How Decades of Oral Tradition Corrupted the Gospels

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(See the first in this series of posts traveling the tortuous journey from 21st-century Western culture back to the original story of Jesus here.)

Imagine that the year is 50 CE and you are a merchant in Judea or Galilee. A traveler stops at your house and asks for lodging, and you comply. After dinner, you chat with your new acquaintance and mention that you have recently become a follower of the Jewish messiah, Jesus. He is unaware of Jesus and asks to hear more, and you tell the complete gospel story, from the birth of Jesus through his ministry, miracles, death, and resurrection. Your guest is excited by the story and eager to pass it on. He asks that you tell it again.

Instead, you ask him to tell the story so that you can correct any errors. He goes through the story twice, with you making corrections and adding bits to the story that you’d forgotten in the first telling.

You’ve now spent the entire night telling the powerful story, but you and your new friend agree that it was time well spent. He is on his way, and a week later the events are repeated, but this time your friend plays host to a traveler and the Good News is passed on to a new convert.

Imagine how long you would need to summarize the gospel story and how many times you’d need to correct yourself with, “Oh wait a minute—there was one more thing that came before” or “No, not Capernaum … I think it was Caesarea.” That confusing tale would be a lot for an initiate to remember, and yet this imaginary encounter was about as good as it got for passing on so complex a story. Consider other less perfect scenarios—getting fragments of the story from different people over months or years or having two believers arguing over details as they try to tell the story in tandem.

“And then Jesus healed the centurion’s slave—”

“No, no—that’s when he healed the daughter of Jairus! Or Gyrus, or something. And it wasn’t the centurion’s slave, it was his son. Or maybe his servant, I forget.”

(And so on.)

Christian response

Apologists appreciate the problem of oral history when they argue that the earliest gospel was written just 20 to 30 years after the resurrection instead historians’ typical estimate of 40 years, but this does little to resolve the problem.

Let’s give them that. Let’s assume just twenty years of oral history in a pre-scientific culture produced a story about the Creator of the Universe coming to earth. What certainty can we have that such a whopper is correct?

Christians and atheists can agree that the period of oral history is a concern, but what is rarely acknowledged is the translation that happened at the same time.

A modern parallel

To see this, first consider a different example. In response to the 1858 sightings of Mary at Lourdes, France by a 14-year-old girl named Bernadette, the local bishop investigated and concluded a year and a half later that the sightings were genuine. Bernadette and the bishop were from the same culture and spoke the same language.

The gospel story had a much more harrowing journey. Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and came from a Jewish culture, but this isn’t where the gospel came from. Every book in the New Testament was written in Greek and came from a Greek culture. The story would have been heard in and (to some extent) adapted to a Greek context.

For example, imagine a gospel without the water-into-wine story. “Wait a minute,” the Greek listener might say. “The Oenotropae could change water into wine. If Jesus was god, couldn’t he do that as well?”

Or imagine a gospel without the healing miracles. “Asclepius was generous with his healing gifts and even raised the dead. Didn’t Jesus do anything like that?”

Or a gospel without the resurrection. “Dionysus was killed and then was reborn. You mean Jesus just died, and that was it?”

In fact, the earliest books in the Bible are Paul’s letters, which have almost nothing of the gospel story—no healings, no parables, no feeding the 5000, and no virgin birth. The Jesus of Paul performs no miracles, gives no Sermon on the Mount, has no public ministry, and gives no Great Commission. Might passage through Greek culture have added some of these elements?

Humans have a long history of adapting gods to their own culture—for example, the Greek god Heracles became Hercules when he was adopted by the Romans. Athena became Minerva, Poseidon became Neptune, Aphrodite became Venus, and Zeus became Jupiter. The Hebrews adopted the Mesopotamian flood story of Gilgamesh as well as the Sumerian water model of the cosmos.

We know how stories evolve in our own time. As Richard Carrier notes (video @ 26:00), the evolution of the Jesus story is like the evolution of the Roswell UFO Incident. A guy finds some sticks and Mylar in the desert, and this was interpreted as debris from a crashed spaceship. But within 30 years, the story had morphed. Now, a spaceship crashed in the desert, and the military autopsied the dead aliens and is reverse-engineering their advanced technology.

Spreading the Word in an oral culture

Let’s return to your telling the story to the new convert. How close was your version of the story to that in the New Testament? And how similar would the new guy’s telling of the story be to the one that you told him? How much variation is added with each retelling?

The gospel story was an oral tradition for four decades or more before finally being written down. That’s a lot of time for the story to evolve.

Christians may respond that by relying on writing, our memory skills have atrophied. In an oral culture like that in first-century Palestine, people became very good at memorization.

