In the 1980 film The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfus and Amy Irving, there is a scene that has always been a metaphor, for me, for how Christians come to know Jesus Christ. Sounds strange, I know, but bear with me a moment.

In the film, Richard Dreyfus plays a talented but not quite top pier pianist desperate to win a major competition so he can become a professional musician. He does everything right: Practices compulsively, really knows his stuff. Living with his parents, now well in his twenties, he travels all over the country to compete in regional and national competitions… and yet he never quite wins. At one competition, he meets a fellow competitor, played by Amy Irving, and they begin a romance that Irving’s stern teacher, played by Lee Remick, is determined to thwart.

At one point in the film, Remick’s character run downs Amy Irving’s musical pedigree to explain to Dreyfus’s character why he is basically outclassed.

“Ludwig Von Beethoven taught Carl Czerny,” Lee Remick’s characters says slowly, lighting a cigarette. “Who taught Leschetizky… who taught Schnabel… who taught Renaldi… who taught me. And now the sixth pianist in a direct line from Beethoven is standing here staring at me in her Jordan Marsh mix-and-match.”

In other words: The music that Amy Irving plays is handed down in a kind of apostolic succession… from one generation to the next… a living tradition passed on, master to disciple, over centuries.

You can read all the biographies of Beethoven you like…you can study music theory to your heart’s content… and yet, if you stand outside of that direct teaching line, that “hands on” instruction, you probably won’t be able to play the piano as well as Amy Irving’s character does. You won’t really hear the music.

Well, learning Jesus, and discovering the truth of his kingdom, is a lot like learning music: you have to learn it in person, not just from books.

This isn’t a pitch, by the way, for the Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox understanding of Apostolic Succession over and against the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scripture… although there is a tie-in.
Instead, I am simply making an historical and sociological point: that, as the saying goes, Jesus is more “caught than taught.”

For most of Christian history, the followers of Jesus learned his story, absorbed his teaching and committed their lives to his service not through academic study… not because they weighed the historical evidence for the resurrection and decided it was probable… but through a quasi-mystical encounter with Jesus’ outsized, cosmic personality in the communities of believers he left behind. They meditated on the events of his life, heard second-hand, depicted in medieval passion plays and modern rock operas, and decided to say a resounding Yes to his call to be part of his kingdom.

In the earliest age of Christianity, there was no Christian Bible to study. Even if there had been, few people could have read it. The overwhelming majority of people in the ancient world were illiterate.
People learned about Jesus through the preaching and teaching of Jesus’ early followers, almost always oral, and through the sacraments, rites and customs of the early Church, especially the “thanksgiving rite” celebrated every week (known in Greek as the eucharist). “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am.” After encountering the Risen Christ on the road to Emmaus, his disciples realized that they had “recognized him in the breaking of the bread.”

When you think about it, that’s still true today.

Most people who are Christians today are Christians because they were born into Christian families, or because they encounter Christian disciple groups that intrigue them enough to learn more. They learn about Jesus Christ and discover his continuing presence in the world through personal testimony, the example of other people.

Indeed, most of what we know about Jesus and his teaching comes not from academic Bible study, as valuable as it is… but through preaching in churches… medieval passion plays… scenes depicted in stained glass windows or in bas-relief Stations of the Cross… Nativity pageants… and, in our time, televangelists… Vacation Bible School… Campus Crusade for Christ meetings… and films like “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

With all due respect to the fine work of Christian apologists, I would argue that very few people convert to Christianity because they’ve studied textual variants in the Gospel of Luke and concluded that, on balance, we have the original text. Instead, they become Christians first… because they encounter the personality of Christ reflected in the lives of his modern-day followers and decide to say Yes to his call to be part of the Kingdom. Only later do they read the Bible in depth… and only later still, if ever, do they engage in an academic study of Biblical origins, sources, and textual variants.

“Jesus is most fully and consistently learned with the context of the believing community of the church…” writes Luke Timothy Johnson, who teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, in his wonderful book, Living Jesus. Johnson is a professional New Testament scholar who spends all his time in academic study of the Bible… yet, he insists, true knowledge of Jesus Christ does not come primarily through such study. For people who have “entered into the energy field that is Jesus’ continuing presence in the world,” that is, believing Christians, knowledge of Jesus comes from other sources than history.

In his book, Jesus, Interrupted, New Testament scholar and scourge of conservative evangelical Christianity, Bart Ehrman, marvels that more Christians in the pews don’t know about the details about contemporary New Testament scholarship, textual criticism and so on. He suspects that it’s a conspiracy among ministers to keep their gullible congregations in the dark. But the real answer is: Ministers and preachers rarely expound on the latest theories of Bible scholars because they’re really not all that helpful…. or relevant to the lives of real people. What’s more, they change frequently and often conflict with one another.

Of course, I am not saying that academic Bible study is not worthwhile. I spent a large chunk of my life engaged in it… and many of my personal heroes are academics, like Bart Ehrman, who master the details of the historical-critical method in search of any new discoveries or insights about Jesus and his kingdom. I think most people could benefit from at least introductory classes on the Bible and the latest research and methods used by Bible scholars.

No, what I am saying is that academic Bible scholarship rarely if ever threatens Christian faith directly… because Christian faith is not based on historical reconstructions of what “really happened” when Jesus walked on earth.

If that were the case, the only true Christians would be Bible scholars and historians… and I don’t think most of them would say that.

This is the basic mistake that fundamentalism makes. It is, at root, a denial of faith as it is actually experienced in the Christian community… which is the experience of the Risen Christ through word and sacrament.

The doctrine of what’s called the verbal or “plenary” inerrancy of scripture leads, almost inevitably, to assertions that the historical truths embedded in the Gospel texts can be “proven” true – when, in fact, they cannot be. If they could be proven, then Christian faith would not be faith at all but history, scientific knowledge. At best, an historian or secular Bible scholar deals in probabilities, guestimates, hunches even. But faith in Jesus is not a judgment of probability: it’s a response to a call from a real human being.

The post Peter Taught Marcus Who Taught Camillus Who Taught Quintus… first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

The debate over Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is one of my least favorite topics.  That’s because I’ve accepted the theory of evolution ever since fourth grade, when it was first explained to me in science class by a Dominican nun.

As a result, debating evolution feels a lot like debating the Pythagorean theorem: It’s something I studied 40 years ago… long ago accepted… but makes my head hurt even thinking about.

This is one of the many differences between Catholics and Protestants, I’ve found.  Catholics rarely if ever think about evolution.  For Protestants, it’s one of their favorite subjects, a principal “litmus test” for theological orthodoxy in many churches.

It took the agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrmann nearly 20 years of rigorous graduate education before he could finally come to accept what I learned in fourth grade:  that human beings have existed on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years… and their physical bodies likely developed out of more primitive animal forms.

When I was in high school, one of my Jesuit teachers showed me a copy of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis in which the pope explained that “the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter” is not incompatible with Christian faith as revealed in the Biblical texts.  Here is the key section (36):

For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.

The key point for Catholics, the pope explained, is that human beings are all descended from a real, historical, single human pair (called in Hebrew ha-adam and Hava, Adam and Eve), however they may be conceived.

Theologically, this belief is known as monogenism, the view that human beings are descended from a single couple.

Ironically enough, scientists in the 1950s were leaning toward another viewpoint, that of polygenism, the belief that the human race developed from many different independent groups.  I have to admit, to my teenage mind, the theory of polygenism seemed much more plausible.  After all, doesn’t it make more sense that there were many different groups of primates all over the world and humans “evolved” independently from those groups?

Nevertheless, I’ve never had any problem believing in both the Genesis account of creation and in various scientific theories of evolution.  Neither of the twin fundamentalisms in this debate — that of some evangelical Protestants or that of atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins — appealed to me.

Pope Pius XII’s explanation made more sense to me:  The first 11 chapters of Genesis, the pope explained, do not conform “to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time” yet constitutes history in “a true sense.”

The inspired text, he added, “in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people.”

Precisely:  Genesis is …

(1) a “popular description of the origin of the human race,” using

(2) “simple and metaphorical language,” that nevertheless contains

(3) “principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation.”

The post Evolution, Creation and Adam & Eve, Part 1 first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

The new atheist crusaders (such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins) like to pretend that the concept of universal human rights just popped out of thin air in the 17th and 18th century, the creation of the agnostic and atheist thinkers of the French Enlightenment.

But the truth is precisely the opposite: The recognition of universal human rights is one of the preeminent legacies of the Bible and the two religions, Judaism and Christianity, centered around it.

We forget that the great English political philosopher John Locke – widely credited with working out the first systematic theory of natural (human) rights in modern times – based most of his arguments on Biblical precedents.

In his First Treatise on Civil Government, which is more Biblical exegesis than philosophy, Locke argued that human rights are not privileges dispensed or withdrawn at the discretion of the State. Rather, they are gifts from God which no prince or potentate, no state or sovereign, may take away.

Thomas Jefferson relied primarily upon Locke’s insights, and not those of French Enlightenment thinkers, when penning the Declaration of Independence — which, for the first time, proposed founding a state upon this fundamental, God-given, Biblically-based idea: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

There is also some empirical evidence that respect for human rights grew out of the Biblical heritage when comparing the “freedom” rankings produced by the international democracy watchdog organization Freedom House – co-founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt — with the percentage of the population in each country ranked as Christian by the CIA. (The CIA designation refers more to “nominal” rather than “practicing” Christians but nevertheless is illuminating when it comes to the cultural context that produces civil liberties.)

Each year, Freedom House publishes its annual survey which attempts to measure the degree of democracy and freedom in every nation of the world, producing “scores” that represent the levels of political rights and civil liberties in each state and territory – from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free). Out of 194 countries and territories surveyed for 2006, 73 countries (38 percent) were rated Free, 54 (28 percent) were rated Partly Free, and 67 (34 percent) were rated Not Free. (This is a marked improvement over 1980 when only 23.9% of nations were rated Free… 24.8% were rated Partly Free… and 51.3% were Not Free.)

