The Story of God
This is what all of us are looking for, really: a convincing story.
This is precisely what I started to look for a few years ago, when I started to dig into various religions and the chronologies that surrounded their histories. How did we get to here and now? How did we get to the point where Christianity is a religion that has captured the minds of over a quarter of the world's population, in a world of 7 billion people?
This might be the last thing I write about religion on here. The subject has held my attention for a surprisingly long duration of time, but I'm starting to push myself to explore other interests that are more relevant to my day to day life. There is an old television show called "Lost", which was known for its long-running plot riddled with incomprehensible mysteries, which were steeped in allusions to various religious mythologies. It aired in the early days of the Internet, so its fans were notorious for endlessly debating answers to these questions at great length. In one of the last episodes, in what is clearly a piece of dialogue directed at the audience of the show, one character cuts off another's line of questioning by saying: "Every question I answer will simply lead to another question. You should rest, and just be grateful you're alive." To one who would endeavor to seek the origins of religion, this is sage advice.
I'll start at the end, which is to describe who I am and what I have come to believe through this whole learning process. If asked to identify my religious beliefs, on a census form for example, I would abstain from answering the question. Not "atheist", not "agnostic", not "other". I simply wouldn't provide an answer. This is the most accurate possible answer.
If you pressed me further and asked me to state some kind of belief about religion, then I would say this: I believe in freedom of religion, as the First Amendment of the United States guarantees. Ideally, political power should remain separate from religious beliefs, but above all, the freedom of the individual to choose what religion they practice is far more important than any one particular religion.
Now you know. That's me.
The largest problem is that the volume of writing on this subject is immense. In the last few thousand years, there has been more written on these religions than any one person could read in a hundred lifetimes. It is simply not possible for one person to load every single interpretation into their head, carefully weigh all of them against one another, consider all of the evidence and arguments that have been presented, and arrive at a globally satisfactory conclusion. The writings around this topic are a massive, complex tapestry, and the best any one person can hope to is pull threads from it. You grab one thread, pull it, examining it until it ends, or until you get bored with that thread, and pull another. No one can possibly grasp the whole thing in its entirety; a cursory sampling of only a tiny fraction of the constituent parts has to suffice.
Therefore, what I write here is almost certainly not correct; at the very best, it is only part of the story. I offer it here because it seems to me to be the version of the story that has the highest probability of being true, compared with all the others that I have considered. I can only hope that it will inspire others to investigate some of these paths for themselves, lead them to different conclusions, and perhaps some of them will elaborate or improve upon these ideas.
One thing I learned relatively late in my search: desire is irrelevant. There are lots of religious arguments that people toss around to "prove" that religion is or is not true. There's the argument from design, argument from first causes, and so on. What I find people tend to argue, most passionately, is that any one particular religion must be true because it has benefited the world, or that it must not be true because it has caused the world great harm. Christianity is true because it has delivered men from their animalistic nature and made them civilized, so it is good. Or, it has made otherwise civilized men torture and kill other men in the name of their God, so it is bad.
Collectively, I refer to these as kinds of arguments as "arguments from merit". They are problematic because they are completely impossible to substantiate one way or another. Much more importantly, however, is that these are entirely useless positions to take. You can make arguments about Christianity pacifying the Vikings, causing the horrors of the Crusades or the Inquisition, or about encouraging people to help the poor, all day long. The question of whether Christianity is true or not is completely independent of how much good or bad it you believe it has done for world. I do not consider this in what follows.
I've covered this before in previous entries on here, but the story of Christianity is, at its core, the story of Judaism. The first 3/4s of the Christian Bible are mostly the stories in the Hebrew Bible. Naturally, we have to start there.
The Creation story in the Bible is one of the more controversial aspects of the entire canon. It is odd that anyone would be adamant in defending this story as a literal account, since it is clear from the narrative that there could have been no eyewitnesses at the time.
What is most striking is that every single tribe of people in history that has practiced some form of religion has had a creation story. Here are a handful of examples:
I could continue listing these creation myths; there are literally thousands of them. What is remarkable is that they all have the same basic elements. Before, there is nothingness. Then, a high god or gods creates the world from this nothingness, creating the finite from the infinite. Then they create mankind as a distinct organism who is part of the world, but somehow separate from the rest of nature.
What's most striking about this is just how banal the creation story of the Bible truly is. I've heard many arguments that the stories in the Bible are truly unique, and that its ideas cannot be found anywhere else in the ancient world. It is argued that, since it is unique, it must have been divinely inspired. The more you come to understand the ancient world, the more impossible it becomes to seriously consider this position.
While the creation myths the world over are easy to scoff at, in light of a scientific understanding of the world, the fact that they are universal to the human experience should make us consider that perhaps they are essential to the human experience as well. Indeed, historically, the creation stories seem to have the critical function of binding tribes of people together, giving them a shared identity and sense of purpose.
And while we might think that we have achieved something that surpasses this, modern-day humans have woven a creation story of our own: that there is nothingness, and then 14 billions years ago, a massive explosion gives birth to the universe as we know it. When put alongside the examples above, it doesn't seem all that far removed from what our ancient ancestors believed. (Although admittedly, science doesn't make up an entity or consciousness that initiated this whole process.)
After the first dozen or so chapters of the Bible, we get to the OG of Judaism: Abraham. Historically, we are unable to confirm that Abraham ever truly existed, since no record of him exists outside of the Biblical account. What is interesting is that there much about his story that does line up with what historians know about the ancient world. According to scripture, for example, he leaves Ur (probably around the time of the Ur III dynasty) to move to Haran, then to Canaan. Archaeology confirms that these places did exist, as do most of the other specific cities named.
Archaeology tells us many other things about these ancient cultures. In particular, we have some information about the gods that the people in these regions worshipped, and about how they worshipped these gods. What follows is what I have gleaned from various writings about the history of the civilization from which the Israelites later emerged. Some of these were written for a general audience; others are erudite texts written by scholars who debate many of the finer points. For simplicity, I'm going to stick to a simple narrative, but some of what follows is oversimplified. (At the end of this post, I will include a list of sources I have used in compiling this entry.)
This is, as we might call it today, the age of paganism. Paganism is not a concrete set of theological beliefs that unifies a set of believers. Paganism is the form of religious worship that was characteristic of the entire world prior to spread of Christianity. There is no Pagan Bible, and no Pagan orthodoxy. It is simply the term that collectively refers to people who believed in various tribal gods, like the ones we know from Roman and Greek mythology.
Typically, these gods were provincial; that is, they held sway over a particular area. A person who moved from one part of the ancient world to another wouldn't take his gods with him. He would simply adopt the worship of the local gods that was conventional in whatever part of the world he had moved to.
While this was true, the boundaries of these religions are fuzzy. The gods of Egypt are relatively well-known, since the ancient Egyptians had a dominant empire, rich in mythology, for a few thousand years. North of Egypt, there was the land of Canaan on the Mediterranean Sea, in what is modern-day Palestine. We have evidence that some of the Egyptian gods (Bes is one example) were worshipped in Canaan, indicating religious syncretism. North of Canaan, in modern-day Syria, there was Ugarit, which had a pantheon of gods that have a striking number of parallels to the gods that were worshipped in Canaan. So, while worship of any one particular god or gods tended to be confined to one region and one people, there is plenty of evidence of people incorporating gods from their neighbors into their own mythology, or appropriating characteristics of other gods into their own.
