The New Gospel

A doctor or pharmacist practicing medicine or dispensing drugs in our time based on either the writings of Aristotle or the formulas of an ancient medicine man would be laughed at first, and then if this activity were not stopped immediately, they would be accused of malpractice, removed from their professions and even imprisoned …  

The claim that scriptures are either divinely inspired or are the “Word of God” in any literal sense has been so destructive that I no longer want to be part of that Christianity!  I do not understand how anyone can saddle God with the assumptions that are made by the biblical authors, warped as they are both by their lack of knowledge and the tribal and sexist prejudices of that ancient time.  Do we honor God when we assume that the primitive consciousness found on the pages of scripture, even when it is attributed to God, is somehow righteous?

His [Jesus’] life is near its end, but watch and observe the portrait the gospel writers painted of how he died:  He was betrayed but loved the betrayer.  He was forsaken but loved those who forsook him.  His arrest was challenged but he demanded that his betrayers put up their swords.  He was falsely accused but he was silent in the face of his accusers ... This is a portrait of a fully human one who has no need to hate or to hurt ... [he was] one who possessed his life so fully that he could give it away.

Of course, Jesus never literally said any of these things [in John].  For someone to wander around the Jewish state in the first century, announcing himself to be the bread of life, the resurrection or the light of the world would have brought out people in white coats with butterfly nets to take him away.  None of the earlier gospel writers give us any indication that any of them had ever heard it suggested before that Jesus taught in this way.