Yes, it’s possible that people memorized the Jesus story so that they could retell it the same as it was taught to them, but there is no reason to imagine that this was how it was passed along. Indeed, it’s wrong to assume that storytellers in an oral culture always wanted to repeat a story with perfect accuracy. We care about perfect accuracy because we come from a literate culture. Only because we have the standard of the written word do we assume that other cultures would want to approximate this unvarying message.

The theory of oral-formulaic composition argues instead that tales are often changed with the retelling to adapt to the audience or to imperfect memory. Any transcription of such a tale (like a single written version of the Iliad) would simply be a snapshot of a single telling, and you would deceive yourself if you imagined that this gives an accurate record of the story. This is seen in modern-day oral epic poetry in the Balkans and is guessed to be the structure of Homeric epic storytelling as well.

But this is a tangent. The gospel story wasn’t an epic poem, but rather a story passed from person to person. It changed with time, just like any story does.

The gossip fence is a better analog than Homer.

Read the first post in this series: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

When a person is determined to believe something,
the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.
— Letters of Junius 12/19/1769

Photo credit: Wikimedia

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/12.)

Witch Hunts, Sex Scandals, and the Atheist Community

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Elevatorgate. Charges of sexual harassment at secular/atheist conferences. Charges of sexual assault or misogyny or just cluelessness leveled at high-profile atheists. It’s gotten so extreme that the title of a recent BuzzFeed article didn’t seem too farfetched: “Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement?”

I’m amazed at the byzantine turns this topic has taken and the hold it has on some atheist bloggers. It would take me weeks to read all that has been written, and let me make clear that, not having done that, I don’t pretend to be well informed about the issue. But let me summarize an event that happened in my part of the country close to 20 years ago that, while much more extreme, may have parallels to today’s anxiety.

This being Halloween, it seems appropriate to bring up the Wenatchee Witch Hunt, what has been called history’s most extensive child sex abuse investigation.

Details of the case

It began in 1992, when, after much questioning, the 7-year-old daughter of poor and uneducated parents accused a family acquaintance of molesting her. After repeated encouragement by the Wenatchee police lieutenant who was acting as foster parent to the girl and her sister, the girls eventually named over a hundred abusers and many child victims.

Local Pentecostal pastor Robert Robertson tried to talk sense to the investigators. For his troubles, he and his family were sucked in as suspects, and the story was rewoven to include his church as a center for orgies with the children. Others who also tried to rein in the crazy were also charged or fired. (What explains a defense of the accused but that that person is similarly guilty?)

Child witnesses, mostly from 9 to 13 years old, were often taken from their families and placed in foster care. Many said later that they were subjected to hours of frightening grilling and if they didn’t believe they had been sexually abused, they were told they were “in denial” or had suppressed the memory of the abuse. They were also told that siblings and other children had witnessed their abuse, or that that their parents had already confessed.

Interrogators called some children who denied abuse liars. Children were told that if they agreed to accusations they wouldn’t be separated from parents or siblings. Many of them later recanted. [The police lieutenant] neither recorded nor kept notes of his interrogations.

Recantations were ignored. “It’s well known that children are telling the truth when they say they’ve been abused,” [the] Wenatchee Child Protective Services [supervisor said.] “But (they) are usually lying when they deny it.”

Aftermath

In all, “43 adults were arrested and accused of 29,726 counts of sexually abusing 60 children…. Eighteen pleaded guilty, mostly on the basis of signed confessions. Ten were convicted at trial. Three were acquitted. Eighteen went to prison.” All confessions were later recanted, all convictions related to the sex ring have been overturned, a third of the children claimed to have been abused were at one point taken from their parents and put up for adoption, and the city of Wenatchee paid lawsuits claiming millions of dollars in damages.

It was a modern-day replay of the 1692 Salem witch trial in which several girls’ accusations resulted in 19 people being hanged and one more pressed to death.

No, just because there’s smoke doesn’t mean there’s fire, and someone encouraging restraint isn’t necessarily part of the problem. As an outsider to the stories behind the accusations of misogyny and rape, I make no claim that I understand who’s right or wrong. I simply offer this Wenatchee case as an example of how well-meaning thinking can go off the rails.

In this blog, I’ve commented on social issues such as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and abortion rights. Christianity creates problems in these areas, and I think I have something to contribute to the conversation. Atheists are pretty much of one mind on these issues.

I might have something to contribute to the conversation on feminism and misogyny as well, but unfortunately this has become a contentious, us-vs.-them issue within the atheist community, and I avoid it. I wish it weren’t so.

