Why prayer fails

The subject of prayer matters to me because of a personal tragedy in my life where, despite praying and following all that the Bible seemed to teach, the person died. At the time I tried to understand and even rationalise the failure of prayer to affect a positive outcome. I blamed myself for lacking faith, studied harder to see if I misunderstood some scripture or nuance that I failed to understand. I tolerated the Christian platitudes (death is God’s ultimate healing, it’s all part of God’s plan etc.). Finally, I put my failure to understand on the back burner and went on with my life, but always with the feeling in the back of my mind that everything I had been taught by preachers, in Bible study groups and conversations with my pastor was lacking in some very fundamental truth. This led me on a journey to where I am today, and why I am writing this essay.

My history

I became a Christian in 1980 after a work friend presented the gospel to me at work. As a teenager I had been an adult member of my local Lutheran church after completing confirmation. That required me to read and memorise Luther’s Smaller Catechism, so I had a good grasp on the fundamentals of Christian belief, but no experience of it beyond an intellectual one. I was a functional agnostic by 18 years of age. Eight years later my work friend witnessed to me, and she presented the same information but in a more direct way that actually made sense to me. Her very fundamentalist approach reached me and I committed to a faith in Jesus Christ as my personal saviour. I was “born again”. I would describe myself as a fundamentalist at that time. I had the born-again experience, which is quite emotional.

I moved on from Pentecostal fundamentalism and I had years of involvement in Christian ministry, mostly in the Baptist movement, went to college and earned an honours degree in Christian theology and preached in several churches as a substitute preacher. I planned a life in Christian ministry. I loved being a member of a church, and my wife and I had friends in our church we valued. I regularly preached in the church as well as being a fill-in preacher in other churches. Life was good. Our church family welcomed our son into the family when he was born and I fully accepted the Christian beliefs and doctrines I heard from the pulpit, and that I preached myself. In my church, I found my tribe. In 2009, personal tragedy struck and my wife died from cancer. That undermined my religious certainty in the nature and truth of God and the promises of the Bible. My life and faith, admittedly diminished, continued until 2024. I then ceased to identify myself as a Christian from January 2024 and I now consider myself an atheist on the existence of any god and agnostic as concerns life after death. So, what changed?

Many things changed. My life experiences challenged me to reconsider the comfortable and formulaic answers that Christian believers are taught. I experienced a profound family tragedy that I couldn’t process as “God’s will” (see Romans 8:28), or find any comfort in by seeing a higher purpose. I began to study outside the boundaries of evangelical Christianity and do deeper and more open academic study. When I had time from running my business, I spent half a day a week at the local university library for several years where I had a library card and access to both hard copy and on-line academic material. I read the “Liberal” theologians who were anathema to my lecturers in college. I learned how terribly flawed and contradictory the New Testament is, and how we have no original scriptures, only copies of copies.

My degree had taught me critical thinking and I began to ask questions I had never asked before. Formerly I had stayed on safe subjects I could preach from. I was a Baptist who started asking questions outside the box, such as questioning the existence of Abraham and Moses, the historicity of the Exodus from Egypt (go Charlton Heston), the actual existence of Adam and Eve, whether the Flood narrative was an actual historical event, and asking why the creation stories are so patently absurd and the characters two-dimensional. I began questioning the accepted dogma. The tragedy forced upon me a need to grow up spiritually and academically and that made me more open to ask previously unwelcome questions about my belief in God and the truth of all Christian theology.

The dogmas of the evangelicals

Christians are taught to self-regulate their beliefs by peer pressure in the church. When disaster or tragedy strikes, the believer is taught to try to see God at work in their lives, and to see his mercy and grace (even when none is apparent) Isaiah 55:8-9 tells believers not to expect to understand God’s ways and purposes and they must never question why God has allowed this to happen. This is the perfect antidote to critical thinking. Believers should be like sheep – dumb and unresisting. The shepherd is always right. We were taught that God’s purposes were so far above our ways, that to question God was blasphemy. The result is that believers are left frustrated, hurt and disappointed in God when there is no good reason they can see for suffering or loss.

