Geisler-Turek Reflux

Reading the Gospels into 1 Corinthians is simply circular reasoning.

-- Earl Doherty, Challenging the Verdict, p. 214

Recent frequent commenter David has repeatedly challenged my view, which I presented in my 27 July blog Is I Corinthians 15:3-8 ‘Too Early’ to Be Legend?, that Geisler and Turek, in their popular apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, begged the question when they asserted that the so-called ‘creed’ which Paul is allegedly quoting in I Cor. 15:3-8 is too early to be the product of legends. Also repeatedly, I have stated my reasons for surmising this (see here, here and here).

David then urged me to reconstruct Geisler and Turek’s argument, which they never formally lay out themselves, and show how that argument commits the fallacy which I have charged it of committing. In one comment, David did me the service of presenting his own rendition of Geisler and Turek’s under-expressed argument, which he culled from statements found on pp. 241-243 of their hokey book. David writes:

In the interest of fairness here is my exposition of the G/T argument from page 241-243:

P1. Legends require sufficient time for development (implicitly assumed)
P2. As corroborated by multiple independent attestation, the crucifixion happened around 30AD
P3. The Gospels record that the Resurrection happened 3 days later
P4. The Corinthian creed predates the writing of Corinth (56AD), probably within 0-3 years of the Resurrection.
P5. 0-3 years is not sufficient time for legend development.

I am content to look at these points along with David as accurately representing the chain of thought which Geisler and Turek may have in mind, as far as it goes at any rate, behind their remark that “there’s no possible way that [I Corinthians 15:3-8] could describe a legend, because it goes right back to the time and place of the event itself” (p. 242). But it needs to be borne in mind that this argument is enlisted by Geisler and Turek in support of a grander conclusion, namely that we have a reliable historical account of Jesus’ resurrection. The overall intent of providing arguments like the one we have above, is to secure belief in Jesus’ resurrection. That is the prime directive, the ultimate purpose, the crowning event which all of this is supposed to help establish. This point cannot be overlooked or denied because, as appearing in chapter 10 of their book, this argument is found in Geisler and Turek’s effort to establish the premise that “the New Testament is historically reliable” (cf. p. 219). Hence the urgency to dispel the position that legends may have crept into the early written Christian accounts of Jesus, and hence the urgency to date certain statements about Jesus’ resurrection so close to the event itself that they couldn’t possibly have been the product of earlier legend-building.


Let's look at these points.

In regard to P1, it is stipulated that “legends require sufficient time for development.” That’s well and good, but the question of how one determines how long a time is "sufficient" for a legend to develop is not adequately explored by Geisler and Turek. How long a time is sufficient, and how does one determine this?

I remember hearing all kinds of stories about Elvis Presley not long after he died in 1977. There were sightings of him virtually every week within months after his death; he was seen in grocery stores from Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, he was seen driving down city streets, he was seen at gas stations, convenience stores, shopping malls, and pictures of him (or what looked like him) were circulating along with these stories, etc. There was even a report of a motorcycle accident in which Elvis, still very much alive, had broken his leg. I always thought these were tongue-in-cheek, but some fans apparently took these reports seriously, and maybe were responsible for generating them to begin with. They had put an undying hope in "the King" – a hope which refused to die with him. The rest of society snickered and sneered while the loyal core held true to the dream. But I don't think anyone who didn't believe these reports felt the need to sit down and launch into refutations, let alone parade Presley's body through the city streets.

Were these stories about Presley legends? Well, I certainly do not think they were factual claims. Were they just tabloid hype intended to sell the gossip rags? Surely these stories were enlisted to promote sales, but does this make them any less factual? And did some people take these stories seriously? Again, they seemed unserious to me, but it also seemed to me that some people certainly were in fact taking them seriously.

While the Elvis phenomenon may be a good test case for how long it takes legends to develop, the one advantage it has is that Elvis’ death can be traced to a date by contemporary records. Elvis died in August of 1977. There is also vast evidence – much much more than sufficient – that Elvis actually existed. But legends focusing on supernatural personages tend to be much more blurry. In such cases, there may not be any actual historical inception date, even approximate, back to which the legend can be legitimately traced. That is, they may have no actual historical basis whatsoever. Can the legends of Mithras, Zoroaster, Dionysos, Osiris, et al., be traced back to some seminal historical event? If not, how can we apply the sufficient time rule to these legends? When did Mithras slay his sacred bull? Can the Mithraen religion be traced back to this event, or did it actually occur in the first place?

Now another point to keep in mind is the fact that legends involving supernatural claims are certainly not going to be unlikely to develop in a culture steeped in worldviews governed by the primacy of consciousness. In such cultures, the basic metaphysical premise of such legends is essentially guaranteed. The evidence we have of first century Palestine and the centuries prior to it and those following after it, sufficiently attests to the widespread acceptance of worldviews assuming the primacy of consciousness. From the Greek pantheon to the official religion of Rome, to the Hellenistic mystery religions, the Egyptian deity cults, and yes, even the culture of Judaism, the primacy of consciousness premise was alive and well, thriving in full bloom at this time in human history. People who accept the primacy of consciousness metaphysics deprive themselves of any consistent rational basis from which to question claims about miracles, miracle workers, magicians, deities, risen saviors, virgin births, miraculous healings, exorcisms, etc. In such a cultural environment we find the basic platform for myth-building and legendary development well established, such that it would difficult to explain if legends did not emerge, especially out of the messianic expectations which had reached their culmination at this time in Judaism. Jews had become desperate for the deliverance promised by the prophesied advent of their Messiah, and it was just a matter of time until inventive mystics were willing to pull one out of their hat.

However, if it is insisted that “legends require sufficient time for development,” and this means a substantial amount of time like, say, 20 years, or even more, this may be exactly what we have in the case of the Jesus story. On pp. 244-245 of their book, Geisler and Turek quote William Lane Craig on the matter, who claims that “tests show that even two generations is too short to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical fact.” What we have in the case of Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament, may in fact be much more than two generations. Wells makes the following points:

If, then, Paul did not regard the earthly Jesus as recently deceased, Alvar Ellegǻrd may be right in suggesting, in his 1999 book, that the earliest Christian ideas about him were to some extent shaped by imprecise knowledge about the Teacher of Righteousness who figures in Dead Sea Scrolls written around 100 B.C. as a revered leader (not the Messiah and no a supernatural personage) to whom God had made known all the mysteries of the prophets, and who had been severely persecuted. Whether he was an actual historical figure or largely a construction to give substance to his followers’ conception of the founder of their movement cannot now be determined. In any case, the Scrolls show that his memory was still treasured a century or more after his presumed death. What his followers thought they knew about him was that he had lived long ago and had been maltreated and persecuted, probably dying as a martyr. It would be natural for those who knew, even indirectly, of what is said of him in, for instance, the Qumran Habakkuk commentary to assume that the persecution eventually led to his martyrdom. The Scrolls do not name him – they avoid actually naming the sectarian personages (including the Teacher’s chief enemies) whom they mention – but ‘Jesus’, which means ‘Yahweh saves’, and hence has connotations of ‘salvation’, would be an appropriate name to have been given at some stage to someone of such religious importance. (Can We Trust the New Testament?, pp. 8-9)

So to suppose, along with the above argument, that there was “not sufficient time for legend development” in the case of the stories of Jesus, relies on a dating scheme which may not in fact reflect the actual facts of the case. What is that dating scheme, and where does it come from? If Paul were in fact enlarging on what was by his time already a set of legends about some ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ who had been martyred a century or more earlier, then obviously there was “sufficient time for legend development” and the dating scheme hired to counteract this is out of a job.

Moving onto P2, we have the premise: “As corroborated by multiple independent attestation, the crucifixion happened around 30AD.” In response to this, we must ask: What do these independent reports allegedly corroborating the claim that a miracle-working man-god was crucified and resurrected in 30 AD actually say, and when were they written? Were these reports written at the time of the alleged event itself? No scholar dates the authorship of any extant text referring to Jesus, either in the New Testament itself or from non-Christian sources, to this time. The earliest we have is Paul, and as we have already seen, he never puts any indicator of time or place for the crucifixion or resurrection. And by all accounts Paul himself was writing from the late AD 40’s into the early 60’s. So even here we are not talking only 0-3 years from the approximate date assigned to the crucifixion going by literalist Christian accounts in the gospel narratives, which blows the “not sufficient time for legend development” thesis out of the water. Apologists seek to get around this by making Paul quote a creed in I Cor. 15:3-8 which, it is alleged, “goes right back to the time and place of the Resurrection itself” (Geisler and Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, p. 242). But even then apologists are unable to stand by this with anything more than wide approximations; Geisler and Turek, for instance, qualify their statement by allowing from “eighteen months to eight years after,” which only causes one to wonder how they arrive at this kind of conclusion in the first place, especially when Paul gives no indication of when or where or under what circumstances Jesus was crucified, and does not even state that what he is including in his letter is a quotation from a pre-existing creed.

The gospels, the earliest being written at least a decade or more after I Corinthians (which itself is usually dated to about 53-57 AD, even on a conservative estimation, this is more than enough time for a legend to have developed if some seminal crucifixion event took place circa 30 AD), are the first documents from which an approximate date for the crucifixion can be inferred, and even then the best for this is Luke, which many scholars date to the later decades of the 1st century (it is generally accepted that Luke’s gospel contains unmistakable references to the war which resulted in the destruction of the temple in AD 70, and Richard Carrier’s summary of Steve Mason’s argument for Luke’s reliance on Josephus identifies solid reasons why Luke was most probably not written until AD 94 at the earliest). All these sources were composed by Christians, and no non-Christian notice (uninterpolated that is) dates to these periods (again, see my Paul, the Historicity of the Gospel Jesus, and Early Non-Christian Testimony for details). By the early second century you start seeing some brief mentionings of Christians and even of Jesus, but these can be reasonably understood as reports repeating what Christians by this point in time had come to believe. None of this is impressive as corroborating evidence, especially for the kind of event they are purported to corroborate.

