Reviews of The Bible (ca. 110 CE) and related work

• Entry: The Old Testament (ca. 164 BCE)
• Entry: The New Testament (ca. 110 CE)
• Remake: The Quran (632/650)
• Parody: “The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness” (2015)
  • Spin-off: “Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness” (2017)
  • Spin-off: “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness” (2018)

The Bible (ca. 110 CE)

I read mainly the 1999 Swedish translation, named Bibel 2000, which represents a substantial effort by a state commission started in 1972. The commission was partly secular, perhaps more so than the English-language NIV commission. It took the approach of literal translation to modern language, with stylistic emulation and textual criticism over dogma.

Though the commission project included the Apocrypha, the printed copy I read cover to cover did not, thus falling in line with Swedish Lutheran tradition. Where I do include books from the Apocrypha in this set of reviews, they are based on other sources.

Some of the material in this book—itself a collection of books—was probably composed in a literal mode on the basis of sincerely held beliefs, i.e. as non-fiction. I have classified it as fiction because indifference to the truth, charlatan intentions and forgeries were evidently more common, not because the beliefs themselves were false.

The text was created piece by piece between the 8th century BCE and the 2nd century CE. Mainly, people wrote down what had been oral tradition and then gradually edited earlier passages or attributed their own additions to dead authors to give the work a more desirable message for each new generation. Numerous proposed additions, including dozens of gospels for one of the later gods, were banned or excised for the same arbitrary historical reasons.

As a result, there has been a huge number of different bibles over time. Through a series of synods and the systematic persecution of internal diversity, a rough mainstream had developed around 200 CE: “The Bible” of Western Roman Catholic Christianity as reviewed here. It differs from lost older Hebrew bibles, the “heretical” Marcionite canon, the younger Masoretic Hebrew Bible (7th–10th century CE), the Peshitta, the Oriental Orthodox Christian (e.g. Ethiopian, Tewahedo) bibles, the Eastern Orthodox Christian Bible and so on. Synods have continued to modify the various canons.

The line between translation and authorship is not always clear. The influential Septuagint translation of an older Hebrew Bible makes its own theological points and expands on the original text, which is no longer extant. In the 16th century, the Catholic church began to officially promulgate the Vulgate (called so since the 13th century), which is a 4th-century translation with some errors. It gave Moses horns on his head, which you can still see in some medieval church murals. Other bibles have taken greater liberties, such as the 1820 Thomas Jefferson Bible, the unfinished 19th-century Joseph Smith Bible and the 1982 abridged Reader’s Digest Bible.

The overall date of 110 CE on this review refers to mainstream scholarly estimates for “2 Peter”, apparently the youngest text in the canonical New Testament. As of this writing in 2019, extant physical fragments of New Testament writings cannot be definitively dated as older than about 200 CE, though largely credible estimates range down to about 125 CE. Chapter numbers were added much later, verse numbers (as used in these reviews) not until about 1551; there were multiple attempts to add them.

When you read this collection, it helps to know some of the ancient history of the Middle East. Scholarly analyses can put each component work in context, and this is useful. However, the main thing you need is an everyday bullshit detector. If you’ve read a bunch of bad fantasy literature, you know what people like to imagine when they don’t need to stick to the truth. If you’ve hung around habitual liars, or even spent time exploring the imagination of ordinary children, you are equipped to read The Bible.

The book speaks poorly for itself. No unprejudiced reader has ever come away from it with a clean, abstract deism, like the faith of David Hume or James T. Kirk. Such ideas come from outside the text. I surmise that actually reading the text—especially with an open mind—has produced mainly atheists. Religion spreads by other means: Parent to child, the peer group, the larger community, song, dance, ritual, political expediency, superstitious fear, the ignorance of facts and alternatives, and above all, wishful thinking.

Internal contradictions litter the text. There are too many for me to list. Even the most basic stuff, like the powers and personalities of the gods, are inconsistent. Generations of rewriters probably fixed some of these errors but left new ones in the canon. Supposedly, this became a concern only at a late date, when philosophy and science presented a more elegant system of explanations even with respect to major questions like the origin of life and humankind. Fundamentalism, it is said, arose under pressure from contrary evidence.

Generally speaking, it’s worth reading some parts of the collection for their influence on politics and other literature, but be prepared to meet some of the least sympathetic authors in literary history.

