In the early chapters of Genesis, Yahweh makes a sweeping promise to Abraham, forefather of the Jewish people:

"In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."

—Genesis 15:18

As I've mentioned in the past, this was no small matter: the land that God promised to Abraham would encompass most or all of the modern nations of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. If the Jewish people had ever controlled this much territory, they would have had an empire to rival the mightiest powers of the Ancient Near East. But now I have an inconvenient question: Did the Jewish people ever control this much territory? Did they ever get what God promised they would have?

The archaeological evidence shows clearly that the answer is no. Although the monarchy of David - described by the Bible as the most glorious era of ancient Israel - apparently did exist, it was a relatively small and insignificant kingdom even by the standards of the day. It never controlled all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. We have abundant evidence of the great empires that did exist in this region, whether Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian or Roman: the cities they built, the monuments they erected, the inscriptions they left behind. An Israelite empire would be equally easy to find in the archaeological record if it had ever existed, and the total lack of historical evidence can only imply that it never did.

And after David and Solomon's reign, even the Bible says that things went rapidly downhill. Solomon's son was an incompetent ruler who caused the kingdom to split apart, and the divided Israelite tribes were conquered by larger powers and scattered across the face of the earth. The modern state of Israel wasn't established until the 20th century, and it still comes nowhere close to controlling all the land that God promised to Abraham.

For almost four thousand years, then, God's land promise has been unfulfilled. Considering that the land he promised is now occupied by millions of other people with a decidedly hostile outlook toward the Jews, it seems unlikely that Israel will be able to control it any time soon. (The biblical solution - military invasion and genocide - doesn't seem to be a prospect today, due to several millennia of progress in humanity's moral sentiments.) And if you believe the evangelical Christians who insist that the Rapture is due to occur very soon and the end of the world shortly thereafter, the time when this prophecy could be fulfilled is rapidly dwindling. And even if Israel did come to own all this land through some bizarre chain of circumstances, would it really count as "fulfilling" a promise if that which was promised is withheld for hundreds of generations and thousands of years? Wouldn't it, in fact, be more accurate to say that this is a failed biblical promise?

The most common Christian apologist explanation for this prophetic failure is that God's covenant with Abraham was conditional, and when the Israelites disobeyed his laws, he took away the land he had promised them as punishment. Unfortunately for them, the Bible itself forecloses this explanation. It states clearly that even though the Israelites were wicked, God still intended to give them the land, in order to keep the promise he made to Abraham:

"Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

—Deuteronomy 9:5

The only rational conclusion is that God has not "performed the word which he swore", because there is no God who shows special favor to the Israelites. This land claim, allegedly a divinely given promise, was in reality just a piece of pious self-congratulation by ancient Israelite scribes who sought to write a self-fulfilling prophecy. They thought that if they could convince their countrymen that victory was guaranteed, that would give them the determination to turn that belief into reality. But their gambit didn't succeed, and millennia later, the Bible's failed land promise stands as proof of the very human and fallible origins of that book.

Although I haven't commented on this previously, I'm sure you've heard of the Conservative Bible Project, a brilliant initiative proposed by the savvy folks at Conservapedia. The plan is that they'll retranslate the Bible to eliminate "liberal bias" in existing verses - but not by going back to the oldest manuscripts or the original languages or anything like that. No, the Conservapedia community simply plans to take an existing, modern English translation of the Bible, and when they come across a verse that strikes them as unacceptably liberal, they'll just change it so as to be in line with what they know God must have meant!

This is a major project and I'm sure it will take all the hands they can get. Since I've previously given advice to the prosperity-gospel believers on how to interpret some difficult Bible passages, I'm sure that the editors of the Conservative Bible Project would be equally happy to hear my suggestions. So, I thought I'd offer them some.

Let's begin with this classic example of liberal bias in the Bible, Matthew 5:9, from the Sermon on the Mount:

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."

Peacemakers? What is Jesus, some kind of liberal Democrat? This is unacceptable.

Real conservatives, as defined in the official Republican Party creed, know that the will of God is to drop bombs on any country that even looks like it might threaten us. After all, that's just what God did through Joshua in the Old Testament. And anyway, we know from good conservative books like Left Behind that the Antichrist will be a peacemaker, so we know from sound logic that any peacemaker must therefore be the Antichrist.

How can we interpret this verse more fittingly? I have a few different suggestions:

"Blessed are those who wage preemptive war on rogue states that we think might be developing weapons of mass destruction."

"Blessed are the waterboarders, for those who torture illegal enemy combatants will be called sons of God."

"Blessed are the politicians who run secret black-site prisons for high-value detainees, for they are righteous in God's sight."

