On Miracles: Ancient Texts

Fourth in an ongoing series on the problem of miracles, and evidence for the Resurrection:

  1. The Problem of Miracles
  2. On Miracles: The Historical Jesus
  3. On Miracles: Jesus of the Pagans

 

♦ Why bother with this old collection of myths, the so-called “Scriptures,” when trying to show that miracles existed, and that there was a resurrection of Jesus?

There is evidence (which I’ve already covered) that Jesus was a historical figure, and this evidence also provides considerable information about the beliefs of early Christians in the deity of Christ and alludes to belief in His Resurrection. But the secular references don’t give a lot of detail about these beliefs or the evidence for them. This is not unexpected, as they had little use for details about a crucified prophet and his followers, other than understanding why they were such a nuisance. For these details we must go to the accounts of those who were actual followers and believers in Jesus.

♦ Surely you don’t believe this stuff was “inspired”? You’ll have a tough time selling me that “inspired” writings can be used as historical evidence.

Well, I do believe that these writings were inspired — a discussion for another time, perhaps. But the “inspiration” of the NT documents is utterly irrelevant to their value as historical documents.

Historical documents? You must be kidding! This stuff was written hundreds of years after the events it purports to describe.

Sounds like someone hasn’t done their homework. Yes, there was a school of biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, led by Rudolf Bultmann and other German theologians, which maintained a late date of writing, placing it well into the second century or later. Their skepticism influenced a number of other biblical scholars as well. But facts have a stubborn way of deflating bad theories. We now know with virtual certainty, based on more recent archaeological manuscript evidence, that the last Gospel, John, was written no later than 90 A.D., and the other three considerably earlier. Luke, who wrote both a Gospel and the book of Acts, was a companion of Paul and is widely recognized by scholars as a superb, highly reliable historian. Paul’s own letters date back to within 20 years after the death of Christ, and he quotes ancient creeds (such as 1st Corinthians 15) which were in circulation at the time of his conversion, a few years at most after the Gospel events.

Whatever. How reliable can a few old scraps of parchment be, anyway? Aren’t they all just copies of copies?

Well, pretty darn reliable, actually. Granted we have no “original signed copies” of the NT documents. But compared to most ancient literature, the NT is almost embarrassing in its quantity of source material and their temporal proximity to its events. Take Homer’s Iliad, the “bible” of the ancient Greeks, composed in 800 B.C. We have about 650 surviving manuscript copies from this work, the earliest ones dating from the second and third centuries, one thousand years after it was written. For Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, we have nine manuscripts of his history of the Jewish War, copied in the ninth through eleventh centuries. Tacitus, the great Roman historian from early second century? Two manuscripts, the earliest in 850 A.D. Despite this paucity of source documents, scholars are quite comfortable that they accurately reflect the content of the originals.

How about the New Testament? Let’s see — over 5,500 Greek manuscripts and fragments, some dating to within one generation of the time of the Apostles. Another 20,000 or so exist in other languages. From the standpoint of source material for ancient literature, this is a rather preposterous prosperity.

♦ But they’re still just copies — lots of errors in that process are inevitable, to be sure.

Well, you underestimate the extreme care taken with copying such documents in the ancient world, especially those held in such high esteem as the NT scriptures. But some copying errors were inevitable, mostly transpositions and misspellings. The extraordinary number of extant copies allows an excellent cross-check, facilitating a high degree of precision about the content of earlier sources no longer available.

♦ OK, you’ve got some old documents which were written pretty close to the time of Christ. But there’s lots of other Gospels out there which disagree with those in the NT — why aren’t they considered good sources?

Good question. Yes, there’s a bunch of other writings which call themselves “Gospels” — The Gospel of Thomas (a favorite of the Jesus Seminar), The Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, and a number of other similar works. Much has been made of these by some, but they largely eliminate themselves as contenders through either their content, their date of writing, or both. First of all, unlike the NT Gospels, there is no evidence that they were authored by one of the Apostles or the Apostles’ companions. Secondly, most are dated rather late, in the 3rd and 4th century A.D. And lastly, their content is steeped in mysticism and Gnosticism, and borders on the bizarre in many cases. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, ends with a “saying” of Jesus which goes, “Let Mary go away from us, because women are not worthy of life. … Lo, I shall lead her in order to make her a male, so she too may become a living spirit.” Gloria Steinam, call your office.

