It all started with a simple question.
The dynamic in our household was supposed to be simple. I had been a Christian for my entire life. She had come to faith as an adult. I was supposed to be the one with answers.
I had grown up in the pews of a Baptist church, sang in the choir, committed the verses to memory in Sunday school and Bible study, defended the Bible against non-believers, and devoured apologetics content with the goal of getting better at defending the faith. I wanted to be the person who had an answer for everything.
My wife, on the other hand, is a person who has always had more questions than answers. She lacked the decades of conditioning I had inherited. She read the Bible with fresh eyes, without the “this is just how we interpret it” dogma I had built over a lifetime. And as a relative newcomer to the faith, she asked the questions I had never thought twice about.
It was Holy Week. We had just finished watching The King of Kings, an animated movie about the Jesus story, and we were reading through the Gospels together leading up to Resurrection Sunday. I promise I wasn’t looking for an exit nor drifting away. Honestly, I had never been more excited about Easter, fully committing myself to dive deeper into the story.
So, when we sat down at the table that evening for Bible study, my Good Book open, I was ready to be the spiritual leader, the head of our household, allegedly. Ready to teach.
She asked me, “So, why did Jesus have to ride the donkey into Jerusalem?”
I smiled, overly confident. This was Christian Theology 101. For someone who wanted to be an apologist, this was easy money. A softball question.
Allegedly.
“To fulfill the prophecy,” I said. “Zechariah predicted the Messiah would come on a donkey.”
I turned to Matthew 21 to show her the footnotes. I wanted to show her how the pieces fit together: how the Old Testament pointed to what the New Testament claimed to fulfill. But as I read the text and cross-referenced the Old Testament, I saw something I’d missed for my entire life.
I pulled the thread.
the thread i pulled
The “prophecy” in Zechariah 9:9 wasn’t talking about a distant future figure, but was about someone in Zechariah’s own time: a king returning victorious, riding on a donkey, humbly, instead of on a war horse. The very next verse makes it pretty clear: “He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea.” This is the description a king establishing military peace and global rule — not a wandering preacher executed by the empire he was supposed to be conquering.
But what troubled me a bit wasn’t really Zechariah.
It was Matthew.
I realized that the Gospel authors weren’t recording history as we understand it… they were mining the Hebrew Scriptures for verses they could rip out of context as prooftexts to legitimize Jesus as the Messiah. They were writing backwards, starting with their conclusion that Jesus is the Messiah, then searched the texts to find details they could sculpt into his life to make it true.
I paused for a while as my confidence wavered a bit. I looked for just one Messianic prophecy that Jesus clearly, objectively fulfilled — one that couldn’t be explained away as retrofitting.
I couldn’t find one.
The suffering servant of Isaiah 53? Read in context (starting from Isaiah 49, where the servant is explicitly called “Israel”) it’s about the nation, or the prophet himself. The messianic reading came much later, post-crucifixion.
The virgin birth in Isaiah 7:14? A mistranslation, the Hebrew word almah means “young woman,” but the Septuagint translated it as “virgin,” and Matthew ran with it. The original prophecy was about a child born in King Ahaz’s time.
The birthplace prophecy of Micah 5:2? It’s about the origin of the Davidic dynasty: David was from Bethlehem. Most scholars think Jesus was actually from Nazareth, and the birth narratives were shaped to fit the verse. Notice that Matthew and Luke don't even agree on how Jesus ended up being born there — one has the family fleeing to Egypt from Herod, the other has them traveling for a census ordered by Caesar Augustus.
“They pierced my hands and my feet” in Psalm 22? The Hebrew is disputed amongst scholars; it may read “like a lion at my hands and feet,” not “pierced.” Either way, it’s a psalm of lament, not even a messianic prophecy. David is describing his own suffering and not predicting a crucifixion centuries later.
The count wasn’t five, nor three, not even one. It was zero. Every single “fulfilled prophecy” required the New Testament authors to misread the Hebrew, mistranslate a word, or strip a verse entirely from its original historical context to make it fit.
