What are you left with?

I just listened to Bart Ehrman's recent appearance on the Unbelievable radio show, with Justin Brierley. Unlike most Unbelievable shows, this was not a debate between two people with opposite opinions, but was rather a Q&A session with Bart, on the subject of his recent book "Did Jesus Exist?"

For those of you who don't know, the book defends the existence of a 'historical' Jesus and is a response to the 'mythicist' position that is increasingly popular on the internet, that the biblical Jesus is a mythical character and is not based on the life of a real person. Authors like Robert M. Price, Acharya S. and, particularly, Richard Carrier have got particularly worked up by some of the things Ehrman said in his books about them and their beliefs, and the debate has got angry and ugly at times. But Unbelievable broke its usual format and didn't have a debate with any of them, perhaps because Bart wasn't prepared to debate on this issue.

The show contained a lot of discussion around the subject of the existence of Jesus, without actually saying anything about the life, character, actions or sayings of the Jesus who apparently did exist. I felt a bit disappointed in this.

Ehrman stated quite categorically that he believes in a historical Jesus, but that there was no resurrection. So what Jesus does he believe in? Not Jesus Christ - Christ being another word for Anointed or Messiah - but merely Jesus, some guy from Nazareth.

I've discussed this before, but come up with no good answer. What happens when you remove the central claim of the Gospel accounts, that Jesus was resurrected and hence validated as Son of God? What are you left with? Miracle stories? Well, I guess if he was just a man you have to remove them from history too. So you end up writing off half the content of the gospels as non-historical, but the important point to note here is that the reasons for doing this have nothing whatsoever to do with a study of the gospel accounts themselves. Nothing in the gospels suggests that one verse is historical and another is non-historical. The distinction is largely arbitrary based on the (non-supernatural) world view of the interpreter. Everything supernatural is written off, everything else might be historical. Is this a good method? Doesn't sound like it to me.

Then you start applying various criteria to the text: the criterion of embarrassment, the criterion of dissimilarity, the criterion of multiple attestation, etc. but I don't think these are actually very good grounds for testing anything. For a start, the criteria pre-suppose that some material is authentic to Jesus and some is inauthentic. But if all of it is inauthentic we will still end up selecting some of it as more likely than other bits, so there is a selection bias. Then again, the opposite works too, if all of it is authentic, the criteria will still lead us to write off some of it. Not very good criteria.

What it all boils down to is this. Whichever set of rules or criteria you use to investigate the text will have an influence over what you decide to be authentic. Someone who prefers one set of criteria will get a different picture of Jesus than someone who prefers a different set of criteria.

So what are you left with?

A man who might or might not have been called Jesus, who might have been born in Nazareth or might have been born in Bethlehem, who might or might not have been baptised by John (probably was), who said some things (though we can't be sure what) and annoyed the Romans such that they killed him (although we can't be sure why).

That's not much to defend in a book is it?

Why trust the Bible?

There is a book by Amy Orr-Ewing with the above title, which I had on my wishlist for a while but have never got around to reading. This is not a review of that book. But it is a serious attempt to answer the same question.

Ms Orr-Ewing addresses some of the issues raised by bible skeptics and sets out to show that the bible has not been distorted through many generations of manuscripts, is historically reliable, is demonstrably more reliable than the holy books of other religions, and furthermore she defends the bible's stance on sex and gives context for the overt violence and explicit sexism in there.

I've read defences of all that before. I'm sure Ms Orr-Ewing does a good job of presenting the same old arguments in a modern and readable manner. But as I say, I haven't read the book...

So. Why trust the Bible?

I suppose we really need to unpack the "trust the bible" part of that before we can get to the "why".

Here is what Scripture Union says about the bible in its statement of faith:

"We believe that the Old and New Testament Scriptures are God-breathed, since their writers spoke from God as they were moved by the Holy Spirit; hence are fully trustworthy in all that they affirm; and are our highest authority for faith and life."

UCCF has a slightly different emphasis:

"The Bible, as originally given, is the inspired and infallible Word of God. It is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behaviour."

The church I currently attend has this:

"We believe that the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors of Holy Scripture so that the Bible is without error in the original manuscripts. We receive the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as our final, absolute authority, the only infallible rule of faith and practice. "

These statements affirm that the content of the bible is what was imparted from God to men and is therefore trustworthy, without error, infallible and has supreme authority. These statements then all include some wooly wording which seems to be a 'get out of jail free' card - "as originally given" or "in the original manuscripts" - the only point to these clauses is to imply that the bible we now have might (just might) contain a little error or two. I happen to like the SU version that doesn't use that cop-out, but does restrict the remit of the bible to merely "all that they affirm" and limits the scope to only "faith and life", not science or history or anything like that.

