Quote of the Day

 For all these reasons I conclude that the historian, of whatever persuasion, has no option but to affirm both the empty tomb and the 'meetings' with Jesus as 'historical events' in all the senses we sketched in chapter 1: they took place as real events; they were significant events; they are, in the normal sense required by historians, provable events; historians can should write about them. We cannot account for early Christianity without them. The tomb-and-meetings scenario is warranted, indeed, by that double similarity and double dissimilarity (to Judaism on the one hand and the early church on the other) for which I argued earlier as a methodological control in the study of Jesus. Stories like these, with the kind of explanation the early Christians offered, make the sense they make within first-century Judaism (similarity), but nobody within first-century Judaism was expecting anything like this (dissimilarity). Stories like these do indeed explain the rise of early Christianity (similarity), but they cannot be explained as the back-projection of early Christian faith, theology and exegesis (dissimilarity).

This conclusion rules out several of the alternative accounts that have been offered from time to time, mostly variations on the theme of mistakes made in the early morning (the women went to the wrong tomb, they mistook someone else for Jesus, and so on). These are in any case trivial when we remember the state of mind of Jesus' followers after his crucifixion and the fact that they were not expecting anything remotely like this to occur. Reports based on misunderstandings would quickly have been sorted out. The hoary old theory that Jesus did not really die on the cross, but revived in the cool of the tomb, has likewise nothing to recommend it, and it is noticeable that even those historians who are passionately committed to denying the resurrection do not attempt to go by this route. Roman soldiers, after all, were rather good at killing people, and when given a rebel leader to practise on they would have had several motives for making sure the job was done properly. A further, more recent suggestion can also be ruled out: that, after his crucifixion, Jesus' body was not buried, but left instead for dogs and vultures to finish off. Had that happened, no matter how many 'visions' they had had, the disciples would not have concluded that he had been raised from the dead. we are left with the secure historical conclusion: the tomb was empty, and various 'meetings' took place not only between Jesus and his followers (including at least one initial sceptic) but also, in at least one case (that of Paul; possibly, too, that of James), between Jesus and people who had not been among his followers. I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

N.T. Wright

The Resurrection of the Son of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, volume 3

Nice

 

Some recent acquisitions

Nonfiction:

William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. (I should have read this one years ago. Written by one of the most important epistemologists of the last hundred years.)

Nathan Aviezer, In the Beginning: Biblical Creation and Science. (A Jewish perspective.) 

Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. 

Frederick Copleston, Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker. 

Charles Darwin, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books (Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals), edited by Edward O. Wilson. (Unfortunately, it doesn't include The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits, so I'm kinda bummed.)

Cardinal Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics. (I've been wanting this one forever.)

The Interlinear NIV Hebrew-English Old Testament. (Almost 3,000 pages. Got it for about $25.)

Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers. (I had this years ago and it was lost in shipping when we moved back to the States.)

John Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? 

C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. (One of the few Lewis books I didn't have, although I've read it more than once.)

Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. (OK, this one I've really wanted forever)

_______, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology.

_______, The Science of God.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 volumes. (I love Nietzsche, and my impression of Schopenhauer is that he's a forerunner of Nietzsche who was more pessimistic.)

Wilbur Marshall Urban, The History of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (This was published in 1898, so as a history it's a little out of date. I'm just a big fan of Urban.) 

Fiction:

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions. (This is all of his short story collections in one volume.)

Fredric Brown, From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown. (Gold.)

Ted Chiang, Exhalation. (Short stories, and the ones I've already read are amazing. The title story is incredibly relevant to philosophy of mind.)

James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes.

_______, Caliban's War.

_______, Abaddon's Gate. (I've watched The Expanse, the show based on these books, and loved it, but the books were expensive. I got these first three as a boxed set for about $20 which is much cheaper than I've seen any of them.

Cixin Liu, The Wandering Earth. (His short stories. I've loved everything I've read from him.)

Ken Liu, Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. (Chinese short stories that Ken Liu translated and edited. He also writes his own books and stories, so I'm going to give those a look in the near future.)

Fred Saberhagen, Love Conquers All. (Same author as the Berserker series. I wanted this one because Saberhagen was a Catholic and from what I understand, this is his version of Brave New World.)

John Scalzi, Redshirts.

Lucius Shepherd, The Best of Lucius Shepherd.

Michael Swanwick, The Dog Said Bow-Wow.

John Varley, The Persistence of Vision.

Peter Watts, Blindsight. (This supposedly has some philosophical relevance to the Chinese Room argument.)

Andy Weir, Artemis. (Same author as The Martian.)

Robert Charles Wilson, The Harvest.

Happy Reformation Day

It's 500 years to the day since Martin Luther posted his 95 theses. You can read them here. In unrelated news, for my Halloween costume, I taped a bunch of Smarties to my jeans. I'm Mr. Smartiepants.

Quote of the Day

Most of us remember when the grace of God first reached our hearts. We were troubled about our sins which had put us at such a distance from God, and the great questions that exercised us were these: How can our sins be put away? How can we be freed from this sense of guilt? How can we ever feel at home with God when we know we have so grievously trespassed against Him and so wantonly violated His holy law? We shall never forget, many of us, how we were brought to see that what we could never do ourselves, God had done for us through the work of our Lord Jesus on the cross. We remember when we sang with exultation:

"All my iniquities on Him were laid,
All my indebtedness by Him was paid,
All who believe on Him, the Lord hath said,
Have everlasting life."

This is the truth of the trespass offering, in which sin assumes the aspect of a debt needing to be discharged.

But as we went on we began to get a little higher view of the work of the cross. We saw that sin was not only a debt requiring settlement, but that it was something which in itself was defiling and unclean, something that rendered us utterly unfit for companionship with God, the infinitely Holy One. And little by little the Spirit of God opened up another aspect of the atonement and we say that our blessed Lord not only made expiation for all our guiltiness but for all our defilement too. "For God hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." It was a wondrous moment in the history of our souls when we saw that we were saved eternally, and made fit for God's presence because the Holy One had become the great sin offering, was made sin for us on Calvary's cross.

But there were other lessons we had to learn. We soon saw that because of their sins men are at enmity with God, that there could be no communion with God until a righteous basis for fellowship was procured. Something had to take place before God and man could meet together in perfect enjoyment and happy complacency. And thus we began to enter into the peace offering aspect of the work of Christ. We saw that it was God's desire to bring us into fellowship with Himself, and this could only be as redeemed sinners who had been reconciled to God through the death of our Lord Jesus.

As we learned to value more the work the Saviour did, we found ourselves increasingly occupied with the Person who did that work. In the beginning it was the value of the blood that gave us peace in regard to our sin, but after we went on we learned to enjoy Him for what He is in Himself. And this is the meal offering; for it is here that we see Christ in all His perfection, God and Man in one glorious Person, and our hearts become ravished with His beauty and we feed with delight upon Himself.

We can understand now what the poetess meant when she sang:

"They speak to me of music rare,
Of anthems soft and low,
Of harps, and viols, and angel-choirs,
All these I can forego;

But the music of the Shepherd's voice
That won my wayward heart
Is the only strain I ever heard
With which I cannot part."

"For, ah, the Master is so fair,
His smile's so sweet to banished men
That they who meet Him unaware
Can never rest on Earth again.

And they who see Him risen afar
At God's right hand, to welcome them,
Forgetful are of home and land,
Desiring fair Jerusalem."

To the cold formalist all this seems mystical and extravagant, but to the true lover of Christ it is the soberest reality.

And now there remains one other aspect of the Person and work of our Lord to be considered, and it is this which is set forth in the burnt offering. As the years went on some of us began to apprehend, feebly at first, and then perhaps in more glorious fulness, something that in the beginning had never even dawned upon our souls, through the work of Christ upon the cross there was something in that work of tremendous importance which meant even more to God than the salvation of sinners.

He created man for His own glory. The catechism is right when it tells us that "the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." But, alas, nowhere had any man been found who had not dishonored God in some way. The charge that Daniel brought against Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, was true of us all: "The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified." God must find a man in this world who would fully glorify Him in all things. He had been so terribly dishonored down here; He had been so continually misrepresented by the first man to whom He had committed lordship over the earth, and by all his descendants, that it was necessary that some man should be found who would live in this scene wholly to His glory. God's character must be vindicated; and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Man, the Lord from heaven, was the only one who could do that. And in His perfect obedience unto death we see that which fully meets all the requirements of the divine nature and glorifies God completely in the scene where He had been so sadly misrepresented. This is the burnt offering aspect of the Cross. By means of that cross more glory accrued to God than He had ever lost by the fall. So that we may say that even if not one sinner had ever been saved through the sacrifice of our Lord upon the tree, yet God had been fully glorified in respect of sin, and no stain could be imputed to His character, nor could any question ever be raised through all eternity as to His abhorrence of sin and His delight in holiness.