The thread was unraveling in my hands. If the prophecies were literary inventions, then what about the lineage?
I turned to the genealogy. Matthew traces Jesus back to Abraham, but Luke traces him all the way back to Adam.
But not only do the two genealogies differ in length — they contradict each other entirely, listing different ancestors for nearly every single generation. Both claim to trace Joseph’s lineage, yet they can’t even agree on who Joseph’s father was.
There was the next snag. To accept Jesus as the “Second Adam” coming to redeem the fall of the first, I had to accept the First Adam as historical.
This forced a question I had been dodging for years, even as a child. I had always loved science: I found evolution and the Big Bang fascinating to learn about. But as a Young Earth Creationist, I had been required to reject them. I had spent years compartmentalizing, enjoying learning concepts while denying their reality. I even told myself things like, “What if God just created an old-looking earth?”
Literally anything to avoid the obvious.
But looking at that genealogy, the wall collapsed. I understood enough about biology, genetics, and human origins to recognize there was no literal Garden, no Adam and Eve 6,000 years ago, and no “Fall” as a historical event.
So… if Adam wasn’t literal, then the genealogy was metaphorical.
If the genealogy was metaphorical, and the prophecies were retrofitted, then where did the history start?
I kept pulling the thread.
I looked into the origin story of Israel: the Exodus. The entire identity of the Jewish people — and the character of the God who delivers them from Pharaoh — practically rests on the narrative of Egyptian bondage, the mass escape, crossing the sea, and the conquest of Canaan.
I had heard the whispers that the archaeology didn’t support the story, so I picked up The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. I needed to see the findings for myself. I wanted receipts.
Instead of answers, I found a verdict. There is no evidence of a mass population of Israelites in Egypt. There is no trace of two million people wandering the Sinai. There was no violent, sweeping conquest of Jericho nor Canaan. The Israelites were Canaanites who slowly developed a distinct identity amongst themselves.
And this wasn’t any fringe internet conspiracy. I wasn’t reading atheist blogs or anything. I was reading mainstream, respectable biblical scholarship. This is what professors at major universities and seminaries have known for decades. The information simply never made the journey from the seminary to the sanctuary.
I promise, I wasn’t trying to deconstruct.
I was only trying to explain why Jesus rode a donkey.
But the text I was holding suddenly felt less like a history book and more like ancient mythology.
the foundation crumbles
Once the Old Testament narrative began to look like folktales, I pivoted to the New Testament. At least we have Jesus, I thought. We have the eyewitnesses, right?
…Right?
Turns out, we don't.
Not one author of the New Testament even met Jesus. The Gospels were written decades after his death, anonymously, by highly educated Greek speakers, not Aramaic-speaking (likely illiterate) fishermen. They were writing down the already circulating oral traditions: stories that had been passed down, translated, and edited for forty to sixty years before anyone put them to paper.
Scholars have known for a while that Matthew and Luke copied large sections directly from Mark and a lost sayings source known as “Q,” editing the material to serve their own theological and political agendas. We’re a few layers removed from anything Jesus actually said.
The legend grew across the decades, we see it in the Gospels:
- Mark (circa 70 CE, roughly 40 years after Jesus’s death): Jesus is an apocalyptic preacher adopted by God at his baptism. There's no mention of a virgin birth. The original manuscripts end with the women fleeing the tomb in fear after his crucifixion — the familiar resurrection appearances (Mark 16:9-20) were added by scribes centuries later (you should see the note in your Bible).
- John (circa 90–100 CE, roughly 60–70 years after Jesus’s death): Jesus is the preexistent Word, there at the beginning, claiming equality with God.
Even the stories we all love, like the woman caught in adultery (”let him who is without sin cast the first stone”), are absent from the earliest manuscripts. They are later insertions, not a part of history.
Between them, the theology had shifted. And the Christianity I practiced didn't seem to be shaped by Jesus, but by Paul, and by the anonymous writers who continued to write in his name.
I couldn't ignore the difference once I finally saw it.