References here: Som en ateist läser bibeln, Divine Comedy (1320), Macbeth (1606), The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/1840), Walden (1854), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), “Neighbours” (1952), A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Man in the Wilderness (1971), The Gnostic Gospels (1979), Valis (1981), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Angel’s Egg (1985), The Sacrifice (1986), On the Silver Globe (1988), Cast a Deadly Spell (1991), Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), Metodboken — Bibel 2000 (1999), “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2001), The Book of Eli (2010), In the Flesh (2013), A Memory of Light (2013), Ministry of Evil: The Twisted Cult of Tony Alamo (2019), Harriet (2019).

text fiction

‣ The Old Testament (ca. 164 BCE)

As I understand it, the defeatof Judah had a bigger impact on the writing process than anything else. It can be compared to the terrorist attacks on 2001-09-11, piercing the heart of a confident, self-aggrandizing nation and causing a crisis of faith. A faction among the exiled elite blamed their fate on disobedience to Yahweh and invented a past and future where their broken country was and would be glorious. This fusion of fantasy and recrimination became the backbone of the new state religion and The Bible, including the New Testament.

This entire development is summarized in psalm 137 of Psalms: The shame and humiliation of the authors and their people, the captors requesting samples of Hebrew culture as a diversion, the authors effectively delivering on this request by composing the psalm, and a fantasy of killing babies, all formulated as pious prayer.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.

Rogerson mentions the Egyptian Merneptah Stele as the oldest preserved writing about an ethnic group called Israel, supporting the idea that some part of the cult of Yahweh came out of Egypt. However, it is also possible that slavery in Egypt was invented to serve as a mythical analogue of exile in Babylon. This makes reading The Bible in its traditional order awkward, but that is what I did. If I had known better, I would have started with “Ezra”.

The Old Testament was written mainly by priests, usually attributing their words to some fictional prophet by pretending to find a lost scroll in the temple library and by revising old texts in the process of copying them and destroying the original, short-lived papyrus. According to Rogerson, “as late as the first century BC there was a group within Judaism that claimed and attributed revelations of God to Moses regarding vital matters of religion.” That is in reference to an apocryphal Temple Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contains plans for a temple, attributed to Moses and meant to supersede the canonical plan for the First Temple. Without apocrypha The Old Testament seems to have been finished around 164 BCE, going by a 2002 John J. Collins estimate of the age of “Daniel”, specifically its second half. The oldest parts borrow from Sumerian literature, which is itself up to 2000 years older than the Collins estimate.

It’s worth reading some books of The Old Testament to get a sense of how dull life was in the ancient Near East when regional Bronze Age cultures had collapsed around 1177 BCE. With their impoverished imagination, the authors show the incuriousness and brutality of that dark age. Through their religion, the message of wilful ignorance survived into Christianity and Islam.

☛ More

References here: Reasons to invent Jesus, The New Testament (ca. 110 CE), The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/1840), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867/1887), On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (1887), “Uomo del mio tempo” (1949), A Clockwork Orange (1962), “The Apple” (1967), Mobile Police Patlabor: The Movie (1989), “Sins of the Father” (1990), “The Collaborator” (1994), Fight Club (1999), Devilman: Crybaby (2018).

text entry fiction

‣ The New Testament (ca. 110 CE)

Although written in the same tradition of wishful thinking as The Old Testament (ca. 164 BCE), The New Testament has the advantage of additional economic and philosophical development reaching Israel. It was written in the Pax Romana, a time when the interconnections of the late Bronze Age had been reknitted and the tribal Yahweh was no longer in fashion. On the whole, therefore, Jesus is more dignified and empathetic than the preceding prophet-wizards, which makes him more appealing as a fictional character.

An important piece of background for this sequel is an already-existing split in Judaism between Sadducee and Pharisee sects, plus a bunch of fringe cults. As explained in Acts, “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits, but the Pharisees believe all these things” (23:8). Basically, the Sadducees were a better informed upper class boosted by the Pax Romana, with beliefs resembling “Ecclesiastes” (ca. 400–180 BCE).

On one level I admire the boldness of the escalation from Isaac to Jesus as a piece of fiction, something I trace in an article on reasons to invent Jesus. It’s a fusion of our most primitive delusions using internal logic, topped off with a tragedy resembling the murders of Emmett Till, John Hron et al. It’s got the power creep of a superhero comic. It even solves the problem of taboo, on the inelegant technicality that Jesus both was and was not human, and it obviates all future human sacrifice. On the other hand, it makes no sense that the creator of the universe—itself an extraneous hypothesis—would kill itself and survive to work around a bug in its creation. Similarly, it makes no sense to accuse people of sin in the first place. Anyway, it might have been possible to write amazing stories on the basis of the escalation. That is what the early Christians tried to do.

