Original
article
By DOUG SHAVER
August
2006
An advocate's hypocrisy cannot invalidate any argument he makes, but all else
being equal, one must at least wonder about the cogency of an argument if its
advocates find it necessary to engage in hypocrisy. Craig begins with a dig at
the "presuppositions" of the Jesus Seminar and its "pursuit of a cultural
agenda." He would do well to re-read Matt. 7:3: "And why beholdest thou the mote
that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own
eye?" Evangelical complaints about presuppositions and agendas are just
laughably ironic. It is of course appropriate to argue that one's adversary's
presuppositions are unfounded or that his agenda is pernicious, but it is the
height of chutzpah for any evangelical to suggest that it is wrong even to have
any presuppositions or agendas.
Craig presents what is, so far as I know, a fair summary of the Seminar's findings. Then he notes: "Now if these conclusions are correct, we who are Christians today are the victims of a massive delusion." We may first note the apparent assumption that nobody can disagree with Craig's Christology and still be a Christian. I hope he has never criticized the pope for making a similar assumption on his own behalf.
Now, it is true that if the Seminar's conclusions are right, then the beliefs of most (not all) Christians—not just "today" but throughout most of Christian history—have been wrong. I would not call that state of affairs a "massive delusion," because delusion tends to imply cognitive dysfunctions that I don't think have been at work among most believers for the past 2,000 years. All people, without exception, believe certain things that happen not to be true, but in ordinary conversation we do not say they are deluded. All we say is that they are mistaken. And, there is nothing unusual about a mistaken belief being both pervasive and persistent. It is, and always has been, a common part of the human condition.
But Craig is trying to show evangelical Christians that the Jesus Seminar cannot be right, and it would hardly have been sufficient to note, "If these conclusions are correct, then we Christians are mistaken." Few Christians want to claim that there is no way they could make a mistake. But, to have been taken in by a massive delusion? "Oh, no, not me, no way." Craig does not make it obvious, though, why evangelical Christians are singularly immune to massive delusions. They have no problem believing that all the world's Muslims are victims of a massive delusion, and most of them think the same about Roman Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and any other religion but their own version of Christianity.
Anyway, call it a delusion, a mistake, a fantasy, an error, a myth, a superstition, or what have you, the appropriate response to anyone who says "You're wrong" is not "That's impossible" but "Show me." Of course members of the Jesus Seminar did try to show why they believed that Christianity has, through most of its history, been mistaken about Jesus. They gave the reasons behind their conclusions. Craig says their reasons are inadequate to support their conclusions, and he might be justified in thinking so. But it is one thing to reach a conclusion from a weak argument. It is something else entirely to reach a conclusion that is demonstrably wrong. A weak argument, like a fallacious argument, can have a true conclusion. If Craig's version of Christianity is provably true, then the Jesus Seminar must be provably wrong.
Attempting to demonstrate this, Craig begins his attack by railing against the Seminar's presupposition of naturalism—on account of which, he says, "things like the incarnation, the Virgin Birth, Jesus' miracles, and his resurrection go out the window before you even sit down at the table to look at the evidence." I've discussed this at some length in another essay on my site, The naturalistic assumption. Suffice it to say here that the question of whether any particular miracle did happen is not the same as whether miracles in general can happen.
It is a demonstrable fact that most miracle reports are, to put it most charitably, unreliable, and I'm very sure that Craig would agree with this. Let us suppose that every such report ever made, not throughout history but just since the closing of the Christian canon, were written down and put into a single book. If Craig were to read that book, would he believe all the stories in it? Most of them? Ten percent of them? Less than that, I'm very sure. There is no such book, but there are countless documents extant, and countless others no longer extant, in which there are reports of miracles, and the New Testament is just one more of them. There is no reason whatever to exempt it from the kind of scrutiny that Craig surely must apply to all other documents containing miracle stories -- or that he surely applies at least to non-Christian documents.
Stories about dead people returning to life are not in general believed, not by anybody. Most of them are not believed even by evangelical Christians unless, and only unless, the story comes from an evangelical Christian. Otherwise they are just as skeptical as any atheist. It is eminently reasonable for anybody not committed to scriptural inerrancy to insist on extraordinary evidence before believing any story about any resurrection. A handful of ancient documents saying it happened is about as ordinary as evidence gets. (And it matters nothing, in this context, how many copies there might be of any particular document.) If Craig and millions of other Christians are satisfied with that kind of evidence, then so be it, but the rest of the world does not prove itself depraved by supposing that Christians are mistaken.