The region of Canaan is of the most interest to us, since this is the area of the world from which the Israelites would later emerge. Archaeology has uncovered a great deal in the last couple of hundred years about the pantheon of gods that existed in Canaan. There was the high god El, who was the ruler over all the other gods. These other gods included Ba'al, Yamm, Anat, Asherah, and various astral and sun gods. It is not controversial to assume that the patriarchs worshipped El.
Just as there are parallels in the Hebrew Bible to the cities we know from archaeology, there are many references to these gods in scripture. Genesis 17 is the chapter in which God demands that Abraham hack off a part of his genitals in order to establish a covenant with him...a directive which, much to the chagrin of many of us men in the Western world today, Abraham unflinchingly obeyed.
In Christian versions of the first verse of this chapter, God identifies himself to Abraham as "God Almighty. However, in any copy of the Torah, the original Hebrew is preserved and God calls himself "El Shaddai". This is a phonetic translation of the Hebrew אֵ֣ל-שַׁדַּ֔י (Genesis Chapter 17) "El" was the name of the high God of Canaan; the meaning of the term "Shaddai" is a matter of some debate among scholars, but the most common translation renders the entire expression "El, the Mountain One". Much like Zeus of Greek mythology, who was supposed to reside at the top of Mount Olympus, it seems the ancient Canaanities might have believed their high god, too, lived on a mountain. (As a quick aside, the geography listed Genesis 2:10-14 might suggest the Garden of Eden was located on a mountain in Armenia, and Ezekiel 28 twice refers to "the holy mountain of God" in a passage about Eden.)
It's not a stretch to conclude that the God in the stories of Abraham (and later Isaac, and Jacob) is El of ancient Canaanite mythology. Many of the names of people in the early chapters of the Bible have "El"-based names. Ishma-EL means "God hears". Beth-EL means "House of God". "Isra-EL" means "God fighter" (or, possibly, "El will rule"). Eventually, the phrase "El" came to refer not to the name of this one particular god, but became the generic Hebrew word for "God". This transition makes sense if you consider the transition to monotheism of early Judaism: if you come to believe that there is only one God, then your God doesn't need a name.
It is almost certain that no one in Abraham's time was a monotheist, in the way we use the term today. (The term itself was coined only a few hundred years ago.) While some people might have sworn allegiance to one particular god (or, more likely, one particular set of gods), no one believed that their own god was the only god that existed. People were quick to accept that other people in neighboring regions had different gods, and that they were just as valid as their own, but with a dominion over a different geographical area and set of people.
The Hebrew "El" (אֵ֣ל) means "god". The plural of this, as a feminine noun (it's curious to me that the Hebrew word for "god" would be feminine), is "Elohim" (אֱלֹהִ֑ים). The opening line of the Hebrew Bible uses this plural term. The line could, therefore, be rendered: "In the beginning, the gods created the heaven and the earth." (Genesis 1) While this makes for a compelling and provocative piece of trivia, we have to look further. Like other languages, the verb has to agree with the plurality of the subject. In this case, the verb itself is singular. Indeed, the plural "Elohim" was often used in a singular fashion.
This is difficult to make sense of. One possible explanation is that "Elohim" was not a single entity, but a collection of entities that was referred to as a singular one. Think about it this way: if you play sports and you are talking about where your cohort is, you would say, "The team is at a bar." In this case, "the team" is meant to refer to a collection of individuals. They are, but the team is. The religious writings from Ugarit (north of Canaan) include El, who is the ruling member of a divine council of gods.
This might explain why, a few verses later, we read the following, in every single modern translation of the Bible, Christian or otherwise: "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...'" (Genesis 1:26) Who, exactly, is "us"? You might point to the opening of the Gospel of John and insist that, based on this, it was Jesus with the Father, but this is almost certainly an anachronism.
The worship of El is eclipsed early on in the Bible, in favor of other deities. In Exodus 6:3, the god Moses is talking to says that he identified himself to Abraham as "El Shaddai", but he did not make his real name known to him. His real name, according to this passage, is "Yahweh". (Exodus 6) Notice that the passage does not make any sense as it is rendered in Christian Bibles: "I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name the Lord [Yahweh] I did not make myself fully known to them." (Exodus 6:3 (NIV); emphasized text added here.) "God Almighty" and "Lord" are merely generic words for God in our language, and are interchangeable. They are not names; why would God need to change his "name" from one to the other? It makes sense that in a theology based on one God, there would be no need for God to have a name, but this doesn't appear to have been the case at the time that this passage was written.
In any case, here we find the author of the story of Moses is appears to be trying to assert that the two gods El and Yahweh, known to us from archaeological evidence to have been two distinct entities, are actually one and the same. This is, most likely, an indication that the author of Exodus is trying to have Yahweh subsume El. Why do this? Perhaps it was a way to preserve the stories of Abraham and the other patriarchs without allowing for multiple deities. We have archaeological records that tell us that El was sometimes portrayed in the form of an anthropomorphic bull. Urgatic texts refer to El as "Bull El". While there isn't concrete evidence for this, the stories of idolotry from the Bible involving the use of a "golden calf" that the Hebrew God Yahweh condemns so violently may very well refer to a statue of El.
Collectively, the book of poetry called the Psalms in the Bible makes reference to Yahweh, El, Eloi, and Elohim. Modern translations render all of these as generic "God" or "Lord", but the authors of these texts originally might have intended to refer to distinct beings. Psalm 82 begins: "God [Elohim] presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the 'gods' [Elohim]." (Psalm 82:1) Here is a clear parallel to the Ugaritic texts mentioning the divine council of El, mentioned above.
We don't actually know where the deity Yahweh came from. He is not mentioned in these Ugaritic writings. There is a hypothesis that he originated from Midian, since this is where Moses first encountered the burning bush, but we have yet to find definitive evidence of his origins. This is the god who is the dominant force throughout much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Other gods are present and mentioned, but it is Yahweh who must be worshipped. Yahweh is the god who hands down the Ten Commandments to Moses, the first of which is "Those shalt have no other gods before me", which is not so much monotheistic as it is monolatrous.
Regarding the name of Yahweh: ancient Hebrew did not include vowels in its writing, so the true name of God is written only with consonants: YHWH. (Or, יְהוָֽה in Hebrew) To pronounce this, many people simply say "Yahweh" (or "Yahveh"), but if you insert different vowels in different locations, it can be rendered "Yehovah", or "Jehovah".
Ba'al was another son of El who is mentioned many times in the Bible. Worship of Ba'al is uncategorically condemned in the whole of the Bible. Most notably, the prophet Elijah, an agent of Yahweh, challenges the priests of Ba'al to a contest to see whose god is greater; naturally, in the narrative, Yahweh prevails. (1 Kings 18)
Later, there is an account of King Josiah sending a priest to start the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The priests discover a set of scrolls, which is believed to be the Torah, or at least some parts of it. In response to this, Josiah destroy the idols that King Solomon created for other gods, namely, "for Ashtoreth the vile goddess of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the vile god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the people of Ammon." (2 Kings 23)
These kinds of stories, common in the Bible, paint us a picture of a world in which multiple deities are being worshipped by different tribes of people, and that these tribes occasionally end up at odds with each other. Indeed, like the story of creation, there is little to distinguish these stories and the tribe of people they describe as being altogether different from the other peoples living in the world around the time same in neighboring regions. Scholars have noted several parallels between the legal rules established in the Torah and Code of Hammurabi, the latter of which preceded the former by almost a thousand years.
