On trial: ‘The Case for Christ’ part 3c

This is the continuation of a series on “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel. If you missed them, here are the other parts in the series: Part 1Part 2Part 3a and Part 3b.

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When I left off last time, Lee Strobel was having what he might say was a well-reasoned and critical look at the gospels as part of a discussion with Christian apologist Craig Blomberg. In the opening pages of Chapter 2, Strobel is asking Blomberg about various elements surrounding the validity of the New Testament gospel writers, and Blomberg claimed that the authors intended to portray events as they happened (See here for my refutation of pages 39-40).

In the rest of the chapter, Strobel and Blomberg subject the gospel writers to numerous “tests,” including ability, character, consistency, bias, etc. In the ability section, Strobel questioned Blomberg on the writers’ ability to accurately relay information by word of mouth a good 30 years or more after the events of the life of Jesus took place. Blomberg noted that in Old Testament times, priests were well known to have committed the entire Jewish scriptures to memory, much like the hafiz in Islam.

Here’s Blomberg:

Books — or actually, scrolls of papyrus — were relatively rare. Therefore education, learning, worship, teaching in religious communities — all this was done by word of mouth. … it would have been well within the capacity of Jesus’ disciples to have committed much more to memory than appears in all four gospels put together — and to have passed it along accurately.

Of course, Blomberg is making pure conjecture here about the gospel writers’ strength of memory, but in any case, his argument is actually strengthened if the gospels were passed down by oral tradition and not written down because at least then, we would not be able to piece together the puzzle of how these documents came to be grouped together as the New Testament gospels. They would simply stand apart as a collection of memories from some people named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who managed to relay a remarkably cohesive narrative, even if we concede some errors in consistency. Minor flaws in the details, apologists will say, is to absolutely be expected if the gospel writers were working from memory. As we will see, however, a greater case can be made that the gospels were based on earlier works.

This article provides a wealth of examples suggesting that at least some ordinary people could read and write in Jesus’ day. Established estimates put the literacy figure at about 3 percent in first-century Palestine under Roman rule. As one example, the article points to the parable of the shrewd manager:

A deed of debt, dated 55–56 A.D., was discovered among the Second Revolt documents and may be an example of the debt notes Jesus referred to in the parable of the Shrewd Manager; in the parable, the manager instructs his master’s debtor, “Take your bill, sit down quickly and write half the amount.” It is taken for granted that an ordinary man would be able to write out a numerical sum.

In others examples, excavations have uncovered ossuaries with writing from family members of dead relatives, along with numerous potsherds with inscriptions in the Masada area:

While most materials that were written on—leather, papyrus and ossuaries—were expensive, one writing material was free and readily available: the potsherd. Ancient crockery was usually simple earthenware (terracotta), which broke easily. Pieces lay scattered in the streets and courtyards of towns and villages—free scrap paper. You could scribble a note on a suitable sherd, then throw it away once you were finished. A Hebrew alphabet found on a potsherd at Qumran is a good specimen of a pupil’s attempt at learning his letters.

Many inscribed potsherds, called ostraca, were found in the excavations at Masada and were left by the Jewish rebels who held out against the Romans until 73 A.D., three years after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple.

And then we have the case of the writer, Luke, who said in his opening that

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.

While the Q document is lost to antiquity, numerous biblical scholars — not to be confused with the kind of biblical apologists Strobel “interviews” for his book — believe that similar content in Matthew and Luke were derived from the earlier text, Q ((Christoph Heil & Jozef Verheyden (Ed.) The Sayings Gospel Q: collected essays, Vol. 189 of Bibliotheca Ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium, Peeters Publishers Pub., 2005 pp. 163 – 164)), while Helmut Koester, Ron Cameron and John Dominic Crossan have argued that Mark was a later version of an earlier work known as Secret Mark ((D. Crossan, Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon, Minneapolis, 1985, p. 108.))

And M. Bar-Ilan, a Jewish scholar at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, has argued that because reading and writing was less essential in Jesus’ time than today, and while 3 percent may seem like a low figure to modern people, that’s not the case if we consider society at the time:

Literacy data from all over the world show the relationship and dependence between farmers (or the state of agriculture), and literacy. This tie has been found in various peoples and in the course of time. The data ‘create’ a world-wide rule.

The other facet of this dependence is population growth, urbanization and infant mortality that apparently go hand in hand with literacy. This connection enables the student of societies in the past to deal with the problem of literacy whenever the direct evidence is not available. This study offers a method to analyze processes that took place in a specific society so that the literacy rate may be derived.

Comparative data show that under Roman rule the Jewish literacy rate improved in the Land of Israel. However, rabbinic sources support evidence that the literacy rate was less than 3%. This literacy rate, a small fraction of the society, though low by modern standards, was not low at all if one takes into account the needs of a traditional society in the past.

Further, are we to believe that out of the 1.5 million-3 million people estimated to have been living in Palestine at the time, not even a few Christians in first century Palestine were literate enough to be able to pen the gospel narratives? While illiteracy does not necessary correlate with inaccuracy, but if I were going to trust a writer, I would certainly want he or she to have some farthing of journalistic ability in being able to give a detailed, error free account of what happened, rather than the fragmented and sophomoric tales before us. Thus, by attempting to argue that the gospels were handed down by an oral tradition, apologists essentially let these writers off the hook, as it were, in expecting them to provide a true historical record of the events.

