The Bible’s questions, answered—part 15: Answers to questions in Matthew and Mark

The bad book

The Bible contains a lot of questions, and it doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers. So I’ve been answering some of the Bible’s questions myself. This time, I’m looking at questions from the gospels of Matthew and Mark.

The Magi ask: Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? Answer: The Jews had some kings who started reigning pretty young, but I don’t think they ever had one who was king from birth.

John the Baptist asks Jesus: I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? Answer: Yes, he comes to you. I don’t know why, but he does.

The legion of demons ask Jesus: What do you want with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time? Answer: No, he’s just going to let you do whatever you want.

John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus: Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else? Answer: Neither.

People who see Jesus performing miracles ask: Could this be the Son of David? Answer: Nah, he’d be much older if he was.

Some people from Jairus’s house ask him: Your daughter is dead. Why bother the teacher anymore? Answer: Because she’s not dead.

In one of Jesus’s parables, a king (representing God) asks one of his servants: Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? Answer: Well, his fellow servant owed him a lot less than the hopelessly enormous debt that he had owed you. I would think that makes a difference. Plus, you’re a king, so you presumably didn’t really need the money all that badly. I would think that makes a difference, too. You don’t think everybody should always be required to forgive every debt they’re owed, do you? Because if you did, that would be the same as condoning theft.

In another parable, an employer (representing God) asks: Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Answer: Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever you do with your money is right.

The employer asks his workers: Or are you envious because I am generous? Answer: No, I’m pretty sure the problem they have with you has more to do with how selective your “generosity” is.

In another parable, a king (representing God) asks a guest at his son’s wedding: How did you get in here without wedding clothes? Answer: It probably has something to do with the fact that all your guests are random people that you had indiscriminately dragged in off the streets at the last minute.

A man asks Jesus: What good thing must I do to get eternal life? Answer: Who said the requirements had to do with doing good things? To get eternal life, you have to have a life full of hardships and suffering and bad things that you hate. (While also having lots of friends who like you because you’re so wealthy.) And you have to avoid doing and saying things God doesn’t like.

You can also get eternal life for arbitrary things like being part of the same household as a Christian, or being from Israel. Except you also have to believe in Jesus to be saved, and there’s probably not a lot of overlap between that and being from Israel. Really, whether you get eternal life is up to God’s arbitrary choice, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Or maybe you could try letting Satan destroy your flesh. That might help.

Some bystanders ask some of Jesus’s disciples: What are you doing, untying that colt? Answer: Yes.

Pilate asks Jesus: Are you the king of the Jews? Answer: No, Jesus refused to be the king of the Jews.

When the Jews demand that Jesus be crucified, Pilate asks: Why? What crime has he committed? Answer: Jesus’s crimes include…

The disciples’ questions

After Jesus tells the storm to stop, his disciples ask: What kind of man is this? Answer: An ugly, bad-breathed, ignorant, rude, heretical, blaspheming, deliberately divisive, lying, xenophobic, hatemongering, violent, lawbreaking, motherfucking bastard.

After Jesus drives out a demon that his disciples had failed to drive out, his disciples ask: Why couldn’t we drive it out? Answer: Apparently it works better if you don’t invoke the name of Jesus.

Jesus’s disciples ask him: Why do you speak to the people in parables? Answer: Because he wants to let Satan sabotage his efforts, apparently.

Jesus’s disciples ask: Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Answer: Whoever’s the best at following the rules.

When Jesus says the temple is going to be destroyed, his disciples ask him: When will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age? Answer: 70 AD, and nothing.

The Jewish religious leaders’ questions

The teachers of the law ask: Why does this fellow talk like that? Answer: Because he thinks it will be easier if he uses more words than necessary, and then has to explain himself, and then repeats even longer versions of both the long and the short versions of what he wanted to say.

They ask: Who can forgive sins but God alone? Answer: The disciples can, apparently. I guess they must be God too.