Jesus preached the Kingdom of God: an apocalyptic vision, yes, but one that demanded radical transformation of behavior and care for the poor. He told people to follow him, to act, to do. The end was near, and how you lived mattered.
Paul, however, preached the Kingdom of Christ. He turned the message from a way of life into a theological transaction based on believing the right things.
Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, instructions on how to live. Paul gave us the Romans Road to Salvation, instructions on what to believe.
I realized that for my whole life, I hadn’t been a follower of Jesus, but only a theologian of Paul. The faith had shifted from “love your neighbor” to “believe the right doctrines,” and I had never noticed the switch.
the god behind the curtain
And the deeper I dug, the less monotheistic the Bible even looked.
I turned to scholars like Mark S. Smith and Francesca Stavrakopoulou (historians and scholars on the Ancient Near East and early Yahwism), who traced Yahweh’s origins. I learned that Yahweh wasn’t always known as “God.”
He started as a storm and warrior deity, one god amongst many in the Canaanite pantheon (the Divine Council) — son of El, the leader of the pantheon. “Elyon,” meaning “Most High,” was originally a title for El. It was only later, as Yahweh absorbed El’s characteristics, did the title transfer to him. The God of my childhood didn't start as one, but several deities, merged over centuries.
Monotheism wasn’t a mere revelation, but an evolution: a type of political consolidation that happened centuries later.
And just as God evolved, so did his nemesis. In the Hebrew Bible, “the satan” isn’t a cosmic villain but a member of the divine council, a prosecutor performing a specific role (see Job). The devil of modern Christianity, the adversary of God, was a later development, heavily influenced by Persian dualism.
This context suddenly explained the moral atrocities that had always bothered me. Why did God command genocide? Why did he permit, command, and regulate slavery rather than ban it? Why did he treat women as property?
- The Apologetic Answer: “God’s ways are higher than ours,” or “It was a different time.” (so much for objective moral goodness, I guess)
- The Historical Answer: These texts were written by Iron Age men projecting their tribal warfare and social structures onto their tribal deity.
I also had to come to grips with the Bible’s physical description of the cosmos and the deity itself. Reading Stavrakopoulou’s God: An Anatomy, I realized the biblical authors weren’t describing a metaphysical, shapeless spirit. They believed in a God with a physical body: hands, feet, and nostrils that smelled their burning sacrifices. The abstract, tri-omni, philosophical God — omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, immaterial — wasn’t the original. That conception emerged centuries later, when Jewish and Christian thinkers began filtering their scriptures through Greco-Roman philosophy (thank you Plato).
Furthermore, the world they described was scientifically wrong. The Bible describes a flat earth covered by a solid dome called the firmament (Genesis 1:6-8), upon which God literally sat (Isaiah 40:22, Ezekiel 1:26). It doesn’t describe the solar system that we know exists today, but only the cosmos Iron Age people thought existed. The flood, the conquest, the firmament: these were the best guesses of ancient people trying to explain their way through the world.
the world we actually see
Beyond the texts and the history, I eventually had to look at the world around me.
Theologians like to talk about the “Problem of Evil,” but for me, it became a problem of logic. The claim of a tri-omni God — omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent — simply does not match the reality of the world we see.
Many apologists often blame suffering on “The Fall”: the idea that human sin broke the world. But that argument falls flat on two counts.
First, timing. Animals were suffering, hunting, dying of cancer, and going extinct for billions of years before a human ever set foot on earth. Their suffering is not a consequence of our sin, but the basic operating system of life on Earth. How does non-human animal suffering fit into a theology of “sin”?
It doesn’t.
They were tearing each other apart long before we arrived.
Second, design. Even if we grant the premise of sin, who designed these consequences? God didn’t just create the rule against eating the fruit, he is also responsible for the punishment. He decided that the consequence of disobedience would be a world of agony and pain. An all-powerful God could have created a universe where the consequence of sin was a loss of intimacy, or some spiritual darkness, or literally anything other than infant bone cancer. He chose the punishment.
But the one that sealed the deal was the concept of Heaven.
