The book of hearsay

[Sexton Blake]

I suppose it does not bother many christians since so few have read the bible, but the bible is mostly hearsay accounts written tens, hundreds, even thousands of years after events portrayed in the book.

 

The stories were not written by omni-present people who were everywhere at the right moment to see and hear spoken everything important and to possess perfect memories so they could write it all down perfectly later, even years and decades later.

 

The Jesus stories are prime examples.

 

There is no: "I saw Jesus do this", and "Jesus told us that..." and "We went with Jesus to...." and so on. There is also a total lack of personal details. We don't know what he looked like, and dressed like. There are no personal details of the authors or Jesus. There are no asides like the disciples and strangers talking about Jesus and wondering how he does his miracles, or even what food he liked. And strangely, nowhere does Jesus laugh, or even smile. He never seems hungry or thirsty, and part of a group of men wandering around, there seems to be no interest in women and no sexist remarks.

 

But he does get angry at times, when it is used to demonstrate a point. How convenient.

 

The gospels were written maybe four to seven decades after Jesus.

 

If you had the most important information ever, about the man-God Jesus and his works; would you in those uncertain times of war, diseases, and such when the average life span was just 30 years, wait decades, till you were very old, to write the lot down?  Even if you were illiterate, scribes could do it for you for very little money.

 

But this does have an upside for the gospels. Stories written so long after claimed events means that eye witnesses were probably dead, so no embarrassing people turning up and saying they were there and this stuff never happened.

 

THE BIBLE UNEARTHED is a must read for the old testament and can be downloaded for free. There are also some youtube videos based on it:

 

https://archive.org/details/TheBibleUnearthedArchaeologysNewVisionOfAncientIsraelAndTheOriginOfItsSacredTexts

 

And for A.D. and the new testament, this site helps:

 

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

 

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