"Blessed are the private mercenaries and the contractors working for Blackwater, for they shall inherit the earth."

Now that's a properly conservative Jesus for you!

Next, Matthew 6:5-6:

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Now, obviously, this is a disgustingly liberal statement. If you read this verse in modern translations invented by egghead Ivy League elitist professors, you might get the impression that Jesus was telling people to keep their faith a private matter and not flaunt it in public. But as we can tell from modern conservatives, who demand that explicitly Christian prayers and overtly religious language be prominently placed in every courthouse, school board, classroom and town council meeting, we know that Jesus couldn't really have meant that. We need a new translation that's more in keeping with what Jesus was obviously trying to say. Here's my suggestion:

"And when you pray, do not be like the liberals, for they love to pray standing in their room, behind closed doors, and to insist that the public square is secular. I tell you the truth, if God can't see you praying - and he can't, because he doesn't know what you do in your own house behind closed doors, except of course for gay sex - then you'll get no reward for it. But when you pray, go into the courthouse, or the floor of Congress, or the workplace, or just stand on a street corner with a bullhorn and a stack of Bible tracts! The important thing is to be sure that the greatest possible number of people see and hear you praying, because then they'll realize how pious and humble you are, and that will totally make them want to convert."

Once this translation is in Bibles everywhere, the religious right will be able to say with perfect honesty that they're just following Jesus' example. And that's what really matters, right?

Finally, let's take one of the most often misinterpreted verses in the Bible, Matthew 19:16-24. Here's the usual, inferior translation chock-full of liberal nonsense:

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

...Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

This liberalism-inspired mistranslation could drive a stake into the heart of Christianity. What Jesus is proposing in this passage is nothing more or less than socialism! And as we good conservatives know, once you've started down the road to socialism, there's only one place you can end up - death panels, abortions at the local 7-11, and mandatory gay indoctrination in elementary schools.

Clearly, we need a dash of good conservative common sense to interpret this passage properly. Here's my advice on how to read it:

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, you must get as rich as possible. The more treasure you have on Earth, the more God is blessing you. I recommend a well-balanced portfolio, with wise asset allocations in both stocks and bonds, plus some side bets on over-the-counter mortgage derivatives. If you run your own business, I recommend hiring cheap immigrant labor, and of course firing anyone who tries to organize a union. And don't forget, politicians who want to tax capital gains hate God!"

When the young man heard this, he went away joyous, because he knew that his great wealth was a sign that his virtue was superior to the sinful people whom God punished by making them poor.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is as easy as your chauffeur driving you in through the golden gates of a luxury resort in a black Escalade SUV. That's not a metaphor. Rich people will actually be chauffeured through the gates of heaven in black Escalade SUVs. If any of the poor somehow make it, they'll be your drivers."

Not even Ayn Rand could find fault with that!

This should get the Conservative Bible Project off to a good start, but there's lots of other liberalism that's crept into the Bible and will have to be purged. What other mistranslations can you detect in the Good Book? And what proper, conservative translations can you offer instead?

In the books of the Torah, Yahweh devotes entire chapters to explaining in exacting detail what kind of animal sacrifices he expects from his people. The one common thread, repeatedly emphasized, is that the animals to be slaughtered must be "without blemish":

"And this is the thing that thou shalt do unto them to hallow them, to minister unto me in the priest's office: Take one young bullock, and two rams without blemish." —Exodus 29:1

"And on the eighth day he shall take two he lambs without blemish, and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish, and three tenth deals of fine flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil, and one log of oil." —Leviticus 14:10

"This is the ordinance of the law which the Lord hath commanded, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke." —Numbers 19:1

"And ye shall offer a burnt offering for a sweet savour unto the Lord; one young bullock, one ram, and seven lambs of the first year without blemish." —Numbers 29:2

"And he shall offer his offering unto the Lord, one he lamb of the first year without blemish for a burnt offering, and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish for a sin offering, and one ram without blemish for peace offerings." —Numbers 6:14

Only animals that are perfect and flawless, without any physical defects, are acceptable as sacrifices to Yahweh. And this rule doesn't just apply to animals, either. The Old Testament makes it equally clear that people with physical defects are equally unacceptable as servants in the holy places.

"Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken; no man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.... he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them."

—Leviticus 21:17-23

(By the way, if you're curious about what the text means when it bars a man who has "his stones broken", the RSV gives a more explicit translation: "a man with crushed testicles"!)

This passage says explicitly that if a person or an animal with a physical defect touched the altar or entered the sanctuary, it would "profane" them. But how can this be? Doesn't God care about the state of a person's soul, not the condition of their body?