So in the book of Leviticus the burnt offering comes first, for it is that which is more precious to God and should therefore be most precious to us.

H.A. Ironside
Lectures on the Levitical Offerings

Jim's comments: This book is interesting, although some of the attempts to read Jesus back into the Levitical offerings seem pretty contrived to me. But this larger summary really spoke to me. I've always struggled with the parts of the Old Testament that detail sacrifices or genealogies -- I suspect many people do -- and this troubles me because we are told to reflect upon them, and that this will be a rewarding experience. This book goes a long way towards helping me in this regard.

The penultimate paragraph is also interesting because it has some relevance to the "O Felix Culpa" defense of the problem of evil, which Alvin Plantinga has stated is his favorite resolution. The idea here is that the best possible worlds would be those which include incarnation and atonement, that is, God entering into his creation and atoning for the sins of the world. These would be the best worlds because those worlds would reveal more of the depth of God's love. Possible worlds in which no one ever sinned could certainly display God's love, but not on the level that a world including incarnation and atonement would.

But of course a world with incarnation and atonement requires sin and evil, otherwise there would be nothing to atone for. In fact, the greater the sin and evil, the greater that world will reveal the depth of God's love in atoning for it. So the greatest possible worlds would be those with a great deal of sin and evil. Ironside goes further and says that even if no one ever accepts God's atonement, God would still do it because his nature requires sin to be atoned for.

Oy

OK, I can finally exhale. I was going to start blogging more, then I had to review the proofs and compile the index for a book that's coming out in a couple months, and the stress was ... considerable. Actually, I still have a couple weeks before the end of the term, then I correct final exams, and then I can exhale. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure, I present you with "Pray the Lord My Mind to Keep" by Cornelius Plantinga.

Bible blog

A former professor of mine has started a blog that focuses on the Bible, theology, and spirituality here.

PoMo

Here's a very biased post against postmodernism. I do analytic philosophy, but I have plenty of friends who do Continental philosophy, of which postmodernism is a subset. According to them, postmodernism has been dead in philosophy since the late 1980s. It lives on in other academic fields which don't realize this. One of those is, of course, theology, although in that case there are somewhat exonerating circumstances: theology has to be, in some sense, pastoral, and so responsive to the needs of the laymen within the Church. And while postmodernism stopped being advocated in philosophy in the 1980s (according to my friends, although philosophers like Lyotard kept writing on it), it kept trickling down into the culture, and so theologians started addressing it in the early 1990s. But this means that theologians are expending a great deal of effort developing postmodern theologies when the whole project is dead in the water.

Now Continental philosophy, the larger project, is still going strong, and there are without question outstanding Continental philosophers. In fact, as I've written before, Continental philosophy has undergone a "religious turn" or "theological turn"; many of the top Continental philosophers are Christians (like Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, William Desmond, etc.). And while some of the criticisms directed against postmodernism apply to Continental philosophy as a whole (it seems to leave too much room for rampant speculation), not all of them do. And there are certainly advocates within analytic philosophy of perspectivism or subjectivism (think Quine) which would be subject to the same objections to postmodernism as well.

And that's a good enough reason to remind you of the Postmodern Generator. Every time you refresh the page, a postmodern essay is randomly generated.

What I'm Reading

For anyone paying attention, I've just re-added the Goodreads widget to my sidebar that shows what books I'm currently reading. I'm still writing my dissertation, but I really am in the final throes at this point, so I'm able to take my focus off of individual journal articles and book chapters. In fact, one of the two books has absolutely nothing to do with philosophy: Paul, Apostle of the Heart Set Free by F. F. Bruce. I may not be able to really get into it until I actually turn in my dissertation, but I read a few pages every few days. The other book is Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga, which my library just got in last week. This is his most recent book where he argues that there is superficial conflict between Christianity and science and superficial concord between naturalism and science; but there is deep-seated concord between Christianity and science and deep-seated conflict between naturalism and science. Not that he's trying to be controversial or anything.

Somebody get me this shirt

Seriously, somebody get me this shirt now.

I was told there would be no math myth

In two earlier posts I argued that the stories of Jesus in the New Testament cannot be explained (or explained away) as either mythological or as urban legend. I should clarify some of the issues involved as well as the difference between the two, bearing in mind that I'm not an expert.

Mythology has many elements to it, but here I'll focus on two. First, it develops over a long period of time. It's sometimes compared to the game of telephone, where one person whispers something in someone else's ear, the second person whispers to a third, etc. After several people, the story has become mangled. This, however, is incomplete. A closer parallel would be the same game where every third or fourth person has to say what he heard aloud, and allow himself to be corrected by the first person. So with mythology: it takes a long time for it to replace the original story because the original is still available and has more credibility.

The telephone game analogy suggests that mythology evolves slowly over time. It should be noted, however, that the inaccurate ideas may arise quickly. What takes a long time is the replacement of the original with the myth. The collective memory of the actual events simply takes a long time to dissipate. A. N. Sherwin-White argued in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament that two or three generations was too short a time to have the original story replaced by a myth. Indeed, when it was first suggested in the 19th century that the accounts of Jesus in the Bible are mythological, it was assumed that none of them were written until the late 2nd century, since that's how long it would have taken for a myth of that magnitude to arise and be widely accepted. At least there aren't any known examples of it happening faster. Indeed, were this not the case, we would virtually have to abandon the field of ancient history, since almost no ancient historical writings were written close in time to the events they narrate. Since all but a few of the books of the New Testament are dated by scholars to within the first century, the time necessary for them to be mythological simply isn't there. In fact, there is no competing story other than the one found in the gospels until you get to the mid to late second century. As William Lane Craig writes:

The letters of Barnabus and Clement refer to Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. Polycarp mentions the resurrection of Christ, and Irenaeus relates that he had heard Polycarp tell of Jesus’ miracles. Ignatius speaks of the resurrection. Quadratus reports that persons were still living who had been healed by Jesus. Justin Martyr mentions the miracles of Christ. No relic of a nonmiraculous story exists. That the original story should be lost and replaced by another goes beyond any known example of corruption of even oral tradition, not to speak of the experience of written transmissions. These facts show that the story in the Gospels was in substance the same story that Christians had at the beginning. (emphasis mine)

A second element of mythology is that it functions as a literary genre. This is a very important point: as the story changes, so does the way it is told. To suggest that the ancients could have written mythology but not in the genre of mythological writings is simply incoherent; these were two aspects of one thing. It is only in the Modern era that we have classified these literary genres and how they function. So in order for someone in the ancient world to write a mythological story but not in the mythological genre is to suggest that he foresaw the development of Modern literary criticism and adjusted his style of writing in order to trick his future readers -- two millennia in the future -- into thinking that the stories he was telling were not mythological when they really were. This is about as conspiracy theory-ish as you can get without spontaneously combusting.

One aspect of the process of mythologization is that it tends to eliminate irrelevant details -- either by simply erasing them or by ascribing some meaning to them (thus eliminating their irrelevancy). In a myth, every element has a role to play, but historical writings record things that are "messy", that don't have some meaning to the overall story. The biblical accounts of Jesus are replete with such little details. Several times before Jesus would speak to people, Mark records him sighing deeply (7:34; 8:11-13) or gazing at them intently (3:5, 34; 10:23). When a crowd brings an adultress before Jesus, he stoops down and doodles in the dust with his finger (John 8:2-11). A few copies of the New Testament several centuries later tried to accommodate this by adding that Jesus wrote down the sins of the woman's accusers to show that they were not without sin. That's exactly how mythology works, by changing the details so that they have some relevance to the story.

Gregory Boyd gave several examples of this in John 20:1-8 in a letter he wrote to his non-Christian father, later published as Letters from a Skeptic (I should note that I disagree with Boyd on some of the points he makes here):

Early on the first day of the week (when? does it matter?), while it was still dark (who cares?), Mary Magdalene (an incriminating detail, see the next criteria) went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved (John's modest way of referring to himself -- another mark of genuineness) and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!" (note her lack of faith here) So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. They were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first (John's modesty again, but who cares about this irrelevant detail?). He bent over (the tomb entrance was low -- a detail which is historically accurate for tombs of wealthy people of the time -- the kind we know Jesus was buried in) and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in (why not? irrelevant detail). Then Simon Peter, who was behind him (modest repetition again), arrived and went into the tomb (Peter's boldness stands out in all the Gospel accounts). He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head (irrelevant detail -- what was Jesus wearing?). The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen (could anything be more irrelevant, and more unusual, than this, Dad? Jesus folded one part of His wrapping before He left!). Finally the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went inside (who cares about what exact order they went in?).