Among the countries ranked as the most free (1) and with the highest respect for civil liberties (1) are Australia (66% Christian), Austria (78.3%), the United States (79%), Canada (66%), Costa Rica (92%), Belgium (100%), Chile (100%), Denmark (98%), France (90%), Finland (86%), Germany (68%), Great Britain (71.6%), Ireland (93%), Iceland (93%), Norway (90.1%), Portugal (98%), Spain (94%), Switzerland (78.9%), Sweden (87%), Italy (90%) and New Zealand (79.5%).

These are not fixed absolutes, of course. There are exceptions.

Haiti, for example, is listed as 96% Christian by the CIA yet has among the very worst record for human rights and political freedoms. The same is true of Rwanda: Rated 93.6% Christian by the CIA, it scores a 6 out of 7 for political freedom and a 5 for civil liberties. Some Latin American countries, just emerging from years of civil war or military dictatorship, have higher Christian populations but somewhat restricted freedom. For example, El Salvador, which is 83% Roman Catholic, is rated “free” but only scores a 3 for civil liberties. Mexico, which is 95% Christian despite its historically anti-Christian government, is rated 2 for political freedom and civil liberties.

But at the opposite end of the spectrum, those countries with the smallest percentage of Christians are rated overwhelming “not free” by Freedom House and are among those with the worst ratings for civil liberties by far – but again, with a few interesting exceptions. Almost all of the Islamic countries have very small Christian populations and rank near the bottom when it comes to political freedom and civil rights – including Saudi Arabia (0% Christian and no political freedom), Sudan (5% Christian and no political freedom), Libya (3% Christian and no political freedom), Iran (1% Christian and no political freedom), and so on.

Current Communist regimes, such as China (4% Christian), Cambodia (0%), North Korea (0%), Laos (1.5%) and Vietnam (7.2%), also have very low Christian populations and virtually no freedom whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, although some of the former Communist states are still ranked as “not free” or “partly free,” including Russia (only 15% Christian) and Albania (30%); a number of former Communist countries with sizable Christian populations are now ranked near the top in terms of civil liberties and political liberty. Once these countries were freed of Soviet military domination, they quickly adopted laws protecting political liberty and basic human rights. These include Bulgaria (83.8% Christian), which scores in the top rank for political freedom and a 2 for civil liberties; Poland (91.2% Christian), which now scores 1 for both civil liberties and political freedom; Hungary (74% Christian), which now scores 1s as well; and Lithuania (85%), which now scores 1s; Romania (99%), which scores 2s;

There are also some countries that are neither Christian nor communist but which nevertheless score badly in terms of civil rights and political freedom, including Bhutan (0% Christian), rated 6 for civil liberties and 5 for political freedom; Nepal (0.2% Christian), rated 6 for political freedom and 5 for civil liberties; the Maldives (0% Christian), rated 6 for political freedom and 5 for civil liberties; Guinea (8%), rated 6 for political freedom and 5 for civil liberties; and Malaysia (7%), which scores 4s.

Finally, there are a handful of countries with extremely low Christian populations but which nevertheless score high in terms of political freedom and civil liberties. These are Israel (2%), which scores 1 for both political freedom and civil liberties; Japan (0.7%), which also scores 1s; Taiwan (4%), which scores 1s; South Korea (26%), which scores 1s; and India (2.3%), which scores 2s.

Clearly, therefore, a sizable Christian population is not a requirement for civil liberty and political freedom, but you could still make the case that those non-Christian societies that have a solid record on human rights and political liberty benefited from prolonged contact with, and influence by, Christian nations.

Israel is a special case because respect for fundamental human rights and political freedom is a preeminently Jewish cultural legacy, one that is implicit in the Torah and which Israel bequeathed to Christianity. Japan, of course, had its western-style democratic government more or less imposed upon it by U.S. Occupation Forces following its defeat in the Second World War – but what was imposed by force has now taken root and grown into a distinctly Japanese style of liberal democracy. India, which was a colony of Great Britain’s for more than 175 years, and which today still prides itself on its membership in the Commonwealth and its record as preeminent cricket champions, is today a federal republic with a president, prime minister, a bicameral Parliament and a legal system based on English common law. While only 2.3% Christian, India has adopted many of the cultural values of liberal democracy and retains, like other members of the Commonwealth, remarkably strong ties to Britain.

In conclusion, therefore, we can say that the enemies of Christianity, Judaism and the Bible have it exactly backwards: Far from being a threat to liberal democracy and political freedom, the biblical heritage is, in fact, the intellectual matrix out of which both arose.

The values and beliefs that permeate the Bible — the notion that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God and that no king or ruler may claim unquestioned obedience — were the proximate cause for the development of a religious theory of liberty and the recognition of universal human rights. It is certainly not true, as atheist crusaders claim and as the freedom rankings from Freedom House refute, that commitment to Biblical religion results in intolerance and oppression. In fact, with a few exceptions, the countries on earth that practice freedom of religion and social tolerance are those with large Christian or Jewish populations.

The post Biblical Heritage Leads to Freedom, Religious Toleration & Human Rights first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

People often ask me why I remain a Roman Catholic – given all the scandals over homosexual pedophiles in the Church, the Peter, Paul and Mary liturgies, and so on.

They’re not asking me for the party line reason but my own, very personal reason.

And this is what I usually say: Whenever I really look into a question – an ethical, political, scientific, religious, Biblical, historical question – whatever it is – whenever I really dig deep and wrestle with all the issues involved, from abortion to Biblical studies – I find myself inevitably concluding that the “official,” even papal position ends up being correct.

I mean that very sincerely.

Over a lifetime, such independent investigations develop a certain amount of trust – the same kind of trust you might feel toward, say, your father, despite his annoying idiosyncrasies.

Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is just another example of this.

Whenever I am goaded by my Protestant friends or in-laws to, once again, really look into the controversies over evolution and creation, I find that, as usual, the Catholic position ends up not only making the most sense exegetically (in terms of the Biblical texts) but is also, amazingly enough, supported by strong scientific evidence.

And that brings us back to Adam and Eve.

For years, I believed that the world was basically covered by overgrown chimpanzees… and that, maybe 50,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon Man suddenly appeared to chase down Woolly Mammoths and drag their wives by their hair into the cave.

But we now know that isn’t the case.

Human-like (hominid) species flourished on earth up to a million years ago – and they looked a lot more like Raquel Welch in the film “One Million Years BC” (a big favorite with my classmates when I was in fourth grade) than they did like Cheetah.

Anthropologists now keep pushing the dates for proto-human groups back hundreds of thousands of years – as far back, in fact, as 800,000 years ago. The scientific evidence for these groups is overwhelming (which isn’t, by the way, the same thing as evidence for Darwinian natural selection).

Nearby is an artist reconstruction of some hominid forebears of ours, Homo heidelbergensis (“Heidelberg Man”), an extinct species of human that may have lived around 600,000 years ago. This is not the knuckle-walking semi-semian many people assume, but a genuine cave man who stood about six feet tall, walked upright and had a brain as big as that of modern humans. There is evidence that Heidelberg Man used primitive tools, buried his dead and may have possessed a language.

An even earlier species, so-called Homo antecessor, fossils of which were discovered in the 1990s in Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain, may have lived as long ago as 1.2 million years ago. This early human species also stood about six feet tall with the males weighing about 200 pounds but had a 20% smaller brain.

There weren’t a lot of these creatures roaming the world back then – as few as a few thousand, perhaps. Our genuine cave man ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, is considered by anthropologists to be the ancestor of both the extinct species of Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). Neanderthals lived in the period from 600,000 years ago until around 30,000 years ago, when they mysteriously became extinct. DNA evidence suggests that there was some, although very limited, inter-breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Anatomically modern humans, known as homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared around 200,000 years ago in Africa. In Europe, they are called Cro-Magnon Man

Now, with all of these various proto-human groups running around the world between 1 million and 30,000 years ago, how likely is it that we are all descended from a single historical human couple, an Adam and Eve?

After all, doesn’t it make more sense that there were many ancestors of the human race?

Well, here’s what fascinating… and what makes any effort to reconcile the Biblical account of creation with what passes for scientific anthropology even more difficult.

The DNA evidence actually does show that all human beings alive today do descend from a single mother – so-called Mitochondrial Eve. Different DNA evidence also suggests we are all descended from a single male – Y-chromosomal Adam.

What isn’t clear is whether the genetic Adam and Eve lived at the same time. It’s possible that they could have literally founded the current human race… but it’s also possible that Eve was an older woman (by tens of thousands of years!).

The bottom line is that the scientific evidence tends to support monogenism, the unity of the human family, which is what Pope Pius XII insisted upon as a key point of Catholic doctrine vis a vis any scientific theory of evolution in his encyclical humani generis.

The post Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve, Part II first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

In just three years or less, the mysterious figure we now know (or think we know) as Jesus of Nazareth somehow changed the face of the world.

His real name was almost certainly Yeshu’a bar Yosef. From all the available evidence, he was a semi-skilled Jewish journeyman from a tiny village in northern Palestine who became, very briefly, an itinerant prophet, miracle worker and social revolutionary, one who challenged the religious and social institutions of his day so radically that he was put to death for it.

Of course, for two billion people on the planet today, he was also something much more: The Word of God… the wisdom and mercy and justice of God … incarnate.

What is undeniable to the honest historian is that this one man’s life, teaching and symbolic acts eventually created a social and cultural revolution that reverberated far beyond Palestine and altered almost every institution on earth — and is still felt today.

In short, Jesus changed everything: politics, art, science, law, the rules of warfare, philosophy, sexual life, the family. Even Napoleon was amazed: “Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires; but upon what foundation did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.”

But the question is: how?

Beyond the piety of believers and the doubts of modern skeptics lies an enduring mystery:

What did Jesus do and say, in as little as one year and a maximum of three years, that could possibly have had such an impact?

