Video: Are the Gospels Eyewitness Accounts?

August 14, 2015 By Bob Seidensticker

The idea that the gospels were written either by eyewitnesses or by the companions of eyewitnesses is popular, but where’s the evidence?

Here’s a brief video rebuttal. The argument that we even know who wrote the gospels is flimsier than most imagine.

The most savage controversies are those about matters
as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
— Bertrand Russell

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/5/12.)
.

Video: Are the Gospels Eyewitness Accounts?

December 5, 2012 By Bob Seidensticker

The idea that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses (or were a step removed) is popular, but where’s the evidence?

Here’s a brief video rebuttal (best when viewed Full Screen).

This kind of project is new for me, so let me know what you think.

I’ve discussed this topic before, and that blog post has references.

The most savage controversies are those about matters
as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
— Bertrand Russell

Why the Gospel of Mark Is Likely NOT an Eyewitness Account

August 1, 2014 By Bob Seidensticker

How do we know that Mark wrote the gospel of Mark? How do we know that Mark recorded the observations of an eyewitness?

The short answer is because Papias (< 70 – c. 155) said so. Papias was a bishop and an avid documenter of oral history from the early church. His book Interpretations was written after 120 CE.

Jesus died in 30, Mark was written in 70, and Papias documents Mark as the author in 120 (dates are estimates). That’s at least 50 years bridged only by “because Papias said so.”

Looking through the wrong end of the telescope

But how do we know what Papias said? We don’t have the original of Papias, nor do we have a copy. Instead, we have Church History by Eusebius, which quotes Papias and was written in 320.

And how do we know what Eusebius said? The oldest copies of his book are from the tenth century, though there is a Syriac translationfrom 462.

Count the successive people in the claim “Mark wrote the gospel of Mark, which documents an eyewitness account”: (1) Peter was an eyewitness and (2) Mark was his journalist, and (3) someone told this to (4) Papias, who wrote his book, which was preserved by (5) copyist(s), and (6) Eusebius transcribed parts of that, and (7) more copyist(s) translated Eusebius to give us our oldest manuscript copy. And the oldest piece of evidence that we can put our hands on was written four centuries after Mark was written.

That’s an exceedingly tenuous chain.

The sequence of people could have been longer still; we simply don’t know. Papias was the bishop of Hierapolis, in western Asia Minor. Mark might have been written in Syria, and no one knows how long the chain of hearsay was from that author to Papias. No one knows how many copyists separated Papias from Eusebius or Eusebius from our oldest copies.

Trash talk

It gets worse. Eusebius didn’t think much of Papias as a historian and said that he “seems to have been a man of very small intelligence, to judge from his books” (Church History, book III, chapter 39, paragraph 13). Evaluate Papias for yourself: he said that Judas lived on after a failed attempt at hanging and had a head swollen so large that he couldn’t pass down a street wide enough for a hay wagon. Who knows if this version of the demise of Judas is more reliable than that in Matthew, but it’s special pleading to dismiss Papias when he’s embarrassing but hold on to his explanation of gospel authorship.

Even Eusebius’s Church History is considered unreliable by modern scholars.

The story is similar for the claimed authorship of Matthew. A twist to this story is that Papias said that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew (or perhaps Aramaic), which makes no sense since Matthew used Mark, Q, and the Septuagint Bible, all Greek sources.¹

The other gospels besides Mark

What about the other gospels? That evidence comes from other documents with simpler pedigree but later dates.

Irenaeus documented the traditional gospel authorship in his Against Heresies (c. 180). Our oldest copy is a Latin translation from the tenth century.
Tertullian also lists the four traditional authors in his Against Marcion (c.208), but he doesn’t think much of Luke: “[Heretic] Marcion seems to have singled out Luke for his mutilating process.” Our oldest copy of Tertullian’s book is from the eleventh century.
The oldest manuscript labeled “gospel according to Luke” dates from c. 200.
The Muratorian fragment, a Latin manuscript from the seventh century, may be a translation of a Greek original from the late second century (or maybe from the fourth). It lists many books of the New Testament, including the gospels of Luke and John.

Evidence arguing that the gospels document eyewitness accounts is paltry. Perhaps only faith will get you there.

If we submit everything to reason,
our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element.
If we offend the principles of reason,
our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
— Blaise Pascal

¹Randel Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels? (Millennium Press, 1997), 41.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/20/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Is Mark an Eyewitness Account?

July 20, 2012 By Bob Seidensticker

How do we know that Mark wrote the gospel of Mark? How do we know that Mark recorded the observations of an eyewitness?

The short answer is because Papias (< 70 – c. 155) said so. Papias was a bishop and an avid documenter of oral history from the early church. His book Interpretations was written after 120 CE.

