Whether they believe in it or not, everybody knows the story. After creating Adam first, God puts him under, cracks him open, pulls out a rib, and builds Eve from the spare part to accompany the first human. It’s the reason women got told for two thousand years that they were derivative, secondary, an afterthought stitched together from a man’s leftovers. Milton and Aquinas ran with it. Paul got there first, and he leaned on it hard enough to tell women to keep quiet in church. The sequence, man first and woman second, hardened into structure that outlived all of them, and it’s still standing: the Catholic and Orthodox priesthood remains male, right up to the Pope.

The story is simple, yet it’s one of the most contested passages in the Hebrew Bible, and the trouble starts at the level of a single word.

The Word Won’t Sit Still

The Hebrew is tsela. It shows up around forty times across the Bible, and almost everywhere else it means side. The tsela of the Tabernacle, the tsela of the Ark, the tsela of a hill David walks along while Shimei curses him from the ridge. It’s an architectural word, the flank of a structure, a plank, a chamber built onto a wall. When a Hebrew author wants a bone with anatomical precision, other words exist and get used.

So Genesis 2 is the one place the word gets rendered “rib,” and it’s the place with the most riding on it. Read tsela the way it reads everywhere else and God takes a side of the human, not a small curved bone under the lung. There’s a reading, going back a long way, that the first human was a single undifferentiated being and the operation was a split down the middle, one side male, the other female, which makes a lot more sense than the rib story does.

Now, honesty demands the other half. “Rib” isn’t a translation error someone can just point at and laugh off. It’s a defensible reading, it’s the mainstream one, and there’s a reason it’s defensible that has nothing to do with lazy translators. It has to do with where this story came from.

The Sumerian Original Has a Rib

Many centuries before Genesis reached its final form, Mesopotamia told a story about the god Enki. He eats plants he shouldn’t, a goddess named Ninhursag curses him, and eight of his body parts fall ill, one of them his rib. Ninhursag relents and creates eight healing deities, one per ailing organ. The goddess made to heal the rib is named Ninti, “the lady of the rib.”

So you may jump to the conclusion that this is too much of a coincidence, that the Hebrews said rib and meant it too. But the Sumerian word for rib is ti, and ti also means “to make live.” So Ninti is the lady of the rib and the lady who makes life at the same time, and the name only works because Sumerian happens to tie those two meanings into a single syllable.

Then look at Eve in Genesis 3:20, which names her Chavah and tells you why, she’s the mother of all living, the one bound up with life. The Hebrew authors kept the life-giving woman. They could not keep the pun, because in Hebrew tsela and “life” share nothing at all. Two syllables that mean one thing in Sumerian mean two unrelated things in Hebrew, so the joke can’t cross the border. What survives is the residue: a woman tied to a rib-ish body part and a woman tied to life, sitting next to each other, with the thing that once connected them left behind in a language nobody in the room still spoke.

What the borrowing does show is that the author was already picking and choosing. The life-giver made it across, the pun didn’t, the word went vague. Selective retention on one element and a loosened, architectural word on another is exactly what a borrowed-and-adapted story looks like, and it leaves the translation open rather than closed in either direction. The word means side almost everywhere. The source it came from had a rib. Both are true, they pull against each other, and anyone who tells you the verse obviously means one and not the other is flattening a dispute.

Two Creation Stories That Flatly Disagree

Set the rib aside, because the strongest problem with “woman came second” doesn’t need it.

Genesis doesn’t have one creation account. It has two, back to back, and they don’t match. Genesis 1 is the orderly one, six days, God speaking the world into being, and when humanity arrives in verse 27 it’s explicit: male and female created together, same moment, both in the divine image. No rib, no sequence, no ranking. Then Genesis 2 restarts the whole thing with a different divine name, a different order of events, a garden, the man formed first and the woman built afterward. These are separate sources, spliced by a later editor who kept both versions instead of choosing between them, which is the same editorial fingerprint you find all over the Torah.

So “woman came second” survives only if you privilege the second story and quietly ignore the first one printed directly above it. Read Genesis 1 as the lead and men and women show up as equals in the same breath, which is the very part that doesn’t wobble. There’s no translation dispute, no borrowed pun, no minority reading. The text contradicts itself on whether the sexes were made together, and the tradition resolved the contradiction by keeping the version that ranked women lower.

Not a paid subscriber yet? Consider joining to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

What Got Built, and What It Was Built On

A word that means “side” nearly everywhere, translated “rib” in the one verse where the stakes are highest. A Sumerian source that actually had a rib, tied to a pun that died the moment the story changed languages, leaving a life-giving woman and a rib stranded next to each other. An editor’s decision to preserve two creation accounts that disagree, resolved centuries later by readers who kept the version that suited them.

Out of that came a doctrine. Woman as secondary creation, dependent by design, the helper made from the leftover part. Paul cites the creation order in 1 Timothy 2:13 to argue women shouldn’t teach. Marriage law and custom across the Christian West took on the assumption that the sequence in Genesis 2 encoded a divine ranking.

What I find ironic in this whole debacle is that if there had to be an order, Eve should’ve been created first, because it’s the male body that resembles the female with no good reason for it. Adam’s creation and Eve’s creation from his rib explains nothing. Run it the other way and you explain why the male fetus first develops female reproductive organs before they recede, leaving residue behind, and why men are born with nipples and fully formed milk lines.

Leave a comment

Share The Unholy Truth

Sources and Further Reading

• Ziony Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (Yale University Press) — the case that tsela means “side,” and a survey of how contested the passage is.

• Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer — the Enki-Ninhursag myth and the Ninti / “lady of the rib” wordplay.

• Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? — the two creation accounts and their separate sources.

• Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context — how later interpretation loaded the text with hierarchy the Hebrew doesn’t require.

• Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses — translation and commentary on Genesis 1-3.

A typical American will tell you the reason Iran hates the United States is that they’re religious fanatics. The mullahs need an enemy to keep the population angry, so they picked us, and the whole thing runs on Quran verses and Friday sermons about the Great Satan. Take away the theocracy, the reasoning goes, and the hostility evaporates, because it was never about anything except Islamic zealotry looking for a target.

It’s a comforting story if you’re American, because it means none of this is your fault. The problem is Iranian, specifically the Iranian religion, and the United States just happens to be standing where the fanatics are pointing.

That story requires you to know almost nothing about the actual history of the two countries, which is convenient, because most Americans know almost nothing about the history of their own country’s foreign policy. The anti-Americanism the Islamic Republic runs on isn’t an invention of the clergy, and the easiest way to see that is to notice who else holds it. By the government’s own friendly surveys, better than one in four Iranians are irreligious, and the anonymous polling puts that figure far higher. Plenty of those people would sooner die than get behind anything with America’s fingerprints on it, and they’ve got reasons that have nothing to do with a mosque.

Not a paid subscriber yet? If you can afford it, consider joining. It’s what keeps this project open for the people who can’t.

Upgrade to Paid

Elected Iranian Government the CIA Erased

In 1951 Iran had a prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh, and he’d been brought to power through parliamentary politics, not a putsch. His signature move was nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British concern that had spent decades pumping Iranian oil and keeping most of the money. When an American oil firm in Saudi Arabia agreed to split revenues fifty-fifty with Riyadh in 1950, the pressure on the British operation in Iran became unbearable, and Mossadegh acted on what a lot of Iranians already believed, which was that the oil under their feet ought to benefit them.

The same allied powers that never tire of reminding you they invented democracy and saved the world from the Nazis decided an elected government helping itself to its own oil was intolerable. The government of Winston Churchill, of all people, approached Washington repeatedly, first under Truman, who declined, worried about the precedent covert regime change would set. The Eisenhower administration had fewer such worries.

In 1953 the CIA, working with British intelligence, ran the operation that toppled Mossadegh and restored the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to unchallenged power. The Americans called it Operation Ajax. For decades it was an open secret, denied officially, understood by everyone paying attention. Then the documents came out.

The admissions came in stages. In 2013 the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a declassified internal CIA history that stated the coup “was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy,” the first time the agency formally acknowledged what it had done. In 2017 the State Department released roughly a thousand pages on the operation, documenting how it was planned, cabled, and paid for. In 2023 the agency conceded on its own official podcast that the coup had been undemocratic, and admitted that 1953 stands as a rare exception to its standard claim that its covert operations propped up popularly elected governments. They overthrew a popularly elected government, and they said so.

So before you get to the mullahs, before you get to a single Friday sermon, you have this: the United States reached into a foreign country, destroyed its elected leadership, and installed a monarch who would rule for the next twenty-six years on American support. Iranians didn’t need a cleric to explain this to them. They lived it.

How America Trained Shah’s Secret Police

The Shah understood what had happened to him and what had saved him, and he built his rule accordingly. In 1957, he established a secret police force, SAVAK, and the CIA helped him do it. This isn’t contested. A classified Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, later cited in a declassified CIA memo, confirms that the agency provided the Shah both money and training to set up the organization. Israel’s Mossad contributed as well, particularly on interrogation.

SAVAK became the most feared institution in the country. It censored the press, screened applicants for government jobs, ran its own prisons including Evin, and surveilled Iranians not just at home but abroad, tracking students in the United States through case officers assigned to that specific task. Its interrogation rooms produced techniques that Amnesty International documented in detail in the 1970s: electric shocks, extraction of fingernails, sleep deprivation stretched over weeks. A former chief Iran analyst for the CIA later went on the record that a senior agency officer had instructed SAVAK personnel in torture methods drawn from German techniques of the Second World War, that the Shah knew his people were being tortured, and that among CIA officers, stories of SAVAK torture were common knowledge.

In short, American intelligence helped stand up the machine, staffed the classes, and its own analysts knew what the machine was doing to Iranian bodies in Iranian basements. And the American public heard none of it. To an Iranian who lost a brother in Evin, the United States wasn’t a distant abstraction. It was the country that trained the men who did it.

By the late 1970s the Shah had made himself one of the largest purchasers of American military equipment on earth, a reliable oil supplier, and Washington’s designated pillar of stability in the region. Jimmy Carter, who’d campaigned on human rights as the soul of American foreign policy, flew to Tehran on the last night of 1977 and toasted the Shah as an island of stability in a troubled region, a tribute to the love his people bore him. Fourteen months later the Shah’s people ran him out of the country. Carter’s toast tells you exactly how much the United States understood about the population it was underwriting, which was nothing.

What the Clergy Inherited

When the Shah fell in 1979 and Khomeini’s movement took control, the new regime didn’t have to manufacture anti-Americanism out of theology. Every faction that had suffered under the Shah already had its own reasons to loathe Washington, and those factions covered the entire ideological spectrum. Marxists, secular nationalists, Islamists, liberal constitutionalists, all of them had been surveilled, imprisoned, or tortured by a secret police the United States helped build to defend a monarch the United States had installed. That shared experience was one of the few things holding the revolutionary coalition together.

The genius of the clerical regime, if you want to call it that, was recognizing a ready-made emotion and claiming it. The Great Satan rhetoric, the annual chants, the murals of skull-faced Statues of Liberty, all of that is theological branding applied to a grievance that predates the theology by a quarter century. Khomeini didn’t invent Iranian anger at America. He put a turban on it and pointed it where he wanted it to go.

You can see the split clearly if you look at what the regime kept and what it discarded. It kept Evin Prison. It kept the apparatus of political policing, rebuilt as VEVAK, and turned it on Iranians with an enthusiasm that outstripped anything SAVAK managed, including the mass executions of 1988. The Islamic Republic didn’t oppose the Shah’s methods. It opposed the Shah, and then adopted his methods wholesale. What it needed from America was the villain, and America had spent twenty-six years auditioning for the part.

This is why the “they only hate us because they’re religious” explanation collapses on contact with the record. When Iran’s mission to the United Nations responded to the CIA’s 2023 acknowledgment of the coup, it didn’t cite scripture. It said the 1953 operation marked “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs,” and it noted, accurately, that admitting the coup never came with any change in American behavior toward Iran. That’s not a mullah quoting the Quran. That’s a diplomat citing a historical fact the United States finally confirmed after seventy years of denying it.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Upgrade to Paid

Sources and Further Reading

• Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Wiley, 2003)

• National Security Archive, George Washington University, declassified CIA internal history of the 1953 coup (released 2013) and the 2017 State Department Foreign Relations of the United States volume on Iran

• Seymour Hersh, “Ex-Analyst Says CIA Rejected Warning on Shah,” New York Times, January 7, 1989

• Amnesty International, reports on human rights and SAVAK torture practices in Iran (1970s, and Report 2005)

• PBS NewsHour, “In first, CIA acknowledges 1953 coup it backed to overthrow leader of Iran was undemocratic” (2023)

• Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press) for the broader arc from Mossadegh through the revolution

Tags: Iran, US foreign policy, 1953 coup, Mossadegh, CIA, SAVAK, Cold War history, Middle East, Islamic Revolution, American history

Similarity isn’t derivation, just as absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. When a Canaanite storm god and the God of Israel share a résumé (riding clouds, splitting seas, thundering from a mountain), that overlap doesn’t prove one became the other by itself. Parallel details can come from a shared cultural inheritance, from independent development, from the plain fact that ancient Near Eastern people had a limited vocabulary for describing power. The tablets from Ugarit, the inscriptions at Kuntillet Ajrud, the divine-council language salted through the Psalms: the fair reading is that the evidence strongly favors an Israelite religion that grew out of, and against, its neighbors’ gods.

Yet the part that gets left out of that retreat is that “strongly favors” is the ceiling any historical argument can reach the moment it runs into received doctrine, because doctrine has a move that history doesn’t. It can always say the evidence is a test, or a corruption, or a mystery, or an improbable but technically not impossible coincidence reserved for God. Nothing is off the table on the doctrinal side, which means no pile of pottery and no run of inscriptions can ever get past “strongly favors” and into “case closed.”

Supporting this project doesn’t have to cost you money. Share it with friends and family.

Share The Unholy Truth

Run the Substitution and See How the Objections Do

So how do you check whether “strongly favors” is actually being treated as too weak, or whether something else is going on? Swap the religion.

Take the exact same standard of evidence, the same tablets-versus-scripture logic, and point it at a religion nobody in the room worships. Say the syncretism argument is about Marduk getting folded into a later Babylonian cult, or about the way Roman emperors picked up the trappings of eastern sun gods. Watch how fast the objection evaporates. Nobody clutches at “similarity isn’t derivation” to defend the theological independence of Sol Invictus. Nobody demands proof rather than strong inference before they’ll accept that Isis worship borrowed freely from older Egyptian material. We accept “strongly favors” as more than enough the second the god in question has no congregation left to offend.

In fact, the religion doesn’t have to be dead as long as it’s not the same. Suppose the claim is that early Islam drew its apocalyptic furniture, its Satan, its final judgment and bodily resurrection, from Zoroastrian and Jewish sources already circulating in late antiquity. Fred Donner and W. Montgomery Watt have made versions of the historical case; John Esposito has spent a career mapping how traditions cross-pollinate. A non-Muslim reader tends to find that argument pretty reasonable. They’ll take the evidence, move on, and not lose sleep over whether they’re jumping to conclusions.

