A Matter of Evidence: Thoughts for Easter

No, the last post was not an April Fool's joke.  I did not like writing it, but it is a part of how I got to where I am today.  But I do have a post for Easter Sunday.  In the past week Andrew Sullivan, a much more known blogger than I am, wrote about the need to get back to Jesus--the real Jesus, not what the church has made of him.  He cited Thomas Jefferson's attempt to cut out all the parts of the New Testament that he thought did not belong there.  But in fact, this actually impedes finding out the truth about Jesus.

I studied under a professor who had done a master's degree thesis on the comparison of the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth and Alexander the Great.  He gave a lecture on that topic every year in his class on New Testament Introduction.  I do not have a copy of his thesis, nor his footnotes, but I am going to give a brief overview of the matter here.

Alexander lived in the fourth century B.C. and Jesus was on earth in the first century A.D.  Nobody now living on the earth was present in either period, and there are no scientific "experiments" that can be performed to determine what happened back then, so all we can go by is the historical evidence.  And this primarily means the written evidence; archeology is limited to study of artifacts that survive to modern times, and is mostly about general conditions, not specific individuals.  So let's look at some of the written evidence.

For Jesus, the primary sources on His life are the four Gospels:  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  The traditions of the early church say that Mark wrote first and John wrote last.  Of the four, Matthew and John were part of the inner group of Jesus' disciples, "the Twelve."   They were eyewitnesses of what happened.  Mark was apparently younger; he may have witnessed some of the events he recorded, but he is also named as an associate of Peter, another of the Twelve, and could have learned from him as an eyewitness like Matthew and John.  Luke was a Gentile rather than a Jew, and became a Christian later than the others, but his travels with Paul (including to Jerusalem) would have made it possible for him to access the eyewitnesses also.

For Alexander, there were first-hand accounts written after his death, including one by Ptolemy, one of his generals who ended up ruling Egypt. But none of those eyewitness accounts have survived to the present time.  Even the second-hand accounts that relied on those eyewitnesses have not survived.  All that we have about Alexander the Great is third- and fourth-hand accounts based on the earlier reports. One that some scholars consider the best is Arrian, a Greco-Roman historian from the second century A.D. (almost 500 years after Alexander's death!)

What about the quality of the work in passing on these accounts?  There was no printing press, so all copies had to be handwritten by scribes.  How accurate were those scribes, and how much did survive?  On Alexander, it is pretty bleak: what we have is a small number of manuscripts; the earliest date from the Middle Ages, hundreds of years later than Arrian's writing and even farther from Alexander's day.

For the Gospels, we do not have the originals, the "autographs" as scholars call them.  But we do have literally thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament accumulated over the centuries before printing started.  There are complete or nearly complete New Testaments from the 300s, and portions and fragments that are even older.  It has been fashionable in some circles for the last couple of hundred years to claim that the Gospels were not eyewitness accounts, but were composed a couple of hundred years later, and incorporated myths and legends that had grown up by then.  This is one area where the archeologists have dug the ground out from under their feet:  years ago a papyrus fragment containing part of John's Gospel was found in Egypt.  It was dated to about 125 A.D., within fifty years of the traditional date of its writing, and on the opposite side of the Mediterranean Sea from where John wrote.  And in the last couple of months news leaked out that a fragment of Mark's  Gospel has been found that dates to the first century!  The "hundreds of years later" claim does not hold water.

But how good were those scribes at copying accurately?  Actually, very good.  There is a science called Textual Criticism that looks at these manuscripts, comparing them to each other, looking for the scribal errors and variations.  They can often tell which later manuscript was copied as part of a chain going back to a specific one of the oldest ones, because the variations got passed on down the chain.  But these variations do not add up to much.  Out of the entire New Testament, all the disputed and questionable passages put together add up to about half a page--that's all!  And no major doctrine of the New Testament is affected by those questionable passages.

The truth is, the church scribes were very accurate, all things considered.  What they were doing was an important part of their faith, and they took pains to do it right.  The Jewish scribes were just as good:  one of the results from study of the Dead Sea Scrolls was how little difference there was between the Scrolls and the later Hebrew copies of the Old Testament.

