"What did Jesus do?" - "New Yorker" article (5/24/2010)

[abelisle]

An interesting survey of modern scholarship that deals with the Gospels and specifically the historicity of Jesus. It's interesting to see the secular interest in Jesus studies and how it compares with our beliefs.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik

A Critic at Large

What Did Jesus Do?

Reading and unreading the Gospels.

by Adam Gopnik

May 24, 2010

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him; if he says something nasty, then probably he really did.

So then, the scholars argue, the author of Mark, whoever he was—the familiar disciples’ names conventionally attached to each Gospel come later—added the famous statement of divine favor, descending directly from the heavens as they opened. But what does the voice say? In Mark, the voice says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” seeming to inform a Jesus who doesn’t yet know that this is so. But some early versions of Luke have the voice quoting Psalm 2: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Only in Matthew does it announce Jesus’ divinity to the world as though it were an ancient, fixed agreement, not a new act. In Mark, for that matter, the two miraculous engines that push the story forward at the start and pull it toward Heaven at the end—the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection—make no appearance at all. The story begins with Jesus’ adult baptism, with no hint of a special circumstance at his birth, and there is actually some grumbling by Jesus about his family (“Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house, is a prophet without honor,” he complains); it ends with a cry of desolation as he is executed—and then an enigmatic and empty tomb. (It’s left to the Roman centurion to recognize him as the Son of God after he is dead, while the verses in Mark that show him risen were apparently added later.)

The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith. The more one knows, the less one knows. Was Jesus a carpenter, or even a carpenter’s son? The Greek word tekto¯n, long taken to mean “carpenter,” could mean something closer to a stoneworker or a day laborer. (One thinks of the similar shadings of a word like “printer,” which could refer to Ben Franklin or to his dogsbody.) If a carpenter, then presumably he was an artisan. If a stoneworker, then presumably he spent his early years as a laborer, schlepping from Nazareth to the grand Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris, nearby, to help build its walls and perhaps visit its theatre and agora. And what of the term “Son of Man,” which he uses again and again in Mark, mysteriously: “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in his new, immensely ambitious and absorbing history, “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” (Viking; $45), the phrase, which occurs in the Gospels “virtually exclusively in the reported words of Jesus,” certainly isn’t at all the same as the later “Son of God,” and may merely be Aramaic for “folks like us.”

Belief remains a bounce, faith a leap. Still, the appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze. Book after book—this year, ten in one month alone—appears, seeking the Truth. Paul Johnson has a sound believer’s life, “Jesus: A Biography from a Believer,” while Paul Verhoeven, the director of “Basic Instinct,” has a new skeptical-scholar’s book. Verhoeven turns out to be a member of the Jesus Seminar, a collection mostly of scholars devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus, and much of what he has to say is shrewd and learned. (An odd pull persists between box-office and Biblical study. A few years ago, another big action-film director and producer, James Cameron, put himself at the center of a documentary called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.”)

What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want—not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. Was the cult that changed the world a product of Paul’s evangelism and imperial circumstance and the military embrace of one miracle-mystery cult among many such around? Or was there really something new, something unheard of, that can help explain the scale of what happened later? Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving, with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world?

Ever since serious scholarly study of the Gospels began, in the nineteenth century, its moods have ranged from the frankly skeptical—including a “mythicist” position that the story is entirely made up—to the credulous, with some archeologists still holding that it is all pretty reliable, and tombs and traces can be found if you study the texts hard enough. The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits—Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls—were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it. (The view that the search for the historical Jesus is like the search for the historical Superman—that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name—has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the Internet; the scholar Earl Doherty defends it on his Web site with grace and tenacity.)

The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over—but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, “Jesus, Interrupted” (HarperOne; $15.99), Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.

The odd absences in Mark are matched by the unreal presences in the other Gospels. The beautiful Nativity story in Luke, for instance, in which a Roman census forces the Holy Family to go back to its ancestral city of Bethlehem, is an obvious invention, since there was no Empire-wide census at that moment, and no sane Roman bureaucrat would have dreamed of ordering people back to be counted in cities that their families had left hundreds of years before. The author of Luke, whoever he might have been, invented Bethlehem in order to put Jesus in David’s city. (James Tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book “The Jesus Dynasty,” takes surprisingly seriously the old Jewish idea that Jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera—as well attested a tradition as any, occurring in Jewish texts of the second century, in which a Jesus ben Pantera makes several appearances, and the name is merely descriptive, not derogatory. Tabor has even found, however improbably, a tombstone in Germany for a Roman soldier from Syria-Palestine named Pantera.)

What seems a simple historical truth is that all the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the First Jewish-Roman War, in 70 C.E.—a catastrophe so large that it left the entire Jesus movement in a crisis that we can dimly imagine if we think of Jewish attitudes before and after the Holocaust: the scale of the tragedy leads us to see catastrophe as having been built into the circumstance. As L. Michael White’s “Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite” (HarperOne; $28.99) explains in daunting scholarly detail, even Mark—which, coming first, might seem to be closest to the truth—was probably written in the ruins of the Temple and spiritually shaped to its desolate moment. Mark’s essential point, he explains, is about secrecy: Jesus keeps telling people to be quiet about his miracles, and confides only to an inner circle of disciples. With the Temple gone, White says, it was necessary to persuade people that the grotesque political failure of Jesus’ messianism wasn’t a real failure. Mark invents the idea that Jesus’ secret was not that he was the “Davidic” messiah, the Arthur-like returning king, but that he was someone even bigger: the Son of God, whose return would signify the end of time and the birth of the Kingdom of God. The literary critic Frank Kermode, in “The Genesis of Secrecy” (1979), a pioneering attempt to read Mark seriously as poetic literature, made a similar point, though his is less historical than interpretative. Kermode considers Mark to be, as the French would say, a text that reads itself: the secret it contains is that its central figure is keeping a secret that we can never really get. It is an intentionally open-ended story, prematurely closed, a mystery without a single solution.

