Atheists again...
Stan Guthrie decided to respond in a CT column to the sudden interest in books written by atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al). He offers a "Why I am a Christian" essay allegedly in the spirit of Russell's "Why I am not a Christian." In this essay he clearly delineates why Russell was more right by using the typical questionable apologetics that ultimately drove me out of the faith. Included in his list of reasons was the Lewis trilemma trope. For those of you not aware of this apologetics standard, it's Lewis's argument in "Mere Christianity" that Jesus must not be considered a good, moral teacher. According to Lewis, we have three choices: lunatic, liar, or LORD. Lewis calls the idea that Jesus is a mere teacher "patronizing nonsense." Jesus, according to Lewis and now Guthrie, does not give us that choice. I am happy to agree that the NT does not seem to offer that as a choice. I am also happy to say that the choice is nonsense and is based on a particular language game that one has to agree to play before the debate can even take place.
When Lewis writes "Mere Christianity" there is widespread agreement among Western people, Christian and non-Christian, that the Bible is "true." By extension, the words of Jesus are also true and accurately represent what he said. If you don't agree with one or both of those assertions, the trilemma is just vocabulary within a closed language game. You first have to establish the trustworthiness of the record before you can convince someone who doesn't believe the Bible is "true" that Jesus is accurately represented. (There is also the secondary and tertiary problems of interpretation and theology being secondary language, not primary language.) What strikes me as funny about Guthrie's piece is that he seems not to understand that: a. the record can't be proven trustworthy, so any claims that require the trustworthiness of the Bible as interpreted by evangelicals are automatically dubious, and b. many, many people don't share the required assumptions to even play the game.
That makes his "why I am a christian" apologetic exercise an internal dialogue irrespective of how much he may believe it is apologetic in nature. Claims about "Jesus said..." are pointless for people who don't trust the Bible and don't trust the church to interpret it rightly, and who don't trust the church to practice what the church says they believe Jesus actually said. The language game will remain specific to a community of reference and closed to outsiders as long as there is a demonstrated lack of embodied ethics. The sooner the Church realizes that ethics matter more than apologetics in this context, the sooner we'll stop hearing silly arguments like Guthrie's.
Indeed the question that should be asked is why would Jesus' followers write the gospels and then Paul write his letters after them?
As for the the hypocrisy of the Church, I quite agree that something needs to change there if Christianity is going to survive. I once heard a statistic that eighty percent of the work of the church is done by twenty percent of its members.
I think maybe the best thing that could happen to Christianity is for it to lose its mainstream popularity.
Posted by: Jon Xlin | November 03, 2007 at 01:08 PM
Jon,
Paul's letters were actually written before the Gospels.
Posted by: Tom Hinkle | November 04, 2007 at 09:56 AM
oh yes, you are quite correct. My mistake. But still, the questions still stand. Though in the opposite order.
Posted by: Jon Xlin | November 04, 2007 at 05:28 PM
Paul wrote letters about events contemporary to him. The gospels (including those that didn't make it into the canon) are based on oral traditions that took a while to be written down. I'm not sure there's anything particularly sinister going on there, though naturally there are questions about how reliable the traditions were, as is a concern any time you have oral teachings that wind up codified decades later.
Posted by: Leighton | November 04, 2007 at 06:43 PM
While it is true that the Gospels were written years after the events took place, Luke makes clear that he writes specifically so that others will have a detailed record of the events in question. We, even today, do not take time to write something like a memoir, until later in life when we're reflecting and want future generations to remember things that will be lost if they are not recorded. This makes sense in the NT as well. The disciples taught in person and then others copied their record (again, in Luke's case, with painstaking detail) for others and for those yet to come. It seems to me that your argument concludes that we can't ever know anything that we didn't actually see happen and that earlier/ancient people didn't take facts seriously or talk in a straight forward manner so nothing they say can be trusted.
And as for Paul, he claimed to have met with Jesus on the road to Damascus. Later said the Gospel was primarily centered around the death (for our sins), burial and resurrection of Jesus. The events he wrote of may have happened earlier, but if Paul claimed to have seen and spoke with Jesus, then we have a bit more to deal with than just "traditions." If he really saw Jesus then we might believe his words as a little more authoritative and trustworthy.
