I’m always looking for an innovative new argument for Christian claims, and “Jesus Christ: Greater Than You Knew, Too Great Not To Be True” by Tom Gilson didn’t disappoint. It didn’t disappoint because I expected it to be unpersuasive.

And the perpetual quest continues …

While we’re here, however, let’s take a look. The key point in Gilson’s argument, as you might guess from the title, is that Jesus is perfect—too perfect to be merely literature or legend. He illustrates this with three questions.

1. Who are the most powerful characters in all of human history and imagination? He gives as examples Andrew Carnegie, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Superman. A few additional names come to mind, so I’ll add John Connor from the Terminator movies, the Watchmen (comics heroes), Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert E. Lee.

Gilson would add Jesus to this list, but let’s consider this. He would say that Jesus was God and therefore the creator of everything. Let’s ignore the fact that the Trinity was an invention centuries after the gospels and consider what God supposedly created. In Genesis 1, God reshapes existing Play-Doh to make the water-dome world of the Sumerians. The stars are insignificant in this story and their creation gets half a verse, though science tells us that the universe is 10²⁷ times larger than the earth.

The actual universe is impressive, but God’s art project is minor by comparison. Sure, let’s add Jesus/God, but remember the tiny “universe” he’s credited with creating.

2. Who are the most self-sacrificial, other-oriented, giving, and caring persons? Gilson suggests Mother Teresa and Sir Galahad. (He clearly views Teresa as the saint-to-be that many Christians imagine rather than the controversial figure who celebrated suffering rather than heal disease.)

We don’t need fiction or mythology to find self-sacrifice. The internet is full of stories of actual heroes who put themselves in danger to rescue strangers from drowning or from burning buildings. There are military personnel who died to save their comrades. A famous example within Christian circles is Maximilian Kolbe, a friar imprisoned in Auschwitz who volunteered to die in the place of a stranger.

About the unsung heroism in everyday life, author Peggy Noonan said,

The bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn’t take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again.

Taking the noble or self-sacrificing path is a big deal for most people because we have a choice. Gilson, of course, wants to add Jesus to this list, but his sacrifice isn’t as substantial as Gilson seems to imagine. Jesus didn’t experience any agonizing choice; he simply knew the right path and took it. His sacrifice was a painful weekend—frankly, not that big a deal.

3. Who belongs on both lists? Gilson proposes Gandalf and Superman for this category but imagines Jesus standing alone, unrivaled in history and fiction as “a character of unparalleled power and self-sacrifice, with no mar or imperfection of any sort.”

But there are other contenders. Obi-wan Kenobi from Star Wars sacrificed himself for the benefit of Luke and the rebel cause—and this was the old-fashioned, died-and-stayed-dead kind of sacrifice. Neo from The Matrix trilogy sacrificed his life to save the city of Zion. Shiva is a Hindu god who drank poison to protect the universe.

My choice for this category is Prometheus, the god who brought fire to mankind. He was punished by being chained to a rock and having an eagle eat his liver each day, only to have it regrow overnight for the agonizing process to repeat. (And Christians think that Jesus had it rough.)

What did Jesus do?

Jesus gave us salvation, a solution to a problem he invented, while Prometheus gave us fire, something that’s actually objectively useful.

If we separate Jesus from the rest of the Trinity and look at just what the New Testament tells us, Jesus didn’t do much. He killed a fig tree. He cured some lepers. He raised Lazarus. Sure, Jesus cured by magic, and that’s pretty cool, but he did less good in his healing ministry than a single modern doctor does. He didn’t eliminate smallpox, for example—modern medicine did.

Of course, the New Testament is where we see the doctrine of hell, though I’m not sure that’s much to celebrate.

Gilson scratches his head trying to figure out the skeptical alternative to the Christian interpretation. We have a story was transmitted orally for decades as it moved from Jewish culture into a new Greek culture (with precedents for dying-and-rising gods, virgin birth, and other elements found in the gospel story), and you can’t see how legend could explain this? What’s left unexplained? It’s like Gilson has never heard of any new religion developing.

He marvels at the power of the gospel story, but why is that surprising? It was polished through retellings for decades before being written, and then reinterpreted for centuries after that as church fathers haggled over points of doctrine.

The problem with Gilson’s apologetic

Gilson is a Jesus fanboy, and he has an inflated view of the contribution of Jesus. He tells us that any other literary or historical sacrifice “[pales] beside the sacrifice of Christ.” He was “a character of moral excellence beyond any other in all history or human imagination.” No competing story gets the “crucial aspect of Jesus’ character—his perfect power and perfect goodness—exactly right, without flaw.”

I think we’ve found the problem. Was Jesus that great? Not if you read the gospels.

• Jesus didn’t stop slavery, didn’t reject polygamy, and didn’t denounce God’s genocide in the Old Testament. Gilson acknowledges without rebuttal that Jesus did nothing to addressing the issues that we reject today.
• Jesus wanted faith without evidence, as in the Doubting Thomas story (“blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed”).
• Jesus said that his mission was only to the “lost sheep of Israel” and cautioned his disciples to avoid wasting time with those who couldn’t appreciate the message (“don’t cast your pearls before swine”).
• Jesus demanded single-minded devotion (“those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples”).
• Jesus demanded faith instead of planning for the future (“take no thought for the morrow”; “do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear”)

It may be that Jesus towers over all other figures from history and fiction in Gilson’s mind, but the gospel story itself shows him to be a not-especially-perfect deity. This is nicely explained as legendary development.

