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IS CHRISTIANITY A FRAUD?
ROUND TWO!
How Can We Know Whether Miracles Happened? Is the New Testament Historically
Reliable?
Were Ancient Pagan Religions Like Christianity? How Are Historical Claims Proven and
Disproven?
A Rebuttal Against
Darrell Conder's Reply Defending Mystery Babylon
corrected
first edition
by
Eric V. Snow
PERSONAL
BACKGROUND, SOURCE ISSUES, AND THE LIMITATIONS OF BGJ EXAMINED
(Original
table of contents included below)
Introduction and
Explanation of the Controversy......................................... 4
Some Personal Background......................................................................... 4
My Dependence on Non-WCG
Scholarship Nothing New......................... 5
Were Typical WCG
Laymembers Familiar with Traditional Christian
Apologetics?............................................................................................. 6
The Need for Bluntness
to Avoid Deception about Mystery
Babylon's Contents................................................................................... 7
The Need for Truth in
Advertising................................................................ 9
Unbelief as the Logical
Outcome of Conder's Mode of Argumentation.... 9
How Citing a Scholar Who
Would Oppose Your Overall Viewpoint
is Powerful.............................................................................................. 10
Fox's Statement Against
Seeing Parallels Between Paganism
and Christianity........................................................................................ 11
Conder's Mistake in
Adopting Higher Critic Methodology, Not Just
Their "Facts"........................................................................................... 13
A Sample of How Conder's
Reasoning Could Be Deployed Against the
Old Testament........................................................................................ 14
Are the Higher Critics
Unbiased?............................................................... 16
Since Both Sides Are
Biased, Charges about this Prove Little............... 17
Why My Academic
Experience Makes Me Suspicious of Mystery
Babylon's Sources................................................................................. 18
The Need to Know the
Scholarly Climate of Opinion on Secondary Works: The
Historiography of
American Slavery as an Example................................. 18
Why Mystery Babylon
Doesn't Represent True Scholarship................... 19
The Scholarly Climate of
Opinion on the Christian/Pagan Tie Revisited. 20
Why ICF Leans on
McDowell and Nash So Much.................................... 22
How Being Too
Open-Minded Can Cause Your Brains to Fall Out......... 23
How Both Sides' Sources
Are Arguably Biased....................................... 24
Conder's Passing Over
Many of ICF's Arguments Imply Their Correctness 24
Most of the Messianic
Text Rebuttals Made by ICF Against MB
Overlooked in BGJ................................................................................. 25
Other Points Conder
Overlooks When Criticizing ICF............................. 25
Mistakenly Understanding
a Challenge, Conder Fails to Provide
Source Citations..................................................................................... 26
Conder Mistakenly Claims
Three Footnote Problems Exist in ICF......... 27
Why Is Christianity a
Fraud? Cites Herbert W. Armstrong....................... 28
Why the True Religion
Would Satisfy Emotions as Well as Reason...... 29
MIRACLES--HOW DO WE KNOW
THEY HAPPENED?
Conder's Arguments
Against Miracles Are Like the Philosopher
David Hume's.......................................................................................... 30
Some Basic Arguments
Against Hume's Critique Against Belief in Miracles 31
Just How Do We
"Prove" a Miracle Occurred?......................................... 33
Evidence from Hostile
Sources That Jesus Could Do Miracles.............. 34
Testing Miracle Claims
by Their Intrinsic Plausibility or Absurdity........... 36
Why Pagan Myths Are
Intrinsically Unreliable Accounts of Miracles....... 38
Why Should This
Eyewitness Evidence Be Believed?............................ 40
Further Internal Evidence
for Believing in the New Testament................ 41
Why the Ebionites'
Denial of the Virgin Birth Proves Nothing.................. 41
Many Higher Critics
"Edit" the NT Instead of Throwing It Out Entirely:
Why Refuting Naturalistic Explanations of
the Resurrection Isn't
Truly Circular........................................................................................... 42
The Higher Critics Did
Devise Naturalistic Explanations for
the Resurrection..................................................................................... 43
Why Claiming the Gospels
Are Legends Doesn't Dispose of
the Resurrection..................................................................................... 44
FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE
NEW TESTAMENT'S RELIABILITY
How the Book of Acts
Implies the New Testament Was Written
Before C. 63 A.D.................................................................................... 45
The New Testament Wasn't
Subject to a Long Period of Oral Tradition 46
Why Oral Transmission
Was More Reliable in the Past Than It Is Today 47
Internal Evidence That
Oral/Written Transmission Accurately Preserved
Jesus' Words.......................................................................................... 49
Miscellaneous Attacks on
the Resurrection Reports Rebutted............... 49
Why Public Debates with
Heretics Before a Local Church Is a Bad Idea 50
Was Eusebius a Reliable
Historian?.......................................................... 51
The Fundamental
Discontinuity in Sunday-Keeping Christianity
Started 313 A.D...................................................................................... 45
Good Evidence for the
Apostles Being Given the Option to Avoid Dying
for a Lie................................................................................................... 54
Why the Counter-Example
of the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith
Proves Nothing....................................................................................... 55
Animal Sacrifices
Revisited........................................................................ 56
Why Will There Be Animal
Sacrifices in the Millennium?:
A Tentative Solution............................................................................... 57
Do Any First-Century
Fragments of the New Testament Exist?
Oops!.. 58
Significant Portions of
the NT Are in Manuscripts Older than
C. 325-350 A.D...................................................................................... 59
How Skepticism about
Primary Sources Can Destroy One's Own Arguments 61
Two Reasons for the
Sunday-Keeping Church's Early Leaders'
Basic Reliability....................................................................................... 62
Could Average People in
First-Century Judea Speak Greek?................ 63
Why Would the Aramaic-
or Hebrew-Speaking Disciples Quote from a Greek
OT Translation?...................................................................................... 64
Did Jesus Permanently
Prohibit Evangelizing the Gentiles?................... 65
Did the Same Man Write
the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of
the Apostles?.......................................................................................... 65
How the Semitic
Constructions of the Gospels' Greek Indicate No Later
"Church Father" Wrote Them................................................................ 66
Further External
Evidence for Luke's Reliability........................................ 67
"Higher" and
"Lower" Textual Criticism Differentiated.............................. 69
The Bibliographical Test
for a Document's Reliability Defended............ 70
The Variations in the
New Testament's Text Revisited............................ 72
The Sunday-Keeping
Church Was the Main Agent God Used to Ascertain
the Canon................................................................................................ 74
The Genealogies of
Christ Revisited......................................................... 75
Was First-Century
Samaritan Religion Largely Pagan?........................... 77
HISTORICAL METHOLODGICAL
ISSUES AS RELATED TO EXAMINING THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS
Conder Confuses Citing
the Primary Sources with Using the
Original Manuscripts............................................................................... 78
Primary and Secondary
Sources Distinguished........................................ 78
Why Printed Primary
Sources Are Sometimes All That Historians Need 79
The Need to Check Out
Primary Sources in Historiographical Debates. 79
The Argument from Burned
Books Is an Argument from Silence........... 81
Medieval Catholicism's
Burning of Books Compared to Josiah's
Image-Smashing.................................................................................... 81
The Date(s) of
Composition Aren't the Dates for Surviving
Ancient Manuscripts............................................................................... 82
WERE THE PAGAN MYSTERY
RELIGIONS LIKE CHRISTIANITY?
Was Mithraism a Major
Force in First-Century Rome?............................. 84
Evidence for Mithraism's
Origination from Asia Minor, Not Persia
or India.................................................................................................... 85
Mithraism Didn't Have a
Strong Presence in Rome in the First Century. 86
Some Specific Ways
Mithraism Differs from Christianity......................... 87
Mere Preexistence
Doesn't Prove Dependence...................................... 89
The Need to Look at the
Specific Meanings of Communion and Baptism 90
How Some
Borrowing by Pagan Religions from Christianity Could
Have Happened...................................................................................... 92
A Curious Custom of the
Roman Army Misinterpreted............................ 93
How Could Latin American
Indian Beliefs Be Like Christianity's?........... 94
Are Some Accounts of
Various Pagan Gods Similar to the NT on
Jesus' Life?............................................................................................ 95
Did the Word
"Cannibal" Originate in Phoenician or in Caribbean Indian? 96
The Early Pagan
References to Jesus Briefly Resurveyed..................... 97
ISSUES RELATED TO THE
MESSIANIC TEXTS REEXAMINED AND CONCLUSION
Does the Old Testament
Doctrine about God Contradict the
the New Testament's?........................................................................... 99
The Duality Principle of
Interpreting Scripture Defended...................... 100
What Was the Original
Reading in Psalms 22:16?................................ 101
Was the Septuagint
Reliably Translated and Transmitted for the Psalms? 102
Why Others Should Avoid
Reading Mystery Babylon............................ 103
Conclusion: How Interpreting the Facts Is More Important
Than the Facts
Themselves in This Debate................................................................. 105
ABSTRACT
This essay replies
against Darrell Conder's "By-gosh Josh:
An Answer to Eric V. Snow."
It defends the New Testament as historically reliable, and Christianity as not depending on pagan religion
for its doctrinal content.
INTRODUCTION
AND EXPLANATION OF THE CONTROVERSY
As expected, Darrell Conder has
written a reply to my rebuttal of his book, Mystery Babylon and the Lost Ten
Tribes in the End Time. Entitled
"By-gosh Josh: An Answer to Eric
V. Snow," (BGJ) it replies to my essay, "Is Christianity a
Fraud? A Preliminary Assessment of the
Conder Thesis" (ICF).[1] To help those unfamiliar with this
controversy, Darrell Conder's book Mystery Babylon (MB) attacks
Christianity through three basic arguments:
(1) the New Testament is said to be historically unreliable, (2) the
teachings of the pagan mystery religions of the Roman empire determined the
doctrines of first-century church, and (3) the New Testament cites out of
context and mistakenly the messianic texts of the Old Testament as referring to
Jesus Christ in advance. Being not an
atheist, agnostic, or deist, Conder defends the Old Testament as inspired by
God, so he advocates conversion to some type of Judaism, "the faith of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." The
purpose of my rebuttal, "Is Christianity a Fraud?," was to use the
standard arguments of modern Christian apologetics to refute Conder's
contentions. Below, Conder's
"By-gosh Josh," which largely restates his arguments in Mystery
Babylon, is weighed and found wanting once again.
Conder mistakenly believes my rebuttal
is a "paper attacking the Holy Scriptures of Israel" (p. 1). But since I'm a hard-shell fundamentalist
who denies evolution, I count myself as a staunch defender of the Old Testament
(the OT, or, as the Jews call it, Tanakh).
The draft booklet I recently completed for a possible local evangelism
campaign by my congregation (which is the Lansing, Michigan (UCG-AIA) church,
not Ann Arbor) has about 18 pages of material defending the Old Testament as
inspired by God using fulfilled prophecy and archeological data.[2]
SOME
PERSONAL BACKGROUND
Since Conder's reply raises the issue
of my intellectual and religious background (BGJ, pp. 5, 6), I really need to
tell the reader something of my religious background, since mine differs
sharply from his. Since I was raised as
an evolutionist by parents who attended the Unitarian-Universalist Church (even
that lasted only for about two years with any consistency), I certainly wasn't
brought up as any kind of steadfast believer in the Bible. I distinctly remember being taught evolution
in Sunday school. Once my father (now
deceased) told me as a child that my maternal grandmother was wrong to believe
we hadn't evolved from monkeys while pointing at pictures on one page of some
book as it dealt with the subject. As a
result, soon after I first started reading the writings of Herbert W. Armstrong
(HWA), the long-time human leader of the Worldwide Church of God, as a teenager
in 1982, I remember mentally ridiculing him.
He said something about mankind having been on the earth for only 6000 years
in an editorial (personal) in the Plain Truth magazine. "Yeah, sure, Mr. Armstrong." But some months later I encountered Dr.
Henry Morris' The Incredible Birth of Planet Earth, which outlined the
arguments for creationism in a brief, easy-to-read format. Although I had read other things some on the
subject in earlier months, this book directly led me to give up evolution as
false. Later on, while working in
Yellowstone National Park during the summer of 1985, I got for free from a
traditional Christian Josh McDowell's book, More Than a Carpenter. This book fired my imagination, for before I
had just taken the resurrection on faith, although I had felt the existence of
God could be proven. Later, through a
book offered by the Conservative Book Club that summarized his thinking, I
first encountered C.S. Lewis (besides as the author of the Narnia Chronicles
that a childhood friend had). Although
Lewis converted from atheism, he never believed the Bible was completely
infallible. Through such books as Miracles,
The Screwtape Letters, and The Problem of Pain, he defended
traditional Christianity by philosophical arguments. He wasn't a "fundamentalist minister," (BGJ, p. 17),
but the one-time professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge
University. With this kind of
background, I had an open mind when I formally accepted Christianity, knowing
full well some of the arguments used against it by the time I was baptized in
1987. Claiming I approached "New
Testament study not from a desire to know the truth one way or the other, but
to be reassured that his faith is valid" (BGJ, p. 6) ignores how I wasn't
really raised as a Christian of any kind.
MY
DEPENDENCE ON NON-WCG SCHOLARSHIP NOTHING NEW
So now‑‑why does my
personal story matter in this context?
Because I was introduced to modern Christian apologetics through sources
outside the Worldwide Church of God, it left a permanent mark on
me. I admired, and still admire, men
such as Dr. Henry Morris, Duane Gish, C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, Francis
Schaeffer, Don Stewart, F.F. Bruce, and R.C. Sproul who defend the Bible and
Christianity. Despite they have
teachings I disagree with, such as on the Trinity and the immortality of the
soul, I could see beyond that. This
reality, combined with the practical experience of having attended the
Seventh-day Adventist church for nine months before attending the WCG, always
permanently restrained how harsh I was on traditional Christians when I
believed the Worldwide Church of God was the one true church. With one eye on the disasters predicted in The
United States and Britain in Prophecy if we didn't repent, I said more than
once over the years that if everyone in America was either a [non-hypocritical]
Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) or a Jehovah's Witness (JW), most of our problems
would be solved. I know full well my
intellectual foundation in refuting atheism and agnosticism largely lays outside
the writings of Herbert W. Armstrong.
HWA's writings led me to embrace Christianity for the first time
seriously, and to most of the specific doctrines and interpretations of the
Bible I still hold. However, for
dealing with the intellectual basis of the (largely) deistic background I was
raised in, the answers largely came from elsewhere. (My father's father had been a dogmatic atheist who, on his
deathbed, proclaimed there was no God.
A few weeks earlier as death approached, told my father and one of his
nieces, while they discussed how they discovered there was no Santa Claus as
children, noted Jesus Christ was in the same category). I've had plenty of experience in dealing
with those on the other side of the fence.
I've been an undergrad student in philosophy, and a grad student in
history at a secular, state-run university with its share of "political
correctness" (Michigan State). I
also became fascinated by the novels of Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, The
Fountainhead), a renowned atheist and critic of Christian ethics, around
the same time I first read HWA's writings.
As a result, I greatly appreciate what those defending traditional
Christianity have done and did. I had
read many books on Christian apologetics and creationism long before I ever heard
of Darrell Conder's Mystery Babylon and the Ten Lost Tribes in the End Times. It's for this reason I don't see the Conder
thesis as anything terribly "new" or as "never-before presented
material," but as a retread of standard arguments by unbelievers against
the NT.
WERE
TYPICAL WCG LAYMEMBERS FAMILIAR WITH TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS?
Conder says he didn't spend much time
citing the works of traditional Christian apologists in MB because
"I grew up in a church [the WCG] where the kind of fundamentalist
scholarship you are referring to Eric, was crammed down my throat" (BGJ,
p. 34). As explained above, my personal
experience was directly the opposite, since basically irreligious parents
raised me. The "church" they
attended was really a social club.
Conder's statement raises another issue, worth some consideration: How often were traditional Christian
apologetics used in the WCG, especially before c. 1990? Although Ambassador College did this some‑‑I
know that it used Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb's seminal scientific
creationist work, The Genesis Flood‑‑in my experience much
less was done among the laity in local congregations. Now HWA was like Catholicism's "Angelic Doctor" St.
Thomas Aquinas in believing God's existence could be proven. He insisted that the Bible could be proven
to be the word of God.[3] Nevertheless, I encountered three men, all
raised in the church who attended the same secular university I did, who all
held to some kind of fideism (meaning, believing God's existence couldn't be
proven by human reason, but it should be believed in by faith alone). One, having been raised in the WCG, despite
majoring in zoology as a doctoral student at a secular university, apparently
never had read a scientific creationist book!
Another, who later attended Ambassador College, had openly started to
become a bit skeptical of the Bible, focusing on the Old Testament especially. After gaining permission from a local
minister, I gave him books by Paul Little, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Josh
McDowell to try to staunch his creeping unbelief. This program today appears to have been largely successful, even
if he has since accepted the WCG's doctrine changes on the OT Law. This experience shows that knowledge of
standard Christian apologetics shouldn't be assumed, whether in the old WCG or
in the various COGs today. In order to
help those who may think Conder's viewpoint was some dramatic new revelation, I
cited in reply McDowell and company extensively to show that most of the
questions Conder raised were nothing new.
Standard answers for them exist.
Conder's personal experience appears to be atypical. Apparently, the average laymember of the old
WCG or the various COGs today don't have much familiarity with what others
outside have written defending belief in the Bible. Perhaps ironically, in this regard, my experience was similarly
atypical. After all, didn't we reason
that we were the one true church, and thought little of religious value was
written outside our fellowship (excluding perhaps
childrearing/marriage/psychological advice)?
It's because (in part) the WCG neglected traditional Christian
apologetics for years under the Tkach administration and even earlier that
Conder's arguments seem persuasive to so many.
The WCG's drift towards fideism, a less literal interpretation of
Genesis, and more liberal views on evolution under the Tkach administration
hardly strengthened the present-time laymembers of the various COGs' resistance
against Conder's arguments.
THE
NEED FOR BLUNTNESS TO AVOID DECEPTION ABOUT MYSTERY BABYLON'S CONTENTS
Consider the following book
description. If you only knew this
statement about its contents, what subjects would you think it covered?
When
the Northern Kingdom of Israel was carried away into Assyrian captivity more
than 2,500 years ago, it was because they had turned from their Creator to
worship the detestable deity known as Baal, the supreme god of the Babylonian
Trinity. Even while in Assyria, and
knowing that their captivity was punishment for their apostasy, Israel still
continued on their detestable course.
Eventually Assyria fell and the Ten Tribes disappeared into what is now
the South of Russia, and have since become known as the "Lost" Ten
Tribes of Israel. Although these chosen
people of Elohim may be lost to the world, they are not lost to their Creator‑‑He
is anything but finished with the Children of Israel! The Elohim of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had promised that in the
end-time the Ten Tribes of Israel will be the most powerful nations the world
has ever seen. Yet, even in the midst
of their tremendous blessings, the scourge of their forefathers will be the
fate of the Ten Tribes. The Elohim of
ancient Israel has foretold through His prophets that the end time-time
Israelites will be enmeshed in the worship of Baal. One of the major proofs of Israel's end-time identity would be
this national baalistic religion. In [book and author omitted] presented
tremendous documentation to lay the groundwork for his research on the identity
of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. His
second book continues with one of the most important proofs of Israel's
identity‑‑their end-time religion!
For those who have read [omitted], there is no need to convince you that
it was a book with many surprising details that have long lay hidden in
history. You can expect the same type
of material in [omitted]. The author writes: "I know that there are a number of
excellent books out there on the identity of the Ten Tribes, so I didn't want
my research to be just a repeat of the material already available. What I've spent the past several years doing
was looking for the never-before considered aspects of this most important
subject, and it has paid off in never-before presented material on the lost Ten
Tribes." [Omitted] has achieved
his goal. What you are going to read in
[omitted] latest book, without any doubt, will cause you to look at the
end-time House of Israel with renewed interest, and leave you with the profound
knowledge that Israel's Creator is going to do what He has promised! Proof number two, which is really what this
volume is all about, will pick up where [omitted] left off. If you read only one book this year, this
should be it! Paperback, 8 1/2 x 11,
159 pages. Item #401 Price: $19.95[4]
After
reading this description of Mystery Babylon and the Lost Ten Tribes in the
End Time, the typical reader would assume it describes some book on the
history of the Ten Lost Tribes and their religious beliefs, past and
present. He or she would never think
this book is, in reality, a full-throttled assault on the New Testament and
belief in Jesus as humanity's Savior.
Nowhere does it state the author's three main contentions about
first-century Christianity being a pagan mystery religion, the New Testament's
misapplying the Old Testament's messianic texts to Jesus, or the New Testament
being unhistorical and plagued with contradictions. This "description" of Mystery Babylon and the Ten
Lost Tribes in the End Time can only be deemed deceptive. Evidently, the real contents are concealed,
because if they were unveiled to the unwary Christian reader of Commonwealth
Publishing's catalog, they most likely then wouldn't order the book. Even the title itself is rather
misleading: Something like First-Century
Christianity Proven to Be a Pagan Mystery Religion would label its subject
matter much more accurately.
Conder's general letter appealing for
funds and subscriptions to support Yair Davidy's Tribesman magazine is
similarly covert. After mentioning on
page 2 that his second book (MB) was going into production, he
states: "I will tell you in
advance that the book will stir up some controversy, because it will be
anything but the usual lost Ten Tribe material!" Later on page 3, concealing his true views from the reader, he
writes in an even-handed manner:
"It is interesting that the orthodox Jews strongly believe in a
literal fulfillment of these prophecies and therefore [in] the reunification of
the Twelve Tribes. . . . The Churches of God believe that this will
come at the second coming of Jesus.
Whether a first or second coming, one way that event is going to take
place is by the preaching of the identity message to the nations of Israel‑‑all
Twelve Tribes! Whether Jew or
Christian, the understanding of just who we are as a people is of paramount
importance." No clear rejection of
Christianity is present here. True, he
could deny this was deceptive, since, after all, he wrote this at the bottom of
page 1: "Also thanks to Mr.
Armstrong, I understood completely that the end-time descendants of Israel
would be caught up in the religion of Baal‑‑that they would be
worshipping a false god in a counterfeit religion called Christianity."[5] But he surely knows that the typical
"Armstrongite" reader would take this sentence in its context (in
light of its first half) as a reference to traditional Protestantism and Roman
Catholicism, not the primitive, first-century church.
THE
NEED FOR TRUTH IN ADVERTIZING
In light of these stealth tactics, the
shock approach was a requirement in reply.
Hence, hunting for startling quotes that would illustrate Mystery
Babylon's contents was completely intentional, complete with the original
italicizing and all-capitals to help ensure readers would know this was
serious. None of these quotes are
"out of context"‑‑if they misconstrue the teachings of Mystery
Babylon, they will happily be withdrawn, upon proof. My choice of a title, Is Christianity a
Fraud?, was for the same reason.
But there's another reason for taking a shock approach. We in the Church of God have spent months,
even years by now, debating minutiae, such as church government, the finer
points of administration, Sacred Names, the Jewish Calendar, new moons, the
date for Passover and Pentecost, etc.
Administering the shock treatment helped make it crystal clear that
Conder's teachings weren't over some additional minor quibble, but struck at
the core of Christianity. If
Christianity is true, but a true Christian abandons it to follow Conder's
teachings, this action will cost him his salvation, unlike (say) mistakenly
observing Passover on the wrong day.
The WCG's apostasy in the 1989-97 period in repudiating Mr. Armstrong's
teachings that differed from evangelical Protestantism's is as nothing compared
to Conder's "doctrine changes" in throwing out the New Testament as a
unhistorical, heathen-influenced, contradictory set of myths.
UNBELIEF
AS THE LOGICAL OUTCOME OF CONDER'S MODE OF ARGUMENTATION
Saying that I believe somehow that
"Judaism, agnosticism, atheism, and liberalism [are] one and the
same" (BGJ, p. 1) sets up and knocks down a straw man. Who could be that ignorant? As I said the first time (ICF, p. 4),
Conder's originality chiefly consists of turning higher critic arguments by
agnostics, atheists, and religious liberals against the New Testament only,
while holding onto the Old Testament as the sole word of God. In this regard, however, a Jew arguing
against belief in the New Testament often sounds like an atheist or agnostic,
since, due to disbelieving in it equally, they use similar arguments against
faith in it. Another straw man argument
is to imply I believe that various Christian reference books were originally
intended to be in the "service of Judaism," insinuating somehow that
would mean I believe in some absurd New World Order conspiracy theory that
links the Jews and the Vatican together (see BGJ, p. 14). Obviously, these works weren't written to
uphold the doctrines of Judaism, but what Conder does is select various higher
critic arguments from them that attack the NT and the traditional Christian
interpretation of the OT, while (usually) ignoring their arguments against the
OT. But by attacking the Old Testament
as well, the atheist or agnostic merely is merely being more consistent than
the Jew (or Conder), since both often deploy the same kinds of arguments. Against the charge that he may eventually
become an atheist, agnostic, or deist, Conder is hardly fully reassuring:
What
he's trying to do here is to warn people away from my book by noting that
"higher critic scholarship" could lead them on to critically examine
the so-called Old Testament, after which they might wind up an atheist. All I can say to Eric's observation is, yes,
I fully realize the implications of "higher criticism" when applied
to the Holy Scriptures. And Eric, I can
say that if I find that the Holy Scriptures can't withstand the light of truth,
then you are right, I will end up wherever that leads. (BGJ, p. 4)
Later
he adds:
Eric
ends his assessment of the book of Daniel by essentially asking if I would
accept the scholarship of my "liberal higher critics" when they
pointed out flaws with the "Old Testament["]? The answer to that Eric is yes. After careful consideration, which would
include an exhaustive study into the accumulated scholarship on the matter, I
would believe what the evidence told me:
I would choose hard fact over you, Herbert W. Armstrong, and Josh
McDowell anytime! (BGJ, p. 6)
By
using the argument from silence, hyper-skepticism about miracle accounts in
historical documents, and a priori (ahead of the facts) assumptions
against the supernatural, the Pandora's box thereby opened can just as easily
destroy faith in the Old Testament. The
question then becomes whether and when Conder consistently takes these kinds of
arguments to their logical conclusion, and deploys them against the Old
Testament as well.
HOW
CITING A SCHOLAR WHO WOULD OPPOSE YOUR OVERALL VIEWPOINT IS POWERFUL
Mentioning my use of the historian
Robin Lane Fox (p. 24 of ICF), Conder seemingly properly complains (BGJ, p.
2): "For instance, he accuses me
of using the works of "higher critics" to back up my points,
while he turns around and uses them when it suits him." Two points need to be made in reply to this
argument. First, if a scholar makes a
statement that may conflict with his overall philosophical viewpoint, or others
with similar overall perspectives, it's perfectly legitimate for those in
opposition to cite them to bolster their own cause. Such concessions then have far more weight than when citing
scholars who are in general argument with the view one advocates. Creationist scientists are masters at
this. For example, Henry Morris in Scientific
Creationism cites perhaps the leading past defender of neo-Darwinism,
George Gaylord Simpson, to show gaps exist in the fossil record: "The fossil record doesn't even provide
any evidence in support of Darwinian theory except in the weak sense that the
fossil record is compatible with it, just as it is compatible with other
evolutionary theories, and revolutionary theories, and special creationist
theories and even ahistorical theories."[6] Clearly, this concession has far more impact
than if Morris had cited (say) fellow creationist scientist Duane Gish make a
similar statement. Likewise, when a
scholar who's not a theological conservative starts saying the entire NT was
written before 70 A.D. (John A.T. Robinson), his testimony has more weight than
if I cited (say) F.F. Bruce as upholding this position (which he may not).[7]
FOX'S
STATEMENT AGAINST SEEING PARALLELS BETWEEN PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Consequently, it's very useful for me
to cite the fundamental thesis of historian Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and
Christians since it totally opposes that of Mystery Babylon. Fox is an enemy of Christianity, but he DENIES
that paganism and Christianity are fundamentally alike. Since his book's main point is to make a
side-by-side analysis of both, this statement has even more impact:
Was
Christianity, perhaps, not so very novel in the pagan world? Even before Constantine, Christians and
pagans have been seen as members of a "common Mediterranean religious
culture," in whose changes the role of foreign ideas was minimal, nothing
more than "alien thistle-seeds, drifting into the tidy garden of classical
Greco-Roman Culture." I wish to
establish the opposite view. Early
Christianity arrived with very distinctive roots. Grafted onto the Old Testament, it was not easily smothered, not
even by the established ground cover of the pagan towns. The Christian groups retained and passed on
ideals which have continued to recur in their history, giving it familiar
patterns. These roots did not die away,
although proofs of "pagan continuity" have been sought in the
developing types of Christian worship.
The cult of saints and worship at the graves of the dead have been seen
as a pagan legacy, as have the Christian shrines of healing and smaller details
of Christian practice, dancing, feasting and the use of spells and
divination. Emphasis on these
"pagan survivals" has opened long perspectives. In the West, it has led to the study of
popular religion and medieval folklore as if they were living alternatives to
Christian culture. In the East, it has
encouraged the myth that Hellenism endured from pagan antiquity to Byzantium
and far beyond, to become the national heritage of modern Greeks. However, almost all of this continuity is
spurious. Many of its details were set
in Christian contexts which changes their meaning entirely. Other details merely belonged in contexts
which nobody wished to make Christian.
They were part of a "neutral technology of life" and it would
be as unreal to expect them to change "as to expect modern man to
Christianize the design of an automobile or to produce a Marxist
wrist-watch."[8]
A
priori,
you would suspect that Fox, since he denies Christianity, would labor long and
hard at finding similarities in paganism to Christianity, just as James Frazer,
an atheist or agnostic, did in the second edition of The Golden Bough.[9] But since he denies paganism is like
early Christianity, or even (apparently) post-313 A.D. Roman Catholicism, his
willingness to overcome any presumed unbeliever's prejudices to see the two as
similar makes the above quote positively deadly against Mystery Babylon. Similarly, Conder's explanation that Harnack
was a theological liberal (BGJ, p. 2) merely plays into my hands, since he
opposed attempts that asserted paganism's beliefs determined the NT's
theology. It merely makes Nash's
citation of him still stronger, since skeptics usually wish to wield any weapon
available against Christianity. Conder,
of course, does similar things‑‑citing the works of mainline
liberal "Christians" against fundamentalist interpretations of the
Bible (OT and NT) is one of Mystery Babylon's stocks in trade. He states (BGJ, p. 2): "As we shall see later, even when I use
Christian sources to make my points against the validity and historicity of the
NT, Eric finds fundamentalist excuses to denounce them." But once it's realized these people often
aren't true believers in Christianity in the evangelical/fundamentalist sense,
their weight as concessions diminishes in direct proportion. Even in Haley's day (fl. 1874) this kind of
Christianity was a major problem:
It
is a lamentable fact that there is abroad in the world, and bearing the name of
Christianity, a spirit which, as Canon Wordsworth well says, "speaks fair
words of Christ, and yet it loves to invent discrepancies, and to imagine
contradictions in the narratives which his apostles and evangelists delivered
of his birth, his temptation, his miracles, his agony, his sufferings, his
resurrection, and ascension."[10]
They
label themselves "Christian," but they don't accept the contents of
the Bible as being true or even mainly true.
Continually prowling about, they seek further reasons not to believe in
it, or all of it, like atheists, agnostics, and deists.
CONDER'S
MISTAKE IN ADOPTING HIGHER CRITIC METHODOLOGY, NOT JUST THEIR "FACTS"
The second general point about citing
the works of scholars holding views the user would disagree with concerns
Conder's inconsistency in using from them types of arguments against the NT
that are equally deadly against the OT.
For example, after citing Ferrar Fenton[11] as a case in point,
Conder asks: "Now Eric, I'm not
saying that you are wrong in using authors or sources with whom you may at
times disagree. My point is that you
are being hypocritical when you denounce others who employ the same methods
that you yourself use" (BGJ, p. 23).
After all, Conder could argue that he accepts what higher critics have
to say about the NT, but rejects them concerning the OT, just as I accept
McDowell as he defends the Bible, but I reject most of his analysis of the old
WCG's doctrines. But this analogy
breaks down, because if Conder used the same methods of reasoning that
higher critics do against the OT, it too would fall before his critical
pen. No longer is the issue the
incidental doctrinal views of this or that traditional Christian or higher
critic scholar that Conder or I cite would disagree with many of our beliefs,
but Conder's adoption of certain overall procedures to analyzing
Scripture. Some of these techniques
include the argument from silence, the (implicit) a priori rejection of
supernatural intervention in the world (in places), uncritical citations of
(liberal) scholarship, and a knee-jerk skeptical rejection of accounts of the
miraculous in ancient historical documents.
The ghost of skeptical philosopher David Hume (1711-76) certainly lurks
in BGJ. Although I did concede
(footnote 43, p. 24-25, ICF) that this kind of argument has a point,
differences do appear between how Conder and I use these scholars who hold
views we would oppose, since the logical culmination of the higher critics'
modes of reasoning he uses results destroys belief in the OT as well as NT,
while the logical culmination of my acceptance the means of reasoning of
traditional Christian apologetics ultimately protects belief in both the OT and
NT.
A
SAMPLE OF HOW CONDER'S REASONING COULD BE DEPLOYED AGAINST THE OLD TESTAMENT
Let's illustrate how devastating some
of Conder's arguments could be when deployed against the Old Testament. Here below OT examples [in brackets] are
substituted for the NT ones he uses when he summarized many of his objections
against Christianity:
To
accept [such and so's pro-OT argument] as "evidence," one has to
accept‑‑on faith‑‑[the Jews'] word that [Moses]
mentioned in the [Jews'] own [Torah] actually lived. They would then have to accept‑‑on faith‑‑that
the accounts of [the Red Sea parting] and [the manna falling in the wilderness]
were written down by [Moses] "a few days or weeks" after [these
events happened]. If they are willing
to accept these two claims, they then have to accept that there was no
possibility that [Moses and Joshua] were telling a lie, they'd have to also
overlook the fact that [Moses and Joshua], who were supposedly reporting the
most stupendous event in world history only "a few days or weeks"
earlier had written down confusing and conflicting accounts [over when Israel
left Egypt on the Passover and the two "creation accounts" of Gen. 1
and 2]. Further, because we don't have
the "original" writings [i.e., the autograph], they would need to
have faith that the surviving manuscripts weren't tampered with [over the
roughly 1300 year period between the time Israel wandered in the Wilderness and
the copying of the Dead Sea Scrolls]; to do that they need to ignore the fact
that these manuscripts surfaced [from an Israel that frequently fell into
apostasy and worshipped false gods, making questionable how well the Pentateuch
was preserved as it passed through the hands of numerous unknown redactors and
editors over the centuries (see BGJ, p. 17 on NT)]. Having this behind them they'd then have to ignore the thousands
of extant [Old] Testament manuscripts which prove that indeed tampering was a
way of life with [Old] Testament preservation [as illustrated by the Soperim's
corrections and the addition of a false punctuation mark in Dan. 9:25 to deny
its application to Jesus]. The next
thing they'd have to do would be to place their faith in men like Josh
McDowell, Gleason Archer, and Eric Snow and believe that the contradictions and
historical inaccuracies that they read in [the parallel accounts of II Samuel,
I and II Kings, and I and II Chronicles] with their own eyes, aren't really
there? If they can believe all of this,
then they can have faith in Josh McDowell's evidence from [a defender of the
OT]. (BGJ, p. 31)
Similarly,
consider these statements: "There
are two problems with this so-called evidence:
1) if [ancient Israel] accepted [the parting of the Red Sea] story that
doesn't prove [it parted]: 2) the assertion that [ancient Israel] accepted [the
Red Sea parted] cannot be proven outside the traditions of [the Jews
themselves]" (BGJ, p. 7).
"The reason that many historians don't accept the [Old] Testament
as reliable but do accept the writings of Julius Caesar is because his writings
do not form the nucleus of a religion, hence there has been no temptation to
corrupt it" (BGJ, p. 26). "A
[fifteenth century b.c.] document declaring [the Red Sea's parting] doesn't
make it so" (BGJ, p. 30, fn 86).
"A true historian wants more than [OT] stories backed by the word
of biased [Jews] declaring their belief in [the slaying of all of Egypt's
firstborn]" (BGJ, p. 8). Although
the inserted examples don't always quite fit, and the slams against how well
the Masoretic text was preserved really are unfair, most of the inserted
examples made above are congruent with standard higher critic reasoning about
the OT, illustrating what Conder's approach to the NT could do to the OT. It's positively naive to believe the OT has
no problems in harmonizing its parallel accounts, just like it requires
ingenuity to fit together some of the Gospels' reports of the same events. Indeed, due to the theory of evolution and
uniformitarian (gradual change) geology, the level of skepticism aimed against
Genesis is higher than that against any other book of the Bible, OT or NT. So now, what can prevent Conder from
directing the same higher critics' methods of reasoning against the OT,
if he was logically consistent? The
real issue isn't what "facts" these higher critic scholars may
find against the Bible's reliability, but what principles of interpretation
and the overall philosophy they bring to their work. As always, if one's premises and foundations
are wrong, the resultant conclusions will be similarly awry. The GIGO principle is inescapable: Garbage in, garbage out. Despite being a creationist with nothing
higher than an M.A. in history or more scientific than a B.A. in marketing, I
am not intimidated by the (presumed) fact that 95%+ of all scientists with
Ph.D's in the biological sciences accept evolution and reject creationism. What matters is the philosophical principles
they use to justify evolution and rule out creationism, not the alleged
"facts" they cite for it, which often fit a creationist model for the
earth's origin just as easily or better.