The objection only regrows its teeth when the tradition on the table is a living one that the reader belongs to. Then, and mostly only then, “strongly favors” gets reclassified as overreach, and the demand for something closer to proof comes back. That asymmetry isn’t coming from the evidence, which hasn’t changed across the three cases. It’s coming from the reader’s relationship to the defendant.

The Kaaba’s Missing Paper Trail

Before Muhammad, the Kaaba was already a pilgrimage site and a working shrine, packed with the idols of the surrounding tribes. It drew pilgrims from all courners off Arabia into Mecca, and the pilgrims brought trade. That traffic was a serius source of income for the Quraysh, Muhammad’s own tribe, who kept custody of the shrine and profited from the people streaming in to visit it.

Then, all at once, the story arrived that Abraham and Ishmael had built the thing with their own hands. The shrine full of tribal idols got a new pedigree as the first house of monotheism, the idols came out, and the pilgrim money kept right on coming, now sanctified. Archaeological evidence for the Abraham construction? Zilch. No dig, no inscription, no material trace that Abraham ever set foot in Arabia, let alone laid a foundation there.

So run the claim forward and watch what it asks you to swallow. Abraham supposedly came to Arabia and delivered the same monotheism Moses would later hand the Jews, and then that religion vanished without leaving a single fingerprint in the ground. It’s almost as if a divine power went back and erased every track, and did it in exactly the pattern you’d expect if a man were inventing a founding myth in the 7th century to keep his tribe’s shrine revenue flowing.

A stretch of history that empty lets an outsider draw the obvious conclusion and move on. The same readers who demand an open mind for their own tradition rarely ride to Islam’s defense with “nobody should jump to conclusions” and “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.” They don’t insist that the improbable might have happened here, that a whole religion evaporated as though it had never existed and every Arab in the peninsula forgot who Abraham was and became a polytheist. And they’re just as quiet about the other side of the ledger. The miracles Muhammad is said to have performed were reportedly witnessed by major Arab cities, by crowds whose sheer numbers, on the believer’s own logic, ought to count as testimony too heavy to wave off.

The consistency only shows up when it’s someone else’s shrine. Point the identical reasoning at Mecca that gets pointed at Delphi or a Canaanite high place, and the missing paper trail reads exactly the way a missing paper trail always reads.

Not a paid subscriber yet? If you can afford it, consider joining. It’s what keeps this project open for the people who can’t.

Upgrade to Paid

Doubt Is Where the Search Starts

None of this means the believer’s caution is dishonest. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who specialized in reconstructing the god Israel actually worshipped before the editors tidied him up, will tell you that the sources are broken and the certainty is provisional. Bart Ehrman says the same thing about the New Testament roughly once a chapter.

While some facts are simply better supported than others, ancient history is still a claim about what most likely happened, not a recording of what happened, and it’s pinned to the best knowledge available at the time. And that’s what keeps every religion immune to archaeology. Present something with 99.9% odds of being true that contradicts a given tradition, and the tradition survives in the remaining 0.1%, because an improbability is never a threat to a system that reserves the right to live inside one.

What the substitution test exposes is that the provisionality gets applied unevenly, that the choice of whether to camp on the 99.9% or the 0.1% depends on whose tradition is in the dock. We hold a dead religion to “strongly favors” and call it settled history. We hold somebody else’s living religion to “strongly favors” and call it fair scholarship. We hold our own to a standard no historical claim was ever built to satisfy, and then treat the gap between that standard and the evidence as a point in doctrine’s favor.

And if you're wondering why I leaned on Islam for this one, two reasons. First, and most importantly, unlike over on Medium, I don't think I've picked up much of a Muslim following here yet, so the point had a chance to land before anyone got defensive. Second, going by the latest survey, a couple of readers think I've been going soft on Islam and giving it a free pass.😉 Tell me you want to hear more about Islam, the Quran, and their history, and I'll dig in.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this.

Truth-seeking starts with doubt, keeping nothing above scrutiny. If we could work that out, so would a super-intelligent creator of this magnificent universe.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted (on the provisional, edited nature of the textual record)

• Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (on the reconstructed pre-canonical Yahweh)

• Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (on transmission and corruption)

• W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (on early Islam and its late-antique context)

• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers (on the formation of the early community)

• John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (on cross-tradition influence)

Tags: biblical criticism, archaeology, comparative religion, Yahweh, Ugarit, philosophy of history, Zoroastrianism

Including Paul, every early Christian believed Jesus was coming back soon. And not “soon” in the geological sense theologians retreat to now but “soon” as in within their lifetimes, within the lifetimes of the people standing next to them. It was Paul himself who told the Thessalonians that “we who are alive, who are left” would be caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and he meant himself and the people reading his letter. Jesus, in Mark, says some standing here won’t taste death before they see the kingdom come with power. Mark 13 continues, noting that this generation won’t pass away until all these things happen.

Then the generation passed away. The people who’d seen Jesus started dying of old age (or execution), and Jesus stayed gone. And the movement was left with a lot to explain.

Who Was the Historical Peter?

Start with who Peter was, because the letter depends on you not thinking about it too hard. His name was Simon, a fisherman from Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, and he worked the family trade with his brother Andrew until Jesus pulled him into the movement. Jesus gave him the nickname that stuck, Kepha in Aramaic, the rock, which comes into Greek as Petros. Aramaic was his language while Greek was the language of the educated elite. Paul, who knew the man and is our earliest source, describes staying with him in Jerusalem, where Peter led the young church as its most prominent figure.

Acts calls him and John agrammatoi, unlettered men, in 4:13, yet the letter we’re about to look at is written in some of the most ambitious Greek in the New Testament.

The Author Gives Himself Away in the First Sentence

Among scholars who study the New Testament for a living, 2 Peter is the most widely rejected book in the entire canon when it comes to claimed authorship. Bart Ehrman calls it the one book that critical scholars are nearly unanimous about. Even conservative commentators who defend Petrine authorship for everything else tend to go quiet here.

The Greek in 2 Peter is elaborate, self-conscious, full of rare vocabulary and literary flourish, the work of someone trained in Hellenistic rhetoric. Peter was a Galilean fisherman. Acts 4:13 describes Peter and John as “unlettered” men, agrammatoi, which is about as blunt as ancient Greek gets about someone lacking formal education. The idea that this same man produced one of the most rhetorically ambitious documents in the New Testament, in a language that wasn’t his first, doesn’t survive contact with the text.

Then there’s chapter 2, which lifts huge chunks of the letter of Jude almost verbatim, reworking Jude’s attack on false teachers into its own. The author of 2 Peter is copying an earlier Christian document and folding it into a letter he’s signing with the name of Jesus’s chief disciple. Jude itself references events and a level of church development that already puts it late. Copy from something late and you land later still.

And the letter refers to Paul’s writings as a collection, comparing them to “the other scriptures.” Paul’s letters being gathered, circulated, and treated as scripture on par with the Hebrew Bible is a process that took generations. In Peter’s actual lifetime, Paul was a controversial contemporary he’d reportedly clashed with at Antioch, not a canonized authority whose letters you’d cite as holy writ.

Put it together and 2 Peter is writing from somewhere around 100 to 150 CE, decades after Peter was executed under Nero. Somebody wrote it in his name and hoped the borrowed authority would carry the argument.

Chapter 3 Is Where the Mask Slips

What sets 2 Peter apart in the Bible is that the author is more concerned with addressing a complaint than with teaching.

“Scoffers will come in the last days,” he writes, “saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”

Sit with what that sentence admits. “The fathers fell asleep” means the first generation of believers has died. The people who were promised they’d see the return are in the ground. And the scoffers, who are real people the author is dealing with, are pointing at those graves and asking the obvious question. Where is he? You said he was coming and they died waiting.

This is the single most damaging objection early Christianity faced, and 2 Peter is the receipt proving people were making it out loud. The author wouldn’t need to manufacture a defense if nobody were attacking. You build a wall where someone’s been getting in.

So how does he answer? He reaches for two moves that Christian apologetics has been recycling ever since.

First, the clock.

“With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” God doesn’t experience time the way you do, so what feels late to you is nothing to him. Notice what this does. It takes a specific, falsifiable promise, this generation, some standing here, we who are alive, and dissolves it into a timescale where “soon” can mean anything and can never be wrong.

Second, the blame flip.

The delay isn’t a broken promise, the author says, it’s mercy. God is holding off so more people have time to repent. The failure of the prophecy gets rebranded as evidence of divine patience rather than divine no-show. And if you're still complaining, that just marks you as one of the scoffers. The objection gets folded into the theology as proof the theology is right.

If you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

The Controversy Isn’t New

The rejection of 2 Peter as a letter from historical Peter isn’t as controversial as it may seem. To begin with, 2 Peter almost didn't make it into the Bible, because the early church thought its authorship was shaky.

Origen, writing in the early third century and one of the most learned Christians of the ancient world, is the first person on record to even mention 2 Peter by name, which is itself a problem, since the letter supposedly written by Jesus’s chief disciple leaves no trace in the historical record for over a century. And when Origen finally does mention it, he flags that its authenticity is disputed. Eusebius, the great church historian of the fourth century, sorted the Christian writings into categories, the accepted, the disputed, and the rejected, and he filed 2 Peter among the disputed, the antilegomena, the books “spoken against.” He says that it was not part of the recognized New Testament and that most had received it only with hesitation. Jerome, translating the Bible into Latin around 400, knew the letter’s Greek looked nothing like 1 Peter’s and had to explain the gap by suggesting Peter used a different secretary, which is the same patch conservatives reach for today, sixteen centuries later, and it wasn’t convincing then either.

So, the letter goes unmentioned for something like a hundred years and when it finally surfaces, the sharpest minds in the church treat it as questionable. This is not how a genuine letter from the leader of the apostles enters the historical record. A real letter from Peter would have been treasured, copied, and quoted from the start. Instead 2 Peter shows up late, gets side-eyed by the very people most invested in accepting it, and squeaks in only after generations of argument.

Yet, the church eventually canonized it, and the modern inerrantist inherits the result as the settled word of God, seamless and unquestionable. The people closest to the evidence, the ones who decided, saw something the inerrantist is committed to not seeing. They saw a book that didn’t add up, and they said so in writing.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God — the fullest accessible treatment of 2 Peter as pseudepigraphy.

• Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings — standard survey on dating and authorship.

• Bruce M. Metzger & Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament — on the letter’s late attestation and disputed canonical status.

• Richard Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Word Biblical Commentary) — a more conservative counterweight, useful for seeing the strongest defense of the traditional view and where it strains.

Tags: biblical criticism, 2 Peter, early Christianity, forgery, New Testament, pseudepigrapha, apocalypticism, church history, second coming

Monotheism was a gradual process, and the God of Israel arrived in the Bible with a résumé, most of his lines belonging to somebody else. His titles, his weapons, his mountain address, even his family tree all came with previous owners: the gods of Canaan, Ugarit, and Mesopotamia.

The evidence for this sits in the ground and in the grammar, and it’s been accumulating for over a century. Israelite religion grew out of the wider West Semitic world, and its high god carried the fingerprints of the gods around him. The inscriptions dug out of the Levant, the clay tablets from the Syrian coast, and the seams left in the biblical text itself all point the same direction. What looks like a clean break from paganism reads, on inspection, more like a hostile takeover.

El, the Father Who Never Left

Elohim in Hebrew, Allah in Arabic, Alaha in the Aramaic Jesus spoke, all mean “god” in the general sense, and they’re all cousins of the word “El.” But “El” hasn’t always been a generic word for “god” that Semitic peoples happened to use. There was a time when El was a specific deity, the gray-bearded head of the Canaanite pantheon, ruling from a tent at the source of the waters. We know him from the clay tablets dug up at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, where he presides over a divine council and fathers seventy sons.

His name is all over the Bible, in El Elyon, El Shaddai, El Olam, and Beth-El (house of El). Genesis 33:20 has Jacob build an altar and call it El, the God of Israel. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 preserves a fossil so old the later editors seem to have missed it: the Most High divides the nations among the sons of God, and Yahweh receives Israel as his allotted share. Take the words at face value and you get El the father parceling out territory to his sons, with Yahweh as one of them, the younger god drawing a portion from the elder.

The merger came later, and Yahweh swallowed El’s identity so completely that the two collapsed into a single figure, the patriarch’s God and the storm god fused into one, with only the seams left showing in the text.

Yahweh Learned to Fight From Baal

If El gave Yahweh his fatherhood, Baal gave him his muscle. Baal was the Canaanite storm god, the rider of the clouds who fought the sea and the god of death to establish his kingship. The imagery is vivid and specific, and it turns up in the Psalms wearing Yahweh’s name.

Psalm 68:4 calls God the one who rides through the deserts, and the older sense of the phrase is “rider of the clouds,” Baal’s own epithet. Yahweh thunders from the heavens (Psalm 18), splits the sea (Exodus 15), and crushes the twisting serpent Leviathan (Psalm 74, Isaiah 27). Leviathan is Lotan, the same sea dragon Baal’s ally slaughters in the Ugaritic texts, the same fight with a different hero standing over the corpse. The scribes handed Yahweh the storm god’s greatest hits and filed off the serial numbers.

The pattern has a shape you can trace across the texts: the powers and titles of several older gods collapsing into one figure over time, until Yahweh alone holds what used to be shared among a pantheon. Yahweh took Baal’s portfolio the way an empire annexes a province, keeping the powers and turning the old god into a name worth cursing.

Asherah, the Wife They Tried to Erase

Yahweh had a wife, and the archaeology couldn’t make it any louder.

At Kuntillet Ajrud, a way station in the Sinai, excavators found inscriptions from around 800 BCE blessing travelers by “Yahweh and his Asherah.” Another turned up at Khirbet el-Qom near Hebron. Asherah was El’s consort in the Ugaritic pantheon, the mother goddess, and for a long stretch of Israelite history ordinary people paired her with Yahweh in exactly this kind of blessing. Whether the inscriptions name the goddess herself or the wooden cult pole that carried her name is argued over, but either way the object points back to her, and the pairing was common enough that the scribes couldn’t ignore it.

The biblical writers hated this, and Kings and Chronicles are full of reformers tearing down her poles and burning her images. The sheer volume of the polemic tells you how popular she was, because you don’t legislate this hard against a practice nobody follows. Editors with an agenda wrote the goddess out of the official story, but the inscriptions were already cut into stone and plaster before the reform reached them, and they’re still legible.

Chaos Monsters on Loan From Babylon

The same pattern runs east into Mesopotamia. The opening of Genesis has the Spirit of God hovering over the deep, and the Hebrew word for that deep, tehom, is a cousin of Tiamat, the saltwater chaos goddess whom Marduk butchers to build the world in the Babylonian Enuma Elish. The flood story runs on the same track as the Epic of Gilgamesh, down to the hero releasing birds to find dry land and the gods sniffing the sacrifice afterward.

Ancient Israel sat at a cultural crossroads, and, as in any culture before and after it, its scribes worked with the materials at hand. The genius shows in how they reworked what they inherited, cutting a crowd of gods down to one and making the result feel inevitable.

Not a paid subscriber yet? If you can afford it, consider joining. It’s what keeps this project open for the people who can’t.

