EDITOR'S NOTE: This post from Fr. Dwight Longenecker is in response to atheist Bob Seidensticker's post yesterday titled 10 Reasons to Just Say Nay to the Naysayer Hypothesis.

 
Atheist Bob Seidensticker has a quip at the bottom of yesterday's blog post which reads, “If a million people say a foolish thing it is still a foolish thing.” I couldn’t agree more, and we should remember this as we read the rest of his post. His basic argument is this:
 

“Apologists tell us that the gospels were written at a time when many disciples—the eyewitnesses—were still alive. If they heard an inaccurate story, they’d say, “I was there, and that’s not the way it happened!” They’d shut it down. An incorrect version of the story would not have survived.”

 
Bob then goes on to give ten reasons why there were no such naysayers. I’m not going to respond to the reasons one by one. Instead I’ll deal with the basic false assumptions, rooted in some very elementary ignorance of the facts of New Testament scholarship, historical scholarship, and what actually happened. Of course, if false, these assumptions make his conclusions irrelevant.

In his second point, Bob asserts this:
 

“We imagine a handful of naysayers who know that the Jesus story is only a legend, but that was in the year 30. Now the first gospel is written and it’s roughly forty years later—how many are still alive? Conditions were harsh at that time, and people died young. Many from our little band of naysayers have died or been imprisoned by this point.”

 
It sounds kind of plausible, but this isn’t how it happened. The gospels didn’t suddenly appear in written form after 70 AD in order to be dissected by naysayers. The gospels emerged from the preaching of the apostles which had been going on since the day of Pentecost fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The gospels aren’t some kind of four part historical biography of Jesus written by some smart guy forty years after the event. They are unique documents which emerged from the experience of the apostles and the early Church. Therefore we don’t ask if there were any naysayers around to disprove the gospels from 70 AD onward. We ask whether there were any naysayers around when the gospel was hot and fresh when the apostles were preaching—first in Jerusalem and then around the Empire.

Furthermore, Bob doesn’t understand the true dating of the gospels. He repeats the tired old idea that they must date from after 70 AD. The only reason for this dating is the modernist scholar's assumption that Jesus could not have prophesied the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, which happened in 70 AD. Why? Simply because prophecies of the future are impossible. Why? Because they say so.

In fact, we have another historically verified date which enables us to date the gospels. It is the deaths of Peter and Paul in 65 AD under the persecution of Nero. Their deaths are not recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, which is surprising since the Acts of the Apostles is all about their ministry. Their martyr’s deaths would surely have been recorded if they had taken place.

The Acts of the Apostles is acknowledged by most scholars as a reliable historical record. Furthermore, it is the second volume by the same author—the first volume being the gospel according to Luke. If the Acts of the Apostles dates from before 65 AD, then the Gospel of Luke must be earlier than that. In addition, most scholars argue that Luke was influenced by Mark’s gospel. This means that the earliest gospels were probably written between 50 AD and 65 AD (some scholars place them even earlier.)

All of Bob’s other arguments about the reasons why there were no naysayers after 70 AD are irrelevant for two reasons: firstly the gospels did not just arrive in the bookstores in 70 AD. Secondly, and most importantly, Bob misunderstands the whole naysayer argument. He spends a long time telling us why there were no naysayers, but that’s not the question in the first place.

To pick up on his first point:
 

"Apologists tell us that the gospels were written at a time when many disciples—the eyewitnesses—were still alive."

 
No we don't. We say the gospel stories were told in the apostolic preaching at a time when many eyewitnesses were still alive. Furthermore, we’re saying that there were naysayers, but that their arguments didn’t hold up. Let’s look at the facts: when the gospel was hot and fresh in Jerusalem in the days after the Resurrection there were plenty of people there who knew Jesus, knew what had happened, and were ready to dispute with the disciples. In fact, in the Gospels we discover naysayers. The Jewish leaders said the disciples stole Jesus’ body (Matthew 28:11-15). Other naysayers heartily denied that Jesus was the Son of God. They said Jesus' miracles were produced by the devil. (Notice, though, that they didn't dispute that he did miracles...) In fact the naysayers were so vehement in their naysaying that they persecuted the Christians. Saul—later St. Paul—was one of their number. There were indeed plenty of naysayers in Jerusalem at the time when many witnesses to the events were present.

Our point is not that there were no naysayers but that there were plenty and that they still couldn’t disprove what the apostles were saying. In those early days in Jerusalem, then in Antioch, then in the communities dispersed first by the Jewish persecution, and then by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, there were plenty of Jews who knew what had happened.

However many didn’t believe the Pharisees’ take on it. They believed the apostles. That’s why the Christian church grew as it did—because the apostolic witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was convincing and life changing.

In the end, an argument trying to explain why there were no naysayers to the gospel is like a conspiracy theorist trying to explain why there are no lunar landing deniers working at NASA. You may come up with ten astounding reasons why there are no lunar landing deniers at NASA, but it might just be because there was a lunar landing and the people at NASA—along with most other people—accept the simple facts of what really happened.
 