These verses should be very disturbing to modern-day Jews and Christians. They attribute to God a primitive, superstitious and ignorant view - one in which a person's worth is tied to their outward appearance, and people with defects are considered impure and unholy. Even people with flat noses are forbidden to come near the altar of God! (All those churches with wheelchair ramps are going against the word of God, if they but knew it!)

Granted, in the New Testament, Jesus abrogates this command. In its place, he expresses the much more sensible view that holiness (if that term has any meaning) consists not of outward appearances, but of attitudes and actions: "There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man... Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man" (Mark 7:15,22-23).

But this hardly solves the problem. If it was never a sin to be ugly or handicapped, why did God say precisely the opposite for the many centuries of the Old Testament? Why was that rule established in the first place, ensuring hundreds of years of discrimination, ridicule and hatred directed at society's outcasts, if God never really meant it? Or did he mean it originally, and if so, what made him change his mind? Did he see the error of his ways? (Apologist site the Christian Think Tank claims hopefully that this prohibition was "perhaps a practical matter of the process of animal slaughter". I'd just love to hear why people with flat noses or crushed testicles were unable to assist in this.)

The apologetic is also sometimes heard that the OT purity laws were a foreshadowing of Jesus' sacrifice. For example:

The animals brought for the "bread of God" must be the best of their kind. They must be without physical blemish, because they were typical of him who had no blemish of sin.

The problem with this comparison is that the OT requires sacrifices and priests without physical blemish, while the NT claims that Jesus was without spiritual blemish. This is not a case of one foreshadowing the other - these are opposite concepts!

The shallow, appearance-obsessed, tribal deity of the Old Testament is just one of the many obscure corners of the Bible that modern-day believers would love to forget about. Atheists shouldn't give them the opportunity.

I realize I haven't updated Ebon Musings much this year. Between writing for Daylight Atheism, work-related responsibilities, and other projects, I just haven't had as much time to write longer essays as I'd like to. But I don't intend to let Ebon Musings go dormant. I've still got plenty of things to say, and as proof, I've uploaded a new essay: Some Mistakes of Scripture.

This deals with a topic I find very interesting: biblical misquotes. As opposed to biblical contradictions, where two verses simply tell different versions of the facts or advocate different theological opinions, without reference to each other, there are parts of the Bible where one verse tries to cite another, but gets its source wrong - either by bungling the reference, by citing a nonexistent verse, or by egregiously misinterpreting what the cited verse is saying. In short, this essay is about the times when the Bible gets the Bible wrong.

This is an open thread. Do you know any mistakes of the Bible that I left out? Let me know about them!

(Editor's Note: This review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site's policy for such reviews.)

If you've been around the atheist blogosphere, you probably know the name Christopher Hallquist, author of the blog The Uncredible Hallq (I've always wondered, does he get more skeptical when he gets angry?).

Well, it seems he's come into his own, because last month in the mail I got a copy of his new book, UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus, which was published earlier this year by Reasonable Press. Here follows a short summary of the book and my review.

The book begins with a brief history of skepticism, from the Roman con-artist Alexander and his nemesis the satirist Lucian, to Franz Mesmer and the spiritualism craze of the 18th century, complete with mediums who could levitate, summon ghosts on command, or communicate using psychic powers. Since most of us rightly consider these claims to be dubious, Hallquist argues, we should apply David Hume's criteria for judging miracle tales and conclude that the Christian resurrection story, which is much longer ago and even less well documented, is even less likely to be true.

There are some great nuggets of information in here, particularly Hallquist's account of an e-mail conversation with Craig Blomberg, one of the experts interviewed in Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. Blomberg complains that Strobel's book "heavily paraphrased" [p.50] and oversimplified their actual conversation, and that he ultimately gave up on trying to correct all the inaccuracies that Strobel introduced. There follow discussions of textual evolution in the New Testament, of the way legends tend to grow and mutate in the retelling, and the general lack of skepticism or a tradition of critical inquiry in the ancient world. Another bit I particularly liked: to drive the point home, Hallquist quotes a Christian magician, Andre Kole, who defends the historicity of Jesus' miracles even while complaining that people tend to misremember his shows and believe he performed far more impressive tricks than he actually did! [p.75]

Building on this argument, Hallquist argues that Jesus may have been similar to a modern faith healer, performing "miracles" that relied mainly on the placebo effect and his devotees' faith in him. These stories then grew in the telling, becoming far more impressive than they originally were.

As for the alleged resurrection and post-death experiences, Hallquist notes that even the Gospels portray the risen Jesus as a strangely ethereal phenomenon, appearing and disappearing without warning depending on who seems to be looking, and often describes his glorified body in mystical, visionary terms. He discusses the modern parallel of UFO abductions, pointing out their similar dreamlike and hallucinatory qualities, and brings up the nice point that stress - such as at the death of a loved one - can make such visions more likely to occur. The closing chapters ably dismantle some common apologist arguments relating to biblical prophecy, the Shroud of Turin, and religious attitudes toward skepticism and doubt.