Upgrade to Paid

The doctrine of a single, self-existent God who tolerates no rivals ranks among the most consequential ideas in human history, and it arrived at the end of a long process rather than at the start. The scribes built it piece by piece out of the gods around them, keeping El’s fatherhood, Baal’s storms, Asherah’s place at his side until they erased it, and Tiamat’s chaos churning under the first verse of Genesis. Read Deuteronomy 32 slowly and the older arrangement surfaces, a crowded council of gods that generations of editors trimmed down to one. They did the trimming, but they left the offcuts in the text, and the offcuts are what let us reconstruct the family Yahweh came from.

That’s all for now. I’m working on a series called “The Making of Yahweh” that goes into all of this properly, but no date yet. More soon.

Thanks for being there,
—Tanner

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (2021)

• Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2nd ed., 2002)

• Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001)

• William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (2005)

• John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (2000)

Tags: biblical criticism, ancient history, Canaanite religion, Yahweh, Asherah, comparative religion, monotheism, archaeology, Hebrew Bible

Open your Bible to the last chapter of Mark and you’ll find the risen Jesus appearing to his followers, commissioning them to preach, promising that believers will handle snakes and drink poison without harm, then ascending to heaven. Twelve verses, 16:9-20. It’s dramatic, it’s quotable, and it’s the reason snake-handling churches exist in Appalachia to this day.

Those twelve verses weren’t written by whoever wrote Mark.

This is the settled position of the people who spend their careers reconstructing the New Testament text from thousands of surviving manuscripts, including scholars who identify as Christian. The two oldest and most reliable complete copies of Mark, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both from the fourth century, end at verse 8. The women flee the empty tomb and the gospel stops there, with no resurrection appearance, no commissioning, and no snakes.

And don’t just read this piece in the inbox. Like it, drop a comment, pick it apart, don’t leave me talking into the void.

What the Earliest Copies Say

Here’s how the gospel ends in the manuscripts that predate the addition. The women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, come to the tomb to anoint the body. They find the stone rolled away and a young man in white who tells them Jesus has risen and instructs them to tell the disciples. Then verse 8: they went out and fled from the tomb, trembling and astonished, and said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

That’s the ending. In Greek, the final word is gar, “for.” The sentence stops on a conjunction, which in Greek is roughly like ending a paragraph on “because.” It’s abrupt to the point of feeling broken, and that abruptness is exactly why later scribes couldn’t leave it alone.

Bruce Metzger, whose work on New Testament textual criticism sat under a generation of seminary students, laid out the manuscript evidence plainly. The longer ending is missing from the best early Greek witnesses. Early church writers who quote Mark, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, show no knowledge of it. Eusebius and Jerome both reported that the accurate copies available to them ended at verse 8. When the fourth-century church’s own scholars tell you the good manuscripts stop short, that settles the question of what the original looked like.

The Tells That Give It Away

You don’t need to read Greek to see that something’s off, but reading the Greek makes it undeniable. The vocabulary in verses 9-20 shifts. Eighteen words in those twelve verses appear nowhere else in Mark, and the connective style changes. Mark’s whole gospel is famous for its breathless “and then, and then, and then” pacing, and the longer ending abandons it.

The seams show in the storytelling too. Verse 9 introduces Mary Magdalene as the woman “from whom he had cast out seven demons,” as if she’s a new character. She was already named three verses earlier, standing at the tomb. No competent author reintroduces someone by their backstory three sentences after putting them on the page. What you’re reading is a summary stitched together by someone who knew the resurrection stories from the other gospels and wanted Mark to have one too.

Some manuscripts preserve a different, shorter ending instead, and a few include both, one after the other, which is the scribal equivalent of hedging your bets by copying two versions because you’re not sure which is right. The manuscript tradition is a record of people trying to fix a problem, and the problem was that Mark stopped at verse 8.

Why an Empty Tomb Wasn’t Enough

Put yourself in the position of a second-century Christian copying this gospel. Matthew has a resurrection appearance. Luke has one. John has several. Then there’s Mark, the oldest of the four, and it ends with terrified women running away and telling no one. To a reader who already believes, that ending reads like a page is missing.

So the gap got filled. Whether the original ending was lost, the last leaf of a scroll torn off or damaged, or whether the author meant to stop on that unsettling note, scholars still argue. The literary case for the abrupt ending being intentional is strong. Mark opens by calling itself the beginning of the gospel, and leaving the reader with fear and an empty tomb throws the weight of the story onto them. The proclamation goes unspoken in the text so that the reader has to carry it out. That’s a sophisticated ending, and it may be the one Mark wanted.

What’s not in doubt is that the twelve verses now printed as the conclusion came later, from a different hand, generations after the fact.

What Rides on Those Twelve Verses

This would be a footnote if the added material were harmless. Mark 16:18, the promise that believers “will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them,” is the direct scriptural basis for the snake-handling churches that have operated across the American South for over a century. People have died from bites, holding to a verse that the earliest manuscripts of Mark don’t contain.

The Great Commission’s Marcan form lives here too, along with the line about baptism and belief that has done heavy theological lifting for two thousand years. Strip out the passage and you strip out proof texts that entire practices lean on.

Most modern Bibles now flag the problem. Open the NRSV, the ESV, or the NIV and you’ll find verses 9-20 set off with a bracket or a note reading something like “the earliest manuscripts do not include” this passage. The information is right there on the page, and the footnote is honest. Almost nobody reads it, and the verses stay in the main text, printed in the same font as everything else, which is most of what a casual reader ever registers.

If a few more readers upgrade, I can spend more hours in the sources and bring back more stories like this one. If you can afford it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to Paid

The woman caught in adultery, the doxology tacked onto the Lord’s Prayer, the one clean Trinity verse that Erasmus got bullied into printing, and the ending of Mark all follow the same pattern. The passages people quote most confidently, the ones that feel load-bearing, keep turning out to be the ones the earliest scribes never wrote. Mark left his readers with an empty tomb and a scream, and every resurrection scene now attached to his gospel arrived later, from other hands.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament

• Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration

• Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

• N. Clayton Croy, The Mutilation of Mark’s Gospel

Tags: Mark 16, biblical criticism, textual criticism, New Testament manuscripts, resurrection, snake handling, Bart Ehrman, Bruce Metzger

The New Testament gives you two churches hiding under one name. There’s the church of Peter and James in Jerusalem, running the operation from the city where Jesus preached, keeping the Law, circumcising their sons, eating kosher. And there’s the church of Paul, a man who never met the living Jesus, planting congregations across the Greek-speaking world and telling gentile converts they could skip the whole Torah. These two versions didn’t coexist in gentle disagreement. They fought, and the fight left scars all over the documents we still read on Sunday mornings.

Most people never notice because the canon was arranged to hide the seam. Put the four gospels first, then Acts, then thirteen letters signed by Paul, and you get the impression of a single expanding movement with Paul as its natural spokesman. Read the letters in the order they were written, watch for what Paul is defending against, and a different story surfaces. Paul spent a large part of his career fighting other Christian missionaries who thought he was a fraud.

Galatians as a Deposition

Galatians is the clearest evidence because Paul lost his temper writing it. Someone had come to his congregations in Galatia after he left and told the converts that Paul’s gospel was incomplete, that to be right with the God of Israel they needed to be circumcised and keep the Law like everyone else in the movement. Paul’s response isn’t a calm theological essay. He opens by refusing to include the usual thanksgiving and goes straight for the throat, calling the Galatians foolish and asking who bewitched them.

Then he does something revealing. He reconstructs his own resume to prove he never answered to Jerusalem. He insists his gospel came by direct revelation, not from any human being, and stresses that he didn’t go up to consult the apostles for three years after his conversion. When he finally describes meeting Peter and James, he can’t resist telling us he confronted Peter to his face at Antioch over whether Jewish and gentile Christians could share a table. James had sent men to Antioch, and when they arrived, Peter stopped eating with the gentiles. Paul read that as cowardice and said so publicly.

You don’t write like this about people you consider allies. Paul is describing a rival leadership that had the authority to make Peter fold, and the men from James could do it with a single delegation. Bart Ehrman has spent a career pointing out how thoroughly this conflict got smoothed over by later readers who assumed the apostles must have all agreed.

The Ebionites and the Jesus Who Stayed Jewish

The Jerusalem side survived for centuries as a group the church fathers called the Ebionites, from a Hebrew word for the poor. What they believed tells you what the original Jesus movement might have looked like before Paul’s version won.

The Ebionites kept the Law, holding that Jesus was the human Messiah, the son of Joseph and Mary, chosen by God rather than divine from eternity, and they rejected Paul completely. Later heresy-hunters like Epiphanius record that the Ebionites regarded Paul as an apostate, a gentile by birth who converted only so he could marry a priest’s daughter and turned on the Law when the marriage fell through. That’s almost certainly a hostile legend, but it tells you the temperature. A whole wing of the early movement thought the man who wrote half the New Testament was an enemy of the faith.

They had their own gospel, a version of Matthew adjusted to their theology, and it didn’t make the cut any more than they did. When the canon closed, the group with the strongest genealogical claim to Jesus, the Torah-keeping Jewish believers led by his own brother, ended up branded as heretics.

The Letter That Answers Paul

If you read the Epistle of James and Galatians side by side you’ll see it sounds more like a reply than anything. Paul insists a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. James writes that faith without works is dead and asks pointedly whether a man isn’t justified by works after all. Luther noticed the collision and hated it, calling James an epistle of straw and wanting it demoted out of the New Testament proper.

Scholars debate whether James is answering Paul directly or answering a garbled popular version of Paul’s teaching. Either way the letter preserves the losing side’s instinct, that a gospel dissolving the moral demand of the Law was a gospel gone wrong. James got into the canon by a thread, tied to the name of Jesus’s brother, and Christians have been performing exegetical acrobatics to reconcile it with Paul ever since.

If a few more readers upgrade, I can spend more hours in the sources and bring back more stories like this one. If you can afford it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to Paid

Why the Winners Wrote the History

Written a generation or more after Paul, it takes the Antioch blowup and the circumcision fight and resolves them into a tidy council where everyone shakes hands and Peter and James endorse Paul’s mission. The author had a stake in showing a unified church, and the friction in Paul’s own letters is exactly what an idealized account would sand down. When Acts and Galatians disagree about the same events, the angry firsthand letter is the better witness.

The movement that produced our New Testament was Pauline and gentile. It kept Paul’s letters, adopted gospels comfortable with a divine Christ, and let the Torah-keeping originals fade into a heresy footnote. History gets written by whoever’s still standing to write it, and in this case the people still standing were the ones who’d won the argument Paul was losing badly enough, in Galatia, to write the maddest letter in the canon.

The Jesus who kept kosher and expected his followers to do the same had a church for generations after the crucifixion, and the reason most Christians have never heard of them is that the winning side edited the table of contents.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

• Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene

• James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism

• Gerd Lüdemann, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity

• Epiphanius, Panarion (for the patristic reports on the Ebionites)

Tags: early Christianity, Paul, Ebionites, biblical criticism, James, canon formation, historical Jesus

In December 1872, a museum assistant named George Smith was sorting broken clay tablets from Nineveh when he read a line about a ship coming to rest on a mountain and a dove sent out to find land. He knew his Bible well enough to understand what he was holding, and according to a colleague’s account, he jumped up, ran around the room, and began tearing off his clothes. Smith had found Noah’s flood on a pagan tablet written centuries before a word of Genesis existed. The Victorian public assumed the tablet confirmed the Bible. It took a few more decades of archaeology to admit the awkward part: the tablet came first.

A Flood with a Familiar Plot

In Genesis, God decides humanity has gone rotten, picks one righteous man, tells him to build a boat, load it with animals, and ride out a world-drowning flood. Afterward the man releases birds to test for dry land, exits the boat, and offers a sacrifice that pleases the deity.

Every beat of that plot appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet XI, where the flood hero is named Utnapishtim. He gets divine warning, builds a boat, loads animals, releases a dove, a swallow, and a raven, lands on a mountain, and burns a sacrifice so fragrant that the gods “gathered like flies” around it. The Gilgamesh version drew on an even older poem, Atrahasis, composed around the 18th century BCE. That puts the Mesopotamian flood story roughly a thousand years ahead of the earliest plausible date for the Genesis text.

The overlap runs too deep for coincidence, and scholars stopped arguing about this in the 19th century, when George Smith translated the Gilgamesh flood tablet at the British Museum in 1872 and reportedly got so excited he started undressing in the reading room. He understood immediately what he was holding: proof that the Bible’s flood had a literary ancestor.

The Genesis writers changed things, and the changes matter. Mesopotamian gods send the flood because humans are noisy and annoying. The God of Genesis sends it as moral judgment. That shift from divine irritation to divine justice is the Israelite contribution. The boat, the birds, and the sacrifice were borrowed furniture.

Moses in the Basket, Sargon in the Basket

Noah’s Ark isn’t alone.

Exodus opens with a baby placed in a reed basket sealed with bitumen, set adrift on a river, rescued, and raised to greatness. By the time the Exodus author wrote that scene, it was a rerun.

The Legend of Sargon, which tells the birth story of Sargon of Akkad, runs like this in the king’s own voice: his mother, a priestess, bore him in secret, placed him in a basket of rushes, sealed the lid with bitumen, and cast him on the river. The river carried him to Aqqi, a water-drawer, who raised him as his own son. Sargon went on to rule the known world.

Sargon reigned around 2300 BCE, and the surviving copies of his legend date to the Neo-Assyrian period, the 8th to 7th centuries BCE, which happens to be exactly when many scholars place the shaping of the Exodus story. The exposed-infant-who-becomes-great motif shows up across the ancient world (Romulus and Remus got a wolf instead of a princess), but the reed basket sealed with bitumen and floated on a river is specific enough to point at borrowing rather than parallel invention. The writers gave Israel’s founding hero the birth story of the emperor every scribe in the region had copied in school, and their audience would have caught the reference.

The Psalm That Sounds Egyptian

Psalm 104 praises God as the one who makes darkness in which the beasts of the forest creep, who sends the sun so man goes out to his work, who made the sea where ships sail and Leviathan plays, who gives all creatures their food in due season.

The Great Hymn to the Aten, on the other hand, composed in Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE. Darkness falls and lions come out of their dens. The sun rises and people go to work. Ships sail the river, fish leap before the sun’s face, and the deity provides every creature with sustenance. The sequence of images matches closely enough that most scholars see a literary relationship, whether direct borrowing or transmission through intermediary texts over the centuries between Akhenaten and the psalmist.

Proverbs further support the Egyptian connection.

Proverbs 22:17 through 24:22 tracks the Instruction of Amenemope, an Egyptian wisdom text from roughly the 12th to 11th century BCE, section by section. Both open with an appeal to hear the words of the wise, both warn against robbing the poor, both advise against befriending the hot-tempered man, and Proverbs 22:20 even asks “Have I not written for you thirty sayings?” which puzzled translators for centuries until Amenemope turned up with exactly thirty numbered chapters. The Hebrew text had preserved a reference to the structure of its Egyptian source.

Free posts give you the argument, and paid subscriptions fund the digging that produces it: the tablets, the manuscripts, the scholarship most people never see. If a few more readers upgrade, I can spend more hours in the sources and bring back more stories like this one. If you can afford it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to Paid

What Borrowing Tells You

The usual defense at this point is that borrowing doesn't disprove inspiration, and that's true as far as it goes. God could inspire a writer to adapt Gilgamesh as easily as to compose from scratch. But that defense concedes that the text everyone was told descended from heaven turns out to have a bibliography, and that bibliography is older than the religion.

