More from Questioning the Bible

In Questioning the Bible, author Jonathan Morrow examines skeptical challenges to the Bible's authority, especially the New Testament. In this blog I want to cover what he has to say about how the early message of Jesus's resurrection and other core doctrines were transmitted among early Christians.

Keep in mind, he says, that the ancient world was predominately an oral culture. Today we wonder how it's possible for such a culture to transmit reliable history. We often think of the telephone game, but it was certainly not like that at all. Disciples of a rabbi were required to memorize his sayings, and people are capable of memorizing a tremendous amount of material. Some Muslims have memorized the entire Koran, for example.

There were four S's used by early followers in order to maintain true history and correct core doctrines until they were written down. The first is Scriptures – Christians sought continuity in what God had done in the Old Testament and what God was doing now through Jesus the Messiah. So they read the Hebrew Scriptures of public worship services. Therefore, the foundational documents of the earliest Christians were the Hebrew Scriptures acting as a theological baseline. Second were summaries, or what we would call creeds. Early Christians memorized and recited doctrinal summaries alongside the Hebrew Scriptures when they gathered for worship. This made it easy for people to remember key elements of doctrine and history. Third was singing. When Christians gathered, they sang their theology and hymns to show their devotion to Jesus (see Philippians 2:5-11 as an example). Finally, the last "S" has to do with sacraments. Baptism and the Lord's supper were practiced on a regular basis, and they both pictured the basic elements of the salvation story as core theology. These creeds, hymns, and practices predated the writing of the New Testament documents.

How early was Jesus being worshiped as God? We see from Paul's letter to the Philippians that Jesus was being worshiped as God within 20 years of his crucifixion. We also see that belief within early Christian hymns. It is also found in early Christian summaries – note 1 Corinthians 8:4-6. This is a powerful passage because Paul has taken the famous Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 and included Jesus as part of the divine nature. Outside the Bible, Morrow notes that a Roman governor, Pliny the younger, wrote: "They [the Christians] were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang an alternate versus a hymn to Christ, as to a God." Then there's the 1 Corinthians 15 creed, which I mentioned in the last blog. This statement may go back to within one year of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

What's the point of all of this? Many skeptics say that exalted beliefs, proclamations, and even worship of Jesus emerge gradually over time. But the truth is far different. Devotion to Jesus as divine erupted suddenly and quickly among his first-century followers.

More to follow.

More from Questioning the Bible--Jesus a copycat myth? How early was his story told?

I am continuing to go through an important book called Questioning the Bible by Jonathan Morrow. Last time I was covering his information about what we can really know about Jesus. I want to continue that this time with a new challenge raised against the Bible.

Years ago some critics charge that Christianity was a copycat religion that had borrowed from earlier myths. The same challenge is back, thanks to movies like Zeitgeist. But the author believes there are three reasons why the copycat myth is false.

First, look at what Christianity came out of in the first century. The Jewish people were committed to one and only one God. Their belief was monotheistic and exclusive. It's doubtful they would want to use stories of other gods.

Secondly, the Jesus story is not like the other myths. When you look at the specifics of each myth, you see that there are huge differences. A dying and rising Jesus is not a meaningful parallel with crops coming to life in the spring only to die off again in the winter. There is no sound evidence of overlapping details between other myths and the story of Jesus.

Probably the most important reason to believe the copycat myth is false has to do with dating. All of the myths date after the birth of Christianity, so if anything, mystery religions were copying from and being influenced by Christianity in the first two centuries because they had to compete to gain new converts and survive.

Morrow takes on another challenge having to do with whether Christianity was invented. He asks if the New Testament contains what the earliest Christians really believe about Jesus from the beginning. For example, how early was the proclamation of the message that Jesus was raised from the dead? The four Gospels were written in the late first century, which is still considered very close to the original events when compared to other ancient manuscripts dealing with other historical figures. But we can get even closer to the time of Jesus by looking at Paul's letters. One of the main text concerning the proclamation of the resurrection message occurs in 1 Corinthians 15, which was written around A.D. 55. Many critics believe the message Paul has included there is part of a creed written within one year of the time of Jesus. Let me repeat that--within one year of Jesus, people were saying he died and was resurrected; he was deity. So, it appears there never was a time when the message of Jesus's resurrection was not an integral part of the earliest apostolic proclamation.

That's powerful information. Let's stop here to digest that.

Questioning the Bible--continued

Yes, I'm continuing a series of blogs dealing with Questioning the Bible. The author, Jonathan Morrow, moves on to a new topic which is interesting – what can we really know about Jesus? Did he exist? Can we be confident about what he said and did?

One key element the author looks at is something called "criteria of authenticity." This is used by New Testament scholars who are looking at the stories about Jesus. One such criterion is multiple attestation, which says a saying, teaching, or event concerning Jesus is probably authentic if it shows up in multiple sources.

So what is the finding when scholars put this and other criteria to work regarding the New Testament stories of Jesus? An international group of Jesus scholars met from 1998 to 2008 see what they could agree on as being authentic about Jesus. Their conclusion was that there were at least 12 significant events in his life that could be positively established by these criteria.