Posted by: Dallas Tim | November 05, 2007 at 10:42 AM
Historians in the ancient world had different standards for what constituted a careful historical investigation. There was a strong preference for interviewing living sources over against documentary evidence. This is because with an oral source, you can ask clarifying questions, whereas with a document, you're fresh out of luck if something confuses you or if you want more information about this or that detail.
The problem is that human memory doesn't work like a VCR. We store little threads of each event, speech and memory, so that when we need to remember, we bring out the threads and weave the memory afresh each time we recall it. As a result, memories tend to change over time, sometimes consciously, sometimes as a result to leading questions from an interviewer. This is well known enough that our legal system has codified eyewitness testimony as the least reliable form of evidence in a trial. That's not to say it's useless, not by any means--it can be the decisive tipping factor when combined with strong physical evidence--but if it's all you've got, it's not likely to come before a jury.
This isn't an indictment for sloppy thinking on the part of the ancients--for them, the recreations, always relevant to contemporary events, were more important than the minutae of what, specifically, literally happened. (We think this way too, to an extent--the story of Aeneas, fiction though it be, is more relevant to people than things like the population of Italy in the second century B.C.E.) Also, given that we know this is the system they used, we can correct for it in a lot of cases where there's supporting or opposing documentation. In cases where there's not--e.g. the life of Jesus--we can't be as confident, from an evidentiary standpoint.
And of course when you're doing history, you never, ever, ever assume that someone actually interviewed eyewitnesses just because they said they interviewed eyewitnesses--in fact, it gives you cause to be suspicious, since this was usually a sign of forgery or fabrication. (Disguising fabrications was a common device even in the ancient world; forged letters claiming to be from Paul--and we have quite a few outside the NT--usually warned the recipients to be wary of forged letters.) I think it's more likely that the introduction to Luke is an attack on at least one other contemporaneous gospel, though, rather than a sign of malfeasance; "Don't trust the Gospel of Thomas," it might be saying, "its author didn't bother to do his homework."
Acts claims Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Paul himself doesn't. It would be more accurate to say that we can't be confident (again, from an evidentiary standpoint) when all we have is testimony without supplementary evidence. This has less to do with ancient practices or culture than with the dearth of documentation.In practice, the eyewitness stuff like the opening of 1 John ("What we have seen with our eyes, touched with our hands," etc.) seems to be for those who already believe. Outsiders, historically, were more convinced either by the vitality of the community they could belong to, or the strength of the story as it was told, or by the behavior of Christians in extreme circumstances. For the most part, Christians were ignored until they started being martyred for atheism. (They wouldn't burn incense to the state gods, which was the Roman equivalent of flag-burning.) Crazy people in mystery cults saw all sorts of things, but people who calmly refuse to recant their beliefs to avoid being torn apart by wild animals--WTF? Believers living their ethic was the real attention-grabber.
Posted by: Leighton | November 05, 2007 at 12:19 PM
"This is well known enough that our legal system has codified eyewitness testimony as the least reliable form of evidence in a trial. That's not to say it's useless, not by any means--it can be the decisive tipping factor when combined with strong physical evidence--but if it's all you've got, it's not likely to come before a jury."
Leighton--
you have my respect and agreement in just about everything you've ever said here . . . except that quote.
Which evidence is more reliable in the following scenario: two cars are in pieces at an intersection controlled by a traffic light--both cars have suffered horrible damage. Would you rather have an eyewitness that saw it all happen; or would you rather surmise the tale of events from the static physical evidence at the scene?
Would you presume it is raining outside based upon seeing some guy's wet shirt or would you be more likely convinced if your wife or child told you they saw it raining outside?
For these reasons and many more, our legal system (and every other common law system) bases the highest calibre of esteem on direct eyewitness accounts of events in lieu of circumstantial evidence. There is no stronger physical evidence than direct eyewitness accounts.
Posted by: dr dobson | November 05, 2007 at 12:55 PM
Dobson, I don't know about what actually is the legal preference, but I seriously hope that you are wrong. An eyewitness account is only as good as the eyewitness, who could be mean, biased, crazy, blind, or any of a multidude of other things that would make their testimony useless in terms of evidence. Even if he/she were none of those things, my experience tells me that a variety of perspectives are necessary to approach the truth about even the most mundane of events. Everyone has had experience being sure that something happened a certain way (He said, "X") when another, equally intelligent and level-headed person had a similarly strong recollection that differed significantly (He said, "Y"). There is no way to reconcile these differences without empirical evidence or a consensus of opinion from a large group of verifiably trustworthy observers. Regardless of Jury Instructions, if you put me on a jury, and the only evidence is what someone says they saw, I'm finding not guilty.
