13 Reasons to Reject the Christian Naysayer Hypothesis (2 of 2)

July 8, 2015 By Bob Seidensticker

Let’s wrap up our critique of the Naysayer Hypothesis.

Recap: this argument says that the gospels were written at a time when many disciples—the eyewitnesses—were still alive. If they heard an inaccurate story about Jesus, they’d correct it. No false story elements would have survived. Said another way, that our gospel story did survive means that it avoided the gauntlet of naysayers and must be true.

We’re exploring this alternate history, where the gospel story was false, and those in the inner circle successfully snuffed it out. It quickly falls apart under examination. Part 1 has the first eight points.

9. Jesus himself couldn’t rein in rumors. He repeatedly tells those around him to not tell anyone about his miracles, and yet we read about both the miracles and Jesus’s fruitless plea. If he can’t stop rumors, why imagine that mortals can?

Jesus asked who people thought he was, and he was told, “[some say] John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets” (Mark 8:28). The gospels themselves say that legendary accretion happened within months. And was Jesus able to play the good naysayer and stamp out the false teaching? Apparently not, if these stories had gone unchecked.

Look at Scientology, cults, or any of the divisions of Christianity, both major (Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses) and minor (thousands of nondenominational churches and sects). Apparently, new religions start quite easily. The incredulous, “But what else could explain the New Testament but that the writers were telling the truth?!” doesn’t hold up when we see how easy it is for a new idea to take hold.

10. One way to stop the gospel story would be naysayers, but a far better way would be to show the gospel story to be false. The gospels themselves document that it was, and even that didn’t stop the story from spreading.

Jesus said that the end would come within the lifetime of many within his hearing. It didn’t (indeed, that this was going to be a longer process than initially thought was a reason that the oral history was finally written down, decades after the events). With the central prediction wrong, what more proof do you need that this religion was false? And yet the religion kept on going.

Or consider Joseph Smith. Here was a man charged with the very occult practices that he then warns about in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is full of anachronisms. This religion should’ve just collapsed under its own weight, but it’s still here. Logical failings won’t necessarily take down a religion.

These examples make clear that religion can grow in the face of evidence showing that it’s false. It is ridiculous to imagine that naysayers could’ve stopped Christianity when internal falsifying evidence didn’t.

11. Christian apologists say that there were no naysayers correcting a false Jesus story, but how do we know that there weren’t naysayers? For us to know about them, naysayers would need to have written their story and have some mechanism to recopy the true account over and over until the present day. Just like Christian documents, their originals would have crumbled with time. What would motivate anyone to preserve copies of documents that argued against a religion? Perhaps only another religion! And it’s not surprising that the Jesus-isn’t-divine religion didn’t catch on.

We see this problem with noncanonical writings. Take the Gospel of Peter, for example. Our primary copy is from the 8th or 9th century. Why aren’t there older copies as with the four canonical gospels? Because very few copies were made, and no one took pains to preserve them.

12. What success will a naysayer have when he’s fighting a belief that’s taken on faith?

Consider another community that had plenty of evidence that they were on the wrong track. The Millerites made themselves right with God by giving away all their possessions and awaited the end of the world on October 22, 1844. Didn’t happen. What better evidence could one want that William Miller’s Bible-based predictions about the End were false?

Did everyone who’d been duped by this Great Disappointment leave poorer but wiser? Of course not. Many Millerite sects adapted to the new information and carried on, one of which eventually became the Seventh-Day Adventist church.

In our own time, Harold Camping predicted May 21, 2011 for the Rapture, with the end coming five months later. Wrong again. And yet his Family Radio adapted and continues even after its own Great Disappointment.

Here are a few more examples of negative evidence dismissed by true believers:

Anti-gay pastor Ted Haggard paid for gay sex and meth and was removed as pastor. He’s now back in the saddle. Ditto Jimmy Swaggart (whose weakness was prostitutes). And Jim Bakker (sexual and financial shenanigans). And Peter Popoff (magic tricks masquerading as prophecy). If clear evidence doesn’t sink these preachers for good, why imagine that it would sink the Jesus story?
An Indian skeptic debunked “tears” from a Catholic crucifix as leaky plumbing. He faces blasphemy charges in India and now lives in Finland.
Half a million people visited in the first two weeks after the report of an iridescent “Mary” on the window of a bank in Clearwater, Florida. James Randi showed that it was just mineral deposits from sprinklers.
9/11 Truthers aren’t convinced by expert testimony.
Does the appearance of the skeptical correction of a sensational but flawed story on snopes.com, urbanlegends.about.com, James Randi’s Swift, or quackwatch.org quickly shut it down? Of course not.

Believers won’t let rebuttals sink a good story. And when a firmly held conviction is so rarely changed by argument today, why imagine it any more common 2000 years ago?

As an additional humiliation to the Naysayer Hypothesis, consider the Shroud of Turin, a fake burial shroud of Jesus. It came to light in the 14th century, during a time of great interest in Christian relics. History documents dozens of claimed shrouds of Jesus. Though there is still debate on the authenticity of the Turin shroud, our earliest mention of the shroud is a 1390 letter from a bishop to a pope stating not only that it was a forgery but that the artist was known and had confessed.

Apparently the Naysayer Hypothesis is cited only when convenient.

13. The gospel story is just a story. Suppose I pass along the gossip that I heard, “40 years ago, Theodore Mertz rose up from the dead.” Where are the naysayers who will rebut that? There aren’t any. So why be surprised that they don’t leap out of the woodwork to attack my false story with firsthand evidence?

The Naysayer hypothesis has it backwards: it assumes the miracle story, which implies eyewitnesses, and then imagines these eyewitnesses wagging their fingers at anyone who gets the Jesus story wrong. But what if the whole thing is legend? Then we see in history just what we’d expect to see: no eyewitnesses curtailing the Jesus story.

This argument is popular but empty. Don’t use it.

Thanking God for sparing you in a natural disaster
is like sending a thank-you note to a serial killer
for stabbing the family next door.
— Mrs. Betty Bowers,
America’s Best Christian

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/26/12.)

