hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick) (06/02/85)
You might want to consider who the audience is for your pamphlets. I can fairly well guarantee that they will not convince any well-educated sceptics. You may not consider this to be a problem, but you did ask for reactions. The most plausible attacks on the NT go roughly as follows. [Note that I don't believe all of the following. I am simply saying that you have to be prepared to answer it.] *********************************** Jesus was basically a messianic prophet. He proclaimed that the End was near, and people should clean up their act. Originally, he was simply announcing that the Son of Man was going to come soon to bring in the End, the Son of Man being someone else. Mk. 8:38 supports this: "If a person is ashamed of me and of my teaching in this godless and wicked day, then the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels". (cf. Lk. 12:8-9) In this passage Jesus seems to be making a distinction between himself and the Son of Man. After his supposed resurrection, Christians decided that Jesus himself had been the Son of Man, and they lost this distinction. Thus the Gospels confuse where he was talking about himself and about this future Son of Man. One can see that this sort of thing can happen, from the following (which are reports of the same saying in three different gospels): Mt 16:13: "Who do people say the Son of Man is?" Mk 8:27: "Tell me, who do people say I am?" Lk 9:18: "Who do the crowds say I am?" When Jesus was crucified, his disciples simply couldn't believe that that was the end. Eventually, they came to believe that he was still present with them. Those subjective experiences finally gave rise to the story of the Resurrection. Note that the earliest account, in I Cor. 15, doesn't say anything about an empty tomb. It simply says the Jesus appeared to the disciples. We can tell that this is a subjective experience, because Paul includes himself in the list of appearances. We know from Acts that the appearance to Paul is what we would call a "vision", since the people around him didn't see anything. This suggests that the other appearances were the same. It is easy enough for legends to grow up after the fact. Indeed we can even see part of the growth of this one in the NT. Compare Mark's young man (Mk 16:5) with Luke's two men (Lk 24:4), and finally Matthew's angel (Mt 28:2). If the empty tomb claim wasn't made until later, it would have been impossible for anyone to have produced Jesus' body. We need not assume that the authors of the NT were dishonest. They simply didn't have the same ideas of what it means to write a gospel that you have. They believed it was their job to give an account that was materially correct. But they didn't have our idea that history needs to agree in a literal way with the external events. They were more like painters, who try to show the inner truth, than photographers. In fact their art is probably closer to modern historical fiction than to scientific historiography. *********************************** Now to return from playing devil's advocate to being myself. What I have just presented is sort of the party line of old-fashioned liberal Biblical criticism. The thing about it is, a lot of what is said is true. You are simply not going to convince me that the NT documents follow our modern ideas of what it means to be history. The example of the young man/angel is just one. Look at almost anything that Jesus said that appears in Mt, Mk, and Lk. There will be differences. Usually not substantial ones, but enough to show that the authors were not trying (or at least not succeeding) at being tape recorders. A typical example is the story of the rich man, Mt 19:16-30, Mk 10:17-31, Lk 18:18-30. In Mk and Lk, the man starts by saying "Good Teacher, what must I do ..." and Jesus responds "Why do you call me good? ... No one is good except God alone." In Mt, this is toned down. Jesus no longer denies being good in such a clear way. It looks more like the man is being told that he should not hope to be good: "Teacher, what good thing must I do to receive eternal life?" "Why do you ask me concerning what is good? There is only One who is good. Keep the commandments if you want to enter life." In Mk and Lk, Jesus volunteers the commandments, and does not include "love your neighbor". In Mt, the man asks "What commandments?", and Jesus includes the "golden rule". Wording differences such as this continue throughout the passage, although the overall structure is the same, and much of it is word for word identical (at least in English), including the famous "it is much harder for a rich person to enter the Kingdom on God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle." If you want to be convincing, any defense of the NT is going to have to start by acknowledging that the NT was created and passed on by human beings, and was subject to the same errors as any other human endeavor. The trick is to avoid slipping from this to the conclusion that therefore it has no validity at all. In one sense I agree with your comparison to other ancient documents. All ancient historians are known to have made mistakes. But that doesn't mean that we throw out everything they say. Unless we have some reason to think that an author is unreliable or biased, we generally accept what they say provisionally. Where there are conflicts with other authors, or with archaeological evidence, we try to find some basis to choose, or just reconcile ourselves to the idea that we may never know for sure. The Bible as a whole has a generally good record for standing up to comparisons with archaeological and other objective evidence. Not perfect, but good enough to support its reliability. (Clearly this record applies mostly to the OT, since the NT is relatively hard to test archaeologically. However it does seem to portray early 1st Century Palestine faithfully, so there is at least some objective support.) But I think I disagree with you in how far purely objective evidence can go. At some point, the reader is going to reach a basic question of faith: Does this account have spiritual power for me? Do I see God through this man? In effect, we end up making the same sort of judgement about the NT that we would make about any human testimony. Do I find the witnesses and what they say credible? I don't think we can finesse this question by establishing beforehand that the NT is error-free. I think the most we can establish objectively is the following: - the authors seem to have had traditions available that went back to the period of time supposedly covered by the accounts. We can tell this because they gave a reasonably reliable account of life in that period, even though they were presumably writing in a very different culture. - transmission of the documents seems to have been very good, as you indicate in your section on "reliability of the NT" - there is at least some external evidence that Jesus at least lived. (though I have problems with some of your evidence. There is some scepticism as to whether Josephus really wrote "if indeed he should be called a man." Nor do I think Pliny's document proves anything other than the existence of Christians who believed in the existence of Christ. The basic problem here is that Christians were in a good position to surpress all embarrassing evidence.) But I am very wary of any attempt to establish more objectively. In the final analysis, we are simply going to have to make a judgement about the believability of the witnesses. Since this discussion touches on the issue of the inerrancy of Scripture, let me say that I regard this doctrine as being a result of inappropriate speculation. It follows roughly the same principle that the first Century Jews did in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah: In both cases, the argument starts out by assuming it knows what God would or would not do: "God would not allow the Messiah to be killed." "God would not allow his message to be transmitted in a manner that is subject to error." I agree that if I were God, things would be different. I would no doubt make my will clearly known to my subjects, and supply appropriate thunderbolts when they didn't listen. But God does not seem to have choosen to work that way. He seems to have subjected both his Son and the testimony about his Son, to the vicissitudes of human life. I believe that inerrancy is a close cousin to docetism. They both refuse to believe that God would truly come into history. Where I differ from the classical liberal view, is that although I do not view Scripture as inerrant, I do view it as reliable. I mean reliable to be taken in its normal sense. When I say that I consider a person to be reliable, I don't mean that he never errs, or that he reports things perfectly. I mean that he doesn't make substantial errors. I do believe that the authors of the NT understood Jesus, and that the portrait that they painted of him is faithful in any way that matters.