A couple weeks ago, we launched an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Dr. Brant Pitre, who is one of today's premier Catholic biblical scholars. His latest book, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Random House, 2016) seeks to debunk skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels put forward today by scholars such as Bart Ehrman.

Hundred of questions poured in and Brant answered as many as he could, sometimes grouping them together where the topics overlapped. Today we share his responses. Enjoy!
 

The Literacy of the Evangelists

Mike: Where/how did the gospel writers learn to write in Greek when they apparently spoke Aramaic and weren't educated men?

Brant Pitre: Great question! First, although a hundred years ago it was widely assumed that all first-century Palestinian Jews spoke only Aramaic, more recent scholarship has shown that the the linguistic situation in first-century Palestine was (at least) trilingual: there is evidence of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic being spoken (see e.g., Stanley Porter).

Second, as Richard Bauckham and other scholars have pointed out, although four of the apostles were “uneducated” fishermen (cf. Acts 4:13), at least one of the apostles was literate: Matthew, the tax-collector, who would have had to be able write tax-documents, probably in both Aramaic and Greek (cf. Matt 9:9; 10:3).

Moreover, from a historical perspective, the illiteracy of the Twelve apostles is largely irrelevant, since of course two of the four Gospels—Mark and Luke—are not even attributed to apostles, but to followers of Peter and Paul. There is certainly no reason to doubt that Luke or Mark could speak and write in Greek, and external evidence as early as Papias of Hierapolis (who knew the apostles personally) is clear that Mark acted as Peter’s scribe or interpreter while he was in Rome.

What about the apostle John? I see no reason to doubt that John was in fact “illiterate” (Acts 4:13). However, after decades of evangelization in Greek cities of Asia Minor, even if John couldn’t write in Greek himself, he could easily have ‘composed’ his gospel by dictating it to a secretary (or ‘amanuensis’) as even literate writers such as Paul, Cicero, and Titus Caesar (!) were known to have done (cf. Rom 16:22; Suetonius, Divus Titus 3.2). In fact, some ancient external evidence claims John’s Gospel was in fact dictated. For more on this, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 1-3.

Eyewitnesses to Jesus? The Memories of Jesus’ Students

Jim Jones: Name one person who met Jesus, spoke to him, saw him, or heard him and who wrote about the event, has a name, and is documented outside of the Bible (or any other gospels).

Brant Pitre: I’ll name two: (1) Matthaios, commonly known as “Matthew,” who was a Jewish tax-collector in Galilee who became one of Jesus’ mathetai or “students,” (commonly known as “disciples”) and was chosen by Jesus as one of the Twelve apostles (see Matt 9:9; 10:1-3); and (2) Iōannēs, commonly known as “John,” who was a Galilean fisherman who also became one of Jesus’ students and was a member of the Twelve (Mark 3:16-19; 14:17-25). According to the unanimous internal evidence of all extant ancient Greek manuscripts (e.g., Papyrus 4, 64, 66, 75, Codex Sinaticius, Vaticanus, etc.) as well as the unanimous external evidence of ancient writers outside the Bible (e.g., Papias of Hierapolis, Irenaeus of Lyons, Muratorian Canon, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, etc.), two of the four gospels were authored by Matthew and John (although Greek Matthew was universally regarded as a translation of a Semitic original).

In fact, the Gospel of John itself explicitly states that it was “written” by the Beloved Disciple, an eyewitness to Jesus who was present at the crucifixion (John 21:20-24, cf. 19:35). As Jesus’ Jewish students, Matthew and John not only would have “met Jesus, spoke to him, saw him and heard him,” they would have lived with Jesus for up to three years, traveling with him everywhere and listening to him teach on a daily basis.

It’s not only Christian sources that attribute the Gospels to eyewitnesses. Even Celsus, the famous 2^nd century pagan apologist and critic of Christianity, could not deny the fact that the Gospels were written by “Jesus’ own pupils and hearers” who left behind “their reminiscences of Jesus in writing” (Origen, Contra Celsus 2.13). Now, one can of course claim that the disciples were liars—and Celsus did—but there is not a shred of text-critical evidence that the Gospels were ever anonymous and no positive historical evidence attributing them to anyone but the apostles and their companions. For more on this topic, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 2-4.

Are the Gospels Biographies?

Jim: To my understanding, there is now reasonable scholarly consensus that the Gospels are best understood as belonging to the genre of bioi or Graeco-Roman biography. First of all, do you agree that this is a correct and useful classification? If so, what are some of the most noteworthy differences between that genre and the genre of modern historical biography? In particular, what liberties might we reasonably expect authors of bioi to take that a modern biographer would not, and what are some of the literary devices might we expect authors of bioi to use that modern biographers would not?

Brant Pitre: Yes, you are right about the scholarly consensus that the Gospels are ancient biographies or “lives” (Greek bioi), especially since the work of the British scholar Richard Burridge’s ground-breaking book, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography (2004). And yes, I think this consensus is correct. With that said, there are some important differences between modern biographies and ancient forms of biography like the gospels, or Plutarch’s or Suetonius’ “lives,” that we should keep in mind:

1. Order: ancient biographies don’t have to be in strict chronological order, but can be more thematically arranged;
2. Length: ancient biographies are often fairly brief, averaging between 10,000 and 20,000 words;
3. Selectivity: ancient biographies often emphasize that they aren’t telling you everything about their subject (see e.g., John 21:25; Lucian Life of Demonax, 67; Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 1.1). They tend to selective rather than comprehensive.
4. Exactitude: ancient biographers are not purporting to give verbatim “transcripts” of what a person has said or done, but rather the “general sense” of what was “really said” (cf. Thucydides, History, 1.22.1)
5. Supernaturalism: ancient biographers—in contrast to modern naturalistic historiography—had no qualms about recording purportedly supernatural events in the life of the subject (e.g., the miracles of Jesus).

Finally, it’s important to remember that just because the Gospels are biographies does not mean that they are verbatim “transcripts” of what Jesus did and said. For more on the Gospels as biographies, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 6.

Fact, Symbolism, and Allegory?

VicqRuiz: Dr. Pitre, upon reading the Biblical account of an event, how to you determine whether it is (1) a factual account of something that happened in history as described, (2) a retelling of an actual event perhaps containing some symbolic or allegorical elements, or (3) a purely allegorical story designed only to explain a deeper truth?

Brant Pitre: The first and most important task in this regard is to establish the literary genre of a book. This means asking questions like: What kind of book is this? What are the closest ancient parallels in form and contents? What kind of book did ancient people think this was? And what did the ancient author think he or she was writing? What are the author’s intentions and the audiences’ expectations? Is the author intending to record a historical event? Or is the author intending to compose poetry, allegory, prophecy, parable, or midrash, etc.?

As I try to show in The Case for Jesus, a close comparison with ancient Greco-Roman biography shows that the literary genre of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is closest to ancient biographies (see above). To be sure, the gospels contain micro-genres such as parables, allegories, hyperbole, etc. For example, the parable of the Sower is clearly presented as an allegory which needs to be explained by Jesus to the disciples (Mark 4:1-20). But the macro-genre of the Gospels is closest to biography.

Moreover, I also show that the Gospels are not just any kind of biographies, but historical biographies, in which an ancient author shows an express concern for historical truth: as Josephus puts it in his biography of himself: “veracity” is “incumbent upon the historian” (Josephus, Life, 336-39). In other words, whether or not you believe their claims, the evangelists intend to relate accounts of actual events and even explicitly claim to be recording what Jesus actually “did” and said, based on the “testimony” of “eyewitnesses (Greek autoptai) from the beginning” (see Luke 1:1-4; John 19:35; 21:24-25). They do not see themselves as composing“folklore” or “myths” (Greek mythos) (cf. 1 Tim 3:4; 2 Pet 1:16). This just isn’t the right genre.

This does not of course mean that the gospels are “verbatim transcripts” of Jesus’ teachings, nor do they claim to be. But again, according to ancient standards, history should adhere “as closely as possible” to the “general sense” of what was “really said” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.1). For more on this, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 6.

What about “Q” and the Order of the Gospels?

Bdlaacmm: Dr. Pitre, Does it matter which Gospel was written first? I often hear people say such-and-such a Gospel was the first written and therefore the "most reliable" (which in itself is kind of interesting, since no one today thinks a book written about WWII in 1946 is for that reason more reliable than one written in, say, 1985 - in fact, usually it's the reverse). The downside of such thinking is that anything in the other three Gospels is then downplayed or even "suspect". At this point, is it even possible to determine the order of composition?

Arthur Jeffries: What is your view on the existence of "Q"? Mark Goodacre, Michael Goulder, and other scholars have argued against its existence, mostly in academic papers (though several books have also been written). However, the consensus seemingly remains unchanged.

Brant Pitre: For well over a decade, I was a diehard “Q believer.” My first book on Jesus was even written using Q as a working hypothesis. Then I read Mark Goodacre’s 2002 book The Case against Q, and it changed my mind. I for one am troubled by the fact that Q only exists in the imagination of scholars; no manuscript has ever been found, and no ancient Christian ever refers to such a book. Even more importantly, as Goodacre shows, there is compelling evidence that Luke both knew and used Matthew’s Gospel, and if that is the case, then the need for Q simply vanishes.

With that said, over the years, as I have continued to study the Synoptic Problem, I have frankly become more cautious and agnostic about ever unraveling the precise literary relationship between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I agree with what the great scholar Joseph Fitzmyer stated some decades ago: the Synoptic Problem is “practically insoluble.” We simply may not have enough data to solve the complex question of literary order and relationship.

In any case, from the perspective of the quest for the historical Jesus, it’s important to remember that the literary question of the relationship between the Gospels (who copied from whom?) is just not as important as the historical question of authorship (who wrote the gospels?) and date (when were they written? within the lifetime of Jesus’ disciples?)

Think about it: if Mark is actually based on the eyewitness testimony of Peter, for basic historical questions, does it really matter who copied from whom? And if Matthew is really written by one of the apostles, for basic historical questions, does it really matter if he copied from Mark? And by the way—as I show in the book—the old argument that an eyewitness like Matthew would never use a non-eyewitness like Mark as a source is bogus. We have evidence of exactly that taking place amongst students of Socrates (cf. Hermogenes, Plato, and Xenophon).

In sum, all of the actual historical evidence we possess points to the Gospels being first-century biographies written within the living memory of the events by apostles and their followers. That is what matters most for those of us interested in the historical quest for Jesus. For more on Q, the Synoptic Problem, and the first-century dating of the Gospels, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 7.