Similarly, no fundamentalist should be intimidated out of his or her
faith by (say) Conder's citation of Dr. Burton L. Mack, "recently retired
John Wesley Professor of the New Testament at the School of Theology at
Claremont" (BGJ, p. 16) and his book, Who Wrote the New Testament? The same goes for any other of a pack of
higher critics with impressive credentials.
Marvin L. Lubenow notes that it has been said that more than 500
doctoral dissertations were written on Piltdown man‑-now known to be a
notorious fraud. The scholarly consensus
that accepted Piltdown for decades (c. 1917-53) was built on quicksand.[12] Assuming Conder's claim is true that an
"overwhelming 1997 consensus" exists that Luke was wrong about the
timing of the census under Quirinius, this really proves little (BGJ, p.
22). Similarly, an "overwhelming
1997 consensus" exists among biological scientists that evolution is
true. What matters are the facts of the
case, not the interpretative assumptions and conclusions of (liberal)
scholars. Higher criticism on the Old
and New Testaments has generated a similar amount of rubbish, based upon false,
a priori assumptions used to guide interpretation. The documentary hypothesis (JEDP theory),
which still savages Old Testament interpretation by attributing to the
Pentateuch multiple anonymous authorship, was originally launched partly by the
nineteenth century higher critics' belief that Moses couldn't have written
anything because writing hadn't yet been invented![13] Whenever reading some scholar with
impressive credentials attacking the Bible, always remember that it's not so
much the facts as the interpretation of them that matters and the a priori,
often latent, assumptions he or she has when interpreting them: False premises lead to false conclusions.
ARE
THE HIGHER CRITICS UNBIASED?
Conder implies that the skeptical
scholars he cites are unbiased:
"The sources I use critically examine both history and the New
Testament itself for accuracy and historicity, and they are not motivated by
illogical Christian emotions" (BGJ, p. 2). "The clarity of [Isaac Asimov's] commentary comes from the
fact that he was not reared by religious parents and therefore had no religious
doctrinal bias when researching and commenting on the Bible" (BGJ, p.
6). But illogical anti-Christian
emotions also beat in the breast of many an unbeliever, because the Christian
God demands actions of people they often don't wish to perform and beliefs they
often don't wish to uphold. The English
author and intellectual Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, best known for the novel Brave
New World) was a staunch atheist.
One time, however, he conceded his and others' motivation for their
irreligion wasn't necessarily a choice born of pure logic and reason:
I
had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed
that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying
reasons for this assumption . . . For myself, as, no doubt, for most
of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an
instrument of liberation. The liberation
we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic
system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it
interfered with our sexual freedom.[14]
Then
consider the biases of the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire
(1694-1778). While looking through
Voltaire's library, one Swedish traveler found Calmet's commentary on the
Bible. In it he found "slips of
paper inserted, on which the difficulties noticed by Calmet were set down,
without a word about the solutions which were given by him. 'This,' adds the Swede, who was otherwise a
great admirer of Voltaire, 'was not honorable.'"[15] Voltaire jotted down on paper for future
reference the discrepancies Calmet noted, but deliberately ignored the
solutions offered: Is this biased, or
what? Similarly, Voltaire, who was a
deeply anticlerical deist, managed to mention Jesus' name in his universal
history of the world just once, and only after Constantine crossed the Milvian
Bridge for battle (the fourth century A.D.)[16] Many other cases of scholars betraying a
knee-jerk unbelieving bias against Christianity that distorts the historical
understanding of the past could be cited, such as Gibbon's The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, but the above suffices to make the point.
SINCE
BOTH SIDES ARE BIASED, CHARGES ABOUT THIS PROVE LITTLE
Although I'll readily concede many of
the scholars I cite are fundamentalist or evangelical Christians who are
(inevitably) biased, so too are the skeptical scholars Conder often
references. As much as the former want
the Bible to be true (They've devoted their lives to Jesus!), the latter want
it to be false (The God of the Bible cramps their sexual and personal freedoms
too much!). So then the point is what facts
are brought by either side to the table, or reasonably sound arguments
they make from those facts when either I or Conder cite them. Properly, the citation of somebody's mere
opinion on (say) when the NT was first written proves little (unless the reason
for that opinion elsewhere appears in the work but was omitted in the
quote). But it's another matter,
however, if they have some reasonable argument or fact for why they date it to
a certain period. Hence, when I quoted
the archeologist William Albright twice on p. 8 of ICF on the date of the NT's
composition, I concede to merely cite him (the first time) saying it was a
first-century document doesn't prove much.
(At least, no more than "expert testimony" in a courtroom
setting might be worth, knowing both the prosecution and defense pay for
experts who'll contradict each other).
But when he (the second time) adds the Qumran discoveries (the Dead Sea
Scrolls) confirm this, then further research into why he ties the two
together becomes necessary before dismissing it as the biased opinion of some
Christian believer. (Actually, he was a
moderate, being neither a fundamentalist nor an entrenched skeptic). Naturally, some purported "fact" a
scholar brings to the discussion could be false, such as Isaac Asimov's claim
the kind of census conducted by the Romans described in Luke 2:1 was
absurd. Or, some logical fallacy may be
committed, such as circular reasoning (assuming implicitly in a premise what
someone wishes to prove in the conclusion) or equivocation (using the same term
in different ways in an argument).
Clearly, it's necessary to look to the facts and to sound arguments
developed using them, and beyond (ad hominem) charges and
counter-charges about this or that scholar having a pro- or anti-Christian
bias, for then neither side can really prove anything.
WHY
MY ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE MAKES ME SUSPICIOUS OF MYSTERY BABYLON'S SOURCES
Since I recently finished an M.A. in
history at Michigan State, I'm someone with basic familiarity with how
historians argue with one another about how to interpret the past in the light
of primary sources. My expertise is not
in ancient history, Biblical or classical, but I specialized as a Europeanist
in the labor history of England. But
since my M.A. thesis topic compared English farmworkers during the Industrial
Revolution with American slaves before the Civil War (c. 1750-1870), I ended up
spending more time looking at primary sources dealing with American slaves than
English agricultural workers. (And
since the rough draft of my thesis came to about 400 pages single spaced before
my committee accepted about 100 pages of it for the simple reason of length,
not quality, this was no "quickie" project causing me to gain only a
passing knowledge of the primary and secondary sources). Having spent so much time looking at
scholarly journal articles and secondary works by historians that interpreted
the primary documents, I have a good "feel" for how academic
arguments are really conducted in history through attending a typical state-run
secular university.
THE
NEED TO KNOW THE SCHOLARLY CLIMATE OF OPINION ON SECONDARY WORKS: THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN SLAVERY AS AN
EXAMPLE
So why should I tout my academic
credentials in this context (and hopefully not arrogantly)? If I, while writing my thesis, had
uncritically used the works of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips on African-American
slavery, I would have tied it to obsolete, racist scholarship. By no means is American Negro Slavery
(1918) entirely wrong, but it is continuously tinctured with racist assumptions
about blacks which undermine the soundness of its interpretations of the
evidence. Yet through this work and
others, Phillips was the reigning historian on the subject in the profession
until being decisively overthrown by Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar
Institution (1956). To really
intelligently use secondary sources in academic debates, often it's necessary
to know how other scholars in the same discipline view them. Before wading into the historiography of
American slavery, it's necessary to know the problems of racism found in
Phillips' work, the biased optimistic tendencies and overkill on econometric
theory of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
(1974), and the grossly distorted, if ingenious, analogy between concentration
camps and American slavery is carried way too far as a way of arguing that the
slaves' personalities often did resemble the "Sambo" stereotype found
in Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A
Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). Because the scholarly consensus can change,
whether due to the discovery of new sources, or new interpretations of old
sources, it can be problematic to use secondary works that were originally
written more than one or two generations ago.
As a true academic debate rages, or just merely simmers, it's necessary
to become familiar with "the climate of opinion" on a given subject and
its literature before one can intelligently use older secondary works (which,
by definition, interpret and make generalizations from the primary
sources).
WHY
MYSTERY BABYLON DOESN'T REPRESENT TRUE SCHOLARSHIP
As a result, as I looked over Mystery
Babylon, I soon saw the work didn't cite fairly recent heavyweight
monographs or scholarly journal articles, but was based on a fairly narrow
foundation of authors deeply critical of Christianity in works (often) written
many decades ago. Leaning significantly
upon encyclopedias, Mystery Babylon clearly presented itself not as a
work of true scholarship (re: BGJ, pp.
4, 16). If Mystery Babylon was
scholarly, it would contain the kinds of references found in (say) James L.
Price's, The New Testament: Its
History and Theology (a basically liberal work). It wouldn't be loaded with citations of Walker (42), Doane (20),
Asimov (12),[17] old editions of the Encyclopedia
Britannica (8), Frazer (6), Legge (6), Wheless (6), Kautsky (5), Hislop
(5), Graves (4), Drazin (3), Graham (2), etc.
(All figures exact or nearly so, counting sources referenced in
footnotes only). By comparison, journal
articles and monographs (books on a narrow subject) in the history of American
slavery or English Farmworkers never cite encyclopedias as a source that I'm
aware of. Besides the New and Old
Testament, Mystery Babylon usually cites the primary sources through
secondary works. For example, it
appears that Conder never directly cites a printed edition for any primary
source on the mystery religions. Such
authors as Hislop (1877), Doane (1882), and Frazer (1890; 1900; 1911-15) are
hardly up-to-date works, and the first two (undeniably) are polemical in nature
(i.e., engaged in making an aggressive attack on somebody else's ideas). Robert Ackerman, Frazer's biographer, notes
that his work was regarded as hopelessly passe' even in the 1930s while
he yet lived, due to using a comparative method that yanks rituals and myths
from the context of various cultures to fill in the gaps in a cultural
evolutionary chain that extends upwards to modern civilization.[18] Although Conder goes to considerable length
to defend Isaac Asimov's credentials (BGJ, p. 6), the fact remains that when a
man trained in biochemistry writes a commentary on the Bible, his level of
expertise is going to be no higher than most other outsiders. The realm of academia is so specialized that
when a scholar or scientist writes or speaks out on something outside his area
of special training, it should be regarded as having little more weight than
what a typical college-educated member of the public would think on it.[19] (Presently, on the global warming debate,
it's conspicuous how scientists outside the field of meteorology/climatology
appear to be much more convinced of its reality than those within it, the real
experts). The field of history, for
example, is extremely specialized these days:
The opinion of a Chinese historian on the soundness of an English or
African historian's work really holds no more weight than what (say) a
journalist doing book reviews for New York Times might write. True, this reality doesn't mean these books
are necessarily wrong because they were written so many years ago or by someone
outside their area of expertise. But
they shouldn't be used uncritically as "Authorities." Still, Conder's complaint that I use old
works like him in many cases is justified.
THE
SCHOLARLY CLIMATE OF OPINION ON THE CHRISTIAN/PAGAN TIE REVISITED
The main place ICF attacked Mystery
Babylon's use of obsolete scholarship concerns its arguments claiming that
Christianity mainly derived its doctrinal content from the pagan mystery
religion religions of the Roman Empire (see ICF, pp. 39, 52 (fn), 54, 56). Now to justify his viewpoint that debate
over this issue still continues, Conder cites (BGJ, p. 25) various recent works
by scholars that argue for or mention these ties. But it appears these men are on the peripheries of their
disciplines when making their claims (especially the ones trying to claim Buddhism
influenced Christianity). "Junk
Scholarship" (re: the controversy over Carsten Thiede's assertion that
dates some NT fragments to the first century; BGJ, pp. 16-17) is hardly limited
just to believers in the Bible, but appears among its critics as well. Citing Riesenfeld's 1956 comment as
evidence, Nash explains that the overall scholarly climate of opinion changed
on the pagan/Christian tie thus:
During
a period of time running roughly from about 1890 to 1940, scholars often
alleged that primitive Christianity had been heavily influenced by Platonism,
Stoicism, the pagan mystery religions, or other movements in the Hellenistic
world. Largely as a result of a series
of scholarly books and articles written in rebuttal, allegations of early
Christianity's dependence on its Hellenistic environment began to appear much
less frequently in the publications of Bible scholars and classical
scholars. Today, in the mid-1980s, most
Bible scholars regard the question as a dead issue.
But
then Nash asks, if this is so, why bother to write another book on the subject
that denies the relationship? Well,
these charges continue to circulate among philosophers and scholars in other
fields in publications since 1940. He
then proceeds to list some examples of more recent works on following pages,
and later in the book, when dealing with the mystery religions directly. As Nash comments on this score:
For
a number of years now, the consensus among biblical scholars has been that the
earlier opponents of a primitive [first-century] Christian dependence on the
mystery religions got the better of their debate. Younger scholars now returning from doctoral studies in Germany
report that, over there at least, the question of a mystery influence on the
New Testament is a dead issue. Once
again, however, we find that news like this has been slow to reach American
scholars in fields other than biblical studies.[20]
Similarly,
Justo L. Gonzalez writes:
Concerning
the relationship between the mystery cults and Christianity, scholarly opinion
has varied. During the first two or
three decades of the twentieth century, it was thought that the mystery
religions constituted a unity based on a common "mystery theology,"
and that Christianity was simply one of them, or at most, a distinct religion
in which the influence of the mysteries was greatly felt. According to scholars of that time,
Christianity had taken from the mysteries its concept of the passion, death,
and resurrection of the god; its rites of initiation‑‑baptism; its
sacramental meals‑‑communion; its ascending stages of initiation‑‑the
orders [of Roman Catholicism's monasticism]; and a multitude of details
needless to enumerate. But since
then, a careful study has been made of the mysteries, and the conclusion
reached by almost all scholars is that there was no such thing as a common
"mystery theology"‑‑at least in the first century of our
era. Quite the contrary, the
mystery cults differed one from another so much that it is difficult to even
explain the term "mystery religion."
Moreover, the mysteries seem not to have reached their full development
until the second and third centuries, which is the time when the majority of
their characteristics in common with Christianity appear. It follows that such traits can be more
easily explained as the influence of Christianity on the mysteries than the
opposite, the more so when we learn that already in this period the pagan cults
tried to imitate some of the characteristics of the dynamic new faith.[21]
Evidently,
for these reasons like these, an aggressive nonbeliever like the historian
Robin Lane Fox made a point of denying paganism and Christianity were
highly similar early on in his work that describes the two side-by-side, Pagans
and Christians. Although Conder can
cite a few scholars who most recently have espoused ideas that tie the two
together, Nash and Gonzalez give us good reason to doubt these men represent
the mainstream of the disciplines of classical and (especially) Biblical
studies. Conder has to cite statements
by scholars in these fields that demonstrate this issue still lives, such as in
a recent literature review article in a scholarly journal, before anyone else
can really accept this debate is still going strong, at least in the field of
Biblical studies. Book titles by a few
individual scholars, etc., simply aren't enough.
WHY
ICF LEANED ON MCDOWELL AND NASH SO MUCH
As reflected in the title "By-gosh Josh," Conder makes a
major point of mentioning my heavy dependence on Josh McDowell's work: "Actually Eric Snow might very well be
at the top of the Josh McDowell fan club because I counted some 65
references to McDowell's books while reading through Eric's 74 page
paper" (BGJ, p. 1). Conder is
rather justified in saying that I could have recommended to people that they
should read McDowell's books and not have written ICF (see BGJ, p. 2, 5). I definitely felt that way myself at times,
and made comments like this to others in my church (although for only one person
locally was Conder's viewpoint truly a "live question"). "Read McDowell, and report back to me
next week." However, I felt it
necessary to come up with something shorter and more to the point that directly
answers his claims. It also was
necessary to use Nash for dealing with the pagan influence on Christianity
issue and three books bought from Jews for Jesus that handled the messianic
texts. After all, Evidence that
Demands a Verdict, vols. 1 and 2, aren't the easiest tomes to plow through,
since they're mostly a compilation of quotes from various other books organized
under various headings with added explanations. Furthermore, McDowell deals with the pagan mystery religion issue
only briefly in He Walked Among Us (written with Bill Wilson). His examination of the messianic texts was
generally much too peripheral in Evidence to do any good against Mystery
Babylon. As a result, I had to lean
on Frydland, Rosen, and Smith mostly for that subject (along with one letter I
got from John Wheeler, a GCG laymember who can read Hebrew). Also, as my aforementioned experience at
Michigan State with fellow laymembers who were raised in the church indicates,
many in the COGs might not be familiar with modern Christian apologetics. By bringing his name forward, many might be
saved much grief when doing their own research. There's no need to reinvent the wheel in the field of Christian
apologetics when analyzing Mystery Babylon; its arguments are largely
tried and true, being the long-time property of various agnostics, religious
liberals, atheists, and/or Jews. I
fully admit ICF was not some careful scholarly work, nor do I claim originality
for it, but it was written as a polemic in a continuing controversy (re: Conder's complaints on BGJ, pp. 4-5,
14). Hence, I simply quickly ransacked
McDowell, Nash, Frydland, Rosen, Smith, Lewis, Jehovah's Witness books, etc.
for relevant points to refute Conder's assertions.
HOW
BEING TOO OPEN-MINDED CAN CAUSE YOUR BRAINS TO FALL OUT
Conder complains, "You see, Eric approaches
New Testament study not from a desire to know the truth one way or the other,
but to be reassured that his faith is valid" (BGJ, p. 6). However, that is one road I don't feel any
need to travel down again. I already
proved the truth to myself years ago, long before MB saw the light of
day, having been subjected to a mostly secular environment while growing up and
having come under the influence of Ayn Rand as a teenager when I became a hard
right-winger in my human politics. You
can become so open-minded that your brains fall out. As a result, you become so uncertain in what you supposedly
believe you really don't believe in anything at all. Even if Conder doesn't accept the inspiration of the apostle
Paul, he should be willing to see the "human wisdom" in the following
statement about men in the end times:
"always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the
truth" (II Tim. 3:7). Similarly,
the apostle James states: "But let
him ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf
of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. . . . being a
doubled-minded man, unstable in all his ways" (James 1:6, 8). I may not be especially open-minded about
the falsity of Christianity, but that's because I'm firmly convinced the facts
are on its side, not unbelief's or Judaism's.
Similarly, at this point, I'm sure Conder is no more open-minded towards
the possibility of Christianity being true, than I am about Christianity being
false. Few points are going to be
scored making (ad hominem) accusations about which side is the more
"open-minded" in this debate.
Instead, let's turn to the facts and how to interpret them correctly.
HOW
BOTH SIDES' SOURCES ARE ARGUABLY BIASED
Conder goes to considerable trouble to
show that McDowell's sources (and mine) are mostly published by various
Christian organizations and by various Christian believers, stating: "I find the use of such material very
deceiving‑‑especially when he denounces my sources as unscholarly,
biased and one-sided" (BGJ, p. 3; cf. p. 9). This kind of ad hominen argument (i.e., one that attacks
the man and his character, not the arguments or facts) can be run against both
sides. For example, Conder cites (BGJ,
p. 25) a book by William Harwood called Mythology's Last Gods, which is
published by Prometheus Books, a known publisher of polemical books by atheists
and/or other unbelievers. G.A. Wells,
who denies Jesus even existed, the writer of The Jesus Legend, also had
at least one book published by this same outfit, The Historical Evidence for
Jesus (note BGJ, p. 35, fn. 94).
Similarly, Isaac Asimov was an atheist, Barbara Walker appears to be an
agnostic, and James Frazer was an agnostic or atheist, whose works Conder often
cites from. Again, since both sides are
going to be biased to one degree or another, the job of dispassionate outsiders
is to weigh the facts each side presents, and how correctly and plausibly they
interpret and draw conclusions from those facts. I believe the facts and the best interpretations of them lead one
towards the truth of Christianity, while Conder believes they don't. Those honestly uncertain have to research
these questions for themselves, and avoid thinking they have all the relevant
information from reading just Mystery Babylon. Anybody who embraces Conder's beliefs without first reading
Ronald Nash's The Gospel and the Greeks, Josh McDowell and Bill Wilson's
He Walked Among Us, and (say) a Messianic Jewish work like Moishe
Rosen's Y'shua is being criminally foolish with his or her
salvation. Conder gives good advice
when saying: "People should never
make up their minds by looking at only one side of an issue and I can only hope
that Eric's readers will take this to heart.
I also hope that people take this advice when reading my book. I sincerely wish people to read papers like
Eric's and then research the issues raised by both of us" (BGJ, p.
3). Hence, it's an admirable gesture
for Commonwealth Publishing (Conder's publisher) to distribute ICF after asking
for my permission to do so.
CONDER'S
PASSING OVER MANY OF ICF'S ARGUMENTS IMPLY THEIR CORRECTNESS
A remarkable feature of Conder's reply
(BGJ) against ICF is how much he passes over in the latter with little or no
comment. Thinking what he already wrote
in MB and/or Masada is enough, he avoids specifically rebutting
many points raised in ICF. This
obviously implies their correctness.
For example, for dating the book of Daniel, I cite Gleason Archer's
analysis that the Aramaic of the book is too archaic to have been written in
the second century b.c. (ICF, p. 6).
The grammatical structure of the Aramaic of the Elephantine Papyri of
the fifth century b.c. matches Daniel's more closely than that of the second
century b.c. Maccabean period. To
merely state (BGJ, p. 4), "I won't argue the specifics of Daniel in this
paper, as I've already done that in my book," fails to respond to the real
issues involved. He adds that "my
criticisms are outlined and backed up by scholars who have spent, in some
cases, their entire adult lives studying the so-called Old
Testament." This statement evades
how these folks are provably wrong, unless they can successfully refute the
technical linguistic points Archer makes in Survey of Old Testament Introduction
that show the Aramaic of Daniel couldn't have been written in the second
century. Since Conder in MB is
the one "attacking the Holy Scriptures of Israel" (BGJ, p. 1) by
claiming Daniel "was not holding up to historical scrutiny" and
contains an "unhistorical mention of Darius the Mede" (MB, pp.
124-25), it's rather absurd a supposedly "Baal/Mithras worshipping"
Christian like myself has to rescue Daniel's infallibility from Conder's own
clutches.
MOST
OF THE MESSIANIC TEXT REBUTTALS MADE BY ICF AGAINST MB OVERLOOKED IN BGJ
More spectacularly, besides raising
the issue of how to prove the duality principle of interpretation and attacking
my interpretation of Psalms 22 as a messianic text, Conder passes over most of
my rebuttals against his commentary on the OT's messianic texts that refer to
Jesus. Complaining that ICF only spent
16 pages on the messianic texts out of its 74 pages, he claims: "A 'quick' look? You'd better believe that Eric gives them a
'quickie' because he doesn't have the answers" (BGJ, p. 36). Ironically, Conder's BGJ features a similar
disproportion, since only about 3 pages out of 40 are devoted to defending his
interpretations of the messianic texts (pp. 36-39). ICF's interpretation of such texts as Micah 5:2, Zech. 12:10,
Isa. 7:14, 9:6-7, 52:13-53:12, Gen. 49:10, Haggai 2:7, and Dan. 9:24-27 are all
conveniently dodged. Also neglected are
ICF's points that the OT's views of the Messiah as Mournful and Conquering
would be contradictory if they weren't fulfilled at separate times, and
Conder's misuse of the Hebrew grammar's state/tense system when interpreting
messianic texts. Conder states: "I won't go into the all-to[o]-brief
Messianic examples outlined by Eric, because I've already explained them in
both my book and in Masada Magazine" (BGJ, p. 39). But if BGJ is supposed to answer the main
issues raised in ICF against MB, why is so much passed over? Substance is lacking here, since ICF called
into question many of Mystery Babylon's contentions on these texts,
unless Masada had an article that rebutted ICF's arguments text by text
and page by page.
OTHER
POINTS CONDER OVERLOOKS WHEN CRITICIZING ICF
BGJ overlooks other major issues
raised in ICF, failing to rebut major sections or points in it. For example, the section of ICF dealing with
alleged contradictions in the New Testament, or between the NT and OT (pp.
24-30) seems to be almost entirely ignored, besides the sections dealing with
Christ's genealogies and whether those believing in the OT alone have to do
animal sacrifices today (ICF, pp. 29-32; BGJ, pp. 14-15, 22-24). Although Conder raises the generic issue of
me overlooking "numerous scriptural contradictions" in my paper, he
neither critiques my specific solutions nor mentions further contradictions
that supposedly exist (see BGJ, p. 10), except for Christ's genealogies. My paper discusses many of the ones he
judges important enough to mention, believing many of the others are easily
explainable by the general principle that an omission or addition of detail
does not constitute a contradiction.
The other issues BGJ passes over include the general differences between
the pagan mystery religions and Christianity, the differences between Jesus'
death and the pagan gods' deaths, and ICF's counterattack against supposed
Gnostic and pagan philosophical influences on the NT (ICF, pp. 43-44, 49-50,
54-56). My critique of Conder's view of
Jesus' trial draws no fire (ICF, pp. 21-23).
My request that Conder proves by citing the primary sources that Mithra
rose from the dead, etc. is ignored as well (ICF, p. 40). In BGJ (p. 29), Conder asserts,
"identical pagan myths predates Christianity by many centuries"
without providing any specifics for this assertion.[22] Conder attacks McDowell's "pedagogy of
God" argument about how God could have used paganism to teach some truth
about Himself (BGJ, p. 32), which ICF never uses, but overlooks C.S. Lewis'
version of a similar argument that sees the parallels as ultimately
unproblematic, which is in ICF (pp. 52-54).
ICF's rebuttal to Conder's assumption that he can read the behavior of
the post-313 A.D. medieval church back to the persecuted Sunday-keeping church
before the rule of Constantine draws no clear reaction (ICF, pp. 16-17).
MISTAKENLY
UNDERSTANDING A CHALLENGE, CONDER FAILS TO PROVIDE SOURCE CITATIONS
Misunderstanding a challenge to cite
the primary sources as a need to produce the original (autograph) manuscripts,
Conder answers with another challenge (BGJ, p. 28) my request to list the
primary sources for the claim that "Every one of the Sun-god saviors
rose from the dead on the first day of the week after three days in the tomb"
(MB, p. 51). Primary sources
need not be the original autograph or ancient manuscripts of some work, but
perfectly adequate for this purpose are individual printed renditions or
collections of them made into one book.[23] Needless to say, answering one demand with
another doesn't fulfill the original request.
Conder protests that:
"Virtually every Christian who addresses the question of no
similarities between the pagan Mystery's savior sun-gods and Jesus, carefully
select examples from pagan mythology that have very little if anything in
common with Christian customs or doctrines. . . . (Eric's paper is
littered with deceptive examples)" (BGJ, p. 30). But, unlike for Stinson on Hercules, Conder made little effort in
BGJ to rebut the specific examples ICF cites for these myths (see ICF, pp.
41-42, 46-52). If Conder is to carry
his point, he needs to cite some printed edition of the myths (the primary
sources) in their alternative versions for each one of the gods (Attis,
Dionysus, Mithras, Adonis, Osiris, etc.) in question that ICF discusses. As it is, the best he does is quote from
ICF's citation of Frazer on Dionysus for an alternative parallel closer to
Christian doctrine of the resurrection (BGJ, p. 30).
CONDER
MISTAKENLY CLAIMS THREE FOOTNOTE PROBLEMS EXIST IN ICF
Three times Conder mistakenly asserts
that ICF lacks some necessary reference.
But with more careful reading, they could have been easily found. For example, concerning my statement about
first-century fragments of the NT having been discovered, Conder writes: "In the paper I have, Eric failed to
give a reference for his Dead Sea cave NT discoveries" (BGJ, p. 16). In fact, this is in footnote 11, p. 9: "See Robert A. Morey, The New
Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1986), p. 112. He cites in turn David Estrada and William
White Jr., The First New Testament (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978); McDowell, Evidence that Demands a
Verdict, pp. 42-43." Although
this footnote, like most in ICF, combined multiple books together in order to
avoid excessively multiplying the number of footnotes, the title of Estrada and
White's book should have made it clear where this information came from. Since Conder has a copy of McDowell's book,
checking this reference personally would have revealed this statement couldn't
have come from it, plainly showing it came from the reference listed
first. As a general rule, when ICF
lists multiple works in one footnote, the citations appear in the same order in
which they were used in the paragraph where the footnote number is. The main exception occurs when multiple
citations from the same work are interspersed with references to some other
work, causing the paragraph's order of arguments to not fully correlate with
the order of their sources found in its footnote. Conder makes a similar mistake later: "Eric doesn't give a reference for these quotes [from
Josephus about what languages were spoken by average people in ancient Judea],
but they are from Antiquities of the Jews, Book XX, chap. XI:2"
(BGJ, p. 18). The middle of footnote
18, page 18 of ICF reads: "my
emphasis, Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book 20, chapter
11, section 2." Still another one
occurs when discussing the number of variations in the NT (BGJ, p. 20): "In response to this Eric quotes C.F.
Sitterly and J.H. Greenlee, without any reference, as saying: 'Such a wealth of evidence makes it all
the more certain that the original words of the NT have been preserved
somewhere within the MSS.'" In
fact, the beginning of footnote 16 (ICF, p. 11) reads: "C.F. Sitterly and J.H. Greenlee,
"Text and MSS of the NT," Geoffrey W. Bromiley, gen. ed., The
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988),
p. 818." A different kind of footnote
problem occurs in BGJ, p. 20, footnote 56:
"On page 14 of his paper Eric offers a secondhand source called The
Problem of the New Testament Canon by one K. Aland, 'as cited in a
Jehovah's Witness book, All Scripture is Inspired of God and Beneficial.'" Although it's a correct description, the
words "as cited in a Jehovah's Witness book" do not appear in
footnote 22, p. 14 of ICF. If brackets
or parentheses had been put around them, this would have been fine. Otherwise, it's unacceptable otherwise to
insert between quote marks additional words that falsely attribute them
directly to the author. Incidently,
Kurt Aland does have respectable credentials:
F.F. Bruce calls him a "professor" and notes he revised E.
Nestle's edition of the Greek NT.[24] Although these slip ups are fairly trivial,
they reflect Conder's haste and/or carelessness when writing up BGJ,
illustrating how more significant misconceptions in it could have arisen which
are covered below.
WHY
IS CHRISTIANITY A FRAUD? CITES HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG
Conder notes that I cited Herbert W.
Armstrong's United States and Britain in Prophecy in ICF, but for
mistaken reasons (BGJ, p. 5): "(I
offer this one example [of problems with this book's scholarship] because Eric
uses it to back up several points in criticism of me.)" (See also BGJ, p. 17). In fact, excepting for using Who Is the
Beast? to enlist Myers' statements to help show the pre-313 A.D.
Sunday-keeping church shouldn't be equated with medieval Roman Catholicism
(ICF, p. 16), I cited HWA for a very different reason: Whenever I mentioned significant alternative
possible interpretations of the Bible that differed from his, I wished to draw
attention to it. Because the Tkach
administration watered down doctrine for many years before its apostasy was
clear (c. 1987-1995), many may have forgotten some of the lesser teachings of
HWA on this or that subject. Although I
don't believe HWA was infallible in his beliefs at the time of his death
(unlike what the PCG and Gerald Flurry almost believe), and I still support
some of the early doctrine changes of the Tkach Sr. administration, I believe
innovations from his interpretations of Scripture should be approached with
unusual care.[25] Hence, I cite HWA's views on the subject of
interpreting Gen. 49:10, Dan. 9:24-27, and Jer. 22:30 since they differ from
what others say when I believe the others may be or are right. (See ICF, p. 32, fn. 58; p. 69, fn. 129; p.
70, fn. 133). This book of Mr.
Armstrong's wasn't cited really as a source of facts or interpretations to
attack Mystery Babylon with, but to help alert brethren in the various
COGs to what is "received doctrine."
It's fine to say HWA was wrong about this or that teaching, or that he
sinned in this or that way, but we should be more careful about doing this than
many today are in the COG. Movement
from HWA's positions should be done fully consciously, not inadvertently when
we hear somebody, in or out of the COG, propounding some new interpretation of
a text or a doctrine change. In short,
I believe in "Burkean" (slow, gradual, careful) reform of HWA's
doctrinal mistakes, not a radical, zealous plunging forward, since (despite all
his mistakes and sins) God used him to preach a non-Trinitarian
Sabbatarianism that reached more of the world than any other man did since the
first century A.D. In this present
time of disillusion over the WCG's church government and administration
problems, let us not forget that!
WHY
THE TRUE RELIGION WOULD SATISFY EMOTIONS AS WELL AS REASON
Conder overstates my emphasis on
emotion, as well as Josh McDowell's, as a means of determining religious truth
by saying: "Well Eric, there you
have me! I can't argue with emotions‑‑either
yours or the coed by-gosh Josh quotes!
If all one needs to prove Jesus' Messiahship is to abandon reason and
embrace an emotional feeling, then all I can say is that I will leave them to
it" (BGJ, p. 39; cf. pp. 7, 40).
Of course, since BGJ is pock-marked with statements which are
underlined, bold printed, italicized, and put in all caps, religion is hardly
an unemotional concern for Conder either.
Clearly, only a small proportion of Evidence that Demands a Verdict
(vol. 1) is devoted to the descriptions of various people's testimonies for
Christ. Of 373 pages of text in the
main section, only about 42 pages are dedicated to describing the inner
feelings of conviction people have had about Jesus (pp. 325-67). None of More Evidence that Demands a
Verdict's 382 pages of text is spent on personal testimonies. As for More than a Carpenter, only
about 18 pages out of 128 describes issues about having a personal relationship
with Christ and Josh McDowell's own testimony.
In Resurrection Factor, McDowell fills around 16 pages on his
personal testimony and experiences out of 190.
In McDowell and Wilson's He Walked Among Us, only four pages (at
the end) of the text's 358 pages are dedicated to encouraging people to accept
Jesus as Savior, long after the chapter dealing with the mystery
religions. This picture sharply contradicts
Conder's statement that (BGJ, p. 30):
"Unfortunately this flip-flop position [on similarities between
Christianity and paganism] will likely be lost on the casual McDowell reader
because Josh tosses in so much rubbish from Christians confessing their faith
in Jesus between the two extreme points, that the reader will probably be
hoodwinked into not seeing the obvious."
Then as for what I wrote, issues touching on emotion and accepting Jesus
as our personal Savior don't constitute a fourth of a page's worth out of 74
(see ICF, p. 53, 73). Nevertheless,
emotional conviction should not be ignored, especially as it may reflect a
changed life during the years one is a Christian after baptism and the laying
on of hands. Admittedly, we can't see,
hear, or feel the Spirit of God directly in us, but we should see the results
of its workings in us by changing our lives from what we were earlier while in
the world. God did not create humans to
be beings of reason and logic only‑‑the true religion should satisfy
both reason and emotion. Seeing
facts and emotion as necessarily opposed can only lead to a life of
unhappiness. I maintain that the facts,
and the best interpretations of those facts, are on the side of Christianity,
as well as my conscience and emotional state.
The latter may change from day to day, but the former don't‑‑they're
the foundations for my faith, for my emotional commitment to God. For an excellent paper that deals with the
inner "subjective" experiences of the mind that help confirm God
really is in our lives as Christians, see Alan Ruth's essay, "Confirming
Conversion: Can You Prove Christianity
is True?"[26] As we see people overthrow the Christianity
of a lifetime when they embrace Conder's teachings, it's necessary to wonder
whether they ever felt they had a personal relationship with God and Jesus to
begin with. If we are really walking
with God now, even as we have emotional ups and downs while enduring various
trials and tests, we should feel some kind of inward visceral reaction against
abandoning our Savior Jesus who gave up His life for us, thinking He's just
another pagan sun god.
CONDER'S
ARGUMENTS AGAINST MIRACLES ARE LIKE THE PHILOSOPHER DAVID HUME'S
Earlier above, I observed that
Conder's means of argumentation could be wielded about as effectively against
the Old Testament. When considering Conder's
arguments against the virgin birth and resurrection (BGJ, pp. 7, 12-13), he
evidently has what McDowell and Wilson label a strong "Hume
hangover." The skeptical Scottish
philosopher David Hume (1711-76) is one of the most influential men who has ever
lived, at least in the English-speaking world.
