By Gordon Hafslund
I had just ordered a to-go pizza at a local pizza place when I found myself witness to an exchange between a newbie Christian evangelist and one of the restaurant’s non-Christian owners. It was a hard-sell effort by the new Jesus lover to “witness” and recruit him to her faith. The pizza owner was doing his best to respectfully listen to his customer’s ill-informed religious sales pitch, but his discomfort was palpable. In a last-ditch effort to free himself from the conversation without offending the customer, he noted that “in my religion we revere your Jesus also.” The woman’s response was lukewarm: “Oh, well that’s really not the real Jesus… my Jesus is the real one. If you come to my church you’ll see.” I so much wanted to step in and help this poor guy. Instead, I decided to just watch how the pizza owner managed to end this encounter by promising to “give it some thought.” The woman promised to return later.
I am sure that promise made his day.
Anyway, after I left with my hot pepperoni pizza, I couldn’t help but reflect on this pizza-shop Jesus discussion. It took me back to my childhood through early adulthood years, in which I too was imprisoned in the illusion of Christianity being the only “right and true” religion. I never questioned any of its premises, even though I found it lacking in both what it proclaimed as the righteous path for the faithful and the actual conduct the church endorsed and sanctified with the excuse that all Christians are “forgiven.” The contradictions just in those two areas were palpably uncomfortable, but I remember holding the course, so to speak, because I thought the Bible was the only key to spiritual fulfillment.
This need or desire to believe in something was a strong drive, reinforced by various Christian charismatic leaders who had become very popular because of their message about Jesus’s imminent return to save us. One of the most popular books on my college campus was Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey’s book was the best-selling work of nonfiction (apart from the Bible; and using the term “nonfiction” somewhat loosely) in the English language in the 1970s. Lindsey, like many evangelicals, believed that the Bible was absolutely inerrant, to the extent that you could read the New Testament and know not only how God wanted you to live and what he wanted you to believe, but also what God himself was planning to do in the future and how he planned to do it. Lindsey firmly believed the world was heading for the Apocalypse described in Revelation, and the inerrant words of scripture could be read to show what, how, and when it would all happen.
Referring to the prophecies of Jesus in the Gospels, Lindsey insisted the Bible was very clear about what was to come: The end of the world would come sometime before 1988, forty years after the reemergence of Israel, which he dubbed scripturally significant. Of course, 1988 came and went with no Armageddon. And it’s worth noting other Christian pundits over the following years offered their own predictions of imminent Apocalypse — in the process successfully selling more of their books — and all ended similarly, with no Jesus arriving on a white-winged horse leading his army of avenging angels.
It became rather clear to me the Bible was not a product of God, but a very human book from beginning to end. It was written by different human authors at different times and in different places to address different theological needs over many centuries. And the majority of these writers were anonymous. Few faithful are even aware of this factoid. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven books that comprise the New Testament were anonymously authored — or some combination of anonymous, homonymous, orthonymous, or forged. The early church added names like Mark, John, Luke and Mathew much later to give their sacred book the appearance of credibility — a common practice in the ancient world. And those anonymous authors often contradict one another in the telling of the same story.