The presence of little details like this should not be understood as absolute. Fully mythological stories can have irrelevant details, and historical writings can show how little details were actually relevant to what was going on. The point is that in general, the more such details there are, the less mythologized the story is. This gives us the ability to test how far along the mythologization process a story is.

Here's a non-biblical example: The Voyage of Saint Brendan is an early medieval text describing an Irish monk who built a small leather boat and, essentially, sailed it around the North Atlantic Ocean. Tim Severin, in The Brendan Voyage, relates how his wife, an expert in medieval literature, thought that The Voyage of Saint Brendan was a partially mythologized story of something that actually happened.

"There's something odd about the Saint Brendan text," remarked my wife Dorothy one evening. Her casual comment immediately caught my attention.

"What do you mean by 'odd'?" I asked her.

"The text doesn't match up with much of the other literature written at about the same time. The best way to explain it is that it doesn't have the same feel. It's a curiosity. ... The story has a remarkable amount of practical detail, far more than most early medieval texts. It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits. It carefully describes the progress of the voyage, the times and distances, and so forth. It seems to me that the text is not so much a legend as a tale that is embroidering a first-hand experience."

Severin decided to build a leather boat out of the same material that would have been available in that particular part of Ireland at that particular time and sail it across the North Atlantic (à la Kon-Tiki). Not only did he successfully sail from Ireland to North America (via the Faroes and Iceland), he learned that a leather boat had great advantages over wooden ones: at one point, they struck an iceberg strong enough that it would have punched a hole in a wooden boat, big enough to sink it. A leather boat, however, can be sewn up en route.

Anyway, the point is that no scholar has ever suggested that the gospels are written in the genre of mythology. Those who have argued that they are mythological (primarily in the late 19th century) said they should be understood this way despite the genre in which they are written. In fact, this is so blatant, so screamingly obvious, that you can verify it yourself: simply read the gospels side-by-side with actual mythological writings -- not modern retellings of mythological stories, but the actual myths themselves. It's obvious that they're not in the same genre. Until fairly recently, it's been a contentious point what genre the gospels belong to, other than that they were roughly historical writings. But in the last few decades, scholars have accepted that they are written in the genre of ancient biography, similar to Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. As I pointed out here, that doesn't mean that they are historically accurate in every detail, but it certainly makes it very difficult to claim that they are inaccurate in their central claims.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time on mythology. Urban legend is simpler: it basically lacks many of these elements. An urban legend is not based on a long process of mythologization but on someone telling a false story. Thus, in contrast with actual mythology, urban legends do not replace the original story, they are, in a sense, competing with it. Having said that, urban legends are similar to mythology in that they will often lack the irrelevant details that we find in veridical accounts. Urban legends are trying to make a point, and so simply ignore the details that don't play a role in this. In my post on this, I argue that the people who originated an urban legend either a) simply made it up (i.e. they lied); b) hallucinated; c) experienced something they mistook for something else (such as nondescript lights in the sky which are mistaken for alien spacecraft); or d) were insane (didn't really experience anything, but now actually think they did). The biblical accounts of Jesus cannot fit into any of these categories. Rather than rehearse them here, I'll just commend you to my earlier post.

Incidentally, if you haven't read The Brendan Voyage, I strongly recommend it.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Quote of the Day

Chiefly, however, determinism is self-stultifying. If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism. But if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false. J. R. Lucas has put the point cogently with reference to Marxist and Freudian forms of determinism thus. 'The Marxist who says that all ideologies have no independent validity and merely reflect the class interests of those who hold them can be told that in that case his Marxist views merely express the economic interests of his class, and have no more claim to be judged true or valid than any toher view. So too the Freudian, if he makes out that everybody else's philosophy is merely the consequence of childhood experiences, is, by parity of reasoning, revealing merely his delayed response to what happened to him when he was a child.' Lucas then makes the same point with regard to a person who maintains, more generally, that our behaviour is totally determined by heredity and environment. 'If what he says is true, he says it merely as the result of his heredity and environment, and of nothing else. He does not hold his determinist views because they are true, but because he has such-and-such a genetic make-up, and has received such-and-such stimuli; that is, not because the structure of the universe is such-and-such but only because the configuration of only one part of the universe, together with the structure of the determinist's brain, is such as to produce that result.'

The exact force of this criticism is sometimes missed. Certainly on deterministic premisses determinism may be true. But we should not have any grounds for affirming that it is true or therefore for knowing that it is so. In order to obtain these grounds we must be free from all determining factors in order to assess the evidence according to its own worth. This principle applies to the assessment of all truth-claims (including those of Christianity). Freedom from determining factors is therefore required in the cognitive as much as in the moral sphere.

Huw Parri Owen
Christian Theism: A Study in Its Basic Principles
(quoting J. R. Lucas, The Freedom of the Will)

The Central Issue; or Location Isn't Everything

Update (Oct. 17, 2014): I temporarily removed the content of this post because it has some similarities with an article I wrote that was published in an academic journal about a year ago. Even though a blogpost probably doesn't count as having previously published the material, I took the content of this post offline in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, with the intention of restoring it after a year had passed. Since it's been a year, the original post is below.
_______________

Before Copernicus, everyone thought that the earth was immobile at the center of the universe, a concept called "geocentrism". Their grounds for this were pretty simple: we don't seem to be moving and everything else does; and everything else seems to be moving around us. Since people thought that everything revolves around us, they concluded that ... well ... everything revolves around us; that is, we are of central importance. This fits well with the biblical narrative, which makes the audacious claim that we have an intrinsic significance and value. In Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan, obviously not a proponent of this position, represented its egotism well:

(I)f the lights in the sky rise and set around us, isn't it evident that we're at the centre of the Universe? These celestial bodies ... circle us like courtiers fawning on a king. Even if we had not already guessed, the most elementary examination of the heavens reveals that we are special ...

But then Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around the Sun. This "revelation" dethroned humanity by removing it from its central position; and because of this, the Catholic church denounced it. This is one of the primary examples of how science conflicts with, or simply refutes, religion. There's a small problem with it though: it's mostly bunk. Let's investigate it, shall we?

First, and least controversial, is that the geocentric model of the universe did not come from the Bible but from Aristotle's cosmology, which was later adopted and made rigorous by Ptolemy. According to this model, the universe was arranged in concentric spheres, with God, the Prime Mover, on the outside keeping it in motion. This was the model throughout the Middle Ages, and Thomas Aquinas explicitly endorsed Aristotle's philosophy in the 13th century. Later, when the Catholic church sanctioned Aquinas' philosophy, this included his sanction of Aristotle.

Second, the most vociferous denunciations of heliocentrism were not made by the church but by the scientific establishment of the time. They had, after all, devoted much of their scholarship towards expounding upon the geocentric model, and were then being told that their paradigm was wrong and their lifes' work meaningless.

Third, the Catholic church did of course denounce Galileo over his writings on this issue, but the controversy wasn't as two-dimensional as is commonly portrayed. For one thing, Galileo had publicly mocked Pope Urban VIII who, until that point, had been a personal friend. The pope misused his power to call Galileo to account, and the heliocentric theory was the excuse he used. Thus, it was more of a political persecution than a religious one. Another issue was that Galileo had claimed that the Catholic clergy had erred in their theology and their interpretation of Scripture by accepting geocentrism. This wasn't long after the Protestant Reformation, so they were a little put off by this. In particular, the texts in question give no indication that they are intended to be understood from a perspective other than the surface of the earth.

But probably the biggest error in this metanarrative is the equation of geocentrism with anthropocentrism. That is, since people thought we were centrally located, it implies that they thought we are centrally significant; that since we are in the center of the universe, we must be the most important thing in it.

This was emphatically not the case. In the ancient/medieval cosmology, the closer one was to the center indicated one's lack of significance and value, that one was less esteemed and privileged. Aristotle had argued that the universe is a sphere which the Prime Mover kept in motion from the outside. So what's the furthest place within a sphere that is furthest from what is outside it? The center. Thus, the center was the place in the universe furthest removed from God (although this does not seem consonant with the Christian concept of God's omnipresence). That they thought the earth valueless is further illustrated by the fact that in this cosmology, the heavenly objects beyond the sphere of the Moon were made up of a fifth element, the quintessence, which was not prone to corruption like the other four elements that the earth consisted of (earth, air, fire, and water).