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Strobel’s short and largely irrelevant next section, titled “The Character Test,” questions whether the gospel writers were of sound moral rectitude. Since they claimed to be followers of Jesus, who again, claimed to have a monopoly on all that is good and loving in the world, I think it’s safe to say the gospel writers certainly thought of themselves as moral people. Of course, those of us who cringe at the noxious and immoral notion of vicarious redemption, that it’s right and just to heap a load of debt on an innocent scapegoat, might cast the writers in a different light.

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The next session of Chapter 2 deals with the consistency of the writers, which I mentioned already, but will again address briefly. Blomberg gives the writers a pass of sorts by claiming that they provided an “extremely consistent” narrative

by ancient standards, which are the only standards by which it’s fair to judge them.

By ancient standards? Why is this the only standard by which we should judge whoever wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Their very anonymity is a problem. But the bigger problem is that the Bible claims to be the unalterable, inspired one and only written transmission from the almighty God of all heaven and earth. I think their standard of judgment should be a few ticks higher than the run-of-the-mill Josephus or other Jewish historian of the day.

Blomberg also argues that if the gospels were “too consistent” they would be invalidated because then it would look like the authors were just copying each other. First, where is the rule that says we had to have more than one author to tell the story of Jesus? Why couldn’t God have simply chosen one person, let’s call him Jesus — since he’s also God, we know for sure he’s literate — to write the gospels and the rest of the New Testament? Surely, he, of all people, could get the facts straight. Why not have Jesus be born and grow into an adult and receive the revelation from God, which would have contained all the information God wanted humanity to know and which we would come to know as the New Testament. Already we know about wide gaps in the life of Jesus. Certainly he would have had time to write his own story before the cross.

Rather, for reasons that escapes comprehension, God entrusts his one and only writing to mankind to humans, who, in his (God) mind, have already proven themselves untrustworthy in the Garden. Not only that, but God allowed his “unalterable” text to become translated and translated ad infinitum for the better part of 2,000 years. I mean, is the God of the Bible all-powerful or not? Can’t he guide human history in such a way as to maintain his untarnished text so that it could hold up against, not only by ancient standards, but by modern ones? No. What we have are ancient writers talking about yet another savior whose life looks suspiciously similar to any number of “dying and rising” gods that have been thrown into the dust heap of religious history, and meanwhile, the texts themselves, remarkably mediocre in their writing, read just as they should read if written in first century Palestine by fearful, trembling individuals always looking to the heavens for answers.

I’ll skip Strobel’s “bias test” because the writers’ bias toward Jesus is self evident. That they were willing to risk their lives for their message makes them no different than thousands of other believers down through history, from Muslims who refused to bow the knee during the Inquisitions to the Heaven’s Gate nuts who thought they were going to get redemption on back of a comet.

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Strobel then asks Blomberg about some of the embarrassing or hard to explain details that pop in the gospels. Again, Blomberg argues that the existence of these details gives validity to the text because it would have behooved the authors to omit certain elements of the story.

For instance, John 6:5 suggests that Jesus could not perform miracles in Nazareth because the people there lacked enough faith. Jesus’s wonderworking power is stifled by heretics in his own hometown. Talk about embarrassing. Blomberg addresses this concern:

Now, ultimately theology hasn’t had a problem with these statements, because Paul himself, in Phillippians 2:5-8, talks about God in Christ voluntarily and consciously limiting the independent exercise of his divine attributes.

Here we have an instance of an apologist cherry picking from one part of the Bible to explain an inconsistency in another part. First, one has to wonder: What was so special about Nazareth? Jesus made a practice of hanging out with women of ill-report and, heaven forbid, tax collectors during his ministry, but the Son of God’s magic is quenched when he steps foot in Nazareth? Second, how are we to understand the phenomenon of God turning off the miracle machine in one specific moment in the New Testament when all throughout the gospels pages, Jesus is healing lepers, curing the blind, raising people from the dead and eviscerating demons from people before sending them into pigs. (A note on that last miracle: After Jesus sent the demons into the pigs, he then made the pigs run down a steep bank into a lake to die. Presumably, demons cannot die via drowning since they are spirits. So, here is a needless slaughter of pigs, but for consistency’s sake, at least this continued the anti-pork message that prevailed throughout the Old Testament. Further, was the global flood in Genesis another comical attempt to kill off all the demons living on earth at the time, along with all of mankind, save Noah and his soon to be incestuous family.)

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Next, Strobel and Blomberg consider whether the gospels can be verified with extra-biblical source material. Without providing a single detail, Blomberg simply confirmed that when the gospels mention specific places and times, they have been confirmed by archaeology. Of course, many of the places mentioned in the gospels actually existed; it’s absurd to think otherwise, but I doubt evidence from archaeology is ever going to be strong enough to increase the overall validity of the Bible. By the way, the archaeological evidence for the Old Testament, as it happens, is pretty scanty, and the famous exodus probably never actually happened. See The Bible Unearthed series.

Blomberg did make one statement in this short section that was a complete lie, namely that we can verify the story of Jesus through non-Christian sources. Again, he gives not a single example, only saying:

… we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life.

It’s hard to fathom a more misleading statement. There is not one contemporary, non-Christian source in antiquity that confirms Jesus’ existence, much less any “key teachings” during his ministry. See this videothis video and see my previous post on this subject, “Josephus and the historical Jesus.”

