Scriptures offer little to enlighten us all
JT Hardy in asking me why I use circumbendibus as a description of the Bible, captures the essence of what I am saying in his letter but presumably does not realise it.
To recall, circumbendibus means “an answer that is so convoluted and evasive that it isn’t really an answer at all”. The Old Testament has 929 chapters.
It has 23,214 verses which comprise roughly 622,700 words. Now I would be the first to admit that at a stretch you could say Isaiah 53 predicts the life and death of Jesus, though one has to ignore the fact that Jesus himself, while not a bad bloke, may have read that passage especially and decided he was the one and so brought things down on himself not unlike the sad leader of the cult at Waco, David Koresh, whose followers all burned to death because of his zeal.
One also needs to ignore the fact that the New Testament was written many many years after Jesus and not by apostles so it is not beyond reason to assume some of his life may have been constructed to fit the bill so to speak.
However, it remains the case that if you wanted to teach the New Testament to the world, (and without the judgmental bits it does have some merit), then all you need of the Old Testament is Isaiah 53.
Hence the rest of the Old Testament is a circumbendibus as I wrote previously.
Certainly the first few books of the OT are a mixture of utter fantasy even more ridiculous than Aesop’s fables, racism and rightwing authoritarianism that Adolf Hitler would be proud of and we would do well to ignore them.
The curious thing for me is that despite the Old Testament being racist, in that this supposed god has chosen a people whom everyone else will live in fear of wherever they tread, (Deuteronomy 11.25), and will become more numerous than the grass, Christians pray every day in reciting the Lord’s prayer for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Now why do JT Hardy or Sue Pilgrim and many others devote their spiritual supplication to wanting to make me afraid of Jews? I would much rather live with them as fellow travellers in the beauty, tragedy, and future evolution of our race and other species.
Nicholas Hales
Bath