Paige Turner's How to Prove That Christianity is Not True does not live up to title even by appearance. It is only slightly larger than a paperback, and contains only 59 pages. The author, Paige Turner, was a mere medical doctor and an apostate, after having supposedly been a Christian for 22 years. The bibliography has only 11 books. 3 of them are Bibles. 1 of them is the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thayer's lexicon and an interlinear Bible make two more. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason is one more. 2 are medical books.
2 medical books? We'll see the significance of this shortly. Both are standard reference works in that field, one for diagnosis procedures, the other for pharmaceutical drugs and their effects.
That leaves three: 1 on bad popes and 1 volume for the Anti-Nicene Fathers. And finally, Asimov's Guide to the Bible.
The Foreword takes the stance of the proud ex-believer who says, "I'm grown up now and you're not". Turner tells us [ix]:
It would be naive and pointless to ask for any objectivity from Christian believers reading this book. They are incapable of any calm, analytical assessment of the New Testament. They are comfortable believing what they have been taught to believe, and it is easier for them to bury their heads in the Bible than to actually study it.
Such vague generalizations speak for themselves, but credit where credit is due. In the next paragraph Turner goes on to admit that this statement is basically autobiographical. It is her own past experience she is describing, she tells us, a past in which she accepted her beliefs uncritically, learned all she knew about the Bible from Sunday School (and learned so little that she could not even name the Twelve Tribes of Israel), and went to church mainly for the company.
Such candor is commendable where it is too often that apostates and "ex-Christians" simply make accusations out without admitting their genesis. But the bad news for Dr. Turner is that she hasn't made any progress at all; rather she has traded one poor choice for another.
She names three books that opened her eyes, so to speak; one of them was Paine's Age of Reason. A second was a book about corrupt popes, and something that really caught her eye was a statement by Pope Leo X referring to Christian belief as a "fable" -- a real clincher for her, apparently, as if a pope living in 1521 could make such an assertion and be accepted as erasing 1950 years of Christian and secular scholarship otherwise. (More on this quote here, which is actually non-authentic.) The third was Ireneaus' Against Heresies, which we will get to later on. .
Now, to the 59 pages -- with nine "proofs" against Christian belief. We'll start with simpler ones.
Proof 1, taking up a single page, offers standard arguments about Matthew and Luke and their birth narratives, with specific focus on the census question; the chapter has 4 footnotes, all from Britannica. (See also here.)
Proof is about differences between the Gospels, with focus on the genealogies of Jesus, and as examples the sign above Jesus' head on the cross, who was at the tomb, etc. Proof 5 objects that the "signs of Christian belief" in Mark 16:17-18 are not seen today, which is a strange argument, since Turner elsewhere seems to be aware that the latter part of Mark 16 is not part of the original text.
Proofs 6 and 7 deal with eschatology, offering the view (refuted here) that the return of Jesus was undoubtedly expected in the lifetime of the Apostles and showing no appreciation at all for the boundaries of eschatological literature.
This chapter also contains an odd claim that Col. 4:18 ["I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Remember my chains. Grace be with you."] suggests that Paul was partially paralyzed and unable to write letters. Hardly so: Even literate people used scribes in the ancient world, because writing was so cumbersome; and even so it would have been harder for Paul to write with a heavy chain on him.
Luke 1:4 is taken to say that Luke is writing a "true" version of events where others were false -- he is actually saying that he is writing a more orderly, that is, historiographically-oriented version of events, as opposed to less-organized, more didactic versions like Matthew and Mark.
Proof 8 is a 4-page treatise on the subject "How We Got the New Testament" -- objecting of no original manuscripts (that's no different for ANY ancient document), hints of conspiracy (documents could be changed by conspiratorial copyists and "no one would be the wiser" -- has Turner not heard of textual criticism?), subsidized with a restatement of the Bauer hypothesis and a mere listing of heretical groups without critical evaluation of them, to prove that there was wide disagreement in the early church.
There is a badly informed evaluation of the canonization process.
There is also an uncritical acceptance of words written by one "Fauste", a contemporary of Augustine who wrote that worthy speaking of fabrications and errors in the NT. I found no references to a "Fauste" in several works about Augustine; if perhaps this is meant to refer to Faustus, he was a Manichean priest who was more sparkle than heat, an eloquent speaker who was utterly unable to answer many of Augustine's inquiries.