He is a major source of the "dogmatic skepticism" that
characterizes irreligious, secular liberals in today's society: Theoretically, these people are certain of
nothing, except of their own uncertainty, but when it comes to religion, they
make completely dogmatic pronouncements about its falsity. Basically, Hume was an epistemological
skeptic, meaning he didn't believe human reason could reliably gain knowledge about
the real, external world outside our own consciousnesses. Maintaining we can observe only
regularities, he attacked the law of cause and effect as having no provable
basis. But, inconsistently, he
dogmatically attacked miracles as being impossible, as violations of the laws
of nature his philosophy elsewhere renders unprovable. Consider some of Hume's own words:
A
miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable
experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the
very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can
possibly be imagined. . . .
But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that
has never been observed, in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every
miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.[27]
Similarly,
but keeping his theoretical basis latent, Conder argues (BGJ, p. 13):
In
the case of John Roberts [an ancestor of Conder's] I really don't doubt that
the stories about his life are basically factual. But what if one of my relatives had declared that John Roberts
rose from the dead after his murder some 250 years ago? What if they claimed he performed
miracles? . . . What if they
told me that he claimed to be a god? In
that case I think you would agree I should reject the stories unless I had some
way to prove them to be true.
Both
authors, Hume and Conder, reason (but the latter only implicitly) that since
miracles are so rare and/or against the laws of nature, we should automatically
reject the testimony of those saying they witnessed them. But now, consider the miracles of the Old
Testament. These include Elijah raising
the widow's son from the dead (I Kings 17:17-24). Why should I believe Elijah did this? Nobody alive today saw it happen. Neither I nor anybody I know has ever seen somebody come back
alive from the dead. Therefore, I have
a "uniform experience" against this "miraculous event" ever
having happened.
SOME
BASIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST HUME'S CRITIQUE AGAINST BELIEF IN MIRACLES
To refute the brand of reasoning
lurking behind Hume's arguments above ultimately would require a book to be
written.[28] But let's make some basic points in reply. First, it's assumed that the Almighty God
can't ever change the regularities of natural processes, that He is a prisoner
of His law‑‑or that He doesn't exist. But if a Creator does exist, it stands to reason He could change
or suspend the very laws He put into force that regulate nature to begin with,
if it would serve some other purpose of His.
So if there's a God, there can be miracles. Second, the allegedly "uniform experience" Hume speaks
of presupposes what it desires to prove.
Skeptically assuming nobody has been raised from the dead by the power
of God a priori, Hume argues a "firm and unalterable
experience" exists against anyone having been resurrected. As C.S. Lewis notes:
Now
of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely "uniform
experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened,
why then they never have. Unfortunately
we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the
reports of them are false. And we can
know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have
never occurred. In fact, we are arguing
in a circle.[29]
Third,
Hume's "uniform experience" assumes something he elsewhere questioned
(certainly implicitly) in his philosophy:
the reliability of the inductive method, which ultimately is the
foundation of all science. Before any
new discovery occurs, somebody could argue, "That can't possibly
happen." (Analyzing what is meant
by "possible" philosophically is a nasty quagmire‑‑to
start exploring this swamp would require explaining the (supposed) distinction
between analytic and synthetic propositions, which can't be sensibly done
here). A philosophical commonplace
concerns white swans. Based upon all
the swans observed in Europe, scientists once concluded, "All swans in
the world are white." Although
their sample was large, it was biased: Black
swans were discovered later on in Australia.
Using a different species of Oceania, McDowell and Wilson take a
slightly different tack:
The
flaw of the "uniform experience" argument is that is does not hold up
under all circumstances. For example,
when explorers returned from Australia with reports of a semi-aquatic,
egg-laying mammal with a broad, flat tail, webbed feet and a snout resembling a
duck's bill, their reports defied all previous uniform experience classified
under the laws of taxonomy. Hume would
have had to say that "uniform experience amounts to a proof
. . . a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against
the existence of any" duck-billed platypus. But his disbelief of such an animal would not preclude its
existence.[30]
Fourth,
Hume sets the bar so high concerning what kinds and numbers of witnesses would
be necessary to prove a miracle occurred that no amount of evidence could
possibly persuade him that one in fact did happen. If we sought a similar "full assurance" for any kind of
knowledge or part of life, we'd have to admit we know almost nothing at all,
excepting (perhaps) certain mathematical (2 + 2 = 4) and purely logical
("A is A") and axiomatic ("I think, therefore I am")
truths. But actually, those committing
themselves to a certain career or mate in life really have less evidence for
their decisions than for belief in the Bible's record of miracles being
justified. Fifth, it's wrong to infer
that because there are many, many false reports of miracles, there NEVER
have been any correct reports. To think
ALL miracle accounts are false because MANY of them are ignores the
difference in the qualities of the reports and the reliability of the witnesses
in question. Doing so is, as McDowell
and Stewart note, "'guilt' by association, or a case of throwing the baby
out with the bath water."[31] This error Conder (BGJ, p. 13) commits by
citing the various relics Roman Catholicism possesses supposedly from various
personalities the NT relates (i.e., "a church that has claimed to have
three or four skulls of Matthew . . ."). Unlike what many skeptics may think, the
philosophical case against believing in miracles is hardly airtight, since it
basically assumes what it wishes to prove:
Since they have no experience of the supernatural, therefore, they
assume, nobody else in history ever has had either. We shouldn't be like the Frenchman Ernest Renan who began his
examination of Jesus' life by prejudicially ruling out in advance a priori
the possibility of the miraculous:
"There is no such thing as a miracle. Therefore the resurrection did not take place."[32] Doesn't Renan sound like Conder?
"They'd have to accept that Jesus did appear alive after his crucifixion
and entombment‑‑something that a true skeptic would never do"
(BGJ, p. 8).
JUST
HOW DO WE "PROVE" A MIRACLE OCCURRED?
Having surveyed some problems with
Humean skepticism about miracle accounts, we should consider what kind of
evidence is necessary to prove to reasoning men and women why they should
believe in this or that report of a miracle.
First, let's assume that we are open-minded about the possibility of God
existing and the supernatural intervening in the natural, material
universe. We haven't ruled out a
priori (before experience) that supernatural entities (God, Satan, angels,
demons, etc.) can intervene in the world.
What kind of eyewitness evidence do we need before accepting any miracle
account? Consider above the example of
Elijah raising the widow's son to life found in I Kings 17. Why would Conder consider this report of a
miracle more reliable than the New Testament's accounts of the resurrection of
Jesus Christ? Why are the Old
Testament's accounts of miracles more reliable than the New Testament's? Fundamentally, the same kinds of arguments
have to be run for both. A major
theoretical point of ICF concerns how IF what in the OT or NT can be
checked is accurate, it is rational to infer that what can't be is
reliable (see ICF, p. 17, 19, 44). Hence, if the book of Exodus correctly describes
Egyptian society and government, then its account of the Red Sea parting
becomes believable. Similarly, if Luke
accurately describes the first-century Roman province of Judea's society and
government, then his account of the specific miracles Jesus performed becomes
trustworthy. Like a scientist believing
his or her lab results are universally true despite being performed only on a
tiny fraction of the universe's matter and energy, this kind of inference (or
extrapolation) is not an act of blind faith. Authors reliable in what can be verified are apt to be reliable
in what can't be. And, as the
archeologist Sir William Ramsay found out to the detriment of his atheism, Luke
is accurate in what can be checked (see ICF, pp. 17-18). Rebutting this kind of argumentation, Conder
claims (BGJ, p. 8): "Well, there
are several ancient religious works that proclaim a man-god as savior. These works make many of the same claims as
Christianity. Further, they are, in the
sense that Josh McDowell is asserting, reliable." These assertions ignore the manifest
difference between the mythological literature set in an indefinite, murky time
and place, and the New Testament, set in first-century B.C. and A.D. Judea. They also take for granted certain
superficial similarities between Christianity's Gospels and the myths of these
savior gods, something which ICF already has called into question (ICF, pp.
47-52). To prove such reasoning is
valid, Conder has to cite various parts of some standard printed edition or
source of these myths about Osiris, Adonis, Mithras, Dionysus, etc. as found in
Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, Plutarch, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, etc. that are, in
fact, historically accurate, that name historical persons and places that can
be verified by archeological or other tangible evidence. The reader shouldn't assume Conder can even
begin to do something similar for some pagan myth as ICF does for the NT (pp.
17-18, 19-21).
EVIDENCE
FROM HOSTILE SOURCES THAT JESUS COULD DO MIRACLES
One standard way to examine the historical
evidence for and against some event being true is to see if hostile witnesses
confirm some fact or event as happening despite the concession isn't in their
own best interests to make. Hence, if
for the Battle of Lexington in 1775 British soldiers alleged the colonists shot
first, and the Minutemen asserted the Redcoats fired initially, the biases of
both sides largely cancel out the value of each other's testimony to proving
their case. But if one Minuteman
admitted, yes, indeed, our side unleashed the shot heard around the world, then
this concession would weigh heavily in favor of the colonists starting the
Revolutionary War's violence. Now, it
happens to be that hostile witnesses outside the New Testament make
statements implying or asserting Jesus of Nazareth did miracles or magical
acts. Although a harsh critic of
Christianity, the second-century pagan philosopher Celsus didn't dispute Jesus'
ability to do miracles, amidst charges he evidently lifted from the Jews. In a work attacked by the Catholic Church
Father Origen, Celsus asserted Jesus after hiring "himself out as a
servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some
miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to
his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these
proclaimed himself a God."[33] Three at least oblique references to Jesus'
ability to do miracles appear in the Babylonian Talmud of the Jews. One striking passage is in Sanhedrin 43a:
It
has been taught: On the eve of Passover
they hanged [compare Luke 23:39; Gal. 3:13] Yeshu. And an announcer went out, in front of him, for forty days
(saying): "He is going to be
stoned, because he practiced sorcery and enticed and led Israel astray."[34]
(Interestingly,
this passage disagrees with Conder's attempts to shift all blame from the
Jewish leadership to the Romans for the crucifixion of Christ in MB, pp.
51-63). Another, more curious passage
(at least to the unversed in Talmudic/Midrashic literature) is a discussion
involving one rabbi who prevented another man from healing another rabbi in the
name of Jesus, dated to about 110 A.D.:
It
happened with R[abbi] Elazar ben Damah, whom a serpent bit, that Jacob, a man
of Kefar Soma, came to heal him in the name of Yeshua ben Pantera; but R[abbi]
Ishmael did not let him. He said,
"You are not permitted, Ben Damah."
He answered, "I will bring you proof that he may heal
me." But he had no opportunity to
bring proof, for he died.[35]
Another
at least indirect reference to Jesus' ability to perform miracles appears in a
statement by Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus made about 95 A.D.[36] Finally, Josephus refers to Jesus' ability
to do miracles in a reliable part of the disputed Testimonium Flavianum
passage: "About this time there
lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats
. . ."[37] The passages found in Celsus, Josephus, and
the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 43a) don't deny Jesus did miracles (or
His existence). Instead, Celsus and the
Talmud imply He did miracles either by fakery or by the power of Satan, similar
to the accusation found in Matthew 9:34:
"But the Pharisees were saying, 'He casts out the demons by the
ruler of demons.'" Similarly, Mark
3:22 reads: "And the scribes who
came down from Jerusalem were saying, 'He is possessed by Beelzebul,' and 'He
casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.'" Given that hostile observers directly or
indirectly state that Jesus did do miracles, there's excellent evidence for
their occurrence. After all, for the
the Exodus, besides the Old Testament, do hostile (Egyptian) observers admit
the Red Sea swallowed up their army? On
this basis of secular historiographical reasoning, better evidence exists for
Jesus' performing signs and wonders than any Old Testament miracle's
occurrence. Now Conder wants to prove
the truth of the NT's "claims" by comparing it with "the Holy
Scriptures of Israel [i.e., the OT]" (BGJ, p. 17). This amounts to a request for running the
internal evidence test between the NT and OT‑‑something which
largely was already done in ICF in the sections dealing with alleged NT
contradictions and the messianic texts.
For example, could the OT be claimed to be self-contradictory due to
portraying the Messiah very differently?
(See ICF, pp. 67-68). Using the
additional light the NT throws on the OT allows this possible claim to be
dismissed. The NT's compatibility with
the OT increases the reasonableness of placing our faith in both parts of
Scripture. But necessarily, the two
other means of testing a historical document's reliability‑‑the
bibliographical and external evidence tests‑‑should also be used
when evaluating the NT's reliability.
TESTING
MIRACLE CLAIMS BY THEIR INTRINSIC PLAUSIBILITY OR ABSURDITY
Another approach to examining the
reliability of accounts of the miraculous in pagan, Jewish, and Christian
documents checks their fitness and intrinsic plausibility while assuming
mankind dwells in an orderly universe.
As I observed in ICF, pp. 44-45, the canonical Gospels simply don't fit
the literary genre of "myth" or "legend." For this reason, it would be absurd to claim
the "historically accurate"
"Book of the Dead" proves Osiris' "resurrection" (BGJ, p.
8). A humanities professor at Wellesley
College, Mary Lefkowitz describes The Book of the Dead thus:
These
funerary texts, which the Egyptians themselves called the Book of Coming
Forth by Day, are designed to protect the soul during its dangerous journey
through Duat, the Egyptian underworld, on its way to life of bliss in the field
of Reeds. . . . Even a
cursory glance at a translation of The Book of the Dead reveals that it
is not a philosophical treatise [like Aristotle's On the Soul] but
rather a series of ritual prescriptions to ensure the soul's passage to the
next world.[38]
Granted
this description's accuracy, the New Testament clearly is in a different
literary category from The Book of the Dead, which is hardly
"history." The Gospels read
much more as straightforward historical descriptions of (mostly) the ministry,
acts, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Described as they happened, the signs and wonders merely come up as part
of the narrative. To fully understand
and to gain a "feel" for why the NT's miracle accounts are
intrinsically more reliable than those in apocryphal Gospels or pagan myths,
the reader may find it necessary to pore over a couple hundred of pages of the
last two. For example, consider this
extract from The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 3.1-4.1, originally written
about 125 A.D. Would the God of love
portrayed in the Gospels perform these acts?
The
son of Annas the scribe was standing there with Joseph. He took a branch of a willow and scattered
the water which Jesus had arranged.
Jesus saw what he did and became angry and said to him, "You
unrighteous, impious ignoramus, what did the pools and the water do to harm
you? Behold, you shall also wither as a
tree, and you shall not bear leaves nor roots nor fruit." And immediately that child was all withered.
. . . Once again he was going through the village, and a child who
was running banged into his shoulder.
Jesus was angered and said to him, "You shall go no further on your
way." And immediately the child
fell down dead.
Consider
how embellished and exaggerated the Roman soldiers' report of the resurrection
feels as found in The Gospel of Peter (39-42) compared to the canonical
Gospels' accounts:
As
they [the soldiers] recounted what they had seen, again they saw three men
coming out of the tomb; two supported one of them and a cross followed
them. The heads of the two reached to
heaven, but the one whom they bore with their hands reached beyond the heavens. And they heard a voice speaking from the
heavens, "Have you preached to those who are sleeping?" And, obediently, (a voice) was heard from
the cross, "Yes."[39]
Doesn't
the intrinsic implausibility of this miracle account make it much easier to
reject than anything in the canonical Gospels' accounts of the
resurrection? Conder claims that the
(Sunday-keeping) church "once backed as authentic" all the
ancient apocryphal gospels (BGJ, p. 9).
This claim is the sheerest nonsense historically‑‑what
canonical list(s), such as those summarized in "All Scripture Is
Inspired of God and Beneficial," contained any or all of these 200
apocryphal Gospels? Although some dispute
surrounded some of these books, as the idea of the NT canon developed only a
relatively few books were actively disputed, as F.F. Bruce's work makes clear.[40] Since many of these "Gospels"
plainly served as vehicles to propagate heretical doctrines, such as the Gnostic
Gospel of Thomas, they can be easily dismissed from serious consideration.
WHY
PAGAN MYTHS ARE INTRINSICALLY UNRELIABLE ACCOUNTS OF MIRACLES
The vast swamp of pagan miracle
accounts, in both myths and purportedly historical writings, now beckons us. Coming from a man who made a life study of
pagan mythology and classical literature, C.S. Lewis' judgment on this subject
shouldn't be lightly dismissed:
"The immoral, and sometimes almost idiotic interferences attributed
to gods in Pagan stories, even if they had a trace of historical evidence,
could be accepted only on the condition of our accepting a wholly meaningless
universe."[41] The stories of Buddha cited in ICF (p. 45)
certainly lack inherent plausibility, such as his having been (in a prior life)
a marvelous elephant with six tusks who gave them all to a needy hunter after
helping saw them off himself. When
considering the principle of "fitness," Conder's citation of the
various relics Catholicism has preserved (BGJ, p. 13) or the story about the
beheaded St. Denys picking up his own head and walking to his grave (BGJ, p. 9)
can easily be ruled out. Even skeptics
believing all miracles are absurd believe some to be more absurd than
others. As Lewis observes:
Whatever
men may say, no one really thinks that the Christian doctrine of the
Resurrection is exactly on the same level with some pious tittle-tattle about
how Mother Egaree Louis miraculously found her second best thimble by the aid
of St. Anthony. . . . More
than half the disbelief in miracles that exists is based on a sense of their unfitness: a conviction (due, as I have argued, to
false philosophy) that they are unsuitable to the dignity of God or Nature or
else to the indignity and insignificance of man.[42]
Since
(presumably) most of those embracing Conder's teachings probably have read
little if any of the pagan myths or apocryphal gospels for themselves, they may
assume their prior experience in reading how the New Testament describes
miracles is easily found in apocryphal literature or pagan myths. Knowing only the NT (and OT), they lack a
standard of comparison for the intrinsic fitness or absurdity of miracle accounts
between the Bible on the one hand, and pagan mythology and apocryphal
literature on the other. Lewis notes
this in connection to how NT scholars could be making similar mistakes since
they had read little or no pagan classical literature due to a high degree of
professional specialization :
First
then, whatever these men may be as biblical critics, I distrust them as
critics. They seem to me to lack
literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they
are reading. It sounds a strange charge
to bring against men who have been steeped in those books [of the NT] all their
lives. But that might be just the
trouble. A man who has spent his youth
and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people's
studies of them, whose literary experiences of those texts lacks any standard
of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience
of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious
things about them. If he tells me that
something in a gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and
romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the
flavour, not how many years he has spent on that gospel.
Referring
specifically to the Gospel of John, Lewis then says:
I
have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my
life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like
this. . . . These men ask me to believe they can read between
the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in
any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards
away in broad daylight.[43]
Before
accepting Conder's critique of the New Testament's miracles, those so tempted
should read enough pagan mythological and apocryphal literature to know why the
Bible's miracle accounts stand out as exceptional. Conder says (BGJ, p. 7):
"All I can add is that biased Christian tradition might be 'proof'
enough for Josh McDowell, who, throughout his books seems to have an aversion
to fact, but it's not enough for me."
In light of this assertion, Conder himself should name his standards of
judgment for why he accepts the OT's miracle accounts as more reliable than the
NT's, instead of relying on (it appears) Humean skepticism to attack the latter
but (inconsistently) not the former.
What specifically constitutes "proof" to him? How does more "proof" exist for
Elisha causing an iron ax head to float (II Kings 6:5-7) than for the
resurrection of Jesus Christ?
WHY
SHOULD THIS EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE BE BELIEVED?
The principle that if a document is
reliable in what can be checked, it should be trusted in what can't be was
mentioned above. For example, the
evidence for the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ comes ultimately from
just the NT and the early traditions of the (Sunday-keeping) church (see BGJ,
pp. 7, 8). But even by purely secular
criteria, good reasons exist for believing New Testament authors were reliable. A document is more apt to be reliable when
it is a personal letter, was intended for a small audience, was written in a
rough, unpolished literary style, and contains rather irrelevant information
such as lists of details like the names of individuals. Although a document can lack these
characteristics and still be perfectly sound historically, they still remain prima
facie powerful points in favor of a document being accurate when its origin
is unclear. Something written for
propagandistic efforts among a vast audience is more likely to shade the truth
or omit inconvenient, embarrassing facts.
Now much of the New Testament is made up of letters intended for small
churches or individuals, especially Paul's, which sometimes reflect rather
hurried writing. (Consider I
Corinthians and Galatians, both of which are pervaded by a crisis
atmosphere). Mostly written in the
rough koine Greek of average people, the NT contains inconsequential
details even in the Gospels which were intended for a broad audience (see John
21:2, 11; Mark 14:51-52). Paul's
greetings and instructions to various individuals largely take up the sixteenth
chapter of the Letter (Epistle) to the Romans.
Furthermore, eyewitnesses who have much to lose and little to gain from
telling what they saw are reliable. The
Jewish Christians of the first century, persecuted by their kinsmen and/or
Rome, often paid for their beliefs with their lives. Eleven of the twelve apostles died martyrs' deaths, according to
(at least) reasonably reliable tradition:
How did they benefit materially from proclaiming Jesus as the Jewish
Messiah? Paul mentioned the many trials
he endured for proclaiming the gospel (II Cor. 11:23-28). If the goal was to make lots of converts to
makes lots of money, the apostles could have found easier and safer messages to
preach by changing their beliefs. This
Paul refused to do: "But I,
brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has
been abolished" (Gal. 5:11). Being
Jews, if they proclaimed falsehoods about God, they had every reason to fear
their God's wrath in the hereafter, so they had strong motives for telling the
truth about the God they worshiped.
Christianity emerged from Judaism's capital, Jerusalem and its vicinity: If the Gospels' portrait of Jesus was seriously
wrong, then-living hostile witnesses (which were hardly few in number) could
have easily shot it down. Peter and
company didn't pack up and go to (say) Athens and start proclaiming the Gospel
far away from where anybody could easily check up on their assertions, but
started in Jerusalem on Pentecost within weeks of Jesus' death. All in all, these eyewitnesses proclaimed
the truth as they knew it, having strong reasons for doing so: Who dies for a lie, knowing that it is a
lie?[44] For these reasons, trusting the NT's miracle
accounts of the virgin birth and resurrection is perfectly rational, since the
NT's passes other historical tests, unlike (say) Homer's Iliad or Ovid's
Metamorphoses.
FURTHER
INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR BELIEVING IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
According to the New Testament itself,
Jesus' life and ideas also had aspects that were problematic, even embarrassing,
to many judging by worldly pagan or Jewish standards. First, there's the deep shame of being executed by
crucifixion. (Roman citizens had the
right of being beheaded instead!)
Facing opposition from within His own family, Jesus was a mere carpenter,
not someone materially rich or powerful.
Jesus had views about legalism, divorce, fasting, women, and sinners
that certainly presented stumbling blocks to mainstream Jews. Similar to the Old Testament's portrayal of
Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David, and Elijah, the New Testament repeatedly
and plainly describes the sins and personal flaws of the disciples, such as
Peter denying Christ three times and their arguments over who was to be the
greatest in the kingdom of God. Surely,
if the church concocted the New Testament to spread its message about Jesus,
editing out embarrassing facts about its founders should have been a top
priority! If you invented a
historical document to promote your beliefs, you could whip up something more
favorable to your cause's leaders than this!
The unfavorable facts about Christianity found in the New Testament show
its early leaders didn't feel free to rewrite history or ignore historical
facts.[45]
WHY
THE EBIONITES' DENIAL OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH PROVES NOTHING
Conder claims that "ancient
Christian tradition" once denied the virgin birth, later citing the
Ebionites' beliefs against it to buttress his case (BGJ, p. 7). By denying the plain meaning of the Gospels
(which came first), whatever contrary "ancient Christian tradition"
that developed on this point was plainly heretical. Note Matthew 1:18, 25:
Now
the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows.
When His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came
together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. . . .
[And Joseph] kept her a virgin [lit. margin, "was not knowing her"]
until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.
Similarly,
Luke 1:26-27, 34-35 reads:
Now
in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city in Galilee,
called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the
descendants of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. . . . And Mary said to the angel, "How can this
[prophecy about giving birth] be, since I am a virgin [lit. margin, 'know no
man']?" And the angel answered and
said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the
Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy offspring shall be
called the Son of God."
Now
let's examine the Ebionites' other doctrines some. Although upholding the OT law and the Sabbath, the Ebionites
can't be considered fully Christian in their theology due to degrading Jesus'
role as Savior and Paul's role as an apostle.
According to Gonzalez's summary, they did not conceive of Jesus' mission
as one of saving humanity, but as one of a line of prophets calling forth
people to obey God's law. He wasn't
considered the Son of God from the beginning, but was adopted due to His
superior performance in obeying the law.
Considering Paul an apostate from the true faith, they also still
practiced circumcision.[46] Citing Ebionite theology on the virgin birth
proves nothing, since it so plainly contradicts the text of the NT. Since the NT (or the earlier oral testimony
it was based upon) preceded the existence of the Ebionites, their theology denying
the virgin birth can't be considered the original version.
MANY
HIGHER CRITICS "EDIT" THE NT INSTEAD OF THROWING IT OUT
ENTIRELY: WHY REFUTING NATURALISTIC
EXPLANATIONS OF THE RESURRECTION ISN'T TRULY CIRCULAR
Conder's critique of the kinds of
arguments McDowell and I make for the resurrection is mistaken in several
points. First, when arguing for the
resurrection based on the NT, the implicit assumption is that a skeptic largely
accepts the non-miraculous aspects of the Gospels as historically accurate. A common exercise of many higher critics has
been to explain naturalistically or deny the stories of Jesus healing others,
casting out demons, raising people from the dead, etc., while accepting as true
at least some of the rest of the Synoptic Gospels as they report Jesus'
teachings and non-miraculous acts. Even
Conder does this some, as this statement shows (BGJ, p. 34): "If you had taken your nose out of Josh
McDowell's books long enough for a serious study of what I'd written, you know
that I quoted extensively from the New Testament to back my beliefs." The point of going over alternative
explanations for the resurrection is to see if any purely naturalistic
explanations can plausibly hold water while having at least some minimal fidelity
to its text. Conder, of course, asserts
the right to reject automatically any and all of the NT as historically
inaccurate (see BGJ, p. 8 and fn. 22).
But given the evidence for the reliability of the NT in what can
be checked, why can somebody be so free to reject any and all of it in what
can't be checked? If this procedure was
done with any other ancient piece of literature, including the OT, it would be
left in tatters as well. Operating like
Immanuel Velikovsky and others, we could then try to devise alternative
explanations for various miracles in the Old Testament.[47]
THE
HIGHER CRITICS DID DEVISE NATURALISTIC EXPLANATIONS FOR THE RESURRECTION
Conder
also asserts that no higher critics ever devised the alternative non-miraculous
explanations McDowell (and I) refuted:
"Hence when he answers these juvenile questions Josh is made to
look like the sensible one while the scholarly critics are made to look like a
bunch of fools‑‑even though they've never asked the questions that
McDowell throws out" (BGJ, p. 8; cf. p. 11). Why Conder didn't encounter scholars dealing with these questions
about the resurrection in his research about the NT? Note Gary Habermas' survey of scholars on this subject:
One
interesting illustration of this failure of the naturalistic theories [that
explained the resurrection] is that they were disproven by the
nineteenth-century older liberals themselves, by whom these were
popularized. These scholars refuted
each other's theories, leaving no viable naturalistic hypotheses. For instance, Albert Schweitzer dismissed
Reimarus's fraud theory and listed no proponents of this view since 1768. David Strauss delivered the historical death
blow to the swoon theory held by Karl Venturini, Heinrich Paulus, and
others. On the other hand, Friedrich
Schleiermacher and Paulus pointed out errors in Strauss's hallucination theory. The major decimation of the hallucination
theory, however, came at the hands of Theodor Keim. Otto Pfleiderer was critical of the legendary or mythological
theory, even admitting that it did not explain Jesus' Resurrection. By these critiques such scholars pointed out
that each of these theories was disproven by the historical facts. Although nineteenth-century liberals
decimated each other's views individually, twentieth-century critical scholars
have generally rejected naturalistic theories as a whole, judging that they are
incapable of explaining the known data.
This approach is a usual characteristic of recent schools of thought.
Habermas
then goes on to list various specific twentieth-century higher critic scholars
who, nevertheless, rejected these alternative explanations for the
resurrection, including Karl Barth, Raymond Brown, Paul Tillich, Wolfhart
Pannenberg, Gunther Bornkamm, Ulrich Wilckens, John A.T. Robinson, and A.M.
Hunter.[48] In The Resurrection Factor, McDowell
cites defenders of various alternative explanations of the resurrection: Charles Alford Guinebert denies anybody knew
where the body ended up after being removed from the cross (the unknown tomb
theory), Kirsopp Lake asserts the disciples went to the wrong tomb, Justin
Martyr records the "stolen body" theory as circulating among the Jews
anciently, and Hugh Schoenfield's The Passover Plot holds to a version
of the swoon theory.[49] Elsewhere McDowell lists Venturini as
championing the swoon theory, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, John
Chyrsostom as mentioning and medieval Jewish literature (Reimarus) as
advocating the stolen body theory, and Lake as upholding the wrong tomb theory.[50] Assuming extensive research was done, the
evident reason why Conder encountered none of the naturalistic explanations for
the resurrection that McDowell rebuts was because liberal scholars have given
up trying to devise or defend them. But
merely because this "puzzle" may now be dead among the higher critics
doesn't mean they solved it. Indeed, in
the light of Habermas' survey, it's because they couldn't unravel the
resurrection by using the old critical method of assuming the truth of at least
some of the Gospels' historical information, while trying to explain away the
miraculous parts naturalistically.
Conder solves this problem by totally liberating himself from having to
believe in anything in the NT, but this fails to reckon with the
information available favoring the verifiable parts of the NT. Throwing out any and all parts that are
found (suddenly) inconvenient, this approach would never be employed on any
other (non-religious/non-miraculous) historical document. The evidence for the NT based on the three
tests‑‑bibliographical, external evidence, and internal evidence‑‑indicate
so much confirmation exists for its reliability that any other significant
ancient historical document (besides the OT) could be more easily dismissed
using the same criteria (See ICF, pp. 6-32).
So why dismiss the New Testament so lightly, except out of an a
priori, skeptical prejudice against its accounts of miracles?
WHY
CLAIMING THE GOSPELS ARE LEGENDS DOESN'T DISPOSE OF THE RESURRECTION
Conder complains about ICF's survey of
the proposed naturalistic theories for the resurrection: "The problem here is that Eric includes
these idiocies in a paper attacking my book, which probably gives the reader
the impression that I've raised such questions. Even though I never once considered these points when researching
and writing my book . . ." (BGJ, p. 9). Instead of being a "deception"
(BGJ, p. 10), the principal point of raising this issue as well as the
"Great Trilemma" was to be on the offensive for once, instead of just
reacting defensively against Conder's attacks on the NT. Conder's casual dismissal of the alternative
theories shows he has no explanation, besides attempting to turn the canonical
Gospels into historically unreliable legends or myths, an approach that can't
succeed with the informed, unbiased mind.
Based on internal evidence alone, they simply don't fit this literary
genre. If the resurrection accounts
were so ill-written, contradictory and legendary, a naturalistic explanation
presumably would be easy to devise, since incongruities or gaps in reasoning
should appear in the text. Furthermore,
eliminating the possibility that resurrection accounts are legends, the time
gap between the time of Jesus' ministry and the writing of the Gospels is too
small: They can't be called
second-century A.D. documents. Sir
William Ramsay, when a committed atheist, believed Acts was a second-century
document. But during his archeological
and topographical work in Asia Minor (Turkey), he found it was composed earlier
since it reflected conditions typical of the last half of the first
century. (See ICF, p. 17-18). An ancient history professor at Western
Michigan University, Paul L. Maier states:
"Arguments that Christianity hatched its Easter [Passover] myth
over a lengthy period of time or that the sources were written many years after
the event are simply not factual."
Critiquing much of NT criticism, archeologist William F. Albright
said: "Only modern scholars who
lack both historical method and perspective can spin such a web of speculation
as that with which some critics have surrounded the Gospel
tradition." He believes that
"a period of 20 to 50 years is too slight to permit any appreciable
corruption of the essential content and even of the specific wording of the
sayings of Jesus."[51] But, of course, Conder would reply biased
Christian scholars made these statements (re:
BGJ, p. 11). Ignoring whatever
manuscript fragments some might have found, is there any internal evidence
for the New Testament being written in the first century?
HOW
THE BOOK OF ACTS IMPLIES THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS WRITTEN BEFORE C. 63 A.D.
A very straightforward argument for
the date of (most of) the New Testament can be derived from the contents of
Acts. Judging from the Gospel of Luke's
conclusion and Act's introduction, they were originally one book, later divided
into two, or else logically written in chronological order, starting with
Jesus' ministry then covering the church's early years. As a result, Luke was necessarily written a
bit earlier than Acts. In turn, Luke
has long been seen as depending upon Mark over and above his own sources, so
Mark was necessarily written still earlier.
Furthermore, Matthew is normally seen as having been written after Mark
but before Luke. Hence, if a firm date
can be given to Acts, all of the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Luke, and Matthew) had
to have been composed still earlier.
Six good reasons exist for dating Acts as being written by c. 63
A.D. First, Acts doesn't mention the
fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., despite much of its action focuses in and around
that city. Only if it was written
earlier does the omission of this incredibly disruptive event in the Holy Land
make sense. Since in his Gospel Luke
himself relates Jesus' predictions of Jerusalem's destruction in the Mount
Olivet Prophecy (chapter 21), it's hard to believe he would overlook their
fulfillment if he had written Acts after 70 A.D. Second, Nero's persecutions of the mid-60's aren't covered. Luke's general tone towards the Roman
government was peaceful and calm, which wouldn't fit if Rome had just launched
a major persecution campaign against the church. (The later book of Revelation has a very different spirit on this
score, even if it is in symbolic prophetic code, since the Beast was
Rome). Third, the martyrdoms of James
(61 A.D.) as well as Paul and Peter (mid-60s A.D.) aren't mentioned in
Acts. The ancient Jewish historian
Josephus (c. 37-100 A.D.) does record the death of James, so this event can be
easily dated. Since these three men are
leading figures in the Book of Acts, it would be curious to omit how they died,
yet include the martyrdoms of other Christians like Stephen and James the
brother of John. Fourth, the key conflicts
and issues raised in the church that Acts records make sense in the context of
a mainly Jewish Messianic Church centered on Jerusalem before 70 A.D. It describes disputes over circumcision and
admitting the gentiles into the church as having God's favor, the division
between Palestinian and Hellenistic Jews (Acts 6:1), and the Holy Spirit
falling on different ethnic groups (Jews followed by gentiles). These issues were much more important before
70 A.D. than afterwards. The
destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. basically wiped out Jewish Christianity as
a strong organized movement. Fifth,
some of the phrases used in Acts are primitive and very early, such as
"the Son of man," "the Servant of God" (to refer to Jesus),
"the first day of the week," and "the people" (to refer to
Jews). After 70 A.D., these expressions
would need explanation, but earlier they didn't in the Messianic Jewish
Christian community. Finally, of
course, the Jewish revolt against Rome starting in 66 A.D. that led to
destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. isn't referred to in Acts despite its
ultimately apocalyptic effects on the Jewish Christian community. Hence, judging from what the author included
as important historically, if Acts was written about c. 63 A.D., the Gospel of
Luke would be slightly earlier, and correspondingly Matthew and Mark probably
should be dated to the mid-40s to mid-50s A.D.[52] Paul's letters have to be older than Acts as
well. This internal evidence
points to a first-century date of composition for the New Testament; there's no
need to find first-century manuscripts of the New Testament to know it was
composed then.
THE
NEW TESTAMENT WASN'T SUBJECT TO A LONG PERIOD OF ORAL TRADITION
Several reasons indicate that the New
Testament wasn't subject to a long period of oral tradition, of people
retelling each other stories over the generations, which would place its
initial composition past c. 100 A.D.
Let's assume the document scholars call "Q" did exist, which
they say Matthew and Luke relied upon to write their Gospels. If "Q" can be dated to around 50
A.D. after Jesus's death in 31 A.D., little time remains in between for
distortions to creep in due to failed memory.
Furthermore, the sayings of Jesus found in the Gospels were in an easily
memorized, often poetic form in the original Aramaic. Then, since Paul was taken captive about 58 A.D., how he wrote to
the Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, and Galatians indicates that he assumed
they already had a detailed knowledge of Jesus. He almost never quotes Jesus' words his letters (besides in I
Cor. 11:24-25). Hence, as James Martin
comments:
As
a matter of fact, there was no time for the Gospel story of Jesus to have been
produced by legendary accretion. The
growth of legend is always a slow and gradual thing. But in this instance the story of Jesus was being proclaimed,
substantially as the Gospels now record it, simultaneously with the beginning
of the Church.
Using
the writing of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-430 to 420 b.c.)
as a test case, A.N. Sherwin-White, a University of Oxford scholar in ancient
Roman and Greek history, studied the rate at which legend developed in the
ancient world. Even two generations (c.