We don't know much about any group of people from this day and age. This is the time of ancient Mesopotamia, where the modern world as we know it today is taking shape. What little we do know is pieced together from odds and ends that we have found in archaeological records. From what little we do know, it's clear that the Israelites weren't unique in any way that might suggest they were divinely inspired. They believed in a god, or set of gods, that united them as a tribe, and worshipped them in much the same way that their neighboring tribes (like the Sidonians, Moabites, or Ammonites) worshipped their gods. What the Hebrew Bible asks us to believe is that, among the hundreds or thousands of gods who existed in the world at this time in history (or any time, really), the god Yahweh of the pagan Canaanite patheon is the only one true God who created the world and has ultimate sovereignty over it.
In our own modern day, our understanding of the world might be incredibly flawed and incomplete, but we understand a good deal more than we did 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. No divine revelation from them ever helped further our understanding of the world. A god who created all of the world, and started to communicate with humanity, might have been able to tell us great details about the vast expanse of galaxies that exist in the universe he created. Instead, he left us to believe we were the center of the universe for another couple thousand years.
This is what I find most problematic: no religion, including Judaism, has ever offered answers that suggest a deeper understanding of the world than the one that the people of its day had achieved. If I ever end up in a situation where I think I'm talking with a divine being, I would ask for resolution to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, or for knowledge about life existing on other planets in the universe. In short, scientifically verifiable information that would further our understanding of reality.
There is some dispute about who the Israelites were and how they ended up in Canaan. The "official" (by which I mean "biblical") story is that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, were liberated by God through Moses, lead to the promised land (Canaan), and upon arriving there, they killed all of the Canaanites to take their land for themselves. This includes the infamous story of the destruction of Jericho. Archaeology and history tell us that there is no evidence to the support the story of the Exodus and the conquering of Canaan. Religious people tell us that there would be no evidence of several hundred thousand people wandering around southwest Mesopotamia for 40 years, and that the Egyptians, humiliated by having lost their slaves, would not have documented the event, in order to save face. This debate matters little to our discussion; the writings of the Israelites clearly exhibit some early polytheism, much of which overlaps with the neighboring lands of Egypt and Ugarit. Whether the Israelites originally split from the Canaanites, or escaped bondage in Egypt and killed the Canaanites, doesn't much change the problem of sorting out the complicated pagan pantheon of deities that eventually morphed into monolotry.
There was a book written in the late 1970's called When God Was a Woman by a woman named Merlin Stone. The title of the book is provocative, intentionally so, but it is greatly misleading. We have no evidence that there ever was a time in history when there was a single god that everyone worshipped who was a female. What we do know is that, when paganism was the norm, many of the gods that existed were women.
The key point that struck me about Merlin's book was in the introduction to the book. In doing research, she had to dig deep into esoteric works scattered across several academic libraries in order to find this information. Much of this is due to the fact that when Christianity started to become the dominant religion, much of the evidence of the pagan world that existed was destroyed by Christians. We have little knowledge of the gods and goddesses of the ancient world because their traces were eradicated so thoroughly. What little that still exists is documented in corners here and there. I can relate to this; most of what I'm writing here was pulled together from various scholarly books about the history of ancient Israel. You don't find these things in the "Religion" section at a typical bookstore.
The Canaanites had goddesses in their pantheon. Asterah was a goddess who was associated, in some way, with Yahweh. There are written records that mention "Yahweh and his Asterah", which might indicate that Yahweh had her as a wife, or perhaps as a romantic partner. This is not as controversial as it might sound; today, it is a heresy to suggest that God as we understand him might engage in sexual intercourse, but in the ancient world, the gods of pagans were generally thought to intermingle with each other, and with mortals, to produce offspring.
It's difficult to know precisely when the transition from polytheism to the monolotrous worship of Yahweh happened. Scholars believe that this might have happened during the Babylonian exile. Leading up to this, the worship of Yahweh was in full force; it is around this time that we start to observe the rise of Yahwistic names. Just as Ezeki-EL contains the name of El, many of the names contain the Yahweh element, which is the suffix "-yahu" phonetically in Hebrew. In English, this suffix is "-iah". Names like Josiah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah are, therefore, Yahwistic, and appear frequently in the later chapters of the Old Testament.
When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and exiled them (Psalm 137:1), the Israelites had to make sense of the tragedy that had just befallen their nation. It's speculated that, instead of accepting that the Israelite god of Yahweh had been defeated by the god Marduk of the Babylonians, the priests in exile revised the story: Yahweh was all-powerful, and was the only god, but had decided to punish the Israelites for their idolatry and sinful ways by taking away their homeland. Indeed, it is only in the later chapters of the book of Isaiah that we find strong, truly monotheistic assertions, and this includes admonitions about how God will punish those who do not obey him.
From what I have written here, it may sound as though there were a bunch of gods in Canaan, and there was a tribe that worshipped each of them. So, there was the tribe of El, the tribe of Ba'al, and so on. This is almost certainly not the case. Like all civilizations around this time, the Canaanites worshipped all the gods, with each god playing a particular role in controlling the forces of nature. El, with his promises to make the patriarchs fruitful with progeny, may have been a fertility god. Yamm was a god of the sea. Ba'al was a storm god. So how did people come to worship Yahweh exclusively? This doesn't take much imagination. Just as Martin Luther fractured the Catholic church by protesting and triggering the Protestant Reformation, certainly there were people in ancient Canaan who objected to the actions of those who wielded religious power. If there were these disputes among people, different clans would form, each claiming allegience to a different set of gods. The evolution of religion throughout human history most closely mirrors the fluctuations of political power and social dynamics.
So how accurate is all of this? Some parts of this are pretty well established by scholars (namely, that there were deities named El, Yahweh, Asherah, and so on), and some which are conjecture based on scattered pieces of evidence (that Yahweh had a wife). But the overall story is consistent with what we know about the world. The story goes: the pagans of ancient Canaan were often divided, and one particular rift pitted one group who worshipped Yahweh exclusively against the others. The Yahweh cult ultimately prevailed, and have become the authors of Jewish history as we know it from the Bible.
There's nothing spectacular about this storyline; people banded together in tribes around various interpretations of god, they disagreed with one another, often went to battle with each other over these disagreements, and so on. None of this should be unfamiliar to anyone who is familiar with events that take place in the world today. Since it is reasonable to assume that the world of 3,000 to 4,000 years ago was very much like our own, populated with people very much like ourselves, it is not a stretch to assume that this narrative might be true.
The primary point is that we don't know everything about the early history of the Israelites. It is a large puzzle with most of the pieces missing. We do know enough to say, with a high level of confidence, that the Biblical account is not the whole story. At the very least, the modern interpretation of the Biblical account, when viewed through the lens of Christianity, strips away some of the critical details and oversimplifies the real story.
In one of the books I read about the history of religion in Canaan, the author makes an interesting point: the Bible is not written the way an historical account would be written. If you think about it, there is a certain expected structure to things based on what they are; if you are watching a slapstick comedy, the format of this movie will be a great deal different than a scientific documentary about the mating habits of weasels. We have historical accounts from the first millienium BCE, like The Histories by the Greek historian Herodotus. This book: very clearly identifies itself as an historical account, presents evidence to back up its claims, and references other historical accounts of its day, arguing for or against their various positions. By contrast, the Bible does none of these things. It is written not like a history book, but like a general work of literature.