Even if we make allowances for Mark’s cryptic tracery, the human traits of his Jesus are evident: intelligence, short temper, and an ironic, duelling wit. What seems new about Jesus is not his piety or divine detachment but the humanity of his irritability and impatience. He’s no Buddha. He gets annoyed at the stupidity of his followers, their inability to grasp an obvious point. “Do you have eyes but fail to see?” he asks the hapless disciples. The fine English actor Alec McCowen used to do a one-man show in which he recited Mark, complete, and his Jesus came alive instantly as a familiar human type—the Gandhi-Malcolm-Martin kind of charismatic leader of an oppressed people, with a character that clicks into focus as you begin to dramatize it. He’s verbally spry and even a little shifty. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design. A story about a vineyard whose ungrateful husbandmen keep killing the servants sent to them is an anti-establishment, even an anti-clerical story, but it isn’t so obvious as to get him in trouble. The suspicious priests keep trying to catch him out in a declaration of anti-Roman sentiment: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not, they ask—that is, do you recognize Roman authority or don’t you? He has a penny brought out, sees the picture of the emperor on it, and, shrugging, says to give to the state everything that rightly belongs to the state. The brilliance of that famous crack is that Jesus turns the question back on the questioner, in mock-innocence. Why, you give the king the king’s things and God God’s. Of course, this leaves open the real question: what is Caesar’s and what is God’s? It’s a tautology designed to evade self-incrimination.

Jesus’ morality has a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. His pet style blends the epigrammatic with the enigmatic. When he makes that complaint about the prophet having no honor in his own home town, or says exasperatedly that there is no point in lighting a candle unless you intend to put it in a candlestick, his voice carries a disdain for the props of piety that still feels startling. And so with the tale of the boy who wastes his inheritance but gets a feast from his father, while his dutiful brother doesn’t; or the one about the weeping whore who is worthier than her good, prim onlookers; or about the passionate Mary who is better than her hardworking sister Martha. There is a wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. He is informal in a new way, too, that remains unusual among prophets. MacCulloch points out that he continually addresses God as “Abba,” Father, or even Dad, and that the expression translated in the King James Version as a solemn “Verily I say unto you” is actually a quirky Aramaic throat-clearer, like Dr. Johnson’s “Depend upon it, Sir.”

Some of the sayings do have, in their contempt for material prosperity, the ring of Greek Cynic philosophy, but there is also something neither quite Greek nor quite Jewish about Jesus’ morality that makes it fresh and strange even now. Is there a more miraculous scene in ancient literature than the one in John where Jesus absent-mindedly writes on the ground while his fellow-Jews try to entrap him into approving the stoning of an adulteress, only to ask, wide-eyed, if it wouldn’t be a good idea for the honor of throwing the first stone to be given to the man in the mob who hasn’t sinned himself? Is there a more compressed and charming religious exhortation than the one in the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus merrily recommends to his disciples, “Be passersby”? Too much fussing about place and home and ritual, and even about where, exactly, you’re going to live, is unnecessary: be wanderers, dharma bums.

This social radicalism still shines through—not a programmatic radicalism of national revolution but one of Kerouac-like satori-seeking-on-the-road. And the social radicalism is highly social. The sharpest opposition in the Gospels, the scholar and former priest John Dominic Crossan points out in his illuminating books—“The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” is the best known—is between John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster. Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.

The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan, the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, makes a persuasive case that Jesus’ fressing was perhaps the most radical element in his life—that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on “commensality,” would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.” Jesus isn’t a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn’t an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He’s interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves.

To a modern reader, the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table can seem undermined by the other part of Jesus’ message, a violent and even vengeful prediction of a final judgment and a large-scale damnation. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet who is preaching the death of the world—he says categorically that the end is near—and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. If the end is near, why give so much sage counsel? If human life is nearly over, why preach in such detail the right way to live? One argument is that a later, perhaps “unpersonified” body of Hellenized wisdom literature was tacked on to an earlier account of a Jewish messianic prophet. Since both kinds of literature—apocalyptic hysterics and stoic sayings—can be found all over the period, perhaps they were merely wrenched together.

And yet a single figure who “projects” two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy, is a commonplace among charismatic prophets. That’s what a charismatic prophet is: someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner. The leaders of the African-American community before the civil-rights era, for instance, had to be both prophets and political agitators to an oppressed and persecuted people in a way not unlike that of the real Jesus (and all the other forgotten zealots and rabbis whom the first-century Jewish historian Josephus names and sighs over). They, too, tended to oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic. Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)

As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like. Still, a real, unchangeable difference does exist between what might be called storytelling truths and statement-making truths—between what makes credible, if sweeping, sense in a story and what’s required for a close-knit metaphysical argument. Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative. The idea, for instance, that the ring of power should be given to two undersized amateurs to throw into a volcano at the very center of the enemy’s camp makes sound and sober sense, of a kind, in Tolkien; but you would never expect to find it as a premise at the Middle Earth Military Academy. Anyone watching Hamlet will find his behavior completely understandable—O.K., I buy it; he’s toying with his uncle—though any critic thinking about it afterward will reflect that this behavior is a little nuts.

In Mark, Jesus’ divinity unfolds without quite making sense intellectually, and without ever needing to. It has the hypnotic flow of dramatic movement. The story is one of self-discovery: he doesn’t know who he is and then he begins to think he does and then he doubts and in pain and glory he dies and is known. The story works. But, as a proposition under scrutiny, it makes intolerable demands on logic. If Jesus is truly one with God, in what sense could he suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, horror, and so on? So we get the Jesus rendered in the Book of John, who doesn’t. But if he doesn’t suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, and horror, in what sense is his death a sacrifice rather than just a theatrical enactment? A lamb whose throat is not cut and does not bleed is not really much of an offering.

None of this is very troubling if one has a pagan idea of divinity: the Son of God might then be half human and half divine, suffering and triumphing and working out his heroic destiny in the half-mortal way of Hercules, for instance. But that’s ruled out by the full weight of the Jewish idea of divinity—omnipresent and omniscient, knowing all and seeing all. If God he was—not some Hindu-ish avatar or offspring of God, but actually one with God—then God once was born and had dirty diapers and took naps. The longer you think about it, the more astounding, or absurd, it becomes. To be really believed at all, it can only be told again.

