Monthly Archives: April 2012

What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say? (Part 2)

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Does God exist?Part 1 of our journey from today’s New Testament back in time to Jesus looked at the problems of translations, canonicity, and finding the best copies.  The next problem to crossing this gulf is textual variants.  There are 400,000 differences between the thousands of New Testament copies—more differences than there are words in the New Testament.  Almost all are insignificant, but thousands of meaningful differences remain.

Historians use several tools to resolve these differences:

  • Criterion of Embarrassment.  Of two passages, which one is more embarrassing?  We can easily imagine scribes toning down a passage, but it doesn’t make sense for them to make it more embarrassing.  The passage that is more embarrassing is likelier to be more authentic.  For example, different copies of Mark 1:40–41 has Jesus either “moved with compassion” or “moved with anger” (for more, see the NET Bible comment on this phrase).  A copyist changing compassion to anger is hard to imagine, but the opposite is quite plausible.  The Criterion of Embarrassment would conclude that “moved with anger” is the likelier original reading.
  • Criterion of Multiple Attestation.  A claim made by multiple independent sources is preferred over one in a single source.

In addition, a contested passage in an older manuscript is preferred, the one contained in more manuscripts is preferred, and so on.

Notice that these tools need multiple manuscripts to work.  They ask: given two manuscripts with different versions of a particular passage, which is the more authentic one?

Consider the long ending of Mark, for example.  Given a manuscript of Mark ending with verse 16:20 (version A) and a manuscript ending with 16:8 (version B), the historians’ tools can be applied to determine which is the likely older and more authentic version.  But what if you don’t have multiple versions?  Suppose we only had Mark version A, with no copies of B and no references to it.  Scholars wouldn’t even know to ask the question!

Consider the three most famous of these embarrassing scribal additions: the long ending of Mark, the Comma Johanneum (the only explicit reference to the Trinity in the Bible), and the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery.  Apologists will argue that these are neither embarrassing nor problems because they’ve been resolved.  We know that they weren’t original.  But this is true only because historians happen to be lucky enough to have competing manuscripts without these additions.  For what added biblical passages do we not have correct manuscripts to make us aware of the problem?

There are consequences.  Pentecostal snake handlers trust in the long ending tacked onto Mark (“In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new languages; they will pick up snakes with their hands, and whatever poison they drink will not harm them”).  What additional nutty demands in our New Testament do we not know are inauthentic?

Of several manuscript categories, our oldest complete copies are Alexandrian manuscripts, including the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus mentioned in the last post.  That’s not because they’re necessarily better copies but because they were preserved better.  The dry conditions of Alexandria, Egypt preserved manuscripts better than many other places where New Testament documents were kept—Asia Minor, Greece, or Italy, for example.  We accept these manuscripts simply because anything that might refute them has crumbled to dust, which is not a particularly reliable foundation on which to build a portrait of the truth.

Read the first post in the series here: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

Next time: The Bible’s Dark Ages

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What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

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Is there really a God who created everything?Remember the 2011 film Anonymous that questioned the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays?  It argued that William Shakespeare was just a front man for the true author, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.  Modern historians have proposed several candidates besides Shakespeare himself, who some have argued was illiterate.

So we don’t know who was perhaps the most famous and influential author in the English language?  Shakespeare only died in 1616, we have a good understanding of the times, and he wrote in Early Modern English, and yet there remains a gulf of understanding that we can’t reliably cross.

And we flatter ourselves that we can cross the far more daunting gulf that separates us from the place and times of Jesus so we can accept the far more incredible claims of the gospel story.

Let’s see how reliable our modern New Testament is.  We’ll follow it back in time to track the tortuous journey on which it has come.  This post will go back to the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, and later posts will explore the hurdles between that point and the life of Jesus.

Our first step is to get past the translations.  In English, we have dozens of versions—New International Version, American Standard Version, New American Standard Bible, and so on.  Some Christians prefer the more archaic King James Version even to the point of arguing that it alone is divinely inspired.  Proponents of different versions find plenty to argue about.

Translation is especially difficult with a dead language like New Testament Greek since text examples are limited and there are no living speakers to consult.  Consider an English example: the idiom “have your cake and eat it too” interpreted 2000 years in the future.  Or “saving face” or “kick the bucket” or “throw in the towel” or “get your comeuppance.”  If given only a handful of examples, future interpreters would have to guess at the meanings.

