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Atheism vs. Christianity, the Existence of God, and the Biblical Canon
Anybody want a throwback to some old-fashioned culture war? I was thinking about religion recently. I was also reading the State of the Motte thread and somehow wound up in this old thread about atheism.
In it is some interesting commentary on the state of the atheism vs Christianity debate:
I broadly agree with this, but not how you might think. I think that logically, it is probable that God does exist, so I am not an atheist. In particular my favorite argument is the argument from causation. There must be an uncaused cause; this can be identified with God.
However, that's a long way from being a canonical Christian. Consider:
The full lists in Genesis 5 and 11 go on like this, generation by generation. Adding up each father's age at his son's birth gives 1,948 years from Adam to Abram.
Now if you add this up, as a canonical Christian you must believe that from creation of Adam to the birth of Jesus around 4 BC, there were roughly 4000 years. Also, my Genesis is from the Hebrew Torah. The Septuagint gives older ages at fatherhood, so it makes 5500 years. Which is correct?
Unfortunately I don't think any amount of presuppositional logic could get canonical Christians out of this conundrum.
One thing I noticed however is that the source of all Biblical errors-according-to-empirical-science is Hebrew scripture. Almost no errors are in the New Testament outside of the books that go hard on Hebrew Scripture, like Matthew.
If you care about this and having a coherent theology to defend, you may get into New Testament criticism. It's a humanities field with low certainty, so it's possible to hold a lot of positions in it. But one popular idea is that of Markan priority. Mark was an earlier Gospel than Luke and Matthew, which are edits of Mark. You will notice that Luke and Matthew are the most egregious offenders of Hebrew scripture injection. Mark reads very differently. In Mark, Jesus mocks the Sabbath and declares kosher laws void. In Matthew, this is re-written so that he comes to fulfill the law and not abolish it. We are treated to excessive Hebrew genealogies that don't match archeology, quotes from the Torah a lot, and general arguments that he's a Messiah sent by Yahweh because he does all of the things that were prophesied about that Messiah, except, of course, making Judea the king of the world.
There's a lot of fulfillment of those Hebrew prophecies missing in canonical Mark and John (this is important because critics believe these were edited by the Matthew and Luke people later to align them, so they are not even in their original states), but a main one is Jesus's relation to David. In Matthew we are slapped with that genealogy. In Mark we get
In John we get:
Matthew and Luke give mutually exclusive birth narratives that fail historical tests (one claims there was a massacre of 2 year olds, one claims an empire-wide census that isn't recorded anywhere and doesn't fit Herod's dates) that make him born in Bethlehem. But in John and Mark he's just from Nazareth.
So the canon of the bookshelf Bible is extremely hard to defend scientifically, yet the original Gospel seems to be more defensible, as long as you accept that Jesus could do magic.
Another question of coherency is what does Jesus save us from? The canon claims Jesus saves us from ... himself. Yes, in this canon, Jesus is one person of the Trinity, a single being that will torture you if you don't accept his salvation. That's kind of an odd way to behave ... I'm not judging morally since I accept theology is above morality, but it still seems intuitively odd.
This brings me to John 8:44 and its controversy. It says:
I have read that the most natural translation here was,
In this case Jesus is talking to the practicing Jews who do not believe in him. So he is pointing out their father created the devil and is a liar. Which fits the empirical errors in Hebrew scripture noted above.
Alternatively this was declared too supportive of Marcionite and Gnostic heresy so the orthodox reading prevailed:
And this is weakened to mean that the Jews were the children of the devil because, I don't know, they rejected their own Messiah or something, as Matthew and Luke make clear, wherein the Jewish majority oppose Jesus with little motive beyond malice, despite Jesus fulfilling their law exactly as written. What is more likely, Jesus mocked their God and they killed Jesus, or that Jesus proved he was their God and they killed their own God that they worship?
Technically I suppose it doesn't matter how you translate this, the Jews were very devout and are called children of the devil either way. Unless they were having secret black sabbaths, I think this line is pretty clear about what it means for the Hebrew God.
