Is there evidence to show Christianity is a lie?

Answer 1

A:Calling any religion a lie is too strong a statement. However, there is evidence not only that Christianity is at least partly based on false premises but that some of the most ardently believed material was knowingly contrived by its authors.

The New Testament gospels are now known to have been written anonymously and attributed to the apostles whose names they now bear later in the second century. So far, so good - anonymous authorship is not a lie, nor is well-intentioned attribution. It is also established that the authors of Matthew, Luke and John based their gospels directly or indirectly on Mark's Gospel. Matthew and Luke also relied on the hypothetical 'Q' document for additional sayings material attributed to Jesus. Once again, it is not a lie to copy another gospel nor to copy Q, and Luke's Gospel openly concedes that it was based on sources that the author trusted (Luke 1:1). However, when the authors add significant new material for which there is no known source, it is reasonable to ask whether they were knowingly publishing untrue material.

An example of this is in the nativity acounts in Matthewand Luke, which are so completely different that both could not be true. Matthew says that Bethlehem was the home town of Joseph and Mary and that they fled from Bethlehem to Egypt out of fear of Herod, beginning to return to their home in Bethlehem after the death of Herod but turned aside and travelled to Nazareth in Galilee instead. Luke says that Nazareth was the home town of Joseph and Mary, that they travelled to Bethlehem because of a census during the rule of Quirinius in Syria but also during the reign of Herod, and that they returned peacefully to Nazareth shortly after the birth of Jesus. Burton L. Mack (Who Wrote the New Testament: The Making of the Christian Myth ) says that Matthew's stories are seen as incredible, implausible, far-fetched fictions that some believe to signal Matthew's naivete with regard to legendary material. Ian Wilson (Jesus: The Evidence) says there is an unavoidable inference that the Luke's author may have been trying to make it appear that he knew more about Jesus' birth than he actually did. The two gospels also provide different and incompatible genealogies of Joseph, earthly father of Jesus, Matthew back through his father Jacob and Luke back through his father Heli. Various explanations have been attempted, to explain such obvious differences, such as that Luke's account is really the genealogy of Mary (in spite of Luke 3:23, or that Joseph must have been adopted. But even if a plausible explanation could be found for the differences between Matthew's and Luke's, there remains the problem that both genealogies differ from the Old Testament version, and that these differences were such as to show through numerology that Jesus was destined for greatness.

There are passages in the Bible that the authors must have known to be untrue but which they felt justified in writing, and there are also passages that were undoubtedly untrue but which the authors might not have known to be untrue. Ultimately religion is about faith, not really about proving the historicity or truth of every belief.