What gets my goat about many public Christians, and Christian churches and denominations, is how un-Christian they appear – to me. This may have something to do with the sort of Christian environment I was brought up in, by my Methodist parents at a little Wesleyan Methodist church, where everyone was friendly and – more to the point – tolerant and non-judgmental. We had a minister who gave good cerebral sermons, and hymns I delighted in singing (many of them written by John Wesley’s brother Charles). The sermons of course were always prefaced with little biblical texts (‘For my brother Esau was an hairy man, but I am a smooth man’, if you recall Alan Bennett’s faux sermon in Beyond the Fringe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPCm6pRCSmQ; starting at about 1.1.38); but it was only a few years later that I realised that the preacher invariably chose these texts only from a certain part of the Bible: namely, the four Gospels.  For me these were the only bits that mattered; and which consequently have informed my own view of ‘true’ Christianity, through to the present day.

But of course the Bible consists of much more than this. That’s the problem. The first third of it, the Old Testament, which I understood it was Jesus’s mission to replace, is often too horrible to be a reputable moral guide, as well as being unreliable and even ludicrous in its history; so that I’m surprised that the Jews still stick with it. (I’m assuming that the Torah is basically the OT. Is that right?)

Then – after the Gospels – we have the ‘Epistles’ (letters) of the awful St Paul: Lenin to Marx’s Christ, and distorting the original message in much the same way; with the whole thing capped off by ‘The Book of Revelations’, which would not look out of place in a collection of supernatural horror stories. Why these very different elements could have been brought together in a single volume which Christians are supposed to swear by – often quite literally – beats me. We surely should only need the middle bit. Which is what was preached to me in my little Wesleyan chapel; and is what I still take to comprise the essence of the religion.

Well, I do know – roughly – how it happened. The present-day Bible was compiled towards the end of the fourth century CE by a number of church elders, all male, who brought together some – but not all – of the old ‘books’ which were thought to be most crucial to the (relatively) new religion. Their process of selection omitted some accounts, like a ‘Gospel of St Thomas’, and possibly a gospel written by Mary, Jesus’s mother; for what reasons I don’t know. (Contemporary misogyny may have been one of them.)  The four Gospels that we have seem pretty kosher; but that too must be questionable, in view of the relative illiteracy of their supposed authors, and possible editorial interventions afterwards. For me that would account for what I regard as the un-Christian bits that remain.

This of course is a critical historian’s way of approaching the texts which are our main source of information about early Christianity. I imagine that it must be the approach of reputable theologians to it too. (I don’t know. I’ve not read their stuff.) So why do certain self-styled ‘Christians’ stray so far from the essential message of the Gospels; which nowhere – so far as I can remember – mention, for example, homosexuality or same-sex marriage or abortion, or many of the other concerns and doctrines that have been added to ‘Christianity’ by popes, Evangelicals and leaders simply wishing to keep their followers in line; and certainly don’t sanction the hostility towards other belief systems, whether religious or secular, that these modern cultish ‘Christians’ display.

Of course, in all these cases what has happened is that the secular world has simply swallowed the Gospels and spewed them out in forms that suit the prevailing ethoses (ethoi?) of the dominant classes of the day; much as Lenin and Stalin and Mao did with Marxism, and now the veritable anti-Christs Donald Trump and JD Vance (a Catholic convert) are doing with the ‘gentle Jesus’ I was brought up with as a boy.

There’s a bloke on the internet who is very good at revealing the detritus that has built up around the original form of Christianity: see https://medium.com/@tanner_79717. This could well reconcile me with the religion I long ago abandoned; – if it weren’t for the ‘faith’ thing, which I’ve written about before (https://bernardjporter.com/2025/03/11/christianity-weaponised/).