How could his rag tag band of illiterate fishermen, reformed prostitutes and tax collectors create the philosophical and social revolution that we have described in this book – one that made possible such diverse realities as experimental science, the abolition of slavery, the recognition of universal human rights, even authentic feminism?

In short: How do we explain the fact of Christianity?

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One answer, given by scholars from a wide variety of perspectives – including that of so-called liberation theology – is that Jesus’ movement was neither small nor “rag tag.”

Instead, it was just as portions of the New Testament describe it as being, a massive popular outpouring of messianic enthusiasm, especially among the poor and marginalized, that alarmed the Jewish religious leaders of the time and made Roman military officials very nervous.

Many modern people think of Jesus as something like the befuddled hippy Christ in the 1970 play and 1973 film Godspell, teaching his message of peace and love to small groups of dazed flower children.

But what if Jesus was actually more like the figure depicted in the film and stage play Jesus Christ Superstar: A fiery, charismatic, rugged populist who drew crowds by the thousands, even tens of thousands — and whose caustic, subversive, often very funny parables about the “reign of God” and the arrogant elites who try to stand in its way electrified an entire country already seething with rebellion?

What if Jesus wasn’t the meek and mild pacifist of Christian iconography but actually something far more dangerous – a genuinely courageous iconoclast who had the sheer guts to stare down a crowd about to stone a woman to death and who stormed right into the holiest place on earth (a place with every bit of polished awe and grandeur as St. Peter’s in Rome) and began attacking the sales people and moneychangers with a whip?

Such a man could very well have put the fear of God (quite literally) into almost everyone in power — the moneyed aristocracy who controlled the Jerusalem Temple (the Sadduccees); the pious frauds who lay unjust burdens upon people’s shoulders; certainly the small band of Roman military officials charged with keeping the peace.

The truth that both religious believers and modern skeptics have forgotten is this: Jesus proclaimed his message of divine reconciliation and universal peace in a time of ferocious violence and red-hot religious hatred. It was a time eerily like our own: an age of empire and brutal terrorism, of ethnic hatred and spiritual yearning.

The reign of God that Jesus inaugurated and proclaimed with his own blood was born in fire, in the social tumult preceding of one of the most violent civil and religious wars in the history of mankind. It was a war that would turn out to be a thousand times more deadly than the current Israeli-Palestinian stand-off and at least two to four times more deadly than the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Historians estimate that fully forty percent of the Jewish population in Judea may have been wiped out in the Jewish War of 66-7- A.D., when the Roman army besieged Jerusalem, tore the famous Temple down and slaughtered hundreds of thousands.

Jesus and the Zealots

One of the few attempts to look seriously at the military context out of which the Jesus Movement arose is S.G.F. Brandon’s classic, albeit controversial work, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967).

Brandon was a professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester from 1951 until his death and not a professional biblical scholar as such; nevertheless, his work was enormously influential. He was a spokesman for the traditional view that saw the Zealots as an organized movement, founded perhaps by the Jewish robber-baron Hezekiah but hearkening back to the Maccabees, that existed throughout the New Testament period and had many important ties to, and affinities and minor disagreements with, the movement inaugurated by Jesus.

Brandon’s work is 384 pages of dense, detailed, extensively quoted arguments that, in essence, make the claim that the evangelists radically misrepresented who Jesus was and what he was all about. For Brandon, Jesus was a radical Jewish nationalist fully in harmony with the primary goals and attitudes of the Zealots… including with the use of violence to achieve his means. Unlike the Zealots, however, the object of Jesus’s reformist zeal was not the Roman occupiers but rather the corrupt sarcedotal aristocracy in Jerusalem which controlled the Temple. Jesus, like the Zealots, sought to establish the Reign of God on earth… but Jesus believed the way to do that was through a radical reform of Jewish religion, particularly in the Temple.

For Brandon, Jesus’s brazenly messianic and triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was immediately followed, if not on the very day, by a virtual assault on the Temple precincts… not merely by himself alone, but by thousands of his followers, all clamoring that he be made King of Israel. This violent, albeit primarily religious mission may have occurred simultaneous with a far more violent uprising by Zealot forces against the Romans or Roman sympathizers, and two of these men, possibly led by Barabbas, were executed side by side with Jesus on Calvary.

For Brandon, in other words, the Gospels are a complete white-wash of what really happened… an attempt to make Jesus and his movement palatable to a Roman world after the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66-70 had been crushed. His critical reading of Mark points out a number of apparent inconsistencies in the narrative that are not, for Brandon, easily reconciled. For one thing, Mark portrays Jesus as a innocent victim of scheming on the part of Jewish leaders, falsely accused of sedition and executed by the Romans… yet the evangelist also admits that Jesus’s popularity with the crowds was so great that Jewish leaders “feared to arrest him publicly” and had to send an armed party to do so, and at night. The fears of the Jewish leaders were apparently somewhat justified, Brandon says, because their attempts to arrest Jesus were met, at first, by armed resistance (when one of the “bystanders” cut off the ear of the High Priest’s servant).

Yet there are important differences between the Zealots, as Brandon describes them, and Jesus and his followers. For one thing, the Zealots, like the Pharisees, were shomrei ha-mitzvot, Torah rigorists. Josephus describes them as being unwilling to even touch a coin that bears the image of a pagan king. Indeed, the paying of tribute to a foreign king was a casus belli of the entire Zealot movement. That is the politically-charged context, then, of the question posed to Jesus about paying tribute: Is it lawful, then, to pay the census tax to Caesar? Jesus’s brilliant answer, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God,” upholds the principle of divine sovereignty without conceding the Zealot ideal of tax resistance. For Brandon, however, this authentic saying of Jesus was meant to say, and was taken by his audience to mean, that pious Jews should not pay the Roman tribute: In other words, that Jesus agreed with the Zealots! Indeed, says Brandon, had Jesus taught anything other than that – given the universal hatred of the Romans by ordinary Jews – he could not have had any support whatsoever among the people, and the historical evidence indicates that he had a substantial following.

However, as much as Brandon wishes to make Jesus and James out to be conservative, traditional Jews, and thus in sympathy with the Zealot cause – as opposed to Paul, the Gentile-loving innovator – it is difficult to build that case from what the Synoptic Gospels say about Jesus’s many run-ins with the Pharisees. Throughout the Synoptics, Jesus is shown to be at odds with conservative Jewish (Pharisaical and Zealot) ideas of what it means to serve God. Jesus’s somewhat defiant attitude towards Sabbath-keeping… his willingness to openly challenge accepted Jewish practice in the Temple… his table fellowship with tax-collectors (considered nothing less than collaborators with the hated Romans)… his own willingness to speak with Roman officials and even Samaritan women… his sayings about ritual hand-washing and unclean food… all of these things in the Gospels present a Jesus who would not have been in sympathy with the violent xenophobia of the Zealots.

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

Brandon is typical of much of the scholarly work done on Jesus over the past two centuries. This work often raises fascinating, tantalizing questions that religious people often never thought of before – and therefore is quite valuable – but it often operates out of one overriding, often unquestioned assumption: that the “real” Jesus was something quite other than what his followers have always said that he was or as he is depicted as being in the New Testament.

This modern quest for the “real” or the “historical” Jesus began with a German Deist named Hermann Samuel Reimarus (c. 1694-1798), wound its way through works by the German theologian David Strauss (1808-1874), the French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823-1892) and the Alsatian physician and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), and then hit a dead-end with the radical historical skepticism of the Lutheran New Testament scholars Martin Dibelius (1883-1947) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976).

In recent decades, however, there have been a second and then a third “quest” to identify who the “real” Jesus was – with the portraits as varied as the scholars who fashioned them. Recent efforts have sought, often successfully, to more fully recover the “Jewishness” of Jesus and his first followers. These respected, often quite “conservative” historical Jesus scholars include Joachim Jeremias (1900-1979); the Jewish scholars Hyam Maccoby (1924-2004) , Jacob Neusner (1934-), and Geza Vermes; E.P. Sanders; the Catholic priests Raymond Brown and John P. Meier; the Anglican bishop N.T. Wright; and the evangelical scholar Ben Witherington III.

However, the most notorious and controversial of “historical Jesus” scholars are those associated with what was called the Jesus Seminar – an ad hoc committee of liberal intellectuals and writers, organized under the auspices of the Westar Institute in 1985, by Robert Funk and the former Irish priest and bestselling author John Dominic Crossan. The seminar included dozens of liberal scholars and just ordinary liberals, including the Dutch film maker Paul Verhoeven (who has a Ph.D. in mathematics but is best known for directing such epic religious films as “RoboCop, “Total Recall,” “Basic Instinct,” and, of course, “Showgirls”), Episcopal bishop John Shelby Strong, and ex-nun and author Karen Armstrong.

The Jesus Seminar was best known for its practice of meeting in groups and voting, according to a pre-determined system of colored beads, on which words and deeds of Jesus were “authentic” and what were likely invented by the early Church. Unfortunately, the Seminar participants found most of the New Testament to be fall into the latter category. They voted only 11% of the words of Jesus in Mark to be authentic, 17% in Matthew, 20% in Luke and pretty much none in the Gospel of John. Jesus’s deeds didn’t fare much better: The seminar participants found that only 16% of 176 distinct “acts” recorded in 387 “reports” to be authentic or probably authentic (meaning they actually occurred) . The Jesus Seminar liberals were pretty sure that there was a Jesus from Galilee who was born of Mary with the “assistance” of Joseph, that he was baptized by and was a disciple of John the Baptist, that he cured sick people, that he was crucified by the Romans , that his body decayed as all corpses do, and that the resurrection didn’t literally happen. Beyond that, they can’t say much.

