"Defamation of Religions"

The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) has been pressing (link) for "defamation against religions" to be placed on the United Nations' Human Rights agenda. The trouble here is that it is not overly clear about what this means.

We have seen Pakistan's blasphemy laws used as a blunt instrument against Christians, usually by people with a personal grudge. There are even some Muslims who feel that the central claims of Christianity are an 'insult to Islam', because if the New Testament as we have it today is true, then various claims of the Qur'an are, it follows, false. If Jesus is the eternal Son of God and not just a human prophet, then the Qur'an is wrong when it claims he is not. If Jesus died on the cross, then it follows that the Qur'an is wrong. And if the Qur'an is wrong, then it is not the word of God. At this point the sensible thing to do would be for us to reason together - but it has always been easier to use violence, as centuries of history have taught. And it's not just Muslims, it is found in Christendom as well, Roman Catholics against Protestants and State Churches against Nonconformists. The book of Acts records cases where Jewish and pagan leaders used violence in an attempt to silence opposition - it is always easier to do that than it is to allow true religious freedom.

Not that there is not such a thing as defaming a religion. The first example that comes to mind is the infamous 'Blood Libel" against the Jews, first invented in the Middle Ages. The Blood Libel is the idea that the blood of a Gentile child is part of the ingredients of the Passover matzos - a claim that is patently ridiculous in the face of the prohibition against eating blood that all Jews observe! There have been many lies told about religious groups with the intention of creating hatred against them, and there still are. A few examples that come to mind are the ancient claims that Christians were cannibals (probably based on a misunderstanding of the Eucharist) and committed incest (probably misunderstanding the Christian practice of calling one another 'Brother' and 'Sister'. Paul says that the Apostles had the right to have "a sister as wife', meaning freedom to marry a Christian woman). Modern claims that come to mind include one saying that all Muslim men have to kill a non-Muslim to be considered truly men, and that human sacrifices take place in Mormon temples. These lies really are defamation, and should be punished first of all by society - we should refuse to listen to them and treat those who maliciously repeat such claims as the troublemakers they are.

But to restrain religious freedom - and as an inheritor of the traditions of English Nonconformity wish to extend that freedom as far as possible - because one religious group is upset by another religious group's claims is frankly tyrannical. I do not like the claims of Islam about Jesus, God and the Bible - but they have the right to teach them, and I have the right to challenge them. I find the teachings of Mormonism about God frankly pagan - but I am very glad that they have the freedom to build their temples, as I have the right to give good and true reasons why Mormonism is not Christianity. My feelings - and your feelings - must not be made the basis of restrictive laws. Christianity is not spread by the sword in any way, and the truth will be triumphant over error in a fair contest.

Other Jesuses

This past week I had another visit from a member of the Watchtower organisation, otherwise known as the Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm also reasing April DeConick's book on the Gospel of Judas. So my mind is moving on things unorthodox and Christological. Then I saw a comment by a Mormon that "Mormons do not believe in another Jesus."

Another than what? I thought. The answer is, another than Christians have historically believed in, another than that taught in the Nicene Creed. Let me give an illustration from American politics. Initial source here.

Ssaome conspiracy theorists say that Barack Hussein Obama, current President of the United States of America, is in fact a Kenyan-born man called Barry Soetero, who is a devout Muslim. On the other hand, his supporters say he was born in Hawaii, his name is Barak Hussein Obama, and he is a liberal Christian. Now, take a person who holds one of these views, and a person whom holds the other. Do they hold to the same Obama? No, Barry Soetero and Barack Obama are two different people, with different histories. One is eligible to be the president of the US, the other is not. It doesn't matter that both men are thinking of the same human being - they think such different things about him that they cannot both be true.

Just so with Jesus. Look at the Jesus of the Watchtower, or the Jesus of Mormonism, and compare them with the Jesus of the Nicene Churches. They are quite different. Fundamental to the Nicene faith is that Jesus is eternal, "of one substance with the Father", and that there is only one, eternal, God. The Mormon, on the other hand, believes that God became God, and was a man who lived on another planet, and that Jesus was born in the pre-existence to one of his father's spirit-wives. To the Mormon, not only was there a time when Jesus was not, but there was a time when the Father was not!

Or take the Watchtower. They say that Jesus is a created being, not co-equal with the Father, who is alone. And we could go on. The fact is that they do believe in a different Jesus. And ony one can be right!