Whatever you decide that means for faith, it settles one thing: The Bible has a history, and that history is longer than the Bible. These texts grew out of a shared ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian culture, written by authors who read, remembered, and repurposed. The stories were already old when the Bible was young, and knowing that changes how you read every page.

Sources and Further Reading

• Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford University Press)

• Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (Penguin Classics)

• Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II: The New Kingdom (University of California Press)

• John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Baker Academic)

• Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (Picador)

• Christopher B. Hays, Hidden Riches: A Sourcebook for the Comparative Study of the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East (Westminster John Knox)

Tags: Bible, Biblical Criticism, Ancient History, Religion, Old Testament, Mythology, History of Christianity

Ask most people where Satan comes from, and they’ll point vaguely toward Genesis: the serpent in the garden, the fall of a rebel angel, a war in heaven that predates human history. It feels so foundational that even the suggestion of its non-Biblicality sounds like a conspiracy theory from someone with an axe to grind with Christianity.

However, the Devil as Christianity teaches him today, the adversary of God who rules hell and orchestrates human sin, doesn’t exist in most of the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that the Old Testament’s version of Satan puts God in a much better light.

Don’t just read this piece in the inbox. Like it, drop a comment, pick it apart, don’t leave me talking into the void, and help shape The Unholy Truth.

The Accuser Who Works for God

“Satan” comes from the Hebrew ha-satan, which isn’t a name but a job title of an entity. It means “the accuser” or “the adversary,” and in its earliest appearances it comes with a definite article, “the satan,” the way you’d say “the prosecutor.”

Look at how ha-satan actually behaves in the oldest texts in their original language. In the book of Job, the satan appears in the heavenly court as one of the “sons of God,” a member of the divine council. He’s an employee whom God created with a purpose. God asks where he’s been, and he reports back like someone serving God. When he proposes testing Job’s faith by ruining his life, he needs God’s permission to do it, and God grants it, which is far from a rebel operating behind enemy lines. He’s the prosecuting attorney in God’s own court, doing a job God signed off on.

The same pattern holds in Zechariah, where the satan stands to accuse the high priest Joshua and gets rebuked by an angel. Again, a courtroom scene. Again, an accuser doing courtroom work. There’s no hell, no horns, no cosmic rebellion, no ambition to overthrow heaven. The figure is a kind of celestial internal-affairs officer, and he answers to management.

Numbers 22 goes further, using the word for an angel sent by God. When Balaam saddles his donkey and rides off, an angel of the Lord plants itself in the road “as a satan against him,” an obstacle, an adversary in the plain sense of something standing in your way. The being blocking Balaam isn’t evil. It’s a messenger of God carrying out God’s orders. The word describes a function, opposition, and God is the one deploying it.

God Takes the Blame Himself

When the Hebrew Bible needs to explain where evil and misfortune come from, it usually points at God, not a devil.

The clearest case sits inside the story of David’s census. In 2 Samuel 24, the text says God, angry with Israel, incited David to take a census, an act treated as sinful, and then punished the people for it. God provokes the sin and punishes the sinner. Centuries later, when the Chronicler retells the same episode in 1 Chronicles 21, that theology has become awkward, and the verse gets edited. Now it’s “Satan” who incites David. Same story, two versions, and you can watch the blame get transferred off God and onto a new supernatural agent between the writing of one book and the other. That’s not interpretation. That’s the invention happening on the page.

The story of David’s census isn’t alone. In Isaiah, God declares that he forms light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates calamity, “I the Lord do all these things.” The prophet Amos asks whether disaster befalls a city unless the Lord has done it, and expects the answer no. In this theology, a single powerful source is behind everything, blessing and catastrophe alike. It has no room for, and no need of, a rival dark power.

Persia Supplies the Missing Piece

The timing points east as the source of the cosmic Devil we came to know. During and after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, Jewish communities came into sustained contact with Persian religion, and specifically with Zoroastrianism, which ran on a stark dualism the Hebrew tradition lacked. Zoroastrian thought pits a good creator god, Ahura Mazda, against a genuinely independent evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, in a struggle that structures the whole universe and drives toward a final judgment. Good versus evil as cosmic principals, not a single deity juggling both.

You can trace the Persian fingerprints in what Jewish writing does next. The centuries after the exile produce a burst of new ideas: elaborate hierarchies of named angels and demons, a sharpening division between the present evil age and a coming good one, resurrection of the dead, a final reckoning. Scholars like Mary Boyce argued for direct Zoroastrian influence on these developments, and the parallels are hard to wave away. The satan, once a courtroom functionary, starts drifting toward the role of God’s cosmic opponent, the head of an evil order that mirrors the heavenly one.

By the time you reach texts like the ones found at Qumran, the shift is well underway. The Dead Sea Scrolls talk about a Prince of Light and an Angel of Darkness, sometimes called Belial, and human beings sorted into two camps in a war between them. That’s Persian architecture wearing Hebrew names. The intertestamental period, those roughly four centuries between the Old and New Testaments, is where the Devil grows up, in books that never made it into the Protestant canon but shaped the world Jesus was born into.

If you’re getting something out of this and you’re not a paid subscriber yet, I’d love for you to become one. It’s what keeps The Unholy Truth going.

Upgrade to Paid

What the New Testament Inherited

By the first century CE the transformation was finished, and it’s the finished product the Gospel writers assume. The New Testament opens with Satan already a fully realized enemy: he tempts Jesus in the wilderness, commands a kingdom of demons, gets called the ruler of this world, and ends up hurled into a lake of fire in Revelation. Nobody explains him because nobody needs to. The audience already knows who he is.

That knowledge came from somewhere, and it wasn’t Genesis. The serpent in the garden is never identified as Satan anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. That connection gets made retroactively, by later readers reaching back to fit an old story into a newer theology. Read forward instead of backward and the picture reverses. The Old Testament didn’t lose the Devil. It never had him. The most consequential villain in Western religion was assembled over centuries, borrowed in part from Persian neighbors, and read back into scriptures that had been getting along without him the whole time.

Share

Leave a comment

Sources and Further Reading

• Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (Random House, 1995)

• Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

• T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

• Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (Routledge, 1979)

• Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Tags: biblical criticism, history of religion, Satan, Zoroastrianism, Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, comparative religion

Everybody knows the story. Judas Iscariot sells out his teacher for thirty pieces of silver, plants a kiss on his cheek in a dark garden, and hands God’s son over to men who’ll nail him to a post. Dante stuck him in the lowest pit of hell, chewed forever in the mouth of Satan alongside Brutus and Cassius. His name became a synonym for treachery in half the languages of Europe. Two thousand years of art, sermons, and passion plays have painted him as the ultimate rat.

However, the traditional story has a hole you can drive a cart through. Jesus picked Judas himself, one of twelve, and John has him admitting from the start that he knew one of them was a devil. Hire an accountant you know will cook the books, sit back while he does it, and you don't get to play the victim when the indictment comes. You're on it too.

The Betrayal as a Crime

Let’s start with what exactly Judas is said to betray. The Gospels say he led the authorities to Jesus in Gethsemane and identified him with a kiss. But Jesus wasn’t in hiding. He’d spent the week teaching openly in the Temple courts, flipping tables, drawing crowds big enough to make the priests nervous. Everybody in Jerusalem knew his face. Mark has him preaching in public day after day right up to the arrest. You don’t need an inside man to find a local celebrity.

So the “betrayal” delivered almost nothing the authorities couldn’t have gotten by following the crowd. That thirty pieces of silver, roughly four months’ wages for a laborer, bought them a convenience, not a secret.

Gethsemane, the garden where Jesus was arrested, was a private olive grove and oil press. Because Jesus used it so frequently, many historians suggest he had a prior arrangement with the property owner, meaning local residents or the owner likely knew he frequented the grounds.

The whole transaction only works as high treason if you already believe Judas is the villain and reverse-engineer the crime to fit.

Judas Was Much Needed

The four Gospels don’t agree on what was going on inside the man’s head, and the disagreement is telling. Mark, the earliest, gives no motive at all. Judas just goes to the priests without any explanation, greed or speech. Matthew adds the silver and later the remorse, the suicide, the field of blood. Luke and John reach for something bigger: Satan enters him, and it was the devil who made him do it.

The earlier the source, the flatter and stranger the Judas character gets. The later the source, the more the storytellers pile on motive and menace. By the time John writes, near the end of the first century, Judas has become a thief who skimmed from the common purse, a demon-possessed instrument of cosmic evil.

The early Jesus movement had a disaster on its hands when the messiah got executed by Rome as a criminal, long before he fulfilled any prophesies and helped Israelites to their freedom. It was the single most humiliating way a claimant to God’s kingdom could possibly end up. Somebody had to be at fault, and it couldn’t be God’s plan looking like a failure. So Judas was there to grip the blame so the story can survive.

The Plan Required a Hand-off

Christianity’s entire claim rests on the crucifixion. If there is no cross there is no resurrection, no resurrection, no salvation. The death of Jesus isn’t an accident that befalls the plan, it’s the plan. Jesus says so repeatedly. He predicts his death, sets his face toward Jerusalem, tells the disciples it has to happen this way.

If the crucifixion had to happen, somebody had to trigger it. And at the Last Supper, Jesus doesn’t try to stop Judas. He points him out. He hands him bread and tells him to go do what he’s going to do, and do it quickly. That’s not a man being ambushed by a traitor. That’s a man giving a cue to an actor who’s been assigned the hardest role in the production.

Read it that way and Judas becomes the only disciple who follows through completely. Peter denies Jesus three times before the rooster crows. The rest scatter into the dark the moment the soldiers show up. Judas alone does the terrible thing that has to be done for any of it to mean anything. He carries out the instruction nobody else could stomach, and he gets eternity in Satan’s teeth for his trouble.

The Gospel that Made Him the Hero

This isn’t my personal interpretation; in fact, it isn’t even a modern provocation dreamed up to sell newsletters. Somebody in the ancient world already thought it. In 2006, National Geographic published a restored third-century Coptic text, the Gospel of Judas, that had spent centuries rotting in a Cairo bank vault. It belongs to a Gnostic community that read the whole story upside down.

In their version, Judas is the one disciple who understands Jesus for who he really is. The others worship a lower, false god. Jesus takes Judas aside and teaches him the secrets he trusts to no one else. The handover is an act of obedience, not a betrayal, and it was meant to free Jesus from the prison of his physical body so his spirit can go home. Bart Ehrman, who worked on the translation, called it a portrait of Judas as the favored insider rather than the arch-villain.

The proto-orthodox church buried that reading, and history remembers the winners. Irenaeus was already denouncing the text as heresy around 180 CE, which tells you the counter-story was circulating early enough to scare the bishops.

If you’re getting something out of this and you’re not a paid subscriber yet, I’d love for you to become one. It’s what keeps The Unholy Truth going.

Upgrade to Paid

The Traitor or the Hero

The answer to whether Judas was villain or loyalist is that the sources won’t let you settle it, because the sources were never trying to report what happened. They were building a story that fit their agenda. A faith spreading through a hostile empire needed a clean line between insiders and enemies, and a named traitor who took the fall did more theological work than an ambiguous friend ever could.

Twenty centuries of anger and disappointment got poured onto Judas, and in all that time almost nobody stopped to ask the obvious question. If Judas is the biggest villain in history, who hired him? He wasn’t voted in by the other disciples to escort Jesus to his death. He was there because Jesus put him there. When a scandal breaks big enough, ministers resign and whole cabinets fall, not always because they personally did the deed, but because it happened on their watch and somebody at the top owns that. Nobody applies that standard to the man who picked Judas, knew what he was, and let him go.

I can’t tell you which version of Judas you should choose, but I can say this: a Judas brave enough to carry out the filthiest task in history, walking the Roman authorities to the exact spot where Jesus means to surrender without causing a scene, points to a leader who has everything under control and is running a deliberate plan.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

• Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

• Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity

• Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst (eds.), The Gospel of Judas (National Geographic critical edition)

• Susan Gubar, Judas: A Biography

Tags: Judas Iscariot, Gospel of Judas, biblical criticism, Gnosticism, early Christianity, New Testament, Bart Ehrman, religious history

The traditional reading of the story goes like this: God asks Abraham for the unthinkable, Abraham obeys, an angel swoops in at the last second, a ram dies instead of the boy, and everyone learns that God provides. The takeaway is supposed to be obedience, trust, the warm reassurance that the divine never really wanted blood.

We’re so used to hearing the story since our childhood that we don’t notice that the reading skips the most interesting question in the whole story: why didn’t Abraham flinch?

A man hears a voice telling him to butcher his son on a mountain, and he gets up early the next morning, saddles the donkey, and goes, without a word of argument. This is the same Abraham who haggled with God over Sodom a few chapters earlier, talking the number of righteous men needed to spare the city down from fifty to ten. For strangers in a doomed city he negotiates like a man at a bazaar, yet for his own son he says nothing. The text wants us to read his silence as faith, though the likelier explanation is that the request just didn’t strike him as strange.

And don’t just read this piece in the inbox. Like it, drop a comment, pick it apart, don’t leave me talking into the void.

The Neighbors Were Already Doing It

For us, child sacrifice is such an abhorrent act and so distant that it doesn’t even occur to us that it was a known practice across the ancient Near East, and the Hebrew Bible knows it. The deity most often connected with it is Molech, who shows up repeatedly in connection with the burning of children, with prohibitions stacked against him in Leviticus and condemnations in Jeremiah and Kings. You don’t write laws banning something nobody does. The sheer volume of biblical anxiety about child sacrifice is itself the evidence that it was happening, and happening among Israelites, not only their enemies.

The archaeology backs this up. At Carthage, a Phoenician colony, excavators found burial grounds with the cremated remains of infants alongside dedicatory inscriptions. The Semitic consonants on those funerary stelae, mlk, are the same consonants sometimes vocalized in the Bible as “Molech.” Scholars including Lawrence Stager and Frank Moore Cross argued that mlk wasn’t the name of a god at all but a term for the sacrifice itself, the type of offering. The Israelites and the Phoenicians were close cultural cousins speaking closely related languages. What one branch did at Carthage, the other branch knew about at home.

Other figures in the Hebrew Bible go through with it. Jephthah vows to sacrifice whatever comes out of his door if God grants him victory, and what comes out is his daughter, and he keeps the vow. King Mesha of Moab sacrifices his firstborn son on the city wall and the tide of battle turns. These stories are told without the narrator pausing to explain the mechanics, because the audience didn’t need it explained.

A Story That Argues With Its Own Religion

Abraham’s child sacrifice story preserves the memory of a world where the firstborn belonged to the deity, and then it does something to that memory. The firstborn son was owed to God. That claim was widely felt, and it sat underneath a great deal of early Israelite religion. The hinge of the story is the substitution, the ram caught in the thicket, which lets the obligation be acknowledged out loud and then redirected onto an animal. The debt is affirmed and paid in the same breath, just not in the currency everyone expected.

