Believe the earth is flat, or I'll kill you. Are you able to ignore the evidence that says otherwise?

Eternal bliss or eternal suffering, each at a level so profound that we cannot begin to imagine the plenary ecstasy of heaven or the relentless horror of hell. This,  Christians contend, is what is at stake as we try to decide whether or not to believe in Jesus as God.

But even this “choice” misunderstands the concept of belief. Belief is not a decision, but rather an intellectual position to which we are taken by evidence (evidence which can include, I am told, personal revelations from God, a courtesy not yet extended to me). We can’t believe the earth is flat, even if threatened with death for that disbelief, because the evidence tells us it’s spherical.

Yet according to the Christian proposition, we must believe certain things to avoid damnation. What are they? Besides the Nicene Creed, here’s the short version.

By 600 C.E., Christianity had spread no farther than the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Is this the work of an omnipotent God? Source: Philip’s Atlas of World History

God the creator of the universe originally bequeathed his holy laws not to the entire world but only to a small group of Semitic nomads in the Middle East who declined to share their revelation with anyone outside their community and whose religious practices, which included genital mutilation and dietary restrictions, proved so unpopular that they attracted almost no converts (which they were not seeking, anyway).

God then delivered a new and improved set of instructions (along with His son, Jesus) that featured eternal salvation for those who believed in Jesus’s divinity in an amended covenant that did away with many of the less alluring elements of the first one (which the original covenant-holders continue to deny), again not to the whole of humanity but to an even smaller group, a literal handful of disciples who, along with their successors, spent the next 600 years spreading the message scarcely beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, despite their declared determination to reach the entire world.

The perfect word of a perfect God?

Today, even with the latest mass-communication tools at its disposal, Christianity still has not been able to get its message to everyone on the planet, and it faces overwhelming competition in many parts of the world from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and other entrenched religious traditions.

An omnipotent, omniscient God could surely do better, particularly since the fate of our eternal souls ostensibly hangs in the balance.

If we are to subscribe to this baffling narrative of divine incompetence, it would seem there must be some overwhelmingly incontrovertible evidence to support it. Christians point, as the font of this evidence, to the Bible.

For many (but, oddly, not all) Christians, the Bible represents the infallible repository of redemptive revelation, the inerrant, complete and inspired word of God. Indeed, if it is not, why would anyone accept it as divine truth? The Bible, therefore, must stand up to extraordinary scrutiny, and must prove itself to be the perfect revelation of a perfect God.

The fact that it does not can be demonstrated on a number of levels: The Bible is imperfectly defined; it has been imperfectly preserved; it contains many internal contradictions and morally deficient teachings; and it is not perfectly clear to every reader. Let’s take these one by one.

Imperfectly Defined

Exactly what is the Bible? Christians do not all agree on its composition, and have not from the earliest days of Christianity when the various books that constitute the New Testament—and many others that were ultimately rejected—began to be written, after, it should be noted, decades of oral transmission.

The Bible used by Protestants does not contain some books that are included in the one used by Catholics, and both are different from the Bible used by the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Early Church leaders debated extensively over the canon, and eventually chose those books they felt were old enough, sufficiently associated with an apostle, were widely enough used and contained the correct theology.

Controversies still swirl about the authorship (and therefore validity) of some books. It is widely believed today by Bible scholars, for example, that Revelation was not written by the apostle John and that Paul did not write Hebrews. Christians may believe that God inspired these books, but there is no doubt that men chose them, and that their choices were not and are not free of contention.

Imperfectly Preserved

Early Christian leaders complained bitterly about copies of sacred Scripture that had been corrupted by inattentive scribes and deliberately altered by others.

Sadly, the original manuscripts, or “autographs,”  of the New Testament do not exist, and the very earliest copies, called “ancient witnesses” by scholars, do not always agree with each other.

In the 1700s, a Bible scholar named John Mill sought to produce an authoritative Greek translation of the New Testament and in doing so catalogued the discrepancies among the 100 or so ancient witnesses at his disposal; he counted 30,000 differences among them. Among the many more ancient witnesses that scholars have today, the differences (yet to be calculated) number more than there are words in the New Testament.

By ingenious methods, Bible scholars are able to deduce which of several versions is mostly likely to be correct, but the fact is that they, and we, can never know with absolute certainty what the autographs said, because they do not exist. If the Bible was miraculously inspired by God, He did a very poor job of miraculously preserving its original manuscripts, as we might reasonably expect an omnipotent deity to do.

Internal Contradictions

Jesus Interrupted, by Bart Ehrman, catalogues the Bible’s many contradictions.