P3 states that “The Gospels record that the Resurrection happened 3 days later.” This is the detail of Jesus rising “on the third day,” an early tradition which is older than any reference suggesting any actual date or timeframe for the crucifixion itself, and appears to have been borne from theological purposes rather than from reports deriving from an actual historical event. Addressing this matter, Wells makes the following points regarding this reference in I Cor. 15:

Nor does mention of ‘the third day’ constitute a precise historical allusion. As the other indications of time in the passage (‘then’, ‘after that’) are vague, and as it supplies no time reference for the death of Christ from which to reckon the three days, the preciseness of this one reference in it cannot be attributed to any general interest in chronology, but is (as Evans concedes) more likely intended as ‘a theological statement’ ([Resurrection and the NT], p 48). Pagan gods whom no one now believes to have existed, were resurrected on the third day. Metzger has observed that ‘in the East, three days constitutes a temporary habitation, while the fourth day implies a permanent residence’; hence the purpose of Paul’s formula may be to ‘convey the assurance that Jesus would be but a visitor in the house of the dead and not a permanent resident therein’ ([article on 1 Cor. 15:4 in Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 8], p 123). The influence of pagan parallels could have been strengthened by the rabbinical idea that the general resurrection – presaged according to Rom. 8:29 and Coloss. 1:18 by Christ’s resurrection – will occur three days after the end of the world. ‘In these conditions’, says Goguel, ‘it is natural that the resurrection of the Christ was placed in a chronological rapport with his death similar to that which was thought would occur between the end of the world and the general resurrection’. If so, then ‘on the third day’ is ‘not a chronological datum, but a dogmatic assertion: Christ’s resurrection marked the dawn of the end-time, the beginning of the cosmic eschatological process of resurrection’ (Fuller, [The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives], pp 26-7, with references to Goguel; cf. Vermes, [Jesus the Jew], pp 234-5 for other saving events occurring, in Jewish lore, ‘on the third day’). (Did Jesus exist?, p. 31)

So the later writers simply picked up on what began as “not a chronological datum, but a dogmatic assertion,” and grafted it into their narratives. This would have been natural if the tradition stuck, which obviously it did, and later writers sought to explain it by putting it into a concocted historical context. What’s notable here, however, is that the supposition that Jesus rose “on the third day” predates any historical setting, which we find a decade or more later in the gospels. This is one way legends are created: a motif is invested with mythical or theological significance, often deriving some of that significance from the surrounding culture, and as it is retained it is recast in new contexts to make it meaningful to the new generation. In Matthew (12:40) the significance of this motif is strengthened by relating Jonah’s time in the belly of a whale to Jesus’ “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” The intent here appears to be to instill continuity between the old prophets and the Jesus story. That this carries theological rather than historical significance is only confirmed all the more by the fact that none of the gospel passion sequences puts Jesus in his tomb for “three days and three nights.” This last part – “and three nights” – is, to put it mildly, hard to reconcile with the passion sequences which have Jesus entombed on a Friday evening and emerging from the tomb on a Sunday morning.

Even highly credentialed Christian literalists are often prone to misunderstanding the reference to “the third day” in I Cor. 15:4. Again I quote Wells:

I must stress that, although Paul clearly implies that all these appearances were quite recent occurrences which went back no more than a few years, he does not say that they followed the resurrection immediately, or even soon. Even Archbishop Carnley, whose book on the resurrection is the most valuable of the NT evidence that I have seen, says that Paul’s “message involved the startling claim that Jesus had been seen alive three days after his death and burial” ([The Structure of Resurrection Belief], p. 140). It is the resurrection, not the appearances, that Paul puts three days after the burial. He does not say that the burial was recent, nor that the appearances followed soon after the resurrection. People who claim to see a ghost do not necessarily suppose it to be the wraith of someone recently deceased. (The Jesus Myth, p. 125)

So the “third day” tradition seems to be nothing more than just that, a tradition, indeed, one that has apparently been adapted from pre-Christian models and woven into the earliest legends of Jesus as the risen savior as a motif bearing theological meaning before acquiring any would-be historical significance.

P4 affirms that the ‘creed’ which Paul is supposedly reciting in I Cor. 15:3-8 “predates the writing of [I Corinthians] (56AD), probably within 0-3 years of the Resurrection.” Of course, this premise assumes that Paul is in fact quoting from a creed in I Cor. 15. I wonder if the entirety of this creed has ever been located, and if so, has a reliable date been put to it? It would certainly be interesting to see what else it says. Paul never recites it again in his letters, which by itself is perplexing. Regardless, assuming the passage does contain an excerpt from an earlier creed, how can its date be established? What evidence puts it "within 0-3 years of the Resurrection"? What else did this creed say? Is it found anywhere else in the early Christian writings? Interestingly this creed is not found in the many speeches given in Acts, which purports to portray the adventures of Jesus’ apostles (well, at least a few of them) after his resurrection.

Now note the questionable assumption we have here. By alleging that Paul has quoted from an earlier creed which dates “probably within 0-3 years of the Resurrection,” isn’t this assuming that the resurrection actually took place? To say that the origins of a piece of text can be traced back to a specific event, is to assume that the event in question actually happened. Indeed, such statements would be nonsensical if they did not assume the event back to which a textual allusion referred actually took place. So really here we have the offending premise, for it assumes what the legend theory disputes, namely the historicity of the resurrection itself. Naturally the question comes up, in addition to the questions about the dating of the creed which Geisler and Turek have assumed in their argument, as to how we can put a date to the resurrection in the first place. As I have demonstrated over and over, Paul never gives any indication of time, place or circumstances for the resurrection, something he references repeatedly in his several letters. So the date for the resurrection does not come from Paul’s own writings. Where do Geisler and Turek get their date for the resurrection? From the gospels, of course, which are the first documents in the Christian record to associate Jesus’ crucifixion with Pontius Pilate. It is only by reading the gospels into Paul’s letter that one can put a date to what Paul talks about. But as Doherty’s statement which I quoted at the beginning of this blog rightly acknowledges, “reading the Gospels into 1 Corinthians is simply circular reasoning.” So at this point, Geisler and Turek are without a doubt begging the question against the legend theory in their frail attempt to wave it away.

P5 stipulates that “0-3 years is not sufficient time for legend development,” which is only relevant if in fact we have something to date back to and start the clock ticking. If the event which starts the clock is itself disputed in fact not to have taken place, then we cannot simply assume, as Geisler and Turek clearly do, that the event did take place, thus warranting the stopwatch to which this statement appeals. Of course, in response to P5, I wonder how one determines that "0-3 years is not sufficient time for legend development." Why can't a legend develop in, say, 6 months? I just want to know why. After all, the germs of a legend could be born in a passing suggestion. Suppose after the crucifixion, Jesus’ followers, anxious for him to live again, believed that he was resurrected in some otherworldly realm, not necessarily on earth, and not in the flesh as the gospel stories have it? After all, Paul does not say that the appearances he mentions in I Corinthians 15 were made by a physical Jesus appearing to followers in the flesh. Paul makes no effort to distinguish the appearances which Cephas, James and the 500 brethren enjoyed from the one he himself got, and nowhere does Paul say that Jesus appeared to him in a physical body, with fresh wounds and eating fish, etc. These are later traditions not found until the gospels, after the legend had developed.

As for the dating, how do we establish that the legend did not start in some very primitive form around the year of, say, 6 AD or even earlier, like 25 BC, and that only by the time Paul hit the scene, it had become quite developed, fusing OT inspired theology with Wisdom literature motifs and a few influences from pagan religions that were popular at the time (e.g., Mithras, Osiris-Dionysos, Bacchus, etc.) sprinkled in, and by the time that the authors of the gospels hit the scene, the central figure of worship, Jesus, had all sorts of stories sprouting up about him (e.g., virgin birth, baptism by John the Baptist, miracles, healings, wrestling with the devil, raising the dead, trial before Pilate, an empty tomb, etc.)? By this point, it would seem that dating the resurrection to AD 30 would be sensible, given the gospels. But if the gospels themselves are legends, then the claim that the resurrection took place in AD 30 is historically worthless.

So let’s review what we have here: Paul, who gives no date to the crucifixion and resurrection that he ascribes to Jesus, is allegedly quoting from a creed in his letter, dated to ca. 56 AD, claiming that this resurrected Jesus "appeared" to a bunch of people, the vast majority of whom being completely anonymous, and this creed can allegedly be dated back to 30 AD or sometime soon thereafter, with no evidence whatsoever for this dating.

From all of this, David concluded:

Conclusion: The window between Resurrection and resurrection belief is insufficient for legend development.

So I was right all along: since the dating of the resurrection which Geisler and Turek use in drawing this conclusion comes from the gospels (which, as later legends, were built on earlier legends), they are clearly assuming the truth of what it is they're trying to establish here, namely that "there's no possible way that such testimony could describe a legend." That's a circular argument. QED. There is no non-circular way for them to draw such a conclusion, and my interaction with the premises David compiled from their book confirms this.

David continued:

Related conclusions of this argument that other apologists use: C1. Early belief in the Resurrection requires an alternative explanation.

This has been supplied in previous responses to David.

Then David stated:

C2. The Resurrection actually happening is the best explanation of early resurrection belief.

This evaluation depends on how one determines the quality of an explanation. The view that the resurrection actually happened is the best explanation is only possible on a view which grants validity to the supernatural. But there is no consistent way to do this, as I have shown. It is philosophically futile.

David wrote:

Again let me just point out that G/T says 'There's no possible way that such testimony could describe a legend, because it goes right back to the time and place of the event itself.' They do not say 'It could not be a legend because the Resurrection actually happened'.

But as you've shown, the statement they do make *assumes* that the resurrection actually happened. That's where they beg the question. By assuming that the resurrection actually happened (note that they never *prove* that the resurrection happened), they are in effect saying that it could not be a legend.