So the long history of the early Church councils that tried to make the tales into a theology is, in a way, a history of coming out of the movie confused, and turning to someone else to ask what just happened. This is the subject of Philip Jenkins’s “Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years” (HarperOne; $26.99). Jenkins explains what was at stake in the seemingly wacky wars over the Arian heresy—the question of whether Jesus the Son shared an essence with God the Father or merely a substance—which consumed the Western world through the second and third centuries. Was Jesus one with God in the sense that, say, Sean Connery is one with Daniel Craig, different faces of a single role, or in the sense that James Bond is one with Ian Fleming, each so dependent on the other that one cannot talk about the creation apart from its author? The passion with which people argued over apparently trivial word choices was, Jenkins explains, not a sign that they were specially sensitive to theology. People argued that way because they were part of social institutions—cities, schools, clans, networks—in which words are banners and pennants: who pledged to whom was inseparable from who said what in what words. It wasn’t that they really cared about the conceptual difference between the claim that Jesus and the Father were homoousian (same in essence) and the claim that the two were homoiousian (same in substance); they cared about whether the Homoousians or the Homoiousians were going to run the Church.

The effort to seal off the inspiration from the intolerance, nice Jesus from nasty Jesus, is very old. Jefferson compiled his own New Testament, with the ethical teachings left in and the miracles and damnations left out—and that familiar, outraged sense of the ugly duplicity of the Christian heritage is at the heart of Philip Pullman’s new plaint against it, “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” (Canongate; $24), in which the two aspects are neatly divided into twins borne by Mary. The wise Jesus is brother to the shrewd Christ. One leads to the nice Jewish boy, the other to Paul’s scary punitive God. Pullman, a writer of great skill and feeling, as he has shown in his magical children’s fantasies, feels the betrayal of Jesus by his brother Christ as a fundamental betrayal of humanity. He wants us to forget Christ and return to Jesus alone, to surrender miracles for morals. Pullman’s book, however, is not narrowly polemical; he also retells the parables and acts with a lucid simplicity that strips away the Pauline barnacles. His real achievement is to translate Jesus’ sayings into a simple, almost childlike English that would seem to have much of the sound we are told is present in the artless original Greek: “Those who make peace between enemies, those who solve bitter disputes—they will be blessed. . . . But beware, and remember what I tell you: there are some who will be cursed, who will never inherit the Kingdom of God. D’you want to know who they are? Here goes: Those who are rich will be cursed.”

If one thing seems clear from all the scholarship, though, it’s that Paul’s divine Christ came first, and Jesus the wise rabbi came later. This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story can’t be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief. It can be amputated, mystically married, revealed as a fraud, or worshipped as the greatest of mysteries. The two go on, and their twoness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism. All faiths have fights, but, as MacCulloch shows at intricate, thousand-page length, few have so many super-subtle shadings of dogma: wine or blood, flesh or wafer, one God in three spirits or three Gods in one; a song of children, stables, psalms, parables, and peacemakers, on the one hand, a threnody of suffering, nails, wild dogs, and damnation and risen God, on the other. The two spin around each other throughout history—the remote Pantocrator of Byzantium giving way to the suffering man of the Renaissance, and on and on.

It is typical of this conundrum that, in the past century, the best Christian poet, W. H. Auden, and the greatest anti-Christian polemicist, William Empson, were exact contemporaries, close friends, and, as slovenly social types, almost perfectly interchangeable Englishmen. Auden chose Christianity for the absolute democracy of its vision—there is, in it, “neither Jew nor German, East nor West, boy nor girl, smart nor dumb, boss nor worker.” Empson, in the same period, beginning in the fatal nineteen-forties, became the most articulate critic of a morality reduced “to keeping the taboos imposed by an infinite malignity,” in which the reintroduction of human sacrifice as a sacred principle left the believer with “no sense either of personal honour or of the public good.” (In this case, though, where Auden saw a nice Christ, Empson saw a nasty Jesus.)

Beyond the words, we still hear that cry. The Passion is still the point. In Mark, Jesus’ arrest and execution feels persuasively less preordained and willed than accidental and horrific. Jesus seems to have an intimation of the circumstance he has found himself in—leading a rebellion against Rome that is not really a rebellion, yet doesn’t really leave any possibility of retreat—and some corner of his soul wants no part of it: “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take away this cup from me.” Mel Gibson was roughed up for roughing up Jesus, in his “Passion of the Christ,” but, though Gibson can fairly be accused of fanaticism, he can’t be accused of unfairness: in the long history of human cruelty, crucifixion, practiced as a mass punishment by the Romans, was uniquely horrible. The victim was stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, then whipped bloody, and then left to die as slowly as possible in as public a manner as conceivable. (In a sign of just how brutal it was, Josephus tells us that he begged the Roman rulers for three of his friends to be taken off the cross after they had spent hours on it; one lived.) The victim’s legs were broken to bring death in a blaze of pain. And the corpse was generally left to be eaten by wild dogs. It was terrifying and ever-present.

Verhoeven, citing Crossan, offers an opening scene for a Jesus bio-pic which neatly underlines this point. He imagines a man being nailed to a cross, cries of agony, two companion crosses in view, and then we crane out to see two hundred crosses and two hundred victims: we are at the beginning of the story, the mass execution of Jewish rebels in 4 B.C., not the end. This was the Roman death waiting for rebels from the outset, and Jesus knew it. Jesus’ cry of desolation—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—though primly edited out or explained as an apropos quotation from the Psalms by later evangelists, pierces us even now from the pages of Mark, across all the centuries and Church comforts. The shock and pity of failure still resonates.

One thing, at least, the cry assures: the Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and the promise wasn’t kept. “Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,” Jesus announced; but none of them did. Jesus, and Paul following him, says unambiguously that whatever is coming is coming soon—that the end is very, very near. It wasn’t, and the whole of what follows is built on an apology for what went wrong. The seemingly modern waiver, “Well, I know he said that, but he didn’t really mean it quite the way it sounded,” is built right into the foundation of the cult. The sublime symbolic turn—or the retreat to metaphor, if you prefer—begins with the first words of the faith. If the Kingdom of God proved elusive, he must have meant that the Kingdom of God was inside, or outside, or above, or yet to come, anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.

