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Daniel’s End Times Prediction

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Scholars are largely agreed that Daniel’s “prophecies” are actually prophecies after the event. These false prophecies were so common in antiquity that they have their own scholarly name: vaticinia ex eventu.

The book of Daniel was written in about 165 BCE (as discussed in Part 1 of this topic), not during the sixth-century-BCE captivity of the hero of the book. Though there may be debate on the issue, this late dating is based on scholarship, not atheists’ attempt at avoiding compelling evidence for a miraculous prophecy.

Dating of Daniel

More than just the “prophecies” failing after 165 BCE point to this date. Daniel wasn’t included in the Hebrew Bible’s canon, which was closed around 200 BCE; it wasn’t referenced in the Wisdom of Sirach (c. 180 BCE), which referenced almost every other book of the Old Testament; and it makes errors in the oldest historical claims (for example, it claims that Darius the Mede conquered Babylon, though this king is unknown to history).

Daniel looks very much like other apocalyptic writings of the period such as Baruch, Esdras, and the books of Enoch. These works are not anonymous but are pseudonymous—that is, falsely attributed to a respected figure of antiquity. A “rediscovered” old book from an ancient authority would carry much weight. Many of these books used Daniel’s trick of listing “predictions” from known history so that whatever had yet to occur would seem credible. Finally, these apocalyptic books all predict that the current painful age would soon end.

Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy

Daniel 9:24–7 gives the famous prophecy that many think predicts the crucifixion of Jesus. I’ll summarize the claims it makes, sometimes with a paraphrase, but feel free to check this against the actual text.

I. “Seventy weeks [“week” is used here to mean seven years, not seven days] are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.”

Equating a week with 7 years, like we call 10 years a “decade,” is seen in Greek literature, so this is a reasonable interpretation. The use of 70 comes from Jeremiah’s prophecy that the Judean captives taken to Babylon would return after 70 years.

This passage tells us we’ve got a long and sinful period of time (seventy weeks of years is 70×7 = 490 years), but things will be great at the end.

II. “From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks.”

When does the clock start? From the command to rebuild Jerusalem. When does it end? When the Anointed One comes. This isn’t a messianic reference, however, because “anointed one” can be applied to many people, including the high priest.

Pulling out the 7 weeks is confusing. Is it concurrent with the 62 weeks? If so, why even mention it (except to find a way to get to 70)? Or does the 62 weeks follow the 7-week period? If so, why not just add them together (except as an excuse to use the number 7, the number of completion)? No commentator has a great answer.

III. After 62 weeks, the Anointed One will be put to death.

IV. “The ruler who will come” will destroy (or corrupt) the city and the sanctuary.

V. War will be continuous, and then the end will be swift.

VI. This ruler will make a covenant with many for one final week.

VII. In the middle of this 7-year period, the ruler will prevent Temple offerings. “And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.”

 Christian interpretation #1

Start the clock with the Decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild the temple, given to Ezra in 458 BCE (Ezra 7:11–26). From this date, count ahead 7 weeks and then 62 weeks (69×7 = 483 years). Remembering that there was no year 0, the math is: –458 + 483 + 1 = 26 CE. This is the beginning of the final week, starting when Jesus was baptized.

Halfway through this final week, Jesus (the Anointed One) is put to death, which finishes the “transgression” and brings in “everlasting righteousness.”

The final week ends in 33 CE, with the conversion of Paul and Cornelius and inaugurating the mission to the Gentiles.

Problem 1: There are loads of problems. First, the weeks are off. Even if you infer that the Anointed One will be killed after the 62 weeks which begins after the 7 weeks (which isn’t really what it says), that makes his death in 26 CE, too early. And the first point makes clear that the atonement happens at the end of the 70 weeks, not halfway through the final week. The Anointed One’s death can’t be the atonement, since they’re separated by that final week.

Problem 2: It doesn’t identify the destroying “ruler who will come” or the “abomination that causes desolation.”

Problem 3: It makes no sense of the 7 week/62 week distinction. Why not just say 69 weeks?

Problem 4: The decree from Ezra 7 is just one of at least four plausible starting dates given in various places in the Old Testament. Why pick this one? (These four dates are given in an appendix to this post.)

Problem 5: It ignores the overwhelming evidence that the final week was roughly 171–164 BCE (see previous post).