Going back to Salvation, this goes best with the idea that Jesus is saving us from a deity like the Hebrew God, something that created the tarnished world, is wrathful and violent, which kills and writes lies.
Now, is this a crazy reading? Not at all. It's a popular historical reading that lost out but not without a fight. It fits the theology of Marcion and some Gnostic groups, who were declared heretics in the mid-to-late 2nd century by proto-orthodox writers. Before around that point, this idea was more popular. I have a radical, maybe unfounded idea, that this theology even could be the original theology of the Gospels, but this is controversial in the Church and the Academy. In the Church it's obvious why: it's the same Church that called it heresy. In the Academy we have atheists who claim Jesus was an essene or something. I will admit my belief is somewhat loaded on the idea that Jesus actually performed miracles. I lean towards this because I don't have a restricted prior against magic, I think all things are possible for the right being, and I think Jesus was obviously somebody because otherwise we would not have a religion about him, particularly one where he died very quickly, a material failure, with only a handful of followers. Other prophets accumulate riches and a harem.
I will stop here, but I thought this could be a fun discussion to be had, because I think it deals with the main adversary of atheism from a different perspective. Also, if you can convince me that the canon is untarnished, I will convert to Catholicism or a similar branch. I originally got into this because I was born secular and was memed into looking for a Church, but this forces me into a predicament in the world of schism. Which Church? The only proper way is to get into theology if I'm serious about it. And this is what I think so far. My priors haven't converged.
Genealogies are not there to provide a timeline in the way a modern reader might try to fit in. For one, it's not required to list exact father-son dyads, but someone listed as a son of someone may actually be a grandson or great grandson.
For another, Matthew is writing David, David, David in his genealogy and you don't see it because you aren't a first century Jew. In ancient writing, numbers are represented by letters. Think Roman Numerals. The name for King David and the number 14 are represented the same way in the language gMatthew was written in.
There are ways to sync up the nativity narratives but your specific objection is weird. "But in John and Mark he's just from Nazareth." In Matthew Jesus is taken from Bethlehem when he is around the age of 2 and goes to Egypt, and then after a few years goes to Nazareth. Let's say you were born in Georgia but moved to New York City when you were four. Later on, you travel around the US and people say you are from NYC. Are they wrong or inconsistent?
You are using an intentionally gnostic translation of John instead of a more neuteral source. Lattrimore is my go-to secular translation of the New Testament. He made waves with his Odyssey translation and is generally respected and far from a Christian hack. His translation of John 8:31-47 is:
And Lattrimore is not a Christian, he's translating from the Greek according to the most natural translation.
Jesus is not saving us from the Hebrew God but from our own sin and error.
Christian theology starts with this basic truth: we are made in the image and likeness of God and this comes with responsibility, which we have failed at. We have wills and intellects and were supposed to participate in Creation by taking dominion over the material world and instantiating the good over it, not as automatons but as free beings. We chose otherwise. Because of our choices we can never be happy unless there is a way to reconcile our current miserable poor choices with the original good we were made for.
This was impossible for us to accomplish on our own but it was possible for God. Our creator sent His begotten Son on a Rescue Mission for our sake. Jesus accomplished this Rescue Mission by being a Human of infinite worth, as He was also God. This Human offered something that was His to possess - His Divine self - as a sacrifice on the behalf of the human race, of which He also was. His life, death, and resurrection is humanity's sole boast through which we have accumulated infinite merit. Because of this infinite merit our redemption is made possible.
From his Wikipedia:
Now, this does not mean that his translation is wrong or that he cannot be trusted; it is entirely possible that his knowledge of Greek somehow led to his faith, and not the other way around. However, that argument would be stronger if he had been persuaded by John and not Luke, the latter being a Gospel about which I have reservations regarding its fundamental legitimacy as a record of the original teachings of Jesus. To me it seems far too plausible that it is a radically edited version of Mark and/or some earlier document.
