Say it ain’t so, Joe…. After innumerable quality articles and essays in VANITY FAIR… after numerous books (I’m sorry I missed you at the Hickory Bookstore in Washington Depot, CT during your Kissinger daze) and after giving me hours of energetic reading (I frequently don’t agree with you, but then what’s the point of always reading people you agree with) after all that, you come up looking like a first former copiously copying Spark’s Notes when you wrote GOD IS NOT GREAT.

I didn’t mind that God does not live up to your standards.  God doesn’t live up to a lot of people’s standards.  He allows too many children to die; he allows too many good people to suffer; and he lets bad people get away with murder.  Obviously, His standards differ completely from man’s standards.   

Actually it was kind of amusing reading your efforts to take the BIG GUY down.  David and Goliath, I get the image.  But when you said the Bible was wrong because of the inconsistency surrounding Jesus’ birth, I practically fell off my chair.  How could such a superior researcher as Christopher Hitchens have gotten something so wrong?  

Catherine Coulter once wrote a book in which the main character in New York City rushes down to Penn Station and hops the train to New Haven.  Now, to her readers in Santa Rosa, that sounds pretty good.  But you and I know that you can’t get to Connecticut from Penn Station. 

In GOD IS NOT GREAT on page 111, you wrote, “They (Matthew and Luke) flatly contradict each other on the ‘Flight into Egypt,’ Matthew saying that Joseph was ‘warned in a dream’ to make an immediate escape and Luke saying that all three stayed in Bethlehem until Mary’s ‘purification according to the laws of Moses,’ which would make it forty days, and then went back to Nazareth via Jerusalem.”

Hello Penn Station.

There is no contraction here when you come to realize that the two events are separated by at least two years.  Luke describes the birth of Jesus -- babe in the manger, no room at the inn, shepherds in the fields (an interesting time-stamp since shepherds don’t leave their sheep outside in the dead of winter).  On the other hand, Matthew describes an even the occurred at least two years after the birth of Jesus – the wise men from the east (no number mentioned) finding the “young child”, with his mother, in a house (Matthew 2:11). 

There is a considerable passage of time here.  Jesus is no longer a “babe” in a manger, but rather he is a “young child” in a house.  That’s when Joseph had his vision.  The time-stamp here is Herod.  The king orders the slaughter of all children two years old and under.  If Jesus had just been born (and the wise men should have known) then Herod would have ordered the slaughter of all newborns. 

Mary’s compliance with the Mosaic purification laws is also another time-stamp.  You were right when you said that it was impossible for both stories to happen concurrently.  They didn’t.  They happened sequentially.  In the first story, you have the birth of Jesus, the purification of his mother and their return to Nazareth.  In the second story, which happened two years later, you have the visit of the wise men and the flight to Egypt.  Every Christmas crèche and nativity scene gets it wrong.   

I guess what disappoints me the most is that you had such a wonderful opportunity to really sock it to false religion and the general hypocrisy that all religions foster.  But you can’t base a conclusion on a false premise, or to use a Biblical equivalent: a little leaven leavens the whole lump.  I expected more from the man who wrote WHY ORWELL MATTERS.