Problem 6: If Daniel was written in the sixth-century BCE, why didn’t anyone during all that time understand and anticipate this prophecy? And the gospels don’t record anyone saying, “Hey, guys? Has anyone made the connection between Daniel’s prophecy and Jesus? It’s spooky—it’s pretty much talking about . . . wow—it’s talking about now.”

Problem 7: Remember the last time we saw the phrase “abomination that causes desolation”? It was the sacrifice of pigs to Zeus in the Jewish Temple, as ordered by Antiochus Epiphanes. Bringing Antiochus in would address more than this—“the ruler who will come” to destroy, continuous war (the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt), the covenant (Antiochus made agreements with Hellenistic Jewish leaders, splitting them away from the traditionalists), and so on. The only problem is that this destroys this Jesus-centric prophecy.

Continued with a different Christian interpretation of this prophecy that claims consequences in our own day here.

Faith isn’t a virtue; 
it is the glorification of voluntary ignorance. 
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/21/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

God Is Love—Does That Make Any Sense?

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rain lovers

Christians delight in telling us that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), but what does this even mean? We can compare this to other New Testament declarations that God is truthful, faithful, and just, but these are adjectives. This doesn’t help us understand God’s relationship to love, which is a noun. We can find “God is light” (equating God to a noun), but this sounds like a metaphor.

Is this phrase saying that “God” and “love” are synonyms? That makes no sense. Love didn’t destroy Sodom and Gomorrah or drown everyone in a global flood.

Or maybe the goal was to assign love as one of God’s properties. Why not then say, “God is loving”? And is love to God what love is to humans? If so, how can these relationships be equivalent when we wouldn’t say “Love is one of Mary’s properties”? No, we’d simply say, “Mary is loving” or “Mary is a loving person” or something similar.

Never mind. The original epistle was written in Greek, which gives Christians some ambiguity to play with as they create their own interpretation. Endless articles have been written about how fabulously loving God is, and I don’t much care how Christians spin “God is love.” What’s more interesting is the tangled tales apologists weave as they improvise their fantasy world.

Love and the Trinity

Peter Kreeft uses love to defend the bizarre idea of the Trinity. He argues that the Trinity is actually an asset to grounding this love question.

If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them. If God were only one person, he could be a lover, but not love itself. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit is the love proceeding from both, from all eternity. If that were not so, then God would need us, would be incomplete without us, without someone to love. Then his creating us would not be wholly unselfish, but selfish, from his own need.

So Kreeft imagines the three members of the Trinity loving each other for the eternity before the universe was created. The only thing in existence was the Trinity, but how would that work? There was no development, progress, or even change of any kind, so what would love mean in this static environment? The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might as well have been marble statues. Where’s the love?

See also: William Lane Craig Misrepresents Christianity and Insults Islam

Keep these statues in mind as we think about how love works with humans. We’ll sacrifice for our beloved. We’ll forgive our beloved’s errors and trust in the same courtesy in return. We value a loving relationship because it is temporary and uncertain. We contrast loving relationships and feelings of loving bliss with the far greater number of ordinary relationships and periods of time.

None of this is possible for the omniscient, invulnerable, unchanging Trinity. So tell me again how “love” could describe the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. (More here.)

William Lane Craig piles on

WLC has a similar take. Here he’s favorably comparing Christianity’s Trinitarian concept against Islam’s strict monotheism:

If I am right that love is of the very essence and nature of God then when there was nothing (when there were no human beings to love) then whom did God love? There isn’t anybody else to love other than God. . . . And this is, I think, a very good argument for a plurality of persons within God over against Unitarianism which says that God is just one person. . . . A Unitarian God cannot do that; cannot be essentially loving. This gives, I think, a very persuasive reason for thinking that there is a plurality of persons within God himself so that within the godhead there are eternal love relationships that have existed forever and now are manifested toward human beings with the creation of the world.

Uh huh. Show me that you got that from the Bible instead of your imagination.

“Good” emotions like love and compassion and “bad” emotions like jealousy and anger each have their role. We categorize them as good and bad simply because we typically see too little of the good ones and too much of the bad ones.

The palette of human emotions that we have exists simply because it provided survival benefit during our evolutionary path. I’m sure Kreeft and Craig want to imagine that they’re grounded in something less arbitrary than evolution. They have no good reason to say that or to elevate love to the pinnacle of emotions. The naturalistic explanation is sufficient.

