The Christian God does not exist

1. If the God of evangelical Christianity were to exist, then the Bible would be God's only written revelation. 
   
2. Thus, if that Deity were to exist, then he would probably see to it that the Bible is perfectly clear and authoritative, and lack the appearance of merely human authorship.
   
3. Some facts about the Bible are the following:
   
1. It contradicts itself in many key places;
   
2. It contains failed prophecies; and 
   
3. It contains interpolations to the texts
   
4. Therefore, the Bible is not perfectly clear and authoritative, and has the appearance of merely human authorship.
   
5. Hence, probably the God of evangelical Christianity does not exist.
   

“It was nine in the morning when they crucified him..” (Mark 15:25)

12 On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, “Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?”

16 The disciples left, went into the city and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. (Mark 15:12-16)

“It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon.” (John 19:14)

9 When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons. 10 She went and told those who had been with him and who were mourning and weeping. 11 When they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen him, they did not believe it.

12 Afterward Jesus appeared in a different form to two of them while they were walking in the country. 13 These returned and reported it to the rest; but they did not believe them either.

14 Later Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating; he rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen him after he had risen.

15 He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

19 After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. 20 Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.

Then they quickly reported all these instructions to those around Peter. After this, Jesus himself also sent out through them from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.

“It must be said that the amount of time between the original composition and the next surviving manuscript is far less for the New Testament than for any other work in Greek literature…Although there are certainly differences in many of the New Testament manuscripts, not one fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading” (David S. Dockery, Foundations for Biblical Interpretation, pg. 182, 1994.)

“The earliest versions of the New Testament were prepared by missionaries to assist in the propagation of the Christian faith among peoples whose native tongue was Syriac, Latin, or Coptic.” (Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, pg. 67,1992)

“These quotations are so extensive that the New Testament could virtually be reconstructed from them without the use of New Testament manuscripts.” (Harold J. Greenlee, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, pg. 54, 1977.)

“It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference. Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or exact detail historical statements in the Bible.” (Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert: History of Negev, pg. 31, 1959)

“…For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick, who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

“For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, murder, theft, adultery,” (Mark 7:21)

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8)

“But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5)

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24)

Since Jesus was a Jew who lived in first century Palestine, any tradition about him has to fit in his own his- Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? Finding the Historical Jesus context to be plausible. Lots of our later Gospels—written in the third or fourth century, in other parts of the world—say things about Jesus that do not make sense in his own context. These things can be eliminated as historically implausible. But there are implausibilities even in our four canonical Gospels. In the Gospel of John, chapter 3, Jesus has a famous conversation with Nicodemus in which he says, “You must be born again.” The Greek word translated “again” actually has two meanings: it can mean not only “a second time” but also “from above.” Whenever it is used elsewhere in John, it means “from above” (John 19:11, 23). That is what Jesus appears to mean in John 3 when he speaks with Nicodemus: a person must be born from above in order to have eternal life in heaven above. Nicodemus misunderstands, though, and thinks Jesus intends the other meaning of the word, that he has to be born a second time. “How can I crawl back into my mother’s womb?” he asks, out of some frustration. Jesus corrects him: he is not talking about a second physical birth, but a heavenly birth, from above.

This conversation with Nicodemus is predicated on the circumstance that a certain Greek word has two meanings (a double entendre). Absent the double entendre, the conversation makes little sense. The problem is this: Jesus and this Jewish leader in Jerusalem would not have been speaking Greek, but Aramaic. But the Aramaic word for “from above” does not also mean “second time.” This is a double entendre that works only in Greek. So it looks as though this conversation could not have happened—at least not as it is described in the Gospel of John

“As you dig into this history a little bit…the Galileans, that’s the northern people, and the Pharisees, counted the day from sunrise to sunrise, the day of Passover.  Whereas the Judean and Sadducees counted it from sunset to sunset…The Mishnah, which is the codification of Jewish law, tells us that.”
(John MacArthur, timestamp-49:52, link)

“But Lecuyer and his colleagues also found a jump in aridity before the downfall of Egypt in the 6th century B.C. during the Late Period, when it was conquered by Alexander the Great.”(link)

“There are numerous examples of this, but I will provide only one.”

“Moreover, Mark portrays the women as being afraid while the other Gospels portray the women as being filled with joy.”

“If the women told no one, then how did everyone else know?”

“Secondly, vs 9-12 seem to indicate that Jesus' resurrected body was not a physical body he appeared to the disciples in different forms.”

As we have seen, the Greek manuscript tradition is unanimously against the inclusion of the Comma Johanneum. So are the majority of the earliest translations. The Latin tradition from which the Comma comes down to us contains quite a few unique examples of added interpolations and expansions of the text, making it difficult to argue for the originality of a reading that is found almost exclusively in the Latin. Finally, most of the so-called citations of the Comma in the early church fathers are just special pleading based on strained parallels. The few that might be legitimate are all, again, in the Latin tradition, and thus only confirm the situation presented to us by the manuscripts. All in all, there is little reason to accept the Comma Johanneum as the authentic, inspired words of John, which is why the majority of modern translations (just as the majority of ancient translations) do not include those words.

Despite the brilliance of the story, its captivating quality, and its inherent intrigue, there is one other enormous problem that it poses. As it turns out, it was not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, it was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later scribes. How do we know this? In fact, scholars who work on the manuscript tradition have no doubts about this particular case. Later in this book we will be examining in greater depth the kinds of evidence that scholars adduce for making judgments of this sort. Here I can simply point out a few basic facts that have proved convincing to nearly all  scholars of every persuasion: the story is not found in our oldest and  best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; 18 its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories im­mediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words  and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is  unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.

“There are numerous passages in the Bible that we would find abhorrent today.”

“Moreover, every culture bans murder and theft regardless of the Bible and the Code of Hammurabi banned adultery and punished it with drowning.”