I can surely appreciate your desire to keep the discussion of the existence of God as religion-neutral as possible. After all, we don't want to get into a "my religion can kick your religion's butt any day" match. However, since the topic of prophesy was broached, and since I believe it's possible to demonstrate that the Bible is unique in this regard (and other regards as well), it seemed fitting to bring it to the table. Also, as arguably the most scrutinized book in history, it is never far from discussions between atheists and theists, I didn't think you'd have a problem with it. :-)
So I don't miss any of your points, I'd like to address your objects in a point-by-point fashion.
1. You are using the Bible to prove the validity of itself. This is circular reasoning. You are basically saying, "Jesus of the Bible is true, because the Bible says so."
I'm not seeing the circularity. I don't want to insult your intelligence, but neither do I want to take things for granted, so please bear with me if the following is old hat to you.
I think that perhaps the reason you feel the argument is circular is that perhaps you believe that the Bible was written by one individual or by a group of contemporaries. If we were to present another "holy" book that was written in this manner, then I think you might begin to have a case for the argument of circular reasoning.
But remember that the Bible is actually a collection of 66 books that were written in three different languages by 40 or so eye witnesses during the lifetime of other eye witnesses over the course of some 1,500 years--most of the authors never met each other. These authors lived on three different continents and hailed from all walks of life; among its authors are kings, shepherds, farmers, fishermen, a doctor, and a Hebrew scholar.
It's also important to remember that there was a 400 year gap between the last book of the OT (Malachi) and the advent of Jesus Christ. So really what you have here is not "the Bible" testifying to its own validity, but we have multiple Old Testament prophets who claimed to have received the oracles of God making predictions about One who wasn't born until hundreds or thousands of years later (e.g. David's vivid portrayal of the crucifixion in Psalm 22 was written roughly 1,000 years before Christ was born). The Dead Sea scrolls, dated to about the 2nd century BC, bear an air tight testimony to the accuracy and preservation of the Old Testament text that we have in our Bibles today--so there is no room for revisionism (barring interference from a teenager in a tricked-out DeLorean).
Now, the charge is usually leveled that Christ did things just to fulfill prophesy or that his followers directly "massaged" the facts to paint a picture of Christ as having fulfilled some or all of these prophesies. I can address that in a follow-up post if you like, but I think the present post is going to be long enough without tackling that issue, too.
So, if using the specific, written prophesies of individuals who lived no less than 400 years before Christ leaves me open to the charge of circular reasoning simply by virtue of these writings being bound under the same cover, I'm afraid I'll have to plead guilty as charged.
2. As I posted in a previous post, the fallibility of human recollection dictates that human testimony, however earnest, is not a valid form of proof that something happened the way that they said it did. This being said, and considering the Gospels of Jesus weren't written until decades after his death, I have a hard time believing the accuracies of their claims.
I don't think you really believe this, Mike. Do you apply this standard to all historical works of non-fiction like, say...the history books you used in school or autobiographies of people like Abraham Lincoln? If you were arrested and tried for a crime you did not commit, would you ask the judge to dismiss the testimony of a dozen eye witnesses who are willing to testify under oath that you are innocent?
You are right when you say that human recollection is easily corrupted. This is explicitly taught in the Bible:
The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes
and examines him. (Proverbs 18:17)
One witness is not enough to convict a man accused of any crime
or offense he may have committed. A matter must be established
by the testimony of two or three witnesses. (Deut. 19:5)
...and this is the reason why we cross-examine witnesses in the court room. Does this guarantee absolute justice 100% of the time? No, it doesn't, because we're still dealing with fallible people making fallible judgements based upon the testimony of other fallible people. However, it's quite a leap from "eye witnesses may be corrupted" to "all eye witnesses are unreliable"--this is the fallacy of hasty generalization.