Did Jesus Fulfill the Jewish Prophecies?

David Nickol: Did Jesus fulfill the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah? If the answer in Dr. Pitre's book is "yes," what are the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah that Jesus fulfilled? Also, what does it mean to "fulfill" a prophecy? Perhaps a better question would be, "What was predicted or foretold in the Old Testament about Jesus?" Or were the "prophecies" outside (and after) the Old Testament? (The word Messiah is not found in the Old Testament.)

GuineaPigDan: I guess I'll give one a shot. How come prophecies of Jesus weren't more specific, like just plainly saying "your Messiah will be Yeshua, born around 4BC and is also the 2nd Person of the Trinity and will be crucified, resurrected and end sacrifices." Having the Jews develop one idea of the Messiah but then suddenly told, "Psych! This other person was the Messiah" is a bit like reading a mystery novel where the reader didn't get a chance to guess the ending on their own.

Brant Pitre: These are both great questions. A whole book could be written on Jesus and Jewish prophecy; for now, just a couple of quick points.

First, David, I’m sorry to say that someone has misinformed you about the word “messiah” (Hebrew mashiach). This word is used dozens of times in the Old Testament—usually as a title for the “anointed” king (for example, see 1 Sam 2:10, 16:6; Ps 2:2; 89:39). Moreover, it actually occurs in the most explicit prophecy about the coming death of a future “messiah” (Hebrew mashiach) that we possess (Daniel 9:25-27).

And intriguingly—to answer your question, GuineaPigDan—this prophecy in Daniel 9 not only proclaims that the messiah will one day come and be killed, it actually foretells when this will take place: namely, some 490 years after the “going forth of the word” to restore and rebuild the Jerusalem Temple and before a final future destruction of the “sanctuary” and the city, in which “sacrifice and offering” will “cease” (Daniel 9:25-27). (Note the reference to the future ‘end’ of ‘sacrifice’ you mentioned.)

Indeed, as the first-century historian Josephus tells us, that is one reason the book of Daniel was so popular among first-century Jews, because Daniel gave a timeline for the fulfillment of his prophecies (Josephus, Ant. 10.267-68). A solid case then can be made that Daniel’s prophecies were expected by ancient Jews to be fulfilled sometime in the first century A.D.

Second, the book of Daniel wasn’t just a favorite among many ancient Jews; it seems to have been one of Jesus’ favorites as well. If you read the Synoptic Gospels carefully, you will see that Jesus’ two most frequently used expressions are (1) “the kingdom of God” and (2) “the Son of man.” Where does he get these expressions? Above all, from the book of Daniel’s oracles about the future coming of the “kingdom” of “God” (Daniel 2) and the coming of the heavenly “Son of man” (Daniel 7). Significantly, the earliest first-century Jewish interpretations of Daniels’ “Son of man” identify him as the Messiah (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra). Once this is clear, Jesus' use of this expression to refer to himself becomes even more striking, since our earliest Jewish interpreters of Daniel also identified the fourth kingdom with the Roman empire. In other words, according to Daniel 2 and 7, the kingdom of God and the messianic Son of Man were expected to come not just ‘one day’ but sometime during the reign of the Roman empire.

So, GuineaPigDan, some prophecies are more vague, but some prophecies are quite specific—and it’s precisely these prophecies from the book of Daniel that Jesus chooses to refer to himself and to the kingdom he is bringing.

These aren’t, of course, the only kinds of “prophecies” Jesus sets out to fulfill. Jesus also engages in prophetic signs and actions that hearken back to the Old Testament, in which he ‘reenacts’ certain events from Jewish Scripture like the divine revelation of the name “I am” to Moses (see Mark 6) or the Cry of Dereliction from Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (see Mark 15), but reconfigures them around himself. This kind of fulfillment is more commonly referred to as typology or recapitulation.

There’s so much more to say. Put it this way: pretty much the entire second half of my book is devoted to examining Jesus, Jewish prophecy, and biblical typology. After reading, I don't think you’ll walk away thinking that “the Jews” had “one idea of the Messiah” and that Jesus had another. Check it out for yourself and see what you think of the evidence. See The Case for Jesus, chapters 8, 9, 11-12.

Was Jesus Wrong about the “End of the World”?

LanDroid: Huston Smith, in his classic book The World's Religions, wrote, "We know almost nothing about (Jesus); and of the little we know, what is most certain is that he was wrong—this last referred to his putative belief that the world would quickly come to an end." There are several passages where Jesus warns that some in his audience would see the kingdom of God in their lifetime. What are we to make of these incorrect predictions 2,000+ years later?

Brant Pitre: Important question, LanDroid. First, although I don’t go into this particular issue in The Case for Jesus, I’ve written a whole book on the Olivet Discourse (2005) and a lengthy article on Jesus’ prophecies of the destruction of Temple and the end of the world for the new Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (eds. Joel B. Green et al., IVP Academic, 2014, pp. 23-33). In that piece, I show that Jesus can’t have been “wrong” about the end of the world, since he expressly states that although “heaven and earth will pass away,” “not even the Son” knows “the day or the hour” (Mark 13:32).

Second, I find it fascinating that your question assumes that “the kingdom of God” is identical to the “end of the world.” What makes you think that? As I show in The Case for Jesus, when Jesus speaks about the Son of man and the kingdom of God, he is principally alluding to the book of Daniel, in which the “kingdom of God” does not refer to the “end of the world,” but the coming of a heavenly kingdom which will arrive sometime during the Roman empire, begin small like a little “stone”, and then spread throughout the world to become a great “mountain” (Daniel 2). In Daniel, the kingdom of God is a mysterious kingdom that has its origins in heaven but spreads throughout the whole world on earth while being ruled from heaven by the mysterious “Son of man.” This future kingdom will be ruled over by the heavenly being who is “like a Son of man” (Daniel 7) and who was identified as the “Messiah” by first century Jews (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra).

In other words, far from showing that Jesus was “wrong” about the coming of the kingdom of God, I try to show that his prediction that the kingdom would come within the lifetime of his disciples is in fact precisely what happened. But people often misunderstand what the kingdom is. Albert Schweitzer’s great mistake was to collapse the kingdom of God and the “end of the world” into one as if they were two ways of talking about the same thing. See The Case for Jesus, chapter 8.

The Divinity of Jesus

Jason Sylly Crabtree: I'm an atheist. I believe Jesus existed, but what real support is there to the claim of his divinity (inside, and especially outside the Bible)?

Brant Pitre: This question is really at the heart of my new book. There’s no way to do it justice here. But I’ll say this: You’re probably familiar with the now common idea that Jesus only claims to be divine in the (later) Gospel of John, but not in the (earlier) Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I spend three chapters in the book showing that Jesus does claim to be divine in the Synoptic Gospels, but he does it in a very Jewish way: using riddles, parables, and, most of all, allusions to the Jewish Scriptures to both conceal his divine identity from his opponents and reveal it to his companions and those who “have the ears to hear.” I look at six or seven episodes, but here I’ll just pick one: in Mark 14, Jesus is handed over by the Sanhedrin to the Romans to be crucified under the charge of “blasphemy.” Now, despite what many Christians assume, it wasn’t blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah. How else would you know who the king was? But it was blasphemy to claim to be divine.

And so the question is this: If Jesus isn’t claiming to be divine, then why is he charged with blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity? Far from not claiming to be divine in the Synoptic Gospels, the climax of these Gospels is precisely the explosive divine claims of Jesus and his subsequent execution. In other words, to answer your question: ‘What real support is there for the divinity of Jesus?’ There are four first-century biographies agreeing that Jesus speaks and acts as if he were divine and that he was in fact charged with blasphemy because of who he claimed to be.

What about the Resurrection?

Ignatius Reilly: The only evidence we have that [Jesus' resurrection] is historical in Mark is that a few women found an empty tomb. Maybe it was the wrong one. We also have the fact that nobody expected Jesus to rise, even though Jesus supposedly kept telling them his plan. The suggestion that the disciples did not understand Jesus when he told them about his resurrection seems like a way of covering over an inconvenient historical fact.

Rick Bateman: Why did the disciples/apostles wait until after Jesus had ascended to heaven to start preaching that he had risen? Wouldn’t it have been far more effective to start preaching while he was still around? For that matter, why didn’t Jesus continue preaching while he was still around (to anyone but the disciples)? For that matter, why did Jesus leave at all? Doesn’t it seem just a little convenient, not unlike the kind of explanations they might’ve come up with later if he hadn’t really come back to life at all?

Brant Pitre: These are great questions, and I can’t do them justice here. But I think they’re related, so I’ll try to make a couple of quick points to consider.

First, Ignatius, it’s simply not true that the “only evidence” for the resurrection we possess is the empty tomb in Mark. The empty tomb is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the early Christian belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (since, obviously, tombs can get emptied in lots of ways besides resurrection.) As I noted above in the question on the literary genre and authorship of the Gospels, we have four first-century biographies of Jesus—attributed either to the apostles or their followers—that testify that (1) Jesus died and was buried, (2) the tomb was empty on Easter Sunday, (3) Jesus appeared on multiple occasions in his body to his disciples (including Matthew and John, to whom two of the four Gospels are attributed (see Matt 28; Mark 16:1-9; Luke 24; John 20-21).

Now, you can say that they’re all lying (as you suggest they may be), but you can’t claim we don’t have any evidence. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that all four authors are ‘covering up an inconvenient fact’, but it also possible (and I would argue much more plausible) that the disciples of Jesus really didn’t understand (or believe) what Jesus meant when he said he would die and rise again. After all, as dense as the disciples sometimes were, even they knew that ordinarily, dead people stay dead.

Second, Rick, the question of why Jesus doesn’t have the apostles start preaching before he ascends seems to be answered in the Gospels of Luke and John, which not only depict the apostles as too afraid for their own skins to go out and preach, but in which Jesus also spends those 40 days instructing the disciples about the mysteries of the kingdom and preparing them to be his “witnesses” (John 20; Luke 4).

Likewise, the question of why Jesus left all is a great question. It revolves very clearly about the meaning of the Ascension. Unfortunately, I don’t get into the Ascension much in the book. From one angle, it does indeed seem ‘convenient’ as you put it, if your goal is to cover up the fact that Jesus’ corpse was really mouldering somewhere in a tomb and never really raised. (So I ask you what I asked Ignatius: Do you think all four biographies of Jesus—including the two attributed to eyewitnesses—are deliberately deceiving their readers? If so, what’s your evidence?)