This avoids the problems of the historical accuracy of the bible. Basically while much of it might be historically accurate, there are a few things we can point to in there that we know are historical errors. The classic example of this is when the census in Luke took place - was it when Quirinius was governor of Syria or was it during the reign of Augustus? It can't have been both as the two did not overlap.

That's not to say that the bible does not contain history, its just that some of the history it contains is wrong. So can you trust the bible for historical details? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

The problem with this is, of course, that it is clear that if there was an impartation of the bible from God to man, then this was not an infallible process, and errors definitely have got in. The bible is not infallible, at least not in the details.

OK, so maybe the bible isn't infallible, but maybe it is trustworthy as it was written by trustworthy men and women (there is a case to be made that Hebrews might have been written by a woman, but I'm not going into that here)? So who were these people? Well, many of them are unnamed, so we don't really know how trustworthy (or otherwise) they were. But some are named. Peter, Paul, James and Jude are all self-identified in their epistles. Well, that could be the case in some instances, but Peter is interesting. Textual study of 1st and 2nd Peter has shown conclusively that these letters could not have been written by the same person. Maybe one of them was written by Peter, but the other certainly was not. Yet both claim to be by Peter. The only reasonable conclusion to make of this is that (at least) one of them is a fake. And thus, there are fake books in the bible, bearing false witness to who it was who wrote them. Textual study also suggests that the author of the 'pastoral' epistles was not the same guy as wrote the likes of Corinthians or Romans, so some of the letters attributed to Paul, and bearing his name are fakes.

So far, we have the bible containing demonstrable errors and demonstrable lies.

Why trust this book? It seems we can't trust the details or its claims about who wrote some bits of it.

But good advice and spiritual truth can be conveyed by anonymous authors, can't they? Can we trust what the bible says about God and how God wants us to live? Surely the 'red letters' (sayings directly claimed to be the words of Jesus or the words of God in the Old Testament) can be considered trustworthy?

Well, leaving aside the observation (that I made in a recent post) that Matthew and Luke, in copying Mark's gospel actually changed some of the words attributed to Jesus, and leaving aside the observation that the way Jesus speaks in the fourth gospel is completely unlike the way he speaks in the other three, we see that even the words directly attributed to God himself in the Old Testament are not trustworthy. Look at Ezekiel 26v7-14:

7 For thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I will bring upon Tyre from the north Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses, chariots, cavalry and a great army. 8 He will slay your daughters on the mainland with the sword; and he will make siege walls against you, cast up a ramp against you and raise up a large shield against you. 9 The blow of his battering rams he will direct against your walls, and with his axes he will break down your towers. 10 Because of the multitude of his horses, the dust raised by them will cover you; your walls will shake at the noise of cavalry and wagons and chariots when he enters your gates as men enter a city that is breached. 11 With the hoofs of his horses he will trample all your streets. He will slay your people with the sword; and your strong pillars will come down to the ground. 12 Also they will make a spoil of your riches and a prey of your merchandise, break down your walls and destroy your pleasant houses, and throw your stones and your timbers and your debris into the water. 13 So I will silence the sound of your songs, and the sound of your harps will be heard no more. 14 I will make you a bare rock; you will be a place for the spreading of nets. You will be built no more, for I the Lord have spoken,” declares the Lord God. 

This is a very detailed and precise prediction of the destruction of Tyre. The thing is, it never happened. Yes, Neb and his army came from the North, yes, they besieged the city. No, they didn't breach the city, no, they didn't trample it, no, it was not destroyed. The prophesied event did not happen. Its not as if the prophecy wasn't right in the details, it wasn't right at all. It was wrong. It says "I the Lord have spoken..." yet clearly either he hadn't spoken, or the prophet completely misunderstood what God had said. Either way, the bible contains failed prophecy and misrepresents the very words of God.

So, is the bible trustworthy?

Doesn't really look like it does it?

Yet millions of people read it on a regular basis and take guidance from it. They claim God speaks to them through it. They believe it to be trustworthy and many will say that their experience shows it to be trustworthy. Bestselling books call these people 'deluded'. Are they?

If there really is a God, would he speak through a book that contains lies, misinformation and false claims about the things he allegedly said? Well, he might. But he could just as easily speak through other flawed and misleading writings, like the holy books of other religions or even the horoscopes in the morning papers.

None of what I say above leads us to the conclusion that God, assuming there is a God, can't speak to us, assuming he wants to speak to us, through the bible. Its just that the bible, on the basis of the above, doesn't seem to be a special way to find his words. It is not special revelation. If God wants to speak to you, rest assured he will, irrespective of what you read. But I don't think I can trust the bible as the exclusive way to hear from God anymore.

