Not long ago, fellow blogger John Zande wrote an excellent post titled “Jesus Christ: Just Not Worth a Sheet of Paper.” It’s actually not as derogatory as the title suggests. Some apologists have suggested that the reason we have no contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life is that paper was so expensive. That’s the argument John deals with in his post.
His post is great — you should read it. But what I actually want to write about is one of the comments that someone left on it. Diana of NarrowWayApologetics.com left a lengthy comment that I decided to include here in its entirety. I identified with it a bit. It reminded me of some of the thoughts I used to have as a Christian:
One of the main reasons people believed Paul was because he explained the reason for Jesus coming into the world. His teachings were amazing. They explained how Jesus “fulfilled the law and the prophets.” I wrote this comment in response to John Zande’s comment on my blog last night. Forgive me for posting it here. Just ignore if you don’t want to read it.
“This passage about Jesus fulfilling the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17-20) is one of the main reasons I believe the Gospel message. The incredible ways that Jesus did this are beyond human ability to create. I don’t think any mystery writer could have weaved together the incredible ways Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets.
I know this post is long, so if you want to skip the parts between the dotted lines, I understand. I just wrote it for anyone who might be interested.
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First of all, there are many ways Jesus fulfilled the law. In fact, believers are constantly astounded by how intricately Jesus fulfilled the law.One way he fulfilled the law was by fulfilling the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the seventh day of rest that the Jews were commanded to obey. Jesus fulfilled the law of the Sabbath by becoming our rest for us. (Hebrews 4:9-11) He said his burden was light and his yoke was easy. Christians no longer practice the Sabbath. They worship on Sunday, rather than Saturday. They enter into his rest and no longer do religious works for salvation. (They are saved by grace through faith.)
Jesus fulfilled the law when he became the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. His death on the cross was similar to the Exodus story, which described the lamb, whose blood would be placed on the doorposts of the home, causing the death angel to pass over that home. (Hebrews 9)
Jesus fulfilled the law when he became the unleavened bread of the Exodus story. Leaven is a symbol of sin and false teaching (1 Cor. 5:6-8, Matt. 16:12). Jesus fulfilled this feast by being sinless and being the TRUTH.
Another way that Jesus fulfilled the law was by becoming a tithe (firstfruits) for us. (Leviticus 23:10) He fulfilled the tithe by becoming the firstfruits from the dead when he was resurrected. (1 Cor. 15:20) Christians are no longer bound by a tithe, instead we are told to be cheerful givers. We are also promised that there will be a resurrection for us because of what Christ did for us.
Jesus fulfilled the law when he became a light to the Gentiles. In the law of Moses, the people were commanded to leave behind the gleanings (or leftovers) of the harvest for the poor and aliens. (Lev. 23:22) This would be fulfilled at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came down and the gospel was preached in all languages, offering salvation to all, not just the Jews. (Acts 10:34-35)
These fulfillments of the law were actually the first 4 feasts that would be celebrated every year by the Jews. They would be celebrated according to the seasons. The feasts celebrated during the early rains were the fulfilled at the time of the early church. Three more feasts are waiting to be fulfilled at the end of the age (or at the time of the latter rains). These three feasts are the feast of trumpets (representing the return of Jesus), the feast day of atonement (representing the salvation of the Jews), and the feast of tabernacles (representing the time when we will all be with the Lord).
There are so many other ways in which Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets. And none of it has to do with Jesus expecting or commanding Christians to obey the law to perfection. It has to do with how it’s impossible for anyone to keep the law. That is why Jesus came. How could any human conceive of a way to have even a made-up, fictional character fulfill all these things? And I’ve barely scratched the surface of the way Jesus accomplished these things.
The greatest concern I feel burdened about is how to convey the magnificence of what I’m trying to explain. He was the manna from heaven. He was the living water. He was the high priest in the order of Melchizedek. He is the “I AM.” He is the Word become flesh. He became a slave for us. (Philippians 2:7) He became a curse for us. He became sin for us, so we could become righteous before God. He offers us mercy because his blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat. All of this is explained in the scriptures.
I haven’t even begun to explain the way Jesus fulfilled the prophets.
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The story of Jewish history and the giving of the law is actually a way to PROVE the reality of God’s plan for the salvation of humanity through Jesus Christ. One random fact doesn’t prove anything, but the cumulative effect of ALL the fulfillments makes the Bible a miraculous book. This is why some of the brightest and best minds in the history of the world have loved and received Jesus. It isn’t a decision based on emotion alone, but a decision based on knowledge. And the more I learn, the more I am in awe of what God did and how he accomplished it.”
To say that the story of Jesus was just created by pasting together myths, fictional narratives, sayings, and borrowed phrases (as Ken Humphreys does) is a ridiculous claim because only a Christ could have conceived of a Christ. Who could have created the amazing Jesus portrayed in the Gospels and explained further by Paul?
Of course, I now see that there are several problems with this line of thinking. In 2015, Star Wars Episode 7 is supposed to hit theaters. Will it shock anyone if the movie syncs up perfectly with the previous 6? The thing is, when there is already an established back story, it’s not impossible to construct a narrative that builds upon it. The fact that we as readers see the parallels between the stories of Jesus and events in the Old Testament is not an accident. The authors intended for us to see those parallels, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t have invented them — even if Jesus was a real person.
Matthew is one of the best books to look to for evidence of this. Matthew is the only book that tells of Jesus’ family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s infanticide. Both events, fleeing to Egypt and the infanticide, seem to be inspired by Matthew’s reading of the Old Testament. Hosea 11:1 says, “out of Egypt, I called my son.” Matthew says that this prophecy was fulfilled when Jesus’ family returned after fleeing to Egypt. But when you read the entire chapter of Hosea 11, it’s very evident that the passage has nothing to do with the Messiah, but is simply talking about Israel’s period of captivity in Egypt.
