First we took the Talmud. Then the Quran.
For those coming in here, the premise is this -
Every time someone writes about Jews, Muslims or Christians, someone turns up in the comments with the same few sentences, meant to expose the whole faith at once. Always with a verse number after them, so it looks as if someone looked something up. Almost no one has. The sentences are clipped from pamphlets or seen on TikTok, they have set the feelings on fire, and then they are passed on in the belief that they have some footing in reality. Because on the surface they look like knowledge.
So I took one book at a time and asked the same three questions of the sentences we see again and again.
Is it actually in the book?
Because much of it is not.
What does the line before and the line after say?
Because a verse without its context can prove anything.
And did it ever become law?
Because that is the question that decides everything. A hard sentence that one scholar said, and that the others wrote down and rejected, is one thing. A hard sentence that became rules, laws and arrangement, that people could be judged by, is something else entirely.
The posts are not a contest about who has the prettiest verses. All three books have hard sides. It is a question of what each tradition did with them. Because that is what decides which Human Being it raises, and therefore which society that Human Being builds.
And after the first two posts came what had to come.
"Now we are only missing your own."
It comes from those who think that I, as a Christian, will not turn the knife on my own faith, my own culture and my own society. As if I had not done it every single week for years.
But yes. Now it comes.
And it comes for the only reasonable reason there is. I live here. It is mine. And so the critique must not merely be as precise as the other two. It must be sharper, so it cuts the infection free where it can be seen. And then it must do what I did not owe the other two. It must say what we do about it.
So. I go harder at this one than I went at the other two. Not because I must. Because I can. And I know full well what it will stir, both in those who have waited for it and in those who would rather have been spared.
Same place. Same method. Same three questions.
And I say what I find.
Here it is.
....
First, what it is.
Jerusalem, around the year 30. The Romans have occupied the country, and the Jews are waiting for a king who will throw them out. And then comes a carpenter's son from Nazareth, a backwater in Galilee so insignificant that one of his own disciples asks whether anything good can come from there at all.
Jesus walks around for three years and talks. To fishermen, tax collectors, whores, lepers. To the people no one talks to. He heals, they say, and he tells stories no one quite understands, about a father who runs to meet his lost son, and about a Samaritan, one of the wrong sort, who is the only one who stops. He eats with sinners. He says the last shall be first. And he says something no Jew can say without being stoned - that he and the Father are one.
He does not write a single line.
Then he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, a week before Passover, and people shout king.
That is too much. For the high priests, who have a temple and a fragile peace with Rome to look after. And for Rome, which does not tolerate kings it has not appointed itself. So the two powers, who otherwise hate each other, find common ground in what powers always find common ground in when they are pressed. One who can die in place of all. The high priest says it himself, quite openly, and it is in the book - it is better that one man die for the people than that the whole people perish.
And the people who shouted "king" on Sunday shout "crucify him" on Friday. They are the same people. They are always the same people.
Five days after the donkey he is executed by the Romans as a rebel, outside the city, between two robbers. His friends have run. One has denied knowing him three times. Another has sold him.
That should have been the end. It was the end for all the others who called themselves Messiah in those years, and there were several.
And then comes the thing his friends say they cannot keep quiet about. Sunday morning the tomb is empty.
That is all of it. Everything else was written afterwards.
...
Four men write his life down in the period forty to seventy years later, in Greek, a language he probably did not speak day to day. They do not agree on everything. The order, what was said on the cross, who came first to the tomb. And they were not corrected to fit. They were allowed to stand, all four, side by side.
Then come the letters. And the man who writes them is the second strangest thing in the whole story.
Saul of Tarsus was his name. Pharisee, learned in the law, and the most zealous persecutor the first Christians had. He stood minding the cloaks while they stoned the first of them, Stephen, and went into the houses and dragged men and women off to prison. He writes it himself, afterwards, without dressing it up.
He was on his way to Damascus to fetch more Christians for punishment when something happened on the road. A meeting he could not explain.
He never came home the same. And he spent the rest of his life spreading what he had tried to wipe out - he was flogged, stoned, imprisoned and finally, by tradition, beheaded in Rome for it.
And he had never met Jesus alive.
He is the one who writes to the congregations in Rome, Corinth, Galatia. Now under the name he carried out into the world, Paul. Thirteen letters bear his name, seven of them are certainly his own. And it is these that build Christianity up as a faith. The gospels tell what happened. Paul tells what it means.
Now notice the strangest thing of all.
