Apology for the Bible and Christianity

The Jesus Debate, by John B. Westerberg

The Importance of Religious Criticism, by John Bede

The problem with established theology is that no one dares to touch what is established. Especially the Bible is impossible to question any letter of. (Already the early Talmudists battled with this problem.) All scholars agree that the Holy Writ is full of inconsistencies, but no one dares to sort them out. Most of them are also aware that it must contain innumerable misunderstandings, especially concerning the story of Christ, but no one dares to point them out with the authority of pure logic and exclaim: "This is wrong!"

Let's start from the beginning with Moses. According to modern research, there is actually much in the Bible which now can be proved to be true, while other material can be doubted on the ground that not a single piece of evidence has been found to support it, for instance the life and work of Moses, as the wanderings of the children of Israel through the desert for 40 years haven't left a single trace behind. Of course, this doesn't prove that Moses never existed, and I embrace the standpoint, that want of proof of what is written is true is no proof that it isn't true.

On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable to doubt that the children of Israel actually wandered through the desert for exactly 40 years, since 40 years in the Old Testament generally is used to mark just a very long period, just as the figure 40 days frequently is used in the New Testament. This critical manner of thought is elementary in exegetic theology.

There is however no logical reason whatsoever to doubt that Moses grew up as a prince of Egypt and brought the people of Israel out from there down to the mountain of Horeb and up again to Mount Nebo and the Jordan river during a period long enough to have the entire older generation disposed of during the way. It is a fact that the ten plagues of Egypt could be explained by the Santorini catastrophe north of Crete. There is, however, reason to doubt that Moses himself compiled the entire Torah. This is to be doubted especially from a literary point of view, since the Torah with all its dry commandments and paragraphs are completely different in mentality and style from the previous epic accounts of Genesis and Exodus. Moses probably commenced the establishment of all these laws which then continued to have effect verbally and were amplified according to what was needed in the course of time until they reached their completion at the latest during the days of Samuel. I can myself easily believe, though, that Moses wrote the whole of Genesis himself, compiling what he had heard and learned from Egypt and Babylonia in his youth.

That Samuel was a far more important and more methodical legislator and editor than was ever recognized by history appears to me as credible. I hardly think that anything of importance was added to the Torah during the long decadence after king Solomon.

Swarming with inextricable misunderstandings, though, is without any doubt the New Testament. Its oldest writings are the letters of St. Paul, which even they did not come into existence until long after the crucifixion and without Paul ever having had any personal contact with Jesus. So he could impossibly be regarded as a reliable source and interpreter of the mission of Jesus. St. Paul's disciple was St. Luke, a professional doctor of medicine, who on the other hand made considerable research on the subject and must have known the mother of Jesus personally. His gospel is the only one of any detachment to the subject. Least detached of all is the gospel of St. Matthew, which gives an overwhelming impression of genuineness but which is hopelessly personal and biassed. Most positive and matter-of-fact is St. Mark, whose gospel is probably the oldest and most original, written by the pupil of St. Peter, which therefore deserves to be regarded as perhaps the only reliable one. St. John's version is the most twisted of all, the last to have been written, all screwed up on personal interpretations of the man and his pretentions. His unreliability is confirmed by the Apocalypse, which is the most aggressive book in the whole Bible. Both John, Paul and Luke could be meted fair amounts of credit for their literary and philosophical values but are not to be trusted as witnesses. Only Mark and Matthew are of any worth as witnesses.

An unknown and supressed apocryphical gospel of St. Jude dares to suggest that Judas Iscarioth has totally been taken wrong and that the other apostles have perverted both the picture of him and of Jesus. According to this gospel, which is not very well known in the western hemisphere, Judas was the link between Jesus and the Essenes, who later on frightened the soldiers away from the grave, carried off the body of Jesus and resurrected him. When Jesus told Judas at the last supper: "That thou doest, do quickly," he meant that everything was ready and that Judas could start acting according to the plans. No one was better prepared for everything that followed than Jesus himself. He had planned everything to the minutest detail, and in sacrificing himself he intended to unite all the world's religions under the realm of that total divine love, which he felt and understood. But he did it too well, and Judas was not equally well prepared. When he experienced what the fantastic plans really involved practically, it became too much for him, he thought everything was his fault and that everything had gone wrong and therefore took his own life in despair instead of waiting with patience until the end. By the resurrection, which proved that Jesus had survived the ordeal and escaped, the precarious enterprise was crowned with perfect victory and success.

The Muslims came somewhat closer to the truth than the church when they advocated that the crucifixion never had occurred. The crucifixion did occur, but Jesus never died, which the phenomenon "blood and water" gushing forth after his so called death clearly indicates.