The medieval theologians tried to account for geocentrism in their hamartiology (doctrine of sin). What was sinful was heavy, and fell towards the center, whereas the heavens were holy and perfect. Essentially, the earth was the universe's toilet. The heaviness of sin also made the earth immobile, as distinct from "the dance of the heavens". Motion was a good thing; the fact that the earth didn't move showed that it wasn't good.

This is easily illustrated. In their view the earth was at the center of the universe, but what was at the center of the earth? Hell. Thus the inhabitants of hell were even closer to the center than the inhabitants of the surface of the earth. Did the medieval theologians think this made hell a place of esteem and its inhabitants more valuable? Of course not. In fact, as Dante wrote, at the very center of hell was Satan, bound and immobile. So, as Arthur Lovejoy put it in The Great Chain of Being, the medieval cosmology is better described as diabolocentric than geocentric.

Thus, the claim that the earth is not at the center of the universe was a huge promotion for humanity, not a demotion. Galileo clearly understood this when he wrote that the earth "is not the sump where the universe's filth and ephemera collect." It wasn't until the mid-17th century that some French satirists first suggested the popular story line that Copernicus' discovery represented a demotion for humanity. C. S. Lewis, in The Discarded Image, explains why the claim that the earth is at the literal, physical center does not entail that it is at the metaphorical, existential center as well.

Because, as Dante was to say more clearly than anyone else, the spatial order is the opposite of the spiritual, and the material cosmos mirrors, hence reverses, the reality, so that what is truly the rim seems to us the hub. ... We watch "the spectacle of the celestial dance" from its outskirts. Our highest privilege is to imitate it in such measure as we can. The medieval Model is, if we may use the word, anthropo-peripheral. We are creatures of the Margin.

Much of this information is addressed in greater detail in several essays by Dennis Danielson, a literary historian at the University of British Columbia. One that can be downloaded online is "Copernicus and the Tale of the Pale Blue Dot"; his description there of how scientists have responded to his arguments is especially interesting. Another Danielson essay is "The Great Copernican Cliché", published in The American Journal of Physics 69/10 (2001): 1029-35. He also wrote "Myth 6: That Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos" in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, edited by Ronald Numbers. Danielson also addresses this point briefly in his biography of Rheticus entitled The First Copernican. I quoted the relevant text here.

Two more points: first, one of the main areas of research in several scientific disciplines today is the Anthropic Principle. This is the idea that in order for life to exist (and especially advanced life), the universe has to have very specific properties. That is, if various aspects of the universe were any different, it would preclude the possibility of life existing anywhere at any time in the history of the universe. There are literally dozens of such properties that have to be precise to absurdly fine degrees, and more are being discovered just about every month.

The claim that the universe is "fine-tuned" has some obvious religious implications: if the universe is exactly the way it has to be in order for us to exist, it suggests that someone rigged it precisely for this purpose. One of the most common objections to this has been that it flies in the face of the whole history of science, which has repeatedly demonstrated that humanity has no significance. This objection is derived first and foremost from the Copernican demotion of humanity. If this paradigm is false, one of the primary objections to the Anthropic Principle is based on a misunderstanding of the history of science and religion.

Second, when people are told that their religion leads to absurd beliefs like geocentrism, some respond by essentially saying "Really? That's what we believe? Well then, let's defend that position!" Today, there is a Christian ministry that defends "geocentricity" (they think this term doesn't have the historical baggage that "geocentrism" does). Additionally, some young earth creationist ministries have jumped on board and are defending a broader concept: galactocentrism (that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is at the center of the universe). Both of these efforts are motivated by the claim that if we are centrally important, we should expect to be centrally located as well. But this claim comes from opponents of Christianity trying to mock it. I suggest that we should not let those who deprecate our faith define it for us.

The Oddity and Audacity of Openness Theodicy

Openness theology is a sort of halfway house between traditional Christian theology and process theology. Much of the motivation for it rests in its theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the occurrence of evil with the existence of an omnibenevolent God.

According to process theology, God is dependent on the world; as such, he is unable to directly cause any events, but can only "woo" free agents (free in the libertarian sense) to submit to his will. This absolves God of evil fairly easily: God doesn't stop evil because he can't. Such a view, however, can't be reconciled with Christianity, or even theism -- it's panentheistic rather than theistic. God cannot perform miracles, such as the creation of the universe or raising Jesus from the dead. It exchanges God's omnipotence for impotence.

Traditional Christian theology has claimed that God, being omnibenevolent, is not responsible for evil. Human beings, being free agents, are responsible for most of the evil that they experience. God, however, allows such evil, but then uses it to bring about good. Jesus' crucifixion is the paradigm for this: the one innocent human being that has ever lived was brutally tortured and executed. Yet, by his death, the human race is reconciled to God. In fact, this seems to suggest that the greater the evil, the greater the good that God can bring out of it.

Openness theologians and philosophers object to this scenario, since it would mean that God foreknows horrific evils and doesn't stop them. God knew the Holocaust would happen, recognized it as evil, and then let it happen anyway. By allowing evil to take place, God is culpable for it, and this is incompatible with his omnibenevolence. They consider this to be simply unacceptable. God must not know that evil will take place before it happens, and therefore he must not know anything before it happens. The future is "open". It is not already laid down for us in the divine mind. We are free to choose the evil or the good. Of course, traditional Christian theology says we are free as well, but openness theologians do not think this view of freedom is acceptable, partially, again, because it makes God bear much of the responsibility for evil.

But this raises enormous problems for openness theologians, not least of which is whether their theodicy really accomplishes what they think it does. First, although God may not know infallibly what will happen, does that mean that he has no idea whatsoever what the future holds? To deny this would seem absurd: human beings can often know what's going to happen before it actually does, and while this knowledge is certainly fallible, it still allows us to sometimes see evil approaching before it reaches us. Thus, openness theology does not deny that God may know with great probability what we will freely choose to do, he just doesn't know it with absolute certainty. But this raises the question, how often is God right? Wouldn't it be possible for God to know everything with such a high degree of probability that he's never wrong? If so, we're faced with the same problem of evil as traditional Christianity has wrestled with; if not, why not? If God's foreknowledge is not infallible, on what basis does the openness advocate determine the degree to which God can know our future free decisions?

So the openness theologian's claims would seem to suffer from the same critiques which he gave to traditional Christian theology: if God knows that a particular evil will probably transpire, why wouldn't he stop it? The only way out of this for the openness theologian that I can see is if every instance of evil goes against what God expected would probably occur. But surely this is preposterous; after all, Nietschze predicted that the twentieth century would be the bloodiest that humanity had ever seen, a prediction that was fulfilled. Would the openness theologian maintain that an atheist philosopher had more insight than God? (If so, the atheist philosopher would appear to be right. Perhaps Nietschze meant to say God is dumb instead of dead.) The point here is that human beings have some capacity to successfully prognosticate when bad things will happen, so it would seem absurd to deny God the same faculty. The difference is that God supposedly has greater motive and ability to intercede.

Even if God were surprised by every instance of evil, this would still leave openness theology with a less adequate theodicy than traditional Christian theology. After all, according to the latter, God allows specific instances of evil only to prevent greater evils or to produce good. In the openness view, God is surprised by specific instances of evil, has no purpose in allowing them to continue, but allows them to anyway. Openness theology claims it is completely implausible that God could have had morally sufficient reasons for allowing the Holocaust; it's more reasonable to think that God didn't know the Holocaust was going to happen. But if this is the case, why didn't God stop it once it started? Why didn't God intervene and stop the Holocaust when it first began instead of letting six million Jews be killed over several years? The traditional Christian theologian can claim that God had morally sufficient reasons for allowing the Holocaust. The process theologian can claim that God was incapable of stopping it. But the openness theologian must maintain that God had the capacity to stop the Holocaust, had no morally sufficient reason not to, but didn't anyway. In other words, their attempt to build a better theodicy has produced the very worst theodicy possible, short of maltheism.

The Christ Myth Myth

I've gone over this before here and here, so let me just summarize. Some people think 1) Jesus Christ is mythological rather than historical, and their primary evidence of this is that 2) there are parallels of Jesus in world mythology. Some take this the further step of arguing that 3) Jesus is completely mythological and thus completely unhistorical; that is, no such person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. I'll deal with these in reverse order. In the following, by "scholars" I mean "scholars of the relevant disciplines", i.e. historical Jesus scholars: people with PhDs in ancient history or New Testament history or something similar. I'm sure there are experts in pharmacology or library science who have different views than the scholars I'm referring to, but this is irrelevant since their area of expertise has no bearing on the subject in question. To think otherwise would be to commit the fallacy of irrelevant authority.