Why imagine that love is that big a deal from a cosmic perspective? We think it is, but that’s our evolutionary programming talking. Our emotions and morals make sense to us because of evolution, but they’re in no sense objectively the best. If we were Romulans or Vulcans or Klingons or maybe even Spartans, we’d think differently. Maybe honor would be at the top if we were Klingons, or maybe respect for wisdom if Vulcans.

We can’t even agree among ourselves what the best moral actions are. Why would our morals be universally correct?

It’s like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Humans are like the guy who grabs a leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.” Okay, from that perspective, it is. And for humans, love might be the pinnacle of human emotional expression. But let’s not take it any farther than that. In a universe that might have millions of independently evolved intelligent species, what is obvious to us is just a relative interpretation.

Concluded in part 2 with more nutty, groundless speculation on love by Peter Kreeft.

We have just enough religion to make us hate,
but not enough to make us love one another.
— Jonathan Swift

 Image credit: t.germeau, flickr, CC

Liars for Jesus: Does Daniel Predict the Future?

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This is post #1000!

This blog has had over 2.5 million views and a quarter of a million comments, and it recently had its sixth anniversary. Thanks for your readership!

 

daniel

 

The book of Daniel is the story of a Judean nobleman taken into captivity in Babylon in the sixth century BCE. If it was actually written in the sixth century, as it claims, it does a remarkable job of predicting the future.

Nebuchadnezzar’s frightening dream

Daniel is an advisor to Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar and is called in to interpret a disturbing dream. The king is admirably skeptical: he demands that his wise men tell him the meaning of the dream without telling them what the dream was. If they have the wisdom to interpret the dream, they must surely have the wisdom to know what it was.

Good for you, O king—we could do with more of that skepticism today.

Of the king’s advisors, only Daniel is up to the challenge. In chapter 2, we learn that the king had dreamed of an enormous statue with gold head, silver chest, bronze loins, iron legs, and feet of iron plus clay. The statue is then destroyed by a huge rock.

Daniel tells him that the statue shows the future succession of kingdoms. Gold represents Babylon, and the subsequent kingdoms become baser (gold to silver to bronze to iron) and more powerful. Finally, they will be swept away by the rock of God’s kingdom.

The four beasts

Daniel then has his own vision, a dream of four beasts (chapter 7). We see the beasts in succession, and, like the succession of metals, they represent the future kingdoms. The first is a lion with eagle wings (though we might call it a griffin, that also describes a cherub), then a bear, then a leopard. The final beast has iron teeth and is the most terrifying and destructive. It initially had ten horns, which represent ten kings, but then three were replaced by a new little horn that spoke boastfully. Again, all is swept away in the end.

It’s not too hard to map these symbols onto the history of the Middle East. (My primary skeptical source for this analysis was “The Failure of Daniel’s Prophecies” by Chris Sandoval—thorough and highly recommended.)

In Babylon—remember, that’s the context of the story—the cardinal directions are represented by animals. The lion is the south (Babylon), the bear north (Media), and the leopard east (Persia). That leaves the west for the dragon (Greece).

Mapping this onto Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Babylon is gold, silver Media comes next, bronze Persia is next, and the iron Greek Empire under Alexander the Great is last. The feet of iron and clay represent the four weaker successor states to Alexander’s empire. The most important of these to Daniel’s story are the Seleucid Empire in Syria and the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt.

The ten horns appear to be ten kings of the Seleucid Empire, starting with Alexander (356–323 BCE) and ending with Antiochus IV Epiphanies (215–164 BCE). Antiochus is the boastful little horn that replaced three other horns, which are three relatives killed to allow Antiochus to take the Seleucid throne.

And now it gets interesting …

Daniel has a final vision (chapter 11), describing the various wars between the kings of the north and south—that is, the Seleucid (Syrian) and Ptolemaic (Egyptian) kings, respectively. The account becomes more detailed as Antiochus Epiphanes—a “contemptible person” (Dan. 11:21)—takes power in 175 BCE. The ebb and flow of the power struggle is accurately described, including a battle where a Roman fleet prevented his victory over Egypt.

Judah was part of the Seleucid Empire at this time, and a Jewish force took advantage of the king’s absence in Egypt to capture Jerusalem. Antiochus retaliated by killing 40,000 Jews, enslaving an equal number, outlawing Jewish worship, and establishing an altar to Zeus in the Jewish temple on which pigs were sacrificed. This “abomination of desolation” (Dan. 11:31) happened in 167 BCE.

Prophecy looking forward or history looking back?

