That was one of the questions asked of presidential candidate George W. Bush. And his answer? Jesus Christ!

Did Bush know what he was talking about? Let's see by examining what Jesus did accept as truth. By looking at what he found and accepted in his Bible, the Old Testament, we can see what Jesus really did believe.

1. Luke 17.26-27: here Jesus says: „As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the" days of the Son of man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all."Matthew 24.37-39: „As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man. For in those days before the flood…" How many scholars still accept this fable of the mid-East as true? Shouldn't a philosopher as great as Jesus have known better?

2. Matthew 12.40: „For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Never mind that Jesus didn't know that his Bible said nothing about a „whale"; it simply says „fish" (Jonah 1.17). It's enough to know that instead of the fish swallowing Jonah, it was Jesus who swallowed the fish story!

3. Luke 17.32: „Remember Lot's wife." Jesus also believed that Lot's wife had in fact turned into a pillar of salt.

4. Luke 20.37-38: „But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the burning bush… [that God] is not the God of the dead, but of the living…" This shows that Jesus believed in this theology too.

5. Luke 17.29: „The same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone." This is another tall tale accepted by Jesus.

6. John 6.49: „Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness…" An unsophisticated man would have believed this story, as did Jesus.

7. Mark 10.6: „But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female." This shows that Bush's favorite „philosopher" naively accepted the tale of Adam and Eve. Jesus also acknowledged that several persons from his Hebrew Bible were real. Isaiah: Jesus didn't know there were at least two authors of „Isaiah." Elijah: through his miracles he expands a meager supply of food and brings a dead child back to life, foretelling the same miracles by Christ). Daniel: although this book tells of the fidelity of this prophet and his friends to their religion, clearly Jesus was unaware that the book is a fraud because the prophecies that were true were written after the fact, and the prophecies that didn't come true were written before the fact. Abel: the tale of him and his murderous brother Cain was merely an allegory about the clash of wandering tribes and those who became settled. Moses: the greatest lawgiver and prophet of Jesus' people, wasn't even buried in the land of Canaan his people had conquered, let alone was made into a god-man. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: Jesus clearly wasn't aware that these patriarchs were merely symbols, not historical persons.

In regard to all these references he found in his Bible, we must conclude that since Jesus did not merely allude to these stories, he authenticated the events in them as factual history to be trusted completely. In the face of these gross errors, how in the world can the President of the United States say without laughing that Jesus is his favorite philosopher?  

Published in the 2003 July/August issue of the American Rationalist ©.