“And the Lord responded, “Look, I am making a covenant. In the presence of all your people I will perform wonders that have never been done in the whole earth or in any nation. All the people you live among will see the Lord’s work, for what I am doing with you is awe-inspiring. Observe what I command you today. I am going to drive out before you the Amorites, Canaanites, Hethites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
One of the things that stands out in the Old Testament narrative is all of the ways God reveals Himself to the people of Israel through powerful, miraculous actions that could only have been accomplished by Him. He wanted the people as clear as could be that He was God and about what kind of a God He was. We see so many different examples of these kinds of actions on God’s part, in fact, that it’s easy for us to wonder a bit why He doesn’t still do that kind of thing today so that a skeptical world can have an easier time believing in Him. The truth is that He does. We simply have to learn to see properly. Let’s talk about it.
In C.S. Lewis’s terrific conclusion to his Narnia series, The Last Battle, there is a scene that is both hysterical and also heartbreaking. The story is about two Narnians, a crafty ape and a foolish and naive donkey (who I think Lewis may call a dumb ass at least once…in a children’s book no less), who work together to convince the clueless Narnians around them that Aslan, the great lion, has returned in order to bilk them out of their resources to the benefit of the selfish ape. It’s a deeply cynical scheme rooted in the ape’s belief that Aslan doesn’t actually exist at all.
After watching all of this play out for several weeks, a group of dwarfs see through the cynical ruse and conclude that no gods exist and that they are the only ones they can trust. In the end, they are wrong. Aslan does exist. He is very much a real lion. He is the good and gracious God who created Narnia and all the animals and creatures in it. And, much to the interest and even opposition of the ones who have not given up their belief in Him, He allows the dwarfs to enter into His eternal kingdom when the present Narnia comes to an end through the portal He created in an old stable.
The eternal Narnia is beautiful beyond all reckoning. It is vast and expansive and perfect in every way. But the dwarfs cannot see it. They have so convinced themselves that it’s all made up, that when they enter the stable door into what they expect to be the darkness of the stable’s unlit interior, all they can see is the darkness. They have so convinced themselves that the darkness is the only thing that’s real that when the light is literally shining all around them, they can’t see it. Aslan comes and creates a delectable feast before them when they are hungry, but when they find it and bite into, all they can taste is dirt and grass. Their senseless hearts were darkened, as the apostle Paul wrote.
This end of the story is a good parable for how so many people approach the world today. There is more to this world than our eyes can see and our senses by themselves can detect. We can’t categorically prove this other world exists, but the countless testimonies of people who have experienced it in one way or the other point insistently towards its existence all the same.
There are some folks, though, who have adopted the worldview position that the only knowledge that counts as knowledge is knowledge gained by empirical means. That is, we can only really know something if we can know it by the means of our senses. This is a worldview position called scientism. The trouble with this position that its proponents – including those who aren’t aware this is the position they hold – rarely understand or acknowledge is that it is self-defeating and contradictory. The idea that the only knowledge that counts as knowledge is knowledge that can be gained empirically is not knowledge that can be gained empirically. Instead, it is a philosophical belief that is only justified on philosophical grounds. But, as the position makes clear, those grounds don’t yield actual knowledge. In other words, according to scientism, we can’t actually know that scientism is true.
For folks who have gotten captured by this wrongheaded understanding of the world, they limit themselves in their ability to perceive things that go beyond it. This means that when God works in ways that are not overt and obvious like parting a large body of water, they won’t be able to see it. The problem with this is that most of God’s interactions with this world are more subtle than not. If we don’t have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, we’ll miss out on them. We’ll convince ourselves that He doesn’t act or even that He doesn’t exist when the truth is as clear as can be for someone who has not artificially limited their ability to know it because of self-defeating worldview commitments.
It’s funny when these folks look at something that is clearly one thing and insist that it is another. But it’s also heartbreaking because they are blind to what is really real. When God announced to Moses that He was going to renew the covenant (which is a sad commentary on the faithlessness of the Israelites given that they had just made it with Him), He said that He would “perform wonders that have never been done in the whole earth or in any nation.” He assured Moses that “all the people you live among will see the Lord’s work, for what I am doing with you is awe-inspiring.” In other words, nobody was going to be able to miss it.
It’s easy for us to wonder why God doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore today. Where are the grand wonders that could only be attributed to God that would render unbelief the sad folly we know it to be? I think part of the challenge here is that what we call to mind when we read these verses and what God actually did are not necessarily the same thing. God’s work most often comes through what look like the natural machinations of history. If we have convinced ourselves that things that go outside the purview of our empirical senses aren’t knowable, then the great likelihood is that we won’t be able to know them. This doesn’t mean they don’t exist, that God isn’t still the one doing them, we simply won’t be able to see them for what they are.
Don’t artificially limit yourself because of worldview commitments that are rooted in bad philosophy. There’s a whole lot you’ll be missing out on if you do. God works in ways that are powerful, but which invite us into a posture of faith to really be able to experience them for all they are worth. It’s not always an easy path to walk, but it is one with rich rewards.
The Nexus 
Hilarious!
But, please, pray tell, what other ways are there to gain knowledge?
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We’ve talked about that before. Go find those conversations and reread them.
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So ultimately all boils down to evidence.
Sorry old chap,faith, prayer, metaphysics, YHWH whispering in yert ear, tales of the Lake Tiberius Pedestrian and Instant Viticulturist are nothing but Oogity-boogity and just don’t cut it, I’m afraid, no matter what your religious cult tries to push.
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The irony of your response is that you’re just demonstrating the point of today’s blog.
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What’s really sad is that you actually believe in the Oogity Boogity.
However, what is tragic is the fact you indoctrinate others and especially children.
In other circumstances this is called abuse.
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Which, again, just makes my point. You can’t see it, and so it appears like that to you. Thankfully (for me at least), your perception on the matter isn’t something that ranks on my list of things to be concerned about. As I have explained time and time and time again, you and I see the world through two entirely different worldview lenses, and I’ve rejected yours as worthwhile. You already know this, which really leaves me wondering what your goal is beyond badgering and belittling.
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The point you are trying establish has no merit, Jonathan.
This is why historians, genuine bible scholars, archaeologists, biogists, cosmologists etc have zero regard for the drivel of religious fundamentalists.
It can only be because you are indoctrinated that you haven’t realized this fact.
In fact it truly is apalling and an illustration of gross ignorance that you didn’t have the integrity or wherewithal to drop Thomas a line and tell him to cease prattling on about such nonsense as Noah’s ark.
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You accept the testimony of people who already agree with your position and reject the testimony of those who don’t. This has been the case from day one. When you say, “genuine bible scholar” what you really mean is “bible scholar who agrees with me about the bible.” This weakens your argument.
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I reject the testimony of people whose worldview is based on drivel.
Are you saying you ACCEPT the testimony of flat earthers, young earth creationists, those who assert Armstrong never walked on the moon, scientologists, Mormons?
Well, do you?
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As long as you insist on being demeaning or belittling or disdainful or some other version of bigoted toward views that are not your own, you won’t ever get very far in your conversations with such people. If you are going to be an evangelical atheist, you might benefit from spending some time reading up on best practices for evangelism from Christians. You can ignore the Christianity, of course, but the principles for persuasion might make you a whole lot more fun to debate with.
Incidentally, I’m curious. You have mentioned before that your wife considers herself at least a believer in God. You have said your mother-in-law (right?) considers herself a committed Christian. If I have that wrong, please correct me. Are you this disdainful or belittling toward them when the subject comes up, or do you save all of this side of you for the internet? Does she know how you portray yourself online, or do you keep your active internet activity to yourself? I’m just curious if you come off to the people you actually have to face and deal with on a regular basis the same way you often do on here.
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There is no room for tolerance for such garbage as YEC. Their intransigence and indictrination is worse than yours.
I have mentioned before the danage such rubbish does and perhaps I told you of Johnny Scarananga who was raised ACE?
You did not respond whether you accept the testimony of YEC, Scientology, Mormons, Flat Earthers etc?
Are you going to answer?
My mother is devout, my wife is not a believer.
I tried once to have a conversation with my mum many moons ago.
We have never discussed religion since.
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How sad that you can’t talk with her about such a significant subject. I’m sorry for that. Did you come off with her as arrogantly and disdainfully as you do with me? At the risk of wildly overstepping, that could have played a role in shutting down that conversation line. Or did she close the door on it?
And I didn’t respond to any of those other questions because we’ve talked about them before, and I answered then. You’re just asking the same questions in a loop. Go back and look up my answers from past conversations if you want to know. My answers haven’t changed.
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Sorry? What on earth for?
She closed the door.
Tell me, do you come off as arrogant and condescending to your children or those of your congregation when they ask you pertinant questions as you are toward me?
Well you raised the topic of intolerance and my atheism so it seemed a fair question to ask how tolerant you are of YEC, Scientology, Mormonism etc.
So, do you accept the testimony of YEC etc?
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There are some folks, though, who have adopted the worldview position that the only knowledge that counts as knowledge is knowledge gained by empirical means. That is, we can only really know something if we can know it by the means of our senses.
Sort of like the parable of the blind men and the elephant where the blind men fight among themselves as each feels like they and they alone know what constitutes the makeup of an elephant, based on their limited “feel” of different parts of the animal. In other words, some of us tend to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experiences or education while at the same time they ignore other people’s expertise on the subject, even if in some cases their assumptions are completely wrong. To be fair, it’s hard to acknowledge you’re wrong when you’re so sure you’re right you will only acknowledge others who coincidentally share your beliefs.
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The really interesting thing about that particular story is that the point it is usually aimed at making is that all religions only get at part of the truth, but not the whole thing. The humorous (and generally unrecognized by the person using it for that end) irony of the story is that the person telling it knows the thing is an elephant. In other words, the person telling that story is perfectly content to believe that someone knows the full truth. He (or she) just doesn’t like that these other people claim to know it. Apparently it’s only arrogant to claim you know the whole truth unless you actually know it. Then it’s okay. Go figure.
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Good morning, Pastor. I’m curious about your worldview. Can you perceive the presence of the resurrected Jesus dwelling within you at this very moment?
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Hi Gary, thanks for the question. Are you an acquaintance of Ark, by chance? Unpack your question a bit for me, if you would. Are you interested in worldview questions or how sensitive I am to the presence of Christ as mediated through the Spirit? Those are not unrelated, of course, but they open two different areas of conversation. Which would you like to pursue first?
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“Are you an acquaintance of Ark, by chance?”
Never met the bloke.
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Then look at me attracting all these new commenters out of the blue. I guess I’m a big deal now 😉
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Indeed. A legend in your own lunchtime.
Have fun. Let me get some popcorn…
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Are you a seasoning guy, a butter guy, or a plain guy? My youngest won’t eat the stuff without about half a bottle of kettlecorn seasoning on it. And you’re close. We’re past lunchtime here. Today I’m a mid-afternoon maven.
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In actual fact I rarely eat the stuff. I always seem to find the one popcorn that either almost breaks a tooth or gets stuck.
Ftr, one really should never give popcorn to dogs in case it gets stuck.
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Don’t have a dog, but I’ll keep that in mind. I tend to agree though. I hate spitting out kernel bits after every bite.
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I have two dogs. Would never take the chance.
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I don’t blame you. We just have a turtle. Named Herbert. He eats lettuce and raspberries and the occasional strawberry. No popcorn in his diet either. He’s at least 20 years old, and possibly much older than that. We don’t really know. He’s very social, though, and enjoys watching tv over my shoulder when I’m in my papasan chair and trying to climb through the glass of his aquarium to join the rest of the family.
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I see John has paid you a visit.
I will definitely follow your chat with interest.