David closed with the following declaration of faith:

I remain firm in my stance that you are incorrectly evaluating the argument when you conclude it is circular.

Yes, David, just soldier on. Maybe it will go away.

by Dawson Bethrick

Another Response to David, Part 7: The Anatomy of Legend and the Ruse of Revelation

I continue now with my final installment in my response to David’s lengthy 16 Aug. comment to my blog In Response to David on I Corinthians 15:3-8.


David wrote:

Are all these ancient historians spewing legend material uncritically?

I certainly would not advocate accepting the New Testament’s stories at face value, nor would I rush to the judgment that their authors were “historians” per se. We need to ask: what informed and guided their worldview, their religious presuppositions or academic criteria for historical accuracy? I see plenty of evidence for the former and basically zero evidence for the latter. Apologists often point to the author of Luke-Acts to secure the claim that the New Testament’s stories have the high caliber credentials of a superb historian. But scholars are far from unanimous on the value of Luke-Acts as actual history.

Verdicts on Acts have ranged from dismissing it as a bundle of legends to accepting it as a history whose trustworthiness is unsurpassed. Today conservative commentators still suppose, as does Dunn ([The Acts of the Apostles], pp. xi, 335), that it may well have been written by a companion of Paul. But a few theologians – John Bowden, for instance – are prepared to set it aside as “ideology, party history” ([Appendix to his English translation of G. Ludemann, The Unholy in Holy Scripture], p. 151. Others say that because it shows accurate knowledge of Roman administration it must be accepted as a well-informed account by a meticulous historian. But there is no reason why Luke should not have known a great deal about the Roman Empire, whatever is true of his story. In this connection, Barrett, who by no means wishes to suggest that Luke created his story out of nothing, observes that he himself has read “many detective stories in which legal and police procedures were described with careful accuracy, but in the service of a completely fictitious plot” ([“The Historicity of Acts,” Journal of Theological Studies], p. 525). (Wells, Can We Trust the New Testament?, pp. 111-112)

I find myself in agreement with Wells when he points out that “the profusion of miracles throughout Acts is something that does not inspire confidence” that we are reading genuine history (Ibid., p. 97). He gives as examples:

the Spirit providing transport for missionaries (8:39), angels ordering them about (8:26) and releasing on one occasion the apostles (5:19) and on another Peter (12:7-10) from the securest of prisons. Such stories of prisoners being supernaturally released were popular in the literature of the time. The apostles themselves work miracles ceaselessly. The Jews have their own magicians but they are always worsted when up against Peter or Paul (8:9-24; 13:6-11). Already by Chapter 2 the apostles have performed “many signs and wonders” (2:43); and in Chapter 5 “the multitude from the cities round Jerusalem” – there were no ‘cities’ round it: Luke had a poor grasp of Palestinian geography – bring sick folk, “and they were healed every one” (5:16). They thought they might be cured if only Peter’s shadow fell upon them (5:15), just as, later, contact with Paul’s handkerchief in fact suffices to make sufferers well (19:12). When Peter raises Tabitha from the dead (9:36-41), the obvious parallel with what both Elijah and Elisha had done (1 Kings 17:17-24; 2 Kings 4:18-37) betrays that Luke’s intention here was to show that the apostles were in no way inferior to the prophets. But the more general overall purpose of the miracle stories is to demonstrate that the growth of the early church was God-driven. (Ibid.)

So if the author of Luke-Acts was a historian, I suppose Agatha Christie was also. At any rate, I’ve seen no good reason from Christians to suppose that the NT authors were not indulging themselves in the development of legends, and with the content and a track record like those which we see in the gospels and the book of Acts, it’s pretty easy to see why.

David wrote:

External sources seem to be the biggest problem for the legend theory.

Actually, as Wells, Doherty, Freke & Gandy, Price, etc., all show, external sources confirm the theory quite elegantly. They just don’t constrain their understanding of those sources according to a supernatural bias. Also, see my Early Non-Christian Testimony.

David wrote:

Do you really intend to reject every piece of evidence simply because it came later and “could have” been embellished?

If the context suggests that a feature or element is the result of embellishment, then I see no reason why I should not identify it as such. For instance, in Matthew, at Jesus’ death on the cross, you have an earthquake, saints rising out of their graves, the rent in the temple cloth, etc., details which no other writer, either in the NT or in the non-Christian record of the time, corroborates. All these things strike me as embellishments intended to make the event all the more impressive and dramatic. I see every reason to suppose these are inventions by the author and no reason to suppose they are historical.

There are many examples, too numerous to cull together here, which give little reason for confidence that we’re reading history in the gospels. For instance, in discussing two passages in Mark – 7:31-36 and 8:22-26 – Wells points out:

In both these pericopes Jesus uses spittle in the process of effecting the cure. All races of antiquity attached magical healing significance to spittle (see the discussion in Hull 1974, pp. 76-78), and this crudity, well-known from pagan parallels and embarrassing to commentators, may explain why Matthew and Luke omitted these two Markan stories. (The Jesus Myth, p. 149)

Are these healing stories really “history”? Why should we accept them as genuine history? It’s no use to try to recreate these conditions using saliva from anyone today, because apologists will say that mere mortal spit does not have the magical properties of an incarnated deity’s spit. So we’re stuck with accepting Mark on his say so in a matter which is simply incredible and obviously fantastic.

In many parts of the gospels, Jesus instructs story characters who are made to witness his acts or identify him as the messiah, to tell no one. Did they all quite coincidentally violate his instruction and go and tell someone who was writing Jesus’ biography about this? In Jesus’ hesitation prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, we read the prayer Jesus supposedly uttered in private. Who was there to record this if Jesus was praying in private? Who was there to witness Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness? The stories are chock full of constructed sequences which are obviously not historical.

David wrote:

The cumulative case is rather devastating; indeed, not even Christian apologists explaining away apparent Bible contradictions have attempted the maneuvers of proponents of the extreme legend theory.

Christian apologists ultimately rest their appeal to supernaturalism; they have to, because that is what the biblical record does. Paul appeals to supernatural revelation. The gospels appeal to miracles. The later apologists appeal to supernatural agencies. Those who see the telltale signs of legend-building need not make appeal to such fantasies.

David wrote:

Douglas J. Moo (The Letter of James,pg 13) points out that ‘…physical ties to Jesus became important only after the time of James’ death.’

I replied:

David, this statement right here undermines the view that "brother of the Lord" indicates a sibling relationship.

David responded:

Absolutely not, because I clearly said that I reject the position that Paul is honoring James with the phrase.

You can reject the view that Paul is honoring James with a title all you like. This only makes Moo's point all the more problematic though, since your position is that "brother of the Lord" is a reference indicating a sibling relationship. You want to interpret Paul as referring to James as a sibling of Jesus while he was yet alive (and writing when he was yet alive, according to Christian tradition), and yet here's Moo proclaiming that “physical ties to Jesus became important only after the time of James’ death.”

David wrote:

Why is any scholar that disagrees with your position a ‘Christian apologist’?

I don’t believe I have affirmed or practiced such a rule.

I wrote:

Actually we can say more than this. There are clear signs of tampering of common sources throughout the synoptics to taylor them to the specific preferences of the writer. It’s clear that Matthew and Luke were drawing upon Mark’s model, for they follow the same general course. But between Matthew and Luke, who (as many scholars – you like those – have pointed out) were both also drawing on a non-Markan source (referred to in the literature as Q), show differences in rendering the same sayings attributed to Jesus.

David responded:

I think a lot of the alleged ‘tampering’ is simply each author demonstrating a purpose and an intended audience.

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. However, a study of the four gospels’ respective treatment of the passion sequences and their aftermath would reveal something other than merely differing purposes or different intended audiences. Rather, we would see that the basic story found in Mark (the earliest gospel) undergoes various transformations as it is developed, reworked and, yes, embellished. One consequence of all this is the jumble of contradictions which apologists have for centuries tried either to cover up or to explain away, both tasks being rather hopeless. For starters, take a look at Dan Barker’s Leave No Stone Unturned. The evangelists’ willingness to revise the story to suit their own individual purposes, indicates that what we’re looking at here is not history, but theologically laden legends.

I had cited two passages, one from Matthew and the other from Luke, which demonstrated how one or the other or both authors adapted a saying which both attribute to Jesus in different ways:

Mt. 7:11: "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"

Lk. 11:13: "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?"

I then commented:

Notice how Luke pushes the promise further into the imaginative realm of the supernatural. Where on Matthew’s version, the reader believing the promise could reasonably expect tangible goodies in response to asking the "Father" for them, Luke preempts such expectation by altering the text to say "the Holy Spirit" instead of simply "good things," which is, even on the Christian view, a broader generality. There are many similar examples of such loose handling of source material in the gospels. Clearly these folks were *creating* narratives, not *recording* history.

David responded:

Some manuscripts for Luke 11:13 read πνευμα αγαθον, or ‘the good spirit’.

Yes, I’ve heard this before. But this does not alter my point. Luke still moves what Matthew has away from a material interpretation. Matthew’s “good things” is far more open-ended. The author of Luke, very likely drawing from the same or closely similar source, probably saw this as imprudent (since promises about material goods can be tested, and are therefore an opportunity for failure), and recast it in a manner which precludes a material interpretation, thus denying a chance for failure. And we’re still left wondering: Which, if either statement, did Jesus really say?