Having finished the book, I have just two complaints, one small, one large. First, the minor: There were a lot of typos in this book - grammatical missteps, missing letters, missing words or incorrect punctuation. On average, I counted one such every few pages at least. It obviously doesn't detract from the soundness of the arguments, but it was distracting. I imagine Reasonable Press, a fairly small printing house by the look of it, doesn't have a great deal of money to invest in proofreading, but still.

Second: The one hypothesis that this book doesn't consider, and that I found conspicuous by its absence, was that Jesus was an entirely mythical figure who was gradually "historicized" into a real human being. All the arguments Hallquist presents about legendary development, exaggeration of rumors and the like would apply equally well, maybe even better, to this hypothesis. This is an alternative that I think deserves serious consideration, and if there's a future edition, perhaps it will address it.

With those caveats, this is a short, smart book, one that's worth your while to pick up and read. Most of the skeptical material on Jesus' resurrection was not new to me, but if you haven't read extensively on the topic, it's a useful and fairly comprehensive primer on how an atheist can best respond to these apologetic claims. What I personally found most illuminating was actually the background material - the mediums and spiritualists of past eras who claimed supernatural powers, and the skeptics, like Harry Houdini, who took them on. This is material that I think will be new to most readers, and there are some powerful lessons to draw on here. Hallquist cleverly points out that plenty of spiritualist "miracles", like the alleged levitation of one D.D. Home (which was supported by three signed eyewitness testimonies) are backed by evidence as good as or better than the evidence for anything in the Bible.

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Of all the evil verses in the Bible, some of the worst must be the ones in which God orders his chosen people to slaughter and utterly exterminate the Canaanites who were living in the promised land, commanding them to kill men, women and children and to show no mercy to anyone under any circumstances. Passages like these are why Thomas Paine said of the Old Testament, "...it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God".

Any person of conscience, I hope, should have come to realize by now that genocide is the blackest of evils. Any person or text that defends it is morally depraved and unworthy of being taken seriously by good people. But since these verses still exist in the Bible, there are still apologists who tie themselves in knots trying to defend them - trying to defend the conclusion that genocide is sometimes an acceptable and justified act.

Let's begin with this article from Rational Christianity, which discusses the genocides of the Old Testament specifically in relation to the Canaanite children. It admits that the children "did not share the guilt of their parents", but insists that the Israelites were still right to slaughter them:

Why were the children killed, if they weren't guilty? Apparently, they were considered as morally neutral, since they weren't yet old enough to be held accountable or to have done much right or wrong. While not as corrupt as their parents, they were part of the society that was judged, and shared its earthly (though not its eternal) fate.

So, even though the children weren't guilty, the society they lived in was guilty, and since that society was sentenced to be destroyed for its crimes, the children were doomed to be destroyed along with it for the crime they weren't guilty of. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

This apologetic is just a restatement of one of the Old Testament's more barbaric notions, the idea of "corporate guilt", which claims that people bear the responsibility for things done by other members of their nation or tribe. This is a bloody and primitive superstition. A "society" as a whole cannot be guilty of anything: only individuals can be guilty for the acts they commit.

Next up, we have Wayne Jackson of Apologetics Press, who in this article offers the time-tested defense that the Canaanites were too evil to be allowed to live:

The Canaanite religion was a horribly brutal system as well. For instance, the goddess Anath is pictured as killing humans by the thousands and wading knee-deep in blood. She cut off heads and hands and wore them as ornaments. And in all of this gruesomeness, the Baal-epic says that her liver was swollen with laughter and her joy was great.

What a horrible image! Anath must have been an unimaginably evil goddess. Good thing she's completely different from Yahweh, who will crush people underfoot until his robes are splattered and stained with their blood [Isaiah 63:3], who will kill so many people with his sword that the land will be "soaked with blood" [Is. 34:7], who demands that dead bodies be hung from trees to please him [Exodus 25:4] [Numbers 25:4], and who will "rejoice" to inflict all these punishments and many others on the objects of his wrath [Deuteronomy 28:63], laughing and mocking all the while [Proverbs 1:26].

The only difference between these savage Ancient Near East war deities, of course, is that Christians believe Yahweh to be the true god, and thus his mass slaughters were perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, while Anath was a false goddess and therefore the slaughters undertaken in her name were a vile and depraved crime. If Anath had any worshippers today, no doubt they'd take the opposite view.

