Paul McGrane
As a teenager over half a century ago, I had a brief flirtation with evangelical Christianity: the apparent certainties on offer were attractive then to the self-conscious, uncertain youth that I was. The flirtation ended very quickly during my undergraduate years, to be replaced with the atheism that I have held ever since, but the experience left me with a lifelong interest in religious faith. I retired fifteen years ago and have spent much of the time since then in revisiting Christianity from a rationalist point of view.
At the heart of my approach has been what is known as ‘textual criticism’: a critical study of writings emphasising a close reading and analysis of the text. Specific techniques include the identification of bias resulting from authorial belief and intent; the identification of possible errors in scribal transcription and mistranslation; and the comparison of different versions of events in different texts. All of these possibilities exist in abundance in the Bible. My own training, experience and qualification is in modern literary texts, but I decided to apply that training in critical analysis to the Bible and other contemporary texts.
I took First Class Honours in my undergraduate degree at Ulster University, and I subsequently conducted three years research in an archive of original manuscripts in Duke Humphrey’s Reading Room at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, before attaining my Doctorate (DPhil) from the latter. I have subsequently published peer reviewed articles in respected academic journals. My degrees and my research have been in English Literature, specialising in the Victorian period. In the academic world this does not qualify me to write about the early history of Judaism and Christianity because in that world, there are strict and rigid demarcation lines between academic disciplines. There is however a growing recognition that those divisions get in the way of real knowledge. In the case of my own research, my stance is that someone like me, trained in textual analysis and practised in working with sometimes chaotic manuscript sources, can have something to bring to the party when studying ancient scriptural texts. Of course, I am dependant on the linguistic, archaeological and historical work of experts in the field – but with my objectivity, borne of a different academic discipline, combined with a lack of supernatural preconceptions – I may be able to offer new insights into the interpretation and meaning of those scriptural texts.
I believe that my researches over the last couple of decades has uncovered a revolutionary new understanding of the roots of Judaism and Christianity. In 2017, I published a book called ‘The Christian Fallacy’ in which I set out my initial findings. This attracted little attention and only a few readers, but undeterred, I continued my research, revised and much enlarged my previous book, and a trilogy called A Bonfire of Inanities is the end result.
On 7 February 1497 in Florence, the religious extremist Friar Girolamo Savonarola, held the first of his ‘bonfires of the vanities’ on which thousands of objects, condemned by religious authorities as ‘occasions of sin’, were consigned to the flames. It is high time we rationalists had our own bonfire on which to consign the sheer inanities of religious belief. My trilogy is a metaphorical bonfire of biblical fallacies. For more details, click here.
Biographical Note
During my varied career I have been a Civil Servant working in central government on White Papers in Transport and Housing policy; a Board Director of Guinness Brewing Worldwide and Prudential UK; and an entrepreneur in marketing services and IT training. I am now retired in Norfolk.