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So, from Gary’s comment, the answer is yes, he is an acquaintance of yours. Digitally so, but in the same way you’re a digital acquaintance of me. I feel much less special now. You can put your popcorn away.
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He is what I would call a blog pal but I know next to nothing about him other than what his about page states.
Hardly an aquaintance.
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The point of the question was discerning if he was here because of a connection with you. To that, the answer is, again, yes.
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In that case yes, he is here because I suggested he might enjoy dialogue.
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So, do you accept the testimony of Mormons, Scientologists and YEC?
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Go find where we’ve talked about it before and I answered then.
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Considering how many threads we have been involved in the easiest option is simply to answer the question here. After, all I could have been equally as rude and dismissive of your question about my wife and mother, especially as I have told you before.
So, do you accept the testimony of YEC, Scientologists etc?
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I apologize for the snark. You deserve better. It gets frustrating that you ask the same set of questions over and over and over again. I asked different questions about them than I have asked before.
Scientology and YEC are two wildly different worldviews. YEC is a Christian position that falls within the umbrella of orthodoxy and that particular question is not a salvation determining issue. I don’t agree with their position on the origins of the world, but that’s one facet of a larger worldview with which I typically have more agreement than not. However, all YEC folks are not in agreement on every point of theology. They are not even in total agreement on all matters of creation origins. Scientology I reject in total.
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Your reply like so many is once again somewhat vague.
The primary foundational tenets and biblical literalism /innerency of YEC including flood geology are recognized by all YEC.
To this end do you accept the testimony of YEC?
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At what point are you going to stop asking the same questions over and over again seemingly expecting different answers? I mean this without an ounce of disrespect or snark. I have no interest in continuing to go back through conversations we have had multiple times in the past, which is something you insist on doing for some reason. If you are going to continue to insist on asking the same questions I’ve answered before, I’m going to have to just start ignoring them. I simply don’t have time for it, especially as there are now more questions to answer with folks who potentially won’t take your approach of asking the same set of a handful of questions on repeat. I’ll leave you to remember my answer to this one from the past or else fill in whatever blanks you need to. When you have something genuinely new to ask about or address, I’ll be all eyes.
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Remember, you continue to insist my position is wrong based solely on your assertion that my secular / atheist worldview(sic) will not allow for supernaturalism, a claim for which I ( personally) have denied on several occasions. All I insist is you provide evidence to demonstrate the veracity of your supernatural claims. Again, something you simply refuse to do, yet expect me to accept your testimony…. on what, faith?
In truth I am not sure that even this is the case as you allude that you are in position of evidence for the outlandish scriptural claims and it is my worldview that is at fault.
The disappearance of Pharoah’s army is a perfect example of just how preposterous is your position.
However, when I ask if you accept the testimony of YEC you return with reams of waffle in a weak attempt to justify not only your position but in some skewed manner theirs as well!
Here is where lies your hypocrisy and you flatly refuse to acknowledge it.
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By the way, have you adopted a similar position toward John and Gary as I notice you seem to have not responded to their follow up questions?
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I would like to rephrase my initial question regarding YEC.
1. On what basis do you reject YEC origins of the world?
2. What other aspects of YEC do you reject and why?
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Ark comments on my blog (and many others, I understand). He thought you and I would have an interesting discussion. I am a former “born-again” Christian. I’m the oldest son of an Independent, Fundamental, PreMillennial Baptist preacher. I deconverted from Christianity 10 years ago after a four month deep dive into the historical evidence for Christianity’s claims, reading books by Christian scholars, theologians, and apologists and books by Christianity’s skeptics. By the end of that four months, I had lost my faith. I was devastated. I no longer believed there was sufficient evidence to continue believing what I had been taught about Jesus since my childhood.
So I’m curious if you perceive the presence of Jesus within you. When I was a Baptist/evangelical Christian it was expected that every true Christian would say yes to this question. The perception of Christ’s inner presence was referred to as “the testimony of the Holy Spirit” or “Christ’s inner presence”. We believed that if you can’t perceive Christ’s presence within you, you probably aren’t saved.
I know what it feels like to (believe that you} perceive the presence of God Himself within you. It is very powerful! This perception affects every aspect of your life. It affected me in how I viewed science and historical evidence, in particular, how science and historical evidence confirm Christianity’s claims, or so I believed. So that is why I ask if you can perceive Jesus’ presence dwelling within you. I believe it is extremely influential upon one’s worldview.
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I understand. I once asked evangelical NT Bible scholar Mike Licona in front of a group of skeptics if he perceives the presence of the resurrected Jesus Christ living within him. He refused to answer the question.
The subjective perception of an omnipotent spirit living inside you is very empowering, but you know that discussing this belief with non-Christians makes you look like a loon. But ask yourself this: if the evidence for the presence of the Holy Ghost within you is as powerful as the Bible says, why are you ashamed to discuss it? And why do Christians so frequently doubt the reality of this presence? I believe those doubts are telling you something: the inner presence of a Holy Ghost is a comforting delusion, and nothing more.
Come visit me on my blog sometime: Escaping Christian Fundamentalism.
Take care.
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Hi Gary, sorry for the delay. Busy day yesterday and I wanted to be able to give you a thoughtful response. I’ll combine my response to both comments you made right here since there’s a fair bit of overlap between your two comments.
It sounds like you had a pretty tough experience with the church growing up. I’m sorry for that. It also seems like the personal experience of God’s Spirit is a key issue for you. Why is that? Was that something that was really emphasized to you when you were growing up and still considered yourself a follower of Jesus? What did you consider to be personal evidence of that feeling and did you have it often or ever? What was your church environment like growing up? Loving? Legalistic? Generous in spirit? Small minded? What prompted you to do your four-month deep dive into the historical evidence for Christianity’s claims? Why did it only take four months? What was going on at that time? I can imagine that you really were devastated when you decided that you didn’t really believe any of the things you had been raised to believe. I’m sorry for the pain that journey surely included. How is your relationship with your family today? Too often Christians don’t have nearly enough compassion for children who leave the faith of their parents. They minister to the agonizing parents, but no one thinks much about how hard it has to be on the children who are agonizing over and mourning a loss of their own, even if a chosen one. I hope that if things are still tense at all after ten years you are able to reconnect and reconcile. Prayerfully that has already happened.
You make a number of assumptions in your comment here that I’m not sure are warranted. For instance, I don’t “know that discussing this belief with non-Christians makes you look like a loon.” And, even if it does, that doesn’t bother me really at all. In fact, But there are spiritually sensitive non-Christians who may not bat an eye at this claim by Christians. They likely do not perceive it in the same way we do, but they don’t necessarily think I’m a loon for saying it. Or, by “non-Christian” did you mean “atheist”? Do please clarify that for me because it makes quite a difference in your assumption.
Even assuming that you meant atheist for a minute, though, while in that case I would expect to be looked at like I had a second head growing out of my shoulders, that’s not a particularly bothersome or threatening reaction to me. If you don’t believe in the existence of a supernatural God in the first place, then of course you aren’t going to accept the idea that the presence of that God’s Spirit is something people who claim to follow Him claim to experience.
You also assume there that I am ashamed to discuss it. Why assume that? Have I given some indication that I’m ashamed to discuss to you? And as for Christians doubting the reality of this presence, I haven’t personally encountered many who do. Maybe that’s just because I’m a pastor.
If you someone were going to experience the presence of God in them, what do you think that should feel like and why? Why did your own experience of what you believed was the presence of God’s Spirit in you affect how you viewed science and historical evidence? There are people who believe they experience the presence of God’s Spirit in them and yet view matters of science very differently than I suspect you did. Why do you think that is when they are just as confident they are experiencing God’s Spirit as you no doubt were?
As one who has walked this journey before, I would be very interested in your thoughts on these and other questions.
I did stop by your blog. That’s quite an impressive reading list there. Good for you. I checked out your review of Evidence That Demands a Verdict. I was a little disappointed you gave such a voluminous work so little attention. I was curious that your response to the fine-tuning argument was to make reference to the multiverse theory. How do you feel about exchange one position of faith (Christianity) for another (the multiverse)? Do you consider yourself still to be a person of faith at all? If so, what form does that faith take? If not, why do you accept something like the multiverse theory in spite of its total and complete lack of evidence?
Again, I’ll be anxious for your thoughts. Thanks, and have a great weekend!
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Great to hear from you!
My denomination of Baptist was very legalistic yet they were still loving to one another. The same for my family. My issue with Evangelicalism was the lack of assurance of faith. My eternal security was based on my decision for Christ. Sounds simple but did I fully repent? Did I fully surrender all? If not, I’m not saved. Many evangelicals struggle with this. One SBC pastor repeated the born again experience 5,000 times, just to be sure. How do you know you are eternally saved?
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Great questions, Gary. Thanks for this. I’m heading out of the office for the weekend. I’ll be back in touch soon.
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“It also seems like the personal experience of God’s Spirit is a key issue for you. Why is that? Was that something that was really emphasized to you when you were growing up and still considered yourself a follower of Jesus? What did you consider to be personal evidence of that feeling and did you have it often or ever?”
Yes, the perception of the inner presence of Christ was emphasized in my version of Evangelicalism. Assurance of salvation was important. Important because we believed in a literal, burning, eternal, Lake of Fire for all non-believers, which was pretty much everyone else except us, the General Baptists, and maybe a few Southern Baptists. The fear of Hell was deeply ingrained in our brains from childhood on. Once you were a true believer, you could never lose your salvation, but the question always remained: ARE you a true believer?? How would you know? Yes, salvation is a gift from God but it isn’t yours until you (properly) decide to accept it. Did you properly accept God’s free gift of salvation??? To properly accept God’s free gift of salvation requires the full surrender of every aspect of your life, soul, and body. It requires full, unreserved repentance for all sins. It requires full and unconditional surrender to God’s will for your life, whatever that might be, even if it is his will for you to be a missionary in Timbuktu…or a pastor in Virginia! 🙂
Did you fully and completely and unreservedly repent, surrender, and commit to Christ in your decision for Christ, your decision to accept God’s free gift, your “born again” experience? Your eternal destiny; your chance to escape the horrors of Hell for an eternity of bliss in Heaven depends ENTIRELY upon a decision for Christ—done properly.
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That must have been quite an environment to be raised in. A loving one, perhaps, but not an emotionally or theologically easy one. I suspect that if I had been raised in an environment like that, I may have given it all up too. It may not mean very much now, but I’m sorry that was the version of the church you experienced. It sounds like there was a whole lot more Christianized subculture happening than properly understood and applied Scripture. Even in saying that, though, I recognize that the fact that the Scriptures get understood in so many different ways presents its own unique challenge to believing.
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”What prompted you to do your four month deep dive?”
Ten years ago this past February I was a happy conservative Christian. I had a popular Christian blog (popular in my denomination). One fateful day searching the internet I came across the blog of a former Baptist pastor turned atheist. I was appalled at his arrogance and blasphemy against my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I started to challenge him. At first we bantered back and forth over the veracity of Christianity’ claims. Finally, he told me he would not debate me anymore until I read a couple of books. I agreed. What was there to fear?
Let me outline my basic beliefs about historic Christianity at that time:
3. The disciples died horrific deaths refusing to recant their claims of seeing and touching Jesus’ resurrected body. No one would die for a lie.
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Interesting journey. I suspect that was really hard. It probably felt really freeing to get to the end of it given the kind of experience with Christianity it sounds like you had had from your other post (which I will comment on more directly tomorrow sometime).
While I agree with parts of those three basic points, I would quibble with some of it as well as unnecessary to hold and still have confidence in the text.
