Bible Tales
Talking snakes, trees, and donkeys are a thing.
The earth is 6,000 years old.
God created light BEFORE he invented the sun and stars.
Noah had 3 sons at 500 years old, and at 600 years old,
when a global flood occured, he managed to put dinosaurs onto the Ark, persuaded penguins to swim to the middle east from Antarctica, somehow shepherds all the other 5 hundred gazillion species onto the ark in a single day, and they magically didn’t all eat each other on the trip.

Jesus walked on water,
fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread, two fishes, and has 12 baskets leftover?
God parted the red sea for Noah.
Samson caught 3,000 foxes, tied their tails together and set them on fire.
Elijah shows that he “is a man of God” by burning 102 men to death.
God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children, for making fun of Elijah’s bald head.
Ahaziah is somehow two years older than his father?
Jonah lives in the belly of a whale for for three days and nights. Awesome.

Jesus recommends cutting off a body part if you sin.
Jesus said those who believe in me, will be able to perform even greater miracles than he did!
Peter’s shadow had magical healing power.
People got out of their graves and walked around after Jesus rose from the dead.
God kills everything to make the world less violent (Genesis 6:11-13).
God decides to kill Moses because his son wasn’t circumcised. Luckily his Egyptian wife took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son. (Exodus 4:24-26).
God sends plagues so people can get to know him better. (Exodus 9:14)
A population of 70 people became several million in less than 40 years during the Exodus.

What to do if you sin without knowing it? kill an unblemished ram for God Leviticus (5:14-15).
After Jesus kills the herd of pigs by sending devils into them, afterwhich the “whole city” asks him to leave. I don’t blame them. (Matthew 8:34).
Physically deformed people cannot approach God (Leviticus 21:18-21.
Cursing at your parents warrants death (Leviticus 20:9)

Genesis chapter 1 says the first man and woman were made at the same time, and after the animals.
But Genesis chapter 2 gives a different order of creation: man, then the animals, and then woman.
 
 

 

How was John able to record what Jesus and the woman at the well said in John 4?
QUORA
Mike Burch
Worked at AT&T (company)Author has 13.6K answers and 51.2M answer viewsUpdated Sep 21

In the gospel of John chapter four, the disciples had left to buy food, leaving Jesus alone with the Samaritan woman at the well. Thus there was no one to record the conversation between Jesus and the woman, nor was there anyone to follow the woman into the city of Sychar to hear what she told its occupants about Jesus. Thus it seems we have an author or editor who was making things up, in order to make a theological point. That theological point being that Jesus proclaimed himself to be the Messiah, a prophet, and the source of “living water.”

These appear to be later Christian beliefs, rather than what Jesus was saying during his lifetime, if he actually lived. John was written toward the end of the first century AD, and this gospel disagrees wildly with the earlier-written gospels on important points. I will discuss some of these wild divergences shortly, and how the Jesus of John is weirdly different from the Jesus of the synoptic gospels.

Speaking of Samaritans, isn’t it ironic that the Christian religion turned Jesus, who saved all his sternest criticism for religious hypocrites, into the greatest HYPOCRITE of them all! In Jesus’s famous sermon the Good Samaritan put aside religious differences to help a man of another faith who was unable to help himself. But Jesus, who was able to save the thief on the cross with a mere nod of his head, will hypocritically not deign to nod his head at billions of people who are unable to save themselves, according to Christians who blaspheme his name from sunup to sundown, accusing him of infinite evil. What will Jesus say when people who call themselves “Christians” have to stand before him on the Day of Judgment and explain why they accused him of such evil?