There are so many contradictions in the Bible that entire books have been written about them. Here are just a few:

About whether monetary wealth is good or bad (good says Proverbs 18:11, bad says Mark 10:25).

About whether salvation is by faith or by works (faith says Ephesians 2:8-9, works says James 2:24).

About who was Jesus’s paternal grandfather (Jacob says Matthew 1:16, Eli says Luke 3:23)

About whether Jesus believed himself to be God (yes says John 14:6, no says John 14:28).

There are many more, but these few illustrate the reasons why Christians have for centuries debated over whether or not it is good to amass monetary wealth, whether Christians are saved by faith or by works, whether Jesus really was of the Davidic lineage as was prophesied about the messiah and whether or not Jesus is divine.

Imperfect Moral Instruction

According to Exodus:21, the punishment for accidentally beating your slave to death is the same as for knocking out his tooth.

Among the glaring examples of flawed morality taught by the Bible, which includes the sanctioned killing of homosexuals, is the Bible’s position on slavery.

Apologists have defended its stance by pointing to the passages that urge kindness towards others, that forbid “man-stealing” and that call on Hebrews to harbor runaway slaves. Nothing in the Bible, however, deals with slavery as explicitly as Exodus 21, which lays out in very specific terms the parameters of the institution.

Male Hebrew slaves are to serve for six years, after which time they are to be set free. This allowed men to sell themselves into slavery to pay off debts, and is clearly a different situation from merely being a hired hand. The slave is the master’s property, and this relationship has implications for both parties, particularly regarding punishment for transgressions.

Proper treatment of slaves is encouraged; if you injure your slave so that he or she loses a tooth or an eye, you must forfeit ownership, that is, you lose your property. You are not, however, subject to the penalty prescribed for so injuring a free Hebrew, in which case you would lose your corresponding body part, injury for injury.

If you kill your slave deliberately, you will be punished, but since the death penalty is not specified, the actual punishment is unclear. What if you beat your slave so severely that he dies after a day or two? Clearly you did not mean to kill him since he was alive at the end of the beating, and yet his death can unquestionably be linked to your actions.

The punishment for this is the same as if you had knocked out his tooth: you lose your slave. The reason is made perfectly clear in Exodus 21:21: “…he shall not be punished: for he is his money.”

The six-year term of servitude, by the way, was only available to Hebrew males. It did not extend to women, anyone born into servitude or enslaved prisoners of war. Indeed, Hebrews were exhorted in Leviticus 25:44-45 to buy slaves from the heathens around them and keep them as slaves forever.

Acceptance of slavery as an institution is implied in no less than the Ten Commandments, in which slaves are mentioned twice—not to prohibit their ownership but to make sure that they do not work on the sabbath and that they are not the object of covetous thoughts.

The New Testament encourages slaves to be loyal to their masters, even cruel ones, and is silent on the issue of whether or not slaves should be freed. The reason is easy to deduce: slavery was so enmeshed in the social structure of the ancient world that no one questioned its morality. To their credit, ancient Jews recognized the potential for abuse and sought to invest the institution with a measure of humanity.

They did not, however, disestablish it. If God wanted to abolish slavery he could have done so in five words: “Thou shalt have no slaves.” Those five words appear nowhere in the Bible.

Unclear to Sincere and Learned Readers

Is Jesus fully human, fully divine or both? Should baptism be by immersion or the mere wetting of the forehead? What percentage of a Christian’s salary should be tithed to the church? Are we predestined for salvation depending on whether or not our names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life?

Should women be silent in church? Is there a purgatory? Should we or should we not own slaves? Are women the source of evil? Is corporal punishment good or bad? Should Christians be able to speak in tongues, handle poisonous snakes and drink poison without injury? Should women be allowed to use any form of birth control?  Should homosexuals be killed?

These and many other questions have been debated between Bible-believing Christians for two millennia, each side citing Scripture to support its position. Even Bible scholars—those who have taken the time and effort to learn ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew, who have studied the scriptural context of ancient history, who have read the non-canonical documents of early church leaders—cannot all agree on the meaning of certain texts.

It is reasonable to expect the revelation of a perfect God to itself be perfectly clear and unambiguous to every reader—particularly to sincere and learned readers—and the undeniable evidence that it is not is demonstrated in these questions and in the dozens of Christian denominations that exist as the result of an interpretation of Scripture that varied from all the others.

The Bible, with all its imperfections, is clearly the work of men, not God, and does not, therefore, rise to the challenge of providing incontrovertible evidence of Christianity’s claims. At least, that’s the intellectual position to which the evidence has taken me.

Stay tuned for Part 2: The Insufficiency of the Revelatory Mechanism