Not one of those who said the tomb was empty took it back. Not when it cost them the synagogue, not when it cost them their freedom, and by tradition not when it cost them their lives. People die for things they believe. They do it all the time. But people do not die for something they themselves know is a lie. And these people knew whether the tomb was empty or not. They had been there.
That does not prove why the tomb was empty. It proves that those who had stood in it were willing to die on the fact that it was.
And then there is what they said afterwards. That he came to them. Behind locked doors. On the road to Emmaus, without them recognising him until he broke the bread. By the lake, where he had made breakfast. Thomas, who would not believe it until he had put his fingers in the wounds, and was allowed to.
It is not one account. It is a dozen, from different people, in different places, over forty days. And Paul writes, twenty years later, that there were five hundred at once, and that most of them were still alive, so you could ask them.
That is what they died on. Not an empty tomb. A man they had eaten with afterwards.
...
Which books belong is decided slowly. Only in the year 367, in an Easter letter from a bishop in Alexandria, are the 27 writings we call the New Testament listed as they stand today. Three hundred years after the tomb.
And here is the first difference.
The Talmud is a dispute. The Quran is one voice.
The New Testament is four witnesses and a bundle of letters.
And notice what is not there. There is no law book. No penal code, no inheritance law, no rules for the state. There is a man who says "judge not", "put your sword back in its sheath" and "my kingdom is not of this world". And there is a Jew who writes that the law is now written on the heart.
That is all the book gives you to build a society with.
Hold on to that. Because that is what the rest of this post is about.
....
So who decides what it means?
In Judaism - the conversation.
In Islam - the chain.
And in Christianity?
The office.
Already in the year 325, the emperor Constantine summons three hundred bishops to Nicaea to decide who Jesus was. And they vote on it. It becomes a creed we still recite. And the one who lost, Arius, is sent into exile, and his books are burned on the emperor's orders.
I want you to see this clearly.
It is the year 325.
The Church has held power for twelve years.
And already books are being burned in its name.
It is impossible not to laugh and shake your head while writing it. But that is how the history is. And it is in the Church's own chronicles.
And here you should notice something, if you have read the other two posts.
Islam has ijma. When the scholars agree, the question is closed forever.
The Church got the same. A council decides, and then it is dogma, and dogma cannot be opened again. In 1870 they went a step further and declared the pope "infallible" when he speaks from his chair.
So the gate I wrote about in Islam existed here too. The Church built it itself. Out of stone.
The difference is not that Christianity had no gate. The difference is that the gate is not in the book. Nowhere in the New Testament does it say that an assembly of bishops can close a question for eternity. The Church made that up. And that is worse, not better. Because Islam did what was written. The Church did something that was not.
....
So where do the sentences come from, the ones sent around in your comment threads and mine every time I write about faith and Christianity?
The same ones, always. "Religion has killed more than anything else." "The Crusades." "The Inquisition." "The witches." "The Church has always stood in the way of science." With a name after them, Galileo, Bruno, so it looks as if someone looked it up.
They too come from pamphlets.
And they are as old as the others.
Around the year 178 a Greek philosopher, Celsus, writes the first. Christianity is a religion for slaves, women and children, and Jesus was a conjurer who learned his tricks in Egypt. We only have his book because a Christian quoted it in order to refute it.
In the 1760s Voltaire signs all his letters with three words - crush the infamous thing. The infamous thing is the Church.
In 1888 Nietzsche writes that Christianity is slave morality, the revenge of the weak on the strong, and that the only Christian died on the cross.
And today. Hitchens, Dawkins. "God is not great." And a hundred thousand posts online with the same four points.
But here too there was another voice. And it is worth remembering where it came from.
The man who in the 1700s most consistently said that no one may be forced to believe, John Locke, grounded it in the gospel. The man who founded the first society in the world with full religious freedom, Rhode Island in 1636, Roger Williams, was a minister and did it because Jesus never forced anyone. And the man who got the slave trade abolished in the British Empire, Wilberforce, did it with the Bible in hand AGAINST a church that had blessed the slave ships.
The pamphlet reads no line before.
And it does not read who abolished the thing it complains about.
....
So when someone sends you a verse, it can be one of three things. And they are the same three.
It can be something that is not there at all.
It can be something that is there, but means something else when you read it in context.
Or it can be something that is there, and is every bit as hard as it sounds.
And here comes the first surprise. Because in Christianity, most of what people throw around is of the first kind. Something that is not there at all. Not because the critics are lying. But because the Christians themselves added it.
First, what is not there.
"God helps those who help themselves." Nowhere. That is Benjamin Franklin, 1736. And the gospel says very nearly the opposite.
"Money is the root of all evil." Not there. It says "the love of money". That is an entirely different sentence with a radically different meaning.