Matthew also claims that Herod’s slaughter of infants in Bethlehem was to fulfill this prophecy:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.
But once again, when we read all of Jeremiah 31, this was no prophecy at all. The chapter is talking about Israel’s captivity in Assyria. Nothing else.
The author of Matthew took these passages and used them to add parallels to the story about Jesus’ birth. It didn’t require magic or divine inspiration to do that — it only took knowledge of these passages. Just like the people working on Star Wars 7 don’t need divine intervention to let them know about Darth Vader.
Diana ends her comment by asking who could have created such a compelling story. Who could have created Christ? But why couldn’t we ask this about anyone? Who could have created Darth Vader? He’s quite a compelling character himself. Who could have created someone as magnificent as Santa Claus? Or Paul Bunyan? Or Achilles? Or King Arthur? Just asking this question doesn’t really mean anything. If Jesus never existed, then someone did just create his story. Or if he was a real person, but not divine, then his story was embellished. We have to draw our conclusions about Jesus based on the evidence, including the fact that Matthew seemed to feel the need to create “prophecies” to give Jesus credibility.
Finding Truth 
A good place to start would be with the Priestly (P) Source, a wacky group of priests in captivity in Babylon, who decided that Israel had been overthrown because its people had grown away from their god (whereas the truth was, that Jerusalem refused to continue paying tribute to Babylonia, which really upset the Babylonians!). So they set about re-writing the earlier books that had, to this point, been written. They decided, for example, that a god who pops down to earth for strolls, “in the cool of the day,” as found in Genesis 2 (which used to be Genesis 1), carries on one-on-one chats with Adam and Eve, and even sews them garments on the Celestial Singer, was WAAY too human a god to accurately portray their Yahweh, so they entirely rewrote the creation fable, creating a more ethereal god, a god more majestic and further removed from humanity – now THAT’S what i would call an agenda! They had intended that their version of the creation fable totally replace the creation fable the Yahwist (J) Source had written, but 150 years later, when the unnamed Redactor finally got around to piecing all of those stories together, decided he didn’t know which version would please his god more, so he left both, contradictory versions in, instead.
In other instances, in order to “sanitize” the early parts of the Bible, the anonymous Priestly (P) Source, in some cases deleted some parts entirely. If you’ve ever read George Orwell’s 1984, you should have some idea of what they did.
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Diana,
Here’s a quick example of a spot in the Bible that seems to show evidence of the editing that arch has been talking about.
In Ezra 1:1-4, we see the following:
Now compare this passage with 2 Chronicles 36:22-23:
These are the last two verses in 2 Chronicles, and they are identical to the first two and a half verses of Ezra. But for some reason, the passage in 2 Chronicles stops mid-thought. “Go up” where? Kind of makes you wonder what state these manuscripts were in that caused them to be edited in such a way. Does 2 Chronicles contain part of Ezra, or does Ezra contain part of 2 Chronicles? Examples like this point toward revision in a work that is supposed to be inspired…
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2nd Thessalonians is believed by many biblical scholars, not to have been written by Paul, but rather to have been a forgery.
In the time of Eusebius, many argued that not only was the prose of “John” in Revelations SO different from that of the Gospel of John, that they couldn’t possibly have been written by the same author, and of those, many argued that it was a heretic named Cerinthus, who wrote Revelations, wanting to promote his own view.
1st Peter is highly suspect among biblical scholars as not having actually been written by the character named Simon Peter, while most experts agree that 2nd Peter definitely was not (see, J. H. Elliot’s Peter, Second Epistle of, Anchor Bible Dictionary). 1st Pete was written by a highly literate, well-educated, Greek-speaking Christian who was intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their Greek translation, the Septuagint – Peter, or, “Rocky,” as I like to think of him, was a fisherman in a land where barely 3% of the population – primarily the wealthy and upper class – could even read or write.
Hebrews, Ephesians, 1st & 2nd Timothy, as well as Titus are also highly suspect by biblical scholars, as being forgeries, rather than letters by Paul.
Were these forgeries, Diana, part of your invisible designer’s grand plan? And how does that work, exactly, in terms of making the book fit together like a seamless, well-written masterwork?
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Well over half, 15 of 27, of the “books” of the New Testament, were letters written by Paul, Diana, a man who never met your Yeshua (his real name, Jesus was only the Greek translation) – can you imagine someone preaching to us today about what John Kennedy’s purpose was, who never met Kennedy, and only knew of him from word-of-mouth sources?
Sure, the majority of us today can read, and of course we have a number of means of global communication – it’s possible to actually SEE Dr. Martin Luther King get shot, but in those days, unless you were in that upper 3% who could read, if you knew anything, it was because you witnessed it personally, or you heard about it through some long, convoluted, multi-membered game of “telephone,” or “Chinese Whispers,” or however the game is called where you’re from.
What if that were your 5 o’clock news source? “This is Channel 8 News – today, in the Middle East, Hassan told Omar, who told Fatima, who told American soldier, Diego, who told his Commanding Officer John, who told my producers, who told me, that ground forces in Afghanistan should possibly prepare for a new Taliban offensive – more news on this, as it filters in –”
Unless I’m mistaken, Diana, Nate believes Yeshua may have actually lived, though he doubts that he was the Superman he was touted to be. I, on the other hand, have serious doubts that he ever existed – literature by Christian sources certainly point to his existence, but one has to question the reliability of testimony given, that advances the witness’ own agenda.
I’ve yet to find a single neutral source, or better still – one bitterly opposed to Christianity – who will attest to the actual existence of Yeshua.
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