60+ years) is not enough to wipe out a solid foundation of historical facts, he
argues.[53]
WHY
ORAL TRANSMISSION WAS MORE RELIABLE IN THE PAST THAN IT IS TODAY
Conder's example about stories told
over the generations about his ancestor John Roberts is seriously misleading
(BGJ, pp. 12-13). It implicitly assumes
modern people, who can be mentally lazy due to being literate and their
resultant ability to write things down, have memories as well developed as the
educated people of largely illiterate cultures where books and even writing
materials are rare and expensive commodities (see ICF, p. 8). Conder later asserts (BGJ, p. 19, fn.
54): "The fact is that I've never
denied the reliability of oral tradition when it was entrust to specially
trained men (called bards in English) for preservation. However, when tradition is passed around
from one generation of born-again ignorant peasants to another, who could
possibly deny the probability for corruption?" This statement totally misrepresents the reality that even the liberal
scholar Kummel's dates place most of the NT's writing in the second half
of the first century A.D.[54] Early on, written transmission began
by necessarily literate people, not "born-again ignorant
peasants" passing along stories orally.
As for the NT's composition, to the extent that oral transmission
occurred in the first decades following the crucifixion, the traditional
rabbinical practices of Judaism ensured Jesus' words would be well preserved,
much like Conder (perhaps dubiously) asserts for British bards.[55] Conder may be implicitly building upon
Rudolf Bultmann's view of oral transmission, which really assumes a gentile
cultural environment, not a Jewish one.
Even the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes writes against the form critics'
assumptions of a gentile culture surrounding Jesus and the apostles:
The
system's chief weakness lies, I think, in the absence among its developers and
practitioners of any real familiarity with the literature, culture, religion,
and above all spirit, of the post-biblical Judaism from which Jesus and his
first disciples sprang. Instead, it is
in the Hellenistic world of early Christianity that Bultmann and his pupils are
at home.[56]
Using
insights like Vermes', the present-day Uppsala school of Harald Riesenfeld and
Birger Gerhardsson analyzes Jesus' relationship with His disciples in the
context of Jewish rabbinical practices of c. 200 A.D. In the role of the authoritative teacher or rabbi, Jesus trained
his disciples to believe in and remember His teachings. Because their culture was so strongly
oriented towards oral transmission of knowledge, they could memorize amazing
amounts of material by today's standards.
The Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 22a, shows that the Jews even were
told to memorize information they didn't understand: "The magician mumbles and does not understand what he is
saying. In the same way the tanna
recites and does not understand what he saying." Similarly, Abodah Zarah 19a reads: "One should always recite, (although
one forgets and) although one does not understand what one is
saying." The rabbis also aided
their students by teaching them mnemonic devices to help them remember certain
passages. Illustrating the premium on
remembering things accurately, Rabbi Meir warned: "Every man who forgets a single word of his Mishnah
(i.e., what he has learned), Scripture accounts it unto him as if he had
forfeited his soul" (Mishnah, Aboth 3. 9.). If a teacher ever forgot what they knew,
because of (say) sickness, he had to go to his own students to learn again what
he no longer remembered. This culture's
values emphasized the need of disciples to remember their teacher's teachings
and deeds accurately, then to pass on this (now) tradition faithfully and as
unaltered as possible to new disciples they made in the future. Paul's language in I Cor. 15:3-8 reflects
this ethos, especially in verse 3:
"For I delivered to you as of first importance what I
also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures
. . ." Remember, Paul
sat at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3).
Being steeped in the practices of rabbinical Judaism, he himself would
have operated in this manner, and passed down accurately what he had been told
to others, although he wasn't an eyewitness of the original event. Paul's language in I Cor. 14:23 reflects
this: "For I received from
the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed
. . ." Correspondingly,
the apostles were seen as having authority due to being eyewitness guardians of
the tradition since they knew their Teacher well (cf. the criterion for
choosing an apostle listed in Acts 1:21-22; cf. I Cor. 9:1).[57] Analyzing the early church's Jewish culture
and how it would orally transmit information about Jesus' life and teachings in
the light of nearly contemporary rabbinical practices has much more historical
foundation than Bultmann's "creative community" idea.
INTERNAL
EVIDENCE THAT ORAL/WRITTEN TRANSMISSION ACCURATELY PRESERVED JESUS' WORDS
Conder denies that the Gospel accounts
are eyewitness evidence (BGJ, p. 11).
Can internal evidence show that later (gentile) writers didn't insert
words into the mouth of "Jesus"?
One common objection to the NT's historical reliability relies on a
standard higher critic view of how oral transmission/tradition about Jesus
developed. Form criticism claims the
church made up stories about Jesus' life and teachings over the decades after
His death because of later controversies it suffered. In fact, much indicates Jesus expressed Himself differently from
how His disciples did. Jesus used
questions and the Aramaic words "amen" and "abba" in unique
ways. Sixty-four times Jesus used
threefold expressions (such as ask, seek, knock). He employed passive verbs when referring to God, such as in this
case: "All things have been
delivered to me by my Father" (Matt. 11:27). Paul, Peter, etc. did not copy His use of "how much
more," "which of you," and "disciple." Often when Jesus' words, as written in
Greek, are translated back into Aramaic, literary qualities such as
parallelism, alliteration, and assonance appear. This feature aids in memorizing them. Monolingual Greek-speaking gentile disciples could not have
fabricated His speeches whole cloth since their poetic quality in Aramaic can't
be accidental. Also, if the church had
created Jesus' ideas decades later, why is it that "Jesus" never was
made to comment on major controversies that divided the church? The Jesus of the Gospels says little or
nothing about circumcision, specific gifts of the Holy Spirit, food laws,
baptism, evangelizing the gentiles, rules controlling church meetings, and
relations between the church and state.
Paul almost never quotes Jesus directly: If he felt free to make up stories about Jesus, he could have
easily and directly justified what he did by manufacturing sayings supposedly
from Jesus. (Some Muslims through the
centuries evidently didn't hesitate to do this for the hadiths (traditional
sayings) of Muhammad, "discovering" quotes convenient for the
doctrinal or political controversies of the moment!)[58]
MISCELLANEOUS
ATTACKS ON THE RESURRECTION ACCOUNTS REBUTTED
Conder also makes assorted other
charges about errors or contradictions in the NT. For some reason, John Wenham regards as a major improbability
that the Jewish leadership paid bribes to the tomb's guards to tell their
officers that Jesus' body had been stolen out of the tomb. Farrell Till's comment in Skeptic Review
that Conder cites (BGJ, p. 10) merely builds upon this concession. I reject Wenham's concession
categorically: Why is it intrinsically
implausible that the Jewish leadership would bribe these witnesses to the
resurrection to lie? Having railroaded
Jesus to death and finding events afterwards not quite going to plan, this
stopgap measure to help squelch the truth about the resurrection spreading
certainly doesn't seem to be an unlikely response. Till and Conder criticize Gleason Archer, the author of Encyclopedia
of Bible Difficulties, for refusing to debate publicly the subject of
contradictions in the Bible. Although I
don't know Dr. Archer at all personally, a possible good personal reason for
refusing this debate exists. It could
be, much like Thomas Jefferson (in the past) or the conservative
economist/sociologist George Gilder (at present), Archer is a significantly better
writer than speaker. Had (say) Lord
North or George III challenged Jefferson to a public debate on the justice of
the American Revolutionary cause (something intrinsically unlikely for all
sorts of reasons, but this is a hypothetical situation), a reasonable chance
exists he would have turned them down.
At one of his inaugural addresses as President, he spoke so quietly
almost nobody heard him. Although
Conder says Farrell in such a debate would "point out the illogic in the
supposed answers that Archer does present," Conder himself never engages
in any such spade work of critiquing specifically and systematically my
proposed answers for various alleged contradictions (BGJ, p. 10; ICF, pp.
24-32), excepting Christ's genealogies.
Conder attempts to rebut McDowell's statement that the emptiness of
Jesus' tomb is evidence for Jesus' resurrection by retorting: "What pure lard! If an empty tomb is a proof of Jesus' resurrection,
then so are the empty tombs that litter half the landscape of the Middle East
. . ." (BGJ, pp. 10-11).
Of course, what matters was this empty tomb, not some other
one. It's necessary to explain how this
one became empty. Rejecting the
Gospels' testimony completely, as Conder does, ignores how so often they were
right in the historical details that can be checked. It's the worst prejudice to reject anything in them that can't be
confirmed by some other source. Conder
believes he has greater freedom than those higher critics who largely or
partially accepted the non-miraculous in the Gospels, but then tried to explain
away the miracles naturalistically.
Instead, there's a knee-jerk rejection of anything and all things in the
Gospels that may be the least inconvenient for Conder's thesis‑‑a
procedure known to be unjustified, once the three standard tests are applied to
its reliability. Using a similar,
arbitrary procedure on any other historical document possessing even part of
evidence for its reliability that the NT has would make history writing easy
for Marxists, Afrocentrists, and anybody else trying to make the past fit some
preconceived ideology: "For any
document I don't like (that contains evidence contradicting my viewpoint) I
will automatically reject anything it says." This procedure hardly constitutes the methodology of an objective
historian, but that of a biased polemicist.
WHY
PUBLIC DEBATES WITH HERETICS BEFORE A LOCAL CHURCH IS A BAD IDEA
Conder complains that Ken Miller, the
web page master for the UCG‑‑Ann Arbor, MI church, said that it
would be "inappropriate" for him and me to debate his book in front
of my local congregation. Conder says
he "responded by asking him why it was, in his opinion, quite acceptable
to publicly misrepresent my book and attack me on United's worldwide web site,
but 'inappropriate' for me to publicly defend myself and my book?" (BGJ,
p. 10). Actually, Conder has an easily
equivalent way to defend his book, which he presumably has already done: Write a critique of the rebuttal (i.e.,
BGJ), and post it on his group's website.
One website is no more "public" than the other, assuming a
reasonably equal number of "hits" on both. I will gladly withdraw any "misrepresentations" of MB,
should they be pointed out. (Be
specific! Quote from them! Number them one by one, citing page numbers
in the process for both ICF and MB).
But as observed above, the real "misrepresentations" of Mystery
Babylon have been those made to sell the book by a misleading book
description to unwary Christians in Commonwealth Publishing's catalog. Not lacking the necessary courage, I still
would never debate Conder publicly before brethren in my congregation (Lansing,
MI, not Ann Arbor). I refuse to
invite a dangerous heretic into the womb of the church that might plant
unnecessary doubts in their minds. Stating
a principle applicable generally, but specifically about those denying Jesus
came in the flesh, II John 10-11 states:
"If anyone comes to you [as a group] and does not bring this
teaching, do not receive him into your house, and do not give him a greeting;
for the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds."
WAS
EUSEBIUS A RELIABLE HISTORIAN?
In order to attack the idea that the
apostles wouldn't have died for a lie as a proof of the resurrection, Conder
argues that only through the unreliable writings and traditions of the
(Sunday-keeping) church can anybody know what happened to them. Focusing his fire on Eusebius (c. 260-c. 339
A.D.), Conder deems this church historian as unreliable (see BGJ, pp. 12-13;
see also p. 17). Edward Gibbons, the
author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is marshalled
against Eusebius. Of course, as the
informed know, Gibbon's anti-Christian biases distorted his work. As Harvard University professor Christopher
Dawson observes:
And
since Christianity has no place in his philosophy, he is compelled to reduce
its place in history by treating it with irony and seeking to discredit it with
sneers and innuendoes. The most
notorious example of this method is to be seen in his treatment of the martyrs
and the great persecutions . . .
This complete lack of sympathy and understanding for the religious
forces which have exerted such an immense influence on Western culture is
Gibbon's great defect as an historian:
and it is a very serious one, since it invalidates his judgment on the
very issues which are most vital to his subject.[59]
Mistakenly,
Conder implies Eusebius wasn't using written primary sources, but oral
testimony three hundred years old:
"He simply wrote down 300 year-old legends offered from people who
had no first hand knowledge of what they were telling." Although Eusebius did use some oral sources,
Robert M. Grant writes: "For the Church
History as a whole, written materials were far more important than oral
traditions. As one can see from
Eusebius' other writings as well, he was a man of books and
libraries." As F.F. Bruce adds,
Eusebius labored in the great church library at Caesarea, which gave him the
material necessary for his work. This
gave him the primary written sources for writing a church history.
Eusebius
was deficient in some of the critical qualities requisite in a first-class
historian, but he knew the importance of consulting primary sources, and indeed
he introduces frequent quotations from them.
We have to thank him for preserving portions of ancient writings (such
as Papias's) which would otherwise be quite lost to us. But where his sources have survived
independently, a comparison of their wording with his quotations confirms the
accuracy with which he quoted them, and this gives us confidence in the
trustworthiness of his quotations from sources which can no longer be
consulted.[60]
Historian
Robin Lane Fox, no fan of Christianity, believes Eusebius' history was rather
hurriedly written (perhaps six months or less) and it made several
"slips" in its fourth book, such as misdating Pionius'
martyrdom. Nevertheless, he states: "Large and justified claims have been
made for the result, its careful citation of documents, its realization that
"ecclesiastical history" was a separate branch of history."[61] Unlike what Conder claims, Eusebius plainly
should be regarded as basically reliable.
THE
FUNDAMENTAL DISCONTINUITY IN SUNDAY-KEEPING CHRISTIANITY STARTED 313 A.D.
To bolster his attack on the
reliability of the historical accounts Catholicism wrote, Conder notes the many
ridiculous and absurd relics it preserved, such as "the wing of the
archangel Gabriel" (BGJ, p. 13).
Similarly, he wouldn't want me to produce as evidence for Jesus'
resurrection "a fourth century manuscript that was in the possession of
the notoriously corrupt Roman Catholic Church" (BGJ, p. 27). These criticisms confound the post-313 A.D.
church, into which worldly, political, and (yes, indeed) pagan influences
inflowed, with the earlier, frequently persecuted pre-Constantine,
Sunday-keeping church. This is the
implicit mistake behind reading (say) the corruption of the forgers of
"The Donation of Constantine" backwards to the pre-313 A.D. church
(cf. BGJ, p. 38, "notorious reputation"). Conder's criticism of Catholicism routinely
imputes the practices and corruption of the medieval church back to the era before
the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which granted Christianity
legal toleration. As was noted in ICF
(p. 16-17), this constitutes one of Conder's foundational fallacies in MB,
routinely repeated or assumed in one form or another. Conspicuously, he never critiques my case in ICF for seeing some
fundamental discontinuity in the character and nature of the Roman Catholicism
of the Middle Ages and the pre-313 A.D. Sunday-keeping church. The Sunday-observers of (say) 310 A.D. who
died in Diocletian's persecution may have been doctrinally "apostate"
by contemporary COG standards. But
apostasy should be conceived as a ladder with higher and lower rungs, not just
a single uniform condition. Clearly,
due to its greater doctrinal and clerical corruption, the Catholicism of (say)
1450 A.D. occupied a much lower rung than the Sunday-keeping church of (say)
250 A.D. In the pre-Edict of Milan
world, a Christian (of whatever stripe) gained far fewer material and political
benefits from his status, for a good reason:
The Roman government periodically sought his life and/or that of fellow
believers. These bouts of persecution
ensured the pre-313 A.D. Sunday-keeping church was far less corrupt and
dishonest than its medieval successor.
As a result, traditions and documents datable to before the early fourth
century are far more reliable than those originating much later when they
describe the origins of Christianity.
Indeed, to call the Sunday-keeping church of (say) 200 A.D. "Roman
Catholic" is rather problematic, yet Conder routinely infers the sins and
dishonesty of medieval Catholicism back to the earlier Sunday-keeping
church. He fails to recognize the
fundamental discontinuity of the two:
The Woman only really mounted the Beast (i.e., got involved in politics)
and became a harlot committing fornication with the kings of the earth after
313 A.D., not before.
GOOD
EVIDENCE FOR THE APOSTLES BEING GIVEN THE OPTION TO AVOID DYING FOR A LIE
Believing that the apostles could have
been dishonest in proclaiming Jesus' resurrection, Conder asserts that they had
no choice but to die for a lie if they were caught: "So, if there were original apostles who died for the
Christian religion they were preaching, what does that prove other than the
fact that they were seized by the authorities and put to death. Once they were arrested, it was too
late!" (BGJ, p. 13). But
historical evidence points to the falsehood of this assertion. Frequently the Roman government could be
made perfectly happy if the arrested Christian repented of his disloyalty to
Caesar by offering a pinch of incense to the emperor or by cursing Christ. If the Christian turned apostate, he or she
then would be released. For example,
after Pliny the Younger asked Emperor Trajan for guidance in how to deal with
the Christians, he replied (c. 112 A.D.):
They
[the Christians] must not be ferreted out; if they are charged and convicted,
they must be punished, provided that anyone who denies that he is a Christian
and gives practical proof of that by invoking our gods is to be pardoned on the
strength of this repudiation, no matter what grounds for suspicion may have
existed against him in the past.[62]
During
a persecution campaign unleashed during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the
Romans arrested Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna (161 A.D.) Before the court and an assembled crowd the proconsul offered: "Consider yourself and have pity on
your great age. Reproach Christ and I
will release you." But Polycarp
refused, answering: "Eighty-six
years I have served Him, and He never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved
me?" In 200 A.D., under Severus, a
Christian named Perpetua was imprisoned for her faith. Apparently moved by her plight, the judge
offered her freedom and life:
"Spare the gray hairs of your father. Spare your child. Offer
sacrifice for the welfare of the emperor." She refused: "I will
not sacrifice." After affirming
she was a Christian, she was fed to the wild animals along with other
believers.[63] Fox summarizes what the pagans demanded of
the Christians hauled into court thus:
Nobody
minded too much what Christians did or did not believe. A gesture of honour to the gods and
conformity to tradition was all that was required of them. As a governor told Bishop Dionysius, there would
be no objection if the bishop would only worship the pagan gods as well as his
own. In Africa, Tertullian knew of a
governor who had tried to help Christians acquit themselves. Some allowed them to offer a pinch of
incense instead of meat and strove to find a "convenient" form of
words. They wanted worshippers of their
own gods, not martyrs for a faith. . . . In 180, a governor in Carthage remarked before passing sentence
that the Christians had been given a chance to return "to the Romans'
custom," or mores. This
note of frustrated Romanity recurs elsewhere, as does the stress on morals.
. . . If a Christian suspect
honoured the gods, he went free.[64]
In
light of these statements, it's hardly obvious that once the apostles
"were arrested, it was too late!"
Although these statements generally reflect second century A.D. Roman
procedure, Conder would have to cite evidence for a less lenient policy that
lacked the option for Christian "repentance" earlier to really prove
his point. Admittedly, for Nero's
persecution that scapegoated the Christians after the great fire in Rome (64
A.D.), a more merciless policy may have been pursued. But since becoming a Christian involves accepting certain ideas,
not unchangeable characteristics such as race, color, or gender, they could be
denied when challenged, depending on how and where the Christians were
captured. It's quite possible that the
first-century apostles could have denied Christ, and saved their necks, if they
had chosen to do so while on trial.
WHY
THE COUNTER-EXAMPLE OF THE MORMON PROPHET JOSEPH SMITH PROVES NOTHING
Conder argues that the Mormon prophet
Joseph Smith's martyrdom (1844) shows someone could die for a lie that he knew
was a lie (BGJ, p. 13). This reasoning
faces fundamental flaws, the first one being the demonstrable many errors and
incongruities that can be found in the LDS Church's Scriptures. Joseph Smith kept changing his beliefs
doctrinally. A comparison of The
Book of Mormon with Doctrine and Covenants or The Pearl of Great
Price shows this. Second, the
dishonest nature and life of Joseph Smith is easily proven, once someone looks
past the LDS Church's own sanitized histories.
Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, 2d ed. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976) is a case in point. Third, as ICF notes (p. 38, fn. 71), all of
those outside Smith's family who signed their names as witnesses for the
legitimacy of The Book of Mormon's divine origin (8 out of 11) later
left the Mormon Church. There's even
record of Smith condemning them.
Obviously, this is no place to pursue and explain systematically the
errors of the Mormon Church. But those
interested in how different early Christianity and early Mormonism are should
consult the following works on the latter:
Ed Decker and Dave Hunt, The God Makers (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1984); John
Ankerberg and John Weldon, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About
Mormonism (Eugene, OR; Harvest House
Publishers, 1992); Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults (Minneapolis,
MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1985),
pp. 166-226. Being someone who has
actually read The Book of Mormon, has known Mormons, and has studied
into the Mormon Church's history and evolving, contradictory theology, I can
assure you the New Testament, the apostles, and early Christianity are in a
very different category.[65] For Conder's point to stick, he'd have to
prove how the apostles materially and personally benefited from upholding their
belief in the resurrection. (They
certainly did not end up with as many wives as Smith did!) Clearly, the apostle Paul didn't (II Cor.
11:23-25):
Are
they servants of Christ (I speak as if insane) I more so; in far more labors,
in far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of
death. Five times I received from the
Jews thirty-nine lashes. Three times I
was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night
and a day I have spent in the deep.
Paul
apparently was headed for a brilliant career within Judaism (Acts 22:2-3; Gal.
2:13-14‑‑although it's not in the NT, it's been said he was on the
Sanhedrin), how was Paul's conversion in his self-interest? Instead of being persecuted, he could have
continued doing the persecuting.
Besides encountering Christ on the road to Damascus, what could have
possibly changed his mind? Material
gain? Don't make me laugh!
ANIMAL
SACRIFICES REVISITED
Speak
to the sons of Israel, saying, "If a person sins unintentionally in any of
the things which the Lord has commanded not to be done, and commits any of
them, if the anointed priest sins so as to bring guilt on the people, then let
him offer to the Lord a bull without defect as a sin offering for the sin he has
committed." (Lev. 4:2-3)
Now
if a person sins, after he hears a public adjuration to testify, when he is a
witness, whether he has seen or otherwise known, if he does not tell it, then
he will bear his guilt. . . . Or if a person swears thoughtlessly
with his lips to do evil or to do good, in whatever matter a man may speak
thoughtlessly with an oath, and it is hidden from him, and then he comes to
know it, he will be guilty in one of these.
So it shall be when he becomes guilty in one of these, that he shall
confess that in which he has sinned. He
shall also bring his guilt offering to the Lord for his sin which he has
committed, a female from the flock, a lamb or a goat as a sin offering. So the priest shall make atonement on his
behalf for his sin. (Lev. 5:1, 4-6)
Literally
scores of other texts could be quoted as well before making the following
point, but these will do: Without the
NT, how could somebody believing only in the OT cancel out these commands of
God? These verses provide no escape
clause. Giving no book, chapter, or
verse number, Conder claims: "The
Holy Scriptures tell us that animal sacrifices are suspended for the present,
not abolished, until the time of the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem"
(BGJ, p. 15). In fact, the suspension
of the animal sacrifices is purely opportunistic: After the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D., the Jews gave
up offering sacrifices. But how does a
gentile army's actions cancel out a command of God for His people? The mere fact God allowed the Temple's
destruction implies the need for the sacrifices had ended. If God still required them, He wouldn't have
made it impossible for the Jews to keep offering them as a nation. Furthermore, due to the difficulties of
travel (even during the millennium), wouldn't more than one site for sacrifices
be necessary? Would Americans or
Australians who sinned routinely travel to Jerusalem to sacrifice an animal? Using Jerusalem as a center for sacrifice
implied all those serving God lived within some reasonable distance from
it. Turning to the issue about whether
a "substitute action" can replace an animal sacrifice, my denial
aimed at claims that some act of penance that isn't an animal sacrifice will
fulfill the commands of God. Conder's
argument that the abolition of the animal sacrifices or the addition of Jesus'
sacrifice contradict Deut. 4:2; 12:32 ignores how these texts concern human-originated
innovations in observing God's law.
Neither text prevents God from changing His law, as He reveals
more truth to humanity. It's silly to
claim Mal. 3:6, where Jehovah says "I change not" prevents God from
making future revelations, or from changing His mind when humans change their
actions. For example, consider Jonah
3:10: "When God saw their deeds
[Nineveh repenting], that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented
concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it." Furthermore, Mal. 3:6 was a statement made in
the context of God's promises to Israel, which had become unconditional: "For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore
you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed." The implication is that God doesn't destroy Israel, despite all
their sins, because of His prior promises to the patriarchs and through the
prophets of Israel's eventual greatness.
Conder's request to explain how Jesus could be the Savior when the OT
declares God to be the only Savior (Isa. 45:21; 43:11) is easily enough
answered: Jesus was Jehovah, therefore,
the two are actually one and the same (I Cor. 10:4, 9; John 1:1, 18; 5:37;
8:58-59; cf. Ex. 33:18-23). Lev.
17:12-14's command not to eat blood doesn't contradict the Christian Passover
ceremony, since the wine stands for blood only symbolically. Micah 6:7 and II Kings 16:3 don't
contradict the sacrifice of God's only begotten Son in the NT because Jesus
sacrificed Himself to the true God, not a false one. He died on a cross, not as a burnt offering on an altar. Furthermore, God often has required
"human sacrifice" in both the New and Old Testaments, but the
sacrifices weren't placed on some altar.
Instead, the prophets, loyal to God's law and ways above all, often died
as martyrs, human sacrifices to God indeed!
WHY
WILL THERE BE ANIMAL SACRIFICES IN THE MILLENNIUM? A TENTATIVE SOLUTION
As for the issue of why God would
continue animal sacrifices in the millennium (BGJ, p. 15; re: Eze. 43:18-27), Archer's basic solution
consists of comparing them to the meaning and termination of the ceremony of
communion ("Passover" in the COG).
As I Cor. 11:26 states:
"For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim
the Lord's death until He comes."
This text implies that after Jesus returns the need to take the wine and
bread will end. But then will believers
take something else that symbolizes Jesus' sacrifice? As Archer speculates:
"Apparently it will be in the form of blood sacrifices once again,
yet without any of the atoning function of the Old Testament period." Although the terms used to describe the
sacrifices remain the same as those found in the Law of Moses, they will gain
new meanings. Archer explains that
Ezekiel used them
because
they furnished the closest analogy to the millennial offerings that the Hebrew
believer had any acquaintance with. But
like so many other terms employed in connection with the end times, so these
designations of sacrifice were sublimated and altered to fit the new conditions
of the new age yet to come.[66]
Like
the newly-rebuilt Temple, the sacrifices then would look back, as a
memorial of Christ's death, instead of foreshadowing God's redemptive acts yet
to come. Although no simple solution to
this problem exists, it's conspicuous Conder passes over the problems in saying
God can just change and remit the penalties of His law whenever He chooses. If this was so, why did God institute the
animal sacrifices to begin with? Since
their symbolism and ultimate meaning isn't explained within the OT itself, it
points to the Old Testament's incompleteness as a revelation from God. Something more was to come. Conder seems to deny God can have
progressive revelation, something which is evident even within the OT itself
from the time of the patriarchs to the Pentateuch to the prophets. For example, it's hard, perhaps impossible,
to find any promise of eternal life in the first five books of the Bible.
Trying
to explain the OT's different portrayals of the Messiah (Conquering vs.
Mournful) without recourse to the NT would certainly constitute enough
challenge to Conder and Company, before asking Christians to explain with
perfect clarity every murky OT prophecy, a section of Scripture notoriously
subject to different interpretations.
DO
ANY FIRST-CENTURY FRAGMENTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT EXIST? OOPS!
Mea
culpa! Conder is right to
insist that I was wrong to say it was "outdated scholarship" to deny
any first-century fragments of the New Testament exist (BGJ, pp. 16-17). I relied on statements in Robert Morey's The
New Atheism which have proved to be at least premature. Ironically, while writing the draft for a
booklet for my congregation's possible local evangelism campaigns and before
I received BGJ in the mail, I read a section in a book I had borrowed from my
local church's library which cast doubt on the claims Morey makes. James C. VanderKam's statement below caused
me pull back from this claim, but not to repudiate it as entirely mistaken:
While
on the topic of sensational proposals like this, I should mention the
suggestion made some 15 years ago that a few small papyrus scraps from Cave 7
[near the Dead Sea], a cave in which Greek texts have been found, were actually
copies of New Testament books‑‑Mark, Acts, Romans, I Timothy, James
and 2 Peter. Naturally if that were
true, the standard scenario for Qumran [the community that copied the Dead Sea
Scrolls] would have to be altered appreciably.
What in the world are Christian texts doing in these caves? There remain some advocates of this position
today but it has been largely abandoned on the grounds that too little of the
texts is preserved and even for what exists, the correspondences with the texts
in question are not exact.[67]
Having
received harsh criticism and scalding book reviews from his colleagues,
apparently few or no other scholars support Carsten Thiede's similar claims
that certain fragments of the Gospel of Matthew (Magdalen GR 17) date to the
first century. T.C. Skeat, a top-ranked
papyrologist, believes they are either "late 2nd century" or
"circa 200." Despite this
dismal outlook on such claims, some scholars (such as the small minority
VanderKam refers to above) still willingly say certain NT fragments can be
dated to the first century. Thiede
states, in his letter to Biblical Archeology Review: "After years of critical analysis (the
papyrus was first identified in 1972), leading papyrologists, among them the
editor of the journal Aegyptus, have demanded repeatedly that Qumran
fragment 7Q5 be given a New Testament papyrus number." Conder objects that a certain purported Dead
Sea Scrolls fragment was identified as from the Gospel of Mark based on a mere
20 letters with only one complete word, "and." But as Thiede notes in his letter, a piece
of the Virgil's great Latin epic Aenid found at the fortress at Masada
had just one line with 14 letters, "two of them incomplete‑‑yet
no one objected to their identification as Aeneid 4.9." On this subject, we face the reality of
being onlookers of scholarly controversy's cutting edge, in which some scholars
question a "paradigm" (i.e., here loosely used for the belief
"There are no first-century fragments of the NT") that a strong
majority of their colleagues vociferously support. Although this controversy shows I was wrong to say it was
"outdated scholarship" (i.e. by a consensus of scholars) to deny that
such fragments exist, there still remains a minority of people with respectable
credentials who have identified NT fragment(s) as dating to the first
century. Although citing scholars who
strongly rejected Thiede's claims, even Hershel Shanks says in his response to
Thiede's letter, his "claims may well be among those 'far-out theories
[that] are sometimes later proved correct,' as I recognized in my
editorial." Perhaps, X number of
years from now, a scholarly consensus will arise that accepts the existence of
first-century fragment(s) of the NT‑‑but presently and clearly a
strong majority of scholars rejects them.[68]
SIGNIFICANT
PORTIONS OF THE NT ARE IN MANUSCRIPTS OLDER THAN C. 325-350 A.D.
On the other hand, it's mistaken to
believe only small fragments of the NT exist before the copying of the great
fourth-century manuscripts (mss) Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, dated to 325-350
A.D. and 350 A.D. respectively. Using
this assumption, Conder mistakenly writes:
"Since McDowell, Snow, and Stinson maintain that the pagans
borrowed from Christianity, and they base this on the assertion that the
earliest surviving writings of paganism date only from the second century
C.E., then how do they explain this in light of the fact that the earliest
surviving Gospel accounts date from the fourth century C.E.?" (BGJ,
p. 31; cf. p. 27, "fourth century manuscript"). But, describing earlier partially complete
mss., C.L. Blomberg writes: "The
Chester Beatty and the more recently discovered Bodmer papyri contain large
sections of the NT, e.g., virtually the complete Gospel of John, most of Luke
and Acts, and extensive portions of Epistles and Revelation." Below his statement comes a list of various
papyrus mss. of the NT that summarizes names, dates, manuscript locations, and
what books (or parts of books) they contain:
p40 Rom. 1-4; 6; 9. 3rd cent. Heidelberg.
. . . p45
Gospels, Acts. 3rd cent. Chester
Beatty Library, Dublin; Vienna. p46 Pauline Epistles. 3rd cent. Chester Beatty
Library, Dublin; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. . . . p47 Rev. 9-17.
3rd cent. Chester Beatty
Library, Dublin. . . . p66 John.
2nd/3rd cent. Papyrus Bodmer
2. Bodmer Library,
Geneva. . . . p75 Luke, John. Early 3rd
cent. Papyrus Bodmer 14-15. Bodmer Library, Geneva.[69]
The
Ryland fragment for the Gospel of John, dated to 125-130 A.D., is the earliest
generally accepted fragment for any part of the NT. Since John traditionally was said to have been written in Asia
Minor, but this fragment was found in Egypt, the difference implies the
original date of composition was (at least) two or three decades earlier. McDowell notes the Chester Beatty Papyri and
the Bodmer Papyri II dates as 200 A.D. and 150-200 A.D. respectively. Because of these discoveries, Millar Burrows
of Yale notes: "Another result of
comparing New Testament Greek with the language of the papyri [discoveries] is
an increase in confidence in the accurate transmission of the text of the New
Testament itself."[70] It's misleading to claim we should be
fearful of what the "Roman Catholic" church did in preserving the New
Testament for the three hundred years before the copying of Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus because only "fragments" precede these fourth-century
manuscripts. Fox claims that because
the Gnostic heretic Marcion (c. 140's A.D.) intentionally perverted Scripture
and the canon, we can't trust the NT being accurately preserved. (See MB, p. 19). This reasoning ignores how the persecuted
mainstream orthodox Sunday-keeping church was the main agent God used to
preserve the NT during much of its first 300 years of existence, not Gnostic
heretics. Similarly, God used
disbelieving Jews who denied Jesus was the Messiah to preserve the Hebrew OT
during the Middle Ages. Although many
of us in the COG would deny these people were true Christians, since a number
of them gave their lives or otherwise suffered persecution for Christ, this
shows the sincerity of their convictions.
Such people aren't good candidates for perverting the New Testament,
which they would have revered as the word of God, just as the Jews revered the
Old Testament. Furthermore, Fox would
not likely apply this same reasoning to the ancient texts of classics, for
reasons F.F. Bruce explains: "No
classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of
Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their
works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the
originals."[71] Then, as shown above, based upon the dating
for Acts, the New Testament's own internal evidence points to its
writing in the first century, over and above the archeological evidence for
Acts that indicated it was a first-century composition that helped persuade
Ramsay to give up his atheism and to embrace Christianity.
HOW
SKEPTICISM ABOUT PRIMARY SOURCES CAN DESTROY ONE'S OWN ARGUMENTS
Similar to his assault on Eusebius,
Conder attacks as unreliable the history and traditions of the early
Sunday-keeping church, such as on the subject of Jesus' mother living past her
Son's death, allowing her to be an eyewitness for His life, death, and
teachings (BGJ, p. 17). Of course, the
Virgin Mary is last noted in the NT as praying with the incipient church before
Pentecost in Acts 1:14. Again, as noted
above, Conder feels free to reject any and all parts of the NT whenever it's
the least bit inconvenient to his hypothesis, instead of allowing the weight of
the three tests, bibliographical, external evidence, and internal evidence,
point to its at least partial historical reliability even by purely secular
logic. As McDowell and Wilson note
about form criticism, which Conder likely leans upon, its skepticism is all
"based on literary analysis (or should we say, conjecture), not on
external historical evidence. As can be
imagined, form criticism could be a mighty handy tool for getting rid of
anything a person might not want Jesus to be saying to them!" These higher critics simply assume the early
Christians (i.e., "the creative community") sat around spinning
stories (i.e., lies) about Jesus for their own purposes without having any real
evidence for it.[72] Conder also faces the fundamental
inconsistency (which he is at least partially aware of) of using for his own
purposes the same "non-scriptural legends of the early Catholic
Church" (BGJ, p. 17) as found in the Christian Church Fathers. For example, his highly speculative
reconstruction of the life of Simon the Sorcerer assumes the basic reliability
of such documents as the writings of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, the Acts of
Peter, and/or Pseudo-Clementines (BGJ, p. 32).[73] Somehow, although Justin and Irenaeus
vehemently oppose the teachings of Simon the Sorcerer, their brand of
Christianity is supposed to originate in Simon's teachings. So now‑‑how can Conder pick and
choose? He undermines Justin's
reliability by noting only two mss. exist for his works and citing someone
saying other(s) may have added to them (see BGJ, p. 36 and fn. 97). Suppose, like Conder does with any part of
the NT that's the least bit troublesome, I say, "Those parts about Simon
in these writings can't be trusted."
Although it's so absurd as it stands, most of Mystery Babylon,
pp. 131-142, is then promptly totally annihilated. Similarly, Conder cites Tertullian and Marcus Minucius Felix to
claim crucified gods existed before Jesus (BGJ, pp. 28-29). Again, I could claim, "Those statements
are unreliable 'early church legends,' and can't be trusted." Promptly, another part of Conder's case
falls to pieces. You can't spend your
time saying, "Nothing in the Roman Catholic Church fathers' writings can
be trusted," then turn around and say, "This statement by Church
Father X proves this or that against the truth of Christianity." Clearly, historical skepticism, of attacking
hypercritically any and all statements indiscriminately in some document one
deems unreliable, produces mutually assured destruction for both sides in this
controversy.