David continued:

There is the issue of the authors placement of this narrative within the theme he is developing for his audience: ‘The Lukan parallel in 11:9-13 comes in a context where prayer is the issue. The point is fundamentally the same, but Luke narrows the focus. Rather than speaking of good gifts, he notes that the Holy Spirit is given. Since the Spirit is the consummate gift of God and also is a source of enablement and wisdom, the different is not that great.’ (Darrell Bock, Jesus according to Scripture, pg 146 sect. 63)

This reads like a bald-faced attempt at spin. No matter how apologists try to explain it, there is still a difference here, and it is in fact a significant difference. That “Luke narrows the focus” only concedes that the author is reworking the material, and thus not recording history but is inserting his own theological interpretation at this point. Since “good things” is much broader and more inclusive than “the Holy Spirit,” which is exactingly specific, there’s a great difference between the two. If one knew only the Matthean passage, he could certainly be forgiven for taking it to be a promise for material values (e.g., new sandals, medicine, wine, a bigger house, clothing for the children, winning the lottery, etc.). But Luke would rebuke such an interpretation, saying “No, no, no... Those kinds of things aren’t what’s being promised here. Something much different, residing in the spiritual realm, is what Jesus is offering you. Sure, you can ask for new garments, better food, disease cures, a restored spine, wealth, etc., but you need to be satisfied with the Holy Spirit instead.” Indeed, Luke’s upgrade of the saying moves the reward of supplication into the realm of the imaginary (anyone can imagine that some supernatural spirit has moved into his soul), and you can’t blame the guy: in such a realm, there are no failures.

David then wrote:

Also, this is arguably usage of a common figure of speech called synecdoche. (see Blomberg, The Historic Reliability of the Gospels, pg 165)

Perhaps I’m just dense (though I’ve studied a lot of poetry in my day), but I fail to see how anyone would take Matthew’s “good things” as a synecdoche for “the Holy Spirit.” In her standard Poetry Handbook, B. Deutsch defines ‘synecdoche’ as “the naming of a part to mean the whole” (p. 88). What we have in the case of Matthew, however, goes the opposite direction: rather than naming some part which belongs to the whole of “the Holy Spirit,” Matthew supplies a vastly broader term, which (if one values it) could be argued to include “the Holy Spirit,” but certainly much, much more than this. Similarly, it is hard to see how “the Holy Spirit” could plausibly serve as a synecdoche for “good things,” because of reasons given. If it is, as the apologist wagers, an instance of synecdoche, then again we’re left wondering what Jesus really said, for at least one author has revised an earlier source.

David wrote:

One need not conclude that the Gospel authors were inventing their entire stories simply because they tried to speak to their audiences.

That the authors “tried to speak to their audiences” is not the essential indicator of invention or reworking a text, so this statement misses the point. When it comes to sayings in the gospels taken from Q (which Mt. 7:11 and Lk. 11:13 appear to be), I don’t think the gospel writers were so much inventing as they were adapting a source to inform their respective portraits of Jesus. However, this vies against the notion that the gospel writers were recounting eyewitness accounts or chronicling history. Did Jesus say “good things” (Mt. 7:11) or “the Holy Spirit” (Lk. 11:13)? Did Jesus say anything at all? Given the shoddy evidence and the contaminated documents, I’m prone to suppose not.

I wrote:

If a variety of religions which preceded Christianity incorporated worship practices that involved, for instance, the consumption of bread and wine as symbols for the flesh and blood of a resurrected deity.

David asked:

Has someone provided an example of this?

I responded:

Yes, see for instance Freke and Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries, Robert Price's many articles and several books on the matter, Wells, Doherty, and numerous other sources. I certainly don’t have time to spoonfeed you here. But here’s a little taste, from Price’s review of NT Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (which I have, but have not fully read):

There are three fundamental, vitiating errors running like fault lines through the unstable continent of this book. The first is a complete unwillingness to engage a number of specific questions or bodies of evidence that threaten to shatter Wright’s over-optimistically orthodox assessment of the evidence. The most striking of these blustering evasions has to do with the dying-and-rising redeemer cults that permeated the environment of early Christianity and had for many, many centuries. Ezekiel 8:14 bemoans the ancient Jerusalemite women’s lamentation for Tammuz, derived from the Dumuzi cult of ancient Mesopotamia. Ugaritic texts make it plain that Baal’s death and resurrection and subsequent enthronement at the side of his Father El went back centuries before Christianity and were widespread in Israel. Pyramid texts tell us that Osiris’ devotees expected to share in his resurrection. Marduk, too, rose from the dead. And then there is the Phrygian Attis, the Syrian Adonis. The harmonistic efforts of Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, Ron Sider, Jonathan Z. Smith and others have been completely futile, utterly failing either to deconstruct the dying-and–rising god mytheme (as Smith vainly tries to do) or to claim that the Mysteries borrowed their resurrected savior myths and rituals from Christianity. If that were so, why on earth did early apologists admit that the pagan versions were earlier, invented as counterfeits before the fact by Satan? Such myths and rites were well known to Jews and Galileans, not to mention Ephesians, Corinthians, etc., for many centuries. But all this Wright merely brushes off, as if it has long been discredited. He merely refers us to other books. It is all part of his bluff: “Oh, no one takes that seriously anymore! Really, it’s so passé!”

David retorted:

The quote you provided does not address my question.

The quote in fact does provide a brief summary in response to your question, and the other sources which I gave in response to your question go further in depth on the matter. As I said, I am not going to spoonfeed you here.

David continued:

Honestly I can stand Doherty but Price (in his debates) uses so much rhetorical bluster that I rarely want to sit and read him.

Price is a delight to read. He turns what can easily become dry reading into something both informative as well as entertaining. Also, his polemic style is fairly mild compared to (and much more mature than) some of the caustic vitriol I’ve seen many internet apologists produce.

I wrote:

Okay, so long as it’s understood that borrowing from pre-Christian religious models was taking place in the molding of the Christian product. There were many sources, including various Jewish sectarian sources, the Wisdom literature, mystery religions, etc.

David insisted:

If you wish to assert borrowing from the mystery religions, go for it but give me an argument, not just assertions from Price.

I don’t see any need to provide my own arguments for this. Price’s work on this topic is sufficient in my view. I see no reason to reinvent the wheel here.

I wrote:

The evidence is clearly the opposite as you have it, but by deeming the mystery cults as "irrelevant to [your] analysis" as you have, you cut yourself off from a vast area of knowledge and source of evidence. I suspect there’s an apologetic reason why you have chosen to do this.

David responded:

The evidence has yet to be presented.

Notice the bald assertion from ignorance here. Or, if it’s not ignorance, it’s simply blatant denial, this after just noting Price’s work on the issue.

David continued:

I see no reason to accept mystery cult allegations on the grounds that we have no historical evidence of it.

There’s no historical evidence of the Osiris cult, the Dionysos cult, Mithraism, the Eleusinian mysteries, etc.? Here you put yourself in the dubious position of having to prove a negative. Do you think scholars invented these cults in modern times in order to view Christianity as “the great surviving mystery religion” (Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle, p. 115)?

David continued:

There is plenty of explanatory power within Judaism for Christian practices, why need I go seek explanations in places where evidence doesn’t exist?

I agree that there is “plenty of explanatory power within Judaism for Christian practices,” but this is incomplete. Paul drew from the OT (instead of from alleged knowledge of a historical Jesus), but also from the Wisdom literature as well (some of which is apocryphal). But there’s no question that Hellenistic culture also had its share of influence on Paul as well.

I wrote:

Now David, I did pose some questions on how revelation is supposed to work, but I do not see that you’ve addressed them. Instead, you seem to prefer trifling over a passing reference to James as “the brother of the Lord,” which seems to be a very small matter in comparison to the claim to have received a revelation from a deity.

David responded:

As I recall you asked two questions: 1. How does Paul know he has received information from a supernatural source? 2. How do we know that Paul has received information from a supernatural source?

Yes, these are the kinds of questions I was hoping to pursue with you. Paul himself does not seem to address any of them. Going by the content of the bible, we're supposed to just take his word for this. But most people wouldn't do this in the case of anyone else. Why does Paul enjoy this privilege with believers?

David continued:

Doug Geivett delivered an excellent paper at the same Greer-Heard conference that I referenced earlier (Dom Crossan vs NT Wright) on the “Espistemology of Resurrection Belief.” He also has a blog and is very responsive and polite, so I won’t hesitate to refer you to him for a thoroughly more educated opinion. His blog here.

Does Geivett get to speak for Paul? If so, why? What special knowledge of Paul’s mental situation does Geivett have that is not available to the rest of us? How would Geivett know how Paul knew that he received a revelation from a supernatural source? I haven't read Geivett’s paper so I don't know if he addresses my questions or not. And nothing you provide here suggests that he does, other than that you recommend it in response to my questions. Is his paper available online, or if not can you recap any of his relevant points? I'm just curious, when someone like the apostle Paul claims to have received knowledge by revelation, how this works, and why we should take Paul's word for it. For apparently that’s all we have to go on – Paul’s say so. In his writings, Paul certainly does not provide any objective evidence to have acquired knowledge supernaturally. Nor does he explain how knowledge can be acquired by revelation, how one knows that what he is experiencing is revelation (if revelation is something experienced in the first place), or how one distinguishes between what he calls knowledge by revelation and what he may merely be imagining. None of this is addressed in the bible from what I can tell; indeed, it seems that the authors who have contributed to both testaments seem oblivious to these concerns from the very get go. If you believe I am wrong, then I invite you to show me where any biblical author addresses these questions and provides inputs which relevantly settle them.

Now again, I have not read Geivett’s essay, but his own description of what occupies him in it does not give me much confidence that he in fact takes on the kinds of questions I have posed. In a response to a critic of his essay, Geivett recaps its purpose as follows:

I argue in my essay that N. T. Wright, a Christian theist, aims for methodological neutrality in his historical analysis of the evidence for and against a literal bodily resurrection of Jesus in the first century; in contrast, Dom Crossan’s methodology is inherently naturalistic.

If this is an indication of what Geivett seeks to establish in his essay “The Epistemology of Resurrection Belief,” I can only wonder what it has to do with explaining how Paul could know that he had received information from a supernatural source or how we can know that Paul actually received knowledge from a supernatural source.

David wrote:

1. As you’ve already pointed out, you will likely believe a personal experience or account if it comports with your expectations for that situation. I think you may have gone further and said you only believe reports that comport with the laws of nature, but a minor difference given the frequency of miracles.