Most important of all to go to the bottom with in the Bible, though, is the whole notion of God. It is probable that Moses himself launched all unsound misapprehensions by manipulating the idea of God to better control the obstreperous Jews. All the rubbish about a God who "takes revenge", "regrets", "kills", "strikes with condemnation" and so forth, in brief, all the myths about a cruel and severe God have to be disposed of. In a certain sense, Christianity succeeded in this, but the cruel and unhuman, the belliferous and vengeful God of violence and hatred then made a come-back with the advent of Islam, which laid a curse on the whole world and history by announcing that Mahomet as the last and perfect prophet gave the world the definite version of God. Thereby atheism was given a justification for existence.

(In the same manner all the myths of Islam and the Catholic Church about hell and paradise have to be disposed of. There is no hell except the one which humankind themselves have created on earth, and no paradise except the one humankind once could have created on earth - and sometimes tried to create to almost succeed therewith.)

As an alternative to monotheistic intolerance, Hinduism and Buddhism appear as much more sensible and human. But Hinduism is primitive and confused while Buddhism goes to extremes in the way of common sense, so that it ends in sterility. The Sikhs united the best of Islam with the best of Hinduism but degenerated into a people of warriors: the necessity to constantly defend their interests made them hopelessly militant and unscrupulous. Jainism tried to unite the best of Hinduism with the best of Buddhism but never reached an acceptable synthesis or any dynamic identity, much because they never found a leader of a Buddha's qualifications. Other interesting efforts to form a constructive synthesis was that of the theosophers, who constantly split up in parties though, just like the Christians.

There are accounts of Jesus having been to India, not only after his youth in Banaras and Ladakh, but also that he should have died in Srinagar in Kashmir in the days of the emperor Trajan. There is no evidence however. But the mere existence of accounts of his activities in India indicates that they took place, just like the existence of Moses and the wanderings of the children of Israel, although there remains no evidence. It is not impossible that Jesus knew the formula for uniting all religions and that he tried to realize it, but that his surviving disciples got it all wrong.

(The theory of Jesus' death in Kashmir at an advanced age is also supported by Islam. The Ahmadiya branch of Islam in Pakistan positively asserts, that Jesus did not die on the cross but that he was in a state of coma as he was taken down and buried. Of this St. John and the women were very much aware, so they managed to prevent that his bones were crushed like on the two malefactors. After the resurrection, however, Jesus was obliged by security to resort to a life underground, which is why he rather avoided the apostles than associated freely with them. He was extremely careful about dispersing St. Thomas' doubts, though, who later followed him to India, where he could live more freely and openly. He had also completed his mission in Israel and didn't have much to do there any more. After the unexpected and most unwelcome death of St. Jude, he gave over the highest responsibility for his community to St. Peter, who had proved himself the most human of his remaining disciples. In India, Jesus is said to have reached the age of 120 years (the same age as Moses) in Kashmir, according to the Ahmadiya branch of Islam, a Pakistani equivalent to the Persian Bahai community.

So there are constantly more sources appearing as witnesses of Jesus' activities in India both before and after the crucifixion.)"

John B. Westerberg

Footnote. The most interesting part of John's presentation is the revaluation of Judas Iscarioth. Already Anthony Burgess tried something of the kind. John goes further, however, and depicts Judas as the only initiate in the plans of Jesus. That Jesus himself was perfectly aware of everything expecting him including the crucifixion is evident from the gospels. This is the first time anyone claims that Judas alone also was familiar in advance with what was going to happen. It is also most evident from the gospels that none of the other apostles knew anything in advance. Experiencing the cruelty and the brutality which the realization of the plans conveyed, Judas should then according to this have panicked, jumped to the conclusion that Jesus had lost control and consequently lost his nerve. This would not have been more than human. The very first thing that the first Christians evidently forgot and overlooked was, that Jesus and his apostles were only human beings.

The Judas theory is however also the weakest point in John's presentation. If Judas meant no harm, how do you explain the 30 pieces of silver? You could explain them by that they were part of the show: only by that could the high priests be convinced by Judas that he was serious about betraying Jesus. Without this transaction as a concrete evidence, the high priests would perhaps never have bothered to arrest Jesus and go through with the plotted trial.

John Bede had this surprising comment:

"At last someone who dares to question the credibility of the gospels! I give him my full support! Here is my contribution:

St. John 12:4-6 ending: "he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it." (of Judas Iscarioth.)

Even if it might have been true, isn't it a strange remark of a holy apostle to make of another after his tragic death? Such an accusation demands proof, but since Judas hade hanged himself he couldn't defend himself, and none of the other apostles did either. Is it then plausible that Jesus should have trusted and kept a disciple who stole from the common purse? It is more probable that the accusation is a lie than that Jesus should have kept him. According to me this one verse is enough to render the holy authority of the gospel of St. John questionable indeed.