Jesus died in 30, Mark was written in 70, and Papias documents Mark as the author in 120 (dates are estimates). That’s at least 50 years bridged only by “because Papias said so.”

But how do we know what Papias said? We don’t have the original of Papias, nor do we have a copy. Instead, we have Church History by Eusebius, which quotes Papias and was written in 320.

And how do we know what Eusebius said? The oldest copies of his book are from the tenth century, though there is a Syriac translation from 462.

Count the successive people in the claim “Mark wrote Mark, which documents an eyewitness account”: (1) Peter was an eyewitness and (2) Mark was his journalist, and (3) someone told this to (4) Papias, who wrote his book, which was preserved by (5) copyist(s), and (6) Eusebius transcribed parts of that, and (7) more copyist(s) translated Eusebius to give us our oldest manuscript copy. And the oldest piece of evidence that we can put our hands on was written four centuries after Mark was written.

That’s an exceedingly tenuous chain.

The sequence of people could have been longer still. Papias was the bishop of Hierapolis, in western Asia Minor. Mark might have been written in Syria, and no one knows how long the chain of hearsay was from that author to Papias. No one knows how many copyists separated Papias from Eusebius or Eusebius from our oldest copies.

Even Eusebius’s Church History is considered unreliable.

What about the other gospels? That evidence comes from other documents with simpler pedigree but later dates.

Irenaeus documented the traditional gospel authorship in his Against Heresies (c. 180). Our oldest copy is a Latin translation from the tenth century.
Tertullian also lists the four traditional authors in his Against Marcion (c. 208), but he doesn’t think much of Luke: “[Heretic] Marcion seems to have singled out Luke for his mutilating process.” Our oldest copy of this book is from the eleventh century.
The oldest manuscript labeled “gospel according to Luke” dates from c. 200.
The Muratorian fragment, a Latin manuscript from the seventh century, may be a translation of a Greek original from the late second century (or maybe from the fourth). It lists many books of the New Testament, including the gospels of Luke and John.

We grope for evidence to back up the claim that the gospels document eyewitness accounts. Perhaps only faith will get you there.

¹Randel Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels? (Millennium Press, 1997), 41.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Bible defeats its own Resurrection story

December 2, 2021 By Bob Seidensticker

Step through the gospel’s crucifixion and resurrection story, and you’ll see that some of the popular arguments made by Christian apologists fall apart.

Many Christian apologists insist that the resurrection was documented by eyewitnesses. Their motivation makes sense—the resurrection is the punch line of the Jesus story, and the authors can’t simply be passing along a popular yarn. Only eyewitness authors could be credible.

We must start by agreeing on what it means to witness a man’s resurrection from the dead. You must (1) see him alive, then (2) see him dead, then (3) see him alive again. This is obvious, I realize, but you’ll soon see where this is missing in the gospels.

Matthew’s passion narrative

We’ll start with the crucifixion story in Matthew. For this to be an eyewitness account, one of the disciples must author Matthew. This requires that the author personally experience the three elements of any resurrection above.

Let’s pick up the story when Jesus is arrested. Next we read, “Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56b). The next day Jesus was crucified, and “Many women were there, watching from a distance” (Matt. 27:55) including Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph. There were men present—Roman guards and passersby who insulted Jesus—but no disciples.

With no male disciples to observe the crucifixion, this eyewitness claim fails in point 2 above: you must see him dead if you want to later claim a resurrection. Matthew doesn’t even claim any disciples at the empty tomb. Note also that it’s modern Christians who claim that Matthew was an eyewitness; that gospel never makes that claim.

The women’s tale

But what about the women? They were there. The two Marys saw the crucifixion, they saw Jesus die, they saw the burial in the stone tomb, they saw the empty tomb, and they saw the risen Jesus. They were part of the inner circle, and surely their word was good enough.

The first problem is that the author of Matthew is still not an eyewitness. At best, he simply reported a story he’d been told.

And as for the women’s story being a reliable report, a popular Christian apologist argument won’t allow that. Here’s Greg Koukl’s version:

Women, disrespected in the ancient world, are the first to witness the risen Christ. Why include these unflattering details if the Gospels are works of fiction?

I’m arguing that the gospels are legend, not fiction, but set that aside. Koukl is using the Criterion of Embarrassment: why say something embarrassing about yourself unless it’s true? If women witnessing the empty tomb is embarrassing (because they’re unreliable) but that story element is still in each gospel, doesn’t that point to it being true?