TWO
REASONS FOR THE SUNDAY-KEEPING CHURCH'S EARLY LEADERS' BASIC RELIABILITY
Despite the weaknesses of the
Christian Church Fathers, two good reasons exist for considering their rough
historical reliability when relating (say) how the apostles died. First, since many Christians died for their
faith in Christianity's first centuries, it's sensible to believe their earlier
spiritual leaders suffered a similar fate.
As McDowell and Wilson ask:
"If the students were willing to die for their faith, how much more
the teachers?" Even if not all (excepting
John) of the first apostles were martyred, "We can be confident that
second- and third-generation believers followed the example of martyrdom set by
the original apostles." Second,
since becoming a Christian could be hazardous to one's life, limb, freedom, and
property, intelligent people would carefully investigate this new faith's
foundation the first centuries after the crucifixion before accepting it. Under these conditions, Conder's belief that
they materially benefited from "draw[ing] members to their money-making
organization" is laughable (my emphasis, BGJ, p. 18). Even 120 years after Jesus' death, such a
man as Polycarp could still recall what Jesus' first disciples said about the
Son of God's life and teachings.
Whether through written or oral sources, people could still check out
the new faith's foundations.[74] Finally, it seems Conder never recognizes in
Mystery Babylon or "By-gosh Josh" that any of the people could
have an ounce of sincerity or integrity in serving the true God, assuming they
weren't totally deceived idiots otherwise.
Their spilled blood should witness to us otherwise (re: BGJ, p. 26, negative comments on NT's
influence).
COULD
AVERAGE PEOPLE IN FIRST-CENTURY JUDEA SPEAK GREEK?
In order to rebut my evidence for
average people being able to speak Greek in first-century Judea, Conder
selectively quotes Josephus, while excluding the key part of the quote that
proves this point (BGJ, p. 18; cf. ICF, p. 13). He cites Josephus saying, "For our nation does not encourage
those that learn the languages of many nations, and so adorn their discourses
with the smoothness of their periods."
Although converting a semicolon to a period is usually an acceptable
procedure, here it is misleading. In
the next clause of the same sentence Josephus continued to explain why this was
so: "because they look upon this
sort of accomplishment [i.e., mastering Greek] as common, not only to all sorts
of freemen, but to as many of the servants [slaves?] as pleased to learn
them." There's additional evidence
for average people speaking Greek in first-century Judea. For example, later in the second-century,
Rabbi Judah the prince contended:
"Why (use) the Syrian language [i.e., Aramaic] in the land of
Israel? Either the sacred language or
the Greek language." The ossuaries
(stone boxes) that archeologists have discovered from the general time of Jesus
indicate that Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew were all spoken in the Holy Land. Mostly fairly average people had the
inscriptions placed on ossuaries' outsides, not the highly intellectual and
literate whose writings have been preserved down through the ages. Stambaugh and Balch note that two-thirds of
these inscriptions found in Palestine were in Greek only, while one tenth were
bilingual inscriptions in Greek as well as Hebrew (or Aramaic). The Hasmonaean rulers (originating in the
Maccabees) issued coins only in Hebrew until Alexander Jannaeus had coins
minted with both Hebrew and Greek writing.
Although a Jew, his grandson used only Greek on his coins, as did the
Herodian princes and Roman procurators over Judea. Even a letter possibly written by the leader of the 132-35 A.D.
Jewish revolt against Rome, Bar Kokhba, reads:
"Now this has been written in Greek because a desire has not been
found to write in Hebrew." They
note that "whether more Greek or Aramaic was spoken in Palestine is
debated." Furthermore, a number of
towns, cities, and areas in Judea were primarily made up of Hellenized Jews,
such as Hippus, Julius, Sepphoris, Tiberias, Gadara, Scythopolis, and Caesarea
Philippi. Although Jews presumably
predominated in these cities, they would have spoken Greek instead of Aramaic
or Hebrew.[75] Clearly, average people in first-century Judea
could have spoken Greek.
WHY
WOULD THE ARAMAIC- OR HEBREW-SPEAKING DISCIPLES QUOTE FROM A GREEK OT
TRANSLATION?
Conder asks why did the presumably
Aramaic- or Hebrew-speaking disciples of Jesus use the Septuagint (LXX) when
quoting the Old Testament in the New Testament (BGJ, p. 18). As Gleason Archer explains, the apostles had
to use the LXX because this translation of the OT was the main, even exclusive,
form available to the Hellenized Jews in the Diaspora (outside Palestine). If they had quoted literally from the Hebrew
OT, but translated it into Greek, what might have happened when those they
evangelized checked out their claims for Jesus (as the Bereans did)? "The readers would have noticed the discrepancies
at once‑‑minor though they may have been‑‑and would
with one voice have objected, 'But that isn't the way I read it in my
Bible!'" Conspicuously, when
writing for an audience composed mainly of Jews, the Gospel of Matthew and
Hebrews often quote from a non-Septuagintal form that's usually somewhat closer
to the Hebrew original's wording.[76] Then, although the Masoretic text (MT)
undeniably represents the original text better than the LXX in most cases, some
passages the LXX has preserved better (for example, I Samuel 14:41 and Gen.
4:8). Among the Dead Sea Scrolls an
alternative Hebrew text to the Masoretic text, called the Vorlage,
sometimes appears. As S.K. Soderlund
reports:
But
far from undermining interest in the LXX, the DSS [Dead Sea Scrolls] have
intensified it, especially since a number of their readings support the LXX
against the MT. Thus many of the
discrepancies between Hebrew and Greek texts of certain books (e.g., Samuel and
Jeremiah), previously blamed on the translators, actually go back to a Hebrew
text (Vorlage) different from, and sometimes superior to, the MT.
This
alternative text presumably sometimes influenced the readings of the LXX that
differ from the MT's. For example, in
the LXX the book of Jeremiah is about one-eighth shorter and has rearranged the
order of its contents some.[77] Although I believe the providence of God
would ensure that the Jews would have weighed the evidence and then have
selected the basic best form of the Hebrew text to preserve, the Vorlage
could be in some cases the better of the two.
Still, these differences leave open one serious possibility‑‑that
when a NT author cites the OT in a version noticeably different from the MT due
to leaning on the LXX or some other Greek translation, it could be the NT form
is closer to the autograph (original copy) than what the Jews preserved in the
MT through the Middle Ages.[78]
DID
JESUS PERMANENTLY PROHIBIT EVANGELIZING THE GENTILES?
Repeating a claim found in Mystery
Babylon (p. 133), Conder believes Jesus "supposedly told his disciples
not to go unto the Gentiles with the gospel because it was meant for
Israel" (BGJ, p. 18). Upon this
claim he builds his assertions that some later writer inserted Jesus'
statements to evangelize the world into the NT and to deny that the followers
of Jesus had a need to learn to speak and write Greek in order to do that. But is the initial claim true? As I explained in ICF (p. 29), it's patently
absurd to read Jesus' statement Matt. 10:5 as anything more than a one-time
temporary command: "Do not go in
the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter any city of the
Samaritans." In the wake of
Israel's complaints following the spies' false report, was Moses' command
telling Israel not to enter the Promised Land then a permanent
command? (See Num. 14:41-43). Were Jesus' commands to the 70 on their
evangelism expedition to "Carry no purse, no bag, no shoes" permanent
commands applying to the apostles later or even to Christians today? (Luke 10:1, 4, 17) The one-time nature of the mission of the 70 proves how absurd it
is to assume the disciples' mission described in Matt. 10 involved permanently
binding commands. Although Jesus
normally only went to cities of orthodox Jews and avoided those of Hellenized
Jews, Samaritans, and gentiles, the NT still records visits to the Samaritan
village of Sychar (John 4) and the Caesar Philippi and Sidon/Tyre regions.[79]
DID
THE SAME MAN WRITE THE GOSPEL OF LUKE AND THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES?
Conder asserts that the Gospel of Luke
was written in a "highly polished Greek vernacular," claiming this as
evidence for "a later Greek-speaking Christian Church father
composing" it. Then he denies that
the same man wrote Luke and Acts. In
fact, good evidence exists for one author writing both books, as Nelson's
Illustrated Bible Dictionary explains:
Each
book is the length of a scroll (about 35 feet), and each is addressed to the
same individual, Theophilus. The
similarities between the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts in literary style,
vocabulary, and theological ideas are unmistakable.[80]
Not
possibly mistaken for a fundamentalist Christian, James Price of Duke
University maintains:
A
comparison of the language and style of the "we" sections and the
rest of Acts leads to the conclusion that if Luke was the diarist he was also
the compiler of the whole of Acts.
Furthermore, if Luke was the author of Acts he was also the author of
the Third Gospel, for the prefaces of the two books link them as parts of a
single work.
He
then discusses the sharp dispute over whether the medical terminology interest
of the author of Acts and Luke indicates he was a physician. He concludes by accepting a moderate
position that sees partial validity to this argument. He later basically endorses J. Fitzmyer's statement that
"most of the arguments brought forth in modern times to substantiate the
distance of Luke from Paul do not militate against the traditional
identification of the author of the Third Gospel and Acts with Luke, the Syrian
from Antioch, who had been a sometime collaborator of the Apostle Paul."[81] The most significant argument for linking
the Third Gospel to Acts is their similar introductions of dedication to
Theophilus, and how the conclusion of one leads directly into the introduction
of the other, almost as if they were one book later divided into two:
From
ancient times the writer of the Gospel of Luke has been credited with the
writing of Acts. Both books are
addressed to Theophilus. Also, by
repeating the closing events of his Gospel in the opening verses of Acts [the
command not to leave Jerusalem is the common link‑‑Luke 24:49; Acts
1:4, as well as a likely double mention of the ascension‑‑Luke
24:51; Acts 1:9], Luke binds the two accounts together as the work of the same
author.[82]
Regardless
of whatever scholarly consensus Conder alludes to, perfectly sound arguments
point to the author of Acts and the Third Gospel as being one and the same.
HOW
THE SEMITIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE GOSPELS' GREEK INDICATE NO LATER "CHURCH
FATHER" WROTE THEM
Although Conder persists in claiming a
highly scholarly Greek-speaking Father wrote Luke (p. 18), he fails to reply to
ICF's point (p. 12) that the Third Gospel is loaded with Semitic-influenced
Greek constructions, such as the apodotic kai ("and"). A well-educated, literary Greek speaker, if
he wrote a highly polished work, wouldn't load it with linguistic constructions
that sound clumsy in Greek but make sense in Aramaic or Hebrew, assuming he
even knew that "barbarous" eastern language to begin with. The NT was written in koine Greek,
the language of the common people, not the highly educated and scholarly, a
point also incompatible with Conder's claim that the Third Gospel was written
in a "high polished Greek" (BGJ, p. 19). Shooting down claims that highly literate Christian Church
Fathers wrote the Gospels is the simple reality McDowell and Wilson note: "The word order in much of the Greek
manuscripts of the gospels is actually more Hebrew than Greek." The Greek of the NT is sometimes loaded full
of "ands," indicating Semitic sources and/or authors, since Greek
normally wasn't written that way.
Furthermore, if the Christian church was primarily gentile by the early
second century, it's highly unlikely "a Gentile of the second century or
later [would] mold an account of the life of Jesus which so thoroughly
reflected the first-century Hebrew culture."[83] Such a gentile forger would be apt to make
easily detected mistakes which the external evidence test would expose, accidently
imputing to Jesus and his disciples aspects of gentile culture that he took for
granted, but which didn't exist in their Semitic culture. Consider the implications of Conder's
implied claim that somebody can't vary in literary style (i.e., Luke between
the parable of the prodigal son and his recording of Tertullus' accusation
against Paul). It suggests that the
English Poet John Milton (1608-74) couldn't have written both "Paradise
Lost" and "L'Allegro," since these poems vary sharply in
style. He wrote political tracts in yet
another manner.[84] Although analyzing literary style does have
weight as internal evidence in determining authorship, it shouldn't be oversold
against external evidence stating "so-and-so wrote such-and-such" in
other documents.[85] Otherwise, we erect the foundation for two
or three "Isaiahs," JEDP theory replacing Moses, etc. in Old
Testament criticism, a result Conder presumably wishes to avoid.
FURTHER
EXTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR LUKE'S RELIABILITY
Conder asserts: "The Holy Spirit wasn't inspiring
'Luke' because 'his' book is noted for error and contradictions" (BGJ, p.
19). In fact, as noted in ICF (pp.
17-18), Luke's historical accuracy was enough to turn an atheist into a
believer, archeologist Sir William Ramsay.
Classical historian A.N. Sherwin-White remarks that "for Acts that
confirmation of historicity is overwhelming." He adds that "any attempt to reject its basic historicity
even in matters of detail must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted."[86] Evidence for this attitude is found in the
source book my professor assigned for the Roman Empire history class I took at
Michigan State‑‑among portions of works by various pagan historians
it included a significant chunk of the book of Acts. Consider some further external evidence favoring Luke's skill as
a historian that justifies Sherwin-White's statement. Luke routinely correctly stated the titles of various Roman
officials despite they changed fairly often in the first century. For example, Luke called Sergius Paulus
"proconsul" (Acts 13:7), not by the old title, "imperial
legate," which notes the change in Cyprus' status from an imperial
province to a senatorial one in 22 b.c.
He correctly called the governors of Asia and Achaia
"proconsuls" since the senate ruled them, not the emperor (Acts
18:12; 19:38). He got it right despite
Achaia was under the senate from 27 b.c. to 15 A.D., then under the emperor to
44 A.D., and back under the senate again.
Luke was the only author from ancient times to preserve the term
"politarches" (Acts 17:6).
The discovery of 19 different inscriptions in Macedonia and Thessalonica
having this title have destroyed the doubts about his accuracy on this
subject. He called Publius "the
first man of the island" (Acts 28:7), which both Latin and Greek
inscriptions have confirmed was the right title for the ruler of Malta then. The chief magistrates in Philippi insisted
egotistically on being called "praetors" (Acts 16:20), as Luke
records, not "duumvirs" as they were elsewhere, as the Roman
Republic's orator Cicero (106-43 b.c.) confirms. He refers to Herod Antipas by the title "tetrarch"
(Luke 3:1, 19), not the popular designation of "king," since the Romans
granted the status of royalty only to his father, Herod the Great. Similar to his supposed error concerning the
censuses conducted by Quirinius, critics used to charge Luke was wrong to call
Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene (Luke 3:1).
After all, the only "Lysanias" then known was a
"king" executed by Mark Anthony in 34 b.c. But then an inscription referring to "Lysanias the
tetrarch" dated to between 14 and 29 A.D. was discovered, routing the
higher critics once again.[87] Similar to how no conclusive evidence
for Quirinius conducting more than one census exists (there is partial
evidence for it), it once was thought that only one
"Lysanias" had been a ruler in this area around the time of Christ,
"proving" Luke was wrong.[88] The discovery of this inscription is a
permanent warning to those arguing from silence to attack Luke's chronology on
the birth of Christ: One day,
archeology may prove you to be totally wrong!
(Re: Mystery Babylon, p.
36).
"HIGHER"
AND "LOWER" TEXTUAL CRITICISM DIFFERENTIATED
Conder asks (BGJ, p. 19): "Which is it, Eric? Is the science of textual criticism an evil
of 'higher critics,' such as those in the Jesus Seminar, or is it a useful tool
for Bible study?" To answer this
question, first it's necessary to differentiate between "higher" and
"lower" criticism. S.K.
Soderlund explains "lower criticism," using the OT's text as an
example:
A
knowledge of the transmission history of the OT text is interesting in its own
right, but the ultimate goal of such study is its application to the practice
of textual or "lower" criticism‑‑the science of
determining the earliest recoverable text form of an ancient document on the
basis of the evidence available. . . . The responsibility of the text critic is to evaluate all relevant
sources in the light of established text-critical principles and a knowledge of
scribal habits.[89]
Similarly,
McDowell and Wilson explain lower criticism as the foundation upon which higher
criticism builds, since it attempts to determine the original form of the
document in question when no autograph (the manuscript the author first wrote)
exists. Higher criticism then can be
divided into two broad categories, literary criticism and historical criticism. Seeking to analyze the text as a completed
piece of literature, literary criticism attempts to determine the meanings of
words, the style of writing, and the grammar.
It may then go on to speculate about the author's circumstances and life
setting. By contrast, historical
criticism investigates the historical setting of the text's composition. Some questions it seeks to answer include
when and where the document was written, who wrote it, who did he or she write
it for, and what circumstances did the author write during.[90] Form and redaction criticism, which analyze
the supposedly isolated units Scripture originally was in and who and how
somebody finally edited them all together, are types of "higher
criticism." To answer Conder's
question, I object to the latter two types of higher criticism, at least once
they operate under the assumption the Bible isn't the infallible, inerrant word
of God. But lower criticism is very
useful for determining the original text for the NT and OT. It shows the discrepancies between various
handwritten copies of Scripture aren't much to worry about. It proves reconstructing a printed text from
ancient mss. is not some highly subjective and arbitrary process. (Conder's criticism of Sitterly and Greenlee
in BGJ, p. 20, implicitly assumes this).
Higher criticism, so long as it tries to shed light to help determine
the text's meaning, can be valuable to a fundamentalist trying to figure out
what God has commanded us. But those
using higher criticism to engage in conjectural emendations of the text usually
have exalted human reason above the word of God, such as the Jesus Seminar
judging how likely Christ spoke this or that statement found in the Gospels
based upon certain assumptions or Ferrar Fenton eliminating the genealogy in
Luke from his translation of the Bible as being supposedly contradictory to
Matthew's. I use the catchphrase
"higher critics" to refer to those analyzing the Bible, OT and NT, who
use the principles of textual criticism (i.e., human reason) to attack its
inspiration.
THE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL TEST FOR A DOCUMENT'S RELIABILITY DEFENDED
The military historian C. Sanders had
three tests for the reliability of historical documents: the bibliographical test, the external
evidence test, and the internal evidence test.[91] A priori (ahead of discovering the
facts), using secular criteria alone, these tests can be applied to any primary
source document to judge its reliability.
Conder attacks the part of the bibliographical test that maintains, a
priori, the more ancient copies of a document that exist, the more likely
it is reliable historically: "So
the argument that the number of surviving New Testament manuscripts somehow
proves the authenticity and validity of the New Testament is absurd"
(BGJ, p. 19). The mere fact so many
were copied implies the truth of the contents, all other factors being equal
(ceteris paribus). Of course, this
can't be the only means to judge the truth of a document: The Greek poet Homer's Iliad, since
it has the third highest number of handwritten copies (643), would then be the
third most reliable document. Since its
literary genre is plainly mythological, it can't be seen as historically
reliable, which is a judgment based on using the external and internal evidence
tests. Although this one aspect of the
bibliographical test, by itself, can't fully "prove" the NT's validity,
it is partial evidence for its reliability.
It's necessary then to judge how great the gap is between the NT's
earliest manuscripts and its original writing (the other part of the
bibliographical test), and also run the internal and external evidence tests to
get a fuller picture. Compared to
classical pagan historical literature, the NT clearly trumps all of it using
the bibliographical test alone (see ICF, pp. 7-9).
The kind of skepticism Fox expresses
about the accurate textual preservation of the NT (cited in MB, p. 19;
cf. BGJ, p. 34) is totally unjustified, judging from the criteria of the
bibliographical test. Otherwise, by the
same reasoning it would be necessary to throw out all classical literature as
"historically unreliable" since there are far fewer copies of
Tacitus, Suetonius, Caesar, etc. and the gap in time between the original
writing and the oldest preserved copy is larger than for the NT. As J. Harold Greenlee, a New Testament Greek
scholar, reasons:
Since
scholars accept as generally trustworthy the writings of the ancient classics
even though the earliest MSS [manuscripts] were written so long after the
original writings and the number of extant MSS is in many instances so small,
it is clear that the reliability of the text of the New Testament is likewise
assured.[92]
Now
Conder replies to this reasoning thus:
"The reason that many historians don't accept the New Testament as
reliable but do accept the writings of Julius Caesar is because his writings do
not form the nucleus of a religion, hence there has been no temptation to
corrupt it" (BGJ, p. 26). First,
it should be noted that Julius Caesar shouldn't necessarily be regarded as
unbiased. As Blaiklock notes, Caesar's
reference to his expedition to England isn't doubted, although "our
principal informant is Julius himself (in a book designed to secure his
political reputation)."[93] We have to remember that in the Roman
Republic, he was trying to get elected and/or gain political power (ahem) more
forcefully. Yet, does that cause us to
become totally critical and doubtful of what he wrote? Furthermore, if this objection annihilates
the New Testament's reliability, it destroys the Old Testament's as well, since
it too formed "the nucleus of a religion." This reasoning ignores the reality that this temptation was
counter-balanced by a natural Christian desire to preserve accurately what they
regarded as the word of God. For
example, consider Origen's Hexpla, which put together six versions of the Old
Testament in six columns, four of them being in Greek, one the Hebrew, and one
the Hebrew in Greek letters. As he made
his own recension of the LXX in the fifth column, he did not feel totally free
to reconstruct a Greek text of the LXX from other versions, but placed critical
marks between the words which future scribes were supposed to copy. Using also the Hebrew text as a means for
correcting the LXX, he explained:
When
I was uncertain of the LXX reading because the various copies did not tally, I
settled the issue by consulting the other versions and retaining what was in
agreement with them. Some passages did
not appear in the Hebrew; these I marked with an obelus as I did not dare to
leave them out altogether. Other
passages I marked with an asterisk to show that they were not in the Septuagint
but that I had added them from the other versions in agreement with the Hebrew
text.
Obviously,
this was no man to trifle with the words of God, despite even Roman Catholics
today would regard a good chunk of his theology as unorthodox. Since the pre-313 A.D. church had enough of
its blood shed by the Roman government, those who became Christians would have
been usually sincere in what they believed, certainly at least as much as Jews
of the same time, and would have found it presumptuous to change God's
words. Although the New Testament's
manuscript tradition doesn't have the truly stunning uniformity of the
Masoretic text, it still was preserved better than the pagan classics by and
large. As S.K. Soderlund notes:
These
modifications of the rules [of textual criticism] are valid for all types of
literature, but perhaps especially for the OT, given its unique transmission
history and the care with which the Hebrew Scriptures were copied in comparison
with Greco-Roman literature or even the NT.[94]
Ironically,
Conder isn't above implicitly using the bibliographical test himself
elsewhere. Casting doubt upon the
writings of Justin Martyr, he notes only two handwritten copies of them exist,
one finished in 1364 and another copied in 1571 (BGJ, p. 36).[95] Noting the problem "that the
'originals' of Justin's writings are missing" (BGJ, p. 36) is besides the
point: The original autographs for all
major ancient historical documents are missing also, but that shouldn't
generate automatic doubt about them. No
original copy of the Pentateuch exists from the time of Moses (c. 1425
b.c.). Does Conder doubt its historical
reliability? Although it must be seen
as only one part of a series of tests, the bibliographical test clearly is a
valuable tool for judging the reliability of any document. Conder's attack amounts to an attempt to
evade its implications for the NT's greater reliability compared to other
ancient documents he trusts.
THE
VARIATIONS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT'S TEXT REVISITED
By applying Geisler and Nix's
estimates of the number of significant variations to the estimate that 200,000
variations exist within the NT's manuscripts, Conder calculates that 25,000
variations have weight and 3,333 are substantial (see BGJ, p. 20). Should these numbers scare Christians? Do these variations clearly threaten any
major doctrines or practices? To know
what the implications of these variations are, ask yourself the following
practical question: Besides the
elimination or curbing of archaic English, what differences have you noticed in
the New Testament between the King James Version and almost any other major
translation of the Bible? If you
haven't noticed any, besides perhaps the difference between the end of Mark and
John 8's incident of the woman caught in adultery, that tells you how
significant these variations are in practical terms. Even then, if you have noticed variations,
the philosophy of translation the translators used had a much greater impact
than text type choices in generating them.
Did they choose to be highly literal (i.e., RSV, NKJV, NASB, KJV,
Young's)? Or did they use "dynamic
equivalence," making it freer and looser and more like a paraphrase (i.e.,
TEV, NEB, REV, NJ, JB, NAB, Phillips)?
Did they use politically correct language that avoids using
"he," "himself," "man," "mankind," as
universal terms for both sexes (NRSV, CEV, NCV)? Those especially interested in the subject of variations in the
NT should consult the footnotes (apparatuses) of this Greek New Testament: Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad, The
Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1985). (Note also the sources listed in ICF, pp.
10-11, fn. 14). A casual glance at this
printed edition of the NT shows that although at least some variations appear
on every page, many of them are spelling and word order variations, etc. Second, if someone commits himself to
following the received text (Byzantine) instead of the critical text
(Western/Alexandrine), a majority of them fall away. There's more diversity between the few manuscripts representing
the latter and far great number constituting the former than within former's
alone. In a statement that the two
apparatuses of their Greek NT confirms, Hodges and Farstad note: "The relative uniformity within this
text shows clearly that its transmissional history has been stable and regular
to a very large degree."[96] But this is no place to take up the battle
between the received and critical texts of the NT‑‑I'll leave that
to Fuller.[97] Third, let's take another practical example
of how interpretive assumptions have far more impact than any of these
supposedly scary NT textual variations do:
When the Worldwide Church of God announced its doctrine changes on the
applicability of the Old Testament law to Christians, how much did textual
variations between the received and critical text bear on that truly massive
shift in Biblical interpretation? I
wrote a careful research paper on the subject after having read Pasadena's
arguments in the Worldwide News over a period of months (revised twice
at least, once some months after getting the boot for my dissent).[98] The only relevant places where textual
issues came up that could favor one side over another were Mark 7:19 (on the
unclean meats issue) and Acts 21:25 (as bearing on whether the Jerusalem
Council in Acts 15 abolished the Law of Moses). I can assure you textual issues in that major controversy were a
trivial point, compared to (even) the (non-textual) translation differences
between the NIV and KJV/NKJV. Whether
you accepted the argument from silence against any OT law being in force by
whether it had to be repeated in the NT, a general exegetical principle, was
far more important than these minor textual issues. Another appeared in Brinsmead's Verdict articles, which
argued the Epistles should interpret the Gospels, and the NT the OT, in a
basically one way direction. Higher
critics can create a menacing big, bad wolf from purportedly high numbers of
variations in the New Testament, but their real, practical impact is
minor compared to other factors, principles, and assumptions bearing on how to
interpret the New Testament.
THE
SUNDAY-KEEPING CHURCH WAS THE MAIN AGENT GOD USED TO ASCERTAIN THE CANON
Curiously misunderstanding my
position, Conder maintains: "Eric
dismissed my findings that the Catholic Church decided the final canon of the
New Testament by following the so-called historical scholarship of the
Seventh-day Baptist Church" (BGJ, p. 20).
"As proof that the Catholic Church didn't decide the final canon of
the New Testament, Eric offers . . ." (BGJ, p. 21). Overlooking for now his failure to recognize
the fundamental discontinuity in the Sunday-keeping ("Roman
Catholic") church's history that began under Constantine in 313 A.D.,
Conder attacks a position I actually uphold.
He misunderstands my denial that the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy
determined the canon as a denial that the Sunday-keeping church elders,
laity, and writers generally figured out which books were inspired and
which ones weren't when placing them in the New Testament. The decisions of the bishops merely
reflected the general consensus ultimately.
In ICF (p. 15), I stated:
In
actuality, the Roman Catholic Church's leadership did not choose the canon, and
then impose it from the top down. . . . It [Conder's argument] also discounts how God can move men who
are not true believers to make the right decisions. (Would God be so careless to let ultimately His holy word become
perverted by those with false doctrines?
After all, how did He preserve the OT and/or have the right books placed
in it when Israel so often had fallen into idolatry as a nation?)
Similarly,
God used the Jews, who had denied Jesus was the Messiah, to preserve the Hebrew
Old Testament and Sacred Calendar through the Middle Ages, which the Catholic
Church didn't do. Although many of us
in the COG would think they weren't true Christians, the Catholic and Orthodox
churches were the main means by which God preserved the New Testament. This job certainly wasn't done principally
by the oft-persecuted Sabbatarian churches down through the centuries.[99] The citations from works by Herbert W.
Armstrong, John Ogwyn (a GCG minister), and Ellen White made in ICF (p. 21)
were meant to prove a fundamental change occurred in the Sunday-keeping church
beginning in the fourth century, and nothing about the canon (see BGJ, p.
21). That church clearly became far
more corrupt and apostate as it gained political power in the centuries
following the issuing of the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.) The fallacy of imputing back the corrupt
nature of medieval Roman Catholicism to the pre-313 A.D. Sunday-keeping Church,
kept on the run and relatively pure by Rome's off and on persecution, never
appears to dawn on Conder.
THE
GENEALOGIES OF CHRIST REVISITED
Since ICF already covered many of the
issues surrounding Jesus' genealogies, this terrain will not be slogged through
again here. Conspicuously, when Conder
takes up the subject of foreshortened genealogies (BGJ, pp. 23-24), he deals
with only one of the examples I used to show the OT will sometimes leave out
ancestors on them. The family trees of
Caleb, Nebuchadnezzar, Shebuel, Ezra, and Maacah all omit ancestors, but these
examples draw no response in BGJ (p. 24).
Being a top leader of post-exilic Judah at a time various Israelites
"were excluded from the priesthood" due to uncertain genealogies
(Ezra 2:62), Ezra's genealogy has to be seen as crucial, as was Christ's. Nevertheless, a comparison of Ezra 7:1-5
with I Chron. 6:3-15 shows at least a couple of generations were omitted in the
former text. As for the dispute about
whether 13 or 14 generations occurred between Jeconiah and Christ, it
apparently comes down to our old friend inclusive versus exclusive counting, familiar
to those who remember the disputes over whether Pentecost is on a Sunday or
Monday[100] or how traditional
Christians try to stuff "three days and three nights" between Friday
sunset and Sunday morning. If both
Jeconiah and Christ are counted as one generation each, 12 generations come in
between according to Matthew's list. If
David and Josiah (Jeconiah's father) are counted as one generation each, 12
ancestors/descendants appear in between in Matthew's list. But although between Abraham and David 12
ancestors/descendants appear, David gets counted again for the next set of
fourteen (until the time of exile). The
basic issue then becomes over how and whether to count inclusively or
exclusively the "ends" and "beginnings" for each set of 14
generations mentioned in Matt. 1:17:
"So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen
generations, from David until the captivity in Babylon are fourteen generations,
and from the captivity in Babylon until the Christ are fourteen
generations." On this basis, it's
hardly clear Matthew committed an error by saying 14 generations came between
Jeconiah and Christ, assuming the generations Jeconiah and Christ are in (as
the "ends") are counted as one each of the 14 since 12 generations
come in between. As for whether any
Biblical precedent exists for adoption, which Joseph could have done with
Jesus, the case of Moses being adopted by Pharaoh's daughter comes to mind (Ex.
2:9-10; Heb. 11:24). But if that
example is rejected because it involved a gentile nation's customs,
quasi-adoption appears in the cases of Jacob's two wives, Leah and Rachel, who
accepted as their own the children born to their handmaids, Zilpah and Bilhah
(Gen. 30:3-8, 12-13, 24). The New
Testament clearly recognizes the concept (Rom. 8:15, 23; 9:4; Eph. 1:5), but
that naturally cuts no ice with Conder.
As for whether Luke's or Matthew's genealogy was Mary's, it's ironic
that the Talmud evidently points to Luke's just like the early Christian
tradition maintains, by saying Mary was the daughter of Heli (Haghigha, 77,
4). Does God's promise that David's
throne would never lack a "MAN" then exclude tracing Christ's
claim to David's throne through Mary?
Must this term exclude "women"? Although feminists object to this usage, when used collectively
the traditional English terms "man" and "mankind" refer to
all human beings of both genders.
Consider how the "king's daughters" were used to keep the Davidic
throne alive when it was transferred to Ireland (re: Jer. 43:10; 43:6). If
Conder still accepts HWA's framework of British-Israelism, then he'd have to
accept that a woman (Elizabeth II) occupies that throne today, and women have
occupied it in the past ("Bloody" Mary I, Victoria, Elizabeth
I). Also under Athaliah an interregnum
occurred (II Chron. 22:10-12; 23:12-13).
Since George I was fifty-eighth in the line of succession in 1714, the
move to put the Hanoverian family on
the throne after Anne's death shows there's no need to trace the family line in
the straightest manner (re: Conder's
comments on other descendants of David besides Joseph passing along this right
and Joseph's other children inheriting this right).[101] Although Conder is totally skeptical about
Christ's genealogies, we must remember no surviving ancient Jewish or gentile
tradition of attacking them as fake is known, such as in the Jewish claims that
influenced Celsus, even though both groups attacked Jesus' birth as
illegitimate. Since the public Jewish
genealogical records survived until the Roman legions destroyed Jerusalem in 70
A.D., Matthew and Luke would have been rather foolish to concoct some false
genealogy of Christ since they could have been easily exposed.[102] Although this topic could be debated
further, the fact remains the supposed problems with Christ's family tree are
nowhere near as bad as Conder thinks.
WAS
FIRST-CENTURY SAMARITAN RELIGION LARGELY PAGAN?
Citing Legge, Conder maintains that
first-century Samaritan religion was mostly pagan, outside of its respect for
the Pentateuch (BGJ, p. 26, fn. 75).
Since Simon the Sorcerer worked his (ahem) "magic" and gained
a following among the Samaritans, how pagan their religion was matters for
disputes about how much Palestinian paganism supposedly influenced
first-century Christianity. R.T.
Anderson describes the Samaritan religion in New Testament times as sharing
"practices and beliefs with both heterodox and orthodox Judaism." For example, like the evidently Essenic
community at Qumran, they renounced the Temple in Jerusalem, interpreted Deut.
18:18 as a messianic text, didn't observe Purim or Hanukkah, used a complex
lunar/solar calendar, and drew the exclusivistic image "sons of
light" in their literature. Although
their religion focused on Mt. Gerizim, their "common feasts, laws,
apocalyptic visions, and scriptural recensions show likely continued mutual
influence." Over the centuries,
they have "shared beliefs and practices with several groups: Rabbinic Judaism, the Qumran sect,
Gnosticism, Christianity, Islam, and the Karaites." As for Simon, Anderson says: "Simon Magus (Acts 8:9ff.) was likely
the leader of the Dositheans, an unorthodox, possibly gnostic-influenced,
Samaritan group that continued to play a role in Samaritan history,
particularly visible in the 4th and 14th cents. A.D." Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary
states about the Samaritans: "At
what stage the pagan elements of Mesopotamian religion were removed from
Samaritan belief is impossible to determine.
But probably by the time of Nehemiah (about 450 B.C.), the Samaritans
considered themselves orthodox."
Later it notes the Samaritans have "retained [until today] their
belief in God as the unique Creator and Sustainer of all things." Note that the Samaritans revered the
Pentateuch, which includes the Shema of Deut. 6:4 and the First
Commandment. Although their canon was
severely truncated, since they only accepted the Books of Moses and possibly Joshua,
the doctrines of these books certainly aren't compatible with polytheism. To assert that the Samaritans were
polytheistic pagans who just had Yahweh as one more god among many does not
appear to be their theology in the first century. As for other kinds of evidence on how common paganism was in
Palestine, evidently Mithraism wasn't popular, because no Mithraic monument has
been found south of Sidon and Secia, which were to the north of where the
Samaritans lived.[103] In light of these similarities to Judaism,
claiming the first-century Samaritans were mostly pagan should be rejected
until further proof (such as citing from their writings) is provided.
CONDER
CONFUSES CITING THE PRIMARY SOURCES WITH USING THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS
In ICF (p. 51), I challenged Conder
thus: "I hereby challenge Conder
to prove specifically, by citing examples while quoting the original
versions of the myths themselves, such as from Plutarch, Ovid, or whomever,
not secondary works such as Doane, Walker, or Frazer, that "Every one
of the Sun-god saviors rose from the dead on the first day of the week after
three days in the tomb. (MB, p. 65; cf. p. 67). After a long discussion of books being
burned by medieval Catholicism, the off-key response this request generated was
this (BGJ, p. 28): "I HEREBY
CHALLENGE YOU ERIC SNOW TO QUOTE THE ORIGINALS [autographs of the NT]. WHEN YOU DO THAT ERIC, I WILL PRODUCE THE
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS!" Evidently, Conder misunderstood what I meant
by "original versions of the myths themselves." What I meant was to get Conder to give the
exact quotes and references from standard printed editions of classical
literature, hopefully available in English translation, for this claim about
these gods rising from the dead on Sunday.
There's no need to produce the autographs or any ancient manuscripts
copied down through the ages to answer this request. His statement in footnote 79 (same page) makes the
statement: "Even when he [Snow]
cites originals they are copies that were made many centuries after the events
that they outline." Since that's
all we have for just about any ancient historical document, including the OT,
this limitation affects Conder's research and mine equally. Original autographs of documents a dozen or
more centuries old are non-existent for any major ancient historical work,
pagan, Jewish, or Christian. For this
reason, textual criticism is important, since it allows for the publication of
printed editions of various ancient and medieval works with sufficient
confidence that they can be used as reasonably accurate reflections of the
autographs.
