www.freethoughtperspective.net

The Bible Against Itself: Why the Bible Seems to Contradict Itself,Randel McGraw Helms, 2006, Millennium Press, 2761 North Marengo Ave, Altadena, CA 91001, ISBN 0-9655047-5-1, 189 pp. hc. $21.95, reviewed by WILLIAM HARWOOD

Randel Helms writes in The Bible Against Itself  (2006), “[a] surprisingly large number of biblical authors write to attack, to reinterpret. even to subsume so as to transform, other biblical authors” (p. ii). I wrote in Mythology’s last Gods (1992), “John was not the first Christian scripture written to repudiate earlier Christian scripture. James had been written to repudiate the teaching (and by implication the letters) of Paul, as P had been written to repudiate J/E. But John was the first Christian gospel written to repudiate earlier Christian gospels, of which Luke  was John’s specific source” p.344). Given that overlap, and the fact that practically every point Helms makes in his new book reiterates what I had written 14 years earlier, I expected to find Mythology’s Last Gods in Helms bibliography, along with The Fully Translated Bible, in which attention is drawn to contradictions and copyings. Since they were not there, I can only suggest that Dr. Helms “has some ‘splaining to do.” 

It is plausible that Helms had not read MLG when he wrote Who Wrote the Gospels? But unless he does not read American Rationalist—an indefensible omission for anyone in the business of biblical or religious criticism—he must surely have read my review of his book in the July/Aug 1998 issue. I wrote, ”Helms’ most useful chapter (and most embarrassing to me, since it raises many valid points that I overlooked in Mythology’s Last Gods) is the one on the final redactor of John.”  But if at that point if he still did not bother to read MLG, he has a LOT of ‘splaining to do.

I also wrote, “About the only point on which I believe Helms can legitimately be upbraided, as opposed to merely disagreeing with him, is his failure to append to the John chapters a verse-by-verse breakdown of which of the three authors he believes wrote what.” That omission has not been rectified, and I continue to see the John gospel as the work of two, not three authors. Perhaps he could not have convinced me, but I would have liked to see his breakdown, since he is a scholar whose conclusions must be given the same serious consideration as those of Michael Arnheim, Bart Ehrman, Richard Freidman, Joseph Hoffman, Gerd Lüdemann and Robert Price.

Helms is not so ignorant that he does not know that the Hebrew word elohim is a dual-sex, generic plural meaning “the (male and female) gods.” Yet he persistently quotes from bibles that intentionally mistranslate it as the singular, masculine, proper name, “God.” And he quotes from translations that falsify the Jewish God Yahweh’s proper name to “the LORD.” Why? Two explanations come to mind: the p.c. cliché, and the p. word that does not always mean a sex trade worker. If encouraging readers to believe what he knows to be a Big Lie is personally profitable, career-wise, than to hell with his scholarly duty of educating the ignoranti, right?

Helms quotes Haggai 2:8 as, “Mine is the silver and mine the gold, says the LORD of hosts.” The Fully Translated Bible corrects the passage to, “The silver is mine and the gold is mine, says Yahweh, commander of armies.” And he quotes Ruth 1:16 as, “Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” The correct translation (FTB) is, “Your nation is my nation, and your gods are my gods.” It is comprehensible that pushers of religion would repeat whatever mistranslation props up the Big Lie that biblical authors believed what modern religions claim to believe. But for a person who is making a point of demonstrating that the bible is riddled with lies, contradictions and failed prophecies to do so is inexcusable. A correctly translated bible was available, and Helms should have used it. He needs to decide if he wants to be part of the solution or part of the problem. He cannot have it both ways.

Helms treatment of the books of Samuel/Kings and Chronicles has its upside and its downside. He reports that, “Yahweh incites David to take a census, then Yahweh kills 70,000 to punish David for obeying and taking the census.” He contrasts that with the equivalent passage in Chronicles in which it was Satan who incited David to take the census. Helms’ explanation is that the Chronicler, “wanted not to supplement the Deuteronomist historian, but to supplant him.” While he argues that Chronicles was written to repudiate an earlier, now lost version of Samuel/Kings, he seems not to have deduced that 2 Samuel 24:1, which blamed Yahweh for ordering the census, is a corruption of a narrative by a pro-census author placed at the front of a narrative by an anti-census author. But that is nitpicking. That Chronicles was written to supersede Samuel/Kings in the expectation that S/K would disappear from history is the point of Helms’ chapter, and that is indeed the way it was.