 
(Image credit: National Geographic)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today we share our first atheist guest post. It's from Bob Seidensticker who writes for the Patheos Atheist Channel at Cross Examined. Be sure to read Fr. Dwight Longenecker's reply: No Naysayers at NASA: Responding to Bob Seidensticker.

 
Apologists tell us that the gospels were written at a time when many disciples—the eyewitnesses—were still alive. If they heard an inaccurate story, they’d say, “I was there, and that’s not the way it happened!” They’d shut it down. An incorrect version of the story would not have survived.

Let’s consider this alternative world, where those in the inner circle tried to snuff out any false statements about Jesus. It quickly falls apart under examination. Here are ten reasons why I say nay to this Naysayer Hypothesis.

1. There would have been few potential naysayers. True, the gospel story reports thousands witnessing the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but these wouldn’t be naysayers. A naysayer must have been a close companion of Jesus to witness him not doing every miracle recorded in the Gospels. He would need to know that Jesus didn’t walk on water and didn’t raise Lazarus. A proper naysayer must have been one of Jesus’s close companions during his entire ministry, and there would likely have been just a few dozen.

2. We imagine a handful of naysayers who know that the Jesus story is only a legend, but that was in the year 30. Now the first gospel is written and it’s roughly forty years later—how many are still alive? Conditions were harsh at that time, and people died young. Many from our little band of naysayers have died or been imprisoned by this point.

3. A naysayer must be in the right location to complain. Suppose he lived in Jerusalem, and say that the book of Mark was written in Alexandria, Egypt, which historians say is one possibility. How will our naysayer correct its errors? Sure, Mark will be copied and spread, but there’s little time before our 60- or 70-year-old witnesses die. Even if we imagine our tiny band dedicating their lives to stamping out this false story—and why would they?—believers are starting brush fires of Christian belief all over the Eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Damascus to Corinth to Rome. How can we expect our naysayers to snuff them all out?

4. They wouldn’t know about it. Two thousand years ago you couldn’t walk down to the corner bookstore to find the latest Jesus gospel. How were our naysayers to learn of the story? Written documents at that time were scarce and precious things. The naysayers would be Jews who didn’t convert to Christianity. They wouldn’t have associated much with the new Christians and so would have been unlikely to come across the Jesus story.

5. There was another gulf between the naysayers and the early Christians: the Gospels were written in Greek, not the local language of Aramaic spoken by Jesus and the naysayers. To even learn of the Jesus story in this community, our naysayers must speak Greek, which is hard to imagine among the typical peasant followers of Jesus. How many could have done this? And to influence the Greek-speaking readers of the Gospels, a rebuttal would have to have been written in Greek—not a common skill in Palestine.

6. Imagine a naysayer knew the actual Jesus and knew that he was merely a charismatic rabbi. Nothing supernatural. Now he hears the story of Jesus the Son of Man, the man of miracles, the healer of lepers and raiser of the dead. Why connect the two? “Jesus” was a common name (or Joshua or Yeshua or whatever his name really was), and supernatural claims were common at the time. His friend Jesus didn’t do anything like this, so the story he heard must be of a different person. So even when confronted with the false teaching, he wouldn’t know to raise an alarm.

7. Consider how hard is it today for a politician, celebrity, or business leader to stop a false rumor, even with the many ways to get the word out. Think about how hard it would have been in first-century Palestine. How many thousands of Christians were out there spreading the word for every naysayer with his finger in the dike? Given the sensational story (“Jesus was a miracle worker who can save you from your sins!”) and the mundane one (“Nah—he’s just a guy that I hung around with when I was growing up”), which has more traction?

8. Jesus himself couldn’t rein in rumors. He repeatedly tells those around him to not tell anyone about his miracles, and yet we read about both the miracles and Jesus’s fruitless plea. If he can’t stop rumors, why imagine that mortals can?

Or consider Joseph Smith. Here was a man convicted of the very occult practices that he then tells about in the Book of Mormon. Should’ve been easy to pull aside the curtain on this “religion,” right? Nope.

Look at Scientologists, cults, or any of the divisions of Christianity, both major (Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses) and minor (thousands of nondenominational churches and sects). Apparently, new religions start quite easily. The incredulous, “But what else could explain the New Testament but that the writers were telling the truth?!” doesn’t hold up when we see how easy it is.

9. One way to stop the gospel story would be naysayers, but a far better way would be to show the story as false. And the gospels themselves document that it was.

Jesus said that the end would come within the lifetime of many within his hearing. It didn’t (indeed, that this was going to be a longer process than initially thought was a reason that the oral history was finally written down, decades after the events). With the central prediction crumbling, what more proof do you need that this religion was false? And yet the religion kept on going. Obviously, religion can grow in the face of evidence to the contrary.

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

This argument is popular but empty. Don’t use it.
 

"If a million people say a foolish thing,
it’s still a foolish thing."

 
 
Originally published at Cross Examined. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Awesome Stories)