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Finally, Strobel describes something he called the “adverse witness test,” which is supposedly a way to check other sources to see if the gospel writers were not telling the truth about their claims surrounding Jesus. Here is a kind of last ditch effort by apologists to affirm the faith by saying something like, “Ah, hah! We can’t find any sources disputing that the miracles of Jesus took place, so they must have actually happened.” Of course, Jesus’ execution and the subsequent persecution of Christians for heresy might be proof enough since if Jesus actually healed people and actually raised Lazarus from the dead and this became public knowledge, wouldn’t Jewish leaders have had no choice but to bow the knee in reverence to the final coming of their long-sought-after messiah? Further, if Jesus was doing all these things, reason would suggest that not just one or two, but many historians of the day would have spilled gallons of ink on this miracle worker. But this is not what we have. We have four gospels written by people who loved Jesus and clearly had some kind of vested interest in seeing the new religion spread. We have no contemporary accounts of Jesus, and Josephus is the only one that finally gets around to mentioning him in 93 or 94 C.E., and that passage, much touted by Christians as  an extra-biblical account, is almost certainly a forgery.

On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,’ part 3b

This is the continuation of a series on “The Case for Christ.” If you missed them, here are the other parts in the series: Part 1Part 2Part 3a.

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Next we move to the substantive “tests” to which Strobel subjects the gospel accounts. The first he calls the “intention” test to try to surmise whether the gospel writers actually intended to present an accurate account of the events. Blomberg mentions the passage in Luke in which the writer says his purpose was to “write an orderly account” of what he had heard from people who were eyewitnesses to the events portrayed in the book. Luke claims he has “carefully” investigated the stories.

The Case for Christ

Strobel then questions why Matthew and Mark don’t contain similar declarations. Blomberg makes this rather large assumption based on no evidence whatsoever:

They are close to Luke in terms if genre, and it seems reasonable that Luke’s historical intent would closely mirror theirs.

Blomberg has no idea what Matthew and Mark’s “historical intent” was; he just takes it, as it were, on faith that Matthew and Mark are not propagandists pushing a certain agenda about the claims of Christ. Strobel also asks about the gospel of John, to which Blomberg points out verse 20:31. The passage states that John was writing “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

So, here is a clear declaration that John is writing with the purpose of advocating the authenticity of Christ as divine, or in other words, he has a clear motive and is far from unbiased. Strobel responded: “That sounds more like a theological statement than a historical one.” Blomberg concedes that point but notes that if a person is going to believe in Christ, the “theology has to flow from accurate history:”

… Consider the way the gospels are written — in a sober and responsible fashion, with accurate incidental details, with obvious care and exactitude. You don’t find the outlandish flourishes and blatant mythologies that you see in a lot of other ancient writings.”

If by “sober” he means drab, I’ll concede that point. Again, Blomberg would help his case by presenting some of the “incidental details” that apologists like to claim give the Bible validity. Of course, just the mere presence of incidental details in a text does not prove anything about the historicity of the stories themselves. Thomas Hardy’s novels include many “incidental” and real elements of what pastoral English life was like in the 19th century, but the characters and the plots were not real. Hell, even comic books and many video games often contain lots of authentic details about places like New York, Los Angeles or the Middle East. Just because a novel or other work has incidental details does not make its basic story true as far as history is considered.

As for his claim that readers don’t find “outlandish flourishes and blatant mythologies” in the gospels, I have to ask: are we reading the same books? Here I’ll argue not only with Blomberg’s claim but with this writer, who states outright that

… there are no “mythological elements.” Those who talk about mythological elements are clearly ignorant not only of the gospels themselves, but of what mythology actually consists of. What they usually mean by ‘mythological elements’ is the supernatural.

Well, no. That is not what is meant, and the writer seems to be putting words in the mouths of critics. What is meant by mythological is just that: elements in the New Testament accounts (not to mention the Old Testament) that appear eerily similar to other myths that were circulated throughout antiquity, namely and most prominently, redemption mythology, which forms the entire foundation of the biblical narrative.

Rudolf Bultmann in “The Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of its Re-interpretation Part I” outlines this framework:

The mythology of the New Testament is in essence that of Jewish apocalyptic and the Gnostic redemption myths. A common feature of them both is their basic dualism, according to which the present world and its human inhabitants are under the control of demonic, satanic powers, and stand in need of redemption. Man cannot achieve this redemption by his own efforts; it must come as a gift through a divine intervention. Both types of mythology speak of such an intervention: Jewish apocalyptic of an imminent world crisis in which this present aeon will be brought to an end and the new aeon ushered in by the coming of the Messiah, and Gnosticism of a Son of God sent down from the realm of light, entering into this world in the guise of a man, and by his fate and teaching delivering the elect and opening up the way for their return to their heavenly home.

Indeed, elements of Gnosticism itself pre-date Christianity, and one could make the case that the basic premise of Gnosticism, attaining individual salvation of the soul from the carnal world through knowledge — replacing esoteric or intuitive knowledge with the knowledge of Christ — was borrowed by Christianity and adopted with its own twist centered on the divinity and saving power of Christ.

Of course, one needs only take a short trek through the “Dying  god” entry on Wikipedia to research and identify the numerous life-death-rebirth myths that have inundated antiquity, Osiris in Egypt being one of the earliest and clearest examples to draw parallels. So much for the absence of “blatant mythologies.” As for the “outlandish flourishes” in the gospels, I won’t even get into the possessed pig, Christ’s temptation in the desert or the earthquake that supposed happened, depending on which account you read, when Christ died (with dead people springing up from the ground to boot) and again when an angel appeared at Christ’s tomb, which are “incidental details” that no historian outside of the Bible thought worthy to mention.