This extends to the wider community and world, where human wickedness is manifest and there is no evidence of God’s grace or intervention. Think Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, USA and the First Nations peoples, the Holocaust and on and on ad nauseum. Pastors and preachers feed their congregation platitudes and helpful aphorisms because they have nothing better, even when tragedy strikes them. Convenient platitudes are easier than admitting that God probably isn’t listening, or perhaps doesn’t exist. They actually exacerbate the pain of those hearing them when they need genuine comfort, not the pseudo spirituality of religious leaders. Platitudes help ministers of religion to avoid confronting the hard questions that might lead to their own loss of faith. Scripture verses are no comfort when a believer has lost a partner or child, been diagnosed with a terminal disease or lost their job and they can’t afford the rent and food. Nonetheless, they are told to trust in God, based in Bible verses but without evidence these actually help. Hoping for God to answer prayer is futile. God’s promises are clouds without rain.

The promises of prayer that are never fulfilled

These verses prove that God never answers prayer. Read and think about the following verses that the Gospel of Mark places in the mouth of Jesus:

Mark 11:23 - “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

That is unambiguous. Ask of God, in faith, and what you want will happen. Jesus uses the example of a mountain, a rabbinic hyperbole, but the principle is what we should focus on here. Jesus is promising that prayer made with faith will be answered. We have Jesus’ own reassurance. How could it possibly fail?

Another example? Matthew 7:7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened”.

Again, look at the unambiguous nature of the promise. Jesus isn’t asking for anything more than a willingness by the believer to ask and be open to receive. The promise of an answer is in the verse, coming from the mouth of Jesus, no less.

Matthew 18:19 “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

This is the well-known prayer of agreement. When I was a Pentecostal, this was the go-to verse for praying for brothers or sisters in the faith who needed a strong prayer. Our Father in Heaven promised to honour this prayer. I can’t count the number of times I was involved in praying for others to receive healings or find jobs or a host of other real needs. In retrospect, I can’t say I can remember a single example of anyone being healed or receiving any blessing, but we certainly leaned into that prayer as a promise of healing. Our job was to pray and leave it to God.

Here are some additional verses we relied on to heal my wife. They all amounted to zero effect.

Matthew 21:22 “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”.

John 14:13 “And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son”.

John 16:23 “And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you”.

The disillusionment of prayer

If these promises are more than hot air, we should be able to pray these prayers for a new job, world peace, healing from cancer, a new world order, just and honest government and so forth, so these verses should apply equally to healing as to any other need. But what is the reality? Looking at our everyday life, it is obvious that prayer doesn’t work. If it did, a cure for cancer or achieving world peace would have been achieved centuries ago. The Jews in Jesus’ day were praying for an end to Roman occupation and oppression and the promised Messiah to free them. Did it happen? No. Instead Rome crushed a Jewish uprising, from 66 CE to 70 CE, destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and killed approximately 1.1 million Jews, according to the historian Josephus.

Vaccination, which has saved millions more than prayer ever has, or ever will, came from human endeavour and a commitment to a better world, not from God, who seems happy for people to die without intervention for millennia from preventable diseases. Remember this verse? “ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. Just another false promise, because love is a verb, not a noun, and love enacted would lead to human suffering being relieved by God, not ignored, or even celebrated if they are the wrong type of people. Prayer is the triumph of optimism over personal experience. Nonetheless, at the time my wife and I were desperate, and we prayed in faith and we trusted in the God who made these promises, because we needed God to intervene with healing. He was our only hope. It was a false hope as it turned out.

Nothing prepares you for the disappointment that comes with each specialist appointment and to be told by the oncologist that the disease was progressing as they expected and the chemotherapy was holding it from progressing too fast, as they planned. Prayer, apparently, was making no difference. Three and a half years later, exactly the time frame the oncologist had given my wife on her first visit, my wife died. Prayer failed. God failed. He did not uphold his Word. To put it bluntly, God’s Word lied, so God lied. God does not care about human suffering and he does not answer prayer. His “word” is just empty promises.

Death isn’t like a Hollywood movie. There is no uplifting soundtrack. Death came for my wife at the end of years of terrible pain and suffering, relieved only temporarily by increasing doses of opiates. All I could think was; “No one cared about her suffering except me, our doctor and finally the palliative care nurses. God was silent throughout the whole experience”. Still, I didn’t curse God. I wanted God to be true. To admit that God had failed to keep his Word, that he was probably not a god, that decades of Bible study and an honours degree in theology, years of being involved in Christian ministry in my church and numerous sermons I had preached, were all foolish folly, was a bridge too far for me to cross at that time. My whole self-image was tied to my commitment to Jesus and Christianity. It seemed all my beliefs were simply wrong and redundant if God had failed so spectacularly. I wasn’t ready to blame God, so I looked inward, at my lack of understanding and faith. Obviously, the fault must lie with me. God was omnipotent, omniscience, all loving etc. Or, perhaps, I wasn’t the one at fault. Perhaps my faith had nothing to do with it. Perhaps Christianity and God were one enormous fraud. I was reluctant to go down that path yet, but I definitely thought about that in 2009 when my wife died.