And why does this verse exist? There is only one explanation: St. John must have envied Judas. But St. John was the disciple whom Jesus loved, according to St. John. This leads us to believe, that St. Jude might very well have been as much loved by Jesus as St. John.

The gospel according to St. Luke is the most charming and beautiful, partly because it is so full of anecdotes and parables which the others didn't care to preserve. What makes St. Luke doubtful is his "Acts of the Apostles", which clearly are in favour of St. Paul at the cost of St. Peter in their silencing down the first christian division between these two, so that Peter is abandoned while Paul is given the entire stage for himself. Also, this book is unfinished. It is impossible to take St. Luke seriously after the "Acts".

Which means, that only Matthew and Mark remain as reliable evangelists, as our friend J. Westerberg so correctly has pointed out.

I also know that there is a grave of Jesus in India. Why would the Hindus find out to dig such a grave unless the body of Jesus was in it? Is Mr Westerberg able to answer that question?"

Another correspondent, a member of the church of Sweden, protested against these arguments and accused mr Westerberg of false motives. We answered thus:

The motivation behind John's reserach is hardly to establish new dogmas. The one thing which he is interested in, we can assure, having known him for 16 years, is to reach closer at the truth. Only in order to find out whether there was anything to the rumours of Jesus' activities in India, he went there to spend years of research on the subject. To the relief of the dogma authorities he found no evidence but many favourable indications. To this then is added these uninvited surprises to stumble on, like the Ahmadiya tradition that Jesus died of old age at Srinagar, Kashmir, and the Essene information of how Judas alone among the apostles was initiated in the mystery of Jesus' death beforehand but couldn't face standing up to it practically. We suggest that the kiss of Judas more than anything else proved the good intentions of Judas, that this was probably his farewell and wish of good luck on the master's difficult journey, and that Jesus' answer could be discussed indeed: this unexpected gesture of Judas might have alarmed him. His answer could for instance be interpreted thus: "Judas, don't go too far!" or, "Please, Judas, more discretion, if I may ask!" We return this debate to our John in India, the expert on such theological speculations.

But the perhaps most important argument of all is this: if it really turns out to be the case that Judas for 1960 years has been unjustly condemned and exiled to hell for ever under never ending curses of all Christian believers and churches in the world, isn't it then about time that he was given some kind of restitution? Since there is an evident risk that we are here faced by the worst example of mobbing, (and of a dead man even,) in history?

by John B. Westerberg.

"No one knows anything for certain about Jesus or his twelve (thirteen) apostles. His activities were from the start until the end a mystery intended only to give rise to mysteries. The first and greatest mistake of his church was therefore to try to concretize any results of his activities in order to establish dogmas. The first one to introduce this denounceable antichristian activity was the great religious founder St. Paul, who failing to understand the mystery as such was the first one to betray and completely debase christianity.

The second who partook in the same destructive activity was the apostle St. John, who by his gospel established Jesus as a cult figure of more divine than human nature. This also was a total corruption of the innermost nature of christianity.

For 1900 years ever since then, in all parts of the world but especially in the western part, you have devotedly continued to ruin christianity by inventing dogmas (the church), or by fashioning hypotheses founded on "science", which generally have sought to explain away the whole Bible as only fairy tales and lies, and which in modern days even cocksuredly have claimed that Jesus never existed and that his religion christendom is totally a merit of St. Paul's. This is how far the continued premeditated destruction of christianity so far has gone.

That's why I left the western world, and my exile from there is to be regarded as voluntary and permanent. A society that constricts imagination, maintains itself by limiting man's freedom of thought, regards idealism and altruism as dangerous and subversive, and which excludes and fights alternatives instead of furthering them, is unhuman and self-destructive. Then I find the most miserable colony of hippies much sounder.

Regarding the efforts to explain away the Bible and Jesus above all, the first and greatest mistake is to deny the possibility that what is written could actually have taken place. Why close the door, when you can't get out unless you open it? Extremely little of what is written in the Bible can be proved to have taken place. It is practically only the history of the state of Israel from the days of king David. What most of all convinces me that what is written in the Bible actually did take place is its psychological realism. The five books of Moses is the first literary realism in history. This emerges above all in the described human relationships. A story like that of the eternal feud between the brothers Esau and Jacob with all its different turns with deadly enmity alternating with moving reconciliation scenes, the shocking psychology in the described relationships between Joseph and his brothers, the relation of the holy wrath of Moses when he murders an Egyptian taskmaster and crushes the two stone tables with the ten commandments, totally desillusioned about that people's reliability which he has sacrificed everything for, the romantic episode about Ruth and Boas - all such intimate and personal affairs could impossibly be made up. They are too convincing and real to be dismissed as "scientifically untenable". They are too human to be able to be dismissed by an established unhumanity.