PRIMARY
AND SECONDARY SOURCES DISTINGUISHED
So what are "primary
sources" and "secondary sources"? Primary sources are accounts written down at the time of some
historical event or process' occurrence by witnesses, or by those same
witnesses (or those they told) later on.
These compose the raw material historians use to write secondary
sources. Secondary sources attempt to
interpret and explain what happened in the past through generalizations based
on various facts and opinions found in primary sources. For example, in the historiography of
American slavery, the Narrative (1845) of Frederick Douglass is a
primary source, since it relates his own personal experiences as a slave in
Maryland before successfully escaping.
By contrast, Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974) is a
secondary work that surveys and analyzes an enormous amount of primary
documentation as well as secondary literature by other historians to come to
basic conclusions and generalizations describing American slavery in the South
before the Civil War. Likewise, in the
debate between Conder and I, Doane and Nash are both secondary works dealing
with the pagan mystery religions, while citing the NT, OT, Aeschylus, Ovid,
Plutarch, etc. directly uses a primary source.
Disconcertingly, as noted earlier above, Mystery Babylon never
appears to cite any of the pagan mystery religions' myths out of some
standard printed edition.
WHY
PRINTED PRIMARY SOURCES ARE SOMETIMES ALL THAT HISTORIANS NEED
Now, in order to adequately use
primary sources, it's not always necessary to look at the original manuscript
or document, depending on whether copies of them, printed or on microfilm,
exist. If copies exist, or a printed
edition, that's normally unnecessary.
Admittedly, sometimes it may be necessary to look at the original, if it
exists. For example, I felt this need
when I studied Barrow Bennet's diary in the printed edition, which was
originally written by a large plantation owner who lived in Louisiana before
the Civil War. When studying the
appendix that listed how often Barrow whipped various slaves, it wasn't always
clear why certain names were listed there without the tell-tale "X"
that indicated Barrow had whipped that slave.
Were those slaves whose names appeared but had no "X" by them
whipped? Mostly I couldn't be certain
they weren't, except if I went through the hassle of trying to locate, travel
to, and laboriously read the handwritten original manuscript of the diary,
assuming it's even available to scholars to begin with. (It may be in private hands, not a library
or research institution's collection).
This issue mattered because Fogel and Engerman in Time on the Cross
claimed that Barrow didn't whip his slaves very often, raising issues that
Herbert Gutman and others responded to in the books Slavery and the Numbers
Game and Reckoning with Slavery.
Nevertheless, depending on what kind of project a historian is engaged
in, often he or she has no need to consult the original manuscript for some
historical document. If a historian is
analyzing how some governmental entity operated according to its own documents
written by its own officials and bureaucrats, most of these documents may have
literally no other copies in existence.
He or she then would have to travel to the place(s) where that
governmental body operated, and look through its archives or record office(s)
to figure out what its officials said or recorded about their actions or
beliefs behind the scenes, as opposed to what any newspapers or other outsiders
may have said about them. In a work
comparing American slavery with Russian serfdom, Peter Kolchin notes his
reliance upon printed primary sources for his subjects while making
"considerable use of the extensive secondary literature" on them as
well, but remarks the two shouldn't be confused.[104]
THE
NEED TO CHECK OUT PRIMARY SOURCES IN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DEBATES
The reason why I issued this challenge
to Conder was to get him to quote directly from assorted pagan myths from
various standard printed sources of them in English translation, instead of
giving us the potentially biased renditions found in the secondary works such
as Walker, Doane, etc. For example, I
am suspicious they may be using Christian terminology to describe pagan rituals
or beliefs, which then artificially forces or strengthens the parallels they're
attempting to draw. Although even
professional historians in thoroughly respectable works do this, it's always
potentially hazardous to quote another book you haven't seen through its
citation in a book you do have. The
quote could have been taken out of context, etc., which is a stock complaint
evolutionists make against books written by creationists that cite
evolutionists to help them make their points.
Proof that Walker or Doane shouldn't be necessarily trusted to get it
right concerning their use of the pagan myths comes from the one case where I
did look up directly the pagan myth being cited. When Doane cited the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus' play
"Prometheus Chained," he plainly and dishonestly quoted from it out
of context to make his point (see ICF, pp. 48-49). Intensifying Conder's debacle in relying on Doane on this point
was how he cited this example no less than three times in Mystery Babylon
(pp. 51, 62, 73). Conspicuously, Conder
makes no attempt in BGJ to salvage his case on this score. Hence, in the one case the original (in a
printed English translation) was consulted to give some context to the original
quote, Conder's case bombed. Given the
conscious dishonesty of Doane's quote from Aeschylus' play that Conder
mistakenly depended upon, I'm totally suspicious of this secondary work as well
as Walker's. I won't accept this
statement in Mystery Babylon (p. 65) as being true until Conder lines up
a dozen direct quotes from different myths from printed primary sources in
English translation which I can check myself using the resources of (say) the
Michigan State University and University of Michigan libraries to make sure
they weren't taken out of context or otherwise misinterpreted. I'm thoroughly convinced that no evidence
exists for any pagan savior god being resurrected on Sunday after being in the
tomb for three days in any primary sources available existing today (compare
the Pinchas Lapide quote found in BGJ, p. 25).
In a scientific dispute between
competing theories, scientists attempt to replicate the results supporting
claims they disagree with in their own labs.
In historiography, disputes between historians involve a somewhat
different verification process, assuming it's not just a matter of interpreting
those sources: By reading the primary
sources for themselves, they can check if something was quoted out of context
or otherwise misused in a colleague's work.[105] Importantly, I'm not questioning the
basic manuscript reliability or general soundness of the written accounts of
the pagan mystery religions in the Christian Church Fathers or elsewhere, but
Conder's interpretations of these sources (see BGJ, p. 29), especially any
that ignore chronological issues about their time of composition or read deep
meanings into superficial similarities.
What matters is what the NT teaches as true doctrine, not what errors
Sunday-keeping Christianity may have picked up later, since the commands of men
(such as on changing the Sabbath) can't override the words of God. I want Conder to lay out the printed sources
Doane and Walker relied upon for the claims they're making, hopefully in
English translations so most of us have the ability to check them out instead
of just scholars trained in Latin and Greek.
THE
ARGUMENT FROM BURNED BOOKS IS AN ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
Conder goes on and on about how
medieval Roman Catholicism burned books (BGJ, pp. 26-27), but I'm convinced
that if such evidence had survived it would have instead clearly exonerated
first-century Christianity from having depended on them. Knowing so much more specifically about the
mystery religions would have made the cases of critics like Conder, Doane, or
Walker harder to prove, since often all that's seized upon are superficial
similarities, such as the absurd equation of the taurobolium and water baptism
(the latter being, as inspired by God, a rite taken directly from the
Jews!) Furthermore, Conder is stuck
arguing from silence here. It may be
nice to think that had all these burned books not been torched, and assuming
the various barbarian invasions and upsets of the Medieval period had allowed their
continual copying down through the generations, his case would be proven. But as it is, he is speculating in a vacuum,
without any evidence to support his contentions. Fundamentally, historians have to depend on what evidence that
has (often fortuitously) been preserved, not speculate about how this or that
idea they have would be proven true had this or that manuscript or document
survived. My speculation that had these
pagan works been preserved, they would have made it easier to exonerate first-century
Christianity from having depended on the pagan mystery religions for its
doctrinal content, is, a priori, just as sound as Conder's contention
that they would have proven Christianity did depend on them for its
beliefs. There's no way to prove otherwise,
except (perhaps) extrapolating from the evidence that is available.
MEDIEVAL
CATHOLICISM'S BURNING OF BOOKS COMPARED TO JOSIAH'S IMAGE-SMASHING
Another factor to consider is why did
Medieval Catholicism burn these books (BGJ, p. 29 on Aztec [or Mayan]
books)? Was it to cover up its
past? Actually, it was out of (perhaps)
misguided enthusiasm for the ways of God.
Consider, for example, the bouts of iconoclasm (image/idol smashing)
that broke out in the Byzantine Empire and in Puritan England during its civil
war in the seventeenth century. Were
the motives of these traditional Christians smashing (say) idols or pictures of
Jesus or Mary any different in motive from the campaigns of Hezekiah or Josiah
against false pagan worship (II Kings 18:4, 23:3-20)? Conder's interpretation of Catholic persecution campaigns
that burned books is that their motive was to suppress evidence that
undermined the truth of Catholicism. My
interpretation of their motive is they were simply being
misguided but sincere religious people who sought to suppress manifestations of
false pagan religions just as Hezekiah or Josiah engaged in. Who's right? Well, that may require citing documents stating what these people
burning the books said were their reasons for doing it, assuming the
"public transcript" (James C. Scott's term) correctly reflects the
true motives of those involved.[106] Of course, since we don't have direct access
to their minds today, and can't ask them any questions, a common
historiographical problem in knowing the motives and beliefs of average people
in the past looms before us. This
question may be ultimately unanswerable.
But Pope Gregory, in one example Conder cites, says it was done
"lest its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation
of heaven" (BGJ, p. 27). This bit
of evidence doesn't agree with Conder's interpretation of these
acts. Ultimately, were they all that
different from Josiah cutting down Asherim? (II Kings 14:23). Consider the books on occult practices newly
converted Christians in Ephesus burned (Acts 19:19). Since these books reflected and explained practices that involved
false religious worship, they couldn't be sold to someone else, lest their
errors influence others. Consequently,
writings worth 50,000 pieces of silver went up in smoke. One can't sit back, centuries later, and
impute to them that the motive was the desire to suppress evidence without
citing some evidence that this was true!
As always, it seems Conder (BGJ, p. 26) can never admit a Catholic
having a pure motive (except, perhaps, when noting he or she has been duped
into a false religion). But even the
medieval church had sincere people such as St. Francis of Assisi (1181 or 1182
to 1226), despite they neither were true Christians nor had the power to
control or fully reform their church.
THE
DATE(S) OF COMPOSITION AREN'T THE DATES FOR SURVIVING ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS
Apparently, Conder confuses the dates
of the copying of manuscripts with when they were originally written, and the
doctrines of fourth-century Christianity as reflecting first-century Christianity's. For example, I argue that a late
fourth-century (376 A.D.) pagan inscription stating "reborn for eternity
in the taurobolium and criobolium" couldn't have influenced the beliefs of
the first-century church's concept of spiritual begettal (see ICF, p. 41). This point discusses a general problem with
those arguing paganism determined Christianity's doctrinal content and rituals
in which they ignore chronology when making comparisons.[107] Conder replies (BGJ, p. 28):
There
isn't any real evidence that the fixed doctrines of fourth century Christianity
can be dated to the first century. The
assertion that the modern religion we know as Christianity is the product of
the first century Jesus and his apostles may be acceptable to a Christian
fundamentalist, but it has little if any historical standing.
A
similar mistake is committed on p. 31:
Since
McDowell, Snow and Stinson maintain that the pagans borrowed from Christianity,
and they based this on the assertion that the earliest surviving writings of
paganism date only from the second century C.E., then how to they
explain this in light of the fact that the earliest surviving Gospel accounts
date from the fourth century C.E.?
Now,
the doctrine of spiritual begettal I'm referring to (traditional Protestants
would say "being born again") is based mainly on Jesus' words in John
3:1-8. If the Gospel of John was
written in (say) 100 A.D., then there's no way the kind of pagan thinking
reflected in a 376 A.D. inscription can be proven to have influenced it. Even the nineteenth-century liberal scholar
Baur dated John to 160 or 170 A.D., and Kummel, another liberal, dates it to
90-100 A.D. The Rylands fragment
(125-130 A.D.) proves the Fourth Gospel existed by the early second
century. A virtually complete copy of
John can be found in the Chester Beatty and/or Bodmer papyri (which date to 155
A.D. to 200 A.D. or so). Like any other
COG member, I maintain the teachings of fourth-century Sunday-keeping
Christianity involved a major apostasy from the truth. Many of its doctrines and practices, which
include the adoption of the date for Christmas from Mithraism and the
Saturnalia, simply can't be read back to the primitive church of Paul, Peter,
and John. What matters isn't what was
taught in the fourth-century church, but rather what are the doctrines of the
New Testament, which is the word of God and was written by c. 100 A.D. Only if Conder can cite from some pagan
document or inscription originally composed in or before 100 A.D. could
he prove paganism might have influenced the teachings of first-century
Christianity. For example, Conder cites
Justin Martyr as a source of information on the mystery religions (BGJ, p.
28). Although Justin wrote in the
middle of the second century, the oldest manuscript copies of his writings date
from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries (BGJ, p. 36). If the document is a copy made centuries
later by a medieval scribe, that would be fine for his case, assuming it was
reasonably accurately transmitted (the bibliographical test bears on this
point).[108] By the standard Conder uses to turn the NT
into a fourth-century document, Justin Martyr's writings (which he uses) become
a fourteenth-century document! Conder
earlier somewhat misstates the arguments of those saying chronology bars the
drawing of parallels between paganism and Christianity (BGJ, p. 25): "They next seek to dismiss the Mystery
Religion's [Is it one or many? The
error of combinationalism may lurk here‑‑EVS] influence on
Christianity by arguing that the surviving records detailing the customs and
doctrines of the Mysteries are not reliable because they are not as old as the
Christian New Testament." What
matters fundamentally is when those records were originally written,
not the age of the surviving manuscripts.
For example, Conder cites something out of the works of Tertullian (155
or 160 to after 220 A.D.) as evidence for a point he is making about the
mystery religions influencing Christianity (BGJ, pp. 28-29). Presumably, like Justin Martyr's, the oldest
copy of Tertullian's works follows his death by (perhaps) a thousand years, but
since they were written in the late second and early third century A.D., they
can be cited to illustrate that period's conditions when relevant. Although this should be all very obvious,
that an ancient document's date of composition usually isn't the date of the
oldest surviving copy, it seems to have been forgotten.
WAS
MITHRAISM A MAJOR FORCE IN FIRST-CENTURY ROME?
After ICF (p. 40) notes that M.J.
Vermaseren's statement that, "no Mithraic monument can be dated earlier
than the end of the first century," Conder replies (BGJ, p. 28): "Need I point out that no Christian
monument[s] at all exist from this time period, including a fragment of the New
Testament." Importantly, this
exchange implicitly concedes the reality that both these religions, not just
Christianity, were still just getting off the ground in the first-century. As David Ulansey explains: "Mithraism began to spread throughout
the Roman Empire in the first century C.E., reached its peak in the third
century, and finally succumbed to Christianity at the end of the fourth
century." To explain the origins
and beliefs of Mithraism, he brilliantly theorizes based upon the iconography
(pictures inscribed in stone as reliefs) found within the places (often
underground caves) where the Mithra's worshippers gathered, mithraea (singular,
mithraeum). The tauroctony was the
central image, featuring Mithras slaying a bull while facing away from it. Seeing these stone reliefs as constellations,
not as (like Cumont, the earlier very influential historian on Mithraism)
depictions of Persian myths, he maintains the god Mithras was the local god of
Tarsus (in Asia Minor, Paul's birthplace) Perseus (one of the constellations
also) renamed. As he states: "Our argument so far has shown that
there is good evidence that Mithras represents the constellation Perseus, and
that the other tauroctony figures [on stone] represent the constellations which
lay on the celestial equator when the spring equinox was in Taurus." The first reference to Mithras in his
western form, when Plutarch wrote about the Cilician pirates, whom the Roman
general Pompey defeated and hauled back to Italy in chains, places them in the
same area of Asia Minor. Mithras'
slaying of the bull (which stands for Taurus) symbolizes the control he has
over the material universe. This idea
came out of how Stoic philosophers in Asia Minor, who had long been interested
in astrology, astral religion, and speculating about the "Great Year"
(i.e., a cyclical view of history, not Judeo-Christianity's linear view),
possibly reacted to the ancient astronomer Hipparchus' discovery of the
precession of the equinoxes (c. 128 b.c.).[109] Being superstitious men, they found the
discovery of some hitherto unknown motion of the cosmos a point of departure
for religious speculation.
Conveniently, since the precession of the equinoxes had moved from
Taurus to Aries most immediately in preceding centuries, the constellation
Perseus, which is just above Taurus in the sky, was a useful figure to represent
his ending the age of Taurus to usher in the age of Aries. As Ulansey further explains:
The
hero killing the bull would symbolize that cosmic force which had, in ancient
times, destroyed the power of the bull by moving the entire cosmic structure in
such a way that the spring equinox moved out of the constellation of the Bull
and into its current position in Aries.
Thus would arise the core of the image of the tauroctony.
Importantly
for our purposes, Ulansey basically denies any connection between
western Mithraism and Persia's Zoroastrianism and the Mithraism of the Magi of
the east.
EVIDENCE
FOR MITHRAISM'S ORIGINATION FROM ASIA MINOR, NOT PERSIA OR INDIA
Now, at this point, you may be asking
why is Ulansey's explanation relevant to Conder's view of Mithraism in Mystery
Babylon? The fundamental issue
becomes whether western Mithraism had any real connection with Persia and its
myths at all. Ulansey maintains the
name "Mithras" was simply lifted by the Cilician pirates (who
numbered at least 20,000) from the local king Mithridates who sided with them,
who (on coins) compared himself with the god/constellation Perseus! Maintaining western Mithraism had no organic
connection to Persian religion he states, "even if my theory is correct,
and Western Mithraism originally had nothing to do with ancient Iran," he
still concedes that some authentic Iranian traditions may have picked up by the
cult as it spread within the Roman Empire.
Since we lack writings by devotees to Mithras about their beliefs (after
all, they wanted them kept secret, i.e. kept "a mystery"), Ulansey's
ingenious reconstruction of their core beliefs has to be seen as ultimately
speculative. Nevertheless, since his
book opens describing how two top scholars on Mithraism attacked (one
moderately, one radically) Cumont's attempts (which had become the standard
paradigm in the field) to explain Mithraism's iconography through Persian myths
at the First International Congress on Mithraism in 1971, his analysis can't be
casually dismissed.[110] Given Ulansey's reconstruction of
Mithraism's origins, my statements in ICF (p. 40) about Mithraism spreading
from Persia in the east I no longer regard as accurate. This may explain why the Mithraeum found in
Dura-Europos has such a relatively late date likely (168 A.D.) despite this
city's location on the Euphrates River.
If western Mithraism's origins lay not in nearby Persia, but in Cilicia
and its capital of Tarsus in southern Asia Minor in the late second and early
first centuries b.c., then the second century date becomes more
understandable. Such a reconstruction
as Ulansey's for Mithraism calls into question the Hislop/Conder doctrine that
states (perhaps crudely summarized here) "All false religions' basic ideas
came from Nimrod's Babylon ultimately."
MITHRAISM
DIDN'T HAVE A STRONG PRESENCE IN ROME IN THE FIRST CENTURY
Conder believes that Mithraism had a
strong presence in the Roman Empire in the first century (MB, p.
110): "Mithraism, don't forget,
was the dominant form of the Babylonian Mysteries present in Rome when the
Christian Church was founded, and Christianity clearly and indisputably
reflects it!" In the context of S.
Wikander's denial that the god Mithras of Iran had anything to do with its
namesake mystery religion in Rome, the French scholar Robert Turcan surveys the
evidence for linking western Mithraism with Iran and the Magi. Despite defending Cumont's basic viewpoint,
he still notes in the context of its first century b.c. form in Asia Minor
that: "What isn't required is to say
that it existed now such that it expressed itself by epigraphic monuments or
reliefs in the second century after Christ." This statement still concedes that Mithraism couldn't have been a
dominating religious force within the Roman Empire in the first century A.D.,
or else the Mithraea, etc. would have been built by then. Some believed that Pompey's hauling in
20,000 Cilician pirates could have established the worship of Mithra on Italian
soil in the first century b.c. In reply
against this idea, he states: "In
fact, no archeological or literary evidence confirms directly this hypothesis." The first literary evidence for Mithra's
existence in Latin literature appears in a c. 80 A.D. reference by P. Papinius
Statius. The oldest image of Mithras
killing the bull is in marble consecrated by a slave of a man who was known to
serve in a position under the Emperor Trajan in 102 A.D. The evidence points to the cult being
solidly implanted in Rome itself by the last quarter of the first century
A.D. The Mithraea multiplied in the
city of Rome from the second to fourth centuries, not earlier. Even in the area Ulansey maintains it was
born, Asia Minor, major uncertainties remain about the case of sanctuaries
found in Pergamon and Kapikaya. Its
manifestations there were sparse, including even Cilicia, although it was
present in Lydia's Savcilar around 77-78 A.D.
It spread into Syria (being in the cities of Tyre, Sidon, Laodicea, and
Caesarea of Palestine (but evidently leaving no monuments‑‑see my
point about the Samaritans above) and North Africa, arriving in Morocco around
190 A.D. It didn't influence strongly
the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), excepting two areas, by 155
A.D. Areas where Mithraism was strong
included valleys along major rivers (Rhone, Rhine, and Danube), certain
administrative and/or commercial centers, and along the frontiers where the
legions took up their posts protecting the Empire from invasion. The first emperor to officially
declare his belief in Mithraism, rather ironically, was the main one
immediately preceding Constantine, Diocletian, who had so badly persecuted the
Christians for ten years starting under his rule (re: Rev. 2:10). Although
evidence indicates Emperor Septimius Severus (196 A.D.) couldn't have ignored
this god, Diocletian's 307 A.D. declaration in the context of restoring a
mithraeum with two others constitutes the first "clear and neat"
official affirmation, in which the god was called the "protector of their
power." Such evidence, including
the two second-century dates he lists for the spreading of Mithraism by two
legions, indicate Mithraism was still only really getting off the ground in the
first century A.D. within the confines of the Roman Empire, just as
Christianity was.[111]
SOME
SPECIFIC WAYS MITHRAISM DIFFERS FROM CHRISTIANITY
When determining whether the doctrines
of Mithraism could have influenced first-century Christianity's beliefs, this
fundamental problem arises, as Turcan explains: "Mithraic art is like a book of images whose text has been
lost." Unlike the case for the
myths of the Olympian gods like Zeus, Athena, or Apollos, no "Bible"
of western Mithraism exists, since the rites and core beliefs were intended to
be kept secret (i.e., a "mystery") to a select few, and so were
passed along orally. The main evidence
comes from (1) Mithraic monuments and inscriptions and (2) the ancient literary
evidence on this cult. But as Turcan
states: "The major difficulty
comes from the fact that the first doesn't always agree with the second, which
are indirect and second hand, seeing that they don't arise from authentic
practicing Mithraists." Still,
certain aspects of their beliefs do appear clear when compared to Christianity's. Turcan attacks those, such as Cumont, Loisy,
and H. Jonas, who reduce the various mystery cults to "religions of
salvation," and simplistically ignore the differences between them. While noting that the Mithraism's doctrines
are rather badly known, he still contradicts the claims Conder makes in MB
(p. 33) about Mithra by declaring:
"Mithra wasn't a god [who was] dead and resurrected. He didn't identify himself in any manner
with the victim of the sacrifice . . ." Furthermore, Mithraism had no place for a
female deity nor for women as active participants in its rituals, unlike other
mystery religions (or, I would add, first-century Christianity). "The salvation that he gives first is
physical safety from living beings."
Inscriptions such as "the fruitful earth" and the
"guardian of fruits" show "the major worry that animated
Mithraists" was the "preservation of life, vigilance towards
life." In one sense they were
collectively saved already, "in the world, with the creation of Oromasdes[/Zeus‑‑a
reference to Persian myth]. The problem
of individual salvation and beyond the earth never achieves standing. It's a question of bio-cosmic [earthly]
salvation." The comparison between
Mithra's ascension in a solar chariot and Christ's has been made too quickly,
"because Mithra never died. Never
being descended from heaven (but totally to the contrary coming from an earthly
rock [in myth]), he [Mithras] has no need to show again in it in order to
affirm his triumph over death, after his acts in the world and for the
world." Implicitly, Turcan is contrasting
John 6:33, 42, 51 with the myth saying Mithras was born out of a rock. Furthermore, apparently like the Stoics,
Mithraism must have also believed in the transmigration or reincarnation of
souls since the great stellar year (the Great Year) involves a repeating
cycle. If Turcan is correct, then Nash
was wrong to say Mithraism believed in a linear view of time like Christianity,
at least in its western version.[112] Clearly, all these differences show that
while some common terminology might be used by both Christianity and Mithraism,
such as some kind of "salvation," the same words certainly didn't
mean the same thing here.
Fundamentally, the pagans sought deliverance from fate, while the
Christians sought redemption from sin's death penalty. All this illustrates a key point Moreland
makes when discussing the alleged parallels between Christianity and the
mystery religions in a general summary form:
Differences
far outweigh similarities. The
mystery religions have a consort, a female deity who is central to the
myth. They have no real resurrection,
only a crude resuscitation. The
mysteries have little or no moral context, fertility being what the mystery
rites sought to induce. The mysteries
are polytheistic, syncretistic legends unrelated to historical individuals.[113]
If
percentage terms could be applied, one might say they are 10% alike and 90%
different. Clearly, for Conder to
maintain Mithraism and Christianity are alike involves selecting out the few
superficial similarities while blotting out the reality of far greater
differences in theology and ritual.[114]
MERE
PREEXISTENCE DOESN'T PROVE DEPENDENCE
Now Conder argues, based upon Justin
Martyr's statement that Mithraism had a diabolical imitation of communion, that
Christianity got it from Mithraism (BGJ, p. 28). Conspicuously, this is a case of selective perception: Conder focuses our attention on the 10%,
ignoring the 90% in which Christianity isn't like Mithraism. BGJ makes no attempt to rebut the general
theological differences between Mithraism and Christianity described in ICF
(pp. 43-44) or those between Jesus' death and that of various "pagan
savior-gods" (pp. 47-50). He
claims that since no NT manuscripts from the first century exist as evidence
for proving it was written then, there's no way to deny Christianity borrowed
from Mithraism. Of course, even liberal
scholars like Kummel believe most of the NT was written by 100 A.D., so
Conder's implicit assertions for a later date aren't supported even by many
higher critics. Next, consider the
logical fallacy described above in a footnote:
"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc," "After this,
therefore because of this." That
something happens before something else doesn't prove the first thing caused
the second to happen. Instead, specific
evidence must be found linking the two together in a causal relationship, such
as through near proximity and a sharing of causal agents (people here). As noted above based on archeological
evidence, Mithraism had little presence in Palestine itself, the birthplace of
Christianity. The NT itself portrays
the Last Supper in the context of the Jewish Passover festival. There's no evidence from the NT or the
writings of the early Christian Church Fathers that Christianity's leaders such
as the apostles were gentiles converted from Mithraism or some other pagan
mystery religion.[115] Furthermore, it's known that the Qumran
community did have a communal meal that looked forward to a "future
banquet with the Messiah." Given
the Jewish cultural matrix Christianity was born within and its geographical
separation from archeological evidence of Mithraic monuments, this meal
among (presumably) the Essenes is certainly a more plausible candidate for
influencing Christianity, if one denies that Jesus Himself was the originator
of the Christian Passover ceremony.[116] The cultural context for the origins of
Christianity, including its initial leaders' ancestry, is always portrayed
(when known) as lying in Judaism and Judea (although Paul was from Tarsus), not
paganism and gentile areas. In the
Gospels, Jesus avoided visiting gentile, Samaritan, and Hellenized Jewish
areas, with the three exceptions of the village of Sychar (John 4) and the
Tyre/Sidon (Luke 6) and Ceasarea Philippi (Mark 8) regions.[117] Even if Mithraism was proven to have a
ceremonial meal like Christianity's before the latter's existed, that still
doesn't prove a causal relationship between the two.
THE
NEED TO LOOK AT THE SPECIFIC MEANINGS OF COMMUNION AND BAPTISM
The specifics of the rituals also can
militate against believing one came from the other. It appears Mithraism had two different kinds of ceremonial
meals. Besides water and bread, as
Justin Martyr knew, Mithraists also ate meat and drank wine in their Mithraea,
as archeological evidence (bones and inscriptions) indicate. Pictures in the St. Prisca Mithraeum in Rome
indicate roosters, a ram, a bull, and a pig would be sacrificed. But this leads to the next issue: How do we know they applied the same meanings
to these ceremonial meals? The context
of the Passover ceremony is the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior from the
death penalty of sin. Deducing what the
devotees of Mithraism thought while going through their meals is hardly
clear. Apparently, it involved in one
version commemorating the sun-god Helios driving his chariot, which while
Mithras was behind him, he seizes his waving mantle and jumps on. The other version involves commemorating a
feast of Helios and Mithras together.
It's a real stretch to find some similar meaning in meals dedicated to
Mithras and Helios to the Christians' acceptance of Jesus as a Savior from
sin. Similarly, consider the example
(Conder doesn't raise this in BGJ) of baptism.
Persian texts (assuming these had any connection with western Mithraism)
can be cited stating that before devotee can take libations to Mithras, they
have to wash themselves. However, the specifics
go against seeing Christianity getting its idea of baptism from Mithraism,
because these involved multiple washings over periods of days, as well
as undergoing multiple "strokes" (whippings). Christian baptism was only supposed to be
done once, unless done in error or by heretics the first time. Then, did Mithraism's interpretation of its
ritual washings match Paul's explanation of baptism as symbolizing the death
and resurrection of Christ as well as Christian's putting to death the old
sinful life and coming up to a new righteous earthly life, giving hope of
eternal life to come (Rom. 6:3-6)?
Unless evidence is found showing Mithraism had a similar view of baptism
taking off sins, etc., it's mighty hard to say Christianity got it from
Mithraism. Finally, again reflecting on
the post hoc fallacy described above, the NT portrays baptism as coming
from a Jewish context, such as the ministry of John the Baptist. Judaism itself had long practiced the rite
(see ICF, p. 42 for further Jewish examples).
Granted the basic non-existence of Mithraism in Palestine in the first
century, and the NT's portrayal of Judaism as Christianity's womb, it makes far
more sense to see water baptism in Christianity as coming from Judaism, not
Mithraism. Similarly, the sacrifice of
a bull in Mithraism had a different meaning from what it would to Christians or
Jews. (Of course, the Christians did
away with animal sacrifices entirely).
As Patterson explains: "The
bull was neither a sacrifice to Mithra, nor a symbol of him [vs. MB, p.
110]. The blood of the bull (which is
the life) and its seed (which is the power of generation) gave new life to the
earth." Then saying the Christian
Church Fathers borrowed from Mithraism becomes absurd when they condemn the
very ceremony they supposedly borrowed‑‑after all, if they had the
typical pagan mentality of tolerant non-exclusivism, of live and let live,
they'd see nothing wrong in what they borrowed from. Even Cumont himself suggests the reason for the similarity
between the two religions stems from both originating in the same general
Middle Eastern culture which may have had similar ideas of how to commune with
the divine: "Resemblances do not
suppose necessarily an imitation. Many
of the resemblances between the Mithraic doctrine and the Catholic faith are
explained by the community of their oriental origin."[118]
HOW
SOME BORROWING BY PAGAN RELIGIONS FROM CHRISTIANITY COULD HAVE HAPPENED
Conder maintains that defenders of
Christianity can't both deny important similarities exist between the pagan
mystery religions and Christianity, yet say sometimes the former did borrow
from the latter: "If there are no
similarities then there is no question of borrowing either by one or the other
religion" (BGJ, p. 30). Of course,
with some slight qualifications, this objection can easily be disposed of: While (say) 90% of the time Christianity
differs from paganism, 10% of the time the two are similar. Hence, at least some of the (superficial)
similarities Conder sees (the "10%") between Christianity and
paganism may have originated in the former.
In the fourth century A.D. especially, as Roman paganism sharply slid
downwards in popularity, the non-exclusive, live-and-let-live philosophy of
paganism could easily have manifested itself by adopting aspects of a powerful
rival religion (in this case, Christianity).
Of course, actually proving this is difficult, since we can't
interview today the person who (say) inscribed "taurobolio cribolioque
in aeternum renatus" ("reborn for eternity in the taurobolium and
criobolium") on a Roman altar in 376 A.D. about what he was thinking when
engraving it and where he got this idea from (see ICF, p. 41). But unless one can produce inscriptions or
documents with such ideas written originally considerably earlier than 300 A.D.
or even 100 A.D., it becomes hard to prove such pagan thinking could have
influenced first-century Christianity, especially if the source isn't found or
originally written in Palestine. A
similar problem comes up for a wall painting dated to the late second century
A.D. taken from the Santa Prisca Mithraeum in Rome referring to being saved by
the shedding of blood. As Turcan
properly observes: "M. Simon has
declared it as a mark of Christian influence, but this remains to be
demonstrated." Since today we
can't get into the heads of these people to know their thinking, or how it
evolved while Christianity spread and became a serious rival, there's no way to
prove such influence occurred.
But the later the date for the similarity, as Christianity developed
into a more serious competitor over the centuries, the more intrinsically
plausible pagans borrowing from Christianity becomes, when we remember their
non-exclusivistic mentality:
Christianity would be just another cult or religion to get ideas from
about how to worship God/the gods.
Hence, the 391 A.D. inscription that connects Mithraism and rebirth
proves nothing about Christian dependence on Mithraism's teachings, since by
then the pagan cults were on a decline headed for doom due to (Sunday-keeping)
Christianity's growth at that time.[119]
A
CURIOUS CUSTOM OF THE ROMAN ARMY MISINTERPRETED
Conder quotes from Marcus Minucius
Felix and Tertullian to try to prove that:
"To me Eric, these statements [sic] sounds like your own Christian
authorities are backing up my historical presentation that there were indeed
crucified savior gods long before the time of Jesus" (BGJ, p. 29). But once one looks up the references and the
commentary on the first one, it becomes obvious neither Felix nor Tertullian
were referring to the crucifixion of pagan gods, but to the practice of Roman
legionnaires of nailing onto crosses or poles the clothes and/or equipment of
vanquished enemies. In context, the
defender of Christianity in Felix's work is trying to point out the pagans use
crosses as well, as against the pagan's charge that they used as an object of
veneration "a man who was punished with death as a criminal and the fell
wood of his cross." Notice the
military connection of part of Felix's statement Conder quotes: "And, surely, your military ensigns,
standards, and banners, what are they but gilded and decorated crosses? Your trophies of victory copy not merely the
appearance of a simple cross but that of a man fastened to it as well." In his notes on Felix's work, G.W. Clark,
the professor of classical studies at the University of Melbourne,
commments:
These
standards were apposite illustrations, as they were objects of military
veneration, for examples see Tac. Ann. 1.39.7, 2.17.2 . . .
Oathes might be taken by them, Livy 26.48.12 . . . Trophies (see n. 388) also occur in Tert. Apol.
16.7, Ad nat. 1.12.14; Just. Apol. 1.55. The "appearance" of a figure of a
man would be the captured helmet, shield, greaves, weapons, etc. of the
conquered enemy hung up on the monument; for the classic description, see Verg.
Aen. 11.5 ff. . . . Note also Joseph. Antiq. 15.272
ff.: Herod's trophies gave offense; the
leaders said they were "images of men" and Herod ordered them to be
stripped to the bare wood.[120]
To
have a better feel for this custom, notice the extract Clark referred to from
Virgil's Aeneid. Although it's
rendered in poetic and (now) somewhat archaic language by John Dryden, a
careful reading of it shows this curious practice of the Roman army (here,
projected into the mythological past by Virgil) doesn't involve a reference to
a crucified God-Man:
The
pious chief, whom double cares attend/ For his unburied soldiers and his
friend,/ Yet first to Heav'n perform'd a victor's vows:/ He bar'd an ancient
oak of all her boughs;/ Then on a rising ground the trunk he plac'd/ Which with
the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd./
The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn,/ Now on a naked snag in
triumph borne,/ Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar,/ A trophy sacred to
the God of War./ Above his arms, fix'd
on the leafless wood,/ Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood:/ His
brazen buckler on the left was seen;/ Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung
between; And on the right was placed his corslet, bor'd;/ And to the neck was
tied his unavailing sword.
As
one continues reading in Aeneid, it becomes obvious the dead Mezentius
whose equipment was hung up on the stake was indeed a "sacrifice"‑‑as
to "the first fruits of war."[121] No feeling of worship or sacrifice for the
sins of humanity is found here, but instead a sense of celebration over a
vanquished enemy. Again, similar to
Conder's reference through Doane to Prometheus Chained, Conder's
reference doesn't check out when examined and the context consulted. But how many people who've accepted Conder's
teachings ever bothered to go through that level of hassle to check any of his
references?
HOW
COULD LATIN AMERICAN INDIAN BELIEFS BE LIKE CHRISTIANITY'S?