The Pharisees ask Jesus’s disciples: Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? Answer: Because no one else exists.

Some Pharisees ask: Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason? Answer: It is now.

When Jesus implies that it’s not lawful, they ask: Why then did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away? Answer: He didn’t.

The chief priests ask: Do you hear what these children are saying? Answer: Yeah, they’re saying a word that they seem to have mistaken for an expression of praise.

The high priest asks Jesus: Are you not going to answer? Answer: No, not really.

He asks Jesus: What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you? Answer: It’s mostly true.

Jesus’s questions

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Has anyone besides Jesus gone to heaven?

Contradictions

Yes.

Job claimed to have a friend who was in heaven, who interceded between him and God.

The last time anyone on earth saw Elijah, he was being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.

Isaiah said the king of Babylon had fallen from heaven. He also mentioned that the king had said he would ascend to the heavens, and evidently he had succeeded. How else would he have fallen from there?

Jesus claimed that starting during the life of John the Baptist, violent people had been raiding the kingdom of heaven. Jesus also said a criminal would go to paradise the day he died.

Paul claimed to know a man who “was caught up to the third heaven“, or paradise. And Paul also said that God had raised his followers up and seated them in the heavenly realms.

No.

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The Parable of the Nymphomaniac

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Some Canaanites had a baby girl, but they hated her for some reason, so they left her to die in a field. A man found the baby lying there naked, and he magically made her grow up and become beautiful. Then he abandoned her too.

Later, the man came back and noticed that the naked girl was all grown up! She had boobs and everything. So he married her. But this woman had an extremely high sex drive, and her husband couldn’t satisfy her. So she started having sex with her well-endowed Egyptian neighbors, and with every stranger who passed by. She made statues of men and had sex with them, too.

Her husband was furious and called her a whore, even though he knew that she was actually the one paying for all that sex. He tried to punish her by stripping her in front of all her lovers, as if they hadn’t already seen her naked. Then the beautiful woman’s lovers got a mob to come and kill her, for some reason.

The end.

Interpretation

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Should people believe the truth?

Contradictions, , , , ,

Yes.

Jesus thinks that if he tells people the truth, they should believe it.

Paul points out that if you think you’re something when you’re not, you’re deceiving yourself. And he presumably thinks that would be a bad thing, or else what would be the point of mentioning it?

Paul also says that people who don’t believe the truth will be condemned, and that people can be saved through belief in the truth.

And he advises Timothy to turn away from ideas that are falsely called knowledge.

No.

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The Bible’s questions, answered—part 14: Answers to questions in the prophets

The bad book

The Bible contains a lot of questions, and it doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers. So I’ve been answering some of the Bible’s questions myself. This time, I’m looking at questions from the books of the prophets after Ezekiel.

Hosea asks Israel: What will you do on the day of your appointed festivals, on the feast days of the Lord? Answer: I assume they will feast.

Joel asks: Who can endure the day of the Lord? Answer: The author of Revelation seems to think a lot of people can. While writing about the events associated with that day, he keeps forgetting that he already said everybody died, and having something kill everybody again. Also, Jesus says whoever loses their life will preserve it, so I guess everybody can endure it?

Amos claims that for some reason, people who oppress the poor ask: When will the New Moon be over? Answer: In a few days or less.

Micah asks: Should it be said, “Does the Lord become impatient?” Answer: No, you’re right, Micah, people should not say that, if they mean to imply that God doesn’t become impatient, because God does very often become impatient and unreasonably violently angry.

He asks: With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? (Micah’s answer: No, God just wants us to be just and merciful and humble and stuff.) Alternative biblical answer: Yes, he would be pleased. Not satisfied, maybe, but those sacrifices certainly are the sort of thing that God demands.

Then he asks: Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Answer: Nah, God probably wants your second-born. Well, he might not mind having your firstborn too… Better kill both.

