In a recent post, I called Christianity “The Ultimate Unfalsifiable Hypothesis.” I am bothered by the worldview held by many Christians in which good things are evidence that God exists, and bad things are also evidence that God exists. This impervious-to-reality God belief can’t lose, but it isn’t realistic. It’s merely insulation from reality.

Christians who want to willfully reject evidence can certainly do so, but they have no grounds to pretend to be following the evidence where it leads. Let’s consider some examples.

Evidence Against Prayer

Imagine a prayer experiment that showed no effectiveness. But we needn’t imagine this; such a test has been conducted. The 2006 STEP experiment, often known as the Templeton Study because of the foundation that funded it, was “by far the most comprehensive and rigorous investigation of third-party prayer to date” (source). It found no value to prayer.

Have any Christians turned away from faith because of this study? I doubt it. They’ll say that you can’t test God or that God isn’t like a genie who answers to your command. They’ll say that using science to study religion is like using a hammer to carve a turkey—it’s simply not the right tool.

But if a prayer study had shown a benefit, you can be sure that Christians would be all over that, citing it as important evidence that everyone must consider.

Mother Teresa’s story is an excellent personal example of the results of prayer. As a young woman, she had an ecstatic vision of Jesus charging her to care for the poor. Surely she would’ve said that this was evidence for the existence of God and Jesus. But then mustn’t we also take seriously the absence of evidence and consider what that means? Her life was colored far more by the agony of ignored prayers than the ecstasy of visions. Late in life she wrote, “the silence and the emptiness is so great” and “I have no Faith … [the thoughts in my heart] make me suffer untold agony.”

Accepting positive evidence for prayer and ignoring any negative evidence is no honest search for the truth.

Pat Robertson publicly prayed that the 2003 hurricane Isabel wouldn’t hit the Virginia Beach area where his Christian Broadcasting Network is based. He demanded:

In the name of Jesus, we reach out our hand in faith and we command that storm to cease its forward motion to the north and to turn and to go out into the sea.

Here’s a photo of Isabel making landfall just south of Robertson’s 700 Club headquarters. It was that season’s costliest and deadliest. Oops.

How did Robertson explain the failure to the faithful? My guess is that it wasn’t too hard to dismiss unwelcome evidence to a flock that doesn’t care much about evidence. Where else can you fail this badly and come out looking good?

Evidence Against Divine Inspiration

A Mormon example of selective consideration of evidence is Joseph Smith’s translation of an Egyptian papyrus he called the “Book of Abraham,” which has become part of Mormon canon. Modern evaluation has shown Smith’s “translation” to be nonsense, but did that sink Mormonism? Of course not—it’s not based on evidence!

When presented with plausible natural explanations for sensations of God’s presence, some people prefer to cling to the imaginary. One epileptic patient wouldn’t take meds because it would destroy her link to God. She said, “If God chooses to speak through a disease to me, that’s fine.”

Evidence Against Prediction

A religious leader’s specific prediction is a great way to put religion into the domain of science. You’d think that if the prediction doesn’t come to pass, the followers would realize that the entire thing was a sham.

But no—when the prediction doesn’t happen, a little song and dance can restore the leader’s credibility with at least some of his followers. The Millerites’ Great Disappointment of 1844 is an example. Determined post-Disappointment believers morphed into several groups, including one that became the Seventh Day Adventist church (which itself has made a number of failed end-of-the-world predictions).

More recent participants in the Guess the End of the World contest, which has been ongoing for 2000 years, include Hal Lindsey, who predicted the end in 1988. More recently, Harold Camping was wrong about his highly publicized prediction of the Rapture on May 21, 2011 and the end of the world five months later.

Even after the complete failure of his “prediction,” he rationalized that it was all God’s will, but what about his followers? How many concluded that Camping was totally wrong, that they were fools for being duped, and that they should’ve seen through his charade from the beginning?

The biggest failed prediction is the one that the end of the world was at hand that’s been in the gospel accounts all the time:

This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened (Matthew 24:34).

I’ve already deflated three of the most popular predictions (the virgin birth, Isaiah 53, and Psalm 22).

The Ultimate Falsifying Evidence?