"Seven deadly sins." Not in the Bible. A monk in the 300s made the list, and Pope Gregory revised it.
Purgatory. Not in the Bible. Celibacy for priests. Not in the Bible, Peter had a mother-in-law. That the pope is Christ's vicar on earth. Not in the Bible. That the Jews are cursed. Not in the Bible, Paul writes the opposite in Romans 11.
And the whole apparatus, heresy tribunals, papal bulls, church tax, that judged Europe for a thousand years, has not a single verse to rest on.
Not one.
That is where Christianity differs from the other two.
Judaism's law is in the Torah. Islam's law is in the Quran and the hadith. The Church's law was in the Church.
It was homemade.
.
Then what is there, but means something else.
"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Matthew 10:34. It is there. And the next verse explains what the sword is. It is that a son will turn against his father, and a daughter against her mother, for the faith's sake. It is a split in the family. Not a weapon.
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother." Luke 14:26. It is there. And it is the Semitic way of saying "loves less than". He says in the same book that you shall honour your father and mother.
"And my enemies, those who would not have me as king, bring them here and cut them down in front of me." Luke 19:27. It is there, and it is sent around as proof that Jesus ordered executions. It is the last sentence of a parable, a made-up story about a king, and the king in the story is not Jesus. Whoever sends you that verse has not read the ten verses before it.
And then the verse that has done more damage than any other in that book, because it was read as if it meant something other than it does.
"Compel them to come in." Luke 14:23. It is from a parable about a man who holds a feast, and the guests do not come, so he sends his servants out onto the roads to bring in the poor. An image of God's generosity.
Augustine, the greatest thinker in the history of the Church, took those four words in the year 408 and used them to justify that heretics may be forced by violence. And for a thousand years that was the Church's legal basis for coercion.
Four words about a dinner.
So. It is the same rule as in the other two books. A verse without the line before can prove anything. And in this book it was proven by the Church itself.
.
And then what is there, and is hard. Because it exists. And one must not pretend it does not.
THE JEWS. "His blood be on us and on our children." Matthew 27:25. It is the people of Jerusalem who shout it when Pilate washes his hands. It is one sentence in one book. And that sentence was for sixteen hundred years read as a judgment on all Jews for all time. It was the reason for the ghettos, for the expulsions, for Luther's book of 1543, "On the Jews and Their Lies", where he writes that the synagogues should be burned. The sentence is there. And it took the Church until 1965 to say out loud that it does not mean that. An admission nearly 2,000 years in the making.
And then notice what makes it more than a mistake.
The WHOLE book is about ONE thing.
An innocent man whom the priests, the state and the people together kill, because that is easier than looking themselves in the eye. It is the first story in the world told from the victim's side and not the crowd's. All the old myths say the victim was guilty, and the city got peace. The gospel says the victim was innocent, and the crowd was wrong. That is what Caiaphas did not understand when he said it was better that one die for the people.
And then the Church took that book, the only book that exposes how a scapegoat is made, and used it to make a new one. For sixteen hundred years. Out of the people the book was written by.
That is not merely hard.
That is reading the book backwards.
HELL. Matthew 25:46. "And these will go away into eternal punishment." It is Jesus who says it, not Paul, not the Church. Eternal. The word is there, and it is the same word used for eternal life in the same sentence. You cannot take the one without the other. It is the hardest verse in the whole book, and it is His.
THE WOMEN. "Women should keep silent in the churches." First Corinthians 14:34. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man." First Timothy 2:12. It is there. Many scholars hold that the latter is not Paul's own. But it is in the book, and it became the rule for two thousand years, and in most of the world it still is.
THE SLAVES. "Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling." Ephesians 6:5. Paul. He does not abolish slavery. He sends a runaway slave back to his owner, with a letter. And that verse was read aloud from the pulpits of the American South for three hundred years.
HOMOSEXUALITY. Romans 1:26-27. It is there, and it is not unclear. I write it here, because whoever says it is not there has not read it.
AMALEK. First Samuel 15:3. "Kill man and woman, child and infant." The book of Joshua, city after city. Psalm 137 - "blessed is he who dashes your little ones against the rock". That is the Old Testament, yes. And no, it does not let Christianity off. Because the Christians took the book with them. And when the Spaniards came to America, and when the Puritans came to Massachusetts, it was Joshua they read.
It is there. All of it.
....
And then the question that decided everything in the other two.
Did the hard sentences become law?
Yes.
And let me say it as clearly as it can be said, so no one can say I went lightly over it.
