Monday, March 16, 2015

The Bible is Fiction: A Collection of Evidence

The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United St...
The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United States Library of Congress, demonstrating printed pages as a storage medium. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Daniel Miessler

The similarities between the stories and characters in the Bible and those from previous mythologies are both undeniable and well-documented. It is only due to extreme the extreme religious bias that pervades our world today that people rarely get exposed to this information.
In this short piece I’ll attempt to show blatant similarities with regard to two of the most important Biblical narratives: the Genesis story and the character of Jesus Christ.

The Book of Genesis’s Flood Story Mirrors The Epic Of Gilgamesh From Hundreds Of Years Earlier

Here are a number of elements that both Gilgamesh and the flood story in Genesis share:
  1. God decided to send a worldwide flood. This would drown men, women, children, babies and infants, as well as eliminate all of the land animals and birds.
  2. God knew of one righteous man, Ut-Napishtim or Noah.
  3. God ordered the hero to build a multi-story wooden ark (called a chest or box in the original Hebrew), and the hero initially complained about the assignment to build the boat.
  4. The arc would have many compartments, a single door, be sealed with pitch and would house one of every animal species.
  5. A great rain covered the land with water.
  6. The arc landed on a mountain in the Middle East.
  7. The first two birds returned to the ark. The third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return.
  8. The hero and his family left the ark, ritually killed an animal, offered it as a sacrifice.
  9. The Babylonian gods seemed genuinely sorry for the genocide that they had created. The God of Noah appears to have regretted his actions as well, because he promised never to do it again.
Keep in mind the level of detail in these similarities. It’s not a matter of just a flood, but specific details: three birds sent out, resisting the call to build the arc, and a single man being chosen by God to build the arc. Then consider that the first story (Gilgamesh) came from Babylon — hundreds of years before the Bible was even written.

Do you honestly think, based on the similarities above, that those who wrote the Genesis story had not heard the Gilgamesh story? And if they had heard it, and they were simply rehashing an old, very popular tale, what does that say about the Bible?

Read the rest here:
The Bible is Fiction: A Collection of Evidence

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