Mental gymnastics posing as faith

Admitting that God failed to honour his Word and make good on his promises, would be apostasy, the abandonment or renunciation of a religious belief. The believer would lose their faith in God. Salvation, the promise of heaven and eternal life, once lost, could never be regained. This is drummed into believers, especially in more fundamentalist churches. You are told; “The failure wasn’t God’s but yours”. Then comes the rationalisations to explain your failure - You didn’t have enough faith; you didn’t understand the Bible correctly, your faith failed because you had sin in your life; you were disobedient in some manner; and the ultimate kicker; you didn’t pray according to God’s “will” as if anyone has ever had a clue what God’s will is.

No amount of effort can solve the unknown sin problem or lack of faith problem. Always, it is the believer who is at fault, never God. The definition of faith found in Hebrews 11:1 is oxymoronic. It reads, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. This is a place to consider the original Greek text. “Substance” in this passage is “Hypostasis (plural: hypostases), from the Greek ὑπόστασις (hypóstasis), is the underlying, fundamental state or substance that supports all of reality. It is a literal substance. “Evidence” here is also a noun, an actual thing. So, the writer to the Hebrews is saying that faith is the underlying fundamental state of the universe, the evidence of the unseen things of God, or something similar. This is so esoteric and, frankly, indecipherable.

It is absurd as an explanation, if you read the actual words without imposing your spin on it. The idea that scripture is inspired and correct in all it asserts, underpins such nonsense, so the believer can’t question the Bible. It says faith is some esoteric “substance” that proves the unseen and that is supposed to be the goal of believers. No wonder my faith was lacking. God can’t be wrong; therefore, the believer must be. Pastors and ministers are professional liars, lying to themselves and telling their congregations that God is faithful, because their very professional existence and worth is tied up with their ministry. And they suffer the same vicissitudes of life and lie to themselves using the same platitudes. They can’t or won’t see their own cognitive dissonance, and I am assuming good faith on their part, unlike the televangelists who prey on people with promises of healing, knowing they are lying.

The degree of cognitive dissonance required to be a Christian is extraordinary and ingrained. You need to believe the Bible, containing sixty-six books with numerous authors, and written over a span of nearly two thousand years, is one univocal, inspired message from God, and that it is inerrant in everything it teaches and asserts. I became a serious student of the Bible after doing an honours degree in theology, which included three years of Greek study. Through this I was exposed to more advanced scholarship, and my simplistic beliefs were shown to be unsupported. The Bible is multivocal, with doctrines like the divinity of Jesus changing from the epistles of Paul to the gospel of John where his divinity is asserted or implied. Centuries of church debate finally led to the Council of Nicaea and the declaration that Jesus was God, sort of, and then a couple another century until the doctrine of the Trinity was affirmed. This was the beginning of my journey because I learned critical thinking and the ability to ask the right questions.

The right questions are more important than the answers they obtain sometimes. In the past, when my faith was tested, it was my failure when God didn’t honour his Word. I believed; he didn’t deliver. Now, I was willing to ask questions of God. I prayed; he failed to deliver, and he was silent, as he always is. Why? What was I missing? Perhaps the Bible was a tissue of lies. Perhaps there was no God. Perhaps the words of Jesus were made up. Spoiler alert – the gospels are literary fictions without any reliable historical content.

Perhaps it was unreasonable of me to expect the words of the Bible to be trustworthy. Surely the verses that told me that God is the same today, yesterday and forever could still be trusted. In trying to understand, I returned to the gospels and began to question their reliability. Did Jesus really utter these promises? Did the person who preached the Beatitudes, who seemed to show genuine love and concern for the poor and oppressed, in the Gospel of Matthew, make false promises to his followers? I can’t identify any answers to prayers in my life or the lives of friends that can’t be easily explained by natural means, so it seems the answer must be yes. Jesus made false promises. Or did he?

The cruelty of evangelical culture

I can’t move on without talking about the rationalisation that Christians engage in concerning healing. I was lucky enough to be born in a Western country, with good education and good health care and social welfare. When I was injured in a bicycle accident (I fell off and punctured my right lung because I was daydreaming), I was rushed off to hospital, patched up, kept in hospital for a few days and sent home with medication and a stern warning to stay off the bike until I healed. It was all covered by public health services. I know Christians who have had serious health issues and were the beneficiaries of the health care services where they lived, but gave all the credit for their recovery to God. Nonsense like, “The Lord took care of me”, trip lightly off their tongues, without the realisation that if they had been born in some poor Third World country, their family would have planned their funeral, not their homecoming. God didn’t heal them; any more than God condemns someone in a poor country to death because there is inadequate health care. This is blind ignorance and racism.

