Apologetics for a New Millennium, Same as the Old Millennium

It's fun to peek from time to time at the present state of fundamentalist Christian apologetics.  I've begun reading Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ by Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace (Thomas Nelson, 2010), and it doesn't seem that much has changed in the past fifty years -- longer, really.

Bock and Wallace are both academics, professional scholars, but they begin Dethroning Jesus with some rather lazy arguments.  Bock recounts how he debated John Dominic Crossan "in front of a packed house at Southern Methodist University" (page 2).  Crossan, a member of the notorious Jesus Seminar, told the audience of a study of college students who were asked where they were when the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up, and were asked again three years later.  Not only did their memories change, but:

Afterward, the students were asked to compare their testimonies and choose the one they liked best. The study noted that most students preferred the description they gave three years after the event rather than the initial account they gave immediately after the event. [Crossan's] point in citing the study was to say that memory becomes distorted over time [page 2].

I notice that we're already getting some distance between the original study and the account I've quoted here: we have Bock's memory of Crossan's description of the study.  No reference is given for the study itself, and though I've heard of similar research that led to similar results, I'd like to be able to have a look at the actual report.  Because memory can indeed become distorted over time, and as we'll see, Bock doesn't actually dispute this, it would be nice to have some backup.  (A cursory search on Youtube didn't bring up anything, but I'll look again.)

Here's how Bock remembers his rebuttal of Crossan:

I noted that two very important points were missing from his discussion of the experiment at Emory. First, it took place in a culture that has developed distance from the use of memory. We have video footage and computers now. Second, those who were asked at Emory had no stake in what was being recalled. I raised the question of what might have happened had the NASA astronaut corps been asked to go through the same exercise, since their lives would be at stake in the shuttle’s fate. The analogy was that those who followed Jesus paid a great price for their belief. Their families probably disowned them. Many even lost their lives for their faith. They likely would have been marked by such an event, and thus their memory was likely to be better. Quite a gap existed between college students and NASA astronauts when it came to the shuttle. The astronauts were more like the martyrs of the first generation of faith.

This is a standard fundamentalist move, brought up-to-date for the space age: because the early Christians suffered, "even lost their lives for their faith", their account of Jesus is trustworthy.  If you accept this argument, however, one must ask about non-Christians who lost their lives for their faith, often at Christian hands.  Many Jews chose martyrdom rather than convert to Christianity, so by Bock's logic, this counts against the truth of Christianity and for Judaism.  Further, most Christian martyrs had no personal memory of Jesus' ministry, so their tenaciousness can not be explained by fidelity to what they had seen and heard and touched.  And what of those Christians who chose life over martyrdom, probably outnumbering those who chose to die?  Notwithstanding its enduring popularity as an apologetic touchstone, Christian martyrdom is not an argument for the truth of the New Testament.

More could be said about Bock's attempt to recast the focus to the "astronaut corps" instead of the students.  The astronauts who died in the Challenger disaster could hardly repeat the experiment, since they were dead.  (The same is true of the Christians who died for their beliefs.)  In the absence of evidence about the other astronauts' memories of the disaster, this move can only be seen as an attempt at distraction.  (I'll try to find a study I read about, of children who'd survived school shootings; as I remember it, if they were near the shooter, they remembered that they were far away from him; if they were not near, they remembered being closer and in greater danger.  There are obvious parallels to some of the gospel material here.)

Bock returns to his second point:

Add on top of this the fact that Judaism was a “culture of memory,” for that is how the Jews passed on stories, and the appeal to a modern analogy at Emory looks less plausible. This difference over memory parallels the way Jesus is remembered and discussed today. Some are skeptical about memory and Jesus, arguing that Jesus has been formed largely in the image favorable to those doing the remembering. Others argue that Jesus’ presence and teaching were so powerful that they were well remembered by people who were used to passing on teaching orally. In many ways, this book is about that debate. It is a debate that rages in our culture as people speak about who Jesus was and what he taught.

I'm a bit surprised that a professional New Testament scholar could get so much wrong, but then Bock isn't the first I've encountered.  Judaism in Jesus' time relied on written sources to pass on stories: it was unique among pre-Christian religions in its reliance on Scripture, which means "writing."  Literacy wasn't as widespread in those days as it is now, but reading the Torah in synagogue was a regular part of Jewish worship.  True, the written text was used as a springboard for oral commentary, but that is true today among Christians too, and that commentary could range widely beyond the letter of the text.  There's a genre of Jewish biblical interpretation, haggadah, which retells the written biblical stories with a great deal of variation and invention, but those retellings have also been written down.  And the earliest Christian evidence we have are written documents, the letters of Paul, written a decade or more before anyone bothered to write the gospels.

If you accept the traditional authorship of the gospels, you have to cope with the fact that the evangelists provide as many as four discordant versions of Jesus' life and teaching -- five, if you include Paul's accounts of the first Eucharist and the resurrection.  That "culture of memory" was not all that reliable, even for preserving material that we know was of first importance to believers.  There's been a resurgence of attention to "oral tradition" in New Testament scholarship in the past couple of decades, but it seems to be as much about variation in the church's use of the Jesus tradition as about preserving historical data, and it doesn't give much support to apologists like Bock.

Still, reading these arguments gave me a warm feeling of familiarity: Bock's arguments are invalid, but they bring back memories of other invalid defenses of Christianity that I've encountered over the past forty years.

What Happens When You Assume

I've been wasting time poking around the Intertoobz lately when I should be writing here, but occasionally it pays off.  There was a post at The Atlantic the other day about an ancient cuneiform tablet inscribed with a version of the Deluge myth, in which a Mesopotamian god gives instructions for building a boat to save a few humans and representative animals from the coming flood.  The hook for the article was that the boat would be round, a coracle.  "Coracles were used in ancient Iraq as river taxies. They were, given their construction materials, light to transport. Their shape gave them stability against shifting currents and, when necessary, floodwaters."  So, not all that surprising, but still a nice light piece with some intriguing information.