Posted by: cheek | November 05, 2007 at 01:38 PM
"...Yes, and the author of Luke still gets things wrong--Quirinius was not governor of Syria during the year of Jesus' birth (he served from 6-9 C.E., when Jesus was likely a teenager)..."
then
"...Historians in the ancient world had different standards for what constituted a careful historical investigation."
You just stated that Quirinius was governor from 6-9 A.D., but you disqualified us from accepting that statement as fact because you said historians from that period didn't seem to care that much for hard facts. Which is right?
How do we know which historian(s) to believe?
There are very plausible descriptions of Luke's account and the "Quirinius question."
The record takes faith and it even states that fact for the readers. Those who recorded the events made clear that this was not just a "near-recollection" but a strict account of a very important series of events that would change the world forever. It was critical to get it right.
I realize that even today, people exaggerate, embellish, lie, plagarize, etc... This happens in books, interviews, reports, and everywhere else. Not getting it right historically is far from an ancient history problem. People are people and people are often wrong (even when they're legitimately trying to get it right).
The issue is that we have multiple records of guy doing and saying miraculous things. many of the things were in direct fulfillment of centuries old prophecies. We have no viable explanation for His resurrection/ missing body and many of His followers died horrible deaths while taking their beliefs to their graves (no record of anyone saying, "Ok, Ok, we were just kidding...").
I agree that doing is more important than just believing. On the other hand, just because many only say they believe and don't do much in the way of action isn't a valid reason to discard the most overwhelming series of events in the history of humanity.
Posted by: Dallas Tim | November 05, 2007 at 02:07 PM
Sorry doc, but eyewitness accounts have been proven time and again to be unreliable. There was a time when they were held as the most important piece of evidence you could introduce in trials, but no more. This is why we see so many convicted on the basis of eyewitness accounts being proven innocent through DNA testing.
Posted by: alice clay | November 05, 2007 at 02:20 PM
I'm not an expert either, but I don't think Dobson will mind me saying that certainly he would have assumed it a given that the credibility of an eye-witness be taken into consideration.
Witnesses who are biased or non-credible would certainly come under much more scrutiny, but a typical, law-abiding, non-conflict-of-interest, type witness would certainly provide the most overwhelming testimony.
Obviously things like DNA evidence are also very important, but eye witness testimony from a "good" witness is often bullet-proof (especially if it's on a video tape or still photo frame).
Posted by: Dallas Tim | November 05, 2007 at 02:24 PM
dr dobson,
If you have trial experience, I'll obviously defer to your account of what is actually used in courtrooms. I'm going by what I've heard in conversations with old roommates who went on to be IP attorneys.
Eyewitness accounts are fine for traffic court, since it's usually all you have to work with; the cost of a forensic analysis of tread marks and impact analyses of the vehicle frames will usually exceed whatever dollar values are at stake in small claims court. But surely you want something better than--or, at least, in addition to--eyewitness testimony if you're making a case for manslaughter or a multimillion dollar wrongful death suit?
Personally? I'd prefer the shirt, assuming the soak pattern fits rain as opposed to, say, a water hose or a fully clothed cannonball into a pool. I also wouldn't doubt a family member about the weather unless I had good cause, but that's because I'm used to water falling from the sky, and pretty unused to people three days dead walking and talking.Posted by: Leighton | November 05, 2007 at 02:38 PM
Tim,
We don't know about Qurinius as governor of Syria from 6-9 CE because historians from that period record it. While I'm sure there are some who do, I am not familiar with any such accounts (nor have I looked). We have independent corroboration of dated bureaucratic records that relate his actions, and dated Syrian coins bearing his image from that time (the earliest were stamped in 5 CE). We have nothing similar for any early Christian claims. Psychologically, it's easier, quicker and less complicated for almost every human to remember what year it is than to recount a narrative, so we tend to trust these things as being more reliable than eyewitness testimony for things that involve dates--unless there's a very strong motivation to lie, to fabricate a claim to an office or a tract of land or something like that. That's missing in the case of the dating of Quirinius's tenure in Syria.