It turns out that women being the sole witnesses at the tomb is not at all embarrassing. In fact, it’s the only way discovering the empty tomb makes sense in a culture where caring for the dead was women’s work, but let’s ignore that as well and watch the apologists dig their hole deeper.

[The reasons supporting Jesus’s empty tomb] include the potentially embarrassing but unanimous agreement in all four Gospels that women were the earliest witnesses. (Gary Habermas)

The discovery of the tomb by women is highly probable. Given the low status of women in Jewish society and their lack of qualification to serve as legal witnesses, the most plausible explanation . . . why women and not the male disciples were made discoverers of the empty tomb is that the women were in fact the ones who made this discovery. (William Lane Craig)

Anyone trying to pass off a false resurrection story as the truth would never say the women were the first witnesses at the tomb. In the first century, a woman’s testimony was not considered on par with that of a man. An invented story would say that the men—the brave men—had discovered the empty tomb. Yet all four gospels say the women were the first witnesses—all this while the sissy-pants men had their doors locked for fear of the Jews. (Frank Turek)

These apologists insist that women were seen as unreliable witnesses. This means that they can’t argue that while the author of Matthew wasn’t technically an eyewitness, that’s unimportant because he trusted the women’s report. They’ve left Matthew with no authority from which to document the most important (and least believable) part of the gospel.

Gospel of Mark

Another reason to discount Matthew as an eyewitness is that that book liberally copies from Mark, the first gospel. More than half of Matthew comes from Mark. Why would an eyewitness account copy from someone else rather than give his own version . . . unless it wasn’t an eyewitness account?

Perhaps that makes Mark the more authoritative gospel. However, Mark’s story is almost identical. After the arrest, “everyone deserted [Jesus] and fled” (Mark 14:50). Again, women watched the crucifixion from a distance. The two Marys are mentioned along with Salome, but there are no male disciples. The women saw the burial and they brought spices on Sunday morning, where they saw the empty tomb.

Mark’s ending is the big difference when compared with Matthew. The women see a young man in a white robe who tells them that Jesus has risen and that they should tell the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. The gospel ends, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”

Mark also shares the problems of Matthew. The author wasn’t an eyewitness to the death or resurrection, and the apologists’ own “women are unreliable” argument prevents the author from using them as reliable sources. Mark adds a unique problem: with its abrupt ending, how did anyone learn of the story since the women kept it to themselves?

Mark is traditionally said to be authored by John Mark, who documented the eyewitness story of the apostle Peter, but the book itself makes clear that neither Peter nor any disciple was an eyewitness to the death, so no disciple could claim to be an eyewitness to the resurrection.

Gospels of Luke and John

Luke and John correct most of the problems. Luke doesn’t have the disciples run away at the arrest of Jesus. At the crucifixion, “All those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching,” so the men were presumably there.

Men are also added to the empty tomb element: women saw the empty tomb and told the disciples, and Peter ran to the tomb to see for himself. Here again, though, Peter was only an eyewitness to an empty tomb. He only had the women’s authority that this was the one that had held Jesus’s body, since no disciple witnessed the burial.

The story in John is similar except that one disciple is mentioned as a witness along with a few women, and two disciples ran back to see the empty tomb.

With Luke and John, Christians have a better argument for disciples witnessing Jesus alive, then dead, then alive again, but they can only do so after admitting a worse problem, that the gospel stories are contradictory.

(This is an aside, but I can’t resist pointing out one more awkward element in the crucifixion story. According to John, when Jesus is on the cross, he sees his mother and “the disciple whom he loved.” Presumably concerned about who would care for Mary after his death, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26–7). But Mary already had another son! Why would Jesus do this when James the Just was his brother? One simple explanation is that James’s assuming leadership of the church after the death of his brother Jesus was a later tradition, and the gospel of John documents the original tradition, that Jesus had no brothers.)

The resurrection is a ridiculous claim that needs a mountain of evidence to support it. Where is this evidence? We could explore how implausible it would be for this dying-and-rising god story to be history, unlike all the others and unlike the supernatural stories of other religions, but we don’t need to go there. Staying within the Bible, the claim that Matthew and Mark are eyewitness accounts fails, and apologists’ own “women were unreliable” argument makes their situation even more desperate.

BSR 10: You Can’t Trust the Bible Because it Was Written by Humans

April 17, 2020 By Bob Seidensticker

The Bible must be held to a different standard than an ordinary book, the gospels being eyewitness accounts is wishful thinking, and the Bible’s successful prophecies are imaginary.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: You can’t trust the Bible because it was written by humans.

Christian response #1: Why then trust any book written by a human or even any statement from a human, including yours? The question should be, is it true?