Postmodernism exemplified

I often regret having taken a module on "Rural Change" at university instead of "Postmodern Geographies." Why is this? Because Postmodernism is rampant as a philosophy! Although my father is an academic, he is most decidedly not a Postmodernist, and has written against it. Thus I exist in the world where history is a matter of facts, not just of opinions.

And, having referred to my father, may I say that he has a good point when he says that the Postmodern approach to history does not work. After all, who wants to say in public that the opinion that the holocaust did not happen is jolly good? Holocaust denial is a pariah subject in academic history, as witness the fate of David Irving. I saw no Postmodernists rush to his defence, declaring that his opinion is just as valid as the opinion that Hitler murdered millions of Jews, Gypsies and other "undesirables".

In my experience, Postmodernism can be wearying for the apologist. Let me give an example. A while ago I engaged a Postmodernist in debate on the internet (informally). He had stated that the Bible had been changed over time, and that we could not know what the documents originally said, because the "Church" had control of them (I summarize). I replied that in fact there has never been a time in which any one person or body had control of the text. Rome and Constantinople have never been willing to submit to each other. I also pointed out that the papyri found in Egypt were under no-one's control.

He re-stated his views, adding "How can you be true to yourself knowing this?" Note the implication that to disagree with him is a sign of intellectual dishonesty. Since postmodernism does not hold absolute truth to exist, it cannot say "you're wrong." All too often the substitute phrase or idea is "you are intellectually dishonest". Thus a personal attack takes the place of reasoned argument.

I answered that there are good factual reasons for holding his view to be factually incorrect, but we were arguing on different planes. He then changed his tack to the idea that "nothing in the Gospels is original", and that it is "an old tale new told." I replied that I would like to know what his sources are so I can examine them for myself, and pointed out that the parallels usually claimed are seriosuly over-stated. His reply was along the lines of:

"My view that the Gospels are 'an old tale new-told' is a deeply held personal belief..."

There you go. This is code for "back off or I'll be offended". Never mind that he began by attacking the trustworthiness of the Bible (surely a 'deeply held personal belief' of Christians, his "deeply held personal belief" cannot be questioned.

Now, for someone like myself, there is the temptation to view this as some sort of victory, showing that his ideas are not based on fact, but are part of an irrational belief system. The trouble is, Postmodernism doesn't really care for the facts, at least not this man's brand of it. This irritates me, as it makes debate all but impossible!

Apologetics Questions that Ought Not to Exist - 3.

"Isn't the story of Jesus based on hundreds of other dying and rising saviour-gods in antiquity?"

The short answer to this one is - no, it isn't. Responsible research has shown the parallels commonly cited to be vastly overstated. In extreme cases, such as the movie Zeitgeist, the parallels are striking because they are made up. There are many good Christian works that answer this objection, such as Nash's The Gospel and The Greeks, and the book Reinventing Jesus. It is important to emphasise also that the mythological gods were not conceived as existing in our world, but in the mythological past when the gods ruled on earth (at least in the case of the Egyptians).

Often the striking parallel is created by emphasising the similarities of a myth with the story of Jesus, while failing to mention the differences. Osiris, for example, was murdered by his jealous brother who seized the throne from him. According to some forms of the legend, his body was then chopped into pieces, and his wife Isis reassembled the pieces and re-animated the body by magic so that she could conceive a child by him. Osiris thus became the first mummy to become a daddy (sorry, couldn't resist). He then became the green-skinned god of the underworld. Compare this to the glorious resurrection of Jesus, and what you find is that Osiris is merely an animated corpse, while Jesus is alive for ever and ever. Again, Osiris was re-animated to father a child, who would defeat Set, his father's murderer, and rule in his father's place. It is Horus, who did not die, who is the "saviour", not the dead Osiris. Incidentally, this is as good a place as any to remind readers that the account of Horus given in Zeitgeist is fabricated. It sounds like the Jesus story because it is!

The Gospels were most likely written in the 1st century, between the late 50s AD and the late 60s. The reason for this conclusion is that not one mentions that the destruction of Jerusalem fulfilled Jesus' Olivet discourse. Now, lest any object that this was deliberate, I must point out that none of the Gospel writers had any reason to represent his writing as earlier than in fact it was. Indeed, there are probably less than five years between the writing of the lst Gospel and the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus died about AD 30, thus we have about thirty years between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels.