Image credit: Rob Shenk, flickr, CC

13 Reasons to Reject the Christian Naysayer Hypothesis

July 6, 2015 By Bob Seidensticker

Apologists tell us that the gospels were written at a time when many disciples—the eyewitnesses—were still alive. If they heard an inaccurate story, they’d say, “I was there, and that’s not the way it happened!” They’d shut it down. An incorrect version of the story would not have survived. Said another way, that our gospel story did survive means that it avoided the gauntlet of naysayers and must be true.

Let’s consider this alternate history, where the gospel story was false, and those in the inner circle successfully snuffed it out. It quickly falls apart under examination. Here are 13 reasons why I say nay to this Naysayer Hypothesis.

1. There would have been few potential naysayers. The gospel story does report thousands witnessing the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but these wouldn’t be naysayers. A naysayer must have been a close companion of Jesus to witness him not doing every miracle recorded in the Gospels. He would need to know that Jesus didn’t walk on water and didn’t raise Lazarus. A proper naysayer must have been one of Jesus’s close companions during his entire ministry, and there would likely have been just a few dozen.

2. We imagine a handful of naysayers who know that the Jesus story is only a legend, but that was in the year 30. Now the first gospel is written and it’s roughly forty years later—how many are still alive? Conditions were harsh at that time, and people died young.

And consider that the gospels were written after siege of Jerusalem in 70, which Josephus says killed 1.1 million people. More were scattered or enslaved. Few naysayers would’ve remained to critique gospel accounts.

3. A naysayer must be in the right location to complain. Suppose he lived in Jerusalem, and say that the gospel of Mark was written in Alexandria, Egypt, which historians say is one possibility. How will our naysayer correct its errors? Sure, Mark will be copied and spread, but there’s little time before our 60- or 70-year-old witnesses die. Even if we imagine our tiny band dedicating their lives to stamping out this false story, believers are starting brush fires of Christian belief all over the Eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Damascus to Corinth to Rome. How can we expect our naysayers to snuff them all out?

4. The naysayers had no motivation for dedicating their lives to stopping the false Jesus story. So there’s yet another nut who thinks he has it all figured out—who cares? Your Judaism isn’t under threat from this tiny cult (and it was a tiny cult in the early years).

Consider a modern equivalent. Many atheists today spend much time responding to claims of Christianity, but that’s because Christianity is society’s bull in the china shop. It causes harm. In contrast, imagine a Christian who also believes in reincarnation. That’s a weird set of beliefs, but who really cares? No one would devote their life to stamping out that belief.

5. The naysayers wouldn’t know about the problem. Two thousand years ago, you couldn’t walk down to the corner bookstore to find the latest Jesus gospel. How were our naysayers to learn of the story? Written documents at that time were scarce and precious things. And the naysayers would be Jews who didn’t convert to Christianity. They wouldn’t have associated much with the new Christians and so would have been unlikely to come across the Jesus story.

6. There was another gulf between the naysayers and the early Christians: the early church was a Greek institution. The epistles and gospels were written in Greek, not the local language of Aramaic spoken by Jesus and the naysayers. To even learn of the Jesus story in this community, our naysayers must speak Greek, which is hard to imagine among the typical peasant followers of Jesus. How many could have done this? And to influence the Greek-speaking readers of the gospels for us to learn of the problem, a rebuttal would have to have been written in Greek—not a common skill in Palestine.

7. Imagine a naysayer knew the actual Jesus and knew that he was merely a charismatic teacher. Nothing supernatural. Now he hears the story of Jesus the Son of Man, the man of miracles, the healer of lepers and raiser of the dead. Why connect “Son of Man” Jesus with your childhood buddy Jesus? “Jesus” was a common name (actually, Joshua or Yeshua), and supernatural claims were common at the time. His friend Jesus didn’t do anything like this, so the story he heard must be of a different person. So even when confronted with the false teaching, he wouldn’t know to raise an alarm.

8. Consider how hard is it today for a politician, celebrity, or business leader to stop a false rumor, even with the many ways to get the word out. Think about how hard it would have been in first-century Palestine. How many thousands of Christians were out there spreading the word for every naysayer with his finger in the dike? Given the sensational story (“Jesus was a miracle worker who can save you from your sins!”) and the mundane one (“Nah—he’s just a regular guy that I hung around with when I was growing up”), which has more traction?

The Jews of the time of Jesus had far better evidence of his divinity than we could ever hope to have. A tiny handful found it compelling and became his followers, but the vast majority didn’t. If eyewitness testimony is relevant, as today’s Christian apologists claim, we should follow that majority.

Concluded in part 2.

If 50 million people say a foolish thing,
it’s still a foolish thing.
— Anatole France

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/26/12.)

Image credit: erokism, flickr, CC

10 Reasons to Just Say Nay to the Naysayer Hypothesis

October 26, 2012 By Bob Seidensticker

Let’s consider this alternative world, where those in the inner circle tried to snuff out any false statements about Jesus. It quickly falls apart under examination.

Here are ten reasons why I say nay to this Naysayer Hypothesis.

1. There would have been few potential naysayers. True, the gospel story reports thousands witnessing the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but these wouldn’t be naysayers. A naysayer must have been a close companion of Jesus to witness him not doing every miracle recorded in the Gospels. He would need to know that Jesus didn’t walk on water and didn’t raise Lazarus. A proper naysayer must have been one of Jesus’s close companions during his entire ministry, and there would likely have been just a few dozen.

2. We imagine a handful of naysayers who know that the Jesus story is only a legend, but that was in the year 30. Now the first gospel is written and it’s roughly forty years later—how many are still alive? Conditions were harsh at that time, and people died young. Many from our little band of naysayers have died or been imprisoned by this point.

3. A naysayer must be in the right location to complain. Suppose he lived in Jerusalem, and say that the book of Mark was written in Alexandria, Egypt, which historians say is one possibility. How will our naysayer correct its errors? Sure, Mark will be copied and spread, but there’s little time before our 60- or 70-year-old witnesses die. Even if we imagine our tiny band dedicating their lives to stamping out this false story—and why would they?—believers are starting brush fires of Christian belief all over the Eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Damascus to Corinth to Rome. How can we expect our naysayers to snuff them all out?

