C. S. Lewis made the claim that Jesus had to be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord, though he overlooked the obvious category, a legend. Let’s continue the list of twelve possible Christian rebuttals to the legend hypothesis.

You may want to read the introductory post and part 1 of this list.

9. The gospels were written by (or perhaps were one step removed from) eyewitnesses. And don’t you think that the sight of something as remarkable as the risen Christ would be seared almost flawlessly into someone’s memory? That memory wouldn’t fade in a few decades.

This is a poor analogy. In the first place, we start with the fact that we have the gospel story and work backwards to find the most plausible explanation; we don’t start with the assumption that Jesus rose from the dead and sift facts to support it.

We have no good reason to imagine that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses. The legends behind this claim are flimsy.

As for the accuracy of memory, I might give you an enthusiastic and detailed account of my wedding day and then my wife might give you a different account (“No, it was your Uncle Jim, not my Uncle Ralph, who spilled the punch”). There’s a big difference between confidence and accuracy. We’ve probably all been embarrassed after confidently stating a recollection only to discover later that we were wrong. (More on the fallibility of memory here and here.)

Besides, you will declare any supernatural event in my wedding story to be a false recollection! (“No, really—we ran out of wine but some guy made some out of water and saved the day.”) Why give a pass to a story from 2000 years ago that you would reject if it happened yesterday?

10. You underestimate the memory skills of the ancients. They were trained for this. Think of Homer and other poets who flawlessly retold the Iliad from memory.

Was flawless repeatability even the goal for these poets or would they adapt the tale to the audience? (I’ve written more on that here.)

More importantly, there’s no evidence that early Christians were cautioned to avoid repeating the gospel until they could repeat the entire thing perfectly. If the point of the Jesus story is that the Messiah has come, who cares about the details? For passing along the gospel story in the early decades before it was written, the gossip fence is a better analogy than Homer.

11. If Jesus rose from the dead and the apostles witnessed and faithfully passed on the story, they did the best that they could. What more could you expect? It was preserved in short order with writing, the most advanced technology they had. Don’t criticize first-century Christians for not having cameras.

Let’s accept that the documentation we have of the Jesus story is pretty good, considering. How does that help provide adequate evidence to support Christianity’s enormous claim? I care nothing for the fact that providing adequate evidence is really hard—without it, the atheist isn’t justified in accepting the claim. In fact, neither is the Christian.

No Christian lets the believer from another religion get away with insufficient evidence, and rightly so. Christianity must meet the same burden.

12. You’re biased against the supernatural.

And you’re not? If you heard of miracles attributed to Ganesh (a Hindu god) or Hachiman (Shinto) or Sumatinatha (Jain), would you accept that as readily as who won Sunday’s football game?

The facts that we start with are the text of the gospels and the historians’ evaluation of the quality of that evidence. We must find the best explanation for this. We don’t start with a Christian presupposition. That the gospels are legend is quite plausible given how we see stories evolve in our own experience.

What’s the likelihood that Odysseus met a Cyclops, Beowulf killed Grendel, or Jesus returned from the dead? Pretty much zero. The gospel story is as absurd as the moon being made of green cheese.

Men … think in herds;
it will be seen that they go mad in herds,
while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
— Charles Mackay,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/1/12.)

Image credit: Wonderlane, flickr, CC

Apologist C. S. Lewis said that Jesus must be a liar (he knew that his claims of deity were false), a lunatic (his nutty claims are explained by his being crazy), or he was who he said he was, the Lord. But we can’t forget Legend. (You may want to read the introductory post and part 1 of this list.)

Let’s continue the list of twelve possible Christian rebuttals to the legend hypothesis.

6. The disciples died martyr’s deaths. Who would go do their death defending a lie?

I don’t say it’s a lie; I say it’s a legend. Both are false, but the error in a legend isn’t deliberate. (I’ve already responded to the argument “Who would die for a lie?”)