Christians tell lies like fishermen after a fishing trip. When I was a Pentecostal, I was told so many times about God moving with healing/miracles/answers to prayer etc. in some church, only to find out the story was exaggerated, that it wasn’t their story but second-hand or just a plain lie. This is how the false televangelists can survive – lies and rumours. Christians are like fishermen with tales of the fish that got away, but it really was a big fish, a really big fish, like you can’t imagine how big this fish was! The need of some Christians to lie and exaggerate is built into their faith. Christians need you to believe their gospel and to convert to Christianity to validate their own beliefs.

They desperately need to prove to you that God is still active and alive and moving today, so they make false claims and make up stories. These stories come back to haunt believers when they need a miracle and for God to move on their behalf, only to find that the heavens are closed up and God is deaf or absent. When God is silent, the believers tie themselves into knots trying to understand God’s silence and his continuing failure to act. They worry, “Other friends testify to miracles so why is God not answering my prayers”? It’s because those “friends” are also lying. This is cruel and dishonest, and very common. This can lead to depression and mental health issues.

The failure of prayer – Gospel unreliability

The Gospels were written in the order Mark, Matthew, Luke and John and were written by educated people writing in koine Greek, not Aramaic, which was the language of Jesus and his disciples. Koine, also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek, Septuagint Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries. It was based mainly on Attic and related Ionic speech forms, with various admixtures brought about through dialect levelling with other varieties.

Jesus and the disciples of Jesus, and those who heard him speak, in Judea and Galilee where he came from, all spoke Aramaic, and were, for the most part, illiterate. This includes Jesus. It is probable that the gospels were written outside Judea, in Greek. They were not translated from Aramaic. The gospels were unnamed for decades and have no internal information as to their authors. The first naming of the gospels was done by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, around 180 CE. They weren’t written by authors called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Within each gospel there is no author’s name, unlike, for example, the Pauline epistles which name their author. Christian scholarship originally dated the gospels very early, close to the death of Jesus, but there are no complete gospels before the start of the third century CE (200 CE). There is not one single original autograph, written by any of the anonymous gospel writers in existence.

There are numerous papyrus fragments but most are no larger than a credit card in size. No complete, or even incomplete, gospels exist earlier than the third century, so we have no way of knowing when exactly they were written, or if earlier gospels were the same as the ones we have today. The actual copies of the books that Irenaeus had haven’t survived, so we have no idea how complete the copies his copies were, or if they resembled the gospels we now have. There is certainly no consistency between copies of gospels that have been found except where they have copied each other. Bart Ehrmann, textual scholar, has written extensively on this subject in “Misquoting Jesus”. There are literally tens of thousands of variations between the manuscripts, and we have no original autographs. The “vast numbers of gospel accounts that agree with each other”, that Christian apologists like to claim, all date from the 10th Century CE, and later, when copying was standardised. The early versions show considerable differences.

Literacy in the time of the gospels

First century Judea didn’t look like our world. Literacy was as low as 15 per cent, and paper wasn’t invented yet. There was no “official” historian following Jesus around to record the words of Jesus. Jesus was a nonentity, not an emperor and Galilee was a very poor region. Papyrus was fragile and had a short life; vellum or animal skin was very expensive. In Galilee, where Jesus came from, scholars believe literacy was as low as 5 per cent. This doesn’t mean what it means today. Literacy was defined as being able to read at a very limited level such as being able to sign their names and understand writing at a very basic level.

Being able to create literature, as I am doing, was the province of a very limited, highly educated elite class in the 1st Century. We presume literacy because it is normal today, but first century society wasn’t literate as we are. The gospels were written for a very small and elite Greek-speaking audience. Within Judea, very early churches would have been run by people speaking Aramaic, who may have been lucky enough to hear Jesus preach during his earthly ministry. They definitely didn’t have scriptures because they hadn’t been written yet. They preached from the memories of other witnesses, and legends and myths that had grown up around Jesus, who was a well-known apocalyptic preacher. When Paul talks about scriptures, he means the Hebrew Bible, not the Christian scriptures we have today.