As for the children, Jackson claims that the Israelites were doing them a mercy:

Would it not have been infinitely worse, in view of eternity, had these children grown to maturity and adopted the same pagan practices as their parents?

Although he doesn't explain this further, the argument is apparently that it was better to kill the children while they were young and innocent, rather than allow them to grow up and become sinners who would end up damned. It's interesting for a Christian apologist to accept this, since they always reject the identical reasoning for abortion.

The third apologist is Gregory Koukl of Stand to Reason. Koukl admits that "on an emotional level I am troubled when I consider this". Nevertheless, he resorts to the inevitable fallback that human moral standards don't apply to God, and that he can kill people however he wants and whenever he wants:

So I'm arguing first that it's God's prerogative to take life when He so chooses, and second that the means He uses to take that life is a matter of His prerogative as well. Whether it's by disease, or mishap, or hailstones, or the angel of life, or the sword of a Jewish soldier, the means is up to Him. It's His prerogative.

In this instance, I'll grant that the apologists have a point: in their theology, God is responsible not just for the genocidal deaths of the Canaanites, but for every other painful and brutal death in the world as well. Why they imagine that this makes the problem better, rather than worse, I can't say.

I think the preponderance of evidence from the same historical record--the Old Testament--is that God is good... This gives us good reason to trust Him. And if we have good reason to trust Him, then when we see things that seem to go against our sense of goodness and justice, it seems only fair to give the benefit of the doubt to [him]...

The moral double standard comes neatly packaged in a paragraph. When the Bible records God acting in ways that are good, we should count those to his credit. But when the Bible records God acting in ways that are evil (sorry - "that seem to go against our sense of goodness and justice"), those do not count against his character, because we should just trust that he is good. All positive evidence is to be trusted; all negative evidence is to be dismissed. The verdict is built into the process from the beginning. Human criminals only wish they could be judged by such a standard!

I don't want to sound like I'm praising myself too highly, so let me make it plain that I don't claim any superior moral virtue for myself. I make mistakes and sometimes use poor judgment, like everyone else. But I think I'm basically a good person, and one of the ways I can tell is that I don't find myself making excuses for genocide. Granted, this is not a very high standard - which makes it all the more shocking that so many Christian apologists don't meet it.

There's a moral cliff here, and the apologists have walked right off the edge. No matter how you got to this point, no matter how slippery the slope or how reasonable your arguments seem, if you've come to the position of defending genocide, that ought to be a clue that you've done something wrong. The conclusion that genocide can be morally justified ought to be a reductio ad absurdum against any argument that you used to get there.

But because these apologists don't see this, they've wandered into a dangerous trap. They're forced to believe that not even genocide can be immoral if God commands it. This is an extremely dangerous position to advocate, because then the question of whether to commit such an act reduces to the question of whether God has in fact commanded it. What this amounts to is the total surrender of one's own conscience - laying aside your moral sense and submitting your will to any authority figure who's sufficiently charismatic to convince the masses that God speaks through him - and that is how crimes like genocide always begin. The apologists have not learned this hard-won lesson of history. By justifying the evils of the past, they leave the road wide open for those same evils to reoccur in the future.

One of the most common Christian beliefs, and the one most often appealed to in order to explain why evil exists, is that human beings have free will to make choices that are not in God's control. God doesn't want robots, the argument goes, nor mindless puppets programmed to sing his praises. He desires genuine fellowship with real, independent beings, and giving us free will is the only way to achieve that, though some people may misuse the gift and cause evil and sin that harm others.

But if you look at the Bible, this reasoning isn't so easy to support. In fact, there's strong evidence that, in the world of Christian theology, human beings are not free to make their own choices - as we see from some little-known bible verses.

"According as [Christ] hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated [Greek proorizo, to predetermine, to decide beforehand] us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will...."
—Ephesians 1:4,5 (KJV)

This verse from Ephesians arguably isn't even the strongest predestination verse in the Bible, but I chose it because it easily disposes of the usual counterargument: that God does not predestine, but with his omniscience, he sees in advance who will freely choose him. This verse refutes that interpretation by using the Greek word proorizo, which specifically means "predestinate".

If the author of this verse had instead wanted to say that God would foresee who would choose him, there's a perfectly good Greek word for that - proginosko. That word is not used here. However, it is used in another verse which puts the nail in the coffin of the foreknowledge argument:

"For whom [God] did foreknow [proginosko], he also did predestinate [proorizo] to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified. What shall we then say to these things? .... Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth."
—Romans 8:29-33 (KJV)

This verse uses both the words for "foreknow" and "predestinate", and it specifically says that God does both. But there's one more predestination verse in the Bible that's the most compelling of all:

"Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"

—Romans 9:14-21 (KJV)

This long verse makes it clear what Paul's views on free will are. Salvation is "not of him that willeth", but the choice of God, who selects some people and shows mercy to them. The rest, like Pharaoh, he "hardens" so that they will reject him and be condemned. But the most incontrovertible proof that this passage teaches predestination is that Paul anticipates the obvious counterargument - that it would be unjust for God to punish people for being as he made them to be - and responds to it! His argument is that since God is the maker, he can do whatever he wants with us - just as a potter shapes clay into different vessels to suit his purposes - and we have no right to lay a charge of injustice against him.