We’re at the tenth reply in this series, and this is the fourth attempt to dodge a challenge by disqualifying it. Oh well, let’s play along. This version should be unobjectionable: “The Bible’s claims are extraordinary, far more so than those of an ordinary history book. How can these claims be supported when the Bible was only written by humans?”

Sure, a nonfiction book isn’t perfect, but science has a secret weapon: crowdsourcing. The argument and the evidence are presented, and then other scientists are encouraged to find errors. That’s also how it works in other legitimate scholarly disciplines like history. Science has no concept of faith, but the Bible does—big difference.

Christian apologists point to the accurate history in the Bible, such as the names of places, people, or tribes. But then archaeologists used clues in the Iliad to find Troy. Does that mean that the Iliad’s supernatural tales are true? Accurate place names are merely a requirement to get to the starting line; you don’t get bonus points for them.

The elephant in the room is that the Bible was supposedly inspired by God. With this claim, the expectations are much, much higher. If God took the trouble to inspire it, you’d think he would take the trouble to protect it. The Bible should be the world’s most reliable book, but it’s not even close.

The Bible holds God’s message, but you wouldn’t know it given its contradictions and errors. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: The gospels claim to be reliable eyewitness accounts. Test this claim, and you’ll find that it holds up.

Reliable eyewitness accounts? Nope. We don’t even know who wrote the gospels, because they don’t tell us. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are just names assigned by tradition. No New Testament gospel has the equivalent of “I Thomas, an Israelite, write you this account,” which is how one of the noncanonical gospels begins.

This response claims that the gospels are reliable eyewitness accounts. The author is eager to have us take that next little step and conclude that the gospels are accurate, so therefore the Bible’s supernatural tales are true. But it’s not a little step. I could write a pile of nonsense and end it with, “I saw this myself!” That doesn’t turn nonsense into fact. Even if the gospels did claim to be eyewitness accounts—even if they were eyewitness accounts—we’d have a long way to go before story becomes history.

Christianity is old, but don’t think venerable and respected; think clouded by time. We have much more data with which to criticize a supernatural claim in yesterday’s news than 2000-year-old miracle claims for which evidence has vanished. Christians will tell us that they don’t have a chemist’s analysis of the wine Jesus made from water or security cam video of Jesus’s tomb, but that’s their problem, not ours. For claims as remarkable as Christianity’s, we need far more evidence than old stories.

The gospels aren’t reliable eyewitness accounts, and they don’t claim to be. Their names are just tradition, and the authors are unknown. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: The Bible records dozens of prophecies plus their accurate fulfillment.

The Bible’s most well-known “prophecies” fail.

Isaiah 7: Matthew says that Jesus’s virgin birth “took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet,” a reference to the Immanuel story in Isaiah 7. But all you have to do is read the three verses about Immanuel to see that his biography is no match with that of Jesus.
Isaiah 52–3: The story of the Suffering Servant matches Jesus only if you carefully select the verses to consider. Ask modern Jews: it’s their holy book, and they’ll tell you that the Suffering Servant actually represents Israel, not any man.
Psalm 22: This also matches Jesus only by careful picking and choosing.
Daniel: This book claims to have been written in the 600s BCE. But it’s much more likely to have been written in about 167 BCE because its “predictions” are accurate up to this point and nonsensical after.

Read a summary of successful Bible prophecies, and they sound impressive. But read a skeptical critique to get the other side of the story. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 11: It’s Narrow-Minded to Think Jesus Is the Only Way to God

For further reading:

Every cake
is a miraculous fulfillment
of a prophecy called a recipe.
— commenter RichardSRussell

Image from Paweł Czerwiński, CC license
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Gospels vs. the Perfect Miracle Claim

August 17, 2019 By Bob Seidensticker

Let’s create the most compelling miracle story possible. Here’s one.

I met Jesus yesterday. At first, I didn’t believe who he was, but he turned my lawn furniture from steel into gold. I just got back from a dealer who assayed the furniture, confirmed that it was solid gold, and bought it. Over 200 pounds of gold at $1389 per ounce works out to be close to $4.5 million.

Guess who’s a believer now!

Compare this story against the gospels

Would you buy this miracle story? I’m sure I’ve convinced no one, and yet, as miracle stories go, this one is pretty compelling. It certainly beats the gospel story. Compare the two:

Taking the claim at face value, the time from event to the first writing was one day, and the original witness documented the event. There was no chance for legendary accretion. Compare this to forty years and more of oral tradition with the gospels.
The time from original document to our oldest complete copy is zero days. Compare this to almost 300 years for the gospels. That’s a lot of time for copyist hanky-panky. (More on the time gap for New Testament manuscripts here and here.)
The cultural gulf to cross to understand my miracle claim is nonexistent—it’s written in modern English with a Western viewpoint. Compare this to our Greek copies of the gospels from around 350 CE, through which we must deduce the Jewish/Aramaic facts of the Jesus story from around 30 CE.
This story claims to be an eyewitness account. The argument for the gospels being eyewitness accounts is very tenuous.
It refers to Jesus, a well-known and widely accepted deity. Compare this to Christianity, which had to introduce Jesus as a new deity into a Jewish context. Ask a religious Jew today, and they will tell you that, no, Jesus wasn’t the messiah they were waiting for.