♦ I’m glad you mentioned the Jesus Seminar — these biblical scholars determined that very little of what Jesus said and did in the Gospels is history, that most of it is myth. So much for your “Scholars believe the Gospels to be historical” argument, eh?

Well, most biblical scholars and archaeologists find the members of the Jesus Seminar to be an embarrassment, a fringe group with lots of media savvy but little scholarly credibility. The Jesus Seminar’s own stated goals were to ditch the traditional understanding of Scripture and create a “new fiction” and a “new Gospel.” In this they have clearly succeeded.

♦ Well, we all know that the Church simply decreed which books would be in the Bible, and invented its weird doctrines, like the Deity of Christ, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. It was all a big power-play to keep control over the ignorant masses who mindlessly followed them.

Big fan of the The Da Vinci Code, aren’t you? Great writer, Dan Brown — lousy historian, too. The councils and synods merely affirmed what the Christian church had known to be true from its beginnings, and accepted and acknowledged those books already held to be genuine and apostolic in origin. The central doctrines which were supposedly “decreed” de novo by the councils are easily found in the writings of ancient church leaders and apologists — the so-called Church Fathers — several centuries before they were publicly affirmed in creeds and councils. It is child’s play to verify this yourself, as many excellent translations of these works are available — unless, of course, you’re not really interested in arriving at the right answer. Oh, and by the way: virtually every verse in the NT can be found cited in these early Christian writings — quoting from manuscripts no longer available. The NT really was written within a generation of the time of Christ, by eyewitnesses or their close associates, and was being cited by other authors within a few decades of their writing.

♦ But even if they’re early and reliable, these Scriptural sources are still religious, written by true believers, fanatics. Couldn’t they just say anything they wanted about Jesus, and expect their followers to buy it?

Well, sounds easy enough, but there’s a small problem: there were lots of folks who were itching to prove them liars. There were the Jewish religious leaders, first of all, who were definitely not amused at this heretical cult which had formed in their midst, preaching blasphemy. Peter stands up at Pentecost and tells a very large crowd of people, “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know … God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact.” So the Jewish leaders waltz over to the grave of Jesus, show folks the dead body, and Poof! The new cult goes belly-up in a heartbeat.

Then there’s the crowd he’s addressing, with quite a few folks who were around when Jesus was preaching, who witnessed his crucifixion, or who had at least heard about these events from other first-hand witnesses. Takes real chutzpah to stand in front of a large crowd and tell them something they (and you) know never happened. Peter could have made a lot of omelets with the eggs and tomatoes tossed his way if he tried that stunt.

♦ But you’re using circular reasoning — using a description of an event taken from a religious writing to prove that what it describes actually happened. What proof is there that this “sermon” by Peter in fact even happened, or that this is what he said?

Well, this description of Peter’s first sermon was written by Luke, in the book of Acts. Luke was a careful, detailed, OCD-kind-of historian. His narrative is filled with extraordinary details: detailed descriptions of maritime practices; ancient marketplaces and cultural customs; specific time and place references; names of secular and religious rulers. His stated intent was to seek out eyewitnesses to the events of which he wrote. He accompanied Paul on one of his missionary journeys, and traveled with him to Jerusalem where he had contact with Peter and the other Apostles. His writing depicts much that archeology and other historical sources verify, and contains nothing of the excesses and hyperbole common to legendary development.

Yes, Luke had a religious bias, as did all the NT writers, because of what he heard and saw from eyewitnesses. If his religious convictions alone exclude his writings as unreliable, then methinks the problem is with your preconditions and prejudices, rather than with the accuracy of Luke’s narrative.