A modern reader is horrified that God would ask for a child at all. We treat it as a basic right that a child’s life isn’t the parents’ to spend, and we expect Abraham to stand up for his son on the strength of that, to refuse an immoral order even when it comes from the top. We assume that refusal is what the test was really measuring, that the right answer was to say no.

An ancient reader would have been startled by the opposite, that God called the whole thing off. In a world where the gods were assumed to want firstborn blood, the shock wasn’t the command on the way up the mountain. It was the reprieve at the top, a loving god declining what every other god in the region expected as its due.

If you’re getting something out of this and you’re not a paid subscriber yet, I’d love for you to become one. It’s what keeps The Unholy Truth going.

Upgrade to Paid

The Substitution Became the Whole Religion

The ram standing in for the son is the seed of the entire sacrificial system that follows. Animal offerings, the redemption of the firstborn, the Passover lamb whose blood spares Israelite children while Egyptian firstborns die: these are all variations on a single idea, that a life is owed and a substitute can be supplied. The mechanism that saves Isaac is the same mechanism that runs the Temple for the next thousand years.

Christianity then took the pattern and ran it to its conclusion. The theology of the crucifixion is the Akedah with the brakes removed. A father offers his beloved son, the son goes willingly to the place of death, and this time the sacrifice is completed rather than halted. The visual echo was obvious enough that the parallel was drawn early and often, with Isaac carrying the wood up the mountain read as a preview of Jesus carrying the cross. The whole logic of atonement, the notion that an innocent death can settle a debt the living owe, traces back through this one chapter to a period when people thought the debt was paid in actual children.

So here is the truth behind Abraham’s child sacrifice. An entire religious tradition grew out of the long process of talking itself out of a practice it had once accepted, and the story we tell children as a parable about trust is a fossil record of that argument. The ram in the thicket is the moment a culture decided that the price was still owed but would be paid in something other than its own sons. Everything downstream, the altar, the lamb, the cross, runs on the terms set in that one chapter.

A god asking a man for his child raised no protest, because in that world it was a request the man already understood.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity

• Francesca Stavrakopoulou, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities

• Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, “Child Sacrifice at Carthage: Religious Rite or Population Control?”, Biblical Archaeology Review

• Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God

• J. H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (commentary on Genesis 22)

• Heath Dewrell, Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel

Tags: biblical criticism, Old Testament, Abraham, child sacrifice, comparative religion, history of religion, Bible

If you’ve ever had a look at Genesis, you must have noticed the unusual lifespans of characters. Adam lives 930 years, Seth makes it to 912, and Methuselah, the record holder, dies at 969, while Noah pushes past 950. Nobody in the chapter blinks at this, because thparallel is hard to misse text presents these as a matter of fact, nothing to read anything more into. The men of the early world simply lived for the better part of a millennium, fathered children at ages when a modern reader would expect a funeral, and kept going.

The instinct is to treat this as primitive exaggeration, a bit of ancient hype we can wave off, but that instinct misses what the numbers are doing.

Sumerian Kings Who Reigned for Millennia

Long before Genesis, scribes were already writing about kings who lived impossibly long. The Sumerian King List, a document copied and recopied across Mesopotamia from roughly the start of the second millennium BCE, opens with eight kings who ruled before a great flood. Their reigns make Methuselah look like he died young. Alulim, the first king, reigns 28,800 years. Another holds the throne for 36,000. The combined total for the antediluvian kings runs to hundreds of thousands of years before the flood wipes the slate clean and reign-lengths drop to something a human accountant could believe.

You have a list of named figures, absurdly long lifespans or reigns, a flood that interrupts everything, and a sharp drop in the numbers afterward. Genesis runs the same sequence. The patriarchs before Noah’s flood live close to a thousand years. After the flood, the ages start sliding down the slope, century by century, until Abraham dies at a comparatively modest 175 and Moses caps out at 120.

The writers of Genesis lived in a world where this was how you wrote about deep time and legendary origins. Enormous numbers signaled antiquity and importance, the same way a national myth might describe its founders as giants. Bruce Vawter and other scholars of the ancient Near East have noted that Hebrew scribes adapted this regional inheritance, then shrank the figures to a more sober scale. Sumer counts in tens of thousands while Genesis counts in hundreds, and that gap is already a theological edit, a quiet insistence that even the oldest humans were still mortal, still small next to the deity who outlasts them all.

The Numbers Behind the Numbers

The patriarchal ages are designed, and they shift from one manuscript to the next.

Three surviving versions of Genesis 5 and 11 don’t tell the same story: the Hebrew Masoretic Text behind most English Bibles, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Greek Septuagint. They disagree systematically, and the totals show it. The time from creation to the flood comes out to 1,656 years in the Masoretic Text, 1,307 in the Samaritan version, and 2,242 in the Septuagint. These gaps aren’t transcription slips, they follow patterns, which means somebody was adjusting the numbers on purpose, probably to line the chronology up with a preferred date for the flood or another anchor point further down the timeline.

Then there's base-sixty arithmetic. Mesopotamian math ran on a sexagesimal system, counting in sixties rather than tens, which is why we still carve a circle into 360 degrees and an hour into 60 minutes. Sixty makes more sense as a base than it first looks. Ten divides cleanly only by 2 and 5, while 60 divides by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30, which makes fractions and trade math far easier when you don't have decimals to lean on.

And several of the patriarchal ages suspiciously turn out to be exact products of that system.

Some scholars read the numbers as built from combinations of sixty, the square of seven, and other numbers chosen for their religious meaning rather than measured against any calendar. Whether every age decodes cleanly is debated, and honest scholars disagree about how far the pattern runs. What’s clear is that someone built the ages to a design rather than recording them off actual lives.

Enoch gives the game away, living 365 years, the only patriarch whose number jumps out, matching the days of the solar year. He’s also the one who doesn’t die in the ordinary way. The text says God took him. A man tied to the solar calendar gets lifted out of the order of deaths entirely, exactly what you’d expect if his number was chosen for its meaning rather than measured against a life.

Reading Age as Status

Treat these stories as ancient Near Eastern literature, not scripture, and they start making sense on their own terms. In the world that produced Genesis, a long life was a mark of divine favor and a sign of standing in the order of things. The further back you went toward creation, the closer humanity stood to its origin, and the longer people lived. The slow decline in lifespans across Genesis tracks a religious claim about distance from Eden rather than a medical record of failing health.

That’s why the numbers shrink in stages instead of collapsing all at once. The flood marks one threshold and the scattering at Babel marks another, and each break in the human story comes with a reset of the human scale. By the time you reach the ancestors of Israel, the ages have settled into a range that still reads as blessed (Abraham’s 175, Jacob’s 147) without straining belief past the point the writers wanted. Long life stayed the reward language of Israelite religion for centuries. Proverbs still promises length of days to the wise and righteous, and the commandment to honor your parents comes attached to the same promise. The arithmetic of Genesis 5 is that idea written large, projected back onto the dawn of the world.

What the Literalists Do With the Numbers

The people who read Genesis as straight history know the ages are a problem, and they’ve built explanations to keep them. The oldest is the vapor canopy: a layer of water vapor around the early earth that supposedly blocked radiation and let people live for centuries, until the flood released it and lifespans crashed. There’s no evidence such a canopy existed, and one thick enough to matter would have cooked the planet, so even creationists have mostly dropped it.

A second argument treats the decline itself as proof. Since the ages fall steadily after the flood, from Noah’s 950 to Abraham’s 175 to Moses’ 120, literalists read the curve as genetic degradation, a flawless original genome accumulating mutations and shedding years with each generation. It sounds scientific until you notice the curve is too smooth, tracking a theology of the fall far better than any mechanism of human aging.

Others rescue the numbers by redefining the year as a month or a lunar cycle, which scales Methuselah’s 969 down to something believable. The same conversion then has Enoch fathering children at age five. The math saves the old men by turning everyone else into an impossibility.

The honest literalist ends up at the last defense, that God willed it and no explanation is owed. That, at least, is consistent, but an argument that needs a miracle for every number has stopped making a historical claim.

If you’re getting something out of this and you’re not a paid subscriber yet, I’d love for you to become one. It’s what keeps The Unholy Truth going.

Upgrade to Paid

What the Awkwardness Is Telling You

The patriarchal ages are a piece of inherited Near Eastern technology, retooled by Hebrew scribes who lowered the figures, embedded their own numerical patterns, and bent the whole sequence toward a theology of decline and blessing. The manuscripts that can’t agree on the totals prove the numbers were live data for ancient editors, things to be calculated and adjusted, not sacred constants handed down untouched.

Read that way, Genesis 5 stops being a list of comically old men and becomes one of the more sophisticated things in the early chapters of the Bible, a deep-time chronology built out of borrowed forms and original math, doing exactly what its authors meant it to do.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bruce Vawter, On Genesis: A New Reading

• Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary

• Carol A. Hill, “Making Sense of the Numbers of Genesis,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith

• Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List

• Ronald Hendel, The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition

Tags: Genesis, biblical criticism, Methuselah, Sumerian King List, ancient Near East, textual criticism, Hebrew Bible, mythology, comparative religion, Old Testament

If you read the previous piece, The Truth Behind the Garden of Eden, and thought the coming-of-age reading sounded nice but convenient, that’s a fair pushback. Anybody can take an old story and project a meaning onto it that flatters their own sensibilities. So the question worth asking is how we know the growing-up reading is in the text rather than draped over it. The answer comes down to method.

Quick Run Down of the Truth Behind Eden

The first piece argues the Garden of Eden gets read backward. The version, where God plants a forbidden tree, acts shocked when Adam and Eve eat from it, then punishes them for disobedience, makes the story buckle under its own logic: an all-knowing God blindsided by an outcome he engineered, a punishment for a crime the culprits were too innocent to understand, and a talking snake who turns out to be the only honest voice in the garden.

If you read the story in its own terms, meaning as Near Eastern literature of its time, Eden is a coming-of-age story. “Knowledge of good and evil” is a merism for the full adult capacity to discern and judge, so the tree marks the threshold between childhood and adulthood rather than a trap. The serpent is the trickster-catalyst who tells the truth, the pre-fruit pair are naked and unashamed like small children, and the “curse” just describes the terms of grown-up life: pain in childbirth, labor for food, and death. Gilgamesh runs the same machinery through Enkidu losing the wild after gaining knowledge. The Hebrew version adds the moral weight that becoming a knowing creature is both a gain and a wound, which is why the authors wrote something closer to a birth than a fall.

The Hebrew Won’t Support “Knowing Right From Wrong”

The tree in question gives knowledge of “good and evil,” and the entire reading we’re accustomed to hearing depends on translating that as moral knowledge, the ability to tell sin from virtue. Yet, the Hebrew doesn’t cooperate.

“Good and evil,” tov va-ra, is a paired-opposite construction, and Hebrew uses these constantly to mean totality rather than the two named items. When Genesis says God made “heaven and earth,” it doesn’t mean he made the sky and the dirt and skipped everything in between. It means he made all of it. When Laban tells Jacob he can’t speak to him “either good or bad” (Genesis 31:24), he isn’t drawing a moral distinction; he’s saying he can’t say anything at all. The same pairing shows up in 2 Samuel 14:17 and Deuteronomy 1:39, and in every case the two poles stand in for the whole range between them.

So “knowledge of good and evil” reads as comprehensive knowledge, the full adult capacity to discern and judge and weigh, not a moral compass installed by a piece of fruit, which is what the Hebrew grammar does everywhere else it appears, and there’s no intellectually honest reason to make this one verse behave differently.

The Text Itself Calls It Childhood

The coming-of-age reading also doesn’t have to import the idea of childhood from outside; Genesis is there to supply it. The pre-fruit pair are “naked and not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25), which is how the Hebrew Bible describes the unselfconscious state of the very young, not the moral innocence of adults who’ve chosen well. Right after they eat, the first thing that changes is that they notice their nakedness and cover it. That’s the arrival of self-awareness, the exact thing that separates a small child from an adult.

Look at what they do and don’t do before the fruit. They take no part in producing their own food, the garden produces it for them. They don’t reproduce, that comes after, in the curse about childbirth. They follow one rule without understanding its consequences, the way a four-year-old avoids the hot stove because they were told to, not because they grasp burns. The text builds the picture of a protected, provided, pre-responsible existence and then ends it. You’re not reading childhood into Eden. You’re reading the childhood the authors already put there.

Gilgamesh Was Running the Same Story

The strongest outside check is that the ancient Near East already had this story, and we can read their version. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu lives with the wild animals, naked and innocent, until a woman named Shamhat introduces him to sex and human knowledge. Afterward the animals run from him and he can’t return to the wild. The text says outright that he had grown wise, that he had become like a man. He gains humanity and loses the easy animal world in one motion.

That epic predates the written form of Genesis by about six centuries, and the Israelite authors lived inside a cultural world that knew it. So when Eden runs the same sequence, innocent human in a natural enclosure, a catalyst bringing knowledge and sexuality, expulsion from the easy world and no road back, we’re not noticing a coincidence. We’re noticing that Genesis is participating in a story its neighbors told, the one about the human creature crossing into self-awareness and paying for it. Reading Eden as a fall from grace makes it an oddity. Reading it as the Hebrew take on the Gilgamesh material makes it a recognizable member of a known type.

The Serpent’s Accuracy Is the Tell

There’s one detail the disobedience reading can’t explain away, and it’s the strongest evidence that the authors weren’t writing about a crime. The serpent makes three claims. They won’t die, their eyes will open, and they’ll become like God knowing good and evil. Every one comes true. They don’t drop dead that day. Their eyes open in the very next verse. And God says, out loud, “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:22).

A liar whose every lie comes true is incoherent, so the disobedience reading has to treat the most honest voice in the story as its villain. That gets easier to question once you know what a serpent meant to the people who wrote this. Across the ancient Near East the snake was a potent symbol that could stand for chaos and danger but also for fertility, protection, and wisdom. Its habit of shedding its skin tied it to renewal and immortality, which is why it became the most common symbol of healing and rejuvenation in the region, the same logic behind the bronze serpent Moses lifts up in Numbers 21. Mesopotamian gods like Ningishzida were pictured as horned serpents guarding the door of heaven and warding off death, and serpents turn up at Canaanite fertility shrines and in Gilgamesh, where a snake steals the plant of immortality and sheds its skin to prove it works.

So a creature that’s cunning, knows things humans don’t, and stands near questions of life, death, and forbidden knowledge would have read to the first audience as the obvious figure to crack the garden open, not a stand-in for Satan. That identification came centuries later.

The Snake Becomes the Villain

Humans evolved to fear snakes, and most of us still do, even people who've never met one outside a zoo. That instinct made the serpent easy to recast. A figure the ancient Near East read as wisdom, healing, and the keeper of life slid into the role of tempter once a later religion needed a villain at the start of the story, and the slide cost almost nothing, because the audience was already primed to distrust the animal.

The irony is that the serpent never tells Adam and Eve to do anything. It corrects God's claim about dying, it describes what the fruit will do, and every word holds up. The eating is their choice, made with accurate information for the first time in their lives, which is the whole point of a coming-of-age story. The serpent that gets blamed for the fall is the one character that treated them like adults, and we turned it into the devil because a snake was the easiest thing in the garden to be afraid of.