4. They wouldn’t know about it. Two thousand years ago you couldn’t walk down to the corner bookstore to find the latest Jesus gospel. How were our naysayers to learn of the story? Written documents at that time were scarce and precious things. The naysayers would be Jews who didn’t convert to Christianity. They wouldn’t have associated much with the new Christians and so would have been unlikely to come across the Jesus story.

5. There was another gulf between the naysayers and the early Christians: the Gospels were written in Greek, not the local language of Aramaic spoken by Jesus and the naysayers. To even learn of the Jesus story in this community, our naysayers must speak Greek, which is hard to imagine among the typical peasant followers of Jesus. How many could have done this? And to influence the Greek-speaking readers of the Gospels, a rebuttal would have to have been written in Greek—not a common skill in Palestine.

6. Imagine a naysayer knew the actual Jesus and knew that he was merely a charismatic rabbi. Nothing supernatural. Now he hears the story of Jesus the Son of Man, the man of miracles, the healer of lepers and raiser of the dead. Why connect the two? “Jesus” was a common name (or Joshua or Yeshua or whatever his name really was), and supernatural claims were common at the time. His friend Jesus didn’t do anything like this, so the story he heard must be of a different person. So even when confronted with the false teaching, he wouldn’t know to raise an alarm.

7. Consider how hard is it today for a politician, celebrity, or business leader to stop a false rumor, even with the many ways to get the word out. Think about how hard it would have been in first-century Palestine. How many thousands of Christians were out there spreading the word for every naysayer with his finger in the dike? Given the sensational story (“Jesus was a miracle worker who can save you from your sins!”) and the mundane one (“Nah—he’s just a guy that I hung around with when I was growing up”), which has more traction?

8. Jesus himself couldn’t rein in rumors. He repeatedly tells those around him to not tell anyone about his miracles, and yet we read about both the miracles and Jesus’s fruitless plea. If he can’t stop rumors, why imagine that mortals can?

Or consider Joseph Smith. Here was a man convicted of the very occult practices that he then tells about in the Book of Mormon. Should’ve been easy to pull aside the curtain on this “religion,” right? Nope.

Look at Scientologists, cults, or any of the divisions of Christianity, both major (Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses) and minor (thousands of nondenominational churches and sects). Apparently, new religions start quite easily. The incredulous, “But what else could explain the New Testament but that the writers were telling the truth?!” doesn’t hold up when we see how easy it is.

9. One way to stop the gospel story would be naysayers, but a far better way would be to show the story as false. And the gospels themselves document that it was.

Jesus said that the end would come within the lifetime of many within his hearing. It didn’t (indeed, that this was going to be a longer process than initially thought was a reason that the oral history was finally written down, decades after the events). With the central prediction crumbling, what more proof do you need that this religion was false? And yet the religion kept on going. Obviously, religion can grow in the face of evidence to the contrary.

10. Christian apologists say that there were no naysayers, but how do we know that there weren’t? For us to know about them, naysayers would need to have written their story and have some mechanism to recopy the true account over and over until the present day. Just like Christian documents, their originals would have crumbled with time. What would motivate anyone to preserve copies of documents that argued against a religion? Perhaps only another religion! And it’s not surprising that the Jesus-isn’t-divine religion didn’t catch on.

This argument is popular but empty. Don’t use it.

If a million people say a foolish thing,
it’s still a foolish thing.

(This post is a modification of one originally posted 11/2/11.)

Photo credit: Military Videos

10 Reasons to Just Say Nay to the Naysayer Hypothesis

November 2, 2011 By Bob Seidensticker

Biological hazard symbol Apologists tell us that the gospels were written at a time when many disciples—the eyewitnesses—were still alive. If they heard an inaccurate story, they’d say, “I was there, and that’s not the way it happened!” They’d shut it down. An incorrect version of the story would not have survived.

But does this make sense? Let’s consider this alternative world, where those in the inner circle tried to snuff out any false statements about Jesus. Here are ten reasons why I say nay to this Naysayer Hypothesis.

1. There would have been few potential naysayers, perhaps a few dozen. True, the gospel story has thousands witnessing the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but these wouldn’t be naysayers. A naysayer must have been a close companion of Jesus to witness him not doing all the miracles recorded in the Gospels. He would need to know that Jesus didn’t walk on water and didn’t raise Lazarus. A proper naysayer must have been one of Jesus’s close companions during his entire ministry, and there’s no reason to imagine there being more than a few dozen.

Christians Reveal! How to Defeat Christianity (2 of 2)

May 15, 2020 By Bob Seidensticker

This is the conclusion of a response to the intriguingly titled article from Christian apologist Greg Koukl, “This One Thing Could Destroy Christianity Completely….” Part 1 of my critique is here.

The argument comes from a verse in 1 Corinthians, which bases the entirety of the Christian message on the historical truth of the Resurrection. No Resurrection means no saving message of Jesus.

Koukl helpfully lays out Christianity’s vulnerability with three facts. He says that they’re strong enough to support the hard-to-believe claim of Resurrection. I say that each one is unreliable and so are not actually facts. In addition, no set of natural claims can support a supernatural conclusion.

“Fact” 1 was that Jesus was dead and buried. (Yes, he was, but only in the story.) Let’s wrap up with the remaining two.

2. The tomb was empty on Sunday morning

Here’s Koukl’s summary.

Nearly three-quarters of all scholars agree here, since the empty tomb was never disputed by anyone at the time, even the Jews and Romans. Why was Jesus’ body never produced to quell the rumor of resurrection? Present the corpse, end the controversy. Pretty simple.

Wow—so few words with so much wrong.

The “three-quarters of all scholars” (I think he meant New Testament scholars) comes from Gary Habermas. It’s a statistic from his personal database of articles, which he hasn’t made it public, so we’re stuck taking his word for it. And who’s in the database—historians? Christian professors? Pastors and street preachers? I’d find historians whose expertise was in non-religious areas of history to be far less biased than New Testament scholars, for example.

My guess is that those motivated to write articles about the empty tomb are Christians, and almost all historians of pre-Columbian America, medieval France, or any other non-New Testament area couldn’t be bothered. (More on this statistic here and here.)

How do we know whether the empty tomb was disputed by anyone at the time? We have poor records of anything from 2000 years ago. Who would’ve gone to the expense of denying an odd claim in writing if it didn’t affect them or challenge anything dear to them? Even more so, who would bother copying that rebuttal through the generations to preserve it for us to read today?

