HI: I’M ELOHIM: THE TROUBLE WITH GOD (COLLECTED ESSAYS 2025)
CHAPTER 6: THE TROUBLE WITH JESUS
Wise men present gifts: We are three wise men.
Mandy Cohen: What?
Wise men: We are three wise men.
Mandy Cohen: Well what are doing creeping around in this house at two o’clock in the morning? That doesn’t sound very wise to me. Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979
God, Fascist Genocide Champion of the Old Testament, and accused absent father of a planet of abandoned children, decides after 13.5 billion years to intervene with a ‘sordid session of begotten-son sacrifice’.
‘Not until gentle Jesus meek and mild is the concept of Hell introduced. Eternal torture, eternal punishment, for you and all your family for the smallest transgression. I have no hesitation in saying this is a wicked belief.’ Christopher Hitchens, debate v Reverend Al Sharpton, Youtube
But you’ll have to imagine the Jesus-story like 3D chess, because many Christians believe God is Jesus.
So that’s as clear as baptismal mud.
Modern scholarship is scathing and sceptical about the scarcely reliability Gospels. First-century scallywags peddling scabrous manuscripts donkey’s years after the event (or lack of events), and that should itch our scratchy-chin-chins.
If you’re a lover of faulty predictions, dull prose, nasty analogies, far-out stories rather than scientific proof, the New Testament is the latest Dan Brown novel for you.
Mark was considered the first Gospel — scorified as fiction. (How did Mark know what Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane if everybody was asleep? And if Jesus is God, who was Jesus praying to?) Matthew upscales the scratch story with a score-sheet of scraggy detail:
‘Their multiple authors — none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion — cannot agree on anything of importance. Matthew and Luke cannot concur on the Virgin Birth or the genealogy of Jesus ... they disagree wildly about the Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery of Judas, and Peter’s haunting “denial”. Most astonishingly, they cannot converge on a common account of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection.’ Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great pp111-112
Such is the disconnect between a proper performing Jesus and the forgers of the Gospels that any psychoanalysis of Jesus is rendered a straw man.
‘Why was it necessary to have a human sacrifice? To have His son tortured and executed in order that the sins of mankind should be absolved? Is that not the most disgusting idea you ever heard?’ Richard Dawkins, interview Nicky Campbell, Big Questions: Is the Bible Still Relevant Today?
Hostile camps of opinion blunder-bluster blue-veined on the Bosworth Fields of the Internet whether a proper Jesus performed for the Cheesemakers on the Palladium Stage of Palestine:
‘The gospel story is an artificial, non-historical work. It has been fabricated from source materials that can be identified and traced to their incorporation into the Gospels. There is not a particle of hard evidence that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ ever existed.’ Harold Leidner, The Fabrication of the Christ Myth
cf.
‘There is a remarkable amount of documents and corroboration.’ Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College
We’re tripping back to 1906 when Albert Schweitzer publishes — Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (History of Life of Jesus Research). Scheitzer traces the history of criticism of the Jesus-story to reflect the zeitgeist of authors. So which way does the swotty Schweitzer swing? Well …
‘The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work final consecration never existed.’ The Quest of the Historical Jesus p478
Jesus is infamous for infecting piggies with a bad dose of the jinn, befriending prostitutes, and laying down a code of morality, yes? Er, no. Forgers of both cloven halves of the Bible fell for the oldest trap in the book — a fascist tougher-skinned God.
‘Why would Christians want to portray Jesus as violent, as someone who killed people, who withered people? And I’m not sure that there’s a good answer to it.’ Bart Ehrman
Cursing fig trees is not figurative of a fruit-fancying Son of God but the fragmentary figment of a fanciful author. Down the rabbit-hole of evidence falls Corpus Christi with a cunning plan. Swallow the red pill.
Resurrection, the casting out of devils (a dying art), walking on water, disrespecting your parents, camping in the desert, pulling motes from your brothers’ eyes, speaking in parables, donkey theft, raising the smelly dead, and dining with prostitutes, were once minority sports but have since fallen out of favour.
Pity. The turning of water into wine is a promising talent with modern marketing potential, and sure to impress your friends at parties.
Lowermost of the pitiable parodies from Lard Jesus lies the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20: 1-16). Here, the Richard Arkwright of Viticulture hires early-morning pruners for a pittance, then throughout the day at the same rate.
Why would Jesus promote dissention in the workplace, and the bat-shit practices of bad employers?
Jesus passes History’s best chance to promote the collective power of workers, women’s rights, racial equality, hygiene, antibiotics, science, medicine, or bud-bud-glorious-bud.
‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household’. (Matthew 10:34-36)
Jesus passes the opportunity to protest domestic violence, slavery, capitalism, the burning of witches, and beware a bloke called Hitler.
Jesus upsetting the markets, and overturning the tables, of the money-changers in the temple, critics agree, was worthy of credit — and credit is what the money-changers would likely have offered had Jesus asked nicely.
Blessed are the meek. We commend your grasp of pigeon English, Lard, but Blessed is for the birds, like the Holy Ghost, carrying promises on the never-never, but without the windfall of hot temple cash.
The meek shall inherit the Earth. Except they won’t. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5:8). The pure in heart, whatever that means, do not see God. This wanton and wanting wielding of philosophy is a weak substitute for scientific revolution. How to cure disease is more useful than the curing of the odd bystander (except for the bystander).
‘If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?’ Christopher Hitchens
The Sermon on the Mount is, however, a welcome blessing for the Cheesemakers.
Right, back to the magic mushrooms:
‘Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom’. (Matthew 16:28)
Defenders of a proper Jesus cite the four Gospels as premier examples of Hearsay. A hatful of first-century historians cite the rising fame of a Jesus/Christus — though they didn’t see the sleights of hand in the flesh:
‘Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles.’ Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18:3:3
Tacitus, born roughly 25 years after Jesus, was diligent in scratching his annals [insert here 1970s joke of your choice]. Tacitus cites a Christus, executed by Pontius Pilot under Tiberius, and Christians persecuted by Nero for a fire in Rome.
Prosecutors of the case that no proper Jesus bewitched the Cheesemakers of Palestine cite Plagiariams from a menu of pagan beliefs. Perhaps we should reserve a helping of Albert Schweitzer’s humanity for the heart-attack Christians on hearing that their hero is heretical.