A troublesome aspect of all religions is the question of authenticity. There are no original documents for any religion, so the natural question is how does anyone know how the documents that we do have differ from the originals, and that’s assuming that there even were originals from the time they were supposed to have been written.

But before we go much further, how is it possible that there are no originals? The documents are supposedly about the words and deeds of at least one supreme being, however in all cases that supreme being was unable to preserve the written message that was considered fundamental to the religions they spawned. Sounds suspiciously like the words didn’t emanate from an omnipotent being. If you were an omnipotent god who was kicking off a plan for your beloved creation, would you like to see the stories, events, people, dates, numbers, messages and rules relating to that plan safe-guarded forever – exactly as you would like them to be? Or would you prefer that those things get handed down by hearsay and only eventually written down decades to hundreds of years later – often introducing variations due to translations and errors, malicious or otherwise?

It’s worth looking more closely at the authenticity issues of the major religions.

Christianity

Here’s something that will shock the average Christian reader: no one knows who wrote your religious texts. That’s right, the entirety of your religious scriptures has an unknown authorship. There’s actually one trivial (possible) exception to that, but you’ll have to read the following articles to find out what that is.

Perhaps you’re saying, “What about people like matthew, mark, luke and john? Didn’t they write the first four books of the new testament named after them?” Well, no, because they are fictional characters who have been invented to give some sort of credence to the writings. That’s right, no one named matthew, mark, luke or john can be proven to have written anything to do with the bible, and there is no clue as to how they received the information they supposedly recorded. And it turns out that, if you go through them, each book in the old and new testaments has a similar problem.

In case you believe that the above criticism is too generic, here’s one specific case: the birth year of jesus. The book of matthew places the birth of jesus during the reign of King Herod the Great (who died in 4 BCE) whereas the book of luke places it during the census of Quirinius (which began in 6 CE). That’s a minimum of 10 years discrepancy and therefore at most only one of those years could be correct. So if the bible is the infallible word of the omniscient creator of the universe, how can there be a discrepancy in his word?

The point being that if you took a black marker and put a thick line through every part of the bible that cannot be supported by a contemporary non-biblical source, there would be almost nothing left to read. And there would certainly be nothing left to read of a supernatural-type event, e.g. a resurrection or other miracle.

The question that naturally arises is how can people today base their lives upon, and try to base other people’s lives upon, a book that has such dubious authenticity?

(More coming soon…)

In the modern, secular world things work differently. When a story has no proof of authenticity, it’s treated as it should be: as a work of fiction – or at least as a work to be distrusted until authenticity can be established. Anyone who introduces a document with dubious authenticity into a court of law won’t get far (in using it as evidence), so why is it considered reasonable to base an entire life on a document that has no credibility when it comes to authenticity, and certainly cannot be tied back to the deity whose word they claim to represent?