3. The Gnostic Text, Apocrypha, and the convening of the Council of Nicaea, are just a few pieces of evidence that we have that in the first few hundred years after Jesus' death, early Christians were still debating what was true, what wasn't, what was going to be considered dogma, what was going to be in the Bible, and what was going to be left out and forgotten. This is obvious evidence that what is in the New Testament is not necessarily accurate to what actually happened.
By this line of reasoning, would you not have to then conclude that no scientist today really knows anything about anything because they argue, debate over the theory du jour? You seem to be arguing that "because there is debate, there can be no truth."
We actually don't even have to wait for a couple of hundred years after Christ's death and resurrection before we start seeing false doctrine (i.e. doctrine that flatly contradicted the plain teachings of Christ and the Twelve Apostles). For example, Paul wrote Galatians between 53 and 57 AD in refutation of the false gospel of the Judaizers (who were teaching that Christians had to, among other things, be circumsized before they could be true Christians). The Apostle John wrote 1 John between 85 and 95 AD to refute the gnostics of his day.
The reason the texts you cite were not considered canonical (even though some, like the books of the Maccabees have historical value) can be summed up in six quick points which I quote from The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (McDowell, p. 25,26):
- None of them enjoyed any more than a temporary or local recognition.
- Most of them never did have anything more than a semi-canonical status, being appended to various manuscripts or mentioned in tables of contents.
- No major canon or church council included them as inspired books of the New Testament.
- The limited acceptance enjoyed by most of these books is attributable to the fact that they attached themselves to references in canonical books (e.g. Laodiceans to Colossians 4:16), because of their alleged apostolic authorship (e.g. Acts of Paul).
4. As in my previous post, the stories of Jesus are very similar to many Messiah-gods of older religions. The stories of Jesus are most likely amalgamations of the stories of the older gods as a series of "one-upmanship" stories told as if to say, "My God is better than your god" to those of differing beliefs. [...snip...]
Similarities do not necessarily imply correlation or relationship. Scientific history is replete with example of men who didn't know each other who made essentially the same discovery completely independent of one another. Just because two men discover the two phenomenon at the same time does not necessarily imply collusion.
The key words in this objection, though, are "most likely". Most likely based upon what? This theory, and that's really all it is, has no compelling evidence to support it that I've ever seen, and it completely ignores the substantial differences between the account of Christ's life and the ancient legends/fables that are claimed to be their antecedents. If you'd like to discuss specific evidence to support this claim, I'd be more than happy to entertain it, but as it stands right now the topic bears no further comment.
5. Considering the amount of time it took for the Christian church to become organized, and the amount of arguing within the early Church about what stories were true and what weren't, I find it far more likely that the stories of Jesus were written to make him sound like the one foretold in the prophecies, and not that he actually fulfilled the prophecies. If that is the case (which I believe it is) then it makes perfect sense that Jesus would fulfill such a staggeringly impossible amount of foretold events. He fulfills the prophecies because the stories we have of him wrote of him to specifically fulfill those prophecies.
There are several reasons why this objection simply doesn't hold any water:
a) The amount of debate over "what stories were true and what weren't" is grossly overstated. There was actually very little debate in the early church about which writings were canonical and which weren't. Please refer back to my response on your objection #3.
b) As I've already stated, the Bible was written by eye witnesses during the lifetime of other eye witnesses, and the apostles actually encouraged people to check out the story for themselves (1 Corinthians 15:1-11) just as Paul's traveling companion, Luke the physician did in writing his Gospel (John 1:1-4).
c) Of the 12 apostles (Judas was replaced by Paul), all but one of them (John) were murdered for their testimony (see http://poptop.hypermart.net/howdied.html). If what you are saying is true, then 11 men went from utter cowards, running when Jesus was arrested (Matthew 26:56) and cowering in a locked room "for fear of the Jews" after his crucifixion (John 20:19,20) to dying for their testimony that Christ has risen from the dead even though, as you say, they knew they were lying the whole time.
