151 thoughts on “Does This Make Any Sense At All?”
I’ve read many books from the late Raymond E Brown. At one time he was the “Go to Guy” for the Catholic Church. He indeed ruffled a lot of feathers within his own church and Protestant Theologians alike because he let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah, I can’t stand how one-sided these kinds of books are. And I guess they have to be, considering the material they’re working with.
The one that always stood out to me was the treatment of the Tyre prophecy in Ezekiel. I know I beat that dead horse all the time, but it was one I had actually researched fairly well, and I couldn’t believe how these guys were trying to act like it was amazing evidence for the Bible.
I’ll have to check out Brown. Peter Enns strikes me that way too — I really enjoyed his book Inspiration and Incarnation (I think that was the title). I thought it was very fair and honest.
It was after reading a Peter Enns article that my faith finally cracked as he proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Bible was not historically accurate.
But what does puzzle me is that Enns seems to continue to have faith himself. I considered very briefly whether faith could be reconciled with an erroneous Bible but could not. Enns like Raymond E Brown seems to be able to reconcile this better than I could.
Brown like Enns seems to see a version of God that communicates through a flawed human medium, This brief clip from Brown does address this matter to some extent:
Not to blow my own horn (well, maybe just a little), I felt I presented both scripture and argument in my book. Perhaps not “scholarly” arguments, but ones the average reader couldn’t help but miss. My hopes were that the seeking believer would read the book (since it wasn’t totally anti-Christian) and be able to discern that what they had been taught had some flaws.
Of course, whether I accomplished any of that … ??
Yeah, Nan, I thought you were very fair in your book. In fact, while I’ve read some skeptics who don’t treat the facts fairly, most of the ones I’ve read have come across as being pretty objective.
Nan, have you gotten feedback from any believers who have come across your book?
Not that I’m aware of … except for one negative review on Amazon and from the comments, it’s doubtful the person even read the book.
There’s been a couple of acquaintances that I would call “borderline” believers who have read it (at least they bought a copy), but I’ve never received any feedback from them — which is actually not all that surprising (although one did comment that I used a lot of words she had to look up (!))
BTW, I just checked the Amazon reviews and had a new one (from an “Amazon Customer”) that was positive. I THINK i know who wrote it, but can’t be sure (a friend).
The bigshot Christian apologist over on Theology Web is Nick Peters, son-in-law of well-known evangelical apologist, Mike Licona. He likes to debate skeptics. He is a smart guy and a well-informed apologist. He is very proud of the fact, as he states on his forum on TW, that unlike many Christians, his belief in Christianity is based on evidence, not personal experiences and feelings. And the event for which he claims to have such good evidence is the Resurrection of Jesus. Below is a comment I left for him today:
I like your thinking, Nick. Skeptics get really tired of some Christians using their personal experiences and feelings as evidence of the veracity of the Christian claims. Most of us like evidence, just like you. And I also like that your belief in the veracity of Christianity rests on the evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus. If only all Christian apologists would believe like you.
I have a suggestion. Both sides, Christians and skeptics, should accept the positions of the majority of NT scholars on the claims of the Resurrection and then let people decide for themselves if this event really happened. So what do we have:
1. Public execution.
2. Public burial.
3. Sealed tomb.
4. Guards at the tomb for most of the period of time in question.
5. Empty tomb, three days and two nights later. (No known witnesses to the body leaving the tomb, however)
6. Post-death sightings, sometimes by hundreds of people at once.
7. Dramatically changed behavior of disciples.
8. Very shameful, very strange new belief system in an Honor-Shame society.
9. A belief never heard of in Judaism, yet believed by several thousand devout Jews.
10. Rapid spread of Christianity.
11. Willingness of thousands of Christians to be persecuted, tortured, and painfully executed for their beliefs.
Now the question:
Based on the agreed upon evidence above, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, do you believe that a dead man named Jesus of Nazareth was brought back to life by an ancient Hebrew God, exited his sealed tomb by some manner other than moving the stone, appeared in a superhero-like body to his grieving friends and family (but apparently no one else), and forty days later levitated into the clouds and from there, in some fashion, traveled to the farthest extent of the universe (or possibly into another dimension) to sit on a throne at the right hand of the ancient Hebrew God? Are there any other more naturalistic explanations for the evidence above, or, are the miracle/supernatural/magical explanations of Christianity the most probable explanation?
“It seems to just run off an assumption that God’s there and that it’s true. At least, that’s how it sounds to me.”
This is the exact problem I’ve faced recently.