Conder asks: "How, Eric, can you explain the great similarities between
this religion [of the Latin American Indians] and the tenants of Christianity
when it was found among a people who were cut off from Europe and the Middle
East for at least 2,500 years?" (BGJ, p. 29). First of all, since Conder's treatment of the similarities
between Christianity and the Roman Empire's pagan mystery religions doesn't
inspire confidence, it's likely he has similarly oversold the similarities
between the Catholicism of the Conquistators and the Indian religions of the
Aztecs, Mayans, and/or Incas. The
specifics of belief, not superficial similarities of some rituals, would have
to be examined. Furthermore, the
Catholicism of the sixteenth-Europe had sucked up the pagan practices and/or
beliefs of Europe for over a millennium:
For Conder to score points here, it's necessary to compare the beliefs
of the New Testament and the first-century church to these Indian religions,
not sixteenth-century Catholicism's.
But now it's necessary to reconsider McDowell's "pedagogy of
God" argument (BGJ, p. 32). Could
have the pagans held onto some remnant primeval revelation from the time of the
immediate post-flood patriarchs? Many
cultures have stories about some flood wiping out most of the human race, such
as the Mandan Indians. The latter even
had a "Mystery Play of the Flood" in which "the only man"
was saved in "the big canoe."
Surely these stories, or the Babylonians' The Epic of Gilgamesh,
don't prove the book of Genesis' record about the Deluge Noah endured is
false! In the context of discussing
recent anthropological studies of various primitive peoples and tribes, Henry
Morris writes: "Further, their
present animalistic religious system can usually be shown to represent a
deterioration from primitive monotheism and higher moral standards now only
dimly preserved in their traditions."
Ackerman describes how anthropology and scholars before its existence as
a discipline had a running battle over whether religion evolved upwards from
animism and polytheism to monotheism, or whether it had degenerated from
monotheism down to polytheism and animism, for primitive peoples. For example, among the Australian
aborigines, there were stories about a high god (the "All-Father")
who had created the world and instituted human morality. But then for some reason he was shunted
aside, and had little influence on the world day to day. Does this story invalidate the Pentateuch's
description of God? Andrew Lang, having
once upheld the evolutionists' view, changed his mind, and became the chief
defender of the degeneration view. Lang
devotes a chapter of one of his books to refuting fellow anthropologist Tylor's
claims that missionaries/Christian influence caused primitive peoples to have
high conceptions of God. Although he
initially says he won't defend the idea that among the American Indians there
was a widespread belief in a "Great Spirit," he ends up effectively
nearly doing that seemingly by citing the works by various explorers and/or
missionaries and refuting the counter-explanations that the Indians just got
these stories from Christian teachings.[122] Hence, the resemblances Conder (BGJ, p. 29)
says people saw between Indian religion and Roman Catholicism in Latin America
soon after the conquest are possibly rooted in remnants of primeval revelation
to the patriarchs.
ARE
SOME ACCOUNTS OF VARIOUS PAGAN GODS SIMILAR TO THE NT ON JESUS' LIFE?
In order to shore up his position
against Vance Stinson and me, Conder maintains that in some versions of
the myths stories like the New Testament's description of Jesus' life appear,
even if in others they are very different:
The
unique history of mythology means that one can find, for example, that when the
Egyptian goddess Isis became romanized, she had attributes far different from
those found in ancient Egypt. When
Mithra came to Rome from Persia [This statement assumes Ulansey and Wikander
are wrong and Turcan and Cumont are right‑‑EVS] he lost some of his
Persian attributes and picked up some others from the romanized Greek myths of
Adonis and Dionysus. . . . I say that if, as good Christians, these
men [McDowell, Stinson, and Snow] are really concerned with truth, why not
present the accounts of ancient savior gods [such as Osiris] whose stories are
identical to the birth, life and death of Jesus? (BGJ, pp. 30-31).
Now,
the challenge here is for Conder to prove, citing from standard printed primary
sources of the myths available in English translation, that indeed such
"identical" myths to Jesus' life exist for Osiris, Adonis, Attis,
etc. For example, above (footnote 22)
the issue of Persian Mithraism's (or Zoroastrianism's) alleged accounts of a
supposed Virgin birth weren't written down until the fifth century
A.D. Furthermore, so far as these two
sources are clear, the women in question became pregnant due to sexual
intercourse with a god, as opposed to being impregnated by the Holy
Spirit. The earlier story that
circulated within the Roman Empire, as recorded by the Catholic Church Fathers
Conder leans upon in other contexts, concerns Mithras being born from a
rock. This merely brings us back to the
challenge made to Conder in ICF (p. 40) about citing from the primary sources
the myths about Mithras in "according to the legends as circulated in
or before the second century."
Unless we want to say Jesus was born from a rock, it certainly doesn't
appear there's an "identical" story to Jesus' here! Similarly, when I flip open my source book
of documents helpful for studying the Gospels, I find the version of the myth
of Hercules it has is Stinson's.
Written by Diodorus Siculus, this version appears to depend on a second
century b.c. piece of writing by Matris of Thebes: "When Zeus lay with Alkmene, he tripled the length of the
night, and, in the increased length of time spent in begetting the child, he
foreshadowed the exceptional power of the child who was to be begotten."[123] Conder cites a secondary source, The
Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, to assert some other version of
the myth of Hercules exists in which the "consort didn't lie with her
until after her Divine Child was born."
However, due to my experience in looking up Doane's citation of
Aeschylus' play Prometheus Chained, I don't trust Walker to have cited
it correctly and in context. Knowing
how Herbert Gutman and Company in Slavery and the Numbers Game and Reckoning
with Slavery destroyed Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel's Time on the
Cross by (in part) noting the latter's misuse and misinterpretation of
primary sources (especially probate records), I know full well even thoroughly
respectable academics in secondary works can't always be automatically trusted
to get things right. (Fogel, for
example, recently won a Nobel prize‑‑but that doesn't mean his
interpretation of American slavery was even half right). If Conder wishes to refute ICF's string of
examples showing various myths about alleged "pagan sun god-saviors"
that don't approximate the Gospels' description of the life of Jesus, then it's
time to cite and quote from standard primary sources in English translation by
Plutarch, Virgil, Ovid, Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Diodorus, Tertullian, Justin
Martyr, etc. to prove that indeed the myths do resemble the Gospels, NOT
FROM SECONDARY SOURCES SUCH AS WALKER, DOANE, OR ROBERTSON.[124]
DID
THE WORD "CANNIBAL" ORIGINATE IN PHOENICIAN OR IN CARIBBEAN INDIAN?
By asserting that close ties exist
between the Spanish and Phoenician languages, Conder defends Hislop's claim
that "cannibal" came from "cahna" (priest) and
"Baal," the Canaanite rain god (BGJ, p. 32). He denies the correctness of the etymology
found in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language
that derives the word from Caribbean Indians.
This claim runs into major problems.
First, according to Merriam-Webster's, the word
"cannibal" was first used in English in 1553. This timing certainly fits the context of
the Age of Discovery. Was the word ever
used in any language, including Spanish, before c. 1500? If it wasn't, then the word almost certainly
couldn't come from religious practices of some 2000 years earlier without
leaving some detectable trace in-between unless a specific record of (say) some
scholar coining it from these two words can be found. Second, two encyclopedias deny Conder's interpretation. Let's begin with The American Peoples
Encyclopedia: "When first
brought into contact with Europeans, the Caribs were a fierce, restless people,
marauders on the mainland, corsairs on the high seas, and undoubted cannibals‑‑this
very word (cannibal) being a Spanish formation from Canib=Calib=Carib." Then there's The World Book Encyclopedia: "Spanish discoverers at the time of
Columbus found that the Carib, an Indian tribe living in the West Indies,
followed the custom of eating other human beings. The modern word cannibal came from a mispronunciation of
their name."[125] Third, as a Indo-European language, Spanish
is fundamentally different from Phoenician, a Semitic language. Although this distinction doesn't prevent
scattered loan words, etc. from crossing into one language from another (in
this case especially, via Arabic when the Moors ruled at least some part of Spain
for c. 700 years), seeing fundamental similarities between the two in grammar
and syntax certainly looks a priori implausible. Being firm monotheists worshipping the God
Allah, it's not terribly likely the Muslim conquerors of Spain would have
passed along the term "priest of Baal" to their Catholic Christian
subjects. Being familiar with how
feminists routinely assert "history" came from "his story,"
a patent absurdity exposed the moment one bothers to consult a dictionary
containing etymologies, I'm suspicious of people claiming unusual derivations
for words, especially when the subject of British-Israelism has had more than
its share of "crank scholarship."[126]
THE
EARLY PAGAN REFERENCES TO JESUS BRIEFLY RESURVEYED
Conder puts some effort into trying to
undermine the validity of the evidence from several early ancient pagan writers
about Jesus (see BGJ, pp. 35-36; cf. ICF, pp. 19-20). On these issues as well as the Testimonium of Josephus, the
interested reader is strongly suggested to turn to McDowell and Wilson's He
Walked Among Us, pp. 35-54, which deals with various critiques skeptics use
against these references. For example,
the passage in Tacitus is considered by top specialists in the field as
authentic, as coming from the hand of Tacitus himself. Conder's alternative theory, that it came
from a work called Chronicle of Sulpicius Serverus (c. 403 A.D.), is
inherently implausible because a passage from a later work isn't apt to be
randomly dropped into another, earlier work, especially when the reference
to Jesus is so uncomplimentary, by some nameless Christian scribe. Even Wells, who Conder refers his readers
to, concedes the passage is "Tacitan Latin," i.e., reflects his
style, not someone else's. Claiming
it's unreliable because "the passage is not mentioned by any of his
contemporaries," is our old friend, the argument from silence. First, as Blaiklock systematically surveys
what was written in the first-century that has survived (which isn't much),
there isn't much one would think a priori that would mention Jesus. Of course, since the barbarian invasions, etc.
torched so much down through the centuries, such references easily could have
been lost‑‑we don't even have all of Tacitus' works from the second
century, let alone other ancient histories deemed of lesser merit. The ancient Egyptian records have nothing
about the Exodus or the Plagues at the time (c. 1446 b.c.) they occurred: Does that mean they never happened? The argument from silence annihilates the OT
and the NT equally when used on both.[127] Suetonius mentions "Chrestus"
causing disturbances in Rome that led to Claudius expelling the Jews (an event
that confirms Luke's accuracy‑‑Acts 18:2). Although "Chrestus" was a fairly
common name, it was a Greek, not a non-Hellenized Jewish name. Since this name was recognizable to
gentiles, they easily could have corrupted the similar sounding title
"Christus," meaning "anointed" for it, when someone wrote
down some (police) report about it.
They simply were unlikely candidates for familiarity with Jewish
eschatology or prophecy. Since the book
of Acts records all sorts of riots and disturbances caused by Paul and others
preaching about Christ and/or his message of the kingdom of God, it's not
surprising someone in the early church in Rome could have stirred up a ruckus
among the Jews by talking about Jesus being the Messiah. Hence, the report of preaching about Christ
plausibly got garbled into one "Chrestus" preaching in Rome. Conder goes on to undermine Justin Martyr's
value as a witness for the existence of public record(s) in Rome about Jesus'
crucifixion under Pilate, forgetting for the moment how this argument similarly
destroys the value of Justin's testimony to him about the similarity between
Mithraism and Christianity in having a ceremonial meal (re: BGJ, p. 28). So why is Justin Martyr a reliable source about Mithraism's
similarities to Christianity, but unreliable for his witness about public
documents in Rome attesting to Jesus' crucifixion? His statements about records on Jesus' death aren't phrased as
"assertions . . . based on nothing more than hypothesis,"
as the Catholic Encyclopedia states.
Concerning Jesus' birth, he states:
"Now there is a village in the land of the Jews, thirty-five stadia
from Jerusalem, in which Jesus Christ was born, as you can ascertain also from
the registers of the taxing made under Cyrenius, your first procurator
in Judea." On the crucifixion, he
states: "And that these things did
happen you can ascertain from the Acts of Pontius Pilate." As McDowell and Wilson plausibly state, this
document could easily have been destroyed by a future imperial administration
either to deny Christians from using the reference or just because it was
deemed unimportant.[128] Clearly, before accepting Conder's
statements on this subject, the reader should consult what traditional
Christians have to say about it, not just Michael Martin's The Case Against
Christianity or G.A. Wells' The Jesus Legend.
DOES
OLD TESTAMENT DOCTRINE ABOUT GOD CONTRADICT THE NEW TESTAMENT'S?
Conder's arguments based on purported
Old Testament theology against the New Testament's doctrine of God all have the
stale air feel of a priori rationalizations. They all implicitly assume God couldn't have revealed more about
Himself than had been in the OT. The
argument about God not changing was already dealt with above as being taken out
of context, as referring to God's dealings with Israel in particular. The statement that Jehovah is "the One
who is the same yesterday, today, and forever" appears to be a citation of
the New Testament: "Jesus Christ
is the same yesterday, and today, yes and forever" (Heb. 13:7). Does Conder still believe in the NT? This is merely a generalization about (say)
moral character, and it shouldn't be taken as literally true in every
detail. Otherwise, (one suspects) the
soaring poetic language of David or Isaiah might similarly trip up believers if
taken literally in every aspect. Note
the context when Jehovah states (Isa. 42:8):
"I am the Lord, that is My name; I will not give My glory to
another, nor My praise to graven images."
Here the Eternal adds He will not allow praise to be given to graven
images, with the classic refrain pattern of Hebrew poetry in full motion. This strongly implies "I will not give
My glory to another" applies to sharing it with false gods. But if Jesus was God, indeed Jehovah Himself
who spoke these words, for Jesus to gain back His glory from the Father is
hardly contradictory (John 17:1), since Jesus then isn't "another"
separate from God. As for the sins of
one man paying for another, this can't be done (cf. Eze. 18:20; Rom.
5:7), except if the man happens to be the Messiah (Isa. 53:10, 11, 12):
But
the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; If He would render
Himself as a guilt offering . . . By His knowledge the Righteous One,
My Servant, will justify the many, as He will bear their iniquities.
. . . Yet He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the
transgressors.
Furthermore,
the animal sacrifices had the animal serve as a substitute paying the
penalty for the human offering it. For
example, note Lev. 5:5-6, 13:
So
it shall be when he becomes guilty in one of these, that he shall confess that
in which he has sinned. He shall also
bring his guilt offering to the Lord for his sin which he has committed, a
female from the flock, a lamb or a goat as a sin offering. So the priest shall make atonement on his
behalf for his sin. . . . So the priest shall make atonement for him
concerning his sins which he has committed from one of these, and it shall be
forgiven him.
This
foreshadowed how the God-Man Jesus would expiate mankind's sins because since
he was God, He had created the human race and so His life was worth more than
all of its lives collectively, and as man, He could die and be raised to life
again to pay for its sins. Only God can
forgive sins, indeed! But if Jesus is
God, He has the authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:5-9; Luke 5:20-24). Conder still doesn't deal with the issue of
how God appears arbitrary with the consistent enforcement of His law by
forgiving some sins and not others (see ICF, p. 29 and fn. 54). As for the issue of not mentioning God
Himself dying in the process, there's sufficient evidence from such texts as
Isa. 9:6-7; Zech. 12:10; and Isa. 53 for a Divine Mournful Messiah who died for
the sins of others. It's asserted that
God would have had to borrow "traditions from paganism to found
Christianity," but that has already long been called into question (ICF,
pp. 39-52)‑‑whatever similarities that can be found, they're
superficial and/or borrowings from Christianity by paganism when (especially)
the latter was on the downswing in the fourth century A.D.
THE
DUALITY PRINCIPLE OF INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE DEFENDED
Using the Old Testament alone (BGJ,
pp. 36-37), can one find justification for the duality principle of
interpreting Scripture? The main, even
exclusive, application for this principle is prophecy and fulfilled types, in
which there's an earlier, lesser fulfillment, followed by a greater fulfillment
later. It's easy enough to find this
principle in the New Testament, such as in Jesus' Olivet prophecy, which
includes the prediction of Jerusalem's fall.
His language has application to both 70 A.D. and to His Second Coming
(Matt. 24:1-3, 15-18; Luke 21:20-21, 24).
Jesus' prophecy that "Elijah is coming and will restore all
things" yet "Elijah already came" (meaning, John the Baptist) is
further proof of the duality principle for Christians (Matt. 17:11-12). But what about using the Old Testament by
itself? Two cases can be
mentioned: The abomination of
desolation and Israel's regathering to the Holy Land. One can see the abomination of desolation occurring twice in
Jerusalem, once when Antiochus Epiphanes in 165 B.C. desecrated the Temple of
Yahweh by making a profane sacrifice (a pig) on top of the altar of burnt
offering (see I Maccabees 1:54 in Catholic Bibles). The second time occurred when the Roman legions torched Jerusalem
and its Temple in 70 A.D. Another, less
disputable case, comes from the texts describing the regathering of
Israel. Of course, this occurs once
after the Babylonian Captivity (Isa. 39:6-7; 44:28; 45:4; Jer. 25:9-12), but it
also will happen in the millennium (although Conder would reject this term for
God's kingdom on earth since it's based on the book of Revelation). There is evidence for the view that the
gathering of Judah today in Palestine is a preliminary fulfillment of the
millennial prophecies about all of Israel returning from the Diaspora. (Note Zech. 12:6-11‑‑Judah is already
there when the Second Coming happens).
Such texts as Eze. 38:8; 37:16-28; Deut. 28:64-68 point to the future
millennial gathering. But Jer. 50:1-10,
17-20+ certainly seems to be more
ambiguous, admitting to some dual application to the return from Babylon and
also at the beginning of the millennium.[129] Hence, even using the Old Testament alone,
there's good evidence for the duality principle, at least for prophecy and
fulfilled types. Applying this
principle outside non-prophetic, non-typical statements in Scripture is
hazardous‑‑It's unlikely the Gospels, Acts or Paul's Letters have
many dual applications, since they mostly aren't prophetic, with some
exceptions.
WHAT
WAS THE ORIGINAL READING IN PSALMS 22:16?
As a warm-up to critiquing my analysis
of Ps. 22:16 (BGJ, p. 37), Conder maintains all of Eze. 31 is prophetic in
nature, in order to defend his principle that if one verse of a chapter is a
prophecy, then all of it is. Of course,
one could call it all "prophetic" in the sense that the example of
Assyria is used as a warning to Egypt.
However, verses 3-9 don't contain any predictions about the future, but
a description of Assyria's glory in the past.
In this narrow sense, it isn't "prophetic." Jer. 36 appears to violate this principle,
since it describes the cold reception some of Judah's leaders gave some of
Jeremiah's prophecies but also gives specific prophecies in vs. 7, 29-31.
Conder complains about my citation of
McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict concerning this chapter, but
fails to give a verse by verse rebuttal of the points ICF makes about it. For example, he makes no attempt to prove
crucifixion was practiced in the Middle East or Palestine in (say) 1000
b.c. His fire is focused upon a key
part of v. 16: "They pierced
my hands and my feet."
Interestingly, while attacking the LXX as corrupt for this verse, he
fails to deal with any of the evidence from the Hebrew for this
reading. Although the standard version
of the Masoretic text (MT) has the intrinsically unlikely reading "like a
lion," the LXX's version is known to appear in some Hebrew
manuscripts. As ICF (p. 62) notes,
according to the Ginsberg and NIV Interlinear Hebrew-English Old Testament,
"some mss." or "other scrolls" contain this reading. It appeared in the first three mechanically
printed editions of the Hebrew text, and Rabbi Nehemiah in the thirteenth
century commented on Ps. 22:16 in the Yalkut Shimoni (687) using this
reading. Furthermore, and most
devastatingly for Conder's position, it evidently appears in the Dead Sea
Scrolls. After having analyzed the
Qumran sect's manuscript remnants, Peter Flint writes in The Dead Sea Psalms
Scrolls (1997) that "pierced" is the preferred option.[130] Although Conder properly asserts the word as
found in the standard MT is "(ka)ari," (#738), this ignores the
likelihood of scribal error: Change the
final letter by omitting a vertical descending stroke, from vav to a yod, and
it becomes #1856, "kaaru."
Hence, "Christian ministers [didn't] put 'Jesus' into Psalms 22 by
changing the meaning of a word" (BGJ, p. 38), but have made a textual
correction based upon others versions (the LXX, Vulgate, Syriac) and the
minority reading in the Hebrew that involves changing one letter to
another.
As for Conder's question about the MT
being judged reliable by me (BGJ, p. 38), the issue is that while overall it's
by far the most reliable form of the OT available today, mistakes do occur in
it. Using the OT to illustrate standard
types of transmissional errors, Gleason Archer in Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties illustrates problems in the MT that could be corrected by
using the principles of textual criticism, including analyzing other versions
to clarify problems in the MT. But
notice, the MT is the foundation from which he proceeds, not the LXX or some
other ancient version.[131] My response to Conder's question is that
while the MT is usually reliable, exceptions do arise (such as I Sam. 14:41 and
Judges 16:13-14). To even ask this kind
of straw man question in this context illustrates an "all or nothing,
black/white" mentality which can't appear to accept exceptions, subtleties
or shades of gray on various subjects.
(This was already encountered above dealing with the controversy over
paganism borrowing some ideas from Christianity).
WAS
THE SEPTUAGINT RELIABLY TRANSLATED AND TRANSMITTED FOR THE PSALMS?
The issue of the LXX's reliability was
already considered above in part: If
such a careful, reverent man as Origen used the Hebrew (or other Greek) texts
to correct the Greek translation from it, and inserted textual critical marks
to note the changes that future scribes were supposed to copy, instead of
leaving them out entirely, he isn't a plausible candidate a priori for
perverting the word of God. Although
varying through the OT books in literary style or in the original Hebrew text
being used as different men translated what became the LXX, this doesn't prove
Christians perverted it. Furthermore,
excellent evidence exists for the LXX being finished by c. 100 b.c. Soderlund notes several facts of interest
for the questions Conder raises about the LXX.
First, "the discovery in the Judean desert of a Greek leather
scroll of the Minor Prophets from the 1st cent. B.C. or A.D. has significant
implications for the question of LXX origins." Among the poetic books, he notes that "the Psalms are the
best section and constitute a fairly faithful rendering of the Hebrew,"
unlike the paraphrasing [perhaps like a Targum at points?] often encountered in
the other books of the Writings.
Earlier, he notes that by far the most common LXX mss. are those of the
Psalms, so there's more material here to study potentially. The prologue to the apocryphal book Sirach
(c. 132-100 B.C.) gives some external evidence for most of the LXX being
translated by the late second century b.c., since it mentions the prior
translation of "the Law itself, the prophecies, and the rest of the
books." Citing Ronald Harrison as
their source, McDowell and Wilson state:
"At least by 117 B.C., the entire translation of the Hebrew Old
Testament into Greek had been completed."[132] However, if Peter Flint's work above
asserting that the Dead Sea Scrolls' readings favor "he pierced"
withstands scrutiny, this whole discussion about the Septuagint's reliability
is rendered moot, since it was in the Hebrew then.
WHY
OTHERS SHOULD AVOID READING MYSTERY BABYLON
Conder complains at various points
about my warnings to others against reading what he has written or against the
writings of various higher critics (BGJ, pp. 4, 6, 27, 40). Isn't this close-minded of me? During the controversy over the "The
Last Temptation of Christ," the movie's defenders said one shouldn't
condemn something without seeing it first.
To this reasoning, Pat Buchanan replied it's not necessary to lift up a
manhole cover to know the sewer stinks.
At the price of appearing intellectually arrogant (although that's not
my intention),[133] to explain why I
believe this is good advice, it's necessary to consider the analogy made in
Eph. 4:11-16 and I Cor. 12:12-27 between a human body and the church. Different people in the church have
different functions. Since I have never
been married or had children, I wouldn't be the first person for a young family
man or woman to ask for advice on raising children or solving marital
problems. But I have more education
than most in the COG in history (M.A. and B.A.), and have worked with
historians at a secular university when writing what initially was the longest
M.A. thesis two of the long-time professors on my committee had ever seen. (Three-fourths of it was eliminated for
reasons of length, not quality). Giving
me a practical idea of how historians writes historical monographs, I have
worked with primary sources in the subject of American slavery and English
farmworkers. Since I also have a B.A.
in philosophy (from a secular university), I also have a practical knowledge of
the basic logical fallacies, the means for judging the soundness of arguments,
and how interpretive assumptions work within arguments as they clearly
influence the conclusions drawn from the facts or evidence (premises). I have immersed myself for years in the
works of Christian apologetics and scientific creationism, so I know the
standard arguments and facts used to defend Christianity against various
attacks by unbelievers, or else know where to find them. So when I read and carefully critique such a
work as Mystery Babylon and the Lost Ten Tribes in the End Time, and
conclude it's spiritual poison and biased polemical nonsense often based upon
similar sources that make its pretenses to scholarship ring hollow, using
arguments that would trash the Old Testament if consistently applied, why
should others in the Body of Christ put a lot of effort into reading it and
refuting it privately (without publishing anything about it)? It's spiritually foolish to go out seeking
experiences and things that can tempt us into sin. We have better things to do with our time than to read what
others reliably have exposed as nonsense or false. Of course, some in the COG have to read and deal with Mystery
Babylon out of a sense of spiritual duty to aid others as brethren. It's certainly not as something fun to do,
since it's so tedious.
This then leads us to the advice our
late pastor general (or rather one of his ghost writers) once gave concerning
reading dissident literature years ago, although he didn't totally prohibit
reading it in the same Personal: If you
go around eating out of garbage cans a lot, you're apt to get sick. When you read the works of higher critics,
many could easily become doubtful and/or deceived, since people doing this
don't necessarily have extensive knowledge of Christian apologetics or what
scholarly critics of the liberal scholars have said on the latter's
theories. As a practical example, while
I never accepted the moral theories of the philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand, who
attacked self-sacrifice as immoral, I never had quite managed to shake an
occasional inward memory of her arguments when I'm told about my Christian
duties to help others, including the poor.
Hence, I would recommend to others in the COG to avoid reading her novel
Atlas Shrugged due to its shrill atheism, its attacks on religious
belief, and its attacks on Christian morality. Why should we be encouraged further to act in our own
self-interest by her arguments against Christian ethics, when that's rarely a
serious problem anyway? There are any
number of attacks available on any number of our beliefs, political and
religious: Is it our duty to read them ALL
to show we aren't "close-minded"?
Finally, the "close-minded" response of automatic rejection
some may feel against some teaching may be how God protects some or even many
people from apostasy or heresy. I was
the one who listened to Pasadena's arguments about the nature of God, listened
to a few of Dr. Stavrinides' tapes, and even went out and bought a book by an
evangelical that was supposed to persuade people to believe in the
Trinity. Due to uncritical reading that
assumed the folks in Pasadena could be trusted to know what they were doing,
and not really checking out uncited Scriptures that contradicted the new
teaching, I ended up being deceived into Trinitarianism. Those "close-minded" individuals
who simply "mindlessly" rejected this teaching had better spiritual
discernment than me, perhaps because they weren't trying to intellectualize
something a lot that didn't need to be.
(It also was because of long-standing lurking doubts over the "God
Family" doctrine and (at least subconsciously) a quest not to be seen as a
cultist at some level (i.e., seeking respectability) as well). True, some people have to sit down and
systematically, intellectually critique the heresy in question in order to
rebut it, such as Roderick Meredith, Raymond McNair, and Gary Fakhoury have
done on the nature of God issue, or I have for Mystery Babylon. But does everyone have to slog down the same
rough road, facing the perils of deception?
Why shouldn't others read Mystery Babylon? Because there's no need for most others to
lift up the manhole cover for themselves to make sure that, yes indeed, the
sewer does stink.
CONCLUSION: HOW INTERPRETING THE FACTS IS MORE IMPORTANT
THAN THE FACTS THEMSELVES IN THIS DEBATE
As surveyed above, few of Conder's
counter-attacks against "Is Christianity a Fraud?" hold any
water. He frequently uses a higher
critic methodology that undermines his own (presumed) arguments in favor of
belief in the Old Testament, such as incipient Humean skepticism about
historical records of miracle accounts and attacks on the Christian Church
Fathers' basic reliability, which would destroy their testimony on the pagan
mystery religions and Simon the Sorcerer for his cause. He attacks the bibliographical test as it
relates to the New Testament's reliability, ignoring how this also undermines
defenses of the Old Testament. He uses
extreme or straw man formulations of his opponents' arguments, creating
artificial contradictions or obvious absurdities within them that can be easily
removed, such as for the discussions of the pagan mystery religions borrowing
from Christianity and how reliable the Masoretic text is compared to the
Septuagint. A sense of historical
amateurishness appears when he apparently confuses citing the original
manuscripts (autographs) with citing printed primary sources in English
translation, and confuses the date of original writing (authorship) with the
earliest surviving manuscripts. He
complains about someone citing copies of original documents made centuries
later, forgetting he does the same. He
also misconstrues a denial that the Catholic church's hierarchy determined the
canon for a denial of the Sunday-keeping church generally ascertaining the
canon. The contrast between the
references in Mystery Babylon and such a work as James L. Price's The
New Testament: Its History and Theology
(an apparently liberal work) can only stamp the former as a polemical work
using the biased scholarship and/or polemical works of others relevant to the
study of the New Testament. He
mistakenly thinks the higher critics represent impartial scholarship, somehow
lacking any biases of their own against Christianity (or Judaism). Excepting my mistake about first-century
manuscripts of the New Testament existing (which still a minority of scholars
still believe in), there are few significant statements in "By-gosh
Josh" attacking "Is Christianity a Fraud?" that can't be
thoroughly blunted, even totally refuted.
The evident similarities between Afrocentrism's and Conder's mode of
argumentation are embarrassing, since both purportedly trace the diffusion of
ideas from one culture to another. Note
Lefkowitz's description of the former in the hands of one of its exponents
(George G.M. James' Stolen Legacy), and compare it to the latter:
James
introduced a new school of historical research, by demonstrating in Stolen
Legacy that anyone can claim anything about the past. The first step is to downplay contradictory
evidence; then to deduce from the limited facts one has assembled only those
conclusions that support one's central thesis, or (if necessary) to invent
evidence that suits one's own particular purposes [cf. much of Conder's
discussion of Simon Magus as the real founder of Christianity]. In order to establish similarity, one needs
to begin from the assumption of a direct connection, and then make the evidence
fit the facts, by omitting details and by overlooking signficant
differences. The only problem is that
the result of such efforts is not history, but a kind of hybrid between myth
and history, a myth about history.[134]
At
this point, impartial readers should remember the crucial importance of assumptions
and interpretative principles in this debate. Outside the facts concerning whether scholars believe
first-century fragments of the New Testament exist, whatever quotes and
citations Conder may be able to dredge up from printed primary sources of the
myths of paganism, and some other loose ends, this debate is no longer about
"facts" but how to interpret the evidence. Should you ever embark to read further works
of Darrell Conder or some high critic he recommends, such as Dr. Burton L.
Mack, it must be remembered the assumptions used to interpret the facts largely
determine the outcome, whether they are explicit or implicit, not the
facts themselves. Using such principles
as the argument from silence, knee-jerk skepticism about everything in a
historical document that's in question, Humean skepticism about miracle
accounts, and anti-supernaturalistic assumptions, Conder's mode of
argumentation can only lead to the elimination of the Old Testament as the word
of God, assuming he takes these principles to their logical conclusion. So then, will the passengers of Locomotive
Conder unwillingly find one day their fearless leader pulling them into a
station of a town named "Deism" or "Atheism"? Time will tell.
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Endnotes:
[1].........Throughout
this rebuttal, the 74-page edition Servants' News distributes is cited from,
not the original 129-page format. All
emphasis in quotes is original to the author's, unless otherwise noted,
excepting Scripture. The time-honored
practice of capitalizing or decapitalizating the first word of quotations has
been followed.
[2]........."Is the
Bible the Word of God? A Rational
Defense of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures." (about 82 pp., in the WordPerfect 5.1 version with regular-sized
fonts for the endnotes).
[3].........My essay
"The Changing Views of the WCG on Christian Apologetics: The Rise of Fideism and More Liberal Views
on Evolution" (25 pp.) details evidence for HWA's position and the WCG's
move away from it. It's largely a
rewriting of two letters I sent in to Pasadena that critiqued these changes.
[5].........Darrell Conder,
director, Commonwealth Books and Publishing, July 4, 1996, letter, pp.
1, 2, 3.
[7].........For this
characterization of Robinson, see McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us,
pp. 128-29.
[9].........See Robert
Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and
Work (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. 11, 31, 164, 167-72. This is a standard scholarly biography of Frazer. After citing an excerpt from the preface of
the second edition of The Golden Bough, Ackerman notes: "He does not seem to understand,
however, that his highminded obligation as a historian to follow the facts
wherever they may lead is not merely in conflict with what he learned in his
pious home but also with his partisanship as a determined enemy of
religion." Frazer traced the Book
of Esther and its "characters" to "Babylonian originals,"
claiming Purim was "yet another member of the family of Near Eastern
holidays of misrule [like Carnival and the Mardi Gras] that were founded in
agricultural magic and in their original form contained a human sacrifice." He then equates Jesus' condemnation and
Barabbas' deliverance at the Passover to Haman and Mordecai's fate, maintaining
these two "were really two aspects of the same god, one considered as
victim and the other considered as risen." Clearly, after surveying this tissue of conjectures that later
got demoted to a footnote in the third edition, Frazer shouldn't be trusted to
restrain his unbelief in his work.
[10].........John W. Haley, Alleged
Discrepancies of the Bible (Springdale, PA: Whitaker House, (1874, original publication)), p. 28.
[11].........The point in
dispute here concerns how objective a translator Ferrar Fenton was, and whether
it's legitimate to cite his translation in some point and reject it for
another. Fenton plainly reads his
evolutionary philosophy into Genesis 1, by translating this part of it thus: "By periods God Created that which
produced the Suns; then that which produced the earth. . . .
This was the close and the dawn of the first age." As cited by Benjamin Wilkinson in David Otis
Fuller, ed., Which Bible?, 5th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids International Publications,
1975), p. 309. Incidently, since many
NT Greek-English interlinears are available, there's little need to cite
Fenton's translation to note the word "Sabbaths" appears in a literal
plural in Matt. 28:1.
[12].........Marvin L.
Lubenow, Bones of Contention: A
Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), pp. 41, 44.
[13].........See Josh
McDowell, More Evidence That Demands a Verdict (San Bernardino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, 1981), pp.
68-72. About half of this book is
devoted to defending the Old Testament against claims by various higher
critics.
[14]........."Confession
of a Professed Atheist: Aldous
Huxley," Report, June 1966, p. 19; as cited in Did Man Get Here
by Evolution or by Creation? (New York:
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., 1967), p. 130.
[15].........John W. Haley, Alleged
Discrepancies of the Bible (Springdale, PA: Whitaker House), p. 27.
[16].........Stanley L.
Jaki, The Origin of Science and the Science of Its Origin (South Bend,
IN: Regnery/Gateway, Inc., 1978), p.
46. Most of this book is devoted to
exposing the unbelieving biases of scholars when examining the history of the
development of science. A rude
awakening awaits those who caricaturize Roman Catholicism (based on Galileo's
showdown with the Inquisition over geocentrism) as the main roadblock to the
development of science should they read this book. (Compare the comment on BGJ, p. 27 based upon Graham and/or the Encyclopedia
Britannica). Jaki is a Roman
Catholic philosopher of science and Distinguished Professor at Seton Hall
University.
[18].........Ackerman, J.G.
Frazer, pp. 2, 37, 45-48, 82, 99, 105, 123, 167-68, 225, 256, 306-7,
328. In his introduction, while
explaining why he chose to do a biography on him, Ackerman notes (p. 3): "As I was not an anthropologist, the
dismal state of his reputation made him, if anything, rather more interesting
than otherwise." On p. 4, he
comments: "I am aware that the
revolutions undergone by anthropology mean that Frazer's approach to religion
is virtually meaningless in terms of contemporary practice. Not only are his answers superseded, but
more important his questions likewise are not longer relevant." Although some time ago I had bought The
Golden Bough (in a reprint of the first edition) because of C.S. Lewis'
admiration of the work, I read almost nothing in it until my local pastor
dropped Mystery Babylon on me for a critique. Since Conder mined Frazer's work for examples of pagan/Christian
parallels, I used it largely only because he did, to check up on his references
some and counter-attack his arguments.
I was somewhat uncomfortable using Frazer's work as I wrote ICF, because
I didn't know the current scholarly climate of opinion on this book. (I basically only knew what C.S. Lewis
thought about it). I did notice that
Nash's The Gospel and the Greeks didn't refer to it even once. Ackerman's biography is a "must
read" for those who wish to use Frazer's work knowledgeably. Andrew Lang's Magic and Religion
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1901) devotes two-thirds of its length to a close, sustained, scholarly yet
polemical refutation of The Golden Bough's second edition that some may
find worth hunting down.
[19].........In this
context, Ackerman mentioned that Frazer when he considered doing a commentary
on the OT. Despite his expertise as a
classical scholar, in 1906 he was a mere beginner here: "By 1907 he had read the Bible in
Hebrew exactly once, and of the critical literature as yet he knew nothing. Far from being steeped in the text or the
history of its scholarship, he was only a first-time scholarly tourist in the
vast landscape of biblical studies."
