A reader told me this week that I shouldn't have to dumb anything down, and that Bart Ehrman, the New Testament scholar with the enormous readership, is the model to follow. He wasn't accusing me of doing it, just warning me off a road he feared in the name of being accessible.

The comment left me with a question he never asked. Ehrman holds a chair at the University of North Carolina and has written thirty books, and most of what I cover here sits somewhere inside them, covered well. So what's the argument for reading me at all?

The honest answer starts with what he's allowed to do that I work hard not to.

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In older editions of the Roman Martyrology, the official Catholic register of saints and their days, under November 27 you’ll find two names listed together: Barlaam, a hermit, and Josaphat, an Indian prince who gave up a kingdom for God. The Greek church kept them on August 26, the Slavic churches on November 19. They had a feast, a biography, a place in the most widely read book of saints’ lives in medieval Europe, and at least one bone sitting in a silver reliquary in Belgium, where it still gets carried through the streets once a year.

Josaphat is the Buddha, and the churches that venerated him for a millennium had no idea.

One thing before we get into it. This is a step outside the usual territory here, so if you want more pieces like this one, say so in the comments. If you hated it, say that too, because a quiet comment section tells me little.

The Prince with a Palace to Hide Death From Him

The Christian version, as medieval Europe received it, goes like this. A king in India named Abenner, a persecutor of Christians, has a son. His astrologers warn him that the boy will one day convert to the faith his father is trying to stamp out. So the king does what fathers in these stories always do: he builds his son a palace, fills it with pleasure, and gives orders that the prince is never to see anything that might turn his mind toward suffering or the divine.

It fails the way it has to, because Josaphat gets out. On one ride he sees a leper and a blind man and learns for the first time that bodies break down. On another he meets a man so old he can barely stand, and he learns that this happens to everyone, including him. Then he learns about death. Shaken loose from the palace and everything in it, he’s found by a wandering ascetic named Barlaam, who teaches him in parables. Josaphat converts. His father tries seduction, argument, and threat to pull him back, then gives up and converts too. Josaphat rules for a while, hands the kingdom over, walks into the desert, and spends the rest of his life as a monk. Miracles happen at his grave.

Anyone who’s heard the standard life of the Buddha has just read it. The palace, the shielding father, the prophecy at birth, the escape, the sick man and the old man and the corpse, the teacher in the wilderness, the renounced throne, the years of asceticism. The Christian version bolted on a conversion and a set of sermons, kept the plot, and shipped it to Europe under a new name.

Bodhisattva, Budhasaf, Yudhasaf, Iodasaph, Ioasaph, Josaphat

The name gives the whole thing away once you line it up. “Bodhisattva,” the Sanskrit title for a being on the path to buddhahood, became Bodisav in Middle Persian. Arabic scribes rendered that as Budhasaf. Then somebody’s pen slipped. In Arabic script, the letter b carries one dot below and the letter y carries two, so a single extra dot turns Budhasaf into Yudhasaf, and that misreading is the form that traveled. Georgian took it as Iodasaph. Greek smoothed it to Ioasaph. Latin dressed it up as Iosaphat, and English got Josaphat.

Barlaam took a similar route, arriving from the Arabic Bilawhar by way of Georgian.

The Route Ran Through Missionaries and a Monk

We figured Manichaeans carried the story to the West thanks to the fragments of the tale that turned up in the ruins at Turfan in western China written in Uighur, Parthian, and Persian. From there an Arabic version circulated in Abbasid Baghdad under the title Bilawhar wa-Budasf. A Georgian Christian writer then rewrote the Arabic into a Christian book, the Balavariani, adding the conversion, the theology, and the martyr’s temperament that the original didn’t have.

The version that conquered Europe was the Greek one, and for centuries it carried the name of John of Damascus, an eighth-century theologian with the prestige to make the book stick. Most scholars now credit Euthymius, a Georgian monk at the monastic community on Mount Athos who translated it from his own language into Greek before dying in a riding accident in Constantinople in 1028. From Greek it went into Latin, and from Latin into every literary language in Europe. It landed in the Golden Legend, the thirteenth-century saints’ collection that sat in more medieval libraries than almost anything else. One of its embedded parables, about a suitor choosing among caskets, worked its way through an English translation and into The Merchant of Venice.

A Doge Sent a Piece of the Buddha’s Spine to Portugal

In 1571, the Doge of Venice, Luigi Mocenigo, presented King Sebastian of Portugal with a bone and part of the spine of Saint Josaphat. When Spain seized Portugal in 1580, the relics left with the Portuguese pretender to the throne, wandered through exile, and reached Antwerp around 1633, where Cistercian monks at St. Salvator’s abbey took them in. In 1672 they were paraded through the city. After the French Revolution shut the abbey down, the relics moved to St. Andrew’s Church, where a silversmith made a new reliquary for them in the 1840s. It goes out in a procession every year.

In other words, there’s a bone in Antwerp that Catholic Europe honored as a relic of the Buddha, and the people carrying it thought they were honoring an Indian prince who’d taken up the cross.

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Marco Polo Missed What the Resemblence Meant

The clues were sitting in the open for a long time. One manuscript of Marco Polo’s travels remarks on how much the life of the man he calls Sakyamuni resembles the life of Saint Josaphat, and stops there. In the sixteenth century a Portuguese chronicler named Diogo do Couto, working in India, saw the same overlap and concluded that the locals had gotten hold of the Christian story and corrupted it into a legend about their own teacher. He had the arrow pointing exactly backward.

Two European scholars finally worked it out in 1859 and 1860, and the identification held. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 states it without a fight: the story is a Christianized version of a legend of the Buddha, and the name comes from a corruption of bodhisattva. The feast day stayed on the books for decades after that admission, which is easier to understand once you know that Barlaam and Josaphat were never formally canonized. They arrived by reputation, through a martyrology entry and a bestselling book of saints’ lives, and reputation is harder to revoke than a decree.

There’s one more thing worth knowing about the text. Tucked inside it sits a version of a second-century Christian defense of the faith addressed to a Roman emperor, a document otherwise lost. The book that smuggled the Buddha into the Christian calendar is also the reason we still have it.

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Paid supporters get the bonus section below, where I walk through the one parable from this book that outlived the book itself: a man hanging over a pit, a beast above him, a dragon below, two mice chewing through the branch, and a few drops of honey on his tongue. It starts in the Mahabharata, arrives in Greek with a unicorn attached, and shows up sixteen hundred years later in Tolstoy, who used it to describe his own breakdown without ever learning where it came from. If you’ve been reading these for free and want to fund the digging, this is where you do it.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Peggy McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint (W. W. Norton, 2014)

• David Marshall Lang, The Balavariani (Barlaam and Josaphat): A Buddhist Tale from the Christian East (University of California Press, 1966)

• David Marshall Lang, The Wisdom of Balahvar: A Christian Legend of the Buddha (Allen & Unwin, 1957)

• Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (Westminster Press, 1981)

• Philip C. Almond, “The Buddha of Christendom: A Review of the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat,” Religious Studies 23 (1987)

• Joseph Jacobs, Barlaam and Josaphat: English Lives of Buddha (David Nutt, 1896)

• “Barlaam and Iosaph,” Encyclopaedia Iranica

• “Barlaam and Josaphat,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)

Jews and Muslims will tell you that they don’t eat pork because it gives you parasites. Pigs can carry worms, and ancient people noticed that eating pork sometimes made people sick, so banning it was a way to protect public health. It’s a satisfying answer because it lets everybody keep their dignity. The ancients get credit for being observant, God gets credit for looking out for people, and the modern reader gets to feel gently superior to both.

Yet, the timeline kills the whole idea.

The parasite behind trichinosis wasn’t identified until 1835, and the link between those worms and undercooked pork wasn’t established until 1860, when an autopsy in Dresden turned up the same larvae in a young woman’s muscles and in the salted pork she’d eaten. That’s roughly twenty-five centuries after Leviticus. Nobody in the ancient Near East was tracking infection rates by protein source, and the beef and mutton they ate freely carried tapeworms with no prohibition attached.

So, where does the pork ban come from?

The Northern Kingdom Ate Pork, Judah Mostly Didn’t

The bone record from the ancient Near East is brutal to the version everyone grew up with.

Excavations across Israel have produced enough animal bone to sort by site, region and century, and sorted that way, 78 assemblages from 35 sites turn up an eighth-century pattern. At the lowland sites of the northern kingdom of Israel, pig bones run between three and eight percent of the animals recovered. That holds at Hazor, Megiddo, Beth-Shean and Yoqne’am, cities in the kingdom the Bible calls Israel, whose residents were eating pork in quantity for generations.

If we head south into Judah in the same century, however, the number collapses below one percent at Lachish, Beersheba and Jerusalem alike. Whatever was going on, it was a regional habit that split along a political border, and the side that kept writing the books happened to be the side that stayed off pork. A practice stretching back to Sinai would show up on both sides of that border.

Pig avoidance was a Judahite trait before it was a national law, and the likeliest moment for the promotion is after 720 BC, when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom and refugees from a pork-eating population started arriving in a kingdom that wasn’t. If you’re a Jerusalem scribe trying to fold those people into your version of the faith, a dietary rule that marks the difference is a useful instrument for saying who belongs and on what terms.

Judah wasn’t perfectly consistent either. Excavators published an articulated pig skeleton in 2021, recovered from a wealthy household in Iron Age Jerusalem, which is to say a pig that got eaten inside the city the rule supposedly came from.

The Philistine Explanation Falls Apart on Contact

The hygiene theory isn’t the only one. The older story blamed the Philistines for pork avoidance. They arrived around 1200 BC, they ate pork, so the Israelites defined themselves against them by refusing it.

The urban Philistine sites do indeed produce a lot of pig. Ekron runs near twenty percent, Ashdod around eleven. But the villages inside Philistine territory, populated by people nobody disputes were Philistine, come in between 0.4 and 1.2 percent. If pork consumption were an ethnic signature, it wouldn’t vanish when you walk twenty miles inland to a smaller settlement. What it tracks is city living, where pigs make sense because they eat garbage, breed fast and don’t need pasture.

The same pattern emerges across the whole region. Pork consumption in the ancient Near East fell steeply after about 1600 BC, centuries before anyone wrote a law about it, as herders shifted toward sheep, goats and cattle, which give you wool, milk and traction while a pig gives you one thing. The pig lost an economic argument long before it lost a theological one.

Egypt makes the point from another direction. Herodotus reports that Egyptians held the pig impure and killed it only for particular festivals, yet Egyptian settlements are full of pig bones and the meat stayed popular with everyone who wasn’t a priest or an aristocrat. The temple could hold a position on the pig while the population went on buying it at market.

Antiochus Turned Dinner Into a Loyalty Oath

So how did a Judahite regional preference become the single most recognizable Jewish practice on earth?

The Maccabean crisis of the 160s BC did most of the work in establishing the pork-avoidance custom. When Antiochus IV moved to suppress Jewish practice, the test he applied was forced consumption of pork, and the martyr stories in 2 and 4 Maccabees are built around refusing it. Eleazar the scribe dies rather than swallow it, and so does a mother with seven sons. Once you’ve buried people over a food, that food stops being a dietary matter and becomes the border of the community.

Rome finished what the Maccabean crisis started. Pork was the Roman meat, so common that a Roman writer on farming could ask who among his people kept a farm without pigs, which made abstaining from it the most legible Jewish behavior an outsider could observe. Roman writers reached for it whenever they wanted to describe a Jew. The pig became shorthand for Rome in rabbinic writing and the refusal became shorthand for the Jews in Roman writing, each side confirming the other’s stereotype.

By the time the Qur’an lists swine’s flesh among forbidden foods, which it does in four passages (2:173, 5:3, 6:145, 16:115), Jewish communities in the region had been keeping the rule for the better part of eight hundred years. It arrives as confirmation of an inherited norm, with no explanation offered, because none was needed.

There’s also almost nothing there to forbid. Pigs need water, shade and somewhere to root, and they return no milk, no wool and no traction, which makes them useless to a herding economy running on sheep, goats and camels. Pig farming in seventh-century Arabia was virtually non-existent, so declaring pork forbidden cost about what it would cost Mexico to declare polar bear meat a religious taboo.

What the Bone Record Settles

The most repeated explanation for the ban treats the pig as a category violation, an animal with cloven hooves that doesn’t chew the cud, out of place in the ordered world of Leviticus. It’s elegant, and it accounts for how the law is worded without accounting for where the law came from. The excavation data accounts for the second part. Pig avoidance was a southern habit before it was a rule, it hardened into a rule when Judah needed to mark itself off from a pork-eating north, and it became the emblem of an entire people only when a foreign king made eating pork the test of obedience.

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If you’re getting something out of these pieces, consider supporting The Unholy Truth. Supporters get the bonus sections, the Friday Editions, and the full archive.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Lidar Sapir-Hen, Guy Bar-Oz, Yuval Gadot, and Israel Finkelstein, “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah: New Insights Regarding the Origin of the ‘Taboo,’” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 129 (2013)

• Lidar Sapir-Hen, “Pigs in Space (and Time): Pork Consumption and Identity Negotiations in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages of Ancient Israel,” Near Eastern Archaeology 81 (2018)

• Lidar Sapir-Hen, Joe Uziel, and Ortal Chalaf, “Everything But the Oink: On the Discovery of an Articulated Pig in Iron Age Jerusalem,” Near Eastern Archaeology (2021)

• Max D. Price, Evolution of a Taboo: Pigs and People in the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2020)

• Jordan D. Rosenblum, “’Why Do You Refuse to Eat Pork?’: Jews, Food, and Identity in Roman Palestine,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100 (2010)

• Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966) and Leviticus as Literature (Oxford University Press, 1999)

• Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1974)

• Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III:48

• Herodotus, Histories 2.47

• Varro, On Agriculture 2.4

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An American evangelical will assert with full confidence that the rapture comes from Revelation, which is awkward, because Revelation never mentions it. The book runs twenty-two chapters through seals, trumpets, bowls, a dragon, a woman on a beast, a lake of fire, and a new Jerusalem, and nowhere in any of it do Christians vanish off the earth ahead of the trouble. The whole doctrine rests on two verses in a letter Paul wrote to a small congregation in Greece, plus a line in Matthew about two men working in a field. Nobody read those passages as a secret evacuation until roughly the year Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon.

Behind this confidence runs a chain of people who each took the doctrine on delivery from whoever stood in front of them, and no one in the line ever went back to ask where the first copy came from. That’s how faith handles knowledge. You inherit the finished product, you defend it, and going looking for its origins feels like disloyalty rather than curiosity. The rapture is the clearest case I know of, because the assembly work happened recently enough that we can name the men, the room, and the year.

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What Paul Wrote to Thessalonica

The verses are 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. Paul tells a worried congregation that the Lord will descend with a shout, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God, that the dead in Christ will rise first, and that those still living will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet him in the air. The Greek verb for “caught up” is harpazo, which the Latin Bible renders rapiemur, and that Latin is where the English word rapture comes from.

Read the passage as Paul’s readers would have. There’s a shout, an archangel’s voice, and a trumpet, which is the loudest arrival anybody in the first century could imagine, and the dead are climbing out of the ground in front of everyone. Nothing about it is secret, and nothing in it happens in two stages. The pre-tribulation rapture takes that single event and splits it in half, putting years of catastrophe between the quiet removal of the church and the public return of Christ. Paul never suggests a gap. Neither does anyone else in the New Testament.

The church didn’t suggest one either. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons writing around 180, spends the fifth book of Against Heresies explaining how Christians will endure the reign of the antichrist, because he assumed they’d be here for it. That expectation held for the next seventeen centuries, through Augustine, through the medieval church, through Luther and Calvin, through the Puritans. Two candidates get offered as early exceptions, a sermon wrongly attributed to Ephraem the Syrian and a 1744 essay by the Welsh Baptist Morgan Edwards, and both are single ambiguous passages that produced no followers, no movement, and no doctrine. A tradition needs more than two disputed paragraphs in eighteen hundred years.

County Wicklow, and a Curate Who Quit

John Nelson Darby trained as a lawyer at Trinity College Dublin, gave up the bar for the ministry, and served as an Anglican curate in the Wicklow mountains south of Dublin. He resigned in 1828 over the established church’s entanglement with the British state and threw in with the Plymouth Brethren, a movement built on the conviction that the visible church had failed past repair.

That conviction is the engine of everything he built next. If the institutional church is a ruin, then God’s real plan has to be running somewhere else, and Darby found it by separating Israel and the church into two distinct peoples with two distinct destinies. Once you hold them apart, the prophetic clock for Israel can’t run while the church is on the ground, so the church has to be taken out of the way before the final seven years begin. The secret rapture solves a problem that only exists if you’ve already accepted Darby’s division.

He worked this out in front of an audience. Lady Powerscourt hosted prophecy conferences at her estate in County Wicklow through the early 1830s, and by 1833 Darby dominated the proceedings. Mark Sweetnam and Crawford Gribben, who’ve done the closest work on the Irish origins of all this, point out that no minutes were kept, which is why the exact moment of invention stays blurry. What the record does show is that Darby’s earliest published prophetic writing, from 1829, expects the church to go through the tribulation, and that the secret removal appears afterward. There’s a popular claim that he lifted the idea from a fifteen-year-old Scottish girl named Margaret MacDonald, who had a prophetic vision in Port Glasgow in 1830. F. F. Bruce, the Manchester biblical scholar, judged direct borrowing unlikely and said the material was in the air. Either way the date holds, and the date is the point.