Verses like these may disturb Christians who've always believed that God gave us free will. But the truth is that such a concept finds little support in the Bible. By contrast, the pro-predestination verses are numerous and specific in their wording: God makes us as he chooses, rewards the people whom he made to be good, and punishes the ones whom he made to be evil, even though neither group had any choice in how they would turn out. Many influential historical Christian thinkers, including Augustine, Martin Luther and John Calvin, accepted these verses for what they say.

Today this view is much less popular, probably because of its unsettling moral implications for God's goodness. As mentioned earlier, even most Christians now seem to accept that a god who was directly responsible for evil, and who condemns people for being as he made them to be, would not be worthy of worship. But this can't change the fact that it is still what the Bible clearly says.

Other posts in this series:

• Little-Known Bible Verses

If you're an atheist who's setting out to debate religious believers, there are three main categories of theism you can expect to meet. Although religious belief is one of the most diverse of human phenomena, with a limitless variety of gradations and exceptions, I think these three suffice to classify nearly all of the theists that a nonbeliever is likely to encounter. If you want to debate, it's important to keep this in mind, because your strategy for dealing with each group needs to be different.

First of all, we have the fundamentalists. This is the most familiar group and the one that atheists encounter the most: the believers who interpret most of their holy book literally, who believe in miracles and demons and all the other trappings of supernaturalism, and a god who is anthropomorphic, judgmental, and intimately concerned with how humans lead their daily lives. The most zealously evangelistic, and the theocrats who most want their belief to be supported by the government, all fall into this category. Because they're the loudest and the most organized, they also take a prominent role in political debates like access to abortion or teaching evolution in schools.

Second, we have the laypeople. These are the ordinary, mainstream believers who are by far the most numerous of the three groups. They usually attend church infrequently, viewing it as one obligation among others, and they participate in religious rituals mainly out of habit, or to maintain a sense of community. Their political beliefs span the spectrum. Members of this group can be frustratingly difficult for atheists to engage, because their views on the Bible (or whatever their church's sacred text is) tend not to be variable so much as vague. Most of them have never read the Bible and know very little about what it says; for the most part, they believe without thinking much about it, and if asked to give a reason for their belief, few would be able to answer the question quickly or with confidence. Their notion of God tends to be somewhat less anthropomorphic than the fundamentalists, and certainly less demanding, less wrathful: more like a kindly grandparent than a stern tyrant.

Last, we have the theologians. These people, numerically the smallest of the three groups, are the elite, highly educated believers who are usually found among the clergy, the professional pundit class, and other rarefied circles. They tend to consider themselves more "sophisticated" than the other two groups, whose beliefs they view as simplistic and overly concrete, whereas they themselves tend to believe in a highly abstract, impersonal idea of God.

When debating with a fundamentalist, it's essential to know your Bible. A fundamentalist's identity is intimately bound up with their holy book, and an attack on it is an attack on them. The contradictions, scientific errors, textual alterations, and moral atrocities in religious texts make them unworthy of belief by any rational person, and that's a point you should hammer on. Granted, there are well-rehearsed apologetics for most of these points, but the important thing is that you know them at all. As Dan Barker has said, they consider the Bible their weapon; atheists aren't supposed to be using it against them. If you're already familiar with it, you'll have defanged their first and most common line of argument and will be able to very effectively put them on the defensive. A fundamentalist can't let an attack on the Bible slide.

For the laypeople, your strategy should be: Drive a wedge between the believer and the Bible. As I said earlier, most lay believers know very little about the Bible - mainly just the parts that are taught in Sunday school. I know from personal experience that they often react with shock and revulsion when they learn about its many violent, racist, or sexist passages. Your goal should be to encourage this feeling, to point out you know that they are a good person, and why would they want to believe in a book that contains such terrible things?

In my experience, the layperson will often claim that the bloody parts of the Bible represent corruption by misguided humans, and that God's true message can be found in the better verses. The best way to respond to this is to ask, "So which verses in the Bible were written by God, and which were mistakenly added by people - and how do you tell the difference?" Point out that what they're really doing is using their own conscience and sense of morality, and if they're capable through conscience of telling good ideas apart from bad ones, then what do they need the Bible for in the first place - and why do they hold it in any special reverence? Lots of books contain both good and bad ideas, and many contain a much higher proportion of good ideas than the Bible.