Despite the fact that the Bible reads more like fiction than history, what is almost certainly not true is that god was "invented". We live in an age of conspiracy, of centralized power, and mass media. It is almost certain that L. Rob Hubbard invented the religion of Scientology for money, fame, or both. It is unlikely that the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition was invented by an individual or group in order to deceive people, to make money, or achieve recognition. The patriarchs and their contemporaries were wandering around in the dark, stumbling through the world with no understanding of why things happened as they did. There were floods, famines, wars, and any number of horrible tragedies that afflicted mankind, all of it seemingly without any purpose. The stories of Abraham and Moses were probably not written to make money selling scrolls, but were the result of oral traditions passed down through several generations, the way stories are created and persist in any culture in the world, in order to bind people together around a shared heritage and identity.
I mentioned earlier that there is nothing that distinguishes the story of the Israelites from any of the other tribes of people in the world at that time. There is one thing I find quite distinctive: their scripture. It is not a surprise to me that the stories of the Hebrew Bible resonate with people even today. If you consider the religious writings of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, all of them contain long stories about their gods. The gods fight each other, interact with each other, and this causes various effects that we humans observe in the world. Take the stories of the Hindu gods in The Bhagavad Gita. The stories themselves are difficult for me to enjoy or understand as a Westerner because they are about gods with whom I cannot relate. They are too far removed from anything that I know. So it is with most mythologies.
By contrast, the Hebrew Bible is very homocentric. God is (or in some books, the various gods are) a central character who at times has a hand in reality, but mostly stays in the background. The stories themselves are about human beings struggling with the kinds of things that human beings struggle with.
Granted, it is easy for me, as a Westerner, to say that the stories of Hinduism don't seem relateable while those of the dominant religion of the Western world do. I'm sure I'm biased in my own cultural context. I would feel much differently if I were a Hindu. Some part of me is disappointed that I cannot fully understand any other culture than my own.
The stories about Jesus in the New Testament are even more striking in terms of relatability. It is about a man who is supposed to be God's own son, as an underdog in an oppressive world, who manages to prevail against his enemies. It aids the reader in making sense of suffering by helping them understand why they suffer, or at least reassuring them that their suffering ultimately will have a redemptive purpose. This is perhaps why Buddhism is also popular in the Western world; it is a sprituality concerned with how people should live their lives in the toil of the world.
I have little to say about Christianity, since I've already allocated so much time to its predecessor. I'll make some stray points about it.
It clearly started out as a movement with origins in the teachings of a Jewish rabbi who had a Jewish message for the Jewish people of his day. If Jesus ever were to return to earth, he would most likely be appalled that the religion founded in his name, claimed by some 2 billion people on the planet, is completely distinct from, and at odds with, its native Judaism. This religion has succeeded since it is inherently viral. For one, it claims exclusivity. Unlike the pagans that preceded them, you cannot worship your god and respect the gods of your neighbors. And, to be a good Christian is to convert other people to the religion. It is the original chain letter.
There is almost nothing about Christianity that did not pre-exist in the world before its time. Most of the earliest writings we have from ancient Sumeria are tax receipts and inventories of who owns what...but among them there are writings that discuss how to address the intractable problem of taking care of the poor and needy members of society who cannot take care of themselves. Much of the social philosophy found in the Christian writings can also be found in the scripture of Buddhism and the writings of Confuscious. If the claim is that Christianity must have been divinely inspired because it was like nothing else in the world at that time, this is a claim that is quite easily undermined.
The central belief required of the Christian faith is, undoubtedly, the Resurrection. This simple fact puts the whole faith completely beyond the realm of concrete evidence. There's simple no possible way you could produce any evidence to prove that a man who died 2,000 years ago came back to life. Even if you could, it would be impossible to prove that it happened because the God of the Judeo-Christian had something to do with it. The "strongest" arguments I have heard put forth involve the tomb. Some say that the Romans were guarding the tomb of Jesus, and somehow the body made its way out of the tomb, which would only be possible if some divine presence interceded. All of these arguments are conjecture, weakened further by the fact that different arguments are predicated on conflicting pieces of information, none of which we can confirm are true.
A friend of mine once argued that archaeologists had found the bones of Goliath somewhere in the modern day Middle East. This, he insinuated, proved that the events of the Bible had happened. But evidence of this sort is not transitive; even if you prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you have uncovered the bones of the Biblical Goliath, this simply means that there was a Goliath as written in the Bible. This does not prove anything else in the Good Book to be true.
Jesus is claimed as God, and people pray to him, but this brings up a paradox. You have God, who is almighty, and his son, who is also almighty. How can these two entities exist? It's similar to the question, "If God can do anything, can He make a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it?" And you've got the Holy Spirit in the mix. So how to do you resolve this?
If you think I'm splitting hairs, consider that this was a very serious point of confusion. There wasn't a cohesive "Christianity" in the early days after Jesus was crucified. (Just as there isn't one today.) For centuries, people debated about who Jesus was, the nature of his divinity, what he taught, what we were supposed to learn from his teachings, and so on. Sebellianists believed that Jesus was God incarnate. Gnostics believed that God entered Jesus at some point in his adult life, but left him shortly before the crucifixion so he could die fully human. This is the fractured world of paganism all over again. You have various tribes of people who all claim to believe in the same God and the same basic theology, but it's far from any kind of true unity. The interpretations are different, and the different tribes go to war with each other.
Eventually, Roman emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea. This group decided upon the notion of the Trinity, as embodied in the Nicene Creed, which most Christian churches still embrace today. The key term here is homoousion, which means "one in being". It part of a theological doctrine that states that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, while being three separate things, are all the same thing. Huh? This sounds like something a person would claim after taking a long drag off a marijuana cigarette. ("Dig this, man...")
For some perspective, imagine that a Roman emperor had convened a council in the fourth century and this council decided, on their own authority, that all of the Greek gods of that mythology are all the same "god". Zeus, Poseiden, Hades, and all of them, while being separate entities, are all "one in being" and are all one god. The assertion they would be trying to make is that Greek mythology is monotheistic, despite there being multiple gods. If you apply it to any religious mythology other than Christianity, it is nonsensical. It makes little sense that the determination of Christian theology of a group of Roman rulers 300 years after Jesus died would carry any authority, but somehow this has been sufficient to allow Christianity to evade being considered a polytheism.
In brief, on a long enough timeline, nothing that ever happened in the chronology of Judaism, or its most popular spinoff, is anything unique. A knowledge of history (of which my own is barely sufficient) lends itself to the understanding that in the few hundred thousand years that men have existed, we have been religious; there is evidence that even the Neanderthals practiced some kind of religion. We have continually reinvented our interpretation of the divine realm, and its inhabitants, in order to make sense of a universe that is chaotic, incomprehensible, and fundamentally out of our control.
There is an old joke about a man who is searching for his car keys late one night under the glow of a street lamp. When asked if that's where he lost his keys, he admits that he lost them somewhere else, but that he is looking for them under the street lamp because that's where the light is. It is unlikely that the religious theologies that have been promulgated most recently--a mere few thousand years ago--are the correct ones. They are a convenience. To look for a deeper understanding of our reality in these religions is to be that man looking in the wrong place for his keys.
This is precisely what I started to look for a few years ago, when I started to dig into various religions and the chronologies that surrounded their histories. How did we get to here and now? How did we get to the point where Christianity is a religion that has captured the minds of over a quarter of the world's population, in a world of 7 billion people?