Seven Crossings and a Country That Said Yes

Britain mostly shrugged. Darby’s own movement split over him, and the Church of England had no use for a man who’d walked out of it. Between 1862 and 1877 he made repeated preaching tours of North America, and there the reception ran the other way.

Postwar America, on the other hand, was apparently the ideal soil. It had a Bible-reading Protestant public, thousands of independent congregations, no bishop anywhere with the authority to rule an interpretation out of bounds, and a recent experience of national catastrophe that made end-times arithmetic feel urgent rather than eccentric. Darby’s system spread through the summer prophecy meetings, above all the Niagara Bible Conference, and picked up the endorsement of Dwight L. Moody, the most famous evangelist in the country. By the 1890s a network of pastors, Bible institutes, and periodicals was teaching it as the plain sense of scripture.

The Kansas Lawyer Who Put It in the Margins

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield enlisted in the Confederate 7th Tennessee Infantry at seventeen, fought at Antietam, got a discharge, was conscripted again, and deserted across Union lines into Kentucky. He read law in St. Louis, won a seat in the Kansas legislature, and became United States Attorney for Kansas at twenty-nine, then resigned in 1873 while under investigation for his handling of money. His wife divorced him in 1883 for desertion, and he remarried the same year. He’d converted in 1879, and he was ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1883 with no theological education of any kind. Through the 1890s he signed himself Rev. C. I. Scofield, D.D., and no institution on record ever granted him the degree.

In 1909 Oxford University Press published his reference Bible, and the design did the work. Scofield’s notes sit on the same page as the King James text, the first English Bible to run commentary alongside scripture that way since the Geneva Bible of 1560. A farmer in Missouri opening it at 1 Thessalonians 4 found Paul’s words on top and Darby’s system underneath, in the same typeface, inside the same leather binding, over the imprint of Oxford. The edition sold more than two million copies by the end of the Second World War, and it became the standard study Bible of American fundamentalism. Millions of readers learned the two-stage second coming as something they’d read in the Bible, because in the only sense that mattered to them, they had.

Everything downstream runs through that page. Dallas Theological Seminary opened in 1924 to train pastors in the system. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth came out in 1970 and sold ten million copies inside the decade and twenty-eight million by 1990, making it the best-selling nonfiction book of the seventies. The Left Behind novels arrived in 1995 and moved tens of millions more. Somewhere along the way a prophecy timeline drafted by an Irish curate hardened into a voting bloc’s position on Middle Eastern policy, which is a strange fate for a footnote.

Count the Years

The empty driver’s seat, the clothes on the floor, the bumper sticker warning you the car will be unmanned, the church-basement arguments over whether the church goes up before, during, or after the tribulation, the wall charts with their seven-year blocks, the countdown sermons keyed to the evening news. All of it is younger than the Book of Mormon, younger than the Alamo, younger than the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Not one Christian on earth held the belief when the United States was founded.

The people who’ll tell you they take the Bible literally, without additions, without tradition, without a magisterium putting words in God’s mouth, learned their end of the world from a nineteenth-century Irishman’s notes printed in the margin, and they’ve never once noticed the margin.

In the exclusive content section for supporters, I’ve pulled the Scofield notes themselves, the annotations on 1 Thessalonians 4 and Revelation 4:1 that turned a private theory into scripture for millions, along with his seven dispensations exactly as he printed them and a breakdown of how the page layout did the persuading.

So where did you first hear it? If you grew up being told the rapture was in Revelation, I want to know who told you, and what happened the first time you went looking for the verse. Comments are open.

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If even a small fraction of regular readers became supporters, I’d spend less time running the business side of this publication and more time in the archives doing the research this work demands.

If you’re getting something out of these pieces, consider supporting The Unholy Truth. Supporters get the bonus sections, the Friday Editions, and the full archive.

Support the work and unlock exclusive content for the full story.

Sources and Further Reading

• Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1970)

• Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982 (University of Chicago Press, 1987)

• Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992)

• Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2014)

• Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (Eerdmans, 2023)

• Mark S. Sweetnam and Crawford Gribben, “J. N. Darby and the Irish Origins of Dispensationalism,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52 (2009)

• Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

• The Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford University Press, 1909; revised 1917)

• Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5

Islam’s scripture arrived in pieces over roughly twenty-two years, and a good portion of it arrived in response to something happening that week. A battle went badly and a verse came, a woman complained about her husband and a verse came. That’s the traditional account, preserved by Muslim commentators who built an entire genre around cataloguing which situation produced which passage, and it’s also what critical historians describe, since the Medinan chapters read like the working papers of a man running a city. Which raises the question of what happens when the situation needing a ruling belongs to the man delivering the rulings.

Four Wives for the Community, No Ceiling for the Prophet

Chapter 4, verse 3 gives believing men a limit of four wives, with the standard advice that one is safer if you can’t treat them equally. Chapter 33, verse 50 addresses one man and hands him a longer list: the wives whose dowries he’s paid, the women he owns, his cousins on both his father’s and mother’s side who emigrated with him, and any believing woman who offers herself to him if he wants to marry her. Then the clause that does the work: “exclusively for you, not for the rest of the believers.”

The verse names its own exception. Nobody had to reason it out of the text later. Two verses on, the door closes behind him, since 33:52 says no more women after these, no trading one wife for another, “even if their beauty pleases you,” with the women he already owns exempted from the freeze. Muslim tradition counts nine wives living when he died, and it never treated that number as a scandal, because the scripture had already ruled on it.

Zayd, Zaynab, and an Adoption Law That Moved at a Convenient Moment

Zayd was a slave Muhammad had freed and then adopted, which in Arabia carried the full legal weight of sonship. Zayd’s wife was Zaynab, Muhammad’s own cousin. The marriage soured, and chapter 33, verse 37 preserves the part a later editor would have cut: Muhammad tells Zayd to keep his wife and fear God “while you concealed within yourself what God was to disclose, and you feared the people, while God has more right that you fear Him.” He wanted her, he knew how it would look, and the verse preserves both facts.

Then comes the resolution: “So when Zayd had no longer any need for her, We married her to you,” with God performing the marriage directly. The stated purpose is that believers should feel no difficulty about marrying the ex-wives of their adopted sons. The obstacle to that marriage was that Zaynab had been the wife of his son, and the passage takes that obstacle apart from both ends. Verses 4 and 5 of the same chapter abolish adoption as a legal relationship and instruct people to name children after their birth fathers. Verse 40 states that Muhammad is not the father of any of your men. He’s the messenger of God and the last of the prophets.

Adoption stayed abolished across Islamic law from that point on, which is why Muslim-majority legal systems today handle orphan care through guardianship arrangements that withhold the family name and inheritance rights. The ruling behind all of it entered the record attached to one marriage.

Aisha’s Remark About a God in a Hurry

Chapter 33, verse 51 tells him he may put off whichever of his wives he wishes and take in whichever he wishes, and that if he wants one he’d set aside, no blame attaches. The traditional setting is the wives quarrelling over the rotation of nights.

Aisha, his youngest wife and the daughter of his closest political ally, is recorded reacting to it: “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.” That’s Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith 4788, sitting inside the collection Sunni Islam treats as its most reliable source after the Quran. The tradition kept the line and read it as a wife’s jealousy rather than an accusation. It still means the tradition preserved a complaint about the timing of these verses from someone who slept in the house.

The Oath He Swore, the Wives Who Talked, and the Chapter That Settled It

Chapter 66 opens with God asking him why he forbids himself something lawful “seeking to please your wives.” The commentators offer two versions of what he’d sworn off. In one he’d been eating honey at a wife’s house and two others conspired to tell him his breath smelled, so he gave up honey. In the other he’d been found with Maria, a Coptic slave woman sent to him as a diplomatic gift from the Byzantine governor of Egypt, and he promised to stay away from her.

The chapter releases him from the oath, and then it turns on the two wives. They’re told to repent because their hearts have deviated. If they back each other against him, God is his protector, along with Gabriel, the righteous among the believers, and the angels. And verse 5 floats the replacement: if he divorced them, his Lord might give him better wives, “previously married or virgins.”

Somewhere in Medina two women complained about their husband’s household arrangements and got answered by the creator of the universe, with the angels listed as character witnesses.

A Fifth of Everything Taken, and Everything Taken Without a Fight

Chapter 8, verse 41 assigns one-fifth of all war spoils to God and the Messenger, his relatives, orphans, the poor, and travellers. Since God doesn’t collect, the Messenger administers the share.

Chapter 59 goes further with property seized from a Jewish tribe expelled from Medina. Verse 6 explains that these gains belong to the Messenger because the community “did not spur a horse or a camel for it,” meaning no fighting took place, so no soldier holds a claim. Verse 7 distributes it and then adds a line that outgrew its context entirely: “Whatever the Messenger gives you, take it, and whatever he forbids you, abstain from it.” That sentence became the standard proof text for treating his rulings and personal practice as binding law alongside the Quran itself. It arrived in a passage about dividing confiscated real estate.

The Fee to Speak With Him Privately, and How Long It Survived

Chapter 58, verse 12 instructs believers to give charity before consulting the Messenger in private. People had been taking up his time, and the fee sorted the urgent from the merely curious.

Verse 13 cancels it: “Are you afraid of spending in charity before your private consultations? Since you did not do it, and God has turned to you in mercy, then establish prayer and pay the alms.” The reports say almost nobody paid, and that Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, was the only man who ever handed over the coin. Two consecutive verses preserve a rule, the community’s refusal to follow it, and its withdrawal.

House Rules, Written Into Scripture

Chapter 33, verse 53 is the longest passage in the Quran about etiquette, and every clause of it concerns his home. Don’t come to his houses for a meal unless you’re invited. Don’t show up early and wait around for the food to be ready. Eat and then leave, and don’t settle in for conversation, because it bothers him and he’s too embarrassed to tell you. Ask his wives for things from behind a screen. Don’t cause the Messenger distress. And don’t ever marry his widows after him.

Chapter 49 tells believers not to raise their voices above his voice or address him the way they address each other, in case their deeds are cancelled without their noticing. Chapter 24 tells them not to summon him the way they summon one another, and not to leave a meeting without his permission.

What Historians Do With the Timing

The scholarly reading doesn’t require anyone to be a fraud. W. Montgomery Watt, whose Muhammad at Medina remains a standard account, treats the Medinan chapters as the administrative record of a leader consolidating a community, in which marriages did political work. Marrying Abu Bakr’s daughter and Umar’s daughter bound him to his two strongest supporters, and later marriages sealed terms with defeated tribes. Fred Donner’s Muhammad and the Believers describes the same material as the governing output of a movement that had turned into a state. Barbara Freyer Stowasser’s Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation follows what happened next, as verses produced by specific household disputes hardened into permanent law for women who never met anyone involved.

Muslim scholarship arrived at the same observation from the other direction and built a whole discipline on it, cataloguing which circumstance produced which passage. You can’t open those commentaries without accepting the premise that a large portion of the book responds to events on the ground.

The traditional defense is straightforward and has been on the table since the ninth century. A prophet carries burdens ordinary believers don’t carry, so he receives provisions ordinary believers don’t receive, and the exemptions are compensation for a job nobody else has.

Both explanations account for the verses, and neither makes the pattern go away, because the pattern sits in the text rather than in anyone’s reading of it. The exemptions cluster around marriage, money, and access to his person, they appear at the moment each became contested, and the text flags most of them as applying to him alone.

A Book That Existed Before the Universe, Ruling on Dinner Guests

The Quran presents itself as universal and permanent. Chapter 34, verse 28 tells Muhammad he was sent “only as a deliverer of good news and a warner to all of humanity.” Chapter 85 calls it a glorious recitation “recorded in a preserved tablet,” kept with God rather than composed on earth. Mainstream Sunni doctrine went further and settled on the position that the Quran is eternal and uncreated, God’s own speech, existing alongside him before anything else existed at all.

That position had to be fought for. In 833 the caliph al-Ma’mun set up courts of inquiry and required judges and scholars across the empire to affirm the opposite, that the Quran was created in time like everything else God makes. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Baghdad jurist whose followers became one of the four Sunni schools of law, refused and was imprisoned and beaten for it. Around 848 the caliph al-Mutawakkil reversed the policy so completely that holding the created-Quran view became a capital offense. The eternal, uncreated reading won, and it’s what most Muslims are taught today.

Follow that doctrine to where it goes. The instruction to eat and leave instead of sitting around his house making conversation existed before there was a house, a meal, or a guest to overstay. The passage releasing him from an oath he swore to placate two jealous wives existed before there were wives to placate. The fee for a private word with him, paid once by one man and cancelled in the very next verse, was inscribed with God before the creation of the world and preserved for a species that would mostly never meet him.

The theologians who set mainstream Sunni doctrine saw the difficulty and produced an answer: God’s speech is eternal as meaning, while the Arabic wording and its sequence came into being in time. That’s a serious answer, and it concedes the thing that matters here, which is that the wording tracks the events.

The same concession sits inside the doctrine of abrogation, which Muslim jurists had to develop because verses in the book cancel other verses in the book. A text handed down whole from outside time has no occasion to revise itself.

A seventh-century leader running his household through his own religious authority is ordinary enough, and men with religious authority have done it in every century on every continent. What’s harder to square is the claim attached to this particular record. A Muslim in Lagos or Jakarta or Detroit in 2026 inherits rules about how loudly to speak in the presence of a man who died in 632, when to get up from his dinner table, and which of his cousins he was permitted to marry. Orphans across most Muslim-majority countries still can’t be adopted with a family name and inheritance rights, because one marriage in Medina required the category to be taken apart. Women pray behind a partition traceable to a verse about access to his wives’ rooms.

The book asks to be read as guidance for all people in all centuries, and a good share of its legislative content reads as the minutes of one man’s decade in one town. The commentaries Muslims have relied on for twelve hundred years say the same thing about how those verses arrived. They just don’t count it against the book.

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If you’re getting something out of these pieces, consider supporting The Unholy Truth. Supporters get the bonus sections, the Friday Editions, and the full archive.

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Sources and Further Reading

• The Quran, chapters 4, 8, 24, 33, 49, 58, 59, and 66. Translations quoted here follow Sahih International and Mustafa Khattab’s The Clear Quran.

• Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith 4788, for Aisha’s comment on chapter 33, verse 51.

• W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford University Press, 1956).

• W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman (Oxford University Press, 1961).

• Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1994).

• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Harvard University Press, 2010).

• Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

• Michael Cook, Muhammad (Oxford University Press, 1983).

• John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford University Press, various editions).

• Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad, translated by Anne Carter (Pantheon, 1971).

Welcome to the second Friday Edition, where we’ll look at Christian history and antisemitism.

It’s a subject that gets people’s backs up, and usually for the same reason. When someone treats it critically, the blame lands on Christianity itself, as though one unchanging religion has been running since the first century. Readers hear an accusation pointed at their own faith, go defensive, and the history stops being something anyone can learn from.

Antisemitism has worked in Christian history the way white supremacy has. Both claim Christian inspiration, both tell people how they’re supposed to live, and both reach for political power on that basis, which makes them ideologies.

So when I write “Christians” and “Christianity” in what follows, I mean the churches, councils and preachers who spoke in Christianity’s name and had the power to act on it at the time.

Hitler Wasn’t Reading Aquinas

The Nazis weren't, by any meaningful theological measure, devout Christians executing church doctrine although crowds involved were predominantly Catholic or Protestant. Hitler wasn't reading Aquinas for policy guidance, and the SS didn't check with the Vatican before Babi Yar. The regime wasn't trying to convert Jews to Christianity to give them their citizenship back. But that makes it anything but a closed case when it comes to Christianity's relationship with the Holocaust.

You have to ask where several hundred million ordinary, baptized, church-attending Europeans got the idea that Jews were a poison in the body of Christendom that needed to be cut out. The resentment wasn’t a twentieth century thing that went viral. They inherited it, generation after generation, from an institution that had been road-testing that idea since before the Roman Empire converted.

The Original Sin: Deicide

The charge itself is older than Christendom as a political entity and it never left. The Gospel of Matthew has a Jewish crowd shouting “His blood be on us and on our children,” and for the next nineteen centuries, preachers treated that line as a permanent indictment, not a piece of first-century polemic between Jews arguing with other Jews about who Jesus was. By the time gentiles ran the church instead of Jews who followed Jesus, the argument had curdled into a permanent verdict: Jews were guilty of killing God, and guilt like that doesn’t expire.

Once Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the state religion in 380, that theological grudge got teeth. Bishop Ambrose of Milan, a man the church now calls a saint and a Doctor of the Church, argued against Jews receiving compensation after a mob burned down their synagogue, asking rhetorically who would even avenge a synagogue. That’s a bishop, on the record, treating the destruction of a Jewish house of worship as barely worth mentioning, and he wasn’t some crank on the margins. He was mainstream fourth-century leadership, setting the tone for everyone downstream.

Building the Machinery

From there the church legislated hostility. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 ordered Jews to wear distinguishing clothing so Christians wouldn’t accidentally mix with them, the same logic the Nazis reached for with the yellow star seven centuries later, minus the subtlety. Ghettos, formalized in Venice in 1516 but practiced in various forms earlier, physically walled Jewish communities off from Christian ones. Forced conversions ran through Visigothic Spain and France in the seventh century, where Jews were given the choice of baptism, slavery, or exile, a pattern that repeated across Europe for a thousand years under different kings.

