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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.
This isn't true. The census described in Luke is not how the real census worked. Who would send a man to his ancestral home from a thousand years ago?
What I think you're noticing is that the New Testament is vastly compressed in both time and length compared to the Old Testament. The events were within living memory for the writers (compared to much of the Hebrew Bible, where writers and redactors seem to have lost the meaning of certain things) and hell even we have documentation of figures like Pilate from Jewish sources (though what they knew is very debatable - Dale Allison's Jesus of Nazareth gives an alarming hypothetical at the start of his book about a particularly prolific and talented writer of Jesus sayings in the pre-Gospel era whose work is simply impossible to disentangle from what Jesus actually said).
This is one of my personal biggest challenges with Christianity. Yes, the Gospels preserve the sense that most people can't know what Jesus is until he helps them along, but this is also consistent with nobody knowing because it's a cope cause Plan A failed.
There's a range of views on Jesus in the academy. I think the bigger problem for scholars is that this is not in our earliest source. Paul already shows a high Christology, or at least conflating or associating Jesus with God in a way that is very odd if he thinks the Hebrew God is evil. None of the Gospels explicitly say that and imply continuity too, but it's pretty bad for your argument that it's just nowhere to be seen in the undisputed epistles.
It also poses a real difficulty: you're right that the Gospels (Matthew especially) is concerned with proving Jesus was prophesied in the Old Testament, because performing miracles alone means nothing (Deuteronomy damns the prophet who performs miracles but preaches against God). The prophecy is a necessary form of authentication.
If you're going this route, the Old Testament is worthless and the authentication mechanism is lost and Jesus is some guy who maybe performed miracles. That could mean anything. A real problem for Islam, as an example.
A lot of Jewish messiahs didn't achieve harems and did die horribly when they faced Rome or the rulers of the world. John the Baptist come to mind (or was he a gnostic too?). Some even suggest that Jesus was a follower of John (the Gospels themselves record that people confused them) who appropriated his movement in life or in death, which explains his success somewhat. There was a preexisting market.
Dale Allison has a discussion on why Jesus' movement survived in the book I cited above. His argument is that Jesus' adaptations to Roman rule (non-violence, indirect resistance) were not enough to save his life given his shenanigans at the Temple but made the Romans not particularly inclined to hunt down his followers as they would other rebels.
This left something to start over. And, besides that, there was already a significant portion of "god-fearers" who were attracted to the Jewish religion. It just took Paul to make it fully acceptable.
I do not accept luke as canon either, and neither Acts. Both books, allegedly written by the same hand, have serious flaws. I believe Luke is a perverted version of Marcion's gospel, which can be well reconstructed from his critics. It does not mention the census.
The academy does some good work as in all fields, but also like in other fields I land somewhat far from the « consensus ». Maybe it is unfair to compare Ehrman to a Turkheimer, however he is no Jensen. I would not take most of his conclusions seriously, though he seems to be a leader in the field.
With Paul the mainstream admits many of the letters are forgeries. What they are more quiet on is obvious interpolations in the widely-accepted-to-be-legitimate letters. In the legitimate letters Paul reads like a gnostic that occasionally insert stomach churning, Yahwehist pablum that reads like it was written by the composer of Matthew or Luke, which often contradicts with something else he said. For example, I believe Romans 12:10 to 13:10 is likely fraudulent; elsewhere he discusses the evil of the archons kai exousia but here he demands the nastiest form of earthly obedience to the low from above. Well, I do not believe that St. Paul wrote that. There are some scholars here and there who have written in agreement with this but it is not a mainstream position. The evidence for it is low criticism (the letter flows better without it, you can see where it would have been inserted if you connect passages from before and after) as well as the fact that our earliest source is from around 200 AD, which is not original. In addition we can attempt to reconstruct the original; Valentinus and Marcion both claimed to be disciples of Paul and no other apostle through a line of descent. Marcion claimed a literal reading of Paul while Valentinus claimed Paul had secret traditions through Theudas. You can see how Marcion is the exoteric doctrine (the two gods, minimal complexity) and Valentinus the esoteric (Aeons, metaphysics, pneumatic-psychic-hylic hierarchy). It is widely accepted that the proto-orthodox wrote Acts and the forged letters after this to reclaim Paul. I think they also edited his original letters. In reconstructions from early anti-heresy books for instance, we find no evidence of 12:10-13:10, even where it would be pertinent; so I think it was written later. There are many other passages such as this, basically anywhere where « Paul » starts writing about Abraham and Israel and other such things, this was not in Marcion's letters.
When authentic Paul says theo, what does it mean? Yes, that can be confusing where there is a higher and lower pantheon . I take it to mean the higher pantheon, beings in the pleroma, the Autogenes, the Son of Man (cosmic) etc. Like how in the mainstream view there are three persons.
Another issue with Yawhehists is what Son of Man means. In gnosticism is means the cosmic Seth. This is a divine figure, so the reading of Mark and John on this topic is easy. In the orthodox church they wish he had called himself Son of God exclusively and not Son of Man excessively.
The issue is priors in a field where that matters a lot. If your prior is atheism with a side of childhood orthodoxy I think you get the mainstream consensus. My priors are that Plato was a pneumatic so his system is inspired and that's why it pops up in gnosticism, that's why Jesus preaches it, that's why it was lost but found again independently in Catharism, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, and now the old writings have been uncovered. But this is not a secular prior so the academy will never share it. It is coherent, however.
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