Intro 4
After the funeral my life descended into a black despair, i really wished i had died instead of my sister. But of course these were only wishes; reality is totally oblivious to our human desires.
Much soul searching followed. What would i believe in now that i had exposed the Watchtower ideology, and found it wanting? Would i ever see my sister again, was there an afterlife? Since i had Christian precepts drummed into me since childhood, i turned to the ideology that sounded familiar to me. I began finding and listening to ex jdubs of the past, who turned to evangelical beliefs. People like Bill and Joan Cetnar, David Reed, and many others. I listened to their testimonies and began to have feelings of following in their footsteps, and becoming born again. I uttered the sinner’s prayer, and began praying to Jesus, something i would never have done as a witness. And for a few months i actually began to believe this new paradigm.
However deep inside i did not want to tie myself to another belief system without doing further research. It would have been so easy to jump from one ideology to another, like getting out of one comfortable chair, walking across the room and getting into another equally comfortable one. Time was on my side, why rush things.
So i gave myself permission to peel the onion, one layer at the time. In my mind i could see the Watchtower was false in so many ways, but what about Christianity, could i trust it to provide the answers. As witnesses we always prided ourselves as being great scholars of the bible, our GB and the writing department were streets ahead of everybody else when it came to bible knowledge, or so we thought. So why not go to an actual scholar of the New Testament and see what he had to say. Thus i found Dr Bart Ehrman, a professor of early Christianity. He had authored many books including, “Misquoting Jesus”, “Forged”, and “How Jesus became God”.
I found his writings fascinating and very revealing about early Christianity, filling in the many gapes i had when it came to actual history, in comparison with the rose coloured glasses of the Watchtower writing department. I also watched his debates with noted evangelical fundamentalist Christians, and enjoyed his learned explanations and refutations. Then i found his “Great courses”, series dealing with the historical Jesus, and how the Christian canon came to be, and also the many forms of early Christian beliefs, like the Ebionites, The Marcionites, the Gnostics, and the proto- orthodox.
With this new insight i could see how having total belief in the infallibility of scripture just didn’t stand up to the evidence. Ehrman explained that of the over five thousand couples of the New Testament, all had differences in them; in fact so many that they exceeded the actual word count in the New Testament. As i researched i could sense my viewpoint changing, and like Ehrman who had been a born again Christian, i also was moving into agnosticism like him.
To be continued............