Then there’s the blood libel, the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. It got preached from pulpits, endorsed by local church authorities, and used to justify massacres from England in the twelfth century through to Russia in the twentieth. The Crusades, ostensibly launched against Muslims controlling Jerusalem, produced some of the worst anti-Jewish violence in medieval Europe before the armies even left the continent, because Christian mobs decided the “infidels” back home were a more convenient target than the ones holding the Holy Land itself.

Luther Doesn’t Get a Pass

Martin Luther, the man Protestants credit with restoring the true gospel, wrote a 1543 pamphlet called “On the Jews and Their Lies” after Jewish communities declined his offer to convert. In it, he called for synagogues to be burned, Jewish homes destroyed, prayer books confiscated, rabbis forbidden to teach on pain of death, and Jews reduced to forced labor or expelled outright. It’s Luther’s own explicit program, in his own words, no footnote scholars had to dig up.

Four hundred years later, in November 1933, the Nazi party threw a nationwide celebration for the 450th anniversary of Luther’s birth, describing their movement as the completion of what Luther started. When Kristallnacht happened in November 1938, Nazi propagandists made a point of noting it fell near Luther’s birthday, treating a pogrom that burned synagogues and murdered Jews across Germany as a kind of anniversary gift to a Reformation hero. That line was drawn by the Nazis themselves, not by historians looking to smear the church after the fact.

But if Christianity is the source of this hatred, how come thousands of Christians in Nazi Germany ended up in the transport wagons that carried them to their suffering and, for many, even to their deaths? The answer to that is sitting in Mein Kampf, the book Hitler published long before he took power.

Friday Editions are exclusive to paid subscribers. The rest of this one covers what Hitler wrote that no church council ever taught, why Christians were killed too, and what the Vatican admitted in 1965.

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Skepticism about the passion stories is well-earned, and it tempts people to apply the same solvent to everything else in the New Testament. Paul the persecutor looks like an obvious candidate. A dramatic villain origin, a blinding light on the road, a name change: the story has the shape of a legend.

The name change is the easiest of the three to check, and it goes first. Acts calls him Saul through the road to Damascus and for four chapters after it, until a stray line in chapter 13 mentions he was also called Paul, in the middle of a trip to Cyprus. He carried both names all along, one Hebrew and one Roman, the way plenty of Roman citizens born Jewish did. Nobody renamed him on the road.

The persecution is a different matter, because Paul keeps bringing it up himself.

To the Galatians he writes that they’ve heard of his earlier life in Judaism, how he persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it, and that the Judean churches knew him only by reputation as the man who once tried to destroy the faith he now proclaims. To the Corinthians he calls himself the least of the apostles, unfit to be called one, because he persecuted the church of God. To the Philippians he lists it among his credentials as a Pharisee: as to zeal, a persecutor of the church.

Three letters, three different audiences, three different rhetorical purposes. These are the earliest Christian writings we have, decades ahead of any gospel, and the man is volunteering the worst thing anyone could say about him.

What a Man Without a Prison Could Do

Imagine running a community with no jail. You let the innocent go, you execute anyone who’s committed a capital crime, and then what do you do with everyone in between?

Paul in the 30s was a young Pharisee with no office, no troops, no jail, and no power to execute anyone. He was also working outside Jerusalem. When he tells the Galatians that the churches of Judea knew him only by reputation, he puts his own persecuting somewhere else, out in the synagogues of the diaspora. The best clue to what he did to others is what was later done to him.

In 2 Corinthians he lists his sufferings, including five occasions on which he received the thirty-nine lashes from Jewish authorities, a punishment given to someone who’s crossed a line and is still allowed to stay. Paul kept coming back for it, which tells you both that he still considered himself a Jew and that the local synagogues still considered him one of theirs, or they’d have expelled him instead of flogging him.

Twenty years earlier, Paul was the one handing out the punishment. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jews meeting in synagogues and making a claim their neighbors found scandalous, that a man Rome had crucified was God’s messiah. Deuteronomy calls anyone hanged on a tree cursed, and Paul himself later quotes that verse. The movement was also taking in gentiles without asking them to keep the Law, which meant uncircumcised men eating at the same table. Disputes like that got settled with public floggings and expulsions. Paul flogging believers in the 30s and synagogues flogging Paul in the 50s are the same procedure, run out of the same synagogues.

A synagogue only flogs its own. Whatever Paul did to the first followers of Jesus, he did it to fellow Jews, inside the community all of them still belonged to, which makes his persecution evidence that the movement hadn’t left the synagogue yet.

What the Acts Improves

Acts makes it all a thriller. A crowd stones Stephen, a member of the Jerusalem community accused of speaking against the temple, and the men throwing the rocks lay their coats at Paul’s feet. He then goes house to house dragging men and women off to prison. He asks the high priest for letters authorizing him to arrest followers of the Way in Damascus and march them back in chains. Later, defending himself before Agrippa, the Jewish king Rome kept on the throne in the region, he says he cast his vote against believers condemned to death.

Paul never says he killed anyone. He never mentions arresting anyone, or having anywhere to put them, or holding a warrant. Every one of those details comes from Acts alone, and several of them fail against what we know of the period. The high priest couldn’t compel anyone in Damascus. The city sat in another province, and in 2 Corinthians Paul says the men hunting him there answered to Aretas, the Nabataean king whose territory ran along the city’s southern edge. A letter from Jerusalem carried whatever deference a synagogue chose to give it, and nothing more.

Casting a vote means sitting on a body that sentenced people to death, which puts Paul on the Sanhedrin, the council of chief priests and elders that heard capital cases. He tells the Philippians he was circumcised on the eighth day, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, a Pharisee, and he leaves the council seat out. Acts also has him raised in Jerusalem and trained under Gamaliel, the most respected Pharisee teacher of that generation, and has him tell Agrippa that every Jew knows he was brought up in the city from the start. Paul writes that the churches of Judea had never seen his face.

Acts was written decades later by someone with a case to make about the continuity of the movement and the innocence of its leaders. The conversion lands harder when the man on the road to Damascus is at his most terrifying.

The Jewish Christians Who Hated Paul

The Ebionites were law-observant Jewish followers of Jesus who lasted into the early centuries, and they loathed Paul. Everything we know about their complaint concerns Torah observance. Irenaeus says they rejected him as an apostate from the Law, and Epiphanius passes along a story that he was a Greek convert who took on circumcision hoping to marry the high priest’s daughter. Nothing about him having hunted their own spiritual ancestors, which sounds like an argument against the persecution until you notice that both reports come from hostile outsiders writing one and three centuries later, summarizing a group whose own books are gone.

The Pseudo-Clementine literature, which comes out of the same Jewish-Christian currents, cuts the other way. In the Recognitions, an unnamed enemy leads a violent assault on James in the temple, throws him down the steps, then heads for Damascus with authority to arrest believers. Scholars have long read that figure as Paul with the name filed off, which puts a memory of the persecution inside the very tradition supposed to have lost it.

A Man with Baggage

Paul’s past wouldn’t matter much if he were one of the men Jesus picked. He was around, and he wasn’t picked.

Paul’s entire authority rests on Jesus skipping the men he’d spent his ministry training and appearing in secret to a thirteenth, unconnected man, handing him new instructions and leaving the original disciples in the dark to spread a wrong form of Christianity until Paul showed up to correct them.

If a man’s past doesn’t count when you’re weighing a claim like that, what else were you planning to use?

If that was not enough, the moment everything relies on is told four times in the New Testament, and no two of the four agree.

Acts tells this story three times and contradicts itself each time. Paul's own version has no road, no light, and no blindness in it. All four, side by side, unlocked only for supporters below.

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If even a small fraction of regular readers became supporters, I’d spend less time running the business side of this publication and more time in the archives doing the research this work demands.

If you’re getting something out of these pieces, consider supporting The Unholy Truth. Supporters get the bonus sections, the Friday Editions, and the full archive.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Galatians 1:13-14, 1:22-23; 1 Corinthians 15:9; Philippians 3:6; 2 Corinthians 11:24-33

• Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (2017)

• E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977)

• Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (2006)

• Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.2

• Epiphanius, Panarion 30

• Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.70-71

• Acts 7:58, 8:3, 9:1-2, 13:9, 22:3, 26:10

Everybody knows the Bible hates other gods. Smash the altars, burn the poles, kill the prophets of Baal on the mountain and don’t leave one standing. What gets overlooked is how much of those gods ended up inside the God who beat them. Israel’s deity rose in a crowded room, and when the room cleared he was wearing everyone else’s clothes.

The Ugaritic tablets dug up at Ras Shamra in 1929 gave us the Canaanite side of the story in its own language, written down before Israel had much of a literature at all.

The scholars who worked most of this out teach at seminaries and divinity schools, and plenty of them are practicing Christians. What follows is where critical scholarship sits. In the bonus section, supporters get what the different camps of Christian scholars say about all of it, including the ones who read the same evidence and reach the opposite conclusion, so you finish with the full picture.

El Handed Over the Throne and the Family Name

At the top of the Canaanite pantheon sat El, the old father god with a divine council and seventy sons. Israel is named after him. So is Bethel, Elijah, Ezekiel, Michael, and the plain word for God that runs through Genesis. Nobody in the Hebrew Bible ever treats El as a foreign god to be destroyed, which is strange treatment for the head of the neighbors’ pantheon.

The reason is that Yahweh took the office rather than fighting the occupant. You can watch the transfer happen in Deuteronomy 32:8-9. In the version preserved at Qumran and in the old Greek translation, the Most High divides humanity according to the number of the sons of God, and Yahweh receives Jacob as his allotted share. That’s a junior deity getting one nation out of the family estate. The Masoretic text later changed the line to read “sons of Israel,” which fixed the theology and left the seam visible.

Psalm 82 keeps the council intact. God stands in the assembly of the gods and puts them on trial for running the world badly, then sentences them to die like men. Whoever wrote that wasn’t denying the other gods existed. He was firing them.

Baal Lost the Storm

Baal was the storm god of the Canaanites, and his standing title in the Ugaritic texts is “rider of the clouds.” Psalm 68:4 hands that exact title to Yahweh. When God shows up in Hebrew poetry he arrives the way Baal arrives, in thunder, on cloud, with lightning as ammo and the mountains melting like wax underneath him.

Elijah’s contest on Carmel reads differently once you know this. It’s a fight over which storm god ends a drought, held on Baal’s home turf, decided by fire from the sky and then rain. The winner takes the job description with him.

The Sea Monster Was a Rerun

Baal’s great achievement was killing Yam, the Sea, and the seven-headed serpent Lotan. A Ugaritic tablet describes Lotan as the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent, the mighty one with seven heads.

Isaiah 27:1 promises that Yahweh will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and kill the dragon that’s in the sea. Same monster, same two adjectives, different killer. Psalm 74:13-14 remembers God splitting the sea and crushing the heads of Leviathan, plural, because the thing had more than one. Job 41 gets the beast after the domestication, reduced to a crocodile with attitude that God likes to show off.

In Genesis 1, the sea is still there in verse 2, dark and formless, but nobody has to fight it. God speaks and it moves. That’s a war story rewritten by the side that already won.

Asherah Went From Wife to Firewood

At Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai, on storage jars from around 800 BCE, someone wrote a blessing “by Yahweh of Samaria and by his asherah.” A tomb inscription at Khirbet el-Qom says something close. These are ordinary Israelites, blessing each other in the ordinary way, and Yahweh comes with a consort.

The Bible confirms it by complaining. Josiah has to haul the Asherah out of the Jerusalem temple and burn it in the Kidron valley, along with vessels made for Baal and for all the host of heaven, and he has to tear down the quarters where women wove hangings for her (2 Kings 23:4-7). You don’t remove furniture from your own temple unless somebody put it there and kept it there for generations.

She doesn’t vanish so much as get respectable. Proverbs 8 has a female figure who was beside God at creation, delighting in him daily, calling to men from the city gates. Her name is Wisdom now, and she’s an attribute instead of a wife.

Death Got Demoted Into a Common Noun

Mot was the Canaanite god of death, and his defining move was swallowing. He swallows Baal whole and the world dries up. Isaiah 25:8 says God will swallow up death forever, which flips the myth by giving Yahweh the appetite. Hosea 13:14 taunts the same figure by name, asking where his plagues and his destruction are.

Two more gods survive in Hebrew as staff. Habakkuk 3:5 has plague going before Yahweh and pestilence following at his feet, and both words are the names of deities in Canaanite texts. Deber and Resheph used to have altars. In Habakkuk they’re walking behind the chariot like servants who lost a war.

The Morning Star Fell Into Somebody Else’s Story

Isaiah 14 mocks the king of Babylon by calling him Helel ben Shahar, Day Star son of Dawn, the one who said he’d raise his throne above the stars of God and got thrown down to the pit instead. Dawn was a god. So was the morning star, and Canaanite myth has a lesser deity trying to occupy the high throne and failing.

Jerome translated Helel into Latin as Lucifer, and the church read the passage as the fall of Satan, which is a promotion the text never offered. A dead Canaanite god became the devil by way of a joke about a Babylonian king.

Scribes Went Back and Edited the Names

The clearest evidence for how problematic all this got is the names. Saul’s son appears as Eshbaal in Chronicles and Ishbosheth in Samuel. Jonathan’s son is Merib-baal in one place and Mephibosheth in another. Gideon’s other name is Jerubbaal, and one verse in Samuel calls him Jerubbesheth.

Bosheth means shame. Israelite parents were naming their sons after Baal, and later scribes went through the text swapping the god’s name for an insult. They caught most of them. The ones they missed are still sitting there in Chronicles, which is how we know what the originals said.

That’s the pattern from Genesis to Isaiah. The gods of Canaan weren’t argued out of existence but dismantled, and the parts were kept, and the God who ended up holding all the parts is the one that three religions inherited.

In the exclusive section of this piece, we will explore how Christian scholars from various theological factions respond to this history. I have deliberately laid out these facts with absolute honesty, even when doing so appears to undermine my own argument.

Leave a comment

If even a small fraction of regular readers became supporters, I’d spend less time running the business side of this publication and more time in the archives doing the research this work demands.

If you’re getting something out of these pieces, consider supporting The Unholy Truth. Supporters get the bonus sections, the Friday Editions, and the full archive.

Support the work and unlock exclusive content for the full story.

Sources and Further Reading

• Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel

• Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism

• Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic

• Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy

• John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan

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

• Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, Pieter W. van der Horst, eds., Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible

• Simon B. Parker, ed., Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (translations of the Baal Cycle)

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Every Easter, the accusation gets dusted off and put back on the road: The Jews rejected him, handed him over, and shouted for his blood while a decent Roman governor tried to save him. Christ-killers. Two thousand years of pogroms, expulsions, and ghettos have rested on that phrase.

Yet the same tradition that blames the Jews insists the execution was voluntary. He went willingly; he could have called down legions of angels to stop it at any moment. He also knew precisely what it would take to convince the crowd he was the Messiah, yet chose to conceal his glory and walk among them as an ordinary man.

Before We Begin

Two things.

First, this post may read like an attack on Christianity to my Christian readers. Please take the whole thing as a set of questions instead. If you have sensible answers to anything raised here, answers that hold your faith together and leave you confident you've been intellectually honest with yourself, I'm fine with that too. Your faith is yours to question or not to question, and nobody else gets a vote.

Second, this post runs about 50% longer than what I aim for, since a lot of you have told me you want the pieces to be shorter and more pointed. I spent quite a while trimming what you’re about to read, and then decided to give you the unabridged version anyway.

So tell me: is this piece too long, or am I keeping myself busy for nothing? Answer in the comments, and tell me what you thought of the piece while you’re there.

Best,
-Tanner

The Statute They Convicted Him Under Came From God

Let’s talk a bit about the accusation the Gospels themselves put in the high priest’s mouth now. Mark 14:64 has Caiaphas tear his robes and say “You have heard the blasphemy.” That’s the charge. That’s the whole basis of the Sanhedrin scene.

Torah commands in Leviticus 24:16: “One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death. The entire assembly shall stone him.” No ambiguity, no discretion, no wiggle room for good behavior. The penalty is death and the community carries it out.

That law didn’t come from Roman occupation policy or from a corrupt priesthood inventing pretexts. In the text Christians treat as divinely given, God wrote it. He dictated it to Moses. So if the Sanhedrin heard a man claim to be the Son of the Blessed One and convicted him of blasphemy, they were doing precisely what their God had commanded them to do, under a statute he authored, with a penalty he specified.

You can’t hand a people a capital law, spend fifteen hundred years insisting they follow it to the letter, and then curse their descendants for following it. Either the law was good or it wasn’t. Christian theology has never picked one.

He Had Every Chance to Say They’d Misheard Him

Mark 14:61-62 has the high priest ask directly: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus answers, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

Under the statute as written, that’s a defendant supplying the confession the law requires, and then adding the Daniel 7 imagery on top of it for emphasis. Matthew and Luke soften it into something more evasive, which tells you the later writers noticed the problem, but Mark, the earliest Gospel we have, gives us a straight answer to a straight question.