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I am attempting to make this series more digestible by breaking it up into smaller parts. Since this section only covered one page of the book (p. 40), this may shape up to be a long series indeed (only 230 pages to go!). I’m sure there will be opportunities to move more quickly at the expense of repeating myself, and I will attempt to do so when it’s warranted. But given that the opening section of this book is so steeped in vague and unsupported claims, I feel it’s important to slow down and highlight as many of them as possible. I didn’t even know there would be a Part 3c, but that seems to be the case. Stay tuned as I plod through the rest of Chapter 2.

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On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,’ part 3a

This is the continuation of a series on Lee Strobel‘s, “The Case for Christ.” If you missed them, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

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In Chapter 2, Strobel continues his interview with Craig Blomberg on the biblical evidence from eyewitness testimony. Strobel begins by identifying eight tests in which people can subject the gospels to get closer to understanding of whether they are trustworthy and credible. I won’t go through every single one because at least three of them, “character,” “bias” and “corroboration” are only given a few paragraphs each, which basically amount to Blomberg’s opinions on whether the gospel writers were of good character, recorded the events with integrity and used other sources to verify various places and events that they reference. I’ll only mention the five paragraphs Strobel calls “The Corroboration Test.”

Strobel asks:

When the gospels mention people, places, and events, do they check out to be correct in cases in which they can be independently verified? Often such corroboration is invaluable in assessing whether a writer has a commitment to accuracy.

Blomberg responds:

Yes, they do, and the longer people explore this, the more the details get confirmed. Within the last hundred years archaeology has repeatedly unearthed discoveries that have confirmed specific references to the gospels, particularly the gospel of John — ironically, the one that supposedly so suspect!

Now, yes, there are still some unresolved issues, and there have been times when archaeology has created new problems, but those are a tiny minority compared with the number of examples of corroboration.

In addition, we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life.

Here, Strobel offers no notes that back up Blomberg’s claim about archaeological evidence, and Blomberg mentions no examples to support his claim either. Here’s a list of some of the Christian archaeological finds, none of which lends any credibility to Jesus or his miracles, just that select elements of the gospels, for instance, the pool of Bethesda and the historicity of Caiaphas, may have reflected actual people and places.

Further, Blomberg contends that non-Christian sources lend credibility to the gospels, but let me make this very clear: there is no contemporary source or bit of evidence that confirms the existence of Jesus. Not one. Here is a list, and here is former pastor Dan Barker on the subject:

There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, not during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.

Christians sometimes like to claim that Josephus 37-100 A.D. was a believable non-Christian who wrote about Jesus, although he was not contemporary. This is the relevant passage:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law …

While this passage may be authentic, two problems exist. First, it’s hard to believe that an historian would mention the Messiah almost as an after thought and buried in a long section of text. Second, why would Josephus, an observant Jew or possibly a priest at one time, would admit that Jesus was the Christ? I wrote more about this here: Josephus and the historical Jesus. Here’s another explanation of Josephus.

Strobel, ever the “unbiased” journalist said Blomberg answer was “concise and helpful.” While it may have been concise, it was lacking on detail. Of course, I can’t blame Blomberg since he knows full well that there are no credible details that he could have presented to support the authenticity of the gospels, much less of the life and miracles of Jesus. Ever the go-getter, Strobel tells us at the end of this short section on corroboration that he is jotting down a note to himself:

Get expert opinions from archaeologist and historian.

I guess we’ll get to that in Chapter 5 when Strobel speaks with John McRay, one of his “experts” who also happens to be an apologist.

So these don’t run too long, I’ll address the rest of this chapter in the next post.

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On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,’ part 2

The Eyewitness Evidence: Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted?

Welcome to the second part of this 16-part series on Lee’s Strobel’s “The Case for Christ.” If you missed it, here is Part I.

Strobel now gets to the meat of the book designed to investigate the trustworthiness of the New Testament authors and their accounts of the life of Jesus.

In Chapter 1, Strobel interviews Christian apologist Craig Blomberg and asks him how we know that the Matthew, Mark and Luke are the actual authors of the first three gospels. Blomberg then points, not to two sources outside of the church who can vouch for the authorship or the validity of the claims, but to two early church bishops, Papias (70 to about 155 A.D.) and Irenaeus (130-202 A.D.).

According to Blomberg,

Papias, who in about A.D. 125 specifically affirmed that Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter’s eyewitness observations. In fact, he said Mark “made no mistake” and did not include “any false statement.” And Papias said Matthews had preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.

Blomberg then read a quote from Irenaeus recounting that Mark was an interpreter of Peter and wrote down his teachings, while Luke wrote down the preachments of his teacher, Paul.

Strobel, in response to this news, said:

If we can have confidence that the gospels were written by the disciples Matthew and John, by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter, and by Luke, the historian, the companion of Paul, and sort of a first-century journalist, we can be assured that the events they record are based on either direct or indirect eyewitness testimony?

“Exactly,” Blomberg responded.

A few points here before we move on. First, there is no such thing as “indirect” eyewitness testimony. Either the event was witnessed in person or it is second-hand information. And the entirety of the gospels is from secondary sources. Mark, the earliest gospel written (c. 70, or perhaps a few years earlier), was allegedly a recreation from conversations with Peter and does not claim to be a direct witness to the event. Further, Papias and Irenaeus are not unbiased sources. They were church leaders, so of course they are going to vouch for the authenticity of the gospels.

