Loading...This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure.
The following is drawn from my old chapter 4.
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I was raised in the church from my infancy. As a child I went to services and Sunday school, every week, in an Episcopal church in Lawrence Kansas; I was confirmed there and became an altar boy as soon as I could. I continued serving all the way until college. But when I was a junior in high school, as a fifteen-year old, I started to attend a weekly Youth for Christ club designed for high school kids with the goal of “converting” them to Christianity. One might wonder — as I do now, looking at things from the distance of many years and many experiences — what it was I was supposed to convert from. I was already a reasonably religious and committed church person. I believed in God, confessed my sins, said and believed in the church creeds, and prayed to Jesus every week of my life. But according to the 20-something leader of this Youth for Christ club, I was not really a Christian. To be a Christian I had to ask Jesus into my heart and begin a “personal relationship” with him. If I did, would be saved. If I did not, I would be just as lost as any of the atheists, Jews, or pagans of the world. And being lost meant spending eternity in the flames of hell. It wasn’t a happy prospect.
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If you don’t mind me asking, when you had this born again experience, did you actually feel you had a living relationship with Jesus? Did you hear him speaking to you? Was it like a presence? A warm-n-fuzzy feeling? I used to believe in God and used to pray and think I was getting answers etc. But as I grew older, I noticed that God’s voice sounded just like my own. So either God was using my voice in my head to communicate with me, or it was simply my mind role-playing in my head, but sort of falling for it at the same time. I think that was one of those little moments of realisation that my belief in God could just be like an imaginary friend. Did you ever have a moment like that? Probably not totally relevant, so feel free to ignore.
Yes, I thought of Jesus as a living presence in my life, and prayer was a matter of talking to him; and yes, it brought a sense of warmth and wholeness that otherwise most people are missing in their lives….
This sounds like it will be an enjoyable read. I hope it’s as big a success as Jesus Interrupted and Misquoting Jesus!
Really enjoying these reads! About your rejection of the “empty tomb” story…are you rejecting it solely because (a) the earliest Christian author, Paul, doesn’t mention it in any surviving writing, and (b) the early Christians would have had good reason to make it up?
I don’t think it can be seen as “made up” as part of identifying what happened to Jesus with the purported “prophecy” in Second Isaiah. You acknowledged that the connection is thin (something that *might* mean “burial among the wealthy”). And the Second Isaiah association, in general, would be meant to stress the Jewish authorities’ opposition to Jesus. Why would crafters of a fictional story have described Joseph of Arimathea as a (dissenting) member of the Sanhedrin?
I know, of course, that most crucifixion victims didn’t receive proper burials. That doesn’t rule out this case having been an exception.
Also…do you still think *most* early Christians first believed Jesus had become divine upon his resurrection, then pushed the time of it back, first to the beginning of his ministry, next to his birth, and finally came to think of him as a preexisting divine being? (As the Gospels suggest?) While *a few* thought from a much earlier date that he’d started out as a preexisting divine being?
These are great questions. I have to decide whether to spill the beans here publicly or make people wait and read the fuller arguments in the book!
//I’M NOT SAYING THAT HISTORICALLY WE CAN SHOW THAT IT DID *NOT* HAPPEN; I ARGUE THAT THE HISTORICAL DISCIPLINES SIMPLY DO NOT ALLOW US TO KNOW WHETHER SUCH A MIRACLE OCCURRED OR NOT, DUE TO THE LIMITATIONS INHERENT IN THE STUDY OF HISTORY//
^ This view of yours has always struck me as weird.
It seems to me that we’ve shown Jesus was just a normal guy. Not God. Not raised from the dead. I could claim Josephus was God too, or that Galen was raised from the dead. And, given all of our evidence (not just of ancient documents but, I mean… the way the world operates, and looks to us right now) we could confidently say: “Josephus was not, and is not God”; “Galen was not raised from the dead”. These are not dogmatic statements made in a vacuum of no evidence in either direction. They are statements about our knowledge. They form a part of our knowledge about the world as surely as saying “Abraham Lincoln was shot”, “Spiderman isn’t real”, or “water contains oxygen”.
Someone might then object that “Well, we don’t absolutely, 100%, super-duper know that about Josephus”.
True enough. But, we don’t “absolutely, 100%, super-duper” know ANYTHING with THAT much certainty. We’re always talking about our beliefs (whether its my Grandma made brownies last week, or my Grandma walked on water last week) in terms of probabilities and the evidence we have to believe them. All ‘knowledge’ is are our beliefs with a really low probability of being false/high probability of being true. Science in its broadest form (history/economics/auto mechanics included) is just about our convictions scaling with evidence. It’s our best effort to understand reality. As such, I don’t see “supernatural conclusions” being off limits for any discipline.
You and I believe Jesus (and everyone else) has died and stayed dead. We both believe Jesus was not raised from the dead. And we believe that on the basis of reasons we’ve evaluated.