The argument is the reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty. Authority and fear can circumscribe the argument, or congeal it, but can’t end it. In the beginning was the word: in the beginning, and in the middle, and right there at the close, Word without end, Amen. The impulse of orthodoxy has always been to suppress the wrangling as a sign of weakness; the impulse of more modern theology is to embrace it as a sign of life. The deeper question is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained. With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once. ♦

Alex

[John317]

How much of this do you believe and what do you not believe?

Most of it is conjecture and theory and what is taught by very liberal scholars, some of whom don't even believe in God or Christ. It would be somewhat like my going to Nietzsche or Marx for my understanding of the NT. I do read Nietzsche & Marx I don't believe their view of the Bible, despite the fact that both men were once followers of Christ.

Much of the writer's characterizations of the Gospels are practically unrecognizable to someone who reads them all the time in many translations and in the Greek original.

Are you familiar with a book, The First Edition of the New Testament, by David Tobisch (Oxford University Press,

2000)?

You might want to read it before accepting the idea that all of the Gospels were written long after 70 AD.

There is at least one manuscript (such as P 46) dated to as early as 85 AD.

[abelisle]

First of all, I do not view myself as an apologist. Since you asked me what I believe and don't believe, I must ask you, "What is the color of water?"

Without faith, for me anyway, all of the Bible would be regarded as pure conjecture, myth and/or theory (using your words). This article makes one think, reflect, study and opens our minds to ideas we would never encounter in Adventist literature. Why do we immediately have to categorize all information as truth or fiction without giving ourselves time to savor the flavor of the piece.

As for me, this article had a tantalizing, tarty flavor, one that will stay with me for awhile while at the same time reminding me of Northrop Frye's wonderful books: The Great Code and Words with Power, both being studies of The Bible and Literaure from the viewpoint of archetypal criticism.

Are you afraid to at least give some consideration to the idea that maybe, just maybe you/we/me don't have it all right? At least now, some of us can get a look at what others think outside of our Adventist ghetto mindset. (I apologize to any who find disfavor with my use of "ghetto")

Brace yourself like a man;

I will question you,

and you shall answer me Job 38:3

Sometimes we don't like the answers or there is no answer but at least keep an open mind

Alex

[wayfinder]

Why, why do I believe in God, why do I seek to know God, am I running around in circles in an effort to convince myself that I have traveled far in my journey to find that illusive destination known as truth? Does God exist and if He does exist, what are His expectations, if any. What are my expectations of God, if I believe He does exist?

Here is my answer to myself. The weight of evidence is important, if it is too ridiculous to be true, it more than likely is false. If eyewitness testimony is different than the testimony of someone who never witnessed what they are telling, than the eyewitness testimony is valid and the other is discredited.

There is a war being fought here on earth. This war is not one fought with guns, bombs and chemicals. The two sides of this war are truth and lies, the righteous and the unrighteous. Is God involved in this war or not? If not than we might as well come to our senses and get real. If God is involved, and I have no doubt that He is, than we need to come to our senses and get real. Interesting, either way, we need to come to our senses and get real. How do we get real? We must discover that which is real/true and that which is not real/lies. The first step in this process is to be completely honest with our self. First step on this road to honesty is to qualify our sources. The first and most important of our sources is the Bible. Is the Bible completely reliable as the words of God, this means from cover to cover. The honest and truthful answer to our self has to be no. The next question than is, does the Bible contain the words of God, the answer is, yes. What we must do now is to determine which words are God's words and which are not. This is done by comparing the words of the eyewitnesses to those who were not, but claimed to be receiving information from God/Spirit of God.

There is a difference between being ignorant and being foolish. The ignorant live by faith, the foolish ridicule faith, but neither the ignorant nor the foolish know the truth. I am not saying that the ignorant or foolish are dumb/stupid, but that neither group has found the truth. The ignorant have faith that they will be saved in their ignorance, because they are ignorant. If we ask questions and look for answers, we are neither ignorant or foolish, we are students seeking knowledge. With our belief in God we learn from our Teacher, the Spirit of Truth. In order to find the truth we must stop going around in circles and start our journey on a new path, the path of truth, but we can only do that if we are completely honest with our self. Jesus did not leave us without a Teacher.

John 14:16 "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever ;

17 that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.

18 "I will not leave you as orphans ; I will come to you.

19 "After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also.

20 "In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.

21 "He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him."

22 Judas (not Iscariot ) said to Him, "Lord, what then has happened that You are going to disclose Yourself to us and not to the world ?"

23 Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word ; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.

[John317]

Quote:

abelisle: First of all, I do not view myself as an apologist. Since you asked me what I believe and don't believe, I must ask you, "What is the color of water?"

Sure, I understand, but I'm not expecting or asking you to be an apologist-- just asking you what you believe.

If I post parts of Nietzsche's books, wouldn't you be interested in what my thoughts are about them?

If you were to ask, I would have no hesitation in expressing my views of them.

Quote:

abelisle: Without faith, for me anyway, all of the Bible would be regarded as pure conjecture, myth and/or theory (using your words).

You're right that faith is necessary to be able to see how the various parts of the Bible fit together. But I'd be interested in knowing why you believe the Bible is true and reliable. The reason I ask is that if you adopt the viewpoint of the essay you posted, you would look upon the Bible just like you would any other piece of ancient literature.

In the final analysis, what makes the difference between the Bible and any other book found among the Great Books of the Western World? Is there any essential difference?

Quote:

abelisle: This article makes one think, reflect, study and opens our minds to ideas we would never encounter in Adventist literature.

That would only be true if a person wasn't already familiar with essays of that kind.

I spent most of my life outside the church and many years with a foot in the church but my other leg and most of my body, including my heart and mind, outside of it.

I intentionally got away from those ideas and am glad that we don't see them in our church publications.

The only Adventist literature I read are histories, biographies, and books on doctrine, in addition to the writings of Ellen White. But I'm not a regular reader of the church's magazines or journals.

Two of my main interests are the beliefs of other Christian denominations as well as non-Christian religions.

