Dan Kohanski

Monotheism-the idea that there is one and only one divine Being in the universe-is the underlying foundation of Judaism. Jews reaffirm this twice a day by reciting the Shema, the basic statement of the Jewish faith: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." This belief is said to have started with Abraham and established for all by Moses at Sinai as one of the Ten Commandments: "You shall have no other Gods besides Me" (Ex. 20:3). But is this really the way it happened in history, even in Biblical history? I suggest that the idea of monotheism evolved only gradually among the ancient Israelites, and even after it was generally accepted by their descendants the Jews, it was not completely so until Roman times.2 Here then is a scenario that, to my mind, describes this evolution.

This piece is meant to be read at the start of the Passover seder (which occurs Monday night this year, 2024), at the point where the reader points to the 3 pieces of matzoh and says "Ha lachma anyah," this is the bread of affliction. I first wrote it maybe 30 years ago, and updated it on occasion to memorialize some new tragedy.

Theologians approach the Bible a priori - they assume it is true and look for verification, while dismissing any evidence to the contrary. Historians take an a posteriori approach to the Bible - they look for evidence to demonstrate whether any, all, or parts, of it are verifiable. The difference in these two approaches has real-world consequences; one example is the current battle over transgender identification.

This article is based on research for my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023).

Trevor Bryce's description of the Hittites needing to purify themselves after having sex before they could approach the gods finds parallels in the Hebrew requirement to do the same, which was later picked up by the Essenes and from there probably by the Jesus Movement. Augustine would then build on that and Aristotle's misunderstanding of human reproduction to define sex as original sin. This, combined with Pope Gregory VII's enforcement of clerical celibacy, has bedeviled the Church ever since.

[Updated with additional reference information added.]

The Song of Songs has often been reinterpreted as an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel, or between Jesus and the Church, but any clear reading of the text makes it clear it is a poem celebrating physical love between a man and a woman. Yet even those translators who agree with that tend to soften the text, particularly in regard to the word דדיך or דדים. I argue in this paper that translating this word as "lovemaking" best conveys the poet's intention.

The trial of Jesus as described in the gospel of Mark, and particularly the part where the high priest charges Jesus with blasphemy, is one of the most hotly debated stories in the New Testament. I suggest that Jesus was never charged with blasphemy at all, and that Mark invented the story of blasphemy as part of his effort to blame the Jewish leaders rather than the Romans for Jesus's crucifixion.

Paul claimed that Jews and Roman authorities were persecuting him because he was spreading the gospel of Jesus, But the evidence shows they wanted to stop him from telling Gentiles not to sacrifice to the local gods. Paul was endangering the pax deorum (the peace of the gods) — the arrangement where the gods protected the city and the empire in return for worship. Comments welcome.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023).

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). The first Christians were largely pacifist, but after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire and Christian soldiers were called on to defend it, Church Fathers had to come up with a theology of war. Ambrose and Augustine developed an idea of "just war," a war of necessity. But over time, the Church became more receptive to "holy war," a war of choice fought to advance Christianity by force.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). I've extracted just a few sections here so as to present some of my ideas on how the idea of God has driven war, and how, even when God is supposedly not involved, other ideologies replace him. The key to reducing war, I submit, lies only partly in removing God; the true solution requires minimizing all ideologies. While I cite sources and scholarly works, the book this note is extracted from is intended for a general audience, not an academic one. Comments welcome, especially on whether I've accurately reported the historical details.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). The chapter this is extract is taken from looks at how belief in the eschaton impacted the world in the Middle Ages and also today. Some footnotes have been shortened for this draft. Comments welcome.]

Jesus is one of the central figures of history, but we actually know very little about his life with any certainty. This article, which is extracted from my book in progress (Inventing God: How Religion Shaped Our Western World), lists the outer limits of what is likely known about the historical Jesus.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). The question for this article is how life after death, the afterlife, came to be more important than this life on earth, and what are some of the consequences of that change. It is intended for a general audience, not for an academic one, but I hope it will be of interest to the scholarly reader as well. I have made every effort to verify all facts and to confirm my interpretation of them, but it is always possible I missed something. Please let me know if you spot any errors or misinterpretations.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). I argue that the ancient Israelites generally had a positive attitude toward sex and didn't limit it to procreation. But around the time of the first Christians, there was one sect, the Essenes, which limited all sexual activity to procreation. Whether or not there was a direct connection, the Christians adopted the same view, to the point that they prized celibacy and virginity above all. Augustine then codified this position by calling sex "original sin," but he did this by making two serious mistakes. Christians have suffered for it ever since, and are only now openly accepting sex without procreation and even without marriage.