For theologians, your strategy should be: Tie them to the Bible. Since most people in this group eschew literal, anthropomorphic interpretations of God, you should point out that the Bible teaches exactly such a view. It repeatedly speaks of God as getting angry, jealous, repentant, and possessing other human passions. It repeatedly speaks of God as intervening in the world and doing miracles - indeed, the essence of most major faiths, especially Christianity, is that they're based on miracles. It repeatedly speaks of God demanding worship and punishing people who displease him. All these things are anathema to the theologian's view, which carefully separates God from any point of contact with the world.

And since they'll likely protest that the literal view is not their view, you can point out that it underlies their perspective, whatever they may think. Ask them if they pray, if they attend church, if they go to confession or otherwise participate in ritual, if they still use the language and participate in all the outward trappings of conventional religious belief - which most of them do - even though those activities make little sense except in the paradigm of the jealous, worship-demanding, miracle-working god they claim not to believe in.

The history of anti-Semitism in the Christian church is a long, sad story. Ironically, this faith which began as a sect within Judaism has been responsible for many more atrocities against the Jewish people than any of their other enemies.

For centuries, Christian Europe reviled Jewish believers as Christ-killers, and Jews were accused of ludicrous crimes like "host nailing" (stealing consecrated communion wafers and driving nails through them, to crucify Jesus anew) or draining the blood of Christian children to bake in matzoh. Throughout the Middle Ages, thousands of Jews were tried and executed, or simply murdered by mobs, after wild accusations such as these incited Christian communities to frenzy. One of the most notable Christian anti-Semites was Martin Luther, who wrote a book titled On the Jews and Their Lies which argued that Judaism should be outlawed, synagogues should be burned down and Jews should be enslaved for forced labor.

At the root of all this anti-Semitic hatred and bloodshed lies a matter of first-century politics. At the time of Christianity's origin, there was a necessity to blame someone for Jesus' death. But blaming the Romans would not have been wise - Christians existed at Rome's sufferance in any case, and depicting their founder as a criminal executed by the Romans for treason would have been inviting far worse persecution. The natural alternative was to cast blame on the Jews, whom the gospels depict as conspiring to murder Jesus with, at worst, the reluctant cooperation of the Roman authorities.

As Christianity cast off its Jewish origins, this story was found useful to serve other purposes. Finding few converts among the Jews, Christianity's evangelists began targeting Gentiles for conversion. The depiction of the Jews as a stubborn, hardhearted people, cursed by God with blindness and unbelief as punishment for their sins, was readily integrated with the Gospel story and used to explain why these people had so widely rejected the faith that was born among them.

Consider some specific examples of biblical anti-Semitism. While all the gospels record Jesus as engaging in debate with the scribes and Pharisees, only the Gospel of John elevates these disputes to an accusation of corporate guilt against "the Jews" in general: "And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him" (5:16). The fourth gospel also says of Jesus: "He would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him" (7:1) and adds darkly that "no man spake openly of him for fear of the Jews" (7:13). In the crowning accusation, John depicts Jesus as accusing "the Jews" as follows:

"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

—John 8:44

When Jesus is tried before Pilate, John writes: "The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die" (19:7), and adds: "Pilate sought to release him: but the Jews cried out, saying, If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend" (19:12).

Ironically, the single most anti-Semitic verse of the gospels comes in the book that otherwise shows the most understanding and sympathy for the Jewish viewpoint, the Gospel of Matthew. In this bloodcurdling verse, the Jewish spectators demand that responsibility for Jesus' death be placed on themselves and on all their descendants:

"When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children."

—Matthew 27:24-25

The anti-Semitism continues in the Book of Acts, where the apostle Stephen is made to say what would become a common Christian refrain against the Jews - that they had always been a sinful and stubborn people with a history of killing prophets, culminating in the supreme atrocity of their killing God's only son:

"Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers."

—Acts 7:51-52

The epistle of Titus adds another pervasive element of anti-Semitic lore, the Jews' supposed obsession with money, and adds threateningly that "[their] mouths must be stopped".

"For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake."

—Titus 1:10-11

The first epistle of Thessalonians, in what may be a later interpolation, alludes to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem as a deserved punishment from God:

"For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost."

—1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

And the Book of Revelation repeats John's accusation that the Jews were secret demon-worshippers:

"Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee."