And he asks: What does the Lord require of you? (Micah’s answer: Justice and mercy and humility.) Alternative biblical answer: To kill anyone who does any work on the wrong day of the week. To never let your sex slaves go free. To destroy entire nations if they’re in your way. Etc.

Nahum asks: Where now is the lions’ den, the place where they fed their young, where the lion and lioness went, and the cubs, with nothing to fear? Answer: I’m guessing it’s in Nineveh, since that’s what this book of the Bible is about.

Nahum asks the king of Assyria: All who hear the news about you clap their hands at your fall, for who has not felt your endless cruelty? Answer: Everyone who doesn’t live in your little corner of the world.

Habakkuk asks: How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Answer: Until you realize that he’s not your friend.

Habakkuk asks God: Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Answer: Because God is an unjust wrongdoer.

Zechariah asks an angel with horses: What are these, my lord? Answer: Horses.

Zechariah asks the angel again: What are these, my lord? Answer: These are trees, and a lampstand.

Malachi asks: Do we not all have one Father? Answer: Yes, we each have one father.

Malachi asks his people: Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by being unfaithful to one another? (By which he apparently means “unfaithful to Jewish women collectively“.) Answer: Because God never actually said you couldn’t marry foreigners in general. He just said you couldn’t marry Canaanites.

Malachi asks: What does the one God seek? Answer: An all-knowing God would not seek anything, because he would already know where everything was.

Malachi says the people of Judah have wearied God with their words, and he says they ask: How have we wearied him? Answer: With your words.

Malachi asks: Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? Answer: Probably depends on which coming you mean. God makes plenty of appearances in the Bible without anyone dying.

God accuses his people of robbing him, and he says they ask: How are we robbing you? (God’s answer: You’re robbing God when you give him gifts, but you don’t give him quite as much as he would like.) Real answer: You’re not robbing him. Giving gifts is the opposite of theft.

Amos’s questions

Amos asks: Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so? (Implied answer: No.) Real answer: Yes.

He asks: Does a lion roar in the thicket when it has no prey? Does it growl in its den when it has caught nothing? (Implied answer: No.) Real answer: Yes, lions do roar for reasons unrelated to hunting.

Then he asks: Does a bird swoop down to a trap on the ground when no bait is there? Answer: Depends on what you mean by “bait”. Birds can be attracted with things other than food. Including sounds.

And he asks: Does a trap spring up from the ground if it has not caught anything? (Implied answer: No.) Real answer: Yes.

He also asks: When a trumpet sounds in a city, don’t the people tremble? Answer: No, not anymore.

And he asks: When disaster comes to a city, hasn’t the Lord caused it? Answer: No, and I’m not sure why you would want to blame all disasters on your god anyway.

Then he asks: The lion has roared—who will not fear? Answer: Samson.

And he asks: The Sovereign Lord has spoken—who can but prophesy? Answer: Non-prophets.

Amos asks: Won’t the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness? (Implied answer: It will.) Alternative biblical answer: It will not.

When he sees God preparing to unleash devastating swarms of locusts on Israel, Amos asks: How can Jacob survive? Answer: Same way Egypt survived the worst plague of locusts ever.

Sailors’ questions

The captain of the ship asks Jonah: How can you sleep in this storm? Answer: By going below deck.

The sailors ask: Who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? Answer: God.

The sailors ask Jonah: What have you done that has angered your God? Answer: Refused to tell a lie.

They ask him: What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us? Answer: You should take him back where you found him, rather than try to kill him. But of course, God isn’t going to let you do the right thing.

Kings’ questions

Nebuchadnezzar asks Daniel: Are you able to tell me what I saw in my dream and interpret it? Answer: Yes.

Nebuchadnezzar asks: Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire? Answer: Yeah, just three. What’s up with that? Why didn’t you put Daniel in there too? He didn’t worship your statue, did he? Did he??

He asks: Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty? Answer: I guess so.