On the other hand, I would suggest that you consider the possibility that Jesus ascends into heaven precisely to fulfill the prophecy of Daniel, in which the “Son of man” ascends to the Ancient of Days to take his seat on a heavenly throne (contrary to what many assume, as James Dunn points out, the “Son of man” in Daniel 7 is ‘ascending’, not ‘descending’). It is, after all, the kingdom of “heaven.” But this doesn’t mean that Jesus ‘leaves’ (as you put it). Indeed, the whole account of the Road to Emmaus shows that the risen Jesus remains with his disciples in “the breaking of the bread.” (For more on this, see my 2011 book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.)

In the final analysis, it seems clear that throughout his public ministry and into his resurrection and beyond, Jesus does not go around shoving the mystery of his identity down people’s throats. To the contrary, he invites people to answer the question for themselves: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29). In other words, he respects the freedom of his disciples and he wants them to trust him. In other words, he is not only giving motives of credibility (miracles, teaching, resurrection, etc.) for believing him (cf. John 10:38), he ultimately wants to call people to trust him, even when they can’t fully comprehend everything he says and does. This, of course, is what Christianity has traditionally referred to as “faith,” and this kind of trust is an essential part of any healthy relationship, including (and perhaps especially) a relationship with God. For more on the resurrection, history and faith, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 12-13.

In a few days, Dr. Brant Pitre, one of today's premier Catholic biblical scholars, will release a new book titled The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Random House, 2016). It seeks to debunk many skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels put forward today by scholars such as Bart Ehrman.

Here's a brief summary:

For well over a hundred years now, many scholars have questioned the historical truth of the Gospels, claiming that they were originally anonymous. Others have even argued that Jesus of Nazareth did not think he was God and never claimed to be divine.

In The Case for Jesus, Dr. Brant Pitre, the bestselling author of Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, goes back to the sources—the biblical and historical evidence for Christ—in order to answer several key questions, including:
 

• Were the four Gospels really anonymous?
• Are the Gospels folklore? Or are they biographies?
• Were the four Gospels written too late to be reliable?
• What about the so-called “Lost Gospels,” such as “Q” and the Gospel of Thomas?
• Did Jesus claim to be God?
• Is Jesus divine in all four Gospels? Or only in John?
• Did Jesus fulfill the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah?
• Why was Jesus crucified?
• What is the evidence for the Resurrection?

As The Case for Jesus will show, recent discoveries in New Testament scholarship, as well as neglected evidence from ancient manuscripts and the early church fathers, together have the potential to pull the rug out from under a century of skepticism toward the traditional Gospels. Above all, Pitre shows how the divine claims of Jesus of Nazareth can only be understood by putting them in their ancient Jewish context.

Since these are all questions we discuss and debate regularly here on Strange Notions, I reached out to Brant and asked if he'd be willing to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on our site, answering whatever questions we threw at him. Thankfully, he accepted!

He's particularly interested in hearing from skeptics and atheists. So whether you doubt Jesus was a real historical person, or that the New Testament offers reliable testimony, or whether the earliest Christians really believed that Jesus rose from the dead, we want to hear from you!

What question would you ask a Catholic Biblical scholar?

What makes you most skeptical about Jesus or the Bible? What's that query you've posed to Christians and never received a good answer?

Again, we're particular interested in questions from skeptics or atheists, but everyone is welcome to submit questions. And they don't have to be challenges or "gotcha" questions. We're interested in plain old curiosity questions, too.

(It should go without saying, but if your question is disrespectful or snarky, it won't be chosen.)

Just type your question below in the comment box, and over the next few days we'll select a handful. Brant will then share his answers here within the next 1-2 weeks. Thanks!

What do atheist skeptics and liberal Scripture scholars have in common? They both love to find alleged “contradictions” in Scripture. Though there are many of these alleged “contradictions,” one of the favorites of both of these camps is one that you can expect to find being re-hashed again and again on the Internet:—especially now that we are approaching Christmas—the “contradictions” found in what are commonly referred to as “the infancy narratives” of St. Matthew and St. Luke.

The late Fr. Raymond Brown, S.S., for example, who definitely made positive contributions to biblical study in the Church, also made some not-so-good contributions. In his book, The Birth of the Messiah, p. 46, for example, he flatly declares the two infancy narratives “are contrary to each other.”

Oy vey!

So What Gives?

The two “infancy narratives” are found in Luke 2:1-39 and Matthew 1:18-2:23. We’ll use St. Luke’s account as our beginning point of reference and from there we’ll move forward inserting the alleged “contradictions” as we go.

I’ll give you a very important pointer here at the outset for clarity’s sake: keep your eyes on the words I put in bold print as I lay out the narrative for St. Matthew and St. Luke's Gospels. These are the problem areas. And also keep in mind that these problems are not created by the texts of Scripture. They are created in the imaginations of those creating the so-called “contradictions.” Here we go:

According to St. Luke’s account, Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of the census called for by Caesar Augustus. It would be there that Mary “gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger…” (2:1-7) Are we good, so far?

Well, maybe not!

According to St. Matthew’s Gospel, there is no account of a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. And this is true. But skeptics claim St. Matthew portrays the Holy Family to have been living in Bethlehem, not Nazareth. There would have been no way for there to have even been a journey to Bethlehem if Matthew’s scenario were true. The Holy Family was already there!

Moreover, Jesus is not found in St. Luke’s “manger,” but Matthew 2:11 says the Wise Men found him in a “house” in Bethlehem where the Holy Family was not staying in the Inn—or more precisely, the manger attached to an Inn—that we find in Luke’s Gospel. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is depicted as being born in the family home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem where they had lived all along, contradicting St. Luke’s account. Herein we find the first of these narratives’ supposed irreconcilable contradictions.

A Biblical Response:

There are two crucial assumptions made here that have nothing to do with the actual text of Scripture.

1. Because there is “no account of a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem” in St. Matthew’s Gospel, this does not mean St. Matthew’s Gospel excludes it as a possibility. It doesn’t. It just means St. Matthew chose not to mention it.

2. And this is the most crucial error that, when understood properly, will end up dispelling most of the misconstrued contradictions we find out and about in cyberspace. The assumption is made that St. Matthew’s recording of the Wise Men following the star leads them to the Holy Family at the time of Jesus’ actual birth, and in Bethlehem. But the text does not actually say this.

Let me explain.

First, let’s look at Matthew 2:1:

"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, Wise Men from the East came to Jerusalem…"

Critics nearly unanimously interpret this to mean that St. Matthew is claiming the Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem at the time Christ was born. The truth is: it doesn’t say that. It simply says Christ was born during the days of King Herod and that the Wise Men came in those days to see—as they themselves asked upon their arrival in Jerusalem—where they could find “he who has been born king of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2).Matthew 2:1-2 does not specify how much time had transpired since the actual birth of Jesus.

However, having said that, though Matthew 2:1-2 doesn’t specify the time of Christ’s birth, we do have clues elsewhere that indicate the Wise Men did not arrive at the time Christ was actually born; rather, one to as much as two years later.

Little Drummer Boy History

I know what you’re thinking. Or, at least, what you should be thinking. I love “The Little Drummer Boy,” too! (Yes, that was said “tongue and cheek,” folks!) My family and I watch it every year at Christmas! And multiple times (we have the DVD).

(It's great having young children in the house. It gives me an excuse to watch all those kid-oriented Christmas specials!)

But unfortunately, “The Little Drummer Boy,” as well as a whole slew of atheists and liberal theologians, has his (and their) time-line all wrong here. Perhaps there is a lesson here about getting one’s theology, or history, through children’s Claymation television shows?

At any rate, the Nativity is commonly portrayed with Magi, Shepherds, and yes, maybe even the little drummer boy, all together at the manger with the Holy Family and the new-born baby Jesus. But that is not the way the Bible portrays it.

First of all, when the Magi “saw his star” in the East that indicated the birth of the “king of the Jews,” it was only then that they began their journey to Israel, according to Matthew 2:2. And remember, this was before you could jump on a commuter jet. Coming from Persia, most likely, they would have had to travel around 970 miles to get to Jerusalem. At least, that’s the distance from modern Tehran, anyway. Even if you move eastward as far as modern Bagdad as their starting point, they would have still had to travel at least 500 miles.

Why is this significant?

Matthew 2:3-7 tells us that after the Wise Men arrived in Jerusalem and began asking about the location of  “he who has been born king of the Jews” (notice, they did not say “new-born king” as many assume, they said, “he who has been born king of the Jews…”), Herod was troubled, for obvious reasons. He was corrupt and didn’t want another “king” to threaten his position of power. So, after “assembling all of the chief priests, and scribes” (v. 4), and asking them where the Messiah was to be born, they informed him of Micah’s prophecy (Micah 5:2) that foretold Bethlehem as the birthplace of the coming king. Herod then decided to pretend he was interested in welcoming, and worshipping, this new “king of Israel” just as the Magi were. He really wanted to find out precisely where this king was located, so he could eliminate the threat… permanently.

But notice what Matthew 2:7 says:

"Then Herod summoned the Wise Men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star appeared, and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.”"

Herod wanted to know “when the star appeared” so he could know the approximate age of the child. This indicates that the star appeared to the Magi when Jesus was born, before their journey to Israel. This eliminates the possibility of the Magi meeting the shepherds and the Holy Family at the manger.

Moreover, after God warned the Magi “not to return to Herod” in Matthew 2:12, and Herod later realizes they were not coming back to give him his desired information about the location of Jesus, in 2:16, “in a rage” he determined to “kill all of the children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Wise Men" (emphasis added).

Thus, if we allow for Herod hedging his bet to make sure he kills the right child, the information he garnered from the Magi would probably have placed the birth of Christ at about a year or so before the Magi’s arrival. Herod would probably want a cushion on each side of the approximate time of Christ’s birth.

Most importantly, this would indicate Christ would have been 1 to at most 2 years-old (though I would again say it would be unlikely Christ would have been a full two years-old) at the time the Wise Men arrived in Jerusalem to find the Christ-child. This would have been 1 to 2 years after the nativity of St. Luke’s Gospel.

Many will say at this point that a journey of 500 to 1,000 miles would not take that long. If you say the caravan of the Wise Men could travel about 5 to 10 miles per day, it would have taken anywhere from two to seven months of travel. This is true, but this does not take into account many variables. You didn’t just jump into a car or airplane and go. It would have taken time to plan the trip, gather supplies, security, etc. These and more contingencies are simply not revealed to us in the text. But we do get hints here about what Herod concluded from his personal interview of the Magi themselves. The text of Scripture indicates it was the Magi that revealed the time of Christ's birth to have been long before the Magi's arrival in Nazareth.