My primary objection to the essay is that it doesn't give a balanced view of biblical criticism. It only tells us what a certain segment of the scholarly world thinks, but negelcts to say that many equally good scholars have come to vastly different conclusions. Examples are liberal NT scholar, John A.T. Robinson, and David Trobisch (The First Edition of the New Testament, Oxford University Press, 2000), and a host of other excellent biblical scholars. I noticed an insignifant mention of Paul Johnson, who recently wrote a biography of Jesus. For a review of his book, see http://calitreview.com/8307

On John A.T. Robinson, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._T._Robinson

About Robinson, the wikipedia article says,

Quote:

Concluding his research, he wrote in his work, Redating the New Testament, that past scholarship was based on a "tyranny of unexamined assumptions" and an "almost willful blindness".

Robinson concluded that much of the New Testament was written before AD 64, partly based on his judgement that there is little textual evidence that the New Testament reflects knowledge of the Temple's AD 70 destruction. In relation to the four gospels' dates of authorship, Robinson placed Matthew at 40 to after 60, Mark at about 45 to 60, Luke at before 57 to after 60, and John at from 40 to after 65. Robinson also argued that the letter of James was penned by a brother of Jesus Christ within twenty years of Jesus’ death, that Paul authored all the books that bear his name, and that the apostle John wrote the fourth Gospel. Robinson also opined that due to his investigations, a rewriting of many theologies of the New Testament was in order.

Quote:

abelisle: Why do we immediately have to categorize all information as truth or fiction without giving ourselves time to savor the flavor of the piece.

I enjoy reading all kinds of books and essays, but once I've savored them, I think it's important to consider whether I believe them or not, and why.

Quote:

abelisle: As for me, this article had a tantalizing, tarty flavor, one that will stay with me for awhile while at the same time reminding me of Northrop Frye's wonderful books: The Great Code and Words with Power, both being studies of The Bible and Literaure from the viewpoint of archetypal criticism.

I do have Fry's book, The Great Code, although I haven't read it yet. Your mention of him in this context makes me want to read it. I remember reading some very good selections of Fry's work for classes in Literary Criticism and Western Rhetorical Theory. I'm especially interested in Fry's criticism of William Blake.

Could you tell something of how this essay reminds you of Northrop Fry's books?

Quote:

abelisle: Are you afraid to at least give some consideration to the idea that maybe, just maybe you/we/me don't have it all right?

Nobody has it ALL right. But there are some things that we can be sure of. If we don't believe we can ever know the truth, then truth becomes like the rabbit forever just a few feet ahead of the greyhounds. I believe what the NT says, that Jesus is the Truth, and it's by knowing Him that we know God.

Quote:

abelisle: At least now, some of us can get a look at what others think outside of our Adventist ghetto mindset. (I apologize to any who find disfavor with my use of "ghetto")

I do agree that it's good to think outside "our Adventist ghetto mindset," but this essay merely replaces one ghetto mindset for another, representive of Paul Verhoeven, Bart Ehrman (a self-proclaimed agnostic), William Empson, Philip Pullman, and Richard Dawkins (a self-proclaimed atheist who opposes Christianity). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

Here are some examples of their conclusions:

Quote:

The Jesus Seminar is a group of about 150 individuals,.... The seminar's reconstruction of the historical Jesus portrays him as an itinerant Hellenistic Jewish sage who did not die as a substitute for sinners nor rise from the dead, but preached a "social gospel" in startling parables and aphorisms.

...The seminar treats the gospels as historical artifacts, representing not only some of Jesus' actual words and deeds but also the inventions and elaborations of the early Christian community and of the gospel authors. The fellows placed the burden of proof on those who advocate any passage's historicity. Unconcerned with canonical boundaries, they asserted that the Gospel of Thomas may have more authentic material than the Gospel of John.

...Rather than revealing an apocalyptic eschatology, which instructs his disciples to prepare for the end of the world, the fellows argue that the authentic words of Jesus indicate that he preached a sapiential eschatology, which encourages all of God's children to repair the world. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar

Most non-Adventist Christians don't believe those things any more than Adventists do. The essay, then, is essentially representative of Jesus Seminar, which chews up the Gospels and spits them out for us in little bits and pieces.

[abelisle]

John,

I'm glad to see I got your undivided attention and you are well read, I must say. Most of what you've said I agree with but I see my function as a forum member is to expose the readers to more secular literature to provide a peek into what "others" see and think when it comes to religious matters.

I daresay that only a handful of CA members read "The New Yorker" or any other journals of higher criticism.I quoted this article as an effort to encourage an expansion of intellectual awareness for my fellow members. It is for them to read, think and make up their own minds as to what they believe or don't believe. Even EGW mentioned the importance of our educational systems to teach students to "think for themselves." A well read person has more choices and a wider spectrum of knowledge to help them see wider perspectives of things secular and religious.

As for Frye's book piquing my interest, it would behoove me to use his own words rather than mine: "Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within, a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means that our imaginations may recognize elements of it, when presented in art or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we recognize. Practically all that we can see of this body of concern is socially conditioned and culturally inherited. Below the cultural inheritance there must be a common psychological inheritance, otherwise forms of culture and imagination outside our own traditions would not be intelligible to us. But I doubt if we can reach this common inheritance directly, by-pasing the distinctive qualities in our specific culture. One of the practical functions of criticism, by which I mean the the conscious organizing of a cultural tradition, is, I think, to make us more aware of our mythological conditioning. . . .The Bible is clearly a major element in our own imaginative tradition, whatever we may think we believe about it."

So, to respond to your question about how the Bible is different from other Western literature, I would say it is the largest repository and most influential of the collective archetypal consciousness of Western man. One needs to know not only what they believe but just how does it work in the inspiration of our spiritual consciousness. Frye provides us with useful tools for this exploratory process.

Incidentally, I find that the essentially negative biases we see in the authors mentioned in the article is probably a result of personal de-conditioning where the critic forces themself to remove preconceived social, cultural and religious ideas in the way they examine a meta-narrative such as the Bible. It's not easy to question one's own cherished beliefs. For many , this very idea opens the door to a dark and mysterious place - a place of uncertainty, possibly without hope, a God who reigns without "benign indifference" as Camus stated in his novel The Stranger

Let each one decide for themself. The ultimate choice(s) are ours to make and ours to live with in terms of their consequences.