In the same way, everything that is written in the New Testament is theoretically possible. Judas could have been a base traitor who stole money out of the common purse of the apostles, but he could also have been Jesus' closest friend and the only initiate in the mystery. The one possibility doesn't even exclude the other. Episodes like when St. Thomas puts his finger through the holes in Jesus' hands, the widow at the well, Peter's fishing party when he gets himself into the water just because he sees the master on the beach, the prostitute who is about to be stoned when Jesus says: "Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone at her," whereupon the whole enterprise comes to nothing - it is all too humanly realistic, too much alive to be "lying nonsense", as some professors and academicians would term it, representatives of that society which I have for ever rejected, that mortally industrialized welfare society dominated by dry boring scientific sterility, the greatest effort of which since the second world war has been to fabricate Plutonium. Such a society can only be designated with one adequate label: Antichrist. I will never be able to fit into such a society, and neither will, I believe, any human person.

Your friend John Bede's question about the grave in India answers itself.

There are many indications that Jesus educated himself to be a master within Buddhism in India, and that after his completed mission in Jerusalem he returned to Buddhism in India."

The first thing to be said about the Bible and its God (in all its various versions, interpretations and definitions,) is, that no one ever has any right to try to bereave the Jews of this theology or the right which it gives them to call themselves God's chosen people. At the same time, this is the ground for all theology, without which no theology is possible, which always has been the major stumbling block to all other peoples concerning the God of the Bible. The eternal protest has been: "Why should the Jews be so special?" This has been the motivation for all antisemitism of all times and the launching pad to all persecutions. All revolts against Jewry including those of Karl Marx, Islam, atheism and communism have sprung from this argument. These eternal revolts against the Jewish monopoly on God will probably continue forever, and they will always continue to abort. They have always failed and will always fail. No man can indulge in a more foolish task than this meaningless revolt. Already Cain, already Sodom and Gomorra, already Pharaoh of Egypt, already the Assyrians and the Babylonians, already Haman in Persia, already Rome failed in this task, and humanity has never learned from all these perpetually aborted examples. The only aim reached in all these attacks against the Jewish monopoly on God is that the Jews have been inflicted griefs and damages to no gain for anyone. The Jews have their right to their God as he is described in the Old Testament, and no one has any right to even try to inflict on this right to religious freedom. Other peoples, though, have exactly the same right to the same God - if they respect the Jews.

We need to say no more about the Old Testament. Before embarking on the Jesus case I wish to defend Pythagoras in a parenthesis. The noble pacifist philosophy as it was developed in Greece after the fall of the state of Israel could be described as the best possible alternative to monotheism, since it is clinically free from all the disadvantages of monotheism. The risk of having one all-powerful abstract God as the highest spiritual and secular authority is that such a conception implies self-imposed authority and power, and all power corrupts. God is the most ingenious justification for autocracy. Not even king David or Solomon succeeded in avoiding getting corrupt by the power position they held by having it confirmed by the dogma of the all-powerful God of Israel. That God from the very beginning equalled power, became the nemesis of monotheism from its very start; and all monotheistic religions were ruined from the beginning by this, especially Christianity and Islam. This could be described as the unavoidable, unsolvable and self-destructive dilemma of monotheism.

What a relief then is not the Greek philosophy with its unto perfection developed logic thinking and reasoning, which with indefatigable pains tried to find logic explanations to everything and almost succeeded. Without doubt, the greatest lengths were reached by Pythagoras and Plato, and their systems are still tenable today. What a marvellous contrast against all the secular turbulence and vanity caused by that power justified by God leading to infinite mess through war and violence, uncompromising one-sidedness, astronomical political stupidity, brute force, intolerance and plain barbarity! Against that background of all the misery caused by monotheism through eternal power struggles and ceaseless wars all over the world, those peaceful Greek philosophical solutions to the world enigmas must appear a better alternative. And being a philosopher doesn't have to mean that you are an atheist or a materialist.

Now we reach that most controversial case of Jesus. Who was he? At least he was a human being. Everything else is uncertain. It has been doubted whether he existed at all, but such remonstrations are as meaningless as to deny the existence of one Homer or Shakespeare on the grounds of no evidence to prove that they wrote what was published under their names. The Homeric poems and the Elizabethan dramas exist, and someone must have written them. If tradition then mentions Homer and Shakespeare as the authors, no one has any right to deny their authorship unless he can prove they did not write their works. It's the same thing with Jesus.

