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Notes -
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.
Given Jews' own gloating about how good they are about "tricking God" and rules-lawyering their way out of following His laws, the latter actually does seem far more likely to me. Look up the "oven of Akhnai" in the Talmud for a very specific and blatant example of this where the rabbis reject a voice from heaven proclaiming that they have interpreted the law incorrectly (and the Jews writing the Talmud treat the rabbi's rejection of a correction from God as a good thing).
Or, as the Book of Mormon put it:
They follow their God well. There is an apocryphal story about the harrowing of Hades which IIRC was preached by Marcion -- When Jesus enters the Egyptians and other pagans run to him and are rescued; Moses and Abraham suspect a trick from Yahweh and remained until Jesus left. They remain there to this day.
— Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.27.3 (ANF 1, trans. Roberts & Rambaut)
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