Conversion, deconversion and the will to believe

I just listened to a show on Unbelievable with a discussion between Leah Libresco, a former outspoken atheist who recently converted to Catholicism (you can read about that on her blog), and Hemant Mehta, the 'friendly atheist' who once 'sold his soul on eBay' (you can read about that on his blog and book). The conversation was mostly about Leah's conversion and the reasons for it. She was quite unable to give a compelling case to him about why she converted.

Listening to the conversation reminded me of a few thoughts I'd been meaning to work up into a blog post for some time, so here goes.

The main thing that struck me during the show was how the 'friendly atheist' simply could not understand how an intelligent atheist could change her worldview and become a believer in a specific religion. He basically said he could understand it if she had become a deist, but couldn't understand how she could possibly have decided that Catholicism was the way to go.

But why is this surprising? People change their worldviews all the time (that is, I mean, all the time there will be someone changing their world view, not that any individual is constantly changing their views). Christians become atheists, muslims become Christians, hindus become muslims, atheists become Christians, secularists become muslims, agnostics become believers, believers become agnostics, and so on, and so on. Worldview conversions happen all the time and, as far as I can tell, the people involved go from being a real believer in worldview A, to a real believer in worldview B, its not as if they were pretending in the first instance. People who genuinely believe that there is no God can and do come to believe that there is a God. People who genuinely believe that there is a God and they are in a 'personal relationship' with him can and do lose that faith and come to believe that there is no God. It happens. Whatever our worldview, we should not be surprised to find that people who once agreed with us can change their minds and end up disagreeing with us, or vice versa.

Whatever your worldview, be it Christian, atheist, or whatever, the evidence is that some people who share your views will end up rejecting them. It happens. And it doesn't matter which worldview someone starts out from, some people will always reject their former worldview in favour of a different one.

What I take away from this is the conclusion that no worldview is 100% compelling. There are good arguments in favour of most worldviews, there are good arguments against most worldviews. There is no set of evidence for any worldview which is guaranteed to convince any believer in a different worldview to change tracks. None. 

A Christian cannot convince an atheist to convert purely on the basis of evidence or reason. 

An atheist cannot convince a Christian to deconvert purely on the basis of evidence or reason.

One thing is missing. The will to believe.

If you have the will to believe in a certain worldview, you will find the evidence in favour of it more compelling than the evidence against it. But you can't be reasoned into a change in the will to believe. The will to believe, I think, has to come from within and is probably much more to do with relationships and emotions than it ever has to do with reasoning, evidence or reality.

Chances are, if you mix with a group of people with a different worldview from your own, and you find out that they are nice, intelligent and decent people, you will be far more likely to develop the will to believe in their worldview. Relationship and emotion will slowly shift the balance of will, and you might end up agreeing with things that you once found disagreeable or find some arguments compelling which you once found unbelievable.

I know this has happened in my life. Reading between the lines in what Leah Libresco said in the radio show I can see it in her life too. She mixed with catholics, had a catholic boyfriend, found them to be nice and intelligent people, and slowly came around to their way of thinking.

There are some statistics I heard once ^{[citation needed]} which show that most people who change worldview beliefs change them at times of stress or change of circumstances in their lives. Death of a family member, birth of a child, relocation to a new town or country, leaving home for the first time, etc. These are the times when people change worldviews. This is why missional organisations tend to target students - generally away from home, in a new place, under stressful circumstances. Students are far more likely to change their beliefs than people who have been in the same location and job for many years. Looking back over my life I can see this in action - I became a Christian in my first term at university, my first time living away from home. And I began to question the assumptions of my Christian faith following the death of my father. So my experience mirrors these statistics. In other words, emotional change led me to change the emphasis in my will to believe.

What about the 'conversion experience'? I had one of these back in 1988 when I became a Christian. Was that real? If I'm considering letting go of Christianity, how can I deny the reality of the experience?

I can't. It was a real experience. But maybe my interpretation of that experience was all wrong. For several years (yes, years) before I became a Christian there had been tension in my will to believe. Or rather, there were two competing wills to believe in my life, basically one pulling me in a Christian direction, and one pulling me in the other (OK, I don't believe there are only two ways to live, but it seemed like it at the time). When I (finally) decided to become a Christian, the tension was resolved and there was release.

Ask a blues musician about tension and release. The release only works if it follows the tension. The emotional release in conversion only manifests because it follows an emotional tension. The experience is real, but it stems from emotional release, not necessarily the presence of God.