The first point I would accept largely unchanged. The second is a view of inspiration that I think is too narrow and doesn’t give enough credit to what was the likelier composition process. Most conservative Christians today who haven’t given much real thought to the question would likely be very uncomfortable to the point of a crisis of faith (like it caused you to experience?) with how the process actually unfolded acknowledging that we don’t honestly know how most of especially the Old Testament physically came into existence as a written text.
On the third point, we don’t know for certain how any of the apostles died. There is church tradition around it, and I would be very comfortable believing all were martyred given Rome’s approach to dealing with Christians more generally, but we don’t know for sure. As for the last part, that’s simply untrue. Lots of people over the course of human history have died for things they believed and weren’t actually true.
In all your wide reading, did you ever interact with the work of Craig Blomberg on specifically the historical reliability of the New Testament?
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When I learned that entire stories had been added to the original Gospels by later scribes, I was shocked. I was shocked to learn of the Johannine Commae. If God did not prevent later scribes from adding to his Word, how could I be certain the original text was inspired by God? I was beginning to see that the Bible is more the word of men than the Word of God. My pastor, a moderate in a conservative denomination, tried to assure me that it is the message of the Gospel that is inerrant, not the “ jots and tittles”.
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Sounds like he tried to backtrack from his views on inspiration to try and placate your doubts. Ehrman’s arguments on the question of textual criticism tends to overplay his hand on the nature and significance of the variance among the various ancient manuscripts that we have. I had asked before, but in all of your reading did you ever interact with Blomberg’s work on the historical reliability question?
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I’ve heard that accusation against Ehrman from apologists many times before, but have you read “Misquoting Jesus”? I think he is very upfront in stating that the overwhelming majority of the thousands of scribal alterations in the Christian Scriptures are minor and insignificant.
You don’t have a problem with the fact that the Church has taught for almost 2,000 years that the Story of the Woman Caught in Adultery, the Story of the Angel Stirring the Waters of the Pool at Bethesda, the long ending of the Gospel of Mark, and the Johannine Commae as the “Word of God” when we now know that these passages are later scribal additions/alterations?
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No, that doesn’t bother me at all. Many things have been presented as the “Word of God” over the centuries that wasn’t really because the one doing the presenting was operating on the basis of inaccurate, incomplete, or incorrect information. Or they were just plain lying. With the possible exception of some of the snake handling nonsense that is sometimes connected with the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel (although they have the ending of Acts to try to justify the nonsense as well), none of those longer passages have any impact on a single point of doctrine. It seems to me that to take the approach that the whole thing is historically suspect on the basis of those handful of passages is to throw the theological baby out with the bathwater.
I am still curious to hear if you have interacted with Blomberg’s work on historical reliability of the New Testament? He spends quite a bit of time interacting with Ehrman’s arguments. I have not read Misquoting Jesus, but have seen several summaries of his basic premise which you are at least in part relying on here. I don’t find it very compelling at all. In my opinion, Blomberg’s work alone pretty effectively counters most of Ehrman’s major arguments regarding Gospels textual criticism.
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I apologize. I forgot to answer your question. No, I have not read Bloomberg. Which of his books in particular do you find compelling?
So if God is not going to prevent alterations/additions to his written Word, maybe he didn’t prevent alterations/additions to his oral Word (the oral traditions upon which the Gospels are based), even if those oral traditions were written down by eyewitnesses. Not even the most conservative of Christian scholars allege that the Evangelists wrote their Gospels as the events of Jesus’ life occurred. Time passed. Years to decades passed. Whether we use the majority scholarly dating or the conservative Christian dating, memories fade and can be confused over time. Eyewitnesses have also been known to embellish their testimony with fictional details, wittingly or unwittingly, some small, some big. And, eyewitnesses have also been known to intentionally lie. Eyewitnesses may lie in order to further an agenda, whatever agenda that may be. But the problem with the Gospels is deeper: the eyewitness status of these ancient texts is disputed among the experts. Is disputed 2,000 year old eyewitness testimony trustworthy?
So why should we trust the historical reliability of the Gospels?
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It’s Blomberg, and if you interested, his book The Historical Reliability of the New Testament is the best place to start. Given how widely read you seem to be, that one would be well worth your time.
On to the substance. Let me start to respond like this: Do you have kids?
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Just because I like to be well-read, I will buy and read Bloomberg’s book. I will even review it chapter by chapter on my blog. However, you are not the first Christian to suggest that there is one more book that I should read; a book that will answer all my questions and doubts, if I will just read it with a receptive mind.
But that book is NEVER the Bible. Never. I find that really odd. No Christian pastor or apologist has ever recommended I read the Bible. God’s own Word is obviously not clear enough. God needs [Dr. Bloomberg] to explain what He really meant to say to humankind.
Yes, I have children.
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Let me start by saying that I hope to come across here with a very conversational tone. I love having conversations like this. In any event, from the sound of it, you’ve already decided that the Bible isn’t reliable or a source of good information for demonstrating its own historical reliability. Besides, you’ve probably already read it a time or three (or four or five or…). Telling you to go read the Bible more in order to gain an answer to your questions here doesn’t seem like the best approach, does it?
But, then again, we aren’t exactly talking about the Bible either. We are talking about ways of thinking about the Bible. We are talking about what one guy said about the Bible versus what another guy said about the Bible. In that kind of a conversation, hearing what yet another guy has to say about it (especially when this other guy is one of the leading experts in the world on the subject in question, namely the historical reliability of the New Testament) strikes me as worthwhile. Your willingness to read it is admirable. If in your process of reading and reviewing the book you want to be able to ask questions of the Blomberg (one “o,” not two) directly for the sake of gaining greatly clarity on his arguments, I can help get you connected. He was my New Testament professor in seminary, and I was able to be his research assistant my final year.
And to your point, God doesn’t “need” Blomberg to explain what He really meant to say. Rather, Blomberg has analyzed the textual critical information carefully along with arguments against the historical reliability to be able to help us understand why we can trust what we find in the text as reliable. That’s a different thing than what you seem to have in mind. But, the idea that God may work through humans to explain and expand on His words doesn’t strike me as problematic at all. After all, Jesus Himself sent out the disciples to explain and expand His words. How is that different from what someone like Blomberg – or, for that matter, me as a preacher – is doing? The clear pattern throughout the Scriptures from start to finish is that God uses people to explain and expand His words.
Near as I can tell, though, you ultimately turned from your faith not on the basis of anything in the Bible itself, but on the basis of what a handful of guys who don’t believe it’s true had to say about it. Am I mistaken in that presumption based on your experience as you have described it to me so far? Please correct me if I am. So, to suggest that pointing you to what at least I would consider helpful extra-biblical resources for broadening your perspective on the matter in question is somehow insufficient strikes me as a bit of an odd argument.
That’s great on the kids. I have three boys myself. Our oldest just turned 16. If it was very long ago (or even if it wasn’t) for you, do you remember the day they were each born? I sure do. I remember details for each one. I remember the rooms. Details in the room. The order of things as they happened. I remember who was there. I remember when we lost a baby to miscarriage too. I remember exactly where I was when we got the news. I remember what happened in the ensuing moments. I remember going to the hospital a few days later. I remember all of it. In detail. That was years ago. My memory of those events has faded even a little. The same goes with life events from further back than that.
One of my members is 99. There are events from her past that took place literally decades ago. Her memory of many of those things is as sharp as a tack. I’ve been around when she was telling one story or another from the past while one of her kids were there. They would have checked her facts if she had gotten any wrong. She didn’t and they affirmed as much.
At least part of your argument against the historical reliability was that that the authors wrote down what happened “years to decades” later and may not have remembered them very well anymore. Do you really think that if you saw someone walk on water or tell a storm to be still and then it happened that your memory of that event would fade even after a generation or two? Perhaps you forget a minute detail or two, but on the reporting of the events themselves, it’s hard to believe that you wouldn’t still be very, very clear on what happened.
As far as arguments against historical reliability go, the amount of time between the events themselves and when they were recorded is an awfully weak argument. It is undercut rather severely by our own memories from the past of things like the birth of our kids. The argument that the eyewitnesses were being intentionally dishonest in furtherance of some agenda falls pretty flat as well. That kind of an argument is only speculative. That is, it is rooted more in faith in one’s skepticism than actual evidence.
Was there anything stronger that you ultimately built your case against historical reliability on than these couple of points along with some skeptical historians doubting whether the reported eyewitnesses were really the eyewitnesses they are claimed to be (an argument that, again, is faith based because there’s not strong counterevidence supporting the traditional authorship claims – or, if there is, please share it as in nearly 20 years of studying apologetics, I’ve never encountered actual counterevidence to the traditional claims of Gospel authorship).
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Near as I can tell, though, you ultimately turned from your faith not on the basis of anything in the Bible itself, but on the basis of what a handful of guys who don’t believe it’s true had to say about it. Am I mistaken in that presumption based on your experience as you have described it to me so far? Please correct me if I am.
You are partially correct. This “handful of guys” triggered my quest for truth, but I did not accept their counter-arguments as “gospel”. I didn’t finish Bart Ehrman’s books and say to myself, “Wow. He’s a NT scholar. He therefore must know what he is talking about. I don’t need to research this issue any further. ” That would be terribly naive. That is what many people do on the internet today but that is not what (university) educated people do. The first thing university educated people do is check to see if there is a consensus expert opinion on the issue in question. If there is not a consensus, they check to see if there is a considerable majority expert opinion on that issue. If there is a consensus opinion, or a significant majority opinion on the issue, most university educated people will accept that consensus/majority expert opinion as fact and move on to the next issue in life. University educated people do not research every controversial subject themselves. We do not have the time. It is silly for (mostly non-college educated) people to think they can spend a few hours, a few days, a few months, or even a few years studying a complex issue on the internet and come away knowing more than the consensus of experts.
I am not an expert in Ancient Near East Studies. Neither am I a New Testament scholar. I do not speak Hebrew or Koine Greek. But, I am a (university) educated man. So that brings us to this question: Can a non-expert take a position on a controversial issue when he or she is not an expert in the field involving that issue?
Answer: Yes! A non-expert can appeal to consensus or a considerable majority expert opinion. If the experts are nearly evenly divided, a non-expert should sit on the sidelines and remain uncommitted. That is what we in the educated class in Western cultures do.
The consensus of experts is that the Gospels were not written by the traditional authors, John Mark, Matthew the tax collector, Luke the physician, or John the son of Zebedee. And even more alarming for conservative Christians (it should be), a sizeable majority of experts believes that the Gospels were written by non-eyewitnesses one or more generations removed from the alleged events described! Even Richard Bauckham in his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, admits that this is the majority/consensus scholarly position.
“They are biased!” evangelicals and other conservative Protestants will counter. “Liberal Christian and atheist/agnostic scholars reject the existence of the supernatural, so of course they are going to reject the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels.” That might be the case with liberals, atheists, and agnostics but how do you account for the fact that the Catholic Church and a significant majority of their Bible scholars also doubt the traditional /eyewitness authorship of the Gospels? Last I checked, the Roman Catholic Church still believes in the supernatural, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and miracles. Here is a collection of quotes from NT scholars regarding the consensus position on the authorship of the Gospels, if you are interested:
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I’m intrigued that you put so much emphasis on a university education here as if someone without a university education couldn’t or wouldn’t think like that. Are people without that someone insufficient to the task of really understanding these matters? Interestingly, recent sociological research into the impact of education on religious belief shows pretty conclusively that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to be a religious believer. The converse is true as well. The less educated a person is, the more likely they are to be secular of some variety. How do you square this modern research with your emphasis on the importance of a university education to accepting the conclusions of the majority and becoming a secular person? From the data, it would seem that a university education is pushing people toward religious belief rather than away from it.