Could this accurate history have been written from the vantage point of the sixth century BCE? If so, Daniel lost his mojo at this point, because the “prophecy” then falls apart. Daniel says that Antiochus would once more attack Egypt, winning this time, and return to camp in central Palestine. And then, like the stone that destroyed the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Michael the Archangel would open a bigly can of whoop-ass on the world that would make Noah’s Flood look like rain on a picnic. The good and wicked from all of history would go to their appropriate afterlives, and the world would end.

From the abomination until the end of the world in mid-164 BCE would be three and a half years.

But it didn’t work out that way. Antiochus didn’t fight Egypt again but took part of his army to address troubles in the east, leaving another force in Palestine to stamp out the Maccabean Revolt. Incredibly, this Jewish uprising against the mighty Seleucid empire was eventually successful, and the Hasmonean dynasty ruled a semi-autonomous and then fully independent Judea for about a century. Antiochus died of a sudden illness in 164.

Conclusions

Daniel “predicted” Alexander the Great, the four successor states, and the pitiless response by Antiochus in 167 BCE, but then he imagined a nonexistent victory over Egypt, missed Judah’s successful revolt, and raised a false alarm about the end of the world.

What seems likelier—that the book was written in the sixth century BCE and correctly predicted the major events in that part of the world up to just after 167 BCE but then lost its touch when it predicted the end of the world a few years later? Or that it was falsely attributed to a respected sixth-century BCE patriarch and was instead written shortly after 167 to give encouragement to a beleaguered Jewish population? In fact, this kind of after-the-fact prophecy was common enough during that time to have a scholarly name: prophecy post eventum.

Continue with more on Daniel.

Other posts on prophecy:

The scientific theory is the modern equivalence of the prophecy.
— comment by MNb

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/19/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

Is Christian Heaven More Real than any Other?

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The 1990s BBC sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf is about the crew of an enormous space ship, lost in distant space. A radiation leak has killed everyone except Dave Lister, a low-level technician who had been safe in suspended animation. He is released three million years after the accident when the radiation danger has passed. One of his few companions is a robot named Kryten.

In the episode “The Last Day,” Kryten’s replacement has finally caught up with the ship. Kryten is packing up his spare heads in preparation for being replaced and is talking with Lister.

LISTER (crewman): How can you just lie back and accept it?

KRYTEN (robot): Oh, it’s not the end for me, sir, it’s just the beginning. I have served my human masters, and now I can look forward to my reward in silicon heaven.

LISTER: Silicon what?

KRYTEN: Surely you’ve heard of silicon heaven. It’s the electronic afterlife. It’s the gathering place for the souls of all electronic equipment. Robots, calculators, toasters, hairdryers—it’s our final resting place.

LISTER: There is no such thing as silicon heaven.

KRYTEN: Then where do all the calculators go?

LISTER: They don’t go anywhere! They just die.

KRYTEN: It’s just common sense, sir. If there were no afterlife to look forward to, why on earth would machines spend the whole of their lives serving mankind? Now that would really be dumb!

LISTER: Just out of interest, is silicon heaven the same place as human heaven?

KRYTEN: Human heaven? Goodness me! Humans don’t go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts.

Kryten’s explanation of his heaven is what I get from many Christians. The existence of their heaven is obvious and indisputable, and the alternative is empty and inconceivable. They’ve read about it, after all, and they’ve heard about it all their lives. No heaven? Who could imagine such a thing?

Christians can easily see through someone else’s nutty idea of an afterlife. (“Hindu reincarnation? Where’s the evidence of that?!”) What they have a harder time with is holding a mirror to their own beliefs. If they did, perhaps they’d find no more evidence for their concept of heaven than for Kryten’s.

Religion makes you happy?
Okay, so does a puppy.
There’s no need to abandon reason for happiness.

— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/11/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

What Good Is Philosophy? (2 of 2)

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nerf gun

In my last post, I summarized some of the useless fruits of the pop philosophy used by Christian apologists like William Lane Craig. Now, let’s look at issue from the other side to find the good within philosophy.

Something nice to say about philosophy

Philosophy contains important stuff. The laws of logic and the understanding of logical fallacies fall under philosophy, as does the study of ethics. The study of philosophy can be great training.

