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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.1

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 (this character represents 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 this servant 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 were about 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 gaining lots of friends by being 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 not very much 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? (Jesus’s answer: Whoever takes the lowly position of a child.) Alternative biblical 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 somehow 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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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.2

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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Was Jesus still with John the day after the Spirit descended on him?

Contradictions, ,

The gospel of John says John the Baptist saw the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descend on Jesus. And it says the next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus passing by again.

But according to the gospel of Mark, as soon as the Spirit descended on Jesus, it sent him out into the wilderness at once, and he stayed there for 40 days.

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Is it valid for Jesus to testify about himself?

Contradictions,

No.

Jesus says that if he testifies about himself, his testimony is not true. And that if he glorifies himself, his glory means nothing. His enemies agree: If he appears as his own witness, his testimony is not valid.

(Jesus tries to get around this by claiming that his father is also testifying about him. He thinks this satisfies the requirement of two witnesses. But even if it was valid to merely testify that someone is testifying about you, rather than having that person actually appear and testify, that still wouldn’t work. Because Jesus insists that he and his father are one. So either Jesus is a liar, or there’s still only one witness. And we’ve already established that his testimony is not valid, so even if there was another witness, that still wouldn’t be enough.)

Yes.

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Did Jesus do any violence?

Contradictions,

Christians consider Isaiah 53 to be a prophecy about Jesus. It says he was assigned a grave with the wicked, even though he had done no violence.

But the gospels indicate that Jesus had done some violence by the time he died. Like chasing people out of the temple with a whip. In fact, violence was his purpose in coming to earth. He came to bring fire and a sword, not to bring peace.

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The Story of the Circum-Schism—
Paul Hijacks Christianity

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Ignorant outsider declares himself the authority on Christianity

When a man named Paul (also known as Saul) saw that Stephen had been killed, he approved. With the high priest’s permission, Paul started beating, imprisoning, and killing all the Christians he could find.

But then, while Paul was going from Jerusalem to Damascus, Jesus blinded him with a flash of light from heaven, and then sent a Christian from Damascus to un-blind him. Paul had a change of heart, but he just couldn’t make himself stop sinning.

Paul spent several days with the Christians in Damascus, during which he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from them. Then he suddenly started proclaiming that Jesus was the son of God, which confused everyone.

The Jews in Damascus wanted to kill Paul now that he was promoting Christianity. But he escaped back to Jerusalem, and tried to join the Christians there. At first they didn’t believe that their enemy was really a Christian now, but someone convinced them.

But then the Jews there tried to kill him too. So Paul went away and started preaching his own foolish message of Christianity to the world. People thought he was insane. Paul preached only to foreigners, who weren’t familiar with Jesus and so had no preconceived ideas of what he was actually like. Paul and his companions suggested that they might harm people who didn’t do what he thought God wanted. And the terrified foreigners complied.

Three years later, Paul went to Jerusalem briefly and met the Christians there for the first time, again. The apostle Peter (also known as Simon or Cephas) also started preaching Christianity to Gentiles, which the other Christians of Judea thought was wrong. They thought only Jews could be Christians. But Peter said he had had a dream that God told him to eat animals that were forbidden by God’s law. Therefore, it must be okay for Gentiles to be Christians.

Paul briefly questions the reliability of his knowledge about Jesus

Over a decade later, Paul heard that Christians from Judea were teaching Gentiles that they couldn’t be saved unless they were circumcised. Paul, having never actually met Jesus nor learned the original church’s doctrine, had been teaching something quite different. He had taught his followers that Jesus had made all those useless old Jewish laws obsolete. Especially circumcision.

So Paul decided to go to Jerusalem again, to talk with the apostles and make sure he was getting the message right. He found that, contrary to what he thought the spirit of Jesus had revealed to him, the original Christian church believed that all Christians had to follow all the Jewish laws, including circumcision. Peter, who tended to say foolish things, discussed the matter with Paul, who he thought was awfully hard to understand. They seemed to come to an agreement, but that didn’t last long.

The apostles sent Paul out with a letter telling the Gentile Christians that they only had to follow a few Jewish laws. But Paul really didn’t think even Jews needed to follow even those laws. He sometimes pretended to think people were still under the law though, in order to be more convincing to people who thought that way.

The original Christians attempt to debunk Paul’s misinformation

Then Jesus’s brother James convinced Peter and the rest of the Jewish Christian church and even Paul’s companion Barnabas that Gentile Christians did indeed have to live like Jews. Paul opposed them and called them hypocrites.

The Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem sent out their own missionaries to the foreign churches Paul had founded, teaching them their version of Christianity, which Paul disagreed with. They taught Paul’s followers that they had to obey the Jewish laws, including circumcision. They pointed out that they were Jesus’s own chosen apostles, and Paul was not. Some members of Paul’s churches started turning away from Paul and his comrade Apollos, and started following Peter.

So Paul started writing his followers defensive letters, proclaiming himself to be an apostle. He insulted and demonized the “other” apostles, insisting that they weren’t any better than him, and he didn’t need their opinions.

Paul’s insistence on lawlessness gets him arrested

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Paul Hijacks Christianity →
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The Story of the Crucifixion of Jesus—
Jesus Goes Back Home for the Weekend

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Mad, bad, or God?

Jesus spent a lot of time with disreputable people. He violated the sabbath law, and encouraged others to do the same. When he saw people trying to enforce God’s law, Jesus got in the way. He told his followers to further break God’s laws by refusing to take oaths, eating unclean food, drinking blood, and hating their parents.

Jesus would go on long rants against the Jewish religious leaders. He acted like he thought he was God. He cured some people’s disabilities, only to give them to others. Jesus rudely discriminated against foreigners when they begged him to heal their children. He performed exorcisms despite knowing that it would make people worse off in the end. He sent a legion of demons to massacre someone’s livestock, just because the demons asked him to. This made everyone in that town want Jesus to go away. So he did.

