Not My God

About the Book

Paul, an 18-year-old-Greek, falls in love with Phoebe, the Jewish daughter of the High Priest of the Temple at Tarsus.

To receive permission to marry, he must first convert to Judaism, involving the mutilation of circumcision and the study of the Torah.

Sent to Jerusalem, he is told by the priests that the Torah is the absolute word of God as given to Moses and is not to be questioned.

He finds many inaccuracies and repetitions and realizes that only part of it was written by Moses, that ancient scribes and greedy priests added the family histories and religios offerings later. He cannot tell his mentors of his doubts, so he writes them down privately.

He finds evidence in the Torah that the God of Moses was vain, jealous, angry, vindictive and murderous and that those are the same characteristics of Moses himself. He sees Moses as an extremely bigoted, completely intollerant religious fanatic who assumed the role of God to the Israelites.

After two years of study, Paul is appointed a Temple guard with the assignment to bring in members of a religious cult for questioning and possible trial for blasphemy. Anxious to complete the requirements and return to Tarsus, he aggressively pursues the members. He witnesses the crucifixion of Jesus and the stoning of Stephen.

He meets a man who, though not a disciple, had followed Jesus long enough to be able to tell Paul about his teachings. The man downplays the significance of the teachings of Jesus: The God of Jesus is not like the God of Moses but is a God of infinite love, mercy, and understanding.

Paul believes that this message needs to be given to the world and he is just the one to do it.

About the Author

The author is a retired radiation oncologist, a graduate of the University of Iowa and Harvard Medical School and former Professor of Medical Schools at Pittsburgh, and Nebraska.

The grandson of a Methodist minister, he was brought up in the usual Christian tradition of Sunday School and Church, being spoon fed various verses of the Bible without ever having read it in any great detail. In church he sang the hymns, repeated the creeds and contributed to the collection as everyone else did.

After retiring with more time to pursue non-medical subjects, he became intrigued by the actions of the primary protagonist of the Christian religion, St. Paul, as portrayed in "The Last Temptation of Christ" by Kazantzakis and in "Paul, the Mind of the Apostle" by Wilson.

Challenged to read the Torah in detail he began to understand Paul's utter dislike for circumcision and the laws of Moses and how Paul came to those conclusions.

The book Not My God tells the story of Paul as it might have happened.

I wasn't born a Jew but I became one for the love of a woman.

At the well there was a young Jewish girl, a dark-haired beauty with a lovely smile and flashing dark eyes.

Phoebe wept so hard and so long that her face became haggard and she wouldn't eat. At this point her father relented but only if I would agree to convert to become a Jew. This would involve my being circumcised and the study of the Torah until I could quote many of the passages from memory, and, pass a text by the priests on its contents.

Converting to Judaism for the purpose of marrying a Jewish girl was not a good reason for converting to Judaism which should be based on truly wanting to believe in the Jewish faith, follow their laws and customs, and not for the reason I gave.

So began my study of the Torah in Greek. I had difficulty with the Torah from the very beginning. When I had the temerity to ask a question, I was sternly rebuked. The Torah was the absolute word of God as given by God to Moses and was not to be questioned, just memorized. I never again asked any questions of any importance but they persisted in my mind.

The possibility that this was a law of God was so ridiculous that to me it proved that the laws of the Torah were those of the man, Moses, and not those of almighty God. To me this particular law was the epitome of the proof that the laws were not given to Moses by God, but were of Moses' own doing.

I wondered if Moses had really talked to God, or if being the Patriarch of his people realized the need for more order and direction that they had received previously, and by himself had carved the Commandments on the stone tablets.

I recognized so many discrepancies and repetitions that I decided to write them down for my own benefit. They were so numerous that I decided that the Torah could not have been written by only one person unless that person was incredibly forgetful and, also, had not taken the trouble to go back and review what had been written.

Of course, my decision that the story was nothing but an allegory proved to me that some ancient scribe had inserted the story into the written word and that, therefore, all in the Torah was not the absolute word of God as told to Moses. This opened up to me the probability that many portions of the Torah were not the words of God. I dared not say this to my teachers, however.

I decided that anyone who believed that the Torah was the absolute word of God as given to Moses hadn't read it. There were numerous repetitions, contradictions, and inaccuracies which a single writer would have recognized.

There were in Genesis, for example: disobedience of God, murder, incest, drunkenness, cowardice, lying, adultery, indifference to life, cheating, rape, thievery, solicitation for prostitution, whoredom, deceit, idolatry, slavery, jealousy, and intent to murder, not to mention others not entered by the scribes.

The God of Moses was vain, jealous, angry, vindictive, and murderous, all of the characteristics of Moses himself, who was the most bigoted, intolerant, religious fanatic who ever lived. That God of Moses existed only in the mind of Moses, and Moses used his idea of God as a weapon to force Moses' beliefs on the Israelites.

The enormity of the numbers of people and animals in the Exodus is mind staggering. At Mr. Horeb, which they reached in three months, a census revealed over six hundred thousand men of the fighting age of thirty to fifty. (EX. 12:37) there would have been older and younger men, boys, wives, widows, divorced women, and young girls. In addition to the Jews there were other people of untold numbers with them. (Ex. 12:38)

Throughout the Torah there is always the IF: If they keep all of the commandments, statutes, and judgements they will receive blessings. IF they don't keep them, they will be afflicted with terrible consequences.

Yahweh is the only God of Midian and is the same name by which Moses refers to God. Moses must have gotten his concept of a single God from the teachings of Jethro.

Until I read the Torah where the numerous offerings were described in detail I had never realized that all of the rules, laws and rituals of my Greek religion and those of all religions were designed and promulgated by those most likely to benefit from them, the priests.

In essence, the plethora of gods and beliefs are the inventions of the shrewd misleading the ignorant, superstitious and illiterate. There are multiple sun, moon, sky, and other gods for all types of earthly happenings, and for all ranges of human emotions and point out that no one really knows the true nature of god, but that hasn't stopped them from saying that they do.

Jeboam then asked me if I would like to be a temple guard. I wasn't eager to become one, but this was a sign of their approval of my efforts and might hasten my examination on the Torah, faster acceptance as a Jew, with a chance to return to Phoebe much sooner than I had anticipated.

I accepted the guard position and so began one of the most dreadful episodes of my life, for only a few weeks in the outer court, I was assigned to go with other guards to capture memebers of a cult that they had heard was blaspheming God.

Their leader, Lucas, began by admonishing them and reminding them of what they believed. From what I can remember he told them that Jesus had said that he was the Way, the Truth, and the Light, and that no man came to the Father except through him.

What arrogance, I thought! Could this Jesus be another like Moses? At least I found out why they called themselves The Way.

Several weeks later, the other group of guards brought in Jesus himself. He was much younger than I would have imagined from the seriousness of his teachings.

This was the first time I had actually been present at a crucifixion, and it overwhelmed me to the point of tears. when they drove the spikes into his wrists and feet, I could almost feel the pain myself and my hands were so sweaty that I imagined it was blood from the spike wounds.

The priests of every religion, no matter how different, have perpetuated the myths of their god being the only true god, that all other gods that people worship are false gods and their followers are heathens. As infidels to the true god, these people deserve to be destroyed and have been massacred by the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, over the years.

Religion is the bane of the world, and tradition is its nemesis. Ancient rites, rituals, and laws that are obsolete are taught to be followed because they