On the rest, the consensus of experts is an interesting thing to put stock in. Interestingly, it is a kind of faith position. We assume that they’ve done their homework and take what they say on faith. That appears to be what you did. Yes, you read many of their books, but like you said, you aren’t scholar in any of these relevant areas (nor am I), so after much consideration, you decided to place your faith in them instead of the version of God you were raised to believe in.
The trouble with putting faith in experts is that experts are sometimes collectively wrong. They were wrong about phlogiston. They were wrong about an eternal universe. They were wrong about the health benefit of embryonic stem cell research. They are actively being proven wrong that putting kids through gender transition surgeries when they are young is a beneficial practice. They were wrong about eugenics. They were wrong about the cell being simple, thus making the kinds of changes Darwin proposed a fairly easy thing to have happened. They’ve been wrong about a lot of things. Who’s to say they aren’t wrong about matters of the date of the writing of the New Testament documents.
One more observation. You say something interesting there. You say this majority of experts “believe” that the Gospels were written much later than the traditional/conservative position on the question. On what evidence? The only real evidence we have points to an early date. Conjectures of a later date didn’t really start to come into existence until the mid- to late-1800s. That puts them as pretty new ideas. Where did these ideas then come from? Skeptics who were looking for reasons to discount and discredit the text in favor of more modern ideas that were rooted then in philosophy, not evidence. Gradually, it became academically fashionable to doubt and question things like this, that fashion got baked into the university system, and it has never really left it since. I’m not categorically saying they wrong. But I am saying there’s more of a worldview and academic cultural impact on the thinking here than anyone at least on the inside of this kind of thinking is very willing to acknowledge. Personally, minority position in academia though they may be, I find the arguments for early dating for the New Testament documents much stronger than arguments for a later date.
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“Moreover, the majority of American adults (71%) identify as Christians. And among Christians, those with higher levels of education appear to be just as religious as those with less schooling, on average. In fact, highly educated Christians are more likely than less-educated Christians to say they are weekly churchgoers. 2
Looking at the U.S. public as a whole, however, the answer to the question of whether more education is correlated with less religion appears to be yes. Among all U.S. adults, college graduates are considerably less likely than those who have less education to say religion is “very important” in their lives: Fewer than half of college graduates (46%) say this, compared with nearly six-in-ten of those with no more than a high school education (58%).”
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/04/26/in-america-does-more-education-equal-less-religion/
So your generalization, “From the data, it would seem that a university education is pushing people toward religious belief rather than away from it” is false.
“On the rest, the consensus of experts is an interesting thing to put stock in. Interestingly, it is a kind of faith position. “
That depends on your definition of faith. If your definition of faith is “trust based on evidence” then, yes. If your definition of faith comes from the Christian Scriptures, then no.
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.”
Trusting scientific and medical consensus expert opinion has proven to be the most reliable method of determining truth known to humankind. It is the foundation of every advanced, industrialized nation on the planet. Is it perfect? No. But it is much more accurate than running society by the various interpretations of your ancient, supernatural-based holy book.
“I find the arguments for early dating for the New Testament documents much stronger than arguments for a later date.”
Are you a scholar or Near East historian? If yes, that is your prerogative. If not, why should your parishioners and blog readers trust you and not the consensus/majority opinion of thousands of experts who have spent their entire lives studying the evidence?
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Pew’s data is helpful, but doesn’t show the full picture. Check out some of the work of sociologist Ryan Burge, one of the better respected researchers on religion in America. Yes, there is a small decline in religious belief, but in terms of attendance at religious services and belonging to religious institutions, the trendline points in the opposite direction. The more educated a person is, the more likely he (or she) is to report being a part of a religious congregation.
You are using an unfortunately common misunderstanding of Hebrews 11 there and accepting a common cultural caricature of faith. I can’t much help you with that one.
A government run by experts has typically been a disaster that makes problems worse rather than solving them. Roosevelt’s efforts to combat the Great Depression through the New Deal almost certainly made it worse and last longer because of his reliance on experts. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty – another offering of the experts – decimated the African American family and made almost no meaningful impact on poverty. If anything, it arguably made it worse. We tend to have more confidence in our ability to solve problems on a mass scale and from the top down than we should.
Meanwhile, it has tended to be “various interpretations of [my] ancient, supernatural-based holy book” that have contributed most of the ideas that became the things that dramatically advanced the standard of living among the nations that adopted them.
On the last point, no, but I am intelligent enough to examine arguments and the claims they make and draw reasonable conclusions about them. If someone doesn’t want to take my word for it and wants to put their faith in someone else, they can. That by itself doesn’t mean my position is wrong.
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By the standards of the educated class of every advanced, industrialized nation on the planet, the non-expert who believes that he is capable of determining when the consensus of experts is wrong is a fool.
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“Do you really think that if you saw someone walk on water or tell a storm to be still and then it happened that your memory of that event would fade even after a generation or two? Perhaps you forget a minute detail or two, but on the reporting of the events themselves, it’s hard to believe that you wouldn’t still be very, very clear on what happened.”
Question 1: Which eyewitness first looked into Jesus’ tomb and discovered his body was missing?
Question 2: Who told the eyewitnesses at the empty tomb that Jesus had risen from the dead?
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I will save you the trouble of researching those two questions. The Synoptics say that Mary Magdalene and other women were the first to enter the tomb and see that it was empty (of Jesus’ body). The Gospel of John says that it was the “beloved disciple”, whom most conservative Christians believe was the author of the Gospel of John, John the son of Zebedee, who first looked into the tomb and saw that it was empty. Conservative Christians allege that the first gospel written, Mark, was written by Peter’s traveling companion, John Mark, essentially making the Gospel of Mark Peter’s eyewitness statement. If one eyewitness is saying that he (John) was the first eyewitness to an empty tomb and another eyewitness says that Mary Magdalene was the first eyewitness, one or both of these alleged eyewitnesses is wrong.
Using the analogy of remembering the birth of your child. If you and your parents go to the hospital to visit your wife and new born child and find their room empty and are told, in the room, by an angel in brilliant white, that your wife and child have been teleported to heaven, are you going to remember who it was who first entered the room and found it empty? Of course you would.
This discrepancy alone proves the Gospels historically unreliable. And it is not the only one. We can do the same process with question #2. In the Synoptics Mary learns that Jesus is risen from a young man/one angel/two angels. In the Gospel of John, Mary does not learn that a resurrection has occurred until she mistakes Jesus for the Gardener. Both accounts cannot be true.
Any reasonable person would look at these two discrepancies and judge the four Gospels as unreliable historical sources.
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Yes, I’ve heard that argument several times before. I didn’t actually need to do much researching of the matter as I’ve looked at this question several times myself, but thank you all the same for sharing your thoughts on it. It’s been a busy morning for me, and I was finally getting to my desk to be able to respond to your notes from yesterday afternoon/evening.
I find a harmonization of all of these apparent discrepancies is pretty easy to put together. The apparent differences are fairly easily explained by acknowledging that you’ve got at least four different observers explain the same set of facts from their respective standpoints. They chose to emphasize different parts of it and even to report some details in slightly different orders as would have been acceptable by the first century’s acceptable standards for historically accurate reporting. This same kind of apparently inconsistent or even contradictory reporting is something police detectives have to sort through all the time even when dealing with eyewitnesses who are all trying to be honest and cooperative. With cold case detectives (and I know you’ve interacted with some of Wallace’s work) this is even more true. And yet, they can still reconstruct a reliable narrative for what happened with a little bit of effort. Honestly, I’ve looked at the question long enough that it doesn’t even make me blink anymore in terms of a meaningful challenge to the reliability of the Gospels. The real sticking point in the whole thing is the worldview frame of reference you are using to analyze the available data, who is doing the presenting of the information, and the bias they bring to the table when analyzing it.
I’m curious about your final pronouncement. I’ve looked at the same pieces data that you did and have concluded differently than you now have. Does this make me an unreasonable person?
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“Any reasonable person would look at these two discrepancies and judge the four Gospels as unreliable historical sources.”
Poor choice of words. I should have said, “A reasonable person could look at these two discrepancies and judge the four Gospels as unreliable historical sources.w
You seem to me to be reasonably reasonable. 🙂
So you, your father, and your mother go to visit your wife and new born child. You and your father head to the hospital cafeteria while your mother goes directly to your wife’s room where she finds the room empty and is told by an angel in brilliant white that your wife and child have been teleported to heaven. Yet, in your memoir, you recount that it was you who first found the room empty. And you believe this would be an historically accurate account?
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In that case it wouldn’t be, but when you read the Gospel accounts closely, that’s not really the picture that appears.
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At the time of your child’s birth, your mother told you and your father that when she went into the hospital room alone (you and your father were in the cafeteria) she saw an angel in brilliant white inside the room who told her that your wife and child had been teleported to heaven. She then came to the cafeteria to tell both of you. But you had left the cafeteria to use the restroom. Your parents could not find you. So, while your mother looked for you, your father ran to the room and confirms that the room is empty (not even an angel). You then arrive and confirm the room is empty. The three of you search the entire hospital and surrounding buildings but no one has seen your wife and child and no one knows where your wife and child have gone. It was as if they had disappeared off of the face of the earth (which is exactly what the angel told your mother). Your father wrote down all these details at some point and published a book on the subject a decade or more later.
You too publish a book several decades later on this very extra-ordinary event. But in your book, it is you who first looks in and discovers the room empty! You discovered the room empty before your father and before your mother. Both your father’s account and your account cannot be true! NO ONE would forget who first discovered “the empty tomb” in this very extra-ordinary event!
According to the Synoptics, Mary Magdalene (and some other women) went to the tomb of Jesus on Sunday morning. Mark and Luke say that Mary (and some other women) arrived and saw the stone moved away, went inside and there, inside the tomb, were told by a young man in white (or possibly two angels) that Jesus had risen from the dead. Mark says the women fled and told no one, but they must have quickly changed their minds because Luke says they went directly to the male disciples and told them everything they had seen. Luke then says that Peter went to the tomb to verify that it was empty. If you believe that the Gospel of Mark is Simon Peter’s eyewitness testimony, and we know that the author of Luke was not an eyewitness and we know that he borrowed heavily from Mark’s story, then both Mark and Luke state that the women discovered an empty tomb first and then Peter. This is Peter’s eyewitness testimony!
John says that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb on Sunday morning. Saw the stone moved away and immediately ran to tell the male disciples. John (if you believe the beloved disciple, the author of the Gospel of John, and John the son of Zebedee, are all the same person) and Peter run to the tomb, but John gets there first, looks inside, and discovers that the tomb is empty. Peter then verifies the tomb is empty. After both men have left, Mary looks in the tomb and sees two angels. She asks them if they know where they have laid the body of Jesus. She obviously has not been told by anyone that “he is risen”. If she had visited the tomb on a previous visit she might look inside the tomb and ask, “Are you guys still here?” but she wouldn’t ask the angels if they know where someone has moved the body of Jesus because they had already told her that Jesus had risen. Only when Mary turns around and sees who she believes is the gardener, it is actually Jesus, does she realize that a resurrection has occurred. Both of these stories cannot be true. One or both have their facts wrong. NO ONE is going to forget who was the first person to find Jesus’ tomb empty. No one. If they cannot remember that fact we should not trust ANYTHING these guys said.
If both Peter and John were eyewitnesses why would John claim that he was the first to discover the tomb empty? Even if you buy the argument that John didn’t believe that women eyewitnesses were worthy of mention (because their testimony was not allowed in a court of law), why did he not state that it was Peter who first witnessed an empty tomb as Peter claims in the Synoptics?
Your claim that you discovered your wife’s hospital room empty when it was really your mother who discovered it empty is either a mistake, due to faulty memory (proof that your testimony is not reliable) or a bald face lie.