Imagine that historians discovered an ossuary (bone box) from roughly 30 CE that said, “Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, born in Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem” and, after much study and debate, the relevant scholars reached a consensus that it was as convincing as any Jesus evidence. Given this compelling evidence of an un-risen Jesus, would all Christians discard their belief? William Lane Craig has made clear that he would not, and I’m sure that many or most would side with him. Rationalizations abound, such as the Justin Martyr gambit: argue that the devil planted false evidence to deceive us.

Remember Poe’s Law: without some obvious wink that you’re joking, you can’t create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing. A Christianity where Jesus actually died? Not a problem!

Christianity has weathered Galileo, evolution, and the 14-billion-year-old universe. It shrugs off the Problem of Evil and the Bible’s sanction of slavery and genocide. What negative evidence could sink Christianity? Probably not even clear evidence that Jesus was just a myth. A religion operating on faith after the generation of the founders is like an arch that stays up after the scaffolding is removed.

Christianity is the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail who said, after Arthur chopped his arm off, “ ’Tis but a scratch.” It’s the Teflon religion.

Before you say something is out of this world,
make sure it isn’t of this world.
— Michael Shermer

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/7/13.)

Image credit: Joe Loong, flickr, CC

The meaning in life is a popular topic among many Christian apologists. They’re eager to push it because they think their product has a competitive benefit: they offer ultimate meaning. It’s not that ordinary meaning isn’t as nice as their deluxe version, it’s that they’ve made ordinary meaning obsolete. With Christianity, they don’t just have the superior product; they have the only product.

I recently heard world-famous apologist William Lane Craig clucking worriedly about fellow Patheos blogger Ryan Bell’s recent departure from Christianity. WLC said:

No one can actually live happily and consistently with the view that life is objectively meaningless, valueless, and purposeless. … So when [Ryan Bell] says that he has found that now, as an atheist, life is more meaningful to him and more precious and so forth, this only shows that he hasn’t understood that the claim is about objective meaning, value, and purpose.

No one can live without objective meaning? Reading Bell’s comments about his new post-Christian life, it sounds like he’s doing just fine.

I want to experience as much happiness and pleasure as I can while helping others to attain their happiness. I construct meaning in my life from many sources, including love, family, friendships, service, learning and so on. Popular Christian theology, on the other hand, renders this life less meaningful by anchoring all notions of value and purpose to a paradise somewhere in the future, in a place other than where we are right now. Ironically, my Christian upbringing taught me that ultimately this life doesn’t matter, which tends to make believers apathetic about suffering and think that things will only get worse before God suddenly solves everything on the last day. …

Without dependency on a cosmic savior who is coming to rescue us, we are free to recognize that we are the ones we’re waiting for. If we don’t make the world a fair and habitable place, no one else is going to do it for us. Our lives matter because our choices affect others and our children’s future.

That’s a tough act to follow. Anyone could be proud to live a life with that as its polestar. By contrast, WLC is stuck with the purpose for life given by the Westminster Confession: the chief end of man is “to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever,” and WLC is eager to be just one more sycophant for God.

Here’s a similar take from Aaron Brake at the Please Convince Me blog:

There is no difference between living the life of a saint or a sociopath, no difference between a Mother Theresa and an Adolf Hitler. Mention of morality is simply incoherent babbling….

If atheism is true, and if atheists honestly reflect on their own eventual non-existence as well as the fact that their actions in this life have no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose, it seems hard to avoid the overwhelming feelings of depression, despair, and dejection.

This is self-debasing crap. You can’t figure out a meaning for your life, so you must have it assigned to you? It’s ultimate meaning or nothing?

He quotes WLC:

If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life … the end of everything is death… In short, life is utterly without reason… Unfortunately, most people don’t realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing has changed.

What’s hard to realize? You’re right, I don’t have ultimate meaning in my life. That’s a “problem” like not being as strong as Superman is a problem—it might be nice if that were true, but it ain’t gonna happen. Adults squarely face the difficult reality that we’re not Superman and soldier on with life.

I thought to write this post after realizing that one of my favorite Christmas movies shows the emptiness of these apologists’ bluster. In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey sacrifices for others. Everyone else seems to have left town to achieve their dreams and get rich or famous, but he must stay in Bedford Falls to mind the bank, the town’s only alternative to the greedy Mr. Potter. Finally, a loss of money becomes one crisis too many. George is about to commit suicide so that his life insurance will resolve the problem but is stopped by Clarence, his guardian angel. Clarence shows him how the town would be like if he’d never been born. His bank failed, and the town is now Pottersville, full of sleazy bars. George sees all the important people in his life, all worse off for his not being there. Finally, he finds his wife, a lonely spinster.