The king of Nineveh asks: Who knows if God will be willing to relent? Answer: God knew all along that he wasn’t actually about to have Ninevah overthrown. So he had no excuse for making Jonah (who also knew it wasn’t going to be overthrown) say that it was going to be.

Angels’ questions

An angel asks Daniel: Do you know why I have come to you? Answer: No.

An angel asks God: How long will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem and from the towns of Judah, which you have been angry with these seventy years? Answer: Probably about 70 years.

The angel asks Zechariah, who has just asked him what these are: Do you not know what these are? Answer: Obviously not.

The angel asks: What are you, mighty mountain? A mountain’s answer: I’m a mountain!

The angel asks Zechariah again: Do you not know what these are? Answer: Dude, he already told you he doesn’t know, in addition to asking you three times.

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Can idols eat?

Contradictions,

No.

Moses warned the Israelites how God would punish them if they ever made any idols. He said God would kill most of them and send the rest to live in other nations where there would be more idols for them to worship. And he described those idols as “man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell“.

Yes.

Moses also said that when God was done punishing his people for idolatry, God would gloat about the gods they used to worship, and would call them “the gods who ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings”.

And through Ezekiel’s prophecies, God said his people had given their children as food to their idols.

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The Parable of the Big Tree

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A certain cedar of Lebanon was the biggest and most beautiful tree around, even bigger and more beautiful than the ones in God’s garden. But God thought it was wicked for the cedar to stand so tall and proud, so he let a ruthless emperor cut it down. He warned the other trees not to grow taller than the rest, or they would die too. Then all the other trees in Lebanon died too. (Presumably because there was always a tallest remaining tree.)

The end.

The moral of the story

Don’t be tall and beautiful.

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Who saw Jesus first after the resurrection?

Contradictions,

Two Marys

According to Matthew, Mary Magdalene and another Mary were the first to find out that Jesus had risen. And then they saw him, before they got a chance to tell the disciples what they’d heard. So none of the disciples even heard that Jesus was alive before the Marys saw him. And I think we can assume they hadn’t independently seen him yet either, or the angel wouldn’t have told the Marys to tell the disciples that Jesus was alive.

One Mary

According to Mark, Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene first. It doesn’t mention any other Mary. And it says when she told the others that Jesus was alive, they didn’t believe her. So that’s further confirmation that no one else had seen him yet.

John agrees with Mark that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the resurrected Jesus. John also says that when Jesus first appeared to some of his disciples after the resurrection, it was to ten of them at once.1

Two disciples

According to Luke, some women found out that Jesus was alive, but they didn’t see him (which contradicts Matthew and Mark). The women told the disciples, who didn’t believe them. Then Peter went to look at the tomb himself, but he didn’t see Jesus either, and he wasn’t sure what had happened to Jesus. So at this point, no one has seen Jesus alive yet.

Then it says Jesus appeared to two disciples, who were seven miles away from the others at the time. When they got back to Jerusalem, they told the other disciples about it. Then Jesus appeared to all the disciples there, and they were shocked, because the disciples in Jerusalem hadn’t seen him alive yet. So when some of the disciples first saw Jesus resurrected, it was only two of them, not ten, contrary to John.

Just Peter

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Religion is irrational

Atheism,

Where do religious people get all the weird beliefs that make up their religions? Well, according to their own scriptures, it seems that a lot of those beliefs came from prophets, who claimed to speak for God. But according to how their own scriptures describe them, the prophets seem to have been insane.

Prophets were known for acting like maniacs, going naked in public, and intentionally getting people to injure them. They would elaborately attack inanimate objects, cook with turds, and claim to see bizarre things that no one else saw. Why would anyone believe anything that these madmen told them?2 In the Bible, God describes his own messengers as metaphorically “blind” and “deaf”. So why would anyone expect them to have any special insights?