I'm aware that in my life at the moment I have tension in my will to believe once more. I genuinely do want there to be a God and for the major claims of Christianity to be true - I have the will to believe in that. But I also have a strong will to believe the truth and am finding out that Christianity looks less and less true the harder you scrutinise it. Once again, I have two competing wills to believe, and I am sure that whenever I abandon one and wholeheartedly embrace the other, there will be release. It wouldn't surprise me if I have a reconversion experience or a deconversion experience, depending on which way I go.

In closing it looks to me that, most of the time, those of us who change our worldviews do so for emotional changes in our wills to believe. Despite what we think, we don't do it out of rational choice. I once could see really compelling reasons to be a Christian, I now see really compelling reasons not to be one. The evidence hasn't changed, but my will to believe has shifted. The thing is, if it really does boil down to this, then actually that seems pretty good evidence that there is no God behind belief. If the worldview we pick is dependent on our circumstances and external influences, and changes in those can result in changes in our core beliefs, even though the evidence doesn't change, then this suggests to me that the evidence for any particular God is simply not compelling, and there is no good reason to believe any of them, except for the emotional need to connect to like-minded people.

So be careful who you mix with, you will quite probably end up believing the same as them.

"God is good!"

I heard two stories recounted across the weekend which ended with the concluding comment "God is good!", both stories involved something going bad before the people involved got out of the situation and found themselves back in a good situation, or at least one which was better than the bad one.

In both cases, I couldn't work out if the statement was the conclusion to the story (i.e. 'these bad things happened, but God overcame the circumstances, therefore God is good') or if it was a statement of faith (i.e. 'despite these bad things happening, I will continue to believe that God is good').

In both cases, the statement was made in a way which sounded like a conclusion, but I've heard much worse stories before coming to the same 'conclusion' when it really must have been a statement of faith, as the details of the story, if considered objectively, simply couldn't lead to the conclusion that God was acting in a good way in the unfolding events.

Therein lies the problem for me at the moment. The bible says "God is good" (I don't think it adds the 'all the time' that seems to feature on so many bumper stickers or t-shirts - do a Google image search and you'll see what I mean) and I think most Christians believe it, whether or not their experience actually supports the statement. What sequence of events would lead the believer to come to the opposite conclusion? None. A family dies in a car crash, one of them survives - God is good. A mud slide wipes out a village but the school is saved - God is good. What has to happen before someone concludes that maybe God isn't good? Or maybe is simply not acting there at all?

I was thinking of discussing some aspects of the book of Job here, but on thinking about it I realised that 'God is good' is not actually one of the points made in Job. The main point of Job is: God can do whatever he wants to do, who are you to question it...? But it doesn't demonstrate the goodness of God.

I have no doubt that for some people, their experience of life suggests to them that there is a benevolent deity working things out for good for them. However, I also look at the world and see many lives that look as if the opposite is true. In the middle are those for whom things work out some of the time, and not at other times. Indeed, if you look at the big picture it is hard to see a good god at work. Its easy for relatively comfortable and well off people in the West to say 'God is good', but I have to say I'm seriously beginning to doubt it. Not to doubt the goodness of God, but rather to doubt the Godness of good.

Both sides now...

"Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere, I've looked at cloud that way.
But now they only block the sun, they rain and snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds at all."

(Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now)

I've been meaning to write this post for a while. (Indeed, I've been writing and rewriting bits of it, on and off, for a while too, sorry if it seems disjointed.) More or less to explain what's going on in my head for the benefit of regular readers who may think I've lost the plot recently. In some sense this is my 'apologia'. It'll be a long read.

For the past 20 years or so I've been a self-confessed evangelical Christian. Perhaps not always very good at the actual evangelism thing, sometimes not even good at the Christian thing, but there you go. Nobody's perfect.

When you're inside 'evangelical Christianity', particularly the Scripture Union (SU) / Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) variety of it that I was part of in my formative years, one of the things that is drummed into you is that you need to read 'sound' books and avoid reading 'unsound' ones. Perhaps the sound/unsound terminology has dropped from culture over the past couple of decades, but that was the gist of it in the early 90s. Reading 'sound' material (in addition to your bible, of course) will build you up in your faith, reading 'unsound' material will lead you to "backslide". There is no worse word for an evangelical than "backslider". Eeeek.

So I suppose this is where things started to go wrong for me (from an evangelical perspective) - I read some books that were not sound.

It started for me in 1994 when I read a book called 'The Unauthorized Version' which I found in the religion section of my local library. I was unemployed at the time and had plenty of time to read this big book. This book looks at the old testament (for the most part) and asks, quite simply, are the stories in it true? Before reading this book I had never seriously considered that they were anything but true. And yet here was what appeared to be good, solid scholarship demonstrating that some of the stories in there are myths and showing how some of the stories are at odds with what we know from archeology and secular histories of the same times and places.