Paul started writing his epistles around 49 CE and Paul wrote in Greek, not Aramaic. These would have been circulated and copied, which would have been a slow process with potential for copyist errors and edits. The idea that the preacher or disciple was reading from scripture didn’t happen because there were no gospels until at least 70 CE. At best there might have been a reading from the Torah if they were still meeting in synagogues. In short, the idea that the early churches had anything more than oral tradition to preach from is a fantasy. The past is a foreign country, completely unlike our own, that we can’t imagine or visit. We can’t impose our ideas of how the world worked in first century Palestine. The gospels were decades away in the future, after the death of Jesus.

The Gospel of Mark

Jesus died approximately 30 CE; the Gospel of Mark is the earliest and is dated from 70 CE, the date of the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. That is 40 years after the death of Jesus. The life expectancy in the first century CE could be as low as 30 years and no higher than 60 years, so it is unlikely there were any living eyewitnesses the author used who remembered Jesus. This makes all the gospels of Jesus literary fictions, perhaps supplemented by stories and legends handed down by the people of the time to their children or taken from ex-patriate Jewish and Gentile believers living outside Judea whose ancestors left oral stories behind with families. We can conclusively say that the long dialogues and teachings of Jesus were made up decades after he died, and are in no way reliable accounts. No written material recording the sayings of Jesus have ever been found, the so called Q source.

The Jewish Wars lasted from 66 CE to 70 CE and many Jews would have left Palestine to avoid the conflict. Possibly, some of these may have heard Jesus and become a source for the “sayings” that are recorded, if they had lived long enough. Jesus was a significant 1st Century apocalyptic preacher around whom myths, legends and stories would have gathered during his life and after his death. These stories aren’t reliable history, any more than the stories that exist about the Buddha are reliable. The stories aren’t exempt from scrutiny as to truth and accuracy just because they are about Jesus. Scholars of the New Testament generally agree that there is not a kernel of historical truth in the gospels. Rudolf Bultmann was a major scholar who challenged the existing ideas of early gospel creation and showed that the gospels aren’t reliable historically.

God’s promise to honour prayer therefore become immaterial because Jesus almost certainly never said those words. They are part of the “kerygma” or proclamation of the gospel message that grew up around the legend that is Jesus. By the same logic, the “name it and claim it” doctrine of modern televangelists fails because there are no promises of Jesus to name and claim. Likewise, the promises of healing and miracles that Pentecostalism promises fail. Not one of these preachers hold a credible degree and all repeat the same old tropes that generations of evangelists have preached. TELEVANGELISTS are frauds, one and all.

An early dating of Mark isn’t accepted by a majority of New Testament scholars and this idea only exists in bible colleges and seminaries with very fundamentalist beliefs. Mark was written after 70 CE and probably not in Judea, which had been at war with Rome since 66 CE.

The Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel of Matthew is dated from around 75 – 85 CE and draws heavily on the Gospel of Mark. It contains the longest monologue by Jesus in the gospels, the Beatitudes, sometimes called The Sermon on the Mount. These are around 2,300 words in length and are in Chapters 4 – 7. There is simply no reason to believe this is an accurate record of the words of Jesus. To begin, when and how were the Beatitudes recorded and preserved? They are more likely a collection of sayings and were never delivered on one particular day. Their recording would require someone or several someones, to write down these sayings and preserve them for future generations in real time. How was that done? No one was carrying around the latest smart phone, to record the sayings of Jesus, and the level of literacy was so low that these is no chance that anyone in the crowd was recording his words on papyrus. If this had been a possible scenario, we could have confidence in what the gospels are saying. We can’t imagine how primitive things were in the 1st Century, when we are surrounded by technology and news reporting. Preserving sayings by oral tradition is unreliable. There is no way of verifying the oral traditions haven’t changed over time as memories fade, people die or embellishments are made. The Epistle of 2Peter 1:21 states “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” This is an argument that fails to account for historical errors and contradictions as well as copyists errors and changes made by copyists and monks over centuries. Only occasionally are we lucky enough to find an ancient set of scriptures like Codex Vaticanus or Sinaiticus and we can see what early texts look like.

This question about the source of the sermons forms part of the Q documents hypothesis. The Q source is a theory but no documents have ever been found that confirm it. Nonetheless, it is the best explanation yet offered to explain the additional material found in Matthew and Luke that doesn’t appear in Mark. Secondly, as already said, literacy in Galilee would have been as low as 5% of the population and even in the rest of Palestine literacy of 15% would be a maximum. This would include people who could write their own name and read at a very basic level. We would see literacy mostly in the Jewish priestly class in the Temple, the Pharisees, the officials who were employed by the Romans and the Romans themselves. Literacy would not include being able to write a sophisticated gospel narrative in the high-quality koine Greek that we find in the gospels. First century literacy can’t be compared with literacy today. Also, the gospels are written in koine Greek, not Aramaic, the language in which Jesus would have been preaching.