To Jewish clergy operating under Levitical law, what else was that supposed to sound like? A man in first-century Judea claiming a seat at the right hand of God is describing something the law has one category for.

And Jesus doesn’t correct the reading. He knew first-century Judea had as many messianic claimants as we have YouTube influencers. Nobody’s word was taken at face value, and nobody’s should have been.

Nobody Threw a Stone

Father prescribes stoning for blasphemy in Leviticus. Jewish capital punishment in this period, as the Mishnah later lays it out in Sanhedrin 7:1, ran to four methods: stoning, burning, decapitation, strangulation. Crucifixion isn’t on the list, and it isn’t on the list because it isn’t Jewish.

A crowd demanding Jesus’s execution for blasphemy would certainly have demanded the chance to stone him, the way their own God had ordered it done.

There’s also the question of who was permitted to kill anybody. Under Roman rule the Sanhedrin had no capital jurisdiction, and John 18:31 concedes it when the priests tell Pilate they aren’t allowed to put anyone to death. Josephus confirms it from the other direction: when the high priest Ananus convened the council and executed James, the brother of Jesus, during a gap between governors, Rome removed him from office for it (Antiquities 20.200). Whatever happened in that courtyard, the death sentence wasn’t the Sanhedrin’s to hand down.

Crucifixion was a Roman penalty, and a specialized one. Rome used it on slaves, on bandits, and above all on rebels and political agitators, people whose deaths needed to be public, slow and instructive. Six thousand of Spartacus’s followers went up along the Appian Way for the same reason.

One detail worth noting in passing. Only the lucky ones died within a few hours. Men nailed up this way commonly hung there for days, dying of thirst, exhaustion and asphyxiation.

Breaking God’s Laws to Hold God’s Law?

Let’s start with Deuteronomy 17:6 and 19:15, which require two or three witnesses in agreement before anyone can be put to death. Mark 14:56-59 states twice that the witnesses contradicted each other. By the standard the text itself sets, the case was over. Deuteronomy 19:16-19 goes further and says a witness who lies in a capital case receives the penalty he tried to inflict, and no one in the story faces so much as a question about it. Deuteronomy 17:7 then requires the witnesses to throw the first stones, which tells you what the end of a lawful blasphemy case looks like.

The high priest tears his robes at the decisive moment (Mark 14:63). Leviticus 21:10 forbids the high priest to rend his garments. Whatever a first-century court did or didn’t do procedurally, that prohibition sits in the same Torah the charge was supposedly drawn from.

Then there’s the timing, and it takes no later tradition to see it. This is Passover. Exodus 12 has every household indoors for the night. The Gospels ask you to accept that the chief priests, the elders and the scribes assembled in full during the festival, ran a capital case overnight, and got a man executed by the occupying power before the holiday meal had settled.

And these are only a few. I’ll write about this in detail in a later post.

Pilate Didn’t Prosecute Insults to a God He Didn’t Worship

The blasphemy theory needs Rome to care about blasphemy, and Rome didn’t. Pontius Pilate was a prefect of an imperial province who worshipped the Roman gods and answered to Tiberius. Yahweh’s honor was not on his list of administrative concerns. Roman governors had no jurisdiction over Torah violations, no interest in adjudicating them, and a standing policy of leaving local religious disputes to local authorities as long as nobody rioted.

Then there’s the Pilate the Gospels hand us, agonizing over the fate of one Galilean preacher, washing his hands, declaring innocence three separate times in Luke, and finally caving to a crowd. Compare him to the Pilate we meet in the sources written by people who lived under him. Philo, in Embassy to Gaius 302, describes his “briberies, insults, robberies, outrages and wanton injuries, executions without trial constantly repeated, ceaseless and grievous cruelty.” Josephus records him sending troops with concealed clubs into a crowd protesting his seizure of temple funds, and later slaughtering a group of Samaritan pilgrims, which finally got him recalled to Rome in 36 CE.

The Blame Shifts in Step With the Publication Dates

Mark, written around 70 CE, has a Pilate who’s suspicious and manipulable. Matthew, roughly 80 to 85, adds the handwashing and then the line that would fund two millennia of violence: “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25). Luke, written in that same stretch, has Pilate declare Jesus innocent three times. John, around 90 to 95, refers to “the Jews” as a hostile bloc more than seventy times, in a Gospel whose hero, mother, disciples and entire early audience were Jewish, and hands us a Pilate who’s practically a philosopher.

The further the text sits from the events, the more innocent Rome becomes and the guiltier the Jews become. That’s what you expect of a movement writing for an audience inside the empire that had just crushed the Jewish revolt, burned the Temple, and paraded its treasures through Rome. A sect trying to survive under Roman rule had powerful reasons to explain that the empire had nothing to do with its founder’s death.

By the end you almost feel sorry for him, this confused and weak Pilate, cornered by the people he was sent to govern. The man behind the character was notorious for his cruelty, indifferent to what anybody in Judea wanted, and violent enough that Rome eventually recalled him for it.

The Empire’s Hand, The Empire’s Hostage

Crucifixion was never a Jewish sentence. It belonged to Rome, and Rome used it as public theater. What the ancient world saw on that hill was an empire executing an itinerant Galilean under the title nailed above his head, King of the Jews, which named the one offense Rome punished this way: challenging Caesar’s peace.

Over the centuries that followed, a brutal prefect got whitewashed into a hesitant philosopher, and a divided population living under occupation got flattened into a single guilty body, with the guilt handed down to its descendants forever.

Take the Gospel account at face value and Pilate still gave the order. Look at what that defense amounts to: I executed a man half-heartedly, because other people wanted it, on evidence that broke no law I was charged with enforcing. Therefore, I’m innocent.

Would antisemitism have vanished if the Gospels had blamed Rome primarily? Hardly. Jews would still fit the bill as scapegoats, since a minority group that maintains a distinct identity while rejecting the host culture’s Messiah will always invite suspicion. They would still be a convenient common enemy for any ruler who needed one. But the theological charge provided the core pretext, turning ordinary human prejudice into a divine mandate, and it blamed the victims for an execution designed, ordered, and carried out by Rome.

The last irony is that if Jews as a group had rejected Jesus as the Messiah, there'd be no Christianity to argue about, given the first Christians were all Jews. On the traditional attributions, so were the authors of the Christian scriptures for the most part.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999)

• Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

• John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995)

• E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Penguin, 1993)

• Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperOne, 2006)

• Helen K. Bond, Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

• William Wrede, The Messianic Secret (1901; English translation, James Clarke, 1971)

• Philo of Alexandria, On the Embassy to Gaius, 299-305

• Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.55-64, 18.85-89

• Tacitus, Annals, 15.44

• Nostra Aetate, Second Vatican Council, 28 October 1965

Unbeknownst to them, just a fraction of what people arrange in a nativity scene every Christmas comes from the New Testament. The rest comes from a book that no church council accepted, that Rome formally listed among the rejected writings, and that lied about who wrote it.

Four Gospels, Two Nativities, and One Line of Greek

Mark opens with a grown man walking into a river. John opens before creation itself. Paul, writing decades before any of the Gospels, says only that Jesus was born of a woman, born under the law, which is the least remarkable thing you can say about anybody. Two Gospels tell a birth story, and they don’t agree on much: Matthew has magi, a murderous king, and a flight to Egypt, while Luke has shepherds, a census, and a manger. What they share is the claim that Mary conceived without a man.

Matthew grounds that claim in Isaiah 7:14, quoting the Greek Septuagint, where the word is parthenos, virgin. The Hebrew reads almah, a young woman of childbearing age, and Isaiah’s own context points to a child born in his lifetime as a sign to King Ahaz about a war that was already underway. The Hebrew has a perfectly good word for virgin, betulah, and Isaiah didn’t use it.

That’s the whole foundation. Everything else you think you know about Mary got built later, and most of it got built in one book.

A Second-Century Book That Signed James’ Name

The Protoevangelium of James (the Infancy Gospel of James, or just the Book of James) was written somewhere between about 150 and 200 CE, most likely in Syria or Egypt. It closes by claiming James, the brother of Jesus, wrote it in Jerusalem after Herod’s death. That’s false. The author writes in polished literary Greek, works from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, and gets Judean geography wrong in ways nobody who lived there could manage. He also gets Judaism wrong. He has a girl raised inside the Jerusalem temple, fed by an angel, and has the high priest wandering into the Holy of Holies whenever the plot requires an oracle. As Bart Ehrman puts it in his work on the apocryphal gospels, the author was a gentile Christian writing well outside Palestine, imagining a Jewish world he’d never seen.

None of that hurt its circulation. It survives in more than 140 Greek manuscripts, the oldest being Papyrus Bodmer V from the fourth century, and it was translated into Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Old Church Slavonic. Origen knew it by the early third century. Clement of Alexandria already knew a version of one of its scenes. In terms of raw influence on what ordinary Christians pictured when they thought about Jesus’ birth, it beat most of the canon.

Mary Gets a Nativity of Her Own

The book opens on a wealthy man named Joachim and his wife Anna, childless and humiliated for it. Joachim goes into the wilderness to fast for forty days, Anna prays in her garden, an angel announces a child, and Anna vows to dedicate that child to God. If this sounds familiar, it’s Hannah and Samuel from 1 Samuel 1, with the names changed and the volume turned up.

Mary is born, and Anna turns her bedroom into a sanctuary so nothing unclean will touch the girl. At three she’s handed over to the temple, where she lives on food delivered by an angel. At twelve the priests panic, because a menstruating girl inside the sanctuary would defile it, so they gather the widowers of Judea and hold a contest. Joseph’s staff sprouts a dove. He objects that he’s an old man with sons and she’s a child, gets overruled, and takes her home as a guardian rather than a husband. Mary is later assigned the purple and scarlet thread for the temple veil, and she’s spinning it when Gabriel arrives.

Joachim and Anna appear in no biblical text. Every Saint Anne church, every Anna in a Catholic family tree, every icon of Mary’s parents traces back to this book and nowhere else. Lily Vuong’s study of the text makes the driving obsession clear enough: the author is building a woman whose purity is temple purity, uninterrupted from conception onward.

The Old Widower Who Solved the Brothers Problem

The Gospels are inconvenient on this point. Mark 6:3 names four brothers of Jesus, James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, and mentions sisters. Paul, who met one of them, calls James the Lord’s brother in Galatians 1:19. Matthew says Joseph had no relations with Mary until she gave birth, which any ordinary reader takes to mean he did afterward.

The Book of James disposes of all of it with one detail. Joseph is elderly, he’s a widower, and he already has sons when he’s assigned to Mary. The brothers become stepbrothers, the marriage is never consummated, and Mary stays a virgin permanently. Origen cites the Book of James for exactly this explanation, which tells you the fix was already circulating as an answer to an argument Christians were having by the early 200s.

The Midwife Who Reached In

Then comes the scene that decided a doctrine. Joseph and Mary are traveling, she’s about to deliver, and he puts her in a cave outside Bethlehem. (Justin Martyr also knew a cave tradition by the mid-second century, and Constantine’s builders later put the Church of the Nativity over one. The stable is Luke’s manger plus a lot of Renaissance carpentry.) A midwife arrives, sees the birth, and runs out announcing a miracle. A second woman named Salome refuses to believe it and says she’ll examine Mary physically. She does, and her hand withers and starts to burn. An angel tells her to pick up the child, she does, and the hand is healed.

That scene establishes something Matthew and Luke never claimed, which is that Mary remained physically virgin during and after the delivery, not only before conception. Theologians call it virginitas in partu, and it entered Christian doctrine through a gynecological exam invented by an anonymous author around 180 CE.

Jerome Condemned the Book and Kept Its Conclusions

By the late fourth century, a Roman named Helvidius made the reasonable argument that Mary had normal children after Jesus. Jerome went after him in Against Helvidius (383) and won the argument for the next sixteen centuries. He rejected the Book of James by name, since he wanted Joseph a lifelong virgin too, so he replaced the stepbrother solution with a new one: the brothers were cousins. Different mechanism, same result, and the perpetual virginity Jerome defended came out of the book he was dismissing.

The West kept condemning it. The Gelasian Decree lists it among the apocrypha to be rejected. Then a seventh-century Latin forger repackaged the whole thing as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, added an ox and a donkey at the manger by reading Isaiah 1:3 into the scene, and sent it back into circulation. From there it fed the Golden Legend, the mystery plays, and the entire medieval painting tradition. In the East it was never controversial at all, and it still supplies the liturgical calendar: the Presentation of the Theotokos on November 21 is a feast day commemorating an event whose only source is this book.

The long tail runs to 1854, when Rome defined the Immaculate Conception of Mary, a doctrine unimaginable without centuries of devotion to Joachim and Anna’s miraculous daughter, and to 1950, when the bodily Assumption was defined out of the Dormition narratives that grew from the fifth century onward in the same devotional soil. Stephen Shoemaker’s work traces that later stream in detail.

The Mantelpiece

Count what’s left.

Mary’s parents, her name-day feasts, her childhood in the temple, her lifelong virginity, the cave, the ox and the donkey, Joseph as a white-bearded old man rather than a young husband, and the stepbrothers who let the whole system hold together. Every one of those comes from a pseudonymous second-century novella that the Latin church put on a list of books Christians shouldn’t read.

The irony is in the shape of the argument, since the same people who’ll tell you their faith rests on scripture alone are decorating their lawns every December with a scene assembled almost entirely from a book their own tradition threw out.

In the exclusive content of this piece, supporters get the Book of James itself, broken into its nine working scenes with my notes on what each one was invented to fix and which doctrine it eventually produced. The frozen-world passage in chapter eighteen is some of the best writing to come out of second-century Christianity, and almost nobody has read it.

So what do you make of all this? If you grew up with the perpetual virginity taught as plain scripture, I want to hear it. Comments are open.

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If even a small fraction of regular readers became supporters, I’d spend less time running the business side of this publication and more time in the archives doing the research this work demands.

If you’re getting something out of these pieces, consider supporting The Unholy Truth. Supporters get the bonus sections, the Friday Editions, and the full archive.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (Oxford, 2011)

• Ronald F. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas (Polebridge, 1995)

• Lily C. Vuong, Gender and Purity in the Protevangelium of James (Mohr Siebeck, 2013)

• Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Doubleday, rev. ed. 1993)

• Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford, 2002)

• J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1993)

• Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987)

• Jerome, Against Helvidius: On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Mary (383 CE)

Before We Begin

Welcome to the very first Friday edition of The Unholy Truth!

Mondays through Thursdays are reserved for deep-dive textual and historical criticism. Fridays will look a bit different: lighter, opinion-based essays meant to raise open questions rather than aggressively sell you on ‘the ultimate truth.’ As a quick note, these Friday pieces are complimentary exclusively for paid supporters as a thank-you for keeping this project going.

I drafted today’s piece a good while ago and kept it tucked away, concerned it might be misunderstood—a recurring risk around here. I decided to run it anyway. If you read this and think I’m taking a definitive stance on God’s existence, let me clarify up front: this essay isn’t a defense or a denial of belief. It’s an inquiry into how we talk about the question.

An Essay I Was Hesitant to Run

Who am I to tell anyone their life would be better with or without religion? People believe what they believe for whatever reasons they’ve got, and on a personal level that’s none of my concern. I don’t care what gets someone through the week. If a story about a loving heavenly father helps a person bury a parent, or stay sober, or sit with a terminal diagnosis without coming apart, then the story is doing real work, and I’m not going to march in with a stack of footnotes and tell them they’ve been comforted by a fiction.

What I do care about is the argument itself, the one that’s been running on a loop since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, the one where the believer says “God exists” and the skeptic fires back “No, he doesn’t,” and both of them walk away convinced they’ve said something. What nobody seems to flag is that they’re almost never talking about the same thing, and most of the time neither of them has bothered to say what the thing is. The whole fight runs on a word neither side has defined, and a word that hasn’t been defined can’t really be affirmed or denied. You can only nod at it.

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Every lost-scripture story you’ve read follows the same arc. Somebody stumbles on old writing in a cave or an attic or a rubbish heap, the writing says something the church would rather it didn’t, and the physical object goes into a museum where anyone with credentials and a plane ticket can go argue about it. The Nag Hammadi codices sit in Cairo. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been photographed, carbon dated, and picked over by teams who can’t stand each other. The Sana’a palimpsest has an ultraviolet imaging record.

Then there’s the one manuscript that broke the pattern, and it broke it in the least convenient way possible for the man who found it.

In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a Columbia University historian with a working knowledge of Greek paleography and a long-standing interest in ancient magic, was cataloging the neglected library of Mar Saba, a monastery bolted to a cliff face in the Judean desert southeast of Jerusalem. Inside a 1646 printed edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, someone had copied three pages of Greek onto the blank endpapers in an eighteenth-century hand. Smith read it and understood immediately what he had, or what he’d been handed, depending on which scholar you ask.

The Letter Clement Didn’t Want Circulating

The text presents itself as a private letter from Clement of Alexandria, a theologian writing around the year 200 and one of the most quotable figures in early Christianity, to a man named Theodore who’d written to him in some distress about the Carpocratians. The Carpocratians were an Alexandrian Christian group the mainstream church loathed, in part because their critics accused them of teaching that spiritual maturity ran through sexual license.