My analysis above will most likely not convince you, but I dare you to show it to several non-Christians and see what they have to say. I will bet my mortgage that they will say that the sources for this story are not reliable.
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You are correct that your analysis remains entirely unconvincing to me. And the invitation to check and see if an unbeliever finds something in the Scriptures to be unreliable seems kind of silly to me. Of course they do. Otherwise they would probably be a believer. But unbelievers become believers all the time, many through an examination of the same evidence you looked at, and conclude that, yes, the story is indeed an historically reliable one.
The women, including Mary Magdalene, arrived at the tomb first. They saw the stone had been rolled away. They went into the tomb, encountered the angels, heard the news of the resurrection (which utterly bewildered them because they didn’t have a category for it), and went back to report to the disciples what they had seen. Peter and John ran back to the tomb to investigate for themselves what had happened. Mary went back after them or perhaps with them. John poked his head into the tomb first, and then Peter went all the way in and took in the scene on the inside. The angels from before did not reveal themselves to those two. They then left to go back and tell the others. Mary hung back a bit to process it all, looked in the tomb a second time, and saw the angels again. Turning around, she saw Jesus whom she did not recognize at first because, again, she didn’t have a category for what was happening. Then He spoke to her, and everything clicked into place. After this, she ran back and reported again to the disciples, but this time that she saw Jesus.
Again, that harmonizes all four accounts. John doesn’t claim to have discovered the empty tomb first. He claims that the women did. Luke simply doesn’t mention that John was with Peter when he went to the tomb. Peter doesn’t claim to have gotten to the tomb first in the synoptics. In Mark, the Gospel traditionally seen as Peter’s report of the events, Peter’s only mention in Mark is when the angels tell the women to tell the disciples and Peter what they had seen. Luke is the only one who mentions Peter of the three synoptics, and he didn’t copy his reference from Mark as it doesn’t appear there. And while he interviewed lots of people, we don’t know who his primary source for the resurrection story was. Nothing is forgotten here by any of the characters. There are simply four different reports of the same event that all highlight different aspects of it. I’m really not sure what is difficult to see about this.
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And this brings up another very important issue regarding the alleged death and resurrection of Jesus. Christians can’t recall the exact dates of these two events. Not even the year! They do a lot of guessing, but NO ONE bothered to write down the date of the death and return to life of …GOD.
Seriously?
Apologists assure us that early (Jewish) Christians were meticulous record keepers. That is one reason why we can trust the historical reliability of the Gospels, they say. Really? The “tradents” (see Richard Bauckham’s “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”) of the Jesus Story and the Evangelists who wrote down these stories, two of the Evangelists being actual eyewitnesses, were excellent record keepers…but they forgot or didn’t bother to record the dates of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. If conservative Christians are correct about the identities of the authors of the Gospels, one of them was a tax collector, for goodness sakes. Aren’t tax collectors good with numbers and dates? If they are any good, they are. Yet Matthew the tax collector forgot to record the day, month, and year of the two greatest events in human history. Just give us the year, if you are too busy, Matthew. John was obviously very educated to be able to write the complex Greek prose he wrote for his Gospel. John could recall and record that Jesus died at the “ninth hour” but it slipped his mind to record the date, month, or year. But maybe dates were not compatible with his “theme”. Or maybe he ran out of parchment… And then there is Luke the physician. Another educated man. Luke could recall and record that Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus Caesar and during the reign of Quirinius, the governor of Syria, but he couldn’t recall or didn’t bother recording even the YEAR when God Almighty died during the reign of Tiberius Caesar.
Give me a break. These people didn’t know the dates of the crucifixion or resurrection because they probably weren’t even born yet! By the time the Jesus story came to the ears of these non-eyewitnesses the story has been told and retold, embellished and even more embellished, thousands of times.
NO ONE who has experienced his wife and child disappear from their hospital room will forget the day, month, and year of this life-changing, extra-ordinary event. Likewise, NO ONE who has witnessed God himself die, return from the dead, and levitate into the clouds will forget the dates of these extra-ordinary events. The desperate excuses given by apologists for why early Christians did not record these important dates are silly and ad hoc. If first century people could record the year of death of every Roman Emperor, they could record the year of death of their Lord and Savior. If first century people could record the year when their Temple was destroyed, they could record the year when God returned from the dead. If first century people could record the year when a volcano exploded (Mt. Vesuvius) they could record the year that God ascended, without mechanical assistance, into the clouds before their very eyes.
Common sense tells us these stories are not eyewitness accounts. Your own analogy proves that, Pastor.
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If common sense was all we needed to think these weren’t eyewitness accounts, you would think a whole lot more people would have come to hold that opinion about them. The guys who were writing down these stories were not consciously writing them down for generations many hundreds of years into the future from their own. They were writing them down for contemporaries who, with the exception of possibly John, were all alive when this all took place. They didn’t need to include the date because everybody already knew it. The trouble with the embellishment argument is that none of these stories bear any of the hallmarks of embellishment. Yes, there are miracle reports, but these all tend to be pretty non-sensationalized relative to what you would expect if they were really being written down many decades or even generations later after all sorts of legends had crept into the tales. Your arguments here just don’t pass the smell test.
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Why would Mary ask the angels where they have taken the body of Jesus if the angels had already told her on her first trip to the tomb that he had risen and for the male disciples to meet him in Galilee?
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Because she was struggling to believe the things she was hearing and seeing. That’s really not a hard concept to imagine given how far outside the realm of expectation all of this was for them.
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Allegedly three heavenly beings (one outside and two inside) informed Mary on her first trip to the tomb that Jesus had risen from the dead. One of those angels had an appearance of lightning (definitely not human). Yet on her second trip to the tomb Mary still assumes that someone has moved Jesus’ body. And you still believe this is coherent and logical??
If you are going to claim that Mary had not fully processed all this fantastical information to grasp what was going on, then what is your excuse for the angels? If the angels knew Mary was oblivious to what was going on, even though she had been told TWICE that Jesus had risen from the dead (once outside the tomb by one angel and a second time inside the tomb by two other angels), what sense does the following conversation make:
“But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. 12 And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet.They [the angels] said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” –Gospel of John
In order to harmonize this story with that of the Synoptics, you must assume that the angels too were confused. After telling Mary twice that Jesus has risen, all they have to say is “Why are you weeping?”
Why not say to Mary, “What are you talking about? Jesus just appeared to you and the other women on your first trip here to the tomb (Matthew). You all touched his feet! You aren’t making any sense. It makes no sense whatsoever for you to ask where Jesus’ body is if you have already seen and touched his body just a few minutes ago! Get a grip.”
John’s angels don’t mention Mary ‘s first trip to the tomb because Mary never made a previous trip to the tomb. Mary’s two trips to the tomb are an ad hoc invention by desperate believers trying to harmonize these four supernatural tales.
Come on, Pastor. Use some common sense.
The truth is, in my opinion, your perception of the resurrected Jesus dwelling within you, which you may not feel all the time but you admit you perceive some of the time, is all the evidence you need to believe this ancient tale. So no amount of evidence to the contrary will ever change your mind. And why should it? If I believed that I could perceive the presence of Elvis Presley dwelling within me, I would believe the many Elvis sighting claims are true, regardless of the objective evidence. So discussing historical evidence with you is an absolute waste of time, Pastor. What we really need to discuss is the evidence that Jesus is alive today, performing miracles, and transporting the souls of recently deceased Christians to a place called heaven where they will live happily ever after. I assert that the only evidence you have for this belief is your off and on again perception of a ghost/spirit living inside you and the perception that this ghost/spirit occasionally fulfills your wish requests, which I guarantee you cannot prove occur any more often than chance.
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I’m surprised you’ve looked at these stories as much as you have and can’t see the rather easy and obvious solution to the tension you seem to think is prohibitive of accepting the historical nature of the reporting here.
Matthew (along with all the other guys) often condensed events into summary fashion relative to how another author put the same story.
In the case of Matthew’s presentation of the resurrection scene featuring the women (to which he was not an eyewitness…none of the authors were), the encounter with Jesus he describes didn’t happen until after Peter and John had been to the tomb and back. Obviously Mary went back to the tomb, following Peter and John, and from Matthew’s telling apparently had the other women with her. John simply doesn’t mention them. When Mary encounters the angels a second time (who apparently did not reveal themselves to Peter and John at all), they asked why she was crying because they had already given her the news. Why was she still crying? But she hadn’t encountered Jesus yet. That was still coming. They couldn’t chide her for that much because it hadn’t happened yet.
I’m intrigued that you see desperation on the part of believers who have mapped out this rather obvious harmonization of the four stories. I’ve personally never felt the least bit of desperation to harmonize them. The harmonization was always fairly obvious to me.
I don’t accept the historicity of the Gospel reports about the resurrection (and everything else) because of my perception of the presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit in me. I accept them because they bear all the hallmarks of sound historical reporting. The only reason to think otherwise is because you are looking at the stories through the lens of an antisupernaturalist worldview lens (per your own admission) that can’t allow for the presence of the miraculous and so you have to find alternative explanations to what is as clear as it could be to someone not hindered by that particular hang up.
As for the evidence that Jesus is alive today and doing His work, if you are coming at things from an antisupernaturalist worldview framework, then there really isn’t going to be any evidence you will be willing to accept. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. Like Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, and which was the subject of my blog from this past Friday, it just means you can’t understand it or see it. It would seem that, given your chosen worldview hangups, that what is an absolute waste of time is discussing the present evidence of Jesus’ life and activity.
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We both know that I am not going to present any new information or new discrepancies that Christians have not addressed in the last 2,000 years. So it is probably pointless to present any more to you, except the following: Christians often compare the four Gospels’ accounts to the eyewitness statements of four persons witnessing an auto accident. The problem with this analogy is this: The four Gospels never describe the same auto accident! No two Gospels describe the same (alleged) Jesus appearance. They each record different (alleged) appearances. This is no different than multiple people in multiple locations claiming to see Elvis. There is no independent corroboration of any single sighting. Therefore every one of these claims could be hysteria, invention, or a lie.
You appeal to the concept that eyewitnesses to a miraculous event would never forget the major details of that experience but then excuse the fact that Peter and John confuse who it was that first saw the empty tomb, and, when Mary was told that a resurrection had taken place. That is contradictory, my friend. Don’t take my word for it. Ask other non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Shinto) what they think. You are giving your supernatural claims the benefit of doubt which I suspect you would not give to another religion’s claims.
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The trouble there is that none of them bear any of the hallmarks of hysteria. They don’t reflect any of the common excesses of religious invention. And there was no reason for them to lie about it. What’s more, culturally speaking, if they were going to lie about it, they did so in a way that was going to make their lie unpalatable to pretty much any audience with whom they shared it. That critique falls completely flat. Again, the harmonization among the four resurrection accounts is really fairly easy to put together. There really aren’t any contradictions at all as far as I’m concerned. Only apparent ones that are fairly easily resolved with a bit of more careful inspection.
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I’m an atheist (I prefer the term “non-supernaturalist, but by definition I am an atheist). So my opinion on the motives of early Christians is immediately discounted as biased. So I’m not going to get anywhere trying to convince you otherwise. But let me ask you this: Have you ever asked other theists regarding what they think was the cause of the Resurrection Belief? Jews? Muslims? Hindus?
And why do you think that the overwhelming majority of Jews believe that the early Christians were either hysterical (heretics) or liars?
“God, being God, can as little become human as He can wish Himself out of existence.”
Religious sects and cults arise all the time. The rise of Christianity is not surprising or unique. A bodily resurrection cult arose in the only culture and religion of that time that believed in bodily resurrection. The new cult just gave the mother religion’s teaching on that subject a new twist.
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I haven’t any of those kinds of folks directly, but I’ve read plenty of alternative theories as I’m sure you have. They all come across as so much nonsense in the face of what the Gospels present.