Though invented by and for Jews, by some coincidence the resulting religion was not a hit with Jews in the long term. Like the other cults of dying and rising gods at the time, but unlike early Yahwism, the cult of Jesus was cosmopolitan, memetically fit for the new age. It mutated rapidly. Not having to cut off your foreskin anymore became a selling point for adult male converts and the new version of Yahweh promised more than just a state for Abraham’s biological descendants.

☛ More

References here: Internal contradiction by omission, The Quran (632/650), The Brothers Karamazov (1879), “Uomo del mio tempo” (1949), Greaser’s Palace (1972), The Gnostic Gospels (1979), Twelve Monkeys (1995).

text entry fiction

‣ The Quran (632/650)

Muhammad (writer).

Read in 2024.

Read in Mohammed Habib Shakir’s translation to English, published posthumously in 1968. This was based on a 1917 translation and is associated with sectarian divisions within Islam.

From reading The Bible, I had learned not to expect logic from The Quran. For example, consider the text of chapter (surah) 98, which I will be returning to throughout this review:

Those who disbelieved from among the followers of the Book and the polytheists could not have separated (from the faithful) until there had come to them the clear evidence: An apostle from Allah, reciting pure pages, wherein are all the right ordinances. And those who were given the Book did not become divided except after clear evidence had come to them. And they were not enjoined anything except that they should serve Allah, being sincere to Him in obedience, upright, and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, and that is the right religion. Surely those who disbelieve from among the followers of the Book and the polytheists shall be in the fire of hell, abiding therein; they are the worst of men. (As for) those who believe and do good, surely they are the best of men. Their reward with their Lord is gardens of perpetuity beneath which rivers flow, abiding therein for ever; Allah is well pleased with them and they are well pleased with Him; that is for him who fears his Lord.

I have omitted only the chapter’s standard dedication to Yahweh (Allah), and the title of the chapter, which is “The Clear Evidence”. As you can see, “clear evidence” is defined as a person (an “apostle”) who talks. The absence of evidence in a more modern sense is unfortunate, because the author of The Quran was in a better position than his predecessors. Little is known about the writing process, but it is probably true as the religious legend says that Muhammad composed and edited the bulk of the text himself over a period of at least 22 years, that later editors changed nothing really substantial for the first complete written version around the year 650, that the completed work had such profound influence on Arabic that the important parts of the early-Medieval text remain intelligible today, that alternative texts (the qira’at) and hundreds of minor errors (spelling mistakes etc.) are insignificant, and that popular modern editions are based on a plausible single version of the first manuscript with little further distortion of the author’s intent. Muhammad’s own political position was supported by force of arms, and he did not claim to perform miracles (10:20), so there is little reason to think that his own acknowledged retcon (two “satanic verses” in chapter 53) was forced upon him by others.

Muhammad’s ability to compose for so long, and to have that composition preserved, would have let him transfer an honest expression of his own belief system to modern readers. This should have been free from the many self-contradictions that exist even between the Gospels (ca. 110 CE), as detailed in Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/1840). Indeed, The Quran is more coherent and dignified than the earlier testaments. It has fewer of the riddles, cryptic parables and vulgar miracles that plague the earlier texts. It is more interesting as a snapshot of what this person and his followers actually thought at the time. Because of its coherence and its popularity, it also says a lot more about modern Islam than The New Testament (ca. 110 CE) says about modern Christianity. In fact, The Quran says more about modern Christianity than The New Testament does.

In The Bible, Heaven and Hell are rudimentary. Matthew (ca. 80–90 CE) and Luke (ca. 80–110 CE) hint at eternal punishments and rewards, but they’re just the early sketches. In The Quran, the same ideas are developed. You can see in chapter 98 above that some people will go to Hell (Jahannam) and others will go to Paradise (Jannah, here called the “gardens of perpetuity”). Other chapters elaborate on both locations. They are not clearly placed physically in or above the earth, in the same world as the reader, but there is a system for the afterlife. It’s a level of worldbuilding that is almost ready for Dante Alighieri to take the torch and run with it. Yahweh arbitrarily condems people by default, and everyone who rejects the book will soon be tortured (40:70ff), yet it’s “good news” that some “shall have a great grace” (33:47). This morality, based on the carrot of Paradise and the stick of Hell, with Hell preselected and the deadline of the eschaton approaching (33:63), is a mainstream Christian morality. It resonates particularly with Catholicism, while other parts of The Quran suggest the joyless Calvinism of my own Swedish heritage and of the USA. It is a recurring message of the book that you should deny yourself pleasure in life out of self-interest (e.g. 32:40). So, for example, you shouldn’t drink wine when you’re alive (5:90), but you can drink it in Paradise when you’re dead (47:15, 83:25). All very Christian.