Once your forefathers and foremothers realized that
[the scientific method] generated results,
in a few generations your species went
from burning witches and drinking mercury
to mapping the human genome and playing golf on the moon.
— David McRaney

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/2/12.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Having Lost the Same-Sex Marriage Fight, What Will Opponents Do Now? (2 of 2)

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gay marriageI summarized the abrupt about-face we’ve seen on the same-sex marriage issue in Part 1. Let’s continue with a thought experiment I posed to the Christian opponents of same-sex marriage as they reorganize behind the demand that they be allowed to deny service to same-sex couples.

Discriminate against a gay couple? How about against a mixed-race couple? Would that be justified as well?

Few modern Christians would support discrimination based on the ethnicity of customers, and they contort themselves trying to show that discriminating against a gay couple is perfectly reasonable while discriminating against a mixed-race couple is unthinkable. Let’s explore some of their rationalizations.

Response 1: Homosexuality is a behavior, not a race. Homosexuality requires action, which you can choose or not choose to do.

No, sexual orientation and ethnicity are both part of what you are.

Sure, a homosexual could choose to remain celibate. So could you, Mr. Christian. If that would be an outrageous imposition on you, why impose it on someone else? Consensual safe sex causes no more harm if it’s homosexual rather than heterosexual.

By contrast, religion is something you choose. Christianity—or at least its outdated attitudes—is something you are able to discard. (Might be something to consider.)

Response 2: “You keep playing the race card. But the way blacks were treated is much different that the way the gays are treated. Blacks were slaves, weren’t allowed to vote, were forced to use separate facilities, etc. That’s not what’s happening to gays. They aren’t being enslaved or having their freedoms taken away. Quite frankly, it’s an outlandish and offensive example.” Source

(And bonus points for the outrage! Wow—who’s taking the moral high road now?!)

No one claims that the oppression of African Americans was the same as injustices done to homosexuals; the point is that they’re both injustices.

“No one talks about same-race marriages. Why? Because it’s irrelevant. Race has no bearing on marriage.”

Agreed, but you’re able to say that only because American Christians have moved on. That wouldn’t have been true just a few decades ago. Consider the original conviction that became the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case that overturned state and local laws against mixed-race marriage in the U.S. The trial judge in the original case gave a clear biblical foundation for the moral error of mixed-race marriage:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Remember the xkcd graph discussed in Part 1. When mixed-race marriage was legalized nationwide in 1967, most Americans disapproved. Yes, race has no bearing on marriage, and yes, no one talks about it anymore, but that wasn’t the case just a few decades ago.

Response 3: Where will these impositions on business owners end? Suppose a restaurant owner didn’t want to sell alcohol or a kiosk owner didn’t want to sell pornography. Could they be forced to?

That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about public accommodation. Restaurants, apartment buildings, stores, and public universities must provide equal access. A restaurant isn’t forced to sell alcohol and a kiosk isn’t forced to sell porn, but if they do, they must provide equal access to customers regardless of race, sexual orientation, and so on.

Response 4: Oh, come on—this is a red herring. No one opposes interracial marriage. That’s not the official view of any major religion. Same-sex marriage, however, is widely rejected by religious authorities.

This is just a bandwagon argument—lots of people and authorities think my way, so you should adopt it. If popularity were the issue, the rapid about-face we’ve seen in polls should shut down this issue. But it’s not. The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to avoid the tyranny of the majority over a minority.

The fact remains that “My honest religious beliefs prohibit me from serving an X couple” applies whether X is “same-sex” or “mixed-race.” The logic of your argument allows both options. I’m simply rubbing your nose in it—if you don’t like the consequences of your argument, drop it.

Response 5: “Race is irrelevant to marriage while gender is essential to it. There is nothing wrong with interracial marriages because men and women are designed for one another and can procreate regardless of their racial background.” — Frank Turek

Ah, the “marriage = procreation” argument—an oldie but a goodie! I wonder if that’s all Turek gets out of the marriage vows. “I promise to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow,” doesn’t sound like “Make babies!” to me.

It’s easy to smoke out these Christians’ true opinions on the subject. Ask these opponents of same-sex marriage why a straight couple should get married instead of living together, and the procreation argument goes out the window, replaced with profound thoughts about love and commitment—precisely the reason same-sex couples want to get married.

I’ve skewered this argument more here.

“Ironically, it’s not conservatives but homosexual activists who are acting like racists. Instead of asking the state to recognize the preexisting institution of marriage, homosexuals are asking the state to define marriage. That’s exactly what racists were trying to do to prevent interracial marriage.”

Gays want marriage expanded. Racist anti-miscegenists wanted it restricted. See the difference?

Before you make the “but marriage has been one man plus one woman since Day 1!” argument, consider the many odd and unpleasant kinds of hookups recognized by the Old Testament.