This paper explores some of the reasons why almost all Jews without exception were uninterested in Jesus, his message, or the arguments of his disciples. It takes a historical look at the Jews' reaction to the early followers of Jesus and to their counter-reaction, and at the reasons why the first Christians were so upset with the Jews' indifference that they invented a caricature of Jews that has haunted history ever since.

Update: I regret that it became necessary to stop the discussion on this draft, but it was descending into anti-Semitism.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). Modern critical Biblical scholarship has long acknowledged that the book of Daniel was put together during the Maccabean revolt of 167-64 BCE, and the last six chapters were written at that time. This dating nonetheless remains controversial in some circles. This article - which is intended to be an appendix to a work in progress on the history of western religion - explains some of the evidence and techniques scholars have used to set the date of Daniel.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). The book of Daniel is best known for being the only explicit mention of personal resurrection in the Hebrew Scripture. But Daniel's author also used a shift in the nature of prophecy through the use of "prophecy after the event" and absolute prophecy. These techniques were later used by the evangelists.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). The early Israelites gradually developed social laws, freely borrowing from other law codes of the Ancient Near East (though they didn't always rely on them). During the Babylonian exile, they needed a new way to enforce these laws, as well as laws ensuring worship of Yahweh alone. They drew on earlier traditions that all laws had come directly from God and codified their cultic laws, along with the borrowed social (and some cultic laws) into something close to today's Torah.

This paper was my project for an online class at Stanford on Revolutionary Russia - I was curious why Stalin made a truce with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) during World War II in spite of his militant atheism. The answer is not, as used to be supposed, that he needed the Church's backing to get Russian troops to fight the Nazis. He was laying the groundwork for retaking the parts of the Soviet Union that the Nazis had captured, as well as for his future takeover of Eastern Europe.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). In this chapter, I argue that Christian antipathy towards Jews and Judaism began with general Jewish indifference to Jesus, which may be why the Jesus Movement turned to preaching to the Gentiles. This created two new problems, however: Gentiles saw little reason to believe in Jesus if the Jews, his own people, did not; and Jews objected to the use of their synagogues for missionary work, as this could get them in trouble with the Romans.

Christians developed four specific responses to this "Jewish problem" which they then used on other opposition: unjustified universalism, denial of reality, a persecution complex, and demonization.

An earlier version of this chapter was posted here as "Christianity and the Jewish Problem."

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). My argument is that the Israelite law code (mainly the Torah) borrowed heavily from the other law codes of the Ancient Near East. But it also developed in a different way from those other codes, and this allowed the priests to claim that the code came directly from God.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). In this chapter, I argue that Christian antipathy towards Jews and Judaism began with general Jewish indifference to Jesus, which may be why the Jesus Movement turned to preaching to the Gentiles. This created two new problems, however: Gentiles saw little reason to believe in Jesus if the Jews, his own people, did not; and Jews objected to the use of their synagogues for missionary work, as this could get them in trouble with the Romans.

Christians developed four specific responses to this "Jewish problem" which they then used against other opposition: unjustified universalism, denial of reality, a persecution complex, and demonization.

Among the many fallacies used by defenders of religion is one I choose to call the argument by anachronistic antecedent. An example of this is the argument made that the Qur'an's version of the Joseph story is both the correct one and not derived from the Genesis version and other Jewish sources.

This extract from a chapter I'm working on about the consequences of religion on our sex lives is admittedly more argumentative than historical; I dealt with the history earlier in chapter. (See also the paper I have posted here on the Catholic Church and sex.) An additional reason I'm presenting it here it that it lays a descriptive analysis of human sexuality that has gotten some positive response.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023).

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). Israelite and early Jewish views on death did not include much of an afterlife, and their ideas of reward and punishment were largely communal. In Second Temple times, this shifted toward individual responsibility, eventually leading to individual reward or punishment after death, since it didn't appear to be working out properly in life.

Christianity expanded on this theme as part of its search for an explanation why Jesus had died on the cross. This eventually led it to focus more on the next world than on this world, and then to promise eternal damnation for deviations from orthodox belief. This draft (a chapter of a book in progress) looks at these developments and their consequences.

While much of my focus is on the history, I am not writing strictly as a student of history, but also as someone concerned with the damage (as well as the benefits) that religion has done to the world.

(I have been experiencing unexpected difficulties in getting this draft properly loaded; my apologies to anyone who looked for it earlier and did not find the full text.)

A God of Our Invention is the product of several years of research into the questions of how the western idea of God developed, and how that development has impacted the western world. I previously posted parts of some chapters here in draft form for commentary and critique, and those critiques have helped shape the final product.