This might be the last thing I write about religion on here. The subject has held my attention for a surprisingly long duration of time, but I'm starting to push myself to explore other interests that are more relevant to my day to day life. There is an old television show called "Lost", which was known for its long-running plot riddled with incomprehensible mysteries, which were steeped in allusions to various religious mythologies. It aired in the early days of the Internet, so its fans were notorious for endlessly debating answers to these questions at great length. In one of the last episodes, in what is clearly a piece of dialogue directed at the audience of the show, one character cuts off another's line of questioning by saying: "Every question I answer will simply lead to another question. You should rest, and just be grateful you're alive." To one who would endeavor to seek the origins of religion, this is sage advice.
I'll start at the end, which is to describe who I am and what I have come to believe through this whole learning process. If asked to identify my religious beliefs, on a census form for example, I would abstain from answering the question. Not "atheist", not "agnostic", not "other". I simply wouldn't provide an answer. This is the most accurate possible answer.
If you pressed me further and asked me to state some kind of belief about religion, then I would say this: I believe in freedom of religion, as the First Amendment of the United States guarantees. Ideally, political power should remain separate from religious beliefs, but above all, the freedom of the individual to choose what religion they practice is far more important than any one particular religion.
Now you know. That's me.
The largest problem is that the volume of writing on this subject is immense. In the last few thousand years, there has been more written on these religions than any one person could read in a hundred lifetimes. It is simply not possible for one person to load every single interpretation into their head, carefully weigh all of them against one another, consider all of the evidence and arguments that have been presented, and arrive at a globally satisfactory conclusion. The writings around this topic are a massive, complex tapestry, and the best any one person can hope to is pull threads from it. You grab one thread, pull it, examining it until it ends, or until you get bored with that thread, and pull another. No one can possibly grasp the whole thing in its entirety; a cursory sampling of only a tiny fraction of the constituent parts has to suffice.
Therefore, what I write here is almost certainly not correct; at the very best, it is only part of the story. I offer it here because it seems to me to be the version of the story that has the highest probability of being true, compared with all the others that I have considered. I can only hope that it will inspire others to investigate some of these paths for themselves, lead them to different conclusions, and perhaps some of them will elaborate or improve upon these ideas.
One thing I learned relatively late in my search: desire is irrelevant. There are lots of religious arguments that people toss around to "prove" that religion is or is not true. There's the argument from design, argument from first causes, and so on. What I find people tend to argue, most passionately, is that any one particular religion must be true because it has benefited the world, or that it must not be true because it has caused the world great harm. Christianity is true because it has delivered men from their animalistic nature and made them civilized, so it is good. Or, it has made otherwise civilized men torture and kill other men in the name of their God, so it is bad.
Collectively, I refer to these as kinds of arguments as "arguments from merit". They are problematic because they are completely impossible to substantiate one way or another. Much more importantly, however, is that these are entirely useless positions to take. You can make arguments about Christianity pacifying the Vikings, causing the horrors of the Crusades or the Inquisition, or about encouraging people to help the poor, all day long. The question of whether Christianity is true or not is completely independent of how much good or bad it you believe it has done for world. I do not consider this in what follows.
I've covered this before in previous entries on here, but the story of Christianity is, at its core, the story of Judaism. The first 3/4s of the Christian Bible are mostly the stories in the Hebrew Bible. Naturally, we have to start there.
The Creation story in the Bible is one of the more controversial aspects of the entire canon. It is odd that anyone would be adamant in defending this story as a literal account, since it is clear from the narrative that there could have been no eyewitnesses at the time.
What is most striking is that every single tribe of people in history that has practiced some form of religion has had a creation story. Here are a handful of examples:
- The ancient Egyptians believed that there was an endless ocean of nothingness that was given form by the high god Amun-Ra, who created the world (and mankind) out of the substance of this ocean.
- The ancient Babylonians believed the world was formless mud, and was given form by the high god Marduk who molded the world (and mankind) out of mud.
- The Hopi Indians believe that there was endless, and then the creator Tawa made the world (and mankind) out of this nothingness.
- In the South Pacific, the various tribes of people believe that there was nothingness, and then the high gods Rangi and Papa created the world by separating the water and land from this nothingness. (And created mankind, of course.)
I could continue listing these creation myths; there are literally thousands of them. What is remarkable is that they all have the same basic elements. Before, there is nothingness. Then, a high god or gods creates the world from this nothingness, creating the finite from the infinite. Then they create mankind as a distinct organism who is part of the world, but somehow separate from the rest of nature.
What's most striking about this is just how banal the creation story of the Bible truly is. I've heard many arguments that the stories in the Bible are truly unique, and that its ideas cannot be found anywhere else in the ancient world. It is argued that, since it is unique, it must have been divinely inspired. The more you come to understand the ancient world, the more impossible it becomes to seriously consider this position.
While the creation myths the world over are easy to scoff at, in light of a scientific understanding of the world, the fact that they are universal to the human experience should make us consider that perhaps they are essential to the human experience as well. Indeed, historically, the creation stories seem to have the critical function of binding tribes of people together, giving them a shared identity and sense of purpose.
And while we might think that we have achieved something that surpasses this, modern-day humans have woven a creation story of our own: that there is nothingness, and then 14 billions years ago, a massive explosion gives birth to the universe as we know it. When put alongside the examples above, it doesn't seem all that far removed from what our ancient ancestors believed. (Although admittedly, science doesn't make up an entity or consciousness that initiated this whole process.)
After the first dozen or so chapters of the Bible, we get to the OG of Judaism: Abraham. Historically, we are unable to confirm that Abraham ever truly existed, since no record of him exists outside of the Biblical account. What is interesting is that there much about his story that does line up with what historians know about the ancient world. According to scripture, for example, he leaves Ur (probably around the time of the Ur III dynasty) to move to Haran, then to Canaan. Archaeology confirms that these places did exist, as do most of the other specific cities named.
Archaeology tells us many other things about these ancient cultures. In particular, we have some information about the gods that the people in these regions worshipped, and about how they worshipped these gods. What follows is what I have gleaned from various writings about the history of the civilization from which the Israelites later emerged. Some of these were written for a general audience; others are erudite texts written by scholars who debate many of the finer points. For simplicity, I'm going to stick to a simple narrative, but some of what follows is oversimplified. (At the end of this post, I will include a list of sources I have used in compiling this entry.)
This is, as we might call it today, the age of paganism. Paganism is not a concrete set of theological beliefs that unifies a set of believers. Paganism is the form of religious worship that was characteristic of the entire world prior to spread of Christianity. There is no Pagan Bible, and no Pagan orthodoxy. It is simply the term that collectively refers to people who believed in various tribal gods, like the ones we know from Roman and Greek mythology.
Typically, these gods were provincial; that is, they held sway over a particular area. A person who moved from one part of the ancient world to another wouldn't take his gods with him. He would simply adopt the worship of the local gods that was conventional in whatever part of the world he had moved to.
While this was true, the boundaries of these religions are fuzzy. The gods of Egypt are relatively well-known, since the ancient Egyptians had a dominant empire, rich in mythology, for a few thousand years. North of Egypt, there was the land of Canaan on the Mediterranean Sea, in what is modern-day Palestine. We have evidence that some of the Egyptian gods (Bes is one example) were worshipped in Canaan, indicating religious syncretism. North of Canaan, in modern-day Syria, there was Ugarit, which had a pantheon of gods that have a striking number of parallels to the gods that were worshipped in Canaan. So, while worship of any one particular god or gods tended to be confined to one region and one people, there is plenty of evidence of people incorporating gods from their neighbors into their own mythology, or appropriating characteristics of other gods into their own.