More important, there was no “anyone at the time” to dispute the story! When Jesus was supposed to have died, the empty tomb was in a book that wouldn’t be written for decades. Seeing it from the other end of the timeline, in the 70s or 80s when the gospels were written, those authors weren’t constrained by history. They could write whatever they wanted to.

Said another way, the empty tomb didn’t exist until the author of Mark wrote “He is not here; see the place where they laid him” roughly forty years after Jesus supposedly died. Was Mark documenting history? That must be demonstrated. Until then, it’s just a story.

Koukl’s “Present the corpse, end the controversy” isn’t realistic. Who’d be motivated to head off any rumor that Jesus was risen? Even if Christians caused trouble in later decades or centuries, in the two or three days after the crucifixion, any Jewish or Roman authority would assume that this fringe Jewish sect was finished. Its troublesome leader was now dead; problem solved. As for the worry about the rumor of resurrection, that, too, was in a gospel that wouldn’t exist for decades.

Skeptics give a dozen reasons why Christianity’s claims are nonsense, and that doesn’t destroy Christianity today. Why imagine it any different 2000 years ago? Even if you imagine naysayers poised to contradict the gospels (and why would you?), contrary facts have little impact on a religion.

3. The disciples were transformed

Koukl now argues that the disciples took the difficult route, proving the depth of their motivation.

Even the most critical scholars acknowledge that the disciples proclaimed the resurrection at their peril because they thought they’d encountered the risen Christ. Many paid the ultimate price—including the skeptic James and the former executioner of Christians, Paul—choosing death rather than retraction.

Let me make a quick aside about Christian scholarship. Many Christian professors must sign a doctrinal statement (statement of faith) before they can work at a Christian college. Their job then depends on their abiding by each point in the doctrinal statement. If the statement says that Jesus’s disciples chose death over denying the divinity of Jesus (say), what does it mean when they write a paper or give a lecture with that conclusion? They were obliged to reach that conclusion, so their objectivity is suspect.

A doctrinal statement is a commitment to a conclusion before any research is done, and researchers can’t honestly follow the facts when some conclusions are off limits. In other fields, practitioners recuse themselves when they can’t be objective, and Christian scholars should do the same. I talk about the problem in depth here and here.

Let’s move on to “paying the ultimate price” as a martyr. This is the “Who would die for a lie?” argument, which asks why a disciple would go to his death knowing that Jesus didn’t resurrect as the story says.

Our first question: why do we think any disciples died as martyrs? Only the martyrdom of James the son of Zebedee is given in the Bible. The oldest source with claims about all twelve disciples, “On the Twelve Apostles,” was written roughly 150 years after the last supposed martyrdom. This is too old to be reliable, but the story gets muddier still when you toss in contradicting accounts written even later. These give us tradition, not history.

Second, on what charges were these disciples convicted? To support the argument, the crime must merit a death penalty (something like treason or sedition) and be such that denying Jesus’s resurrection would get you released. “On the Twelve Apostles” doesn’t tell us what any disciple was charged with, if anything. It only claims to document how they died. That means we have no evidence, not even poor evidence, that they would’ve been released by saying the magic words, “Okay, I’ll admit it—Jesus didn’t rise from the dead!”

And with that, the “Who would die for a lie?” argument fails. (More here.)

Punch line

Every fact is false and even the grounds for his argument are gone, but Koukl still springs his nonexistent trap.

Which brings us to our final, most important question: What single explanation makes sense of all of the historical details that virtually every academic in the field agrees on—the death of Jesus, the empty tomb, and the transformation of the disciples and the skeptics? What single interpretation accounts for all the facts?

That it’s a story.

Jesus was buried in the story. The tomb was empty in the story. The disciples became bold proclaimers of the divinity of Jesus in the story. Don’t take us to a certain point in the story and then demand to know, given the constraints of the story to that point, what alternative we could have to a supernatural explanation.

This is Robert M. Price’s yellow brick road problem: “Of course there’s an Emerald City. Where else would the yellow brick road go to?” Or, in this case, “Of course Jesus rose from the dead. What else explains the empty tomb?” Step outside of it and see the story, and you’ll discover that nothing about it constrains you to accept a supernatural conclusion.

In the beginning of part 1, I pointed to C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument and noted that a fourth possibility, Legend, was the obvious explanation. How could Lewis or any apologist today make the argument without that omission being apparent? And with Koukl’s “The one thing that could destroy Christianity” argument, we have a similar mystery. How can anyone make this argument without “It’s just a story!” springing to mind?

Koukl wraps up:

Here it is, the answer Peter gives—the only answer that fits all the evidence: “This Jesus God raised up again, to which we are all witnesses” (Acts 2:32). Those who disagree must solve this problem: “What is a better explanation of the facts?”

That it’s a story.

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For further reading: 8 Lessons Learned from the Minimal Facts Argument

They say [swearing’s] not necessary,
as if that should stop one from doing it.
It’s not necessary to have colored socks! . . .
Things not being necessary are what makes life interesting.
— Stephen Fry (Joys of Swearing video @1:50)

Image from Tom Edgington, CC license
.

Another Attempt to Explain God’s Hiddenness (or Nonexistence) Fails

September 23, 2019 By Bob Seidensticker

Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious? This question may be Christianity’s biggest Achilles heel, and I applaud Christian apologists for frequently struggling with this gaping hole in their worldview. I just wish I could be as appreciative of their responses.

Tom Gilson is a Christian apologist and senior editor with The Stream, and he tackled this question. Let’s take a look at his justification of God’s hiddenness.

The problem (and a first try at a solution)

Gilson expresses the problem this way:

You say there are all these evidences for God, but I look at them, and every one of them can be interpreted another way. Why doesn’t God just prove Himself?

Yes, great question. I can imagine both Christians and non-Christians asking this.

The answer (more accurately, “answer”) is that “many people disbelieved in Jesus, even when they had proof before their eyes.” He gives the raising of Lazarus as an example.

Wow—where do you begin with something this naive? First, he’s pointing to a story in the New Testament, not a history book. Many questions hang over the reliability of our version of the New Testament. How much does it differ from the originals? We can’t say for sure (more on the problems with recreating the original New Testament here, here, here, and here). When the document holding miracle stories is suspect, so must be the stories.