Alex

[cardw]

This is one of the most compelling examples of what the author quoted at the beginning of this thread was talking about in terms of the Greek influence on the gospels. The following example really indicates that John was written from a Greek perspective and John the apostle is unlikely to be the author. It also has some implications around the stories being made up from existing wisdom myths.

In John 3 we have Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the night in which Jesus says the following in verse 3...

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

In Greek this sets up a play on words. The word again in Greek can mean two things. It can mean again as in going back through the womb and be literally born again or it can mean above or in English born from above.

To use this aspect of the Greek word the writer of John has Nicodemus making the mistake of thinking Jesus meant born again from the womb. Nicodemus says...

"How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"

This allows Jesus to impart a wisdom or metaphorical meaning by correcting Nicodemus. Jesus then says in the King James...

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." In the NIV you will see a note at the bottom that tells us that "of water and of the Spirit" can be translated as above.

Now this is a very clever story that works in Greek. The fact is Jesus didn't speak Greek, but spoke Aramaic. The word in Aramaic doesn't have the same double meaning. This would indicate that this event never happened because Jesus couldn't have had this conversation in Aramaic.

This story involves a significant understanding of being born again and because of the ignorance of the writer of John we have this inconsistency.

Now it may be argued that this doesn't change the overall message of Jesus, but this isn't the point. The point is that the Bible contains the same typical mythical elements that many other wisdom writings do. The difference is that because most Western cultures have been dominated by a Biblical world view, most Christians don't question talking snakes, raising from the dead, and other rather fantastic claims when they are in the Bible.

No matter what the message, it is quite evident that the Bible is a human creation.

[John317]

Quote:

cardw:"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." In the NIV you will see a note at the bottom that tells us that "of water and of the Spirit" can be translated as above.

Could you explain this? There is no doubt about the correctness of the translation of the words in v. 5, "of the water and of the Spirit" [Gk ek hydatos kai pneumatos].

I see no note in any of my editions of the NIV about these words.

The main notes in the NIV refer to vv. 3, 7, having to do with "above" or "again."

[John317]

Quote:

cardw: This is one of the most compelling examples of what the author quoted at the beginning of this thread was talking about in terms of the Greek influence on the gospels. The following example really indicates that John was written from a Greek perspective and John the apostle is unlikely to be the author. It also has some implications around the stories being made up from existing wisdom myths.

There are other ways of explaining the use of the Greek in John 3 than the way you've done it.

I'll get back with you about this.

The Gospel of John, unlike that of Luke, shows evidence of not having been written by a native speaker of the Greek language. The writer also shows a knowledge of Jewish life and of the Palestinian region far better than we could assume a non-Jew would. It contains indications that it was written by an eyewitness. Early Christian writers say that John wrote the Gospel, and all other evidence agrees.

And so

[John317]

[cardw]

Quote:

cardw:"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." In the NIV you will see a note at the bottom that tells us that "of water and of the Spirit" can be translated as above.

Could you explain this? There is no doubt about the correctness of the translation of the words in v. 5, "of the water and of the Spirit" [Gk ek hydatos kai pneumatos].

I see no note in any of my editions of the NIV about these words.

The main notes in the NIV refer to vv. 3, 7, having to do with "above" or "again."

It's not about the doubt in the translation, it's about the play on words. I have the Greek lexicon linked in the colored words so you can see it in the actual Greek. The word "again" is translated as the word "above" a number of times in other verses.

Here is the Online NIV. Note the footnote at the bottom.

John 3 in NIV

[wayfinder]

The Spirit is from above (heavens). When we are born of the Spirit we are born from above and enter the kingdom of the heavens. The Spirit is the Mother(the Woman of Revelation 12) of the righteous brothers and sisters of Jesus. The offspring (those born from above)are described in verse 17(Keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus) the testimony of Jesus is truth.

John 18:37 NAS

Therefore Pilate said to Him, "So You are a king ?" Jesus answered, "You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice."

[cardw]

The Spirit is from above (heavens). When we are born of the Spirit we are born from above and enter the kingdom of the heavens. The Spirit is the Mother(the Woman of Revelation 12) of the righteous brothers and sisters of Jesus. The offspring (those born from above)are described in verse 17(Keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus) the testimony of Jesus is truth.

John 18:37 NAS

Therefore Pilate said to Him, "So You are a king ?" Jesus answered, "You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice."

I am clear on this. The point of my post is that Jesus could not have had this conversation in Aramaic since there is no play on words in Aramaic. Nicodemus was a famous person in the ancient world and it would be in the interest of the early Christians to establish a connection with Jesus and place Jesus in a superior position and get an endorsement from a respected figure in the ancient world.

[wayfinder]

John 7:45 The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, and they said to them, "Why did you not bring Him?"

46 The officers answered, "Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks."

47 The Pharisees then answered them, "You have not also been led astray, have you?

48 "No one of the rulers or Pharisees has believed in Him, has he?

49 "But this crowd which does not know the Law is accursed."

50 Nicodemus (he who came to Him before, being one of them) said to them,

51 "Our Law does not judge a man unless it first hears from him and knows what he is doing, does it?"

52 They answered him, "You are not also from Galilee, are you? Search, and see that no prophet arises out of Galilee."

John 19:39 Nicodemus, who had first come to Him by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds weight.

40 So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen wrappings with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.

I don't want to guess as to wheither there is a play on words or not. John here describes Nicodemus as having believed and is proactive in his involvement with the "Galilean". John may have written his gospel in Greek to give it "academic credentials". We see this same characteristic in Revelation and his three Epistles.

[John317]

Quote:

cardw:"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." In the NIV you will see a note at the bottom that tells us that "of water and of the Spirit" can be translated as above.

Quote:

John317: Could you explain this? There is no doubt about the correctness of the translation of the words in v. 5, "of the water and of the Spirit" [Gk ek hydatos kai pneumatos].

I see no note in any of my editions of the NIV about these words.

The main notes in the NIV refer to vv. 3, 7, having to do with "above" or "again."