Response 6: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. … In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.” — Sen. Rick Santorum (2003)

And now we have the slippery slope argument. Do bigamy, polygamy, bestiality, incest, or pedophilia cause harm? If so, then you see the difference between Santorum’s fevered, straight-laced imagination and the issue at hand. Consensual, safe gay sex causes no more problem than consensual, safe straight sex.

And don’t imagine that marriage has had one definition since forever. Society has changed it many times (more).

[Gay sex] destroys the basic unit of our society.… Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Sounds like we’ve devolved into the “gay sex is icky” argument. Hey, Senator, if you don’t like gay sex, don’t have any. Problem solved.

Final thoughts

Conservative Christians, you’re seriously telling me that there’s such an abundance of love in the world that you can get in the way of homosexuals who only want the marriage that you’ve got? Aren’t there enough actual problems in the world that we can work on instead?

Drop the petulant, backwards-looking attitude. Your mistake was letting politicians lead you around by the nose, and they led you into an indefensible dead end. The next time politicians buzz around like flies and tell you that the sky is falling, tell them to take a hike. Tell them that you’re able to figure out social issues on your own.

I stayed because my pastor told me that God hates divorce.
It didn’t cross my mind that God might hate abuse, too.
— Beverly Gooden

Photo credit: Jeremy Richardson

Having Lost the Same-Sex Marriage Fight, What Will Opponents Do Now?

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homosexuality gay marriageReverend Francis Schaefer is no longer a reverend. (I’m talking about the former United Methodist minister, not the theologian Francis Schaeffer who died in 1984.) Schaefer was defrocked a year ago because he officiated at his gay son’s 2007 wedding. His Methodist denomination states that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Schaefer was recently reinstated. His case was heard last week by the church’s highest court, the Judicial Council. It is expected to rule on Schaefer’s fate any day now. [UPDATE 10/27/14: the Judicial Council decided in Schaefer’s favor, and he has been allowed to remain an ordained minister.]

Current state of the gay-marriage issue

Two years ago, in the weeks before the 2012 U.S. election, conservative pundits gloated about their 32 victories over the previous decade and a half, an unbroken record of rejection for same-sex marriage. Six states and Washington D.C. had legalized same-sex marriage at that point, but they had done so through the legislature or court decisions, not through voter initiatives.

What a difference two years make. Three same-sex marriage initiatives won in the 2012 election, including the one in my own state of Washington. More victories trickled in. Three weeks ago, the Supreme Court declined to review three appellate court rulings, which allowed a number of lower-court rulings to stand and put most Americans in states that allowed same-sex marriage.

The next day, Nevada and Idaho joined the list. Then West Virginia, and then North Carolina, and then Alaska. Ten days ago, Arizona and Wyoming. That makes 32 states in which same-sex marriage is legal.

(Look in the dictionary and you’ll see this turnaround as the top example for the word schadenfreude.)

The comic xkcd has an enlightening graph that contrasts acceptance through public opinion vs. state-by-state legality for two issues: mixed-race marriage and same-sex marriage. The two issues played out surprisingly differently. For mixed-race marriage, legality was out in front, and even after it was legal nationwide in 1967, public acceptance was a minority opinion.

With same-sex marriage, it was the other way around. Public opinion was the leader (56% approving vs. 37% disapproving at the moment), which supported the landslide of states approving it in the last two years.

Conservatives lost the gay marriage issue; what hijinks are next?

The gay marriage issue in the United States has been used by politicians as a vote getter. They play Chicken Little and insist that the sky is falling. They’ll cry that only by voting for them will the looming catastrophe be avoided. That this “catastrophe” doesn’t exist seems not to have hurt their cause.

Or, at least it hadn’t in the past. Many voters now find the anti-gay stance offensive, and it is turning many young people away from churches that embrace that message. Since Plan A has soured, what’s next?

Conservative politicians and Christians see the writing on the wall. Going forward, homosexuality will be to them as morally relevant as left-handedness, another inborn trait the church historically was on the wrong side of. We’ll be on the same page, at least on this moral issue.

Kidding! In fact, Mike Huckabee, perhaps to demonstrate his presidential timber, recently doubled down on the losing position. A GOP that went flaccid on same-sex marriage, Huckabee said, would lose members like himself. The conservative position may morph into a rear-guard action that does nothing useful as it simply tries to slow the inevitable. It may wane only as these conservatives they die off.

#AtheistVoter

The right to impose one’s will on others

We will have more of the Gay Cake Food Fight in our future. The obligation to treat homosexual customers equally seems to be the new battleground and “religious liberty” the new battle cry.