Read more

Read it the way contemporary Sunday schools tell it and you get something thin from Adam and Eve and what they went through: a deity plants a tree, forbids the fruit, then acts shocked and disappointed when the two people he made curious enough to name the animals go ahead and eat it. And it gets more confusing, because the deity knew perfectly well what Adam and Eve would do the second his back was turned. It’s like handing kids a box of matches, telling them not to play with them, then walking out the door knowing they’ll burn the house down.

But Israelite literature, even in its oral stage, was more advanced than that. Reading it literally doesn’t give it enough credit. Take every word and every phrase at face value, the way you’d read a history book, and you get a story that buckles under its own logic: an all-knowing God blindsided by an outcome he set up himself, a punishment for a crime the culprits were too innocent to know they were committing, and a talking snake who turns out to be the most honest voice in the garden.

This interpretation does a serious disservice to an otherwise beautiful piece.

Trees in the Garden of Eden

Let’s start with the two trees named in the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That second phrase, “knowledge of good and evil,” gets flattened in most retellings into “knowing right from wrong,” as if Adam and Eve were moral infants who couldn’t tell virtue from vice until they ate.

However, the construction “good and evil” in the original Hebrew is what scholars call a merism, a figure of speech where you name two poles to mean the entire span between them. “Heaven and earth” means everything. “Day and night” means always. “Good and evil” means the full range of experience, the whole of discernment, the capacity to judge and choose and weigh consequences. It’s adult knowledge. It’s the difference between an animal that acts and a person who knows what they’re doing.

So the tree is the threshold between two modes of being, rather than a trap prepared for the two lodgers.

The Serpent Told the Truth

The serpent says that if they eat, they won’t die, and their eyes will be opened, and they’ll become like God, knowing good and evil. Then they eat, and their eyes are opened, and God himself says, “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” The serpent was right about everything, and there was no deception.

Here the serpent functions as the catalyst that any coming-of-age story requires, the voice that points at the closed door and asks why it’s closed. In folklore terms it’s the trickster, the figure who breaks the static world open so the story can start. Without the serpent there’s not much to tell, just two people standing naked in a garden forever, never aging, never choosing, never becoming anything. The serpent’s sin, if we want to call it that, is impatience with innocence.

And innocence is the right word, because the story keeps telling us the pre-fruit state is childhood. Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed, the way the text describes small children rather than adults. They don’t work in any meaningful sense, they don’t reproduce yet, and they do what they’re told without any idea what follows if they don’t. They have no knowledge of their own mortality. They live inside a provided world with one rule, the way a four-year-old lives inside a house with one forbidden cabinet. The garden is the womb-state, the protected enclosure before anything is demanded of you.

What the Curse Describes

The Punishments Are Descriptions of Adult Life

Then they eat, and the consequences arrive, and most readers hear them as arbitrary divine retribution. Pain in childbirth, labor in the fields, the ground bringing forth thorns, a life that ends in dust. Punishment, supposedly, for one act of disobedience.

But the punishments describe nothing more than adult human life. Women bear children in pain. Men wrest food from reluctant soil. Everybody dies and goes back into the earth they came from. The “curse” reads less like a sentence handed down by an angry judge and more like an accounting of the terms of grown-up existence, the bill that comes due the moment you trade the provided garden for the open world. You wanted to know good and evil and this is what knowing good and evil costs.

It costs the cabinet, the house, the not-having-to-work, the not-yet-knowing you’ll die.

As for expulsion, God drives them out and posts a guard so they can’t reach the tree of life, can’t reverse the process, can’t crawl back into childhood now that they’ve grown. That’s how time works. Once you know what you know, there’s no road back to not knowing it. Nobody returns to the garden because nobody returns to childhood.

If you’re getting something out of this and you’re not a paid subscriber yet, I’d love for you to become one. It’s what keeps The Unholy Truth going.

Upgrade to Paid

A Growing-up Story

The Adam and Eve story reflects the culture of the ancient Near East, and it turns beautiful once you read it from the Israelites’ side, as something they were trying to express rather than a rulebook they were handing down.

The Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, which predated the Garden of Eden by six centuries, runs the same machinery in a different order: Enkidu lives among the animals, naked and innocent, until a woman brings him knowledge and sexuality, and afterward the animals flee him, and he can never go back to the wild. He gains humanity and loses the garden. The Eden authors were working a tradition their neighbors knew well, the story of the human animal crossing the line into self-awareness and paying for the crossing with everything easy.

What the Hebrew version adds is the moral weight, the sense that the crossing is both a gain and a wound. That tension is the point. The story refuses to resolve into a simple win or a simple loss. Becoming a knowing creature is the thing that makes us human and the thing that exiles us from ease, both at once, inseparable. You don’t get the knowledge without the death. You don’t get the choosing without the labor. The fruit gives exactly what it promised and charges exactly what such a thing should cost.

Which is why reducing it to “they disobeyed and got punished” misses nearly everything the authors built. They weren’t writing a courtroom transcript about a rules violation. They were writing the oldest story there is, the one where the child has to leave the house, where knowing comes wrapped in loss, where you can’t have the open world and the safe enclosure both. We read it as a fall because the religion that inherited it needed a fall to explain. The authors wrote something closer to a birth, and a birth always looks like an expulsion from where you used to live.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and further reading

• Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary

• Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context

• Ziony Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?

• The Epic of Gilgamesh, Andrew George translation

• John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (for the ancient Near Eastern context, read critically)

Tags: Genesis, biblical criticism, comparative mythology, Adam and Eve, ancient Near East, religion and literature

The obvious assumption is that American Christianity is just Christianity, practiced by some Americans. Same God, same book, same two thousand years of theology, only with bigger parking lots and a praise band. That’s a picture wrong in more ways than one.

First, let's agree on the definition. By American Christianity, I mean something specific, not Christians in America. That would be ridiculous, since there's no homogeneity across the country. Think of it like this. When we say Brussels sprouts, we mean one particular vegetable, even though sprouts of every kind grow in Europe's capital. They're a Christmas-table staple that looks like a miniature cabbage and gets called a sprout, yet the name tells you almost nothing about the thing itself.

Today we’re talking about a movement that grew up on American soil, feeds mostly from American sources, and treats a particular reading of Christianity as its raw material when it’s convenient rather than its actual content. Call it a religion, and you’ve already misnamed it.

The Tell Is What Gets Defended

A religion has commitments that cost the believer something. The Sermon on the Mount asks you to love your enemies, turn the other cheek, sell what you have and give to the poor, and stop storing up treasure. These sit at the center of what Jesus is recorded as teaching, hardly buried under theological jargon.

Watch what American Christianity fights for, though. The energy goes to gun rights, low taxes, border walls, and a particular vision of who gets to run the country. The teachings that would cost the believer something, generosity toward strangers, suspicion of wealth, gentleness toward enemies, get quietly shelved. The more a politician violates nearly every personal standard the gospels set out, the harder the movement rallies. A faith bends the believer toward its difficult demands, while an ideology bends the source material toward what the believer already wanted.

Religions come with strict structures, and the more devout someone becomes, the less forgiving they tend to be. Religion says adultery is wrong and leaves no room to negotiate, no clause saying an occasional slip can be overlooked. Religion says lying is a sin, with no exception for when everyone else is doing it, no quiet permission to turn the truth upside down or make your own version of it because others may have already done it too.

I’m not alone in my thinking.

Robert Putnam and David Campbell, in their work on American religion, found that political identity increasingly predicts religious affiliation rather than the other way around. The politics comes first now, and the theology arrives, or departs, to match it.

Made in USA, Now with Extra American Anxieties

American Christianity’s obsessions track American history more than Christian history. The fixation on individual salvation as a personal transaction, the prosperity gospel, where God rewards the faithful with money and a nice house, the fusion of national flag and cross, none of this comes from Antioch or Nicaea. It comes from the revival tents of the Second Great Awakening, the Cold War’s need for a God-fearing enemy to Soviet atheism, and the marketing genius of twentieth-century televangelism.

The phrase “under God” entered the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, slotted in as a Cold War loyalty test, and “In God We Trust” became the national motto in 1956 for the same reason. Both are midcentury political moves dressed in religious language, and they tell you what the movement is for. The God on the currency works as a team mascot for the country, a long way from the deity of the Nicene Creed.

Ideology Borrows, Religion Inherits

A religion inherits its commitments from a tradition and then has to live with the parts it finds inconvenient, and those inconvenient parts are the proof it’s a religion, because nobody would invent them. An ideology runs the other direction, starting from what its adherents want, then shopping the tradition for verses and symbols that decorate the want.

American Christianity shops this way, keeping a favorite handful of verses about marriage and authority and the unborn alongside a vast blind spot covering everything Jesus said about money, mercy, and the foreigner. The selection maps onto a political program with remarkable precision, which is what you’d expect if the politics came first and the proof-texting came after.

This is why two people can both call themselves Christian and share almost nothing underneath. One inherited a faith and wrestles with it, while the other adopted a political identity and reached for the nearest sacred vocabulary to bless it.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

The Cost of Calling It a Religion

Treating American Christianity as a religion grants it protections and deference it hasn’t earned. We extend respect to religious conviction because we assume it answers to something beyond the believer’s preferences, some authority that can tell the believer no. An ideology that has hollowed out its own scripture answers to nothing but the movement’s appetites, and dressing that up as faith lets it claim the immunity we reserve for conscience.

Secularism in America gets sold as a shield for atheists, the idea being that “God” in public life might offend the people who don’t believe in him. That misses the larger point. When “under God” entered the Pledge of Allegiance, when “In God We Trust” became the national motto, when the Ten Commandments go up in courthouses and classrooms in plain defiance of the Constitution, the Christians should have been the first to object, because the politicians behind these gestures weren’t moved by devotion so much as by what the gestures bought them at the ballot box.

Christians elsewhere in America will wake up one day and realize that no atheist ever did Christianity the damage American Christianity is doing to it from the inside. Secularism turns out to be the thing protecting Jesus, the Bible, and God from politicians who treat all three as props. Whether that recognition arrives in time is another matter.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us

• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

• Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States

• Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Tags: Christian Nationalism, American Religion, Secular Humanism, Religion and Politics, Evangelicalism

If I asked you when Jesus became God, chances are you’d point to the manger. He was born divine, the Son of God from the first breath, and everybody who met him supposedly knew it. The Gospels we read in church, the carols, the creeds, all of it reinforces the idea that the divinity was there from the start and the only question was whether people would accept it.

Today we’re talking about what the Bible says about when Jesus' divinity emerged.

Paul’s Letters and His Unusual Habit

The timeline of Christian scripture runs Paul’s letters, then Mark, then Matthew, Luke, and John, which makes Paul our earliest source. He’s our oldest Christian witness and also our most theologically ambitious one, so it’s worth noticing what he does and doesn’t say.

In Romans 1:3-4, Paul describes Jesus as descended from David according to the flesh and declared Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. Paul here seems to be quoting an older formula, one that locates the moment of divine sonship at the resurrection rather than at birth or before, which implies that Jesus wasn’t always the Son of God in this telling. He became the Son of God when God raised him. The resurrection isn’t proof of a status he already held, it’s the event that confers the status. He gets exalted to divine rank as a reward, lifted up by God after the crucifixion, which means before the crucifixion, he was something less than divine.

Paul himself moves past it. Philippians 2 gives us a hymn, probably older than the letter, about a Christ who existed in the form of God and emptied himself to take human form. According to this account, Jesus doesn't climb up to divinity at the end, he starts divine and steps down into a human life, then gets restored to his rank afterward. One view has a man promoted to God, the other has a God who lowered himself to man. Paul preserves both ideas in the same body of work, they cannot be correct at the same time.

Mark Starts the Clock at the Baptism

The earliest Gospel, written around 70 CE, has no Christmas. Mark opens with a grown man walking out of Galilee to be baptized, and the heavens tear open, and a voice says he’s the beloved Son. That absence isn’t as strange as it looks at first. Greek writers of the period tended to start a biography wherever the noteworthy events began, not at the cradle, so a Gospel that opens with a grown man at a river fits the conventions of the day. What raises eyebrows is the implication. If Mark saw nothing about the birth worth reporting, the simplest explanation is that the story of a miraculous birth hadn’t reached him yet, or didn’t exist for him to report when the oldest Gospel was written around 70 CE.

For a long time readers assumed Mark just skipped the nativity for length. The more careful reading is that Mark’s theology begins where his text begins. The baptism is the moment of divine designation, the public announcement of who this man now is. Mark gives us a Jesus who keeps his identity quiet, silencing demons and swearing disciples to secrecy, which makes sense if the divinity is a new and dangerous fact rather than an obvious one.

Matthew and Luke Bring the Date Forward

A decade later, Matthew and Luke both rewrite Mark and both add birth stories, and the additions move the divine moment earlier. Now Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit. The sonship arrives at conception rather than at the Jordan, which is why both writers need a miraculous birth to carry the weight.

The two nativity accounts contradict each other on almost every checkable detail, the genealogies, the timing, the geography, the reason the family ends up in Nazareth. What they share is the instinct to back the divinity up the timeline. Each generation of storytellers seems less comfortable with a Jesus who became divine partway through his life, so each one moves the start date closer to the beginning.

John Runs the Clock to the Beginning of Everything

By the time we reach John, written around 90 to 100 CE, the trajectory completes itself. The Gospel opens before Bethlehem, before Abraham, before creation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Jesus is divine before the story even starts, before time, before matter.

Look at the four Gospels in sequence and you can watch the moment of divinity slide backward in front of you. Resurrection in the oldest formula Paul quotes, then baptism in Mark, then conception in Matthew and Luke, then eternity in John. The later the text, the earlier the divinity. That pattern tracks the work of a community feeling its way toward an answer it didn’t start with.

What Do I Think?

It’s fair to assume the source of Jesus’s divinity is Paul. By the time the Gospels were being written his letters were already in circulation, so the earliest written Christianity we have is his. And the literal “Son of God” idea sits oddly in a Jewish setting. It reads far more Greek than Semitic, so much so that Roman emperors were claiming the same title for themselves, sons of gods walking the earth.

The Hebrew Bible does have sons of God, but never in the sense that God literally fathered them, with or without a human mother. The phrase marks something God made. The same goes for the divine beings scattered through those texts. They aren’t deities in their own right, they’re creatures God brought into existence, members of his court rather than rivals to his throne. Paul’s Greek-speaking audience would have heard the title against a very different background, one where gods fathered children on earth and emperors traced their bloodline to heaven.

Put Paul in context and his motives come into focus. While it’s impossible to know exactly how Paul thought, and I don’t claim I do, we know for a fact that he believed he was racing to save as many souls as he could before Jesus returned and the end of days arrived. He wasn’t sitting down to compose scripture, he was firing off letters to convince people, at any cost, to believe. In that setting, holding the convictions he held, I wouldn’t blame him for stretching things or filling gaps with his own creativity. He all but tells us he’s operating on his own authority. In Galatians he insists his gospel came straight from revelation rather than from the men who had walked with Jesus, and he describes facing Peter down to his face. The implication he wants you to draw is that his line to the truth runs higher than theirs, which conveniently sidelines the people who knew the man.