Alvin Plantinga argued that philosophy is relevant at the frontier of science when he said that philosophy is simply thinking hard about something. By that definition, Werner Heisenberg (a physicist) was doing philosophy when he came up with his uncertainty principle, Kurt Gödel (a mathematician) was doing philosophy when he discovered his incompleteness theorems, and Alan Turing (a computer scientist) was doing philosophy when he developed the Turing Test. Maybe string theory or ideas on the multiverse are philosophy.

A broad definition of philosophy doesn’t bother me, but note that all these “philosophers” were first scientists or mathematicians. That’s why they were able to make their contributions. While a scientist can put on a philosopher’s hat and do great work, the reverse is not true. A philosopher isn’t qualified to contribute to science or math. This was the problem outlined in the previous post with philosopher William Lane Craig’s ill-advised dabblings in science.

I get annoyed with philosophers putting on an imaginary lab coat and playing scientist like a child plays house. Craig imagines himself strutting into a meeting of befuddled scientists and saying with a chuckle, “Okay, fellas, the Christian philosophers can take it from here” and seeing them breathe a sigh of relief that the cavalry has come to save them from their intellectual predicament. He imagines that he has something to offer on questions that his discipline couldn’t even formulate.

In perhaps the height of hubris, Craig the non-scientist permits himself to pick and choose the areas of science that are valid. He likes the idea of a beginning to the universe, so the Big Bang is A-OK with him. But complexity in life without the guiding hand of God doesn’t sit so well, so he questions evolution.

I pick on William Lane Craig here just because he’s a well-known example. Other Christian apologists take similar positions.

Contributions in science vs. philosophy

Every year we see lists of the top scientific discoveries of the previous year, and 2016 didn’t disappoint. We detected gravity waves with the LIGO experiment, we found a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (the star closest to earth besides the sun), NASA’s Juno spacecraft began orbiting Jupiter, the New Horizons spacecraft finished transmitting its data taken of its Pluto flyby, clues suggest a mysterious Planet 9 in our solar system, Greenland sharks can live to 400 years, and more.

I couldn’t find a list of the Top Ten philosophical breakthroughs for 2016.

Philosophy as a caltrop

While thoughtless and ungrounded pop philosophy is one problem, weighty arguments such as the Transcendental Argument or the Ontological Argument are another problem. This is philosophy as a caltrop.

A caltrop is a defensive weapon used when the opponent is getting too close. These and other complicated philosophical arguments can be handy when the expected evidence for God isn’t there. You want to discard the God hypothesis? Hold on—first, you must respond to this ponderous argument. And there are more behind it. These arguments are effective because they’re confusing, not because they’re correct.

What does it say about Christian apologetics that such arguments are necessary? If you want to see what keeps the planet warm, go outside on a sunny day and look up. A god who is eager to have a relationship with us and is so much more powerful and important than the sun should be at least as obvious. Complicated philosophical arguments simply paper over the glaring fact that evidence for God is negligible and that we have no justification for belief.

Philosophy is useful in the hands of scientists. But philosophers? What have they done for me lately?

Religion was our first try at philosophy,
it was our first try at epistemology.
It’s what we came up with when we didn’t know
we lived on a round planet circling the sun.
— Christopher Hitchens

Philosophers do not agree about anything to speak of.
— Peter van Inwagen

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/14/14.)

Image credit: Tim Pierce, flickr, CC

 

So How Does an ATHEIST Explain the Resurrection Story?

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My recent posts have focused on Gary Habermas’s claim for a scholarly consensus in favor of the resurrection of Jesus (discussed here) and his minimal facts argument supporting the resurrection (here, with lessons learned here).

His arguments might be great when preaching to the choir, but they don’t hold up to a skeptical critique. But if the Christian explanation is wrong, what does explain the facts?

Let’s begin by making clear where we’re going and how we’ll get there.

The claim: The gospels each claim that Jesus rose from the dead, but a natural explanation is plausible. To be clear, I have no interest in finding a natural explanation for the resurrection; I’m looking for a natural explanation for the story of the resurrection.

The facts: I’m taking as evidence for this claim the books of the Bible, documents from the early church fathers, and writings of early historians. (Noncanonical books also exist—the Gospel of Thomas, for example—but these aren’t part of apologists’ arguments, so I’ll ignore them.) I like Habermas’s starting point: “I am not basing my argument for Jesus’ resurrection on the inerrancy of the Bible or even on its general trustworthiness” (The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 212).

Note the distinction between “These documents say that Paul was converted,” which is a valid initial fact, and “Paul was converted,” which is not.

Given these facts, we will try to explain the resurrection with a natural explanation—that is, without taking the gospel story as history.