A basic misunderstanding is his name. His real name was Yeshùa, which is the same name which was carried by Joshua the successor to Moses, king Josiah of Israel, the prophet Hosea and Jesus the son of Syrach in the Old Testament Apocrypha, in other words a very ordinary name, like John in English. Some people claim that Jesus in fact lived some hundred years before Christ and that the gospels is a construction based on another Jesus a hundred years earlier. That's like claiming that a novel about a certain John in fact is a distortion of the story of another person named John who lived a century before the John of that novel. Jesus the son of Joseph, Yeshùa Bar Joseph, is as common a name at the time of Christ as John Andrews is in England today. These ridiculous speculations about different Jesuses probably come from the fact, that the unknown Jesus Bar Syrach of the Old Testament Apocrypha has very much in common as a personality with the New Testament Jesus and his teachings.

The controversy about Jesus is not really Jesus himself but rather what his disciples caused in the name of their master.

Before dealing with the disciples (the so called apostles) one by one, we must treat the Jesus case. Although all the gospels completely lack reliability (since they were written three decades after the death of Christ or later, and since they are biassed and personal not to say tendentious,) they give a very clear picture of an undeniable human fate during the Roman occupation of Israel. He was of royal blood and heir to the throne of Israel, which mere possibility made the old sick king Herod extremely uneasy, who had no such heredity himself. He was related to John the Baptist, and it's not improbable that they were cousins, (so that Elizabeth would have been Mary's elder sister). Both were in close contact with the numerous freedom fighters' movements in Israel against Rome: the Zealots, the Nazarenes, the Essenes, the Sicarians, and others. After John the Baptist had publicly baptized Jesus and so to say launched his debut as an authority and leader among the prophets of Israel, Jesus takes full responsibility for that character. Many acknowledge him both as king and Messiah, and he acts very convincingly as if he was both. He challenges the Roman establishment by letting himself be greeted as king of Israel by entering Jerusalem riding on a donkey, which the Prophets had written the proper king would do. He continues the challenge by driving all the marketeers out of the holy temple by force. He thereby assumes full responsibility both as king and high priest. No wonder then that the Romans dispose of him.

It's probable that the Gospel according to St. Matthew comes closest to the truth since it is the most convincing and realistic of the gospels. Here we have a Jesus who "doesn't bring peace but swords" and turns "the son against his father and the daughter against her mother" etc. This is no kind pacifist but a brave determined revolutionary, who definitely is subversive against present conditions, that is the Roman occupation of Israel and the position of the Sadducees as Quislings of the Romans. The Pharisees held a position in between of an almost diplomatic character. Jesus had friends among these, but he definitely turned the Sadducee party into his enemies.

The whole crucifixion drama is so outrageous and realistic in its vast complexity with so many differently acting figures, that this can't be any pure fabrication. Pontius Pilate is a historical person, procurator in Israel 26-36, and so are the different Herods and Quirinius, the procurator of Syria at the time. The historical factors are so numerous in the whole New Testament, that it's impossible to try to explain away Jesus as a historical person except by blind and biassed idiocy and petty nonsense. He died a martyr to his cause as a rightful heir to the throne of Israel and as a witness of his religion; and it was the Romans, not the Jews (except the Sadducees), who executed him.

The less said about the disciples, the better - Jesus himself at times expressed his exasperation at their stupidity; but some of them went farther in folly than others. I will not dwell on the issues whether Simon Zelotes and Simon Peter were one and the same person or not, whether Thomas, Judas II and James II were the brothers of Jesus or not, if St. John the evangelist was the same as St. John of the Apocalypse or not. Interesting is that St. Thomas also is called "Didymus", the twin; but the name Thomas also means twin. Whose twin brother was he then? My guess is that he might have been the brother of Jesus as well as the so called St. Jude of the epistle, but that he hardly was Jesus' twin brother but might have been called "the twin" since he might have looked very much the same and been particularly close to the master. The apocryphal gospel of St. Thomas expresses a deeper understanding of Jesus and his words than any other gospel.

There is much to speak for the second James as a brother of Jesus, who became the leader of the Christians in Jerusalem after the master's death. He lived up to his responsibility, which led him into conflict with the upstart and maniac later called Paul.

The interesting thing about Simon Zelotes is that there even was a member of that sect, the fiercest of all resistance movements against the Romans, among Jesus' disciples. He might have been Peter himself, who then would have been a Zealot before Jesus converted him into St. Peter. Peter is also known to have used force as he raised his sword against the high priest's servant in the garden of Gethsemane and chopped of his ear - even in the last days of Jesus he apparently was quite ready to use force and violence. It is written that also some of the other disciples had weapons. ("He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one." St. Luke 22:36) Obviously they expected some attack at any time, so maybe it was for some reason that the Romans sent a whole army unit of at least 500 soldiers to the garden of Gethsemane.

Judas Iscarioth was probably also a Zealot. The name "Iscarioth" is most probably a mistaken spelling of "Sicarioth", which was another nomination of a "Zealot". The Sicarioths were the most fanatical among the Zealots. The tragical despair and innocence of poor Judas I have treated earlier.

