Underpinning
all the claims of the JW org is a belief in the sanctity of the Bible as God’s
word. This “holy” assumption is certainly never challenged by the Watchtower
and neither does the believer dare to use critical thinking to evaluate the
source of his or her beliefs.
The Watchtower org, for obvious reasons would
not do this as they would need to sell up and hand back the money were they to admit
that the Bible is just a piece of literature and not divine in origin. For the
true believer, to discover fault would be most unsettling. To investigate
further, could reshape their whole world-view, it could actually change the
identity of the person. What an incentive not
to go down this avenue?
For countless generations of Homo sapiens
possessing a faith in an invisible spirit world has been their emotional anchor.
This idea is promoted in the Bible texts and in turn the Bible is revered as
holy to the point that it is the word of God. So to come to realise that the
Bible is mainly pagan and that Jesus is
just a literary fiction would be to invite insecurity and probably depression
as well.
Yet all
things considered, the Bible is simply a collection of texts selected by the
imperial Roman religious authorities as the corpus of writings made divinely sacred
by the state Church for the purpose of political control. This is the story of
Bible Christianity, it is fourth century Roman and not the imaginings of the
Bible writers who are credited with the Christ story.
When
Paul wrote “All scripture is inspired of God...” he referred to any writing of
an uplifting nature as opposed to legal works, dramas, histories and
inventories. He was not referring to the Bible since it did not exist. The received
view is of some miraculous descent from heaven of Jesus and Christianity in the
first century. This is a myth imagined by Christians and JWs.
The
only reference to Jesus of Nazareth outside of the Bible is the mention in
Josephus (called in scholarly circles
the Testimonium Flavianum) which has been satisfactorily dismissed as a forgery.
It was probably performed by an early church father inserting his wishful
thinking into the historian’s hand-written text. Do not confuse the word christ
with Jesus-Christianity for christs have existed from the early Bronze Age. In
fact “Krst” was a name of the Egyptian saviour figure Osiris and his mother for
that matter was “Meri”. These facts alone hint at the enormous field of textual
scholarship regarding the entirely pagan and uninspired Biblical source
documents from antiquity.
To
imagine that Jesus said all the things he said in the Bible is preposterous in
terms of literal historical truth. Hand written documents are most susceptible
to alteration when being copied and political and cultic imperatives are easily
slipped into the text. But more than that, since the character and deeds and
life story of Jesus were already those same character, deeds and life stories
of earlier ’God-men’ known from antiquity, it is highly improbable that Jesus
ever existed as an individual since his character is a composite, a mosaic built from these
older stories. The Bible writers were simply re-telling the same ”holy” tales
in their local cultural dialect to promote their own religious power-base.
In
short (since this is a long subject) I have little doubt now that Jesus is a
fabrication and that the Bible is not in the slightest bit sacred apart from what
human sentiment attributes to it.
The
failing of the religious mind is to become enslaved to what other people have
already called "holy".