I don’t imagine a sinister mastermind behind the creation of Christianity, just like there is no reason to imagine one behind Zoroastrianism or Mithraism, and there is none behind the corruption of a message in the game of Telephone. It’s just a story—a legend that grew over time.

I admit that I don’t know that the gospel story is false, and I don’t know that the supernatural elements were added during the decades of oral history. What I’m saying is that this is the null hypothesis; this is where we start. Only with extraordinary evidence (which doesn’t exist) can a supernatural explanation replace this.

The gospel story, the story of the George Washington of Galilee, the savior who was going to come back any day now to save the Jews’ bacon but who still hasn’t returned after 2000 years, evolved during 40 years of oral transmission. It was finally written down during a time when supernatural explanations were accepted and, indeed, may have been the most plausible explanation people had. It came from Palestine, the crossroads between Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures, each of which brought their own competing god claims.

Given our own experience with stories quickly getting out of hand (consider celebrities’ lives, for example), the Jesus story being a legend seems exceedingly plausible. The Christian position has the burden of proof, a burden that has yet to be met.

7. Just how skeptical are you? If you doubt the Jesus story, why imagine you can trust the stories of other figures from ancient history—Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, for example? If you dismiss the Jesus story for insufficient evidence, the same logic discards most of our knowledge of history.

The big difference between the gospel story and historical account of the great leaders of antiquity is that the gospel story makes miracle claims, and any such claims in historical accounts have been scrubbed out. I discuss this here and here.

8. The game of Telephone is a poor analogy. There is no chance for participants to verify what they heard; they must simply repeat as best as they can a message that is deliberately convoluted. Not only could hearers of the gospel story ask for clarification, they could search out the source and verify it with him.

I agree that the game of Telephone is an incomplete analogy, in particular because of the huge time difference. A story passed from person to person over the course of 10 minutes can’t go through half a dozen people without significant change, and for the gospels we’re talking 40 years and more!

When you tell me a story, you’re right that I have the chance to make sure that I got it right, but why would I take advantage of that? I could easily have gotten it wrong but wouldn’t know. When I pass it on, particularly a story as long as the gospel, I will (inadvertently) add my errors. And so on as the story is retold from person to person. There is no maliciousness, and no central authority guides things; this is just fallible people doing their fallible best.

The Christian position seems to imagine a web of authorities, quick to correct any error in each telling of the story. But it’s unreasonable to imagine these authorities everywhere, eavesdropping on each conversation like Big Brother. And when someone said, “Hold on—that’s not how I heard the Jesus story,” which person was right? There was no written authority to consult before the gospels. Oral history isn’t self-correcting; errors are likelier to accumulate with time. (This is related to the Naysayer Hypothesis, which I refute here.)

Could eyewitnesses have been the final authority guiding the gospel story? That’s implausible given that eyewitness were likely far away. The gospels were written in cities all over the eastern Mediterranean, decades after the events. We can have no certainty that the handful of disciples of Jesus still alive at the time would be in Alexandria and Corinth and Damascus and Rome (or wherever the various gospels were written), ready to rein in incorrect stories.

This list of Christian arguments is concluded in Part 3.

There are lots of nice things you can do with sand, 
but do not try building a house on it.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/1/12.)

Image credit: aka Tman, flickr, CC

You’ve probably heard of the papyrus document christened by some “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” That’s a big title to put on a scrap the size of a credit card, but note that most of the handful of papyrus manuscripts dated to the earliest days of the church aren’t much bigger.

The phrase of interest in the manuscript is, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.…’”

Was Jesus saying, “Take my wife, please”? We don’t know the context because the scrap has just 33 words on both sides.

The document is written in Coptic and is thought to have come from the fourth century CE, but it appears to be a translation of a Greek document from the second century.

The fragment was big news in 2012, and scholars have since had more time to study it. One 2014 study concluded, “The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women, only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake.” Nevertheless, there are many scholars who reject its authenticity.

Is it a fake? Does it even matter if it’s not?