As for the claim that "myths and legends" grew up and were incorporated into the Gospels, the archeological evidence now has cut the available time too short; the evidence is too strong that all four Gospels were written within the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses (In I Corinthians Paul wrote that there were 500 hundred people who saw the Risen Christ at one incident, and most of them were still alive when he wrote that).

The other evidence is in the writing style of the Gospels themselves:  They do not read like "myths and legends," but like matter-of-fact reportage.  In a paper delivered at Cambridge University in 1959, C. S. Lewis (his academic field was medieval literature) wrote about John chapter 8:
"I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life.  I know what they are like.  I know that not one of them is like this.  Of this text there are only two possible views.  Either this is reportage--though it no doubt may contain errors--pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell [companion and biographer of Samuel Johnson in the 1700s].  Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative.  If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind.  The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read."

From "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" published in "The Seeing Eye" (1967) and later in "Christian Reflections" in 1994.

We have better evidence for the life and actions of Jesus of Nazareth than we do for Alexander the Great, or nearly any other figure of ancient history.  Some people may not like the evidence, or the conclusions it leads to.  But that is another issue.  But we live in the real world, not anyone's fantasy world, and sooner or later we must face up to The God Who Is There rather than the god we wish was there.

A Religious Conflict

The political activity is heating up, on both sides.  In some quarters, the rhetoric is heating up to the point that I'm beginning to think there are only two things left that could tone it down effectively:  one would be a major religious revival (it would probably have to be bigger than the 1700s Great Awakening and the 1800s Second Great Awakening combined), the other a revival of the practice of dueling.  It would be nice to see a lot of our politicians get religion and turn into nicer people; the redneck in me thinks many of our politicians deserve to be used as targets, and reducing the numbers of the political class might well be beneficial.  Dueling in this country had a long history, and died out relatively recently.  Even Abe Lincoln was once challenged to a duel.  As the challenged party, Abe chose the weapons; and he picked sledgehammers in six feet of water.  His much shorter opponent nearly died of laughter, patched it up with Abe and they became good friends.

But the discussion is getting heated, and I think one of the reasons is that this is in part a religious conflict.  And I am not referring to the Christian Right, but about the Left side of the issues.  Years ago, probably in the early 1990s or possibly in the 1980s, James Dobson, despite his reputation in some circles as an intolerant bigot, had a couple of Orthodox Jews as guests on his program.  One was Dennis Prager, a columnist and talk show host, the other was Rabbi Daniel Lapin.  During their discussion, Lapin was asked why so many Jews were so liberal in their politics.  His response was that when a Jew drifts away from his ancestral religion, often he takes up a new one--liberal politics.  (G.K. Chesterton once remarked that when a man ceases to believe in God he does not believe in nothing, he believes anything.)

In recent years there have been some who commented on the religious frenzy associated with the global warming debate, but I think a case can be made that liberal politics is a type of religious system.  It has its dogmas:  "The poor" are always virtuous, and  "the rich" and "profits" (and those who receive them) are evil...Any problem requires government action to solve it, usually by spending money or passing a new law, or both (which is why the IRS Code is now past 60,000 pages--most Bibles are something like 1,200 pages or so)....  They have their various sorts of clergy:  politicians, academics, media figures, kind of like the various "orders" in the Roman Catholic church....And they have informal systems of penance and atonement, so that people like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates who have made a lot of money can absolve themselves by supporting liberal politicians and causes....And if you look at how they operate, they try to use guilt and shame to control people's actions, just like any other religious system--talking about what's "fair" (without giving any objective definition of "fair"), calling their opponents ugly names, and accusing them of wanting to bring back slavery and lynching and other nasty motives.  And like the scribes and Pharisees in the Gospels, they have their ways of overlooking certain sins of their own and harping on the sins of others.  (There's a local talk-show host who says he will believe in human-caused Global Warming when Al Gore sells his mansions, quits flying by private jet, and starts living like he says we all ought to live.)

Now I am sure someone out there who reads this will be thinking "But many of these people are Christians!"  And my question in return is "Are they Christians or just churchgoers?"  Just going to church is not guaranteed to make a person a Christian.  In my life I have known many people who were Baptists or Roman Catholics first, and Christians second; I have known some who were Christians first and Baptists or Catholics second.  I think some people need to decide whether they are Christians first and liberals second, or liberals first and Christians second.  The Ten Commandments starts out, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."  And Jesus said, "No man can serve two masters."