—Revelation 3:9

Rivers of innocent Jewish blood have been spilled through the ages because of verses like these. Today, to their credit, the mainstream Protestant churches have gone a long way toward banishing anti-Semitism to the shadows - but it is far from dead. It still has some prominent backers, such as John Hagee (as well as Mr. "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" himself), and the Catholic church is intently moving backward.

However, Christian anti-Semitism has taken on a more subtle form: the so-called "Christian Zionist" movement, which encourages militant Jewish settlers to further expand their settlements in the occupied territory of the West Bank. What few of these people mention explicitly is that they encourage the settlers because they believe it will more swiftly bring on the End Times, in which one-third of Jews will be converted to Christianity and the rest will be slaughtered and then eternally condemned to Hell. This veiled wish for a new Holocaust, one condoned and directed by God, must be the most virulent manifestation of anti-Semitism to be found in all the dark history of Christianity.

Summary: An eye-opening look at just how much the text of the Bible has changed over the centuries. Not to be missed.

I've read two other books by Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted and God's Problem, and while they were both competent, readable works explaining the principles of biblical textual criticism, neither one really floored me. But I circled back around to read some of his earlier books, and I'm glad I did. His 2005 book, Misquoting Jesus, is by far the best of Ehrman's works that I've read so far.

For modern, English-speaking readers, the Bible often seems as if it's a book whose content is set in stone. It's right there in the title - The Bible - implying that the text which follows is single, immutable, and beyond dispute. Many Christian groups work their hardest to support this impression with doctrinal statements which proclaim the Bible to be divinely inspired and perfectly free of error. And while atheists challenge this claim by pointing to the numerous contradictions in the Bible, even relatively few of us dispute that the text we have is the text as it was originally written.

This is a line of argument that deserves more attention from us, because as Ehrman convincingly shows, what's striking to a historical scholar is the fluidity of the Bible. There are thousands of conflicting manuscripts - in fact, as he colorfully puts the point, there are more variant manuscripts of the Bible than there are words in the Bible [p.90]. And while many of these variants arise from simple and obvious copyist errors, many others cannot be dismissed so simply. There are variant readings affecting important verses, which can only be explained as the result of deliberate alterations made by scribes and theologians who wanted to alter the text to support a particular point of view - and in most cases, it's far from clear which was the original meaning and which the alteration. The Bible we have today, in its variant translations, is little more than a snapshot of this process of textual evolution, and many controversial passages are the product of judgment calls by modern scholars as to which variants to reject and which to accept.

Ehrman begins by briefly discussing the origins of Christianity and the formation of the canon. He describes some of the barriers to accurate copying of a text, including the extremely low rates of literacy in the ancient world. Even some so-called village scribes were illiterate and only knew how to copy the letters of their own name to sign a document. This would have been a particular problem for Christianity, which by all accounts began in the low, less-educated classes and only much later spread to the literate elites.

This leads into an important point: even when copying of Christian texts took off, the early copies were the sloppiest. This is because they weren't written by professional scribes, for the most part, but by the relatively few literate Christians who recopied texts for their own use, before the religion became established. As you'd expect from amateur work, many copying errors and other mistakes slipped in. But more important than these unintentional changes were the deliberate ones, made by scribes who were bothered by difficult or theologically troubling verses and "corrected" them to something more palatable, or even more importantly, by apologists who wanted to reshape the text to more clearly teach a doctrine that they held (or more clearly condemn an opposing belief).

The following chapters give an introduction to the principles of textual criticism and how modern scholars tease out the original wordings. There are some basic guidelines: all else being equal, for example, the older manuscript is usually preferred to the younger. More difficult variant readings are usually preferred to simpler, easier ones, since a scribe would be likely to "correct" a difficult verse to an easy one, rarely vice versa. And verses that don't fit with the language, theology or style of the rest of the book are more likely to be interpolations than ones that do fit in.

The last section of the book will be the most interesting to atheists: using these principles, Ehrman analyzes several passages from the Bible that are widely accepted to be later, theologically motivated alterations, and explains how we know that this is so. Many of the passages he cites contain key doctrinal statements or very well-known biblical tales - including all the post-resurrection appearances in Mark, the verse in Luke of Jesus' sweat falling like drops of blood as he prayed in Gethsemane, John's story of the adulterous woman, and the single clearest NT verse establishing the doctrine of the Trinity. All of these are likely to be interpolations. (I may dedicate future posts to expounding on Ehrman's arguments in these cases.)

I'm always in favor of more books that make the case for nonbelief or that expound a positive view of atheism, but the books I value the most are the ones that I genuinely learn something from. Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle was one; Jennifer Hecht's Doubt: A History was another. This one has more than earned its place on the list, and I highly recommend it to any atheist who wants to acquire a more detailed understanding of the origins and evolution of the biblical text.