The first century Jews believed the early Christians were heretics because they proclaimed the Messiah had come when they didn’t think He had.
The rise of Christianity was wildly unlikely and entirely unique. There was nothing else like it at the time. As for the timing of the whole thing, Paul addresses that in Galatians 4, but you already knew that.
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But it wasn’t just the discrepancies in the Gospels that shook my faith. Apologists often talk about the “collective evidence” for Christian faith in Jesus Christ. During the four month process of my deconversion I took a fresh look at this collective evidence and this is what I found:
-The concept of a Trinity is tough to find in the OT. Is this due to progressive revelation or due to Christian invention?
-The concept of an afterlife is non-existent in the first (almost) half of the OT. It seems to appear out of nowhere once the Hebrews are taken captive to Babylon and then ruled by Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks. Where once God rewarded you in this life for your obedience, now God rewards you in an afterlife. Seems like a logical evolution in theology if one sees no possibility of hope in this life due to foreign oppression and occupation….or again, is it progressive revelation?
-Most archaeologists now consider the Exodus, Forty Years in the Sinai, and the Conquest of Canaan to be folk tales. Most archaeologists believe there is zero archaeological evidence to support the historicity of these events. (Yes, some evangelical archaeologists disagree but they are a very small minority.) If these alleged events are folk tales, why did Jesus refer to Moses, the Exodus, and Passover as real events? Cultural accommodation or was he mistaken.
-Jewish Bible scholars can provide very good arguments for why the alleged prophecies about Jesus in the Hebrew Scriptures are works of manipulation and distortion. Disputed predictions of future events are not good evidence for the reliability of any text, let alone one from Antiquity.
-Most experts doubt the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels. Disputed eyewitness testimony from 20 centuries ago is weak evidence, especially when it comes to very, very extra-ordinary claims such as the sighting of a levitating, resurrected corpse.
Each facet of the “collective evidence” falls flat when closely scrutinized. Both the individual pieces of evidence and the collective evidence for Christianity’s core claims are poor.
But I’ve forgotten one more piece of the collective evidence: the inner testimony of the Holy Ghost. It is my opinion that no amount of historical evidence regarding the discrepancies in the Christian holy book will ever convince a Christian of Christianity’s error as long as he or she believes this spirit/ghost lives inside their bodies, occasionally granting them wish fulfillments, and giving them life guidance on every facet of their life from choice of career to choice of life companion.
–
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These are all indeed common challenges to the Christian narrative. They have all been answered many times over by Christian scholars and in ways that have been sufficiently compelling to convince many former skeptics to change their mind and embrace the faith. In your research, I assume you engaged with the answers and not only the critiques.
Ultimately, though, a worldview shift like you went through almost never happens purely for evidentiary reasons but for emotional, psychological, relational, or philosophical ones (and this includes going from skepticism to faith). Personally, I’ve engaged with all of the arguments you have presented (you were correct to observe that you haven’t presented anything new to me), and found all of the critiques to be only moderately compelling and the available responses more than sufficient to the questions.
What’s more, the philosophical implications of atheism (and with apologies, I never did ask or clarify this: do you claim that label or something else as a proper description of the position you now hold?) versus the philosophical implications of Christianity are pretty divergent from one another. A shift of this nature almost never comes purely on the basis of a handful of arguments about whether or not some ancient reports of Jesus rising from the dead can be trusted. What else contributed to this transition for you?
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“Ultimately, though, a worldview shift like you went through almost never happens purely for evidentiary reasons but for emotional, psychological, relational, or philosophical ones (and this includes going from skepticism to faith).”
I agree. Most people change worldviews during a crises. A non-emotion triggered review of the evidence rarely convinces someone who is deeply invested in his current belief to change positions. Evidence usually only makes the deeply committed dig in harder!
I guess I am a rare exception. I deconverted from my beloved Christianity for one reason alone: a fresh look at the evidence. I sadly discovered that the supernatural claims and many of the historical claims of Christianity had very poor evidence to support them. The evidence in support of the core traditional/conservative Christian claims was almost entirely dependent on 1.) minority scholarly opinion (almost entirely composed of fundamentalist Protestants and evangelicals), and, 2.) many, many assumptions and generalizations.
When I deconverted ten years ago I was in my early 50s. Happily married with young children (I’m a dinosaur dad!) My career was established and doing well. I loved my conservative Christian church and my pastor. I had no secret sins or secret desires to sin. Everything was really good. So, no, in my case, there is no other cause for my dramatic change in worldview.
And I had resolved my worries about my assurance of salvation many decades earlier. How? I became a Lutheran! I got tired of the “assurance of salvation evangelical roller coaster”. One week I’m really “feeling” Jesus and the next, nothing. Is that really how Jesus intended it? Why would a devout Christian like Pastor JD Greear, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, be driven to repeat the born again experience over 5,000 times? (Check out Pastor Greear’s blog discussion of this issue). Why would Jesus set up such an insecure method of knowing one is a child of God?
But then I found Lutheranism. What did I learn from the teachings of Martin Luther and the Lutheran Church? I learned that salvation is 100% God. Sinners cannot “make a decision for Christ”. The Epistle to the Romans clearly states this. Sinners are incapable of reasoning their way to God. God comes to them. And how does God come to sinners? Answer: the mystical power of his spoken Word, the Gospel. When the Word of God is preached, “magic” happens. The supernatural power of the Word triggers belief in those whom God has elected to be his. God does not need nor allow the sinner to choose Him. God chooses the sinner. Once God has saved you by the power of his spoken Word, he commands you to be baptized. In the sacrament of Holy Baptism, the mystical power of the Word of God enters the water of the baptismal and marks you as redeemed as it runs over you; this sacrament marks you as a child of god. It is Holy Baptism that is your objective proof of your eternal security. Not your decision for Christ. Nor is it because you chose to be baptized. Baptism is not your work it is an act of God. Baptism is your objective proof that God has marked you as his property for all eternity.
So when do Lutherans believe I was saved? When I was baptized at age 9? No. Lutherans believe I was saved at age nine, before being baptized, when I bowed my head and asked Jesus to forgive me of my sins and to be my Lord and Savior. This event occurred after I had just heard the Word of God preached at my Baptist church that Sunday morning.
“But Lutherans baptize babies! Lutherans believe babies can receive the gift of eternal salvation without making an informed, adult, decision for Christ! That is nonsensical! How can a baby believe??”
Lutherans answer this Baptist/evangelical objection with this: Ana-baptist/Baptist/Decision theology is a product of the Enlightenment when Europeans began to pooh pooh belief in mysticism (the supernatural). But the Church catholic has always taught that it is the Word that saves, not the human act of getting into a baptismal. Unfortunately, Roman Catholics strayed from this simple principle and began to add good works to the requirements for salvation. Luther brought Christianity back to the teachings of the apostles: Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins!
I was soooo relieved to find, what I believed, was true, apostolic Christianity. Salvation is 100% Gods’ act! I believe and am baptized because he chose me as his child before the universe existed. It is all Him! Like Martin Luther once said, if Satan comes around to test my faith and my assurance of salvation, I can pull out my baptismal certificate and say, “Here, Satan! Here is my proof that I am bought and paid for for all eternity. I am God’s child.”
But of course, the Lutheran view of God and the power of the spoken Word depends entirely on the historical reality of the Resurrection; the reality that Jesus of Nazareth was who he claimed he was: God the Creator. If evidence proves that these two pillars of orthodox/catholic Christianity are proven false, then the whole belief system collapses, as the Apostle Paul said.
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Interesting story. And, you are correct along with Paul. If the resurrection didn’t happen, the whole thing is bunk and a bad joke. Fortunately, guys like Habermas and Licona (with whose work I know you have interacted) have done a pretty admirable job demonstrating the reasonableness of the conclusion that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead.
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Have you read the work of Roman Catholic NT scholar Raymond Brown, “The Death of the Messiah”? No one would consider him a liberal. He believed in the bodily resurrection, the virgin birth, and Jesus’ miracles. Yet in this two volume book, in which he examines the Passion Narratives in the four Gospels pericope by pericope, he demonstrates very clearly that eyewitnesses did not write those books , confirming the majority scholarly view. If you have any interest in reading it, I would be my honor to purchase it for you and send it to your church address.
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I think I’ve heard of Brown, but I have not read that one. I’ve had Wright’s Resurrection of the Son of God on my shelf for a very long time and still need to read that one (and all the rest of his works). Reading time comes few and far between in my current season (two teenagers, a preteen, and a church in the middle of a capital campaign). I’ll put the book on my list to read at some point. Because that may be quite a while yet, while I am honored by your offering, with gratitude, I’ll hold off on taking you up on it just yet.
The thing about the arguments like this is that the text is what it is. All the arguments like Brown’s or Wright’s or even Habermas’s or Licona’s is that they are all simply analyses of the text. There’s no hard, physical evidence that the reported eyewitnesses wrote the Gospels nor that they didn’t. This means that the primary determining factor in terms of what one sees is worldview. And while this certainly can be used to cut against conservative scholars and their views, it cuts the other way as well. Even for someone like Brown while his worldview apparently allowed for maintaining some traditional beliefs, it also allowed for the acceptance of a much later composition date as well. And because worldview considerations are so hopelessly entangled in these questions, using this kind of thing as an argument against or even for Christianity isn’t ever going to be ultimately conclusive. Those broader worldview considerations will unavoidably be a part of the final determination that a person makes.
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Maybe. I bought the book for my (former) pastor who had taught from the pulpit that the Gospels are “prima facie” eyewitness accounts. After reading it, he had to admit he was wrong.
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I don’t think they are prima facie eyewitness accounts. Luke certainly isn’t. Mark isn’t really either. Matthew and John appear to be in many places, but there are also passages in both that clearly are not. They bear the hallmarks in many places of being reports from eyewitnesses, but that doesn’t mean it is accurate to call them eyewitness accounts from start to finish.
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I have shared the circumstances of my conversion to Christianity and my deconversion from Christianity. Would you kindly share the circumstances of your conversion; that moment in time when you first believed in the resurrected Jesus as your Lord and Savior? Please include your age.
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Personally, I don’t think I can point to a single moment in time when it happened. Thankfully, even though I grew up in the Baptist church (a CBF church I later learned), I did not grow up in a tradition that put such an emphasis on a point of salvation moment. I made a profession of faith and was baptized when I was 8. It was Easter Sunday when I was baptized and my best friend since almost birth who is still my best friend in the world was baptized on the same day. We always went to church, but never was it shoved down our throats growing up. Ever. We didn’t have any kind of family devotions or many spiritual conversations other than praying before meals. My growth from that point was mostly on my own, but in the context of a community where I saw people lovingly living out their faith in positive and meaningful ways. I started reading the Bible regularly on my own from an early age. That habit has never left me. I started journaling in middle school and still do that by way of this blog. There was a moment at 16 when I remember things clicking like they hadn’t before. I started engaging with apologetics in high school and spent a lot of time reading different apologists and interacting with their arguments.
My call to ministry came when I was in college and was totally unexpected. It wasn’t dramatic, just unexpected. I was a Bible study leader at a youth camp. I had spent the summer encouraging kids to consider whether or not God was calling them into ministry, but hadn’t considered the question myself. The camp director (a woman who is still a good friend and who later went on to pastor Lottie Moon’s home church if that name means anything to you) led a staff devotion late in the summer in which she essentially encouraged us to pay attention to what we were teaching. I had never seriously considered ministry before that moment, but have never very seriously considered anything else since. I’m a teacher by gifting and passion. Most of my ministry is spent in writing and teaching.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time examining the arguments for and against the Christian worldview. The case for is, in my opinion, vastly more compelling and convincing than the case against.