Now, this is simply not long enough for legends to develop. There are approximately one thousand years between the time at which the historical King Arthur lived and the date of Sir Thomas Mallory's Morte d'Arthur, the developed form of the Arthurian legend. Thus for Jesus to have become a figure of legend in a matter of decades would itself be incredible.

Another point that tends to weaken the idea that the Gospels are merely "an old tale new-told" is the methodology used by those who advocate the idea. A scatter-gun approach utilising a wide variety of pagan deities is used, thus we are asked to believe that the Gospel writers deliberately created a mosaic from pagan deities, a claim that holds no water.

Apologetics Questions that Ought Not to Exist - 2

"The Bible has been translated, re-translated, copied and changed, so how can we even know what it said in the first place?"

This is a bad question, and the person using it has probably picked it up from The Da Vinci Code or some such. First of all, tell them that Prof. John Charmley of the University of East Anglia, England, one of Britain's leading academic historians, has described Leigh and Baigent, whose writings undergird Dan Brown, as "Fabulists." In other words, serious historians laugh at the ideas in the book.

Second, it shows the questioner has no idea about how we got our Bible. They suppose that each translation is made from a translation, whereas all good translations are made from the original language texts. A cursory study of textual criticism, for example via James White's book The King James Only Controversy, should help here, as it shows that the agreement between copies is staggering. There is something like 5% of variation that is meaningful and viable. There is finally no evidence that it has been changed by anybody, as no-one ever had exclusive control over all manuscripts in all places. The long-running disagreements between Rome and Constantinople actually help here!

So no, we can trust the Bible, and the existence of multiple English translations does not mean that we have no idea what the texts originally said!

Apologetic Questions that Ought not to Exist - 1

As we come up to Easter, we face the inevitable flood of sceptical articles and programmes about Jesus and the Gospel. Some of them ask good questions (to which good answers exist), others are just silly. In this short series, God willing, I shall deal with some of the latter type.

1. "There's no archaeological evidence Jesus ever existed."

This is a depressingly common one. Depressing because it evidences a total ignorance of how we do archaeology, and what archaeology can do. I recently came up against this idea on another blog, in the comments. I responded:

"My dear Anonymous, we have four accounts of the life of Jesus, plus a whole religion based on him. What else do you want? I know of NO credible historian who would agree with the proposition that we don't know if Jesus existed or not! Obviously they debate whether or not he really was all Christians believe he was, but there is pretty much a consensus that a man called Jesus of Nazareth was crucified outside Jerusalem some time between about AD 30 and 35.

"Given that he was a teacher from a peasant background, what archaeological evidence would he have left that we could pin on him? What archaeological evidence do we have of Rabbi Akiva? Or Philo of Alexandria for that matter!"

We are also faced with the fact that Jerusalem has been destroyed several times since the time of Jesus. The climate in Jerusalem is such that anything written on anything other than stone would have perished long ago, and the stone has been re-used and damaged. So we really have a very slim chance of finding any objects that can be associated with any individual from that period.

It gets worse. Jesus was a peasant from Galilee. Those whose names are preserved in stone inscriptions are the upper classes, but Jesus appealed to the outcasts of society. He was not a priest or associated with the government. Jesus did not own a fancy rock-cut tomb, and since he rose from the dead, his bones were never placed in an ossuary.

Result? We ought not to expect to find any direct archaeological 'evidence' for the existence of Jesus. He is, however, so well-attested in literature that it is quite absurd to suggest that this shows he did not exist. A good comparison is with the aforementioned Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, about whom we know much less. Like Akiva and Philo, Jesus was primarily known as a teacher, and thus did not leave the sort of monuments that archaeology can unearth. Rather his monument is in his teaching.

Of course, Jesus is more than a teacher, he is the saviour of the world, but on earth he was known primarily as a teacher. So ask those who say "there's no archaeological evidence Jesus existed," what sort of evidence they would expect there to be. Then point out that Jesus is in reality one of very many figures of antiquity who are known only from literary sources, and that the literary sources about Jesus are VASTLY superior than they are for any other ancient figure.