My FIL wanted to “educate” me on the historicity of the Resurrection of Christ. And he proceeded to throw me the book by WLC which I have read previously. The funny thing is even before he threw the book at me, we were already discussing about modern day apologetics and I’ve already told him that I do not find WLC’s argument persuasive. I also mentioned the tactics WLC used, and why WLC had to resort to this instead of relying on CS Lewis apologetics 101.
So him throwing me WLC’s book after me telling him WLC is a hack job was amusing to say the least.
But wait! There is more!
So I utterly debunked everything WLC said in that book – chapter by chapter, point by point, and what he did was simply throw another book at me – Gary Habermas Minimal Jesus (which I have also read) – without addressing any points that I’ve raised.
Then, in his email, he added the fact that it is great that we are having this discussion as his faith in the Resurrection has actually increased by talking to me.
That was kinda the last straw for me, and I called him out on it.
Firstly – clearly he didn’t read any counter-apologetic books on the historical facts about christ, so I told him what he is doing is akin to someone who simply watch Fox news and reaffirm himself that Obama is a Muslim.
Secondly, the fact that he said his faith in the Resurrection grew suggested that he has NEVER read WLC nor Gary Habermas prior to talking to me, and I told him as much. I told him this is clearly out of line as the reason we are even having this conversation in the first place was because he was convinced I got my conclusion wrong, and he actually has evidence that Jesus resurrected. However, in our cursory exchange, it is clear he have never explored the evidences, and on the other hand I have done all the necessary readings and found the “evidence” wanting. Yet, somehow I’m the one who has reached the “wrong conclusion”. And of course throwing books at me that I’ve already read while you haven’t is insulting to say the least.
___________________________
That was 2 weeks ago, till now there’s no reply for him so I guess that is tacit admission to my charge.
Well, that was a pretty lengthy response to Nate’s one liner lol.
I want to say that what you experienced is totally crazy, powell. Unfortunately, I think it’s pretty much par for the course. 😦
When my wife and I were going through our deconversion process, I had many people ask to speak to me about all of it, and I readily agreed every time. But in almost every case our interactions were essentially the same thing you’re going through with your father-in-law. In fact, I can only think of one person who ever read anything that I suggested, and he actually had the decency to admit that he didn’t have good answers for it. I don’t know why he’s remained a Christian ever since, but I at least admire the fact that he didn’t try to BS me.
It’s funny: Conservative Lutherans tell my deconversion was because I was never a true conservative Lutheran. Evangelicals tell me my deconversion was because I was never a true (born again) evangelical. And fundamentalists tell me my deconversion was because I was never a true fundamentalist.
My deconversion is always due to me not believing and understanding the one TRUE flavor of Christianity…never the fact that all of Christianity is wrong.
I have presented two (and I have more) hypothetical, naturalistic (non-miracle) explanations to the Christians on Theology Web which accounts for all the evidence related to the Resurrection claim of Jesus, and Christians still believe that the supernatural explanation is far more probable than any possible naturalistic explanation for the Resurrection! It is mind-boggling. And they think that I have a presupposition.
Here is what one of them said about my alternative, naturalistic explanations that explain all the evidence for the alleged Resurrection (evidence as agreed upon by the majority of scholars/experts), and I have even allowed for the empty tomb to be considered an historical fact:
“Yeah, it’s pretty ad hoc. I’m certain Occum would have something to say about Gary’s re-imaginings. In my opinion, a lot of this does comes down to presuppositions though. If you believe there exists a divinity who has the capability to raise people from the dead, then there really isn’t any reason to deny where the evidence leads. The Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide wasn’t a Christian, but believed the evidence was insurmountable, and led to the conclusion of a resurrection. A skeptical non-heist or deist is always going to look for naturalistic reasons to explain the miraculous.”
What I have realized in talking to these Christians is this: the root cause of our inability to understand each other’s position is this: our view of the probability of miracles.
For any extraordinary event involving a Christian, these Christians give a very high probability that the cause was a miracle. I and most other skeptics would give a very, very low probability that the cause was a miracle. So if we look at the (limited) evidence for the Resurrection claim, I and most skeptics see so many more probable explanations for the development of this claim, but Christians only see one plausible explanation: the miracle explanation.
This is mind boggling to me.
Even when I was still a Christian, when I found out that only ONE gospel mentions that there were guards at the tomb (Matthew), and even in Matthew’s “guard story”, he states that there was a period of time when the tomb was not guarded and sealed, even then I could see: “Hey, wait a minute! Someone could have taken the body during that short period of time!”
But this explanation is impossible to these people for many reasons, many of them based on generalizations:
“No Jew would ever move a body that had already been buried.”
“No Roman would have broken the seal of a tomb as this was a crime against Caesar.”
