In Defense of the Old Testament

Your agnostic seeker defends the whole Bible in this Underthrow Holiday Special.

Source Nick Haupt: An Old Testament scroll rescued from the city of Lodz, Poland.

Marcionism was an early Christian movement founded by Marcion of Sinope in the second century AD. Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament—a deity focused on law and judgment—was entirely separate from and inferior to the God of the New Testament revealed by Jesus.

Marcion not only rejected the Old Testament entirely but also created his own biblical canon, consisting of edited versions of Luke’s Gospel and ten of Paul’s letters. Crucially, he removed what he saw as Jewish influences.

Early, mainstream Christians declared the sect heretical. Still, Marcionism remained influential for several centuries and ultimately pushed the Church to define its own scriptural canon and theological boundaries more formally.

Marcionism is back—with an attitude.

Sotiris Rex over at Bonds of Prometheus writes,

When we embrace immoral tales as virtuous, we lose sight of morality. This is the evil of Abraham, the psychopath who, without protest, happily obeyed the voices in his head instructing him to slaughter his child just to suck up to a perceived “authority”, and then patted himself on the back for being supposedly “virtuous”. This nightmarish story is the “moral” basis for the three biggest religions in the world. Then we wonder why insanity is the norm.

Let’s pass over Rex’s liberal use of quotation marks that quote no one in particular, not to mention the odd gnostic references to demiurgic entities. We can even pass over the fact that I’m arguing with a pseudonymous writer. But we shouldn’t overlook Rex’s Neo-Marcionist case.

Presentism is the tendency to interpret, evaluate, or judge past events, people, and cultures through the lens of contemporary values rather than in their unique historical contexts. The most salient example of presentism in Rex’s work is the use of terms like “psychopath” and “voices in his head,” designed to dismiss.

Obviously, the Hebrew Bible—never mind the New Testament gospels—was written and compiled in eras before any modern conception of schizophrenia. But even if we thought presentism were an appropriate way to judge Abraham, a consistent presentist would at least argue that someone with a terrible mental illness isn’t “evil” so much as he is crazy. Without antipsychotic medication, the mentally ill have very little agency, which is necessary for making moral choices.

In short, when it comes to presentism, Rex needs to pick a lane.

In other words, Sotiris Rex would have to demonstrate first that the voices in Abraham’s head were manifestations of crazy instead of being put there by God. Despite multiple references to goat fucking in one article, Rex appears to argue his case in a circle. It reads like: These stories show God is evil because God does evil things in these stories, and we know these things are evil because this God is evil. With such question begging, is one meant to forego wrestling with theological questions or confronting life’s troubling paradoxes to become a Pillar Saint?

Observant Jews and mainstream Christians would also likely point out that the Binding of Isaac is understood not as divine cruelty but as a test of faith, which establishes that God rejects human sacrifice—a revolutionary moral stance in the ancient Near East where such practices were commonplace. The story ends, after all, with God providing Abraham a ram to kill instead. Most Jewish and Christian interpreters see this as foundational to their traditions, both in ethical and covenantal terms, though that doesn’t mean the story is wholly prescriptive. It is, instead, an invitation into moral reasoning—an existential meditation.

Believers would also argue that the Old Testament presents a God characterized by justice, mercy, and commitment, too. After all, the Binding of Isaac precedes Moses’s Exodus in time. God’s testing of Abraham establishes the Covenant that Moses’s God affirms.

Sotiris Rex thinks that “Christianity was an improvement over Judaism; it was the adaptation of Judaism to Western standards of morality and philosophy.” But it’s hard to argue that Christianity sets “Western standards” and Judaism does not. Christianity was started and spread by a group of Jews in the Levant. Still, Rex attributes this improvement to Jesus himself, writing:

Christianity was an upgrade. Jesus says in Matthew 22:37-40 that the most important commandments are “love God with all your soul and mind” and “love thy neighbour as yourself.”

Yet Jesus seems to be quoting the Torah here, as in Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” And of course, Rabbi Hillel the Elder was attributed with an early formulation of the Golden Rule: “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” Rabbi Hillel comes right before Jesus in time, but then, of course, Rabbi Hillel would have gotten the Golden Rule from:

• Leviticus 19:18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” This is the exact wording Jesus cites in Matthew 22:39.

