Here are some of the excellent questions I’ve been receiving recently, and attempts to respond to them!

 

 

QUESTION:

I understand why the problem of evil makes belief in God difficult. When you look honestly at suffering, it weighs heavily. I don’t think that should be dismissed.

But I wonder… if the existence of evil counts as evidence against God, are we accounting for the existence of beauty/goodness?

Why does self-giving love move us so deeply? Why does forgiveness feel noble? Why does injustice disturb us so profoundly?

And what about beauty… music that stirs something almost sacred in us, acts of courage that restore our faith in humanity, moments of kindness that feel bigger than mere biology?

If suffering makes us question whether a good God exists, could goodness point in the opposite direction?

I’m not saying this solves the problem of evil. It doesn’t. But I do wonder whether we weigh only the darkness and forget the light.

Maybe there’s something else to consider too: when we respond to evil by creating goodness (loving/forgiving/helping/building) are we participating in something deeper? Almost as if we’re aligning ourselves with what is most real.

This isn’t an argument meant to corner you. Just as a question worth holding alongside the others. Are we accounting for the existence of beauty?

 

RESPONSE:

Yes, it’s a good argument and many people find it persuasive.  It is definitely worth pondering at length.

My problem with “God and suffering” is not the simple fact of the existence of evil; it is the massive suffering in extremis.  I’ve had a good deal of bad in my life, but certainly not “my share” in comparison with the vast majority of the 115 billion homo sapiens who have been on this planet over the past 300,000 years, the majority of whom have had a wretched existence (massive starvation, deprivation, incurable and excruciating illness, wounds, birth defects, on and on and on).

If everyone had my share of badness and that was all, I’d certainly continue to believe in God.  But alas, the horrors of suffering have been ever-present and in billions of cases extreme.

I do, happily, revel in the goodness as well, andI  stand amazed at it.  But I don’t think it requires a belief in God to accept it.  I do, though, think the horrible pain of billions of people calls into question the idea of a God who is loving and in control.

We each have to decide what makes best sense in our own minds….

 

 

QUESTION:

If the strongest explanation for Luke’s alteration/omission of the centurion’s declaration that Jesus was the Son of God at the crucifixion is that he wants to anchor Jesus’s divine sonship at least as early as his birth, then why does he later associate that same divine sonship AND innocence with Jesus’s death and resurrection in Acts 13.  Luke is combining a variety of early traditions that are at odds at WHEN it happened in order to stress that he really WAS the Son of God.  (Similar problem in Luke-Acts with other titles for Jesus as well: Christ and Lord.  He gets *made* those at the resurrection but is *already* those before he dies!)

RESPONSE
Yes indeed!  It’s one of the major questions to be addressed about Luke’s Christology, and it can be extended even further:  why does he state that Jesus became Son of God at his conception (1:35); at his baptism (3:21 — the original text probably); and at his resurrection (speeches in Acts). Which is it?  So too, as you point out, with other titles – for example, when does he become “Lord”?  Luke indicates Jesus is born the Lord (2:11); he is called Lord during his life (10:1), but then he is said to become Lord at his resurrection (Acts 2:38).  That’s true of other titles Jesus is given in Luke.  (I deal with the issue in Orthodox Corruption in my discussion of the textual variant of 3:21.)

One major difference between Luke and Mark involves this kind of timing.  For Mark, the first time anyone (any human) explicitly recognizes Jesus is the Son of God is at his death (when the centurion proclaims it; Mark 15:39).  Luke, though, does not retain Mark’s idea of a “messianic secret,” and he does not describe the crucifixion as the point at which Jesus is shown to be the son of God, as in mark. For Luke the point of the crucifixion is that Jesus  was wrongly executed: he was completely innocent.  You can see that especially by comparing carefully Mark and Luke’s trials before Pilate, where Jesus’s innocence is declared repeatedly (by Pilate three times; Herod once; the Centurion; etc).

 

 

QUESTION:

I am unable to wrap my wits around one fundamental question about Jesus’ three-year ministry: why did his disciples, his main followers, stick around month after month? The answer is not obvious. If the historical Jesus were in no way a miracle worker, then how did he establish his bona fides with them? Given that Jesus was very smart, very astute, intense, straightshooting, a strong personality with lots of charisma, it still does not ring true that a young person would drop everything to follow this man not just for a week or a month or two, but for years.

The fact they did follow suggests deep conviction and solid commitment, which seems way too much of a personal investment for what appears to be on offer. Sure, the kingdom of God was a wonderful promise, but it was just a bunch of well-fashioned words that tell of a future event. Is your view that Jesus did in fact make such a compelling case that, all by itself, could have earned this kind of ‘all in’ commitment of his followers.

 

RESPONSE:

Part of the problem is that we don’t know how long Jesus’ ministry was.  In Mark it begins in the summer when fields are ready to be harvested (ch. 2), and everything after that happens right away (“immediately,” “immediately,” “immediately” — one of Marks’ favorite ways of staring his stories); Jesus goes to Jerusalem in the fall (Passover feast) and is arrested there and executed.  So it appears the ministry lasts only a few months, half a year or so.

People say “three years” because in John he celebrates THREE passover feasts (it’s an annual event), but I don’t know that that’s historical.

In any event, there are many religions in the world in which people have abandoned everything to belong, apart from society and experiencing hardship — for years!  If they believe the message! That seems to be what’s going on with Jesus in the Gospels.  His followers know he speaks the truth, they think he will bring salvation, and they give up everything to follow him.

 

QUESTION:

Let us at least consider the implications of four gospels circulating anonymously before they are each eventually assigned an author by the time of Papias. Most scholars hold that “Matthew” and “Luke” relied on “Mark”. But for the theory of anonymity to work this must mean that two people relied on a gospel they knew not who wrote it. Yet they both considered it authoritative. This is very strange if they had no idea who wrote it. Had it already become “textbook” gospel? But why?

Again, how does a book even circulate anonymously? Are we to imagine a “Mark” laboring late at night, concealing his project from family and friends (Christians), then dropping his final draft at some door of some primitive house-church and stealing off into the night?

I wonder what would happen if we applied this degree of skepticism to other works. Does Plutarch announce himself as the author in the “Lives” attributed to him?

RESPONSE:

Good questions!  To start with, I don’t think Matthew and Luke actually did consider Mark particularly authoritative. It provided them with a number of their stories with wording that they often thought was satisfactory. But the fact that they changed it so extensively shows they didn’t think it was fully “authoritative” per se.

When we say that Mark was circulated anonymously, you’re right, we’re not saying that his original audience didn’t know who he was. But when it got copied and taken to other places, his identity was soon forgotten. That happened a lot in the ancient world. A number of well-known instances involve authors, not just, famously, “Homer,” but all sorts of writings which were later attributed to someone who obviously did not write them. There is an entire field of scholarship devoted to this issue (scholars figuring out who wrote all those anonymous writings back there that eventually were attributed to Socrates or Plato, or Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Hippolytus, etc