Check Your Assumptions at the Door

Once we get the above timeline right, the “contradictions” between “infancy narratives” are not so contradictory any longer. We are not going to get to all of the “contradictions” claimed, but as one other example, the claim is also made that when the Wise Men were sent to Bethlehem by Herod, then that would naturally have been where they ended up finding the Holy Family when they arrive at the place “where the child was” in Matthew 2:9. This is the foundation for the “contradiction” between St. Luke’s “manger” and St. Matthew’s “house,” and more. The problem is: the text doesn’t say the Wise Men actually found the Christ-child in Bethlehem. This is another non-biblical assumption.

In fact, Matthew 2:9 tells us that after Herod ordered the Magi to go to Bethlehem, it would be the miraculous star that would actually guide them to Christ. The text doesn’t explicitly say this, but we can reasonably assume the star would not lead them to the wrong location! If the Wise Men would have then headed to Bethlehem, the Holy Family would have been long gone. The star would have led them to Nazareth, where, St. Luke tells us, in 2:39, “[the Holy Family] returned,” but only after “they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord.”

Back to St. Luke’s Gospel

It is crucial to understand that other than the mention of Christ’s actual birth in Matthew 2:1, there is no overlap with Luke’s infancy narrative and Matthew’s. Here’s a time-line:

Matthew 2:1 mentions Christ’s actual birth in Bethlehem. This sole overlap parallels Luke 2:6-7.

But because we know St. Matthew’s Gospel then leaps forward to the story of the Magi, one to at most two years after Christ’s birth, the story of the shepherd and the angels finding Christ in Bethlehem in Luke 2:8-20, the circumcision of Christ while the Holy Family was still in Bethlehem in Luke 2:21, the “Presentation of the Lord” in the temple of Luke 2:22-36 (a six-mile trip that would take the better part of a day to walk), and the “return to Nazareth” of Luke 2:39, all happen within about 40 or so days after Christ’s birth, and long before the Magi arrive at Nazareth in search of the “king of Israel.”

With this in mind, we can now eliminate the above-mentioned “contradictions” quite easily:

1. The “home” in Matthew 2:11 does not conflict with the “manger” in Luke 2:7. The “home” was in Nazareth where the Holy Family had traveled well over a year before the coming of the Magi.

2. Matthew’s Gospel never actually says the “home” mentioned in 2:11 was in Bethlehem.

3. The Wise Men were “sent” to Bethlehem by Herod, but the text never says that is where they ended up. We know, in fact, they would have ended up in Nazareth where Christ actually was, not Bethlehem.

Another Assumption Exploded

As I said above, in this brief post, we are not going to eliminate all of the errors that are out there claiming contradictions between the infancy narratives. In fact, there are some who argue for contradictions even within the narratives themselves. But if you keep in mind the historical timeline laid out here, you can deal with most of the claimed anomalies.

Here is one final example:

Matthew 2:23 tells us the Holy Family never went to live in Nazareth until after the coming of the Magi and the flight into Egypt. It was only then, the text says, “[Joseph and the Holy Family] went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth.” Yet, St. Luke says, it was after the 40 days of purification after the birth of Christ that “[the Holy Family] returned into Galilee, to… Nazareth.”

Actually, Matthew 2:23 does not say the Holy Family “first” went to Nazareth after the flight into Egypt. That is another unbiblical assumption. After being warned by God to flee Herod’s wrath and travel to Egypt in Matthew 2:13-14, and then after being told by an angel of the Lord to return to Israel, in Matthew 2:20, it appears St. Joseph’s desire was to go back to his family’s native Bethlehem in Judea, but because Herod’s son, Archela’us, was reigning there, “he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream” he went to Nazareth instead (Matthew 2:22-23).

We have to remember that the inspired authors place emphases on particular aspects of the life of Christ and the Holy Family for particular theological reasons. St. Matthew is writing to a Jewish Christian community; thus, he emphasizes both Christ’s birth in Bethlehem to fulfill the Old Testament prophecy of Micah 5:2 (Matthew 2:5-6), and the fulfillment of the Oral Tradition, or word “spoken by the prophets,” that Christ would be “called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23). St. Luke, the only inspired Evangelist who was also a Gentile, did not seem as interested in pointing those things out.

For St. Matthew’s purpose, it would not suffice for him to simply mention Jesus' brief sojourn in Bethlehem as an infant and toddler; he had to be raised in Nazareth in order to be “called a Nazarene.” Thus, the emphasis of St. Matthew is on Christ and the Holy Family coming to Nazareth where Christ would be raised in order to fulfill the prophecy “spoken by the prophets” (Matthew 2:23). But he never says this was the “first” time they had been there.

Final Thought

There is much more to be done here—multiple alleged “contradictions” to clear up. But to do that, we must establish a true context for Scripture free from assumptions that don’t jive with the entirety of the text.
 
 
Originally appeared at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

One common argument against the inspiration or even the trustworthiness of the Bible is that it affirms the existence of mythical creatures. For example, atheist Jason Long says, “The cockatrice, unicorn, and dragon, are examples of mythical creatures in the Bible that fail to leave any reliable evidence for their existence.”¹

Do these legendary animals prove the Bible itself is a collection of legends? No, because in most cases the Bible is affirming the existence of real animals. It is only the work of later translators, and not the Bible’s original authors, that refer to these legendary creatures. This is especially prevalent in the King James Version of the Bible (or the KJV) which became popular for skeptics to quote ever since Steve Wells used this translation for his popular Skeptics Annotated Bible.

In this post I’ll examine two animals in the KJV that critics often cite: the unicorn and the cockatrice.

Unicorns

A unicorn is a horse with a long horn that protrudes from its forehead that medieval literature described as possessing medicinal or even magical powers. In the KJV the unicorn is depicted as a symbol of strength and wild power. Numbers 23:22 says, “God brought [the Israelites] out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn.” In Job 39:9-10 God points out Job’s human limits and says, “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?”

The Hebrew word the KJV translates as “unicorn” is re’em, which modern scholars have identified with an auroch, or a large horned cow that is now extinct. The ancient Assyrians also referred to these animals by the similar name rimu.² So how did the Hebrew word re’em become “unicorn” in translations like the KJV?

The translators of the Septuagint, or the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, used the Greek word monoceros (literally “one-horn”) in place of the Hebrew word re’em. In the fifth century St. Jerome translated the Septuagint into the Latin Vulgate and used the Latin equivalent of “monoceros,” or “unicorn.” Eventually, this word became “unicorn” in English.

But why did the Septuagint translators use a word that literally meant “one horn” instead of something like “wild ox? One theory is that the Septuagint translators may have been thinking of another animal besides a wild ox that also fits the description found in passages like Numbers 23:22. The first century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described a real animal from India called a monoceros that,

“has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive.”³

Today, in northern India, there is a very strong animal with feet like an elephant, a large body, and one horn that protrudes from its head. If we allow some leeway in Pliny’s description (which is necessary in ancient descriptions of unique creatures) we can identify this creature with the modern Indian rhinoceros. Indeed, monoceros means in Greek “one horn” and rhinoceros means “nose horn” (or rino ceros). A rhinoceros would make sense of these passages because, unlike unicorns, they are known for being very strong beasts that can’t be domesticated.

Even though a rhinoceros would fit the sense of these passages, in order to remain faithful to the original language, and to avoid confusion with the medieval conception of a unicorn, most modern translations of the Bible render the Hebrew word in these passages as, “wild ox” and not “unicorn” or “one-horn.”

The Cockatrice 

This creature is mentioned several times in the KJV’s translations of the books of the prophets. Jeremiah 8:17 reads, “For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.” Isaiah 11:8 says, “And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.” Long says of this creature, “The prophet Isaiah informs us that a cockatrice, a mythical creature able to kill it’s victim with a casual glance, will arise from a serpent (Isa. 14:29). What tangible evidence do we have to believe that a creature with this incredible ability has ever existed?”⁴

But Long is mistaken in his description because Isaiah never mentions the “cockatrice” nor does he describe this creature as having supernatural powers. Like the King James Bible in whose pages it is found, the cockatrice is a product of medieval European thinking and would have been unknown to prophets like Jeremiah or Isaiah. According to English scholar Laurence Breiener, “The cockatrice, which no one ever saw, was born by accident toward the end of the twelfth century and died in the middle of the seventeenth.”⁵

Although allusions to the creature can be traced back to Pliny the Elder, the dissident Catholic John Wycliffe first used the term “cockatrice” in 1382 in his popular translation of the Bible. It was later used in the 1535 Coverdale Bible, which may have been the source for the KJV’s use of this word.

While Isaiah and Jeremiah would have been unaware of the “cockatrice,” they would have known what a tsepha‘ was. This is the original Hebrew word used in passages like Isaiah 11:8 and it simply means “snake” or “viper.”⁶ Today, most modern translations render passages like Isaiah 11:8 in this way, “the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den [an adder is a kind of venomous snake].”

Check the Original

Remember that the Bible was not written in 17^th century English. It was written in ancient Hebrew (along with some Aramaic and Greek) for the Old Testament and ancient Greek for the New Testament (the Old Testament was later translated into the Greek Septuagint). This refutes objections raised by atheists like David Mills, who says of passages that seem to describe mythical animals, “in the newer, modern-language translations of the Bible, these ridiculous passages of Scripture have been dishonestly excised, rewritten or edited beyond recognition from their original translation in the King James.”⁷

However, Mills is erroneously treating the KJV as if it were the original text of the Bible. The truth is that newer translations of the Bible are better than the KJV because they use earlier manuscripts that better capture the sense of the Bible’s original text. But even these bibles represent the opinions of modern translators. This is why when we confront a scripture passage that is difficult we must examine what the inspired author originally said in Hebrew or Greek. By doing this we sometimes see that the words the original word author used make more sense than what a later translator used instead, especially if the translation is an older one like the KJV.

Excerpted and adapted from Trent's upcoming book These are Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Bible Difficulties (2016).
 
 
(Image credit: RawStory)

American Atheists responded to the Pennsylvania state legislature’s designation of 2012 as “Year of the Bible” with mocking billboards, and a press release insisting that “the House of Representatives should not be celebrating a barbaric and Bronze Age book.” It’s a common argument against the Bible, that it can’t be trusted because it’s a book from the Bronze Age. Over on Twitter, Richard Dawkins extended this argument to attack both the Bible and the Qu’ran.