Elane Photography refused to provide services for a same-sex commitment ceremony in 2006 and lost in the New Mexico Supreme Court in 2013. One critique of that ruling:

The danger here is that the courts are now telling all of us that we must compartmentalize our religious beliefs. What we believe on a Sunday we cannot act upon on Monday or we will be in violation of the law.

Well, yeah. If what you believe on Sunday is morally indefensible, it won’t fly when you leave the church. You expect society to apologize for that?

Religious freedom exists in this country thanks to the U.S. Constitution and for no other reason. The Constitution calls the tune. Imagine that there’s a Law above the law if you like, but you’re bound first by the only law we can agree actually exists, the law of the land. When religious belief clashes with the law, guess which one wins?

If you need help answering that question, remember Davis v. Beason, the Supreme Court case that prohibited polygamy. From the unanimous decision:

However free the exercise of religion may be, it must be subordinate to the criminal laws of the country.

Discriminate against a gay couple? How about against a mixed-race couple?

Consider a parallel situation. Suppose someone had a deeply held Christian belief that mixed-race marriage was wrong. Would these Christians support denying mixed-race customers in that case?

There’s plenty of biblical support for this position.

Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons. (Deuteronomy 7:3)

Do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or take their daughters for your sons (Ezra 9:12).

We promise not to give our daughters in marriage to the peoples around us or take their daughters for our sons (Nehemiah 10:30).

Is discriminating against a gay couple on religious grounds justified if discriminating against a mixed-race couple is not? Think about how Christians respond to this thought problem.

Concluded in Part 2.

We’ve got to stop being the stupid party.
— Bobby Jindal,
Republican governor of Louisiana

Photo credit: Patrick Giguère

The Truth of the Bible (Fiction)

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This is an excerpt from my book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey. A bit of background: Jim is a 50-something, wealthy, housebound, and somewhat obnoxious atheist, and Paul is the young acolyte of a famous pastor, doing his best to evangelize. It’s 1906 in Los Angeles, and they’re in Jim’s study.

♠  ♠  ♠

Christian apologetics book“Let’s discuss the accuracy of the Bible.” Paul looked for approval from Jim, saw nothing, and continued. “Many say that the Bible contains the world’s greatest literature. It’s certainly the world’s most influential book—a book that has inspired mankind for thousands of years.”

“I won’t disagree.” Jim picked up what looked like a clumsily wrapped cigar laying on the sofa and put the soggy end in his mouth. It left a small dark stain on the seat cushion.

Paul wanted to continue but was distracted as the end of the thing bobbed up and down under Jim’s shaggy mustache while he chewed, making gentle crunching sounds. “Is that a cigar?” Paul asked finally.

“Cinnamomum zeylanicum—cinnamon bark,” Jim said, his words garbled as he spoke while holding the cinnamon stick with his lips. “It promotes sweating.”

Paul had never considered sweating worth promoting. He tried to ignore the noise, deliberately looking down at his note card to avoid the distraction. “So what I’m saying is that the Bible is very accurate. Researchers have found thousands of copies, enough to convince them that errors introduced from copy to copy have been insignificant. And old, too—less than 400 years after the New Testament originals.* In other words, today’s English translations started with a copy that differed minimally from the original text. Aside from the different language, we read almost the same words as were originally written two to three thousand years ago.”

Jim shook his head. “That’s a foolish argument.”

Paul’s jaw went slack.

“I can say the same of Homer’s Iliad,” Jim said. “It’s quite long and very old—older than much of the Old Testament. We have many old copies of the Iliad, and today’s version may also be a decent copy of the original. Using your logic, must we conclude that the Iliad is correct? Must we say that Achilles really was invulnerable, that Cassandra really could see the future, that Ajax really was trained by a centaur?”

“But that’s not a good comparison,” Paul said. “No one believes the Iliad. Biblical fact is quite different from Greek mythology.”

“Don’t change the subject. You introduced the question of the accuracy of manuscript copies. Does your logic help us judge the accuracy of ancient books or not?”

“I don’t think the Bible and the Iliad can be compared is all.”

Jim sighed. “To your point, no one believes the Iliad now, but they once did. Achilles, Hector, Helen, Aphrodite, the Trojan War—the Iliad tells much of the history of the Greeks just like the Bible is a history of the Jews. And, of course, many of the places and people in the Iliad actually existed. Archeologists have found Troy, for example.”

Jim held up a hand as Paul opened his mouth to speak. “Of course I see the difference. While the Iliad and the Bible were the histories of their people, only the Bible is believed today. Here’s my point. Let’s assume that the Bible and the Iliad are both faithful copies. That doesn’t make them true.”

Paul said, “It’s not just the Bible—other sources confirm Bible stories. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, for example, writes about Jesus.” He glanced at a note card in his hand. “Also, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and other writers from that time.”