Further still, Matthew never claims to be an eyewitness. Indeed, the quote that Blomberg reads from Irenaeus looks mysteriously similar to a quote from Papias. During their interview, Strobel said Blomberg reached for “a book” from which to read the quote from Irenaeus but conveniently did not provide the source of the quote itself. Consider the following:

  • “Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the church there.” — unsourced quote from Irenaeus read by Blomberg
  • “Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.” — Papias, Eusebius in Hist. Eccl. 3.39

According to commentary from Peter Kirby at earlychristianwritings.com:

We know that Irenaeus had read Papias, and it is most likely that Irenaeus was guided by the statement he found there. That statement in Papias itself is considered to be unfounded because the Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek and relied largely upon Mark, not the author’s first-hand experience.

But let’s grant it. What if at least one of the gospels was written by someone who was actually there? Would that change anything about the gospel’s reliability?

Doubtful. Since Strobel constantly reminds us that he is a journalist, one would think that he would know that eyewitness testimony, in court cases and in written accounts, are not reliable because our memories are not reliable. The psychology has shown this.

In a lecture titled, “The Problem with Eyewitness Testimony,” by Stanford University professors Barbara Tversky and George Fisher, said several studies have been conducted that document people’s propensity to concoct events that didn’t happen:

Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory.4  Subjects were shown a slide of a car at an intersection with either a yield sign or a stop sign. Experimenters asked participants questions, falsely introducing the term “stop sign” into the question instead of referring to the yield sign participants had actually seen. Similarly, experimenters falsely substituted the term “yield sign” in questions directed to participants who had actually seen the stop sign slide. The results indicated that subjects remembered seeing the false image.

After some more discussion, Blomberg and Strobel move to the alleged claim that Jesus was God. Strobel asked Blomberg about the theological differences between the John and the other three gospels on the divinity of Jesus. Blomberg claimed that the gospels of Matthews and Mark included implicit references to Jesus’ deity:

Think of the story of Jesus walking on the water, found in Matthew 14:22-33 and Mark 6:45-52. Most English translations hide the Greek by quoting Jesus as saying, “Fear not, it is I.” Actually, the Greek literally says, “Fear not, I am.” Those last words were identical to what Jesus said in John 8:58, when he took upon himself the divine name “I am” …

OK, so investigating this claim is easy to do. Here is the original Greek in

  • Matthew 14:27: “εὐθὺς δὲ ἐλάλησεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς αὐτοῖς λέγων θαρσεῖτε ἐγώ εἰμι μὴ φοβεῖσθε” or in English: “But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.”
  • Mark 6:50: “πάντες γὰρ αὐτὸν εἶδον καὶ ἐταράχθησαν ὁ δὲ εὐθὺς ἐλάλησεν μετ’ αὐτῶν καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς θαρσεῖτε ἐγώ εἰμι μὴ φοβεῖσθε” and in English: “For they all saw him, and were troubled. And immediately he talked with them, and saith unto them, Be of good cheer: it is I; be not afraid.”

If you look carefully toward the end of the verse in Greek, you will find this word: “ἐγώ” in both verses. It is simply the word “I.” While the end of John 8:58 appears nearly identical in the Greek to the “I” reference in the other two verses, “εἶπεν αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς Ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι ἐγὼ εἰμί,” the verse in John is written in a completely different context than in Matthew and Mark. In the earlier two gospels, the disciples appear troubled by a man coming across the water, and Jesus verifies for them that it’s him. But in John, however, Jesus is speaking with the Jews and mentioned that Abraham was glad to see him come along. The Jews questioned how he could have spoken with Abraham given his young age. Jesus then replied, “Before Abraham was, I am,” where the words “ἐγὼ εἰμί” actually mean, ” I exist.” First, the various “I am” passages that appear in John are to be taken with a grain of salt anyway because John was the last and most embellished gospel of them all. Second, the early church editors would have wanted to make the New Testament appear to be a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, so they probably tied as many New Testament passages to the old, most notably in this case, Exodus 3:14, in which Yahweh handed down a tautology for the ages, “I am that I am.”

Blomberg was also misleading when asked about the “Son of Man” title often conferred on Jesus in the New Testament:

“Look, contrary to popular belief, ‘Son of Man’ does not primarily refer to Jesus’ humanity. Instead, it’s a direct allusion to Daniel 7:13-14.”

With that, he opened the Old Testament and read those words of the prophet Daniel.

Strobel’s language, “read those words,” seem to indicate a reverence for scripture, not the language of an objective reporter.

In any case, I suppose we’re just supposed to take Blomberg’s word for it that the passage “Son of Man” means is a “title of great exaltation” in Daniel and that the “Son of Man” references in the New Testament look back to Daniel. Again, the New Testament writers and their editors wouldn’t have it any other way.

Just one more quick point. Blombergs points out late in the chapter that the two earliest biographies we have of Alexander the Great were more than 400 years after his death, where as the first gospel was penned within closer proximity of Jesus’ death:

So whether the gospels were written sixty years or thirty years after the life of Jesus, the amount of time is negligible by comparison. It’s almost a nonissue.

This is an often-touted apologetic line. I won’t bother to look up when the first accounts were written of such and such figure in antiquity but the important point is this: no matter when the first account of other historic figures were written, this historic figure, Jesus, is supposed to be the most important figure in all of humanity, and all we have are four relatively short narratives that are equally short on detail. Why couldn’t several of the disciples get together to write an account? If their god were real and all-powerful, he could have made sure it passed through the ages unblemished. How about the 500 people who supposed saw Jesus after the resurrection? Where are their accounts? Comparing Alexander to a person who made the claims that Jesus did just will not do.

On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,” part 1

Here begins a new series investigating the claims in Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ.”