Bible and Quran were the best that Bronze Age desert tribes could do. But we’ve moved on. And even at the time, others were doing it better.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) May 17, 2015

Factually, the argument is wide of the mark. Despite its name, the Bible isn’t a book, but a collection of books, the majority of which were written several centuries after the Bronze Age. (The New Testament is closer in age to the foundation of the University of Paris in the High Middle Ages than it is to the close of the Bronze Age in c. 1200 B.C.). Historical inaccuracies aside, Dawkins' argument relies upon a sort of genetic fallacy, the assumption that certain beliefs can be proven false simply because they’re old. But this assumption doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We don’t reason, for example, that murder must be okay simply because people have always thought it was wrong.

Furthermore, this Bronze Age argument is circular. It assumes that the Bible is wrong because it was written by ignorant people. But this assumes, in turn, that the human authors of Scripture were limited to the knowledge otherwise attainable at that time and place, the very question in dispute in debating the authenticity of the Bible. In other words, the strength of this argument relies upon a prior assumption that the Bible is wrong – for example, in its claim to divine inspiration – and concluding from this that the Bible is wrong.

Curiously, in characterizing the Scriptural authors as ignorant and uneducated, American Atheists finds an unlikely ally: Saint Luke, the author of the Book of Acts. In Acts 4:13, he says that when the Jewish Temple authorities “saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and they recognized that they had been with Jesus.” Luke doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Peter and John, who together authored seven of the 27 books of the New Testament, were uneducated commoners. But rather than a cause for arrogant dismissal, this should lead us, as it did the Temple authorities, to a state of wonder. If the human authors of Scripture were “Bronze Aged” ignoramuses, how do we account for the credibility of the Apostles’ testimony?

Recall that the Bible isn’t, as American Atheists suggests, a single book. Instead, it’s a collection of centuries worth of religious texts, including centuries worth of Messianic prophecies. This means that, unlike the Qu’ran or the Book of Mormon, the prophecies and the accounts of the fulfillment of these prophecies aren’t coming from the same sources. This makes it all the more remarkable that the life of Jesus Christ so neatly fits the time and place foretold by the Jewish prophets.

For example, the Book of Daniel foretold that “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed” during the fourth kingdom after the then-reigning Babylonians, a timeline corresponding with the Roman Empire. The Book of Micah specifies that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem, and be of the tribe of Judah. The Books of Malachi and Haggai prophesied that the Second Temple of Jerusalem (destroyed in 70 A.D.) would be greater than the First Temple because the Lord Himself would enter it. And Psalm 22 depicted the Messiah as being executed by having his hands and feet pierced, a description eerily reminiscent of Crucifixion, despite having been written several centuries prior to its invention.

Christ meets all of these criteria: no small feat, given that none of these factors involved events within the Apostles’ control. He rose to prominence from a very particular part of the world, within a very particular time frame. A generation after His death, the Second Temple, so central to the Malachi and Haggai prophecies, was permanently destroyed. Nevertheless, these prophecies might serve as a baseline, of sorts. Anyone claiming to be the Messiah would need, at the very least, to meet these criteria. But the Apostolic message is profound, in that it goes beyond claiming that Christ fulfilled these explicit prophecies.

Instead, they view Him as so much more, as the key to revealing the deepest meanings of Scripture as a whole: “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Countless passages which, on face, don’t even appear prophetic are revealed to have a Christological dimension. To take a single example, consider John 19:32-34, “So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.”

In verse 36, John explains that this “fulfilled” the Scripture saying that not one of his bones would be broken. But that doesn’t come from an obvious Messianic prophecy; it comes from the instructions for preparing the Passover Lamb. And the water that streams out alongside the blood isn’t just a sign that Christ’s body has ceased metabolism. It’s a fulfillment of the Temple prophecies in Ezekiel. The last several chapters of the Book of Ezekiel describe a miraculous Temple from the side of which will flow life-giving waters. In John 2:21, John explains that this Temple is Jesus’ Body, and Christ applies the life-giving waters prophecy specifically in John 7:38.

This, in turn, points to the Sacramental theology latent in this passage: the life-giving waters flowing from the side of Christ signify Baptism, just as the blood signifies the Eucharist. These two Mysteries together form the Church, revealing yet another sets of Scriptures which are fulfilled: “As Eve was formed from the sleeping Adam’s side, so the Church was born from the pierced heart of Christ hanging dead on the cross” (CCC 766). In a single event, we see the meanings of several parts of Scripture, from the story of Adam and Eve to the Passover ordinances to the Temple prophecies, revealed in a radical new light as prophetic of the Messiah. Unlike the explicit Messianic prophecies, these weren’t predictions that the Apostles “had” to show as fulfilled in order to present Jesus as the Christ. And yet the Gospels are filled with events like this one, each one chock full of meaning and Scriptural significance.

Now perhaps this could be the work of a literary genius, who found a way to take the whole Jewish religious tradition, set it in the context of a single (real or fictional) human life, and combine the various prophecies and literary elements like so many instruments in an orchestra. But of course, the New Testament is no more the work of a single author than is the Old Testament, and we know from Roman sources like Pliny and Tatian that there were already Christians followers in the 50s and 60s A.D., before most of the New Testament (including the Gospels) was written. So the skeptic is left positing, not a single genius, but a cabal of geniuses, conspiring to craft a false Messianic narrative for reasons not immediately apparent. (This is precisely the direction skeptical Biblical scholarship has gone, creating ever-more complex theories about the textual origins of the Bible,)

But even if you’re willing to accept that sort of theory, it’s squarely contradicted by the charge of Bronze Age barbarism. You can’t simultaneously write off the Scriptural authors as halfwits and as too clever by half. The Bible can be primitive nonsense, or it could be an elaborate fraud, but it can’t very well be both. If Richard Dawkins, the American Atheists, and St. Luke are right that many of the writers of the New Testament were simple, uneducated folk, then it’s hard to explain away the literary genius of the New Testament as anything less than Divine inspiration.
 
 
(Image credit: The Guardian)

A lot of people online are sharing flow charts that are supposed to show the ridiculousness of opposition to gay marriage. For example (click here to expand):

There are several variations of this theme, almost all of which say the same three things: (1) Leviticus forbids homosexuality, but it also bans a bunch of other stuff, and nobody [a.k.a., no Gentile] actually lives by all those rules; (2) Paul seems to forbid homosexuality, but actually means something like temple prostitution; and (3) Jesus doesn’t mention homosexuality. Let’s look at each in turn:

What Does Leviticus Really Say?

Like every other flowchart I’ve seen on this question, the one above conflates three things found in the Book of Leviticus: (1) expressions of the moral law (like the Ten Commandments, or the prohibition against homosexuality and other forms of sexual immorality); (2) temporal punishments; and (3) the so-called ceremonial law (like the laws on keeping kosher).

The moral law, as an expression of what is good and evil, is timeless. Good doesn’t suddenly become evil, or vice versa, because it’s Tuesday, instead of Monday, or because it’s 2015 A.D. and not 2015 B.C.

But the particular statutory punishments *weren’t* timeless: they were quite explicitly the law books of the nation of Israel. These laws can be illuminating, in that they show the severity of certain sins, but the Church never considered Israel’s statutory punishments to be binding on Christians. And the ceremonial laws were a way of setting apart the Jewish people to signal them as chosen and to prepare them for Christ.

This was literally the first major dispute within the Church: the so-called Judaizers tried to enforce the ceremonial provisions of the Law on new converts, and the Church corrected them. Acts 10 is clear that the food laws aren’t still binding on Christians, and Acts 15 distinguishes between which of the Levitical precepts in ch. 17-18 are still binding on the Christians of the first century (and even these restrictions were later loosened).

So the early Christians clearly grasped that adultery was wrong but eating shellfish wasn’t. It’s remarkable that Christianity’s critics don’t realize this. I suspect that this is because the critics of traditional Christianity assume that we’re (a) all believers in sola Scriptura, and (b) senseless, so they seem to be genuinely ignorant that we might actually have an intelligent interpretive hermeneutic for knowing which parts of the Old Covenant are still applicable to the New Covenant.

What Did Paul Really Say?

The idea that Paul doesn’t really condemn homosexual behavior is based on a selective interpretative of two Greek words that he uses in 1 Corinthians 6:9: pornos (πόρνος) and malakos (μαλακός).

Pornos means:

1. a man who prostitutes his body to another’s lust for hire
2. a male prostitute
3. a man who indulges in unlawful sexual intercourse, a fornicator

And malakos:

1. soft, soft to the touch
2. metaph. in a bad sense
   1. effeminate
      1. of a catamite
      2. of a boy kept for homosexual relations with a man
      3. of a male who submits his body to unnatural lewdness
      4. of a male prostitute

So the Greek terms used in Paul’s day weren’t specific to only adult male-male sexual behavior (since a great deal of it was man-boy), but they certainly included those behaviors. But besides this, Paul and several other parts of the New (and Old) Testament condemn fornication. That’s broader still, but it shows that non-marital sex is sinful… regardless of who the parties are. (This raises the question: what sort of sexual unions are marriage-material? We’ll get to that shortly).

Because he rejects homosexual sex, the chart up top angrily writes St. Paul off as a judgmental xenophobe and chauvinist. This is baseless name-calling. Paul is the Apostle to the Gentiles, and he brought people from all sorts of nationalities and religious backgrounds into the Church, and fought hard to prevent them from being discriminated against or treated as second-class Christians.  Xenophobe? This is the same man who wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

But at least the chart is honest enough to admit that if you actually believe Leviticus and/or the writings of St. Paul, you’re not going to end up favoring same-sex marriage. So instead, they’re just going to mock faithful Jews and Christians as xenophobes and sexists… and then call us judgmental.

What Did Jesus Really Say?

There are two important points here. First, trying to pit Jesus against the Bible is a losing game. Since the people who make this argument like flow charts, I’ll lead with one from Adam4d:

But there’s a second problem with this claim. It assumes that the Bible is essentially a rule book full of Thou Shalt Not’s. That misses that both Jesus and St. Paul present a positive view of marriage. That is, Scripture shows us what marriage is, which is why we can also say what it isn’t.

This is important, because as we saw from the attempts to work around St. Paul’s prohibitions, the same-sex marriage side is essentially arguing: “but here’s an arrangement nobody had thought of back then!” With a positive view of what marriage is, we can easily establish whether some new sexual variation is compatible with marriage or not.

