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9 JesusWhile I wrestled with the problems that creationism brought me the historicity of the New Testament was not a problem. But in time after the issues with the Old Testament I wanted to know how historical is Jesus? How true is the resurrection? After all if the story of creation is now a myth then why did Jesus need to die for sin? How factual is the evidence that demands a verdict? For that matter what does it mean that someone else died for me? One of the interesting things about the most popular books that examine the resurrection is that they are almost all written by lawyers. The idea seems to be that lawyers are by nature honest and seek truth as a fundamental calling of their profession. This is a fallacy. Lawyers do not seek truth as a professional stance they are advocates for the cause of their client, and as such present the case in the best possible light for their clients interests. The first question I had was what external historical evidence is there for the accounts in the Gospels? The answer is very little. The attribution of the Gospels to their four authors is by Eusebius. He was writing in the fourth century and was a collector of “historical” documents. He thought the epistle of Jesus to the Persians was genuine and wrote that the use of falsehood in supporting the cause was justified. The earliest references to Christians come from Tacitus who mentions having met believers in the second century but there is no confirmation of an actual person of Jesus. Josephus was a historian writing for the Romans. He lived just after the estimated time of Jesus’ death. He was a witness, or at least recorder of witnesses, of the events at Massada where thousands of Jews died. However he remained a confirmed Jew and did not, from the evidence of his writings, convert to Christianity. On the basis of this and the flow of the text as well as discrepancies with Arabic versions his two isolated references to Jesus are regarded as later Christian redactions (editor’s insertions). There were historians recording events at the time of Jesus. None of these mentions him. Philo Judaeus lived through the period of Jesus life. He was in Jerusalem and should have noted the massacre of the innocents and the triumphal entry but he makes no mention. Justus of Tiberias lived in the region of Galilee. His history has been lost but Photius a ninth century Christian scholar noted that he made no mention of Jesus. The Talmud does mention two Jesuses one crucified in 126BCE Yeshu ben Pantera a magician whose mother’s name was Mary Magdala. The other Yeshu the Nazarene committed heresy in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, who ruled Palestine from 104-78 BCE. [15] Other reporters on the Talmudic comments say there is evidence that the two may have been the same person. The story associated is that Yeshu was stoned to death and hanged on a tree before Passover, cut down and claimed to have risen afterward by his disciples. This story from the Talmud was probably recorded in the second century as it is found in sources from that period and not earlier. It may have been an attempt by the Jews to discredit the story of the resurrection. But why is it left until the second century, and why did they invent a Jesus over a century before if the real Jesus actually lived at the beginning of the first century? Prophetic Evidence and Support from other Scriptures In John 7:38 Jesus declares “Whoever believes in me as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” There is no reference to the original scripture because no one can find it. To declare that something was prophesied requires a prophecy. Likewise in Luke 24:46, Jesus, and 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Paul, declare that Christ was to suffer and die for sin and rise on the third day. There is no reference predicting three days in the Old Testament. The implication of a lost prophesy is that the Bible is incomplete or worse that the writers have made errors. Either way the trustworthiness of the Bible is compromised. God's Word is described as eternal (Is40:8) so how can any of get lost? The Bible sets a very high standard .for its integrity being an evidence of divine protection. I would have greater regard for its other claims if it met that standard. Where references exist (especially with Mathew) the original is often distorted to fit his requirements. The reference to Rachel weeping for her children in Matt 2:18 is actually a prophecy about the return of the Jews after the exile Jeremiah 31:15-17. The full statement could not apply and no one would have viewed this as an unambiguous prophecy about the messiah before Mathew appropriated it. The epistles give little or no support to the Gospel accounts. In I Corinthians 15 Paul declares that Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh – so no virgin birth here. Later in the same passage Paul talks of the people who saw Jesus after the resurrection. Paul’s own experience of seeing the risen Jesus is in a vision so we cannot take this as evidence of a physical resurrection. Paul in the same passage talks about five hundred others who saw Jesus but as there are no details of this sighting it is just unsupported hearsay. In fact given Paul’s counting of his own vision as evidence we have to question his standard for what counts as evidence. Internal Evidence Certainly the evidence demands a verdict but the book with that title expects the reader to select the verdict of case proven. However the case is far from determined. A court of law hearing from four witnesses who differed so much would conclude that at least three of them were lying or deceived. The following are a few discrepancies. Jesus was born during the reign of Herod, who died 4 B.C. (Matt. 2:1), or Jesus was born at the time of Quirinius, in 6 A.D. (Luke 2:2). John Blanchard [op cit.] declares that the time of Jesus birth was accurately prophesied. As there are two dates linked to historical people who did not overlap one has to question how accurate the prophecy was. Hal Lindsay [op cit] if I recall correctly, did have a spurious interpretation of Daniel’s comment about the seventy ‘sevens’ or weeks. If you do the arithmetic the crucifixion occurred in 104 BCE and the sack of Jerusalem seven years later in 97 BCE. The prophecy does not fit even the Maccabean revolt. Likewise Jesus family tree is claimed by Blanchard to be accurately predicted. Was that the Mathew