Quote:

cardw: It's not about the doubt in the translation, it's about the play on words. I have the Greek lexicon linked in the colored words so you can see it in the actual Greek. The word "again" is translated as the word "above" a number of times in other verses.

Here is the Online NIV. Note the footnote at the bottom.

John 3 in NIV

You are right, of course, about the play on words in verses 3 and 7, but the words "of the water and the Spirit" have nothing to do with that. Those words are in v. 5.

I wasn't sure why you said that the words "of the water and the Spirit" could be translated differently. The footnotes in the NIV aren't about the words, "of the water and the Spirit."

I know the words "of the water and the Spirit" aren't the main point you are making, but I'm just trying to understand what you are saying about those words in v. 5.

By the way, that's a great website source you referenced. It has all of the most important printed Greek texts and even parses the Greek words for you.

[John317]

Quote:

cardw: The point of my post is that Jesus could not have had this conversation in Aramaic since there is no play on words in Aramaic.

Quote:

Nicodemus was a famous person in the ancient world and it would be in the interest of the early Christians to establish a connection with Jesus and place Jesus in a superior position and get an endorsement from a respected figure in the ancient world.

Can you show some evidence of this? Start with your evidence that Nicodemus was a famous person in the ancient world. What was he famous for, and during what years?

It's true that he was a highly respected Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin and probably a wealthy man as well.

Your argument presupposes that the person who wrote the Gospel was lying. At the very least, on this view, the writer had specific ulterior motives for deliberately making up fiction and passing it off as the truth. I find that hard to believe for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that the Gospel is about the God-Man and His heavenly Father who requires honesty and integrity.

Another problem is that when people start making up lies, the news gets around and this puts kind of a damper on the lies. I'm sure that in this case, Nicodemus would have denied it if it was all a lie; or at least those who knew him would have passed the word that Nicodemus never had any such conversation with anyone. Notice that no one in those times said that Christ never existed or that he didn't die as people reported or that they knew where his body was. Even the worst enemies of Christianity aknowledged that he had lived and that he had been crucified, and they didn't say they had proof he didn't rise. They claimed they couldn't find the body because his followers stole it and hid it somewhere.

Finally, all of the disciples except for John the Beloved died a martyrs death, proving that they believed what they were teaching. No one is going to die as a martyr when they don't have to if they know everything they're saying is fiction. Preaching the gospel in those times was not an advantage but was actually unhealthy and dangerous. People suffered immensely for believing and teaching those things. People still do.

[cardw]

Quote:

cardw: The point of my post is that Jesus could not have had this conversation in Aramaic since there is no play on words in Aramaic.

Quote:

Nicodemus was a famous person in the ancient world and it would be in the interest of the early Christians to establish a connection with Jesus and place Jesus in a superior position and get an endorsement from a respected figure in the ancient world.

Can you show some evidence of this? Start with your evidence that Nicodemus was a famous person in the ancient world. What was he famous for, and during what years?

[cardw]

I don't want to guess as to wheither there is a play on words or not. John here describes Nicodemus as having believed and is proactive in his involvement with the "Galilean". John may have written his gospel in Greek to give it "academic credentials". We see this same characteristic in Revelation and his three Epistles.

It is highly unlikely that John would have written anything in Greek, let alone obtain the ability to write in academic Greek as a fisherman.

[cardw]

Quote:

cardw:"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." In the NIV you will see a note at the bottom that tells us that "of water and of the Spirit" can be translated as above.

Quote:

John317: Could you explain this? There is no doubt about the correctness of the translation of the words in v. 5, "of the water and of the Spirit" [Gk ek hydatos kai pneumatos].

I see no note in any of my editions of the NIV about these words.

The main notes in the NIV refer to vv. 3, 7, having to do with "above" or "again."

Quote:

cardw: It's not about the doubt in the translation, it's about the play on words. I have the Greek lexicon linked in the colored words so you can see it in the actual Greek. The word "again" is translated as the word "above" a number of times in other verses.

Here is the Online NIV. Note the footnote at the bottom.

John 3 in NIV

You are right, of course, about the play on words in verses 3 and 7, but the words "of the water and the Spirit" have nothing to do with that. Those words are in v. 5.

I wasn't sure why you said that the words "of the water and the Spirit" could be translated differently. The footnotes in the NIV aren't about the words, "of the water and the Spirit."

I know the words "of the water and the Spirit" aren't the main point you are making, but I'm just trying to understand what you are saying about those words in v. 5.

Poor communication skills. I could have worded it much better.

[John317]

Quote:

John317: Finally, all of the disciples except for John the Beloved died a martyrs death, proving that they believed what they were teaching. No one is going to die as a martyr when they don't have to if they know everything they're saying is fiction. Preaching the gospel in those times was not an advantage but was actually unhealthy and dangerous. People suffered immensely for believing and teaching those things. People still do.

Quote:

cardw: This has no logical connection at all. People die for all kinds of lies. Otherwise you would have to consider that radical Islam must be true because of all the people willing to die for it.

Yes, the Muslims do die for lies-- but the critical point is they beleive those lies.

What you seem to be asking us to believe is that the people who made up the lies about Jesus being raised died willingly and even happlily for those lies.

You say that maybe they weren't aware they were writing lies but they may have thought they were hearing it from a spirit, etc. So you are saying that this great book, the New Testament, was written because of things different people thought they were hearing in their heads. Wouldn't that be very remarkable-- especially if in fact they were not hearing any such voices in their heads?

But what "spirit" would that be? Do you believe it was just their own imaginations? Where did they get this story and these words that have so captivated the world? Remember that the Bible was written over hundreds of years and by many people who never even knew each other. The OT and the NT fit like a hand in a glove. I find it incredible to believe that this just happened by coincidence.

Do you expect people to believe that the NT, and particularly the Gospels, just arose out of someone's imagination without any basis in fact or history?

To me it requires greater "faith" (and of a blind kind) to believe that explanation than it would to believe the NT just as it reads.

[John317]

Quote:

cardw: Poor communication skills. I could have worded it much better.

Oh ok. No problem. I just wanted to make sure I understood you.