Paul was a Roman citizen and was paid by the Romans to follow their command and persecute the Christians, until he suddenly changed his mind and became a Christian himself. But he became more than a Christian. Apparently he was a man of exaggerations, and he overdid Christianity into something that no longer was Jewish. He must have had some constant objection against the Jewish authorities, who maybe had brought him up too hard. He had never met Jesus and could in no way have any real impression of him, wherefore he had nothing to go on except the legends. His letters are regarded as the oldest writings of the New Testament. They start the tendentious literature of Christianity on no other ground than an outrageous mythomania. Jesus is made into the Son of God, the unavoidable speculations about the empty grave Paul transforms into the dogma of the resurrection of the flesh; and his myths and fanaticism for the Jesus cult creates such a confusion among the Christians, that when Paul has missioned in Turkey and Greece, the Lord's brother James must in despair send out other missionaries after him to undo the disastrous effects of his boundless mythomania. Thus occurs the first great schism among the Christians between Paul on one side and James with Peter on the other. These tried to avoid the separation of the Christians from the Jews, but the intense labours of Paul compelled this to happen.

The doings of St. Paul are indeed for good and evil. On one hand he starts off the triumphant Christian conquest of the world, which he leads with the same adroitness as Mahomet 600 years later carried on the Muslim conquest of the world; but on the other hand he debases Christianity into an intolerant and dogmatic autocracy, which ruthlessly extirpates all opposition and does not tolerate any argument or criticism against the established myths of Paul. Again we see the ugly monster bastard of monotheism: authority gives power, which breeds corruption, cruelty and violence. Thus Christianity became the fatal executioner of classical antiquity with its wonderful cultural world of Pythagorean enlightenment. This devastating narrow-minded intolerance was exclusively the result of Paul's hard labour and dogmatization.

After the introduction of Paul's eloquent mythomania in eminent letters, the gospels were written more or less under their influence in the same vein. It's important to note, that the gospels were written after the incineration of Rome, after the first persecution of the Christians, and after the destruction of Jerusalem, when all Jewish resistance against Roman oppression had been destroyed and Jewry was reduced to martyred ashes. The Christians had earlier been persecuted together with the Jews - the emperor Claudius for instance made no difference. From this the tendency evolved to try to lick the Romans and blame the death of Jesus on the Jews. This was a political necessity. Otherwise Christianity would never have been able to take over Rome.

The most objective of the gospels is that of St. Mark, the disciple of Peter, which probably also is the oldest of the gospels. I already mentioned St. Matthew. Doctor Luke was a disciple of Paul and wandered completely in his shadow under his influence, but was more careful about his investigations into the matter than Paul. John finally gave his very own personal version of things, inspired by Paul's successful mythomania and eagerness for establishing a lasting cult, and was obviously also bent on establishing his own position for eternity as Jesus' favourite. There is nothing to prove that he did not also write the Apocalypse as a definite stamp on Christianity as a very subversive revolt movement against the Romans.

Theologians of the future face the very difficult and serious task of separating Jesus the man from Jesus the cult figure, distilling truth from myth. To reconstruct what really happened after 2000 years is of course tremendously difficult, but you can always start by cleaning up among the myths, where most if not everything is dusty old lies. On the whole, Jesus the cult figure is just an artificial construction which was fashioned for opportunistic reasons to make way for the career of the militant Church as a political world power.

These necessary settlements must not in any way however harm or threaten the institutions. I rather believe that these only can survive if they undergo a clean sweep. By the institutions I mean the churches, the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church, the Calvinist Church, the Coptic Church, the Anglican Church and almost all Christian churches. They are all as holy as Jewry by their mere faithfulness towards the religious literature and the worship of the idea of God.

Let that be the end of this theological discourse this time. I hope you have not found the topic too boring and exhausting. I apologize, but the subject is comprehensive.

Allow me to immediately confess who I am. In all my life I have been involved and engaged in the conflicts of Northern Ireland, being a Catholic of Londonderry. That should be all I should be obliged to say about that. Those who know anything about this the most meaningless of all conflicts will understand what I mean without one more word.

All my life people have tried to force me to take stands. I always refused to. I think both sides are wrong. So I have always thought, and it seems unlikely that I will ever find reason to change my mind.

All my life I have collected bad things to say about my Christian Church, whether it's Catholic or Protestant. They are all the same to me, and I find both equally bad. But if you express your criticism you will raise hell out of nowhere, you will get beaten down, you might get shot in your knees, you simply are forbidden to say anything against any rotten devil in any rotten church.

So the church is full of devils, but you can't reach them. You can't deal with them. You can't settle with them, because all the pious believers will do anything to stop you.