Although the Jesus Seminar participants tried to present themselves as cutting-edge scholars in the “mainstream” of New Testament research, they immediately had many critics from within the scholarly community. One common criticism was that very few members of the Seminar were actually professional Bible scholars; the majority were, instead, public intellectuals and educated persons but without any formal training in Biblical studies. One critic, the Catholic New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory University in Atlanta, even went so far as to call the Seminar a “self-indulgent charade.” That’s because the Seminar’s conclusions were pre-determined before a single vote was cast by the selection of the seminar participants and the methodology they used to evaluate the Biblical evidence. Whatever else they may have been, co-founders Funk and Crossan were certainly not what you would call an orthodox believers. “The plot early Christians invented for a divine redeemer figure is as archaic as the mythology in which it is framed,” Funk explained on the Jesus Seminar website. “A Jesus who drops down out of heaven, performs some magical act that frees human beings from the power of sin, rises from the dead, and returns to heaven is simply no longer credible. The notion that he will return at the end of time and sit in cosmic judgment is equally incredible. We must find a new plot for a more credible Jesus.”

Other critics pointed out that at least some of the criteria that the Jesus Seminar used to judge whether the New Testament passage was “authentic” or not were logically consistent. These criteria included…

The criterion of dissimilarity: This is the notion, common outside of the Seminar, that if a saying or act of Jesus is unlike something the early Church would say or do… it is probably authentic. But this is a crazy notion, when you think about it: It requires you to believe that Jesus’ early followers had nothing in common with the Teacher whose memory and message they were risking their lives to preach to the entire world.

The criterion of embarrassment: As noted earlier in this book, this is the belief that if something is inherently embarrassing, such as the apostles being a bit cowardly or stupid, it is probably authentic because people don’t usually make up things that make them look bad.

The criterion of self-reference: This is the assumption that Jesus would never refer to himself in grandiose terms or to his having an important mission. This is why the Seminar rejects most of the sayings in the Gospel of John, such as “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:1).

The criterion of diverse settings. As we’ll discuss below, the synoptic gospels often quote the same saying of Jesus but have it in varying contexts. As a result, the Seminar participants believed most of the “framing” material around a saying was made up by the evangelists.

The criterion of community needs. If a saying of Jesus has anything to do with the early Christian community, such as instructions for missionaries or references to Peter as “the rock” upon which the church is built, it is almost certainly inauthentic.

The criterion of theological agendas: The Seminar participants believed that any saying that is in harmony with the identified theological “agenda” of a given evangelist is almost certainly inauthentic. For example, the prophecy of the sheep and the goats was voted almost certain inauthentic because it allegedly fits in with Matthew’s intent to distinguish between true and false followers of Christ.

Of course, some of these criteria are used by mainstream biblical scholars, although in different ways. As we will see below, it is widely accepted by virtually all reputable New Testament scholars that the evangelists, in writing their own gospels, arranged their material and selected from their sources those parts of the story that emphasized the points they, the evangelists, were trying to make. But mainstream scholars don’t draw from this commonsense observation the radical skepticism exhibited by the Jesus seminar. For example, the fact that a given evangelist includes a saying of Jesus that makes one of the evangelist’s key theological points, or puts it into a particular place in his narrative, doesn’t necessarily mean that he made it up. We know, because we can see for ourselves in the Gospel texts, that one evangelist will use a saying of Jesus and another one won’t. All this means is that the evangelists, like modern journalists choosing which quotations to use in an article, selected those sayings of Jesus, and arranged them in a particular way, to support the points they were trying to make – and not that they made them up.

Contemporary Biblical Scholarship

It goes without saying that the Jesus Seminar at least engaged Biblical scholarship. Some of its leaders were real scholars trained in some of the best universities in the world. To that degree, it’s possible to debate the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions.

But there is a whole other “school” of New Testament bashing that is beyond the reach of reason or of critical comment. That would include those who, like Christopher Hitchens, still insist that Jesus Christ was likely a mythical figure who never even existed in the first place . It also includes the millions of people who believe The Da Vinci Code was based on real events – that Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene (the real “holy grail”) and fathered descendents who became the kings and queens of France. In a similar way, most faithful Christians and Jews don’t really have ready answers for those who insist that the Old Testament was based on aliens docking the Mother Ship on Mt. Sinai (after all, Exodus describes a mountain of “fire and smoke”) – a view popularized by a series of books (e.g., Chariots of the Gods) in the 1960s by Swiss author Erich von Däniken.

The truth is, recent attacks on the New Testament by atheist crusaders, such as Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens, are closer to the Chariots of the Gods or Da Vinci Code school of Biblical scholarship than to that of the Jesus Seminar.

Christopher Hitchens, for example, in Why God is Not Great, titles his chapter on Jesus “The ‘New’ Testament Exceeds the Evil of the ‘Old’ One.” He asserts that the Gospels’ “multiple authors – none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion – cannot agree on anything of importance.” He finds any differences at all in the Gospels to be ipso facto proof that they are all complete frauds and contain nothing worth thinking about.

“They flatly contradict each other on the ‘Flight into Egypt,’ Matthew saying that Joseph was ‘warned in a dream’ to make an immediate escape and Luke saying that all three stayed in Bethlehem until Mary’s ‘purification according to the laws of Moses,’ which would make it forty days, and then went back to Nazareth via Jerusalem,” he says. Elsewhere, Hitchens explains that the “contradictions and illiteracies of the New Testament have filled up many books by eminent scholars, and have never been explained by any Christian authority except in the feeblest terms of ‘metaphor’ and ‘a Christ of faith.’”

But the reality is that the discrepancies and “inconsistences” in the four canonical Gospels, far from being an argument against their authenticity, are actually arguments for their genuine testimony. In the earliest days of the Church, the Christian community had the opportunity to publish a harmonized “one volume” account of Jesus’ life and teaching with all the inconsistencies and disagreements of fact ironed out. In fact, many of these harmonizations were actually written and were quite popular. The most famous and influential was called The Diatessaron, probably written in Syriac around A.D. 175 by an Assyrian (Syriac) Christian named Tatian and used in the Syriac Church for two centuries.

But when it came time for the Christian Church to officially approve those books that most accurately portray the Christian faith as it has been handed down, from teacher to disciple, over the generations, the early Christian leaders deliberately chose the four canonical Gospels (with all their “inconsistencies”) rather than a neatly harmonized account. They did so because they believed the truth of who Jesus was and what he taught and did was better served by these varying accounts, with all their discrepancies, than by any attempt to try to fit them all together in a neat package.

As Brandon and others have argued, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people heard Jesus teach and saw his deeds. Decades after his death, there were undoubtedly thousands of “hearers of the Lord” still living. They naturally traded stories about things Jesus had done and said. Eventually, these sayings of Jesus were translated from their original Aramaic into koine Greek and gathered together into a collection or collections which modern scholars call “Q” (from the German word Quelle for source). Later, when the evangelists began their task of writing about Jesus’ life and teaching, they almost certainly had access to this basic “sayings source” as well as to other, independent sources and to the various eye-witness testimonies of apostles and disciples still alive. The evangelist Luke says this explicitly:

“Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us,” he says in the opening words of the Gospel – and note the words “many” and “compile” – “just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I, too, have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings that you have received” (Like 1:1-4)

In other words: Luke, at least, claims that he investigated “everything accurately anew” and drew upon the testimony of “those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning.”

Most (but not all) modern scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was likely written first, in Rome in the late 60s A.D., followed by Luke in the early 70s and Matthew in the late 70s – who both used the same Q sayings source — and then by John sometime after 80 A.D. Most liberal scholars tend to push the dates back later but virtually all still believe Mark was written first. They believe this because Luke and Matthew follow the basic order of events in Mark almost exactly, although they appear to make minor changes (such as cleaning up poor Greek grammar) found in the Markan account; and there are big chunks of texts that are not in Mark but are found, word for word, in both Matthew and Luke.

What’s more, in piecing together the facts of Jesus’ life, and drawing upon the same or similiar “sayings source” (Q), the evangelists sometimes differed as to where a particular “saying” should be put in the narrative (its setting) and sometimes modified the saying itself. The evangelists were each individuals, writing from different locations, perhaps in different languages, and each had their own “agenda” or particular points they wanted to make. Of course, Christian apologists have long pointed out that Jesus traveled from town to town all over Palestine, preaching his message and telling his parables, and it is likely that he would have repeated himself often. Thus, it’s natural that some eyewitnesses would remember his saying something in one context and another witness might remember him saying it in another.

Anyone interested in the details of all this can see for themselves by consulting what’s called a “synopsis” of the Gospels (such as the one published by the United Bible Societies and edited by Kurt Aland) that shows the accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds arranged in parallel columns by Gospel. A humorous example of how the concerns of the individual evangelists can determine what they do and do not put into their version of events – and which demonstrates how so-called “critical” scholarship often strengthens the case for the authenticity of the Gospels – is the account of the woman with a hemorrhage.

According to all three of the synoptic gospels, when Jesus was on his way to cure the daughter of a synagogue official named Jarius, a woman who suffered from hemorrhages for years came up to him and touched him, seeking to be cured. Keeping in mind the idea that Mark probably wrote his gospel first, notice how the three versions differ slightly – and remember that, according to tradition, the evangelist Luke was a physician by trade:
Mark 5:25 Matthew 9:20 Luke: 8:43
And there was a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment.

And behold, a woman who had suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years

came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment.

And a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years

And could not be healed by any one,

Came up behind him, and touched the fringe of his garment.

Minor differences, of course. But notice that the version by the alleged physician Luke removes the biting comments about how the woman had suffered under “many physicians” and had spent all she had on them but only grew worse. Also, notice how Mark, probably writing from Rome for at least some Gentiles, refers merely to Jesus’ “garment” while Matthew, whose concern above all else is to show how Jesus is the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies and teaching, adds the detail about the “fringe” (Hebrew: tzitzit) of his garment, a reference to the traditional tallit or “prayer shawl” commanded in Numbers 15. It is through this kind of careful, “critical” reading of the New Testament that scholars attempt to discern the theological assumptions and emphases of the Biblical writers and, through them, to discover more about who Jesus really was and what he did. In other words, we learn more looking through the eyes of four evangelists – each with his own agenda and purposes – than we would from a “harmonized” account that tried to remove the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies that skeptics so dislike.