Jim jerked a hand as if dismissing a gnat, and his face showed an exasperated disgust. “I’ve read these sources, and they strengthen your case not a bit. They basically say, ‘There are people who follow a man named Jesus’ or ‘Jesus is said to have performed miracles.’ I already agree with that! I’d be interested if an eyewitness from the Jerusalem Times newspaper wrote a report the day after a miraculous event, but that didn’t happen. You’re left with four—not thousands, but four—written accounts that summarize the Jesus story after it had been passed around orally for decades, and they’re not even completely independent accounts. I need a lot more evidence than that.”

Paul thought for an instant how satisfying it would be to take their argument to the street, even though it would be an unfair fight. He rubbed his right fist against his left palm and strained the muscles of his upper body to drain away some rage. In five seconds he might remind this atheist of his manners. But he had to take the high ground and he pushed on, using a response that Samuel had given him. “Why do you need more evidence? You never saw George Washington, but you accept the historical account of his life. The Bible has the historical account of Jesus’s life—why not accept that?”

Again Jim shook his head. “We have articles from newspapers of Washington’s time published within days of events, and there are hundreds of accounts by people who met him. We even have Washington’s own journals and letters. By contrast, Jesus left no personal writings, we have just a few Gospels as sources of his life story, and those are accounts of unknown authorship handed down orally for decades before finally being written. They were even written from the perspective of a foreign culture—Jesus and his disciples would have spoken Aramaic, and the New Testament was written completely in Greek.”

“You’re overstating the problem. If you don’t like Washington, take Caesar Augustus—you accept the story of Caesar’s life even though he’s from the time period of Jesus.”

“How can you make this argument? Are you stupid?” Jim leapt to his feet. “The biographies of historical figures like Washington and Caesar make no supernatural claims!”

Paul opened his mouth to protest but retreated as Jim waved his arms as he stalked back and forth in front of the sofa like some hysterical prosecuting attorney.

“They were great men, but they were just men. Suppose you read that Washington was impervious to British bullets during the Revolutionary War or Caesar was born of a virgin—these claims were actually made, by the way. You would immediately dismiss them. Or what about Mormonism: Joseph Smith invented it just fifty miles from my hometown of Syracuse, shortly before I was born. We have far more information about the early days of his religion—letters, diaries, and even newspaper accounts, all in modern English—and yet I presume you dismiss Smith as a crackpot or a charlatan. In the case of Jesus, the most extravagant supernatural claims are made—why not dismiss those stories as well? The Bible has tales you wouldn’t believe if you read them in today’s newspaper, and yet you see them as truthful ancient journalism.”

Paul struggled to keep his hand steady as he glanced at his note card. He had no response but was not about to admit it. He decided to try a new line of attack and took a deep breath. “Okay, answer this one. The Bible has stories of fulfilled prophecy. Early books documented the prophecy, and later books record that prophecy coming true. There are hundreds about Jesus’s life alone. For example, the book of Isaiah details facts about the Messiah’s life, and then the New Testament records the fulfillment of that prophecy.”

“Show me.”

“Okay, let’s look at Isaiah 53.”

Jim walked to his bookshelf and pulled off a large leather-bound Bible.

Paul turned to his own copy. “Isaiah says, ‘He is despised and rejected of men’—Jesus should have been the king, but He was rejected by his own people. ‘He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth’—He could have proven that He was God with a word, but He chose to keep silent. ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities’—this describes the beatings He endured before crucifixion. ‘With His stripes we are healed’ and ‘He bore the sin of many’—Jesus was whipped and took the burden of our sins when He died. All this was written hundreds of years before the crucifixion.”

“Unconvincing,” Jim said. “‘He is despised’ doesn’t sound like the charismatic rabbi who preached to thousands of attentive listeners and had a triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And I notice that you’ve ignored the part of this chapter that was inconvenient to your hypothesis: in the same chapter, God says, ‘Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.’ Jesus is counted as merely one of the great ones and must share with them? That’s quite an insult to the son of God. And who are these equals? Most important, note that there’s no mention of the resurrection here. How can this be a Jesus crucifixion story without the punch line? This chapter is actually a very poor description of the crucifixion because the ‘he’ in this chapter is not Jesus but Israel.”

“But the Gospels themselves refer back to this chapter as prophecy of Jesus.”

“I don’t give a damn—this chapter isn’t about Jesus.”

Paul felt blindsided, as if he were lying on the ground, wondering where the haymaker came from. Samuel hadn’t told him about this rebuttal. Paul said, “Well, what about Psalm 22? It describes the crucifixion experience and has Jesus’s last words, exactly. It even describes the guards casting lots for his clothes. And this was written centuries before Jesus’s day.”