Thus the evil remains with all believing Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland. Thus both churches appear totally evil. Of course they are not. I am a solidly confirmed supporter of the paradox, that there is no evil without something good about it, just as there is nothing good without something being rotten about it.

To explain this baffling duality, how good and evil in religious business always is intertwined and almost inseparable, let's have a look at a totally different sort of religion, one of the outsider churches, who people have loved to cudgel occasionally and who has acquired a kind of label of 'all abuse allowed'. Let's have a look at the extraneous Church of Scientology.

One year I remember the Scientology page on Internet caused some attention across the world since it disclosed confidential material from an advanced Scientology course called OT III. The motive for revealing this remarkable material was apparently, that the source had studied the course, quit Scientology and used Internet to demonstrate why.

After some time this page was removed from Internet by the source himself, since, according to witnesses, he had been intimidated by scientologists to do so. This appears even more remarkable since the material disclosed had been regarded as "science fiction nonsense".

Most remarkable then is the scientologist reaction. If Catholics who leave the Church disclose intimate experiences of exorcisms and promiscuity, the Church doesn't mind at all but merely takes on a Jewish attitude like "that's what we get for our sins". But the smallest objection against the Church of Scientology immediately raises the most violent reactions. They can't take criticism. They are as confirmed bigots as the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland.

Thereby the Church of Scientology places itself on the same level with other American esoteric movements, who all share that characteristic: the members can't tolerate criticism. The more important, then, becomes criticism. What may not be said then becomes vital. If a voiced opinion is silenced it will turn into a scream.

They are all the same, those American salvation armies, with their doomsday outlook on life, claiming to be the only ones capable of saving the world and preparing to do so when the time comes, like the Jehovists have been waiting now for quite some time, establishing definite coming doomsdays and getting disappointed each time their doomsday prophecies prove phoneys. I know you well, all you pious American extremists of naïveté. Your chief problem is that society always seems to be able to manage quite well without all your fatalist sects. It just doesn't care, even when you not seldom end up in a mass suicide.

Yet I will not be critical against Scientology, but on the contrary I must belaud its constructive parts. It has a splendid rehabilitation program for drug addicts which works, its founder Mr L. Ron Hubbard launched brilliant pioneering initiatives in the 40s against psychiatric abuses and within prison discipline and could have made history as a great scientist and psychiatric reformer, if he hadn't turned his assets into a religion and made it marketable in order to shamelessly use the doctrine of the immortality of man to make money.

The Church of Scientology probably went wrong when it was organized into a religion involving secrecy around its materials. The founder made it his ambition to "clear the planet", and in the 60s he launched his own private "Sea Organization" on ships, where the members signed contracts of a thousand million years. Media often mistook this figure and made it only a million years or even less, but the contract actually bound the signer to a thousand million years of service. Most people who signed this contract had low wages and had to work day and night for the organization. One of the most frequently used quotations of L. Ron Hubbard is: "The truth shall set you free," while at the same time it is remarkable that the scientologists can't stand hearing the truth about themselves and Scientology. I also wonder how much the Scientology religion and its sea organization was the creation of L. Ron Hubbard and how much of his lately imprisoned wife Mary Sue Hubbard. In a publication about the founder published after his death he is quoted during his youth in China ( - another Indiana Jones?) to have found there in the western outskirts the truth about mankind, realized the reincarnation mechanics and how to sort this mental problem out by scientologist technology. Please observe, that he embraced these ideas at the age of 15 in the middle of puberty. His mentality seems very close to that of Chinese emperors and Mao Zedong, who often qualified themselves by advocating ideas which they took for granted must be of universal application. L. Ron Hubbard seems to have taken for granted that his ideas would work not only on criminals and psycho cases but on everyone. Sound people under scientologist treatment have reacted against this. I would recommend, that if Scientology succeeds in curing mentally ill, criminals and drug addicts, it should only devote its energies to them and leave sound people in peace, and above all, not make sound people suffer economically by scientologist encroachment. There are after all people who don't take drugs, who don't become criminals and who are not mentally ill, and all such people I think had better stay off Scientology.

The most suspect thing about Scientology is in my opinion its secrecy. All material in advanced courses is confidential and obtainable only for money at large. All the same, such material has always leaked out by hearsay and even reached Internet. The religion has never tolerated disclosure of such materials, and what is once available on Internet can never be stopped, since even if it is removed it can be copied by any computer as long as it remains. The founder also created a methodical system which made criticism against the religion impossible. Scientologists were prohibited to mention any word of disparagement about each other, all disparagement about the religion was classified as "entheta", which means 'anti-spiritual', and people who committed this crime were labelled as "suppressive persons" and excommunicated, with the practical consequence that scientologists were forbidden to have any contact with them. If they violated this they were themselves excommunicated. In this way uncountable families have been divided by the Church of Scientology, which thereby turned very skilful in making unyielding enemies. And thus, the existence of freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of conscience within the firm was debatable.