Let’s look at similar problems in the Bible.  Consider the Hebrew word reem, translated nine times in the King James Version as “unicorn.”  For example, “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the reem.”  It’s now translated as “wild ox,” so perhaps we’ve got this one resolved.  But what other rarely used words and phrases have been misunderstood?  With no authority, we have nothing more than our best guesses to rely on.

A bigger question is: what is “the Bible”?  That is, what is canonical, the books accepted as scripture?  The Christian church is not unified on this question.  For example, Protestants accept the fewest books.  The Roman Catholics add two books of Maccabees and Tobit (and others), the Greek Orthodox church accepts those and adds the Prayer of Manasseh and Esdras (and others), and the Ethiopian Orthodox church accepts those and adds Enoch and Jubilees (and others).  In other words, Christian churches themselves can’t agree on what books contain the inspired word of God.

Our next challenge is to find the best original-language copies.  The King James version was based on the 16th-century Textus Receptus (“received text”), which was a printed version of the best Greek New Testament texts known at the time.  More Greek manuscripts have come to light since then, and modern scholars rely on a broader set, so let’s discard the Textus Receptus and focus on those instead.

Many apologists point proudly to the thousands of New Testament manuscript copies we have today—roughly 5000 Greek manuscripts and lectionaries (collections of scripture used during church services) and close to 20,000 manuscripts in other languages (mostly Latin, but also Ethiopic, Slavic, Syriac, and more).  This compares with just 600 copies of the Iliad, our second-most well-represented ancient book.

These are impressive numbers, but too much is made of them.  Many of these are incomplete fragments—especially the oldest and most important—and almost all are far removed from the early church period.  Suppose scholars discovered a library with 1000 previously unknown Latin Bible manuscripts from the 12th century.  This would be quite a find, but these late manuscripts wouldn’t override the content from the best and oldest handful.  Today’s 25,000 copies tell us little more about the originals than would having only the most reliable and complete 25 copies.

While there are fragments of gospels going back to the second century, for complete copies we go to manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.  These are our oldest copies of the New Testament, and each was written in roughly 350 CE, perhaps as part of the newly approved canon from the Council of Nicaea.

We’ve still got a long way to go before the events in the life of Jesus.  It’s like we’re looking the wrong way through a telescope.

See all posts in this series here:

We see through a glass, darkly
(That is: we dimly see in a mirror)
— 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)

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Jesus: Just One More Dying and Rising Savior

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It’s a week after Easter, so here is one final post on the theme of resurrection.

History records many dying-and-rising saviors.  Examples from the Ancient Near East that preceded the Jesus story include Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, and Baal.  Here is a brief introduction.

Tammuz was the Sumerian god of food and vegetation and dates from c. 2000 BCE.  His death was celebrated every spring.  One version of the story has him living in the underworld for six months each year, alternating with his sister.

Osirus was killed by his brother Set and cut into many pieces and scattered.  His wife Isis gathered the pieces together, and he was reincarnated as the Egyptian god of the underworld and judge of the dead.  He was worshipped well before 2000 BCE.

Dionysus (known as Bacchus in Roman mythology) was the Greek god of wine and dates to the 1200s BCE.  The son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Dionysus was killed and then brought back to life.

Adonis (from 600 BCE) is a Greek god who was killed and then returned to life by Zeus.

Attis (from 1200 BCE) is a vegetation god from central Asia Minor, brought back to life by his lover Cybele.

In Canaanite religion, Baal (Baʿal) was part of a cycle of life and death.  Baal and Mot are sons of the supreme god El (yes, one of the names of the Jewish god).  When El favored the death god Mot over Baal, the heat of the summer took over and Baal died.  He was resurrected when his sister-wife kills Mot.

All these gods:

  • came from regions that were close enough to the crossroads of Israel (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor) for the ideas to have plausibly made it there,
  • were worshipped well before the time of Jesus, and
  • were of the dying-and-rising sort.

This is strong evidence that the gospel writers knew of (and could have been influenced by) resurrecting god stories from other cultures.