or the Luke version? They cannot both be right and Mathew adjusts the generations so he can declare three lots of fourteen between significant members or events (Luke has 54 between Jesus and Abraham compared to Matthew’s 42, 42 between David and Jesus and 74 in total to Adam). The fact Mathew states this means either he adjusted it deliberately, or was ignorant of the missing generations, in order to get the ‘spooky’ symmetries. Did Mathew make the only record in history of the massacre of the children of Bethlehem or was Herod already dead as Luke’s account requires? No other account of Herod’s reign mentions the killing of the children even though this would certainly have been the most heinous of the many crimes he perpetrated and many less important items of his life are recorded. Josephus made a very careful chronicle of Herod’s life and crimes and he does not mention this, though Christians want to stress Josephus' accuracy when the two references to Jesus are involved. While on the differences in the birth stories Matthew has Joseph hear the annunciation and Luke has Mary visited by the Angel Gabriel. What is remarkable is the fact that there is no mention of Mary’s visitation in Matthew or Joseph’s dream in Luke even though the accounts raise the question in the reader’s mind how did the other partner know? Also it would appear that by the time Jesus starts his earthly ministry Joseph is dead. Certainly any mention of Jesus’ family is of his mother and brothers. So there should only have been one source of the birth story and that would be Mary. So again I ask why the discrepancies? At what time in the morning did the women visit the tomb? At the rising of the sun (Mark 16:2), or when it was yet dark (John 20:l)? Note that the argument that one timing is of someone setting out from Bethany before sunrise and arriving after sunrise in the other account is destroyed since in John they arrive before light and in Mark they are on their way after sunrise. Was the tomb open or closed when they arrived? Open (Luke 24:2). Closed (Matt. 28:l). Who came? Mary Magdalene alone (John 20:1), or Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (Matt. 28:1), or Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16:1), or Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and other women (Luke 24:10)? Did Mary Magdalene know Jesus when he first appeared to her? Yes, she did (Matt. 28:9), or no, she did not (John 20:14). Jesus was crucified when it was the third hour (Mark 15:25), or it could not have been the third hour since he was still before Pilate (John 19:14). At the hearing before Pilate, Jesus answered no charges (Matt. 27:14), or Jesus responds directly to all of Pilate's questions (John 18:33-37). To sum up. If this were evidence presented at a trial then the jury would be told to disregard the gospels as hearsay as they cannot be tied to eyewitnesses because of their anonymity. However if we stretch a point and allow that this is the only evidence we have then why should I believe the extraordinary claim that Jesus rose from the dead when the witnesses cannot even decide if the tomb was open when they arrived or not. Yes we might be able to reconcile some of the discrepancies by saying the record is from different people’s testimonies and so minor items might be missed or slightly different. It stretches credulity when one who was supposed to be present at least for two appearances after his resurrection omits those events and says that the first and last post resurrection meeting was in Galilee not Jerusalem as in the case of Matthew. The Acts account suggests that the disciples had a period of 40 days in which Jesus made frequent appearances before the ascension and that this took place outside Jerusalem and not in Galilee as Matthew has it with one appearance. On the basis of the inconsistencies alone many have decided to disbelieve the historicity of the Gospels and therefore of Jesus. The discrepant sections are the basis of the timing of Jesus birth, death and resurrection and the only historical evidence of these things having happened. It is also from these passages that the timing of Jesus life is deduced. So to have them as the least reliable details of the account is rather unfortunate, to say the least. If these sections are as they seem, fillers to pad out the story and without collusion between the four writers to get the story straight then there is no issue of a historical Jesus. The most common counter from believers about the resurrection being untrue is to ask the question “would the disciples have allowed themselves to be martyred for a lie?” There are a number of refutations to this. The disciples recorded as being martyred are, mostly, second-generation disciples. Peter is recorded, in legend, as being executed but as much for political involvement as his religious position. The disciples may have believed without seeing an empty tomb or visited the wrong tomb or been the victims of fraud themselves. To say that people who perpetrated a fraud would not die for it is naďve as many have done. Jonestown or the Heavens Gate cults are examples of the extent to which people will go for a deception. In these cases and, possibly, that of Joseph Smith the perpetrators of the fraud were themselves self-deceived. In such a case Peter could have been so convinced that Jesus would rise that he generated the idea that he had risen in the way that people today believe they see Elvis? The whole resurrection situation has the hallmarks of an urban myth like the “Angel of Mons”. The story of the “Angel of Mons” arose early in the First World War. Stories appeared that described either angelic armies standing between the Germans and the retreating British or ghostly armies of archers firing at the enemy. An author Arthur Macken had written a story about a fictitious event around the time that the British Expeditionary Force encountered and was routed by the advancing Germans as a sort of ghost story where ancient archers from the battle of Agincourt appeared to help the modern British troops, and found that it was being reported in the newspapers as fact. Many people reported sightings but always third hand as knowing someone who had a friend who had seen something. Only one claimant has been found to say he saw something first hand. Given the stress and exhaustion of the men involved hallucinations would be expected and are documented by others who have experienced spooky experiences in the extremes of exhaustion. |