Here they are – Jesus affirmed the ministry of John the Baptist, Jesus collected 12 key followers, Jesus publicly associated with sinners, Jesus claim to be Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus cast out demons, Jesus accepted Peter's declaration that he was the Christ (Messiah), Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, Jesus claim to have authority over the sacred space of the Temple, Jesus connected the Passover meal with his disciples to his claim to be the deliverer of God's people, Jesus claimed unique divine authority when examined by Jewish leadership, the Roman ruler Pontius Pilate publicly executed Jesus for sedition, following Jesus's crucifixion and burial his tomb was found empty by a group of women followers.

So even skeptical scholars can agree that a large part of the New Testament Gospels' stories of Jesus are authentic. But what if we did not have the Bible? Morrow notes that these main points about his life are found in secular historians as well (Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus, just to name a few). He quotes Ben Witherington: "There is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for the historical existence of Julius Caesar… The only persons who doubt the existence of Jesus of Nazareth are those who either hate Christianity and so want it to disappear, or those who have not bothered to do the proper historical homework."

Okay, that's enough to digest for now.

More on Challenges to the Bible

Here we go again. I'm continuing a long series of blogs dealing with Jonathan Morrow's book Questioning the Bible. Let's look at more about David Hume (see the last blog).

Morrow spends time to refute Hume's arguments since so many skeptics today use these arguments to ridicule the idea of miracles. One argument that Hume brought up was this – no historical miracle has been sufficiently attested by honest and reliable men than. But Morrow says that the New Testament writers were both interested in and capable of recording accurate history. In addition, both Christian and non-Christian sources agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a miracle worker.

I want to continue Morrow's chapter arguing that the Bible is actually not unscientific. He was challenging David Hume's arguments against the possibility of miracles.

Hume presented four arguments against miracles. I covered the first one in the last blog. For the second point, Hume believed that people crave miraculous stories and are gullible to believe absurd stories. Morrow agrees there are certainly gullible people, but is that true of everyone? Decidedly not. Hume also stated that miracles only occur among ignorant and uncivilized people. That smacks of racism. The miracles of Jesus did not occur among ignorant uncivilized people, but among the Jews, who were highly educated and sophisticated. Finally, Hume argues that miracles occur in all religions and thus cancel each other out since they teach mutually contradictory doctrines. But Morrow says none of these other miracles is as powerfully attested as the miracles of Jesus Christ. He focuses on the resurrection, claiming that historical evidence for it is quite strong. A more rational approach, he believes, would be to examine the strongest claims one by one rather than just dismissing all of them.

In the rest of the chapter Morrow looks at scientific reasons that point to the existence of God. First is the cosmological argument (why is there something rather than nothing?). Science tells us now that the universe had a beginning and since something can't begin to exist without a cause, it seems reasonable to believe that a cause outside of the universe is responsible for its existence. The Big Bang, in other words, is not a threat to belief in God but a supporting point. Secondly, the author points out a design argument from physics. He notes that the laws of physics that govern the universe are fine-tuned for the emergence and sustenance of human life. It is as if the universe was crafted with us in mind. If there were the slightest changes in any number of physical constants, our universe would be unable to have human life. Finally, Morrow discusses the design argument from DNA. Scientists in the last half-century have learned that cellular organization and the development of living creatures are orchestrated by genetic information. Natural forces such as chance and necessity have failed to explain the origin of biological information.

So Morrow comes to the conclusion that the Bible is not unscientific since arguments against the existence of miracles fail and there is so much scientific evidence suggesting the existence of a creator.

The Bible and Hume

I am going slowly through an important book called Questioning the Bible by Jonathan Morrow. In the last blog I've finished his first chapter taking on the challenge that the Bible is anti-intellectual. I'd like to jump around a bit and go to his eighth chapter because I think it ties in very well with the previous one. This one is titled "Is the Bible Unscientific?" I see this as an extension of the previous chapter dealing with the Bible and rationality.

The author starts by noting that for many people the Bible seems unscientific since it deals with miracles in particular. After all, Christianity and Judaism are supernatural religions. Their worldview clashes with a prominent Scottish philosopher David Hume, who thought such miracle claims were rubbish.

Hume claimed that belief ought to be justified by probability and that probability is based upon the uniformity or consistency of nature. Nature  behaves in a certain way over and over again. Therefore, it's likely that it will always behave that way. So, according to Hume, exceptions to nature's laws are so infinitely improbable they can be considered impossible. He says a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and since our experiences have established these laws, the proof against a miracle is complete. 

Here's how his argument looks in a short form:

1. Natural law describes regular occurrences.

2. Miracles are rare occurrences.

3. The evidence for the regular is always greater than for the rare.

4. We should always base our belief on the greater evidence.

5. Therefore, we shouldn't believe in miracles.

But there seems to be an obvious problem with this line of reasoning. It is circular. C. S. Lewis takes this on:

            Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely" uniform experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

Hume's big problem is number 3 in the above statements. There are all sorts of rare occurrences that we believe in--the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the entire history of the world, each of our births, a hole in one in golf, etc. 

The key is not how regular or rare something is--the key is the evidence for the event.