“Come now, think about it! The writers of the Gospels were literate, and they would have read all of the Law—what we call the Old Testament. They could have sifted through it to find plausible prophecies before they wrote the Gospels. Don’t you see? It’s as if they looked at the answers before taking a test.”

Paul leaned forward. “You’re saying that they cheated? That they deliberately invented the Gospel stories to fit the prophecy?”

“Think of the incredible boldness of the Bible’s claims,” Jim said, “that Jesus was a supernatural being sent by an omnipotent and omnipresent God who created the universe. That’s about as unbelievable a story as you can imagine. Deliberate cheating to invent this story—that is, a natural explanation of the Gospels—is much more plausible than that the story is literally true—which is a supernatural explanation. But here’s an explanation that’s more plausible still: suppose Jesus was nothing more than a charismatic rabbi. The original facts of Jesus’s life were then told and retold as they went from person to person, each time getting a little more fantastic. Details might have been gradually changed until they matched a particular prophecy. If people assumed that Jesus was the Messiah, he had to fulfill the prophecies, right? The Gospels were passed along orally for decades after Jesus’s death before they were written down, gradually translated into the Greek culture on the way. No need to imagine the deliberate invention of a false story.”

“But there was no oral tradition. The Gospels were written by eyewitnesses.”

“Prove it.”

“Ask any minister!” Paul said with a chuckle that probably betrayed his unease. “It’s common knowledge. Matthew was an apostle, he was an eyewitness, and he wrote the book of Matthew. And so on for the other Gospel authors—all apostles or companions of apostles.”

“The names of the Gospel books were assigned long after they were written. No one knows who wrote them—each Gospel is anonymous, and the names are simply tradition. No Gospel begins, ‘This is an account of events that I witnessed myself.’ Even if they did, should that convince me? You take any fanciful account, put ‘I saw this myself’ at the beginning, and it becomes true? A natural explanation—that the Jesus story is just a legend—is far, far likelier than the supernatural explanation.”

Jim had been noisily worrying his cinnamon stick but now set it back on the sofa. “Besides, we have lots of examples of similar things in other religions—holy books that are really just myth. For example, we can probably agree that the Koran, Islam’s holy book, is mythology. Muhammad wasn’t really visited by the angel Gabriel and given wisdom from God. Did Muhammad invent it? Did a desire for power push him to create a new religion, with him as its leader? Through extreme fasting, did he have delusions that he interpreted as revelations from God? Any of these natural explanations and many more are much more likely than the Koran being literally true. Or Gilgamesh or Beowulf or the Hindu Vedas or the Book of Mormon. They all have supernatural elements and they are all mythology. How can you and I agree that these are mythology and that mankind throughout history has invented religion and myth, but you say that the Bible is the single exception? When you cast a net that brings up Christianity, it brings up a lot of other religions as well.”

“You can’t lump the Bible in with those books. It’s in a completely different category.”

“Prove it,” Jim repeated, and he slammed his Bible onto the table.

“Why should I have to prove it?”

“Because you’re the one making the remarkable claims.”

“Remarkable?” Paul paused, his mouth open, as he collected his thoughts. “How can you say that? You’re in the minority and you reject the majority view. Christianity is the most widespread religion the world has ever seen. Almost everyone in this country is thoroughly familiar with Christianity. They wouldn’t think the claims are remarkable.”

Jim smiled. “I wouldn’t make that majority claim too loudly. Within your own religious community, your views are in the majority, but your flavor of Christianity isn’t even in the majority right here in Los Angeles. Even when you lump together all the denominations of Christianity worldwide, the majority of people on the Earth still think you’re wrong.

“It’s true that the tenets of Christianity are widely familiar, but that doesn’t make them any less remarkable. A God who can do anything, who has been around forever, and who created the universe? Take a step back and see this as an outsider might. You’ve made perhaps the boldest claim imaginable. No one should be asked to believe it without evidence, and very strong evidence at that.”

Jim picked up his cinnamon stick and waved it as he spoke. “Suppose someone claims to have seen a leprechaun or a dragon or a unicorn. Next, this person says that, because no one can prove him wrong, his beliefs are therefore correct. And since they’re correct, everyone should adopt them. This is nonsense of course. He is making the bold claim, so he must provide the evidence. In other words, we are justified—no, we are obliged—to reject extraordinary claims until the extraordinary evidence has been provided.”

“I have provided evidence!” Paul said.

Jim leaned back on the sofa and looked at Paul, for the first time at a loss for a quick retort. “Son, this is what I expected from you,” he said quietly, almost gently. “But this evidence barely merits the name. What you’ve provided is a flimsy argument that might satisfy someone who wants to support beliefs that he’s already decided are correct. But don’t expect this to convince anyone else.”