Have I convinced anyone in my gold lawn furniture story yet? If not, why is the gospel story more acceptable when I’ve beaten it on every point? It’s almost like evidence is just a smokescreen, and Christians believe for non-evidentiary reasons.

The Christian response

Let’s consider some responses from skeptical Christians. They might point to important elements of the gospel story: what about the terrified disciples who became confident after seeing Jesus, the conversions of former enemies Paul and James, or the empty tomb?

Okay, so you want a longer story? It’s hard to imagine that simply adding details and complications can make a story more believable, but I can give you that. Let’s suppose that the story were gospel-sized and included people who initially disbelieved but became convinced.

You say Jesus doesn’t make appearances like this anymore? Okay, make it some other deity—someone known or unknown. You pick.

You say that these claims are so recent that they demand evidence—photos, a check from the gold dealer, samples of the gold lawn furniture? Okay, then change the story to make the evidence inaccessible. Maybe now we imagine it taking place 200 years ago. It’s hard to imagine how making the story less verifiable makes it more credible, but I’m flexible. It’s just words on (virtual) paper—whatever additional objection you have, reshape the story to resolve the problem.

And yet if you were presented with this carefully sculpted story, you’d still be unconvinced. Why? What besides tradition or presuppositions of the rightness of the Christian position makes that more believable?

Example #2

Let’s approach this from another angle. Imagine that we’ve uncovered a cache of Chinese documents from 2000 years ago, rather like a Chinese Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. These documents claim miracles similar to those found in the gospels. Here are the remarkable facts of this find.

These documents appear to be originals, not copies. They seem to date from the period about which they are writing. (That beats the gospels, for which this gap is 300 years.)
They claim to be writing immediately after the events, and the paleographic evidence supports this claim. (For the gospels, this gap is 40 to 70 years.)
They claim to be eyewitness accounts. Not only do the gospels not claim to be eyewitness accounts, not only is there evidence against such an idea (Matthew and Luke wouldn’t copy most of Mark, some of it verbatim, if they were eyewitnesses), but the evidence for the eyewitness tradition very weak.
Four different accounts in our Chinese documents give plausible independent attestation. The four gospels are not independent (the three synoptic gospels rehash similar material).
There are no internal contradictions between the four accounts, nothing is unclear, and the message is unambiguous. Contrast that with the gospels, which disagree with each other and the rest of the Bible on such fundamental issues as whether or not salvation comes exclusively from faith, how long Jesus remained on earth after the resurrection, whether the resurrected Jesus had a spirit body or not, whether hell exists or not, and others.

Christian response #2

Here again, the claims of our imaginary find trounce every equivalent Christian claim. But our Christian skeptic might have plausible responses.

These Chinese authors were lying, and they actually weren’t eyewitnesses. Maybe they even had an agenda. This is just words on paper, after all. Who knows if they’re true, especially if they’re unbelievable?
The authors were confused, mistaken, or sloppy in their reporting. We can’t guarantee that an author from prescientific China recorded the facts without bias. Perhaps they were constrained by their worldview and unconsciously shoehorned what they saw to fit what they thought they ought to see.
We can’t prove that the claims are wrong, but so what? That’s not where the burden lies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this story simply doesn’t have sufficiently compelling evidence.
Gee, I dunno. It’s an impressive story, but that’s all it is. This is implausible, unrepeatable evidence that can’t overturn what modern science tells us about how the world works.

This Christian skeptic sounds just like me. These are the same objections that I’d raise. So why not show this kind of skepticism for the Christian account?

The honest Christian must avoid the fallacy of special pleading—having a tough standard of evidence for historical claims from the other guy but a lower one for his own. “But you can’t ask for videos or newspaper accounts of events 2000 years ago” is true but irrelevant. It amounts to “I can’t provide adequate evidence, so you can’t hold that against me.”

Ah, but we do. In fact, we must.

Some Christians will point to Christianity’s popularity as evidence, but surely they can’t be saying that the #1 religion must be true. When the number of Muslims exceeds that of Christians, which is expected to happen at shortly after 2050, will they become a Muslim? Popularity doesn’t prove accuracy.