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Did you perceive the presence of Christ dwelling within you at age eight?
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From your reflections on your experience with church growing up, it seems like you had driven into your head and heart an understanding of what experiencing the indwelling presence of Christ means as well as what kind of a role that plays in determining a person’s salvation status that I was never given and don’t personally share.
What that means is that to directly answer your question, no, I can’t recall a time when I was sure I had experienced the indwelling presence of Christ when I was 8. I meant the confession I made, though, and have sought to live consistently with it ever since. Was I fully saved then? I’m inclined to argue that I was, but it was several years before I had learned enough (which again happened largely on my own through my personal study of the Scriptures and the arguments for and against the Christian faith) that I could say I had a fuller grasp of the nature and extent of my profession of faith from years before.
To your question from much earlier, no, I don’t perceive the indwelling presence of Christ as a constant thing. I can point to many specific moments when I believe that I did that were impossible for me to miss. But I don’t know of a believer who would confess to experiencing Christ’s presence as you seem to have been taught to believe you must if you were to be considered truly saved.
I don’t see anything in the New Testament that leads me to believe the kind of expectation you seem to have been given if a fair or accurate one either. I don’t think Christian experience bears out the truthfulness of such an idea either. St. John of the Cross wrote about his desperation to experience the presence of Christ the way you are describing and yet being unable to do so for long periods of time until he finally broke through and experienced it once again in The Dark Night of the Soul.
Perhaps this is not very helpful, but I think of something like the presence of Christ more like a spiritual heartbeat. It’s always there when a person is made alive in Him (to use the New Testament language), but you’re not always pressingly aware of it at all times.
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But you do believe that from time to time you can perceive the presence of Jesus within you. How certain are you that this presence is Jesus, when you perceive it? 100%?
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If I answer that affirmatively, you’re probably going to assume at least some measure of dishonesty in my response. If I answer negatively, it’ll give you leave to think I’m asking questions or otherwise entertaining doubts about my faith that I’m not.
Could some of the occasions I might point to as experiences with Jesus’s presence through the Holy Spirit have been little more than emotional swells? Sure. I could be wrong. There are at least a handful, however, about which I am indeed entirely certain beyond any reasonable doubt. That last part is important. The Christian life is not ever going to be lived without any doubt at all. Jesus certainly never insisted upon such a thing. Trying to construct a faith that is devoid of doubt is a fool’s errand. But living beyond reasonable doubt isn’t nearly as large of a hurdle to clear. I find that aiming in that direction is a much healthier and more honest approach to take.
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What methods of investigation do you use to reach a level of confidence which you describe as “beyond reasonable doubt” regarding the presence of an invisible, inaudible, untouchable, ghost/spirit dwelling within you?
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Are you looking for something empirical? And surely you are already aware of the range of answers and have long since rejected them. So, what are you looking for here? I may still not be able to give you something you’ll find satisfactory, but knowing the parameters would be at least interesting to know.
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You are teaching adults and children that if they submit to and worship the invisible, untouchable ghost/spirit which you are reasonably certain lives inside your body they will live forever after death in a blissful paradise. What methods of investigation can they use to verify that this invisible being really exists and that he is not just your imagination?
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Here is the problem with Christianity’s claims, Pastor:
–Even if the majority of experts are wrong and the Gospels are eyewitness sources, people today, 2,000 years later, must make a blind leap of faith to believe these eyewitnesses were recording historical facts and not theological/literary historical fiction (some truth mixed with a lot of fantasy).
–There is no solid evidence that even one of the Twelve was tortured and executed because he refused to deny seeing Jesus’ resurrected, walking, talking body. All we have is Catholic Church tradition from centuries later. Human beings have died for many, many outlandish beliefs.
–And even if by some freak natural event, or supernatural act, Jesus’ brain-dead corpse did come back to life, that in no way guarantees that he is alive today and Master of the Cosmos. Asking someone today to believe this is asking them to take a gigantic leap into the dark. You have no evidence other than your subjective, not 100% but greater than 50%, certainty that a ghost/spirit occasionally makes his presence felt/perceived inside your body.
You, as a pastor, are asking naive adults and gullible little children to believe that the ghost/spirit living inside of you, which you aren’t 100% certain is really there, will transport their inner invisible self (soul) to an adult Never Neverland at the time of their death.
Is that rational, Pastor?
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Per your logic there, we have to make a similarly blind leap to accept a great many historical claims. Surely you don’t apply a similar standard to historical records that don’t include miracle reports in them. So why do that here?
What on earth does how or when or why the apostles died have to do with anything? We don’t know how they died, and that has absolutely no bearing on the question of the resurrection.
And to the last bullet, if Jesus was raised from the dead (which is what it seems you are rather crudely implying there as a hypothetical), then that would be a supernatural event. It would have to be. Otherwise dead people stay dead. And if it was a supernatural event, then the supernatural exists. Furthermore, if Jesus really was raised from the dead, then we have pretty good reason to take everything else He said seriously including His claims regarding His identity. And if that’s the case, then we aren’t asking people to take a giant leap into the dark at all. We’re asking people to trust the word of the guy who predicted and pulled off His own death and resurrection. I’m willing to take that bet. I’m also perfectly willing to encourage others, including kids, to do the same without the slightest bit of reservation. That strikes me as entirely rational, yes.
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Maybe the Hebrew god did raise Jesus from the dead. Or maybe another supernatural power decided to trick death 2000 years ago. What is your evidence that Jesus of Nazareth is alive at this very moment, TODAY?
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Are you seeking something empirical in response to that question?
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I would like to know what you would say to someone contemplating becoming a Christian if he asks how he can know that Jesus is alive today and capable of granting him eternal life.
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I would point him to the reliability of the New Testament which claim those two things numerous times in very clear language. I would tell him that because we can trust the reliability of the New Testament authors, we can comfortably take their word for it and put our faith where they put theirs.
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I started reading Craig Blomberg’s book that you recommended. I am reading and reviewing it chapter by chapter on my blog:
Please feel free to add your comments and suggestions under the posts in the comment section. The first comment is moderated, after that there is no moderation.
Gary
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I scanned it. Interesting start. I’ll be more curious to read your reviews that focus on the substance of his arguments. I’ll stay tuned.
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You answered this question today but under one of my comments higher up in this comment chain. I will respond here for clarity.
NT scholar Craig Blomberg states in the first chapter of his magnum opus, “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels” that the Early Church Fathers were just as concerned about the “differences” in the four Gospels as many modern skeptics. Different Fathers harmonized these differences in different ways. Irenaeus (second century) believed that the differences were due to each author’s theological perspective. Origen (third century) believed that the Evangelists were mixing historical facts with allegories. If a “difference” could not be resolved historically, it should then be resolved allegorically. He said that this “appeal to allegory” is necessary because “he admitted that at the historical level certain contradictions did in fact exist.”
John Chrysostom (fourth century) “…seemed to foreshadow those who would later limit the infallibility of Scripture to matters of faith and practice, rather than also including details of history and geography.” Chrysostom doesn’t appear to have been very confident in the historical reliability of the Gospels, if he held the position Craig Blomberg says he did
St. Augustine (fifth century) “Under Augustine’s influence harmonization remained for most the reasonable approach. Not every apparent contradiction among the Gospels was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, but most people were content to trust that future study would offer better solutions.”
So for several hundred years the Early Church Fathers were not sure what to do with the many “differences” (contradictions?) in the Gospels. “Should we attempt to harmonize them when some Fathers have stated on the record that some differences cannot be reconciled, at least not on an historical level, or should we assert that it is the ‘message’ that is inerrant and not every historical claim?” By the FIFTH century, Augustine appears to have settled the issue: We will harmonize the differences! And that is what the Church did until circa 200 years ago when, once again, some independent-thinking scholars decided they were not satisfied with the Church’s harmonizations and looked for other explanations.
Question: All this confusion could have been avoided. Why didn’t the Church sit down with John the Apostle (son of Zebedee) at some point during his long life and let him, the ultimate eyewitness, reconcile all these differences? If evangelicals like yourself are correct, John the Apostle lived a very long life in Ephesus, possibly living into the early second century. If all four Gospels were written as yearly as you and other evangelicals believe (pre 70 CE), the Church had access to copies of all four Gospels during John’s long lifetime. The Church could have sat down with John, laid out the four Gospels, asked him to reconcile all the differences, and recorded these reconciliations for posterity. But they didn’t, did they, Pastor? We know they didn’t because in the second century Tatian attempted to write a “Gospel harmony”, in which all four Gospels were combined into one consecutive narrative. Why would Tatian do such a thing if everyone in Christendom knew that John the Apostle had already reconciled the four Gospels?
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So, you didn’t actually get the book from Blomberg that I suggested to you. You picked up “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.” I had suggested “The Historical Reliability of the New Testament.” That’s probably the work I would refer to as his “magnum opus” instead of the one you got.
You suggest that other evangelicals and I believe the Gospels were all written before AD 70. That’s not quite accurate. The accepted position of the vast majority of evangelical scholars are that the synoptic Gospels were all written before AD 70. The broadly accepted date of John’s Gospel is not until the mid-90s. And, the traditional position is that he wrote that (along with 1-3 John and Revelation) from exile on Patmos. Before then, church tradition has long held that he served as the pastor of the church in Ephesus for some number of years. We don’t really know much about John’s whereabouts between perhaps the first church council in Jerusalem and Patmos except for his stint in Ephesus, and we aren’t sure when that was.
The point here is that “the Church” as you collectively put it couldn’t “have sat down with John, laid out the four Gospels, asked him to reconcile all the differences, and recorded these reconciliations for posterity.” Yes, there were 30 years between the completion of the synoptics and his writing his own Gospels, but by the time he wrote his, he was at the very end of his life and largely inaccessible for “the Church.”
In other words, you’re asking for something that to the best of our historical reconstructions can account for couldn’t have happened. You seem to be guilty of the oft-repeated error of applying modern historical reporting expectations to ancient historical literature. Of course they are going to fall short of those. They weren’t worried about modern historical standards some 2,000 years ago. You have to be willing to take them on their own terms and using the standards they would have applied to themselves.
You also have to factor in what their goal was in the first place. If you had picked up the correct book, you would have seen where Craig quoted from the early church father Papias that while Mark wrote down everything accurately, he didn’t necessarily present it in the order in which it historically took place.
As for your “independent-thinking scholars,” it wasn’t the independence of their thinking that resulted in the approaches they started taking to the Gospels and the Scriptures more generally, it was that they were thinking through the lens of the then-newly fashionable secular worldview framework. So, secular scholars (or professedly Christian scholars who were deeply influence by the new secular modes of thinking and wanted to be academically fashionable) looked at religious literature and started find ways and reasons to doubt its veracity and trustworthiness. Color me shocked.
I do find it a bit interesting that in other settings but focused on the same basic topic you have insisted that because the majority of scholars have determined the Gospels to be historically suspect, their conclusions must be correct, but here you point back to a time when the majority of scholars would have accepted the historicity of the Gospels making the small but growing pool of scholars taking a secular approach the ones who shouldn’t have been trusted (using the criteria you apply now). It would seem that the number of scholars holding some opinion or another isn’t really the issue so much as the worldview of those scholars. The scholarly world today in large part holds to the secular worldview framework you have decided is the correct one and so thus they must be correct. If we were to be transported back 200 years and were having this same conversation, I wonder if you wouldn’t be citing the courageous independence of thought of the minority as the reason to trust them instead.
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“Yes, there were 30 years between the completion of the synoptics and his writing his own Gospels, but by the time he wrote his, he was at the very end of his life and largely inaccessible for “the Church.” “
John didn’t need to wait until he wrote his own Gospel to harmonize the stories in the three Synoptics with his version of the truth. He could have told his congregation in Ephesus or other Church elders how to harmonize his version of events with the Synoptics. He didn’t.