♦ Well, everyone knows that whole empty tomb thing was just a grand hoax — the disciples stole the body, and then claimed a “resurrection” to make themselves religious big-shots.

Well, maybe everyone you know thinks that — but I wouldn’t bet your inheritance on it. But that discussion will have to wait until my next post. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: If you are interested in more depth on the reliability and veracity of the NT documents, I suggest this book (full text online) by NT scholar F.F. Bruce. There are many others, but this is easily digestible and short by one of the best scholars in the field.

On Miracles: Jesus of the Pagans

Third part of an ongoing series on the problem of miracles, and evidence for the Resurrection:

  1. The Problem of Miracles
  2. On Miracles: The Historical Jesus

 
It has been said that Christianity is the only religion which traces its origins to the humiliation of its God. As followers of its crucified leader dispersed widely after its germinal events, traveling great distances from a remote corner of the Empire over dusty Roman roads, they indeed told a tale bizarre in every respect. How ludicrous the story of a God made man; who worked miracles among men; who suffered the most heinous execution the Romans could devise. A man who, if these fables be factual, arose from the dead, utterly transforming the lives of all who saw Him — these same men who audaciously claimed to be eyewitnesses to this mysterious manifestation.

The people of the ancient world were no strangers to quixotic stories, to endless tales of gods and goddesses, myths and magic. Rome in its pragmatic wisdom absorbed them all, with their blood rites and orgies, their asceticism and temple prostitutes. Such tolerance kept the Empire unified and the conquered content; no sense risking unrest and rebellion over senseless fantasies.

Such legends amused and titillated, and their rituals provided feeble comfort in a brutal world ruled by heartless Fate. Yet Christianity was not merely another imagined tale of jealous gods and devious deities, but carried in its implausible story a spark fully absent from pagan fables: the flicker of hope in hopeless darkness, of purpose in a world chained and weighted to emptiness and futility. This spark fell upon the dry straw of a desperate world, and started a conflagration which reshaped that world in ways unimaginable.
Continue reading “On Miracles: Jesus of the Pagans”

On Miracles: The Historical Jesus

Roman columns

I have begun, in a previous post, to lay out a framework for reasonable faith in the proposition of miracles, with particular focus on the Resurrection. By serendipity or grace, the following address by Rev. Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, showed up recently in First Things:

I’d like to start with a proposition. Here it is: To be a Christian is to believe in history.

All the great world religions have sacred books: the Quran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Analects of Confucius. What those sacred texts have in common is that they’re essentially wisdom literature. They’re collections of noble teachings aimed at helping believers live ethically and find the right path to peace or happiness or enlightenment.

The Bible also aims to make people wise. But it does much more. It seeks to lead them to salvation, which is much more than enlightenment. The Bible’s starting point is totally different from any other sacred book. The first words are: “In the beginning…” The Bible begins with a step-by-step report of the first day in the history of the world…

Christianity, thus, means believing definite things about history and about our own respective places in history. We don’t just profess belief in the Incarnation. We say we believe that God took flesh at a precise moment in time and in a definite place. Pontius Pilate and Mary are mentioned by name in the creed — and the reference to Mary, his mother, guarantees Christ’s humanity, while the reference to Pilate, who condemned him to death, guarantees his historicity.

All this ensures that we can never reduce the Incarnation to an abstract concept, a metaphor, or a pretty idea. It ensures that we can never regard Jesus Christ as some kind of ideal archetype or mythical figure. He was truly a man and truly God. And once he had a place he called home on this earth. There’s something else, too. We believe that this historical event, which happened more than 2,000 years ago, represents a personal intervention by God “for us men and for our salvation.” God entered history for you and me, for all humanity.

These are extraordinary claims. To be a Christian means believing that you are part of a vast historical project.

The Archbishop’s speech is extraordinary, and I encourage you to read it. It cuts straight to the heart of the Christian faith: the assertion and conviction that it is not merely a belief system, nor simply a framework for morality and wise living, but rather a radical, and historical, event in time. Christianity claims, outrageously, that the eternal God of the universe stepped into time — and the events resulting from this intervention are verifiable in history, not merely believed in the intellect.