In the year 380 the emperor Theodosius makes Christianity the state religion, and in the same law it says that all others are "mad" and will be punished. In 391 the temples are closed. In 415 the philosopher Hypatia is torn to pieces by Christians in Alexandria.
In 1231 the pope establishes the Inquisition. In 1252 he permits torture. And for the next five hundred years heresy is punished with the stake, all across Europe, by church and king together. Jan Hus in Constance, 1415. William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English, strangled and burned, 1536. Michael Servetus, burned in Geneva, 1553, and that was not the pope, that was Calvin. Giordano Bruno in the square in Rome, 1600. Galileo, condemned in 1633 for saying the Earth goes round the Sun. The Church conceded it in 1992.
The witches. Between forty and sixty thousand people executed in Europe from 1450 to 1750. Not in the Middle Ages. In the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Most of them in the Protestant countries. Here in Denmark too. Christian IV was an eager witch-hunter, and the Danish Code of 1683 carried the death penalty for blasphemy. Here. It stood in our law until 1866.
And then America. In 1452 the pope gives Portugal permission to make all non-Christians slaves in perpetuity. In 1493 he divides the new world between Spain and Portugal. That is law. It is the Church writing it. And neither of the two bulls has a single verse to rest on.
So to the question.
In the Talmud the answer was no.
In Islam the answer was yes, and the law was in the book.
Here the answer is yes.
And the law was not in the book.
That is the hardest thing that can be said about Christianity. Not that it was hard. EVERYONE was hard. But that it was hard without warrant. Islam did what was written. The Church did what was not written, and said it was.
That is not a sin.
That is a lie.
....
And then the Hillel test.
Who was written down, and who was burned?
Arius was sent into exile. Origen, the greatest scholar of the early church, was condemned three hundred years after his death, and his books were burned. Pelagius, Hus, Wycliffe, whose body was dug up and burned 44 years after he died. Luther, who only survived because a prince hid him. Servetus. Bruno.
The Talmud writes the losers down.
Islam burned them.
The Church did the same.
And it did it with a book in its hand that says "judge not".
....
And now to the thing that is hardest to write, because it is my own.
Who stopped it?
Here comes the answer most Christians do not like. It was not the Church. The Church did not give up the laws. It lost them. The Enlightenment took them. French revolutionaries who beheaded priests. Jurists who wrote the church out of the penal code. And yes, it must be said, without decoration. Christianity did not put out its own pyres. They were put out from outside.
But then read the line before.
Because that is where it gets interesting.
Who was it that took them? Locke, who wrote his letter on toleration with the gospel as his argument. Roger Williams, the minister. The Quakers, who were the first to say slavery was sin, in 1688. Wilberforce. Las Casas, the friar who in 1550 stood before the emperor and said the Indians had souls. And Bonhoeffer, who was hanged at Flossenbürg in April 1945 because the gospel could not be reconciled with Hitler.
They ALL stood on the book. AGAINST the Church. And they won.
So Christianity is the only one of the three where the losers, the ones who were burned, ended up being right.
They did not because the Church gave in. But because the book HAD SAID SOMETHING ELSE ALL ALONG, and in the end someone read it.
And that is the only reason I can still stand here.
Not because my, our, tradition is clean. It is not. But because it carries its own judge with it.
It has a book that judges the Church.
And the Church lost.
And let me just say it quite plainly, so no one need guess.
I do not need the Church. Not the Church of Denmark, not Rome, not any bishop's office or any synod or any other institution that calls itself Christian, to know what I know. No one needs to confirm it for me. Remind me of it. Or tell me about it. What stands between a Human Being and God is not an organisation. That was the whole point of the man from Nazareth.
He tore the curtain in the temple in two.
That is in there too. In the Book.
I stand on the book and on what I have met myself. That is enough. It has always been enough. It was enough for Paul on the road, and he had no church to ask either.
So when I say I am a Christian, it is not an institution I am joining.
It is a Person I have answered.
And yes. I am fond of many of the places where Christians gather, and they are often churches. I value their enormous beauty, the power they still have, and all the good they do. In His name. But they are not what I stand on. They stand on the same thing I do.
....
And then to the Human Being Christianity raises. Seen from inside, by one who is it.
In the Islam post I wrote about three Human Beings. The Jewish one, who wrestles with God. The Muslim one, who obeys him. And the Christian one, who had the Law moved inside. Into the conscience. And I wrote that this is where the rule of law comes from, and the freedom to leave.
I stand by that. But now the hard part.
Because that Human Being has one weakness the other two do not have. The Jew has his people. The Muslim has his umma. The Christian has ONLY his conscience. And a conscience with no one above it becomes an opinion. And an opinion becomes a taste. And a taste becomes nothing. Indifferent. Worthless.