You don't believe them. You look at their methodology and judge how likely their conclusions are based on the evidence. You can't do this with every little thing, of course, but with important questions, it seems like it's worth a little time investment. No, there aren't. Or if you're referring to apologetics accounts like Greg Boyd's, you're correct if by "plausible" you mean "plausible to people who don't study history or consult sources published after 1960." I've seen four separate defenses of a second Quirinius governership in 8-6 BCE; three relied on fabricated evidence that we never actually found, and one argued that because we can't be absolutely certain that there wasn't one with the same confidence we have that 2 + 2 # 5, we can conclude that it happened. These arguments are nice for people who want to continue believing things without thinking about them, but it's a terrible, terrible way to study history.The only documents that claim there was an empty tomb come from Jesus' followers. You only need an explanation if you assume the documents are trustworthy a priori.
And we have loads of records of Christians recanting under persecution--even of church leaders who argued that saying something false to someone behaving unjustly was the proper course of action. This is why church fathers like Polycarp and Tertullian spent so much time vilifying people who didn't die for their beliefs. There were also many who did not recant, and this inspired people like Justin Martyr to convert (and sometimes later die as martyrs themselves), but it was by no means a sure thing--and the vast majority of martyrs could not possibly have seen either Jesus, or anyone who had seen Jesus themselves.
No eyewitness testimony is bulletproof. And while it is very true that, in courtrooms, a witness to an assault who was just passing by (and is not prejudiced against the race, culture or gender of either party) is superior to a witness who is a close friend of one of the parties involved, surely you'll agree that followers of Jesus--Christians--have arguably the strongest possible conflict of interest in the question of the resurrection.Posted by: Leighton | November 05, 2007 at 03:04 PM
Greg,
You said...
"The sooner the Church realizes that ethics matter more than apologetics in this context, the sooner we'll stop hearing silly arguments like Guthrie's."
The reason that the Church does is because of what it believes. Those two cannot be seperated. And even if the Church does enough, will it ever be enough to make the Bible true? Not as in "proveably" true anyway.
Ethics are a belief(s) that things should happen a certain way. Many (if not most) of the major universities and hospitals in our country have their origins in some branch of the Christian church. Many of the world's major relief organizations are also rooted in Christian culture. Many of the shelters and homeless aid agencies in our major metropolitan areas are Christian agencies.
I grew up in a suburb of Dallas ("suburb-of-dallas Tim" is too long a moniker) and our local food pantry to the less-fortunate was a collaboration of area Christian churches.
The Christian church (in it's myriad branches) does more than any other single agency in the world when it comes to helping those less-fortunate. It will never be enough and we will continue to try and sift through what we believe and why, but asking us to start doing more seems a little near-sighted. I'm all for more encouragement and constructive criticism, but if you can think of a group who gives more, serves more, does more than those who call themselves "Christian" then please do so.
Are we perfect? No. Should individual members examine their own habits and seek ways to show the Love of Christ more? Yes. But all of this doing will come from our allegiance to a Man who lived several thousand years ago and who taught (along with His disciples) that the reason we live the way we live is because of what is expected of us by the God we serve. He is the God of Truth and that Truth is eternal and unchanging. Without a solid platform of ethics and truth, out movement, like so many others, would eventually burn out and fade away. Because of the truth we believe, we continue to push forward and live out the commands of the one we serve. Not perfectly, but with far greater success than anyone else.
Posted by: Dallas Tim | November 05, 2007 at 03:23 PM
Leighton,
I like to just take a discrepancy to it's conclusion. Let's say Luke's timing was off.
What does that mean? Take all the other questions, issues, discrepancies, etc...
What do they mean for us? Jesus didn't really exist? Didn't say what He said? Didn't do what multiple records claim He did?
The bottom line for Christians is that Jesus lived and taught a message that was echoed by His followers. He performed miracles and claimed to be one with the God of the OT. He made specific statements about sin, hell, the devil, etc... His followers watched Him die then followed suit by teaching His message and often being killed themselves.
Jesus fulfilled OT prophecies, reiterated His intent and reaffirmed the teachings of those before Him. Why?
In light of all of the testimony, eye-witness accounts, continued teaching by His disciples and to-this-day following, there is as much reason to take His message seriously and there is to try and determine any other historical event or series of events.
Unbelief requires the rejection of far too much evidence.
Posted by: Dallas Tim | November 05, 2007 at 04:30 PM
I can't tell you how often I've argued with fundamentalists who are convinced--convinced--that that if something stupid like Quirinius not being governor during Jesus's birth year turns out to be true, then all life is meaningless. I'm convinced that this mindset misses the point of just about everything. It sucks immense amounts of time and energy away from the things that actually matter.