“No Jew would ever have believed the shameful, unheard story of the death and resurrection of Jesus unless they or someone they knew had seen the resurrected body”
To these Christians, the rare violation of these generalizations are much more improbable than that a dead Jewish preacher walked out of his grave with a “resurrected” (superhero) body, to later levitate into outer space!
“No Jew would ever have believed the shameful, unheard story of the death and resurrection of Jesus unless they or someone they knew had seen the resurrected body”
Yep, we hear this one from time to time. But Crossan’s book The Historical Jesus mentioned something I hadn’t thought of before. Consider Mark 6:14-16:
King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some said, “John the Baptist has been raised from the dead. That is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.” But others said, “He is Elijah.” And others said, “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”
This looks like a problem for that claim. If we can trust Mark, then plenty of people were ready to believe that Jesus was a resurrected John the Baptist. How in the world did they get that idea if it was so unheard of among the Jewish people? Or if Christians are right that no one thought of this until Jesus’s resurrection, then the writer of Mark simply made it up. What else might he have invented?
“At some point, everybody got a copy of the gospel”
So is 1BP saying that at some point, all 97% of the illiterate population of the Levant received a copy of a book they couldn’t read? How is that more advantageous than showing an armless man how to juggle?
“The four gospels and the writings of Paul are good evidence for the existence of a real, historical Jesus”
I’m not sure that the literary efforts of five authors who never met the principle character of any of their works, is evidence of ANYthing, other than reaffirming P. T. Barnum’s observation that there’s a sucker born every minute.
“4. Guards at the tomb for most of the period of time in question.” – While that is essentially true (in terms of being in accordance with the scriptures), it’s important to note that the tomb was not guarded the first night.
“6. Post-death sightings, sometimes by hundreds of people at once.” – Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, Unconfirmed reports of post-death sightings, etc., etc —“?
“11. Willingness of thousands of Christians to be persecuted, tortured, and painfully executed for their beliefs.”
How many young men and women died in Iraq in the misguided belief that that country possessed weapons of mass destruction? People will often die for a lie if they believe the alternative to be worse.
Finding Truth 
I’ve read many books from the late Raymond E Brown. At one time he was the “Go to Guy” for the Catholic Church. He indeed ruffled a lot of feathers within his own church and Protestant Theologians alike because he let the chips fall where they may.
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Yeah, I can’t stand how one-sided these kinds of books are. And I guess they have to be, considering the material they’re working with.
The one that always stood out to me was the treatment of the Tyre prophecy in Ezekiel. I know I beat that dead horse all the time, but it was one I had actually researched fairly well, and I couldn’t believe how these guys were trying to act like it was amazing evidence for the Bible.
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I’ll have to check out Brown. Peter Enns strikes me that way too — I really enjoyed his book Inspiration and Incarnation (I think that was the title). I thought it was very fair and honest.
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It was after reading a Peter Enns article that my faith finally cracked as he proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Bible was not historically accurate.
But what does puzzle me is that Enns seems to continue to have faith himself. I considered very briefly whether faith could be reconciled with an erroneous Bible but could not. Enns like Raymond E Brown seems to be able to reconcile this better than I could.
Brown like Enns seems to see a version of God that communicates through a flawed human medium, This brief clip from Brown does address this matter to some extent:
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Not to blow my own horn (well, maybe just a little), I felt I presented both scripture and argument in my book. Perhaps not “scholarly” arguments, but ones the average reader couldn’t help but miss. My hopes were that the seeking believer would read the book (since it wasn’t totally anti-Christian) and be able to discern that what they had been taught had some flaws.
Of course, whether I accomplished any of that … ??
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Yeah, I don’t get it either. It seems to just run off an assumption that God’s there and that it’s true. At least, that’s how it sounds to me.
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Yeah, Nan, I thought you were very fair in your book. In fact, while I’ve read some skeptics who don’t treat the facts fairly, most of the ones I’ve read have come across as being pretty objective.
Nan, have you gotten feedback from any believers who have come across your book?
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Not that I’m aware of … except for one negative review on Amazon and from the comments, it’s doubtful the person even read the book.
There’s been a couple of acquaintances that I would call “borderline” believers who have read it (at least they bought a copy), but I’ve never received any feedback from them — which is actually not all that surprising (although one did comment that I used a lot of words she had to look up (!))
BTW, I just checked the Amazon reviews and had a new one (from an “Amazon Customer”) that was positive. I THINK i know who wrote it, but can’t be sure (a friend).
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Meant to add … if it was this friend, she’s one of the “borderline” believers.
