This is the sixth part of my multi-part story of how, as a non-believer, I spent years in my teens and twenties looking at all the evidence for and against Christianity as fairly as I could, eventually concluding it wasn’t true. The introduction is here, and I’ll link all the parts back there as I write them.

By this point, I’d finished my A-levels, narrowly missed the grades I needed for medical school (turns out that spending large chunks of what’s supposed to be your study time on obsessing over religious questions isn’t a great strategy for getting good grades; who’da thought it), done resits, and started medical school, which comes directly after school in the UK rather than being a postgrad degree. All the rest of the story takes place in my first few years at medical school, which puts me in the ’19 – early 20s’ age range at this point.

I’d also, by this point, concluded that – despite all the hype – no-one seemed to have any convincing evidence either way on the question of whether God existed, and so I’d reached the point of considering mysef an agnostic. (I’d eventually move on to atheism, but that wouldn’t be until years later.) However, I was still as torn as ever on the question of Christianity. (On the one hand: horrible theology and a lot of reasons to doubt the accuracy of the gospels. On the other: lack of a good answer to how Christianity could have got started if it wasn’t true.) So, I kept right on browsing the ‘religion’ section in the library shelves and bookshops, looking for any new thoughts on the matter.

(One benefit of moving to university was that I now got to do this in the stunningly gorgeous Picton Reading Room at Liverpool Central Library, a vast round room with bookshelves three stories high edged by galleried landings reached by wrought-iron spiral staircases, all topped off with a giant arched dome across which every little noise softly echoed back and forth; to this day, when I think of the Picton Reading Room, I can hear those soft triple echoes. It’s the most breathtaking public library I’ve ever been in. If you’re ever in Liverpool, do go and check it out.)

By this point I’d spent enough time looking at pro and con arguments that most of the stuff I found was just a repeat of things I’d read already. Even so, however, there were several times when I did come across something new on the matter. I’ve already written about one such – C.S. Lewis’s infamous Moral Argument – but here are some others that were more specifically Christianity-relevant. (I’ve bundled them all together into one post, so it’s a long one.)

Definition of a delusion

This one was actually from lectures, not from my reading; first-year psychology, if I recall correctly. (If not, then I suppose it would have been final-year psychiatry and hence outside the time frame I’m covering here, but it’s relevant anyway so I’ll put it in.)

What we learned was that a delusion is a fixed unshakeable belief, derived by abnormal means, that can’t be explained in terms of the person’s cultural background. The bit that’s relevant here is the last part of that definition. Our lecturer explained to us that we have to be careful when assessing people from different cultures who are expressing strange beliefs, because something that seems delusional to us could actually be a normal belief within their culture and would therefore not be delusional. He gave us an example, which my memory has probably garbled beyond recognition in the intervening three decades but which was, to the best of my recall, a story of an isolated society where the men claimed to be red macaws and were thus initially thought to be mad by the explorers who first made contact until it emerged that this was actually part of a normal belief for that culture. (If anyone has a clue what anthropological story I’m semi-remembering there, I’d love to have the details clarified.)

So for me, of course… boom. Jesus and his claims to be the son of God/the Messiah! One of the ploys I’d seen in apologetics books was the quoting of an anonymous psychologist/psychiatrist assuring the readers that the only way Jesus could have made those claims was if he was either mad or correct; not to mention, of course, C.S. Lewis’s famous statement that Jesus must either be a devil, as mad as all those well-known lunatics who think they’re poached eggs (now there was a man who didn’t have much knowledge of mental illness), or genuinely the Son of God. But, in fact, we actually had to consider Jesus’s claims in the light of what they would have meant in his culture; and, while it was hardly an everyday occurence in first-century Judaism for men to go around claiming to be the Messiah or son of God, it also wasn’t a sign of insanity. The people of that time and culture firmly believed that someone – some apparently normal human being – was going to be chosen by God as the Messiah. As for ‘son of God’, that could be used metaphorically to describe men thought to have a special relationship with God. Jesus’s claims were normal within his culture. Thus, according to actual psychiatric definitions, they weren’t signs of insanity, and so the infamous ‘trilemma’ wasn’t actually a trilemma at all.

God for Nothing

God for Nothing: Is Religion Bad For You? was a book by a vicar (Richard MacKenna) discussing, as I recall, his thoughts on the role of Christianity and how to interpret the gospels in our society. I don’t remember much of the specifics, although I recall finding it a readable and thoughtful book overall; however, one particular point stayed with me.

MacKenna, writing about the ways in which the gospels are interpreted in our time, used the analogy of a contemporary newspaper article which described Thatcher as being ‘left in rags’ until another polititian ‘brought her her glass slipper’ and pointed out how easily this could be misunderstood by historians finding this isolated scrap in two thousand years in the absence of any surviving Cinderella stories. Similarly, he argued, we have no way of knowing which passages the gospel writers might have meant as symbolic at the time in the knowledge that the people for whom they were writing would get their cultural references, but which are getting misinterpreted by us two thousand years later. It was a really helpful reframing of the usual apologetics approach of ‘were they wrong or lying or did this all happen this way? CLEARLY THE LATTER’. And, yes, it does sound obvious now; but it was the first time I can remember seeing it framed that way, and it made quite an impression on me.

The Mythmaker

I found Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker in one of those atmospheric browsing sessions on the Picton Room’s galleries. Maccoby was a Jewish Talmudic scholar who did exactly what I’d been longing to see a Jewish scholar do; he interpreted the New Testament in light of what we know about rabbinical teachings and Jewish culture of the time, and wrote about this in a straightforwardly readable way. And, while he didn’t address my ever-present question about how the disciples could have come to believe Jesus had been resurrected if this wasn’t the case, he did come up with intriguing theories about how early Christianity could have progressed from there.