I'll respond to the rest of your message later, probably tomorrow--I've got to run to rehearsal, and I'm finishing off the last of my Spaten Oktoberfest after that.
Posted by: Leighton | November 05, 2007 at 05:49 PM
There's a huge difference between saying that the biblical texts are mistaken about Quirinius and saying that the biblical texts are mistaken about who and what Jesus was.
Its less about whether the Bible is completely right on every historical account and more about whether the biblical teachings on sin and reality itself are correct or not.
If the bible is wrong about the resurrection, sin, salvation, God, etc. Then we might as well scrap it.
Posted by: Jon Xlin | November 05, 2007 at 06:37 PM
I'm not an expert either, but I don't think Dobson will mind me saying that certainly he would have assumed it a given that the credibility of an eye-witness be taken into consideration.
Witnesses who are biased or non-credible would certainly come under much more scrutiny, but a typical, law-abiding, non-conflict-of-interest, type witness would certainly provide the most overwhelming testimony.
Whether a fact witness's (i.e., eye witness) testimony is credible is a question for the jury. In federal court (and most state courts), as long as the witness is competent to testify (which I won't go into), his testimony comes in for what it's worth, and we leave the jury to decide its credibility.
I don't know of any rule/codification that says that eye witness testimony is, ipso facto, the least reliable form of evidence. (I think that's more of a rule of thumb that cops use to solve crimes.) But obviously, memories fade and are susceptible to other influences, which is why we let the finder of fact give the testimony weight.
Posted by: Jason | November 05, 2007 at 07:34 PM
Leighton,
I think God is bigger than inerrancy. Even bigger than "classical inerrancy." I see Him using ordinary (often even, as he Bible puts it, "untrained, uneducated") men to complete the text. Issues like the Quirinius issue may require further investigation, but if your/my view is "Dammit, this better make perfect sense to me or I'm quitting church" then (as you intimated) you have missed the bigger picture.
That bigger picture, though, does require us to hear the overwhelming testimony and to discern what it means and how it should affect our lives.
For me the evidence and the faith that I have compells me to follow the truth of the Christian message and the leader who died for me.
Quirks aside, the main message of the Bible is one of sin, atonement, salvation, obedience and eternity. Those threads saturate the text. The underlying message seems clear to me, regardless of when Quirinius was govenor.
Enjoy your Spaten.
Posted by: Dallas Tim | November 06, 2007 at 09:04 AM
The writer of the experimental theology blog http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2007/11/death-and-doctrine-part-1-need-for-ante.html wrote something that I feel is pertinent to this discussion.
"But this analysis isn't just a coffeehouse musing, over a decade of replicated empirical research has shown that worldviews (routes to meaning and significance) are explicitly involved in death repression and transcendence. And this story has a dark side. Given that our worldviews are existentially vital, we react hostilely when our worldview gets poked, prodded, or attacked. In short, much of the ideological violence in the world today can be traced back to death concerns. The conflict between fundamentalist Christians in America and fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East is overtly about ideologies and worldviews, but covertly the issue is about death. Both groups have worldviews in place that allow for death transcendence (i.e., being saved/favored by God or Allah at the death event) but the mere existence of the other calls each worldview into question. Who has the correct vision here? It is a question that is an existential bomb. It's a question that suggests that our cherished worldviews might be arbitrary human constructions. And if that's the case then death fears surge into the mind as we contemplate the purpose and meaning of our existence."
Posted by: Jon Xlin | November 06, 2007 at 12:38 PM
I've read through the discussion again, and I misspoke when I said "...our legal system has codified eyewitness testimony as the least reliable form of evidence in a trial." I apologize.
The courtroom analogy was an unfortunate digression; I should have stuck to what I've personally studied, and said instead that we know eyewitness testimony to be among the least reliable forms of evidence, especially in two cases: first, where there's a conflict of interest; second, where the memory in question is deeply emotionally significant.
On to the rest of my response to Tim.
Belief/faith in God and Jesus is a freedom of conscience issue that I prefer not to get into (with the exception of the Jesus wrapped in the American flag that is nationalism masquerading as an ancient belief). What I do object to, though, is remarks like:
In other words, based only on the evidence without first consulting faith, any person in the world who doesn't believe in a literal resurrection is some combination of stupid, dishonest, ignorant, or confused.