And let’s assume that the New Testament originals did say that about Lazarus and other healings. So what? It’s just a story. Let me say that again because it’s easy to understand, central to the issue, and yet never brought up by the apologists: the gospel story is just a story, just words on paper. Did the gospels correctly document history? Was historical reliability even the authors’ goal? The apologist are responsible for arguing that it’s accurate history.

The Bible has loads of contradictions. Drop the idea that the New Testament is accurate journalism, and what we see is easily explained by it being just an imperfect human book, not the inerrant word of God. God is an unnecessary hypothesis.

The gospels were written decades after the events they claim to document. Few people from the time of Jesus would’ve been around to contradict them, and none would’ve been motivated to correct them. (This is the Naysayer Hypothesis, which claims that the gospel story is correct because, if it weren’t, there would’ve been naysayers who would’ve shut down the false story. I deflate that here.)

Finally, consider Gilson’s claim, “many people disbelieved in Jesus.” After Lazarus was raised (John 11), no one in the story said, “Wait, I know how that trick was done—Jesus had Lazarus up his sleeve the whole time!” No one in the story doubted that Lazarus was raised, so even the Bible says that Jesus performed a miracle and everyone understood it as such. The core of his claim is now gone. If he pointed to other stories besides Lazarus where people disbelieved, we’re back to it just being a story.

What can we reasonably demand of God?

Gilson points to cosmologist Lawrence Krauss as an atheist who has identified what he’d need to believe God existed. (I’m trusting Gilson for the quote, because he didn’t provide a valid link.) Krauss said:

[Suppose something happened] completely inconsistent with the operation of the universe as we know it, something impossible. . . . For instance, if the stars rearranged themselves to spell a different bible verse each night. Or if the tree in my front yard started growing KJV bibles instead of crabapples.

(As for me, I’d need more—crowdsourcing for starters. Even then, smart aliens is always a possible explanation.)

Update: Nope, that quote isn’t from Lawrence Krauss but from a 2016 post at the Question With Boldness blog! Thanks to Ubi Dubium, the author of that blog, for the correction. To minimize confusion I’ll continue to refer to Krauss as the author, since Gilson does.

In response to Krauss’s demand, Gilson said:

God isn’t going to do that. I know that, you know that, and Dr. Krauss has shielded himself quite well from having to worry about God proving Himself, because he knows God won’t do it, too.

Yes! You’re right—we do know that! God won’t show he exists in dramatic fashion through patterns in the stars, and he won’t show he exists in mundane fashion by simply hanging out with us so that his existence would be as obvious to everyone as the sun or a next-door neighbor.

We have more evidence for the existence of esoteric things like quarks and black holes than God. Praying, the official one-way communication route to God, works no better than chance, despite assurances from Jesus himself. This should tell you (and would tell you in any other situation) that God doesn’t exist.

Struggling to regain his footing, here is where your typical Christian apologist will bring up the need for having a mature faith. A mature faith means an outlook that understands that things in Christianity don’t work as promised, and yet you believe anyway. Someone with a mature faith has shed the constraints of evidence and just believes. Any doubts are nonexistent, suppressed, or examined only with the goal of finding out why they’re incorrect.

If this doesn’t sound like you, then your faith is immature, and that’s your fault. No, you’re not entitled to insist on evidence as you would in any other situation.

Continued in part 2.

More posts on faith:

Apologetics doesn’t exist to demonstrate
support for Christian claims.
It exists, instead, to divert attention away from them.
And it accomplishes that task grandly.
— Captain Cassidy, Roll to Disbelieve blog

Image from Isaac Castillejos, CC license
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Test Drive a Foolproof Method for Separating History From Legend

February 13, 2018 By Bob Seidensticker

Sweater people

Let me share with you an article that I enjoyed. And when I say “enjoyed,” I mean, “was baffled by.”

The article is “The Bible and Miracles: Fact or Fantasy?” and it proposes rules for separating history from myth and legend. It concludes that the Bible’s miracles are history.

Four simple rules

The author proposes four rules for identifying historical accounts.

1. Unlike myths, biblical miracles are presented in a historical context, that is, in conjunction with actual historical events, many of which can be verified by archaeology.

Yes, myths are often unconnected with human history, but that’s a quibble for this conversation (more on the distinctions between myths and legends here). Let’s consider legends instead, which typically are presented in a historical context. For example, the legend of King Arthur and Merlin the shape-shifting wizard was set in England around 600. The legend of William Tell was set in Switzerland around 1300. The legend of Jesus the miracle worker could be set in Palestine around 30.

Archeology supports biblical miracles no more than it does the supernatural stories in the Iliad. Yes, there was a Jericho and yes, there was a Troy, but archeology gives no support to the supernatural.

2. Miracles are presented in a simple, matter-of-fact style. No fanfare, sometimes not even a comment.

I don’t think that Jesus’s miracles are treated any more matter-of-factly than Merlin’s magic, the gods’ supernatural actions in the Iliad, or Paul Bunyan’s overlarge feats.

Fiction can also be presented in a matter-of-fact style. Witches and wizards can do magic (Harry Potter), and vampires and werewolves fight (Twilight).

3. Miracles occur in a framework of reason and logic. There are no miracles just for the sake of miracles. They are not performed for show; they are not “magic tricks” designed to entertain the reader.

The Bible’s miracles are not entertainment, but they are done as demonstrations. Jesus performed his miracles “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:6).

4. Miracles are performed in the presence of hundreds, sometimes thousands of witnesses; and many of the witnesses are still alive at the time the events are written down.

No, the stories claim that miracles were performed in the presence of many eyewitnesses. There is no independent historical documentation of a single miracle. I discuss the weakness of Paul’s claim of 500 eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus here.

Let’s test drive these rules

To illustrate a false claim, the author gives this example:

Even now, over 200 years after the fact, would anyone believe someone today who wrote that George Washington calmed the Delaware River and walked across it while his soldiers rowed?

We have the author’s own foolproof 4-part method to separate miracle from legend. Let’s try it out on this example.

1. “Washington walked across the Delaware River” is in a historical context. No one doubts that the Continental Army crossed that river the night of December 25, 1776 to attack enemy forces in Trenton.

