Last night I wrote an email to a friend of mine who I have spent the last year contemplating religion with. He is a Christian and runs a Bible study group that I attend with a friend. I was however pretty rattled by Thursday’s meeting and it’s been nagging at me since. Below is the core of what I wrote to him about how I was feeling. It was in itself a blog........

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I'm feeling unsettled. At the heart of it is, I think, a rumbling in me that The Bible doesn’t tell the whole story. The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Gnostic Gospels, the original meanings lost in translation, the things left out or needing ‘interpretation’ leave me wondering whether Christ’s story has been manipulated, testimony edited and interpretation increasingly more influenced by generational telling and retelling and I can’t seem to get over it. Maybe I just don’t trust humanity not to manipulate the greatest questions in life ‘where did we come from – how will it end’ to the advantage of a few to control the masses.

Thursday’s session brought me to several things in my head:

· You have to believe that Jesus died on the cross despite all the evidence that he was seen by many for 40 days after his death. I find that harder to believe than the idea that he came back from the dead. That’s a huge issue in my mind because so much rides on it. Every element of the idea of him being seen after and moving amongst the disciples says he didn’t die in the first place, not that he came back to life. As Sarah rightly points out, the obvious evidence is that his side was pierced and split liquid came flooding out. But we only know that because someone wrote it on to a piece of papyrus decades later.

If the disciples can tell elements of the story of Christ’s life differently through the gospels from different angles and create inconsistencies in the process, as source material – does it really seem plausible that one man writing that his side was pierced and he was put in a tomb was indisputable evidence that he died when there is so much evidence to the contrary. The fact that it was recorded that he’d died also doesn’t offer up enough evidence because no doubt he did die at somepoint (and I believe that he did live) but is it more than possible that the handful of people who wanted to believe his teachings so badly that they wrote things that would convince people using elements born as much of imagination as of fact. I know it sounds sceptical but just stop for 30 seconds and think about it again because its not meant as scepticism – it tears me in two because of how important it is.

· The other thing about Thursdays study was that the premise of the resurrection’s message is the idea that Jesus died on the cross, self sacrificing, in order to take away our sins. Jesus was without doubt a martyr and I believe enough of the story of his life to believe he was crucified. The circumstances of that crucifixion trouble me however. If Jesus was aware all along that he was going to be sacrificed by God and that it was his fate - was it really a self made sacrifice? Did Jesus give his life or did God create Jesus as the ONLY human to exist that did not have free will as it was his preordained destiny to be collateral in God’s quest to prove his love for humanity.

And why does this bother me so much? Because again you have to believe that Jesus knew that Pilate would not release Barabbas that the Jews would call for him to be crucified and that all the circumstances that led to his crucifixion were all fixed in place to his knowledge. The role of Judas denying him 3 times and the last supper etc, written down long after the event documents Jesus as seemingly knowing all the pieces in the game with the wonder of hindsight tying events together thanks to the author. I’m less inclined to believe that Jesus knew the outcome and its details than I am to believe that he was crucified for his beliefs and the impact of his teachings. So in this case, you have to believe he was destined for death from the beginning and that he did not have the free will to alter events to save himself rather than the idea that he had free will and chose to sacrifice himself in the knowledge that the series of events that would lead to his crucifixion and prove his point.

So this leaves me thinking that I can believe Jesus of Nazareth was crucified because the Jews predominantly believed he was a false prophet and trouble maker and that during the crucifixion Jesus lost the will to live but not his life and either never made it to the tomb and was nursed enough to sustain his life further by some time until infection or fatigue finally saw him die (explaining the sightings) or that he was removed from the tomb under secrecy in order that several days later his miracle could be witnessed by a larger number of people in order to confirm him as the prophet he was exclaiming himself to be.