3) No scholar thinks it even remotely possible that Jesus may not have existed. Those that do mention such claims explicitly put them on the same intellectual level as Holocaust denial, Moon landing hoax claims, and other conspiracy theories. Indeed, scholars maintain that certain events regarding Jesus are historically certain, and he would obviously have had to exist in order for these events to have taken place. So, for example, Jesus' crucifixion is considered by scholars to be one of the central events in human history; you can't deny it without having to deny most of ancient history in order to be consistent, and it would render subsequent historical development virtually inexplicable. N. T. Wright, the most prestigious contemporary scholar, wrote in The Resurrection of the Son of God that this is true of the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus as well: "I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category of historical probability so high as to be historically certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70". Similarly, William Lane Craig has called Jesus' post-mortem appearances "a fact that is almost universally acknowledged by New Testament scholars today".

2) The claim that there are parallels to Jesus in world mythology was only ever held by a minority of scholars, and has been completely rejected by scholars for nearly a century. The parallels in question were conceived so broadly that virtually anything would fit. As such, they were completely contrived. There are, of course, some authors who argue for these parallels even today, but they are not scholars. Joseph Campbell comes to mind: he wrote extensively about mythology and how the Christian myths had many antecedents (except the antecedents were far superior to the Christian version). But Campbell didn't have a PhD, he had a Master's degree in French literature. That's certainly very valuable and a noteworthy accomplishment, but it doesn't qualify him to be considered a historical Jesus scholar. I have a couple of Master's degrees in Philosophy; that doesn't qualify me to be considered a scholar of solid state physics. At any rate, many universities have "The Bible as Literature" courses which are essentially stages to advocate the parallels between Jesus and mythology. But again, these courses are not taught by historical Jesus scholars, they are taught by people with degrees in unrelated disciplines. I find this unfortunate.

1) The idea that the gospels are mythological survived a few decades longer within scholarly circles than did the idea that there are mythological parallels to Jesus. Rudolf Bultmann advocated the view that when the gospels are "demythologized", very little of Jesus could be known beyond the fact that he existed and was killed by crucifixion. Bultmann lived to the 1970s, but his views were rejected by the 1950s with the initiation of the Second Quest for the historical Jesus (we are currently in the midst of the Third Quest). But there is a much more obvious problem with the claim that the gospels are mythological. Mythology is, at least partially, a literary genre, a style of writing. But I'm unaware of any scholar, ever, who argued that the gospels are written in the genre of mythology. Rather, those who claimed they were mythological argued that what the gospels record could not be historical, and so must be mythological, regardless of the genre in which they were written. This point is easily demonstrated: simply read some actual myths -- not modern accounts of myths, but the actual myths themselves -- side by side with the gospels. It's obvious that they don't belong to the same genre, the same type of writing. Thus, James D. G. Dunn argued in the entry for "Myth" in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels that the entry wasn't really necessary: "Myth is a term of at least doubtful relevance to the study of Jesus and the Gospels". The genre of the gospels has been a matter of dispute for the last couple of hundred years, although most scholars would have said that they are written as historical writings. But in the last 20-30 years there has been an incredible revolution within historical Jesus studies to the effect that most scholars today consider the gospels to have been written in the literary genre of ancient biography. Of course, this doesn't speak to their reliability in matters of detail, but it certainly makes it difficult to claim they don't have a solid historical core at all.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Some Issues in NT Historiography, part 5

I’ve dealt with the claim that there are parallels to the life of Jesus in world mythology before. I made three primary points:

First, virtually all scholars acknowledge that the gospels are not written in the literary genre of mythology or folklore or allegory. They are written in the genre of historical writing, specifically in the genre of ancient biography (I recently mentioned this here as well). The significance of this is that the understanding of how these different genres functioned in ancient literature only became known in the Modern era. Thus, in order to maintain the myth hypothesis, one would have to argue that the NT authors anticipated Modern discoveries and categories of thought, and then intentionally wrote a myth as if it were a biography in order to trick future analysis of their writings. This is obviously absurd.

Second, in order to find these parallels, the categories have to be so broad that they can apply to virtually anything. "Death and rebirth" (or alternately, "resurrection") means any kind of change, since you’re "dying" to the old way and being "reborn" to the new. To take another example, I’ve read a few dozen myths, or accounts of myths, that contain the "virgin birth" motif. So far, I can group them into three categories:

1) Virgin births in which the woman becomes pregnant by having sexual intercourse with a hero or god.

2) Virgin births in which the woman becomes pregnant via a substitute form of sexual penetration (the hero or god leaves his "seed" in a pool, a woman bathes in the pool ...).

3) Virgin births in which it is not related how the woman became pregnant.

It’s just weird to refer to a birth initiated by a woman having sex as a "virgin birth". And obviously, none of these categories parallels the virginal conception of Jesus, in which no sexual penetration of any kind took place. The only way these are similar to Jesus is that a woman became pregnant, and the supernatural is somehow involved. Thus we see that the people who call these myths "virgin births" are using Christian terminology so that the parallels don’t appear as vague -- then they turn around and marvel at the similarities.

Third, the attempt to compare Jesus to mythologies is completely rejected by historical Jesus scholarship, and has been for nearly a century. It still lives on in popular culture and college campuses, no doubt partially because many teachers and professors of other fields are unaware of historical Jesus scholarship, and use the classroom as a platform to expound their (mis)understandings of the nature of Christianity. Even C. S. Lewis thought that there were many parallels to Jesus in world mythology, but ironically, it actually played a role in his conversion to Christianity -- the parallels were there to "prepare the way" for acceptance of Jesus. In Christ, "myth became fact". Nevertheless, historical Jesus scholars believe (very reasonably) that Jesus should be understood in the context of first century Judaism rather than myths that have little to no similarities to Jesus, and at any rate had no historical connection to him and the early Church.

This leads me to my final point (in this post and this series): modern scholarship. When I first turned to historical Jesus studies to try to find a way to reject traditional Christianity, I was shocked at how much they accept. But others coming from a different direction may be equally shocked at how much they deny. I think a good case can be made based solely on what the scholars acknowledge as historically demonstrable, but here I’d like to focus on the perils of scholarship.

C. S. Lewis wrote a very succinct essay called "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" (alternately titled "Fern-seed and Elephants" for reasons you’ll soon discover) in which he delineates a few of the problems with modern attempts to reconstruct a portrait of Jesus different from what the NT relays. While volumes of books have done this extensively, Lewis’s treatment deserves a detailed exposition.

First, bearing in mind that Lewis was a literary expert, he claims that many of these critics demonstrate a lack of literary judgment. After giving several examples of this he concludes, "These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence [against this] is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight."

Second, Lewis points out that these critics claim that Jesus’ followers were completely wrong about who he was and what he did, but that they’ve recovered this information by reading the records his followers left behind. Lewis gives a few other examples of this sort of reasoning:

One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian rather like T. H. Green. I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearean play really meant. But in this third instance I am a privileged person. The revolution in thought and sentiment which has occurred in my own lifetime is so great that I belong, mentally, to Shakespeare’s world far more than to that of these recent interpreters. I see -- I feel it in my bones -- I know beyond argument -- that most of their interpretations are merely impossible; they involve a way of looking at things which was not known in 1914, much less in the Jacobean period. This daily confirms my suspicion of the same approach to Plato or the New Testament. The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance. (emphasis mine)

Third, as discussed in parts 1 and 2, these scholars equate "miraculous" with "unhistorical". This is simply a philosophical bias which can be (and has been) refuted. When a historian bases his theories on bad philosophy instead of historical evidence, he has ceased to speak to us as a historian.

Lewis’s fourth, and best argument is as follows:

What forearms me against all these Reconstructions is the fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way. ... I have watched with some care similar imaginary histories both of my own books and of books by friends whose real history I knew. ... Now I must first record my impression; then, distinct from it, what I can say with certainty. My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 percent failure. You would expect that by mere chance they would hit as often as they miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can’t remember a single hit. But as I have not kept a careful record my mere impression may be mistaken. What I think I can say with certainty is that they are usually wrong. ... Now this surely ought to give us pause. ... In order to decide how reliable the method is, what more could you ask for than to be shown an instance where the same method is at work and we have facts to check it by? Well, that is what I have done. And we find, that when this check is available, the results are either always, or else nearly always, wrong.

We can contrast this with the second point to make this even clearer: if those that lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, and shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions as Lewis could not reconstruct an accurate history of any of his works, how likely is it that those doing this with the gospels, who are working without these advantages, would do so successfully?