One of the arguments in favor of its authenticity is that very few people would be able to create such a hoax. The hoaxer would have to be a scholar himself, but this isn’t beyond consideration. The provocative 1973 discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark is thought by many to be a hoax created by the very man who first reported the find.

Many Christians have been eager to discount this discovery. Not only might it be a forgery, there are other issues.

• “Wife” could simply be a metaphor for the church. This would fit with Gnostic thinking of the time.
• Scholars know nothing about where the manuscript came from, which denies them an important source of evidence to consider.
• This is thought to be a fourth-century copy of a second-century document. Even if this is authentic, there’s a lot of distance between this document and the historical events. Changes can be added by copyists, and no one knows how the story might have evolved over the decades from Jesus to the original document.

Christian view of marriage

The second century was a time when marriage was debated within the church. The apostle Paul discouraged children. He made clear that marriage was second best and that chastity was preferable (1 Cor. 7). Marriage wasn’t even a Christian sacrament until the twelfth century. The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife could be an important data point in our understanding of the changing views of marriage in the early church.

The Christian commentary that I’ve read rejects the idea of a married Jesus. That shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose. There’s a lot at stake here. The Roman Catholic Church has reiterated its ban on both women and married men as priests, using the life of Jesus as a model. A married Jesus (which, after all, would have been the state of a typical Jewish man during that time) might also add weight to the Adoptionist view of the early Jesus, where Jesus was simply an ordinary man who was adopted by God because of his sinless devotion.

But Jesus being married shouldn’t cause too many problems since his dad was married as well. Like Father, like Son? The solitary Yahweh is a late development, and before the Babylonian exile (586 BCE), Yahweh was often paired with Asherah (or Astarte, Ashtoreth, or Ishtar). This pairing is explicitly seen in extra-biblical evidence, but we do see clues within the Bible. King Josiah reformed Judaism to allow only Yahweh worship, but these reforms document that Asherah worship happened within the Temple (2 Kings 23:4–7).

An appeal for consistency 

Here’s what I find odd about Christian pushback against this new evidence. They skillfully point out the weaknesses in the argument, and good for them. Our goal should be to set agendas aside and discover if this document is genuine and, if so, what to make of it. But why can’t they be just as skeptical about the tenuous claim that the gospel of Mark was written by a companion to Peter, who was an eyewitness (I explore that here)? Or be that skeptical about the “Why would they die for a lie?” claim that the apostles’ martyrdom points strongly to the historicity of the gospel story (I explore that here)?

We all have our biases. Maybe the many Christians who play both sides of this question—earnest about evidence they like and skeptical about what they don’t—honestly don’t see the hypocrisy. But then my job is to gently tell the Christian when he has toilet paper trailing behind his shoe.

Life is not a warmup. 
Live, learn, love, life. 
— Randy Rumley

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/22/12.)

The “Who would die for a lie?” apologetic lies in tatters at our feet. The claim that almost all of the apostles died as martyrs is too weakly attested in history to support much of anything. Not only can no historical consensus emerge from the blizzard of contradicting claims about how they died, we have scant evidence—even if the apostles were executed or murdered—that these were martyrdoms. (See Part 1 for more.)

And on this, apologists want to support what may be the biggest claim possible: that the universe has a supernatural creator, and he came to earth 2000 years ago.

Consider option 1: disciples didn’t know the lie

Let’s move on to pursue a few other aspects of this argument. A story could be a lie in two ways. First, it could be a false story that was either false from the start or (more likely) grew with time. The adherents wouldn’t know that it was false. Most of us would put the 9/11 hijackers in this category—their views of the afterlife were wrong, but they honestly believed them. Or those who drank the Kool-Aid in Jonestown. Or who burned to death with David Koresh.

We must distinguish between two categories of disciples. Those mentioned in the Bible and in the summary of Hippolytus are potentially legendary. We can say nothing with confidence of their work; we can’t even say for certain if any were historical figures.