• Leviticus 19:34 extends this principle to the resident alien: “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself,” showing that “neighbor” is not merely a narrow in‑group category.

So, it doesn’t appear Jesus’s words in Matthew were much of an ethical upgrade in this context, much less a “Western” one. I realize a lot of Christians think Jesus offers an upgrade to moral teaching, mainly by stripping out many of the outdated aspects of Mosaic Law—and that’s the point of being a Christian for many. Still, it doesn’t require cleaving off the Jewish bits.

Indeed, I would argue that doing so would be a mistake.

Most people, including me, would acknowledge that specific bible passages are challenging to filter through modern sensibilities. In fact, there are passages I can’t abide in both the Old and New Testaments. But I’m not concerned with thinking of the Bible as perfect or as setting down Divine Dogma.

Michael Huemer compiles “Scary Bible Quotes” so I don’t have to, but you be the judge.

The scribes who wrote, compiled, or translated it were human. Abraham was a Bronze Age figure reflecting Bronze Age circumstances and norms. Nevertheless, timeless truths can be extracted from these scriptures, even if we don’t take slaves or stone people to death anymore.

Faithful Jews and many Christians argue that the Abraham story requires careful, layered interpretation—hermeneutics—within historical and literary context rather than a superficial reading filled with invective and presentism. After all, these “goat herders” lived in a time of violence and privation. Conceptions of nature and nature’s God will reflect ancient life experiences, including harsh environs and the challenges of pastoralist life.

By contrast, Jesus lived in a time of relative peace and plenty under the Roman Empire. By today’s standards, of course, Galilean peasants would have lived in economic precarity and Roman oppression. But relative to Abraham, Jesus was at least willing and able to pay Caesar for his roads and aqueducts.

Yet the neo-Marcionists should ask whether even the Prince of Peace would consign all to Gehenna to suffer for eternity if they do not accept him as their savior. Consider:

• John 3:18: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

• Matthew 10:32: “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.”

• Matthew 25:41: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels… And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Secular presentists might turn their standards against the teachings of Jesus and his apostles in a manner reminiscent of Sotiris Rex. After all, eternal fire should strike us as a disproportionate punishment for those brought up in other faith traditions. Even the Old Testament prescribes an eye for an eye, which, though violent, is at least proportional. Of course, Christians argue among themselves about how to interpret these passages in a manner that recommends proportionality.

Annihilationists, for example, grant that the New Testament uses phrases like eternal punishment and eternal destruction, but interpret these as describing an irreversible outcome (final death and non-existence) rather than an endless experience of torment. “Eternal,” under this view, modifies the result, not the process, so the punishment is everlasting in effect, not in duration. This position is often defended as more consonant with a God who is just and whose punishments are not grotesquely out of proportion to a finite sin.​

But here again, the Gospels invite us to wrestle with theological and eschatological questions more than they demand we accept a perfect dogma.

We can, of course, acknowledge that the Abrahamic religions—including the Christianity favored by Sotiris Rex—have been abused for political purposes. But they’d also be able to point to their traditions’ contributions to ethics, proto-conceptions of human rights, and a penchant for wrestling with philosophical and theological conundrums. Indeed, relative to Bronze Age morality, the Hebrew Bible invites one to question unjust authority, too, not blindly submit to it. Moses was a liberator of slaves, after all, notwithstanding God’s harsh treatment of the Egyptians under Pharaoh.

And Job, who remains devoted despite all the indignities, questions God’s actions. Neo-marcionists might think Job’s God is eeeeeevil, but people of resilience and perseverance see a model in Job. One valuable lesson in Job is simply that life can be cruel and unfair, but you have to suck it up.

But back to Abraham.

The Binding of Isaac, despite its affront to our delicate modern sensibilities, symbolizes humanity’s wrestling with the question of God and his connection to goodness or piety, dating to around fifteen hundred years before Plato.

Recall Plato’s Euthyphro. Socrates encounters Euthyphro outside the court in Athens. Socrates is there to face charges of impiety, while Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father for manslaughter. When Euthyphro confidently claims to know what piety is, Socrates engages him in one of his dialogues. After running through several definitions, they arrive at a famous dilemma:

Is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?

The dilemma has endured as a fundamental question in the philosophy of religion: Does God command things because they are good, or are things good because God commands them? This touches on whether morality has an independent rational foundation or is purely a matter of divine authority.