During my period of “wandering in the desert” somewhere between belief and skepticism and right up to my present day non-belief, I have been asked more than once to read this book, as well as “The Case for Faith” and other apologist manifestos. I am almost certain that I’ve already read both of these books at some point during my Christian tenure, most of what C.S. Lewis has had to say on the subject, “Handbook of Christian Apologetics” and others. None are convincing and fail because of their purposeful attempts at obscurantism. Lewis was the most erudite of the bunch, but for some reason, seemed to have convinced himself that Jesus could have only been a “lair,” “lunatic” or “lord” with no other options on the table. He didn’t seem to realize that Jesus could have been first, wrong about his purpose on Earth and second, fictionalized in total or in part by his supporters.

In any case, I recommend these two books by Strobel, not so much for their intellectual muster and arguments in favor of Jesus, but as a mental exercise for the non-believer to do what many, dare I say most, believers are too afraid or too intellectually lazy to do: reading and engaging with contrary opinions.

Introduction: Reopening the Investigation of a Lifetime

I was originally going to call this series “The Case Against The Case for Christ,” but quickly learned that Robert Price has already written a book by that name. Thus, I conjured a title that is just as fitting, since Strobel in “The Case for Christ” frames his introduction around a murder case that he worked as a reporter with the Chicago Tribune.  The murder trial involved a man who was wrongly accused of shooting a cop who responded to a dispute. The policeman was apparently carrying an illegal pen gun at the time of the incident. The pen gun fired inside his own pocket, resulting in a non-lethal wound. The officer subsequently pleaded guilty to misconduct and was fired, while the accusation against the man was dismissed.

After a source alerted him to the possibility of a different theory about the shooting — that the gun wound resulted from the pen gun — Strobel then makes the most baldly disingenuous statement that I could have fathomed at this early point in the book (p. 13):

When the police told me the case was airtight, I took them at their word and didn’t delve much further. But when I changed those lenses — trading my biases for an attempt at objectivity — I saw the case in a whole new light. Finally I allowed the evidence to lead me to the truth, regardless of whether it fit my original presuppositions (emphasis mine).

That was more than twenty years ago. My biggest lessons were yet to come .

Later (p. 14), he informs us that he has interviewed 13 “leading scholars and authorities” with “impeccable academic credentials” to give weight to his case. If Strobel is going to investigate the case for Jesus from a place of objectivity, one might think, given his background in journalism, that he would interview scholars with different viewpoints to get the fullest picture possible, for instance, Price, John Dominic Crossan, Neil Silberman, Bart D. Ehrman, Israel Finkelstein and others. As any good journalist knows, there are not just one or two sides to a story, but in some cases, three or four. While Strobel is disingenuous, he is not stupid; he knows that his general church audience, and maybe even the stray non-believer who happens to peruse is book, may take the professionals that he presents as legitimate sources. And Strobel is betting on that fact. Readers of this blog can no longer claim ignorance.

So, before we get into the meat of the book, let’s first briefly take a look at these 13 “scholars” and see just how impeccable their credentials are in view of Strobel’s claim of objectivity:

1. Craig Blomberg — A professor of the New Testament at Denver Seminary. The seminary’s website has this mission:

Denver Seminary prepares men and women to engage the needs of the world with the redemptive power of the gospel and the life-changing truth of Scripture. Through real relationships you’ll find real answers to help bring real change to the world.

Blomberg is author of “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels,” “From Pentecost to Patmos: An Introduction to Acts through Revelation” and “Contagious Holines: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners.”

2. Bruce Metzger — Formerly a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and biblical translator. According to his obituary:

On both academic and popular levels, Metzger was well-known for his involvement (since 1952) with the RSV and especially NRSV translations. From 1977-1990 he was Chair of the Committee of Translators for the NRSV, and was largely responsible for seeing it through the press. His association with the RSV and NRSV was given additional visibility by his editorship of various study Bibles and tools based on these translations, as well as his service as Chair of the Committee on Translation of the American Bible Society 1964-1970.

3. Edwin Yamauchi — A Christian author and professor of history at Miami University in Ohio. He is a founding member of the Oxford Bible Fellowship.

4. John McRay — A New Testament professor emeritus at Wheaton College, McRay is just another Christian apologist. In his 2008 book, “Archaeology and the New Testament,” McRay writes in his preface:

In these pages we invite readers to step inside the current study of archeology as it relates to the New Testament period. It is for those who wish a convenient, one-volume introduction to the field. If it stimulates its readers to further research, reflect, and respect the New Testament as the historical revelation of the Word of God, it will have fulfilled its author’s hopes (emphasis mine).

Further, Wheaton’s mission statement reads

Wheaton College exists to help build the church and improve society worldwide by promoting the development of whole and effective Christians through excellence in programs of Christian higher education.

and carries the motto:

This mission expresses our commitment to do all things – “For Christ and His Kingdom.”

5. Gregory Boyd — The senior pastor and co-founder of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn.

6. Ben Witherington III — A United Methodist Church pastor and a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary.

7. Dr. Gary Collins — A psychologist who taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is author of “Christian Coaching: Helping Others Turn Potential into Reality,” “The Biblical Basis of Christian Counseling” and “Christian Counseling: A Comprehensive Guide” and is as qualified to provide an unbiased view of Jesus as James Dobson, another Christian psychologist who can not be trusted to provide any kind of objective view of the New Testament.

8. D.A. Carson — A research professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a former pastor.

9. Louis Lapides — Formerly with Beth Ariel Fellowship in Sherman Oaks, Calif., he holds degrees from Dallas Baptist University and Talbot School of Theology.

