I often check the sister papers to my local Black Press community one. I particularly enjoy that The NEWS has religious people writing in and wish my local paper allowed such freedom of expression.
But I’m very sure those individuals would not appreciate the reasons I do as I seldom find anyone professing to know their own bible, actually understand its all too human origins, contradictions, plagiarisms and pagan elements going back to the ancient writings of the Sumerians.
Taken as a book of literature it is an interesting albeit often horrifying read. If read as proof of the supernatural then I have no time for delusional circular thinking: the Bible is true because the Bible says it is/the Bible says it is true therefore the Bible must be true.
This brings me to the recent letter to the editor in your paper penned by Mary Whiteman, secure in her Bible knowledge that Isaiah foretold the coming of Jesus and his sufferings. Isaiah, in the original Hebrew language, never said that Jesus was going to be born of a virgin. It was later Christian writers who subsisted virgin for the original word almah which meant only a young woman.
In reference to Whiteman’s feel-good claims that Jesus died for our sins, let me put it as clearly as I can. The historical Jesus was simply a flesh and blood man of the Jewish faith who wrongly believed that the apocalypse was going to happen in his lifetime. When that didn’t happen later, followers who never knew the man just heaped it on to try and smooth over how their now reinvented messiah could have died as a mere human on the cross.
The universe owes none of us reassurance or comfort. The historical Jesus couldn’t have died for our sins as there was no original sin as the two separate creation myths in Genesis are just that, myths.
Robert T. RockMission City