Muhammad did not personally make up the more modern-seeming ideas. He just used his position as a longer-lived cult leader to put them all in one text, which is better. For example, in The Bible, it’s not known whether Yahweh is omniscient, why Satan’s against him, whether Jesus is a new god (different from Yahweh), and so on. As with Heaven and Hell, that other stuff was all cleaned up in Christianity by Muhammad’s time, but after it had become too late to edit The Bible again. Muhammad’s Yahweh (Allah) is omniscient, his Lucifer (Iblis) has a backstory of resentment (chapter 15), and his Jesus (Isa) is not a god. These are clear answers. Incidentally, Muhammad’s reason for denying the divinity of Jesus (and his resurrection, 4:157f) is the same deist one that Strauss used in questioning a lot of the miracles of Jesus. That reason derives from 18th-century English naturalists via Reimarus. In short, it would be too vulgar for the mature form of Yahweh, who is more abstract than the tribal warrior god of the late Bronze Age, to father a human child. Muhammad says “it is not worthy of the Beneficent God” (19:92), and that is a genuinely logical reason to reject the divinity of Jesus. For the same good reason, Muhammad deprecated idols. This put him multiple steps ahead of popular Christianity, which had reinstituted icons (idols) in the 4th century after deprecating them in Acts (ca. 80–110 CE). Again, The Quran is more coherent and dignified, and therefore it makes more sense.

Muhammad did not separate his more mature god from his less-mature source material. The Quran builds upon biblical myths and includes versions of these myths. These inclusions are corrupt, in the same way and for the same reasons as Genesis (ca. 500–400 BCE) corrupts its sources. This causes yet more internal contradiction within the Abrahamic canon as a whole, and the more novel material is similarly flawed. Mischievous mythological humanoids, called jinni, are imported from tribal folklore and confused with Christian demons, muddying up the worldbuilding. As a trivial example, the satanic Iblis is an angel (chapter 17) and a jinn (chapter 18), but those categorizations are mutually exclusive. He is possibly identical to Satan (Shaitan), but unfortunately, this is not stated. It is pretty clear that Yahweh still commands Satan (43:36) and is responsible for human suffering (90:4), but not why. There is no decent theodicy. Muhammad did clean up the worldbuilding a lot, but he could have gone further, taking more care. Instead, he lapsed into parables with vulgar miracles, such as chapter 18, where even Muhammad doesn’t know how many characters are involved or how many years their miracle lasted.

As a more important example of preserved and added inconsistency, the text repeats the two major creation stories from the opening of Genesis, that is the six-day creation and the story of Adam. Each time he mentions the six-day creation, Muhammad is careful to emphasize that Yahweh is so powerful that he wasn’t tired, so he didn’t have to rest on the seventh day. Not having him rest, and not using the word “day” for the six “periods”, is another two points scored for proto-deism. However, as far as I know, the narrative twist of resting on the seventh day was the reason for the original story. The Jewish version used religion to justify a cultural practice of a day of rest, with seven being Yahweh’s favourite number. If you’re going to take that external purpose away by correcting the story’s internal logic, it would have been more consistent to omit the story entirely and simply state that Yahweh doesn’t rest. Similarly, Muhammad mentions Adam, and that Adam had a wife, but he doesn’t mention Eve (Hawa) by name. This omission of the mythical mother of all humans is a weird way to distort the original. Compare how, although Mark (ca. 68–70 CE) and John (ca. 90–110 CE) omit the virgin birth of Jesus by Mary, Muhammad mentions Mary (Marium) 34 times and includes the virgin birth. This is one of those details where Muhammad is more Christian than the evangelists, but there’s no obvious reason to include just these fragments about Eve and Mary. It’s not a smart way to deny the excluded fragments, and it doesn’t preserve anything that is true or useful. On creation, Muhammad mixes it up still further: Yahweh creates humans out of clay (15:26) as in a Jewish story, or dust (3:59), or nothing (19:67), or water (21:30). Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s 1934 translation, which leans toward the Sunni sect instead of Shakir’s Shia sect, adds different further substances. In 16:4, Shakir has humanity created from “a small seed”, but for Ali, it’s a drop of sperm. In 96:2, Shakir has humanity created from “a clot”, which Ali thinks is blood. Modern apologists, knowing how humans are created in real life, prefer to think of the clot as a sticky embryo, but creating a human from a human embryo doesn’t take magic. I think Muhammad was trying to describe both ontogeny and phylogeny, but without the scientific knowledge to separate those two concepts in his mind.