But I digress. Getting back to the woman at the well…

We have to remember that the gospel of John was the last of the gospels to be written, circa 90-110 AD, and thus it was written “under the influence” of a “big fish” story that kept getting bigger and bigger. The copyists of the texts that became the New Testament were taking more and more liberties, adding things that the evangelist Paul knew nothing about, such as:

    The “virgin birth.”
    The “massacre of the innocents,” which never happened or the famous Jewish historian Flavius Josephus would have mentioned it in his extensive writings about King Herod the Great. Josephus discussed misdeeds of Herod far less than massacring babies.
    The earthly “miracles” of Jesus, other than the empty grave. Paul knew about the alleged resurrection but none of the “miracles” before the resurrection, and none of the “miracles” at the grave or thereafter.
    The cartoonish ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, which obviously never happened or all Israel would have been abuzz and the famous Jewish historian Josephus would have written about it.
    The loopy “Transfiguration.”
    The even loopier “Ascension” of the book of Acts, with Jesus soaring into the clouds like Superman while angels preached a sermon. We know this never happened because no one outside the author of Acts knew anything about it, not even the apostles who supposedly witnessed the most amazing things ever seen by human eyes, if it had actually happened. According to the New Testament, Paul was in communication with the other apostles, and yet none of them ever mentioned the most marvelous miracle of all time!

In conclusion, the Bible was “padded” with highly dubious “miracles” after the fact. As a result the four gospels and Acts disagree on critical points. Why? Because after 70 AD and the destruction of Jerusalem the Christian church dispersed and the various authors and copyists of the Bible were too far apart to keep their tall tales in synch.

The “woman at the well” story was added to confirm that Jesus said he was the Messiah and the source of “living water” but there is no reason to believe it ever happened. If it did, why didn’t Paul know about it, or the other writers of the New Testament?

by Michael R. Burch

THE WILD DIVERGENCES OF JOHN FROM THE OTHER GOSPELS

The gospel of John was written by a highly literate Greek whose Jesus was weirdly unlike the Jesus of the synoptic gospels:

    The Jesus of John sounds nothing like the Jesus of the synoptic gospels. In fact, he sounds like a completely different person. John’s Jesus is incredibly egotistical, long-winded, rambling, repetitive and quite the pain in the ass to read for any length of time.
    John’s gospel omits a surprising number of important episodes:
        John has no “virgin birth,” no census, no trip to Bethlehem, no lack of room, no Magi, no shepherds, no choirs of angels serenading Jesus’s birth, no “massacre of the innocents,” no “flight into Egypt,” etc. Does this suggest that such things were added to Matthew and Luke after John was written? Who could leave such stunning things out of a gospel if they were known at the time it was written? The evangelist Paul also knew nothing about such “miracles” so these inventions seem to have been added later rather than sooner. Thus, I propose the following timeline with estimated dates:
            The original gospel of Mark with no “virgin birth” and concluding with an empty grave with no one ever seeing Jesus or speaking to him after the alleged “resurrection.” The original version of Mark ended with a huge question mark, pardon the pun. (~70 AD or later)