There is also a hint that Jesus picked up his magical powers in Egypt, with the assertion that "there are individuals today who can multiply food, levitate themselves (walking on water), and heal people by touch." Do we get the name of even one of these?
Proof 9 is the largest section of the book (nearly 20 pages) but is nothing more than a repeat of Paine's arguments against typology and ancient literary practices.
What about unique material?
Proof 2 is where the medical aspect comes in. The title of the chapter: "A Living Body Was Taken Down from the Cross". Turner's proof for this? It comes in these parts, over two pages:
- Consulting Thayer's lexicon and an interlinear Bible, Turner
says that soma (body) meant "a living body of a human or an
animal", but another word, ptoma, was used for a dead body.
Joseph of Arimathea asked for Jesus' soma, so Turner concludes
that Jesus was still alive.
But ahat about the fact that Pilate asked if Jesus was dead? It is said: The centurion "was a sympathizer with an unjustly treated man and in order to allow Jesus' living body to be taken down from the cross and medicated with aloe vera and other treatments of the day, the centurion stated that Jesus was dead."
Indeed? Joseph really slipped when he asked for a living body, didn't he? Pilate was that out of sorts? But the centurions were smart: They even knew how to do a modern medical procedure called thoracentesis in which fluid was drained from the lungs, and this was what was applied to Jesus when the centurion who was in on the conspiracy thrust his spear into Jesus' side. That this procedure was known and used by Roman centurions is documented neither from contemporary medical texts nor from any source at all, but merely deduced from the supposition that centurions, being in charge of soldiers in battle, would be familiar with "very basic life-saving techniques" like applying tourniquets. I would prefer something from the text of Hippocrates to Turner's unsupported speculations.
It is bad enough that Turner has turned conspiracy theorist, but if she is going to make statements about the Greek language, she should at least consult relevant sources. Gundry's thorough study on the use of the word soma shows that it was used to refer to the "thingness" of the body, and "appears not only for corpses but also for living bodies immediately threatened with death" [Gund.Som, 11]. This simple fact refutes Turner's "living body" thesis completely. In fact, soma is used in the NT of John the Baptist's dead body [Matt. 14:12]. Ptoma is used 4 times in the NT, once of John's body and three times referring to carrion. For more uses of soma this way, see here.)
Proof 3 is a supplement to Proof 2: "Jesus Lived to an Old Age". The entirety of this chapter is based on a few statement in Ireneaus' Against Heresies that, read uncritically, suggest to uninformed readers like Turner that Jesus "lived to an old age, living and teaching in Palestine." [8] So, she says, this (along with the fact that Mark does not mention it -- what of Luke?) disproves the ascension.
Admittedly this is a puzzling passage by the church father. Ireneaus first speaks in these passages figuratively of Jesus' wisdom being so great that he was like unto an "old man" although he was not in the age group associated with such wisdom; so that some suppose the entire passage is meant figuratively. Other parts of this passage from Irenaeus has been regularly misinterpreted by people like Turner who merely read the English versions and think they understand it "clearly" (for example, when Irey says that "he remained among them up to the times of Trajan," he refers not to Jesus, but to John, as a careful reading reveals).
But some say that Ireneaues does indeed assert that Jesus was fifty, but that when he died. If so, then the overwhelming consensus is that Irenaeus is simply wrong -- perhaps a little too desperate to refute Gnostic speculations about the significance of Jesus' age.
Either way, those who have actually studied these writings understand that there is no proof here that Jesus lived to an old age.
Turner concludes her slim volume by comparing Christians to flat-earthers, throwing in some veiled objections about Christian intolerance, and adding: "(B)y reading the contents of this book, you have added new facts and new truths to your awareness."
That's quite a claim from someone who claims to be able to debunk Christian faith in only 59 pages and using only 8 non-Bible sources -- and as part of that, argues that Jesus did not actually die on the cross.
-JPH Sources
- Gund.Som - Gundry, Robert. Soma in Biblical Theology. Zondervan, 1987.
- Turner, Paige. How to Prove that Christianity is Not True. New York: Vantage Press, 1992.