The second category includes those disciples who actually did the work to proselytize early Christianity. Someone helped spread the word, so we can be sure that they existed. They would likely have been, like the 9/11 hijackers, true believers who believed a story but didn’t witness the history claimed to back it up.

Consider option 2: disciples did know

Now consider the other way a story could be a lie. Can someone die for something that they know is false? Sure—consider captured soldiers or spies who maintain a false story to their deaths.

Robert Price gives the example of the second-century philosopher Proteus Peregrinus, “a charlatan prophet, [who] immolated himself because he could not resist such a grandstanding opportunity.”

The 19th-century Millerites, while not faced with loss of life, were faced with their own difficult challenge. They were a Christian sect that expected the end of the world on a particular day in 1844. Many made themselves right with God by selling all their possessions. When Jesus didn’t show up as expected, this event became known as the Great Disappointment.

So the thousands of members of this sect who had very clearly backed the wrong horse walked away poorer but wiser, right? Of course not—some couldn’t admit the lie to themselves and doubled down on prophetic religion, and the Seventh-Day Adventist church was one result. Though no one died for a lie, they drastically rearranged their lives for what they had been given ample evidence was a lie.

Joseph Smith and Mormonism

The most significant example of someone who died for a lie might be Joseph Smith. Not surprisingly, I don’t accept the Mormon claim that the angel Moroni showed Smith a set of golden plates that he translated from “reformed Egyptian” into English using a seer stone. Rather, I think he was a treasure hunter and con man who either took advantage of or was caught up in the Second Great Awakening and created a new religion.

Mormonism was the invention of one man, and that man died for it. Of course, it’s possible that Joseph Smith gradually came to believe his own PR. But either way, he died for what he should’ve known was a lie, exactly what Christians deny is possible.

Compare Joseph Smith with the supposedly martyred apostles. Modern apologists would have us believe that the apostles (1) saw the earliest days of the Christian church and so were in a position to know whether the gospel story was correct or not, (2) were killed because of their faith, and (3) never recanted.

Bingo—that’s Joseph Smith. He (1) knew all details of the founding of the Mormon religion, (2) was killed in the middle of religious controversies brought on by his faith, and (3) never recanted.

Does Joseph Smith’s death show that Mormonism is correct? If not, then why is the equivalent argument trotted out to show that Christianity is?

And note how much stronger the Mormon case is. (More here.) The gospels are simply snapshots of the Jesus story at different places and times. They are the result of decades of oral history that evolved within a credulous prescientific culture. They are legends. But there are no decades of oral history in the Mormon case. No one argues that Joseph Smith didn’t exist or that his story grew with the retelling because he documented the story himself.

Were disciples given a chance to recant?

One final problem with the “die for a lie” argument is that it suggests the ridiculous notion that a doomed man could recant his beliefs and be set free. This kind of exchange comes to mind:

Judge: “You have been found guilty of sedition and are sentenced to die by stoning. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Condemned Man: “Okay, okay—I’ll admit it! That whole Jesus thing—it was just made up!”

Judge: “Well, that wasn’t so hard now, was it? You could’ve saved us all a lot of bother by admitting that earlier. Very well—case dismissed.”

From what capital charges are you released by admitting that Jesus isn’t divine? Sedition? Incitement to riot? Treason? Offending a powerful person? General rabble rousing?

“Why would they die for a lie?” fails because it pretends that rejecting Jesus would have gotten the apostles released from capital charges, because we have negligible evidence that they were martyred, because there’s little reason to suppose that the stories of the original apostles are more than legend, and because the earliest actual missionaries were probably just like today’s—earnest believers who were converted by a community rather than by being eyewitnesses to history.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty
— Will Durant, historian

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/10/12.)