What I accept as truthful is more involved than what you describe here. Briefly I will say that a claim, at minimum, needs to adhere to or at least be compatible with the primacy of existence principle; there must be some objective input from reality to inform it; it cannot contradict previously validated knowledge, etc. Certainly I would not accept as truth any statement which contradicts, either directly or indirectly, the primacy of existence principle. Conformity with the primacy of existence principle is a minimum requirement for accepting any ideational content as true. If a claim fails on this point, I know that it cannot be true.

David wrote:

2. If someone has an experience, and finds no reason to believe things aren’t as they perceived, then they have good grounds for believing their experience to be authentic.

This is rather vague. At any rate, in any instance of experience, there is perception of an object(s), which is non-volitional, and there is – if one pursues what he has perceived – also the identification of the object(s) he has perceived. This latter activity is volitional in that we can choose to identify what we have perceived or ignore it, and if we choose to identify what we have perceived, the process by which we do this involves selective focus (the proper method is called integration by essentials). This is not an infallible process; we can and sometimes do make mistakes. When someone tells me that he has had an experience in which he has encountered a supernatural being, I tend to wonder what perceptual inputs (if any) were involved and what process he used to identify what he experienced as being supernatural. I also wonder what epistemological safeguards he may have in place (again, if any) which secure his claims from contamination by imagination, particularly because – after studying the issue myself for nearly 20 years – I find it pretty much impossible to distinguish supernaturalism from the playland of imagination. It is on questions such as this that theists tend to be most careful about covering their tracks, or outright evading.

In the case of Paul, who claims that the risen Christ appeared to him, he gives us nothing to go on in investigating these details. Did he see something? Going by what he says in I Cor. 15, it seems that he did see something, but he does not specify this. I’ve known Christians personally who claimed that Jesus appeared to them, and yet they did not claim to have seen anything that they called Jesus, but rather seemed to be imagining Jesus as an invisible, ethereal or immaterial being in their immediate vicinity. So whether or not Paul saw something or thought he saw something is not exactly clear. But let’s suppose for argument’s sake that he did see something. Well, what exactly did he see? He says it was the risen Christ. Well, how does one know what the risen Christ looks like? Is it possible that he saw something completely mundane but mistook it or misidentified it as something supernatural? Of course, Christians want to rule out such possibilities, but it’s hard to see how one could reasonably do so. Christians apparently want Paul to be infallible where the rest of us are clearly fallible. So how did Paul identify what he saw as the risen Christ? He does not say; he gives no indication of how he made such an identification. We’re expected simply to take his word for it. We are apparently obliged to grant Paul wide allowances on these matters which we would not consider giving to a man on trial for murder who claims that a werewolf appeared between him and the murder victim just long enough to do the gruesome deed and vanish in a puff of smoke. Why is Paul an eyewitness of the risen Christ, but the man on trial making such a plea is not likewise an eyewitness? After all, he was there, was he not? The evidence puts him there, that’s why he’s on trial. How could we prove his story is false? We wouldn’t want to be presuppositionally biased against the existence of werewolves, would we?

So people claiming to have seen a resurrected human being, may very well have perceived something, but how they identify what they perceived as a resurrected human being is something that is not explained in the earliest testimony. The gospels were added into the record later in order to put credible eyewitnesses into the story, but these are clearly concocted stories, bearing the hallmark of fiction throughout, and not rationally credible whatsoever.

David wrote:

3. Reporting such an experience to others would follow similar criteria; namely, they would deem such testimony valid given they had no reason to believe the person was crazy, dishonest, or mistaken.

In the case of someone writing 2000 years ago, how can we gauge whether or not that individual was crazy, dishonest, or mistaken except by reference to what he has written? If the content of what he wrote contradicts basic fundamentals (such as the primacy of existence principle), why wouldn’t we suppose that something about him was amiss in some way, be it that he was crazy, dishonest, mistaken, or simply constructing a story which was intended to have allegorical significance rather than historical value?

The policy which involves assessing a person's claims as automatically trustworthy if we have "no reason to believe the person was crazy, dishonest, or mistaken," strikes me as nothing more than a recipe for indiscriminate credulity. But if someone told me that he saw a resurrected man, why wouldn't I think he's at least mistaken, if not dishonest or deluded? Paul does not claim to have the kind of experience which the gospels give to some of Jesus' immediate followers. In fact, Paul gives no indication that he knows about the kind of experience that the gospels report in their post-resurrection appearance scenes. He gives no indication that Jesus had a following of disciples during his earthly life, or that his post-resurrection appearances to Peter and the other apostles were in the flesh and on the day of his resurrection, as the gospels depict it. The loose ends here are simply too reckless to take seriously as historical, and given their underlying commitment to the primacy of consciousness, such accounts cannot be true, for the primacy of consciousness defies the very concept of truth.

David wrote:

Conclusion: A person claiming to have experienced something miraculous is generally not going to convince me; especially if I haven't had personal experiences or reports from other, or most certainly not if I presuppose the impossibility of said events (which I do not). I do think in combination with other types of revelation (such as the Old Testament for those Paul was writing to, remember how much he liked to argue using it?) and with examination: experiences and testimonies lend support to warranted belief. At minimum such things may press a person to further explore something.

So a single claim by itself is not sufficient to convince you, but multiple claims to the same effect are? Apparently in your view, simply repeating claim (even if it's arbitrary?) will vouchsafe its credibility, is that right? It appears that your view of the world lacks a fundamental understanding pertaining to the proper orientation of the subject-object relationship. I have discussed this matter elsewhere on my blog, so I won't repeat myself here. But this deficiency on the part of your worldview is evident due to your willingness to take the notion of the supernatural seriously. Cultures around the world today, some of them untouched by the influence of Christianity, do in fact take superstitions and stories of supernatural beings and phenomena seriously, and, like Christians today and in the past, find ways of making these beliefs compatible with their everyday experience. The common denominator to the willingness to entertain supernaturalism is the acceptance, typically unbeknownst to the believer, of the primacy of consciousness view of reality. Without the primacy of existence principle as one's ultimate criterion in evaluating truth claims, a thinker, no matter how careful otherwise, is susceptible to falling prey to an irrational worldview. This is because, on the most fundamental issue in philosophy - namely the orientation of the subject-object relationship - an individual who grants validity to the primacy of consciousness, even implicitly, has conceded the foundation of his understanding of reality and of man to the hazards of subjectivism.

You allude to different "types of revelation," which sparks my curiosity. How many types of revelation are there, what distinguishes them, and how do they work? You then appear to be saying that a combination of different "types of revelation" with "examination" will lead to a warranted belief. I wonder why examination would be needed for someone who has received a revelation from a divine source. What could this add to the revelation? Isn't a revelation supposed to be accepted as a self-sufficient transmission of knowledge on its own merits qua revelation? If the content of a revelation could be verified by examination, why would it need to be revealed? And what would keep someone from calling a fantasy which has no objective correspondence to reality a "revelation" from a divine source? For instance, what would keep me from claiming that it has been revealed to me by a divine source, that Mesus sits at the right hand of Yeah-Way in the supernatural Jingdom of Bleaven in triumph over Matan, the chief representative of uvil in the universe? For nay-sayers to disparage this truth as incoherent in some way, would only expose them for not having received the revelation. Indeed, I know of 762 other people who also received the same revelation. So with 763 witnesses to these truths, how could anyone dispute this?

When Paul says that the risen Jesus appeared to 500 brethren, and gives no details about time, place or circumstances, or even gives no specifics on what exactly these 500 people allegedly saw or experienced, how does one "further explore" this claim? It seems to come to an immediate dead end. Paul does not even name any of these people, so they're completely anonymous. What alternative does Paul give even his contemporary readers to having to simply take his word for it? What I find fascinating is that Paul apparently claimed to have had a personal visit by the risen Jesus, but he mentions it only once in all his letters, and then only in passing, giving no details to what actually may have transpired. For all that he gives us, he may have been sleeping when this happened. We only have his say so on the matter, and he does not describe his experience, which therefore means we have nothing to examine. He gives us no content to investigate or "further explore." But somehow you still conclude that Paul was telling the truth when he claims to have received knowledge via revelation. How do you determine this?

I wrote:

Also, I do have another question, which I've asked other Christians, but for which I have not received any satisfying responses. My question is this: Why doesn't Jesus just appear before all of us, as he allegedly did before Paul on the road to Damascus (according to Acts anyway), and settle all these conflicts which have raged for 2000 years? I asked a Christian this question once, and his response was "Jesus wants us to have faith" (which only confirms the disjunction between faith and reason). To which I asked another question in response: Are you then saying that Paul, the most prolific writer of the NT, did not have faith?

David responded:

If you're heading where I think you are, I don't want to get into the problem of evil this weekend, maybe another time. :)

No, that's not what I had in mind. I'm simply wondering, as I asked, why Jesus doesn't just appear to everyone in some profoundly compelling way, such as he is alleged to have done for Paul on the road to Damascus. This is not the problem of evil. It is what I call The Problem of Saul. Jesus is supposed to be God in Christianity, and God according to Christianity is said not to be a respecter of persons. Moreover, before Jesus' appearance to him, Paul (then Saul) was supposed to be a vicious persecutor of the church, far more formidable than some internet blogger like me. So if Jesus is no respecter of persons, why doesn't he just appear before me and everyone else? It would settle things quite quickly, and it would probably go a long way in averting heresies, apostasy, rogue cultish spin-offs, etc.

Now, perhaps you are like the late D. James Kennedy, who apparently did not believe in an omnipotent Jesus. Without explanation, Kennedy asserted in passing that “Christ cannot appear personally to all of the billions and billions of people that have lived on the earth since” the time of Paul.” But if Jesus is supernatural, "controls whatsoever comes to pass" (Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, p. 160), and is not constrained by the laws of nature or the contingent facts of the universe, why suppose that he couldn't appear before everyone? He can know everyone's thoughts, can he not? And in his divine nature, he's omnipresent, is he not? What would prevent Jesus from appearing to anyone or everyone if he wanted to? D. James Kennedy?