Christians believe in Heaven: a perfect place with no suffering, no pain, no tears nor sorrow. If such a place is possible, why didn’t/couldn't an all-powerful God create that world first? The standard defense for suffering on earth is “free will”, that we can't have love/goodness without the choice to do evil. But does free will exist in Heaven?
Either way, the defense falls flat.
If free will exists in Heaven, then free will does not require school shootings and bone cancer. It proves God could have created a world with both freedom and safety, but chose not to.
If free will does not exist in Heaven, then Heaven is no more than prison.
If God is capable of creating a reality where free will and perfection are able to coexist (Heaven), then the suffering on Earth is entirely unnecessary. Why build a planet that runs on pain for fuel? Why the cancer, the tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, and the food chain built on suffering?
I know theologians have spilled centuries of ink (and blood) on this. But I couldn't find an answer that could make infant bone cancer feel like anything other than a design flaw.
When I viewed the world through the lens of a loving Creator, it looked cruel and broken. When I changed that view through the lens of evolution and geology, it wasn't comfortable but it was honest. Not quite the answer I wanted, but it was the only one that fit our observable reality.
the anthropological reality
Then I had to face the final, most uncomfortable truth of all:
Geography is destiny.
If I had been born in Mecca, I would be a Muslim. In Varanasi, Hindu.
I didn’t arrive at Christianity through investigation. I arrived there because I was born in the US to Black Christian parents.
They had Christianity handed down to them through colonialism, slavery, and forced conversion. What my ancestors built from it was theirs. But the origin remains.
Anthropologists can look at a civilization’s environment and social/political structure and predict, with amazing certainty, what gods they will worship.
Warlike societies produce warrior gods. Agricultural communities center fertility deities. Patriarchies create father figures in the sky. When people fear the chaos of nature, they invent storm gods and sky gods who control the weather. When societies are built on hierarchy, their gods enforce it.
Give an anthropologist a people’s geography, economy, and social structure, and they can sketch your god before you tell them his/her/their name.
I realized I wasn’t holding on to some divine truth, but only an artifact of the culture around me.
after the asterisk
For years, I looked at the gaps in my understanding and knowledge — the complexity of the universe and the coincidences of life — and I filled them with God. I called that “mystery.”
But I have come to realize that everything is a mystery if you lack enough information.
I confused gaps in my knowledge for concrete evidence of the divine. And when I finally gathered enough information — archaeological, historical, scriptural, theological, anthropological — the “mystery” didn't deepen. It dissolved.
I am not angry at the people who taught me.
They believed it, too. But I can't unknow what I know.
I know some will say I never really believed — that I just memorized verses without the “relationship”. Not only did I believe, I felt it. I wept at altars, sensed the presence in worship, heard what I thought was God’s voice in prayer even when moving across the country with much uncertainty. Those experiences were real to me. I just no longer believe they require a supernatural explanation.
Others will say these stories were never meant to be taken literally. But that reading is a modern theological retreat: an escape hatch invented after science made the literal claims no longer credible. Paul believed Adam was real. Augustine believed in a recent creation and a real Adam. The authors of these texts believed them.
So did I. And when I discovered they weren’t true, I couldn’t act like the metaphor had been the point all along.
And the irony is, I can still find value in the message of Jesus: to care for the poor, practice radical forgiveness, show love for the outcast, speak up for the oppressed — all these things without believing he was a god. In fact, those teachings are profound enough on their own without needing magic to validate them. I can follow the wisdom without bowing to the deity.
Funnily enough, I love the Bible now more than ever. Seeing it as a human work, rather than a divine one, gives me deeper insight into the human experience. These were people staring into the same void we stare into today, asking the same questions about suffering and meaning and life and death, filling their gaps the same way we try to fill ours.
And I find that beautiful.
I have traded certainty and dogma for the honesty of “I don’t know.”
It turns out, she was right to ask.
The world is still full of questions. But now, like her, I get to sit with them instead of scrambling for answers. Every book I read, every story I hear adds to the picture.
Not as a puzzle I have to complete, but a mosaic I get to watch come together.