To any reasonable person this is evidence that the Gospels are historically unreliable. If you can’t see that, then, no, you are not being reasonable. The fact is: No amount of historical evidence is going to change your mind as long as you believe you can perceive the resurrected Jesus living somewhere inside your body. Yet you cannot provide evidence that this perception is true other than perceived wish fulfillments which occur no better than chance.
You did not answer what you would tell a potential convert to Christianity who asks you for evidence that Jesus is alive today and possesses the power to grant him eternal life. You can’t answer that and you know it. The only thing you can say is, “Well, Jesus fulfilled all his previous prophecies, so we have to have (blind) faith that he is alive today.
Christianity is still a leap in the dark. A leap in the dark is not rational.
And FYI, no matter how many Christian books I read, you Christians will never be satisfied that I have read enough until I reconvert to your ancient superstitions.
Wake up, Pastor. You are living in a nonreality of superstitions. Abandon the dark world of imaginary spirits, ghosts, and devils and come into the light of science and rational thinking!
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I’m curious what your goal here is. You complain that Christians won’t be satisfied until you reconvert. From the handful of atheist bloggers who have decided to jump into the comment feed in my blog, it seems that you guys won’t be satisfied until I deconvert. What’s the difference accept for the direction? So far you haven’t made any arguments that have struck me as strong or compelling in the least bit. I’m not terribly confident that you will, and you are free to explain that fact however you need to. So then, again, what’s the end goal? To convince me of something (which, full disclosure, is highly unlikely), or merely argue for the sake of arguing?
On to your comments…your point could be valid unless John didn’t feel the need to harmonize the stories in the other Gospels because he knew about them and wasn’t bothered enough by what he saw to prompt him to engage in such a project. The trouble with the position you are staking out here is that it’s built on nothing more than speculation through a particular worldview lens. You are arguing that John or another church leader could or should have done this or that to fix things according to how you think they need to be fixed. Now, admittedly, Christians can’t do any more than that either, but that doesn’t in and of itself have any bearing on the actual historicity of the documents.
The decision comes down this this: are you willing to trust that the documents are historical or not? That’s it. Everything else is just an attempt to justify or not the decision you make. And, if you are willing to trust other ancient historical documents which are not nearly as well attested as the Gospels are from an historical standpoint in terms of the accuracy and confidence in what was written, you have to answer the question of why. Why extend trust to those that you don’t extend to the Gospels? I would argue that the reason has little to do with the kinds of issues you are raising and everything to do with the fact that you have chosen to look at them through the lens of an antisupernaturalist worldview framework.
On the matter of your reconverting, sure I’d be delighted if you did that, but my goal in suggesting a book (and for you to complain about my suggesting another book is kind of your own fault since you didn’t get the one I suggested in the first place) is so you can engage with the best arguments that are out there. If you choose to reject those and stick with the position you’ve claimed for yourself, so be it. Given your extensive reading list, I’m honestly surprised that you hadn’t interacted with Craig’s work yet. As I’ve noted before, he is one of the world’s foremost experts on the question of the historical reliability of the New Testament with a special focus on the Gospels. If you are going to reject all of that, I’d rather you have the chance to reject the best version of it rather than one based on incomplete or otherwise bad arguments. You’ve yet to make a counter point that even begins to challenge his arguments so far as I have been exposed to them (which includes two years in classes and as his research assistant).
And I did answer your question on another thread post. It does get tiresome when atheists tell me what I know about the position I hold. It’s like you have to assume some level of doubt to my position because of the doubts that sunk the faith you once claimed to have. Or, if I don’t have any doubts, then I’m simply to blindly committed to faith or otherwise indoctrinated to see clearly. You ask again about evidence. You still haven’t really answered my question (or if you have, I missed it) regarding what kind of evidence you would be willing to accept that Jesus is alive today. Let’s start with that.
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“I’m curious what your goal here is. You complain that Christians won’t be satisfied until you reconvert. From the handful of atheist bloggers who have decided to jump into the comment feed in my blog, it seems that you guys won’t be satisfied until I deconvert.”
I am involved in one of the greatest movements in human history: The debunking of religious superstitions, the source of much of the world’s division, discrimination, violence, and wars.
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That still doesn’t answer what your goal is here on this blog. Is the goal to see me deconvert? If that’s the case, do you have better arguments to present than what you have done so far? An ace in your sleeve, if you will? Or are you simply trying to make sure the information is out on as many blogs as you can?
Personally, I can think of historical movements of far greater historical consequence than debunking religious superstitions. I mean, if debunking religious superstition is the goal, you should be in the church. There’s been no greater threat to a broad array of religious superstition than the Christian faith. When it moved across Europe, it wiped out huge swaths of traditional religious superstitions. In fact, some critics have made that as an argument against it.
I take it that you are not a fan of religious liberty, then? What about the division, discrimination, violence, and wars that have stemmed from more secular sources?
When you think about just the teachings of Jesus and the apostles (which, a strong argument can be made, form the foundational substance of the Christian worldview), which of those teachings lead directly to the division, discrimination, violence, and wars that you want to oppose?
And are you looking to counter religious superstition generally? Your blog seems pretty laser focused on Christianity from what I can tell. What efforts are you making to stop other sources of things that more often come to mind when people think of superstitions like Wiccanism or New Age theology? Should I expect a big piece on the follies of modern witchcraft soon since we are in the season for that?
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“Why extend trust to those that you don’t extend to the Gospels? I would argue that the reason has little to do with the kinds of issues you are raising and everything to do with the fact that you have chosen to look at them through the lens of an antisupernaturalist worldview framework.”
Are you saying that we should trust all books from Antiquity, including their supernatural claims, until proven false? If so, we then are forced to accept Homer’s Cyclops and the Boatman on the River Styx as real entities. Silly. Professional historians accept as historical facts those claims from Antiquity for which there are independent, corroborating sources. We have independent, corroborating sources for the existence and crucifixion of Jesus, according to professional historians. We do not have independent, corroborating sources, according to the consensus of professional historians and Bible scholars, that Jesus walked on water, was sighted after his execution in a “resurrected” body, or that he ascended into the clouds in front of a crowd of witnesses. That is the difference! I don’t know why evangelicals trot out this silly argument that we skeptics treat the Christian texts any different than other texts from Antiquity. We treat them exactly the same. Homer is given no more leeway than the author of Matthew. Historians accept the historicity of the Greek-Trojan war. They reject as unsubstantiated the claims of Cyclops and a man-god with supernatural powers that can be only broken by shooting an arrow into his achilles tendon. Likewise with Matthew, historians accept as historical the existence of Jesus and his crucifixion, they reject Matthew’s claims of virgin births and the revivification of brain dead corpses as unsubstantiated. No difference!
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Nope, but the amount of independent corroboration we have for ancient historical claims relative to the actual number of ancient historical claims we accept as true isn’t very big. You are again making the mistake of treating the New Testament with a different set of standards than other ancient historical documents. This is a worldview issue, not an evidentiary one.
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You have ZERO undisputed, independent, corroborating eyewitness testimony of even ONE alleged post-death Jesus sighting! Not one. None of the Gospels describe the same sighting! They each describe different alleged appearance events. Many different alleged sightings of post-death Jesus claims are no more corroborating than many different alleged Elvis sightings claims! There is no corroboration of any single sighting!
Secondly, even most Christian scholars acknowledge that the authors of Matthew and Luke borrowed extensively from the author of Mark’s text. That is evidence they are NOT independent sources. Eyewitness testimony is only of value if it is independent AND corroborating. Can you imagine what would happen in a court of law if the judge discovers that witnesses #2 and #3 had access to witness’ #1 written testimony prior to writing out their own eyewitness statements?? He or she would probably dismiss the case!
And what about the author of John? Was he an independent, eyewitness source for the Jesus Story? Well, 50% of scholars (according to NT scholar Raymond Brown) believe he was, 50% think he was not. But think about this: If John lived into the early second century, as evangelicals claim, isn’t it likely that he had read or a least heard the stories found in the Synoptic Gospels? If you have already had access to the testimonies of the other three witnesses in a case, can we really look at your testimony as “independent”? I doubt most reasonable people would. Is this speculation? Yes. But that it was we must do with much of ancient history. We don’t always have sufficient evidence one way or another.
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“On to your comments…your point could be valid unless John didn’t feel the need to harmonize the stories in the other Gospels because he knew about them and wasn’t bothered enough by what he saw to prompt him to engage in such a project. The trouble with the position you are staking out here is that it’s built on nothing more than speculation through a particular worldview lens. You are arguing that John or another church leader could or should have done this or that to fix things according to how you think they need to be fixed.”
You and your Christian readers need to ask yourselves this question: Why would the Church worry so much in the second and subsequent 2,000 years of Church history about the “differences” in the four Gospels but the first century Church was not bothered by these differences? If the first century Church knew the resolutions/harmonizations for all these differences, why wasn’t this information passed down to subsequent generations of Christians??? Evangelical scholars and apologists ask us to believe that first century Christians were meticulous in maintaining their oral traditions, they even appointed “tradents” for each and every story about Jesus…but then they forgot to maintain or write down the harmonizations for the four Gospel accounts of the greatest event in human history! Not believable, folks. Now, you can claim that his is speculation, but isn’t it just good ol’ common sense? Use your brains, Christians. First century Christians were either meticulous archivists of the Jesus Story or they were sloppy and careless. Which is it?
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“I would point him [a potential convert] to the reliability of the New Testament which claim those two things [Jesus is alive today and that he has the power to grant you eternal life] numerous times in very clear language. I would tell him that because we can trust the reliability of the New Testament authors, we can comfortably take their word for it and put our faith where they put theirs.”
You are not using good logic or even common sense.
Imagine if 30% of aviation experts believe that Boeing’s new airplane is unsafe. Would rational people fly on it? Probably not. What if 50% of aviation experts believe that the new airplane is unsafe? Would rational people fly on it? Highly unlikely. But what if a significant majority of aviation experts believe that the new airplane is unsafe. Would rational people fly on this new plane? No way!
Well, dear Christian reader, a significant majority of NT scholars doubt the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels. If you don’t believe me, see the link below. Now Pastor Waite is going to tell you that the majority of NT scholars are liberals and atheists and therefore biased against the supernatural. But the truth is most Roman Catholic scholars, who believe in the supernatural and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, also doubt the traditional eyewitness authorship of the Gospels! They only scholars who believe in the traditional eyewitness authorship of the Gospels are almost exclusively evangelicals and fundamentalist Protestants! So who is most likely to be the biased party??
Bottom line: Disputed eyewitness testimony is not good evidence. Disputed eyewitness sources are not good sources. It only takes an honest, objective analysis of the evidence to see that the claims for the historical reliability of the Gospels are based mostly on assumptions, not good evidence and definitely not majority expert opinion. And if the evidence for the reliability of the Gospels is poor, the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, his continued existence today, and his ability to grant you eternal life is in serious doubt. Don’t take my word for it, folks. Study BOTH sides of the evidence for yourselves. But don’t just read one side’s claims.
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I’ve taken up enough of your time, Pastor Waits. I wish you the very best. Visit me on my blog if you have any interest.
Good bye!
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Well, I’m sorry to see you go so soon. You’re welcome back anytime. I wish you the best as well!
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If you are interested, Pastor, today’s post on my blog asks this question: “Is it wise for evangelical Christians to reject consensus and majority expert opinion on so many issues?” My conversation with you and another evangelical apologist was the impetus for this post. I would be honored with your comments.
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I’m honored by the invitation. I’ll give it a read as soon as I can. My week just turned much busier than I had planned.
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