Abraham be like: Trust me, I know. And Job? Eat your heart out, Plato.

But Sotiris Rex is not alone in his Old Testament bashing. Andy Stanley, an influential megachurch pastor, has urged Christians to “unhitch” their faith from the Old Testament, according to Duke Crux, a student journal. By Stanley’s lights, too many people were avoiding the church because they couldn’t handle the petulance and cruelty and weird laws of the Old Testament God. In a 2018 sermon series, Stanley said that “Peter, James, Paul elected to unhitch the Christian faith from their Jewish scriptures, and my friends, we must as well.” He went on to claim that “Jesus’s new covenant … can stand on its own two nail-scarred resurrection feet. It does not need propping up by the Jewish scriptures,” and told his audience that “your whole house of Old Testament cards can come tumbling down” without affecting the truth of Christianity.

More recently, the Israel-Palestine conflict and a fresh conflagration of anti-Jewish tropes have prompted more Christians to sever the Old Testament from the Bible and the Jewish influence from Christianity.

Tucker Carlson’s eulogy for Charlie Kirk strongly implied that a shadowy group of influential Jews conspired to kill Jesus and, by analogy, Charlie Kirk.​ (I hesitate to detour away from theology and ethics into political polemics, but that’s kind of what neo-Marcionism does.)

In his speech, Carlson described Jesus as someone who “starts talking about the people in power” and “tell[s] the truth,” prompting those people to become obsessed with making him stop. He then said he could “picture the scene … in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking!’” This is a pretty thinly veiled way of casting Jews as diabolical plotters behind Jesus’ death. But even if they were, surely it was part of God’s plan, and these particular Jews were God’s instruments in a chain of events that led to a sacrifice offered for sinful humanity for a chance at redemption.

According to neo-Marcionists, it’s not just that the God of the Old Testament is evil, Abraham is crazy, and the God of Genesis is just petulant and cruel; it’s that the Jews, not God, are responsible for the ultimate evil.

What follows is perhaps the strangest irony for neo-Marcionists:

The story of the Passion mirrors that of Abraham and Isaac.

The difference is that, this time, God didn’t intervene mercifully to save the son; instead, God let him suffer.

I realize Jesus is also God, according to Christians, so the trinitarian view presents some theological strangeness for us all to sort through. Still, by Rex’s rationale, if Abraham was crazy or evil for taking his son to be sacrificed because he heard an evil God’s voice in his head, what shall we say about a God who would send his only son to become flesh, knowing that he would ultimately be tortured and sacrificed? By Rex’s presentist standards, the God of the Passion who didn’t intervene is somehow considered less evil than the God of Abraham who did. To me, this mirroring of Jesus’s Crucifixion and Isaac’s Binding is as much a deep theological exploration as it is a perfect revealed truth.

But far from making the Abraham and Isaac story crazy or evil, much less calling into question Jesus’s father's ethics, both stories carry tons of mythic truth. And both Testaments of the Bible offer loads of literary genius. To be fair, neo-Marcionists are more concerned with ethics than aesthetics, but philosophy and art are close cousins.

I admit to being a sucker for the Old Testament. The ancient scribes and rabbis were brilliant, and, from a literary perspective, the Torah and the Tanakh contain heaping helpings of truth, beauty, and goodness. Qohelet’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes is rife with timeless insights. Despite the apparent futility (vanity) of life, it closes with an optimistic note tied to the simple joys of being together as a people. That book alone is a gold mine of timeless wisdom for anyone who thinks, feels, and lives a human life.

Don’t get me started on the poetry of the Psalms and the Song of Solomon.

In any case, said the agnostic seeker, attempts to separate Judaism from Christianity, or the Old Testament from the New Testament, are just vain attempts to cut away the roots of the West. Modern Marconians, like Muslims and Marxists, are iconoclasts. But even we contemporary Prometheans have deep moral and cultural roots in the Old Testament, which means, like it or not, we Westerners are all tied to this determined little tribe of Israelites.

The Jews have been sent from pillar to post by imperial powers for most of human history. Yet, they are still here, figuratively and literally—affirming life and doing their best to heal the world despite being hated, attacked, cleansed, and terrorized through history. They are part of our Western family. And their Hebrew Bible—which symbolizes their Covenant with God, their unity in diaspora, and their connection to all of us in the West—is an imperfect work of genius and paradox.

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas to the faithful.