Christians Don’t Realize How Much They Disagree with Jesus

Binge reading the gospels has never caught on. 

It would be easy to come up with a couple dozen Jesus quotes from the gospels, and run them by devout church-goers, claiming that a crazy street preacher just said them. The devout would agree, “Wow, what a nut job!” If we then admitted that they are all Jesus quotes, most of these believers (but not all) would not give up on their lord and savior. They’d run to their clergy for explanations. Adoration of their idealized Jesus is so deeply imbedded that accepting any negatives cannot be tolerated. Thus has the church survived—and, of course, failure to read/study the gospels has helped. There is staggering ignorance of the Jesus story. Don’t believe me? Just ask a Christian friend to describe the difference between the Jesus in Mark’s gospel and the Jesus in John’s gospel.
 
 
“Wow, what a nut job!” is indeed an appropriate reaction to so much of the Jesus-script we find in the gospels. Maybe it’s for that very reason that believers aren’t so fond of Bible study. When I was working on my 2021 book, Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught, I reread the gospels thoroughly, carefully—and arrived at a list of 292 Jesus quotes that qualify as bad, mediocre, and alarming. I divided them into four categories: (1) preaching about the end times, (2) scary extremism, (2) bad advice and bad theology, and (4) the unreal Jesus of John’s gospel. 
 
It's the scary extremism that would most likely give Christians the creeps. This can also be called cult fanaticism. Cult leaders commonly claim to be in direct contact with their gods, they demand total loyalty and sacrifice for their version of the divine. Total loyalty includes abandoning family, hence we find this Jesus saying in Luke 18:29-30: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who will not get back very much more in this age and in the age to come eternal life.” 
 
Just ponder that for a while. It’s okay to leave house and family in order to somehow achieve the kingdom of God? —because you’ll gain “very much more” while you’re alive—and you’ll get eternal life as part of the bargain. How does that possibly make sense? Do you know many Christians who would leave their houses and families “for the sake of the kingdom”? And what does it mean to “get back very much more”? Children to replace those you left? 
 
We find more fanaticism about the kingdom of God in Luke 9:59-62:
 
“To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’”
 
Even when I came across this text as a kid, I thought it was rude. But “fitness” for the kingdom of God was a key obsession of the author of Luke’s gospel, whose primary goal was advancing and protecting the early Jesus cult. His fanaticism reached its high point in Luke 14. In this chapter Jesus tells the famous parable of the Great Banquet. All of the invitees back out at the last minute, so the host gave this command to his servant: “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” (Luke 14:21) The message is clear: no matter your social status, you are welcome in our cult. You don’t have to be wealthy or famous. However, divided loyalties will not be tolerated, thus we find the infamous verse, Luke 14:26: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” 
 
I was once chatting with a Catholic woman who was raving about her church, and her wonderful lord and savior Jesus. I asked her how she felt about Luke 14:26, and quoted it to her. She flew into a rage for telling such a horrible lie—there could be no such verse. I would give her an F in Bible study, but her priests would be pleased. There are other Christians who will say, “Well, Jesus couldn’t have meant that” —based on what they’ve been taught about Jesus. My reply: If you can assure me that you are an expert in ancient Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and in the Greek of the gospels; and if you can assure me you have a way of getting inside the head of a guy who lived a couple of thousand years ago—then we can discuss your interpretation of this verse. You might also want to read Hector Avalos’ 39-page chapter on this verse in his book, The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics. He makes the case that his verse—with the Greek word for hate right there—means exactly what it seems to mean. And, by the way, help us understand why the author of Luke’s gospel reported that Jesus said this. Was he lying? It would seem the Luke’s author was trying to increase the severity of Matthew 10:37: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” Family takes a hit in the preceding verses, Matthew 10:34-36: 
 

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
 
There is too much brutality elsewhere in quotes attributed to Jesus, e.g., Matthew 12:36, “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter…” Also, Mark 16:16: “The one who believes and is baptized will be saved, but the one who does not believe will be condemned.” Both of these verses are marks of cult fanaticism. 
 
Christians should certainly be distressed at these grim sayings attributed to Jesus, but they are happy to ignore, brush aside, other benign advice that Jesus gave—as in the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
Is this the way most Christians deal with everyday life: 
 
Matthew 7:39-42: “…Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
 
And how can Christians approve of pension plans?
 
Matthew 6:19:20: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.” 
 
Earlier I quoted Mark 16:16, i.e. those who don’t believe will be condemned. This text is in the long ending of Mark that was tacked on to the gospel later, vv. 9-20: it doesn’t appear in the earliest versions of the gospel. But whoever wrote it was confident he knew what Jesus had said. But he too—as much as the author of the gospel itself—was pushing the agenda of the cult. Hence we get this very strange Jesus-script, Mark 16:17-18: “And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
 
“Using my name” is a mark of magical thinking: by pronouncing the Jesus name—casting a spell—wonders can be accomplished. How do churchgoers today rate themselves on these items? The Vatican maintains a staff of trained exorcists—no doubt skeptical that ordinary Christians can cast out demons. There are fundamentalist sects that speak in tongues, yelling gibberish while jumping about, and there are snake-handling cults as well; occasionally we hear that one of the preachers has died of snakebite. The power to drink poison and remain unharmed didn’t work all that well for the Jim Jones cult. Nor are there hordes of devout Christians showing up at hospitals to heal the sick by the laying on of hands. 
 
I have been writing for this blog since 2016, and I often come back to the topic of the bad things Jesus taught. It is possible to use a wide variety of philosophical and theological arguments to falsify Christianity; but the great irony is that the gospels, with so much truly dreadful Jesus-script, undermine all efforts to take the Jesus-cult—and the church built upon it—seriously. 
 
Does anybody know a way to get churchgoers to binge read the gospels?  
 
 
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.