The book’s mythology of creation is diverse for the same reason that a lot of the biblical myths were already diverse. They were recited as poetry before they were written down. Natural corruptions in oral tradition made them drift apart. Some Muslims believe that Muhammad was illiterate, but the text itself is not clear on this point; it may be wishful thinking to make him seem special, like the mythical figure of Homer as a blind man. I don’t think Muhammad was illiterate, but consider chapter 83. In it, there’s “Sijjin”, which Shakir calls “a written book”. He has to say that twice about Sijjin, precisely because The Quran was not a written book when it was composed. Incidentally, despite Muhammad’s excellent circumstances and oral repetitiveness, Islamic belief identifies Sijjin variously as a prison (part of Hell), or as torment in Hell, or as the kind of record that Enoch keeps in Jubilees (ca. 160–150 BCE). Muhammad acknowledged that he was known as a “mad poet” (37:36), although he resented it. Shakir’s translation preserves the style of ancient oral delivery throughout: He’s got 476 instances of the word “certainly” and a whopping 1514 instances of “surely”, 313 of which are the superlative “most surely”. This makes the “mad poet” sound comically insecure. Chapter 55, a psalm, comes with 31 instances of the phrase “Which then of the bounties of your Lord will you deny?”, a typically confrontational rhetorical question for a pre-literate society.

Muhammad asserts that The Quran is easy to learn because it’s in plain Arabic. That is to say, it’s a freewheeling translation of The Bible (“the Book”) for a nation that could not otherwise read the original. However, Muhammad was not proud of his work collecting and adapting biblical myths. He was rightly accused of rehashing “the stories of the ancients” (6:25, 8:31, 25:5f). Doing so for a new nation was problematic from that nascent deistic perspective. Nationalism, whether Jewish or Arabian, is like Jesus’s divinity and resurrection. It is “not worthy” of the general god Muhammad wanted. The Quran is so specific to the idioms of its time and place that some parts of it can no longer be parsed. The “mysterious letters” (muqatta‘at), words or disconnected single letters that appear at the beginning of 29 chapters, are unintelligible to modern scholars. Some of these have made it into chapter titles. It’s not really plain Arabic, and was not even when it was written. The idea that Arabic would be plain to all of humanity would have been a silly guess for Yahweh to make: Again “not worthy” of the nominal subject matter.

The overall layout of the 114 chapters is disappointing. They’re not in chronological order or any order, the longer ones shift randomly from one topic to the next, it is often hard to tell who is speaking to whom, and much is repeated because the whole thing is intended for oral tradition. Some features that have become central to modern Islam are barely mentioned, such as Ramadan and the oppressive biblical dress codes for women. Nevertheless, in chapter 98, the author includes himself in the category of people whose words qualify as clear evidence of the divine. He never comes up with a test for identifying such people. The absence of testability is a symptom of the absence of reason, but Muhammad does point to various facts as “signs” for his followers. For example, take verse 31:31:

Do you not see that the ships run on in the sea by Allah’s favor that He may show you of His signs? Most surely there are signs in this for every patient endurer, grateful one.

In other words: Ships are evidence that Yahweh is real. Also, Yahweh keeps them afloat because he wants you to know he is real. The rest is a refrain. This is an example of the “clear evidence” implied by chapter 98. In my humble opinion, the evidence isn’t definitive. The ships of Muhammad’s time may have been built by humans. Perhaps they had observed buoyancy as a natural phenomenon. It is not logically necessary to assume that there is an invisible man holding ships afloat, or that such a man would want you to observe Ramadan. To interpret the evidence as Muhammad does, he says in this particular version of a common refrain that you must be a “patient endurer”, a “grateful one”: euphemistic synonyms for a believer. In other words, to see how ships prove Yahweh is real, you must already believe Yahweh is real. Accordingly, not one person has become a Muslim because they saw a ship float.