In conclusion, we see that the objections and counterpoints which David has raised have already been anticipated in the critical literature, and are easily answered with a little digging. A fringe benefit to that digging is the discovery of more and more problems for the literalist Christian interpretation of the New Testament’s stories. That what we have in the New Testament is a wellspring of legends and tall tales, is undeniable. Try as they may, Christian apologists, driven by their desire to protect a fantasy, will struggle in vain to validate their religious beliefs. Sadly, futility is their only reward.

by Dawson Bethrick

Another Response to David, Part 6: Signs of the Legends

In this post, I continue my long-awaited response to David's comments in response to my 29 July post In Response to David on I Corinthians 15:3-8.

I wrote:

Yes, you adhere to supernaturalism on the one hand (which defies explanation), and yet demand more and more and more explanation when it comes to hypotheses involving embellishment, fabrication, misunderstandings that beget further misunderstandings, manipulation of sources (such as OT "prophecies" of Jesus), etc., all couched in a worldview which condemns human beings as depraved liars. Got it.

David responded:

Not even close Dawson, and I’m surprised you would hurl such insults if you are really laboring in love as you claim. It only makes the discussion less productive.

Why consider my statement above insulting? You do adhere to supernaturalism, do you not? The bible is full of supernaturalism, so because of your confession as a Christian, I assume you do adhere to supernaturalism. And so far I've not seen how supernaturalism can be explained (to explain it would be to defuse it) or how supernaturalism can be accepted as a rational explanation to anything. Suppose someone tried to explain the growth of green plants because some supernatural being makes them do so. How is that a reasonable explanation? I've written amply on the issue of supernaturalism (see for instance here), and have concluded that proponents of supernaturalism consistently fail to explain how someone like myself can distinguish between what they call "the supernatural" and what they may merely be imagining.

Also, it is the Christian worldview, not mine, which views man as contaminated with some malady or force called "sin," something we are said to be born with or into, something that is part of our nature whether we like it or not. There's no use denying this aspect of our existence, Christians say, for it is traced back to the fall of Adam, the first man, according to the Genesis myth which got the whole thing started. It's never been clear how one "inherits" sin from Adam, or how one man's guilt can be hereditary. But then again, supernaturalism defies explanation, and we're just supposed to believe that this curse is passed on from generation to generation, without exception. In Rom. 3:12 Paul declares "there is none that doeth good, no, not one." To be true, this statement would have to include Paul himself. This statement was preceded by the declaration, in 3:4, "Let God be true, but every man a liar," which I've always thought a very puzzling statement, for it seems to put this decision, that "God [is] true" and "every man a liar" in the hands of the believer. That makes sense on my analysis of Christianity as ultimately being rooted in imagination. But Christians want to believe all this is true. But if it's true, that men are inherently depraved and involuntarily prone to lying, why should I trust what any Christian says? It's completely self-undercutting, even coming from the bible, because it was written by men, and, as men, they are involuntarily prone to lying according to their own worldview.

And here I am, I have offered a non-supernaturalistic explanation of the data which we find in the New Testament, and it's rejected because a few inconsequential things here and there are left "unexplained." But if being able to explain everything comprehensively were the guiding criterion for qualifying an account as reasonable, then surely we ought not accept the Christian account of the New Testament.

David had written:

3. Your interpretation provides little explanatory power, since if 'brother of the Lord' simply means James was a Christian, this is nothing unique and honorific at all.

I responded:

Did you read what I had written? Paul clearly thought that James was a "pillar" of the church at the time (I referred you to Gal. 2:9). He was not just another convert in Paul's view.

Now David writes:

This doesn't at all lend credence to your argument about the meaning of the phrase in Galatians 1.

Why isn't Paul's reference to James as one of the pillars of the church allowed to inform the context of his reference to James as "the brother of the Lord"? The word 'Lord', as I have shown, is a title, not a name. The impression I get from Paul is that James was an elder in the church with some elite claim to authority. If Paul had meant that James was a sibling of Jesus, why didn't he say "a brother of Jesus" instead of "a brother of the Lord"? All the data points to a title being used of James rather than a biological relationship which most likely wouldn't have mattered to Paul anyway, given his abhorrence for the flesh.

David continued:

Paul could say James was purple in chapter 2, but why assume that has any bearing on the meaning of a phrase in chapter 1?

I don't think Paul calling James purple in chapter 2 would be at all comparable to what we actually have. In chapter 1, Paul mentions, in passing and without further explanation, what appears to be a title for James, since he uses the word 'adelphos' (which Robert has shown can have a wide variety of meanings) in relation to "the Lord," which for Paul is the post-resurrection Jesus. As Robert pointed out in a comment, if Paul meant to specify a biological relationship between James and Jesus, he would have been better off using kasignêtoio instead of adelphos. Also, it is unlikely that he would have meant to denote this kind of relationship in reference to "the Lord," for reasons stated. Furthermore, that Paul clearly refers to James as a central figure in the Jerusalem church, so the implication here is sufficiently strong that Paul could only mean some positional status by virtue of his place as one of the "pillars." Meanwhile, I've seen no good reason why this reference would suggest a biological relationship. The only rationale I’ve seen for this involves an appeal to the gospels, but I’ve already addressed why this is at best shaky, and persistence in taking this course in the matter requires one to ignore the enormous context weighing against the authenticity of the gospels.

I wrote:

Specifically what evidence "points to the historicity of the Gospels"? What exactly do you mean by this? What evidence is there that a deity incarnated itself, was born as a human being to a virgin mother, performed miracles and cured congenital blindness, rebuked demons and devils, raised dead people back to life, and was himself raised back to life after being crucified? We have stories, and stories can be made up. Tell me what evidence supports these stories?

David responded:

It seems like you have only supernatural events in mind for the historicity of the Gospels. There are voluminous works out there on the historical Jesus from all spectrums of the issue which give evidence for this. Need I summarize them all here?

No, you needn’t summarize these works, because they aren’t what I’m asking for. Volume after volume of text is not what I’m asking for. I’ve seen enough “argument” for these things. When I ask for evidence which “points to the historicity of the Gospels,” I’m asking for something more substantial and more solid than just some apologetics book. There are books out there which argue for the reality of near-death experiences, astrological influences, ESP, sorcery, Mormonism, Scientology, etc. Defenseless readers are taken in by this stuff all the time, because the authors make it seem like these things are all true. Authors of these kinds of texts play on the reader’s imagination and rely on specious reasoning, and that’s how they hook them in. Josh McDowell, Bill Craig, NT Wright and yes, even Geisler and Turek, are all good examples of this. It gets even more perverse with the presuppositionalists.

All Christians have for validating the gospel narratives are the storybooks themselves, and sources which variously date later but are taken as confirmation of these storybooks. But in the end, stories are all they have, stories which become “real” in the believer’s imagination, because he envisages the characters and events which they depict. They are, in essence, the precursors to today’s cartoons.

I wrote:

As for the legend theory, I’ve already pointed to things which Paul says that conflicts with the later record, such as his view of rulers.

David responded:

I already asked how Paul’s general description of rulers is relevant to a specific description in the Gospels.

I gave as an example the view which Paul gives in Rom. 13:3 that

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same.

This is something Paul is saying within the lifetime of those who have supposedly been taught that Jesus was put to the cross under Pilate at the urgency of the Jewish leadership of Jerusalem. As such, Pilate would strike Paul’s readers – had they known the passion stories of the gospels – as an obvious and blatant counterexample to the general assessment that Paul gives here. But Pilate is no isolated case in the gospels and book of Acts. Recall in Matthew, we have Herod the Great, alleged to be responsible for the slaughter of innocents upon hearing of the birth of a new king (see Mt. ch. 2). There is also the story of Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, who as ruler of Galilee had John the Baptist beheaded at the request of his daughter, according to the NT that is (see Mt. ch. 14). Then of course there was Pontius Pilate, who sanctioned Jesus' execution by the cross. Then later, according to Acts, James the son of Zebedee was killed by Herod Agrippa (see Acts. 12:1-2). With all these murderous exploits taking place by rulers and governors, why would Paul issue a generality like the one he gives in Rom. 13:3, when the gospels and Acts portrays some very vicious rulers and governors?

Now, if Paul had no knowledge of these things, and in fact had known differently about rulers and governors, thinking they were fair, then Paul's proclamation about rulers and governors might make sense. But why wouldn't he know about these things? Is it possible that Paul was just uninformed? But how could that be the case, given his travels and humanitarian ventures? It seems difficult to believe that Paul would have been so ignorant of the behavior of rulers and governors which not only impacted the lives of believers, but also helped to propel the very events of the narratives which we find in the gospels and book of Acts. Besides, Paul was supposedly “divinely inspired,” having his knowledge by result of it being revealed to him from a supernatural source. This would seem to make ignorance of these evil rulers all the more unlikely. And if Paul were so divinely inspired, wouldn’t he have at least some inkling of the state-sanctioned persecution to come? Surely Christians would not suppose that Paul’s generality could apply to Nero, Severus, Maximinus, Decius, Diocletian, etc. Clearly many rulers and governors of Paul’s time (even of the Roman state itself) were not fair, as he describes them, nor were many to come. At best, Paul’s statement seems wildly naïve. We can reasonably ask: What rulers and governors did Paul have in mind here? Paul himself does not tell us, which is not surprising.

But Paul’s statement that rulers and governors is only one of numerous points of discrepancy between what we read in his letters as opposed to what we read in the gospels and the book of Acts.

In I Cor. 5:9-11, Paul writes:

I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.

Did Paul know of the gospel Jesus, who kept company with adulterers, harlots, publicans, and other vicious types?

For Paul, spiritual maturity clearly involves doing away with “childish things.” Famously, he tells us (I Cor. 13:11):

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things

In I Cor. 14:20, Paul writes further:

Brethren [believers might mistakenly think he’s speaking to Jesus’ biological siblings here], be not children in understanding... in understanding be men.