His prayer to be returned to his life is granted. He returns home and finds that everyone has pitched in to solve the problem. After a lifetime of putting his own dreams last, he realizes that he’s become the richest man in town.

The movie topped the American Film Institute’s list of most inspirational movies, and I’ll admit that I always get choked up at the end.

Yes, Christianity is alluded to in the movie, but ultimate meaning isn’t the point. George Bailey realized the rich, full life he had made for himself. He didn’t need ultimate meaning; the ordinary kind as defined in the dictionary worked just fine. He had striven for the same goal as Ryan Bell outlined above, and his was indeed a wonderful life.

Think back on our apologists’ complaints about a life without ultimate meaning. A purposeless life? Life without reason? Depression, despair, and dejection? Not only can life be full, satisfying, and complete with ordinary meaning, these apologists’ “ultimate” meaning isn’t the brilliant jewel that they imagine. They’re just selling elbow deodorant, and they haven’t shown me that I need any.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread
winding its way through our political and cultural life,
nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that
“my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
— Isaac Asimov

Image credit: Wikimedia

Charlie Brown keeps trusting in Lucy, and she keeps pulling away the football at the last minute. And still Charlie Brown comes back for more. Doesn’t he ever learn? What would it take for him to see that his trust is misplaced?

This is how God belief works. Christians tell themselves that God exists, and maybe they have a special experience or feeling that reassures them that they’ve backed the right horse. But then there’s that tempting call to connect with the external world and provide evidence that the belief is firmly grounded. Like Lucy with the football, they’re often disappointed when the evidence doesn’t stand up.

A popular example of Christian “evidence” is that when you pray and get what you wanted, then God did it. When you don’t get what you wanted, God did that too.

If I point to puppies, sunsets, and other good things in life, the Christian might say it’s because God is a perfect designer. If I point to cancer, tsunamis, and other bad things, that’s because of the Fall. God can’t lose.

When something good happens, that’s God’s gentle and loving hand taking care of his special people. But when something bad happens, that’s God testing us or improving us.

If someone is good, then that’s due to nudging from the Holy Spirit. If they’re bad, that’s their fault.

There’s a snappy answer or rationalization for every situation. If God’s existence is always a given, then we’re going to bend the reality to fit that assumption. But no one approaches truth that way in any other sector of life. We don’t start with an assumption and then try to twist the facts to support it. It’s the other way around: we start with the facts and ask what the most reasonable explanation is.

To any Christian reading this, what would it take for you to see Christianity as false? What would it take for you to see that God doesn’t exist?

I’ve talked to lots of Christians who say that they do demand evidence, and that they would go where the evidence points. I have my doubts—I think that for many of them belief comes first and evidence is marshaled after the fact to support this presupposition— but let’s leave that for now.

I’ve also talked to Christians who admit that nothing would change their minds. That is, they can’t (or refuse to) imagine anything that could remove faith from their lives. Christianity is then the ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis—“ultimate” because God is the most fantastic thing imaginable and “unfalsifiable” because for many believers, nothing will change their minds.

World famous apologist William Lane Craig uses rational arguments and points to science to support them. You’d think that he above all other apologists would put evidence ahead of agenda.

Not so:

It is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role. (Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, p. 47)

(I’ve explored Craig’s unhealthy relationship with evidence more here.)

Some people are beyond evidence. Christianity for them is like the T-1000 in the film Terminator 2, the liquid metal robot that takes a beating and then reshapes itself after an injury to continue its rampage.

Consider a much more wholesome attitude toward evidence. Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky said, “As scientists, we like to make our theories as delicate and fragile as possible. We like to arrange things so that if the slightest thing goes wrong, everything will collapse at once!”

Scientists want their theories to collapse if they’re wrong. If they’re wrong, they want to know it, since their goal is the truth, not to support a Bronze Age presupposition. Imagine a world where all Christians were this eager to understand reality, where they followed the evidence where it led rather than making their worldview unfalsifiable.

You can’t rationally argue out 
what wasn’t rationally argued in.
— credited to George Bernard Shaw

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/5/13.)

Image credit: Nic Fonseca, flickr, CC

We’re told that God is all powerful, and stories of other deities are false. Though this is the Christian interpretation today, that wasn’t the case in the early days of the Old Testament, and the Bible itself makes that clear. Let’s look at two examples where God was not all powerful.

Story 1: Cage match of the gods

In the tale of yet another Old Testament battle, Israel, Judah, and Edom are allied against Moab. The year is around 846 BCE. Trekking through the desert, the allied army runs out of water, but the prophet Elisha promises both water and total victory over Moab. The next morning, pools of water cover the ground, plenty for both men and animals.

The Moabite soldiers massed on their border see the unexpected water, but it looks red because of the morning sun. Thinking that this is the bloody aftermath of infighting within the alliance, the Moabites advance to plunder the camp. Hidden Israelites rise up and turn them back, and then they advance into Moab and destroy all the cities and towns except one stronghold.

The king of Moab has one final ploy. He takes his son, the future king, and sacrifices him on the city wall to the Moabite god Chemosh. The result:

There was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland (2 Kings 3:27, NET).

Wait a minute—I thought that just a few verses earlier, Elisha promised that “[Jehovah will] hand Moab over to you. You will defeat every fortified city and every important city” (2 Kings 3:18–19). That’s an odd way of saying, “You will get your butt kicked.”

But more important, in a mano-a-mano between Jehovah and Chemosh, Chemosh wins? Could Jehovah have won but he didn’t get that extra energy boost that Chemosh got with his sacrifice, so Jehovah couldn’t give a hundred percent?

Ever resourceful, apologists have various rationalizations. One is that the Moabites were energized by the public sacrifice and fought with renewed vigor, and another is that Israel’s allies were fed up with the campaign and attacked Israel. Or, perhaps “his son” means the King of Edom’s son, and the Edomites become furious with Israel.

Though what defeated Israel is variously translated as “fury,” “great anger,” “great wrath,” or “great indignation,” the NET Bible says that the Hebrew word in question is almost exclusively used to mean “an outburst of divine anger.”

Letting the Bible speak for itself, the king of Moab sacrificed his son to Chemosh and then, as a consequence, there was divine anger against Israel. The only two divinities in play here are Jehovah and Chemosh, and though Jehovah is sometimes capricious, it’s hard to imagine why he would defeat Israel when he had just promised to give them victory.

In this cage match, Jehovah lost.

Story 2: Tent pegs can be fatal

In one of the more oddly savage passages in the Bible, Israel defeats an army led by Sisera, leaving Sisera as the sole survivor. He finds refuge in the tent of Jael, a non-Israelite woman, and he falls into an exhausted sleep. But she’s not the ally that he imagines, and she uses a hammer to drive a tent peg through his head into the ground (Judges 4:17–22).

Sisera had harassed Israel for twenty years with 900 chariots “fitted with iron” (Judges 4:3). But as powerful as this chariot force was, Israel (and God) were able to defeat it.

Earlier in Judges, another conflict ends very differently. The book begins with the tribes of Judah and Simeon joining forces to mop up remaining Canaanite strongholds including Jerusalem, Hebron, and others.

One interesting city was Debir, which sounds like the Alexandria of Canaan. Also called Kiriath Sepher (City of Scribes), it was inhabited by giant Anakites, descendants of the Nephilim, to whom ordinary men were as grasshoppers (see Numbers 13:31–33). The defeat of this city is given no comment except that the Judean leader gave his daughter to the commander who captured the city.

But the campaign wasn’t universally successful.

[Jehovah] was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron (Judges 1:19).

Was Jehovah not supporting them? The verse makes clear that he was. And if he was there, what’s the problem with the iron chariots?

(If God was confounded by them, he’d cry like a little girl if confronted with a battalion of the bad boys in the photo above.)

If you want support from the toughest god, maybe Chemosh is your guy. He certainly convinced the Moabites. Or, if Chemosh is just fiction, perhaps Jehovah is the same.

God gives every indication of being simply a literary character who has evolved over time. Of course he has setbacks—it wasn’t like he was all-powerful (at least, not at this point in the story).

We know that reason is the Devil’s harlot, 
and can do nothing but slander and harm all that God says and does…
Therefore keep to revelation and do not try to understand.
— Martin Luther

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/26/13.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

If Christianity is the correct moral and spiritual path, why doesn’t it look like it?

Some Christians are good and some not so much, just like in any large population, but if morality is a central part of religion and Christianity is the one true religion, shouldn’t this be obvious somehow? Why can you not tell a person following the truth path from one following a false religion by their actions? Why are prisons full of Christians?

Christians have a response. When you look in a church, you see that it’s full of sinners. Well, what did you expect? Christianity says that we’re all fallen people. Jesus said, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” The church is a hospital, with the sinners as the patients.

Let’s take this metaphor for a drive and see the many ways it fails.

1. A hospital stay is temporary. When you’re sick, you go to the hospital if you must, but your stay should be as brief as possible. The hospital is the option of last recourse. Financial pressure encourages the patient to leave quickly.

By contrast, church isn’t to be avoided, it’s celebrated. It’s a lifestyle and a worldview. Once you’re in, there are often penalties for leaving such as loss of friendships and even family. Church isn’t free, and you are encouraged to contribute as much as possible.

2. Hospitals improve society. If we can expand the metaphor to include modern medicine and health-focused social policy, this expansive view of “hospitals” has found many ways to keep you out of a hospital bed: a healthy lifestyle with proper diet and exercise, vaccines, improved environmental conditions, laws to safeguard working conditions and food, and preventative medicine like periodic checkups.

By contrast, churches have no interest in seeing you leave. They sometimes encourage their members to fiddle with social policy, standing in the way of same-sex marriage and abortion, for example. Church leadership often dabbles in politics. Christians can push for Creationism to be taught in schools. Evidence drives medicine, but dogma drives religious meddling.

3. A hospital can cure you. Modern medicine isn’t perfect, but it often cures an illness. While medical treatment and research is expensive, we have a lot to show for it.

By contrast, churches have no concept of a cure for a spiritual ailment. To follow the metaphor, churches provide palliative care only. Christianity says that we’re born spiritually sick, there is no cure in this lifetime, and God himself made us so. As Christopher Hitchens noted, “We are created sick and commanded to be well.”

Religion takes in over $100 billion in the U.S. every year. Tell me that church is a country club and I’ll buy it, not so much that it’s a hospital.

4. Hospitals treat actual illness. Hospitals treat illnesses like pneumonia, hepatitis, and AIDS.

By contrast, churches invent a new problem of sin plus a god to get offended by it, as if there weren’t enough real problems in the world. This is theology, not science.

Here’s an idea: if God is offended by sin, let’s assume that he’s a big boy and can take care of it. He can tell us himself how we should conduct our lives, not through a religion that looks no different from all the other manmade religions. That God needs human agents here on earth and never speaks for himself is more evidence.

5. Hospitals follow science. Hospitals use medicine, and medicine follows evidence.

Churches use dogma and faith, not evidence.

6. Hospitals work. Antibiotics and other medicine as well as other treatments work. Some are 100% reliable, while others are less so, and doctors can reliably predict how a course of treatment will go.

Churches use prayer whose only effectiveness is as a placebo. Christians often say that prayer works, but it certainly doesn’t in the sense that medicine, electricity, or cars work. Prayer may reliably work only in that it provides meditative benefits, but that is certainly not the intention behind the claim “prayer works.”

They also claim that miracles happen. I issue a challenge to provide that evidence here.

7. Hospitals use professionals. Doctors and nurses are trained. Evidence is used to improve their training.

Jesus is the Great Physician (as in a spiritual healer) in name only. He never shows up. It’s said that he does his work by magic, but there’s no evidence of this. People marvel at his work, just like people marveled at the diaphanous fabric made by the tailors weaving the Emperor’s new clothes. Any example of an actual healing through the church—someone who kicked an addiction or got out of homelessness or got control of their anger—has people behind it.

In this “hospital,” the patients treat each other. Some are lay members and some are clergy, but they’re all ordinary people, with the Big Man conspicuously absent.

The treatments (that is, the right path of spiritual living) are sometimes incompatible between Christian denominations. Extend that out to all religious people, and the incompatibilities underscore the partisan nature of religion’s answers (more here).

8. Bad things happen if you need to go to the hospital but don’t. Centuries ago, doctors might’ve caused more illness than they cured, but we’re long past that. Faith healing or wishful thinking are no help when there is a medical cure.

By contrast, people outside the church look about the same as those who are members. In fact, those who had been in but quit the church say they’re happier. (Of course, Christians will say that the opposite is also true—those who had been outside the church and are now inside are happier. There are plenty of miserable Christians, but let’s accept that point. That simply makes this a worldview issue. Atheism and Christianity are worldviews, and those in each one prefer it to the other. But is this the best that the One True Religion can claim? It’s just another worldview? Shouldn’t it be obviously better somehow?)

But there is one parallel that works. Hospital-acquired infections cause or contribute to 100,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Similarly, churches can give you new spiritual infections such as new biases or hatreds.

Acknowledgement: This post was inspired by an excellent commentary by Deacon Duncan at Alethian Worldview.

You say you’re supposed to be nice
to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists
and this, that, and the other thing.
Nonsense! I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.
— Pat Robertson

Image credit: Wikimedia

For being the founder of Christianity, Paul knew surprisingly little about Christ.

Paul is our first and, for that reason, potentially our most reliable source of information on the life of Jesus. Let’s sift Paul’s writings for information about Jesus. Using the gospels as a guide, we’ll find that Paul is a shallow source of information.

If we were to extract biographical information from the gospels, we’d have a long list—the story of Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water, raising Lazarus, the Prodigal Son story, curing blindness with spit, odd events like his cursing the fig tree, and so on. But what information about Jesus do we get from Paul?

Paul’s famous passage

We’ll start with the well-known passage from 1 Corinthians 15.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Cor. 15:3–8)

This tells us that

1. Jesus died “for our sins.”

2. Jesus was buried.

3. Jesus was resurrected from the dead three days later, in fulfillment of prophecy.

4. Jesus made many post-resurrection appearances.

Though 1 Corinthians was written perhaps twenty years after the death of Jesus, some scholars argue that this three-sentence passage was written with a different style and so is an early creed that preceded Paul’s writing, taking us back closer to the earliest disciples. But others use the same logic to argue the opposite conclusion, that it was a later insertion. (Our oldest copy of this passage comes from papyrus manuscript P46, written around 200. That’s close to two centuries where we can’t be sure what changes might’ve been made.)

Let’s first sift through Paul’s epistles for confirmation of these first claims.

1. Confirmed—Paul writes elsewhere that Jesus was a sacrifice (see Romans 3:25, 5:6–8, 8:3; 1 Cor. 5:7; and more). The passage above does not contain the word “Jesus,” but many other Pauline verses combine “Jesus” and “Christ.”

2. Confirmed: “We have been buried with [Jesus] through baptism into death” (Rom. 6:4).

3. Confirmed: many verses report that Jesus was raised from the dead (see 1 Cor. 15:20; Rom. 1:4, 4:24; 2 Cor. 4:14; and more). Note, however, that there is no confirmation of the three days or the scriptural prophecy.

4. Not confirmed: There is no confirmation of the post-resurrection appearances in Paul’s epistles.

The rest of Paul’s Jesus

Here are the additional biographical details we find in Paul’s letters.

5. He was a descendant of David: “his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David” (Rom. 1:3).

6. He had brothers: “Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (1 Cor. 9:5; also Gal. 1:19). (“Brothers of the Lord” can’t mean just spiritual brothers because Cephas [that is, Peter] is excluded, and he would obviously be a spiritual brother.)

7. He was poor: “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor” (2 Cor. 8:9).

8. He was meek and gentle: “the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:1).

9. He was selfless “do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others; [this attitude] was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:4–7).

10. He was crucified: “we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23; also 1 Cor. 2:2, Galatians 3:1, 2 Cor. 13:4, and more).

11. He was betrayed: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23; also 2 Timothy 2:8).

12. He asked that his followers eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him (1 Cor. 11:23–6). (However, the Vridar blog argues that this is an interpolation.)

13. He was a Jew: “God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. 4:4; also Gal. 3:16).

14. His mission was to both Jews (“Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God …,” Rom. 15:8) and Gentiles (“… and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy,” Rom. 15:9).

15. Jesus was killed by Jews: “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 2:14–15)

We could go further afield, into books that are almost universally rejected as authored by Paul. For example, 1 Tim. 6:13 places the trial of Jesus during the rule of Pontius Pilate, and Hebrews 5:5 gives an Adoptionist view of Jesus (that is, Jesus was a man adopted by God).

But if we stick to just the reliably Pauline works, assume the authenticity of 1 Cor. 15, and ignore that our copies are far removed from the originals and therefore suspect, here is the Gospel of Paul:

Jesus died for our sins by crucifixion, was buried, and was then raised from the dead three days later, according to prophecy. He was seen by many after the resurrection. He was a Jew, had brothers, and was a descendant of David. He was poor, meek, gentle, and selfless, and his mission was to both Jew and Gentile. He was betrayed, he defined a bread and wine ritual for his followers, and the Jews killed him.

The End.

What’s missing?

The Gospel of Paul is one brief paragraph. It arguably has the most important element—death as a sacrifice for our sins and resurrection—but very little else.

No parables of the sheep and the goats, or the prodigal son, or the rich man and Lazarus, or the lost sheep, or the good Samaritan. In fact, no Jesus as teacher at all.

No driving out evil spirits, or healing the invalid at Bethesda, or cleansing the lepers, or raising Lazarus, or other healing miracles. As far as Paul tells us, Jesus performed no miracles at all.

No virgin birth, no Sermon on the Mount, no feeding the 5000, no public ministry, no women followers, no John the Baptist, no cleansing the temple, no final words, no Trinity, no hell, no Judas as betrayer (he mentions “the twelve”), and no Great Commission. Paul doesn’t even place Jesus within history—there’s nothing to connect Jesus with historical figures like Caesar Augustus, King Herod, or Pontius Pilate.

Perhaps everyone to whom Paul wrote his letters knew all this already? Okay, but presumably they already knew about the crucifixion, and Paul mentions that 13 times. And the resurrection, which Paul mentions 14 times.

Christians may say that Paul knew the biographical details of Jesus but simply didn’t have occasion to write of them, but this route must not be taken lightly. When the issue of the dating of New Testament books comes up, those Christians will want to take the opposite approach. The lack of certain historical events in the gospels or Acts (death of Paul, destruction of the Temple) must mean that the author didn’t know of them. As a result, they’ll say, we must date these books before those historical events.

So which is it—does a notable omission mean that the author didn’t know that fact or simply didn’t bother relating it?

Paul indirectly admits that he knew of no Jesus miracles:

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor. 1:22–3)

Why “a stumbling block”? Jesus did lots of miraculous “signs”—why didn’t Paul convince the Jews with these? Paul apparently didn’t know any. The Jesus of Paul is not the miracle worker that we see in the Jesus of the gospels.

But suppose the problem is Jews demanding actual miracles performed in front of them, not merely stories of miracles. That shouldn’t be a problem either. Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14:12). And, indeed, the book of Acts reports that this happened. Peter healed a lame man (Acts 3:1–8) and raised a woman from the dead (Acts 9:36–42), Philip exorcised demons to heal people (Acts 8:5–8), and “the apostles performed many signs and wonders” (Acts 5:12).

So then who was Paul referring to?

The Jesus of Paul isn’t the Jesus of the gospels. Robert Price questions whether Paul even imagined an earthly Jesus (Bible Geek podcast for 10/3/12 @ 1:15:10). Where did the Jesus in Paul’s mind come from, if not history? Perhaps from the Scriptures. Commenter Greg G. lists Paul’s traits of Jesus and shows where in the Old Testament he could have gotten them. (I’ve written more about the evolution of the Jesus story here.)

What would Paul have said about the philosophical issues that divided the church for centuries? These don’t mean much to most of us today because they’ve long been decided, but they were divisive in their day—whether Jesus was subordinate to God or not, whether Jesus had a human body or not, whether he had a human nature or not, whether he had two wills or not, whether the Holy Spirit was part of the Godhead, and so on. No one knows how Paul would have resolved them or even if they crossed his mind.

The Gospel of Paul is more evidence that the Jesus story is just a legend that grew with time.

Good sources for more information:

• Bart Ehrman blog series (paywall)
• Vridar: “What Did Paul Know About Jesus?”

Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. 
Faith must trample underfoot 
all reason, sense, and understanding.
— Martin Luther

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/17/12.)

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