Craig complains that the Seminar in effect defines any assertion of supernatural occurrences as unhistorical.
Anything that is supernatural is by definition not historical. There's no argument given; it's just defined that way. Thus we have a radical divorce between the Christ of faith, or the supernatural Jesus, and the real, historical Jesus. Now the Jesus Seminar gives a ringing endorsement of Strauss's distinction: they say that the distinction between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith is "the first pillar of scholarly wisdom." [Emphasis in original.]
One could just as well complain about Craig's position: "Anything in the Bible is by definition historical" or "Craig gives a ringing endorsement to the assumption that the historical Jesus is identical with the Christ of evangelical faith." The point is not that he scolds others for doing what he himself does. The point is whether there is a real symmetry between the Seminar's scientific presumptions and Craig's evangelical presumptions. Disbelief in miracles is hardly confined to liberal academics or the scientific community in general. Plenty of uneducated conservatives don't think they happen, either. If he would convince the world that such disbelief is unreasonable, the burden is on him and his fellow believers to prove it, especially if they think our skepticism makes us deserving of an eternity of hellfire.
From naturalism, Craig moves on to berate the Seminar for treating the Gospel of Thomas as if it were at least as reliable as the canonical gospels. He is probably hoping that his readers will forget a vital difference between historical Christianity and modern scholarship. Christian dogma affirms that the gospels tell us about Jesus and nothing but Jesus. Modern scholarship understands that they tell us what early Christians believed about Jesus, and it does not assume that those early Christians were incapable of error. There is no reason at all, considering what seems to be known about the provenance of the Gospel of Thomas, to suppose that the Christians who produced it were to be trusted less than those who produced the canonical gospels, considering how little is reasonably certain about the provenance of almost any early Christian writing.
As Craig notes, Thomas was found along with numerous other documents apparently produced by a Gnostic community in Egypt, and there is a consensus among scholars that it is a copy of an original written during the late second century. Craig also claims that a "vast majority of scholars" consider the document to be "a derivative source." Derivative from what, he does not say, and then he remarks: "Incredibly, however, fellows of the Jesus Seminar regard the Gospel of Thomas as an early, primary source concerning Jesus . . . ." I don't know how the seminar defines "primary source" or whether they actually said that the Gospel of Thomas is one. I am under the impression that a primary source has to be contemporary with its subject, and therefore no second-century document could be a primary source for Jesus. From Craig's viewpoint, though, the real problem is that, labeling issues aside, the Jesus Seminar put Thomas on a par with the canonical gospels. That is a problem for him because, for any defense of evangelical dogma, the canonical gospels have to get special treatment. They must be treated differently from all other ancient documents.
Craig next offers, as a "second example" of the Jesus Seminar's folly, the opinions of one member, co-chairman John Dominic Crossan, about the Gospel of Peter. Whether Crossan's opinions about this particular document represent the consensus of the Seminar members, I have no idea, and Craig offers not a hint one way or the other. But, for the sake of discussion, let us assume that Crossan's personal opinions about the Gospel are every bit as absurd as Craig thinks they are. What does that tell us about the reasonableness of doubting the resurrection? Absolutely nothing. Crossan's opinions about that book could not be less relevant to the question of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead. But that is actually beside Craig's point. His point, aimed at the believers among his readers, is: See how foolish these liberal skeptics are; they're all like Crossan, and I've just shown you what a stupid crackpot he is.
Moving on from there, Craig then tries to wave the bloody PC flag.
The third presupposition of the Jesus Seminar is that religion in general and Jesus in particular must be politically correct. In our day of religious relativism and pluralism it is politically incorrect to claim that one religion is absolutely true. All religions have to be equally valid ways to God. But if you insist on being politically correct, then somehow you've got to get Jesus out of the way. For his radical, personal claims to be the unique Son of God, the absolute revelation of God the Father, the sole mediator between God and man, are frankly embarrassing and offensive to the politically correct mindset. The Jesus of the gospels is not politically correct!