I do think it is possible for a person to be both a Christian and a liberal.  Back in the Nixon years, there was a Minnesota Congressman named Al Quie, who was a committed Christian.  He was also a liberal.  When he heard the news that Charles Colson had become a Christian in the middle of the Watergate scandal, at first he could not believe it.  But through a mutual friend he met Colson, became convinced his conversion was genuine, and stood by him as a friend through Colson's trial and imprisonment. They were on opposite sides of the political divide, but they became Christian brothers.

It is possible; but that incident was nearly forty years ago, and I'm afraid such things are both harder and rarer now.  There is a passage in C.S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength" where Professor Dimble is explaining to his wife:  "If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp;and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous.  Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse:  the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.  The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder."  This "sorting out" is still going on, and there are some of us, on both sides of the political divide, who are going to have to choose whether our Christian faith or our political "faith" takes priority.

Another Lewis Quote

If anybody hasn't figured it out yet, C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite Christian writers. And this passage has resonated with me, probably because I've made my living for years working on houses. He admitted he borrowed the idea from George MacDonald; I've never read enough of MacDonald's stuff to find the original reference. Here's Lewis' take:

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of--throwing out a wing here, putting up an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself." "Mere Christianity", p.205

My life has had a lot of unexpected changes and turnings compared to where I was, say 40 years ago. But I've learned to trust the Architect, and I have no wish to go back to my own original plans.

Which HasBeen Put First?

I was re-reading a C.S. Lewis book last night and came across this passage:

"And no sooner is it possible to distinguish the rite from the vision of God than there is a danger of the rite becoming a substitute for, and a rival to, God Himself. Once it can be thought of separately, it will; and it may then take on a rebellious, cancerous life of its own. There is a stage in a child's life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas and Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began 'Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen'. This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer be sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life." from "Reflections on the Psalms", pp.48-9.

Reading this now at the beginning of the annual "Christmas rush" it struck me that our society has largely chosen the ritual over the spiritual. Think of the controversies the last few years over the euphemisms being promoted over names of items associated with Christmas--"holiday trees" and "Winter Break" are only a couple. Some want to keep the festival while discarding the Reason for it. But removing the spiritual element also removes the moral restraint, and so the festival becomes one of excess and overindulgence. And once that pattern takes over, it always escalates; it always takes more and more to keep up the pretense of satisfying the urge, because our people have chosen the Lesser and are trying to fill up the void left when we rejected the Greater.

The Postmodern Process

I just finished reading "A New Kind of Christian" by Brian Maclaren. (Yeah, I know, I'm late getting around to it.) I have already read a couple of his books; in fact, it was Maclaren who helped me realize I've been postmodern for years. And after that, I went back and re-read some of Francis Schaeffer's books that I acquired in the 1970s; I found that he was dealing with postmodern issues before anybody had come up with the name for it. But unlike some, he didn't start ranting "Postmodernism must be stopped--it destroys our apologetic!" He just quietly adapted and found ways to talk to people where they were. He understood that all people are created in God's image, even if they themselves do not believe it, and should be treated with love for that reason. Because he believed that, he was able to reach out to all kinds of people, from teenagers to middle-aged ultra-liberal church bishops like James Pike. He was not always successful in bringing them to Christian faith, but he still did not "write them off" or indulge in hate.

Maclaren had a quote from a C.S. Lewis book that I had never read (it was a book on medieval literature, his professional field, not one of his "Christian" works). In this quote Lewis seems to note the differences between modern thinking and the medieval patterns, but then acknowledged that someday the modern pattern would be replaced itself. Whether he was aware that the process had already begun is hard to say, but at least he could distance himself from modernity enough to see the possibility.

And the change IS a process, not an event. The change from medieval to modern was a process too. The date Maclaren sets, 1500 A.D., is only a convenient approximation, just as 2000 is for postmodernism. (I would say that the first crack in the fortress of modern science was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in 1927--the first hint scientists had that they could not nail everything down; even Einstein didn't like it.)

Some complain that postmoderns are too negative, but that was true of the first moderns as they broke with the medieval traditions, too. Schaeffer was as aware of the faults of modernism as anyone--he had some negative things to say about it. In order to replace something, you've got to recognize its defects; then you can look for something better (or at least different).

I have to get to work--probably more on this later.