I don’t mean to imply that scholarship is a crock; far from it. Just that when it comes to the NT, some people hold it to different standards than they do other ancient documents. When held to the same standard, NT history is established at least as firmly as classical Rome and Greece. If it wasn’t for a bias against what the NT documents record, no historian in the world would ever doubt them. As Kreeft and Tacelli write,

If the books of the New Testament did not contain accounts of miracles or make radical, uncomfortable claims on our lives, they would be accepted by every scholar in the world. In other words, it is not objective, neutral science but subjective prejudice or ideology that fuels skeptical Scripture scholarship.

(see also part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4)

Craig vs. Spong

I recently listened to a debate between William Lane Craig and John Shelby Spong on the historical Jesus (this was an actual debate, unlike the presentation and response Craig had with Dennett). You can listen to it here. Craig argued that Spong is so insulated that he doesn't know what scholars outside of his small circle actually say. He points out that a survey of NT scholarship of the last few decades indicates that three-fourths of the scholars writing on the subject accept the historicity of Jesus' empty tomb, and almost universally accept his post-mortem appearances as historically demonstrable. Moreover, most scholars today recognize that the four gospels are written as historical writing, specifically in the genre of ancient biography -- not myth, not legend, not allegory, not midrash (as Spong claims). Spong seems genuinely puzzled by this. It reminds me of something N. T. Wright wrote of Spong in Who Was Jesus?

What is central is that Spong apparently does not know what 'midrash' actually is. The 'genre' of writing to which he makes such confident appeal is nothing at all like he says it is. There is such a thing as 'midrash'; scholars have been studying it, discussing it, and analysing it, for years. Spong seems to be unaware of the most basic results of this study. He has grabbed the word out of the air, much as Barbara Thiering grabbed the idea of 'pesher' exegesis, and to much the same effect. He misunderstands the method itself, and uses this bent tool to make the gospels mean what he wants instead of what they say.
...
We may briefly indicate the ways in which genuine 'midrash' differs drastically from anything that we find in the gospels.

First, midrash proper consists of a commentary on an actual biblical text. It is not simply a fanciful retelling, but a careful discussion in which the original text itself remains clearly in focus. It is obvious that the gospels do not read in any way like this.

Second, real midrash is 'tightly controlled and argued'. This is in direct opposition to Spong's idea of it, according to which (p. 184) 'once you enter the midrash tradition, the imagination is freed to roam and to speculate'. This statement tells us a good deal about Spong's own method of doing history, and nothing whatever about midrash. The use made of the Old Testament in the early chapters of Luke, to take an example, is certainly not midrash; neither is it roaming or speculative imagination.

Third, real midrash is a commentary precisely on Scripture. Goulder's theories, on which Spong professes to rely quite closely, suggest that Luke and Matthew were providing midrash on Mark. It is, however, fantastically unlikely that either of them would apply to Mark a technique developed for commenting on ancient Scripture.

Fourth, midrash never included the invention of stories which were clearly seen as non-literal in intent, and merely designed to evoke awe and wonder. It was no part of Jewish midrash, or any other Jewish writing-genre in the first century, to invent all kinds of new episodes about recent history in order to advance the claim that the Scriptures had been fulfilled. It is one of the salient characteristics of Jewish literature throughout the New Testament period that, even though novelistic elements could creep in to books like Jubilees, the basic emphasis remains on that which happened within history.

A moment in the debate that particularly struck me was when Spong related how Carl Sagan had once approached him and said something to the effect of, if Jesus had ascended away from the surface of the earth at the speed of light, he'd still be in the Milky Way galaxy. This is essentially the claim that the Ascension was predicated on a local heaven just above the clouds and thus that the ancients and medievals didn't know the universe is incomprehensibly large, something I showed to be false here.

The fact that Spong thinks this is a good or original point further demonstrates how insulated he is. The South England Legendary, written in the 13th century, says something similar. C. S. Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, that the Legendary is "better evidence than any learned production could be for the Model as it existed in the imagination of ordinary people. We are there told that if a man could travel upwards at the rate of ‘forty mile and yet som del mo’ a day, he still would not have reached the Stellatum (‘the highest heven that ye alday seeth’) in 8000 years." Since this was common knowledge several hundred years before it occurred to Sagan or Spong, I can't get too excited about their "insight", much less their claim that it threatens traditional Christianity -- a point that the South England Legendary somehow misses.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

1 Corinthians 15:3-8

(This is an essay I wrote for my MA in theology. It should be noted that there is not an original thought in it, and it is significantly dependent on the works of William Lane Craig; many of my references are his, and I just looked them up to make sure he got the quote right.)

In 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul exhorts the fledgling Corinthian church to hold fast "to the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved." He then identifies this gospel with a creed which the vast majority of scholars date to the AD 30s, within about five years of Jesus’ crucifixion. This creed cites that Jesus was killed to atone for our sins, that his corpse was buried, and that he then rose from the dead. He then appeared to various individuals and groups of people. In this essay, I intend to examine this creed by defending its identification as such, the evidence which has convinced most scholars to date it so early, and its content, and the resulting significance for accepting the historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

Exegetical evidence for recognizing 1 Cor. 15:3-8 as a creed
"That this confession is an early Christian, pre-Pauline creed is recognized by virtually all critical scholars across a very wide theological spectrum."[1] Some of the reasons given for holding this view are that, first, Paul introduces it as information with which his original audience was already familiar. Second, Paul describes this creed as that which he himself had received (paralambanein) and delivered (paradidonai). These are technical rabbinical terms employed in reference to the passing on of oral tradition.[2] Third, the language is organized stylistically, which is a mnemonic device used in order to facilitate memorization. This is demonstrated by the repetition of phrases such as, "and that" and "according to the Scriptures."[3] Fourth, the language is decidedly non-Pauline, which demonstrates that it probably did not originate with Paul. Non-Pauline phrases include "according to the Scriptures" (kata tas grafas, whereas Paul’s statement to this effect is always kathos gegraptai), as well as "for our sins," "he has been raised," "the third day," "he was seen," etc.[4] Fourth, this passage appears to have been translated into Greek from an Aramaic original, as evidenced by the fact that many of the non-Pauline phrases mentioned above are Semitic in character, as is the parallelism, and the use of Peter’s Aramaic name, Cephas.[5] "These [and other] considerations have persuaded virtually all New Testament scholars that vs. 3-7 do contain a pre-Pauline formula."[6]

The exact content of this creed is a more disputed issue among scholarship. Most would maintain that the creed ends in the middle of verse 6 after the statement that Jesus appeared to the 500 brethren, since the latter half of this verse is typically Pauline, and seems to be a break in the sentence structure. However, there are good exegetical grounds for seeing this, not as the cessation of Paul’s use of the creed, but merely as a parenthetical addition made by Paul, and that the creed continues in verse 7. This is evidenced by the fact that this latter verse contains the statement that Jesus appeared to all of the apostles; but one of Paul’s purposes in 1 Corinthians is to defend his own apostleship (1 Cor. 1:1; 9:1-6). Since verse 8 clearly indicates that he was not present at this appearance, it would serve no purpose for Paul to describe it as having been witnessed by "all the apostles" unless this phrase does not originate with Paul.[7]

Thus the creed would appear to consist of the following statement, minus the parenthetical comments in red font:

(For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:)
That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
And that he was buried,
And that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
And that he appeared to Cephas,
And then to the Twelve,
Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time,
(most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep)
Then he appeared to James
And then to all the apostles.
(Then, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.)[8]

The origin and date of the creed
Unfortunately, it would extend this essay beyond reason to discuss why scholars date 1 Corinthians in the mid-AD 50s, as well as why the timeline of Paul’s life detailed in Acts and corroborated in his letters is considered to be fundamentally historically reliable. We must accede to the judgment of the scholarly consensus on these issues in order to set our sights on a more particular target: when did Paul receive this creed? This then lends itself to two more questions: with whom does this creed originate? And when?

Paul’s conversion to Christianity in Damascus is dated at between three to five years after Jesus’ crucifixion, and he visited Jerusalem to confer with the apostle Peter and Jesus’ brother James three years after that (Gal. 1:18-19). The Aramaic character of the creed indicates that it originated when the church was still primarily made up of Jews rather than Gentiles who would have needed it to be in the "trade language" of Greek. Thus, most scholars date Paul’s reception of this creed to within this early period, i.e., three to eight years after the crucifixion.[9]

The particular event which most scholars lean towards is Paul’s visit to Jerusalem three years after his conversion. One of the reasons for dating his reception of the creed to this event is that it would accord well with the prominent place given to Peter and James in the creed, since Paul’s trip to Jerusalem was specifically in order to meet with these two. I don’t find this convincing because it would appear to belie the whole nature of the creed predating Paul; in other words, if Peter and James are mentioned in the creed because Paul met with them at this point, then it would imply that Paul was the one constructing the creed. But we’ve already seen that it’s very unlikely that Paul is the author.