The same absence of reason colours all of Muhammad’s purported signs. His Yahweh doesn’t just hold up ships, but also birds (16:79, 67:19) and the sky (22:65). At a more domestic level, Yahweh created cattle to please people (16:5ff), and not only cattle. He created the human desires that you associate with a good life, including your desire for cattle (3:14); a charming piece of one-upmanship that leaves Yahweh in control of your mind. More prosaically, Yahweh created mail, that is armour, to protect you in war (16:81, 21:80), and that’s a sign. I suppose he created all the gangrene and the war crimes too, not just the armour.

The conclusion of the argument, that Yahweh exists, does not follow from the premise of the argument, that mail exists. Muhammad’s teleological thinking is not one whit better than Romans 1:20. The book’s examples of Yahweh’s wisdom, on the other hand, are generally better than The Bible’s. Consider verse 31:27: If you made pens out of every tree and eight earths’ worth of oceans full of ink to write with, “the words of Allah would not come to an end”. Here, Muhammad conflates wisdom with verbosity. That would be a poor choice of metaphor for the age of social media, but it’s a defensible metaphor for the Dark Ages. It is better than the edgelord wisdom of Solomon and the bloodbath of 1 Kings (ca. 620–530 BCE). The problem is that Muhammad, like his predecessors, does not demonstrate wisdom. Instead, he relies on his personal authority: “Whoever obeys the Messenger, he indeed obeys Allah” (4:80). Arguing from authority, like the teleological argument of the ship, is an informal logical fallacy. This type of argument is used, for example, in verses 40:55f:

Therefore be patient; surely the promise of Allah is true; and ask protection for your fault and sing the praise of your Lord in the evening and the morning. Surely (as for) those who dispute about the communications of Allah without any authority that has come to them, there is naught in their breasts but (a desire) to become great which they shall never attain to; Therefore seek refuge in Allah, surely He is the Hearing, the Seeing.

In other words: I cannot prove anything, but remember, there is no prophet of Yahweh who says Yahweh is not real. Don’t listen to the haters, the wannabes. Continue to obey me and go through the motions, sinner. Be patient. You’ll find out when you’re dead.

At his worst, Muhammad equates his own assertions, backed up by threats of violence, with “true certainty” (69:46ff). He hints that if you call him a liar, you will be supernaturally crushed (e.g. chapter 91), which I suppose he meant as a threat. His followers may have been willing to carry out its equivalent in real life. More rarely, Muhammad says outright that he will murder his opponents if he gets the chance (33:60f). As Muhammad himself acknowledges (33:62), that attitude is not different from the bloodbath of 1 Kings, and that is a problem. Here, aside from cleaning up the fantasy worldbuilding, Muhammad had an opportunity to favour logic over force, but he did not. In the year 629, he cemented his legacy by overseeing the military conquest of Mecca. He was not just a preacher, but a warlord too. When he advises against conjecture (6:116), he’s advising against logic, rather than admitting to the faults of his own conjecture. It looks as if he fell into the same trap as other charismatic religious leaders: The trap of using his worldly power to silence dissenters, while personally thinking of his own high status as evidence of being supernaturally right and good. “The Prophet”, he said of himself, “has a greater claim on the faithful than they have on themselves” (33:6). When he’s decided something, his followers should have no choice (33:36), and that would be true even after his own death. Famously, Muhammad said there’d be no prophets after him, in the same way that nobody would be allowed to sleep with the women he’d slept with, even after his death (33:53).

Because The Quran is more coherent and more intelligible than The Bible, it presents a more sustainable worldview. It doesn’t just give you an interesting picture of the author’s mind. Without the possibility of further prophets, the religion it produced has evolved less over time, and split less, than Christianity. This less compromising stability probably contributed to the Islamic world’s preservation of ancient Greek and Roman texts through the Dark Ages, early Islamic advances in mathematics, the downfall of the Eastern Roman Empire, etc. Ironically, because The Quran is better than The Bible as far as books go, its flaws have been more influential. The book preserves the anhedonic pessimism, militarism and authoritarianism of The Bible. This is one of the reasons why extremists within Islam are associated with totalitarian regimes and holy war, including Hafez al-Assad’s suicide bombers in the Islamic Republic of Iran. There is an unbroken, internally harmonious line of thought from Muhammad’s own religious laws in the 7th century to the theologian and lawyer Abu Hanifa in the 8th century, to the Hanafi school that preserved his views through centuries of prosperity, to the reactionary Deobandi movement that revived them in the industrializing 19th century, to the Taliban, to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in the 21st century. Because The Bible is more obviously incompatible with itself and with the scientific basis of every modern economy, Jewish and Christian theocracies have typically failed faster. The sillier the religious text, the less harmful the religion.