Similarly, when the author of Chronicles cited the book of Samuel the seer as his source for the life of King David, even though Samuel died before David became king, Helms recognizes that, “The Chronicler is counting on his readers’ ignorance of the canonical book of Samuel, not their knowledge of it.” To repeat: that is indeed the way it was. This is one of many places—far more than I cited in MLG—in which Helms shows a biblical author writing to repudiate an earlier biblical author.

Helms expresses some opinions that seem hard to justify. He recognizes only two authors of Isaiah, attributing to Second Isaiah passages others attribute to a Third Isaiah, and even cites Second Isaiah as the author of Isaiah 56:7, the beginning of a segment of eleven chapters that most scholars attribute to a large number of separate interpolators sometimes lumped together as Fourth Isaiah. He attributes the whole of Revelation to John of Patmos, unaware that John was a Nazirite (Jesus Jew) who wrote chapters 1-3 and 20-22 during the reign of Domitian, whereas the rest of Revelation was written by an orthodox Essene who wrote between July and August 70 CE. 

He acknowledges that Jesus’ title, “the Nazirite/Naziraios,” became confused with a village called Nazareth. Yet he persistently refers to ”Jesus of Nazareth,” and does not mention that there was no village named Nazareth earlier than the fourth century CE. He devotes half a chapter to the circumstantial evidence that Paul of Tarsus was a latent homosexual. But he ignores the more definitive evidence that David progressed from Saul’s boy toy to the lover of Saul’s son, that Judith spent most of her life with an intimate female companion, and that Jeremiah was openly gay. But most indefensible is his citing of Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel of Mark as a legitimate ancient document. Is he unaware that Stephen Carlson in The Gospel Hoax blew Smith out of the water?   

Helms quotes Jeremiah’s vitriol against the temple priests, “How can you say, ‘We are wise, we have the law of the LORD,’ when scribes with their lying pens have falsified it?” Helms interpretation is, “For this prophet, the ‘word of the LORD’ was only what he, Jeremiah, said it was.” While essentially true, that conclusion is oversimplified to the point of being useless. Helms seems to be unaware that Deuteronomy, found in the temple 621 BCE by a high priest who may have been Jeremiah’s father, was almost certainly written by Jeremiah as an adjunct to the J/E Torah; that the J/E/D Torah repudiated the Aaronic priesthood’s uniqueness by identifying all Levites as priests; that the Priestly caste retaliated by writing an alternative, Priestly Torah intended to supplant J/E/D; and that Jeremiah in the book he later wrote under his own name denounced the P  Torah as emanating from the lying pens of scribes, primarily because it introduced into Judaism a new taboo, designed to maximize the breeding of tithe-paying believers, that pronounced Jeremiah’s orientation sinful.  

Helms also repeats some arguments of Burton Mack, although with the proviso that, “Since he builds theory on top of hypothesis, Mack’s thesis has not been universally accepted.” I was less polite. In a review reprinted in A Humanist in the Bible Belt, I wrote, “The law of averages says that, somewhere in Burton Mack’s two books under consideration, he must have got something right. If so, I failed to find it.” 

The big problem with The Bible Against Itself  is that Helms tries to have his cake and eat it. In his previous books, Who Wrote the Gospels?  and Gospel Fictions, he was willing to tell it like it is and let the gods fall where they may. He did not, as he does here, attempt the impossible, demonstrating that the Christian bible is a product of human imagination while simultaneously (perhaps under pressure from the Millennium Press hierarchy who seem to consider equivocation politically correct) refusing to recognize that religions based on the bible are products of the human imagination. “Seems to Contradict Itself?” Oh come now. He definitely needs to read Mythology’s Last Gods, if he ever wants to correct his ongoing imperfections.

All in all, The Bible Against Itself  adds little to what Helms has written in his earlier, better books. Nonetheless, the new material is interesting, and even this book contains enough unanswerable logic to cure any godworshipper who actually reads and understands it. Particularly meaningful to anyone with a functioning human brain is  that, “The apocalyptic mind desperately holds onto the illusion that failed eschatological predictions are in fact as-yet unfulfilled prophecies—not about the past but still valid in the future.” Any reader who recognizes his own doublethink in that passage should by all logic be cured. But I doubt if even Helms himself expects that to happen.   

—————————————————————————-