The Gospel of Matthew is as much a literary fiction as the Gospel of Mark, which makes the promises of prayer equally invalid. As we can easily see from a comparative reading of the birth narratives of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, there is no univocality in the gospels. Univocality is the idea that the gospels, epistles and the Hebrew Bible all speak with one unified voice, coming from one inspired source regardless of the author, genre or period in history. This seriously undermines the claims of inerrancy because the differences between parts of the gospels are irreconcilable, and therefore either one account is wrong or both are wrong. A similar problem arises with the death and resurrection narratives of all four gospels. The gospels demonstrate more creativity than historical accuracy in these accounts. The gospels aren’t trustworthy.

The so-called tradition of releasing a criminal at Passover as recalled in Matthew Chapter 27:15-18 is also an entirely fictitious story and shows that the gospel writer of Matthew knew nothing of Roman rule in Judea or elsewhere. Pilate would never have released a violent criminal like the mythical Barabbas, and Pilate was a procurator, not a governor. Barabbas would have been crucified along with Jesus. Equally troubling is the name “Barabbas” which means in Aramaic “son of the father”. Matthew relates the story of the baptism of Jesus by John, and the voice from Heaven saying “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”. Jesus Barabbas is released; the true Jesus “Barabbas”, Jesus of Nazareth, is crucified. This story of Barabbas appears in Mark from whom Matthew and Luke borrow and John mentions it also, so its appearance in all four gospels doesn’t add any veracity to the story. It also promotes the idea of antisemitism. When Pilate tells the crowd Jesus is innocent in Matthew 27, they reportedly say:

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

This has come back to haunt the Jews and contributed to numerous pogroms and persecutions over the centuries because the Church branded Jews as Christ-killers. Perhaps the gospel writers weren’t sympathetic to the Jews and Jewish religion and were strangers to the time of Jesus and history of the time. Alternatively, they had no awareness of the implications of the narratives they wrote. Pilate was a brutal procurator and the idea of him letting anyone off the hook or caring if Jesus was guilty of some religious crime which the high priest brought is absurd. Jesus was executed for the political crime of being potentially the next King of the Jews. Supposedly this was the inscription Pilate had affixed to the cross in Latin (INRI), Hebrew and Greek.

The birth narrative of Matthew is historically incorrect. The baby Jesus is supposedly endangered by King Herod’s decree that all children under two years of age be killed to prevent a new King of the Jews taking his power (Matthew 2). Joseph and Mary take Jesus and flee to Egypt:

“When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.

Hosea 11:1 is the passage quoted here and in full it reads: “When Palestine was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt”. This is a reference to the Exodus and is used completely out of context. Matthew is using “prophecy” to promote the idea of Jesus as the promised Son of God which is a theme throughout the gospel.

Two problems are immediately apparent. The first is the dating of Herod, whose son Archelaus was ruling after his father’s death when Jesus and his family returned from Egypt. Herod died in 6 BCE, three years before the birth of Jesus. There was no slaughter of the innocents. It’s an entirely fictitious account written for an audience. The false use of Hosea 11:1 proves the gospel writer didn’t know the Hebrew Bible and he uses a completely irrelevant scripture to give his writing credibility, and fails.

The second problem is the contradiction of his birth narrative by the writer of Luke. Luke has Jesus born during the census of Quirinius, governor of Syria who called a property census that required people to return to some imaginary town of their ancestors. This idea is absurd. Rome never conducted a census based on something as irrelevant as your ancestral birthplace. This census was called in 6 CE. It was conducted nine years after the birth of Jesus. In this narrative, Jesus attends the Temple so Mary could present him to the Lord according to Leviticus 12. He doesn’t flee to Egypt from a non-existent threat. Both narratives can’t be true. Both, in fact, are wrong.

The Gospel of Luke

The Gospel of Luke is dated much later; perhaps as late as 95 CE as it shows some familiarity with The Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus, written in 93 CE. Luke’s birth narrative is historically incorrect, as we have already established in the previous paragraphs. The story of the census of Quirinius is found in Josephus. Reading all three synoptic gospels in parallel is an easy way to quickly see the errors and contradictions in the narratives. This defeats the idea of inerrancy. If the Bible isn’t inerrant, how can any of it be trusted, including the passages in prayer? Just a reminder, this gospel is written sixty-five years after Jesus was crucified, basically two generations. The author knows little to nothing of the Jerusalem of Jesus’ time, just as I know almost nothing of the time of my grandparents back in 1900 CE.

