The Circular God

A Letter to Walid Husayin

As any first year student of law, science or philosophy will tell you, circular reasoning is a well known logical flaw. It occurs when one makes an assertion and then cites as evidence for the assertion nothing more than a thinly disguised repetition of the assertion itself. To cite a contemporary example:

All Muslims are terrorists.

Why do you say that?

They must be, or why else would I be so frightened of them.

In this example, the “evidence” cited to support the opinion that all Muslims are terrorists is the speaker’s fear, which is nothing more than an indirect reassertion of his opinion itself. The parent’s admonition to their questioning child, “because I said so” is a common (and perhaps often justified) use of circular reasoning.

The following is an actual conversation I once had in a bar in Shanghai over the famous Little Red Book of Communist China. It is paraphrased, but captures the gist of it:

Me. So you believe Mao Zedong was a wise and noble leader?

Her. Yes.

Me. Why do you believe Mao Zedong was a wise and noble leader?

Her. Because it is written in the Little Red Book.

Me. And why do you believe the Little Red Book?

Her. Because it was written by Mao Zedong, a wise and noble leader.

As an ardent fan of the famed Sino-Communist leader, this “logic” was satisfactory to her. I doubt she would have been so gratuitously accepting of a similar turn of logic concerning Adam Smith or another free market economist.

Indistinguishable is the Christian reasoning for believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ and the Judeo-Christian god:

Mr. A. Do you believe in god?

Mr. B. Yes

Mr. A. Why do you believe in god?

Mr. B. Because it is written in the Bible.

Mr. A. Why do you believe the Bible?

Mr. B. Because the Bible is the word of god.

As obvious and visible a case of circular reasoning that this is, it is essentially satisfactory to millions of Christians. They bootstrap their way into a belief that reciprocates by giving them so much artificial comfort that they dare not question the circular and flawed route that took them there. Moreover, they rely wholly and solely on the Bible for their god. It is not as though they also have other sources, such as “The Bible II” or “The Insider’s Bible - A Carpenter’s Tale” to also rely on. It is the ultimate sole sourcing.

Now one might protest and say, “But look at the World around you. I rely on [a beautiful sunset/my newborn baby’s smile/life on Earth] as evidence of the Christian god”. The logic is the same in all these arguments, although the putative source evidence is generally interchangeable. “My newborn baby girl is just so beautiful, there must be a god”; or “that sunset is so pretty, how can you not believe in god; or “Life on Earth is so complex, how can you believe it all happened by chance? God must have done it”

Well, wait. Even if you buy into this assumptive argument (the essence of which is, “I don’t know” equals god) it cannot be proposed as evidence for the Judeo-Christian god. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Jains, for example, all have babies, see beautiful sunsets and ruminate over the origins of life. Even the most hard core of Christians will acknowledge that these other creeds see this as evidence of their own god or gods. At best, one can rely on this as“evidence” for some sort of higher power (whatever that may mean) not necessarily for the Christian God. That is not written in the clouds. It arises independently of any awe of natural objects and comes straight from one source and one source only - the Bible.

More specifically, for Christians, their belief in Jesus Christ comes straight from the New Testament. They believe Jesus Christ was a manifestation of their tripartite god sent to Earth to save us from the original sin of Adam and Eve. This is why they are called “Christians” as opposed to “Jews”. So, getting above the primary color simplicity of church stories showing a well-groomed, handsome, anglicized male with good teeth, a strong jaw and a calming disposition, what can a professional biblical scholar or historian really tell us about Jesus’ life?

Well, as it turns out, not a lot. There is, of course, an entire field of study devoted to this very topic. It rejects the above reasoning that the Bible is the literal truth of events described in it, and takes a cold, objective, historical look at what we know about the life of Jesus.

As such, it often demonstrates that much of what is widely accepted about Jesus’ life is, at best, highly questionable and quite probably sheer nonsense. In any other field (history, science, sociology) such studies, where credible, would be welcomed and incorporated into the evolving knowledge of the field, possibly even earning their discoverer a place in a reputable scientific publication. Here, however, because we are dealing with the Great Pretend, this entire field of study is shunted to the side by believers.

It is actually given its own name, “The Historical Jesus” and regarded as an entirely distinct field of study to Christian theology, never to be taught in the seminaries. This is absurd if you think about it. It is as if two parallel universes exist, the real or “Historical Jesus” and the pretend Jesus of brightly colored Bible stories. No prize for guessing which messiah 99% of Christians are familiar with.