Think of it like a parent who’d bend any story to keep a child away from danger and never feel a flicker of guilt about it. Paul believed the stakes were eternal. It would be understandable if a little invention in service of saving souls didn’t trouble him.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

What The Councils Were Doing

Adoptionists were still around in the second century, still reading their Bibles and finding support, because the support sat right there in the text. The fights at Nicaea in 325 and Chalcedon in 451 were institutional attempts to impose a single answer onto texts that had never spoken with one voice.

The version that won, fully God and fully man, co-eternal with the Father, is the one most people now assume was always obvious. It looked nothing like Mark’s Jesus, who enters the story at a riverbank, and nothing like the formula Paul quoted in Romans, where the resurrection does the work. The orthodox answer was one option among several that early Christians lived with, and it became the only option once emperors and councils stood behind it.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014)

• Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press)

• Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003)

• Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Doubleday, 1977)

• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Eerdmans, 2008)

Tags: biblical history, early Christianity, Jesus, Christology, New Testament, Bart Ehrman, Gospel of John, religious history

Every culture that has left a written or spoken record arrived at the same impulse. Before anyone built temples or wrote laws, people were already telling stories about where the world came from and why anyone was here to notice it. The Babylonians had Marduk splitting Tiamat’s body into sky and earth. The Norse had a cosmos assembled from the corpse of a slain giant. The authors of Genesis had a deity speaking light into a formless void. These traditions never met, never borrowed from one another in any direct line, and yet they all reached for the same kind of answer to the same kind of question.

That convergence is the interesting part. It suggests the hunger for an origin story isn’t a quirk of one priesthood or one civilization. It’s something closer to a standard feature of the human mind, and the reasons for it sit at the intersection of cognition, social need, and the plain mechanics of staying alive.

Today’s topic came straight out of the reader survey. Someone asked for it, so here it is.

The survey changed a few other things too. I’m moving to one piece every weekday, and the posts will be shorter and more to the point from here on. More often, less of a time commitment each time.

If you haven’t filled out the survey yet, there’s still time.

Start Survey

The Brain That Can’t Stop Finding Causes

Humans are pattern-detection animals, and the detection runs whether or not there’s a pattern to find. There’s a well-documented tendency to assume that movement, sound, or change has an intentional agent behind it. A rustle in the grass might be wind or it might be a predator.

The ancestors who assumed predator and ran survived more often than the ones who shrugged and kept foraging. So we inherited brains primed to see purpose and intention everywhere, even in places where there’s only weather and physics.

Apply that machinery to the largest possible question, why is there anything at all, and the answer almost writes itself. A mind built to ask “who did this” won’t accept “no one” easily. It looks at a sunrise, a harvest, a death, and reaches for an actor. Creation myths are what you get when agency detection meets the cosmos. They populate the void with someone responsible, because a brain like ours finds a responsible someone far easier to hold than an indifferent nothing.

The same habit shows up everywhere we look. We see faces in clouds and intentions in storms. Gods are that habit, only scaled up to the size of everything.

Death Is the Engine

If agency detection lights the fuse, mortality keeps the fire burning. Humans are, as far as we can tell, the only animals who carry a constant background awareness that they’re going to die. That knowledge is useful for planning and catastrophic for peace of mind, and the tension between the two has shaped a great deal of what we call culture.

One influential account of human behavior builds the whole thing around this. The terror of personal annihilation is so corrosive that humans construct elaborate symbolic systems to manage it. Religion is the most direct of these systems, offering an afterlife, a soul, a cosmic order in which the individual matters and doesn’t simply stop. An explanation of existence almost always smuggles in an explanation of what happens to you when yours ends.

This is why origin stories and death stories tend to arrive as a package. The same Genesis text that explains where the world came from also explains why people die, why labor hurts, why childbirth is agony, why we’re cast out of the garden. The cosmology and the consolation are the same document. You can’t separate the human need to know where everything came from from the human need to believe that going away isn’t the end of the story.

A Story Everyone Shares Is a Society That Holds Together

One of the founding arguments in the study of religion is that belief is the glue of collective life. When a group of people share a story about the origin and order of the world, they share a set of values, obligations, and identities that let strangers trust one another and act as a unit.

A shared origin myth answers more than “where did the world come from.” It answers “who are we, what do we owe each other, and why do our rules have force.” A tribe that believes its laws were handed down by the same power that made the sky will follow those laws more reliably than one that treats them as arbitrary human inventions. The explanation of existence becomes the charter for the society that tells it.

This gives the need a survival logic that operates above the level of any single person. Groups bound by a common cosmology cooperated, defended themselves, and reproduced their structures more effectively. The story didn’t have to be true to work. It had to be shared.

What complicated this was monotheism. For most of human history, communities took it for granted that other peoples had their own gods, and that was fine. Your gods were yours, theirs were theirs, and the arrangement held. Monotheism broke it. A single jealous god who tolerates no rivals turns every other community’s cosmology into a falsehood to be stamped out. The shared story that once bound a single group became a claim about everyone, and the gods of the neighbors stopped being foreign and started being enemies.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

Why Science Hasn’t Closed the Question

We have the Big Bang, evolution by natural selection, plate tectonics, the chemistry of how stars forge the atoms in your body. Surely the need for myth should have evaporated once we could explain the same phenomena with evidence.

It was never meant to. Science asks “how” and religion answers “why,” and the two questions don’t compete because they aren’t aimed at the same target. Scientific cosmology can describe the mechanics with extraordinary precision and still tell you nothing about whether any of it has a purpose, because purpose sits outside what the method can test.

Cosmology can tell you the universe expanded from a hot dense state 13.8 billion years ago. It can’t tell you what that means for how you should treat your neighbor or whether your life adds up to anything. The questions that drove creation myths were never only mechanical. They were questions about meaning, value, and place, and those don’t dissolve when you learn the mechanism.

The hardest thing science offers is the possibility it leaves open, that for all we can measure, there may be no purpose behind any of it. That’s the answer myth exists to refuse.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (2004)

• Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (1993)

• Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973)

• Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

• Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001)

Tags: religion, anthropology, philosophy, cognitive science, mythology, human nature

There’s a certain kind of person online who’s convinced they’ve found the root of every problem, and it’s Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Scroll the replies under any post about war or bigotry or bad policy and you’ll find them, persuaded that if religion would just die already, the fever would break and we’d all wake up reasonable. Religion is the disease, atheism is the cure, case closed.

While I'll give the Church its due as a builder of Western civilization, I've still spent years writing about how the texts got assembled, who edited them, and how much of what gets preached on Sunday would startle the men who wrote the New Testament. So I'm not here to defend the faith but to point out that internet activists are charging at windmills.

The problem was never religion specifically but its exploitation and nationalism or ideology can easily replace religion.

So we’re ending the week with an opinion piece where I’ll talk about a historical event that shows what can happen when you try to kill the influence of religion, but we’ll be back to facts next week. Don’t just read this piece in the inbox. Like it, drop a comment, pick it apart, don’t leave me talking into the void.

Enjoy.

What Religion Does for the People Who Hold It

A religion gives its believers a few things that have nothing to do with whether any of it’s true. It tells them who they are and who they’re not. It hands them a story where they’re on the right side, a community that’ll notice if they disappear, and a reason to get up in the morning that’s bigger than their own small life.

Those needs don’t evaporate when you talk someone out of the resurrection. They stand there, fully intact, looking for the next thing to fill them, and plenty of things are happy to volunteer. Nationalism does the same work. So does a political movement with a flag and an enemy. So does a conspiracy that explains why you’re losing and who to blame. The architecture is identical, and only the paint changes.

When the Ottomans Swapped Faith for Nation

If you want to see how this plays out at the scale of a whole country, look at the late Ottoman Empire. For centuries it ran on a religious organizing principle. The millet system sorted people by faith, and a Christian Armenian, a Greek, a Jew, and a Muslim Turk all lived under an order that defined them first by their religion. It wasn’t tolerant in any modern sense, but there was no assimilation policy, no push for a single Ottoman identity. Everyone followed the basic secular laws, and on top of those they kept the laws their own religion demanded. Mosques, churches, and synagogues stood next to each other. Still, the Muslims were the majority, the binding glue was Islam and the Sultan’s role as caliph rather than blood or ethnicity, and Muslims held first-class citizenship, leaving second-class citizenship to the rest.

Then the empire started losing, badly, for a hundred years. A big part of the reason was the reactionaries who controlled the talking points and stood against any technology or school of thought that came out of Christian Europe. They were so influential that even the Sultan couldn’t overrule them. So a new generation of officers and intellectuals decided the old religious identity was the thing holding them back. The Young Turks who took control by 1913 were modernizers and secular nationalists who wanted to trade the crumbling religious empire for a tight, modern nation built on Turkish identity. The sacred thing stopped being the faith and became the nation. To their credit, that Turkishness was a matter of accepting you were Turkish. The aim was assimilation, not bloodline.

That swap is what turned Armenians from a tolerated religious community into a population the new nation couldn’t place. When some Armenian groups tried to found an independent country on Ottoman land, it became clear they wouldn’t fit into an all-Turkish nation.

Any country would send its army if a group tried to carve an independent state out of its soil. So the problem isn’t that the Ottomans took military action. The problem is how they handled it. They decided the area where an independent Armenia was meant to rise had to be emptied of its Armenian population.

Under the cover of the First World War, the Committee of Union and Progress organized the deportation of the empire’s Armenians, with a death toll that Bloxham, Suny, and most historians outside Turkey put close to a million, many of them marched into the Syrian desert to die.

The line they drew wasn’t ethnic. The Kurds weren’t Turks either, but they were Muslim, and the CUP assumed they’d melt into the Turkish nation through their faith, even using them as instruments in the deportations. Christianity was the disqualifier, and not for theological reasons. In a different universe, if Armenians had been the front-line backers of the nationalist movement, the ultranationalists might have embraced them, hoping it set a precedent for the other Christian minorities. The trouble was Christianity as an identity and the assumption that assimilating Armenians into Turkishness would be hard, maybe impossible.

Scholars like Donald Bloxham and Ronald Suny have traced how a population that had lived there for millennia became disposable once belonging in the new nation got measured by religion rather than the old order that had protected them as a community. The Turkish state still disputes both the scale and the intent, calling the deaths wartime casualties rather than an organized campaign. The documentary record the historians work from says otherwise.

By Turkey's account the high numbers are manufactured, though it admits Armenians died, and it adds that the war killed Muslims in huge numbers too.

On Turkish soil, disputing the state’s account is a criminal matter, prosecutable as insulting Turkishness. The irony is that Turkey’s standing abroad takes its real hit from the prosecutions themselves, not from anything the dissenters say.

That said, the speech runs both ways. In Switzerland, taking Turkey's side is treated as a punishable offense, so policing what gets said about 1915 isn't something only Turkey does.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

The Same People Get Exploited Either Way

The trait that makes someone an easy mark for a charismatic preacher is the same trait that makes him an easy mark for a demagogue, a cult leader, a get-rich-quick pitch, or a movement that needs a scapegoat. It’s the willingness to hand your judgment to a story that flatters you and a leader who promises certainty.

Take away the church and that willingness goes shopping. Sometimes it lands somewhere harmless and often it doesn’t. The anti-vaccine influencer, the strongman politician, the financial guru with a course to sell, they’re all fishing in the same pond, and a freshly deconverted believer is a fat target swimming in it.

If you want fewer people captured by bad ideas, the fight isn’t against any particular belief. It’s for the habits that make capture hard, like checking sources, living with uncertainty, and noticing when a story exists mainly to make you feel righteous. Those habits are rare, hard to teach, and they don’t fit on a protest sign, which is exactly why the loudest voices skip them and swing at the easy target instead.

Teaching people to think is slow, unglamorous work with no enemy to rally against, which is why almost nobody signs up for it. Killing a religion would only leave the same people standing there, just as ready to follow the next voice that sounds sure of itself.

Leave a comment

Share

Upgrade to Paid

Disclamer: This is an opinion essay, not a legal or definitive historical determination. The events of 1915 to 1916 remain the subject of genuine scholarly and political dispute. I've tried to represent the Turkish state's position as well as the conclusions of historians who disagree with it, and readers are encouraged to do their own research and reach their own judgment. Nothing here is intended to insult any nation, people, or faith.

Yesterday a convinced atheist from Quora gave me some negative feedback about this publication, that the newsletter sucks and it's nothing more than mindless drivel that screams I hump for God. He told me to prove him wrong or go do something meaningful with my life instead.

I don't get offended by negative feedback, in fact I appreciate it, since it tells me why the people who don't like this don't like it, or points out something I could do better. People pay for getting their work reviewed, and critical comments come free.

But I didn't agree with this particular review, and I want to lay out my answer to it here and share it with you, including something about my upbringing.

Don’t just read this piece in your inbox—like it, comment on it, and critique it to help shape the future of The Unholy Truth, rather than leaving me in the void.

You Can’t Be the Referee and a Player at Once

Biblical criticism only works if the reader trusts that the analysis isn’t bent toward a predetermined conclusion. The moment I plant a flag (for God, against God), every argument I make afterward gets read through that flag. Point out that the Pastoral Epistles weren’t written by Paul, and a reader who knows I’m an atheist hears an attack on Christianity. Point out the same thing as someone with no declared position, and the reader has to deal with the evidence on its own terms.

The evidence about Pauline authorship doesn’t change based on what I believe about the afterlife. The vocabulary statistics, the anachronistic church structure, the theological drift from the undisputed letters, none of it cares whether I pray. So why would I hand readers a reason to dismiss the analysis before they’ve read it?

Argue against God while doing this work and all you’ve built is an echo chamber where atheists nod along, everyone else clicks away, and you patiently preach to the converted.

The Vegan and the Steak

Think about it. Why should a Christian care what you say about Jesus, the Bible, or the Church if you reject God outright and rub their nose in it every chance you get? As a meat lover, would you trust or even care about a vegan’s review of a steak dish, especially if that person couldn’t help bringing up the horrors of slaughterhouses and dairy farming?

I understand the instinct, but it confuses two different jobs. A vegan can tell you, accurately, whether the steak is overcooked, whether the cut matches the menu description, whether the kitchen sourced what it claimed to source. Those are questions of fact, and competence answers them, not appetite. But the constant reminder of their veganism kills the trust.

What I do here is the second kind of work, without getting into my views on animal farming. When did this text get written? Who wrote it? What did the earliest manuscripts say before later hands changed them? How did a particular doctrine develop across three centuries? These are historical and textual questions with historical and textual answers. My beliefs about the divine are as relevant to them as a chef’s politics are to whether the meat is cooked through.

And the analogy cuts both ways. You don’t want the steak reviewed by someone so devoted to steak that they’ll defend a bad one. You want someone who’ll tell you the truth about what’s on the plate and leave all personal opinions aside.

What Belief Has to Do with It

In other words, what I have to say about Christianity or Islam shouldn’t have anything to do with whether I believe in a god.

The dating of the Gospel of Mark isn’t a theological position. The textual history of the ending of Mark, those verses that don’t appear in the oldest manuscripts, says nothing about whether Jesus rose. The development of Trinitarian doctrine through the fourth-century councils is documented church history that believing scholars and secular scholars largely agree on. The disagreement, where it exists, runs along lines of evidence and method, never along lines of faith versus unbelief.

Some of the best textual critics in the field are practicing Christians. Some are atheists. They publish in the same journals and cite each other’s work because the work stands or falls on its merits. That’s the standard I’m holding this publication to, and declaring my personal theology would undermine it.

