Introduction

In this first post, I just want to quickly sketch out what the point of this blog is and how I'm going to try and work. I'm not going to go into too much detail about who I am and my motivations for doing this right now, for the simple reason that I think it'd be more interesting to write posts about that later on as the blog develops.

What I will say is that I am an atheist. Moreover, I am an apostate - a former born-again evangelical christian who not only rejects his former beliefs, but actively opposes them. That is going to colour all that follows, and I think it's important to have that stated up front.

While I not only reject the truthfulness of christian theology, but reject the idea that christianity is even a "net good" force in the world, I still have a great deal of affection for the bible. While it has been comprehensively stripped of the glossy veneer that it's status as the inerrant word of God gave it, as I've learned more about it's history and purpose, I've come to find it a more complex and fascinating document. I read the bible, cover to cover, ten years ago while I was a christian, and found it a disturbing and confusing read. Discovering the historical backstory to the Old Testament, the documentary hypothesis of how the first few books were put together, and the evolution of the religion that eventually gave rise to Judeo-Christianity throughout the history of Israel gave answers to a lot of the questions my naive reading had raised.

At the same time, I'm highly critical of the theology of Christianity, drawn somewhat obliquely from the New Testament. I tend strongly towards the conclusions of "higher criticism" biblical scholarship, that the gospels were written late on, and presumably represented the consolidation of tradition rather than eyewitness account. However, even as someone who rejects the conclusions of christianity - perhaps especially as such a person - I've often been attracted to take a second look at the New Testament (and especially the Gospels). What is the message? Is it basically a good message? Are there lessons to take from the New Testament, or as Rabbi Hillel might have put it, is it just "do unto others" and then a lot of finessing the point? Are there passages that have had a negative effect?

So, to this end, I'm reading through the four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - as an Atheist, as an Apostate, necessarily as a skeptic and a cynic. I'm going to try and compare the passages roughly in parallel, but with the different purposes of the four Gospels that might get a bit rough in places. But here we go, anyway.