10. Dr. Alexander Metherell — Strobel outright admits here that Metherell is a Christian:

I’ll be honest: at times I wondered what was going on inside Dr. Metherell’s head. With scientific reserve, speaking slowly and methodically, he gave no hint of any inner turmoil as he calmly described the chilling details of Jesus’ demise. Whatever was going on underneath, whatever distress it caused him as a Christian to talk about the cruel fate that befell Jesus, he was able to mask with a professionalism born out of decades of laboratory research.

11. William Lane Craig — One of the most well-known Christian apologists in the nation.

12. Gary Habermas — Another of the most well-known Christian apologists.

13. J.P. Moreland — Take a look at his website. This one speaks for itself.

I have only added the title “Dr.” on those names if the sources were, in fact, medical doctors from legitimate institutions. Every single one of them are at the very least, Christian, and most of them are or have been active apologists.

So by every account and right out of the gate, Strobel betrays the precedent that he claims to have set as a journalist. All of these individuals live their lives based on one worldview, and one can not get closer to the truth by examining only one, or even two, sides of any story.

Remember one of Strobel’s opening lines: “Finally I allowed the evidence to lead me to the truth, regardless of whether it fit my original presuppositions.” Actually, this can’t be further from the truth. He seems to have purposefully selected people who were going to tell him what he wanted him to hear. Further, he admits on page 15 that he challenged these “experts” with the same objections that he raised “when I was a skeptic,” indicating that he was no longer a skeptic when he conducted the interviews. So, there you have it. Strobel becomes convinced in the truth of Christ and then seeks the counsel of various apologists across the nation to help write his equally apologetic book, thereby confirming his views, which he never sought to challenge in the first place.

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The God question: My testimony

The debate on the god question has come up recently on Facebook between a couple friends of mine, and I thought it might be interesting if I laid out and clarified a few points about my own experiences regarding this matter to attempt to come around to an overall theory. Some family, friends, former church members of mine have probably noticed peculiar postings of mine regarding religion and God, and I thought an explanation was in order. This post took me a couple weeks to write (Thus the reason for no other recent posts), so bear with me. I’m not saying my conclusion won’t or can’t change, but my thoughts right now as they stand are recorded in this post. To borrow a religious term, here is my “testimony:”

First, as I have stated to a couple people in the last year, I set about in Oct. 2008 or so to the task of trying to figure out precisely why I believed what I proclaimed to believe. I will say here that I was raised in the Christian tradition, as most people in the southeastern United States are, and spent many years performing musically and otherwise toward that end. I sang with my grandfather, whom I miss to this day, in more than one Southern gospel group. I played acoustic and electric guitar for seven or more years in a contemporary-style church in Upstate, South Carolina. Until I reached college, I knew little of teachings other than what was in the Bible. Despite taking and passing a philosophy class and many English classes which served to, at least, introduce certain issues that would later challenge my faith, I maintained my core beliefs through college and even through numerous years after college.

Like so many with physical ailments who have wanted desperately to believe in a god who had the power to, not only save souls, but to physically heal, I tried my best to read the Bible and believe. In the years after college, my life was largely dominated by loneliness and despair over various issues, the most immediate of which would be emphysema.

I had heard stories that many people back home prayed me out of certain death when I was a baby hospitalized for 3 1/2 years in New York City, apparently saving me from dying from a critical immune system disorder. I don’t want to discredit or marginalize family members’ and friends’ efforts or concerns back home. They were doing what they thought was best.

So, poof, after much research and after three years of testing and poking and prodding at me, doctors came up with a way to give me an unprecedented unmatched bone marrow transplant to set my immune system on the right course. In the early 1980s, this was no small thing.

Now, I’m wise enough to recognize that science and research saved me in my infancy. I’m wise enough to know that, had I been lying in a crib inside my home in South Carolina, with the same prayers but without the same science and medical treatment, I would be a memory, and would probably not have even made it past my first year. So, at 4 1/2 years old, with medical research providing and setting my path toward adulthood, I set out on a vast world that I had never known cramped inside my little, sterile hospital-world.

And, of course, my parents not only gave me life … but a second life. I was a dead man, but they packed up their things in their early 20s at the time (I’m now 32 and can’t imagine doing such a thing at their age) and moved 900 miles north to a cockroach-ridden Manhattan apartment with their young daughter … all for me. For all my hard-boiled, emotional determinism, the thought of what they went through to keep me alive still brings a lump to my throat … and I’m thankful beyond words.

Back to religion, I decided a year or so back that it would be the most insincere and dishonest thing that I could imagine if I were to continue to lead the people in church worship without believing myself in the words of the songs I was playing (I think even believers can agree with me on that point.) I surmised that it would also be distasteful to not know full well why I believed in what the folks around me were singing, and not be able to articulate what I believed, and why I believed it. I concluded, even before I began questioning faith, that to believe and live my entire life and then die some day without knowing precisely why I believed such and such, without evidence and without a good explanation for any of it, essentially giving my entire life to something, sheepishly, was a most foolish and tragic thing (In fact, the word “tragic” probably represents an understatement).

Believing simply based on a “feeling” that we get on Sunday morning in the presence of nice music and other believers — which is all it is, since there’s not a stitch of evidence for any of it — was not good enough for me, and this was the realization that hit me between the eyes at some point last year. I can, perhaps, pinpoint the precise time. It may have been during a long car ride to Boston with my wife, when I had a fantastically long time to do a lot of thinking.