We need a consistently high bar of evidence for supernatural claims, both for foreign claims as well as those close to our heart.

If Christ has not been raised,
our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
— 1 Corinthians 15:14

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/15.)

Image from Tax Credits, CC license

9 Tactics Christians Use to Dismiss Bible Embarrassments (3 of 3)

February 13, 2019 By Bob Seidensticker

Benetton Photoshopped the pope with the sheikh of the Al-Azhar mosque in this ad supporting the Unhate Foundation

Let’s conclude our look at the tactics Christian apologists use to respond to embarrassments in the Bible and Christianity. How well do they work? Let’s find out. (Part 1 here.)

**Tactic 7: Contradictions? That’s a Good Thing!**

Some Christians respond to contradictions within the Gospels by saying that that’s actually a good thing, because if they were identical, we’d suspect collusion. A few inconsistencies are the hallmark of honest eyewitness accounts. Jim Wallace of the Cold-Case Christianity ministry was a detective and used his reputation to give this tactic credibility.

But by making two categories indistinguishable, this creates a new problem. Category one is what they’re referring to, accounts that are honest attempts at accurate reporting with inadvertent errors or different editorial choices. Category two has accounts that aren’t bound by what actually happened but are written with a religious agenda. How do we know which bin to put a contradiction into?

Here’s an example. The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) have the Last Supper as the Passover meal, so Jesus is crucified after the Passover meal. John has the Last Supper one day earlier so that Jesus is crucified before the Passover meal. With this change, John can make a deliberate parallel between the unblemished lambs being killed for Passover concurrent with the death of the perfect Lamb of God. Maybe that’s just how things worked out . . . or maybe John, the last gospel, deliberately changed the tradition to make that theological parallel.

This tactic mixes the two categories, and agenda-drive theology hides behind the skirts of history. Honest seekers would want those to be as distinct as possible.

Tactic 8: They’re both right

I used to be impressed when Christians would come up with some rationalization for a Bible problem, but I’ve seen it so often that now I just expect it. After all, the Church has had 2000 years to hear the problems and think up answers.

This tactic attempts to directly rebut the problem. Did Jesus heal two blind men near Jericho (Matthew) or just one (Mark and Luke)? Both are correct. Did Sennacherib attack Judah in the third year of Hoshea’s reign (2 Kings 18:1) or the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s reign (2 Kings 18:13)? Both are correct. Was Jacob buried in Shechem (Acts 7:15–16) or near Mamre (Genesis 50:13)? Pick a contradiction, and this tactic will argue that they’re both right.

I’m sure that a few of the Bible’s many contradictions can be resolved this way, but I’m skeptical that this tactic works everywhere it’s applied.

Tactic 9: Patience

This tactic tells us that some things in the Bible are confusing and that we’ll just have to wait until we get to heaven to understand them. For example, the Christian might explain away Christianity’s inability to make sense of the Trinity by calling it a divine mystery. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God.”

But if the Trinity can’t be explained so that we understand it, don’t bring it up. What sense does it make to present mysteries when the purpose of the Bible and Christianity are to educate us here, not in heaven?

(As an aside, it is extraordinary to see Christians who, in one breath, humbly admit that they don’t understand the mind of God then, in the next breath, suddenly regain their confidence and proclaim God’s very clear views on homosexuality, abortion, or some other social issue.)

Conclusion

Search Amazon for “Bible contradictions.” Half of the books will explore those contradictions from a skeptical standpoint, but the rest will pat you on the head and assure you that those contradictions don’t exist or aren’t important. Popular books defending the Bible include The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, and Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions. With titles like these, at least we’re in agreement that the Bible has many problematic passages.

While the contradictions might turn potential converts away, the contradictions can actually be a plus. They make the Bible malleable. You can emphasize some verses and ignore others to create one message and then change the mix as social conditions change. When slavery is fashionable, the Bible supports it, and when slavery becomes unpopular, the Bible supports that position as well. God is merciful or strict; God is loving or violent; God is forgiving or demanding—it’s all in there. (More.)

God becomes the Christian’s sock puppet, mouthing what the Christian wants to hear while speaking with the authority of the Bible.

I always refer to the Bible as the world’s oldest,
longest-running, most widespread,
and least deservedly respected Rorschach Test.
You can look at it and see whatever you want.
And everybody does.
— Richard S. Russell

Christian Historical Claims Are Surprisingly Fragile: a Case Study (2 of 2)

January 17, 2019 By Bob Seidensticker

early church manuscripts

Polycarp, an important second-century Christian bishop, was martyred in about 155. A letter, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, documented the appeal by the Roman proconsul to get Polycarp to avoid a death sentence by making an obligatory prayer to Caesar. Polycarp rejected the idea, saying, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

The lecture that prompted me to write about Polycarp was “Church History” from the Credo House ministry. In response to Polycarp’s famous line, one lecturer said, “I just read that and get chills. That needs to be a t-shirt.” The other replied, “That’s one of the most beautiful statements in all of church history. It really is.”