Only in the Great Pretend would such a contradiction be tolerated. Imagine if, for example, a large body of convincing evidence emerged that Winston Churchill was gay, including love letters exchanged between him and his male lover, letters of protestation from his wife and pictures of the two men on vacation wrapped in lovers’ embrace – pretty solid stuff. Think how ludicrous it would seem if, instead of historians modifying their records to reflect this fact, they simply ignored the evidence and a new field of study had to emerge to deal with it called “The Historical Winston,” so as not to offend the sensitivities of homophobic fans of this gifted British orator.

So, what solid historical evidence do we really have on the life of Jesus? Obviously have no pictures, tape recordings or YouTubes of Jesus. One Hundred percent of our information about him comes from old written texts. The four Gospels are by far the best known and most relevant sources, but there are a few others. Needless to say, there are also a lot of forgeries and fake accounts recorded over the centuries, and one of the challenges for biblical scholars is to sort out the nonsense from the credible sources. Fortunately, they have a number of tools at their disposal in order to do so.

When these tools are applied, we end up with a pretty discrete list of credible writings about Jesus. The following is a list of one hundred percent of the surviving material we have that was written about Jesus within 100 years of his death. While there is some disputes as to the dating of some other material (the so called “sayings Gospel of Thomas”, for example) it is fair to say that the vast majority of biblical scholars, from the most conservative traditionalists in the Vatican to the most world wary of skeptics, agree that the following pretty much encompasses one hundred percent of the surviving material that mentions Jesus Christ and which was written within 100 years of his death.

(a) The Letters of Paul – which have very brief, passing references to him, written about 15 years after Christ died.
(b) The Gospel of Mark – written about 35-40 years after Christ died.
(c) The Gospel of Matthew – written about 50-55 years after Christ died.
(d) The Gospel of Luke – written about 50-55 years after Christ died.
(e) The Gospel of John – written about 60-65 years after Christ died.
(g) Two very brief and references to him in letters by Roman administrators, written about 90 years after his death, and two references by Josephus, a Jewish historian.

That’s it. All other references were written later and cannot be anything but unlikely repetitions of earlier material. Tellingly, there are no records of Jesus’ existence in any other Roman or non-religious records from the time. There are no Roman records of his birth, of his death or of his crucifixion. The Romans were prodigious record keepers, yet never saw fit to mention him, except in the above letters, which were more about keeping an eye on his followers, who were starting to emerge, Falun Gong like, as a dangerous cult to the Romans.

What emerges is that, during his lifetime and immediately after it, Christ was essentially a theological nobody. An irrelevant, ranting, apocalyptic prophet among many in the region at the time. The sort of disheveled, “the end is neigh” nut that one is panhandled by (every two minutes) in Gastown, Vancouver. Even Saint Paul, whose 13 letters are the earliest records we have of Christ’s life and make up half of the 27 books of the New Testament, makes very little reference to Jesus. He certainly did not consider him a particularly important figure, much less the messiah.

It was only in the centuries after his death that Christ began to take on any significance. The only truly interesting thing to me in the whole Christ fable is why and how this happened and how the myth grew to take on the worldwide proportions it has today. The spark was likely an irrelevant prophet, the fuel he ignited (our astonishing predilection toward theism) is a fascinating mystery.

Does all this really sound to you like the way the creator of the Universe would handle things? Would such a being send his “son” (whatever that means when you are a one off being that created the Universe, with no female counterpart) to Earth via a virgin, only to be largely ignored and to die a horrible death when, after all, you, as god, make the rules!!

As (an unnamed) blogger on CNN wrote:

Christianity is the belief that God impregnated a virgin with himself to give birth to himself, so that he could sacrifice himself to himself to negate a rule that he himself made.

Perhaps it was the Universe’s first case of multiple personality disorder.

Is it not more likely that Jesus was an ordinary prophet from the time, who was executed for offending the contemporary Jewish religious hierarchy and because the Romans saw him as a political threat? That much later, Christians had to justify his death to skeptical Jews and Gentiles, so they came up with the “it had to happen this way to save us” story? If not and if I were Jesus Christ, next time “daddy” wanted a favor out of me, I’d be like, “hell no, you get your divine arse down there and get nailed to a cross.”