The Gospel of John

The Gospel of John is less interested in providing a narrative than it is in providing a theological framework to present Jesus as the promised Messiah. Starting from John Chapter 1, the author parallels Genesis Chapter 1 to prove that Jesus was the Logos, the creator of the world. Logos is used in Stoicism as “the active reason pervading and animating the Universe” according to Zeno, circa 300 BC.

The Gospel of John is dated no earlier than 95 CE and possibly as late as 120 CE. It is so far removed from the events of Jesus’ life as to have little or no relevance. This gospel has an historical error in linking Annas and Caiaphas as high priests in John 18. There was only one high priest at a time. Annas was the father-in-law of Caiaphas and his time as high priest ended in 15 CE, fifteen years before the crucifixion. Luke doesn’t mention the high priest by name. Matthew has only one high priest, and it’s Caiaphas, so he has that correct. John doesn’t have a birth narrative but his crucifixion and resurrection narrative differs from the other three gospels.

Again, there is no consistency between the four accounts, which undermines their veracity. The author of John has no interest in anything historical except proving Jesus is the Son of Man come down from heaven. See John 3 to see the argument. He uses and misuses scripture to prove the Son of Man is the Messiah and will be lifted up, in death, even as the serpent in the desert was lifted up. This is creative fiction designed to convince non-Jews who had no Hebrew Bible knowledge that the Messiah was intended to die for their sins, the exact opposite of the truth in the Hebrew Bible in the Messianic passages.

Summing up gospel reliability

To sum up, unless the gospels can be shown to be accurate historically, and to be in agreement on history, there is no longer any reason for believing anything in them. We do not have one single original autograph from any gospel writer or from Paul for that matter. We have copies of copies, none of which were done by professional copyists in the first couple of centuries before monasteries took over the task. The promises that prayer will be answered come from fictional literary accounts, which means that prayer has no objective basis. Believing in the promises of prayer is like reading Harry Potter and believing that people like wizards really existed. It’s delusional.

Prayer is a dead ritual, followed because a dead apocalyptic preacher of the first century CE is purported to have promised he or God would honour your prayers, or a Jewish preacher called Paul insisted that men ought always to pray. It’s no surprise that prayer isn’t ever answered. Probably Jesus didn’t preach those words or he never had the power and authority to make them actually happen. In other words, unless Jesus was God, or speaking as God’s representative, they are just empty words. The divinity of Jesus wasn’t agreed until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, and has no objective basis in reality. It is inferred from the texts and wasn’t the majority view, even after the council. The writer of the Gospel of John is at pains to convince us Jesus is God, but his gospel contradicts the other synoptic gospels on this matter.

God, if he exists, isn’t required to honour non-existent promises placed in the mouth of Jesus by biographers creating a narrative. It is equally true that an omnipotent and omniscient God should be able to inspire his gospel writers to produce accounts that complement each other without contradicting each other and being blatantly incorrect historically. J Warner Wallace, who pretends to use forensic analysis to understand the gospels, argues that if the accounts were identical that would prove collusion and make the accounts unreliable. It’s a ridiculous argument, because it demands that the gospel not be consistent with each other to prove their authenticity. Classis Orwellian doublespeak. His arguments hold no water, and it’s just another lame attempt by an apologist to explain away the numerous gospel inaccuracies. IF GOD INSPIRED THE BIBLE, IT MUST BE UNIVOCAL. IT ISN’T, SO GOD DIDN’T INSPIRE IT.

I like the way Bart Ehrman sums it up in “Misquoting Jesus”. He wrote; “I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given them the words in a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew). The fact that we don’t have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.”

It is not surprising prayers for my wife’s healing fell on deaf or even non-existent, ears, but it was no less devastating that prayers for her healing were unheeded by God at the time when we still had faith. Anyone who has nursed a person with advanced cancer will understand the terrible pain that accompanies cancer, and the cruelty of promising answers to prayer that are never honoured is unconscionable. The Bible has no more credibility than any other religion’s holy books. Believers give the Bible a pass for inaccuracies, arguing that these aren’t mistakes that affect doctrines or deny the truth of God, but these arguments are at best sophistry and at worst, plainly dishonest. They are so invested that they can’t face the fact that this is just one more false religion.