Jesus said he was there to save the world, but he really just wanted to watch the world burn. He went into the temple and wrecked everything and chased the people out with a whip. He promised that those who followed him would not be excessively burdened, but then he required people to do completely pointless and unreasonably unpleasant things.

Jesus insisted on talking in confusing parables, and then got mad when no one understood him. The more he talked to people, the more they hated him. But he couldn’t figure out why. He offered people a reward, but said they could only get it if they didn’t expect a reward. People thought he was demon-possessed. Even his own family thought he was crazy.

God betrays Jesus

But there were also a lot of people who were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, which the Jewish leaders were worried would get the Jews in big trouble with their Roman overlords. God inspired the high priest to point out that it would be better for one man to die than for the whole Jewish nation to be destroyed over the treasonous claim that Jesus was their king. So the Jewish religious leaders that Jesus had so often disparaged plotted to get him killed. Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples, agreed to get paid to hand Jesus over to them.

Jesus knew what they were planning, and he didn’t want to die. He repeatedly asked God to prevent his death if that was possible. But even though it was possible, God chose not to save him, because he wanted to see him suffer. God wanted to strike Jesus with a sword. How else could God demonstrate his righteousness and justice, if not by getting his innocent son killed instead of punishing all the actual evil people? Unless Jesus let himself be killed, God wouldn’t love him anymore.

Judas “betrays” Jesus

The religious leaders sent soldiers to arrest Jesus. Judas had arranged to let them know who they were after by kissing Jesus. But Jesus told them who he was himself, so Judas didn’t actually have to do anything. But he kissed Jesus and got paid for betraying him anyway. Later, Judas decided he didn’t want that money, and gave it back to the religious leaders, and he also used it to buy a field.

The soldiers took Jesus to the high priest. After he was questioned by the high priest, Jesus was sent off to the high priest, who for some reason wanted to know if Jesus was the son of God. When Jesus replied that he was, the high priest was shocked that Jesus would say such a thing, and the Jewish religious leaders said Jesus should be put to death for blasphemy. But though the Jewish law said Jesus had to be killed, the Jews didn’t have the right to execute anyone under Roman law.

So they handed him over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who for some reason thought Jesus was the king of the Jews. Even though no one but those astrologers had ever called him the “king of the Jews” before. And even though the Jews didn’t recognize him as their king. And even though Jesus had refused to become king of the Jews. And even though Jesus, being a descendant of Jehoiachin (AKA Jeconiah), wasn’t even eligible to be king of the Jews.

Pilate didn’t think Jesus had done anything wrong, and he wanted to release him. But the crowd insisted that he should be executed, because the Jewish leaders had somehow gotten all their people to suddenly stop liking Jesus.

So Pilate handed Jesus over to his soldiers to be crucified, while blaming the Jewish people for his decision and proclaiming himself to be innocent, as if he couldn’t overrule the commoners. (It was really God’s fault, though.) The soldiers stripped Jesus, stole his underwear for themselves, beat him, mocked him, and nailed him to a cross. He died, and was put in a tomb.

The totally convincing account of the resurrection

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Jesus Goes Back Home for the Weekend →
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The Story of the Resurrection of Lazarus—
A Friend Who Stinks

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Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus was very sick. If Jesus had gone to help him, Lazarus wouldn’t have died. But God had made Lazarus sick, just to give Jesus a chance to show off. So Jesus chose to stay where he was and let him die.

Then four days after Lazarus died, Jesus finally went to the hometown of Lazarus, whose sisters were mourning. Jesus went to the tomb and told Lazarus to come out, and he did. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t still sick.3

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A Friend Who Stinks →
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How long was Jesus dead?

Contradictions, , ,

Three days and three nights

Before Jesus died, he told his disciples he would be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights. He said he would rise again after three days. In other words, he would rise three days later, and he would raise his body again in three days.

Other times, he told his disciples he would be raised to life “on the third day“. That’s a rather ambiguous way to say it. It’s not really clear which day he’s counting from as the first day here. But let’s just assume he meant the same thing as when he said it more precisely.

The day Jesus came back to life, some disciples mentioned that it was the third day since Jesus had been crucified. And then when Jesus appeared to some other disciples, he claimed that the scriptures said the Messiah would rise from the dead on the third day. And Peter and Paul both later stated that Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day. So that’s what Jesus and his followers said, but what does the Bible say actually happened?

Two days and two nights

The gospels disagree with each other on most of the details of the resurrection story. But one thing they all agree on is that Jesus was not dead for three days and three nights. The gospels say Jesus died in the afternoon on Preparation Day, the day before the Sabbath. By the time the women went to visit his tomb around sunrise on the first day of the week, after the Sabbath, Jesus had risen.

Preparation day starting in the afternoon + night + the Sabbath day (the seventh day of the week) + one more night before Jesus rises early on the first day of the week = less than two days and two nights.

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The Story of the Calling of the Disciples—
Fishing for People

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Two disciples of John the Baptist decided they would rather follow Jesus. One of them was Andrew, and he introduced Jesus to his brother Peter. Then Jesus went to a lake, where he met two pairs of brothers who were fishing. One of those pairs was Peter and Andrew. When he said he could teach them how to fish for people, they immediately abandoned their task and followed him.

Jesus’s new followers followed his example by immediately abandoning their families when he called them. Jesus required them to do this, because dividing families was his purpose in life. He promised to give each of them a hundred new families, because Jesus thinks families are replaceable. In total, Jesus chose twelve men to be his main disciples, also known as the apostles.

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Fishing for People →
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