One of my favorites is Jonah 3:3 which informs us that Nineveh (the capital of the powerful Assyrian empire) was an exceedingly great city, three day's journey across! Based on old traveler's accounts that gives a city 60 miles in diameter. Holy jumping rats! That's bigger than Los Angeles. Fact: Archaeologists have shown that Nineveh was never more than about 3 miles in diameter. Several desperate attempts have been made to rationalize that ghastly problem, but I won't bore you with them. They are all huge stretches of the imagination.

Jonah is full of good stuff in addition to that whale of a tale.

Another favorite of mine is Jonah's trip to Nineveh where he converts all its people! That would be a little like some obscure preacher going to the old Soviet Union under Stalin and converting everyone overnight!! Of course, there are no recorded celebrations. It's hard to think of anything more perfectly absurd!

Then there's that little matter in Leviticus where God confuses mold and leprosy. You sense the confusion by noting the similarity of treatment, the near panic. The Hebrew word for "leprosy" (perhaps meaning corruption or some such thing since they were not into detailed classification of diseases) is used throughout even though many translations of the Bible use "mold" in places where that makes sense in modern-day thinking.

For sheer number of contradictions attached to one story, it's hard to beat Peter's denial of Jesus. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John contradict themselves in numerous places. List their accounts side by side and you will see what I mean if you read them carefully.

Yet another favorite of mine is the completely different stories that Matthew and Luke come up with to get Mary to Bethlehem so that Jesus could be born there in fulfillment of some prophecy it seems. Normally the two copy from Mark, but Mark has nothing to say about Jesus' early life. So, Matthew and Luke have to scrounge around in the scriptures to fill in the blanks--and apparently they latched onto different passages on which their conflicting accounts might have been built. Hence, you get some rare insight into how the Gospels were actually written. Hint: they weren't eyewitness history!

I have many.

WHAT WOULD YOU BE

if you were born THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO

in the American Southwest into the culture known as

T H E A N A S A Z I

Would you be a Catholic? a Muslim? a Hindu? or a Baptist? Would you be a Christadelphianist? an Eckankarian? a Unificationist? or a Transcendentalist?

No. Those religions were invented many thousands of years later by people living on an entirely different continent. Their stories and psalms would not reach your location until long after you and your decendants had passed away. There would be no such thing as the above religions and no one to tell you otherwise.

Would you feel dismayed by your belief in shamanism and seek another?

No. This type of belief was held by all of the people that ever inhabited the prehistoric North American continent. It would be the only belief of your time and for hundreds of thousands of generations thereafter - well into the earlier part of the 20th century.

Would you or your children be able to tell if this belief in sorcery contained hints of false worship?

No. There would be no evidence found anywhere that points to this suggestion. Your ancient beliefs would be the correct belief to you and your decendants and would play an extremely important role in your lives. The religions mentioned above were not even invented yet, let alone published in a book and distributed for the world to see. It is impossible to deduce any particular religion by looking at the stars and the trees. It must be taught to you by others who were taught in much the same way.

Would you have a way of knowing if there was another religion that you should be practicing and worshipping?

No. It would be many thousands of years into your future before people from other continents arrived to convert you to their relatively modern belief system through oppression and persecution. Because of your timeline and location, you wouldn't have the slightest idea of the mythical tales of Adam and Eve, Jesus, Moses or Muhammad. Such legends were not yet invented and many of its icons were not even born yet.

Do you think that these Ancient Pueblos were born....

..... in the WRONG PLACE

...... at the WRONG TIME?