Every bone in my body was brought up to believe the ethics and morality of Christ’s story and being both Christened and Confirmed I feel that I will always have an empathy for all things that proclaim God’s existence and Jesus’ story. But I get stuck on the things that seem to be completely against every rational thing I’ve been taught in every other element of my life. The idea that the bible is in places ‘picture language’ leads me to fear that gaps have been filled, stories told and truths left unspoken. The fact that other publications have surfaced through history that were written around the same time but tell other parts of the story from other points of view but are excluded from the canonic texts leads you to ask – why are these stories told with such strict editorial control.

The bible quotes Jesus word for word in so many cases. If these things were written days, weeks, months, years or decades after the event – how certain can we be that they are the words Jesus spoke and that they were not a faithful biblical blogger recounting their memories of teachings of someone they admired. If I watch the news on TV, the editor has the power to show me recorded footage of someone saying ‘Saddam Hussein is harbouring weapons of mass destruction’ but because that editor has chosen to recount that information out of context – I miss the rest of the sentence that started ‘I cannot say with any degree of certainty that .....’ This is the stuff that wars are made of. When people start editing, embellishing stories with picture language and quoting someone decades later out of the context of his literal words – interpretation, fallibility and desire to share ones belief’s can and do amass into truths becoming stories, becoming myths, becoming fantasies, becoming religions and matters of faith.

I do believe that the subtext of the teachings of both the old and new testament are valuable and that it is the greatest story ever told, inspiring the greatest art ever made and that it is a story that defines the human condition. I don’t however yet have the courage to disregard all else I know about life, the Universe and everything and take it on faith that it is the truth.

That is why I’m doing a bible study and also did the Alpha course and weekend and also why I want to debate and discuss it with other people. I do appreciate though that I’m the only one in the group (possibly apart from Kate) that truly wants to break apart all I was brought up to believe in order to start again and work out what I believe now that no one is forcing me to believe in anything anymore. There are times however when I do end up feeling that trying to do that inside a group of people who want to deepen their faith in order to question less rather than question it more is possibly the wrong way of achieving that. The Alpha course was more inclined to open the debate up where as Bible study is more inclined to close the debate down (for obvious reasons and quite rightly!).

I am very aware that we’re not getting through the sessions as quickly as we should, mainly because I probably hold things up by wanting to get underneath some of the assumptions many of the leading questions in the books hint at. I guess its really born of wanting to share with others the experience I have in coming face to face with all I was brought up to believe despite so much of real life being to the contrary.

Someone once said to me when I was looking up at the clouds whilst lying back on the grass one summer in Guildford – ‘when people see faces in the clouds, do you think they just see what they want to see?’. I remember being struck by it as I didn’t really know the answer. I’ve seen faces in the clouds but does that mean they are faces or just clouds?. For those people who want to see truth in Christianity, do they see what they want to see – faces in the heavens, the truths they want to see?. And just because they see truths – does that make it THE truth or just letters on a page?

If I could prove to you that a cloud is not a face yet you still see it, is that faith or imagination in you? If I could prove to you that Jesus was not the son of God and the bible was a story made of some fact and some fiction, would you see it as truth or imagination in someone else?

At the end of the day, I do NOT want to try and stop people from coming to God through Christ or to slow people in the group down from accepting more and more of the bible as truth. As I was trying to point out unsuccessfully on Thursday (with probably a poor analogy) – the Waco event was so tragic because the people that died with the man we have deemed to be a false prophet, believed in him whole heartedly and clearly utterly loved God through him. To them he was the truth – to us he was a complete c*nt. Isn’t this exactly the premise the Jews took with Christ? Isn’t this precisely the scenario that religions are made of. Isn’t it the case that some of those people found total and utter peace with God through him, enough to follow him to the end of their world. To them he was as much the truth as Jesus was for the disciples. To us he was a man, flawed, vindictive and praying on people’s fears. More people have died due to the conflicts caused by belief in who Jesus was than died at Waco. To me, religion still seems a fickle thing and its the consequences of it being the truth that really keep me questioning it I guess.
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Thoughts welcomed.....