Is it possible that Judea at this time was a backwater, and the people were unaware of the ideas from the wider world?  That seems unlikely.  The book of 2 Maccabees, written in c. 124 BCE, laments at how Hellenized the country was becoming.  It says that the new high priest installed by Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes “at once shifted his countrymen over to the Greek way of life.”  He “introduced new customs contrary to the Law” and “induced the noblest of the young men to wear the Greek hat.”  The book complains about “an extreme of Hellenization and increase in the adoption of foreign ways” and the youth “putting the highest value upon Greek forms of prestige.”

In fact, the gospels themselves report that the idea of dying and rising again was a familiar concept.  Jesus in the early days of his ministry was thought to be a risen prophet.

King Herod heard of [the ministry of Jesus], for His name had become well known; and people were saying, “John the Baptist has risen from the dead, and that is why these miraculous powers are at work in Him.” But others were saying, “He is Elijah.” And others were saying, “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But when Herod heard of it, he kept saying, “John, whom I beheaded, has risen!” (Mark 6:14–16)

One Christian website does a thorough job attacking poorly evidenced parallels between Jesus and these prior gods.  For example, was Dionysus really born to a virgin on December 25?  Did Mithras really have 12 disciples?  Was Krishna’s birth heralded by a star in the east?  The author offers $1000 to anyone who can prove that any of these gods’ lists of parallels are actually true.

I’ll agree that there are strained parallels.  One early work that has been criticized for too many claims and too little evidence is The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves (1875).  The recent “Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ” by Acharya S also seems to be reaching, in my opinion.

I don’t have the expertise to weigh in on these many issues, so let’s grant the complaints and dismiss the many unsupportable specific parallels.  What’s left is what really matters: that the Jesus story arose in a culture suffused with the idea of dying and rising saviors.

Apologists raise other objections.

Many of these gods actually came after Jesus.  That’s why the list above only includes dying-and-rising gods who are well-known to have preceded Jesus.  There are many more such gods—Mithras, Horus, Krishna, Persephone, and others—that don’t seem to fit as well.  In fact, Wikipedia lists life-death-rebirth deities from twenty religions worldwide, but I’ve tried to list above the six most relevant examples.

But Jesus really existed!  He’s a figure from history, unlike those other gods.  Strip away any supernatural claims from the story of Alexander the Great, and you’ve still got cities throughout Asia named Alexandria and coins with Alexander’s likeness.  Strip away any supernatural claims from the Caesar Augustus story, and you’re left with the Caesar Augustus from history.  But strip away the supernatural claims from the Jesus story, and you’re left with a fairly ordinary rabbi.  The Jesus story is nothing but the supernatural elements.

Most of those gods were used to explain the cycles of the seasons.  Jesus isn’t like them.  Christianity is different from all the other religions, just like any religion.  If Christianity weren’t different from one of the earlier religions, you’d call it by the name of that religion.

In another post I explore the Dionysus myth more fully to show the parallels with the Jesus story.  That post also notes how Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) not only admitted to the similarities but argued that the devil put them in history to fool us.

Okay, they’re all myths, but the Jesus story is true myth.  This was the approach of C.S. Lewis, who said, “The story of Christ is simply a true myth; a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference, that it really happened, and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s Myth where the others are men’s myths.”

So you admit that the Jesus story indeed has many characteristics of mythology but demand that I just trust you that it’s true?  Sorry, I need more evidence than that.

And the throw-in-the-towel argument:

Just because Christianity developed in a culture that knew of other resurrecting gods doesn’t mean that Jesus wasn’t the real thing.  Granted.  But “you haven’t proven the gospel story false” isn’t much of an argument.  Those who seek the truth know that proof is impossible and try instead to find where the evidence points.

And here’s where the evidence doesn’t point: that humans worldwide invent dying-and-rising saviors (except in the Jesus case, ’cause that one was real!).

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The Moon Isn’t Made of Green Cheese … Is It?

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A moon made of cheese is cut, and a wedge is pulled awayEaster has recently passed, and I’d like to rerun a post on the resurrection.

In a fable going back centuries within various cultures, a simpleton sees the reflection of the full moon in water and imagines that it’s a wheel of green (that is, young) cheese.  It’s a tale that we often pass on to our children and that we discard with time, like belief in the Easter Bunny.

But how do you know that the moon isn’t made of green cheese?

Physicist Sean M. Carroll addressed this question recently.  After a few moments exploring physical issues like the moon’s mass, volume, and density and the (dissimilar) density of cheese, he gave this frank broadside:

The answer is that it’s absurd to think the moon is made of green cheese.