Interestingly enough, modern scholarship is not as original, or as shocking, as modern skeptics would have people believe. Faithful Christians have always known the basic facts of how the New Testament came to be written. We have numerous (again, conflicting accounts) of how the New Testament came to be written in the writings of early Christian theologians, such as Papias (c. 120) and Eusebius (c. 270-339). Papias, a bishop in what is now central Turkey, wrote a lost book called Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord that obliquely testifies to the existence of a Q source. We no longer have his works, but the Church historian Eusebius quotes Papias’s account of how the New Testament books came to be written:

“Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord’s sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.”

This account actually jives quite neatly with what many modern scholars believe. Due to the many semiticisms and Aramaic words in the Greek text of Matthew, for example, many scholars believe it was originally written in Aramaic and later translated into Greek.

The Lost Gospels

A final issue when it comes to New Testament studies: The so-called “lost” Gospels. As skeptics tell it, reflecting the worldview captured in The Da Vinci Code, the Christian church systematically suppressed the truth about Jesus and his early disciples, “censoring” alternative accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching because these texts didn’t reflect the “dogma” (primarily the alleged “sexism” and “homophobia”) of the institutional Church. Examples of these “alternative” Gospels include the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of James. More recently, a Gospel of Judas was discovered and published.

The Da Vinci Code was hardly original in taking this line: In 1972, novelist Irving Wallace wrote a thriller called The Word that described, interspersed with lots of sex, the alleged discovery of an alternative gospel (the Gospel of James) that would “blow the lid” off of institutional Christianity and reveal the truth that the evil Church had kept hidden for millennia. There’s even a secret society that has suppressed the truth that Jesus survived the crucifixion – and a man who, “if he can survive long enough,” struggles to tell the whole world what really happened.

So, is there truth to the charge? Did the Christian church “suppress” lost facts about and sayings of Jesus?

The answer of mainstream biblical scholars would be: If only! That’s because, for two centuries now, scholars have been poring over every word of every “apocryphal” (non-canonical) gospel available, desperately searching for a lost saying or an authentic new fact. Far from being “lost,” every single apocryphal gospel extant can be easily read in translation in such collections as The Nag Hammadi Library (edited by James Robinson), or in more popular anthologies such as The Complete Gospels (edited by Robert J. Miller) or The Other Gospels: Non-Canonical Gospel Texts (edited by Ron Cameron).

Alas, the results have been disappointing.

The researches of such scholars as Elaine Pagels and Bart Erhman have taught us a lot about early Gnosticism but precious little new about Jesus. The primary reason for this is because these lost, “apocryphal” gospels were written, by and large, decades, sometimes even centuries after the canonical Gospels. They were the creation of Gnostic sects (sort of second- and third-century New Agers) that usually just followed the outlines of the canonical Gospels and simply put into the mouth of Jesus various philosophical ramblings of a particular Gnostic sect. Most of them strike modern readers as deadly dull and quite bizarre… and nothing like the canonical Gospels in vivid, real-life detail.

Here is a typical passage from The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), a favorite with New Agers and conspiracy theorists:

The Savior said, “All natures, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. For the nature of matter is resolved into the [roots] of its nature alone. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

As you might guess, if the church “suppressed” these texts it was probably more for bad writing than for heresy. The simple truth is that, when the early Christian leaders looked over the various works purporting to be about the life and teaching of Jesus, they found that most had little if anything to do with the Jesus proclaimed by the Church and instead were full of bizarre Greek philosophical ideas (about various deities and emanations from the godhead) that Jesus would have had nothing to say about. That’s why the church historian Eusebius, writing around A.D. 324, spoke of the books that are “adduced by the heretics under the name of the apostles, such as the Gospels of Peter, Thomas, Matthew, and others beside them or such as the Acts of the Apostles by Andrew John, and others.” He added the common sense observation that “indeed the character of the style itself is very different from that of the apostles, and the sentiment and purport of those things that are advanced in them, deviating as far as possible form sound orthodoxy, evidently proves they are fictions of heretical men.” These “other” gospels, Eusebius concludes, are “spurious writings [that] are to be rejected as altogether absurd and impious.”

What Do the Earliest Texts Say?

So: If the “real” Jesus can’t be found in the New Age ramblings of third-century Gnostic Gospels… or in the radical revisionism of Jesus Seminar intellectuals and pundits… or in the violent revolution planned by the forerunners of the Zealots… where can he be found?

Perhaps in the last place many people appear to want to look, in the New Testament itself.

Modern New Testament scholars have actually done a pretty good job of identifying which parts of the New Testament were written first – by correlating passages with known historical events. When they did this, however, they made a discovery that undermined two centuries worth of “certainties” about Jesus and Christianity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, liberal theologians (such as Adolf von Harnack) believed that the first followers of Jesus were pious Jews for whom Jesus was a rabbi, perhaps a prophet, but nothing more… and it was only after the Jesus Movement spread out into the Gentile world that his followers began using grandiose language that described Jesus as having divine or quasi-divine status. The idea was that the early Greek followers of Jesus (pagans all!) simply adapted Greek “divine man” myths to speak about Jesus. These liberals theologians believed, therefore, that the earliest Christian tradition would speak of Jesus as a simple teacher, the later writings as an exalted quasi-divine figure.

But after scholars successfully identified the lowest “strata” in the New Testament, the earliest pieces of tradition, they made a shocking, very disturbing discovery: The very earliest traditions, not just the latest, speak of Jesus as sharing in God’s unique sovereignty over all things. In fact, a fairly “high” christology of Jesus permeates virtually the entire New Testament.

The British New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham names this strange, unexpected phenomenon “Christological monotheism,” meaning the earliest traditions about Jesus see him sharing in the very life and wisdom and even the power of God . This can be seen, Bauckham says, in a number of ways.

First, the earliest New Testament texts speak of Jesus’ lordship over “all things,” which is a status in Jewish thought previously allocated to God alone. Writing to the Corinthians in A.D. 55 or thereabouts, Paul says that Christ will destroy death itself (1 Corinthians 15:26).

Second, Bauckham says, Jesus shares God’s exaltation above the angels. In Ephesians 1:21-22, perhaps written in A.D. 62, Paul (or his scribes) say that “[God] raised [Jesus] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet…”

Third, Jesus is given the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) – the name, says Bauckham, “which names the unique identity of the one God, the name which is exclusive to the one God…” According to Philippians 2:9…

Christ Jesus… Who, though he was in the form of God

Did not regard equality with God

Something to be grasped.

Rather, he emptied himself

Taking the form of a slave…

Because of this,

God greatly exalted him

And bestowed on him the name

That is above every name,

That at the name of Jesus

Every knee should bend,

Of those in heaven and on earth and under the hearth

Fourth, Jesus participation in the divine sovereignty extends even to worship. The central, unalterable truth of Israelite religion is the Shema: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Or as the First Commandment puts it: “You shall have no other gods beside me.” Yet in the Gospel of Mark, which scholars almost unanimously believe to be the first gospel written, Jesus is asked by the High Priest, “Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?” And Jesus answers…

“I am, and you will se the Son of Man

Seated at the right hand of the Power

And coming with the clouds of heaven.

At this, Mark says, the high priest “tore his garments” and said, “Have we further need of witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy.”

The word that the New Testament uses to express this unique incorporation of the man Jesus into the very life of God is “sonship.” The way the New Testament scholar Burton Mack describes what this means is:

“In Paul’s mind, the Christ was now a historic person, now a son of God, a ‘corporate personality’ representing a collective humanity, a cosmic king, a spiritual power pervading the cosmos, the hidden meaning behind the significant events of Israel’s history, and the incarnation of the very mind, promise, and intention of God for humankind… The Christ had become an overwhelming, all-encompassing symbol of the agency of a Jewish God in a Greek world.”

The important point to remember, however, is that these unusual, mind-boggling modifications to traditional Jewish monotheism were made, not by Greek-speaking Gentiles in far away Rome or Athens, but by the earliest Jewish followers of the very Jewish Jesus.

The same man who quotes the early Christological hymn in Phillipians (quoted above), the Pharisee convert Paul, brags in the very same letter that he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, in observance of the law a Pharisee” and claims he was a Jewish zealot who studied under the great Torah scholar Gamaliel and persecuted the early followers of Jesus.

Some scholars have pointed to Semitic characteristics behind the Greek text and argue that this hymn originated from the early Jewish-Christian community at Jerusalem. This means that perhaps the earliest extent stratum in the New Testament, from a distinctly Jewish provenance, perhaps learned by Paul within the first five or ten years after Jesus’ death in A.D. 30, displays the same elevated understanding of Christ that liberal theologians used to believe came only very late, in the second century, among pagans.

The bottom line for faith

What this means is this: You don’t have to go as far as evangelical apologists like C.S. Lewis or Josh McDowell and say that either Jesus was a madman or the Son of God… because that begs the question as to whether the Gospels accurately report what Jesus really said or merely put words into his mouth, as modern skeptics claim and as later Gnostic writers actually did.

But any fair evaluation of the historical evidence has to at least admit this: The earliest, most authentic documents we have – which are, to the chagrin of Gnostic fans everywhere, the canonical books of the New Testament – clearly claim that Jesus was something much more than merely a prophet or even the long-awaited Jewish messiah.

Of course, many faithful Jews then and since could not accept that… and many modern people can no longer accept it as well. But that is precisely what the New Testament says, at the very earliest strata of the tradition: The man Jesus of Nazareth… the carpenter of Nazareth who electrified all of Galilee and Judea with his fiery denunciations of religious hypocrisy and calls for true repentance… somehow shares in the very mind and mercy and even power of God himself.