Clement congratulates Theodore for shutting them down, and then does something no orthodox church father is supposed to do. He concedes the Carpocratians have a point about their source. There is, Clement writes, a longer version of the Gospel of Mark. Mark composed it in Alexandria after Peter’s death, working from his own notes, adding material meant for readers who’d advanced past beginner instruction, and the Alexandrian church kept it under guard and read it only to those “being initiated into the great mysteries.” A Carpocratian named Carpocrates got a copy out of the archive through what Clement describes as bribery and manipulation, then contaminated it with his own additions.

Then Clement instructs Theodore to deny the secret gospel’s existence under oath, because “not all true things are to be said to all men.” That line alone made the letter famous. Whether or not the man from Alexandria wrote it, somebody put in writing that the early church lied on purpose about which books it owned.

What Happens at Bethany

To settle Theodore’s questions, Clement quotes the disputed passage, which slots into Mark between what we number 10:34 and 10:35. Jesus arrives at Bethany. A woman whose brother has died begs for help, the disciples try to push her off, and Jesus goes to the tomb, rolls back the stone, and raises a young man by the hand. The young man looks at him and loves him, and asks Jesus to stay. Six days later Jesus gives him instructions, and that evening the young man comes to him “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body,” stays with him through the night, and receives from him “the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

A second, shorter fragment follows, slotting into the odd unfinished sentence at Mark 10:46.

Smith spent fifteen years working on this before publishing in 1973, and the conclusion he came to guaranteed the reception he got: he read the passage as evidence that Jesus ran a nocturnal initiation rite, possibly involving some form of erotic union, and that the canonical Gospels are what’s left after the church sanded that down. Half his colleagues thought he’d lost his mind. The other half noticed something more damaging, which is that the linen cloth and the naked young man show up again in Mark 14:51 with no explanation whatsoever, as if a scene had been cut and one thread left dangling. The passage explains a loose end in canonical Mark that nothing else explains.

Everybody Who Studied It Was Studying a Photograph

Smith took black-and-white photographs of the pages and, for reasons nobody has satisfactorily explained, never went back to examine the original again. He was a specialist in manuscripts. He knew what ink analysis could do. He argued about this document for the rest of his life on the strength of pictures he’d taken in an afternoon.

In 1976 a small group of scholars traveled to Mar Saba and confirmed the book existed and the writing was in it, and then said nothing publicly about the visit until 2003. The following year the monastery’s collection moved to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate library in Jerusalem, where the librarian, Kallistos Dourvas, cut the handwritten leaves out of the binding so they could be photographed in color. Those color photographs exist. The leaves themselves stopped being anywhere. They’re not in the Patriarchate’s holdings, no one has produced them since, and there’s no accounting for where they went.

So the only object that could end the argument, through ink chemistry or paper analysis or any of the forensic work that has settled comparable disputes, went missing from inside a church library while under the care of the institution that had the most obvious motive to want it gone. That last part is where the conspiracy version writes itself, and it’s worth resisting, because institutional carelessness with unglamorous old books is a much better-documented phenomenon than institutional conspiracy.

The Case That Smith Was a Forger

Quentin Quesnell put the forgery question in print in 1975, pointing out that the tools to make a convincing fake had been sitting on library shelves since the 1930s. The full prosecution arrived in 2005 with Stephen Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax, which read the letter as a hoax Smith built with his own fingerprints deliberately left on it.

Carlson’s case had three pillars. He found a passage about salt losing its savor through adulteration and connected it to the Morton Salt Company, a signature hidden as a joke. He identified a manuscript at Mar Saba cataloged by one “M. Madiotes,” parsed the name from Greek roots for baldness and swindling, and pointed out that Morton Smith was bald. And he examined the handwriting under magnification and found what document examiners call forger’s tremor, the faint wobble in a line that gets drawn rather than written.

For about five years this looked devastating, and a lot of people who’d never liked Smith or his conclusions treated the matter as closed.

Three Clues, Three Retractions

Scott Brown went through the salt passage and found that the letter never describes salt being mixed with anything. The mixing in the text applies to true things and false ones, which is a stock ancient metaphor, and adulterated salt was a recognized problem centuries before anyone put it in a blue cylinder.

Brown and Allan Pantuck then tracked down the Madiotes manuscript and established that the hand belonged to an unremarkable eighteenth-century writer with no connection to Smith, and that the name reads closer to Modestos, which was about as unusual at Mar Saba as Michael is at an American high school.

The tremor went last and went hardest. Timo Paananen and Roger Viklund demonstrated that Carlson had done his handwriting analysis on halftone reproductions printed in Smith’s 1973 book. The wobble he’d measured was the dot pattern of a printing process. Working from the original photographs, the tremor disappeared.

None of that proves the letter is ancient. It does mean the most confident published case for forgery was built on a printing artifact, a common monastic name, and a brand of table salt.

Whatever the Mar Saba Manuscript Was, Its Final Act Is Pure Theater.

Imagine three handwritten pages sitting quietly in the back of an unread book for centuries, emerging just long enough to ignite a half-century academic civil war, and then dissolving back into the desert ether before anyone could hold a magnifying glass to the ink. It is the ultimate historical ghost story: a text that exposed the early church’s obsession with secrecy, only to disappear inside the very institution accused of keeping the secret.

In the end, the Mar Saba letter leaves us with a profound historical paradox. If Morton Smith forged it, he executed a masterpiece of literary sabotage so brilliant that even the forensic cases against him collapsed under scrutiny. If an ancient monk forged it, it reveals a lost world of early Christian dissent fighting for survival with every stroke of the pen. And if Clement really wrote it, then the foundational story of the Christian Gospel was edited, censored, and reshaped far earlier than most believers dare to imagine.

We will likely never know which door leads to the truth. The physical leaves are gone, the ink is unanalyzable, and the men who held the pages are dead. All that remains are black-and-white photographs of a vanishing act, a stark reminder that history is not a locked vault of permanent facts, but a dimly lit room where the lights can go out at any moment, leaving us to argue over what we thought we saw in the dark.

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What did the text actually say? Below, I’ve included the full English translation of the letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria, including the suppressed passage from the “Secret Gospel of Mark” describing the night initiation at Bethany, and Clement’s explicit instructions to deny its existence under oath.

To read the complete text and support deep-dive historical analysis like this, consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Smith, Morton. Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark. Harvard University Press, 1973.

• Smith, Morton. The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark. Harper & Row, 1973.

• Quesnell, Quentin. “The Mar Saba Clementine: A Question of Evidence.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 1975.

• Carlson, Stephen C. The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Baylor University Press, 2005.

• Brown, Scott G. Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005.

• Brown, Scott G., and Allan J. Pantuck. “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson’s Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 2008.

• Paananen, Timo S., and Roger Viklund. “An Eighteenth-Century Manuscript: Control of the Scribal Hand in Clement’s Letter to Theodore.” Apocrypha, 2015.

• Smith, Geoffrey S., and Brent C. Landau. The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity. Yale University Press, 2023.

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

There are thirteen letters in the Bible attributed to Paul, and all thirteen of them shaped Christianity as we know it. Scholars worked out long ago that six weren’t written by the same man who wrote the other seven.

Bring up the forged letters and you’ll watch people file it under atheist debate-club material, the sort of thing that comes packaged with a podcast microphone and an axe to grind, as though who wrote Colossians has any bearing on whether God exists. To be fair, that’s mostly a Medium phenomenon and hasn’t happened yet here.

Then you look at who built the argument. These are professors at Notre Dame, Yale, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Catholic University of America. Several of them are ordained. The most influential voice on the question was a Catholic priest who served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission under two popes and taught for decades at Union Theological Seminary.

The Seven Letters Nobody Argues About

Thirteen letters in the New Testament open by claiming Paul as their author. Critical scholarship sorts them into three piles, and the sorting has held since the 1970s.

Seven are undisputed: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. You can argue about how to read them, but nobody serious argues about who wrote them.

Three sit in contested territory: Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians. Raymond Brown, the priest mentioned above, worked through the state of the field in his Introduction to the New Testament and put rough numbers on it. Around 80 percent of critical scholars judged Ephesians to have been written by someone other than Paul, roughly 60 percent said the same about Colossians, and the split on 2 Thessalonians ran close to even.

Then there are the three Pastoral Epistles: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. Brown estimated that 80 to 90 percent of critical scholarship treats these as written after Paul’s death by an admirer using his name. That’s about as close to unanimous as this field gets.

Worth being clear about what undisputed means, because it’s a weaker claim than it sounds. It means the vocabulary, the theology, and the situations these letters address all hold together, and that the external evidence puts them in circulation early, so there’s no reason to doubt they started with Paul. It doesn’t certify every sentence in them. 2 Corinthians and Philippians both look like several letters composed together by a later editor, the passage in 1 Corinthians ordering women to keep silent in church is widely treated as something a scribe inserted, and every one of these letters was copied by hand for centuries before our earliest complete manuscripts. Nobody has the originals, so undisputed here rests on the absence of evidence against rather than the presence of evidence for.

Three Hundred Words Paul Never Used

The oldest thread of the argument runs through vocabulary. P.N. Harrison’s 1921 study counted 306 words in the Pastorals that appear nowhere in the other ten letters bearing Paul’s name, with 175 of them absent from the entire rest of the New Testament. A large share of that vocabulary turns up in Christian writing of the second century, which is a strange place for a man executed under Nero to be borrowing his diction from.

Word counts on their own prove less than people want them to. Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic scholar at Emory, has argued at length in his Anchor Bible commentary that the vocabulary evidence gets oversold, that samples this small can’t carry the statistical weight placed on them, and that a secretary given latitude over the wording, writing on subjects Paul hadn’t addressed before, accounts for much of the gap. He’s right that the numbers alone won’t settle it. The reason the consensus holds anyway is that the vocabulary lines up with everything else that’s odd about these letters.

The Pastorals Describe a Church That Hadn’t Been Built Yet

In 1 Timothy 3 what you get is a job description with qualifications for overseers, qualifications for deacons, and standards for their households and their drinking. Titus 1:5 has Paul instructing his delegate to appoint elders town by town. First Timothy 5 sets up an enrolled order of widows with an age minimum of sixty and rules about which younger women to keep off the list.

However, in 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, Paul deals with an assembly that has prophets and tongue-speakers talking over each other, and his solution is a set of ad hoc instructions about taking turns. There’s no office to appeal to, because there isn’t one yet. Philippians 1:1 greets overseers and deacons without a word about how anybody qualifies for the job. The institutional machinery in the Pastorals belongs to the generation that had to organize itself after the apostles died and the second coming didn’t arrive on schedule.

Second Thessalonians Warns Its Readers About Forged Paul Letters

2 Thessalonians 2:2 tells the congregation not to get rattled by a spirit, a spoken word, or a letter appearing to come from Paul. The closing at 3:17 makes a point of the signature in Paul’s own hand, presented as the mark of authenticity in every letter he writes. A letter that half the field judges to be pseudonymous spends its energy insisting on its own credentials, which is the overcorrection of a forger covering his tracks.

The theology underneath supports the case. 1 Thessalonians 5 has the day of the Lord arriving like a thief in the night, with no warning and no schedule. 2 Thessalonians 2 tells readers to calm down, because the rebellion has to come first and the man of lawlessness has to be revealed, seated in the temple and declaring himself God. Those are two different answers to the same pastoral emergency, and the second one reads like an attempt to manage disappointment among people who took the first one literally.

In Colossians and Ephesians the Resurrection Already Happened

Paul’s position in Romans 6 keeps the believer’s resurrection in the future tense. You’re buried with Christ now and you’ll be raised with him later, and the gap between those two things is where the whole ethical argument lives.

Colossians 2:12 and 3:1 close that gap. The believer has been raised already. Ephesians 2:6 goes further and seats him with Christ in the heavenly places, present tense, transaction complete. A church that had stopped expecting the end within the lifetime of its members needed the payoff moved from the future into the present, and that shift is a main reason these two letters get dated after Paul’s lifetime.

Ancient Christians Punished Forgers Who Meant Well

The standard defense holds that pseudonymity was an accepted convention, a respectful gesture from a disciple toward a dead teacher. That description of the writer is an assumption the defense needs rather than something anyone can show. Nobody knows who produced these letters. They could have come from a devoted student, or from someone a generation removed who never met Paul, or from a party inside a church that wanted its position on women and slaves to carry apostolic weight. The defense picks the most flattering of those and argues the ethics from there, which concedes that Paul didn’t write the letter and moves the discussion to the writer’s manners.

The people running the early church weren’t lenient on the manners either.

The people running the early church weren’t lenient on the manners either. Tertullian reports that a presbyter in Asia who composed the Acts of Paul out of admiration for the apostle was convicted and removed from office, and the man’s motives were never in question. The Muratorian Fragment, an early list of accepted books, names letters to the Laodiceans and the Alexandrians as forgeries circulating under Paul’s name and rules them out of the church’s reading.

Bruce Metzger, a Presbyterian minister who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary and shaped the Greek text nearly every modern translation rests on, worked through the ancient evidence in a 1972 article and reached the same conclusion. Antiquity knew what a literary forgery was, had a word for it, and disapproved.

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The Forgeries Did the Most Damage

1 Timothy 2:11-15 orders women to learn in silence and forbids them to teach or hold authority over a man, grounding it in Eve. Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22 instruct slaves to obey their masters with fear and trembling, and Titus 2:9 tells them not to talk back. The consequences are still running. Rome ordains no women, the papacy is closed to them, and the Vatican’s 1976 declaration on the question cites 1 Timothy directly.

The undisputed Paul gives you Romans 16, where Phoebe is a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, Junia is prominent among the apostles, and Prisca gets named ahead of her husband. That’s the man whose name got attached to the household codes, by writers he never met, in service of an arrangement he never endorsed. Two thousand years of Christian teaching on women and on slavery leans hardest on the letters with the weakest claim to his authorship, and the seminaries have known it the whole time.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (Doubleday, 1997)

• Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God (HarperOne, 2011)

• Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery (Oxford University Press, 2013)

• Bruce M. Metzger, “Literary Forgeries and Canonical Pseudepigrapha,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972)

• P.N. Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (Oxford University Press, 1921)

• Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, Anchor Bible (Doubleday, 2001)

• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Raymond E. Brown, and Roland E. Murphy, eds., The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Prentice Hall, 1990)

• Tertullian, On Baptism 17

The church spent its formative centuries destroying the idea of a Torah-keeping, non-divine Jesus, and that idea then became the foundation of Islam. The Christianity Islam actually encountered was made up almost entirely of communities Constantinople had condemned: the Church of the East across Mesopotamia and Persia, Miaphysites in Syria, Egypt, Najran, and Ethiopia, who held that Christ has one united nature rather than two, all of them people who’d lost at the councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451, where the church settled how Christ could be both divine and human, and been prosecuted for it ever since. Within Christianity itself, the Ebionites held exactly the position the Qur’an would later hold, keeping the Jewish law, treating Jesus as a human messiah chosen by God rather than born divine, and rejecting Paul as the man who wrecked the movement. Their theology was continuous with James’s Jerusalem community, which means the believers closest to Jesus’s own family ended up on the heresy lists while gentiles who’d never kept the law built the winning tradition.

The gap in the argument is that nobody can find a seventh-century Ebionite congregation in Arabia. A tenth-century Muslim polemic looked for a while like it preserved genuine Jewish Christian source material and might close that gap, and the reading came apart within two years of being proposed. What survives is a body of Jewish Christian writing that teaches a True Prophet recurring through history in Adam, Moses, and Jesus, and holds that the scriptures contain false passages inserted by people who tampered with the text. That does the same work as the Qur’anic chain of messengers and the charge that earlier communities corrupted the revelation they were given. The ideas were in circulation in the environment the Qur’an addresses, and ideas travel without leaving membership rolls. Direct descent is more than the evidence supports; what it does support is that the positions orthodoxy had to eliminate were still available to be thought in the seventh century, and one of them went on to become the second-largest religion on earth.

The Ebionites were one case out of many Christian heresies that built Islam. Jewish Christianity gave the Qur’an a human Jesus and a chain of prophets, and that’s the tidiest line of descent because the theology matches so cleanly. It’s also the least interesting one, because a group that never accepted the incarnation obviously produces a Jesus who isn’t divine. The harder question is what happens to the material Rome worked hardest to destroy, the books it burned and the teachers it excommunicated by name, and the answer is that a good deal of it kept circulating east of the empire’s reach and turns up in Arabic three or four centuries later.

The Man on the Cross Was Somebody Else

Basilides taught in Alexandria in the 120s and 130s, and he denied that Jesus died on the cross at all. The account that survives, written by a bishop refuting him around 180, has Simon of Cyrene, the man the gospels have carrying the crossbeam, transfigured into Jesus’s likeness and executed in his place, while Jesus stood off to the side in Simon’s form watching the Romans kill the wrong man.

That’s a hostile witness, and a second Alexandrian source gives a different account of what Basilides taught, so the details are contested. What isn’t contested is that the position existed and that the church treated it as a serious threat, because the major heresy-hunters of the second and third centuries wrote at length against the idea that Christ only appeared to have a body and only seemed to suffer. The Nag Hammadi library, dug up in Egypt in 1945, produced two texts that hold the same view, both describing a Jesus who watches his own crucifixion from above, and in one of them he’s laughing.