As part of a good Facebook thread on this topic, my friend Peter Ascik (a seminarian for the Diocese of Charlotte) explains:

Jesus does indeed comment directly on the nature of marriage in Matthew 19, and he reaffirms that marriage is founded on the sexual difference of man and woman (Matt 19:4-5), which is itself grounded in God’s creation of humanity in his image (Gen 1:27; Gen 2:24). St. Paul reaffirms the foundation of marriage in the doctrine of creation, again grounding it in the sexual difference of man and woman, (Ephesians 5:31-32), and teaches that it is a symbol of Christ’s union with the Church.
 
Jesus and St. Paul explicitly teach a doctrine of marriage that is incompatible with gay marriage. Even if Leviticus and Romans were silent on the subject of homosexual acts, the New Testament teaching that marriage is founded in the creation of male and female would be enough to reject same-sex marriage.

And Princeton’s Prof. Robert George chimed in to point out that this witness to marriage doesn’t start in the New Testament, and isn’t confined to Christianity:

The Biblical witness to marriage as a conjugal relationship first appears in Genesis 2. It is restated in various places, including in the teaching of Jesus. The same basic idea appears in the thought of Greek and Roman thinkers and even some teachers from the Eastern traditions. What, in fact, makes no sense is the idea of non-conjugal marriage–marriage as mere sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership. That explains why it has no patronage in the great faiths or traditions of philosophy.

George’s contribution is also important because it’s a reminder that even though you can’t be an orthodox Christian or Jew and accept gay marriage, you can reject gay marriage for entirely non-religious reasons. All you have to do is understand what marriage is, or understand that men and women are different, and that children deserve a mother and a father. Believing in Scripture will get you to that point, but you can get there apart from Scripture (or faith) as well.

So the gay marriage view that’s supposed to show that we’re a bunch of Biblical hypocrites more accurately shows that the best argument against Jews, Christians, and anyone holding to any of the great philosophical traditions, is just to shout us down, call us nasty names and, where necessary, to use simplistic and deceptive flow charts.

My previous post at Strange Notions underscored the often-unacknowledged philosophical premises at work when believers and non-believers sit down to debate about things biblical. In the course of my argument, I pointed to a possible area of common ground for Catholics and agnostics/atheists. A survey of statements by thinkers as different as Benedict XVI and Bart Ehrman reveals an important agreement upon the reality that everyone carries their own philosophical presuppositions and that a purely objective consideration of Jesus’ miracles is therefore impossible. Today I would like to carry forward this discussion. By way of doing this, I will first briefly summarize Bart Ehrman’s position on Jesus’ divinity and resurrection. Then I will critique what I consider to be an insufficient (but very common) Christian response to the skeptic’s position. Finally, I will dwell upon a couple keys given by C.S. Lewis and Pope Benedict XVI which point out from a Christian perspective the direction a philosophical dialogue about miracles needs to head.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Divinity and the Failure of the “Trilemma” Argument

Ehrman’s position concerning the divinity of Christ can be quickly grasped from his evaluation of C.S. Lewis’ famous “trilemma” argument. According to Lewis, Jesus’ lordship can be shown by reducing to the absurd the possibility that he was either a liar or a lunatic. But in Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman reveals a problem with Lewis’ logic:

"I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God…I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself…not three options but four: liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend."

At the risk of oversimplifying Ehrman’s more lengthy narrative, his position is that Jesus’ disciples began to profess his divinity only after they experienced him as risen from the dead. According to Ehrman’s analysis of the data in How Jesus Became God, the earliest Christian sources (Paul and Mark) do not portray Jesus as divine but rather as an exalted human or an angel. While Jesus certainly existed as a historical person, for Ehrman he is nevertheless a “legend” in that he was not divine as Christians subsequently came to believe.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Resurrection

One of the interesting features of Ehrman’s work is that he affirms at least some direct followers of Jesus sincerely believed their master had been raised from the dead. He suggests that “three or four people—though possibly more—had visions of Jesus sometime after he died.” Ehrman states that the question of whether these putative experiences were veridical (i.e. whether Jesus was really there or whether they were hallucinatory bereavement visions) is beside his point. Rather, the claim he puts forth is the following:

"[A]nyone who was an apocalyptic Jew like Jesus’s closest follower Peter, or Jesus’s own brother James, or his later apostle Paul, who thought that Jesus had come back to life, would naturally interpret it in light of his particular apocalyptic worldview— a worldview that informed everything that he thought about God, humans, the world, the future, and the afterlife. In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom."

In Ehrman’s view, then, it was the disciples’ own apocalyptic worldview (informed by Jesus’ teachings while he was alive) that led them to think of their visions of the crucified Jesus in terms of resurrection.

An Insufficient Christian Response

While the constraints of this post do not permit me to elaborate further on Ehrman’s arguments, it should be noted that they are formidable and cannot simply be written off without a robust response. For instance, I do not find satisfactory the response to this “quadrilemma” (Jesus is either a liar, lunatic, lord, or legend) in Kreeft and Tacelli’s Handbook of Christian Apologetics. With due respect to these thinkers whom I deeply admire (and who have likely provided more solid arguments in other texts outside of the present one), I think their response to the “legend” issue unfortunately evinces a rather common but simplistic understanding of the biblical evidence. The authors state that our extant biblical manuscripts contain “very few discrepancies and no really important ones,” but I think Ehrman’s books Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and Jesus, Interrupted sufficiently disabuse one of the notion that the Gospels only differ in accidentals such as order and number. And Ehrman is by no means the only author who writes about this sort of thing; he is popularizing information that biblical scholars already know.

Moreover,Kreeft and Tacelli argue, “If a mythic ‘layer’ had been added later to an originally merely human Jesus, we should find some evidence, at least indirectly and secondhand, of this earlier layer.” Here I think the authors have an unduly narrow view of “myth,” and moreover I think they fail to anticipate the obvious response of a bible scholar like Ehrman. What might he say? The evidence for this earlier, non-mythical layer is right there in front of us: it is the Gospel of Mark, whom scholars by and large recognize to be the first gospel composed.

Finally, the authors of the Handbook ask who possibly could have invented such a myth about Jesus. I think they are on to something in remarking, “No one invents an elaborate practical joke in order to be crucified, stoned, or beheaded.” Ehrman agrees to some extent with this insofar as he does not seem to think that the disciples maliciously invented the myth of a divine Jesus. (Remember, in Ehrman’s view at least some of the disciples really thought they saw Jesus alive after his death, and it is this that eventually led them to conclude he was divine). The authors fail to envision this sort of counter-argument when they claim, “Whether it was his first disciples or some later generation, no possible motive can account for this invention.” It is indeed difficult for a Christian to imagine someone inventing the notion that Jesus was divine, but is it fair to say that “no possible motive” could account for this? Couldn’t the disciples themselves have been delusional, as Ehrman seems to suggest? Or couldn’t they have been using the “risen” Jesus as a power play for their own (ultimately unsuccessful) personal ambitions? Now as a believer I am certainly not saying that this is what actually happened, but one cannot properly call it an impossible scenario.

Where the Discussion Ought to Head: C.S. Lewis on Miracles

While C.S. Lewis may not have hit a home run with his “trilemma” argument in defense of Christ’s divinity, I think that his book Miracles is invaluable for those who wish to profess the divinity of Jesus in the face of modern biblical criticism. Lewis begins by arguing along the same lines of Benedict XVI and Ehrman as discussed in my previous post. He correctly observes that the real issue at hand is a philosophical one: “The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle; they begin much further back.” For Lewis the miracles question boils down to whether or not the natural world we know is the only reality that exists. Looked at from another angle, this is the same as asking whether or not the supernatural or divine exists. A negative answer to the question of the divine’s existence necessarily entails the conclusion that purported miracles such as Christ’s resurrection cannot be true.

A positive answer, on the other hand, means the following for Lewis: “If we decide that Nature is not the only thing that is, then we cannot say in advance whether she is safe from miracles or not.” In other words, if there exists a Being which/who is not limited by the confines of the natural world but is rather the very ground of this world, then we can never conclusively deny that this Being sometimes acts in a way other than that which we tend to expect based on our observations of nature. Lewis thus proposes that within the universe “there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity.” While Christians often speak of miracles as divine “interventions,” this unfortunately appears to presuppose that God is somehow “absent” from his creation and then “intrudes” upon it to perform a miracle. But in truth, if God exists he is always present to his creation. For Lewis, then, the miracles we take to be “interruptions” of nature’s history are in reality “expressions of the truest and deepest unity in [God’s] total work.”

Even if we personally are not conscious of having experienced the miraculous, Lewis reminds us not to discount the fact that our world is full of stories of people who claim to have experienced miracles. Moreover, even if we were to live an entire millennium our experience would not necessarily inform us whether a given miracle happened. Indeed, Lewis and Ehrman both acknowledge that miracles are by definition improbable. It is always more likely that the witnesses to the alleged miracle are lying or deluded than that the miracle actually occurred. And yet, even as we know fraudulent cases exist, these by no means discredit all such claims regarding the miraculous. On this score I myself tend to be very skeptical when people talk of miraculous healings on the one hand or demonic possessions on the other. But then every once in a while I hear an account of some such phenomenon directly experienced by someone I trust and know not to be psychologically imbalanced. These are the moments that make me reconsider the possibility that maybe such things happen after all even if I (thankfully, in the case of possessions) have never directly experienced them.

At the end of the day, Lewis is right: I would be arguing in a circle if I were to conclude that miracles have not occurred merely because I have not experienced them. The bottom line for Lewis is that our experience cannot prove nature is closed, i.e. that it never admits of what from our point of view might look like “interruptions.” To be sure, living sanely in the world requires that we assume the laws of nature continue operating as we have always experienced them (We should not jump out of a boat expecting the gravity to be suspended before we sink into the sea). In fact, Lewis argues that the existence of miracles presupposes that nature is governed by laws. But this does not mean that walking on water is per se impossible. The impossibility of miracles is not something that can be proved, only assumed.

Benedict XVI and the Question of an “Open Philosophy”

I would like to conclude this post by returning to my point of departure in the previous one. In his 1988 Erasmus Lecture, the future Pope Benedict XVI poignantly wrote that “the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” In the course of his lecture, Benedict called for a “criticism of the criticism,” a self-critique of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. In the course of these two posts I have attempted to carry forward this critique in one small way, identifying the presence of philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and underscoring that believing miracles to be impossible is something people can only assume, not prove.

As one who daily engages in the craft of historical-critical exegesis, I find Benedict’s comments on this subject refreshing and liberating. In contrast with a naturalist, “ready-made philosophy” that precludes the possibility of miracles, the Christian approaches the Bible with an “open philosophy” that refuses to exclude the possibility that God himself “could enter into and work in human history, however improbable such a thing might at first appear.” This posture, deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition with its conviction that the boundary of time and eternity is permeable, allows for the Bible to be what the Church has always claimed it to be: the word of God in human words.