Far from refuting that fact, the best Biblical scholarship of the past century actually confirms it.

Of course, that doesn’t answer the most important question of all: Whether it’s true. In this, the great New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolph Bultmann was correct: from a strictly historical perspective, we can never really know what Jesus actually did and said but only what the Gospels say he said and did. The New Testament is virtually the only historical document we have. As a result, whether Jesus really is the Son of God is not a question that can be answered by “critical” Biblical scholarship or archaeology. It can be illuminated through such scholarship, explored and debated and expanded, but not, ultimately, answered.

That is why people rarely come to faith in Christ based on a critical study of textual variants in the Gospel of Luke. Instead, they come to faith in Christ as the ultimate revelation of God primarily because they are born into, or encounter, communities of faith (which we call “churches” or “assemblies”) that have preserved his memory for nearly 2,000 years.

For two millennia, the tribe that calls itself Christians has gathered together in groups – some large, some small – to hear Jesus’ words, meditate upon his deeds and obey his last request that he be remembered in the breaking of the bread.

Across the ages, this international community has continued to pass on the memory and the testimony of who Jesus Christ was and is – from father to son, mother to daughter, catechist to student, in an unbroken chain of “apostolic succession,” for generations. This faith is often communicated orally and visually, depicted in the stain glass windows of Gothic cathedrals and celebrated in songs in “rock operas.” That’s why you don’t have to be an historian or a Biblical scholar to believe in Jesus – and why the great saints and mystics of Christendom, from St. Francis of Assisi to John Wesley, Corrie ten Bloom to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, knew more about who Jesus was than the hundreds of supposed experts in the Jesus Seminar.

Thus, on a practical level, deciding whether to believe the Christian testimony is less about history, archaeology and Greek paleography than it is about our own understanding of people, the world and our eternal destinies.

People usually decide to remain or become Christians because the story of who Jesus was and did, and the words he said, seem to “fit” their experience of the world. Put simply, it rings true. The Gospel stories of Jesus’s encounters with sinners and sycophants, the powerful and the impoverished, seem believable… often far more believable than the elaborate conspiracies and dubious reconstructions postulated by scholarly skeptics. Jesus’s words of mercy and forgiveness… his challenge to live a life of integrity far beyond the minimum required by religious law… his humor and courage and simple decency… strike ordinary believers as too authentic and “real” to have been made up. That is not, as undergraduate philosophizers like Sam Harris like to say, blind faith, but rather a judgment that attends to data other than those produced by scientific instruments or the random facts we can cull from archaeology.

The simple truth is that the New Testament claims that Jesus of Nazareth is Lord of heaven and earth… the ultimate revelation of who God is and what he wants from his creates… and about one third of the planet’s population finds it credible. The snide put-downs, sophomoric arguments and thinly veiled threats of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Penn and Teller do not impress them. Forced to choose between what the cynical media say is plausible and “scientific,” and what the Bible says about Jesus, billions prefer the Bible. They know Jesus, and trust him – more than all the scholars in the Jesus Seminar.

The post Jesus Christ Remains the Greatest Enigma in History to Believers and Skeptics Alike first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

A final issue when it comes to New Testament studies: The so-called “lost” Gospels.

As skeptics tell it, reflecting the worldview captured in The Da Vinci Code, the Christian church systematically suppressed the truth about Jesus and his early disciples, “censoring” alternative accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching because these texts didn’t reflect the “dogma” (primarily the alleged “sexism” and “homophobia”) of the institutional Church.

Examples of these “alternative” Gospels include the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of James. More recently, a Gospel of Judas was discovered and published.

The Da Vinci Code was hardly original in taking this line: In 1972, novelist Irving Wallace wrote a thriller called The Word that described, interspersed with lots of sex, the alleged discovery of an alternative gospel (the Gospel of James) that would “blow the lid” off of institutional Christianity and reveal the truth that the evil Church had kept hidden for millennia.

There’s even a secret society that has suppressed the truth that Jesus survived the crucifixion – and a man who, “if he can survive long enough,” struggles to tell the whole world what really happened.

So, is there truth to the charge? Did the Christian church “suppress” lost facts about and sayings of Jesus?

The answer of mainstream biblical scholars would be: If only! That’s because, for two centuries now, scholars have been poring over every word of every “apocryphal” (non-canonical) gospel available, desperately searching for a lost saying or an authentic new fact. Far from being “lost,” every single apocryphal gospel extant can be easily read in translation in such collections as The Nag Hammadi Library (edited by James Robinson), or in more popular anthologies such as The Complete Gospels (edited by Robert J. Miller) or The Other Gospels: Non-Canonical Gospel Texts (edited by Ron Cameron).

Alas, the results have been disappointing.

The researches of such scholars as Elaine Pagels and Bart Erhman have taught us a lot about early Gnosticism but precious little new about Jesus.

The primary reason for this is because these lost, “apocryphal” gospels were written, by and large, decades, sometimes even centuries after the canonical Gospels.

They were the creation of Gnostic sects (sort of second- and third-century New Agers) that usually just followed the outlines of the canonical Gospels and simply put into the mouth of Jesus various philosophical ramblings of a particular Gnostic sect.

Most of them strike modern readers as deadly dull and quite bizarre… and nothing like the canonical Gospels in vivid, real-life detail.

Here is a typical passage from The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), a favorite with New Agers and conspiracy theorists:

The Savior said, “All natures, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. For the nature of matter is resolved into the [roots] of its nature alone. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

As you might guess, if the church “suppressed” these texts it was probably more for bad writing than for heresy.

The simple truth is that, when the early Christian leaders looked over the various works purporting to be about the life and teaching of Jesus, they found that most had little if anything to do with the Jesus proclaimed by the Church and instead were full of bizarre Greek philosophical ideas (about various deities and emanations from the godhead) that Jesus would have had nothing to say about.

That’s why the church historian Eusebius, writing around A.D. 324, spoke of the books that are “adduced by the heretics under the name of the apostles, such as the Gospels of Peter, Thomas, Matthew, and others beside them or such as the Acts of the Apostles by Andrew John, and others.”

He added the common sense observation that “indeed the character of the style itself is very different from that of the apostles, and the sentiment and purport of those things that are advanced in them, deviating as far as possible form sound orthodoxy, evidently proves they are fictions of heretical men.”

These “other” gospels, Eusebius concludes, are “spurious writings [that] are to be rejected as altogether absurd and impious.”

The post Lost Gospels Revealed first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

“We’re told that four fifths of American homes have a Bible, so go get it,” bellows Penn Jillette of the controversial comedy/magic act, Penn & Teller, on their Showtime TV series, Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!

“Really, no kidding! Go get your goddamn Bible! If you don’t read along with us tonight, you’re going to think we’re making this sh*t up.”

And so begins the controversial duo’s debunking of the holy scriptures of Christianity and Judaism—a twenty-eight-minute, foul-mouthed harangue exhibiting all the erudition of a biker bar and just about as much sensitivity.

Penn, a towering lumberjack of a man with a ponytail and Norris Skipper goatee, does all the talking in the show while Teller illustrates his points with little magic tricks.

“Tonight, we’re going to take you through the damn Bible and show you it’s full of inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and outright impossibilities … that it’s more fiction than fact,” he announces solemnly—and then, thumping his black leather Bible, he adds, “You know, being on TV, in a suit, and yelling with this damn book in my hand … I look just like one of those evangelical assh*les.”

On and on it goes.

Anyone who says that Christianity in general, and the Bible in particular, are not mocked in popular culture has not been watching TV in a while.

Penn & Teller trot out a handful of alleged Biblical “experts”—such as Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine—to make their case against the Bible.

“The more we learn about archaeology and history of Biblical times,” says Shermer excitedly, “the more we realize that most of the stuff in the Bible is fiction.”

Want proof?

In the first chapter of Genesis, Shermer points out, Adam and Eve are created at the same time. In the second chapter, Adam is created first.

See? Right off the bat, you know the whole book is a complete fraud. Inconsistencies like that just rattle your faith to the very bone.

“Sometimes the Bible is the word of God,” explains Penn, “sometimes it’s the word of one man, sometimes it’s the word of two men. Sometimes the Bible is literal, and sometimes it’s simply symbolic.”

Clearly, this makes it unreliable and a waste of time.

All of this might be merely amusing—yet another example of how high you can climb in Hollywood with a high school education—were it not for the fact that such village-atheist assaults on the Bible are now commonplace in public schools, universities, the media, and even some elite seminaries.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the these attacks on the Bible represented something genuinely new—something witty and entertaining on the level of, say, a Nietzsche or Swinburne—but instead they are merely repetitions of allegations made for about 1,800 years. They are as original as dirt—and about as interesting. The problem is, many of these new champions of enlightened reason, standing on high from the pinnacles of academia, don’t appear to be aware that their ideas are literally millennia old.

The Bible’s Enemies

The Bible was not exactly a raging bestseller when it was first “published” in the centuries after Jesus’s death. The Romans didn’t particularly like the Jews to begin with, considering them barbaric and quite primitive. In the Jewish Wars of A.D. 66–70, the Romans put down the Jewish fight for freedom with definitive ferocity: Up to a million Jews were slaughtered and the holy city of Jerusalem (and its world-famous Temple) was razed to the ground.

When Christianity came on the scene, it was viewed as worse—a bizarre, superstitious cult whose founder—a wild-eyed Jewish fanatic stirring up trouble—was sensibly put to death. His erstwhile followers were said to meet secretly where they ate human flesh and drank human blood. There were rumors of rampant immorality, even incestuous orgies, as the members of the cult referred to one another as “brother” and “sister.” Plainly, as “new religions” go, this Eastern superstition had little to recommend it when compared to, say, the elevated mystery rites of Isis or Mithra or the Stoics.

And then there was their holy book!

If there was anything designed to chase an educated Roman away from Christianity, it was the Christian Bible.