The region of Canaan is of the most interest to us, since this is the area of the world from which the Israelites would later emerge. Archaeology has uncovered a great deal in the last couple of hundred years about the pantheon of gods that existed in Canaan. There was the high god El, who was the ruler over all the other gods. These other gods included Ba'al, Yamm, Anat, Asherah, and various astral and sun gods. It is not controversial to assume that the patriarchs worshipped El.
Just as there are parallels in the Hebrew Bible to the cities we know from archaeology, there are many references to these gods in scripture. Genesis 17 is the chapter in which God demands that Abraham hack off a part of his genitals in order to establish a covenant with him...a directive which, much to the chagrin of many of us men in the Western world today, Abraham unflinchingly obeyed.
In Christian versions of the first verse of this chapter, God identifies himself to Abraham as "God Almighty. However, in any copy of the Torah, the original Hebrew is preserved and God calls himself "El Shaddai". This is a phonetic translation of the Hebrew אֵ֣ל-שַׁדַּ֔י (Genesis Chapter 17) "El" was the name of the high God of Canaan; the meaning of the term "Shaddai" is a matter of some debate among scholars, but the most common translation renders the entire expression "El, the Mountain One". Much like Zeus of Greek mythology, who was supposed to reside at the top of Mount Olympus, it seems the ancient Canaanities might have believed their high god, too, lived on a mountain. (As a quick aside, the geography listed Genesis 2:10-14 might suggest the Garden of Eden was located on a mountain in Armenia, and Ezekiel 28 twice refers to "the holy mountain of God" in a passage about Eden.)
It's not a stretch to conclude that the God in the stories of Abraham (and later Isaac, and Jacob) is El of ancient Canaanite mythology. Many of the names of people in the early chapters of the Bible have "El"-based names. Ishma-EL means "God hears". Beth-EL means "House of God". "Isra-EL" means "God fighter" (or, possibly, "El will rule"). Eventually, the phrase "El" came to refer not to the name of this one particular god, but became the generic Hebrew word for "God". This transition makes sense if you consider the transition to monotheism of early Judaism: if you come to believe that there is only one God, then your God doesn't need a name.
It is almost certain that no one in Abraham's time was a monotheist, in the way we use the term today. (The term itself was coined only a few hundred years ago.) While some people might have sworn allegiance to one particular god (or, more likely, one particular set of gods), no one believed that their own god was the only god that existed. People were quick to accept that other people in neighboring regions had different gods, and that they were just as valid as their own, but with a dominion over a different geographical area and set of people.
The Hebrew "El" (אֵ֣ל) means "god". The plural of this, as a feminine noun (it's curious to me that the Hebrew word for "god" would be feminine), is "Elohim" (אֱלֹהִ֑ים). The opening line of the Hebrew Bible uses this plural term. The line could, therefore, be rendered: "In the beginning, the gods created the heaven and the earth." (Genesis 1) While this makes for a compelling and provocative piece of trivia, we have to look further. Like other languages, the verb has to agree with the plurality of the subject. In this case, the verb itself is singular. Indeed, the plural "Elohim" was often used in a singular fashion.
This is difficult to make sense of. One possible explanation is that "Elohim" was not a single entity, but a collection of entities that was referred to as a singular one. Think about it this way: if you play sports and you are talking about where your cohort is, you would say, "The team is at a bar." In this case, "the team" is meant to refer to a collection of individuals. They are, but the team is. The religious writings from Ugarit (north of Canaan) include El, who is the ruling member of a divine council of gods.
This might explain why, a few verses later, we read the following, in every single modern translation of the Bible, Christian or otherwise: "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...'" (Genesis 1:26) Who, exactly, is "us"? You might point to the opening of the Gospel of John and insist that, based on this, it was Jesus with the Father, but this is almost certainly an anachronism.
The worship of El is eclipsed early on in the Bible, in favor of other deities. In Exodus 6:3, the god Moses is talking to says that he identified himself to Abraham as "El Shaddai", but he did not make his real name known to him. His real name, according to this passage, is "Yahweh". (Exodus 6) Notice that the passage does not make any sense as it is rendered in Christian Bibles: "I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name the Lord [Yahweh] I did not make myself fully known to them." (Exodus 6:3 (NIV); emphasized text added here.) "God Almighty" and "Lord" are merely generic words for God in our language, and are interchangeable. They are not names; why would God need to change his "name" from one to the other? It makes sense that in a theology based on one God, there would be no need for God to have a name, but this doesn't appear to have been the case at the time that this passage was written.
In any case, here we find the author of the story of Moses is appears to be trying to assert that the two gods El and Yahweh, known to us from archaeological evidence to have been two distinct entities, are actually one and the same. This is, most likely, an indication that the author of Exodus is trying to have Yahweh subsume El. Why do this? Perhaps it was a way to preserve the stories of Abraham and the other patriarchs without allowing for multiple deities. We have archaeological records that tell us that El was sometimes portrayed in the form of an anthropomorphic bull. Urgatic texts refer to El as "Bull El". While there isn't concrete evidence for this, the stories of idolotry from the Bible involving the use of a "golden calf" that the Hebrew God Yahweh condemns so violently may very well refer to a statue of El.
Collectively, the book of poetry called the Psalms in the Bible makes reference to Yahweh, El, Eloi, and Elohim. Modern translations render all of these as generic "God" or "Lord", but the authors of these texts originally might have intended to refer to distinct beings. Psalm 82 begins: "God [Elohim] presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the 'gods' [Elohim]." (Psalm 82:1) Here is a clear parallel to the Ugaritic texts mentioning the divine council of El, mentioned above.
We don't actually know where the deity Yahweh came from. He is not mentioned in these Ugaritic writings. There is a hypothesis that he originated from Midian, since this is where Moses first encountered the burning bush, but we have yet to find definitive evidence of his origins. This is the god who is the dominant force throughout much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Other gods are present and mentioned, but it is Yahweh who must be worshipped. Yahweh is the god who hands down the Ten Commandments to Moses, the first of which is "Those shalt have no other gods before me", which is not so much monotheistic as it is monolatrous.
Regarding the name of Yahweh: ancient Hebrew did not include vowels in its writing, so the true name of God is written only with consonants: YHWH. (Or, יְהוָֽה in Hebrew) To pronounce this, many people simply say "Yahweh" (or "Yahveh"), but if you insert different vowels in different locations, it can be rendered "Yehovah", or "Jehovah".
Ba'al was another son of El who is mentioned many times in the Bible. Worship of Ba'al is uncategorically condemned in the whole of the Bible. Most notably, the prophet Elijah, an agent of Yahweh, challenges the priests of Ba'al to a contest to see whose god is greater; naturally, in the narrative, Yahweh prevails. (1 Kings 18)
Later, there is an account of King Josiah sending a priest to start the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The priests discover a set of scrolls, which is believed to be the Torah, or at least some parts of it. In response to this, Josiah destroy the idols that King Solomon created for other gods, namely, "for Ashtoreth the vile goddess of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the vile god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the people of Ammon." (2 Kings 23)
These kinds of stories, common in the Bible, paint us a picture of a world in which multiple deities are being worshipped by different tribes of people, and that these tribes occasionally end up at odds with each other. Indeed, like the story of creation, there is little to distinguish these stories and the tribe of people they describe as being altogether different from the other peoples living in the world around the time same in neighboring regions. Scholars have noted several parallels between the legal rules established in the Torah and Code of Hammurabi, the latter of which preceded the former by almost a thousand years.