Let me first address your specific claims, then I'll present my take on the situation.
You mention "multiple records" a lot, but the records, for supposedly being multiple, are awfully sparse for an event that is supposedly the turning point in human history. A little more independent evidence of Jesus's existence would be nice if you're going to make an absolute claim binding on every human who ever existed; a footnote in Josephus is pretty meager fare for something like that.
Why not trust eyewitness testimony? Well, testimony coming from people who have everything in the universe to lose if they're wrong isn't exactly free from conflict of interest. From what we know of inner-circle members in deeply countercultural religious groups, very little can convince them that they were mistaken. One of the more extreme examples is the 15th century case of Sabbati Sevi, the presumptive messiah whose followers kept the faith even after he apostatized to Islam, considerably altering the content of his "lifelong teachings" in the process. There's nowhere near sufficient evidence to make a compelling case that this was the case with early Christians, but from a strictly evidentiary standpoint, you don't want to rule it out.
(Tangent: I've said it before and I'll say it again: if there are other reasons to believe--belonging to a community, strength of the meaning of the story before considering its factuality, a preexisting commitment--this isn't sufficient grounds to back off. It's an examination of whether the evidence alone is binding on all people, everywhere.)
The faithfulness of Jesus's followers, strictly speaking, doesn't say anything about the truth of their claims--only about them and what they're willing to sacrifice for their beliefs. There have been Buddhist martyrs since the fifth century BCE, not to mention today in Burma; Jewish and Muslim martyrs throughout history; some Hindu martyrs in the wake of the British colonization of India; even secularists who have been killed for their unbelief in middle-eastern countries. Martyrdom puts a belief in a separate category from a lot of everyday notions, as something worth dying for--something to come to understand, but not ipso facto something to commit to, or to declare as "true" based solely on the death of those who believe it. It would be silly to have a martyrdom contest where we gather everyone killed for their beliefs throughout history and count up who has the most, to see who has the strongest evidence for the truth of their claims.
This is very much unclear, particularly given recent manuscript discoveries in the past six decades that have shed more light on other forms of earlier Christianity. Every group--Marcionites, Ebionites, Gnostics, and the small-c catholic church that eventually won the culture war--claimed that theirs were the teachings of Jesus and his apostles and the eyewitnesses to both. They responded to other groups by destroying their gospels and writings. So what we have is (or was, a hundred and fifty years ago) the only testimony of Jesus's life, not because this is what every early Christian agreed on, but because the testimony of dissenters was exterminated in a series of classical political power plays.(Tangent: I don't see any clear implications for believers in these facts. All institutions, because they are institutions, have systematic flaws from their origins to their ends. It only calls into question the [always false] claim by traditionalists that "This is always how we've done things," which leads us to greater compassion, humility and carefulness to avoid falling into the human trap of destroying people who don't submit to the way we want to do things.)
Well, this tendency was helped along quite a bit by Polycarp, who argued forcefully that this was the proper way to respond to persecution, rather than giving a straw retraction in public and going on to worship privately. As I mentioned in my last post, the response to persecution was by no means unified. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of the prophecies cited as predictive in the NT were not regarded as predictive by the Jews of the time. Better scholars than I will ever be have spent decades poring through our abundant contemporaneous writings of rabbis and Jewish philosophers looking for such expectations, and came up with absolutely nothing. (The one I know personally is a devout evangelical Christian.)There wasn't even a unified idea among Jews of what the messiah would be, as I've written about before. Some thought it would be a king, some a military leader, some expected two people at once--a prophet and priest, some a prophet and king, priest and king, etc. Jesus wasn't the first, nor was he the last, claimant to the mantle of Jewish messiah. To the first audience of the canonical gospels, the "prophecies" "fulfilled" in the NT had no evidentiary value to those who weren't already believers. The same is true today.
(Tangent: once again, the only implication for people who believe for reasons orthogonal to evidence is that the NT authors are giving a new lens through which to read the OT. This was fairly common, albeit on a lesser scale, with influential rabbis, though of course they didn't throw out all other interpretations--midrash, having a principled discussion about interpretation, was a key part of Jewish hermeneutics, which is why the Talmud reads more like a collection of arguments than a systematic commentary.)
This post is way too long already. I'll get to my take on the situation later on.