But it seems you want to say *some* reasons are excluded from a narrowly defined field of “history”. Even though, they’re the reasons that we both used to come to this conclusion about the historical affairs of the cosmos.
I can easily imagine a situation where the evidence would be good enough to believe that the resurrection of Jesus (a “miracle”) took place. Likewise, I can imagine the evidence being such that its even beyond dispute it was Yahweh who helped engineer it. Its just included in the science/history books as one more fact about reality. I wouldn’t have had to witness it either (though, that too would be awesome evidence lol). And I find it difficult to believe you couldn’t imagine the same…
I don’t mean these remarks to be offensive; I’m a huge fan of your work! I’m just really struggling to agree with your view of “history/science” that you seem to have adopted here and elsewhere. Any thoughts you have would be appreciated!
Best,
Ben
I’m saying something quite simple. The nature of historical disciplines does not allow a historian to demonstrate that a miracle probably did happen in the past; and it does not allow a historian to say that a miracle certainly did not happen in the past. The way history *works* (that is — the way we reconstruct the past) makes it impossible to pass any judgment one way or the other on whether there are such things as miracles. That question may be a scientific one, or a philosophical one, but it is not a historical one, because of the nature of historical evidence.
I understand that you’re saying that– but I think you’re plainly mistaken. The nature of historical disciplines *does* allow us to do that. It just happens that the evidence doesn’t support such conclusions. But, in principle, it could. That’s all I’m saying. Scientific questions and philosophical questions are not magically separate from historical questions, and vice versa. Our knowledge of “science” is catalogued via history, and historians make decisions using scientific tools.. carbon dating, paleography, film, etc. The line between these fields are blurry ones.
Its not as if we had video and journalistic evidence of Yahweh manipulating space-time and matter, that historians would say “sorry guys, we need *historical* evidence, your film doesn’t count because its scientific evidence.”
Here’s my take on the topic at hand:
1. Simple can be good or quite misleading.
2. It’s easy to say, “The nature of historical disciplines does not allow judgments about miracles one way or the other,” but that notion is only a relatively recent “judgment” about the way historians are supposed to work, not necessarily how they have actually behaved throughout history.
3. Most of history has been shaped and written “by the victors,” except perhaps when the losers managed to hide their own “spin” where they could be found by future generations.
4. Reconstructing the past, as a verbal, visual and written retelling of human history, does not happen in a vacuum, nor is it untainted by the point-of-view and personal prejudices of the story teller.
5. It’s somewhat disingenuous, I think, and all to convenient, for any “bible scholar” to make judgments about words, people and events of the distant past, without telling the reader (or listener) when he or she is putting on or taking off his/her historian’s hat.
I couldn’t agree more, Ben. Very well put and unassailable, I think. Bart seems to live in a compartmentalized universe with strict categorical divisions, especially when it comes to the role of historians and the methods they use to uncover what happened in the past. This is no small problem for anyone who deals with non-historical sources like the Bible and who claims to be describing, or attempting to describe, real people in the real world. It’s like running a race on a treadmill, with blinders on, inside an Aristotelian circle…..Okay, it’s not exactly like that, but something along those lines. 🙂
The Bible is as much a historical source as any other literature written from the period. It’s authors did not know they were writing Scripture! Like all other writings from the time, the books have to be treated critically — not accepted because they were later canonized and not rejected because they were later canonized, but used independently of their canonical status. I don’t think I’m the one with blinders on!!!
Well, we all come equipped with a set of personalized blinders. They don’t so much obstruct our field of vision, not entirely anyway, it’s just that we see things differently, from different points of view. When you say, “The Bible is as much a historical source as any other literature written from the period,” I’m tempted to agree. Unfortunately, that translates into *small doses* of historical reality hidden beneath multiple layers of fictionalized fantasies. More than that, the Bible IS unique, not better or worse, and not the same, or even close to being the same as other things written in the remote past. Isn’t that why it consumes so much of your time and attention? Not to mention countless other Christian and former Christian scholars? When you say, “Its authors did not know they were writing Scripture,” I say, “Okay,” but “they were nonetheles writers steeped in prejudice with anti-Jewish agendas!”
From the very beginning of the post-war period, they spun their stories as though God had a hand in shaping what happened. At its core it was a hatchet job aimed at Jews. (To some extent this included the Old Testament, but for different reasons.) So when you say, “Like all other writings from the time, *the books* have to be treated critically… ,” I say, “Yes, of course.” But in this instance that’s precisely where the issue and the problem lies.
I merely mentioned that I liked what Ben wrote. “Science in its broadest form (history/economics /auto mechanics included) is just about our convictions scaling with evidence.” (Very true.) He also said, “I don’t mean these remarks to be offensive; I’m a huge fan of your work! I’m just really struggling to agree with your view of ‘history/science’ that you seem to have adopted here and elsewhere.” My response was, “Very well put and unassailable, I think.” I then added, “Bart seems to live in a compartmentalized universe with strict categorical divisions, especially when it comes to the role of historians and the methods they use to uncover what happened in the past.” (The part about a treadmill and Aristotelian circles was another failed attempt at humor.) That said, I still agree with Ben and I still think you live in a compartmentalized universe, at least from where I sit.