More convincing is the argument of Paul’s description of this trip as historesai. This is another technical rabbinical term used to "designate fact-finding missions to well-known cities and other points of interest with a view toward acquiring first-hand information about them. Accordingly, it implies that Paul’s visit to Cephas and Jerusalem was for the purpose of gaining information about the faith from first-hand witnesses."[10] In fact, we could reasonably conclude this even without any direct exegetical evidence; if Paul traveled to Jerusalem and met with Peter and James there, "we may presume that they did not spend all their time talking about the weather."[11]

Another suggestion is that Paul received this creed immediately after his conversion in Damascus. However, the Aramaisms would suggest that this creed originated in the Jerusalem church, and there may not have been sufficient time for it to have been transferred to the Damascus church during the then-ongoing persecution. Thus, if we must date Paul’s reception of the creed to this early period, Paul’s historesai to Jerusalem, about five to eight years after Jesus’ crucifixion, would appear to be the best candidate, and this is the view that most scholars hold.

This raises the question of who the creed actually comes from. Insofar as Paul received the creed from Peter and James, who are listed therein as having experienced individual appearances of Jesus after his death (not to mention the fact that Peter would have been included in the appearances to the Twelve and to all the apostles), this would constitute eyewitness approval of these statements, if not direct eyewitness statements. Gary Habermas noted this very point in a debate with Antony Flew, that "we have two separate appearances, to the twelve and to the apostles. So that’s in the creed, it’s eyewitness testimony, and it dates back to the time of the Crucifixion."

Most critical theologians who address the issue hold that Paul was given this material by Peter and James in Jerusalem. They were eyewitnesses and both are listed in the creed in 1 Corinthians 15. Now if they gave the creed to Paul, then that is a step earlier than the date of AD 33 to AD 38, which is when Paul received it. If they gave it to him, they knew it even earlier. And then the facts that make up the creed before it is stylized have to be even earlier. So we have three stages, the facts themselves, the disciples’ formulation of it, and Paul’s receiving of it. We do have the eyewitness material here because it was the eyewitnesses, in all likelihood, who gave it to Paul, number one. Second, in 1 Corinthians 15:11, 14, and 15, right after the creed, Paul states that these same eyewitnesses were also proclaiming this message that Jesus was raised. So we do have the eyewitness reports.[12]

It seems to me that we cannot make the claim that the creed was authored or formalized by eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances; however, we can say that it was at least approved of by eyewitnesses. This fact has been recognized by the consensus of scholarship. We are told of this creed that, "This account meets all the demands of historical reliability that could possibly be made of such a text,"[13] and, "The passage therefore preserves uniquely early and verifiable testimony. It meets every reasonable demand of historical reliability."[14] The time needed from the beliefs of the early church to be formulated as a creed and then to Paul’s reception of it brings us back directly to the time of the crucifixion, and thus the beliefs must correspond to the actual events. "No longer can it by charged that there is no demonstrable early, eyewitness testimony for the resurrection ... for this creed provides just such evidential data concerning the facts of the gospel, which are the very center of the Christian faith. It links the events themselves with those who actually participated in time and space."[15]

Content of the creed
In what follows, I will go over the creed line by line, to determine exactly what is being said.

That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures -- Here we not only have a statement corroborating Jesus’ death, but also an interpretation of it, in which it is seen as an atonement for our sins. This is significant because the early date of the creed doesn’t allow sufficient time for this interpretation to develop from the brute fact of Jesus’ death itself. It might be suggested that this interpretation can be accounted for in the further statement that this is "according to the Scriptures," i.e., that the followers of Jesus found this interpretation in the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. However, this actually further emphasizes the difficulty: the Jews were not expecting a Messiah who would die, much less one who would do so in order to atone for their sins, but rather a political Messiah who would free them from the yoke of their oppressors (in this case, the Romans); and this expectation is largely based on the Old Testament prophecies about the conquering Messiah. While there are prophecies about an "atoning" Messiah, even John Crossan, one of the more radical scholars, admits that it would take at least five to ten years for the early Christians to interpret Old Testament texts in such a way after Jesus’ death.[16] This is dangerously close to too little time, not to mention the fact that most scholars see Crossan’s view as hopelessly optimistic.[17]

While there are plenty of OT passages which predict that the Messiah would suffer, there aren’t any which state unequivocally that he would die. The fact that the early Christians interpreted these passages as referring to Jesus’ death, then, is extremely significant, especially since the OT passage that the Messiah would not be abandoned to the grave or experience decay (Ps. 16:10) was universally understood as meaning that the Messiah would never die.

And that he was buried -- This importance of this statement lies primarily in what it implies for the one following. In itself, it provides us with a very early belief that Jesus’ corpse was interred.

And that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures -- Here we have what is, quite simply, one of the most significant statements in ancient history. The length of time between the events and the beliefs completely repudiates any attempt to assign belief in Jesus’ resurrection to legendary or mythological development. Moreover, as has already been stated, the ancient Jews simply did not believe in a dying Messiah, much less a rising one. While the resurrection of the dead is a Jewish category of thought, the resurrection of Jesus contradicts it in two central respects: the Jewish belief was in a universal resurrection which took place at the end of time, whereas Jesus’ resurrection was an isolated event which took place within history. This has led most scholars, even Crossan, to admit that there is insufficient material in the Old Testament to interpret in terms of a messianic resurrection.[18] Thus, we are faced with what C. F. D. Moule, a scholar from Oxford University, has called, a belief which nothing, in terms of prior historical influences, can account for -- apart from the resurrection itself.[19]

This statement also affirms that Jesus’ resurrection was "according to the Scriptures." This is probably in reference to the prophecy in Psalm 16:10 that the Messiah would not be abandoned to the grave nor would he see decay. However, as has already been stated, this prophecy in itself is insufficient to account for belief in Jesus’ resurrection, since it was universally believed to mean that the Messiah would never die in the first place.

When tied to the preceding statement, that Jesus’ corpse was buried, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead has great import in that it strongly implies what the gospels state explicitly: his tomb was left empty. In ancient Judaism there was a continuity between the body interred and the body raised. To speak of a resurrection while the body still lay in the tomb was an incoherent concept, and required the passage of nearly two millennia before it would occur to anyone.[20]

Nevertheless, it is frequently held among scholars that, whatever the resurrection was, it had nothing to do with Jesus’ physical body. One of the arguments given for this is that, since Paul clearly views Jesus’ resurrection as the "first fruits" of the general resurrection at the end of the world (1 Cor. 15:20), whatever conclusions he draws about the latter must apply to the former. Thus, when Paul says later in chapter 15 that "it is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body," (v. 42-44), we are to take this to mean that the resurrection body is being contrasted with our present physical bodies in the sense that the former is not physical in nature. Therefore, it’s not the same body that is interred, and this would then apply to Jesus’ body as well.

I have two responses to this: first, if it is sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body, there is clearly a continuity between the body interred and the body raised. If this means that the physical body is transformed into a non-physical body, so be it; but this can’t be used to maintain that the resurrection body has nothing in common with our earthly, physical bodies. Second, in this very same letter, Paul uses exactly the same vocabulary to contrast the natural man with the spiritual man (1 Cor. 2:14-15); but here the contrast is clearly between a man under the domination of sinful human nature and the man who has submitted himself to God’s Holy Spirit. In other words, it’s a contrast in orientation, not of substance or materiality.[21] One of the central tenets of exegesis is to interpret the unclear in light of the clear. Thus, we should interpret Paul’s statements in chapter 15 in light of his statements in chapter 2: the resurrection body is a real, tangible, physical body that is no longer under the control of sin and corruption and mortality. Similarly, when Paul states that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable," (1 Cor. 15:50), we need to recognize that the phrase "flesh and blood" is an idiom which Paul uses in reference to sinful human nature (Gal. 1:16; Eph. 6:12), and should not be understood as stating that the resurrection body will be a non-physical entity. Likewise, by saying that the perishable won’t inherit the imperishable, he’s simply saying that our resurrection bodies won’t be prone to death and corruption like our earthly bodies are.

And that he appeared to Cephas -- "Cephas" is the Aramaic name for Peter. The only other account we have of this appearance is in Luke 24:34, but no details are given.

And then to the Twelve -- This is a name given to the original twelve apostles which Jesus chose. At first, there would seem to be a problem, since Judas Iscariot had already committed suicide by the time of this appearance, and Matthias had not replaced him yet. However, when choosing a replacement, it was specifically required that he be someone who had "been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us" (Acts 1:21). So the Twelve were not alone when Jesus appeared to them; there were others present as well, who had been with the apostles "the whole time." An apostle was anyone who had witnessed the entirety of Jesus’ ministry. It was from this pool of people that Judas’ successor was chosen.