I’m not sure why. If Jesus helped Polycarp through life’s trials no more overtly than he helps people today, I don’t see what’s worth dying for. The Jesus who urged believers to pray in a closet instead of in public wouldn’t be pleased at a public show of devotion through martyrdom. The Bible doesn’t encourage it, and martyrdom for being a Christian (in the West, anyway) doesn’t happen. (I explore a modern version of this foolish sacrifice here.)

But that’s a tangent. Our goal here is to answer the question, Did Polycarp really say this? We’ve covered three glaring red flags already (in part 1)—the story contains miracles, Polycarp’s death reads like a deliberate imitation of Jesus’s death, and many decades may have intervened between the death and the documentation of the event. Let’s continue.

Problem 4

We have a series of copyists, though fortunately these are known. Unlike many manuscripts, the letter documents the earliest series of copies: someone wrote the original (in Greek), and then Irenaeus got a copy, which was copied by Gaius, which was then copied by Socrates, which was then copied by Pionius. Pionius noted that the copy he had to work with “had almost faded away through the lapse of time,” which raises the possibility that he used guesswork to fill in gaps.

Problem 5

But at least that initial series of copyists was documented. Our final problem is the unknown period between Pionius (assuming the accuracy of the letter’s appendix) and the oldest copies that we have today. We have seven Greek manuscript copies of the letter, but these date to the tenth century and later. That isn’t a reliable foundation on which to build our translation.

There’s also a Latin version from the tenth century and an Old Church Slavonic version from the fifteenth century. These are no improvement—not only are they late, but there’s a translation in there.

Finally, we have Church History by Eusebius (also known as Ecclesiastical History), written in Greek in about 320. He copied much of The Martyrdom of Polycarp into his book, including the “he has done me no wrong” quote.

The problem is similar here: there are seven Greek manuscript copies from the tenth century or later, six Latin copies from the eighth century and later, and two Syriac copies. The earliest Syriac copy is the oldest of all existing copies, with a (surprisingly precise) copy date of 462.

Which do we point to for our most reliable copy? We have a tenth-century Greek copy of the letter, and we have a fifth-century copy of a translation of Eusebius’s copy of the letter. Neither inspires confidence. One source characterizes the problem this way: “The letter as presented in extant Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which dates from the 10th century, is somewhat different from the account given by Eusebius, so that probably the work has undergone interpolation [change].”

The two options for the dates of Polycarp’s death are more evidence of problems with these two manuscript traditions. Each tradition gives a clear but contradictory date. The copies of The Martyrdom of Polycarp say 155 or 156, while those of Church History say 166 or 167.

(A similar analysis with a tenuous chain of evidence is the claim that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. I’ve responded to that with a blog post and video summary.)

Have we chosen a particularly poor example? Candida Moss argues in The Myth of Persecution that the martyrdom of Polycarp is one of the best martyrdom accounts, and yet it’s still unreliable.

Lessons

Admittedly, what Polycarp said, if anything, isn’t very important by itself. What is important is this as an example of the feeble foundation that supports many other claims that, collectively, are important.

Let’s review the problems that came up with this quote.

Miracles. The story contains miracles. Sure, I’ll listen to miracle claims, but the hill to climb to show historicity has suddenly become huge.
Fan fiction? It looks to be a deliberate parallel to the Jesus death story. That might make literary or theological sense, but it brings historicity into question.
Time gap from event to autograph. The date of original authorship is unclear. Clues in the text suggest many decades between the event and the original letter.
Time gap from autograph to our best copy. The letter documents three or four steps in the copying process, the last of which implies that creative license might’ve been taken to fill in the blanks in a tattered manuscript.
And more time from autograph to our best copy. Next is the unknown period from that point to our best copies (a tenth-century original language Greek copy or a fifth-century translated copy, neither of which inspire confidence).

When confronted with a claim about early church history, be skeptical. Ask: How do you know? Any declaration about something that happened in the early church comes down to manuscripts. Are they plausible history? How long is the chain from original to our best copies (in years and number of copies)? Did anyone in the chain of copies have an agenda to “improve” the text? And so on.

Very few typical Christians will have answers. That shouldn’t be an invitation to dump a bunch of questions and insults on them and smugly walk away, however. These are complicated issues, and maybe you can each learn from the other.