That is what has happened.
The fourth one I wrote about, he or she who no longer believes in anything, holds the keys to Europe as I write this. He did not come from outside. He is Christianity's own child. Nietzsche knew it. "God is dead. And we have killed him." We. Not the Muslims. Not the Jews.
Us.
Christianity raised THE ONLY Human Being in the world who could leave it without losing his life. And then he left it. That is not Islam's fault. It is not the Enlightenment's fault. It is ours. We were given a Freedom the other two do not have, and we used it to walk away.
The house I wrote about, the one where no one lives.
That is my house.
And you can see the sickness everywhere now, if you care to look. A culture that has stopped producing beauty, and is instead obsessed with spreadsheets. Rules, laws, regulations, oversight, control, surveillance. We no longer build cathedrals. We build compliance departments.
Take art. The same civilisation that painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and wrote the St Matthew Passion, the most unfathomable thing a Human Being has reached for in every direction one can reach. And where does it stand now? A banana taped to a wall, sold for 6.2 million dollars in 2024. The buyer ate it. And in Denmark a plaster bust of Frederik V, lifted out of the Royal Academy's ceremonial hall and thrown in the harbour in 2020, followed by a debate about "whether it was art or vandalism". NOT EVEN about whether it was beautiful. We no longer ask that question.
It is not art's fault. Art merely shows what and where we are. A Human Being who has lost what stood above him does not make beauty. He makes commentary.
And that is precisely the spirit of the age.
....
And then the thing I owed an answer to. What do we do about it.
Here is what I have seen, after talking with hundreds of people about it in every imaginable facet over the last twenty years, in comment threads, over coffee and in podcasts, with the microphones on and off.
And this is the strange part.
Because the vast majority buy all of it from our inheritance -
That a Human Being has a worth no one can take away. That conscience is the final court. That whoever holds power stands under a Law he did not write himself. That one can fall and be raised again. That the enemy is also a Human Being. That the small child counts as much as the emperor. That truth stands above the majority.
And the vast majority want all of it.
And they live off all of it.
Right up until you say where it comes from.
Then the door closes.
And it is not the book that closes it. It is the words.
Christianity. God. Jesus.
Three words that have been stained by twelve hundred years of institution, by heretics' pyres and schooling and dull Sundays, until they now mean the opposite of what they meant when they were first said. Old-fashioned. Dangerous. Brainwashing.
The Word that was once the most radical thing anyone had heard, the one that raised the slave and the woman and the child and made the emperor a man under the law, has become a word a modern Human Being cannot say aloud without looking over his shoulder to see if anyone heard.
Christianity.
That is the Church's legacy.
Not the Word's.
Not the Book's.
And that is what must be undone.
Not by making the Church good again. It has had its chance, and I do not write for it. I write to dig the words free. To go back to THE PLACE where a craftsman stood in Galilee and said something NO ONE had said before, and make it sound the way it sounded then.
Like something new.
Like what it is.
So that the Human Being who already stands on the ground of the gospel without knowing it can see what he is standing on.
And choose it. Himself. From within. Freely. As a friend, not as a servant.
That is what I do. That is what all these posts have been. Not a defence of a tradition. An excavation.
Because it was never, and has never been, the institution that was Christianity. It was the thing the institution could not make fit.
....
So. Three houses.
Judaism put the hard sentences in a book of disagreement and let them lose.
Islam put them into the law, and there they still lie.
Christianity put them into the law without having the right to. Was caught at it by its own book. Lost the laws. And then lost the house too.
So the next time someone, Muslim, Jew or neither, sends you a verse from my book, the Bible - the most unfathomable book of all - the Book of Books - ask the same three questions.
Is it there?
The Bible is free online. Most of what you are sent is not in it.
What surrounds it?
Read the line before. Augustine, for one, did not, as I showed you.
Did it become law?
Yes. And who removed it again?
Because the clown exists here too.
The one who says "the Church has always fought science" has not heard of Mendel, Lemaître or Bacon. And the one who says "they were not real Christians" has not read Theodosius.
And this was never about the people.
It is about the arrangement. Where the Law lives.
In my tradition it lives in the heart. I believe that is the strongest place. And the most vulnerable. Because a Heart can choose. Especially a free one.
And Sunday morning the tomb was empty. It still is.
That is the only thing that never became law. It became a door.
Let us keep it open.
....
(Written in Danish on October 17, 2026, as the third post in a series. The first took the Talmud, the second the Quran. This one takes my own book, and goes harder, because it is mine.)
