An Immoral Jesus?

I find it fascinating, not that Hitchens claims the Bible as immoral—one could certainly pick out a number of passages that indicates an inhumane bias, as Hitchens does. No, it is his chapter title that states, “The New Testament is More Immoral Than the Old Testament”. Not only is the author far distant from proving his point, I don’t really see how he claims that the NT is immoral at all. So he shows that John 8 isn’t in the original text. Christian scholars have admitted so for a century. How is this immoral? That some scribe decided to insert a connected text in a margin and another scribe got confused and put it in the text? How is that “immoral”?

Hitchen’s main claim that the New Testament’s morality of forgiveness is less than ideal. Hitchen’s idea of this morality is misguided, but even with this misconception, it is difficult to call this idea of “all forgiveness all the time” immoral. He misunderstands the basic idea of NT forgiveness, however. There are many times in the NT that people are NOT forgiven. In fact, the most brutal part of the NT, the deaths of Ananias and Saphira, is a display of not forgiving someone for their sin—in this case, of lying to God. Paul also declares one person to not be forgiven, and then, later to be forgiven. This all looks very inconsistent unless you understand the basis of Christian forgiveness, which is repentance. Many passages speak to what causes one to not be forgiven—and the main one is being merciless to another person. The one who abuses another, who deceives another intentionally in order to obtain gain, the one who hates, the hypocrite who teaches others their hypocritical ways, these are not forgiven.

This does not mean that these sinners are to be punished, exactly. They are not to be harmed by any followers of Jesus. Rather, they are asked repeatedly to repent, and if they hold to their unmerciful ways, then they are declared to not be a part of the community. That’s all. Any further punishment is up to God. Thus, it is not a wide open forgiveness, nor is it the harsh punishments of sinners of later Christianities.

What bugs me about Hitchen's statement most, that the NT is "immoral" is that this book, which I and many others follow as our guide to ethics and life, leads us to immorality. So Hitchen's is calling me immoral. I have never claimed that atheists in general are immoral. Nor have I claimed that any group is generally immoral. So how can he make that claim about me and those who are like me? That is simply hypocritical.