We don't know much about any group of people from this day and age. This is the time of ancient Mesopotamia, where the modern world as we know it today is taking shape. What little we do know is pieced together from odds and ends that we have found in archaeological records. From what little we do know, it's clear that the Israelites weren't unique in any way that might suggest they were divinely inspired. They believed in a god, or set of gods, that united them as a tribe, and worshipped them in much the same way that their neighboring tribes (like the Sidonians, Moabites, or Ammonites) worshipped their gods. What the Hebrew Bible asks us to believe is that, among the hundreds or thousands of gods who existed in the world at this time in history (or any time, really), the god Yahweh of the pagan Canaanite patheon is the only one true God who created the world and has ultimate sovereignty over it.
In our own modern day, our understanding of the world might be incredibly flawed and incomplete, but we understand a good deal more than we did 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. No divine revelation from them ever helped further our understanding of the world. A god who created all of the world, and started to communicate with humanity, might have been able to tell us great details about the vast expanse of galaxies that exist in the universe he created. Instead, he left us to believe we were the center of the universe for another couple thousand years.
This is what I find most problematic: no religion, including Judaism, has ever offered answers that suggest a deeper understanding of the world than the one that the people of its day had achieved. If I ever end up in a situation where I think I'm talking with a divine being, I would ask for resolution to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, or for knowledge about life existing on other planets in the universe. In short, scientifically verifiable information that would further our understanding of reality.
There is some dispute about who the Israelites were and how they ended up in Canaan. The "official" (by which I mean "biblical") story is that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, were liberated by God through Moses, lead to the promised land (Canaan), and upon arriving there, they killed all of the Canaanites to take their land for themselves. This includes the infamous story of the destruction of Jericho. Archaeology and history tell us that there is no evidence to the support the story of the Exodus and the conquering of Canaan. Religious people tell us that there would be no evidence of several hundred thousand people wandering around southwest Mesopotamia for 40 years, and that the Egyptians, humiliated by having lost their slaves, would not have documented the event, in order to save face. This debate matters little to our discussion; the writings of the Israelites clearly exhibit some early polytheism, much of which overlaps with the neighboring lands of Egypt and Ugarit. Whether the Israelites originally split from the Canaanites, or escaped bondage in Egypt and killed the Canaanites, doesn't much change the problem of sorting out the complicated pagan pantheon of deities that eventually morphed into monolotry.
There was a book written in the late 1970's called When God Was a Woman by a woman named Merlin Stone. The title of the book is provocative, intentionally so, but it is greatly misleading. We have no evidence that there ever was a time in history when there was a single god that everyone worshipped who was a female. What we do know is that, when paganism was the norm, many of the gods that existed were women.
The key point that struck me about Merlin's book was in the introduction to the book. In doing research, she had to dig deep into esoteric works scattered across several academic libraries in order to find this information. Much of this is due to the fact that when Christianity started to become the dominant religion, much of the evidence of the pagan world that existed was destroyed by Christians. We have little knowledge of the gods and goddesses of the ancient world because their traces were eradicated so thoroughly. What little that still exists is documented in corners here and there. I can relate to this; most of what I'm writing here was pulled together from various scholarly books about the history of ancient Israel. You don't find these things in the "Religion" section at a typical bookstore.
The Canaanites had goddesses in their pantheon. Asterah was a goddess who was associated, in some way, with Yahweh. There are written records that mention "Yahweh and his Asterah", which might indicate that Yahweh had her as a wife, or perhaps as a romantic partner. This is not as controversial as it might sound; today, it is a heresy to suggest that God as we understand him might engage in sexual intercourse, but in the ancient world, the gods of pagans were generally thought to intermingle with each other, and with mortals, to produce offspring.
It's difficult to know precisely when the transition from polytheism to the monolotrous worship of Yahweh happened. Scholars believe that this might have happened during the Babylonian exile. Leading up to this, the worship of Yahweh was in full force; it is around this time that we start to observe the rise of Yahwistic names. Just as Ezeki-EL contains the name of El, many of the names contain the Yahweh element, which is the suffix "-yahu" phonetically in Hebrew. In English, this suffix is "-iah". Names like Josiah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah are, therefore, Yahwistic, and appear frequently in the later chapters of the Old Testament.
When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and exiled them (Psalm 137:1), the Israelites had to make sense of the tragedy that had just befallen their nation. It's speculated that, instead of accepting that the Israelite god of Yahweh had been defeated by the god Marduk of the Babylonians, the priests in exile revised the story: Yahweh was all-powerful, and was the only god, but had decided to punish the Israelites for their idolatry and sinful ways by taking away their homeland. Indeed, it is only in the later chapters of the book of Isaiah that we find strong, truly monotheistic assertions, and this includes admonitions about how God will punish those who do not obey him.
From what I have written here, it may sound as though there were a bunch of gods in Canaan, and there was a tribe that worshipped each of them. So, there was the tribe of El, the tribe of Ba'al, and so on. This is almost certainly not the case. Like all civilizations around this time, the Canaanites worshipped all the gods, with each god playing a particular role in controlling the forces of nature. El, with his promises to make the patriarchs fruitful with progeny, may have been a fertility god. Yamm was a god of the sea. Ba'al was a storm god. So how did people come to worship Yahweh exclusively? This doesn't take much imagination. Just as Martin Luther fractured the Catholic church by protesting and triggering the Protestant Reformation, certainly there were people in ancient Canaan who objected to the actions of those who wielded religious power. If there were these disputes among people, different clans would form, each claiming allegience to a different set of gods. The evolution of religion throughout human history most closely mirrors the fluctuations of political power and social dynamics.
So how accurate is all of this? Some parts of this are pretty well established by scholars (namely, that there were deities named El, Yahweh, Asherah, and so on), and some which are conjecture based on scattered pieces of evidence (that Yahweh had a wife). But the overall story is consistent with what we know about the world. The story goes: the pagans of ancient Canaan were often divided, and one particular rift pitted one group who worshipped Yahweh exclusively against the others. The Yahweh cult ultimately prevailed, and have become the authors of Jewish history as we know it from the Bible.
There's nothing spectacular about this storyline; people banded together in tribes around various interpretations of god, they disagreed with one another, often went to battle with each other over these disagreements, and so on. None of this should be unfamiliar to anyone who is familiar with events that take place in the world today. Since it is reasonable to assume that the world of 3,000 to 4,000 years ago was very much like our own, populated with people very much like ourselves, it is not a stretch to assume that this narrative might be true.
The primary point is that we don't know everything about the early history of the Israelites. It is a large puzzle with most of the pieces missing. We do know enough to say, with a high level of confidence, that the Biblical account is not the whole story. At the very least, the modern interpretation of the Biblical account, when viewed through the lens of Christianity, strips away some of the critical details and oversimplifies the real story.
In one of the books I read about the history of religion in Canaan, the author makes an interesting point: the Bible is not written the way an historical account would be written. If you think about it, there is a certain expected structure to things based on what they are; if you are watching a slapstick comedy, the format of this movie will be a great deal different than a scientific documentary about the mating habits of weasels. We have historical accounts from the first millienium BCE, like The Histories by the Greek historian Herodotus. This book: very clearly identifies itself as an historical account, presents evidence to back up its claims, and references other historical accounts of its day, arguing for or against their various positions. By contrast, the Bible does none of these things. It is written not like a history book, but like a general work of literature.