Historically, the appearance to the Twelve is one of the best attested appearances of Jesus. "We have independent narratives of this event in Luke and in John. Both of them locate it in the upper room in Jerusalem. Then you have it attested by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. So the appearance to the Twelve, it seems to me, is very well attested -- even the location of it, which I regard as a secondary detail and not so important."[22] Among critical NT scholars, multiple, independent attestation of a historical event is one of the key criterion for establishing authenticity. That is precisely what we have here. Very few events in ancient history have as much evidence in their favor as Jesus’ resurrection appearance to the Twelve.

Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time -- This statement hits us like a ton of bricks. Jesus appeared to over 500 people at one time. Just in case there was any doubt that an appearance to over twelve people rules out the possibility of hallucination, we are given an example that outdoes this fifty-fold. This appearance completely repudiates any attempt to deny Jesus’ resurrection.

Because of this, the only option open to detractors of Christianity is to deny the historicity of this appearance. It has been suggested, for example, that since there aren’t any explicit references to this appearance in the gospels (although Jesus’ appearance on the Galilean hillside in Matt. 28:16-20 has been suggested), this event didn’t happen.[23] The reasoning behind this objection seems bizarre, though: since an event isn’t corroborated in our later sources, but is only mentioned in our earliest and most reliable source, we should presume it didn’t happen? Are we really supposed to take this seriously?

(most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep) -- This is an interpolation by the apostle Paul. While it’s not a part of the creed itself, and thus can only be dated to the time when 1 Corinthians was written in the mid-AD 50s, this statement further compounds our amazement at the claim that Jesus appeared to 500 people at one time -- Paul tells his original audience that most of these people are still alive to be questioned! Most scholars recognize that Paul is essentially challenging his readers to verify that this event occurred by checking with the people who experienced it.

Then he appeared to James -- While there are several people named James in the NT, even radical scholars concede that this refers to Jesus’ brother James.[24] During Jesus’ life, his family did not support him or his actions (Mark 3:30-5; John 7:1-5), but not long after his crucifixion we suddenly find his mother and brothers worshipping him along with the apostles (Acts 1:14). Flavius Josephus reports in about AD 93 that he was eventually stoned to death for his belief that his brother was Israel’s Messiah and had risen from the dead.[25] The inexplicability of James’ conversion has eluded all attempts of explanation -- unless his brother really did rise from the dead, and James saw him.

And then to all the apostles -- This is probably not referring to the Twelve, since they’ve already been mentioned in the creed by a different name, but to the larger group of those who had witnessed Jesus’ entire ministry. It’s unknown how many people this referred to. Perhaps this is the group of seventy that Jesus appointed and sent out to the Galilean countryside (Luke 10:1), but this is just speculation.

(Then, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.) -- This is an addendum to the creed made by Paul which relates that he experienced an appearance of Jesus as well. It has been argued by some that, since Paul’s experience as related in the book of Acts was not a physical apparition, and since he is here putting it on the same level as the other resurrection appearances of Jesus, that all of these appearances should be regarded as non-physical in nature (this is obviously another argument that Jesus’ resurrection didn’t have anything to do with his corpse).[26] My response to this is, first, even a scholar as radical as Crossan admits that, "Paul needs in 1 Cor. 15 to equate his own experience with that of the preceding apostles. To equate, that is, its validity and legitimacy, but not necessarily its mode or manner. ... Paul’s own entranced revelation should not be ... the model for all the others."[27] As has already been mentioned, one of Paul’s main goals in writing 1 Corinthians is to defend his own apostleship. Thus, he includes his experience with the others, not to relate theirs to his but to relate his to theirs.

Second, it is simply false to say that the several accounts of Paul’s experience in Acts relate it as non-physical. While it certainly differs from the other resurrection appearances in that it’s description seems to be more of a "heavenly vision," the people with Paul saw a light and heard a voice, but they were not able to understand what was being said (Acts 9:3-8; 22:6-11; 26:12-18). So Paul’s experience was not something that happened "only to him," but was witnessed by several other people as well.

The significance of this statement by itself is that Paul is describing to us an appearance he personally experienced of the risen Jesus, one that was witnessed (but not comprehended) by others. This experience convinced him to join the fledgling church he had hitherto persecuted.

He was a rabbi, a Pharisee, a respected Jewish leader. He hated the Christian heresy and did everything in his power to stamp it out. He was even responsible for the execution of Christian believers. Then suddenly he gave up everything. He left his position as a respected Jewish leader and became a Christian missionary: he entered a life of poverty, labor, and suffering. He was whipped, beaten, stoned and left for dead, shipwrecked three times, in constant danger, deprivation, and anxiety. Finally, he made the ultimate sacrifice and was martyred for his faith at Rome. And it was all because on that day outside Damascus, he saw "Jesus our Lord."[28]

Conclusion
R. T. France, a NT scholar from Oxford, states that

Ancient historians have sometimes commented that the degree of scepticism with which New Testament scholars approach their sources is far greater than would be thought justified in any other branch of ancient history. Indeed many ancient historians would count themselves fortunate to have four such responsible accounts, written within a generation or two of the events, and preserved in such a wealth of early manuscript evidence as to be, from the point of view of textual criticism, virtually uncontested in all but detail. Beyond that point, the decision as to how far a scholar is willing to accept the record they offer is likely to be influenced more by his openness to a ‘supernaturalist’ world-view than by strictly historical considerations.[29]

I have appealed throughout this essay to the consensus of scholarship. It needs to be pointed out here that very few of these scholars believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead. Most of them come to the table with the presupposition that miracles can’t happen, not to mention their overly skeptical stance of their sources. And yet, with all of this, they have found themselves compelled by the nature of the evidence to acknowledge that 1 Corinthians 15:3ff relates an ancient creed that dates back to immediately after the events it purports to relate. Moreover, they freely admit that they are completely impotent to explain the historical evidence without recourse to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.[30] Their unwillingness to accept this, therefore, is not based on any lack of historical evidence, but rather on their belief that such things couldn’t really happen. This strikes me as an intellectually irresponsible concession to the spirit of the age; in fact, it seems to be a view held by blind faith. They should be reminded that, "Any interpretation of reality not in accord with the facts about reality is just a fairy tale which no rational person should believe."[31]

Notes:

[1] Gary R. Habermas, The Historical Jesus (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996), 153.
[2] Joachim Jeremias, Die Abendmahlsworte Jesu, 4th ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 95-8; cited in William Lane Craig, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mullen, 1989), 2-3. Specifically, Jeremias claims that paralambanein and paradidonai correspond to the Hebrew phrases qaval min and masar qa respectively. The significance of this is that oral tradition was memorized and passed on in a word-for-word fashion.
[3] Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1966), 102-3.
[4] Ibid., 101.
[5] Ibid., 102-3.
[6] Craig, Assessing the NT Evidence, 3.
[7] Peter Stuhlmacher, Das paulinische Evangelilum, FRLANT 95 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 268-9; cited in Craig, Assessing the NT Evidence, 5-6.
[8] Personal translation.
[9] Habermas, Historical Jesus, 154.
[10] Craig, Assessing the NT Evidence, 17.
[11] C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, 3rd ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), 26.
[12] Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate, Terry L. Miethe, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 54, 83.
[13] Hans von Campenhausen, "The Events of Easter and the Empty Tomb," in Tradition and Life in the Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), 44.
[14] Archibald M. Hunter, Jesus, 100. Quoted in Habermas, Historical Jesus, 156.
[15] Habermas, Historical Jesus, 157.
[16] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), 145.
[17] See several quotes given in William Lane Craig, "Opening Address," in Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, Paul Copan, ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 31.
[18] John Dominic Crossan, Four Other Gospels (Minneapolis: Winston, 1985), 174.
[19] C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament, Studies in Biblical Theology, 2nd series, no. 1 (Naperville, Ill.: Alec R. Allenson, 1967), 3, 13.
[20] Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist, 1973), 70, n. 121.
[21] See Craig’s excellent discussion of this in Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?, 51-2.
[22] Craig, in Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?, 55.
[23] Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 90. Martin is not a NT scholar.
[24] Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 73.
[25] Josephus, Antiquities 20:200.
[26] Gerd Lüdemann, "Second Rebuttal" in Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli, eds. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 60-1.
[27] Crossan, Jesus, 169.
[28] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1994), 283.
[29] R. T. France, "The Gospels as Historical Sources for Jesus, the Founder of Christianity," in Truth 1 (1985): 86.
[30] Craig, Reasonable Faith, 280.
[31] Craig, Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?, 32.