The Christian and Jewish scriptures had to be seen to be believed, they said: A rag-tag collection of folk tales, strange laws, badly written letters, biographies of wonder-working magicians—all written with no regard to literary style, verbal felicity, or the rules of rhetoric.

To educated Romans raised on the polished elegance of Virgil and Cicero, Ennius and Cato, the Christian writings were positively juvenile, filled with vulgar misspellings, absurd grammatical errors, and ridiculous plots. As the second century Latin Christian apologist Tertullian put it, “Men are so far from accepting our Scriptures, no one approaches them unless he is already a Christian.” St. Augustine, the greatest theologian of the first millennium of Christianity, was so put off by the Bible he ignored it (and Christianity) for a dozen years.

“It is clear to me that the writings of the Christians are a lie, and that your fables are not well-enough constructed to conceal this monstrous fiction,” said the second century anti-Christian polemicist, Celsus. “I have heard that some of your interpreters … are on to the inconsistencies and, pen in hand, alter the original writings, three, four and several more times over in order to be able to deny the contradictions in the face of criticism.”

As an example of the absurd stories found in the Christian and Jewish scriptures, Celsus cites Noah’s ark: “So too their fantastic story—which they take from the Jews—concerning the flood and the building of an enormous ark, and the business about the message being brought back to the survivors of the flood by a dove (or was it an old crow?). This is nothing more than a debased and nonsensical version of the myth of Deucalion, a fact I am sure they would not want to come light.”

Nor was Celsus alone in his contempt for Christianity and the Bible. Around the year A.D. 280, the Roman philosopher Porphyry wrote a fifteen volume work entitled, Against the Christians. It was a runaway bestseller for its time. Sort of a third century version of Penn & Teller, only with more education, Porphyry wrote a witty, sarcastic refutation of the Bible almost line by line. Modern day critics insist that science, archaeology, and critical scholarship have all “proven” that Moses did not write one word of the Torah. They then sit back, with a look of triumph on their faces, as though such a declaration will shock anyone.

The trouble is, Porphyry said the same thing—only he said it 1,700 years ago: “‘If you believed Moses, you would have believed me, for he wrote concerning me,’” Porphyry begins, quoting Jesus in the Gospel of John. “He said it, but all the same nothing which Moses wrote has been preserved. For all his writings are said to have been burnt along with the temple. All that bears the name of Moses was written 1,180 years afterwards, by Ezra and those of his time. And even if one were to concede that the writing is that of Moses, it cannot be shown that Christ was anywhere called God, or God the Word, or Creator. And pray who has spoken of Christ as crucified?”

Of course, repeating past criticism doesn’t make it false, but one might think that real journalists (assuming they exist), might be curious as to whether these criticisms evoked any responses over the millennia. There are literally thousands of books written by Christian apologists attempting to present rational answers to “Bible difficulties”—alleged historical or scientific contradictions, historical inaccuracies, textual variants, apparent misquotations or erroneous citations of Biblical texts by later authors, and so on. Some of these explanations are convincing, others less so—often depending upon how you understand the doctrine of Biblical inspiration and how the Bible came to be written.

Oftentimes, the “inconsistencies” and “errors” that critics allege are found in the Bible are little more than misunderstandings of what we mean when we say that the Bible is an “inspired” text. Believers do not mean, and never have meant, the Bible was “dictated” by God in the way that Mohammed says the Koran was dictated. Even Christians who affirm that the Bible is “inerrant” also agree that it was written by limited, fallible human beings within a real historical context, speaking a human language (with all its limitations and accommodations), making use of certain literary forms and social conventions, and possessing a certain worldview which they inherited from their time and place. In other words, proper interpretation and understanding of these ancient texts require patient study and analysis—something difficult to sum up during thirty seconds of Good Morning America.

Too often, critics of the Bible mistake descriptions of actual human conduct for God’s will. “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled,” wrote Thomas Paine in his notorious The Age of Reason. “It would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”

The notion that you can read an encyclopedia of ancient wisdom like the Bible—written over the course of 1,000 years, in three difficult ancient languages, by many different human authors spread across the breadth of the Middle East—the same way you read a newspaper article only reveals an astonishing (for lack of a better word) comic book understanding of the ancient world.

For Christians, therefore, these and similar attacks on the Biblical texts often just seem silly, not threatening. It would be as though they heard a TV news anchor on one of the major networks announce:

“This just in. Scholars at the University of Tubigen in Germany have discovered that there is actually more than one Christian gospel written about the life of Jesus. While Christians continually refer to ‘the’ Gospel, it turns out that there are actually many of them—and they do not always agree on all the details of Jesus’s life. The inconsistencies in the various accounts of Jesus’s life raise new, often troubling questions about the reliability and authority of these foundational Christian texts.… ”

The news that there is more than one Christian gospel and they do not always agree on all the details of Jesus’s life may be shocking and new to members of the elite media (or even to Penn and Teller) but does not, as astonishing as it may seem, really shake the faith of ordinary believers—most of all because Christians have known about these facts for two millenia.

The Elites Against the People

For approximately 1.8 billion people on the planet—roughly 1 billion Roman Catholics, 280 million Orthodox, 473 million Anglicans and Protestants, and 14 million Jews—the Bible is revered, in one way or another, as the word of God.

It’s a source of divine inspiration, moral guidance, and the foundation of Western civilization. There are differences among denominations, of course, but a general consensus exists among faithful Christians and Jews worldwide that the Biblical texts communicate vital, often shocking and unusual truths central for our self-understanding and the key to our eternal destinies.

But for an influential group of academic, government, and media elites, the Bible, far from being the cornerstone of Western civilization, is actually the source of most of the evil in the world today—a veritable cornucopia of superstition, obscurantism, and “bad taste.”

“Long before modern inquiry and painstaking translation and excavation had helped enlighten us, it was well within the compass of a thinking person to see that the ‘revelation’ at Sinai and the rest of the Pentateuch was an ill-carpentered fiction, bolted into place well after the nonevents that it fails to describe convincingly or even plausibly,” asserts the irascible but always entertaining British journalist Christopher Hitchens (at left) in his 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. “Intelligent schoolchildren have been upsetting their teachers with innocent but unanswerable questions ever since Bible study was instituted.”

The term recently coined for these dogmatic, inflexible, increasingly totalitarian ideologues is “secular fundamentalist,” those who believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that the triumph of civilization has been largely accomplished through the systematic debunking and elimination of religious belief, by force if necessary.

Of course, there have always been village atheists and skeptics in the West—some intelligent, others much less so—fulminating against Biblical prohibitions that inhibit their lifestyles.

The Marquis de Sade, for example, the eighteenth century libertine from whom the word “sadism” was coined, insisted that religions are “cradles of despotism” against which enlightened persons must rebel—primarily through lots and lots of extramarital sex. “Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other,” he proclaimed.

In the past, the anti-religious rants were more or less confined to isolated individuals, fulminating in tracts against society and Christianity. The 1960s and 1970s changed that as the secular fundamentalists took control of the media and many academic and government institutions.

Thus, in the West and particularly in the United States, we have the increasingly combustible situation in which most people hold fairly traditional views about the Bible and religion, while a minority of privileged elites is not only indifferent, but actually hostile towards them.

If you think that judgment is too harsh, consider the case of Robert Reich. According to Reich, former U.S. labor secretary during the Clinton administration, the “greatest danger we face” in the twenty-first century is—not terrorism, not epidemic disease, not poverty or famine or war—but religious belief itself.

Writing in The American Prospect, Reich stated the secular fundamentalist viewpoint with admirable frankness:

The great conflict of the twenty-first century may not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The underlying battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe blind allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is no more than preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe truth is revealed solely through scripture and religious dogma, and those who rely primarily on science, reason, and logic. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the only danger we face.

If the “great conflict of the twenty-first century” is, as Reich says, between secularists and religious believers, that would put the secularists at war with virtually the entire planet . The world’s population is estimated at 6.5 billion. The number of people who claim some religious affiliation stands at about 5.8 billion. Reich and his fellow secularists see their as their enemy (real or potential)— the overwhelming majority of mankind.

And Reich is not unique in his extremism.

American universities and newspapers are literally bursting at the seams with a kaleidoscopic assortment of former ’60s “revolutionaries” or neo-Marxists who espouse similar beliefs.

According to Timothy Shortell, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, “religion without fanaticism is a logical impossibility.” In a brief essay published online in 2005, Dr. Shortell elaborated on the essential link between religious belief and murder:

“Anyone whose mind is trapped inside such a mental prison [as religion] will be susceptible to extreme forms of hatred and violence. Faith is, by its very nature, obsessive-compulsive. All religions foment their own kind of holy war. (Those whose devotion is moderate are only cowardly fanatics.).…It is no wonder, then, that those who are religious are incapable of moral action, just as children are.…Faith, like superstition, prevents moral action.…On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like bad taste. The immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others. One only has to read the newspaper to see the results of their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude, and belittle. They make a virtue of close-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot.

The British champion of neo-Darwinian evolution, Richard Dawkins, likes to use the same sort of language. Opposition to evolutionary dogma, he says, “comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States.” The United States, he adds, is “slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age.”

Charming, no? In the early 1990s, media elites believed—as the famous quote from The Washington Post had it—that religious people were “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” Now, alas, they’ve become dangerous. The handful of “moderate” Christians and Jews are simply “cowardly fanatics.” There it is in a nutshell: the worldview shared in newsrooms and faculty lounges across America and Europe (although, truth be told, newspaper reporters have slightly better manners).

For secular fundamentalists, religion in general, and the Bible in particular, are not just wrong-headed but actually dangerous. That’s because religion and the Bible stand in the way of everything they value most in life—primarily unlimited sex, of course, but also the power to reshape society into a kind of secular utopia free from traditional ethical restraint.

The sudden eruption of Islamic terrorism worldwide has given secular fundamentalists the excuse they’ve long needed to basically draw a circle around all religious belief—from the Taliban to the World Council of Churches to the Dalai Lama—and insist that, well, it’s all the same thing. In principle, they imply, Mother Teresa was no different from Osama bin Laden: only her methods differed.