Without the silliness of The Bible, Muhammad repeats a fundamental message of The Bible: You should hate (49:7) and fear (6:51, 35:28), not think. The Quran’s fundamental attitude towards men is black (16:61). It is even more contemptuous of women, who are a degree below men (2:228). Non-human animals are lower still. Slavery is OK because Yahweh himself will provide whatever your slave needs (24:32). As you would expect from this humourless misanthropy, threats and admonitions with negative sentiment are much more common than useful advice with positive sentiment. To be precise, in Shakir’s words, there are 231 chastisements and 198 punishments, but only 187 rewards and 1 correction: “Surely the rising by night is the firmest way to tread and the best corrective of speech” (73:6)! Indeed, there are many rules for the masses to live by. Some of them are nasty, such as a blanket authorization of marital rape (2:223), but some are nice. Muhammad is particularly persistent in his exhortation, seen in chapter 98, to “pay the poor-rate”. He says it 27 times, and although he never defines it, it’s better than Jesus merely pointing at poor people in Matthew 26:11. It is a big step forward that this prophet tells you to take care of each other in a scalable way, but you don’t really need a prophet to tell you to pay your taxes.

With such a central rule to divert funds to help the poor, the general misanthropy of the text is a paradox, but it is not a self-contradiction. In chapter 74, some of the inhabitants of Paradise talk to one another about what it was that brought the other people to Hell. In order for Muhammad to include such a scene, he must have used his imagination, briefly transcending the limits of biblical fabulism. Unfortunately, the dwellers in Paradise are not bothered by the graphic suffering of their fellow humans. In Muhammad’s imagination, the ones who make it to Paradise are not compassionate to those who don’t. The book is consistent on this point. Yahweh is compassionate, but “to the believers” (9:128). Those who are with Yahweh are “compassionate among themselves” (48:29), but other people “shall not have any compassionate friend” (40:18). Although this pattern is internally consistent within the book, it is a philosophical self-contradiction. It’s like saying you support freedom of expression for your own opinions. In reality, you support freedom of expression when and only when that freedom includes the right to say things you disagree with, otherwise the statement “I support freedom of expression” becomes meaningless. By the same token, you are truly compassionate when and only when you feel for those who suffer, no matter who they are. By Muhammad’s own admission, Yahweh and his followers don’t do that, and that’s important.

The Quran, much like The Bible, puts borders around groups of people. When there’s only one god left to speak of, there are only two groups. The most central message of the book is that you’re with us, or else you’re with them.

Some of these phrases look meaningful, but most of them are not. For example, what Shakir calls hypocrisy is not what is meant by the term in English. There are no examples of how “they”, in the out-group, violate the moral standards they advocate for others, like they do in “Amos” (ca. 750 BCE). Muhammad does not count as one of the hypocrites, even though he holds himself to a more privileged standard than his own followers (33:50, 49:2f). He is one of “us” by an Orwellian definition: You know that the figurative hypocrites (not Muhammad) are bad because they are in the out-group, and you know they’re in the out-group because they’re bad.

By the same logic, the in-group are also called “the people of the right hand” (70:39, 90:18), because that is the hand that early-Medieval Banu Hashim ate with. The out-group are called “the people of the left hand” (90:19), because that is the hand you’d wipe your ass with, before soap and water became widely available. It would be a mistake to think that your hand is evil because of what you did with it. The empty insult says only that you hate, not that the out-group is literally shit-stained. For the purpose of the insult, the real behaviour of Muhammad’s out-group—of “them”—is irrelevant, just like his own hypocrisy is irrelevant to his identification of hypocrites.

Some descriptions are more substantive. Take the “polytheists”. This descriptor is literal, but that was so hard for the readership to discern that Muhammad had to clarify that it’s literal: Polytheists are bad even if they are your near relatives (9:113). Under normal circumstances, your near relatives would be in your personal in-group. The clarification is necessary in the social context of a cult that aspires to replace your in-group entirely, such as the cult of Jesus Christ.

Now take the apostates. Those who leave a cult make the cult look bad. That is why Muhammad, like his predecessors, hated and feared apostates. He never came up with a plausible excuse for this attitude in religious terms. Within the fantasy setting of the book, where faith in Muhammad is rewarded and non-faith is punished, there is no logical reason why apostasy should receive special treatment. Nevertheless, it should (2:217, 3:91, 4:137, 47:25ff). As a result of this plot hole, leaving Islam is a crime in Saudi Arabia and the punishment is death. This is also true in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, the UAE, Mauritania and a handful of other countries, all of which are predominantly Muslim.