2. Matter of fact style? Check. It’s easy to imagine the story told in this style.

3. Not performed as a trick or entertainment? Check. Washington had to get across somehow, and he could’ve walked across the water as a morale booster for the troops.

4. Performed in the presence of hundreds of witnesses? Check. History records 2400 soldiers in the group that crossed with Washington.

You might argue that Washington walking on water is nonsense, and those soldiers would rebut the claim. But if that’s the case, show me the letters from these men saying, “There’s a crazy rumor going around that General Washington walked on water. Let me make clear: I was there, I saw Washington, and it didn’t happen like that.” You can’t provide those letters? Then you begin to understand the weakness in the Naysayer Hypothesis, the idea that a claim that lasted until today must not have been defeated by any contemporary naysayers and so must be true (more here).

According to the author’s own checklist, he would be obliged to accept this account of Washington walking on water as an actual miracle. Since this account about Washington would be written in Modern English, it would be more reliable and accessible than gospel stories written in 2000-year-old Greek from an ancient culture (more here).

Parallel the gospel story with a modern analogy

The author bristles at the concern that the gospel story is unreliable history because it was initially passed on as oral history and written long after the events. He proposes a parallel. Compare Jesus known only through gospels written decades after his death with Mahatma Gandhi known only through the film Gandhi (1982), which was produced decades after his death.

To understand the early readers of the gospels, consider ourselves learning about Gandhi only through the film. But the author wants us to imagine a very different Gandhi. This Gandhi does the things that Jesus did: he proclaims himself divine, heals the sick, and multiplies loaves and fishes. Would you believe it?

Now go further. Would you believe that this Gandhi died and resurrected? That He died for your sins? Would you drop everything to accept this Gandhi’s call to follow Him?

Of course not. That’s a helpful parallel, and this Christian author has nicely demonstrated that the gospel claim is ridiculous. If you wouldn’t believe an account of Gandhi doing miracles, produced decades after his death, why believe the same thing for Jesus?

[SFX: record scratch]

Nope, that’s not the conclusion of this author. He tries to salvage his situation, not by running from, but actually embracing his ridiculous situation:

No one could have fabricated a story as that told in the gospels with the expectation that people would believe it. Yet believe it they did. Why? Because it happened, that’s why! And the apostles that preached the gospel must have demonstrated its truth by performing the same miracles. It’s the only answer that makes sense. No one in their right mind would have concocted those stories,* because no one in their right mind would believe them without reason.

* I argue that the gospel story is legend, not that it was deliberately invented.

Wow—you can’t make this stuff up! This author admits that the gospel story is crazy but tries to salvage his position by spinning this as a good thing. It’s so crazy it has to be true. It’s like early church father Tertullian who is quoted as writing, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Yeah, seek out the absurdity. That’s a good way to find truth. Or maybe not.

This reminds me of Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian spiritual leader who died in 2011 with millions of followers. He is claimed to have performed almost all of Jesus’ miracles, including raising from the dead. That the absurd stories are true is the only answer that makes sense, right?

The Son of God died:
it is wholly believable because it is absurd;
he was buried and rose again,
which is certain because it is impossible.
— Tertullian, early church father

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/25/14.)

Image via See-ming Lee, CC license

Response to Lee Strobel’s “Five E’s of Evidence”

October 27, 2017 By Bob Seidensticker

Lee Strobel has a story. No, it’s not the Greatest Story Ever Told (though he gets to that). The story is his conversion from unpleasant atheist to humble Christian servant, using his tough legal mind and journalistic experience to verify the facts of the Jesus story. (This story has been turned into a movie, The Case for Christ, which I critique here.)

He offers five reasons to accept the gospel story, each starting with the letter E. Let’s examine them and see if we can apply the eight lessons we developed from wading through Gary Habermas’s “minimal facts” argument for the resurrection.

E #1: Jesus was Executed. We can be sure that Jesus was dead. The Romans were very good at killing people. Don’t imagine that Jesus survived and then revived in the tomb. In addition, non-Christian historians like Tacitus and Josephus confirm the death. [I’ll show Strobel’s argument in italics.]

I’m always startled when Christians wallow in the agony Jesus went through. Strobel takes us on a gory journey through the details of the beating, how crucifixion worked, and so on. That apparently makes his sacrifice more impressive (though I’m unimpressed).

Strobel’s Executed claim violates our Lesson 1: it’s just a story. Yes, the story says that Jesus was executed, but so what? That’s not history. I’ll grant that someone dying is a fairly easy claim to accept. There’s nothing supernatural there, but we must emphasize the difference between a story and history. Is the gospel more than a story? That must be shown.

As for the historians, they give us little more than “there are people called Christians” (more on Josephus here).

E #2: There were Early accounts of the Jesus tale. Not only do we have four gospels, but 1 Corinthians 15 gives a creed stating that Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected on the third day. This creed has been dated by scholars to just a few years after the death of Jesus.

A creed is a statement of belief; it isn’t history. (I’ve written more about the 1 Corinthians passage here.)

As for the accounts being early, if you read the story of a three-days-dead man resurrecting from the tomb in yesterday’s newspaper, you wouldn’t believe it. Why believe it in a 2000-year-old document? Does making it harder to verify somehow make the claim more plausible?

The Early Accounts claim violates Lesson 8: just because the consensus of New Testament scholars says so doesn’t make it true. To those who demand that Christian scholars get a seat at the table, I wonder if they’d like to have Muslim scholars at the table. They have no supernatural bias, and they even accept much of the story of Jesus. Oddly, they universally reject the resurrection part. Are they biased by their religion? Perhaps, but if Muslim scholars are biased, what does that say about Christian scholars? Let’s not forget their bias.

Don’t imagine legend crept in to the gospel story. Historian A.N. Sherwin-White argues that “the passage of two generations of time was not enough for legend to wipe out a solid core of historical truth.”

I’ve written in detail about Sherwin-White’s work here. In short, Sherwin-White wasn’t making an immutable rule about the growth of legend. Note also that his claim is that the truth isn’t erased, not that there’s a reliable way of retrieving it.