I don't intend to go into all the 'unsound' books I've read over the past couple of decades, but suffice it to say I've read quite a few. Of course, I should also state that I've read a good many 'sound' books in the same time too. The thing is, in recent years I've begun to have serious issues with the unstated presuppositions of the sound books. Its only by reading the unsound ones that you realise the failings of the sound ones. In other words, if I'd been a good evangelical and had never read the unsound stuff, I'd likely have remained a good evangelical to this day.

But, of course, once Pandora's box is opened, you can't shut it again, and evangelical Christianity (as an ensemble, not necessarily individuals in it) knows this, and tries to prevent you from reading unsound or unorthodox things.

While much of the unsound material out there may be flawed, biased, fraudulent, or downright wrong, not all of it is. Some of it contains truth. A great man once said that 'the truth will set you free' - but set you free from what? And what great man was it that said it?

I've looked at evangelical Christianity from both sides now
from sound and unsound and still somehow
its evangelical Christianity's illusions I recall
I really don't know evangelical Christianity at all...

That's the problem. As another great man (Socrates, I think) said: "The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know" - when you explore the issues around Christian belief, you find out that there is no good reason for believing many of the things that once you believed strongly in. By reading a lot of stuff and learning a lot, my faith is weakened and my beliefs became less certain.

Fundamentally, evangelical Christianity knows that this will happen if you read some of the non-approved materials, which is why it tries to stop you reading them. That's OK, as far as I am concerned, if its preventing you from reading deceptive material, but it also tries to prevent you from reading the truth as well, and I have big issues with that. I would rather know the truth and be cast out, than conform by believing a lie.

So what truth and what lies am I talking about? Well, how about this one for starters:

The bible is not inerrant. Indeed, it is quite clearly errant, biased in parts, and possibly entirely made up in other parts.

I discovered this truth many years ago, but never really considered the full implications of it until recently. As I've said in other posts on this blog, the problem boils down to how to distinguish the 'inspired' bits of the bible from the non-inspired bits. There is no reliable method, so all Christian denominations basically end up picking their favourite bits and disregarding (or explaining away) the bits they don't like.

The above is a big claim, so I'd better offer some evidence in support of this. The evidence I present is the four canonical gospels themselves. They disagree. They disagree in major ways. Fundamentally, they disagree on who Jesus even is. OK, they may all use the terminology 'Son of God', but they actually disagree on what it means. If you read the gospels from within an evangelical perspective, you fundamentally assume that they must agree, so you will find ways of explaining the differences away. If you read them from an outsider's perspective, you will see that they don't agree. Indeed, the reason there is more than one of them is that the writers of the later gospels disagreed with what the writers of the earlier ones wrote and set out to correct them.

Look at the opening verses of Luke (1v1-4):

"Many people have tried to tell the story of what God has done among us. They wrote what we had been told by the ones who were there in the beginning and saw what happened. So I made a careful study of everything and then decided to write and tell you exactly what took place. Honorable Theophilus, I have done this to let you know the truth about what you have heard."

Note the tone of this: Many people tried to tell the story. I did a careful study. I tell you exactly what happened. So you know the truth. The clear implication of this is that Luke (or whoever wrote this anonymous gospel) had access to at least two older gospels (certainly Mark, possibly Matthew as well, maybe others we don't know), but thought they were imperfect, careless, inexact and containing untruths. He also implies that the original (i.e. pre-Lukan) gospels were not eyewitness accounts. We know he used Mark, sometimes using chunks of text without changing them, sometimes modifying them slightly, sometimes completely rewriting them, sometimes even changing the entire sense of the passage, sometimes omitting bits and frequently adding bits that Mark didn't have.

If Luke wrote an inspired and inerrant gospel, then Mark did not. Or vice versa.

Its easier to believe - and I would now say that the evidence suggests - that both these gospels are merely human attempts to tell a story. But both tell stories with personal biases and how can we break through these to see how much truth about Jesus lies behind them?

I've looked at the bible from both sides now,

from believing and critical points of view and still somehow

its the bible's illusions I recall

I really don't know the bible at all...

Faced with just the evidence of the four canonical gospels themselves, we find that it is actually very hard to conclude anything about Jesus whatsoever. Most scholars would point to Jesus's baptism with John and his crucifixion as two fixed points in his life which are beyond doubt, but when you put the four gospel stories up against each other, even these two 'facts' come into question.

Mark has Jesus coming to John to be baptised as a sign of his repentance, and the story conveys that the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus (for the first time?), marking the start of his ministry. It appears that Mark used the story of Jesus baptism as a way to start the story off, to explain how the Spirit of God came to be in Jesus.

