The supposedly Christian religions and their contradictions

An uproar has been caused, specially in the United States, by a series of works by the  professor Bart D. Ehrman, who has questioned the authenticity of the Bible and its origin supposedly sacred.

Bart Ehrman resides in the city of Chapel Hill, United States, where he teaches and coordinates the Department of Religion of the University of North Caroline. Raised in the Protestant Church, that professed during a long time of his life, stopped being part of Christianity to become Agnostic, fact that he explained recently in the interview conceded to the magazine Época: “... I left Christianity not because of my historical studies about the Bible, but for being no longer able to believe that there could be a god ruling this world full of pain and suffering”.

In 2007, during a speech at the University of Stanford, he focused on the textual inconsistencies of the New Testament. In the following year, he published the book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Import Question – Why We Suffer. This year, he released the work Jesus, Interrupted , still without translation into Portuguese, in which he revels the contradictions within the Bible, which proof, according to his understanding, that such a book was not sent by God to humankind, like the Catholic and Protestants believe and affirm.

For Ehrman, it is possible to highlight two contradictions within the New Testament.

The first one: the apostle Paul says that the person reaches God through faith only, and not through actions. In the chapter 24 by Matthews, however, we read that good actions take us to the Kingdom of Heaven. “These two views – says he – exclude one another regarding a fundamental subject, salvation.”

The second one: there are different views about who Jesus was. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is God, but in the texts of Mark, Matthews and Luke, there is nothing about that. In the Gospel of Matthews, it is clear that he believes that Jesus is a human being, and he is the Messiah. “The Church – observes Ehrman – ended up joining these two views, that he is both human and divine, and created a concept that is not written neither in John nor in Matthews.” (Read about the work and thoughts of Bart Ehrman in the special report that is part of the present edition)

We can perceive, given such ideas, how the knowledge of the Spiritist Doctrine is important in order to understand about life and the biblical texts.

In 1864, in the introduction of his book The Gospel according to Spiritism, the Codifier of Spiritism wrote: “Many topics of the Gospels, the Bible and the sacred authors in general are only unintelligible, sounding sometimes irrational, because of the missing key that makes possible to learn the true meaning. This key is complete in Spiritism, as those who study it seriously could understand and like everyone, later, will recognize it even better. It is the Spiritism that we encounter everywhere in the past and different epochs of the humankind. Everywhere its traces are discovered: in the scriptures, creeds and monuments. This is the reason by which, at the same time that tears new horizons to the future, projects light not less vivid over the mysteries of the past”.

Denying the law of reincarnation and ignoring the mechanism of the law of cause and effect, the religions which are supposedly representatives of the Christian thoughts do not offer means of comprehension about life and what the actual objectives of our passage through Earth are to its adepts, turning really difficult to understand why pain and suffering rule the globe where live in.

The questions raised by the American writer were already examined and solved by Kardec more than 150 years ago, and it is amazing that news like this have not yet reached people like Bart Ehrman, to whom the key of the Spiritist knowledge would be very beneficial.