            Also, the Jesus of Mark is completely incompatible with the Jesus of John. The Jesus of Mark teaches in parables but the Jesus of John preaches in wordy, tedious, repetitive sermons. The Jesus of Mark instructs that his identity as the Messiah must not be revealed, while the Jesus of John loudly and repeatedly proclaims his identity.
            Proto versions of Matthew and Luke, sans the “virgin birth” and ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, etc. (~70 AD or later)
            An “enhanced” version of Mark with the longer resurrection account added but still no “virgin birth.” (~100 AD or later)
            The gospel of John with no “virgin birth” but a much-expanded view of Jesus as the “son of god” and provisions for Jesus not returning while his disciples were alive. (~100 AD or later)
            Greatly “enhanced” versions of Matthew and Luke with the “virgin birth” and other invented “miracles” such as the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE added. Celsus disputed Jesus being born of a virgin, circa 175 AD, so that is my educated guess for such “enhanced” gospels. (~175 AD)
            The New Testament texts would continue to be “enhanced” with loopy nonsense such as Jesus spending 40 days in Jerusalem after the alleged “resurrection” but no one bothering to record a single word the “resurrected god” said, and Peter healing every sick person in Jerusalem and surrounding cities with his shadow, with Josephus being somehow clueless about the “miracles” happening in his neighborhood!
        There are no narrative or story-like parables in John, even though that was Jesus’s primary teaching method in the other gospels. The author of John has Jesus repeatedly speaking in long, rambling sermons rather than in parables. This strongly suggests one of three things:
            The author of John had no eyewitness testimony and was making up his Jesus’s long-winded abstract sermons.
            The authors of the other gospels had no eyewitness testimony and were making up Jesus’s parables.
            Everyone was making everything up, which would be my educated guess after studying the Bible and its myriad flaws and wild exaggerations for 55 years.
        John never mentions the the coming Kingdom of God, which is a focal point of the rest of the New Testament. Had the author of John given up on biblical prophecies of an earthly Messiah who would bring about world peace and universal worship of the One True God?
        John never mentions the temptation of Jesus.
        John never mentions the “transfiguration.”
        John never mentions the institution of the Lord’s Supper and Holy Communion.
        John never mentions the Sermon on the Mount.
        John never mentions the Lord’s Prayer. But didn’t Jesus teach the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples as the proper way to pray? A very curious omission unless it was a later addition to the gospels.
        John never mentions Jesus casting out demons, not even the infamous Legion. Perhaps the erudite author didn’t believe in “demons.”
    The author of John goes out of his way to stress that the “beloved disciple” — usually presumed to be John — was favored over the other eleven disciples. In John this disciple is portrayed as the one closest to Jesus, the one who rested his head on Jesus’s chest, the first to believe, and the one Jesus entrusted his mother to (chapter 19). A minority school of thought is that the “beloved disciple” was Lazarus because of rumors he wouldn’t die, having been raised from the dead.
    The Jesus of John frequently discusses eternal life, unlike Jesus in the earlier-written gospels, probably because the concept of eternal life had evolved after Jesus failed to “return” during the lifetimes of his disciples as he had promised. Thus the “kingdom of God” had to be moved from earth to heaven.
    John begins with the revelation, found nowhere else in the other gospels or the rest of the Bible, that Jesus was the Greek Logos (the “Word”) and Creator of the Universe! How did the author of John stumble upon this stunning information, and why did no other author of the Bible know anything about it? Was the “big fish” getting bigger and bigger?
    The Jesus of John openly proclaims himself to be the divine Son of God, not hiding his identity, as he does in the other gospels. For instance in the synoptic gospels Jesus advises people he heals to tell no one what happened. In the other gospels only the disciples are given clues about Jesus’s real identity and they don’t seem to ever get what they’re being told.
    John introduces “miracles” the author apparently invented, such as Jesus’s first “miracle” being the turning of water into wine. If that was actually Jesus’s first miracle the other gospels would have mentioned it. It seems this “miracle” was added to have Jesus duplicate the feat of a more ancient “savior” figure, Dionysus.
    Nearly half John’s gospel is related to the passion of Jesus, beginning with Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in chapter 11, foreshadowing his own death and resurrection, and Mary the sister of Lazarus anointing his feet with oil, in chapter 12. It bears noting that this Lazarus, who had a house, was never mentioned in the other gospels. (The metaphorical Lazarus of Luke in the famous parable was a beggar and he wasn’t raised from the dead.) If Jesus raised a beloved friend named Lazarus from the dead, it seems very odd that none of the other gospels bothered to mention such a stunning miracle, which occurred immediately before his own death and resurrection. Was the “big fish” getting bigger and bigger?
    Furthermore, John attributes the Sanhedrin plotting to murder Jesus to this “miracle.” If this were true, why didn’t the other gospels mention it? More fishy “big fish” stuff, obviously.
    According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus was murdered on charges of blasphemy, but in John, there is no such verdict. Rather, the Lazarus “miracle” caused the Sanhedrin to plot Jesus’s murder, and it was clearly the “will of God” according to John, for Jesus to die, in order for “god” and Jesus to be “glorified.”
    The author of John was obviously aware of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD, and the subsequent Jewish diaspora, and thus he backdated a “prophecy”:

    John has Caiaphas prophesy at an emergency meeting of the Sanhedrin: 48 “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.” 49 Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! 50 You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” 51 He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, 52 and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. 53 So from that day on they plotted to take his life. (John 11:48-53)
    John, also being aware of the expulsion of Christians from Jewish synagogues and persecution by the Romans, later backdated another “prophecy”:

    They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God. (John 16:2)
    John also attributes a Jerusalem crowd greeting Jesus as their King to the Lazarus miracle, making it even more unfathomable than none of the other gospels bothered to mention it. (John 12:1-19)
    The Jesus of John does not pray for the cup to pass, but accepts it willingly:

    27 “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name!” (John 12:27-28)

    Apparently, “god” glorifies his name by murdering innocents in the most ghastly form imaginable.
    John has an audible voice respond to Jesus’s prayer from heaven, and the voice is heard by the assembled crowd:

    Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” 29 The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him. (John 12:28-29)

    Again, if these things actually happened it is unfathomable that they were not mentioned in the other gospels. The disciples were right there, in the crowd, so how is it possible that this stunning confirmation of Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God was not mentioned?

    The “big fish” keeps getting fishier and fishier. Something is obviously rotten in Denmark.
    Despite these manufactured-after-the-fact “miracles” many Jews still did not believe. The author of John attributes this to an evil “god”:

    “He has blinded their eyes
    and hardened their hearts,
    so they can neither see with their eyes,
    nor understand with their hearts,
    nor turn—and I would heal them.” (John 12:40)

    Of course the reason many Jews didn’t believe in Jesus was that none of this actually happened. We know this from the other gospels and the epistles of Paul, where none of this malarkey was ever mentioned.
    John skips the Last Supper and Holy Communion for a foot-washing!
    John denies that Jesus is God or equal to God:

    28 “You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. (John 14:28)
    John denies that human beings have free will because they are predestined by God to either be saved or damned, a common theme in the New Testament:

    16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you… (John 15:16)
    John loopily claims that God will give Christians whatever they ask in Jesus’s name, another common theme in the New Testament, and one that every Christian knows is complete and utter hogwash:

    … whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. (John 15:16)

    Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. (John 16:23)
    John promises “the Spirit of truth” while lying his ass off! (John 15:26)
    John claims “the Spirit of truth” will lead Christians into “all truth” when in fact Christians would bounce from error to error: burning women at the stake as “witches,” burning each other at the stake over slight differences in dogma, claiming slavery was “the will of God,” etc.

    But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. (John 16:13)
    The Jesus of John prays very selectively, not for the world, but for the “chosen few” who were chosen by predestination:

    I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. (John 17:9)
    John manages to make his Jesus intensely unlikable as well as unbelievable. John’s Jesus engages in long, rambling, repetitive discourses on his unique nature and “glory.” John records long prayers and discourses that are nothing like anything in the synoptic gospels. These include:
        Nicodemus (Chapter 3)
        Samaritan woman (Chapter 4)
        Disciples (Chapters 13-16)
        Jesus’s lengthy prayer prior to his arrest (Chapter 17)
        Pilate (Chapters 18-19)
        Mary Magdalene and Thomas (Chapter 20)
        Peter (Chapter 21)
    According to John, Jesus himself was also predestined for glory:

    “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. (John 17:24)