A thorough knowledge of the bible
is worth about as much
as a thorough knowledge of Harry Potter.
— JT Eberhard

Photo credit: sonofgodresources.com

Today is the five-year anniversary for Patheos, the site that hosts this blog. Patheos is now in the top 500 U.S. websites and is the world’s largest site for several communities, including atheists. Congratulations, Patheos!

I’ve been blogging at Patheos for close to two years (and solo for a year before that). When I started, there were about ten Patheos atheist blogs, and now there are 21. Patheos hosts more than 300 blogs exploring many categories of thought.

The Cross Examined blog has gotten almost 900,000 total views. Patheos as a whole will generate that twice in a week, but that sounds like a nice bit of impact to me. And I don’t make the views—you do. This wouldn’t work without you, and I’m very appreciative for your time and feedback.

Figuring out what content connects with the audience and what doesn’t is sometimes difficult. Maybe the headline was boring (if yesterday’s Doonesbury is good advice, I need to work “sideboob” into my titles more). Maybe the post just didn’t get the Facebook or reddit love that it deserved. Or more likely it was just a lot less insightful or interesting than I thought. Ah well—I always learn from the process.

I’ll take this fifth birthday opportunity to muse on five categories of blog posts during my time at Patheos.

1: “10 Reasons the Crucifixion Story Makes No Sense”

This post has been my most popular. Each of the ten points is touched on only briefly, but the post seems to be a useful high-level summary of skeptical criticism of this part of the gospels. Christians who find the sin/redemption story compelling would probably dismiss this post as no challenge to their faith, but that’s not where it ends. These Christians would likely also think that the crucifixion story is compelling to outsiders. It’s not.

2: Social issues

Google ranks “20 Arguments Against Abortion, Rebutted” first for the search “arguments against abortion.” That’s ironic, since it’s a rebuttal of those arguments, and I wonder how many pro-lifers arrive here to find something they didn’t expect. Still, I’m not complaining. I hope it’s provocative while being civil.

Christianity is an 800-pound gorilla within society. It does some good, but it also does a lot of harm, and I’ve responded to some of those social issues—homosexuality and same-sex marriage, Creationism, church/state separation, the First Amendment, and so on.

Institutions like Christianity are inherently conservative, but the paradox is that this one claims to have a direct line to the source of morality. Christianity should be leading the way rather than digging in its heels. Let me quickly acknowledge that some Christians are doing honorable work to improve society, but theirs is too often the still, small voice amidst the wind and earthquake.

3: History

I’ve found the history behind Christianity to be both more complicated and less supportive of confident Christian pronouncements than I expected. I’ve written about:

• biblical polytheism
• the immense gulf of understanding separating us from the events of Jesus’s day
• the illogic of the Garden of Eden, Flood, and Resurrection stories
• the weakness of claims of prophecy (Psalm 22, Isaiah 7, Isaiah 53, Daniel 9)
• the Mesopotamian Combat Myth (in which good conquers chaos) present in the Old Testament
• the irrelevance of our vast number of New Testament manuscripts

In general, I’ve been fascinated at how easily some icons of Christian thought have crumbled with research. That’s not to say that there’s nothing there, but what’s there often turns out to be different from we’ve been told.

4: Apologetics

Apologetics, the intellectual arguments in favor of Christianity, are what got me into this study over a decade ago. I’ve blogged about the Transcendental Argument, Argument from Design, Argument from Morality, Cosmological Argument, and others.

I’ve also responded to arguments from about two dozen apologists. Repeat offenders include William Lane Craig, Greg Koukl, Lee Strobel, Frank Turek, and John Hagee. Their arguments are widespread, and I will continue to respond to what appear to be the most popular.

5: Trying on some new things

New projects keep it lively. I made a short video, “Are the Gospels Eyewitness Accounts?” I wrote a flash fiction piece, “Interloper.” I wrote my second novel exploring atheism and Christianity, A Modern Christmas Carol.

I also issued a public challenge to organizers of Christian apologetics conferences: you say that your apologetics can withstand the challenge? Then don’t have a Christian present the atheist position; bring in an atheist. You’ll get the last word, but don’t you want your attendees to understand the real challenge? Give me an audience, and I’ll do it for free. (So far, no takers. Just intimidated, I guess?)

As a blogger, sometimes I feel like the new teacher who’s just a chapter ahead of the students in the book. I’ll never be a biblical scholar, but if I can learn interesting things and pass them on to you, that will be enough. If you’ve enjoyed reading along, I hope you’ll continue to share the journey with me.

So what’s next? Do you have ideas for improvement? Any fundamentals that I need to focus on or new areas to explore?

Faith is not an excuse for getting “there” last.
It’s an obligation to get there first.
— Leonard Pitts, speaking about how Christianity
often lags society in knowing the right thing to do

Photo credit: Robo Android