But according to the gospels, Jesus taught oppositely, requiring that one become as a little child in order to receive the kingdom of heaven. In Mt. 18:3, for instance, Jesus is made to say

Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

And in Mark 10:15, Jesus is made to say:

Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.

Other quotes suggesting a similar sentiment can be found in the gospels. But the question is: if Paul were divinely inspired in his writings by the same Jesus as the gospels depict, would he say things that directly conflict with what the gospels record Jesus as saying?

For Jesus, salvation (the kind that grants entry into heaven anyway) is available if one should “keep the commandments” (cf. Mt. 19:16-19). But Paul would have none of this, as this is a soteriology of works. For Paul, salvation is through faith:

If thou confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness: and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

The two do not seem to agree even on a matter so important to the believer as the formula for salvation! Jesus is clear in affirming the view that salvation comes as a result of obedience, while Paul is clear in affirming that it comes as a result of confession and belief that Jesus rose from the dead, a component which is not at all present in Jesus’ salvific recipe. But if Paul knew that Jesus had taught that obedience to the Torah was necessary for salvation, would Paul ignore this and give his own formula? Or do we have two different traditions being represented here, combined into the same Testament and jointly affirmed by the institution known as the church? One thing, however, that both formulas share is the element of personal voluntary determination: one can choose to obey commandments just as he can choose to confess Jesus is Lord (though I would not argue that beliefs are comparably governable by choices; for instance, I cannot choose to believe that werewolves exist). This is a major difficulty for Calvinism and similar subcults which focus on the involuntary recipes for salvation, such as the need to be rebirthed (cf. John 3:5-8 et al.). Steven B. Matthies, in his Christian Salvation? supplies a telling survey of the different views of salvation found in the New Testament.

When it comes to the resurrection appearances, the view which gospels give us differs significantly from what we find in Paul, and even amongst themselves the gospels have some major points of discrepancy. Wells summarizes these problems as follows:

As, then, appearances of the resurrected Lord were of importance in the early church in establishing apostolic authenticity, it is at first surprising that those recorded in the gospels correlate poorly with those posited by Paul. The canonical gospels know nothing of an appearance to James, or to five hundred. And although Cephas as, according to Paul, the first to see the risen one, Peter plays but a very minor part in the gospel resurrection stories... In Matthew and John, appearances to women (unmentioned by Paul) are given pride of place. This suggests that the gospels were written at a time when establishing one’s apostolic authority by reference to appearances had ceased to be important. Mark, whose Christology led him to represent Jesus as dying deserted by his disciples, introduced women instead of them as witnesses of the crucifixion and burial, and naturally represented these women as going to the tomb on Easter morning, where they receive the resurrection news from an angel in the empty sepulcher [also unmentioned by Paul]. Matthew initiated a tradition of actual appearances of the risen one to these women by supplementing Mark’s story... It is also noteworthy that, while Paul has nothing to say of the locality where the appearances occurred, later Christian documents which are explicit on this matter contradict each other. Matthew locates the appearances to the disciples exclusively in Galilee, whereas Luke confines them to Jerusalem, seventy miles away. Such major discrepancies concerning a matter of the greatest importance to early Christianity suggests that stories of the appearances are legends. Initially Christians would simply have believed that Christ was risen; later, various stories about his appearances entered the tradition as attempts to substantiate this claim... That Christ rose from the dead does not of itself give him any share in God’s sovereignty. To achieve this he must be exalted to heaven, to sit at God’s right hand. Resurrection, then, and exaltation or heavenly session are not identical, although it was natural for the earliest Christians to assume that the latter the former immediately. Paul does not suggest any discontinuity when he writes of “Christ Jesus... who was raised from the dead and is at the right hand of God” (Rom. 8:34). And in Phil. 2:8-9 the sequence of events is said to be: Jesus dies and God exalts him to heaven. In Paul’s view, the post-resurrection appearances were made from heaven... The evangelists, however, writing a generation later, were anxious to establish the reality of the resurrection by making the risen one return – even if only for a few hours – to the company of disciples who had known him before his death. It was natural to represent him as doing this before his exaltation, and so the possibility was given of terminating his resurrection appearances with a distinct act of ascension. This possibility was not taken up by Mark and Matthew, but fully exploited by Luke. (In the appendix to Mark the ascension is stated in phrases clearly drawn from Luke.) In Luke and Acts the physical reality of Jesus’ post-resurrection body is brought out by making him eat and drink with his disciples (Acts 10:41) as he had done before his death. Paul would surely have rejected as blasphemous any claim to have eaten and drunk with the exalted one, and his claim that this person had appeared to him is intelligible, as we have seen, as religious experience. Luke’s story of the risen Jesus consuming broiled fish (Lk. 24:41-3) represents later apologetic, relevant to a situation where Christians were replying to Jewish and Gentile incredulity with a narrative which established the physical reality of his resurrection. (The Historical Evidence For Jesus, pp. 44-45)

So as the story was retold, the legend grew. For Paul, Jesus was crucified and resurrected and immediately joined God in “heavenly session.” For the later writers concocting narratives intended concretize the growing story, they began to insert a second earthly sojourn between resurrection and exaltation, something Paul knows nothing about. And since this was not enough to combat non-Christian incredulity, Luke has his Jesus actually eating food. It’s quite a fish story, but we’re not done yet.

The profound discrepancy between Paul’s epistles and later canonical tradition is carried into Acts, which is written by the same hand that wrote the gospel of Luke, and which is supposed to document the travels of Paul on his missionary journeys to places like Ephesus and Corinth. Before going to Corinth, Paul went to Athens, and according to Acts he gave his famous public square speech (speeches are a big thing in Acts, and make for interesting study). A comparison of the speech that Acts puts into Paul’s mouth with what Paul writes in his letters is quite revealing. Wells summarizes:

That Paul preached effectively in Athens and won followers (as Acts alleges) before leaving for Corinth (17:34-18:1) – there is no suggestion that he was driven out – is incompatible with Paul’s own statement (1 Cor. 2:3) that he reached Corinth in “fear and trembling,” obviously after a very rough time in Athens. If he ever did speak as Acts represents him, then he indeed went a long way to accommodate his Christian views to pagans – so far as to eliminate the redemptive significance of the cross, which he stresses at every turn in his letters.

Luke knows nothing of Paul’s idea of the efficacy of the crucifixion. For him, this event was a miscarriage of justice, a sin of the Jews, in that they perpetrated it when they should have known from their scriptures that Jesus was their Messiah.

Apologists have tried to argue that at Athens Paul modified his real views, in accordance with his declared principle (1 Cor. 9:10) of becoming like a Jew to win Jews and like a Gentile to win Gentiles. But the context shows that what he had in mind when he wrote this was observation of the Jewish religious law (which in his view is in any case unnecessary to salvation). In Jewish company he is prepared to be bound, for instance, by Jewish food laws, but in pagan company he feels free to abandon them. What he does not mean is that he is a hypocrite who will change his theology so as to win converts. In Galatians he insists that, as far as the theological substance of his preaching is concerned he will make no compromise: “Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:8; cf. the whole of Gal. 2).

Apologists who reconcile Romans with Acts by making Paul modulate his theology thus pay a heavy price for the consistency thus achieved. But if, in fact, the author of Acts knew nothing of Paul’s epistles and little of their theology, then the address to the Athenians becomes quite intelligible. Luke lived in a world where the Christian mission had turned from Jews to Gentiles, and so he naturally wished to show that Christianity is acceptable from Gentile premises. To this end he makes Paul say that pagan religious ideas need by slight recasting to become Christian, that Greek lore allows of Christian interpretation. (The Historical Evidence For Jesus, p. 162)

A major issue which Acts tries desperately to smooth over is the relationship between Paul and the Jerusalem council. This involved not only whether or not Paul subordinated himself to the Jerusalem leadership, but also the issue of whether or not Gentile Christians were supposed to adhere to aspects of the Mosaic law, specifically circumcision. According to Paul, he did not subordinate himself to the Jerusalem church. In fact, he seems quite defiant of them (cf. Gal. 2:6). Paul saw himself as the apostle to the Gentiles (Rom. 11:13), but he did not view this as an assignment from the Jerusalem; on the contrary, according to his own report the Jerusalem church accepted this as Paul's role (Gal. 2:7-9), but were not responsible for commissioning it to him.

The picture in Acts is significantly different. Acts has Paul subordinating himself to the Jerusalem church at every turn. Acts 15:23-29 recounts a letter written by the Jerusalem church to Paul and Barnabas who were in Antioch. This letter included instructions on what Paul and Barnabas should be including in the content of their missionary teaching and preaching. Among those instructions are the following injunctions (Acts 15:29):

that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.

These are requirements that Paul and Barnabas are instructed to impose on Gentile converts. And Acts portrays Paul and Barnabas happily going along with these instructions:

Acts 16:4

And as they went through the cities, they delivered to them the decrees to keep, which were determined by the apostles and elders at Jerusalem.

Paul himself, however, gives us a completely different account of this episode in Gal. 2:10, where he says of the Jerusalem council's requirements:

They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do.

This contradicts what we read of this same situation in Acts, for Paul makes no mention of the injunctions which, according to Acts, the Jerusalem council issued in their instruction letter, and says that the "only" thing they wanted was that he and Barnabas "remember the poor." It appears that the author of Acts has drawn from a tradition about Paul of which Paul knows nothing, a tradition would subordinates Paul to the Jerusalem council. For indeed, it would be hard to suppose that Paul would go along with the injunction against food sacrificed to idols, for in 1 Cor. 8:4-6 he speaks directly to this:

Therefore concerning the eating of things offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords), yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live.

It seems that one could easily use a similar line of argument that Paul gives here in response to the prohibition of consuming blood and "things strangled." Since both blood and "things strangled" are "of whom are all things and we for Him," they should be just as acceptable as "things offered to idols." What’s more, Revelations 2:20 has Jesus condemning the consumption of “things sacrificed unto idols,” and puts this on a par with fornication.