As for the word-play, I got too busy doing other things today so I didn't talk about those words in John 3: 3, 7. It's something I'll do Friday-- I mean after I get a few hours sleep.

[cardw]

Quote:

John317: Finally, all of the disciples except for John the Beloved died a martyrs death, proving that they believed what they were teaching. No one is going to die as a martyr when they don't have to if they know everything they're saying is fiction. Preaching the gospel in those times was not an advantage but was actually unhealthy and dangerous. People suffered immensely for believing and teaching those things. People still do.

Quote:

cardw: This has no logical connection at all. People die for all kinds of lies. Otherwise you would have to consider that radical Islam must be true because of all the people willing to die for it.

Yes, the Muslims do die for lies-- but the critical point is they beleive those lies.

What you seem to be asking us to believe is that the people who made up the lies about Jesus being raised died willingly and even happlily for those lies.

[John317]

Quote:

John317: Finally, all of the disciples except for John the Beloved died a martyrs death, proving that they believed what they were teaching. No one is going to die as a martyr when they don't have to if they know everything they're saying is fiction. Preaching the gospel in those times was not an advantage but was actually unhealthy and dangerous. People suffered immensely for believing and teaching those things. People still do.

Quote:

cardw: This has no logical connection at all. People die for all kinds of lies. Otherwise you would have to consider that radical Islam must be true because of all the people willing to die for it.

Quote:

JOHN3:17: Yes, the Muslims do die for lies-- but the critical point is they beleive those lies.

What you seem to be asking us to believe is that the people who made up the lies about Jesus being raised died willingly and even happlily for those lies.

Quote:

cardw: The ancient world combined different religious beliefs all the time to reconcile different belief systems. In the Pagan world there tended to be a belief in everyone's gods and different aspects of these gods would be combined freely to create a better understanding of the great unknown god. This would not be seen as lying but in our terms would be myth building. Truth, in the platonic sense, was by inspiration because it was seen as a higher truth. It was truth that provided meaning and this was seen as more important than factual truth.

What is your strongest proof that this explains the Gospels or the NT? Can you make a direct connection between the NT and the theory you're proposing?

You're talking about the pagan world, but the world of the NT was not pagan. It was opposed to pagan beliefs and pagan gods.

You say that the people who wrote the Gospels did not see falsehood as lying but rather as "myth-building." How can you show this to be true? Aren't there many places throughout the entire Bible, including the Gospels, which condemn lying and telling falsehood? Are you saying very ones who wrote it didn't know the difference? Why then do they say things such as Luke 1: 1-4; John 20: 30, 31; 21: 24-25; Gal. 1: 20; Rev. 22: 15?

The above are just a few of the verses that show both the writers and the readers knew the difference between lying and telling the truth. Luke said he did research in order to be able to assure his readers of the accuracy of what he was telling them. Paul tells his readers that he is not lying but telling the truth. Jesus talks about the absolute centrality of truth (as opposed to lies). And the last book of the NT says that those who tell lies will be outside the kingdom of God.

Notice that both the Old and New Testaments are based on historical events. That is extremely important. The writers are meticulous in their details of what took place within history, not in the imagination. This is one way that the Bible is totally different from the scriptures of the other religions, such as those of Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. They could care less about history. For the writers of the Bible, history is the foundation of everything important.

[Jeannieb43]

I've been reading the New Yorker for many years, and have an ongoing subscription. I read this article "What Did Jesus Do?" from my hard copy before I even saw you had reprinted it here.

First of all, Adam Gopnik is not a Biblical scholar. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, on numerous topics. I even bought one of his books a few years ago, entitled Paris to the Max, or something like that, in which he wrote about his experiences of living in Paris for a few years.

Reading this recent article by Gopnik merely made me realize what flimsy fabrications can be strung together when the author is not really a Biblical scholar. He's obviously writing this merely on a few sources -- and I couldn't agree with his interpretations of the Greek, or with his allegation that the Disciples probably weren't educated men and would not even have been able to read the language in which these gospels were written. In other words, I would not go to the New Yorker for Biblical criticism. Or to Adam Gopnik. I don't think this is representative of the best of Biblical interpretation extant today.

To tell the truth, aside from the classic cartoons, the things I like best about the New Yorker are the editorials by Hendrik Hertzberg. He has a good "take" on what's happening in today's world.

Something like Adam Gopnik's article piques my interest, but only in passing. I wouldn't use it as a yardstick by which to measure Biblical scholarship.

[cardw]

Quote:

What is your strongest proof that this explains the Gospels or the NT? Can you make a direct connection between the NT and the theory you're proposing?

The miracle stories. You are completely willing to accept that Jesus did all these miracles when we see no evidence that anyone can do any of these things today. We also know that other ancient teachers and god men were given powers to heal the sick and performed signs and wonders.

This is typical myth building to shore up claims of Jesus being divine. We see this in the ancient world all over the place. It doesn't matter if the Bible claims these to be true or if it claims that these things were historical or if this was unique.

And the fact that the NT has to point out that the gospels aren't cleverly designed fables is indicative that many suspected that they were. Unfortunately Christianity did a systematic destruction of any literature that would be critical of Christianity or indicate that previous myths existed before Christianity around many aspects of the life of Jesus.

I did a blog review of D.M. Murdock's book on the similarities between Egyptian mythology, sun worship, and Christianity. She clearly outlines this point in the book "Christ in Egypt: The Hours-Jesus Connection."

We find a number of Church fathers dealing with the similarities of Jesus to other pagan god men. And we even have a church father calling Jesus the SUN god. You can read this in my blog at

Review of the Horus-Jesus Connection

One simply has to point out the large group of people calling themselves Mormon to demonstrate the insidious nature of mythology and the large groups of people willing to believe it. Even though there is no genetic evidence of Middle Eastern DNA in the American Indian population Mormons continue to insist that they are descendants of a lost 13th tribe of Israel. They consider the book of Mormon to be historical and factual and yet you would never accept their claims of truth around the Book of Mormon.

Christianity is simply given a free pass on the issue of evidence and all kinds of ridiculous claims are sustained by odd tangential arguments that would never be acceptable in any other kind of pursuit of truth.