The whole story of human history is:
the blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.
— Ralph Nader

Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Part 1)

June 20, 2018 By Bob Seidensticker

To give me a time to work on a new book project, I’m replaying a few oldies from the vault. I’ve recently been adding to this list (spoiler: I’m already well past 25), but let’s go back and review the first few arguments from four years ago.

You did NOT just say that

Hey, gang! Get out your Christian Fallacy Bingo cards and cross off the bogus arguments as they’re called out! These are some of the dumb arguments apologists often use. Christians, do us all a favor—yourself especially—and make good arguments. These aren’t what you want to use.

Stupid Argument #1: the consequences of atheism are depressing.

Atheism is sad or unfortunate or otherwise discouraging, or atheism declares that life is hopeless and meaningless.

This is like saying that the consequences of earthquakes and hurricanes are sad or unfortunate. Sure, the consequences of reality can be sad, but that doesn’t make them untrue. “Atheism is depressing; therefore, it’s false” is a childish way of looking at the world. A pat on the head might make us feel better, but are we not adults looking for the truth?

As for life being meaningless, I find no ultimate meaning, but then neither can the Christian. Atheists can find plenty of the ordinary kind of meaning. Look up the word in the dictionary—there is nothing about God or about ultimate or transcendental grounding. (More on objective truth here.)

Stupid Argument #2: I sense God’s presence; therefore, God exists.

The argument is more completely stated: If God existed, I would sense his presence; I sense God’s presence; therefore, God exists. This is the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (formal version: if P then Q; Q; therefore P). I’ve discussed this in more detail here.

The point is that there could be lots of reasons why you sense God’s presence, God’s existing being only one of them (and the least likely). Maybe you were just raised that way and are a reflection of your culture. Maybe humans were programmed by evolution to err on the side of seeing an intelligence behind that rustling in the woods.

I can’t tell whether you’ve deluded yourself or whether you’re justified in believing in a supernatural experience. Nevertheless, your subjective personal experience may be convincing to you, but it won’t convince anyone else.

Stupid Argument #3: defending God’s immoral actions.

Christians might say that genocide or slavery was simply what they did back then, and God was working within the social framework of the time. Or they might say that God might have his own reasons that we mortals can’t understand.

This is just embarrassing. You’re seriously going to handwave away God’s being okay with slavery (discussed in detail here and here) and ordering genocide (here, here, and here)? If it’s wrong now, it was wrong then. How do you get past the fact that the Old Testament reads just like the blog of an early Iron Age tribe rather than the wisdom of the omniscient creator of the universe? And if you dismiss slavery as not that big a deal, would you accept Old Testament slavery in our own society? This reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s comment, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

As for God having his own unfathomable reasons for immoral actions, this is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. No, we don’t start with God and then fit the facts to support that presupposition; we follow the facts where they lead—whether toward God or not.

Stupid Argument #4: I’ll believe the first-century eyewitnesses over modern historians.

The Christian gives more weight to writings closer to the events.

It’s fair to be concerned about the accretion of layers of dogma or tradition over time, but don’t think that you’ve solved that problem by reading the Bible and the writings of the early church fathers. We don’t have what the original authors wrote; we have copies of what they wrote (and it’s debatable how good those copies were). Perhaps the Christian actually wants license to dismiss unwanted ideas from modern sources.

As for the “eyewitness” claim, this is often slipped in without justification. None of the gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts. We don’t even know who wrote them. That Matthew and Luke borrow heavily from Mark—often copying passages word for word—make clear that they’re not eyewitness accounts. And those gospels that do make the claim (the Gospel of Peter, for example) are rejected by the church. Show compelling evidence for the remarkable eyewitness claim before confidently tossing it out.

Of course, getting closer to the events is a good policy. The problem is that this doesn’t work to Christianity’s favor. We’re separated from both Islam and Mormonism by less time than from Christianity. Mormonism in particular fares much better than Christianity in a historical analysis (more here). This is an argument the Christian wants to avoid.

What arguments should be in this list?

There will be some controversy about this list. Maybe some of these deserve more space. Maybe you’d combine or divide them differently. Maybe some are reasonable enough that they shouldn’t be on a “stupid” list. And I’m sure there are plenty that I’ve forgotten.

At the very least, referring back to the argument number might be a shorthand way for us to respond to bogus arguments by Christian commenters. But my hope is that thoughtful Christians will understand the problems behind these arguments and minimize them in their own discourse.

Continue with part 2.

DNA and [radioisotope] dating shows that
we evolved with all life over billions of years.
Bible says God created us from dust and ribs.
I’m torn.
— Ricky Gervais

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/29/14.)