The claim that the injunctions in Acts. 15:29 are best understood as an injunction against participating in pagan festivities, as some apologists have argued in order to overcome the problem, is unpersuasive. For if this is all that the Jerusalem council intended, why didn't they say this? Indeed, it is quite a different matter, for things sacrificed to idols were often sold to the public for personal consumption. Thus one need not participate in the festivities which produced things offered to idols, and still consume them. As if anticipating such a spin on things, Paul confirms the point in I Cor. 10:25-26, where he writes:

Eat whatever is sold in the meat market, asking no questions for conscience’ sake; for “the earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness.”

Of course, it seems that one could justify just about any chosen action by appealing to the slogan that "the earth is the LORD's, and all its fullness," especially when the god so designated is said to have "a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists" (Bahnsen, Always Ready, p. 172).

At any rate, we still have a problem when Acts tells us that the Jerusalem council issued a decree instructing Paul and Barnabas to have converts abstain from things offered to idols, blood and strangled things (Acts 15:29), while Paul tells us that all they wanted of them was that they remember the poor (Gal. 2:10).

To make matters worse, in Acts. 16:1-3, when Paul meets up with Timothy in Lystra, the apostle compels Timothy to be circumcised - my reading of Acts suggests that Paul performed this operation himself (eww!). Surely the god of foreskins and calves' blood would have been pleased, but Acts has Paul do this to appease the local Jews. And yet according to Paul's own letter (Galatians), he rebuked Peter in Antioch for appeasing a Jewish faction which had been sent there by James (Gal. 2:11-12). This on top of Paul's vehement denial of any requirement that Christians be circumcized (cf. Gal. 5:6).

According to Paul's letters, there were some scandalous disagreements between them, much of it revolving around the place of the law in the new Christ-centered religion as it involved Gentile converts. This is evident in Galatians where Paul gives his side of the dispute and recounts his rebuke of Peter, something the book of Acts completely ignores.

I wrote:

You believe the literalist Christian propaganda because you’ve invested yourself so deeply into its program, and admitting that your leg has been pulled is just too much to bear, especially when the messenger is someone so “loathsome” as a confessed atheist. I realize this, David, I was in your shoes at one point in my life. Only I woke up.

David responded:

It’s rather unfortunate that my beliefs be relegated to mere “devotion to a system.”

Not that I did, but why would this be so unfortunate? Isn’t it the case that you’re devoted to the Christian faith? If it is more than “mere ‘devotion to a system’,” what is it?

David continued:

It’s not as if you have any particular insistence on the negation of my beliefs, or hold stock in the legend theory for any reasons relevant to your own Christianity experience.

I’ve learned things that I cannot sit down on. I have learned from many readers that my work has benefited them in some way. Several have come to me and thanked me for helping them find their way out of the darkness. I am not sponsored, as are many professional apologists, by some ministry or 501(c)(3) organization hiding behind charitable programs.

David wrote:

No not at all! I am completely biased and blind because of my worldview and you are the wise old atheist waking me up with the somber light of disbelief.

I don’t know if I have the ability to wake anyone up, but if I can help people discover and learn about a rational worldview, even one person at a time, I am pleased to try.

David wrote:

I find that rather silly, but amusing nonetheless. :) I’m 24 years old and grew up in a Christian home in the deep Southern Bible belt. I wildly abandoned my parents’ faith in college and eagerly followed the natural sciences as the sole means of attaining truth. I did things I never dreamed of (and will have nightmares about later in life), having been freed from the morality of my youth. Then, through events in my life, God took hold of me. I picked up the Bible and actually read its claims about God, mankind, and the world as well as the relationship between them. It makes perfect sense to me, and everything in the Bible meshes with what I’ve experienced personally in my “walk”, or whatever the popular Christian word is these days. In addition, I find the 4 facts about the resurrection very compelling.

You are still very young, David. When I was your age, I too was smitten with Christianity and other forms of supernaturalism. I have taken Paul’s advise, only in its own most consistent terms, and have put away such childish things.

David wrote:

So you see, from my perspective I too woke up, and I was also in your shoes.

I don’t think you’ve been in my shoes. Were you an Objectivist before becoming a Christian? I highly doubt it.

David wrote:

Actually I know a limited amount about your shoes, but I think you have a great deal of confidence in your dismissal of Christianity.

It’s important to note that, contrary to what many believers have charged, my rejection of Christianity is not an irreducible primary. I do not begin by denying the Christian god. No one begins by denying. We begin by recognizing, then integrating, then affirming, then assessing, etc. How the mind does any of this is a mystery to most individuals; their minds are the most alien objects in their entire existence and experience. And they are not encouraged to understand it in an objective manner. Instead, they are immediately taught, from before the time they can even speak in many cases, to fear an invisible magic being with whom they can have no actual dialogue, and to obey instructions they’re not supposed to understand on pain of supernatural threat. They are indoctrinated into such a mindset long before they have had the chance to develop the cognitive tools needed to defend themselves philosophically. There is no doubt that religion preys upon the philosophically defenseless.

My confidence in my critique of Christianity is subordinate to my confidence in my critique of mysticism as such, because I understand why it is false, why it is dangerous, and what the proper alternative suitable to man is. It would be very difficult for me to just sit on this knowledge and do nothing about it. Hence I broadcast it, free of charge, with open admission to all who would like to come.

David wrote:

I'm sure you've thought this, but I'm always one to say doubt everything even your skepticism.

Doubting is not a prime directive in my worldview. It has it’s place, but it is surely not a starting point. It can’t be; to suggest that it is, is to commit the fallacy of the stolen concept. We begin our intellection with positive recognition of perceptually self-evident facts, facts that are available to us firsthand, in the “here and now,” for this is where our awareness begins – with that which is immediately perceivable. The suggestion that we should “doubt everything, even your own skepticism,” is intellectually counterproductive. For one, there is no good reason why I should “doubt everything” (the claim that there is a good reason to doubt everything would itself need to be subject to doubt), and, also, skepticism is neither my standard nor my method.

David wrote:

indeed all other sources examined use the phrase specifically to identify Jesus’ siblings.

I responded:

And I’ve addressed this several times now: had later Christians not known that ‘brother of the Lord’ was a church title not at all denoting a sibling relationship, it could easily have been mistaken by them as meaning a sibling relationship, or opportunistically seized on in order to contrive such a view. Using ‘brother’ to denote others as believers was common parlance; it still is today. When I was a Christian, everyone in my church was so eager to call me his brother. Also, it is doubtful that Paul would have put stock in a relationship of the flesh. Nowhere does Paul say that Jesus had any siblings.

David then wrote:

Are you basing your assertions about later Christians on what is probable or what is possible?

My inferences are based on what is reasonable given both the overall context of Paul’s teaching as well as the specifics of the case at hand. Is it really that unreasonable to suppose that Paul, who refers to James as one of the “pillars” of the church (Gal. 2:9), was making use of a title here?

In Gal. 1:19, Paul indicates that whoever “James the Lord’s brother” may be, he was one of the apostles. He writes there:

But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.

If we compare this to the list of apostles given in the gospels, an interesting picture emerges. Here is Mark 3:16-19, where the 12 apostles are listed:

And Simon he surnamed Peter; And James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder: And Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Canaanite, And Judas Iscariot, which also betrayed him: and they went into an house.

This list is repeated in Matthew 10:2-4:

Now the names of the twelve apostles are these; The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip, and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the publican; James the son of Alphaeus, and Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus; Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.

The two lists agree on the names, which are as follows:

1. Simon Peter
2. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother
3. James the son of Zebedee
4. John the son of Zebedee
5. Philip
6. Bartholomew
7. Thomas
8. Matthew
9. James the son of Alphaeus
10. Thaddaeus (surnamed Lebbaeus)
11. Simon the Canaanite
12. Judas Iscariot

There are two individuals named James in the lists which Mark and Matthew provide. They are James the son of Zebedee and James the son of Alphaeus. What’s curious here is that there is no “James the son of Joseph,” as we would expect if “James the Lord’s brother” were supposed to be the biological sibling of the earthly Jesus. Apparently “James the Lord’s brother” was not understood to number among “the twelve.” Or was he? Again, confusion reigns here. But in the end, this is not my problem.

David wrote:

If all your probability assessments rely on the legend theory, I think you’re in big trouble.

Threats of being “in big trouble” will not move me.

I had written:

I’ve spoken to this already. The phrase "brother of the Lord" as used by Paul most likely indicates that James had some very high position in the Jerusalem church; for Paul, James is one of the “pillars” of the church (Gal. 2:9).

David responded:

You’ve given no evidence that “brother of the Lord” indicates this, and neither have the quotes you provided. Speculating about unnamed “extant texts” doesn’t do much for me.

Here you simply display the persistence of your own confessionally motivated denial. You want “brother of the Lord” to validate the sibling relationship which the gospels make explicit between Jesus, not because anything in Paul’s letters warrant this, but because you want to preserve the literalist view that the gospels portray authentic history. Indeed, you have provided no evidence to support the view that Paul really did have a biological relationship in view with his reference to James as “the brother of the Lord.” I’ve given several reasons why this interpretation is highly unlikely, and your response to these reasons is to dismiss them with the wave of your hand, to deny them outright if for no other reason than that you simply prefer otherwise.

I wrote:

Especially because it references "the Lord" as opposed to "Jesus," the phrase strikes me very much to be a title rather than a reference to a biological sibling. I don’t think a reference to a sibling here would at all make sense.

David responded:

Actually when the alleged ossuary of James was found, one of the reasons some critical scholars rejected it as authentic was precisely because it named him “brother of Jesus.”

Well, there you go, then. A later Christian could have easily come along and used his inscription on the ossuary to correct what he considered a problem in the written record.

I wrote:

I see that you resist answering my question. At any rate, I will answer yours:

David responded:

On the contrary, I clearly stated that I didn’t think James’ sibling status had much to do with it.

Yes, you’re right, you did. Had I time to edit my response I probably would have caught this. My apologies.

by Dawson Bethrick