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The bigshot Christian apologist over on Theology Web is Nick Peters, son-in-law of well-known evangelical apologist, Mike Licona. He likes to debate skeptics. He is a smart guy and a well-informed apologist. He is very proud of the fact, as he states on his forum on TW, that unlike many Christians, his belief in Christianity is based on evidence, not personal experiences and feelings. And the event for which he claims to have such good evidence is the Resurrection of Jesus. Below is a comment I left for him today:
I like your thinking, Nick. Skeptics get really tired of some Christians using their personal experiences and feelings as evidence of the veracity of the Christian claims. Most of us like evidence, just like you. And I also like that your belief in the veracity of Christianity rests on the evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus. If only all Christian apologists would believe like you.
I have a suggestion. Both sides, Christians and skeptics, should accept the positions of the majority of NT scholars on the claims of the Resurrection and then let people decide for themselves if this event really happened. So what do we have:
1. Public execution.
2. Public burial.
3. Sealed tomb.
4. Guards at the tomb for most of the period of time in question.
5. Empty tomb, three days and two nights later. (No known witnesses to the body leaving the tomb, however)
6. Post-death sightings, sometimes by hundreds of people at once.
7. Dramatically changed behavior of disciples.
8. Very shameful, very strange new belief system in an Honor-Shame society.
9. A belief never heard of in Judaism, yet believed by several thousand devout Jews.
10. Rapid spread of Christianity.
11. Willingness of thousands of Christians to be persecuted, tortured, and painfully executed for their beliefs.
Now the question:
Based on the agreed upon evidence above, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, do you believe that a dead man named Jesus of Nazareth was brought back to life by an ancient Hebrew God, exited his sealed tomb by some manner other than moving the stone, appeared in a superhero-like body to his grieving friends and family (but apparently no one else), and forty days later levitated into the clouds and from there, in some fashion, traveled to the farthest extent of the universe (or possibly into another dimension) to sit on a throne at the right hand of the ancient Hebrew God? Are there any other more naturalistic explanations for the evidence above, or, are the miracle/supernatural/magical explanations of Christianity the most probable explanation?
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http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/physics.asp
😀
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@Nate
“It seems to just run off an assumption that God’s there and that it’s true. At least, that’s how it sounds to me.”
This is the exact problem I’ve faced recently.
My FIL wanted to “educate” me on the historicity of the Resurrection of Christ. And he proceeded to throw me the book by WLC which I have read previously. The funny thing is even before he threw the book at me, we were already discussing about modern day apologetics and I’ve already told him that I do not find WLC’s argument persuasive. I also mentioned the tactics WLC used, and why WLC had to resort to this instead of relying on CS Lewis apologetics 101.
So him throwing me WLC’s book after me telling him WLC is a hack job was amusing to say the least.
But wait! There is more!
So I utterly debunked everything WLC said in that book – chapter by chapter, point by point, and what he did was simply throw another book at me – Gary Habermas Minimal Jesus (which I have also read) – without addressing any points that I’ve raised.
Then, in his email, he added the fact that it is great that we are having this discussion as his faith in the Resurrection has actually increased by talking to me.
That was kinda the last straw for me, and I called him out on it.
Firstly – clearly he didn’t read any counter-apologetic books on the historical facts about christ, so I told him what he is doing is akin to someone who simply watch Fox news and reaffirm himself that Obama is a Muslim.
Secondly, the fact that he said his faith in the Resurrection grew suggested that he has NEVER read WLC nor Gary Habermas prior to talking to me, and I told him as much. I told him this is clearly out of line as the reason we are even having this conversation in the first place was because he was convinced I got my conclusion wrong, and he actually has evidence that Jesus resurrected. However, in our cursory exchange, it is clear he have never explored the evidences, and on the other hand I have done all the necessary readings and found the “evidence” wanting. Yet, somehow I’m the one who has reached the “wrong conclusion”. And of course throwing books at me that I’ve already read while you haven’t is insulting to say the least.
___________________________
That was 2 weeks ago, till now there’s no reply for him so I guess that is tacit admission to my charge.
Well, that was a pretty lengthy response to Nate’s one liner lol.
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ratamacue — that was hilarious! I had never seen it before. Well played, sir. 🙂
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I want to say that what you experienced is totally crazy, powell. Unfortunately, I think it’s pretty much par for the course. 😦
When my wife and I were going through our deconversion process, I had many people ask to speak to me about all of it, and I readily agreed every time. But in almost every case our interactions were essentially the same thing you’re going through with your father-in-law. In fact, I can only think of one person who ever read anything that I suggested, and he actually had the decency to admit that he didn’t have good answers for it. I don’t know why he’s remained a Christian ever since, but I at least admire the fact that he didn’t try to BS me.