Verse 4:157 says the Jews neither killed nor crucified Jesus, “but it was made to appear so to them.” The Arabic phrase, shubbiha lahum, is two words, and Muslim commentators have argued about it for twelve hundred years without settling on a reading. The substitutionist interpretation, in which somebody else died in Jesus’s place, became the majority position among the classical commentators, and various commentators nominate Judas, a volunteer disciple, or a Roman soldier. A competing reading has the verse denying Jewish agency rather than denying the crucifixion.

Set that aside and the situation is still remarkable. A position that Christianity spent its first three centuries stamping out, one that had a name, a founder, and a paper trail of refutations, shows up as scripture in seventh-century Arabia.

A Five-Year-Old Jesus Makes Birds Out of Clay

Verse 3:49 has Jesus tell the Israelites that he shapes a bird out of clay, breathes into it, and it becomes a living bird by God’s permission. Verse 5:110 repeats it, with God reminding Jesus that he did this.

The story comes from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a second-century text where the child Jesus molds twelve sparrows from clay on the Sabbath, gets scolded for working, and claps his hands so the birds fly off and destroy the evidence. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have nothing like it. No council accepted the book, and it circulated anyway, in Greek, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic, which tells you how popular a childhood Jesus who works miracles and occasionally kills the neighbors’ kids turned out to be.

It isn’t the only one, either. Verse 19:29-33 has the infant Jesus speak from the cradle to defend his mother, a scene with no parallel in the four gospels and a long history in Syriac Christian material. Verse 3:37 has Mary raised in the temple and fed by God, and verse 3:44 has the men cast lots to decide who takes charge of her, both of which come out of the Protevangelium of James, a second-century account of Mary’s childhood that the Western church eventually rejected outright while the Eastern churches kept the substance of it in their liturgy.

The transmission route taken was that Christian material moved through Syriac into Arabic-speaking communities in volume, and these particular stories were the popular devotional literature of the day, the material people told each other rather than the material bishops signed off on. Whoever was talking about Jesus in seventh-century Arabia had read the books Rome threw out, or heard from somebody who had.

Mani Claimed the Seal Three Centuries Before Muhammad

Mani was born in Babylonia in 216, under Persian rule, in a Jewish Christian baptizing community. He preached a religion that ran a chain of messengers through Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus, each sent to a different people with the same message, each message corrupted after the messenger died. He identified himself as the last of them, and Manichaean texts call him the seal of the prophets.

Verse 33:40 calls Muhammad the seal of the prophets, and the title was already a working technical term in Manichaean usage well before Islam. The chain of messengers with a repeated message and a final seal, the charge that earlier communities corrupted what they’d been given, and a Jesus who wasn’t crucified in the flesh: Manichaeism holds all three, and so does the Qur’an.

Nobody has produced a Manichaean congregation in Mecca, and the honest position is that Mani’s religion and Muhammad’s inherited from overlapping sources rather than one copying the other. Both grew out of the same eastern Christian and Jewish Christian environment, one in third-century Mesopotamia and one in seventh-century Arabia, and both reached for the same vocabulary because the vocabulary was lying there.

Diocletian Ordered the Books Burned and a Baghdad Bookseller Kept the Contents

In 302, Diocletian issued an order that Manichaean leaders be burned along with their scriptures. Justinian later made the religion a capital offense. The Roman state hunted Manichaeans for the better part of three centuries, and it worked, in the sense that almost nothing survived in Greek or Latin.

What survived came from a bookseller called Ibn al-Nadim in Baghdad who compiled the Fihrist, which means the catalog, and that’s what it is: a list of every book he could find in Arabic, finished around 987. He devoted a long section to Mani, described the Manichaean scriptures, quoted from them, and recorded the cosmology in detail.

What makes him useful is that he wasn’t a follower of Mani. On the contrary, he was a Muslim bibliographer doing what bibliographers do, and because he did it, the Fihrist remained the single best account of Manichaean doctrine available to scholarship until the twentieth century, when German expeditions to Turfan and the Coptic codices from Medinet Madi finally produced primary texts.

A religion the Christian empire spent two hundred years erasing survives in usable form because a Muslim shopkeeper wrote down what was in the books.

The Qur’an Gave the Mandaeans a Legal Status Rome Never Offered

Verses 2:62, 5:69, and 22:17 name the Sabians alongside Jews and Christians as a protected community. The Qur’an never defines them, and Muslim jurists spent centuries arguing about who qualified, which was a live question because the answer determined whether a given community got taxed or killed.

The best candidate is the Mandaeans, a baptizing sect in southern Mesopotamia who revere John the Baptist, reject Jesus as a false prophet, and hold a dualist cosmology of light and darkness that no church would have tolerated for an afternoon. They’re the only gnostic community from late antiquity still practicing today, with their own scriptures in their own dialect of Aramaic. The identification wasn’t stable, and it stretched over the centuries to cover groups the jurists needed to bring inside the category.

Christianity’s answer to groups like this was suppression. Islamic law’s answer was a tax bracket, which is a lower bar than tolerance and considerably higher than the alternative on offer further west.

Emanation Runs Through Ismaili Cosmology

By the tenth century the Ismailis were producing systematic Neoplatonic theology in Arabic, describing a God beyond being who originates a first Intellect, from which Soul proceeds, and from which the material world descends by stages. An encyclopedia compiled anonymously in Basra put a version of it into general circulation.

The lineage runs from Greek Platonism through late-antique commentators and their Arabic translations into Islamic philosophy, and it’s the same lineage that fed gnostic cosmology in the second century. Both ended up with a hidden ultimate reality, a descending series of intelligences, and a doctrine of the soul’s return, because both were reading Plato through the same intermediaries.

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Inheritance Explains the Materials, Not the Building

When Rome’s councils met to define orthodoxy, they drew hard lines that converted millions of believers into outcasts overnight. But excommunication is not extinction. Driven past the imperial frontier into the deserts of Arabia, the marshes of Mesopotamia, and the cities of Persia, these condemned christologies, banned infancy tales, and gnostic cosmologies continued to whisper through the Syriac and Arabic-speaking worlds. They circulated not as cold academic theology, but as the living, popular devotional atmosphere of late antiquity.

When the Qur’an emerged in seventh-century Arabia, it spoke directly into that rich, eclectic landscape. It reached for a vocabulary that was already lingering in the air—a human Messiah who molded sparrows from clay, a chain of prophets culminating in a final seal, a Jesus whose end on the cross was not as it seemed, and a tradition of scripture preserved against text-tampering.

In a sense, the great imperial purges failed by succeeding too well. By chasing its dissidents into the East, the church ensured that the alternative visions of Jesus it strove so fiercely to erase were preserved, recontextualized, and given new life. What orthodoxy condemned as heresy did not die in the sands; it became the bedrock of a new global civilization, leaving the ideas Rome burned to become the cornerstone of the second-largest religion on Earth.

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Recommended Reading

Lost Christianities

If you want the long version of what this piece only sketches, start with Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities. It’s the book on the movements the church spent three centuries beating into silence: the Ebionites who kept the law and refused to call Jesus divine, the teachers who insisted the body on the cross was an illusion, and the gospels that circulated for generations before they were legislated out of existence. Ehrman writes for readers who want the evidence rather than the reassurance, and he’s straight about where the sources run thin. It’s cheap in paperback, it’s on Kindle and Audible, and it’ll change how you read every sentence above.

✔️ Read

Muhammad

If you want the man rather than the theology, read Maxime Rodinson’s Muhammad. Rodinson was a Sorbonne professor and an avowed Marxist who treats Muhammad as a person with a biography, a temperament, and a set of political problems to solve, set against the wreckage of two exhausted empires. It reads like a life, not a seminar, which is why it’s still the standard secular account sixty-five years on, and still banned in parts of the Arab world for approaching a prophet the way you’d approach any other historical figure. New York Review Books has it back in paperback.

✔️ Read

Sources and Further Reading

• Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book I

• The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2007)

• Ibn al-Nadim, The Fihrist, trans. Bayard Dodge (Columbia, 1970)

• Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’an and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge, 2010)

• Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’an and the Bible: Text and Commentary (Yale, 2018)

• Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam (Princeton, 2013)

• Guy G. Stroumsa, “Seal of the Prophets: The Nature of a Manichaean Metaphor,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 7 (1986)

• Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd ed. (Mohr Siebeck, 1992)

• Iain Gardner and Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2004)

• Jason David BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body (Johns Hopkins, 2000)

• Kevin van Bladel, From Sasanian Mandaeans to Sabians of the Marshes (Brill, 2017)

• Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford, 2003)

• Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Harvard, 2003)

• Patricia Crone, “Jewish Christianity and the Qur’an,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 74-75 (2015-2016)

The Arab armies took Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in the 630s and 640s, and across all of that territory Byzantine orthodoxy was a minority holding. Mesopotamia and Persia belonged to the Church of the East, which had backed the losing side at Ephesus in 431. Syria, Egypt, and Armenia were overwhelmingly Miaphysite, meaning they had rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and been prosecuted for it by Constantinople ever since, sometimes with soldiers. The Christians of Najran in southern Arabia were Miaphysite, and so was the Ethiopian kingdom that sheltered Muhammad’s followers during the first hijra.

So the Christianity that Islam grew up next to was made almost entirely of people the imperial church had condemned. That contact stayed close and stayed workable for centuries. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the man most responsible for moving Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic under the Abbasids, belonged to the Church of the East, as did most of his colleagues in the translation effort. Muslim rule handed those communities something Byzantium had withheld, which was permission to run their own churches without an emperor auditing their Christology.

Read the Qur’an’s arguments about Jesus with that in mind and its Jesus starts looking about as Christian as anybody else’s in the seventh century.

The Group That Stayed Closest to Jesus Ended Up on the Heresy Lists

There was a Christian constituency for the Qur’an’s position on Jesus, a human messenger of God and nothing more, and it had been around for six hundred years before Muhammad. Irenaeus called them Ebionites. Origen, Eusebius, and Epiphanius all wrote about them, none of them kindly.

They kept the Torah. They circumcised their sons, observed the sabbath and the food laws, took Jesus as the messiah promised to Israel, and treated Paul as an apostate who had wrecked the movement by throwing out the law. Epiphanius quotes their gospel, in which the voice at the baptism tells Jesus “today I have begotten you,” a line that also survives in one of our oldest gospel manuscripts, Codex Bezae, at Luke 3:22. It describes adoption. God chooses a man. Nobody gets born divine.

Now consider what that position is continuous with. The Jerusalem community under James kept Torah, worshipped in the temple, and had to be argued out of requiring circumcision of gentile converts, which is the entire business of Galatians 2 and Acts 15. Paul wrote his angriest letter about that fight, which tells you he was not winning it easily. The believers who stayed closest to the practice of Jesus’s own family and first followers were the ones later classified as heretics, and the tradition that won was built by gentiles who had never kept the law in the first place.

Stack up what Islam holds and the resemblance gets uncomfortable. One God who has no son and shares his nature with nobody. Dietary law, ritual washing, circumcision, prophets in succession, revelation delivered through a man who stays a man. Every item on that list was a live Christian option in the second century, and every one of them was on its way to being illegal by the fifth.

Which leaves the question that has occupied scholars for a hundred years. Nobody has produced a seventh-century Ebionite congregation in Arabia with a name and an address. The heresiologists stop mentioning these groups as living communities around the fourth century, and Muhammad’s preaching begins in 610. That gap is where the argument lives.

In 1966 a scholar in Jerusalem announced that he had found something on the far side of it.

What Shlomo Pines Found Inside a Muslim Polemic

The book was the Tathbit Dala’il al-Nubuwwa, written around 995 by ‘Abd al-Jabbar, a Mu’tazili theologian in Rayy, and it’s a standard piece of anti-Christian polemic on its surface. Buried inside it is a long stretch of material describing the origins of Christianity that reads nothing like anything else in Arabic. It tells the story from the point of view of Torah-observant followers of Jesus who were pushed out by gentiles, and it makes claims about Paul, the gospels, and the abandonment of the law that line up with what the heresiologists tell us the Ebionites believed.

Pines argued that ‘Abd al-Jabbar was working from a genuine Jewish Christian source, translated into Arabic, that had survived somewhere in the East for centuries after everyone assumed those communities were gone. If he was right, the gap closes. There was a channel.

S.M. Stern went after the argument two years later and did serious damage, showing that much of the material could be accounted for by Muslim polemical invention and by ordinary anti-Christian arguments already circulating in Arabic. The consensus since then has landed closer to Stern than to Pines. The text tells us a great deal about what a tenth-century Muslim wanted to say about Christian origins, and much less about what a second-century Jewish Christian believed.

But the question refused to die, because the Ebionite parallels are not the only ones. The Pseudo-Clementine literature, a Jewish Christian body of writing surviving in Greek and Latin, teaches a True Prophet who appears again and again through history in Adam, Moses, and Jesus, and it holds that the scriptures contain false passages inserted by people who tampered with the text, which the informed reader has to identify and discard. Set that beside the Qur’anic doctrine of tahrif, the corruption of earlier revelation by its own custodians, and beside the chain of messengers running from Adam through Abraham and Moses and Jesus to Muhammad, and you have two systems performing the same operations with the same tools.

Patricia Crone spent part of her last years on this, publishing a two-part study arguing that Jewish Christian ideas were present in the environment the Qur’an addresses, without requiring a surviving congregation to carry them. Ideas travel in ways that leave no membership rolls. They move through stories, through arguments made in marketplaces, through what a Syrian merchant tells his Arab counterpart about why his neighbors’ church is wrong.

The direct-descent theory is too strong and the evidence won’t carry it. What the evidence does carry is harder for both sides to sit with: the positions the church had to destroy in order to become orthodox were still available to be thought in the seventh century, and one of them became the second-largest religion on earth. Christianity spent three hundred years and eventually the machinery of an empire making sure the Torah-keeping, non-divine Jesus lost. He lost inside Christianity. He won everywhere else.

Tomorrow I'm running the rest of it: Basilides and the empty cross, the clay birds in Surah 3, Mani calling himself the seal of the prophets three hundred years early, and the Baghdad bookseller whose catalogue preserved the religion Rome spent two centuries burning. This work takes weeks of reading per piece and it stays free because paid subscribers cover it. If you've been getting something out of these, that's what upgrading pays for.

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Sources and Further Reading

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

• Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2011)

• Petri Luomanen, Recovering Jewish-Christian Sects and Gospels (Brill, 2012)

• Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism (Mohr Siebeck, 2018)

• F. Stanley Jones, Pseudoclementina Elchasaiticaque inter Judaeochristiana (Peeters, 2012)

• Shlomo Pines, The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity According to a New Source (Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1966)

• S.M. Stern, “’Abd al-Jabbar’s Account of How Christ’s Religion Was Falsified by the Adoption of Roman Customs,” Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968)

• Patricia Crone, “Jewish Christianity and the Qur’an,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 74-75 (2015-2016), in two parts

• Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’an and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge, 2010)

• Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam (Princeton, 2013)

• Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton, 2018)

• Michael Philip Penn, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Pennsylvania, 2015)

• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Harvard, 2010)

The Quran survived fourteen centuries word for word, unchanged, memorized by millions in an unbroken chain back to the Prophet himself. That belief is one of the fundamentals of Islam, because Islam also claims the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were originally God’s word too, just corrupted by human hands over time. The Quran is supposed to be the one exception, the only scripture that was never touched.

Then in 1972, a work crew fixing a ceiling in Yemen knocked a hole straight through that claim, which didn’t have a leg to stand on to begin with.

Before We Begin

Just a quick note before we go any further.

I already sent a separate email with a preview of Monday's post. This Friday I'm skipping the post to give your inbox some breathing room. If you think that's a bad call, let me know in the comments, so I know what's working for readers and what isn't.

In the bonus section for supporters, you'll find the specific manuscript variants behind Wednesday's piece on the Yemen attic discovery, the verb changes, the flipped chapter order, and the numbers behind just how far off from standard that erased text really was.

Even terzijde, zeker gezien de bevolkingsomvang van Nederland binnen Europa, heb ik een disproportioneel hoog aantal ondersteuners en daar wil ik het land van tulpen en klompen :) hartelijk voor bedanken.

Workers Renovating a Mosque Found a Library

The Great Mosque of Sana’a had a storage space above its ceiling, the kind of forgotten loft every old building accumulates. During restoration work that year, the ceiling gave way and buried the crew in decaying parchment, thousands of sheets that had been stuffed up there and left to rot for who knows how many centuries. Nobody involved understood what they’d found. The workers shoveled the material into potato sacks and stacked them on a staircase, which is not how you’d treat priceless manuscripts if you knew that’s what they were.

Word reached the head of Yemen’s antiquities authority, who recognized the find could matter and intervened before the sacks got hauled off as trash. What followed was decades of slow, underfunded cataloging, first by Yemeni authorities and later with German researchers brought in to help sort a hoard that eventually topped fifteen thousand sheets. Most of it turned out to be Quranic material spanning nearly a thousand early codices. One folio in particular became the center of everything that followed.

A Palimpsest Is a Manuscript With a Secret Underneath

Because parchment was expensive, scribes frequently scraped off old text to reuse the surface, much like the TV networks wiping master tapes to record new shows, inadvertently erasing vital history. Over centuries, however, ink and pressure conspire: the erased layer can bleed back through, leaving faint traces invisible to the naked eye but readable under ultraviolet light. That is precisely what German scholar Gerd Puin and his team discovered when examining a manuscript from the Sana’a cache, now cataloged as Sana’a 01-27.1.