And yet when all is said and done, Christians should beware of thinking we have definitively proven that which we hold by faith. On the basis of reason alone we cannot conclude whether the Bible is the word of God, whether a given miracle has occurred, or whether Jesus rose from the dead. The real question undergirding all these has been given to us by Lewis. It is the question of whether or not God exists, whether we have independent reasons to believe that there exists a supernatural Being beyond the natural order, a Being to whom nature owes its existence and who may act within that order in ways we do not typically expect.

Read Lewis’ Miracles attentively, and there you will find well-argued reasons to believe that the answer to the above questions is “yes.” Moreover, even if you do not agree with him, I think you will find that he provides serious arguments which call into question whether a non-theistic worldview offers an intelligible account of the world in which we live. But this post’s aim remains much more modest in focusing on just one key thought from Lewis’ book: If we admit that nature is not the only thing that is—if we come to the conclusion that theism is true—then we are not “safe” from miracles. This by no means disproves atheism or agnosticism, but at least it points out one direction our dialogue needs to go.
 
 
(Image credit: Real Clear Religion)

You know how the story goes: in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve have a conversation with the serpent.

Does this mean Christians believe in talking snakes? That’s the charge from certain atheists. To be a Christian, they assume, you have to believe in talking snakes. But then why are there an awful lot of well-educated, smart Christians? Are they simply all gullible or deluded?

This story in Genesis about the talking snake, like many others, has to be interpreted using what experts call “literary criticism.” Here's how it applies to the talking serpent in Genesis.

First of all we accept that the story is just that: a story. Christians realize that this is not really the sort of story that we need to take literally. It was never intended to be read as a historical account of events that took place in a particular garden six thousand years ago somewhere near Iran. It is a story about the beginnings of guilt and evil in the world. This doesn’t mean that the story was totally made up. Indeed, Catholics teach that there was a historical “Adam” and “Eve” who did make a wrong choice. We are not insistent however that the story as it is recorded is word for word literally true. We allow that it may be a legendary story–that the events are rooted in history, but that over time the details were lost and the meaning of the story became more important than the history.

This is not being tricky or evasive. It is recognizing that the stories at the beginning of Genesis are very ancient and that ancient people told stories and recorded their history in a very different way than we do. To read stories that are thousands of years old one has to try to get into the mindset of the people to whom the stories belong and from whom they originated. We do this all the time with other forms of literature. If we read Grimm’s fairy tales we imagine the world of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Same with any historic document.

There are other things to consider as well if we are to understand religious literature. Religious literature is always about meaning more than facts. Once we accept that this is not a newspaper report of particular events, but a reflection on the meaning of real events, we’ll start to understand what’s going on.

Secondly, we allow for something called “metaphor”. That is to say that the language used may well be symbolic of the situation rather than literal. This is how literature works. A legend, a story, a fairy tale, a myth, or a poem relates truth through metaphorical language. Therefore the fruit tree might be symbolic of a choice that had to be made. The garden may be symbolic of a beautiful state of innocence in which mankind was enjoying. Likewise the serpent may be the way the storytellers spoke about a being who was behaving in a sneaky and serpentine manner.

Think how this might develop in a story over time. First they said, “That old devil! He was just like a snake the way he was sneaking around!” then someone said, “That old devil. He was a real snake!” Then someone said, “The snake tempted them and said…” You can see that perhaps they never meant that it was a real snake talking to start with.

But then again, while all these explanations work we can also allow that a long time ago perhaps people did communicate with animals more freely. Some people today are very gifted in “talking” with animals and listening to what they have to say.

When you use the imagination all sorts of things are possible. I can relate, for instance, the time a bird spoke to me. I was walking over to church for evening prayer and was praying as I was walking. I was worried about the fact that I had to take part in a healing service and I was not confident about it and was feeling doubtful. As I walked along a bird hopped along at my side. As it chirped its peculiar rhythm I seemed to hear it reciting a reference to a Bible verse. “Mark 3:32,” it seemed to say. I heard it in my mind as the bird was chirping. Then when I got to church I got a Bible and opened it up and the verse was about Jesus healing a person and telling his disciples to do the same. So, if you like, a bird spoke to me.

Perhaps that’s how the serpent spoke to Adam and Eve.

Or maybe before the fall into brokenness and sin the animals and humans really could speak to one another.

Or maybe God just did a miracle so the snake could talk.

There are lots of possibilities, but the point is that it's not necessary for Christians to believe in a literally talking snake.
 
 
Originally posted at Standing On My Head. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Telegraph)

“At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” - Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

My reflection today revolves around this poignant line from Joseph Ratzinger’s 1988 Erasmus Lecture in which he famously called for a “criticism of criticism.” In penning these words, the German cardinal was looking for a self-criticism of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. On the part of those involved in the craft of exegesis today, this would entail the effort to identify the philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and to consider honestly the degree of certainty warranted for the conclusions we draw when it comes to things biblical.

Joseph Ratzinger: Pure Objectivity Does Not Exist

Ratzinger’s comments a generation ago remain as relevant as ever for the sort of discussions we have here at Strange Notions. Whether we are aware of it or not, both Christians and atheists bring different philosophical presuppositions to the table when we sit down to debate about the Bible. These first principles are ‘spectacles’ we wear which color our entire view of reality, including what we think is going on within Scripture. Ratzinger for his part argues that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies here: “pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction,” for “the observer’s perspective is an essential determinant of the outcome of an experiment.”

What this means in terms of present purposes is that the answers to particular questions we ask of Scripture are in large part determined before we ever open up the text in the first place. What are we to make of Jesus’ miracles and of his resurrection in particular? If one is an atheist, then a natural explanation will be adduced for these phenomena. Such an explanation could take many forms: for example, a putative healing miracle could be explicable in light of modern medicine, or perhaps it was invented by the Gospel authors decades after Jesus’ life in order to convince others of his divinity.

On the other hand, a person who approaches the text assuming theism to be true will likely take the healing story at face value and attribute it to Jesus’ divine mastery over the natural order. Or perhaps the believer might take a position similar to that of the atheist but with the understanding that God in his providence shows us the face of Jesus by working through natural causes, whether that be medicine or human authors with their own agendas.

My point here is not to adjudicate which if any of these explanations best explains a given miracle story in the Gospels. Rather, I simply wish to underscore the reality that our conclusions about a given text are in large part governed by principles and commitments we had before opening up the Bible.

Throughout his career, Ratzinger has shown himself to be at once a great admirer and practitioner of modern exegesis as well as one of its most incisive critics. Far from rejecting a modern approach to Scripture, Ratzinger nevertheless admits that it “has brought forth great errors” caused in no small part by an unquestioning allegiance to certain “academic dogmas.”

A key mainstream assumption he finds particularly problematic is the belief (and I use that word here deliberately, to mean something one cannot prove) that God cannot enter in and work in human history. However improbable divine intervention in our world might appear, Ratzinger argues that this cannot be excluded a priori unless one has definitive proof that God does not exist. The miraculous is by its very nature, if you will, something unexpected and improbable. The jump from calling it improbable to impossible is what Ratzinger finds problematic, and he thinks that many people today read the Bible in this way without reflecting upon whether assuming such a conclusion is warranted or not.

Bart Ehrman: Everyone Has Presuppositions

Since this site is dedicated to fostering dialogue between believers and nonbelievers, I think it is only fair that we attempt to glimpse the same phenomena described by Ratzinger through a competing lens. One of my favorite authors in this regard is Bart Ehrman. The bestselling author, who describes himself as an agnostic, has written several books popularizing modern exegesis and challenging believers to consider more thoughtfully the origins of the Bible and Christianity. The reason I like reading Ehrman, as opposed to many other agnostic or atheist authors, lies not only in his accessible style but above all in his intellectual humility often lacking in believers and nonbelievers alike.

For this post, I simply wish to share some of his thoughts on doing historical biblical study as articulated in three of his recent books. I think there are many points of convergence with what Benedict is saying, even as the two authors ultimately come to quite different conclusions about the Christian faith.

Misquoting Jesus

In this book Ehrman rightly takes issue with those who dismiss modern scholarship out of hand as if it were only practiced by the godless. I suspect that the author is right in remarking that his own books are sometimes written off by those who—whether consciously or unconsciously—perceive his arguments as threatening to their faith. In response Ehrman remarks, “These scholars are not just a group of odd, elderly, basically irrelevant academics holed up in a few libraries around the world.”

In a real sense Christians owe our modern, translated Bibles to such people—some of whom are not believers. These academics have dedicated their careers to producing Bible editions that present us, as closely as possible, with the “original” texts of Scripture.

Most people fail to realize just how complicated was the origin of the biblical texts we now take for granted as “the Bible.” For one thing, we do not possess the original letters of the New Testament fresh from their authors’ pens. Moreover, the (many and much later) copies of texts we do possess contain important variants and points of seeming contradiction among themselves.

As if that were not enough, we then still have to consider the question of how to interpret what we do have. Which manuscripts ought to be considered authoritative? Which, if any, is the one Christians are supposed to consider inspired? As Ehrman says, “If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says.” For better or worse, that is clearly not the case.

Jesus, Interrupted

Ehrman here again goes to great length to make clear his conviction that modern biblical exegesis is not exclusively the domain of agnostic or atheist thinkers:

"My personal view is that a historical-critical approach to the Bible does not necessarily lead to agnosticism or atheism. It can in fact lead to a more intelligent and thoughtful faith— certainly more intelligent and thoughtful than an approach to the Bible that overlooks all of the problems that historical critics have discovered over the years."

The author mentions more than once that his closest friends are both scholars and believers. According to Ehrman, “[I]t was the problem of suffering, not a historical approach to the Bible, that led me to agnosticism.” He discusses the reasons for his conviction elsewhere in his book God’s Problem.

While I do not share his convictions regarding the problem of evil as an insurmountable obstacle to belief in God, that is the topic for another thread which receives frequent attention on this site. For our purposes, let us simply recall that Ehrman’s basis for professing agnosticism has primarily to do with the problem of evil, not the problems unearthed by modern biblical scholarship.

In my estimation, Ehrman does both sides of our debate a great service in debunking the notion that we hold our respective convictions on the basis of certain proofs. For example, he writes that we can neither prove nor disprove the resurrection:

"I am decidedly not saying that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I’m not saying the tomb was not empty. I’m not saying that he did not appear to his disciples and ascend into heaven. Believers believe that all these things are true. But they do not believe them because of historical evidence. They take the Christian claims on faith, not on the basis of proof. There can be no proof."