Zeitgeist - or, another bad conspiracy theory

Recently, on the way to the dentist, I saw a spray-painted graffito directing people to the Zeitgeist film on line. This film is frankly one of the best arguments against the internet available. Containing nearly no factual information at all, it argues that Jesus did not exist, and is a composite of various ancient gods. The film points in particular to Horus of ancient Egypt, and points out a number of "compelling" similarities between Jesus and Horus. In fact, hearing the Zeitgeist account of Horus, you think "that sounds like Jesus." The reason for this is of course that it is Jesus!

Yes, the people behind Zeitgeist have presented an entirely fabricated Horus mythology that is founded on the Biblical accounts of Jesus (for the most part), and use this as if it proves something. It proves nothing beyond breathtaking duplicity.

One of the best sources on the subject that I have found is here. The author is not a Christian, and for that reason the site is a useful one to point those who are thinking that Zeitgeist may have a point to. This author has no pony in this race. Of course this means there are statements in the article that I would not agree with, but it removes the impression that this film is based on truth. There is also a very helpful anotated Bibliography. Inexplicably, the author seems to think the King James Bible is really, really bad. I do not know on what basis.

'Conspiracies and the Cross'

We all remember the Da Vinci Code book and movie, and as we look back to 2004, we wonder just how it was that the book and the film created so much hype in the first place. But the fact of the matter is that the book was only part of a whole series of attacks on the nature and authority of the Bible, and the facts of Christ's life. Many excellent books answering the Da Vinci Code were released at the time that the film came out, but now that the Da Vinci Code is a distant memory in the remainder bin of life, that research needs to be put in a more permanent form. Thus Peter Jones' Stolen Identity, and the excellent Reinventing Jesus by Komoszewski, Sawyer and Wallace, were born. Now Timothy Paul Jones, author of Misquoting Truth, the response to Bart Ehrman, has given another book of this type, Conspiracies and the Cross.

This is popular-level apologetics at its best, serious research underpins eveything that Jones says. Not only has he obviously worked hard to understand the ten 'conspiracies' that he deals with in this book, but he has read widely to refute them. The book is structured around these ten 'Conspiracies', widely-popular theories that attack the Gospel. Each chapter begins by simply laying out the 'conspiracy', then giving a list of those who say so. The rest of the chapter interracts with these sources, finally refuting the 'conspiracy'. Jones' prose is lively and often humorous, though without ever becoming crude or insulting. There is a ten-page bibliography, and twenty-nine pages of endnotes that display the scholarship that underlies the answer. This is not a simplistic book, and Dr. Jones is plainly very much aware of contemporary scholarship. He refuses to buy into easy answers or dubious interpretations of facts, rather exposing the reader to the facts as they are. The book will probably be most useful in a more intellectual setting, such as a university, where the Christian faith is under intellectual attack. It contains a study guide for use in small groups, which will again be of most use in a more intellectual environment, such as a Christian Union at university.

I liked this book, and I think that the books that are now trying to put the research that was done to debunk Dan Brown (vastly more than was ever done by Dan Brown) into more permanent form are a great contribution to the corpus of apologetics.

'The Historical Reliability of the Gospels'

As the son of an historian, and a man interested in history myself, I find the question of the historical reliability of the Scriptures, and especially the Gospels, to be of great interest. We have all heard people telling us that the Gospels are not history, but legend, written up later (well, I have, but then I come from a liberal Anglican background). How do we respond to this?

Craig Blomberg's book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels has been a standard work on this subject for two decades. While it has been of great usefulness, these two decades have seen new challenges to the historicity of the Gospels, or rather, new forms of the old challenges. A great deal of material has been written on both sides of the debate. In 2007 a new, completely revised and updated, edition of Blomberg's book appeared, now with references to Bart Ehrman and to the Jesus Seminar, as well as other developments in this field. The book is quite welcome, as it brings togther in a useful single volume a huge amount of important research. For the reader who knows that there are answers to the challenges of the sceptics, but does not know what they are, this book will be extremely helpful. It is my favourite book on the subject - not that the opinion of an assistant pastor in South Wales should count for very much, of course!

Blomberg considers the question of historical methodology, the history of the question, and such questions as miracles, differences between parralell accounts of the same events, and apparent contradictions. This is a very thoughtful book, and at 416 pages, inluding indices and a fifty-six page bibliography, certainly weighty! It is published by IVP Academic in the US and Apollos in the UK.