He goes on to say that we understand how the planets were formed and how the solar system works.  There simply is no reason to suppose that the moon is made of green cheese and plenty of reasons to suppose that it’s not.

This is not a proof, there is no metaphysical proof, like you can prove a statement in logic or math that the moon is not made of green cheese.  But science nevertheless passes judgments on claims based on how well they fit in with the rest of our theoretical understanding.

Bringing this thinking into the domain of this blog, how do we know that Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead?  The answer is the same: it’s absurd to think that Jesus was raised from the dead.

  • We know how death works.  We see it in plants and animals, and we know that when they’re gone, they’re just gone.  Rats don’t have souls.  Zebras don’t go to heaven.  There’s no reason to suppose that it works any differently for our favorite animal, Homo sapiens, and plenty of reasons to suppose that it works the same.
  • We know about ancient manuscripts.  Lots of cultures wrote their ancient myths, and many of these are older than the books of the Old Testament: Gilgamesh (Sumerian), Enûma Eliš (Babylonian), Ramayana (Hindu), Iliad (Greek), Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon), Popol Vuh (Mayan), and so on.  For whatever reason, people write miracle stories, and we have a large and well-populated bin labeled “Mythology” in which to put stories like those in the Bible.
  • We know about how stories and legends grow with time.  We may have heard of Charles Darwin’s deathbed conversion to Christianity (false).  Or that a decent fraction of Americans thought that President Obama is a Muslim.  Or that aliens crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico.  Or that a new star appeared in the night sky with the birth of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il.  In our own time, urban legends so neatly fit a standard pattern, that simple rules help identify them.
  • We know that humans invent religions.  There are 42,000 denominations of Christianity alone, for example, and uncountably many versions of the myriad religions invented through history.

Natural explanations are sufficient to explain Christianity.

Might the moon actually be made of cheese?  Science doesn’t make unconditional statements, but we can assume the contrary with about as much confidence as we have in any scientific statement.

Might Jesus have been raised from the dead?  Sure, it’s possible, but that’s not where the facts point.  Aside from satisfying a preconception, why imagine that this is the case?

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Is Christian Heaven More Real than any Other?

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Christian apologetics, novel, and blogThe 1990s BBC sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf is about the crew on an enormous space ship, lost in empty space.  A radiation leak has killed all the crew except Dave Lister, a low-level crewman who had been safely in suspended animation.  He is released 3 million years after the accident when the radiation danger has passed.  His only companions are the ship’s computer, a hologram of another crewmate, an evolved form of his housecat, and a robot named Kryten.

In the episode “The Last Day,” Kryten’s replacement has finally caught up with the ship.  Kryten is packing up his spare heads in preparation for being replaced and is talking with Lister.

LISTER (crewman): How can you just lie back and accept it?

KRYTEN (robot): Oh, it’s not the end for me, sir, it’s just the beginning. I have served my human masters, and now I can look forward to my reward in silicon heaven.

LISTER: Silicon what?

KRYTEN: Surely you’ve heard of silicon heaven. It’s the electronic afterlife. It’s the gathering place for the souls of all electronic equipment. Robots, calculators, toasters, hairdryers—it’s our final resting place.

LISTER: There is no such thing as silicon heaven.

KRYTEN: Then where do all the calculators go?

LISTER: They don’t go anywhere! They just die.

KRYTEN: It’s just common sense, sir. If there were no afterlife to look forward to, why on earth would machines spend the whole of their lives serving mankind? Now that would really be dumb!

LISTER: Just out of interest, is silicon heaven the same place as human heaven?

KRYTEN: Human heaven? Goodness me! Humans don’t go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!

Kryten’s explanation of his heaven is what I get from many Christians.  The existence of their heaven is obvious and indisputable, and the alternative is empty and inconceivable.  They’ve read about it, after all, and they’ve heard about it all their lives.  No heaven?  Who could imagine such a thing?

Christians can easily see through someone else’s nutty idea of an afterlife.  (“Hindu reincarnation?  Where’s the evidence of that?!”)  What they have a harder time with is holding a mirror to their own beliefs.  If they did, perhaps they’d find no more evidence for their concept of heaven than for Kryten’s.

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  • Screenplay found at: “RED DWARF Series 3 Episode 6, ‘The Last Day’” PlanetSmeg.