I must regret that L. Ron Hubbard never wrote an autobiography. That might have straightened out many question marks. The disadvantage of turning in without first cleaning up your desk is that you can no longer defend yourself after death. We shall now never learn the truth about his first two marriages, which seem to have broken up as the wives considered him out of his mind, which is the most common of all divorce causes. What we know for certain is that he was very apt at writing science fiction, category B. He is no stylist, his imagination is crude and stereotypical, he has no feeling and negligent empathy. One example is the short story "The Man from Hell", an adventure story with a colourful gang of dashing swashbucklers of very obscure origin and character, where captain Norton, the hero, is a fugitive from Devil's Island and the villain Chacktar is a Negro. The story consists of fights, murders, gunfights, violence and a finale by the geographically unknown Hurricane Island somewhere between Devil's Island and Martinique with a machine gun massacre. Bouts of fisticuffs are epically described in detail, and the corpses amassing in heaps during the course of events are almost uncountable. There is no human value - on one occasion the one woman asks the hero most anxiously: "Have you killed a human being?" He has already killed lots, and he answers directly: "You can't call those beasts human, can you?" Of course, this hero gets her at last. Whatever a writer writes says something about the writer's mentality and what stuff he is made of. In comparison with this pornographic violent trash, the very opposite of Joseph Conrad, a writer of popular adventure stories like Dennis Wheatley stands miles above in quality. If an author of such cheap superficial action nonsense then founds a religion, it is hardly more than natural that that religion in that case will have some difficulty in making itself be taken seriously, especially if that religion turns out to be the best marketed religion in the world, - since it's not very religious for religions to be marketable. Towards the end of his life, when his third wife and many of his closest associates were in prison for phoney tax declarations, he seems to have returned to his science fiction authorship and spent his last years isolated on a ranch somewhere in the vicinity of Hollywood, where he first made his luck. I would incline towards thinking that L. Ron Hubbard's mistake after 1950 was to take his own science fiction fantasies so seriously that he thought they must be universally applicable, and thus all his scientific detachment was lost. Is that what happens to all founders of religions?

Some twenty years ago I happened to hear in a radio program one of his former friends relate how he went out on treasure hunts in the Caribbean Sea with his ships. Since he was certain that he once had been a rich pirate in an earlier life, he was also certain that he remembered exactly where he had buried the treasures. This absolute self-confidence is a rather conspicuous scarlet thread throughout this man's life. He wouldn't have anything to do with the saying, "It is human to err," which he denied, and his life's work the scientologist technology and organization excludes "the human factor" as anything worth considering. All the same, no treasures were found in the Caribbean. The story could have been made up, that's what the scientologists say unanimously with certainty, but that is the kind of stories that circulate about L. Ron Hubbard. On the other hand, if he had found some treasure somewhere in the Caribbean, perhaps the scientologists would have used such a fact in order to prove their leader's infallibility.

During the 80s many scientologists had to stand trial for monkey business, as they had persuaded proselytes to take loans from banks in order to finance their Scientology courses. When these loans couldn't be amortized in spite of completed Scientology courses, these proselytes found themselves in a difficult position, and several turned themselves into enemies of Scientology for life. For this the responsible scientologists were given some thrashing by their chiefs, since their procedure had resulted in bad PR for the whole business. It is possible that all these responsible and excommunicated scientologists would not have been thrashed by their seniors if their proselytes after having completed their Scientology courses all the same had been able to repay their loans.

Conclusion: if criticism is silenced it becomes legitimate. Since 1950 the Church of Scientology has refused to listen to criticism. The result is a mafia-like world autocracy which continues to make money out of the doctrine of the immortality of man. This doctrine can not be questioned, since no one can prove what happens after death; but to make money out of the immortality principle is quite another thing. I would suggest that everything Scientology says can be used against it. The only exception are the few scientific results which the foundation never can be denied the most commendable invention and introduction of, above all the working and successful purification program for the rehabilitation of drug addicts, criminals and mental cases.

In the same way, though, also communism, fascism and nazism are defended by that they started off well with some good ideas. But that can never diminish or indemnify their damage.

An autocracy always remains an autocracy. The Church of Scientology in my opinion thereby remains hopelessly controversial and doubtful, like all monotheistic religions governed by a centralized organization, like the Catholic Church and Islam.

God save us from all religious paranoia and power complex! And may God deliver us from all religious fanaticism and bigotry!

One last reservation: I am only against Scientology as an autocracy, not as an applied philosophy. This distinction is vital.

In the same way, I am only against all religions as autocratic and destructive influences in politics, like in Iran. Please let me not disturb anybody's sacred faith.

No offence! Only just criticism.

July 1999.

John Bede, Londonderry.