One hardly knows where to start, there are so many biblical absurdities to choose from, so I expanded the six impossibilities of the White Queen to ten biblical ones. Other than that, here are my top ten biblical impossibilities, a quintet from the Old and New Testaments.

Now imagine if your next door neighbor, co-worker, demon, relative, spouse or significant other told you that he (or she) had…

1) He was swallowed by a great shark and lived to tell the tale. You would have to conclude that there are fantastic fisherman’s tales and then there are the real tricks! This would be a Whopper squared! (Jonah and the whale)

2) Haircuts that made their knees as weak as a newborn. You could conclude that they had some kind of physiological condition that made them prone to fainting, but that the haircuts had no logical connection to those spells. At least that is what I would conclude. (Samson haircut)

3) They practiced their trumpet at home, stood near the neighbors who wanted to stone them for the noise, but to add insult to injury, their house collapsed around them. If they blew a trumpet and as a result your house came crashing down around you, you would have to conclude that the architects and builders were careless, in fact downright fraudulent. You certainly wouldn’t make any connection between a well-built brick house collapsing and blowing the trumpet. (Joshua and the Battle of Jericho)

4) Followed your doctor’s advice to the letter; get enough sleep and exercise and eat all the right and proper foods in the right and proper amounts; have an ideal body weight and refrain from smoking or drinking alcohol or caffeine. Their doctor has now promised them that they will live to Methuselah’s 900 years! What do you think about that? I suspect that you would think that the doctor in question was delusional, practicing snake oil medicine, probably a total fraud and that his neighbor had the Buckley syndrome of reaching 90 and much less than 900 and above. (biblical longevity)

5) It commanded the Sun and Moon to stop (or stop the Earth’s rotation, same difference), and it did, a kind of do-it-yourself daylight savings. The obvious question, how come you didn’t notice or benefit from this unique DST event? (Joshua in Gideon)

6) Being born of a virgin. The date in question clearly has to be the first of April, right? (virgin birth of Jesus)

7) He existed in the desert for 40 days and nights without eating. I’ve heard of fad diets, but this borders on the ridiculous! I suspect that if you were able to survive 40 days without eating, you must have been quite flabby at first; plenty of fat stores to draw from for your energy needs. (Jesus in the desert tempted by Satan, though I don’t remember ever seeing any illustrations of Jesus being fat or even flabby)

8) They walked on water because they didn’t want to get their “tiny, tiny, tiny yellow polka dot bikini” wet. Since the average human isn’t sweet enough to have to worry about dissolving if submerged in water, what’s the problem with getting wet, especially if your friendly neighbor has a pool in their backyard? (Jesus walking on the water)

9) A supply of bagels and fish sticks that, at your finger-snapping command, resulted in a near-infinite supply, all without having to go to the supermarket to restock. Now, if that got out, you’d think the supermarkets would press charges against your friend for practicing witchcraft! (Loaves and Fishes Multiplied by Jesus)

10) He kicked the bucket but was resurrected. May I kindly suggest that he suspect his neighbor inhales the good stuff or puts some magic mushrooms in his stew? (The Resurrection of Jesus)

Now, what would you really think of your neighbor’s sanity if he or she made such statements? I imagine he might be inclined to call up all those nice young men in their clean white coats and have them take their neighbor to the fun farm! If you don’t tend to believe your friends and neighbors, even your family, about such extraordinary claims, why would you put your faith in an ad hoc improvised text (the Bible) written millennia ago by people you’ve never met They have known? undergone a polygraph test?

Seriously, if someone you know made any of those claims, and therefore you questioned their good faith as a result, why not question the sanity of the biblical scribes who made the above ten claims and many more? And if you do that, a logical extension would be the assumption that almost all parts of the biblical tradition are really suss, and if some parts are highly suspect, then all biblical texts are likely to be equally wacko.