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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.
I've read a few of Bart Ehrman's books on the historical Jesus, and although they can tend to be repetitive, they are a really interesting look into what the historical consensus is on Jesus the real man (as opposed to Jesus the religious figure), mixed in with some of Ehrman's own speculation.
For example, the overwhelming consensus among historians is that Jesus was an apocalypticist, that is to say, he thought the world was going to end within his lifetime or very soon. Not only do quotes from the man himself talking about this survive in the gospels (particularly Mark, the earliest and most reliable of the four) but his entire ministry makes a lot more sense once you realise that's what he believed. The later gospels toned this down as it became apparent that the end times weren't happening.
Some other interesting bits I remember:
The Son of Man was an actual figure within Judaism at the time, that's why Jesus talks about him in the third person. It was only later on that Christian writers decided that Jesus was talking about himself.
Jesus of Nazareth was born in...Nazareth. The two contradictory gospel stories about his birth in Bethlehem were necessary because the book of Isiah said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, so Jesus' birth was retconned.
Related, Isiah said that the Messiah would be born to a young woman. This was mistranslated in the Greek version of the Old Testament to virgin, hence Mary, who was obviously not a virgin (she had a husband and many children) becomes the Virgin Mary.
The Gospel of Mark ends with a cliffhanger. The women turn up at the tomb, see the stone has been rolled away and flee in terror. Later, the 'long ending' was added, which many bibles note wasn't in the original manuscript.
The gender-egalitarianism in earlier Christian writings was toned down through scribal amendments in the first few centuries. E.g. 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 says women should be silent in church whereas the rest of Corinthians talks explicitly about how they should pray out loud.
Jesus' brother James was the leader of the Jewish Christians, basically Jews who thought Jesus was the messiah but still wanted to keep Mosaic law and worship at the temple. James was killed and his Jewish Christianity was outcompeted by Pauline Christianity which was open to gentiles (although Paul, aka Saul, was also a Jew).
Bart Ehrman argues that Judas' betrayal wasn't telling the Romans where Jesus was. After all, he was a preacher, Roman soldiers could just follow him home from wherever he was preaching publicly. Instead, he argues the betrayal was telling them that Jesus was (secretly) calling himself the King of the Jews to his disciples. That explains the motif of Messianic Secrecy in Mark.
Ehrman also argues that the story of Jesus' resurrection came about because Mary and James had posthumous visions of him, and they then convinced some of the other disciples that he had literally risen from the dead. That's why the parts of the gospels which describe him staying with the disciples, eating and drinking, telling them to touch his body also include this strange motif of them still doubting his resurrection. Why would there be doubt if he is literally standing in front of you? The motif survived as a remnant of disciples who were skeptical of the story they'd been told by Mary and James.
None of this stuff is really news to biblical historians or less fundamentalist theologians, but it's fascinating to me as a layman.
Ooh, ooh, I love this one! Will you do the Ice Floe one next, huh? Please? I love that one even better!
Yes, the good old Warm Fuzzies theory of the Resurrection: the disciples were soooo sad after their nice friend got executed by the Romans that they were really, really sad. So sad they could only sit around and think about him and how great he was when he told them secret mystic truths like "Be nice!" and "Share your stuff!"
And they sat and they sat, and they thought and they thought, and they remembered him sooooo hard that they felt like he wasn't really dead after all! And then they realised that as long as they felt like he was still with them, then... then... why then, he was with them! Always and forever! And this made them feel so, so happy after they had been so, so sad!
So they went around to tell other people about this and how if you thought really hard about their nice friend Jesus and learned from them the stories about him, why, he could be your friend too! Everybody could be friends!
Of course, that ignores things like:
But that's only silly old Paul and we don't listen to silly old Paul.
This womanly sarcastic sneering you do is really offputting and unpleasant to read, I wish you'd stop doing it. Just say what you're saying.
Aw, you think I'm womanly! Never been so complimented before, should I blush modestly and avert my maiden eyes?
He's right, IMO. I can't make out what you're trying to say in between all the sneering.