Thus, former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan—a disgruntled Catholic upset that the Vatican won’t change 2,000 years of Christian teaching and declare homosexuality just another “lifestyle choice”—now writes routinely of “Christianist” organizations and figures.

Drawing a parallel with “Islamist” figures who advocate mass suicide-bombings, these menacing “Christianist” figures, Sullivan says, are now scheming to impose a kind of Christian theocracy on the enlightened secular societies of the West. Those who object to partial birth abortion, for example—or to the creation of animal-human embryos in laboratory experiments—are no different from Islamic terrorist groups. As the anti-religion crusader Sam Harris put it, “Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society.”

Harris—the author of the 2005 bestseller and National Book Award-winning, The End of Faith and, most recently, Letter to a Christian Nation—is merely one of a number of widely celebrated writers to warn the world about the growing menace of religious convictions.

According to his biography, Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University who is currently pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience at UCLA. The stated purpose of his book is not to describe an actual social reality (the end of faith), but rather to issue a call to arms to secular fundamentalists everywhere to drive religious persons of all persuasions out of the public sphere altogether.

Harris openly and proudly insists that what the world needs now is intolerance, not tolerance. He reminds the educated reader of the old menacing claim by the eighteenth century philosophe Denis Diderot that “men will never be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.” Or in Harris’s own words:

“To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.”

Harris’s solution is to eliminate biblical religion because “the degree to which religious ideas still determine government policies—especially those of the United States—presents a grave danger to everyone.”

Harris’s basic arguments are hardly original, but they have an unfortunate pedigree. For more than three hundred years, from the French philosophers to Marx, Lenin, and the “death of God” theologies of the 1960s, we have been assured that, freed from the superstitions and imbecilities of organized religion, rational secularists could render the world as utopia. The results have invariably been horrific—from the Terror of the French Revolution to the terrors of Nazism and Communism.

Contrary to what anti-religious Zealots such as Harris assert, throughout history far more lives have been snuffed out by faith-hating fanatics than by religious believers.

Historical demographers estimate that, in the 350 years between 1478-1834, the Spanish Inquisition was responsible for the execution of between 2,000 (Encyclopedia Britannica) and 32,000 people (Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, 1987).

That works out to about 97 people a year – a ghastly number, to be sure, but a far cry from the “millions” routinely cited by secular fundamentalists.

As for the “witch hunts,” another example Harris and others give of irrational religious fanaticism, the British historian Norman Davies estimates 50,000 people, primarily women, were executed as witches over a 400-year period – an average of about 125 a year.

Yet as horrible as these examples of religious intolerance may be, they pale in comparison to the single-minded, bloody-thirsty, satanic fury unleashed upon the innocent by secular fundamentalists – those militantly atheistic regimes that sought to expunge religion from society altogether and which, like Harris, claimed that religious belief and “bourgeois” morality represented intolerable obstacles to social progress.

According to research conducted by the political scientist Rudolph Rummel at the University of Hawaii, the officially atheist states of the Communist bloc committed more acts of genocide than any societies in history. The total number of people murdered by their own anti-Christian governments in the twentieth century—communist, socialist, fascist—equals about 170 million. :

• USSR: 61 million people murdered between 1917–1987
• Communist China: 35.2 million people murdered from 1949–present
• Mao’s Army: 3.4 million people murdered between 1923–1949
• Nazi Germany: 20 million people murdered between 1932–1945
• Communist Poland: 1.6 million people murdered between 1945–1948
• Communist Cambodia: 2 million people murdered between 1975–1979
• Communist Vietnam: 1.6 million people murdered between 1945–1975
• Communist Yugoslavia: 1 million people murdered between 1944–1987
• Anti-Christian Mexican Revolution: 1.4 million people murdered between 1900–1920
• Turkey: 1.8 million people murdered between 1900–1918
• Pakistan: 1.5 million people murdered between 1958–1987
• Japan: 5.9 million people murdered between 1936–1945

And these numbers don’t even include the people killed in the wars initiated by these officially anti-Christian states—such as the estimated 25 million soldiers killed in the Second World War.

These are the people lined up against brick walls and shot—often for the crime of merely believing in God—by the rational, more “scientific” social planners of Communist Russia and China, or anti-Christian Mexico and Germany.

Rummel’s conclusion is as shocking as it is inescapable: War wasn’t the most deadly evil to afflict humanity in the twentieth century. Government was! And not just any government, but atheist government.

As a result, ordinary people – whether religious or not — might be forgiven their general skepticism when today’s secular fundamentalists talk about the “intolerance” and “violence” of Biblical religion or the people who believe in it.
In terms of raw numbers—which is the only kind of evidence that rationalists such as Harris claim to accept—the evidence is incontrovertible: Freed of any moral restraint, believing that the ends justify the means, scoffing at the notion that they will ever answer to a Higher Power than themselves, the murderous dictators of atheistic regimes feel little hesitation in committing mass murder if they believe it will advance their more “rational,” more “scientific” social aims.

Christopher Hitchens in his book God Is Not Great lamely tries to deflect atheism’s contribution to global genocide by insisting that all tyrannies are really theocratic; and, in any event, Christianity, he says, didn’t do enough to stop fascism and Stalinism.

As for Dawkins, he is only slightly more candid. In The God Delusion, he concedes that Hitler was ferociously anti-Christian, and that Stalin, Mao, and the other Communist tyrants were dogmatic atheists. He agrees that they were among the greatest mass murderers in history. But, he says, the difference between religious people who kill and atheists who kill is that there is “not the smallest evidence” that atheism per se “influences people to do bad things.” Dawkins adds, “Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.”

But didn’t the atheist dictators of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries kill priests, nuns, monks, and believers? Did they not kill in the name of science, rational state planning, and revolutionary “morality”?

Indeed, it was their arrogant belief in the absolute power of the State—in direct opposition to the teaching of the Bible—that led to the horrors of their regimes. It was precisely atheism’s teachings that there are no “bourgeois” moral limits—no moral limits whatsoever—that allowed atheistic states to commit mass murder in the name of a higher cause. As Doestovesky’s Grand Inquisitor put it, “If God is dead, all things are permitted.”

Most Americans—and all believing Jews and Christians— believe that there are moral limits, that all things are not permitted. Some are sinful, some are evil; and we should put our trust not in an all-powerful government, but in all-powerful God who is Himself concerned with our morality and has in fact revealed standards of right and wrong.

We can only gasp in wonder at the wholesale historical ignorance displayed by contemporary secular fundamentalists – their utter lack of knowledge about events as recent as the fall of the Berlin Wall – when they start prattling on about how much more “rational” atheists are and how much more “moral” their social policies would be, freed from the superstitious morality of Biblical religion.

A century of first-hand, bloody experience with “rational” atheism has proven that it is atheism, not the Bible or religious belief, that is the greatest danger to world peace.

The post Atheist Crusaders Misrepresent Both History and Science in their Denunciations of the Bible first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Unbeknownst to many Americans, Thanksgiving is yet another legacy of the Biblical heritage that shaped American law and culture over the centuries.

There is at least some evidence that the deeply pious Pilgrims — who, as Puritans, believed the Old Testament law was binding on Gentiles as well as Jews — may have been partially inspired by the Jewish harvest festival of Booths (Sukkot).

Sukkot is a week-long celebration, mandated in Leviticus 23, in which the Jewish people remember and give thanks for their deliverance from bondage in Egypt. It is usually observed in October — as was the original Thanksgiving in 1621.

At the very least, the concept and duty of thanksgiving is deeply rooted in the Biblical tradition. Indeed, you can actually see much of the Torah’s ceremonial commandments as being nothing less than institutionalized thanksgiving: The Sabbath, Passover, the Festival of Weeks, The Festival of Booths, the entire sacrificial system, seeks to inculcate among the people the awareness of divine graciousness.

“He appointed some of the Levites to minister before the ark of the LORD, to make petition, to give thanks, and to praise the LORD, the God of Israel,” says Chronicles. “Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done,” sang the Psalmist.

The apostle Paul, in the earliest book in the New Testament, makes thanksgiving a virtual commandment: “Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the Pilgrims set aside a special time to give thanks to God for his mercy.

Thanks to contemporary accounts written by Edward Winslow (in his 1621 A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth) and Governor William Bradford himself (History Of Plymouth Plantation), we have a pretty good idea of what happened 386 years ago.

As most people know, the first winter was devastating: Of the 110 Pilgrims and crew who left England, only about 50 survived the cold and hunger of that first winter.

But then, on March 16, with freezing winds still blowing across the Atlantic ocean, a seeming miracle occurred. An Abanki Indian named Samoset strolled right into the Pilgrim settlement and announced, in English, “Welcome!” Samoset had learned English from British fishermen along the coast. Samoset brought his friend, Squanto (Tisquantum), who not only spoke better English but had actually lived in England for nearly a decade. He had been kidnapped from the Plymouth area in 1608 and had traveled back and forth.

It was Squanto who taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn, how to catch fish and eels, how to tap maple syrup — and basically how to survive in this harsh Massachusetts winter.

By the time fall arrived, the Pilgrims meager barley and wheat crops were offset by a bountiful supply of corn, fish and wild turkeys. For that reason, the deeply pious Puritan Governor Bradford, reflecting on the ancient Israelites’ thanksgiving for their deliverance from Egypt, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving.

Squanto, the local chief Massasoit and 90 Indian braves came to the three-day celebration — and brought most of the food!

Thanksgiving has evolved into a secular holiday in the United States, shared by people of all faiths and no faith, but we should remember that our Pilgrim forefathers and foremothers looked to Biblical precedents for their inspiration. Plus, it bears remembering whom the early Pilgrims were thanking as they enjoyed the unexpected bounties of nature and the equally unexpected kindnesses of America’s native people.

The post The Biblical Roots of Thanksgiving first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.