Matthew and Luke disagree with Mark here, they take Jesus filling with the Spirit back to his birth or conception, but retain the baptism story (perhaps because it was a well known story) and modify it to make it clear that Jesus didn't need to repent of anything.

John changes it so much that Jesus actually doesn't get baptised by John at all. (Read it again if you doubt that).

So this is a story which changes in the telling, the main point of the story in Mark is lost in the later tellings, and the main event in the story vanishes in the fourth retelling. Given that, it looks like the three later tellings are somewhat dependent on the first, which was included for dramatic effect. Can we be sure that this contains history?

The other point of consensus is that Jesus was crucified ("under Pontius Pilate"), but look again at the four tellings of this story. All the details in the first telling (Mark) come from the psalms (mostly number 22), this doesn't appear to be an eyewitness account, it appears to be someone attempting to tell the story of a death about which he knows next to nothing. Matthew and Luke pretty much copy Mark, while adding in extra details which don't agree with each other and also don't sound like the authors have access to any eyewitness testimony. The fourth gospel goes as far as to invent a character in the story whose very presence is completely denied by the other three gospels.

So did the crucifixion happen? Well, it might have done, but the four accounts we have are very shaky ground upon which to try and base a historical reconstruction.

I've recently read (parts of) a book called "The Christ myth theory and its problems" by Robert M. Price. One of the longest sections in the book shows how virtually every episode in each of the gospels has a parallel in the Old Testament. Price sets out to demonstrate that everything in the gospels could have been constructed entirely on the basis of the OT stories without any need for an actual historical Jesus. I'm not sure I agree entirely with this theory, but it certainly does appear that many of the stories of things that Jesus allegedly did were based on things from the OT. Again, if that's the case, how do we distinguish the 'true' history of the 'real' Jesus from the myths based on the older stories of Elijah, etc.? We have no way of distinguishing the two.

I think I'm now at the point where I have to accept that some, at least, of the stories about Jesus are mythical in origin. I don't necessarily think that they are all mythical and there is no historical kernel there, but I can see no method of separating the truth from the myth. If there was a real historical character, who may or may not have been named Jesus ("saviour"), he is probably forever lost under the many strata of myths which have been deposited upon him.

I've looked at Jesus from both sides now

from man and myth, and still somehow

its Christ's illusions I recall

I really don't know Jesus at all...

It appears (to me, at least) as if the character of Jesus, as presented in the bible, entirely hides the 'real Jesus' of history to the extent that we can never know him. Critical study of the gospels makes it appear unlikely that the real Jesus of history was anything other than a charismatic, but entirely human, teacher and preacher. Or possibly even a revolutionary freedom fighter, but not a God, or the son of a God. But there is another Jesus to consider - the Jesus of faith, the Jesus that contemporary Christians believe to be in a 'personal relationship' with them. From observation, this Jesus is generally an extrapolation from the character presented in the bible, combined with inferences from Christian experience. So the question for me is does this composite 'Jesus of Faith' actually exist? The biggest issue I've faced over the past year or so of trying to reconcile my thoughts on Jesus and God is this:

Even though the bible gives a flawed and man-made picture of God and Jesus, this doesn't mean there is no God at all. If there is a real God behind the man-made facade, what is he like?

You see, while I can be convinced that I have believed flawed and incorrect things about God and Jesus, it is hard to reconcile my past experiences (and the experiences of others) with non-theistic worldviews. Not that I've had a great many 'supernatural' experiences, although people I know and reasonably trust claim to have had greater experiences than mine.

In my experience, there is something transcendent that can be experienced in times of worship. I have had what I once considered to be answered prayers. I have met people who seem to have been healed in inexplicable ways (legs growing longer in a matter of moments, eye cataracts vanishing instantly with prayer, etc.). People from my church are involved in a weekly healing 'on the streets' ministry, and every few weeks they come back with stories of something 'miraculous' having happened. I have no reason to doubt these claims. And yet, I do doubt the mechanism behind the apparent healings.

If Christ is mostly myth and is not God, yet someone seems to answer some prayers, then something 'supernatural' may be going on, but it might not be Christ.

Alternatively, there might be 'naturalistic' explanations for all these things, and we are misinterpreting the signs and inferring the actions of a God where there is none.

What are the necessary characteristics of an entity to make that entity a (or 'the only') God? You see, the way I find myself thinking is this: suppose there is a being who hears prayer and sometimes effects 'miraculous' healings on people, does that mean that this being was also responsible for creating the entire universe? Of course not. Does that mean that this being has a plan and a purpose for your life or mine? Of course not. Does that mean that this being is the source of morality? Of course not. Does that mean that this being will be the judge of the living and the dead? Of course not. Does that mean that this being would be able to do anything about the postmortem existence or eternal destination of any people? Of course not. Our experience of this being, if he even exists, does not and cannot inform us about most of the big claims made about God in the bible or by Christians.