E #3: The tomb was found Empty. “Nobody in the first century was claiming it was anything but empty.” The authorities said that disciples stole the body, but the disciples had no motive to, and that story simply confirms that the tomb was empty! The skeptics had to invent a story to explain away this embarrassing fact.

Apologists are drawn to weak skeptical arguments like sharks to chum. “Disciples stole the body” or “Jesus wasn’t dead and revived in the tomb” are fun to knock over, but this process is just misdirection. Apologists hope we won’t notice how weak the primary argument is.

Disciples are said to have stolen the body? Lesson 1: it’s just a story. Strobel says that skeptics invented the story, but of course that story comes from Matthew, not from skeptics.

75% of critical scholars accept the empty tomb as historical.

Lesson 8: the consensus of New Testament scholars doesn’t count for much, especially when this “75%” isn’t a valid poll.

Remember that the gospel accounts of the empty tomb come decades after the supposed event. Why would anyone expect there to still be naysayers (people who knew the truth who could rebut a false tale) to challenge the gospel story? Though the Naysayer Hypothesis is popular, it crumbles with a little investigation.

E #4: We have Eyewitness evidence. In 1 Cor. 15, Paul mentions individuals who saw the risen Jesus by name and makes clear that there were 500 more. And the icing on the cake is when Paul challenges the reader to look them up to verify the claim! “No way would he have said that if it wasn’t true.”

500 eyewitnesses? That’s no evidence. And you know who agrees with me? The author of each of the gospels! None of the gospels repeat this claim. Perhaps the authors hadn’t heard of this rumor or knew it to be false; either way, Paul’s claim looks pretty weak.

“You’ll back me up on this, right guys? Guys . . . ?” Sorry, Paul, but you’re alone on this one.

(I write more about the claim of 500 eyewitnesses here.)

“I’ve seen people sent to the death chamber on a fraction of this kind of evidence.”

And now Strobel really jumps the shark. He’s seen people convicted by a single sentence written by a stranger? I doubt it. The Sixth Amendment demands that the accused be able to cross-examine a witness. Not only is Paul long dead, but we know very little about him. Strobel compounds this problem because he probably takes the conservative line by insisting that the thirteen Pauline epistles were indeed all written by Paul, though most scholars only acknowledge seven. In other words, Strobel doesn’t even accept the scholarly consensus about this “witness.”

E #5: The Emergence of the early church. The Christian church emerged in the very city where Jesus had just been crucified. “Now, how do you sell [a false story] to people if they are there and they know better?”

No, the people weren’t there! The New Testament wasn’t written in Jerusalem just days after the events it claims to document; the many books of the New Testament were written in cities all around the Mediterranean decades later. Skeptics couldn’t read it and then step out their doors to do man-on-the-street interviews to verify the facts.

Weeks after the resurrection, Peter stood up publicly and proclaimed the gospel story. People didn’t say that it was nonsense. “History shows that on that day 3000 people” proclaimed the truth and joined the church.

No, it was a story. The “people” are just characters on a page that can be made to do whatever suited the author’s purpose. The claim of history must be shown.

The 8 lessons

Some of the other lessons are relevant to dismantling Strobel’s simple argument.

2. The natural trumps the supernatural. The God hypothesis might be right, but we need big evidence.
4. “Given the story to this point . . .” Strobel often wants to assume part of the story as history as he evaluates what comes next.
7. Evaluate similar claims with a similar bar of evidence. If you’re unimpressed with a particular claim from another religion, don’t expect us to be any more convinced by an analogous claim from Christianity.

Strobel said that he had rejected Christianity because he refused to be held accountable for his worthless life and because he was too proud to bend his knee to Jesus. The bigger issue is that he had no good reason to accept it.

[Heaven is like] when you hear someone
talk about Hawaii like they’ve been there
but they only read about it in a brochure.
— Kodie (commenter)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/11/14.)

Responding to the Minimal Facts Argument for the Resurrection

August 5, 2017 By Bob Seidensticker

Gary Habermas claims that the resurrection is well evidenced because most scholars accept it. That claim crumbles for many reasons (more here), but let’s move on to consider his larger argument, the minimal facts approach to the resurrection as documented in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Mike Licona (2004).

I like the idea. Habermas wants to minimize the number of facts necessary to build his foundation and use only claims granted by “virtually all scholars on the subject, even the skeptical ones.” He thinks four such “facts” are sufficient to show that the resurrection actually happened. (Going forward, I’ll use Habermas as a stand-in for the two authors.)

Let’s see if the argument holds up.

Fact 1: Jesus died by crucifixion. Habermas points to the gospels, which are first-century writings that all report a crucifixion. From outside the Bible, he gives Lucian, Mara Bar Serapion, and the Talmud, but these all appear to be second-century writings and don’t add a lot. An earlier non-Christian source is Josephus, but Josephus’s two references to Jesus appear to have been added or modified by later scribes (more here).

Habermas concludes, prematurely, “Clearly, Jesus’ death by crucifixion is a historical fact supported by considerable evidence.” The story does gradually became widespread, though this was long after the time of Jesus. That doesn’t make it “historical fact.”

Fact 2: The disciples believed that Jesus rose and appeared to them. The disciples went from cowards hiding from the authorities to bold proclaimers of the gospels, even to the point of martyrdom.

Yes, that’s what the story says, but let’s be skeptical about stories. We don’t take at face value the story about Merlin being a shape-shifting wizard. We don’t even unskeptically take the very un-supernatural claim that Arthur was king of England. Why then take elements of the supernatural Jesus story as history, even the natural ones?

In the second place, the “Who would die for a lie?” argument (that the disciples’ deaths is strong evidence) also fails. In brief, the historical evidence for apostles’ martyrdom is weak (more here).

Finally, the claim that the gospels document eyewitness history is also suspect when we don’t even know who wrote them (more here).

The gospel mentions emboldened disciples, but until we have good evidence otherwise, this is a story rather than history. Both “But they were eyewitnesses!” and “But they died for their faith!” are poorly evidenced claims.

The sources

Habermas gives Paul as one important source. It is rather incredible that Christianity was so strongly shaped by Paul, someone who wasn’t even a disciple of Jesus. Paul claimed to have known Peter, James, and John and claimed apostolic authority, but some random dude is just going to step in and declare that he’s got it all figured out, and he becomes part of the canon? Paul is authoritative just because he was influential, not because of any irrefutable sign from heaven.