The text visible on top matched the standard Quran in circulation today, the version tracing back to the canonical seventh-century codification. Underneath, however, the erased layer revealed a distinctly different Quranic text. While clearly recognizable in structure, it contained word substitutions, altered phrasing, and a chapter order that matched no known arrangement, not even the early personal copies circulating before the text was officialized. Detailed textual analysis confirmed that this wasn’t scribal sloppiness, but a text still in flux at the exact moment someone decided to erase it and write the “correct” version on top.

Radiocarbon work by Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi, published in Der Islam in 2012, dated the parchment to before 671 CE with high confidence, putting the lower text within living memory of Muhammad’s death.

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Islamic Tradition Already Knew This

Islamic scholarship has never actually denied that variant codices existed. The ‘official’ story includes early leaders ordering the destruction of competing versions precisely because there were competing versions to destroy. Some early figures famously resisted handing their copies over. The sanctioned reading variants still used in recitation today are themselves an institutional acknowledgment that the text wasn’t perfectly uniform from the start.

What this palimpsest does is take that story out of ancient history books, where it can be managed, footnoted, and explained away as minor dialectal variation, and puts it in your hands as ink on seventh-century parchment.

The fact that the standard reading looks, in case after case, like a correction of something else in the manuscript record is the kind of claim textual critics make about the New Testament without anyone calling it heresy. Apply the same method to the Quran and you’ve touched the one text every school of Islamic theology insists cannot have a history, because a text with a history is a text somebody wrote, edited, and standardized rather than a text that fell from heaven whole.

Why Half the Cache Still Hasn’t Been Properly Studied

Access to Sana’a 1 and its companion fragments has never been simple. Yemeni authorities restricted photography and publication rights for years, and the manuscripts that remain in the Dar al-Makhtutat in Sana’a are still, by most accounts, undercataloged. Then Yemen’s civil war made the question moot for a while: a collection housed in an active conflict zone doesn’t get much scholarly access regardless of anyone’s intentions. Estimates suggest roughly half the material recovered in 1972 has never been properly photographed or published, which means the fullest picture of what that ceiling was hiding may still be sitting in storage, waiting for a stable enough Yemen to let researchers back in.

The comparison to the Dead Sea Scrolls writes itself, and not just for the dramatic accident-of-discovery story. Both finds sat under tight institutional control for decades after they surfaced, both involved a small circle of scholars gatekeeping access to material with obvious doctrinal stakes, and both eventually forced a public reckoning that the guardians would rather have avoided. The scrolls took nearly fifty years to reach full publication. Sana’a’s attic might take longer, if the region ever settles enough to finish the job.

What’s already out of the bag is enough. A ceiling collapsed in Yemen and dropped proof that the Quran, like every other scripture humans have ever produced, went through drafts.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Sadeghi, Behnam, and Mohsen Goudarzi. “Ṣan’ā’ 1 and the Origins of the Qur’ān.” Der Islam, 2012.

• Puin, Gerd-Rüdiger. “Observations on Early Qur’an Manuscripts in Ṣan’ā’.” In The Qur’an as Text, edited by Stefan Wild. Brill, 1996.

• Puin, Elisabeth. Published analyses of Sana’a manuscript DAM 01-27.1, 2008-2009.

• Lester, Toby. “What Is the Koran?” The Atlantic, January 1999.

• Sadeghi, Behnam, and Uwe Bergmann. “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’ān of the Prophet.” Arabica, 2010.

In December 1945, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for fertilizer near the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif in Upper Egypt when his mattock struck a sealed clay jar. He hesitated over opening it, worried about what spirit might be sitting inside, then figured gold was the better bet and smashed it open.

What came out was thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices containing roughly fifty-two separate texts, nearly all of them unknown to any living scholar. His mother used some of the pages for kindling yes, we lost some of it to breakfast). The rest moved through the Egyptian antiquities black market for years, one codex getting smuggled out of the country and bought by the Jung Institute in Zurich, before the collection ended up at the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

By the time Elaine Pagels published The Gnostic Gospels in 1979, the story had hardened into something everybody thinks they know: here are the books the church tried to erase, the suppressed Christianity, the version with the divine feminine and the secret teachings and Mary Magdalene at the center. Dan Brown built a bestseller on that premise, and the History Channel has been recycling it ever since.

The suppression is documented, and the stories about the church burning these scriptures are literal, down to the emperors who signed the orders. Almost everything else in the popular version falls apart once you check the dates.

Provenance is half the story with a find like this, and the archaeology gets less attention than the theology. If that's your side of it, I'd recommend The Academic Archaeologist, who covers Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, especially Mesopotamian, and works from the excavation reports.

Nicaea Wasn’t a Vote on the Bible

Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325, the bishops voted on which gospels to keep, the losers got thrown on a bonfire, and the New Testament as we have it came out of that room. At least, that’s the version most people carry around today.

In our universe, though, one of those things happened. The council fought about the relationship between the Father and the Son, produced a creed against Arius, and settled a scheduling dispute over Easter. The canon didn’t come up. We have the creed, we have canons on clerical discipline and readmitting lapsed Christians, and we have contemporary accounts. Nobody at Nicaea took a show of hands on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The four-gospel canon was already old news by then. Irenaeus of Lyon was defending it around 180, and his argument tells you how contested it still was: there are four gospels because there are four zones of the world and four principal winds, which is the reasoning of a man asserting a conclusion he can’t otherwise justify. The first surviving list matching the twenty-seven books of our New Testament exactly comes from Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Festal Letter of 367, more than four decades after Nicaea and roughly three centuries after the crucifixion.

That letter matters for the jar in the cliff. Athanasius told Egyptian Christians which books were legitimate and instructed them to purge the rest. The Nag Hammadi codices were bound in the mid-fourth century (the scrap paper used to stiffen the covers includes dated receipts from the 340s), the Pachomian monastery complex sat a few miles away, and somebody buried the whole library shortly after. A monk clearing out the library ahead of an enforcement order is a hypothesis rather than a proven fact, and it fits the evidence better than anything else on offer.

The God Who Didn’t Know There Was Anything Above Him

The Secret Book of John has a creation story that reads like a hostile takeover of Genesis. The true God is unknowable and remote. A lesser being called Yaldabaoth, produced by an error in the divine order, makes the material world and then announces that he’s the only god there is, which the text presents as the boast of an idiot who has never looked up. That “I am God and there is no other” line is lifted straight out of Isaiah. The point being made is that the God of the Hebrew Bible is the villain, and the serpent in Eden was doing humanity a favor.

The rest of the library ranges wider than that. The Gospel of Truth, probably from the circle of Valentinus, is closer to a meditation on ignorance and the joy of being found. The Gospel of Philip calls Mary Magdalene the companion of Jesus and says he loved her more than the other disciples, in a manuscript with holes in exactly the places people most want to read. The Gospel of Mary, which came from a separate manuscript bought in Cairo in 1896 rather than from Nag Hammadi, has Peter refusing to believe a woman received revelation and Levi telling him to sit down. The Gospel of Judas surfaced later still, in a codex that spent years decaying in a safe deposit box before its 2006 publication, and the initial reading of Judas as the hero who alone understood Jesus got picked apart by April DeConick, who read the same Coptic and concluded Judas is a demon handing his teacher over to the wrong powers.

What holds most of this together is a conviction that salvation comes through knowledge rather than through a death and a resurrection, that the material world is a mistake, and that a divine spark is stuck inside you waiting to hear its own name.

Irenaeus Wrote the Losers Out of the Record

Until 1945, nearly everything anyone knew about these Christians came from the people who wanted them gone. Irenaeus wrote five books against them. Tertullian, Hippolytus, and later Epiphanius kept the genre going, and Epiphanius in particular collected heresies the way other people collect stamps. They quote their opponents selectively, paraphrase uncharitably, and describe rituals that sound invented for shock value.

Then the state joined in. Constantine ordered the books of Arius burned and made possession a capital offense. Theodosius I and his successors turned anti-heresy legislation into a standing program, and the Theodosian Code preserves law after law on confiscating property, banning assemblies, and destroying texts. Christianity spent the fourth century acquiring the machinery of an official religion and used it immediately.

So the losing texts survived by accident, in translation, in the ground, in Coptic versions of Greek originals nobody kept.

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Why Nag Hammadi Doesn’t Get You Closer to the Historical Jesus

The canonical gospels were written roughly forty to sixty-five years after the crucifixion by authors who never met the man and whose names were attached to the texts generations later. That’s bad. The Nag Hammadi material is worse. Most of it dates to the second and third centuries, and it shows it, arguing about problems that only existed once Christians had spent a hundred years developing theology. The Secret Book of John is doing Platonism with Jewish scripture as raw material. The Gospel of Truth assumes a Christian audience already fluent in a system of thought.

The Gospel of Thomas is the one serious exception, a collection of 114 sayings with no crucifixion, no resurrection, and no narrative at all, and there’s a live scholarly argument about whether some of its core goes back as early as the canonical material or whether the whole thing is a second-century compilation. Bart Ehrman lands on the later side, Stephen Patterson and others push earlier. Even the optimistic reading gives you sayings rather than events.

Anyone selling these texts as the suppressed true biography is, intentionally or unintentionally, running the same play as the apologists, just from the other direction.

The Valentinians Were Sitting in the Pews

The texts filed under “Gnosticism” contradict each other. The Secret Book of John gives you a creator produced by a mistake, hostile and ignorant, with an entire mythology of aeons behind him and a baptismal rite to go with it. The Gospel of Thomas has no villain creator, no aeons, no cosmic accident, just sayings about a kingdom already spread out over the earth that people fail to see. The Valentinians landed somewhere else again, with a creator who was ignorant rather than malicious, and they held that position while sitting in ordinary congregations taking communion next to everyone else. Tertullian says Valentinus was once in the running to be bishop of Rome.

Irenaeus opens his attack by complaining that these people use the same words as everybody else and mean something different underneath, which is the complaint of a man who can’t pick his opponents out of his own congregation. They shared buildings, clergy, and scripture with the bishops writing against them, and the line between the two groups had to be invented before it could be enforced.

What the Fourth Century Was For

Athanasius sent his letter in 367, and somebody near Nag Hammadi put a library in the ground. A Christian in 150 could hold a view that raised no eyebrows in Alexandria and got you thrown out in Lyon. We know who won that argument, roughly when, and what they did to the other side’s books, and none of it tells you which side had the better claim on the man they were both writing about.

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Sources and Further Reading

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

• Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford, 2003)

• Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979)

• Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Harvard, 2003)

• Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, 1996)

• David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Harvard, 2010)

• Marvin Meyer, ed., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition (HarperOne, 2007)

• April D. DeConick, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says (Continuum, 2007)

• Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (English translation, Fortress, 1971)

• Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford, 1987)

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Ask a white evangelical pastor why he believes what he believes, and you’ll get some version of the same answer. He’s just reading the Bible. No tradition, no philosophy, no politics, no agenda. The text says what it says, and he’s following it wherever it leads.

The mandatory requirement to accept this answer is to know almost nothing about where the text came from, who wrote it, what got added to it, and what it says on the subjects the movement has built its politics around. Seminary-trained pastors know this material. It’s covered in the first semester of any introductory New Testament course, including at evangelical schools. This doesn’t mean it ever makes it into a sermon.

Today we’re going to talk about a few things about the Bible that some may see as an attack on Christianity. However, I’d like you to bear in mind that the historical realities laid out here are openly acknowledged by mainstream Christian scholars, plenty of whom are practicing believers teaching at institutions that train clergy. If you’re a Christian reader, the point isn’t to toss your Bible in the trash (your faith is your business and no one else’s) but to test what you’ve been taught against actual evidence, rather than retreating into denial to keep a fragile theology intact. Intellectual honesty requires looking at history as it exists, not as one wishes it were.

Nobody Has the Original Manuscripts

I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no original of any book of the Bible. What we have are copies of copies of copies, the earliest substantial New Testament manuscripts dating to around 200 CE, well over a century after the originals were written, and the oldest complete Bibles dating to the fourth century.

Furthermore, scribes were relaying the meaning of the text they were copying, interpreting things to clarify them and rewording things to improve them. They worked more like modern editors than like photocopy machines, which makes hunting individual words in the Bible for meanings deeper than the text carries at face value a dangerous exercise.

Not surprisingly, the copies don’t always agree with each other. Scholars put the number of variants across the surviving Greek manuscripts somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000, which is, to put things into perspective, more differences among the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. Most are trivial, spelling slips and word-order swaps made by tired scribes working by lamplight. Bruce Metzger, the teacher of modern figures like Bart Ehrman and the most respected textual critic of the twentieth century, built his career on cataloging these variants, and he was a believing Christian who saw no conflict between the evidence and his faith.

The doctrine of inerrancy claims the Bible is without error in its original manuscripts. Those manuscripts don’t exist and nobody has ever seen one. The doctrine protects a document that can’t be produced.

Three Most Quoted Passages Aren’t in the Original

There are verses in the Bible that we know were added later by various people at various points in history because they don’t exist in the earliest Greek manuscripts, and some of them miraculously appear in the Latin Bible, which is supposed to be a translation.

Three of the most quoted are worth walking through.

The woman caught in adultery, the story where Jesus tells the crowd that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone, appears in John 7:53-8:11. It isn’t in the earliest and best manuscripts of John. It floats around in the tradition, appearing in different places in different copies, and some scribes parked it in Luke instead. Most modern Bibles now bracket it with a note. Nobody reads the note.

Mark originally ended at 16:8, with the women fleeing the empty tomb and telling nobody because they’re terrified. The twelve verses that follow, including the resurrection appearances and the bit about handling snakes and drinking poison, are missing from the two oldest complete Bibles we have. Whole Appalachian congregations have organized their worship around a passage that a second-century scribe wrote to give the Gospel a more satisfying finish.

Then there’s 1 John 5:7-8, the Comma Johanneum, the one verse in the entire Bible that plainly states the Trinity. It appears in no Greek manuscript before roughly the fourteenth century. It entered the printed Greek text because Erasmus, under pressure, included it in a later edition after a manuscript containing it conveniently surfaced. From there it went into the King James Version and into four hundred years of English-speaking Christianity. The clearest proof text for the central doctrine of the faith is a Latin gloss that worked its way into the margin and then into the page.

Half of Paul’s Letters Weren’t Written by Paul

Thirteen New Testament letters carry Paul’s name. Scholars across the spectrum, including at Catholic and mainline seminaries, treat seven as uncontested: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Nobody can authenticate these against an original, since none survives, so the case rests on internal evidence: vocabulary, theology, how much church organization the letter assumes, and where it sits historically. The seven hang together on all four counts and the rest pull away from them. The Pastorals (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus) are almost universally regarded as later productions written in Paul’s name, with Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians heavily disputed.

This matters because of which verses land where. The instruction that a woman must learn in silence and submission and may not teach or hold authority over a man comes from 1 Timothy 2:11-12. That’s one of the letters Paul didn’t write. The household code telling slaves to obey their masters comes from Ephesians and Colossians. Even 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, the command for women to keep silent in the churches, sits in different positions in different manuscript families, which is a strong indicator that it started life as a marginal note by a scribe who agreed with the Pastorals.

The uncontested Paul greets Junia as outstanding among the apostles and works alongside Phoebe, a deacon, and Prisca, who taught. The Paul who tells women to sit down and shut up is a man writing under a dead apostle’s name a generation or two later. Every church that bars women from the pulpit is running on the forgeries.

Counting evangelical and confessional scholars in these percentages flatters the theological position, because those numbers include people who reached their conclusion before they read anything. All thirteen letters are Paul’s, and the evidence offered is that the letters say so, which is the claim being tested rather than support for it.

The Bible’s Only Abortion Ritual Is Performed by a Priest

Numbers 5:11-31 lays out what to do when a husband suspects his wife of infidelity. The priest mixes dust from the tabernacle floor into holy water, writes out curses, washes the ink into the drink, and makes her swallow it. If she’s guilty, her belly swells and her thigh falls away, which is Hebrew idiom for a pregnancy ending. God is the operator of the procedure and the temple is the clinic.

Exodus 21:22-25 handles the case of men fighting who strike a pregnant woman and cause her to miscarry. The penalty is a fine paid to her husband. If the woman herself dies, the penalty is life for life. The fetus is property damage and the woman is a person, which is the opposite of the hierarchy preached from evangelical pulpits today.

Southern Baptists knew this. In 1971, two years before Roe, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for legislation permitting abortion in cases including rape, incest, fetal deformity, and damage to the emotional or physical health of the mother. W.A. Criswell, one of the most influential fundamentalists in the country, said publicly after Roe that a baby became a person at birth. Randall Balmer, the historian who has done the most careful work on this, traces the movement’s pivot to the late 1970s and to Paul Weyrich, who spent years looking for an issue that would mobilize evangelical voters and found that the thing lighting up conservative Protestant pastors was the IRS revoking tax exemptions from segregated Christian academies. Abortion arrived later as the respectable version of the grievance.