You see, I kind of want to be scientific about this - what can be tested about God? Existence? Perhaps. Characteristics in the present day? Perhaps. Claims about the far past or the distant future? Absolutely not.

So where I find myself is this: I believe there might be a god (let's go for a small 'g' for now) with the ability to hear and answer some prayers and the ability to effect some minor healings. But this god bears almost no connection to the God of the bible. So many myths and undemonstrable claims have been added to the original kernel of this god that it is now virtually impossible to discern the real god from the myths. 'He' might be there, but he might be a lot smaller than most believers think. I have no way of knowing. Sigh.

I've looked at God from both sides now

from omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creator and sustainer of all things and not, but still somehow 

its God illusions I recall

I really don't know God at all...

So the big problem now is where I go from here, and how I should live? Don't worry, I'm not about to go on a wanton immoral activities spree because I don't necessarily believe in the eternal consequences of my moral actions, but what you believe has consequences for how you live. Presently I go to church on a weekly basis and give a significant percentage of my income to the church. Should I change that? Beyond that, I have a great number of family members and friends who are Christians. What should I say to them (only a tiny minority of them read this blog, so most are quite unaware of the way I find myself thinking these days)? What if I'm wrong? What if Matthew 18v6 is true? If I'm in error, I don't want to drag anyone else into the same error. But then again, if I'm not in error, then I don't really want family and friends to waste their time believing in myths and other unjustifiable things.

One of my favourite verses in the bible has always been John 10v10b, which says: "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." I still want to experience life in all its fullness, but is this best achieved by believing the unverifiable and following the mostly mythical, or can this be achieved by turning away from all that and heading out into uncharted territory without a guide?

The great schism...

And so it begins.

On Monday last week, St George's Tron Church in Glasgow formally left the Church of Scotland because of the stance on homosexuality (particularly in the clergy) adopted by the General Assembly of the kirk. This is the first church to leave the CofS over this issue, and I suspect others will join them soon.

This doesn't surprise me. Indeed, what surprises me is that its taken so long. I can distinctly remember having a conversation about this circa 1995 when I was fully expecting things to come to a head over this issue and the breakup of the kirk to begin.

According to Wikipedia, there are at least 62 CofS congregations who are members of the "Fellowship of Confessing Churches" (who have a website, but it seems to be dead at the moment), who are united in their disapproval of the CofS stance on gay clergy. The ministers of many of these churches are also part of the "Crieff Fellowship" (who have almost no web presence, but you can download their sermons here), which is an informal network of 'conservative evangelical' churches in Scotland (mostly, but not exclusively, CofS, I think) which dates back to the golden era of the 1970s when Willie Still was minister of Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen, Jim Philip was minister in Holyrood Abbey Church in Edinburgh and George Philip was minister in Sandyford Henderson Church in Glasgow.

You'll note the surname Philip is prominent here. Willie Philip (sorry, the Rev Dr William Philip; but I've known him since I was a boy, so he's still 'Willie' in my head), who is minister of St George's Tron is the son of Jim and nephew of George and, I suspect, named after Willie Still.

With St George's Tron leaving the CofS, I think it won't be long until Holyrood, Gilcomston and others have jumped ship too. I'll be interested to see if they form their own new denomination of if they stay independent. Accountability is important to these folks, so I think an organisation will form sooner rather than later.

But are they right to jump ship? I have a whole heap of mixed feelings about this.

I've made several comments on my opinion on the whole homosexuality in the bible debate on this blog in the past (here, here, here and probably elsewhere too) and my opinion hasn't really changed much since I wrote the old posts. So I'm broadly in favour of what the CofS is doing, and broadly against the attitudes of the Fellowship of Confessing Churches.

But (and this is a big but) I am also in broad agreement with what St George's Tron Church have just done, and agree with their reasons for doing it. You see, the CofS has crossed a line in the sand. It has said, in essence, we will allow contemporary culture to guide us in reinterpreting the message of the bible. Of course, they don't say that in so many words, but that's effectively what they are doing.

Changing your stance on an issue is fine, if you can justify why you have changed your stance. But the CofS seems to be changing stance on their opinion on the bible without admitting that they have done this. St. George's Tron have decided not to change their stance, and so they have to part with the CofS. The real issue here, for them, is the attitude to the bible, not the attitude to homosexuality. I approve of the attitude of St George's Tron, even if I no longer hold the bible to be as inspired and foundational as they do.

Anyway, I'll be intrigued to see what the fall out of this split is over the coming months and years.

Old earth vs Young earth vs Infallible bible...