The Archbishop stresses, appropriately, this history as detailed in Scripture, and the subject of the historical veracity of Scripture I shall cover at some length in due time. But it may be argued — and has been — that the Scriptures are a hopelessly biased and distorted record, if indeed they are a record at all, of the events detailed in its its pages. Filled with fantastic myths and implausible events, written by zealots, they portray not history but fantasy. If indeed a man named Jesus even existed — and some doubt even this simple premise — we surely know little or nothing of him. Hence the distinction has grown between the “Jesus of history”, of whom we know precious little, and the “Christ of faith” — the spiritual apparition created by zealous followers and true believers, perhaps morally and ethically useful, but surely not based in history and fact.

These are in fact the presuppositions, almost always unspoken, when one hears about the “historical Jesus” today — the assumption that the divine did not intervene in history; that the biblical record is replete with myth, hyperbole, and fabrication; that the Gospel record in particular — especially where it relates miracles or other supernatural events such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection, is simply not to be believed. The moral teachings of Jesus (if he even existed), such as the Sermon on the Mount, may be reasonably accurate of his teaching as a moral agent, but surely anything smacking of the supernatural must be dismissed.

This is invariably the perspective of the mainstream media, manifest in the Time or Newsweek cover story at Easter, supported by media-friendly theological skeptics such as the Jesus Seminar. Consider this from the opening statement of the Jesus Seminar in 1985, a most enlightening summary of the Seminar’s preconditions and assumptions:

… we are having increasing difficulty these days in accepting the biblical account of the creation and of the apocalyptic conclusion in anything like a literal sense. The difficulty just mentioned is connected with a second feature: we now know that narrative accounts of ourselves, our nation, the Western tradition, and the history of the world, are fictions…

Our dilemma is becoming acute: just as the beginning of the created world is receding in geological time before our very eyes, so the future no longer presents itself as naive imminence. … To put the matter bluntly, we are having as much trouble with the middle, the messiah, as we are with the terminal points (creation and Armageddon). What we need is a new fiction that takes as its starting point the central event in the Judeo-Christian drama and reconciles that middle with a new story that reaches beyond old beginnings and endings. In sum, we need a new narrative of Jesus, a new gospel, if you will, that places Jesus differently in the grand scheme, the epic story.

Not any fiction will do. The fiction of the superiority of the Aryan race led to the extermination of six million Jews. The fiction of American superiority prompted the massacre of thousands of Native Americans and the Vietnam War. The fiction of Revelation keeps many common folk in bondage to ignorance and fear.

We require a new, liberating fiction, one that squares with the best knowledge we can now accumulate and one that transcends self-serving ideologies. [Emphasis mine]

Thus we have two competing worldviews on the historical veracity of Christianity: one based in the events and evidence of history, integrated through the window of faith, verifiable in measurable ways by the tools of the historian; and the view of postmodernism, which sees all such “facts” as mere cultural constructs, narratives fomented by the lust for power, to be deconstructed through the eye of skepticism, thus creating a new narrative apropos to our times to free us from the patriarchal tyranny of religious ignorance.

These are the poles, the stark outlines sketched against the canvas of history. There are positions charted out between these extremes, of course, by those who feel cozier in compromise, for whom intellectual sloth seems more virtue than vice. But at its heart, this division comes down to the soul of reason: does truth matter? Is the historical record reliable, and does it in fact point to truth in the area of Christian faith?

For those who are willing to set aside prejudice to judge for themselves, I hope to lay out this history in some limited way. It is, to my eye, compelling — far less as a few definitive “proofs” than a complex mosaic whose lines run in tandem to a single vanishing point at history’s center. As G.K. Chesterton summarizes it in his remarkable work Orthodoxy,”

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, “For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.” I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts.

My next post will begin detailing some of these facts, examining the Jesus of the pagans.