Again, this cuts both ways for me as a reader, too. A scholar who happens to be a Christian is fine by me, right up until they introduce themselves as a Christian scholar, at which point I’ve stopped listening. Same with an atheist. The work is welcome, but the moment someone makes their atheism the headline, I lose interest. It's a reflex, a guard against letting someone's agenda do my thinking for me.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

Where This Habit Actually Comes From

All of that is true, but I’ll be honest about the reason, because it predates any of these editorial calculations.

I came up under a strict secularist upbringing, and the lesson got drilled in early: in any official capacity, you leave your personal religious and political views outside the door. You don’t bring them to the desk. You don’t let them color the work you put your name to in a professional setting. The job is the job, and your private convictions are private.

That training stuck, and it shapes how I run this place. The Unholy Truth isn’t my personal diary. It’s a publication with a stated purpose, which is to give readers scholarly material on religion and history without sermon and without an axe to grind. The second I turn it into a confessional, a place where I tell you what I believe and why you should believe it too, it stops being that and becomes something I have no interest in writing.

You came here for evidence, argument, and the occasional uncomfortable fact about texts people treat as untouchable. You didn’t come for my spiritual autobiography, and you’re not going to get it. I think that’s the respectful arrangement, both to the material and to you.

Leave a comment

Share

Upgrade to Paid

Around the year 144, a wealthy shipowner from Sinope stood before the presbyters of the Roman church and laid out a reading of the faith so radical that they expelled him and handed back the enormous donation he’d made when he first arrived. His name was Marcion, and he’d just assembled the first Christian Bible anyone had ever seen. The church threw him out, argued with him for the better part of two centuries, and eventually built its own canon largely in reaction to his. Most Christians today have never heard his name, which is its own kind of win for the people who beat him.

Marcion’s idea was simple as well as devastating. He read Paul, really read him, and decided the God Paul preached, the God of grace and the crucified Christ, couldn’t be the same deity who drowned the world in Genesis, hardened Pharaoh’s heart so he could punish him for it, and ordered the slaughter of Amalekite infants in 1 Samuel 15. So there had to be two Gods. The lower one, the Demiurge, made the material world and handed Israel its Law. The higher one, a stranger God of pure love who’d never once been named in Jewish scripture, sent Jesus to rescue humanity from the Creator’s botched handiwork.

The church that survived called this the worst heresy of the age.

And as always, don’t just read this in your inbox and leave me in the void. Like it, comment, criticize it, help shape The Unholy Truth.

The Bible Becomes a Short Book About Paul

Marcion’s Bible came in two parts, the Evangelion and the Apostolikon, and that was the whole thing. The Evangelion was a version of what we’d call the Gospel of Luke, stripped of the birth narrative and the Jewish framing. The Apostolikon was ten letters of Paul, also edited. No Matthew, no Mark, no John, no Acts, no Revelation, no Hebrew Bible bound in front of it as an Old Testament. The Jewish scriptures stayed real to Marcion, he just thought they belonged to the other God and had nothing to teach a Christian about salvation.

In a Marcion-wins world, that’s the Bible. Christians in 2026 grow up with a sacred text you could read in an afternoon, centered entirely on Paul and a single gospel that reads like Paul’s theology turned into narrative. There’s no Genesis, no Exodus, no Psalms, no prophets. A Christian child never hears about Noah’s ark, never colors in a picture of David and Goliath, never learns the Ten Commandments as a religious obligation, because the Law came from a God this religion exists to escape.

The whole architecture of Christian reading changes. The actual church spent centuries developing typology, the practice of reading the Hebrew Bible as a coded forecast of Christ, where Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice prefigures Jesus carrying the cross, where the Passover lamb points forward to Calvary. None of that exists for Marcion. There’s nothing to prefigure anything, because the old book belongs to a different deity and the connection orthodoxy worked so hard to build is exactly the connection Marcion denied. Christian art loses half its subject matter. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, if it gets painted at all, has no Creation of Adam, because the creation of Adam was the Demiurge’s work and no Christian would put it on a church.

Two Gods, and the Good One Is a Stranger

The center of Marcion’s theology is the split between the Creator and the Father. The God of the Hebrew Bible is real, powerful, and just, in the narrow legal sense of handing out exactly what the Law prescribes. He made the world, and the world is a mess of disease, decay, and death, which tells you something about the workman. Marcion called him the Demiurge, the craftsman, and he didn’t hate him so much as refuse to worship him. Above and beyond this Creator sat a God nobody had ever heard of, with no claim on humanity, no covenant, no history of demanding anything, who acted out of nothing but mercy when he sent Jesus to buy people out of the Creator’s jurisdiction.

This is the part modern Christians would find hardest to recognize as Christianity at all. The faith we inherited insists, hard, on a single God who creates and redeems, whose justice and mercy are the same attribute seen from different angles, and who runs history as one continuous story from Eden to the New Jerusalem. Marcion tears that in half. Salvation stops being the rescue of God’s own creation and becomes a jailbreak, the loving God smuggling souls out of a cosmos that was never his to begin with.

Run that forward and the emotional tone of the whole religion shifts. There’s no “God has a plan” in the Marcionite world, because the God who runs the plan is the one you’re escaping. Suffering doesn’t get explained as discipline or testing or mysterious providence, since the suffering is just the nature of a badly made world, and the good God’s only involvement is the exit he offers. You lose the entire tradition of theodicy, the centuries Augustine and Aquinas and Leibniz spent trying to square a good Creator with a world full of horror, because Marcion answered that question before it was asked. The world is full of horror because the Creator wasn’t good. Next question.

No Incarnation, No Real Body

Marcion’s Jesus didn’t get born. A divine being from the higher God doesn’t pass through the Demiurge’s reproductive machinery, doesn’t spend nine months assembled out of the Creator’s matter, doesn’t enter the world as a screaming infant covered in the stuff of a fallen cosmos. Marcion’s Christ appeared, fully grown, in the synagogue at Capernaum in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, looking human but not made of human flesh. This is the position later called Docetism, from the Greek for “to seem,” and it solved a problem Marcion cared about a great deal. If matter is the Creator’s corrupt product, the redeemer can’t be made of it.

A Marcion-wins Christianity has no Christmas. There’s no manger, no shepherds, no wise men, no star, no Virgin Mary, because there’s no birth to celebrate and no mother to venerate. The entire Marian tradition, the prayers, the apparitions, the cathedrals named for Our Lady, the rosary, the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, never comes into being. Christianity loses its central female figure completely, which has consequences I’ll come back to.

The crucifixion stays, but it means something different. Marcion’s Christ suffered and died, or appeared to, and that death was the price paid to the Creator to release the souls under his Law. The body that hung on the cross was real enough to die yet not the redeemer’s own native substance. You don’t get the doctrine that would later anchor everything, the insistence that God became fully human, that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, that Jesus was true God and true man in one person. The councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon spent three centuries hammering out exactly how the divine and human natures fit together in Christ, and got people exiled and killed over the grammar of it. In a Marcionite world there’s nothing to hammer out. Christ was divine and only looked human, and the long, bloody argument about his two natures never happens.

The Law Is the Enemy, Not the Foundation

Paul wrestled with the Jewish Law. He called it holy and good in Romans and then spent chapters explaining why it couldn’t save anyone, and the tension in his letters comes from a man trying to honor a tradition he’s also leaving. Marcion cut the tension by cutting the respect. The Law wasn’t a holy thing that Christ fulfilled or transcended, it was the Creator’s instrument of control, and the good God’s whole intervention was aimed at freeing people from it. Where Paul agonized, Marcion just rejected.

This produces a Christianity defined against Judaism in the sharpest possible terms, and here the counterfactual turns dark. The historical church carried plenty of its own anti-Judaism, the centuries of “the Jews killed Christ,” the ghettos, the expulsions, the pogroms. A Marcionite church would have all of that built into its theology at the foundation, because in Marcion’s system the Jewish God is literally a lesser, harsher deity and Jewish scripture is the record of the wrong God’s dealings. There’s no Romans 11, where Paul insists the Jews remain beloved and the covenant unbroken, because there’s no shared God to keep a covenant with.

But the picture has a strange flip side. A church with no Old Testament also has no Leviticus, which means the handful of verses Christians have used for two thousand years to condemn homosexuality, the dietary anxieties, the purity codes, the death-penalty lists, none of it is scripture. A Marcionite Christian has no biblical basis for stoning anyone, because the book that prescribes stoning belongs to the rejected God. The modern culture-war Bible, the one quoted in legislatures to justify this prohibition or that one, mostly doesn’t exist, because most of those prohibitions live in the Law that Marcion threw out. You’d trade one set of theological poisons for another rather than escaping poison altogether.

A Religion You Can’t Build an Empire On

Marcion was a hard-line ascetic. If the material world is the Creator’s flawed product and the body is made of his corrupt matter, then the spiritual move is to use as little of it as possible. Marcionite Christians didn’t marry, didn’t have children, didn’t eat meat, and fasted often, because reproduction just manufactures more prisoners for the Demiurge and indulging the body honors the wrong God. This wasn’t a counsel for the especially holy. It was the baseline expectation.

A religion that tells its members not to reproduce has a math problem. The historical church grew partly by conversion and partly by Christian families raising Christian children across generations, and Marcion’s rules cut the second engine entirely. His movement spread fast in the second century, fast enough that Justin Martyr complained it had reached the whole human race, but a faith that depends entirely on adult conversion and forbids its converts from having kids is structurally fragile. Every generation has to be rebuilt from scratch.

So the Marcion-wins scenario contains a paradox. For his theology to win, the ascetic rules would’ve had to soften, the same way every world-denying movement eventually makes its peace with marriage and children when it wants to last. A Marcionite church that survived to 2026 is one that quietly abandoned Marcion’s sexual ethics somewhere along the way, kept the two Gods and the short Bible, and let people marry so there’d be a next generation to inherit it. Which tells you something about why the actual church beat him. Orthodoxy embraced creation, marriage, and childbirth as good things made by a good God, and a religion that blesses families outbreeds a religion that discourages them every single time.

The Reformation Eats Itself

The man who rediscovered him was Martin Luther. Luther’s whole theology runs on the contrast between Law and Gospel, between the terrifying God of judgment and the merciful God of grace, between salvation by works and salvation by faith alone. He got there straight out of Paul, the same Paul Marcion read, and Luther’s instinct to set grace violently against Law is Marcion’s instinct without the second God attached.

In a world where Marcion already won, there’s no Reformation, because there’s no Catholic Church built on the synthesis Luther was reacting against. The whole medieval structure, the sacramental system, the merit theology, the penances and indulgences, was built on the assumption Marcion denied, that the Creator and the Redeemer are one God whose Law and grace work together. Pull that assumption out at the root in the second century and the thing Luther protested against never gets built, so the protest never happens.

What you get instead is a Christianity that was already, from the start, what Luther only wished he could make Christianity into. Grace with no Law underneath it. Faith with no works tradition to fight against. A gospel of pure rescue, unencumbered by the Jewish inheritance that Paul couldn’t quite let go of and that the church spent centuries integrating. The Enlightenment, when it comes, has nothing like the same target, because the orthodoxy it sharpened itself against, the unified Creator-God of natural law and ordered cosmos, was the thing Marcion’s church abandoned in the cradle.

What Happens to Islam

The James-wins counterfactual erased Islam by removing the doctrines Muhammad argued against. Marcion does something subtler and worse. He makes the argument sharper.

Muhammad’s Qur’an attacks Christian claims that compromise strict monotheism, above all the Trinity and the divine sonship of Jesus, and it does this while holding the Hebrew prophetic tradition in the highest regard. Abraham, Moses, and the God who spoke to them are central to the Qur’an, which presents Islam as the restoration of the original monotheism of those very prophets. A Marcionite Christianity hands Muhammad the easiest target in religious history. A faith with two Gods, one of them explicitly the God of Abraham and Moses recast as a lesser deity, is everything Islamic monotheism exists to refute, and the refutation barely needs an argument. You worship the wrong number of Gods and you’ve insulted the prophets. Done.

But the deeper effect runs through the shared scripture. Islam treats the Torah and the Psalms as genuine revelation, given to Moses and David, later distorted by human hands but real at the source. That assumption only works in a world where Christians and Jews already treat those books as scripture from the one true God, the world the historical church created by binding the Hebrew Bible into the Christian one as the Old Testament. A Marcionite Christianity that threw the Hebrew scriptures out entirely breaks the chain Islam later assumed. Muhammad’s whole model of successive revelation to a line of prophets culminating in himself depends on those earlier books being real revelation, and a dominant Christianity that called them the work of a rejected God would’ve poisoned that ground centuries early.

So Islam in a Marcionite world, if it emerges at all, emerges into a religious environment with no shared Abrahamic scripture to claim and restore, facing a Christianity that’s its theological opposite at every point rather than a near cousin it can argue is corrupt. The polemic gets easier and the common ground vanishes. Whatever Muhammad preaches, he’s not completing a tradition the dominant Christianity shares, he’s standing against a religion that denies the prophets he reveres. The family resemblance that let Islam present itself as the original faith restored is gone, replaced by a confrontation with no middle term.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re finding value here, I’d love for you to consider becoming one to keep The Unholy Truth alive.

Upgrade to Paid

The God Who Made the World Is the One You’re Running From

Orthodox Christianity, the one that won, says creation is good, the body is good, marriage is good, and the same God who made all of it is the God who saves it, and history is the story of that God redeeming his own handiwork. It’s a religion that can bless a harvest, consecrate a marriage, build a hospital, and call the material world a gift, because it believes the Maker and the Redeemer are one and the same and that matter was never the problem.

Marcion’s religion can’t do any of that without contradiction. The world is a prison, the body is the prison’s brickwork, the God who built it is not the God who loves you, and the most spiritual thing you can do is want out. A civilization built on that premise doesn’t produce the Christian humanism that fed the Renaissance, doesn’t easily develop the theology of natural law that shaped Western jurisprudence, doesn’t celebrate the goodness of creation that runs from the Psalms through Aquinas to the modern hymn. It produces something colder and more otherworldly, a faith permanently at odds with the cosmos it finds itself in.

The church fathers who fought Marcion understood the stakes better than they’re usually given credit for. Irenaeus, writing around 180, defended the unity of God and the goodness of creation against him with an intensity that only makes sense if he saw what was at risk. What they were defending was the idea that the world is worth saving and the God who made it is worth loving, and that the matter we’re made of isn’t a mistake. Marcion offered a cleaner, more logical religion, a God with no blood on his hands, a Christ untainted by flesh, a salvation that solves the problem of evil by blaming it on a different deity. Christianity looked at that clean, logical, world-hating system and chose the messier God who made the world and called it good.

If Marcion had won, the religion would make more internal sense and offer far less to live for.

Leave a comment

Share

Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford University Press, 2003)

• Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

• R. Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity (Scholars Press, 1984)

• Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (1921; English translation, Labyrinth Press, 1990)

• Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies (c. 180 CE)

• Tertullian, Against Marcion (c. 207 CE)

• Heikki Räisänen, The Rise of Christian Beliefs: The Thought World of Early Christians (Fortress Press, 2010)