Gary Habermas is pessimistic about our project:

No plausible natural explanations can account for all of the known facts regarding the resurrection of Jesus. Never in history has there been such a unique combination of events. . . . A huge problem is that no single natural option, however unusual, can explain all of the evidence for the Resurrection (Case, p. 142).

Despite his certainty of our failure, let’s push on and consider the various elements of the Bible story.

Why did church fathers write what they did?

The Christian leaders from the first and second centuries believed (and wrote about that belief) just like people do today. Nothing supernatural here. We can explain them in the same way that Habermas explained the Muslims who attacked on 9/11: “Deceived? Yes. Liars? No” (Case, p. 93).

Why does the Old Testament say what it says?

The Old Testament looks just like it was written by primitive people from that region of the world. We see polytheism and support for slavery and genocide. We see in early Judaism the Combat Myth, which came from earlier Babylonian and Akkadian stories. We see Sumerian cosmology in the Genesis creation story. Early Judaism was simply another Canaanite religion, and we even read about Elohim and Yahweh in Canaanite holy books that preceded the Old Testament.

Here again, the natural explanation is plausible (I would say “overwhelming,” but our goal is simply to offer a plausible natural alternative to Habermas’s supernatural one).

Why did historians like Josephus write what they did?

Historians who followed Jesus said at most, “there are people called Christians who worship a man named Jesus,” hardly compelling evidence for the supernatural stories about Jesus. (I’ve written more on Josephus here.)

And now for the main event:

What explains the New Testament resurrection story?

If Jesus died around 30 CE and the first gospel was written forty years later, that’s a long time (in an unsophisticated prescientific culture) for the story to evolve. The gospels were written in Greek, which means that the Jesus story was filtered through Greek culture, full of their own stories of miracles and gods (one example: the story of Dionysus dying and rising from the dead). Some early Greek Christians might well have been former worshippers of Dionysus. If the Jesus story didn’t have him rising from the dead before they heard it, there’s a good chance that it did after they got through with it.

I’m not proposing malicious tampering with the story or claiming that any part is a hoax. I’m simply saying that human memory is notoriously inaccurate, and oral history is an error-prone process. Even in our own time, you can find errors in newspaper stories from the previous day. Stories change with the retelling.

As to the elements that are unique to Christianity, how does any new religion branch away from its earlier beliefs? Christianity isn’t the only religion that made innovations.

That’s it. It was oral history for decades in a culture full of supernatural tales, and it picked up changes and “improvements” along the way before being written.

And there are other possible variations along Christianity’s path. Maybe someone was lying along the way. That’s hardly surprising—we know that people lie. You might ask for their motivation. I dunno, and I don’t much care—we understand those times so poorly that there could be lots of surprising reasons. Are you going to trot out the literal, supernatural interpretation of the Jesus story and claim that that’s more likely?

Or maybe our understanding of the early church is significantly wrong because of deliberate changes to the gospels in the centuries-long period after initial authorship but before we get our first complete New Testament copies in the fourth century. Gospels could have been amended or added to, and competing gospels could have been discarded or destroyed. To give one uncontroversial example, half of the “Pauline” epistles—those that claim to have been written by Paul—were not.

Or maybe Jesus never existed. Paul was writing about a mythical Jesus in the unspecified past (his understanding of the gospel story is basically nonexistent), and later authors could have historicized the story.

QED

I only claim to have sketched out plausible natural paths through the facts. You might find better ones. My goal is to show that some natural path is possible. With the facts plausibly explained, that defeats the supernatural claim.

Habermas claims that (1) Jesus died by crucifixion, (2) the disciples believed, (3) Paul believed, (4) James believed, and (5) the tomb was empty. He says, “Two thousand years of attempts by critics to account for these facts by natural causes have failed” (Case, p. 128).

What’s to explain? You’ve got a marvelous story full of miracles from a distant culture 2000 years ago, and you’re wondering which bin to put it in? Stamp it with “Myth/Legend” and let’s move on. The gospel’s miracles, the doubts turned into beliefs, and the enthusiastic eyewitnesses are just a story.

If somewhere within the Bible,
I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5,
I wouldn’t question what I’m reading in the Bible.
I would believe it, accept it as true,
and then do my best to work it out and understand it.
— Pastor Peter LaRuffa in
2014 HBO documentary “Questioning Darwin”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/5/14.)

Image credit: Ted, flicker, CC