More generally, the deciding factor that distinguishes the book’s in-group from its out-group is not whether they pay the poor-rate and care for the orphans, but whether they please Muhammad. The most meaningful descriptor in the table above, therefore, is “the obedient ones”. That is only people who are obedient to Muhammad, not obedient people in general. As for the out-group, you should not make friends with them (60:13) or listen to what they say, because they’re annoying (33:48). Muhammad went so far as to make up a supernatural law that says you can’t stay and chat after he’s invited you over to his house for dinner, because it made him uncomfortable (33:53).

In The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), a religious schizophrenic who made war against the English hears voices. She says they are the voices of saints. The judge at her trial asks her about these voices: “Do St. Catherine and St. Margaret hate the English?” She replies: “They love what God loves and hate what God hates.” That response outlines the basic process underneath each religion of two social groups. First you look at what you love and hate. You turn those preferences into the definition of a group: Those who love and hate like you. By its nature, this group is infinitely expandable, unlike a family or a group of friends. Its out-group is simply everybody else. From there, Henri Tajfel’s bias for your social group takes over. The only thing that separates this process from normal human sociology is the set of invisible members, whom you imagine, like Joan of Arc hearing voices. In the Abrahamic religions, one member of the group is the creator of the universe, who shares all of your preferences. If the object of your hatred makes a similar claim, you deal with that cognitive dissonance by dismissing them as “self-conceited” (31:18), “arrogant” (57:23) or “unjustly proud” (7:146).

When I was a child, I thought that each popular religion was built in part around visions or ideas that had been written down. That’s not true. They’re built around the deepest feelings that our cognitive biases can evoke. Tajfel’s game of “us” versus “them” is a stimulus for our competitive instincts. Muhammad even imagined his god personally bearing witness that the out-group are “liars” (9:107). Liars are a kind of social parasites. The metaphor of your opponents as liars is an example of identity threat: An invitation to memetic moral outrage in defence of the in-group. Taken together, the ideology of The Quran is a supernormal stimulus, strong enough to help organize human labour on a grand scale. There was nothing more politically useful than this in the impoverished Dark Ages, when literacy and critical thinking were even more rare than they would be in the time of Joan of Arc and Johannes Gutenberg.

A technical term for the dividend of Tajfel’s game, in Robert Putnam’s sociology, is “bonding social capital”: An asset that strengthens the in-group and explains its persistence over centuries. Muhammad’s new rules for this game were extremely successful, probably because he brought the invention of separate destinations—in the afterlife—into the core text and threw out a lot of the ambiguous chaff. He added multiple daily sessions of prayer (30:17f) to remind you of your religious identity, as if you lived in a Christian convent. From a sociological perspective, one drawback is a resulting lack of Putnam’s “bridging social capital”: It becomes harder to live with people who don’t buy into the exact same rules. Therefore, Muhammad’s “people of the left hand” in the out-group are the same people who “disbelieve in our communications”.

The problem is still contradiction. If you follow Muhammad, you eventually fall so deep into contradiction that you arrive at Umberto Eco’s observation of the ultimate out-group: A group that is simultaneously internal and external to the in-group. Eco said, in “Ur-Fascism” (1995), that this imaginary enemy is “at the same time too strong and too weak”. Muhammad said: “Fight therefore against the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak” (4:76). Thankfully, in his more humane moments, Muhammad saw the whole project as hopeless (chapter 109). Otherwise, his followers would have fought even more holy wars.

Reading The Quran is more pleasing than reading the original. For the same reason that the experience as such is more satisfying, the religion described by the book is also more rigid and has been a taller obstacle to human happiness than the older myths. Maybe that’s what it takes for a holy book to compete.

References here: The Histories (440 BCE), Dungeons, The Ego and Its Own (1844), “The Child” (1988).

text remake fiction

‣ “The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness” (2015)

Zach Weinersmith (writer).

Read in 2020.

text parody fiction

‣‣ “Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness” (2017)

Zach Weinersmith (writer).

Read in 2020.

text spin-off non-fiction

‣‣ “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness” (2018)

Zach Weinersmith (writer).

Read in 2020.

The biographical framework for interpreting the original is well summarized. The abbreviated poetry is remarkably readable in that context; the book actually succeeds as an introduction, unlike the series’ books on The Bible and science, which are merely inside jokes.

text spin-off non-fiction poetry