To catalog a few of the works I’ve studied thus far that have influenced me one way or the other since and before that particular trip:

  • “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles
  • “Mere Christianity” “Surprised by Joy,” “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis
  • “The Case for Christ” and “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel
  • “Godless” by Dan Barker
  • “Why I Became An Atheist” by John Loftus
  • “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris
  • “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” By Albert Camus
  • “Notes from the Underground” By Fyodor Dostoevsky (To a lesser degree, “The Brothers Karamzov” and “Crime and Punishment”
  • This does not mention, of course, most of the Old and New testaments, numerous Christian commentaries, two decades of Christian teaching from various workshops, sermons and classes, and many of the gospels and texts that did not make it into the “official” King James Bible as pieced together by various church officials centuries ago.

I’m under no illusion that my recent thoughts and studies are crushing to any possibility, or any fraction of a possibility, that I might supernaturally be made better physically some day (For I deny even the possibility of a being capable of such things … nothwithstanding his unwillingness). I dare say no one has called out more to God than I for answers, even for answers about his own existence. No one has pleaded more with God for help. No one has been on their knees more than me. But I’ve heard nothing. Not one thing but my own voice, until eventually I got the impression that my prayers were merely floating to the ceiling and falling back down like stillborn stars. So, I got off my knees and determined, like the human that I am, to find the truth.

Believers will probably question this, saying something like, “Well, you can’t just give up. God is faithful to answer prayer in his time on his watch” or with, “God answers all prayer with either a ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ or ‘Maybe.'” But those are the only three possible options, aren’t they? We can write off or explain away any unanswered prayer (or perceived answered prayer) by that logic to help God escape an explanation for his own silence.

We have, indeed, for centuries, received nothing at all but silence from the God of the Old Testament, just as we have received no recent word from Jesus or Zeus or Apollo or Allah or Osiris. Thousands of years have passed and not an utterance. Does that not strike anyone else as peculiar? Believers, again, will say the Bible is God’s revealed word or his instruction manual and that he exists in the hearts and minds of those who are filled with the Holy Spirit because they have believed in him. Well, I have believed — I have with all my heart — and other than some hormones jostled around, stimulated by some inspiring tune in the company of believers, have felt or heard nothing but my own voice.

So, I know there will be those to whom these words are very troubling — family, friends, former churchgoers, etc. but please know that I expect none of the same thoughts from any of you and am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m merely stating my experiences, and don’t particularly want this to meltdown into a large debate. Again, I did not set out at the start to disprove anything. I set out to find the truth. And these truths we can’t escape: Earth is billions of years old, Earth exists on a spiral arm of our galaxy, an insignificant spot, and not the center of the galaxy as many of our forebearers thought (which, by the way, gave creedance to the argument that we are the special planet, and a special species, in all of creation). The Earth will one day be uninhabited by people once again, not by a rapture, but either by a wayward asteroid or gamma ray burst or by the sun losing power. The truth is the canonical Bible contains many irreparable self-contradictions; condones slavery, mass slaughter, rape, the mutilation or altering of children’s genitalia, among other things; and cannot even get the details straight about the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Again, when I set about my studies, I was not seeking hope or spiritualism or miracles or wishful-thinking, I was seeking the truth, which in the 17th century when John Milton was alive, “a wicked race of deceivers … took the virgin Truth (and) hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds.” But they are not at the four winds anymore. Truth is much closer to us in modern America. So, at least at this juncture, I have concluded that the ancient, contradictory books of the Old and New testaments, written in a time of widespread myth and legend, are not good enough to make me, first, believe, and second, to base my entire life on such things contained therein.

I feel compelled to say that I apologize to certain people (of whom I still hold a great deal of respect) for that statement, whom I know, would want me to conclude differently, but that’s how I feel. The Christian tradition is so embedded in this part of the country (the Southeast), that to say such things, is almost like seceding a second time from the Union. But again, I ask, what’s more important? The truth or wishful thinking? When I set out about this, I resolved to be comfortable with whatever philosophical pathway on which my studies took me down. And that’s what we all must do.

And at some point, all us of have to make a similar choice: Do we want to be complacent in living our lives for a faith that may or may not, in reality, be true, or can we mentally and emotionally handle another possibility: that we are an insignificant dot in a vast, vast universe. As a friend of mine was saying, we need religion. We do indeed. But can’t we be strong enough to move past it and accept our place in the cosmos? As one writer, John Loftus, said that we humans think we are so special that we can’t imagine a fate that would see us go extinct like all the rest of life on Earth. Yet, that is our fate. Our extreme intelligence compels us to think of other worlds or other dimensions like heaven or hell, but our humanity also compels us to surmise that we are on a small planet in an insignificant galaxy, of which, there are millions. It is quite believable to think other species in some undiscovered galaxy thought themselves self-important, like us, and then, saw their own existence come to a crashing hault.

Of course, we may never know 100 percent if there is a god or not and we may never know 100 percent how life began, but I think we can be pretty sure it did not happen as the Bible, with its self-contradictions, recounts. (Note: I do not cite examples of the Bible’s contradictions here because they are well documented and this post is long as is. Search Google for “bible contradictions” and you can view them for yourself.)

For me, the option that we are an insignificant dot in a vast universe, takes much more wherewithall, and frankly, is a quite liberating axiom, to know that we are, at the core, connected and interconnected with the universe, not just Earth, and everything in the universe is quite a beautiful thing, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted.

Thus, again, I did not seek hope (specifically for my health conditions or otherwise) or karma or spirituality or wishful thinking. I sought the truth. For truth, should we reference the record of science, which says this planet has existed for billions of years and will again be vanquished or a book authored by superstitious people thousands of years ago during a time consumed with myth and legend? I have to side with the former.