I've just listened to a debate between old earth and young earth creationists on the Unbelievable podcast feed. Fascinating stuff. But I think the debate helped reinforce my belief that both sides are wrong.

All four speakers in the debate were well educated, intelligent and erudite people. They all knew an awful lot of science and an awful lot of theology, and all of them could quote and cite loads of appropriate scientific studies and bible verses to support their side in the debate. Their performance in the debate was excellent. I have no doubt that I'd lose a debate against any one of them!

And yet, the thing that clearly shone out of the debate for me was the amount of intellectual acrobatics all four of them had to go through to get their presuppositions to fit with the facts of science and the verses in the bible.

I'll leave their thoughts on science to the side and focus on their attitude to the bible, as that was what fascinated me the most. All of them believe the bible to be the Infallible Word of God, and yet all of them accept that the Infallible Word is subject to flawed human interpretation. In other words, all of them accept that the Infallible Word does not speak clearly on any of the issues on which the debate touched.

This brought me back to a question that has troubled me for some time. How can anyone believe that the bible is infallible when they admit that it doesn't speak clearly?

This set me wondering, if the old earth vs young earth thing is totally open to interpretation, and things like the global (or local?) flood are totally open to interpretation, then what is there in the bible that actually isn't totally open to interpretation? What did Jesus' death on the cross actually achieve? Well, there's at least four incompatible schools of thought on that one. How and when will the world end? Again, several different schools of thought.

If you were to take away all the things that different groups of Christians interpret in incompatible ways, what would you be left with? Not much, I suspect. Would it actually be enough to build a belief system on? Well, given that there appears to be no such belief system built upon it, I suspect not.

All different systems of Christian belief are built on the shaky foundations of interpretations which some other Christians will disagree with. I'm sorry, but that's not good enough for me anymore. I can't find one system which appears more justifiable than the others.

Blind Faith...?

"blind faith and blind obedience are morally wrong. I must at least be a critical follower of the party line, judging for myself on each occasion that the line being handed out as good in itself. Obedience as such is not a morally good thing. Prudent, maybe - but not morally good."

Don Cupitt, in the introduction to "Taking leave of God".

Jesus the Magician?

I've just read a fascinating article online about the depictions of Jesus and the apostles in early Christian carvings on sarcophagai. The most surprising thing, well surprising if you accept the orthodox views on the beliefs of the early Christian church, is that a great number of such carvings depict Jesus and Peter (the 2nd most common character depicted) as using a wand to carry out miracles.

Such a thought is totally alien to Christians today. This clearly demonstrates just how far Christian perceptions of Jesus have shifted over the centuries.

The Criterion of Dissimilarity and the Son of Man

The Criterion of Dissimilarity, which is related to the Criterion of Embarrassment, is a test applied by some critical scholars to judge the authenticity of sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.

It goes something like this: if a particular saying attributed to Jesus is similar to other sayings known to be in circulation at that time in history, then there is no good reason to claim that the particular saying originated with Jesus, it could have been a common Rabbinic saying which someone attributed to Jesus after his time but before the gospels were put into writing. However, if a saying of Jesus is dissimilar to all the other sayings from the time, then this is good evidence that it might have originated from him.

One issue I have with this is that it is common to include the sayings and teachings of the early church as part of the 'sayings of the time' with which Jesus's sayings are compared. In other words it is common to assume that if a saying existed in the life of the early church and it also appears in the mouth of Jesus in the gospel stories, then the criterion of dissimilarity suggests we cannot assert that the saying originated with Jesus.

Eh? So if Jesus said something and his followers were repeating it a few decades later then this criterion immediately casts doubt on it. So any words of Jesus which were put into action by his followers are immediately suspect... Doesn't sound like a very good criterion to me.

The flip side of this is the sayings which the criterion suggests are authentic because they are unique to the gospels and are not mirrored in the life of the early church are more likely to be authentic to Jesus. What? The stuff that Jesus apparently said that the early church ignored is the most authentic stuff? Not convinced there.

The classic instance of this is the  use of "Son of Man" - this phrase appears nowhere in the literature of the early church, nowhere in the epistles, nowhere in things like the Didache, it only appears in the Gospels. Because of this, the criterion of dissimilarity suggests that it is most likely that Jesus used this terminology to speak of himself in the third person. What?

Surely if there was a historical Jesus who taught his followers things, those followers would use the same terminology when they discussed and wrote things later on. They wouldn't ignore the terminology for decades, suddenly use it when they were writing gospels, then suddenly stop using it again. That pattern suggests that those words were unique to the Gospel writers, but didn't originate with the historical Jesus.

So the claim that Jesus was the Son of Man is a claim made about Jesus (some decades later), but is clearly not a claim made by Jesus.