To cut a long story short, Maccoby analysed the information we get from Paul’s letters and from Acts and what we can piece together about Paul’s teachings and his uneasy relationship with the early church, and argued that Jesus and his original sect were practicing Jews with a typical Jewish concept of the Messiah as being the one who’d lead the longed-for rebellion against Rome, and that the change to a new religion with a new (and very un-Jewish) concept of salvation theology came about with Paul, the eponymous mythmaker, who resolved the conflicts in his own life by mentally fusing Jewish, Gnostic, and pagan beliefs in an entirely new way.

Maccoby’s argument left me simultaneously bowled over and unsure what to make of it; I’d already learned, by that stage in my life, how easy it was for an argument to sound completely convincing until you found someone who knew enough to give you the other side. I decided that I’d better, on general principles, assume he was wrong about at least some of what he said; not because I could spot any obvious errors in reasoning, but because it seemed unlikely that he could have been that accurate in figuring out what took place two thousand years ago in a different culture. Looking back thirty years later, I think that was a sensible approach. While Maccoby made several well-argued and evidence-based claims, he did also have an unfortunate tendency to jump from those to assumptions.

But, for all that, I now had a plausible theory about how Christianity could have transmuted from Judaism and then taken off, that would never have previously occurred to me but which now made complete sense. And that meant, logically, that explanations in that category could exist. If Maccoby’s explanation was the wrong one… well, it was still perfectly plausible that the right one was something other than ‘because Jesus really was sent by God as a sin sacrifice and Christianity’s whole awful theology is true’.

Operation Judaism

You might have heard of Jews for Jesus, an evangelical Christian organisation specifically targeting Jews for attempted conversion. Operation Judaism was a group set up in the early ’80s to counter this. (This particular group no longer seems to be running; Jews for Judaism now does the same thing with a broader reach, countering other proselytising religions as well as Christianity, so I assume Operation Judaism was either subsumed or renamed at some point.)

While I was at medical school, the university’s Jewish Society invited Operation Judaism to come and speak. So, to my delight, I got to hear a talk from a group whose entire raison d’être was explaining inaccuracies in Christian theology from a Jewish viewpoint.

The speaker covered multiple useful points, including Jewish concepts of the Messiah (about which, of course, I already knew something) and key differences between Jewish and Christian theology (Christianity’s basic concept of being hopelessly lost to sin/doomed to hell for the least mistake is alien to Judaism, which is strong on personal redemption via genuine effort and repentance). But the most helpful part was their discussion of ‘proof texts’, the passages from the Jewish scriptures that Christians claim to be prophecies of Jesus’s coming. I wrote a couple of posts ago about the examples I’d spotted for myself from reading the gospels, but the Operation Judaism speaker took the time to explain a couple of major ones for which the flaws are less easy to spot without a good background knowledge of Jewish scripture; Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9:24 – 27.

Thinking back, I honestly can’t remember coming across Isaiah 53 before that talk. If not, don’t ask me how I’d managed to miss it with the amount I’d read, as it’s a biggie in Christian apologetics. It describes a ‘Suffering Servant’ who was ‘wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities’, who is, of course, believed by Christians to be Jesus dying for the sins of the world. However, I now learned that ‘servant’ was a term often used metaphorically of the Jewish people and which seemed in context to be meant exactly that way here, and that the passage included a line that translated as ‘he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days’, which fitted metaphorically with the ‘Jewish people’ interpretation’ but didn’t fit well with the interpretation that this was a prophecy of Jesus. Nor did the lines about him having ‘no form or majesty that we should look at him’ or being ‘a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity’. It’s easy to read salvation theology into this passage retrospectively, but, read in context, it doesn’t really introduce the idea.

I had heard about the Daniel 9 prophecy; I remember one of the books I read, written by a Jewish man who’d converted to Christianity, assured me that the time given in in the prophecy for the coming of the Messiah worked out exactly to the year Jesus started preaching, how could this be a coincidence, etc. What I learned now, however, was, firstly, that the passage just used the word ‘messiah’ in its more general sense of ‘anointed one’ (a term that Jews of the time used for any king, or for that matter just in its literal sense for anything that was anointed; Daniel also uses it to refer to the Holy of Holies in the Temple), and, secondly, that the time period didn’t come out at Jesus’s time unless you lump two time periods from the passage together in a way not supported by the wording. Interestingly, one thing I’ve since learned that they didn’t point out is that even if you do that the timing still doesn’t work out as coinciding with anything significant in Jesus’s life, and Christians have to play around with the calendar to make it come out at an appropriate time. I have no idea why Operation Judaism didn’t add that. Even without that, however, I now had enough information to spot the flaws in the apologetics about this passage.

In short; yet again, claims made by Christian apologists did not hold up when examined. Which, by this time, was not even a surprise.

So, where did that leave me?

At this point, if you’re still reading at all, you’re probably wondering why I was even still hung up on this. I’d found plenty of reasons to doubt the truth of Christianity’s claims, and it wasn’t as though I was tied to the religion by teachings or fears implanted in childhood, the way some people are.

But, nevertheless, I was still scared by the horrifying prospect of a universe in charge of a sociopath willing to allow millions of people to burn in eternal hellfire due to simple mischance of which time and place they were born to. And I still didn’t have good answers for the claim that the disciples would never have started preaching Jesus’s resurrection unless they had convincing evidence it was true. What if I was getting it all wrong, and God really was that awful? The prospect niggled at my mind and I couldn’t shake it. And so, I kept on looking.

Next up: what happened when I tried asking God directly for help with this.