Despite the fact that the Bible reads more like fiction than history, what is almost certainly not true is that god was "invented". We live in an age of conspiracy, of centralized power, and mass media. It is almost certain that L. Rob Hubbard invented the religion of Scientology for money, fame, or both. It is unlikely that the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition was invented by an individual or group in order to deceive people, to make money, or achieve recognition. The patriarchs and their contemporaries were wandering around in the dark, stumbling through the world with no understanding of why things happened as they did. There were floods, famines, wars, and any number of horrible tragedies that afflicted mankind, all of it seemingly without any purpose. The stories of Abraham and Moses were probably not written to make money selling scrolls, but were the result of oral traditions passed down through several generations, the way stories are created and persist in any culture in the world, in order to bind people together around a shared heritage and identity.
I mentioned earlier that there is nothing that distinguishes the story of the Israelites from any of the other tribes of people in the world at that time. There is one thing I find quite distinctive: their scripture. It is not a surprise to me that the stories of the Hebrew Bible resonate with people even today. If you consider the religious writings of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, all of them contain long stories about their gods. The gods fight each other, interact with each other, and this causes various effects that we humans observe in the world. Take the stories of the Hindu gods in The Bhagavad Gita. The stories themselves are difficult for me to enjoy or understand as a Westerner because they are about gods with whom I cannot relate. They are too far removed from anything that I know. So it is with most mythologies.
By contrast, the Hebrew Bible is very homocentric. God is (or in some books, the various gods are) a central character who at times has a hand in reality, but mostly stays in the background. The stories themselves are about human beings struggling with the kinds of things that human beings struggle with.
Granted, it is easy for me, as a Westerner, to say that the stories of Hinduism don't seem relateable while those of the dominant religion of the Western world do. I'm sure I'm biased in my own cultural context. I would feel much differently if I were a Hindu. Some part of me is disappointed that I cannot fully understand any other culture than my own.
The stories about Jesus in the New Testament are even more striking in terms of relatability. It is about a man who is supposed to be God's own son, as an underdog in an oppressive world, who manages to prevail against his enemies. It aids the reader in making sense of suffering by helping them understand why they suffer, or at least reassuring them that their suffering ultimately will have a redemptive purpose. This is perhaps why Buddhism is also popular in the Western world; it is a sprituality concerned with how people should live their lives in the toil of the world.
I have little to say about Christianity, since I've already allocated so much time to its predecessor. I'll make some stray points about it.
It clearly started out as a movement with origins in the teachings of a Jewish rabbi who had a Jewish message for the Jewish people of his day. If Jesus ever were to return to earth, he would most likely be appalled that the religion founded in his name, claimed by some 2 billion people on the planet, is completely distinct from, and at odds with, its native Judaism. This religion has succeeded since it is inherently viral. For one, it claims exclusivity. Unlike the pagans that preceded them, you cannot worship your god and respect the gods of your neighbors. And, to be a good Christian is to convert other people to the religion. It is the original chain letter.
There is almost nothing about Christianity that did not pre-exist in the world before its time. Most of the earliest writings we have from ancient Sumeria are tax receipts and inventories of who owns what...but among them there are writings that discuss how to address the intractable problem of taking care of the poor and needy members of society who cannot take care of themselves. Much of the social philosophy found in the Christian writings can also be found in the scripture of Buddhism and the writings of Confuscious. If the claim is that Christianity must have been divinely inspired because it was like nothing else in the world at that time, this is a claim that is quite easily undermined.
The central belief required of the Christian faith is, undoubtedly, the Resurrection. This simple fact puts the whole faith completely beyond the realm of concrete evidence. There's simple no possible way you could produce any evidence to prove that a man who died 2,000 years ago came back to life. Even if you could, it would be impossible to prove that it happened because the God of the Judeo-Christian had something to do with it. The "strongest" arguments I have heard put forth involve the tomb. Some say that the Romans were guarding the tomb of Jesus, and somehow the body made its way out of the tomb, which would only be possible if some divine presence interceded. All of these arguments are conjecture, weakened further by the fact that different arguments are predicated on conflicting pieces of information, none of which we can confirm are true.
A friend of mine once argued that archaeologists had found the bones of Goliath somewhere in the modern day Middle East. This, he insinuated, proved that the events of the Bible had happened. But evidence of this sort is not transitive; even if you prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you have uncovered the bones of the Biblical Goliath, this simply means that there was a Goliath as written in the Bible. This does not prove anything else in the Good Book to be true.
Jesus is claimed as God, and people pray to him, but this brings up a paradox. You have God, who is almighty, and his son, who is also almighty. How can these two entities exist? It's similar to the question, "If God can do anything, can He make a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it?" And you've got the Holy Spirit in the mix. So how to do you resolve this?
If you think I'm splitting hairs, consider that this was a very serious point of confusion. There wasn't a cohesive "Christianity" in the early days after Jesus was crucified. (Just as there isn't one today.) For centuries, people debated about who Jesus was, the nature of his divinity, what he taught, what we were supposed to learn from his teachings, and so on. Sebellianists believed that Jesus was God incarnate. Gnostics believed that God entered Jesus at some point in his adult life, but left him shortly before the crucifixion so he could die fully human. This is the fractured world of paganism all over again. You have various tribes of people who all claim to believe in the same God and the same basic theology, but it's far from any kind of true unity. The interpretations are different, and the different tribes go to war with each other.
Eventually, Roman emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea. This group decided upon the notion of the Trinity, as embodied in the Nicene Creed, which most Christian churches still embrace today. The key term here is homoousion, which means "one in being". It part of a theological doctrine that states that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, while being three separate things, are all the same thing. Huh? This sounds like something a person would claim after taking a long drag off a marijuana cigarette. ("Dig this, man...")
For some perspective, imagine that a Roman emperor had convened a council in the fourth century and this council decided, on their own authority, that all of the Greek gods of that mythology are all the same "god". Zeus, Poseiden, Hades, and all of them, while being separate entities, are all "one in being" and are all one god. The assertion they would be trying to make is that Greek mythology is monotheistic, despite there being multiple gods. If you apply it to any religious mythology other than Christianity, it is nonsensical. It makes little sense that the determination of Christian theology of a group of Roman rulers 300 years after Jesus died would carry any authority, but somehow this has been sufficient to allow Christianity to evade being considered a polytheism.
In brief, on a long enough timeline, nothing that ever happened in the chronology of Judaism, or its most popular spinoff, is anything unique. A knowledge of history (of which my own is barely sufficient) lends itself to the understanding that in the few hundred thousand years that men have existed, we have been religious; there is evidence that even the Neanderthals practiced some kind of religion. We have continually reinvented our interpretation of the divine realm, and its inhabitants, in order to make sense of a universe that is chaotic, incomprehensible, and fundamentally out of our control.
There is an old joke about a man who is searching for his car keys late one night under the glow of a street lamp. When asked if that's where he lost his keys, he admits that he lost them somewhere else, but that he is looking for them under the street lamp because that's where the light is. It is unlikely that the religious theologies that have been promulgated most recently--a mere few thousand years ago--are the correct ones. They are a convenience. To look for a deeper understanding of our reality in these religions is to be that man looking in the wrong place for his keys.