    How is “god” glorified? By bloody sacrifices, whether of innocent animals or his “only begotten son.”
    According to John, God’s love is limited to the predestined “chosen few.” (John 17:20-26)
    According to John, Judas doesn’t just betray Jesus, he leads a detachment of soldiers and “some officials from the chief priests and the Pharisees” to Jesus in the Kidron Valley. (John 18:1-3)
    Only John has Jesus carry his cross all the way to Golgotha by himself. (John 19:17)
    John claims to have had an eyewitness — an unlikely story considering when his gospel was written — but he says nothing about about Jesus promising one of the men he was crucified with that he would be saved, nor a three-hour eclipse, nor a tremendous earthquake, nor a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. Thus either the author of John was lying, or the other gospel writers were.
    John differs with the other gospels by saying Jesus accepted the vinegar when it was offered. (John 19:28-30)
    John disagrees with the other gospels about Jesus’s last words. This is an important point, because if Jesus was the Messiah and God in the flesh, these were sacred words. The Holy Spirit would know what Jesus said and would not change his sacred words. But the four gospels do not agree about these sacred words. Someone was making things up, or they all were.

    “It is finished.” (John 19:30)
    Only John has Jesus pierced by a spear after his death. (John 19:34)
    John disagrees vigorously with the other gospels about what happened at the tomb. He says Mary Magdalene went by herself, before sunrise. No angels. No guards. No earthquake. Mary saw that the stone had been rolled back, so she ran to tell Peter and the beloved disciple, not that Jesus had been resurrected, but that his body had been taken. The two disciples ran to the tomb, and the beloved disciple was the first to believe, making him the first Christian, before Mary and Peter. As we constantly see in the Bible, parallel accounts are changed to make theological points. Here the point is that the beloved disciple was not only the closest to Jesus but also the first Christian. Only after the beloved disciple believes without seeing, does Mary see the angels and Jesus. This was contrived to make the beloved disciple the “most blessed” when Jesus later told “doubting” Thomas: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29)

    Apparently there were different sub-cults within early Christianity, with Mary Magdalene being favored as the first Christian and primary apostle by some, and Peter by others. Here the author of John has rather obviously changed his resurrection account to elevate the beloved disciple to the “head of the class.”
    Only John has Jesus giving the disciples the Holy Ghost before Pentecost. (John 20:22)
    Only John has Jesus giving the disciples the power to forgive sins, which would become a staple of Catholicism. (John 20:23)
    Only John has the rehabilitation of Peter, with Jesus asking three times if Peter loved him. (John 21:15-17)
    John has no ascension of Jesus, disagreeing with Matthew, Luke and Acts.

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE COMMENTS

In the comments, I was given the usual Christian lecture about “all scripture being inspired by God.” This was my response:

I am well aware of Paul’s claim that all scripture is inspired by “god” and is thus “beneficial” or “profitable,” but Paul was wrong if he meant the entire Bible because, for instance, the Bible’s evil commandments to stone girls to death for being raped and for not proving their virginity by bleeding on their wedding nights in chapter 22 of the satanic book of Deuteronomy are not “beneficial” nor “profitable” and must have been inspired by the Other Guy.

And are you forgetting that Paul instructed Christians to “rightly divide” the word, separating the good verses from the mountains of chaff? Paul said in 2 Timothy 16–17: “16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: 17 that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” However stoning girls to death for non-sins is not a “good work” but the work of the Devil. Thus one has to divide the Bible and when one does, very little of it passes the tests of truth, love and justice.

If we hold the Bible up to the litmus test of 2 Corinthians 13, the rest of it fails on the spot because Paul describes Divine Love as holding no record of wrongs, never giving up and never failing. Paul says that if God does not live up to this ultra-high standard, then God is nothing despite all his wisdom and power, and the Bible is just a bunch of meaningless noise: clanging gongs and tinkling cymbals.

For God to be anything at all, according to Paul, there can be no hell, no record of wrongs held against anyone, and his love must never give up and never fail. “And the greatest of these is love,” but such love is almost entirely lacking in the rest of the Bible.
 
 

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MORE
Some Reasons Why Humanists Reject The Bible
https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/reasons-humanists-reject-bible/

BIBLE WISDOM: Randomly collated from the Web
 https://www.hillmanweb.com/reason/inspiration/bible_says.html

Biblical Contradictions
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/biblical-contradictions/

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