You argue from authority as well. I will admit, I cannot read the Greek myself; I really, really wish that I could read Classical Greek. Since AI is coming, maybe I will learn it, but it obviously takes years... I have authorities that go either way on this passage. At any rate, it is not a fundamental problem for gnosticism either way, as I noted in my post. There is also the fact that at least some scholars believe John, like all the documents in the NT canon, was subject to an arbitrary redaction process; the original might shine through in a modern version, but character by character it can be arbitrarily incorrect. IIRC the Greek that we have for every book is post-canon, unfortunately.
Omission says something, and the Catholic logical OR never was convincing to me.
This is not getting past the archaeological and geological issues with the creation of Adam and the Garden of Eden, sorry. You can easily add another 10,000 years and it's still wrong.
People back then seemed to think sin caused disease, like, directly. We now know creation causes disease. That's another mark against your theology in favor of a Marcionite/gnostic idea. You have to admit creation is corrupt, but that humans deserve it because our ancestor (?) sinned and so do we. I personally do not dismiss the idea that it is sinful to be here, so this is not entirely foreign to me.
I can accept this. I think what I advance here expresses it more clearly. Jesus is in fact the way to that reconciliation. Here's where I think we differ:
People are made more or less in the image of the higher God. Valentinus gives us three types, like Plato. Modern science aligns with this the most (although it is taboo to say). Your theology is silent on this; Calvinists keep the canon and say there is an elect, so the idea is not entirely foreign, but it's the clearest in Valentinus and his forebears.
Will and intellect: thelema and nous. I agree those are important, and this is a real point of contact between us. In the Apocryphon of John, Christ is accompanied by exactly these: Nous, Thelema, and Logos. Where we part ways is Genesis. I know you'd say the sin was disobedience, not knowledge itself, but the thing forbidden was still the tree of knowledge, and reaching for it is what brings the Fall. In gnosticism, nous is good. The demiurge, by contrast, is ignorant of what is above him; he boasts that there is no other God beside him. As I read it, he acts mostly from will without real knowledge, which is why the world is poorly made.
Who is "we," and how did he choose otherwise, other than by coming into the world?
Indeed. I think we must follow Jesus's example. I feel that hasn't been going too well. I know you'd say there is real joy in the Christian life now, but in practice the canonical theology puts the weight of happiness in the future and asks for blind faith in the meantime; in this other theology, one can gain a first happiness through coherent knowledge of Christ and then more happiness after death.
So I think that I agree with most of what you say, but I am just seeing it as too... covered up in the canon. It doesn't seem like the Old Testament should be there.
There was no intentional omission here, I misremembered a few details (I was thinking he was a more recent translation but this was from the 70s, for example.) My point that he's not a religious scholar but a linguist still stands, along with he did not start off as a Christian when doing his translation.
What genre do you think the first chapters of Genesis are? They are clearly not biography or history. As the USCCB writes:
I don't deal a lot with Gnostics so I'm not going to argue it with you. It's like diving into a Book of Mormon debate with a Mormon. Or a round Earth with a flat Earther. Someone who has spent 100s of hours on a topic is going to trounce someone who's only given it attention recently, even if the second person is correct. I am still confident in the historical record, Apostolic succession, and the vindication of present day Catholic spirituality and miracle claims.
I mean between the Gospels.
This is basically a huge mote in your eye so to speak and I just think you aren't getting rid of it properly:
The Christmas Proclamation from the 1584 Roman Martyrology was read for centuries:
After Vatican II it was changed to «when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world.»
Again, you really cannot get passed this, sorry. This invites Jordan Peterson right into your home, with his it was just a metaphor theology, and he talks about Jung ... and Jung talks about Nag Hammadi ... and Nag Hammadi talks about cosmic Adam. This is a very big problem for your canon. A gigantic problem, which is why your Church (you know them by their fruits) had to persecute Galileo and the others.
The same as the Gospels? Both are men and a God doing things and talking to each other.
Not true, I think this is a coping mechanism for being wrong mostly, and besides I have not spent 100s of hours.
Well I made it clear I think the record you refer to is suspicious. Why are you so much more confident in it?
Heavily disputed. Both between churches and on the basis of textual criticism.
What vindications? If God did miracles on video in Rome once a year, or even once a lifetime, I'd convert.
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