Since the biggest religions are centuries old, they tend to incorporate a lot of the ignorant beliefs that were common back then, when people were even more likely to fall for superstitious ideas than they are now. These religions were developed in times when most people couldn’t even read, science hadn’t really been invented yet, and all the ordinary phenomena of nature that we now understand so well were seen as inexplicable magic and the work of invisible spirits.

Most of the things that come to mind when you think of “superstitions” originated from religious ideas. Christian religious ideas, as often as not.

Religion involves belief in highly desirable things, like miraculously answered prayers, universally enforced justice, and immortality. But these things are how we wish the world was, not how we observe the world to actually be. This sounds like the result of wishful thinking, rather than the result of any kind of thinking that reliably produces true beliefs. And if people have beliefs based on wishful thinking, that means they have these beliefs for reasons unrelated to whether these things are actually true.

One way religion irrationally manipulates people’s beliefs is by promising them endless bliss if they believe certain things, and threatening them with endless torture if they believe certain other things. Can you imagine a worse obstacle to true belief than that?

To varying extents, religious people tend to completely ignore large portions of their own religion’s teachings. The actual requirements and claims made by religions are so unreasonable that most people manage to convince themselves that a lot of those parts of their scriptures don’t mean what they say. Or that those disagreeable parts don’t matter, for some reason. And they also convince themselves that rejecting those things somehow doesn’t constitute disagreeing with their religion.

Because religious beliefs are mostly false, incoherent, or mutually inconsistent, people have to adopt all kinds of irrational thinking habits if they want to preserve their belief. Which is something religious people will tend to want to do, as a result of another irrational thinking habit which religion directly promotes: Faith.

Faith is unquestioning belief in a particular thing, regardless of evidence. Faith is a mix of gullibility and closed-mindedness and other forms of stupidity, which religion pretends is somehow a virtue. This kind of mindset will generally lead to false beliefs and bad consequences. A lot of people have died because they had faith that talking to their imaginary friend would save their lives, so they didn’t bother to get any real help.

Faith means you have no real reason for what you believe, and it means you refuse to change your mind for any reason. Faith-based beliefs are by definition completely disconnected from reality. So if you want to have true beliefs and not false ones, having faith is the worst possible way to think.

The fact that religious beliefs are based on blind faith is one good reason to think that those beliefs are most likely false. If people believe something on faith, there is no reason to think it’s true, since they would believe it whether it was true or not. A true belief wouldn’t need to rely on faith, because people would be able to arrive at that belief by following the evidence. And also because the belief wouldn’t be threatened by people considering the evidence.

Most people believe in a particular religion just because they were born into it, which is clearly not a very good reason to believe something. You would likely have different religious beliefs if you had been born in a different time or place. Even worse, religions have often been enforced by law or spread through violence, leading to people believing arbitrary things for non-truth-based reasons.3

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Will God destroy all living creatures again?

Contradictions, , ,

No.

After God flooded the whole world, he famously gave us the rainbow as a sign that he would never destroy all life on earth in a flood again. But that’s not all. In the chapter before that, God went further, and declared that he will never again destroy all living creatures. So that even rules out the possibility that he’ll do it by some method other than a flood.

Yes.

God told Nahum that he would leave the lions of Ninevah no prey on the earth. What does that entail? Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that absolutely all animals on earth will die out, but it sure doesn’t sound promising. Even if he doesn’t mean actual lions, God is saying the people of Ninevah will have no more people on earth left to kill. Which means God must be planning to at least kill all the people on earth.

Which God confirms in Isaiah, when he says he will totally destroy all nations. Or maybe he just means he’ll destroy their armies? No, Zephaniah says God is going to consume the whole earth with fire and make a sudden end of all who live on the earth. So God is definitely going to destroy all the people on earth. And it sounds like he’s going to destroy all the animals too.

Which God confirms in that same chapter, saying he’ll sweep away everything from the face of the earth, man and beast, when he destroys all mankind on the face of the earth. And the New Testament agrees that the earth will be laid bare on the day of the Lord, when everything will be completely will be destroyed by fire.

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