The Convention Was Founded to Defend Slaveholders

The Southern Baptist Convention split from northern Baptists in 1845 over whether a slaveholder could serve as a missionary. The southern churches said yes and left. They had scripture on their side, which is the part nobody wants to sit with. The Bible regulates slavery in Exodus and Leviticus, sets terms for beating your slave short of killing him, tells slaves to obey their masters in the New Testament epistles, and returns a runaway in Philemon. Mark Noll’s work on the theological crisis of the Civil War shows the pro-slavery preachers winning the proof-text argument comfortably, because the literalist reading was theirs.

The abolitionist case ran on themes, on the arc of Exodus and the ethics of the prophets and the logic of imago Dei, which required reading the Bible as a document with a trajectory rather than a rulebook. Curse of Ham theology, built out of a garbled passage in Genesis 9 about Noah’s drunkenness, supplied the racial justification and outlived slavery by a century in Sunday schools. The SBC apologized in 1995, a hundred and fifty years late.

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Where This Leaves the Inerrancy Claim

All this comes from the manuscript evidence, from the standard critical editions, and from historians of American religion, much of it produced by Christians working in Christian institutions. The information is available, taught, and published. What’s missing is any incentive to bring it into the sanctuary, because a congregation that knows the Pastorals are pseudonymous is harder to keep quiet, and a congregation that knows its denomination was born defending slaveholders has questions about who decides which verses are timeless.

The movement’s authority rests on the claim that it reads a perfect book plainly. Both halves of that claim fall apart under the evidence, and the people holding the microphone have known it the whole time.

Contrary to what some of the loudest public figures keep insisting, believing in God doesn’t put anyone out of touch with reality, and neither does following a religion. The break comes when someone loses track of the line between what they know and what they believe, at which point the belief stops being answerable to anything outside itself. That’s the condition a lot of white evangelical leadership has cultivated in its people, and it’s why the facts in this piece will bounce off most who were brought up in that environment, no matter how solid the evidence is. The ones it won’t bounce off are the ones who go check.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperOne, 2005)

• Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God (HarperOne, 2011)

• Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (Oxford, 2005)

• Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Eerdmans, 2021)

• Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (UNC Press, 2006)

• Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise (Zondervan, 2019)

• Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed. (Eerdmans, 2014), on 1 Corinthians 14:34-35

• Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022)

The New Testament's table of contents hands you four authors. Two of them are supposed to have walked with Jesus, one traveled with Peter, one traveled with Paul. Those names carry the whole evidentiary weight of Christian origins, because if Matthew and John wrote down what they saw, you're reading testimony. The books themselves never make that claim, and when one of those men turns up inside the story, the text talks about him in the third person, the way you'd write about somebody else.

What the Four Books Say About Their Own Authors

Mark opens with a sentence about good news and then runs 16 chapters without the author ever stepping into the story. No “I was there,” no “we sailed,” nothing.

Matthew tells you about the calling of a tax collector named Matthew in the third person, at 9:9. Mark tells the identical story at 2:14 and calls the man Levi son of Alphaeus. Somebody changed the name while copying, which is the behavior of an editor working with sources rather than a man recalling the afternoon he quit his job.

Luke is the most explicit of the four. The prologue at 1:1-4 tells Theophilus that many people have already undertaken to compile accounts of these events, that those events were handed down by people who were eyewitnesses from the beginning, and that the author has investigated everything carefully so Theophilus can be sure of what he’s been taught. The writer puts himself downstream of the eyewitnesses and says so in his opening paragraph.

John closes twice. The first ending arrives at 20:30-31, and then chapter 21 comes along like a bolted-on appendix, finishing at 21:24 with a line that gives the whole thing away: this is the disciple who is testifying to these things and who has written them, and we know his testimony is true. Somebody else is vouching for the author in the third person plural. Authors don’t write endorsements of themselves in the voice of a committee.

When the Four Books Were Written

Mark 13 has Jesus predicting that the Temple will come down with not one stone left on another, described with an urgency that reads like recent news. Rome burned the Temple in 70 CE, which puts Mark around that year, give or take a few. Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a written source, so both come later, roughly 80 to 90. Matthew 22:7 slips a detail into a parable about a king who sends troops to burn a city, which Luke’s version of the same parable lacks. John lands somewhere between 90 and 110, with its references to followers of Jesus being put out of the synagogue (9:22, 12:42, 16:2) reflecting a conflict that belongs to the end of the century.

Set that against who the disciples were. Galilean fishermen and village laborers who spoke Aramaic. Acts 4:13 describes Peter and John with the word agrammatoi, meaning unlettered. Literacy across the Roman empire ran somewhere near 10 percent, and it ran lower in rural Galilee, and being able to sign your name sat several tiers below composing extended narrative prose in a second language. Whoever wrote these four books had Greek rhetorical training, access to the Septuagint, and the leisure to compose at length.

Matthew and Luke Copy Mark Word for Word

Of Mark’s 661 verses, roughly 600 turn up in Matthew and about 350 in Luke, frequently with identical Greek vocabulary in identical word order. That level of agreement happens when one writer has another writer’s scroll open in front of him.

Matthew the tax collector, one of the Twelve, present for the ministry, sat down and copied nine-tenths of Mark into his own book, and that borrowed material accounts for more than half of everything he wrote. A secretary of Peter’s working up other people’s stories a generation after the events, the man he was copying from wasn’t an eyewitness either. Then he reached the passage about his own calling, took that over from Mark along with the rest, and changed the name in it to his own. The tradition asks you to believe an eyewitness preferred hearsay to memory.

Then, Where Do the Names Come From?

The first surviving attempt to name gospel authors comes from Papias of Hierapolis around 120 to 130 CE, and it survives only because Eusebius quoted it two centuries later in his Church History (3.39). Papias says Mark served as Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately but not in order, and that Matthew compiled the sayings in the Hebrew dialect and everyone interpreted them as best they could. Our Matthew is a Greek composition dependent on Greek Mark, so whatever book Papias was describing, it wasn’t the one in your Bible. Papias also admits he got this from an elder, meaning secondhand information about events three generations back.

Justin Martyr writes around 150 to 160 and quotes gospel material constantly. He calls the material “memoirs of the apostles” and doesn’t attach individual names to individual books. A prominent Christian teacher in Rome, using these texts as scripture, apparently had no fixed authorial labels for them.

The four names as a settled set arrive with Irenaeus of Lyon around 180 CE, in Against Heresies 3.1.1. Irenaeus also explains why there must be exactly four gospels, and his reasoning is worth quoting in substance: there are four zones of the world and four principal winds, so four is the fitting number. That’s the argument of a man defending a collection already in his hands against Marcion, who wanted one gospel, and against Valentinian teachers circulating others. The names solved a problem in the second century.

The titles in the manuscripts point the same direction. “According to Matthew,” “according to Mark,” phrased as euangelion kata, is the wording you use to distinguish copies sitting side by side in a collection. Martin Hengel argued the titles must go back to the beginning, since a book in circulation needs identification and the title forms show almost no variation. Uniformity works equally well as evidence of standardization at a single moment, and the earliest manuscripts preserving those titles date to around 200, long after the names had hardened into tradition.

Scribes Who Improved What They Found

Nobody has an original. The earliest substantial copies are third and fourth century, and everything in between was hand-copied by people ranging from professional scribes to bored monks to enthusiastic amateurs. Across roughly 5,700 Greek manuscripts, the count of textual variants runs past 400,000, which is more variants than there are words in the New Testament. The overwhelming majority are spelling slips and word order. A handful changed doctrine.

Mark 16:9-20, the resurrection appearances and the snake handling, is absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and its vocabulary doesn’t match the rest of Mark. The gospel originally ended at 16:8 with terrified women saying nothing to anyone, which is a difficult ending, and later hands fixed it.

John 7:53-8:11, the woman caught in adultery, is missing from the earliest manuscripts entirely. In the manuscripts that do carry it, the passage wanders: some put it after John 7:36, some after 21:25, some drop it into Luke after 21:38. A story that floats between books wasn’t in either one to start with.

Luke 22:43-44, where an angel strengthens Jesus and his sweat falls like drops of blood, is missing from several of the best early witnesses. At Mark 1:41, Codex Bezae reads orgistheis, moved with anger, where most manuscripts have moved with compassion, and both Matthew and Luke, copying that verse, delete the emotion word altogether. At Luke 3:22, Codex Bezae has the voice at the baptism say “today I have begotten you,” straight out of Psalm 2, which reads as adoption rather than eternal sonship. Later manuscripts smooth it into Mark’s safer wording.

What Survives Once the Names Come Off

These four books remain the earliest connected stories about Jesus, composed within one or two generations of his death, drawing on oral tradition and at least one lost collection of sayings. Nobody serious throws them out. What they can’t do is function as sworn testimony from named witnesses, because they’re anonymous documents of uncertain provenance, built from decades of oral transmission, shaped by writers with theological positions to defend, and copied for centuries by people who occasionally corrected what they read.

That’s an ordinary situation in ancient history, and historians work with it all the time. The problem shows up when a tradition that acquired its author list from second-century bishops fighting heresy gets presented as the reason to believe the accounts in the first place.

And in the exclusive content for supporters, we’ll cover what mainstream Christian scholarship says about this entire ordeal, which is rarely what the readers expect.

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If you find value here, become a supporter of The Unholy Truth. Paid subscriptions are what make this work possible.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted and Misquoting Jesus

• Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

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

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

• Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book 3, chapter 39 (on Papias)

• Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 3

• Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ

• Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine

• William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy

• Dale C. Allison Jr., The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus

Some beliefs sit so deep in the culture that we assume they have to be in the Bible, and anyone suggesting otherwise sounds like they’re running an anti-Christian smear campaign. Today we’re going after three of them.

Many people will point at the Bible to tell you where hell comes from, usually with a vague gesture toward the back half. Trouble is, the God of Genesis, Exodus, and Judges never threatens anybody with eternal fire. He threatens famine, plague, invading armies, and boils, and when Yahweh wants to punish you in the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible he does it here on the ground, in your lifetime, often hitting your grandchildren for good measure.

The furnace under the earth, the horned adversary, and the sorting of souls into reward and torment all showed up late, and every one of them came in from somewhere else.

And the irony of all is revealed at the end.

Sheol Was a Universal Waiting Room Until It Wasn’t

The Hebrew Bible uses Sheol roughly sixty-five times for where the dead go, and the picture is bleak without being punitive. Sheol’s dark, dusty, silent, and universal, where kings, prophets, and murderers land in the same pit and God stops paying attention. Psalm 6:5 asks how anyone can praise God from a place where nobody remembers him, Ecclesiastes 9:5 says the dead know nothing and get no further reward, and Job 14 gives a cut tree better odds than a man, since the tree can sprout again while the dead man lies down without rising.

There’s no fire, no demons, no torture, no postmortem sorting. An Iron Age Israelite would’ve found it strange that your earthly behavior determined your afterlife accommodations, because Yahweh settled accounts during your life, and Deuteronomy spells out the terms: obey and you’ll get rain, disobey and you’ll get locusts.

The Heavenly Court’s Prosecutor

In the Hebrew Bible, satan’s a common noun meaning adversary, accuser, or obstructor, usually appearing with the definite article as ha-satan, which functions as a job title.

In Numbers 22:22, Yahweh’s angel blocks Balaam’s donkey as an adversary, performing the function of a satan. Zechariah 3 shows the accuser standing in the heavenly court to bring charges against Joshua the high priest, only for Yahweh to overrule him like a judge reining in an overzealous prosecutor. In Job 1 and 2, the accuser attends a divine staff meeting with the other sons of God, reports on his travels, and proposes auditing Job’s piety. God signs off twice, meaning the accuser can’t touch Job without written authorization from management.

The clearest proof of this character’s late evolution sits in two parallel passages. In 2 Samuel 24:1, Yahweh grows angry with Israel and incites David to take a census, subsequently punishing seventy thousand people for the sin. Centuries later, the author of 1 Chronicles 21:1 retold the story and assigned the role of inciting David to Satan. The plot stayed identical while the underlying theology shifted, giving a writer somewhere else to dump divine liability.

The Persian Rewire

Judah spent roughly two centuries under Persian rule after Cyrus captured Babylon in 539 BCE. Persian imperial religion revolved around Zoroastrianism and its cosmic dualism, pitting Ahura Mazda against Angra Mainyu with the universe as their battlefield and humanity forced to pick a side. It featured an individual judgment at the Chinvat Bridge, an ordeal of molten metal for the wicked, a bodily resurrection, and a cleanup where evil gets erased.

Judaism entered the Persian period with Sheol and emerged with full apocalyptic machinery: a named adversary, ranks of demons, named angels, a war between light and darkness, and bodies climbing out of the dirt. Daniel 12:2, written around 165 BCE during the Maccabean crisis, holds the only clear resurrection promise in the Hebrew Bible, showing sleepers in the dust waking to either everlasting life or everlasting contempt.

While dating Avestan texts remains tricky because of centuries of oral transmission, the timeline on the Jewish side’s clear. These concepts appear in Jewish literature during and after the Persian and Hellenistic periods, whereas earlier texts lack them entirely. By the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, the shift had hardened into place, with the War Scroll depicting the Sons of Light fighting the Sons of Darkness under Belial’s command.

The Ravine Outside Jerusalem

The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) record Jesus using the word Gehenna for hell, referring to a location you can visit today. The Valley of Hinnom runs along the southern and western edge of Jerusalem’s Old City, earning its reputation through child sacrifice. 2 Kings 23:10 records King Josiah defiling the high place at Topheth in the valley so no one could pass children through fire to Molech, while Jeremiah 7:31 promises the ravine will turn into the Valley of Slaughter.

Gehenna started as a ravine with a horrific past before morphing into shorthand for divine judgment by fire. Mark 9:47-48 quotes the end of Isaiah, describing corpses lying with unquenched fire and undying worms, which describes dead bodies piled outside city walls rather than conscious souls suffering in an underground chamber.

Popular myth claims Gehenna served as Jerusalem’s burning garbage dump, but that story originated with medieval rabbi David Kimhi around 1200 CE and lacks support from ancient sources or archaeological digs.

From Serpent to Satan

Genesis 3 never mentions Satan in Hebrew, describing the tempter as a nachash or serpent. Creation includes this animal, and its sentence fits a beast: crawl on your belly, eat dust, and get crushed by human heels. Hebrew authors never point back to Genesis 3 to explain evil’s origin, and major prophets like Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah ignore it completely.

The identification appears in Revelation 12:9, where a first-century author stacks four names onto the character: the dragon, the ancient serpent, the Devil, and Satan. Early Christians read Genesis 3 backward through Revelation 12, giving the garden snake horns retroactively.

The fall-from-heaven story came together through similar backward readings. Isaiah 14:12 mocks a fallen tyrant as helel ben shachar, the Shining One, explicitly framing the passage as a taunt against the king of Babylon. Jerome translated helel into Latin as lucifer, the ordinary word for the morning star, and the King James translators capitalized it into a proper name. Readers inherited a biography of the Devil built out of a mistranslated nickname for a dead Mesopotamian king.

Ezekiel 28 underwent identical treatment, where a prophecy directed at the king of Tyre was reinterpreted by church fathers as the Devil’s original resume.

Watchers, Titans, and Folk Tales

The machinery transforming the accuser into the ultimate enemy was built in intertestamental Jewish literature that didn’t make the Protestant canon. The Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch expands the brief verses of Genesis 6 into a story where two hundred angels descend, teach humanity forbidden arts, father giants, and end up chained beneath the earth to await fire.

Jude quotes 1 Enoch directly as prophecy, while 2 Peter 2:4 claims God cast sinning angels into tartarus, adopting the Greek term for the abyss beneath Hades where Zeus imprisoned the Titans. New Testament writers routinely pulled from shared Jewish and Greek underworld lore.

Luke 16 demonstrates this borrowing through the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The structure of reversed fortunes and communication across a fixed chasm matches an Egyptian folk tale about Setne and Si-Osiris that circulated across Greco-Roman Egypt.

How Augustine Closed the Door

Early Christians debated hell’s nature for centuries before the hardline position won out. Origen of Alexandria argued in the third century for apokatastasis, the universal restoration of all souls, reasoning that punishment from a good God must correct rather than destroy. Gregory of Nyssa defended a similar view without facing contemporary backlash.

Augustine locked down the Latin West by arguing in City of God that hell’s fire’s eternal, physical, and conscious. He insisted that finite sins against an infinite God deserve infinite torment, explicitly including unbaptized infants. Three centuries after Origen’s death, the Second Council of Constantinople formally condemned his restoration theology.

The visual details came later from art and literature. Scripture gives Satan no pitchfork, horns, or red skin. Medieval artists recycled features from Pan and satyrs, while Dante’s Inferno designed the nine circles and frozen lake around 1320. John Milton later provided the rebellion, the celestial war, and the charismatic personality in Paradise Lost.

What ends up in modern sermons is a composite built from Persian dualism, Canaanite star myths, a Judean ravine, Greek underworld mythology, Egyptian folk tales, North African theology, Florentine poetry, and English epic verse.

And the irony of it all? Islam borrowed hell, Satan, and the afterlife from Christianity and put them in writing, which means, strictly speaking, the versions most Christians believe about hell, Satan, and the afterlife today are more Quranic than biblical.

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Sources and Further Reading

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

• Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (1995)

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

• T.J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, The Birth of Satan (2005)

• Philip Jenkins, Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World (2017)

• Alan F. Segal, Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (2004)

• Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (2021)

• Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (2002)

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

• George W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch: A Commentary (2001)