If God can conjure the universe into existence, uphold creation by the word of his power and supposedly raise Jesus from the dead, it is remarkable that he is unable to ensure we have a single, reliable, authentic and factually correct gospel account of his son’s work on this Earth. Not one original, authentic autograph from the 1st Century exists or a complete copy from the 2nd Century. Add to that, God could conclusively and demonstrably give answers to prayers without Christians doing mental gymnastics to explain why God failed to answer prayer, again and again and again, or even make it clear why the prayer wasn’t answered. Christians operate in the dark, and God’s Word provides no light.

There is no correlation between prayer and outcomes in real life. Jesus promises that prayer will be answered. The truth is more like a disconnected number. “Sorry, God is currently unavailable. Please leave a message and no one will get back to you”.

Does the believer have the right to question God?

Jesus promises the believer a relationship of father and son through faith in him. He uses the Aramaic “abba” which is an intimate term for father, suggesting an intimacy quite unlike that of Israel and God, where Israel is the servant of God (Isaiah 53). However, it is forbidden to actually question God, to demand accountability from him and to question his motives and actions. Consider these verses from the Apostle Paul in Romans Chapter 9:17-21:

“It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory. (NIV)

So, God can do whatever he wants, including killing the entire world’s population by flood and killing all the innocent first-born children of the Egyptians just to show Pharaoh how tough he is. God is Creator and his word is final, and believers have to just suck it up. Pharaoh was prevented from letting Israel leave because God hardened his heart, and then he punished Pharaoh, all his people and the entire land of Egypt, for a decision God imposed on Pharaoh. We are no more important than clay being moulded by a potter for his pleasure, and we have no recourse to question God and call his actions unjust or unfair. This also means some of us were born to be condemned to an eternal Hell, because God decided this from the beginning of the world. Freewill is an illusion. This includes his utter failure to ever answer prayer, because it’s his sovereign right to ignore you. The “abba father” is window dressing, not a reflection of reality.

God’s hiddenness leads to our frustration when prayers aren’t answered and when our own personal experiences don’t match the expectations which the Bible leads us to believe are promises. If our prayers aren’t answered, there can only be one reason – we are at fault, either through sin, wrong motivations, or incorrect exegesis of scripture. God can never be at fault, nor can his Word. This is victim blaming at its worst, and is engaged in by priests, pastors, apologists and preachers and every member of your church who has an opinion, as asinine as it may be. They can never admit that the Bible is a massive collection of conflicting promises, theologies and beliefs without a unifying framework that never offers a coherent answer as to why prayer fails, why God is hidden, or why suffering exists (outside of the Adam and Eve mythology). The believer does have, and should have, the right to question God. We demand too little from God and accept crumbs from his table in return for our worship. Any relationship we think we have is a self-delusion. We prayer to an empty room and convince ourselves that the small still voice we hear is God, when it’s our own lonely little voice, trying desperately to convince us we are being heard.

Conclusion

The failure of prayer wasn’t the single event that made me an atheist and to decide to renounce God, Jesus and Christianity but I was disillusioned by God’s failure to answer prayer. My current beliefs come from fifteen years of study, thought, research and even prayer at times. I clung to belief because I really wanted God to be real, for there to be an eternal, good and just God. I am now convinced otherwise. If God is real, if his Word, the Bible, has any validity or relevance, then why is prayer a pointless exercise, and why should believers tie themselves in knots praying and convincing themselves that prayer works? Consider Luke 18 from the King James Bible:

And he spoke a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint; Saying, there was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; Yet because this widow troubles me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.

Is this a template of how we should approach prayer? Is the believer required to importune God endlessly until our prayer wearies him sufficiently to answer our prayer, not out of love and because he is our father, but because he is sick to death of hearing us? This is exactly like the gods of the Ancient Near East who only act after extreme prayer and sacrifices. This is a window on YHWH’s true origins, as a Canaanite god that the Israelites adopted and developed into their deity. This is terrible advice and proves my point that God doesn’t answer prayer. Even Jesus knew that. Jesus started with the words “that men ought always to pray, and not to faint”. If God answered prayer, men wouldn’t faint. This parable is cruel.

Death is our natural end and it shouldn’t be the cause of loss of faith, but it was much more than death that tipped the scales for me. Loss of faith in God because of loss of faith in prayer was catalyst for me to begin questioning prayer, and therefore God. Ultimately it led me to atheism. Prayer is a chimera; God an illusion.