When you insist that the narratives of the Bible, even without the theology and the miracles, somehow reflect history, I say, “Not necessarily so,” and “not because you say it.” Like everyone else, you express your opinions within a framework of your own making, using your own categorical and methodological standards (I know you insist they are not yours alone), standards that leave out or downplay other critical factors that need to be considered in order to separate fact from fabrication.
Based on your view of *literature,* the Bible should be approached using the methodology of historians. If that’s what you were/are doing, then your conclusions would be/should be more widely embraced by the majority of your peers. After all, you have acknowledged that your arguments and your judgments are often out of step with theirs? If it’s just a matter of the right methodology, wouldn’t the facts be more readily discernable? And collectively agreed upon??
For me, “literature written from the period” is automatically suspect, no matter how you categorize it or what your methodology seems to be. It’s still “just about [y]our scaling with [highly suspect] evidence.” Why else would James be so effectively written out of the story, and why would Judas be included as the quintessential Jew who betrayed Jesus in a slanderous subplot, which according to your own Christianized summation, “had something to do with money!”
You also say, without any sense of embarrassment, “The way history *works* (that is — the way *we* reconstruct the past) makes it impossible to pass any judgment one way or the other on whether there are such things as miracles.” Of course, you do make judgments about miracles and non-miraculous events whenever you decide to take off your historian’s hat, opinions that can, by your own reckoning, only come from a scientist, or perhaps a philosopher.
One last point. If you don’t wear blinders, would you admit to *blind spots* from time to time???
I think I must have them — everyone does; but I don’t think you’ve identified them!
How would you know?
I am still sorry that you are not including these personal anecdotes in your book. They really are quite helpful and they would have provided occasional breaks from the heavy theological writing in the book. Moreover, they would have made the book so much more personal and applicable to daily life.
What you describe in this blog is very, very familiar. I have been there and done that. Being an avid reader of Spong, I can also tell you that his autobiography was much more effective and helpful than his many other books. Likewise, with your personal anecdotes. Ron
You are absolutely correct in saying that we cannot know whether the physical resurrection occurred or not, but historically we can say that the disciples of Jesus, for whatever reasons, believed it happened, otherwise there would be no Christianity. And I think a case could also be made that without the high Christology developed in the first four centuries, Christianity would not have survived for two thousand years. The question I have is what is the future for Christianity? As more Christians examine their beliefs and dig deeper into their church history and begin to understand the origin of their creeds and belief system, will they become disenchanted, as i assume you did, and join the church alumni association as Spong believes? I think we already see this in Europe but not so much in this country.
BTW, your early Christian experience does not sound like any Episcopal church I know. I assume the youth group you joined was not associated with the Episcopal church.
Yes, it was a non-church youth group, completely separate from my church.
Bart, do you ever consider becoming a Christian again? Do you ever miss being a Christian?
I”m always open to it — as to most things. But if I were to become a Christain, it would be a very very different kind from what I was before. I certainly miss some aspect of it — as I lay out in my book God’s Problem
being a hero of the “new sceptics” that have risen in the last 10+ yrs have you bumped into any of the other famous Sceptics (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris,Degrasse tyson, Kaku ect) if so what sort of people do they come across as? (not saying your an anti religious machine like some of them just pointing out you are a modern celebrity sceptic of Christianitys claims)
I have had dinner with Dawkins, and found him delightful. Funny, humane, interesting, and interested. He has a reputation for being nasty in public, but I didn’t see it. I know Harris only from email correspondence, but find him also humane and interesting. The others I haven’t had any contact with.
“it surely is not healthy, to imbue fifteen-year olds with a sense of enormous guilt for all their sinful ways and to threaten them with the firestorms of hell in order to get them to join your religious group”
I wouldn’t say it is “sick”, I wouldn’t even say it is not healthy…. I’d say it is criminal. It is my personal opinion of course, you’ve been too kind. Feel free to not publish this comment, I won’t complain.
I became “Christian” at the age of 32 cause by chance I’ve been forced to read the Gospels while looking for a sentence to read out at my wedding ceremony. I didn’t care about historical issues, I’ve been amazed by their…. beauty. The “criterion of beauty” is quite powerful (I learned it studying Physics and Math in my Master of Science) and, most important, no-one can easily “force” you to see the beauty (there’s no much beauty out there, anyway :-D)
I for one believe it was a good thing to trim this anectdote (although I am interested in it, as you say, you’ve covered that ground). The reason I think this is that if this precedes your chapter on the resurrection, (especially the last paragraph where you come close to challenging the character of evangelicals who prsteltyze to youths), then everything that follows would be tinged (even for readers who already know this history and may share the opinion) as a sort of polemic. I expect the content is much more than a diatribe.
Your trade books/lectures are much better with some dispassion in the style.