Well, I am probably about as politically correct as George W. Bush. If Bill Craig, or any other advocate for any other religion, can prove that his religion is absolutely true, then I will say that that religion is absolutely true whether the PC crowd likes it or not. What's more, even though I don't now think any such thing, if Craig does believe that evangelical Christianity is absolutely true, then I have no problem with his saying so. In fact, I would think him a hypocrite if he did not. But, his saying "My religion is absolutely true" does not make it so, and no skeptic in or out of the Jesus Seminar is obliged to assume that it does. It's up to him to prove its absolute truth. The Seminar's failure to presuppose the absolute truth of evangelical Christianity was not a methodological fault. It was a virtue. They would have been at fault if, in the course of their investigation, they had uncovered proof that Christianity was indeed absolutely true and then denied it. Craig has to show that they did find such proof but ignored it. He has not done that, and until he does his objection amounts to nothing more than a complaint that they don't agree with his dogma.
Craig is, however, on to something when he observes, "The desire to have a politically correct religion and in particular a politically correct Jesus skews the historical judgement of the Jesus Seminar," and notes a bit later: "It's hard to disagree with Howard Kee's verdict: the fellows of the Jesus Seminar have succumbed to the temptation to create Jesus in their own image.{20} They have looked down the long well of history and seen their own faces reflected at the bottom.{21}" I agree that historicists of all persuasions tend to find a Jesus who is rather like themselves in some important way. Perhaps unlike Craig, I think evangelical Christians are no less inclined to do this than anybody else. They think they have, as Jesus had, an exclusive insight into God's thinking. They think nobody can have any excuse whatever for doubting whatever they say about Jesus, just as no one had any excuse for doubting what Jesus said about himself. If they believe it, then God said it, and that settles it. So, too, do they read the words of the gospel authors and, in turn, the words those authors attributed to Jesus. If an authority said it -- or if an authority claims that another authority said it -- then it is not to be questioned, by anybody or for any reason.
Craig next devotes a few paragraphs to impugning both the motives and the academic competence of the Jesus Seminar members, and he tries hard to suggest that they speak only for some lunatic fringe of New Testament scholars. He seems also to imply that his own opinions are solidly within the consensus of the scholarly mainstream. But while Craig probably accepts the mainstream judgment on many incidental issues of NT scholarship, for him the bedrock of anything having to do with understanding the New Testament is that the original documents were produced without error under divine guidance. That is not a mainstream position. Mainstream scholars rejected inerrancy over a century ago and have given it no serious consideration since then. That does not make inerrancy wrong, but it does make Craig inconsistent when he attacks any scholarly position on grounds that the mainstream rejects it.
He says,
Fortunately, the main stream of New Testament scholarship has been moving in a much different direction than the left-wing fringe represented by the Jesus Seminar. Gone are the days when Jesus was treated like a figure in Greek and Roman mythology. Gone are the days when his miracles were dismissed as fairy tales based on stories of mythological heroes. Gone are the days when his empty tomb and resurrection appearances were written off as legends or hallucinations. Today it is widely agreed that the gospels are valuable historical sources for the life of Jesus and that the proper context for understanding the gospels is not mythology, but Palestinian Judaism.
To put it most charitably, Craig is exaggerating quite a bit. I am not thoroughly familiar with mainstream NT scholarship, but it is certainly not true that "the days are gone" when at least some mainstream scholars can assert that the gospel Jesus is in many respects similar to a Greek or Roman mythological figure, that the miracle stories were not based on historical fact, or that the resurrection appearances were either legendary or hallucinatory. It does seem to be a fact that a larger segment of the scholarly community than in years past treats the gospels as if they were genuinely historical, but this presupposition of reliability hardly represents the solid consensus that Craig wishes it did.
According to Craig, "the movement of New Testament scholarship as a whole is in the direction of confirming the traditional understanding of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels." This apparently is true in the sense that there are more evangelicals nowadays doing academic work in NT scholarship, a field that for a while apparently was dominated by modernists and liberals. But it was so dominated because in the early 20th century, evangelical Christians were famously anti-intellectual and wanted little to do with serious scholarship. In their view, higher education was not a desideratum but something to be sneered at. Academia was for eggheads, liberals, and other skeptics. But then many evangelicals saw the wisdom of joining them if you couldn't beat them, and so nowadays we're seeing a lot of evangelical apologists with nice credentials and fat curricula vitae.
"In particular," says Craig, "my own research concerning Jesus' resurrection has convinced me more than ever that this was a historical event, verifiable by the evidence." Well, of course. Research undertaken for the sole purpose of confirming a hypothesis usually will confirm that hypothesis, or at least can always be made to. Many scholars, whose credentials are just as good as Craig's, nevertheless have examined exactly the same data that he has examined and reached contrary conclusions. Somebody's analysis of that data is faulty, and it doesn't require a Ph.D. to figure out whose it probably is.