The comments to the post largely focused on the relation between the biblical version of the Deluge myth, starring Noah, and other ancient versions.  Some commenters objected to the story using the story of Noah as clickbait, "which obscures how interesting the discovery is on its own merits. It shouldn't need to be tied to the Bible to make it interesting."  I quibbled mildly: 

I agree with you, but it seems unlikely to me that anyone in the modern West (even atheists like me) could hear about this story without thinking of its similarity to the Noah's ark story. That's not necessarily a bad thing. And there's a lot of lore about the history of religion floating around the atheist communities which is just as received and half-understood as anything you find in evangelical Christian circles. (I'm currently reading Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist?, so that's on my mind at the moment.)

This morning I found that someone else had answered me:

DUNCAN!! I've got something for you. go to Amazon.com get into the books ask for "The Case for Christ; a journalists personal investigation for the evidence for Jesus " by Lee Strobel. There's the 'Look Inside' feature....you can only look at the cover and the beginning. click on beginning and scroll down to 'FROM DIXON TO JESUS' start reading there. AND, look up "More Than a Carpenter" by Josh McDowell. I mean, really. If you're not going to believe, you ought to know what you're not believing! Nez pah?

I found that this same person had posted several other comments on the same post, writing from a fundamentalist, inerrant-Bible viewpoint that has become familiar to me over to the years from reading and from interaction with people who hold it.  It fits with the books the person recommended to me, and with the assumptions about me they evidently made.

In fact I already have a copy of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, because other fundamentalists recommended it to me.  I've leafed through it and it appears to be basically the same fundamentalist apologetics that I've encountered before -- in Josh McDowell's More than a Carpenter, for example, which I read about thirty years ago when I was studying up on the subject.  McDowell was, with C. S. Lewis, the go-to guy for a lot of campus evangelicals in those days, best known for a book called Evidence That Demands a Verdict, originally published in the 1970s but reissued and "updated" several times since then.  Every time an evangelical would engage me in conversation to try to win me for Christ and discover that I knew a lot more about the Bible than they did, they'd tell me I should look at McDowell's Evidence, which, they said, answered a lot of the points I raised.  This was one reason I set out to write an anti-apologia in the 1980s, so that unbelievers faced with Christian misisonaries could simply say to them, "Have you heard of Duncan Mitchel's book Like Father, Like Son?  It answers a lot of the points you've raised."

Evidence That Demands a Verdict is not a book so much as a data dump of debater's notes, arranged topically as an outline.  Much of the material is testimonials from numerous people to the excellence and credibility of the Bible, the perfection and authority of Jesus, and the like.  Most of these testimonials are irrelevant, but even more notable, they are mostly from Christian thinkers of the 1800s and earlier.  A great deal has been learned about the Bible and its background in the ancient world that was unavailable to scholars and theologians two or three centuries ago, and even when McDowell includes twentieth-century archaeological and historical material, it's often outdated or misquoted.  But McDowell, like most apologists, relies on his audiences (whether they're Christian or not) being even less knowledgeable than he is.

McDowell is an evangelist and motivational speaker who travels to many college campuses for Campus Crusade for Christ, so I once had a chance to ask him a question when he appeared at IU.  I asked him about one of the factual errors in Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and (obviously flustered) he replied that he'd dealt with that in More Evidence That Demands a Verdict.  So I tracked that down and found that he hadn't dealt with it.  I wrote to him and told him so, and he wrote back saying, not altogether unreasonably, that a man can't remember everything he's written and thanks for writing.  When I checked later editions of Evidence in the late 1990s, the same misinformation was still in it.

More Than a Carpenter, originally published in 1977, really is a book, a relatively short argument for the divinity of Jesus.  As I say, I read it thirty years ago and don't remember any details about it; maybe I should reread it and do a blog post about it, since evidently it's still being recommended.  What I do remember is that it was standard popular fundamentalist Christian apologetic, and since McDowell is not a particularly reliable source anyway, it didn't require a lot of attention from me.  (By "popular" I mean to imply that there are more scholarly apologetics out there, such as the work of the late F. F. Bruce, whose The New Testament Documents -- Are They Reliable? was first published in 1943 but is still in print seventy years later.  It's better than More Than a Carpenter, but it still rests on some of the same untenable arguments used by McDowell.)

I don't know what assumptions my interlocutor at The Atlantic made about the fact that I'm currently reading Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist?  She or he couldn't have known that I've read not only More Than a Carpenter but quite a lot of Christian apologetics, plus a shitload of scholarly and popular writing on Christianity from a wide spectrum of theological positions.  I'm reading Did Jesus Exist? not because I expect to learn much from it (and so far, about halfway through, I haven't: the material Ehrman is covering is mostly familiar to me) but to see where the debate on the existence of a historical Jesus stands nowadays.  I've encountered the Jesus-myth position before, mainly in G. A. Wells's The Jesus of the Early Christians (Pemberton, 1971), and found it intriguing but not convincing, nor do I think it's all that important.  Some of the "mythicists," as they call themselves, make some good arguments, but they also make some really flagrant mistakes.  It would be interesting if someone could prove that Jesus was a purely fictional person (as opposed to the legend-embroidered person depicted in the New Testament): it would eliminate the problem of distinguishing fact from fiction in the gospels.  But so far no one has, and given the difficulty of proving a negative no one is likely to; and I find it annoying when some of my fellow atheists declare dogmatically that Jesus demonstrably and certainly didn't exist, with no more basis than fundamentalists have for declaring dogmatically that Jesus demonstrably and certainly was the Christ, the Son of God.