Does it really seem likely to you that a dozen men would have their lives so radically transformed (remember, Paul was busily persecuting and executing Christians before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus--he wound up authoring about 2/3rds of the New Testament!) and die for what they know to be untrue?
Case in point #10 from your list: The messiah is born in Bethlehem. Jesus was from Nazareth. It seems terribly convenient to me that Joseph and Mary traveled many days to go to Bethlehem at the time Jesus was born. The reasoning behind this is because there was to be a census. We have enough documentation from the Roman records at that time to know that they would not have required people to go to the town of their ancestors for a census. In fact, that doesn't even make any sense. Sending people elsewhere to take a census ruins the results of the census and is in direct opposition to the whole reason the census is used. This is clearly a band-aid answer to cover up the fact that Jesus is a Nazarene and yet still supposedly the foretold Messiah.
Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean there aren't good reasons for it--kinda like the way out of Chinese finger cuffs seems totally counter-intuitive to those who first encounter them. But once you understand how they work, there's no problem getting out of 'em. If you would like to present some specific documentation from the Roman records that support your claim, I'd be more than happy to look 'em over.
I'm not sure what the problem is here. Micah 5:2 says the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem and that's what happened: Matt. 2:1,4,5; Luke 2:4-7; John 7:42. Joseph is warned in a dream that Herod was on the rampage and that he should take his family to Egypt (Matthew 2:13,14). After Herod died, they returned from Egypt (Matthew 2:15) in fulfillment of another prophesy made hundreds of years before (Hosea 11:1). But he couldn't go back to Judea because Herod's son Archelaus was in power, so the family settled in a little town in the region of Galilee known as Nazareth (Matthew 2:19ff). I have a friend who was born in Okinawa, Japan because his dad was in the military; but not long after his birth, his family came back to the State of Washington. Is my friend a liar for saying that he's from Washington when he was clearly born in Japan? Or is he a liar for saying that he was born in Japan when he clearly has spent nearly all of his life in Washington?
Case in point #9 from your list: Jesus is from the house of David: Is Jesus the son of God? If so, he's not descended from Joseph. Is he descended from Joseph? If so.... Is Joseph from the house of David? He apparently has two fathers: Jacob (Matthew 1:16) and Heli (Luke 3:23). This two-fathers example alone shows the fallibility of the claims by the New Testament. Now that we've established that the New Testament could be wrong... we have no way of knowing what ELSE could be wrong. Yet again, another reason that I can't accept the Bible as accurate proof of anything.
"Though the phrase 'son of' can mean 'offspring of,' it also carries the meaning, 'of the order of.' Thus in the Old Testament 'sons of the prophets' meant of the order of prophets (1 Kings 20:35), and 'sons of the singers' meant of the order of the singers (Nehemiah 12:28). The designation 'Son of God' when used of our Lord means of the order of God and is a strong and clear claim to full Deity." (Charles Ryrie, quoted by McDowell, p. 152).
The discrepancy between Matthew's and Luke's genealogies comes from their starting/ending points. Matthew, writing to demonstrate that Jesus is the promised Messiah, demonstrates Christ's right to be called the King of the Jews (as a descendant of David)--it's his legal ancestry as the adopted son of Joseph. Luke's genealogy in chapter 3 of his gospel likely traces Jesus' lineage back through Mary all the way back to Adam, but there are other possibilities as well. I've only just now skimmed it, but an article on Wikipedia discusses a half-dozen or so explanations for the discrepancy.
Again, you've got to remember that when reading about events in the Bible we're reading literature that comes from and documents events that occurred in a culture very different than our own. Just because we don't immediately "grok" what's said or it seems foreign to us, remember that there's a good reason it seems foreign--it is foreign. This is why when we go to the text (any text, really) we employ a historical-grammatical hermeneutic. If we don't consider both the cultural context as well as the grammatical context of passages under examination, we're almost surely going to butcher the text and get out of it what was never intended.
I could go on and on.
Cool! So can I. Bring 'em! I love this stuff. :-)
-dan
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