Paul sat back in his chair as if hit in the stomach. He had been preparing for a debate like this with increasing intensity for two years, and he thought that he deserved more. He didn’t expect accolades for his cleverness . . . but something? He tried to salvage the discussion and glanced at his note card, almost used up. His voice felt shrill and unreliable as he began. “But you must adjust your demands given how long ago this was. You can’t ask for photographs and diaries when the events happened close to two thousand years ago. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair? Suppose you come to me and ask to buy my house. I say that it’s worth three thousand dollars. You say, ‘I’ll give you five dollars for it.’ I say, ‘No—that’s ridiculous. I must reject your offer.’ And then you say, ‘But that’s not fair—five dollars is all I have.’”

Jim leaned forward, staring at Paul and with his arms outstretched. “That would be absurd. But it’s equivalent to the argument ‘since proving the fantastic claims of the New Testament is quite hard, you’ll have to accept whatever evidence we have.’ No, I don’t! I won’t accept five dollars for my house, I won’t accept pathetic evidence for leprechauns, and I won’t accept it for God.”

Jim paused and then said, “And while we’re at it, neither should you.”

I am the punishment of God….
If you had not committed great sins, 
God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
— Genghis Khan

*Older copies have been found since 1906.

Photo credit: John

God Belief as a Logic Puzzle

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apologeticsWhen I was a kid, I liked to read puzzle books and try to figure out the answers without looking in the back. I do remember one puzzle, though, that I couldn’t understand even after I read the answer.

Here’s a variant of that puzzle. See if you do any better.

The puzzle of the hidden dots

The abbot at the Logical Monastery was retiring. He had submitted logical tests and puzzles to the monks to find the most worthy successor. With three candidates remaining, he presented his final problem.

He arranged them in a circle facing each other. “Close your eyes,” the abbot said. “I will put on your forehead a dot of paint, either red or blue.”

The abbot put a red dot on each monk’s forehead. “Now open your eyes, and raise your hand if you see at least one red dot.”

Each monk raised his hand.

“The first one to identify the color of his dot, with the correct reasoning, will take my place as head of this monastery.”

Finally, one monk said, “My dot is red, and I know why.”

What was his reasoning?

If this puzzle is new to you, you may want to work on it before reading the answer below.

God belief as a logic puzzle

Some Christians have little use for evidence and arguments and are content to accept a remarkable claim from an authority such as a parent or a priest. But for those who need reasons to support their beliefs, however, this logic puzzle is analogous to what some apologists say God has set before us. You must read books. You must study philosophy. You must listen to lectures and watch debates. You must wrestle with and overcome your doubts. You must learn obtuse arguments like the Transcendental Argument or the Ontological Argument, and you must defeat challenges like the Problem of Evil or the Problem of Divine Hiddenness.

Apologists imagine God belief as this kind of obtuse puzzle, not because the evidence points that way but because they’re forced to. They have no choice, since the simpler and more desirable option—that God’s existence is as obvious as the existence of the next person you walk past in the street—is clearly not available to them. Unwilling to give up their beliefs or to admit that they’ve been wrong, they assume God, double down on faith, and invent these bizarre rationalizations.

Find the simpler explanation. A loving creator god who desired a relationship with his creation would just make himself known. We have insufficient evidence to overcome the default hypothesis, that God is yet another made-up supernatural being.

If you’re just going to go with “well, his ideas lived on,”
I’ll put Jesus behind Archimedes, Socrates, Euclid, Galileo, Newton,
Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein, Fleming, and Bohr in that regard.
All of their ideas are current today and of great value in modern society,
whereas Jesus espoused monarchy, slavery, and 2nd-class status for women.
— commenter Richard S. Russell

Photo credit: David Singleton

Appendix: The reasoning of the logical monk

I suppose the test should be equally hard for each participant. I see two red dots, and for us to have the same puzzle, symmetry would demand that we all see two red dots. But I can’t be sure that we were each given the same puzzle, so that assumption may be a trap.

Let me start with the facts: I see two red dots, and the options are (1) I have a blue dot and (2) I have a red dot.

Consider option 1 first. How would the other monks reason if I had blue? Since they each have red, they would see Red Guy and Blue Guy. They would think, “Suppose I had blue. Red Guy would see two blues—me and Blue Guy. He wouldn’t have raised his hand to say that he saw at least one red. But he did! So therefore the hypothesis ‘I have blue’ is false. So therefore I must have red!”

This is simple reasoning, and they would have given the answer within seconds. But that didn’t happen. Therefore option 1—that I have a blue dot—must be false.

Therefore, option 2 is true, and I have a red dot.