Habermas argues that 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 is an early creed and so is very close to the events it claims to document. But a creed is simply a statement that is taken on faith, not evidence or an argument. His argument that these verses look distinct from the rest of Paul’s epistle could just as easily argue that they were added later. Note also that Paul’s Jesus story reads as mythology and is not grounded in history (more here).

Other authorities are church fathers Clement and Polycarp. Habermas argues that they were taught by the apostles, but his evidence comes from 150 years after the death of Jesus.

The innocence of a child

The credulity of Habermas is a little hard to believe. He says:

[The disciples] denied and abandoned [Jesus], then they hid in fear. Afterward, they willingly endangered themselves by publicly proclaiming the risen Christ (p. 56).

It’s just a story, and an untrustworthy one at that since we have a poor view of the original events (more here). Is this history? Show us.

Habermas again:

The apostles died for holding to their own testimony that they had personally seen the risen Jesus. Contemporary martyrs die for what they believe to be true. The disciples of Jesus died for what they knew to be either true or false (p. 59).

Habermas says that what we read is consistent with apostles seeing a risen Jesus, but of course that’s begging the question. Habermas assumes what he’s trying to prove. The honest interpretation is that we just have a story about Jesus and his apostles, and the stories of martyrdom developed decades later. Neither is history.

Naysayers

Here’s a common error that Habermas repeats several times.

If the news spread that several of the original disciples had recanted, we would expect that Christianity would have been dealt a severe blow (p. 60).

This is the Naysayer Hypothesis—the idea that a false story would have crumbled after the corrections of naysayers, those people who knew the truth. Here again, Habermas starts with the assumption that the Jesus story is correct and then wonders what would happen in various situations. This is backwards. Instead, start with the documents that we know exist and see where the evidence points.

I list 10 reasons why the Naysayer Hypothesis is flawed. To give just one, ask yourself why anyone who knew that Jesus was not divine would spend his life stamping out the brush fires of Christian belief throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

And one final quibble: notice the word “recant” above. The only people I’ve heard who suggest that the disciples deliberately invented the story (and had something to recant) are apologists. I presume that the Paul and the gospel authors honestly believed, just like Christians today.

Since the original disciples were making the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, his resurrection was not the result of myth making. His life story was not embellished over time if the facts can be traced to the original witnesses (p. 60).

And again Habermas starts with an assumption, this time that the gospels come from the disciples’ eyewitness accounts. Habermas acts as if he can’t tell a story from history.

Continue with the remaining two “facts” here.

Our objective is to arrive at
the most plausible explanation of the data.
— Habermas and Licona,
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 83

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 02/19/14.)

Image credit: British American

Mormonism Beats Christianity—Or Does It?

March 31, 2017 By Bob Seidensticker

The Christian world has plenty of people eager to predict the future. Hal Lindsey published several predictions of the End. Harold Camping hilariously predicted the end of the world in 2011 (I wrote about that here, here, and here).

These are just a few in the long line of end-of-the-world predictors, and they all make two mistakes. First, they delude themselves that they can predict the future. Second, they’re too specific! That’s why Nostradamus’s nonsense is still popular but Hal Lindsay’s breathlessly titled books The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon or Planet Earth: The Final Chapter aren’t. Nostradamus is ambiguous, so it can be interpreted (always in hindsight!) to mean something profound. Specific, short-term predictions tend to explode in your face when they don’t happen.

The importance of that lesson will be apparent shortly.

Mormonism beats Christianity

I wrote a post with this thought experiment: imagine the most convincing historical record of a religion. What could it possibly say to convince you to sign up?

Mormonism almost has the perfect historical record of that imaginary situation. It certainly beats conventional Christianity.

Number of documents. The Christian apologist may say that the New Testament story is supported by the writings of Josephus, Tacitus, and other outsiders. But Mormons point to newspaper articles, diaries, letters, and even court records documenting the early fathers of the church, a far broader record than that of the New Testament. Some of these accounts of the events in the early Mormon church were written days or even hours after the events.
Quality of copies. The apologist will talk about the tens of thousands of New Testament manuscript copies and the antiquity of some of the oldest manuscripts, the most voluminous record of any book, but the Mormon record beats this again. The books of Mormonism were written after the modern printing press, and we have many early, identical copies. There is no centuries-long dark period separating originals from our earliest copies and no worry that scribes “improved” manuscripts as they copied them.
Cultural gap. The Jesus story is from a culture long ago and far away, and the gospels document the Christian tradition within Greek culture, already one culture removed from the Aramaic Jewish culture of Jesus. In Mormonism, we can read the accounts of the participants in our own language.
Oral history gap. The apologist will talk about how little time elapsed between the events and the documentation of those events—perhaps 40 to 70 years for the gospels. Not bad, but Mormonism spent basically no time in the limbo of oral tradition. Its holy books were committed to paper immediately.
Provenance. The New Testament books were written by ordinary people, not by God himself or even angels. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was told by an angel about the golden plates, from which the Book of Mormon was written. Yes, Smith’s translation process was fallible, but he wasn’t writing from memory. That his source document was vetted by an angel says a lot about the quality of what he started with.
Eyewitness accounts. The four gospels don’t claim to be eyewitness accounts. We don’t even know who wrote them. Within Mormonism, 12 men saw the golden plates. Testimony from those men is at the beginning of the Book of Mormon.
Who would die for a lie? Christian apologists ask this question and then point to the martyred disciples of Jesus. In the first place, this argument crumbles on investigation. In the second, Mormonism matches it. The Mormon inner circle put themselves through much hardship, including death in at least the case of founder Joseph Smith. If Christian apologists claim that this is strong evidence for Christianity, must it be for Mormonism as well?
Naysayer hypothesis. Christian apologists say that if the Jesus story were false, naysayers of the time would’ve snuffed it out. A false story wouldn’t have survived to be popular today. In the first place, this argument is ridiculous. In the second, Mormonism matches it. If the story were false, those in the inner circle would’ve shut it down, right?

But there’s another side to the story: part 2.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed;
if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
— Mark Twain

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/14/13.)

Image credit: Michael Whiffen, flickr, CC