Is it sneering? I'm laughing at the simplified notions on show, and it's not just Ehrmann: no of course Jesus wasn't resurrected from the dead, the dead stay dead. No we don't accept miracles in this house. The disciples claimed He was risen, that they saw Him? Well of course that was all just hallucinations (if we're charitable enough not to call them deliberate liars). They were grieving and upset, their mental balance wasn't stable. Strong feelings about the deceased have an effect on humans. They felt that the memory of Jesus was so strong and meaningful to them, that the best way they could express it was in crude terms of "still alive" and over the centuries that got turned into a belief about literal resurrection. But we are smart modern educated people and we know better.
If we're liberal Christians, we call this the Resurrection Experience and use it as a community building tool, which is the important part here after all: we all are part of a community which agrees on the entire laundry list of liberal to progressive causes, and old-fashioned crude Biblical literalism is not on the menu.
I have more respect for people who say "It's all crap and I don't believe any of it", even for those who go "The disciples were lying because they were trying to keep their cult going, so a dead and risen god figure was all part of that". I don't respect "I'm a Christian but..." where the "but" means "I dump all the beliefs of centuries in favour of warm fuzzy secular liberalism".
The baby-talk is deliberate, because that's how the liberals holding these views regard the literalist believers: too dumb to understand complicated thoughts and philosophies.
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FWIW she is right about Ehrman. He is a protestant atheist whose project is making Jesus the one of Thomas Jefferson, a nice guy who believed in liberalism, was not narcissistic enough to actually believe in being special (since magic is clearly not real), whose real teachings were all the agreeable things and none of the disagreeable things to modern audiences.
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I mean, the Gospels are actually really weird about this? In both John and Luke, the disciples start out talking to a random stranger, and only later "realize" that it is actually Jesus. Mark originally ended with the empty tomb. This honestly sounds like something people could have made up after the fact, not unlike those who think that a dead relative came to say goodbye to them.
As Scott Alexander points out in "Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?", there is less eyewitness testimony for the resurrection of Jesus Christ than there is for the golden plates of Joseph Smith, so from an epistemic perspective it is pretty odd to believe in the first but not the second.
Why would you listen to a grifter who showed up afterwards to hijack the movement and never even met Jesus?
The gospels are too theologically thin.
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« Overwhelming consensus » in climate science means 97% to 99% of papers. No one has ever surveyed NT scholars on this. The standard textbook, Theissen & Merz, The Historical Jesus, says « most » hold it and calls the non-apocalyptic view « a significant trend » Dale Allison, the best modern defender of your position (Constructing Jesus, 2010), spends his longest chapter arguing it against Crossan, Borg, Wright and the Jesus Seminar, notable scholars that disagree with this idea. Those dissenters were the most-read Jesus scholars of the 1990s. Wikipedia's summary of the field today says: «there is little scholarly agreement on a single portrait.»
The «consensus» is also not actually a consensus. It's entirely separate views in a coalition, not one theory. Ehrman's Jesus (predicted the end within a generation, and was wrong), Allison's (conditional timetable, partly metaphorical), Meier's (the kingdom coming, not the world ending) and Wright's (Jerusalem, not the cosmos) all claim to be «apocalyptic».
Two corrections: Matthew heightens the apocalyptic: «you will not have gone through the cities of Israel until the Son of Man has come» (Matt 10:23; also 24:30; 25:31–46), so «later gospels toned it down» is not true. And Mark 13, where «this generation» is, is widely thought to rework a Jewish-War-era apocalypse. The hypothesis is from Colani (1864): «Donc ce discours n'a pas été prononcé primitivement, mais écrit. Nous avons sous les yeux une courte apocalypse d'un auteur inconnu, que les synoptiques ont prise pour un discours de Jésus et insérée dans leurs recueils» (Jésus-Christ et les croyances messianiques de son temps, p. 207); given its standard form by Pesch, Naherwartungen (1968), and carried in the current commentaries (Collins, Mark, 2007; Marcus, Mark 8–16, 2009). So «quotes from Jesus himself» is not evidenced by that being in Mark.