These words may alarm some Christians who think that we can “prove” the resurrection with the internal evidence of the New Testament or any other evidence for that matter. To be sure, we Christians can and must adduce reasons for our belief and be prepared to defend our faith against objections. But Ehrman is perfectly right to push us on the reality that these reasons do not amount to a definitive proof. That, indeed, is why we call it faith, not science.

Again, the Catholic position is by no means saying that faith is “unscientific” or at odds with science. Rather, the point here is that the Christian and the atheist may look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions because of our prior commitments which involve a decision to view the Bible through the lens of faith or not.

How Jesus Became God

Ehrman probes the issue of belief in the resurrection at greater length in his most recent work. Here he rightly criticizes an all-too common response of Christians when they are faced with the findings of modern biblical scholarship:

"The reason historians cannot prove or disprove whether God has performed a miracle in the past—such as raising Jesus from the dead—is not that historians are required to be secular humanists with an anti-supernaturalist bias. I want to stress this point because conservative Christian apologists, in order to score debating points, often claim that this is the case. In their view, if historians did not have anti-supernaturalist biases or assumptions, they would be able to affirm the historical 'evidence' that Jesus was raised from the dead."

Unfortunately, I have seen plenty in my years of teaching a mostly-Catholic audience to confirm Ehrman’s observations. Sometimes Catholic writers and speakers write off modern scholarship tout court with the use of scare quotes, calling modern thinkers “scholars” as if they were not actually scholars because they lack or at least seem to lack the faith that the Christian thinks is required for them to have any competence at all in their field.

Regarding evangelical Christians—Ehrman’s former self which I take to be his principal audience—the author adds a fascinating point to his criticism above:

"I should point out that these Christian apologists almost never consider the 'evidence' for other miracles from the past that have comparable— or even better—evidence to support them: for example, dozens of Roman senators claimed that King Romulus was snatched up into heaven from their midst; and many thousands of committed Roman Catholics can attest that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to them, alive—a claim that fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians roundly discount, even though the 'evidence' for it is very extensive…Protestant apologists interested in 'proving' that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary."

This point of criticism is difficult for any Christian to address, and a robust response is needed. While it is not my point here to take on this problem, I would simply note that for the Catholic tradition God’s grace (including the possibility of miracles) is not constrained within the visible confines of the Catholic Church. Unlike some Christians, Catholics are not intrinsically opposed to the possibility of a non-Christian performing or experiencing a miracle.

In a later section of this book, Ehrman turns aside from the above considerations to consider in more detail the fundamentals of how to do history properly. At a pivotal point he says something which I could have mistaken as coming from the pen of Pope Benedict had I not known otherwise:

"The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions, and it is impossible to live life, think deep thoughts , have religious experiences, or engage in historical inquiry without having presuppositions. The life of the mind cannot proceed without presuppositions. The question, though, is always this: What are the appropriate presuppositions for the task at hand?"

This is one of the questions that interests me most and which I think lies at the heart of Pope Benedict’s statement that the debate in exegesis is at bottom a philosophical one. We can never completely suspend our biases, but we can at least do our best to remain conscious of their presence and engage in a self-critique that helps to purify our thought and attune it with the breadth of knowledge we can gain from the sources available to us.

In this critique, a few pivotal questions emerge: Whose philosophical presuppositions best position us for an accurate understanding of the nature of things? Which ones best enable us to live well? And what would the process for making such a determination look like? These are issues I hope to take up in my next post at Strange Notions, but here my concern remains much more basic in showing that there is a problem recognized by good thinkers on both sides of the religious/non-religious aisle.

I would like to draw these remarks to a close with a word on complete objectivity which Ehrman, like Benedict, rejects as a possibility in our effort to interpret the Scriptures. As Ehrman states, “This is one of the great ironies of modern religion: more than almost any other religious group on the planet, conservative evangelicals, and most especially fundamentalist Christians, are children of the Enlightenment.”

Both modern Christians and modern skeptics yearn for a level of certitude that simply does not exist or exists for only a very limited range of truth claims. In Ehrman’s words, “[F]aith in a miracle is a matter of faith, not of objectively established knowledge.” For instance, if Jesus really did perform the miracles the gospels claim he did, then this would help explain how Jesus’ opponents could deny these actions in the face of evidence that God was working through him.

It is the same dynamic that we find in Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. The rich man suffering in Hades begs Father Abraham to send someone to his living relatives and warn them about the place of torment, to which Abraham replies, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Here again, people could look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions, a process largely determined by their prior convictions.

So did Jesus really come back from the dead as the above parable intimates? And was this parable even uttered by the historical Jesus in the first place? These are important questions which—for both believers and nonbelievers alike—are often answered even before they are asked. In the following post we will continue the conversation in more detail, but for now this is a good place to begin our discussion.
 
 
(Image credit: Marc Cz

The theory of evolution proposes an explanation for how life in general and mankind in particular arose. It holds that that there was a long period in which natural processes gave rise to life and to the different life forms on earth.

This in no way conflicts with the idea of God. As the omnipotent Creator, he is free to create either quickly or slowly and either directly or through intermediate processes that he sets up.

He can even do a mixture of these things, such as creating the universe in an instant (as apparently happened at the Big Bang) and then having it experience a long, slow process of development giving rise to stars and planets and eventually life forms including human beings.

He can even intervene periodically in these processes going on in the universe, such as when he creates a soul for each human being or when he performs a miracle.

From its perspective, science can learn certain things about the laws governing the universe and the processes occurring in it. But that does nothing to eliminate the idea of God, for the question remains: Why is there a universe with these laws and these processes in the first place?

Consider an analogy: Suppose that after a thorough and lengthy scientific investigation of the Mona Lisa, I concluded that it was the result of innumerable collisions of paint and canvas which gradually went from indecipherable shapes and colors to a beautiful and intriguing picture of a woman.

My analysis of the painting may be correct. That is, in fact, what the Mona Lisa is and how it developed. But it by no means disproves nor makes unnecessary Leonardo Da Vinci as the painter behind the painting.

Furthermore, if we were the product of a purely random processes then we have good reason to doubt our mental faculties when it comes to knowing the truth. Why? Because our mental faculties would be the result of a random evolutionary process which is aimed, not at producing true beliefs, but at mere survival. But if that were the case then why should we trust the idea that we are the product of purely random factors? The mental processes leading to this conclusion would not be aimed at producing true beliefs.

Charles Darwin seems to have understood this when he wrote:

“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

This worry disappears if God was guiding whatever process led to us and if he shaped the development of the human mind so that it was aimed at knowing him, and thus knowing the truth.

"But," you might be thinking, "surely evolution contradicts the creation account in Genesis."

No, it doesn't.

The Bible contains many different styles of writing. History, poetry, prophecy, parables, and a variety of other literary genres are found in its pages. This is not surprising since it is not so much a book as it is a library – a collection of 73 books written at different times by different people.

As such it is important that we distinguish between types of literature within the Bible and what they are trying to tell us. It would be a mistake, for example, to take a work as rich as the Bible in symbolism and literary figures as if it were always relating history in the manner that we in our culture are accustomed to.

Much less should we expect it to offer a scientific account of things. If one is hoping to find a scientific account of creation then he will not find it in these texts, for the Bible was never intended to be a scientific textbook on cosmology.

Saint Augustine put it this way: “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said, ‘I am sending you the Holy Spirit, that he may teach you about the course of the sun and the moon’. He wished to make people Christians not astronomers.”

The Catholic Church is open to the ideas of an old universe and that God used evolution as part of his plan. According to Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers” (CCC 283).

When it comes to relating these findings to the Bible, the Catechism explains: “God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337).

Explaining further, it says:

“Among all the Scriptural texts about creation, the first three chapters of Genesis occupy a unique place. From a literary standpoint these texts may have had diverse sources. The inspired authors have placed them at the beginning of Scripture to express in their solemn language the truths of creation–its origin and its end in God, its order and goodness, the vocation of man, and finally the drama of sin and the hope of salvation. Read in the light of Christ, within the unity of Sacred Scripture and in the living Tradition of the Church, these texts remain the principal source for catechesis on the mysteries of the ‘beginning’: creation, fall, and promise of salvation.” (CCC 289)

In other words, the early chapters of Genesis, “relate in simple and figurative language, adapted to the understanding of mankind at a lower stage of development, fundamental truths underlying the divine scheme of salvation.” (Pontifical Biblical Commission, January 16, 1948).

Or, as Pope John Paul II put it:

“The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its makeup, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise but in order to state the correct relationship of humanity with God and the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God” (Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 3, 1981).

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) explained:

“The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God...does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary–rather than mutually exclusive—realities.”

The recognition that the creation accounts must be understood with some nuance is not new, nor is it a forced retreat in the face of modern science. Various Christian writers form the early centuries of Church history, as much as 1,500 years or more before Darwin, saw the six days of creation as something other than literal, twenty-four hour periods.

For example, in the A.D. 200s, Origen of Alexandria noted that in the six days of creation day and night are made on the first day but the sun is not created until the fourth. The ancients knew as well as we do that the presence or absence of the sun is what makes it day or night, and so he took this as an indicators that the text was using a literary device and not presenting a literal chronology. He wrote:

“Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars—the first day even without a sky? . . . I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.” (De Principiis, 4:16)

What Origen was onto was a structure embedded in the six days of creation whereby in the first three days God prepares several regions to be populated by separating the day from the night, the sky from the sea, and finally the seas from each other so that the dry land appears. Then, on the second three days, he populates these, filling the day and night with the sun, the moon, and the stars, filling the sky and sea with birds and fish, and filling the dry land with animals and man.

The first three days are historically referred to as the days of distinction because God separates and thus distinguishes one region from another. The second three days are referred to as the days of adornment, in which God populates or adorns the regions he has distinguished.

This literary structure was obvious to people before the development of modern science, and the fact that the sun is not created until day was recognized by some as a sign that the text is presenting the work of God, as the Catechism says, “symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work’” (CCC 337).

Origen was not the only one to recognize the literary nature of the six days. Similarly, St. Augustine, writing in the A.D. 400s, noted: “What kind of days these were is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!” (The City of God, 11:6).

The ancients thus recognized, long before modern science, that the Bible did not require us to think that the world was made in six twenty-four hour days.
 
 

 
 
(Image credit: For Wallpaper)