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It’s funny: Conservative Lutherans tell my deconversion was because I was never a true conservative Lutheran. Evangelicals tell me my deconversion was because I was never a true (born again) evangelical. And fundamentalists tell me my deconversion was because I was never a true fundamentalist.
My deconversion is always due to me not believing and understanding the one TRUE flavor of Christianity…never the fact that all of Christianity is wrong.
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And despite the fact that you know more about all of those varieties than most of the people who believe them.
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I have presented two (and I have more) hypothetical, naturalistic (non-miracle) explanations to the Christians on Theology Web which accounts for all the evidence related to the Resurrection claim of Jesus, and Christians still believe that the supernatural explanation is far more probable than any possible naturalistic explanation for the Resurrection! It is mind-boggling. And they think that I have a presupposition.
Here is what one of them said about my alternative, naturalistic explanations that explain all the evidence for the alleged Resurrection (evidence as agreed upon by the majority of scholars/experts), and I have even allowed for the empty tomb to be considered an historical fact:
“Yeah, it’s pretty ad hoc. I’m certain Occum would have something to say about Gary’s re-imaginings. In my opinion, a lot of this does comes down to presuppositions though. If you believe there exists a divinity who has the capability to raise people from the dead, then there really isn’t any reason to deny where the evidence leads. The Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide wasn’t a Christian, but believed the evidence was insurmountable, and led to the conclusion of a resurrection. A skeptical non-heist or deist is always going to look for naturalistic reasons to explain the miraculous.”
Are these people brainwashed or what??
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He/she is begging the question.
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(Emphasis mine.)
Question begging is not virtuous.
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What I have realized in talking to these Christians is this: the root cause of our inability to understand each other’s position is this: our view of the probability of miracles.
For any extraordinary event involving a Christian, these Christians give a very high probability that the cause was a miracle. I and most other skeptics would give a very, very low probability that the cause was a miracle. So if we look at the (limited) evidence for the Resurrection claim, I and most skeptics see so many more probable explanations for the development of this claim, but Christians only see one plausible explanation: the miracle explanation.
This is mind boggling to me.
Even when I was still a Christian, when I found out that only ONE gospel mentions that there were guards at the tomb (Matthew), and even in Matthew’s “guard story”, he states that there was a period of time when the tomb was not guarded and sealed, even then I could see: “Hey, wait a minute! Someone could have taken the body during that short period of time!”
But this explanation is impossible to these people for many reasons, many of them based on generalizations:
“No Jew would ever move a body that had already been buried.”
“No Roman would have broken the seal of a tomb as this was a crime against Caesar.”
“No Jew would ever have believed the shameful, unheard story of the death and resurrection of Jesus unless they or someone they knew had seen the resurrected body”
To these Christians, the rare violation of these generalizations are much more improbable than that a dead Jewish preacher walked out of his grave with a “resurrected” (superhero) body, to later levitate into outer space!
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Yep, we hear this one from time to time. But Crossan’s book The Historical Jesus mentioned something I hadn’t thought of before. Consider Mark 6:14-16:
This looks like a problem for that claim. If we can trust Mark, then plenty of people were ready to believe that Jesus was a resurrected John the Baptist. How in the world did they get that idea if it was so unheard of among the Jewish people? Or if Christians are right that no one thought of this until Jesus’s resurrection, then the writer of Mark simply made it up. What else might he have invented?
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Excellent point, Nate. I’m going to use that!
Thanks!
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“At some point, everybody got a copy of the gospel”
So is 1BP saying that at some point, all 97% of the illiterate population of the Levant received a copy of a book they couldn’t read? How is that more advantageous than showing an armless man how to juggle?
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“The four gospels and the writings of Paul are good evidence for the existence of a real, historical Jesus”
I’m not sure that the literary efforts of five authors who never met the principle character of any of their works, is evidence of ANYthing, other than reaffirming P. T. Barnum’s observation that there’s a sucker born every minute.
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I have a couple of problems with that:
“4. Guards at the tomb for most of the period of time in question.” – While that is essentially true (in terms of being in accordance with the scriptures), it’s important to note that the tomb was not guarded the first night.
“6. Post-death sightings, sometimes by hundreds of people at once.” – Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, Unconfirmed reports of post-death sightings, etc., etc —“?
“11. Willingness of thousands of Christians to be persecuted, tortured, and painfully executed for their beliefs.”
How many young men and women died in Iraq in the misguided belief that that country possessed weapons of mass destruction? People will often die for a lie if they believe the alternative to be worse.
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