Posted by: Leighton | November 06, 2007 at 02:01 PM
Jon,
I've seen that post, and others like it, a lot; I've never really understood it, but enough people find merit in the argument that I'm pretty sure there's something there that I'm missing.
Once you see death face to face, no worldview is strong enough to hide it from you. My experience was spending a couple hours lying in a hospital bed with a catheter in my arm, wondering if parts of my heart had died. Others get cancer or need an organ transplant.
I guess it all depends on how you respond to it, but once you get that feeling where you know your heart won't be beating in 20 minutes (even though the feeling is usually mistaken)--that gut-wrenching sense of imminent doom and (perceived) certain knowledge that you will be dead soon is something you know you eventually will have in common with everyone living, no matter who they are, no matter what they believe. It makes it easier to act compassionately toward other people.
(And you know what's funny, is I hate needles and tubes, and I was more scared of the IV than I was of dying. We're such funny little creatures.)
Posted by: Leighton | November 06, 2007 at 02:12 PM
Alright, here's my take on the situation. Reading the other thread, I think the best thing to do is to state my position clearly and briefly, and then go into detail as needed.
The thing about the small-c catholic church (from which we derive our traditions about the life and teachings of Jesus) is that it, like every other form of early Christianity, claimed to embody the authentic tradition as taught by Jesus and handed down by his apostles. We know both from recently recovered documents and from citations in the early heresiologists (attackers of heresy--mostly []) that the Ebionites, Marcionites and Gnostics made the same claim--that Jesus and the apostles sided with them, not with the small-c catholic church. Nobody disputes this. Almost everyone agrees that at most one of the groups is correct, of course.
There are two observations here that are both important, but have to be considered together.
First, we have much, much more evidence to support the small-c catholic church's claim of embodying the tradition of the inner circle followers of Jesus. Again, nobody (to my knowledge) disputes this.
Second, we also know indisputably from the writings of the church fathers that as the small-c catholic church acquired power, it ordered the writings of its Christian competitors burned, and the heretics expelled from their communities. Among Western churches, this purge was systematic, and lasted decades. Once in a while you see a knee-jerk reaction on the internet like "But they had the truth, and there's no need for truth to be so defensive, so Christians wouldn't have done anything like this!" But nobody who has actually read the church fathers disputes that this is the case.
Now I'm about to move from the realm where agreement is compelled by evidence, into interpretation of that evidence. I think these things have two sets of implications: one for people who are already committed believers, and one for people who aren't.
First, for myself, in the latter category. I observe the following things:
* The Church Fathers' defense of their religious cleansing activities is that making exactly the correct claims about the relationship of Jesus's divine nature to God's divine nature (which the overwhelming majority of Christians today fail at, by their standards) is a matter of eternal salvation; thus eliminating heretics for both their own good and for posterity is the only defensible response to disagreement.
* This is puzzling to me, since the core disagreement between the small-c catholics and the Gnostics was ostensibly over the question of a spiritual elite within the body of believers, which catholics vehemently denied. Yet the catholics' complicated, convoluted ideas about the human and divine nature of Jesus are things that I can only understand two out of every three days (and this is before the doctrine of the trinity was articulated), and I have graduate training in mathematics. How much harder would that be for someone in the second and third centuries with no education at all to affirm coherently?
* But then I remember that the point wasn't to understand the claims about Jesus; it was to affirm them--that is, to agree with your bishop when he says them.
* This is suspiciously like the contemporaneous Roman understanding of worship, wherein the most important part isn't relating to the gods, but in going through the rituals to appease the human authority figures supervising you. (This is why early Christians were persecuted for atheism: they wouldn't sacrifice to the Roman gods, which was condemned not because Romans actually thought the gods would be mad, but because it was an open declaration of disloyalty to the emperor and the state.)
* Further, ideological cleansing is a common tactic among such human rulers, but not in all cases of dissent--you only make a systematic practice of it when it looks like your opponents are making a convincing case that might oust you from power.
* Clement writes in 100 CE of a case where the bishop and leaders in Corinth were ousted in a religious coup, so we know there was some such infighting going on in the early church during the time the gospels were being written.
* Why would the small-c catholics come to power if not because they were, on some level, fundamentally right? Looking at the conflict the same way I look at the dispute between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims (i.e. without considering doctrine as a relevant concern), I notice the following.
