From Part 2 of this excerpt from my book Cross Examined:

Paul sipped from his cup as he considered Jim’s argument. He was beginning to enjoy this tea—harsh but with a sweet aftertaste. “I heard a story about a woman tending her garden.” Paul wasn’t much for telling jokes, but this one took on a new meaning. “The pastor walks by and says, ‘Isn’t it marvelous what God can do in a garden?’ She wipes the sweat from her forehead and says, ‘You should have seen it when He had it all to Himself.’ ”

Jim stood and let out a whoop. “There’s hope for you yet!” He picked up the tea tray. “Let’s continue in the kitchen.”

Paul followed Jim. “What about the miraculous recoveries from illness? I suppose luck or coincidence or legend explains them.”

“If there is a remotely plausible natural explanation, that is far more believable than a supernatural one. Just take the facts for what they are and don’t force them to fit a Christian presupposition. The Bible was written by a tribe of people thousands of years before modern science. Supernatural explanations were the best they had. Religion is a cultural fossil from a time when society had nothing better.”

Jim showed Paul where he kept the tea. Paul put two fresh spoonsful in the pot while Jim refilled the kettle and set it on to boil.

“I’m impressed by how tidy you keep things,” Paul said. In truth he’d seen only the kitchen, the living room that Jim used as his office, and a hallway with several closed doors, but he was curious about this grand house.

“I maintain things the way Vive liked. She was content for me to keep my office as I wanted, but the rest of the house she kept pristine. Our neighbors had maids but Vive insisted that keeping the house in order was her job.”

Paul felt a wave of sympathy with a bit of pity for this sad recluse. He was keeping his house in order so Vive could return at any moment and be satisfied. Locked away in his luxurious hermitage, this man with his savage intellect and mismatched socks was living in a world of the mind, shielded from outside emotion. But Paul felt strongly drawn to this eccentric man and realized he now thought of Jim as a friend.

Jim stared out the window. Paul shrugged off the weight of the silence to restart the discussion. “What do you think of the other attributes of God—that He’s merciful, just, loving …”

“Loving? Ha! Imagine a man saying to his wife, ‘Darling, I love you more than words can express, and I want you near me forever … but if you ever leave me, so help me, I’ll hunt you down and kill you slowly!’ We are told that God’s love is infinitely deep, far greater than that of a parent for a child, and yet if we don’t believe the right thing, into hell we go for a jolly and exhilarating carnival of torture forever.”

Paul remembered a frequent subject of Samuel’s sermons. “The book of John says, ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ A father offering up his child—it’s the ultimate sacrifice.”

Jim smiled and shook his head. “Jesus’s sacrifice—hugely important to the Christian, but it now seems to me a rather small matter.”

“No!” Paul had listened in awe to too many sermons in which Samuel paid loving attention to the details of Jesus’s death to let this stand. “Jesus died by crucifixion—a horrible, humiliating way to die.”

“And I might die from cancer,” Jim said. “I might suffer from six months of agony before I finally die—agony so great that I would wish I were dead. Six hours of pain on the cross might seem the easier route.”

“You may not understand six hours of pain from crucifixion.”

“And you may not understand six months of pain from cancer.” Jim ran his fingers through his long hair. “Now let’s imagine I go to hell to suffer an eternity of torment. That makes Jesus’s six hours of pain insignificant compared to mine.”

“Still, His death was the height of sacrifice. He’s God. It’s like a human sacrificing himself to benefit an insect.”

“Not a good analogy. Jesus is supposed to have infinite love for humanity, but I don’t see any human having much love for an insect.” Jim placed two clean cups on the tea tray. “The absurdity of the story, of course, is the resurrection. If he died, there’s no miraculous resurrection, and if there’s a resurrection, there’s no sacrifice through death. Miracle or sacrifice—you can’t have it both ways. The Gospels don’t say that he died for our sins but that he had a rough couple of days for our sins. And if we must bear Adam’s sin no matter what we do, why don’t we benefit from the sacrifice that removes it no matter what we do?”

“But the Christian story is unique. Where else do we have a god dying for the benefit of humans?”

“Christianity is unique, just like every religion,” Jim said. “And what about Prometheus?”

Paul had read quite a bit of Greek mythology, but he let Jim continue.

“Prometheus stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity. Zeus discovered the crime and punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock so that a vulture could eat his liver. Each night, his liver grew back and the next day the vulture would return, day after agonizing day. Now that’s a sacrifice for humanity. Jesus is crucified once and then pops back into existence—rather weak by comparison.”

Prometheus was fiction, of course, but Paul had nothing to argue that the miracle stories of Jesus were anything different. “But if the sacrifice saves you from hell,” he said, “maybe we should appreciate it and be grateful for it, even if we can’t understand it.”

“Do Bronze Age customs persist so that we need a human sacrifice? If God loves us so deeply and he wants to forgive us, couldn’t he just … forgive us?”

“God can’t just forgive us.”

“Why not? That’s how you do it.”

“What I mean is, He’s the judge, and to forgive us, to simply let our sins go unpunished, would bypass His perfect justice.”

“Then I don’t think much of his ‘perfect justice.’ It’s certainly not the lesson we get from the parable of the Prodigal Son where the father forgives the son even after being wronged by him. If that’s the standard of mercy, why can’t God follow it? And maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I’d prefer to see punishment in proportion to the crime. The person whose crime was a white lie shouldn’t get the same punishment as Attila the Hun. No crime deserves an eternal stay in hell.

“And I find the logic behind Jesus’s sacrifice especially opaque. God made mankind imperfect and inherently vulnerable to sin. Living a sinless life is impossible, so hell becomes unavoidable. But God sacrificed Jesus, one of the persons of God, so mankind could go to heaven instead. That is, God sacrificed himself to himself so we could bypass a rule that God made himself and that God deliberately designed us to never be able to meet? I can’t even understand that; I certainly feel no need to praise God for something so nonsensical. We can just as logically curse him for consigning us to hell from birth.”

Paul leaned against the counter and stared at the floor, absorbing these ideas and taking stock of his position. He had crossed a boundary, gradually. Like a wagon almost imperceptibly cresting a large and gently rounded hill, things felt different, and he now realized that he was on the other side. Two drops of rain can land near each other on a mountain ridge, the first flowing down one side, and the second down the other. One eventually finds its way into the Atlantic Ocean and one into the Pacific—a slight initial difference with vast ultimate consequences. He had been on one side of the ridge, and now he was on the other. He had assumed that God existed, and any evidence to the contrary he had reshaped to fit that assumption. But he could do that no longer.

The kettle whistled. Jim filled the pot and carried the tea tray back to the living room with Paul following.

“How’s your chess game?” Paul asked.

“It’s still early, but I’m gaining the upper hand.”

The two men sat and drank tea and traded pleasantries as the afternoon light faded. But as congenial as the environment was, Paul couldn’t relax. He fidgeted in his chair, feeling distracted as he gave increasingly curt responses to Jim’s comments. Finally he turned the conversation to the issue that had been nagging him. “I don’t think I believe anymore.” There—it was out. “I can’t force myself to believe—I need reasons. That’s why I was a quick convert to Reverend Hargrove’s way of thinking—he promised those reasons.” His thoughts seemed muddled, but the words tumbled out more easily now. “I thought that he delivered on that promise . . . but I don’t think so anymore. If the reasons aren’t there, I can’t believe, can I?” Maybe it wasn’t advice he needed as much as support. He didn’t mention that he could never admit this to Samuel. Samuel would be furious.

“You gave up childhood things once you’d outgrown them.”

Paul felt doubtful and said nothing. While in Samuel’s orbit, his belief had kept him in a safe place—confining but comfortable. Jim’s new thinking took him out, away from those confines. He felt as if he were squinting in the bright sun, breathing invigorating but unfamiliar air. Old constraints now appeared ephemeral, even imaginary. There were many possibilities, but it was all so new.

Jim leaned back with his arm on the top of the sofa. “Imagine that a man goes to a doctor. He has been crippled for his entire life and uses crutches. The doctor examines the man and says, ‘Good news—I’ve seen this problem before, and I know how to fix it. After a couple of months of treatment, you’ll be able to walk normally. No more need for those crutches.’ The man hugs his crutches and says, ‘Don’t throw away my crutches, Doc! I couldn’t get along without them.’ But the doctor has no intention of doing so. He heals the patient, and the crutches become unnecessary. The patient throws them away himself.”

“But who are you to say what my crutches are?”

“No one at all. If you think you don’t have crutches, then that’s fine. If you think you do, then you’re the one who will need to discard them. It’s all up to you. Don’t replace Sam as your authority with me. You are the authority.”

This is excerpt from my book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey. These excerpts are a little longer than the usual post, but I think the fiction format is an interesting way to explore apologetics arguments.

Background: Jim is a wealthy, housebound, and somewhat obnoxious atheist, and Paul is the young acolyte of Rev. Samuel Hargrove, a famous pastor, doing his best to evangelize. It’s 1906 in Los Angeles, and they’re in Jim’s study.

Paul remembered that Jim was simply a lost sheep. Jim had understood the truth of the Bible, and he could be reminded of that again. Paul felt confident and enthusiastic as he began. “You argued yesterday that oral tradition is unreliable and that we can’t trust the Gospel story of Jesus.”

“I argued that the evidence the Gospels provide is paltry compared to what is necessary to justify such amazing claims.”

“Yes. I’d like to challenge that—”

Jim held up a hand. “Before you begin, let’s try an experiment. You think that oral tradition is reliable. Let’s simulate a step in that process. I’ll tell you a story, and then we’ll see how well you remember it.”

Paul didn’t expect a quiz. “I suppose, but remember that I’m just an ordinary person. I’m not trained in memorizing stories.”

“And neither would have been an ordinary citizen in Palestine who heard the story of Jesus and passed it along. From Jesus’s death to the first Gospel was thirty or forty years. The story wasn’t confined to scholars—it was passed through ordinary people.”

“I suppose so,” Paul said. Samuel had talked about trained scholars memorizing the story, but the story passing through common people made sense.

“Do you know the story of Circe from the Odyssey?”

“No—I’ve only read the Iliad.”

“Then you know the context.” Jim got up and walked to the bookcase on his left. The bookcase was densely packed with no apparent order. He ran his fingers across the spines of the books on one shelf, muttering titles to himself. After a few moments, he pulled off a book and leafed through it as he returned to the sofa. “The Iliad is about the Trojan War, and the Odyssey is the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and his ten-year trip home.

“Here’s the story—pay attention.” Jim looked down at the book as he spoke. “Odysseus and his men were lost and they landed on the coast of a strange land. After a few days of rest, Odysseus sent Eurylochus, a trusted friend, with a party of twenty-two men to explore. They found a house in a clearing guarded by lions, wolves, and other animals but were surprised to find the animals tame. They approached the house, and a woman named Circe invited them in. The men were delighted to find so beautiful a hostess and accepted the offer—except for Eurylochus, who suspected a trap. Circe showed the men a banquet and they ate enthusiastically, but she was a witch and the food was drugged. She turned the men into pigs and locked them in pens. The wild animals were men from other expeditions that Circe had also transformed.”

Jim looked up at Paul and then continued. “Eurylochus saw all this and hurried back to tell Odysseus. Odysseus was determined to rescue his men and went alone to Circe’s house. On the way, he met the god Hermes, who wanted to help. He gave Odysseus an herb that would protect him from Circe’s magic, and he told Odysseus that the threat of his sword would beat the threat of her wand. The encounter went as Hermes had predicted—Circe was no match for Odysseus, and she returned the men to human form. Odysseus and his men enjoyed Circe’s hospitality for a year, and she and Odysseus became lovers.”

Jim looked up and set the open book on the sofa. “That’s long enough. The Jesus story is far longer, of course, but let’s see how you do with that. Make sure you got it right—are you unclear on anything?”

Aside from Hermes and Odysseus, the names in the story were new to Paul, and he asked to have them repeated. He checked on the number of men, the kinds of animals in the clearing, and other details.

“Okay,” Jim said after Paul was satisfied, “let’s sit on that for a bit and return to what you were saying about oral tradition.”

“My point is that if the Gospel story was wrong, there would have been people who said, ‘Hold on, now—I was there, and that didn’t happen’ or ‘I knew that fellow, and he didn’t do that.’ A false story wouldn’t have survived.”

“Have you thought this through?”

“Sure,” Paul said.

“I doubt it.”

Paul again felt the punch in the stomach.

Jim frowned. “Think critically about claims like this. You’re smart enough to demand the truth, not just a pleasing answer. First, let’s get an idea of how few potential naysayers there could have been. I’m guessing a few dozen.”

“But there were thousands who saw the miracle of the loaves and fishes. And that’s just one miracle—there were many.”

“That doesn’t help us. A naysayer must have been a close companion of Jesus to witness him not doing all the miracles recorded in the Gospels. He would need to know that Jesus didn’t walk on water and didn’t raise Lazarus. Seems to me that a naysayer must have been one of Jesus’s close companions during his entire ministry. No, there’s no reason to imagine more than a few dozen.”

Odysseus, Eurylochus, Circe, Hermes, Paul thought to himself.

Jim looked up at the ceiling and counted off numbers with his fingers. “Two: the naysayer must be in the right location to complain. Suppose he were in Jerusalem, and say that the book of Mark was written in Alexandria, Egypt. How will our naysayer correct its errors? Sure, Mark will be copied and spread, but there’s not much time before our 60- or 70-year-old witnesses die. Even if we imagine our tiny band of men dedicating their lives to stamping out this false story—and why would they?—believers are starting brush fires of Christian belief all over the Eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Damascus to Rome. How can we expect our naysayers to snuff them all out?

“Three: remember that two thousand years ago, you couldn’t walk down to the corner newsstand to find the latest Jesus Gospel. How were our naysayers to learn of the story? Written documents at that time were scarce and precious things. The naysayers would be Jews who didn’t convert to Christianity, and they wouldn’t have associated much with the new Christians and so would have been unlikely to come across the Jesus story.

Twenty-two men, the food was a drug, the men became pigs, Paul thought.

“Four: there was another gulf between the naysayers and the early Christians. The Gospels were written in Greek, not the local language of Aramaic spoken by Jesus and the naysayers. To even learn of the Jesus story in this community, our naysayers must speak Greek. How many could have done this? And to influence the Greek-speaking readers of the Gospels, a rebuttal would have to have been written in Greek—not a common skill in Palestine.

“Five: suppose you knew the actual Jesus, and you knew that he was merely a charismatic rabbi. Nothing supernatural. Now you hear the story of Jesus the Son of Man, the healer of lepers and raiser of the dead. Why connect the two? ‘Jesus’ was a common name. Your friend Jesus didn’t do anything like this, so the story you heard must be of a different person. So even when confronted with the false teaching, you wouldn’t raise an alarm.”

“Six: consider how hard is it today for a politician or business leader to stop a false rumor, even with the press to get the word out. Think about how hard it would have been in first-century Palestine. How many thousands of Christians were out there spreading the word for every naysayer with his finger in the dike?”

Magic plant for protection, sword beats wand, Paul thought.

“Seven: you say that there were no naysayers, but how do we know that there weren’t? For us to know about them, they would need to have written their story and have some mechanism to recopy the truth over and over until the present day. Just like Christian documents, their originals would have crumbled with time. What would motivate anyone to preserve copies of documents that argued against a religion? Perhaps only another religion! And it’s not surprising that the Jesus-isn’t-divine religion didn’t catch on.”

Jim let out a sigh. “That’s a longer list than I expected. I hope you can see that naysayers could hardly be expected to stop Christianity.”

“A lot to consider,” Paul admitted. “But I still think the oral tradition preserves the truth.”

“That’s a poor rebuttal!” Paul looked away as Jim glowered at him and continued. “Think about it—you’re smarter than this. I hold you to a higher standard, one that doesn’t abide by sloppy thinking. Does God exist? If so, he gave you that mind to use. Your mind is an engine to be harnessed, not a vessel to be filled. You must be a truth seeker; don’t blindly follow someone else’s thinking.”

A soft metallic clap came from the hallway. Paul appreciated the break in the scolding as Jim walked to the door. He returned holding a postcard, dropped it in a trash can, and stood over the chessboard.

“You must read awful fast,” Paul said.

“It was a short message: ‘Knight to king’s bishop three.’ I’m playing chess through the mail with an old friend from college. He still lives in Boston, so this will be a long game.” He moved one of the white pieces. “Do you play chess?”

“I know the rules for how the pieces move, that’s it,” Paul said. “Do you know how you’ll respond?”

“Yes. The early moves in a game are rather predictable, but still interesting. They’re the foundation on which your position rests.”

Jim gazed at the board a few moments, then slowly walked back to the sofa and sat. “Do you eat nuts every day?” He pushed a bowl of shelled almonds across the table toward Paul with a bare foot.

“Uh … no, not often.”

“You should. Your body is a machine, and it needs lubrication. Nuts provide oils that are essential to good health.”

“Well, thank you. I didn’t realize that.”

“And I suppose you eat meat.”

“You don’t?”

“I’m a vegetarian—I follow the Battle Creek Sanitarium diet. Whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. And lots of nuts. Nature provides all that we need to be healthy—no need to kill animals for us to live.”

Paul said nothing as he wondered how to get this derailed train back on track.

“And do you enema?” Jim asked.

Paul assured him that he did not.

“You should, every day. And drink lots of water.” Jim described in unnecessary detail how the colon works and the benefits of daily cleansing. “You’d be shocked at what comes out,” he said.

Paul felt vaguely ill as he agreed.

Jim moved on to how to avoid mucus and the need to chew food so thoroughly that it slithered down the esophagus by itself, but this was mercifully interrupted by a knock on the door. “This should only take a moment,” Jim said.

“Groceries,” he said as he walked into the kitchen carrying a small wooden box. “I get a delivery every day.”

Home delivery seemed to be an extravagance when there was a grocery store two blocks away. Paul mused that the rich lived quite differently than ordinary folk.

When he returned, Jim picked up his copy of the Odyssey as he sat and thankfully dropped the topic of healthy living. “Now, pretend that I’m someone who hasn’t heard the amazing story of Odysseus and Circe and that you’re eager to pass it along.”

Paul said a little prayer as he slid to the edge of his chair. He gestured as he spoke. “Odysseus and his men walked into a strange land. Odysseus stayed behind and Eurylochus took the remaining twenty-two men to investigate. They found a witch named Circe in a house in a clearing, surrounded by wild animals that were actually tame. She invited them in for a banquet. All entered, but Eurylochus refused. One of the foods was a drug, and the men turned into pigs after they ate it.”

“Go on,” Jim said, his left index finger tracing the story in the open book.

“Eurylochus went back to Odysseus and reported what happened. Odysseus went to the house to free his men, and on the way he met Hermes, who gave him a magic drug to protect him. When he met the witch, they fought, Odysseus using his sword and Circe her wand. Odysseus won, and he forced her to release his men. She became nice—though I’m not sure why—and they stayed with her for a year.”

“Not bad,” Jim said. “The basic story is correct, but you changed a lot of details. First off, Odysseus and his men were sailors—they didn’t come marching in overland.”

“I didn’t hear ‘sailors.’ ”

“I said that they landed on the coast,” Jim said, looking down at the book. “These are minor changes, but multiplied with the retelling, they soon turn into big changes. You forgot that they rested first … the party of men who went to the house was just part of Odysseus’s crew, not all of it … you forgot the kinds of wild animals—lions and wolves … Eurylochus stayed outside, he didn’t refuse to enter … you said one food was a drug, but I said ‘the food was drugged’ … the food didn’t turn the crew into pigs, Circe did … the wild animals were also men … Odysseus and Circe didn’t fight.” Jim looked up. “Well, how do you think you did?”

“Okay, I guess. That’s a lot to remember in a short time. But the early church was a web of interconnections. If one person is telling the story to a group, another person in the group may well have heard it before. He could correct any errors.”

“Based on what?” Jim asked. “When I corrected your story just now, I was reading from a book—that’s our authority. There was no book when the Jesus story was oral tradition. When two people’s memories conflicted, whose was right?”

“There were scholars who memorized whole books of the Bible. They would have been an authority.”

“Are you saying that the Jesus story went from scholar to scholar, with a student sworn to secrecy until he could flawlessly repeat the story? That’s not how it was told.” Jim gestured impatiently as if unable to contain his amazement at Paul’s stupidity. “It was a dramatic and exciting yarn that went from fallible person to fallible person, just as stories do today. Society has changed since then, but the basics of storytelling haven’t. When you see two women gossiping over the back fence, you’re seeing something that hasn’t changed in thousands of years.”

Jim leaned back into the sofa, and his voice softened. “You did pretty well, but now imagine that the story was far longer, and you waited days instead of minutes to retell it. Such a story can change dramatically after decades of retelling over and over. What better explains the supernatural elements of the Jesus story—that they actually happened that way or that the story is legendary? Sure, the supernatural claims could be accurate, but why think that? You’ve got a long way to go to show that that’s the best explanation.” Jim grabbed a handful of nuts and ate them one by one. “I’d as soon believe that you could turn me into a pig with magic.”

Paul felt emotionally drained. Empty. His intellectual arsenal was spent as well. He could only pray that Samuel had more ammunition.