And it's debateable that Mark is the earliest. Klinghardt claims reconstruction of Marcion's gospel as the oldest gospel (Peeters 2021; JSTOR) Where Mark 13:30 has «this generation will not pass away», Marcion's gospel says «heaven and earth will not pass away until all these things are completed» (Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 4.39); and where Mark 14:62 has «you will see the Son of Man coming with the clouds», Marcion's reads «from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God».
You can say they have a majority but to say it's an overwhelming consensus is just false rhetoric. Why did you do that?
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Ah, this one again. Which started off, if I am recalling correctly - and don't take the rest of this comment as 100% accurate because I'm just in the door home from work, decompressing by some light social media checking, and not having facts'n'figures to hand in order to argue about this - with the Jews being majorly pissed off at early Christians quoting the Old Testament at them about how Jesus had fulfilled it and were particularly fed-up about the quoting of Isaiah there, so they emphasised that "no, almah is not the same as virgo, Isaiah was not talking about your dumb guy".
Got taken up during the Reformation (of course) in order to counter Mariolatry but not too much emphasis because Reformation Protestants also believed that the prophecy was tht Jesus would be born of a virgin. What happened wiht Mary and Joseph after that? Not so important.
Really took off as we get into the Historical Criticism of the Bible during the 19th and is very much beloved of modern day liberal Protestant Christians because nope nope nope, Mary no virgin, she had sex! Sex good! Saying she was a virgin is saying sex bad! Plus we are modern smart educated people, we know you need sex to get pregnant! Miracles? Pfft, who believes in those anymore?
And the modern liberal Protestants like the "Mary had other kids" part because it's the lingering echo of Reformation anti-Mariolatry and anti-Catholicism. Not really being aware of Orthodoxy and the veneration of the Virgin there, they take it as a Roman Catholic thing and dumb old hang-ups about sex and stuff. Try saying "obviously she had a husband and sex with her husband to have many kids" to some of those devoted to the Theotokos, I dare you 😁
Is almah the same as virgo? I'm not educated in linguistics to say yes or no, but it was held that Mary was the Blessed Virgin for centuries and that the prophecy in Isaiah did refer to the Messiah being born of a virgin and that this was fulfilled with the Virgin Birth, before we got all fancy and out over our skis about the likes of that.
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This I think has been challenged by scholars who are more focused on Christology like Larry Hurtado , who also reviewed Ehrman's book
Ehrman's field of study is specifically textual criticism, and his opinions on Christology changed over time (from a normal, human Jesus who developed into a God) to come close to Hurtado's "early high Christology" view on other matters but I'm not sure about this one (Hurtado, for his part, seems inclined to downplay precedents for the "Christian mutation" of early devotion to Jesus).
Unless the later Christian writers rewrote the gospels, the idea makes no sense, and you don't need to be a scholar to see that. When Jesus does the "son of man" thing he is foretelling events that are about to happen to him. It's plain as day.
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I've always found it interesting how people reconcile the fact that the Bible talks about Jesus's brothers with Mary's virginity. Normies don't even seem to notice, because normies don't read, and nobody brings it to their attention (when was the last time a preacher or movie mentioned that Jesus had siblings?) but of course Church intellectuals noticed, and had their own rationalizations.
The Catholic view is that the word "adelphoi" can mean either brother or cousin, and those mentioned are actually Jesus's cousins. The Orthodox view is that Joseph was a widower who had children from his previous marriage, so Jesus's brothers were actually his stepbrothers. And the Protestant view is that Mary was only a virgin until Jesus's birth; after that, she laid with her husband the way any other wife does, and Jesus's brothers were thereby conceived.
It is fascinating that there was a completely separate tradition of Jewish Christianity, headed by Jesus's own brother and which almost certainly hewed much closer to Jesus's original message, which died out early on. Modern Christianity is based on the teachings of Paul, who never met Jesus. It's probably for the best; Jesus, being an apocalyptic preacher, did not feel the need to create a Gnon-compliant religion that could last two thousand years, but Paul did.
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