* Unlike Ebionites, who insisted that followers of Jesus must become Jewish (citing Matt 5.18), small-c catholics argued that believers didn't have to convert to Judaism before becoming Christians. Ebionites also mandated vows of individual poverty, sharing things in common a la Acts 2.44-45. Authority figures and influential academics were more likely to join a group that didn't require adult circumcision and giving up all their possessions, so it makes sense that small-c catholicism would eventually find a wider following than that of the Ebionites.
* Marcionites, who rejected Judaism and the law entirely, made an unfortunate tactical mistake. Jews, like Christians, didn't offer incense to the Roman gods; but Jews, unlike Marcionites, were an ancient religion. Romans had great respect for antiquity, and exempted the Jews from the religious ceremonies imposed on all other Roman conquests because their traditions went back centuries. Romans were also deeply suspicious of novelty, and saw the Marcionites (and later, all Christians) as essentially upstart terrorists. The small-c catholic church, by contrast, spent a lot of time reading their doctrines back into the OT to claim the mantle of ancient religion, so the Romans were slower to persecute them. This likely helped the small-c catholics build a larger following than the Marcionites.
* Gnostics were trickier to pin down, because they would affirm the doctrines of whatever group they belonged to, while secretly reading in their own "higher" meanings. They were eventually systematically exterminated from the body politic because of political differences; you don't trust your bishop unquestioningly when you think you understand the word of God better than he does.
* The early small-c catholic chuch was big on unquestioning trust in authority that way. "I have therefore taken upon me first to exhort you that you would all run together in accordance with the will of God. For even Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the [manifested] will of the Father; as also bishops, settled everywhere to the utmost bounds [of the earth], are so by the will of Jesus Christ," writes Ignatius to the Ephesians. Obey your bishop like you would God Himself.
So, wrapping up: I'm asked to believe that a turning point in human history happened two thousand years ago, with minimal independent corroboration of the existence of the man through which it happened; further, relevant evidence of the life and teachings of this man were intentionally, systematically destroyed by the very people whose word I'm supposed to be trusting about what happened? I think Christianity is important because many people believe it is important, but the naked evidence, from a historical standpoint, is deeply underwhelming.
Now, on to the second case: the implications for believers.
I suspect the real difference between Christians and non-Christians is not in what they affirm or decline to trust; I think it's the significance they ascribe to the resurrection. For me, it isn't important; if I decided one day that I believed it, almost nothing in my life would change. I might try to find a church or something, but I'd still spend my days caring for the people around me, looking for ways to be involved in making life better for people far away, and doing what I can to mitigate the evils of the systems I'm complicit in. I've made enough Christian language part of my internal vocabulary already that the way I think and talk about things wouldn't change. (The same is true of Buddhist, rationalist and Enlightenment deist language.) I'm not scared of being dead; the idea of life after death never really seemed important to me, since it was always dying that concerned me more, even when I was a little kid. Jesus's story is still important, and I, personally, don't see any loss if it weren't factual. The Ninth Doctor models a better way for us to live our lives; that message isn't negated just because Doctor Who is clearly and explicitly a work of fiction. For me, the only consequences to affirming specific things about the past would be declaring my loyalty to a social group and my opposition to others.
But of course this isn't the case for everyone. What do these things imply for people who believe the resurrection is important--perhaps the most important thing?
Honestly, not much, I don't think. Your mileage may vary. It might (or might not) have some implications for the way you talk about coming to faith; the evidence isn't within light years of overwhelming, but what evidence is there, coupled with a choice and at least one leap of faith, might rightly make commitment overwhelming.
The shenanigans of the church fathers are troubling, but all institutions (all of them) have to participate in evil in order to survive. It's the nature of being born as humans. The only consequence there would be the same humility everyone else has (or should have)--not voting the Pat Robertson/James Dobson ticket would be nice, maybe smacking down Christian supremacists and dominionists once in a while.
If you want an outsider's perspective, which is probably worth what you paid for it, I've seen people who have faith in God, and that seems to be a viable way of living life; people who try to put their faith in first- and second-century Christians tend to get brittle after a while--both in their faith and as people. For what it's worth...
Posted by: Leighton | November 07, 2007 at 01:52 PM
Ack, didn't finish editing. I meant to add in the brackets that the primary heresiologists I'm thinking of were Irenaus, Epiphanius and Tertullian.
Posted by: Leighton | November 07, 2007 at 01:54 PM