Image credit: André Koehne, Wikimedia, CC

Almost all of the original apostles of Jesus died martyr’s deaths. If they knew that Jesus was just a regular guy and that the resurrection story was fiction, why would they go to their deaths supporting it? Lee Strobel said that though people may die defending their beliefs, “People will not die for their religious beliefs if they know that their religious beliefs are false.”

While people have died for lies—the 9/11 hijackers, for example, or the Heaven’s Gate cult—they didn’t know it was a lie. That the apostles were in a position to know and still died defending it is strong evidence that the Jesus story is accurate.

Or, at least this is the story Christians tell themselves.

How did the apostles die?

There are several issues here, but let’s focus first on the big one: how we know how the apostles died. Since their dying as martyrs is key to this apologetic, you’d think that this was well established in history. But sometimes Christian historical claims have a very weak pedigree.

Our one-stop shopping source for this question is historian Hippolytus of Rome (170–235) in his “On the Twelve Apostles.” At best, this is an early third century work written close to 150 years after the facts it claims to document. At worst, it was written even later by an unknown author (called “Pseudo-Hippolytus” by historians) and inadvertently or deliberately compiled with the writings of Hippolytus.

Here’s the summary:

• 4 apostles were crucified: Andrew, Bartholomew, Peter, and Philip (the last three upside down).
• 3 were killed in some other way: James the son of Alpheus was stoned, James the son of Zebedee was killed with a sword (presumably decapitated), and Thomas was killed by spear.
• 5 died natural deaths: John, Matthew, Matthias (the new twelfth disciple added after Judas left the group), Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James (Thaddeus).

Another source disagrees.

Another popular source for this information is John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563 and in many later editions. Its late age, 1500 years after the events, is enough to disqualify it since we have the earlier account, but its popularity makes it an important source. To a large extent Foxe was simply a mouthpiece for the anti-Catholic sentiment in England at the time, and many sources dismiss its accuracy (Wikipedia, 1911 Britannica, Catholic Encyclopedia).

Foxe largely agrees with Hippolytus on the deaths of the apostles except for the ones that Hippolytus says died natural deaths, giving that fate only to John. He says that Matthew was “slain with a halberd” in Ethiopia, Matthias was stoned in Jerusalem and beheaded, Simon the Zealot was crucified in Britain, and Judas the son of James was crucified in what is now eastern Turkey.

James the son of Zebedee seems to have the oldest martyrdom story. Hippolytus probably got his account from Acts 12:2, written in the latter half of the first century, which says that Herod Agrippa (grandson of Herod the Great) killed him “with the sword.”

For most of the other apostles, however, contradictory stories cloud the issue. For example, Bartholomew’s death is documented in a number of contradictory ways. One account says that he was beaten and then drowned. The Martyrdom of Bartholomew (c. 500) says that he was beaten and then beheaded. The most popular, perhaps because it’s the most gruesome, is that he was skinned alive and then crucified (or beheaded).

Various sources add to the story of Matthias. He was crucified in Ethiopia. Or he was blinded by cannibals but rescued by Andrew. Or he died a natural death in Georgia on the coast of the Black Sea.

Simon the Zealot might have been sawn in half in Persia. Or crucified in Samaria. Or martyred in Georgia.

Add to this:

• the many additional contradictory stories about other apostles not included in this brief list,
• the decades-long period of oral history from event to writing, and
• the time span, usually centuries long, between the original manuscripts documenting the martyrdom stories and our oldest copies that make those copies suspect.

What can we conclude given this evidential house of cards? Only that “most apostles were martyred for their faith” is historically almost indefensible.

And it’s not just that the claim for any particular martyrdom story is flimsy; it’s that we can be certain that many of them are false because they contradict each other.

Let’s pause for a moment to savor the larger lesson. “Tradition holds that” or “The Church tells us that” is never enough—be sure to look behind the curtain to see what evidence actually supports a historic claim. Too often these claims crumble.

“Who would die for a lie?” you ask. I dunno—let’s first establish that someone died at all.

Concluded in part 2.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity,
never of the correctness, of a belief.
— Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/8/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia