One of the things I’ve been struggling with on this new path I’m on is figuring out where the Bible fits in. I’ve moved past the “God dropped the Bible from heaven” belief system, but I haven’t been able to embrace a new one.
In Letters from a Skeptic, Greg’s dad constantly challenges the perspectives of the Bible that he’s heard about (which typically are fundamentalist views). Greg comes back with some fascinating answers. This is going to get long, because I’m going to repost his answers here. I’m very curious to see what some of you have to say.
From Greg’s dad:
But I have a more important problem with your last letter, especially the last part of it. This really gets to the heart of a lot of my problems with Christianity. Christians, especially the “born-again” types, are always quoting the Bible to back up their beliefs. They justify their beliefs as absolute truths because “the Bible tells me so.” All I can say is, by whose authority is the Bible granted this lofty position?
So you say that “history” proves that God loves us, and then you quote the Bible! And I don’t blame you because that’s the only place you could ever find out anything about Jesus. But it just doesn’t cut any mustard with me because I don’t accept the Bible in the first place. I don’t see any good reason to take the blind leap of faith to accept, lock, stock, and barrel the truthfulness of the Gospels your entire faith is based on.
Excerpts (very long ones) from Greg’s reply:
Now on to your more fundamental objection that I am assuming the authority of the Bible to prove that what the Bible says about Jesus is true. Dad, when I say that “history” shows what reason demands, I mean just that – history. Perhaps from your previous encounters with “born-again types” you assumed that I was just referring to the Bible as “God’s Word” when I referred to Jesus being Lord, but I wasn’t. It’s true that almost all our knowledge about Jesus comes from the Gospels, but this doesn’t mean that by referring to the Gospels I’m referring to them as God’s Word. I’m not. I’m referring to them merely as historical documents.
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I’m not asking you to accept on “blind faith” that they are God’s Word. Forget about that altogether for right now. I’m simply saying, look at them as you would any ancient document. Apply to them the same criteria historians apply to other ancient documents when they research history. And my contention is that, when the Gospels are treated in this critical-historical way, they fare very well and can be trusted to tell us a good deal about the person of Jesus Christ, enough, in fact, to know that was present in Him and working through Him in a most significant way.
Then he lists what the criteria are which historians apply to ancient documents – both internal external.
Internal Criteria:
1. Was the author in a position to know what he or she is writing about? Does the text claim to be an eyewitness account, or based on an eyewitness account? Or is it based on hearsay?
2. Does the document in question contain specific, and espeically irrelevant, material?
3. Does the document contain self-damaging material?
4. Is the document reasonably self-consistant?
5. Is there evidence of legendary accretion in the document?
External Criteria:
1. Would the authors of the document have a motive for fabricating what they wrote?
2. Are there any other sources which confirm material in the document and/or which substantiate the genuineness of the document?
3. Does archeology support or go against material in the document?
4. Could contemporaries of the document falsify the document’s account, and would they have a motive for doing so?
Now here are the basics of his answers to those questions about the Bible:
Internal #1
Luke, who is not an eyewitness, tells us that he is using eyewitness sources and that he is seeking to write an orderly and truthful account of the things he records (Luke 1:1-4). John tells us he is an eyewitness, and the other two Gospels, Mark and Matthew, are broth written from the perspective of an eyewitness.
Internal #2
The Gospels are full of the sort of irrelevant detail which typically accompanies eyewitness accounts.
He uses John 20:1-8 as his example here. There are details like it was the first day of the week and still dark. Even though John got to the tomb first, Peter went in first. He is arguing that those sorts of things are irrelevant details because they don’t further the story line.
Internal #3
The Gospels are also full of self-damaging detail. For example, in the Resurrection account [of John 20], a woman is said to be the first one to discover that the tomb was empty. But this could only damage the testimony of the early Christians, as women in first-century Jewish culture were regarded as “talebearers.” They couldn’t even testify in court (which is why Paul doesn’t include any women in his list of people who saw the risen Christ in 1 Cor. 15).
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And even aspects of Jesus’ life are included which, if the story were being fabricated to convince people of His messiahship, would have been excluded. For example, on the cross Jesus cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Now this is hardly what one would expect from the Messiah, especially if the Messiah is supposed to be divine. It’s a tough statement, but that just proves the point. The only motive anyone could have for including it in his account is because Jesus actually said it!
Internal #4
The Gospels present a consisten portrait of who Jesus is and what He did, as well as of the events which surrounded His life. If the four accounts were individually fabricated, where did this consistency come from? But there are also significant differences in each account, showing the relative differences of their perspectives. If they were all fabricated together, the consistency would be greater than we find.
Internal #5
The Gospels do include supernatural acts, but the accounts which we find in the Gospels don’t have any of the features of ancient mythology. They are very sober.
External #1
What possible motive would the early disciples have had for fabricating stories about Jesus? They claimed to believe in Jesus because of His miracles and resurrections, combined with the kind of life He lived and teachings He gave. And far from gaining anything from this, they suffered great persecution for it. Why would they lie? And is there anything about their characters which would lead us to think that they were the kind of people who deceived others? No scholar I know of doubts the disciples’ sincerity.
External #2
We can ascertain some things about Jesus and the early disciples, things which fit in well with the Gospels, from other secular ancient sources such as Tacitus (Ca. 55-120), Suetonius (early second century), Josephus (ca. 37-97), Thallus (mid first century), Pliny (early second century), as well as ancient Jewish writings written against the Christians (the Talmud).
External #3
While there have always been archeologists who claim that their findings are in tension with some aspect of the biblical account of things, time and time again these findings have been reversed in favor of the biblical account.
The examples he lists include Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus.
External #4
Finally, Christianity was born in a very hostile environment. There were contemporaries who would have refuted the Gospel portrait of Jesus – if they could have. The leaders of Judaism in the first century tended to view Christianity as a pernicious cult and would have loved to see it stamped out. And this would have been easy to do – if the “cult” had been based on fabrications. Why, just bringing forth the body of the slain Jesus would have been sufficient to extinguish Christianity once and for all.
In spite of this, however, Christianity exploded. The disciples preached their Gospel to people who had been eyewitnesses of the things they claimed Jesus said and did. How could they have fabricated it? And even those who remained opposed to Christianity did not deny that Jesus did miracles, and did not deny that His tomb was empty. The facts behind the Gospel are not questioned. What is questioned is how the facts were established. The opponents claimed that Jesus did what He did either through trickery, or the power of Satan, and that the disciples stole the body of Jesus.
So far, I’m sold. He makes really good points. I know this has gotten way long, but bear with me. Keep reading.
His dad responds to him with some good questions. His dad is stuck in a similar place to where I am. He’s got this portrait in his head of how Christians are supposed to be that his son is blowing it out of the water – and he’s having a hard time adjusting to it. He says, “Most of the Christians I’ve ever run into are so certain that they’re right – on every point – that there’s little sense in discussing anything with them.” He asks Gregory how his faith can survive so strongly on historical documents that can sometimes lack certainty.
This is the part that really spoke to me and where I am today.
My faith doesn’t hang on the demonstrable credibility of these documents in every detail, but does hang on their overall credibility. The Jesus I am personally related to can’t be wholly different from the Jesus of history as shown by these documents, otherwise “my Jesus” isn’t the Jesus I think He is. The certainty I have on the truth of my faith thus attaches both to my experience of Christ in worship and to my investigation of the Gospel accounts which, to my mind at least, has shown them to be at least generally reliable. Faith is a loving, trusting relationship with Christ, an attachment which goes way beyond a theoretical assessment of ancient documents. But it isn’t divorced from this historical assessment. It’s much like our relationships with others. Your relationship with [your wife], for example, goes way beyond the factual information you know about her, but you’d have a hard time being related to her in the first place without this information.
There’s definitely going to be a part 2 to this, because they talk about the Bible more, but this is already too long.
I’m loving this book, because it seems to me that Greg is answering all the questions I’ve had in non-fundie answers.
Amanda….tell Greg Boyd to stop looking inside my head!
I’m simply saying, look at them as you would any ancient document. Apply to them the same criteria historians apply to other ancient documents when they research history.
On that front they fail instantly, because historians generally assume that any references to the supernatural are of dubious veracity.
For example, on the cross Jesus cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Now this is hardly what one would expect from the Messiah, especially if the Messiah is supposed to be divine. It’s a tough statement, but that just proves the point. The only motive anyone could have for including it in his account is because Jesus actually said it!
This displays a shocking ignorance of early Christianity. This is exactly the sort of paragraph that a Docetic Christian would have wanted to see included in the text.
If the four accounts were individually fabricated, where did this consistency come from?
Straw man. No-one says they were individually fabricated (apart from John) – the current best guess is that Mark was written first, with Matthew and Luke written later based on Mark and one or more unknown sources.
The “consistency” he points to actually goes too far in some places. To pick an example at random: compare Matthew 9:10 and Mark 2:15. There’s an entire wad of text from those points on that is precisely identical – not just in terms of what Jesus said, but also in terms of the background information it supplies. In my version of the Bible, they’re totally word for word (although that might just be a translation artefact).
Now, if these had been written independently, you might expect to see them record some of Jesus’ best bon mots. But you wouldn’t expect to see them record exactly the same contextual information, and in precisely the same order. Conclusion: it was copied.
What’s interesting to notice is the places where Matthew and Luke obviously got their stories from different sources. For example: immediately after his birth, was Jesus taken to Jerusalem or Egypt? The birth story was not in Mark, so Matthew and Luke ended up with wildly different legends that have almost no overlap.
The Gospels do include supernatural acts, but the accounts which we find in the Gospels don’t have any of the features of ancient mythology. They are very sober.
Rubbish. Immaculate conception, celestial phenomena, attempted babycide – these were all par for the course with ancient myths.
I’m very amused by his remark about the Gospels being more sober than ancient myths. Could that possibly be because most books about ancient myths these days are written by people who know they’re not true? Rest assured that the people who believed in those myths took them every bit as seriously as this guy takes Christianity.
We can ascertain some things about Jesus and the early disciples, things which fit in well with the Gospels, from other secular ancient sources such as Tacitus (Ca. 55-120), Suetonius (early second century), Josephus (ca. 37-97), Thallus (mid first century), Pliny (early second century), as well as ancient Jewish writings written against the Christians (the Talmud).
Tacitus only refers to the fuss that the early Christians were kicking up – he includes no info about Jesus. Suetonius wrote a one-liner that may not even be referring to Jesus, and that again is more focused on the fuss that “Chrestus”‘s followers were making. Pliny again gave no information relevant to the question of Christ’s historicity – he was focused on (you guessed it) the fuss that the Christians were kicking up.
We don’t actually have Thallus‘ writings – only a summary that someone else (a Christian) wrote. Josephus‘ one reference to Jesus is generally held to be a later insertion, for a variety of reasons (for example, it contains words not otherwise used by Josephus).
If you think I’m exaggerating how rubbish these “sources” are, please follow the links and check for yourself.
While there have always been archeologists who claim that their findings are in tension with some aspect of the biblical account of things, time and time again these findings have been reversed in favor of the biblical account.
I believe there’s currently a fairly strong consensus that Luke was talking out of his donkey when he ascribed the census to Quirinius. And, of course, Quirinius signed on as governor of Syria several years after the death of the much-maligned Herod the Great. I tend to infer that whoever came up with the story was more interested in ensuring Jesus “fulfilled” the Bethlehem prophecy than in keeping to the actual facts.
There were contemporaries who would have refuted the Gospel portrait of Jesus – if they could have.
We know there were contemporaries who disagreed with the Biblical portrayal of events. For example, Matthew indicates that people were claiming the body had been stolen.
(In a classic bit of interpolation, Matthew also claims that the people saying this had been paid off by the Jewish priests, even going so far as to quote from a private conversation. How the heck would he have known that? My answer: he probably didn’t – as with many other examples of interpretation in his Gospel, he was pulling the information straight out of his donkey.)
And [stamping it out] would have been easy to do – if the “cult” had been based on fabrications.
Tell that to the Mormons and the Scientologists.
And even those who remained opposed to Christianity did not deny that Jesus did miracles, and did not deny that His tomb was empty.
Here, Greg appears to be pulling a Matthew. We don’t have any knowledge of what Christianity’s earliest critics thought of it, except that found in the Bible. So how the heck does Greg know whether they denied Jesus’ miracles?
Sorry for the excessively long response, but a lot of Greg’s claims are zombies – they appear over and over in every forum I’ve ever frequented, and despite their gaping wounds they simply will not die
Well, since I had to look up Docetic Christian, I guess I am ignorant of early Christianity. After looking it up, I’m not sure why you say that is something they would have wanted to see. If they thought the whole thing was an illusion and not real anyways, why would they want to know he cried out?
Are there any pro-Christian arguments that you don’t find to be a straw man?
Right. But that doesn’t do anything to detract from them. I’ll write more on this in Part 2.
Isn’t it true that Quirinius’ rule in around 6AD was his second rule?
Touche. Although…neither of those have been around for a few thousand years. Scientology as been around for only 60 years – and most of the world recognizes how laughable it is. Mormonism, though they teach they’ve been around since 600BC, has really only been around since the mid 1800s.
Well, since I had to look up Docetic Christian, I guess I am ignorant of early Christianity.
Its not really “Early Christianity” but more like “early Christianities“. There is an interesting primer on this sort of thing (early versions of christianity) called “Lost Christianities” by Bart Ehrman(who also does a nice little textual criticism primer called “misquoting Jesus”, which discusses many of the things that Lifewish has brought up). If you want a brief introduction to these sort of topics, I would highly suggest them, they are pretty well written, and the author, like you, was a fundie until he started seeing the impossibility of the veracity of the bible when he started looking at old versions of it.
Are there any pro-Christian arguments that you don’t find to be a straw man?
The strawman is rarely about the Christian argument itself, if ever. It usually happens when someone tries to represent “the other side” in a false way, only to take down the falsehood and not the actual argument. Its probably the most common fallacy employed in every hot topic.
Although…neither of those have been around for a few thousand years.
true, but both are growing, and neither have been “easily stamped out” (although the Germans are trying pretty hard to get rid of scientology).
There are many religions, with accompanying texts, that have been around for far longer than Christianity. Judaism is an obvious one, but there is also Hinduism (the worlds oldest existing religion), Jainism, Buddhism. These “cults” are widespread and older, does that mean that they are also accurate (i.e. we should be truly worried about Shiva, the Destroyer)? Are they not based on any more reality than the jesus stories?
Does the story of the buddha seem outrageous to you? Its just another jesus story to me.
[btw....the preview button doesnt work for me anymore]
I think ‘My God why have you forsaken me’ is from Psalm 22 ‘The Suffering Servant’. In other words it could have been used to prove that Jesus was fulfilling the Jewish prophecies. (Or he may have said it, not provable either way.)
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Most people are ignorant of early Christianity (and I’m one of them). The difference between you and him is that you’re not attempting to use your knowledge of the subject to derive accurate historical conclusions.
The reason that Docetic Christians would have approved of the “oh God, why hast thou forsaken me” bit is because many of them thought that Jesus was a normal human being, and Christ was a separate entity, a divine spirit that possessed him. So when Jesus said “oh God”, the Docetists thought he was referring not to the Father but to Christ, who had just jumped ship (so to speak) and left Jesus on the cross.
So Greg’s claim, that this quote would only have been included if true, doesn’t stand up: any early Christians with Docetic inclinations would have loved to see this passage included.
(There were actually two completely different Christologies that were called “Docetic”; this argument only applies to one of them. The other group thought that Jesus only appeared to have a physical body, but was in fact wholly spiritual. Both were an attempt to resolve the apparent paradox of a divine force experiencing human weakness.)
Yes – for example, all the other points he made that I responded to. The term “straw man” has a very specific meaning: attempting to demonstrate the plausibility of a conclusion by picking on the weakest of the alternative hypotheses. That term applies here, because the alternative he attacked is (as far as I know) not held by anyone, and he’s completely ignoring the synoptic hypothesis, which is held by the majority of Biblical scholars.
I completely agree. But Greg’s point was that their mutual consistency could only arise if they were based on the same events. This is clearly not the case – the consistency could also result from the massive amount of copy/pasting that the Gospel writers did. I was attacking the specific argument Greg proposed in support of the Gospels, not the Gospels themselves.
No, that stopped being the academic consensus some time in the 1930s, for a variety of reasons. In particular, it’s pretty much impossible to fit such a prior period of rule into the known chronology of Syrian governors.
(My source here is this wikipedia page)
Touche. Although…neither of those have been around for a few thousand years. Scientology as been around for only 60 years – and most of the world recognizes how laughable it is. Mormonism, though they teach they’ve been around since 600BC, has really only been around since the mid 1800s.
I completely agree about the laughability of both of these. But Greg’s specific argument was that, had Christianity been based on dodgy facts, it would have been stamped out early on. Clearly that hypothesis does not fit the facts, so he can’t use it as support for the Gospels.
The passages you cited from Greg’s letters are looking more and more like “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. He lists a huge number of arguments, but they’re consistently rather bad. And, of course, lots of bad arguments don’t add up to a good argument.
By the way, I’m surprised you didn’t pick me up on my comment about virgin births being par for the course in paganism. I wrote that before reading this post, which raised some valid questions about that claim. I need to do some source-tracing on the claim – will let you know if I find anything interesting.
I second TechSkeptic about the preview button not working.
I know the preview button doesn’t work – I just haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.