J.G. Frazer, p. 186.
[20].........Ronald H. Nash,
The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the
New Testament Borrow From Pagan Thought? (Richardson, TX: Probe Books, 1992), pp. 9-11, 119-21. Josh McDowell cites from this book under
another title and publisher: Christianity
and the Hellenistic World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984). Having heard about these charges years ago, through reading H.G.
Wells and C.S. Lewis, I bought Nash's book some time before I ever heard
of Mystery Babylon, when I happened to see it on a bookshelf in a
traditional Christian book store. But I
read little of it before (surprise!) my pastor dumped Mystery Babylon on
me for a critique. Needless to say, no
one should commit themselves to accepting Conder's beliefs without reading
Nash's book first. Incidently, Ronald
Nash is not a mere "Christian minister," (BGJ, p. 24) but the former
head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University,
and has edited or written 13 books on religion and philosophy. McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us,
p. 176.
[21].........my emphasis,
Justo L. Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought: From the Beginnings to the Council of Chalcedon, vol. 1
(Nashville, TN: Abington Press, 1970),
pp. 56-57. A Yale University Professor,
Roland H. Bainton, wrote the preface for this book, so it shouldn't be casually
dismissed. Now it does appear
specialists in Mithraism and classical paganism still willingly draw parallels
between Christianity and Mithraism. See
Eberhard Sauer, The End of Paganism in the North-Western Provinces of the
Roman Empire: The Example of the
Mithras Cult (Oxford, England:
Tempvs Repartvm, Archaeological and Historical Associates Ltd., 1996),
pp. 76-78; Celsus, On the True Doctrine:
A Discourse Against the Christians, R. Joseph Hoffman, trans. (New
York: Oxford University Press,
1987), pp. 15-16. But as is seen below from the work of the
French scholar Robert Turcan and due to other considerations, these
similarities are much more superficial than substantiative.
[22].........For example,
consider the stories about Mithra having a virgin birth and being worshipped by
shepherds (MB, pp. 33). First of
all, the earliest versions of the myths about Mithra as they circulated in the
West according to various Christian writers, such as Justin Martyr (c. 150
A.D.), Commodian, Firmicus Maternus, John Lydus, and St. Jerome, all refer to
Mithras being born out of a rock. Only
in a tradition recorded later, in fifth-century Armenian writers, has
Mithras being the son of the god Ormuzd.
His birth was not at all clearly "virgin." Elisaeus Vartabed, an ancient Armenian
historian, reported the answer Armenian bishops gave to Viceroy Mihr-Nerseh: "Thou [a Zoroastrian presumably] hast
said, that God was born from a woman:
thou shouldst feel neither horror nor scorn at it . . . There
is a thing still more curious: the god
Mihr being born of a woman, as if one could have intercourse with one's own
mother." Another Armenian writer
put it similarly, mentioning Ahriman accusing the god Ormuzd of not being able
to make light: "Now if he were
wise, he would have intercourse with his mother, and he would have a son, the
Sun (Miher); and he would likewise have intercourse with his sister, and the Moon
(Mah) would be born." In neither
case was this a virgin birth, in which by the Spirit of God, instead of sexual
intercourse with a god, a woman is impregnated (cf. the story about Zeus
impregnating Alkmene, who later gave birth to Hercules). The inscriptions the past leading historian
of Mithraism, Cumont, cited to say shepherds witnessed the birth of Mithras
from a rock or just afterwards are not terribly close to what Luke describes
either. See L. Patterson, Mithraism
and Christianity: A Study in
Comparative Religion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1921), pp. 12-14.
[23].........Used commonly
as texts in college history classes, source books gather together long extracts
from various primary sources to supplement the second sources the professor may
be using. For example, Lacey Baldwin
Smith and Jean Reeder Smith, eds., The Past Speaks to 1688: Sources and Problems in English History
(Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co.,
1981). Conder may find this collection
of interest: David R. Cartlidge and
David L. Dungan, eds., Documents for the Study of the Gospels
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980).
[24].........F.F. Bruce, The
Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 1988), pp. 270-71, 286.
[25].........For the record,
I believe the Tkach administration correctly changed at least the following
doctrines or practices: (1) saying a
Christian using human medical science did not reflect a weakness of faith (2) legalizing interracial marriage and
dating (3) legalizing make-up (4) de-emphasizing prophecy from HWA's overkills
on the subject. Later changes I support
include: (5) promoting the idea of personal
and local evangelism (6) the denial of exclusivity, that true Christians can be
in other physical corporate organizations separate from our own. HWA's approach to church government in his
latter years (one-man rule through a human hierarchy and extreme
centralization) was wrong as well.
[26].........For a copy,
write Alan Ruth at P.O. Box 310208, Detroit, MI 48231 or ARUTH88521@aol.com or
visit his website, http://www.biblestudy.org, where it should be available.
[27].........David Hume, An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Co., 1977 (original
publication, 1748)), section X, "of miracles," pp. 76-77.
[28].........Those
interested in researching this subject further should consult the following two
works: C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1960); Colin
Brown, Miracles and the Critical Mind (William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co., 1984). Josh McDowell and Bill
Wilson briefly but effectively survey this topic in He Walked Among Us: Evidence for the Historical Jesus
(Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson
Publishers, 1993), pp. 262-77.
[31].........Josh McDowell
and Don Stewart, Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian
Faith (San Bernardino, CA: Here's
Life Publishers, 1980), as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us,
p. 265.
[33].........Origen, Origen
Against Celsus, book I, ch. 28; Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson,
eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers:
Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325 (Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1951), vol. 4, p. 408; cf. Fox, Pagans and Christians,
p. 482.
[35].........Tosefta: Hullin 2.22ff; cf. Babylonian Talmud,
Adorah Zarah 27b; Jerusalem Talmud, Shabbath 14d, Adorah Zarah 40d,
41a; as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp.
64-66. The point of such a citation is
to give evidence for Jesus' bare existence and his ability to do miracles as
conceded by his enemies. The rest of
the "Panthera" legend need not be accepted (note BGJ, p. 32).
[36].........Babylonian
Talmud, Shabbath 104b; Tosefta: Shabbath
11. 15; as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp.
275, 343.
[37].........Antiquities 18. 3. 3
(63-4); as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 40. Using the loaded example of pretending I was
on trial for a capital offense, Conder criticizes my citation of this passage
since its authenticity has been hotly disputed (BGJ, p. 35). Conder here forgets that the standards of proof
in a criminal trial are intentionally so high that much evidence gets
intentionally excluded, but thoroughly respectable historians operate by
significantly lower standards. For
example, criminal trials exclude most types of hearsay testimony, of one person
repeating what another told them. Yet
much journalism, of what is reported in solid respectable newspapers that
people rarely question the facts they relate (not necessarily the
interpretation of them, i.e., editorials), is hearsay. Consider what happens when a reporter writes
that the police say such-and-so happened at an accident scene or that a press
secretary reports such-and-so occurred on the battlefield in Iraq during the
Persian Gulf War without having personally visited either. The next day, we read it in the newspaper,
and believe it happened: We are then
relying on hearsay evidence. Many
business, investment, and personal decisions people routinely make are based on
information less reliable than what appears in New York Times on any given
day. Should we presumptuously demand of
God so much more proof for belief in Him and His religion than we use for
deciding who to marry or what career to engage in? We may rise the bar so high we logically couldn't believe in
anything else, if we consistently applied the same standard to other
beliefs/knowledge we have. Furthermore,
Conder doesn't deal with any of the stylistic/linguistic reasons favoring this
passage as having been partially written by Josephus originally, as found in
ICF, pp. 20-21 and its references. A
tenth-century Arabic work cites a fourth-century version of the Testimonium
which largely preserves it intact.
[38].........Mary Lefkowitz,
Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism
Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p.
138. Having noted this description, the
question then becomes: Does The Book
of the Dead even mention Osiris or his "resurrection"? Page number please! Ultimately, Mystery Babylon has
little better basis for its major claims than Afrocentrism does for its.
[39].........Cartlidge and
Dungan, eds., Documents for the Study of the Gospels, pp. 85, 92-93; see
also McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp. 99, 281.
[40]........."All
Scripture Is Inspired of God and Beneficial" (New
York: Watchtower Bible and Tract
Society of New York, 1983), pp. 301-303; See also F.F. Bruce, The Canon of
Scripture (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 1988), pp. 161, 165, 174, 183, 185, 188, 194,
198-203, 209-12 for some description of how some books later rejected some
in the church had accepted earlier. The
200 figure, which presumably includes epistles and other apocryphal literature,
is in MB, p. 20. The main books
debated at least some before finally and decisively appearing in the canon were
Hebrews, James, 2 and 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation, but they compose
only a relatively small part of the NT.
See McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 92.
[43].........C.S. Lewis, Christian
Reflections, Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1974),
pp. 154-55; as cited by McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp.
134-35.
[44].........J.P. Moreland, Scaling
the Secular City: A Defense of
Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Book House, 1987), pp. 136-38.
[47].........See Immanuel
Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos: From the
Exodus to King Akhnaton, vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1952), pp. 12-39.
[48].........Gary R.
Habermas and Antony G.N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate, Terry L.
Miethe, ed. (Harper & Row, Publishers:
San Francisco, 1987), pp. 20-21.
This section is laced with some 12 footnotes, so anyone could easily
look up Habermas' references.
[49].........Josh McDowell, The
Resurrection Factor (San Bernardino, CA:
Here's Life Publishers, 1981), pp. 77, 79, 93, 99. Again, he provides specific references here.
[50].........Josh McDowell, Evidence
that Demands a Verdict, vol. 1 (San Bernardino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, 1979), pp. 232 (Anderson
quote), 238, 255. The record of the
early Catholic Church Fathers, along with Jewish medieval literature,
externally confirms Matt. 28:11's statement about the disciples stealing the
body being a standard and ancient counter-explanation for the resurrection. (See BGJ, p. 10).
[51].........Paul L. Maier, First
Easter (New York: Harper & Row,
1973), p. 122; William F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity,
2d ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press,
1946), pp. 297, 298; as cited in McDowell, Resurrection Factor, p. 81.
[52].........Moreland, Scaling
the Secular City, pp. 152-54; See also John Ross Schroeder, "Carsten
Peter Thiede: When Was the New
Testament Written?," Good News, Nov./Dec. 1997, pp. 27-28. Despite not being a conservative scholar,
John A.T. Robinson's Redating the New Testament (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976) contains a
similar argument that maintains all the NT was composed before 70
A.D.: Nowhere does the NT mention the
fall of Jerusalem as a historical event.
[53].........James Martin, The
Reliability of the Gospels (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1959), p. 103-104; John Warwick Montgomery, History
and Christianity (Downers Grove, IL:
Inter-Varsity Press, 1964, p. 37; both as cited by McDowell, More
Evidence, pp. 212-13; Moreland, Scaling the Secular City, p. 156.
[55].........Due to dying
out, a major break in the history of the Welsh bards came in the 17th-18th
centuries. See Prys Morgan, "From
a Death to a View: The Hunt for the
Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,
eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 49-51, 56-57, 62-66.
[56].........Geza Vermes, Jesus
and the World of Judaism (London:
SCM Press Ltd., 1983), p. 19; as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He
Walked Among Us, pp. 129-30.
[57].........Moreland, Scaling
the Secular City, pp. 142-44; McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us,
pp. 164-65, 171.
[59].........Christopher Dawson,
The Dynamics of World History, John J. Mulloy, ed. (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 327. Although Conder could counterattack by
saying Dawson is a Catholic, he bolsters his judgment by citing Gibbons'
non-Christian editor, J.B. Bury:
"Neither the historian nor the man of letters will any longer
subscribe, without a thousand reserves, to the theological chapters of the
Decline and Fall, and no discreet enquirer would go there for his
ecclesiastical history." Not a man
guilty of sympathy for fundamentalist Christianity, H.G. Wells states: "Gibbon was strongly prejudiced against
Christianity, and here [on the Roman emperor's Diocletian's persecution of
Christians] he seems disposed to minimize the fortitude and sufferings of the
Christians." The Outline of
History, Raymond Postgate, ed., (Garden City, NY: Garden City Books, 1956), vol. 1, p. 435.
[60].........As Grant
explains elsewhere, Eusebius would paraphrase from his sources at points, such
as from Tertullian in a poor Greek translation from the Latin, before quoting
from him directly. For a careful,
close, scholarly examination and critique of Eusebius as a church historian,
Grant's work is an excellent place to begin.
Robert M. Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press,
1980), pp. 63-64. Bruce, Canon of
Scripture, p. 198. Bruce states in
the footnote: "One must recognize
his habit of extracting from their contexts just so much of the passages quoted
from earlier writers [note‑‑this isn't oral testimony!] as suited
his immediate purpose. But J. B.
Lightfoot's emphatic witness remains valid:
'In no instance which we can test does Eusebius give a doubtful
testimony' (Essays on 'Supernatural Religion', p. 49; his
italics)." Instead of having an
odor of forgery about him, Eusebius appears to be merely uncritical in
his use of sources. In a dual
Greek/English version of The Ecclesiastical History, the introduction
notes on the letters between Abgar and Jesus:
"According to H.E. i. 12. 3 ff. Eusebius made use of
material in the Archives of Edessa. . . . It is not certain whether Eusebius had
himself seen this archive or made use of it only at secondhand through the
writings of Julius Africanus, but in any case there is no reason to doubt the
statement that the apocryphal story of Abgar Uchama was found in the archives
at Edessa, which is also the probable source‑‑direct or indirect‑‑for
most of the information contained in Eusebius as to the history of Christianity
outside the Roman Empire in the region of Mesopotamia and such details as the
story of Mani." Eusebius, The
Ecclesiastical History, Kirsopp Lake, trans. (London: William Heinemann, The Loeb Classical
Library, 1926), vol. 1, pp. xxxix-xl.
[63].........John Foxe, Foxe's
Christian Martyrs of the World (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour and Co., 1985 (original publication 1563), pp. 11, 13.
[65].........Those
interested in a brief write-up on contradictions between and within the LDS
church's special scriptures compared to the Bible may wish to read my essay,
"Problems with the LDS Scriptures:
Do Contradictions Exist?"
[66].........Gleason L. Archer,
Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1982), pp.
280-81.
[67].........Hershel Shanks,
James C. Vanderkam, P. Kyle McCarter Jr., and James A. Sanders, The Dead Sea
Scrolls After Forty Years (Washington, DC:
Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991), p. 35.
[68].........See
"Carsten Peter Thiede," Good News, Nov./Dec. 1997, pp. 26-28;
Hershel Shanks, "The Battle Against Junk 'Scholarship,' Biblical
Archeology Review, Jan./Feb. 1997, p. 18; Carsten Peter Thiede and Hershel
Shanks, "Queries and Comments Junk
Scholarship Thiede Defends His Claims
on New Testament Fragments," Biblical Archeology Review, May/June
1997, pp. 8, 10-11.
[69].........C.L. Blomberg,
"Text and Mss of the NT," Geoffrey W. Bromiley, gen. ed., International
Standard Bible Encyclopedia (ISBN) (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988),
p. 815.
[70].........Millar Burrows,
What Mean These Stones? (New York:
Meridian Books, 1956), p. 52; as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He
Walked Among Us, p. 109; McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict,
vol. 1, pp. 46-47. Ironically, the
oldest NT fragment is for the Gospel traditionally dated as being the latest
canonical one written. As Bruce Metzger
remarks: "Had this little fragment
[of John] been known during the middle of the last century, that school of New
Testament [higher] criticism which was inspired by the brilliant Tubingen
professor, Ferdinand Christian Baur, could not have argued that the Fourth
Gospel was not composed until about the year 160." Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New
Testament (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1968), p. 39; as cited by McDowell, Evidence that Demands
a Verdict, vol. 1, p. 46. As an
example of "liberal dating," McDowell cites (p. 62) Baur as placing
John at 170 A.D. Conspicuously, largely
contradicting the theory of NT origination found in MB, the
"liberal dating" scheme by Kummel still places most of NT in the
second half of first century, not later.
[71].........F.F. Bruce, The
New Testament Documents: Are They
Reliable? (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 1960), pp. 16-17.
[73].........Excepting a
secondary reference citing Hippolytus and Irenaeus, Conder cites no sources on
the life of Simon in his gratuitous fantasy mislabeled, "Epilogue A True History of the Christian Church"
in Mystery Babylon, pp. 131-42.
However, what the earliest Catholic Church Fathers and others wrote
about him is usefully summarized by D.E. Aune in "Simon Magus,"
Bromiley, gen. ed., ISBE, vol. 4, pp. 517-18. The Gnosticism that Justin Martyr and Irenaeus' writings indicate
when describing Simon's theology is sufficient proof Simon couldn't have been
the true founder of Sunday-keeping Christianity.
[74].........McDowell and
Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp. 75-76; for their weaknesses, see pp.
72-73.
[75].........Babylonian
Talmud, Baba Kamma 82b-83a, Sotah 49b; as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He
Walked Among Us, pp. 207, 216, 236; The possible statement by Bar Kokhba is
found in Joseph A. Fitzmyer, "The Languages of Palestine in the First
Century A.D.," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 32 (1970), p.
514; as cited in John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch, The New Testament in
Its Social Environment (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1986), p. 87.
[80].........Herbert Lockyer
Sr., gen. ed., Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville,
TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1986), p.
15.
[81].........J. Fitzmyer, Luke,
p. 51; as cited in James L. Price, The New Testament: Its History and Theology (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987), pp. 128-29,
303; see also McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 166.
[82]........."All
Scripture Is Inspired of God and Beneficial", p. 198; see
also McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 166.
[83].........McDowell and
Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp. 237, 238. For the first statement, they cite Robert L. Lindsey, A Hebrew
Translation of the Gospel of Mark, 2d ed. (Jerusalem: Dugith Publishers, 1973). The second is backed by loads of specifics
cited in the same chapter.
[84].........The Bible: God's Word or Man's (New
York: Watchtower Bible and Tract
Society of New York, 1989), p. 40.
[85].........Some of the
external evidence indicating Luke wrote Luke is rehearsed in William G. Most, Catholic
Apologetics Today: Answers to Modern
Critics (Rockford, IL: Tan Books
and Publishers, Inc., 1986), pp. 48-52.
[86].........A.N.
Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1963), p.
189; as cited by McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 117.
[88].........Conspicuously,
Conder spends no time trying to rebut any the specific points raised in
ICF against his claim Luke misdated the census. He quotes out of context my mention of his dependence on Isaac
Asimov because the subsection this quote came from concerned whether how
the census was conducted was absurd or not, not its timing. (See ICF, p. 19; cf. BGJ, p. 22; MB,
p. 36). Conder's complaint here about
how I supposedly implied his whole discussion of the census' timing was based
on Asimov merely obscures how he has been decisively refuted concerning whether
or not this census was absurd in how it conducted. Partial evidence that the census occurred while Herod was alive
involves how Joseph and Mary, in order to report to Bethlehem for the census,
didn't have to cross any provincial boundaries since Herod ruled the whole area. If the census had occurred in 6 A.D., they
would have had to leave Galilee, ruled by Herod Antipas for Judea, now directly
ruled by Rome since Archelaus had just been disposed of. Only by assuming these boundaries could be
ignored when reporting to home towns for registering and doing more than once
province (etc.) at once can this point be evaded. See Wayne Brindle's argument in McDowell and Wilson, He Walked
Among Us, pp. 201-2.
[91].........C. Sanders, Introduction
to Research in English Literary History (New York: Macmillan Co., 1952), pp. 143+, as cited in
Josh McDowell, More Than a Carpenter (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1977), p. 47.
[92].........J. Harold
Greenlee, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1964), p. 16; as cited by McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 113.
[93].........Blaiklock, Jesus
Christ: Man or Myth?, p. 10; as
cited by McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp. 33.
[94].........Origen, Commem.
in Matt. (xv. 14), as cited by S.K. Soderlund, "Septuagint," and
Soderlund, "Text and Mss of the OT," Bromiley, gen. ed., International
Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. 4, pp. 405, 813.
[95].........This is ironic
for someone who accuses others of questioning the reliability of sources on the
pagan mystery religions (see BGJ, p. 29).
The Christian Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and
Hippolytus, are a major source of information on the mystery religions such as
Mithraism. Why are they reliable
sources on paganism but not on Christianity's origins?
[96].........Hodges and
Farstad, The New Testament According to the Majority Text, p. xi. On pp. xxiii-xxxii they make an excellent
case for the original author of the Gospel of John writing John 7:53-8:11, the
case of the woman caught in adultery.
They note how John 8:6, 10, 11 contain stylistic constructions like
those found in the rest of the Fourth Gospel.
[97].........David Otis
Fuller, ed., Which Bible?, 5th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids International Publications,
1975). Conder questions the
authenticity of the last eleven verses of Mark (BGJ, p. 38), but advocates of
the received text have made excellent arguments for its authenticity. As Alfred Martin explains (pp. 168-69),
although Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (fourth century) omit them, they appear the
second-century Old Latin and Syriac versions, and are cited from by Papias,
Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, among the earliest traditional
Christian writers. In the third
century, they appear in the Coptic and Sahidic versions made then. Hippolytus, Vincentius at the seventh
council of Carthage, the "Acta Pilati," and the "Apostolic
Constitutions" in two places cite from them. For the fourth century, a slew of names can be noted as citing
from them, including Augustine, Jerome, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Ephraem, Leontius,
Epiphanius, Didymus, Aphraates, Marcarius Magnes, and even Eusebius (who made
statements both for and against their reliability). Cureton's Syriac and Gothic versions have them, as well as the
Syriac Table of Canons and the Syriac "Acts of the Apostles." They appear in the vast majority of (later)
manuscripts that form the corpus of the received (Byzantine) text, as well as
even "A," the fifth-century Alexdrinus codex whose readings outside the
Gospels normally line up with the critical text's. Furthermore, Vaticanus undercuts its own testimony against these
verses by leaving a blank column at the end of Mark, signifying the
scribe knew something was missing. Much
of it being older than the two major manuscripts usually cited for omitting
these verses, this textual evidence indicates they were in the original,
especially given the a priori implausibility that Mark would break off
at verse 9 for his ending. Plainly,
it's absurd to put Mark 16:9-20 in the same category as I John 5:7's spurious
Trinitarian interpolation, which only has as textual evidence for it two very
late Greek manuscripts witnessing for it besides the Latin Vulgate (from
which it is still missing from its earliest copies).
[98]........."Does The
New Covenant Do Away With the Letter of the Old Testament Law?: Recent Changes in WCG Doctrine
Reconsidered" (42 pp.) is distributed by The Servants' News, P.O.
Box 220, Charlotte, MI 48813-0220;
email: 75260.1603@compuserve.com.
[99].........In this
context, Conder attacks the historical accuracy of the works by Herman Hoeh and
Dugger and Dodd on the history of the Sabbatarian churches. Judging from the evident historical problems
in Mystery Babylon, it's not wise to accept these statements on faith,
without further proof. For those
interested in alternative sources of information on the history of Sabbatarian
churches not mentioned by Conder, consider consulting the following works: Ivor C. Fletcher, The Incredible History
of God's True Church (Altadena, CA:
Triumph Publishing Co., 1984); B.G. Wilkinson, Ph.D., Truth
Triumphant: The Church in the
Wilderness (Brushton, NY: TEACH
Services, Inc., 1994); Richard Nickels, History of the Seventh day Church of
God, vol. 1. See also "Six
Papers on the History of the Church of God," offered by Giving &
Sharing, P.O. Box 100, Neck City, MO
64849.
[101].........J.C.D. Clark, English
Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social
Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 133.
[102].........For general
points on this subject used above, see Aid to Bible Understanding (New
York: Watchtower Bible and Tract
Society, 1971), pp. 37, 640-41; Lockyer, Nelson's Illustrated Bible
Dictionary, pp. 20, 410-11.
[103].........R.T. Anderson,
"Samaritans," Bromiley, gen. ed., ISBN, vol. 4, pp. 304, 307;
Lockyer, ed., Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, p. 943; David
Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 5 (map).
[104].........Peter Kolchin, Unfree
Labor: American Slavery and Russian
Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 377.
[105].........For a practical
example of this, see the debate over the influence of German big business and the
rise of Nazism between David Abraham and his opponents Henry Turner (Yale) and
Gerald Feldman (Berkeley) over errors in the former's book/Ph.D.
dissertation. Peter Novick, That
Noble Dream: The "Objectivity
Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.
612-21.
[106].........James C. Scott,
Domination and the Arts of Resistance:
Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1990).
[107].........Additionally,
it must be noted in this context that even if one could cite pagan thoughts or
rituals in books originally written in the first century or later, that still
doesn't prove necessarily their thinking influenced early Christianity's
doctrinal content. A standard logical
fallacy is (in Latin) called:
"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc," meaning, "After this,
therefore because of this." The
mere fact something happens after something else doesn't prove the first thing
caused the second to happen, otherwise I could assert the noise my alarm clock
makes in the morning "caused" some kid in school to throw a paper wad
at me. Being successive in time does
not prove some earlier object's nature influenced some later thing to change. An expression of pagan thinking that started
among (say) first-century B.C. Chinese is irrelevant to discussions of what
influenced primitive Christianity or the NT's content since geography places
the two too far apart. For this reason,
it's far more sensible to seek the origins of water baptism in the practices of
contemporary Judaism, such as among the Qumran Dead Sea Scroll community, than
in the pagan taurobolium ceremony (which isn't known to be practiced before the
second century anyway), since Christianity represents itself as originating out
of Judaism, not paganism, in the NT.
[108].........Of course,
assuming these writings were accurately transmitted doesn't prove the
information in them is necessarily true.
For example, it appears the Christian Church Fathers only knew their
information about the mystery cults at least second hand, having not been
involved in them personally themselves.
The Church writer Firmicus Maternus (fourth century) can't be trusted to
always be right about the Mysteries, because sometimes his information
contradicts what is known from other sources for certain (cf. BGJ, p. 28). Turcan says you can't hardly place your
confidence in him, because he imputes to Mithraism the belief of a double fire
in feminine and masculine form as part of his integrated theory of the four
elements. Mithra et le Mithriacisme,
pp. 93, 145. (Helping to make it
attractive to Roman legionnaires, Mithraism was an emphatically masculine
religion, having no place for women in its theology or secret rituals). A similar problem appears as he describes
the teachings of the cult of Attis and Cybele since it "appears
inconsistent with known elements of the cult" at least at times. Nash, The Gospel and the Greeks, p.
141.
[109].........The equinoxes
occur around March 21 and December 21 each year, when the days and nights are
equal in length. Due to the earth
"wobbling" like a top slightly, the location of the path through
which the sun appears to cross the sky gradually changes over the centuries. As a result, the precession of the earth causes
the North Star to change since the North Pole points towards a different star
very gradually. The North Star has not
always been Polaris.
[110].........Ulansey, Origins
of the Mithraic Mysteries, pp. 3, 8-15, 45, 67, 82-85, 88-89, 93, 111 and
in passing. Of course, not all scholars
necessarily agree with him. Maintaining
Ulansey's theory hasn't explained everything or fully correlated the
constellations with Mithraic stone reliefs, French scholar Robert Turcan
obviously still traces Mithraism back to India, Persia and the latter's
religion of Zoroastrianism. Robert
Turcan, Mithra et le Mithriacisme (Paris: Les Belle Lettres, 1993), pp. 9, 12-17, 107-8. Still, to appreciate how brilliant Ulansey's
theory is, you'd have to read his book, for certainly he does have evidence
favoring his conclusions.
[111].........Omitting the
accent marks, here's the original French for the specific quotations: "Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'il existe
alors tel que l'exprimeront les monuments epigraphiques et figures du IIe
siecle ap. J.-C." (p. 29).
"En fait, aucun temoignage ni archeologique ni litteraire ne
confirme directment cette hypothese" (p. 31). "claire et nette . . . protecteur de leur
pouvoir" (p. 42). All translations
mine, Turcan, Mithra et le Mithriacisme, pp. 19, 29, 31-42. Turcan is a professor at the Sorbonne
("France's Harvard") in Paris, so his scholarly credentials are
unquestionable.
[112]........."L'art
mithriaque est comme un livre d'images dont le texte serait perdu" (p.
93). "La difficulte majeure tient
au fait que les premiers ne concordent pas toujours avec les seconds, qui sont
indirects et de seconde main, puisqui'ils ne procedent pas d'authentiques
mithriastes practiquants" (p. 93).
"Mithra n'est pas un dieu mort et ressuscite" (p. 109). "Le salut qu'il donne est d'abord la
sauvegarde physique des etres vivants" (p. 109). "'la Terre feconde . . . ' . . . 'gardien des fruits'
. . . du souci majeur qui anime les mithriastes: preservation de la vie, vigilance envers la
vie" (p. 109). "Dans le
monde, avec la creation d'Oromasdes. Le
probleme du salut individuel et extra-terrestre ne se pose pas. Il s'agit d'un salut bio-cosmique" (p.
110). "Car Mithra ne meurte
pas. N'etant pas descendu du ciel (mais
tout au contraire issu du roc terrestre), il n'a pas besoin d'y remonter pour
affirmer son triomphe sur la mort, apres ses exploits dans le monde et pour le
monde" (p. 111). Turcan, Mithra
et le Mithriacisme, pp. 93, 109-111.
Nash maintains the idea of rebirth was a late addition to Mithraism, and
that its conception of time was linear, not cyclical. The Gospel and the Greeks:
Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? (Richardson,
TX: Dallas, 1992), p. 147. But if Ulansey is right, and Stoic
philosophers caused Mithraism to exist, the idea of the "Great Year,"
with its conception of history ultimately always repeating, had to be its view
of time from the beginning. Evidence
for a non-linear view of time in Zoroastrianism can be found in L. Patterson, Mithraism
and Christianity: A Study in
Comparative Religion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1921), pp. 60-62.
[114].........Ironically for
Conder's assertions about Christianity's dependence on paganism, rabbi H.G.
Enelow describes a point of contention between Jewish and traditional Christian
scholars: "Jewish writers have
tried to prove that anything taught by Jesus may be found in Jewish literature,
and that therefore he could not be called original; while Christians have
deemed it necessary to defend Jesus against the charge of borrowing or
reproducing from Jewish sources, lest his originality be impugned." A Jewish View of Jesus (New
York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1920),
p. 14; as cited in McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 241.
[115].........By comparison,
consider the similarities between various Masonic rituals and Mormon Temple
ceremonies. It's no coincidence some
are highly similar, because many of the top leaders of the early Mormon (LDS)
Church were Masons, including Joseph Smith himself. Other Mormon leaders who were Masons include Brigham Young (the
second President of the LDS Church), Sidney Rigdon, W.W. Phelps, Heber C.
Kimball, and Newel K. Whitney. Hyrum
Smith, Joseph's brother, was admitted to the Masonic Lodge at about the same
time Joseph supposedly received the plates to translate the Book of Mormon
from. Indeed, so many early Mormons
joined the Masonic Lodge in Nauvoo, IL that the Masonic hierarchy decided to
expel them to keep Joseph Smith from eventually becoming Grand Commander. In this case, causation for the similar
ceremonies can clearly be proven, since those in one religion (Masonry) were
members of another (the Mormon Church).
See Dave Hunt and Ed Decker, The God Makers (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1984), pp. 122-28.
[118].........Turcan, Mithraism
et le Mithriacisme, pp. 79, 144; Patterson, Mithraism and Christianity,
pp. 36-37, 49-52. Only once in the
Avesta of Zoroastrianism is Mithra called "the bull," and as
Patterson notes: "Bulls can only
have been sacrificed to Mithra when the original meaning of the rite had been
forgotten." After all, it's Mithra
who kills the bull in the stone image of the tauroctony, so he can't be
sacrificing it to himself as symbolizing his own death!
[119]........."M. Simon
y a decele la marque d'une influence chretienne, qui reste a demonstrer,"
Turcan, Mithra et la Mithriacisme, p. 103; Nash, Gospel and the Greeks,
p. 176. It's assumed that the quote
from the Santa Prisca Mithraeum's wall painting has the date Nash describes,
although Nash's mention doesn't seem to refer to what it says correctly, or is
referring to another quote from the same painting or another in the same
Mithraeum. For a discussion of this
quote not in French, see Sauer, The End of Paganism, p. 77. On this point, Nash references his
information to H. Betz, "The Mithras Inscriptions of Santa Prisca and the
New Testament," Novum Testamentum 10 (1968): 52-80.
[120].........Marcus Minucius
Felix, The Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix, trans. G.W. Clarke (New
York: Newman Press, 1974), pp. 64,
106-7, 330-31.
[121].........Virgil's Aeneid, John Dryden,
trans. (New York: Airmount Publishing
Co., 1968 (original publication, 1697), p. 286.
[122].........Henry Morris, The
Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), pp. 402-3;
Ackerman, J.G. Frazer, pp. 149-53; Lang, Magic and Religion, pp.
15-45 (generally).
[123].........Cartlidge and
Dungan, Documents for the Study of the Gospels, p. 135. Another problem faces the user of Diodorus,
Herodotus, and perhaps other ancient Greek writers when tracing cultural
influences, as Lefkowitz explains:
"But evidently he [Diodorus] followed Herodotus's example in
imagining that any similarity was proof of direct connection, rather than a
sign of indirect influence, or simply a coincidental occurrence. Like Herodotus, he seems eager to discover
correspondences [between ancient Greek and Egyptian culture], with such zeal
that he takes the most superficial similarities as a sign of borrowing." Not Out of Africa, p. 73. It sounds like Diodorus anciently was making
the same mistakes as Conder has recently, only the former constitutes a primary
source with the same problem, which undermines its soundness for proving the
cultural diffusion of religious ideas.
[124].........For an example
of how Frazer's work can't be treated as infallible, note what P.W. Graebelein,
Jr. wrote concerning the supposed relationship between various "pagan
savior gods" that has been rebutted by another scholar: "It is important to stress that the
dictim of J. G. Frazer (Adonis, Attis, Osiris [1906])‑‑"under
the name of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western
Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life, . . . which
they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead"‑‑though
it enjoyed widespread scholarly acceptance for about half a century, has been
invalidated by later material, as admirably set forth by O. R.
Gurney." "Tammuz,"
Bromiley, gen. ed., ISBN, vol. 4, p. 726. The reference is to O.R. Gurney, Journal of Semitic Studies
7 (1962), 147-60. Note the implications
for MB, p. 66, for this new information.
[125]........."Carib
Indians," Franklin J. Meine, Editor-in-Chief, The American Peoples
Encyclopedia (Chicago: The Spencer
Press, Inc., 1952), 4-859; The World Book Encyclopedia (Chicago: Field Enterprises Educational Corporation,
1960), vol. 3, p. 142.
[126].........In this
connection, I think of Prys Morgan's essay dealing with the cranks investigating
and preserving (supposedly) the culture and history of Wales. He mentions offhand the belief that Welsh
was related to Hebrew (p. 67). See
"From a Death to a View," in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of
Tradition, pp. 67-74.
[127].........E.M. Blaiklock,
Jesus Christ: Man or Myth? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984), pp. 13, 16; as cited by McDowell
and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp. 25-27; Tim Williams, "The Jesus
of the Gospels: Fact or Fiction? Tacitus Reference to Jesus," Masada,
Spring 1997, p. 43. McDowell and
Wilson, He Walked Among Us, pp. 48-51, powerfully rebut skepticism about
the historical value of this passage.
[129].........For a quick
discussion of this subject, although it's hardly mistake free, see Hal Lindsey
with C.C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970), pp.
32-47.
[130].........See Kevin D.
Miller, "The War of the Scrolls," Christianity Today, Oct. 6,
1997, pp. 42-43.
[132].........S.K. Soderlund,
"Septuagint," Bromiley, gen. ed., ISBN, vol. 4, pp. 403, 404,
408; Ronald Kenneth Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 228+; as cited by McDowell and Wilson, He Walked
Among Us, p. 228.
[133].........I do apologize
if anything written in this essay sounds intellectually prideful or
arrogant. As a writer of letters to the
editor, I long tried to exercise the courtesy of trying to avoid mentioning the
writer of what I was attacking more than once, in order to focus on his ideas
and not his person. Unfortunately, due
to the nature of BGJ, this was virtually impossible, since my personal beliefs
and even motives became the focus of attack (note especially pp. 5-6), and
because my reply had to be similarly focused, to help ensure Conder or one of
his followers couldn't say I was attacking beliefs he didn't believe in. As a result, I ended up having to speak a
lot more in the first person in this essay than I like doing (compare this
essay to ICF in this regard). I've had
to unveil my academic credentials in order to show I know something about the
subject of history writing, the differences between primary and secondary
sources, how historians operate, etc. in order to give some backing for judging
Conder's work and methodology negatively.
[134].........Lefkowitz, Not
Out of Africa, p. 153.
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