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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.
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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