choice. Just like people who say: "I'm a Republican because every member of my family has always been a Republican." But then in talking with them you may find that they believe in entitlements and socialism and big government, yet they claim to be Republicans, which shows that they don't even know what Republicans believe because if they did, they wouldn't be espousing the beliefs of Democrats, and yet they claim to be Republicans.

Very few people will investigate a new concept or a new religion without dragging their old beliefs into it. They won't give the new concept a chance because they are continually saying: "Well, I don't know if I can accept this, because this contradicts Jeremiah 6:12 or Micah 3:5 or whatever. Well, that's like saying: "I can't use a touch-tone phone because it doesn't have a dial and if it doesn't have a dial it can't be a real phone."

We will never learn anything new if we don't keep an open mind. A great sage once said: " You can't add anything to a glass that's already full." And this is very true. We need to empty our minds before trying to understand new concepts.