Why I Am Not a Christian (2000)

This essay was originally published for the Atlanta Freethought Society in 2000. Reprinted with permission.

Introduction



Why I Am Not a Christian



1. The Sins of Christianity



2. Kreeft and Tacelli on Hell



3. The Historicity of the Gospels

The Gospels Were Written by Persons Unknown (Not Eyewitnesses)

The Dates of the Gospels

The Gospels are Based on an Unreliable Oral Tradition

The Gospels Have a Theological Bias and an Apologetic Agenda

The Gospels Contain Fictional Forms

The Gospels Are Inconsistent with Each Other

The Gospels Are Inconsistent with Known Facts

There is No Independent Support for Gospels Claims

The Gospels Testify to Things Beyond Belief



4. Craig's Case for the Resurrection

The Postmortem Appearances

Were the Gospels Written Down Early, Under the Scrutiny of Eyewitnesses?

The Empty Tomb



5. Legend



6. Kreeft and Tacelli on the Hallucination Theory



Appendix: C.S. Lewis on Sex Outside of Marriage



Introduction

This monograph will have an unusual format. It begins with an essay based on the opening arguments of my debate with Dr. William Lane Craig on the subject "Why I am/am not a Christian." This debate was held at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, on June 15, 1998, before an audience of approximately 4500 (about 4450 of whom supported Dr. Craig). Dr. Craig defended his Christian beliefs, and I gave my reasons for disbelief. At the end of the debate I felt confident that I had defended my view effectively and had rebutted Dr. Craig's points. The reactions of others who witnessed the debate or viewed the videotape (available from Prestonwood Baptist) encourage me in that conclusion. I would therefore like to present an elaborated and extended version of those arguments as my opening essay.

The remainder of the book will consist of chapters that provide more detailed support for the arguments in the opening essay. In these chapters I extend my critique and rebut anticipated replies and objections from Christian apologists. I also give lengthy quotations from authoritative sources in support of my claims. Parenthetical references in the opening essay will refer the reader to the chapter number where the relevant points are elaborated and supported. This format allows me to open with a succinct case in the mode of Bertrand Russell's famous essay, "Why I am not a Christian." While that essay reflected Russell's literary brilliance, it has been criticized as superficial and dismissive. The documented corroboration and detailed argument supporting the claims of the opening essay should obviate that criticism.

I would like to thank Ed Buckner and the Freethought Press for inviting me to do this book and all others whose comments and criticisms were offered.

Why I Am Not a Christian

Can belief argue with unbelief or only preach to it? When worldviews clash, is rational debate possible, or only a hostile exchange of epithets and rhetoric? Positions too far apart cannot find enough shared ground even to begin a debate, and there is no question that believers and unbelievers often simply talk past one another. The problem is this: Knowledge claims are never evaluated in a vacuum. When we assess a particular claim, we do so in the light of background knowledge. That is, the credentials of a claim are evaluated by how well it is supported by what we already believe and by our standards of rationality or justification. However, what "we" count as background knowledge or appropriate standards might differ so radically between Christians and non-Christians that rational debate is a practical impossibility.

Generations of Christian apologists have assumed that fruitful communication is possible. They have assumed that enough common ground exists for reasonable debate between belief and nonbelief. I share that assumption. That is, I think that Christians and nonbelievers share enough background beliefs, values, and standards to engage in fruitful debate about the reasonableness of Christian claims (though some of the wilder effusions of creationists and fundamentalists tempt me into doubt).

Christian apologists argue that Christian claims are well grounded vis-à-vis the background knowledge they share with unbelievers and that, therefore, unbelievers should acknowledge Christian truth. My argument is just the opposite, i.e., that given only what we (scientifically and philosophically literate Christians and non-Christians at the beginning of the twenty-first century) share in our background beliefs (about science, history, the Bible, and everything)--and excluding any specifically Christian "revelations"--Christian claims are poorly supported and therefore less reasonable than unbelief. I shall endeavor to appeal only to common sense and to invoke no premises Christian apologists cannot accept, or at least concede.

In this century the Christian religion will become 2000 years old. During those twenty centuries it has not only survived but flourished. Christianity began as a nondescript sect, despised by pagan and Jewish intellectuals (when they bothered to notice it), and subject to sporadic persecution. In the early fourth century the Roman Empire became Christian. By the end of the first millennium, except for a few pagan holdouts in the north and a Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, Europe had become Christian. Christian missionaries set sail on the voyages of discovery and conquest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and soon reached every part of the globe. Now a third of the world's six billion people are at least nominally Christian--and the religion continues to grow rapidly, especially in Asia and Africa.

Christianity has inspired a rich cultural and intellectual tradition. Many of the greatest paintings of the Renaissance masters represent Christian themes. Christian music from Amazing Grace to the Missa Solemnis achieves a beauty and depth seldom reached by other music. The King James Bible is one of the treasures of the English language; its sound resonates in many of the great works of British and American literature. Some of the greatest intellects of the Western world have been Christian theologians and philosophers. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to name only two, are among the handful of thinkers who may be mentioned in the same breath as Plato and Aristotle. Christian charities have alleviated want and brought education and medical care to many needy areas.

Yet Christianity has a Janus-face. As we note, the Christian religion has inspired much of the world's great art, literature, and music--but many of history's most horrifying crimes were committed in the name of Christ. Christianity has encouraged scientists to seek to know God by understanding nature, but Christianity has also been the most powerful force of obscurantism. Great pioneers in all fields have suffered--and continue to suffer--the ignorant opposition of priests, preachers, and inquisitors. Christianity has comforted, uplifted, ennobled, and empowered. It has also degraded, persecuted, terrorized, and polarized. Both the highest and purest love and the basest and cruelest fanaticism are legacies of Christianity.

So, on balance, has Christianity been a force for good or ill in human history? Why are we even asking this question? Is not the only relevant question whether Christianity is true? It is an appropriate question because not all defenders of Christianity appeal to its truth. People often defend religion by adducing its allegedly good effects on society. This is a stock claim of right-wing politicians and of the recent plague of "Dr. Lauras"--common scolds and busybodies who have appointed themselves guardians of other people's morality. To assess such a pragmatic apologetic we need to ask whether Christianity is likely to make us better and happier.

The problems with Christianity begin with the Christian Bible. What are we to make of stories like that of II Kings 2? That chapter relates how the prophet Elisha was approaching the town of Bethel when a group of boys jeered him. Elisha cursed them in the name of the Lord and two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the children. I once asked a Christian philosopher about this passage. He bit the bullet and said that God must not permit his holy prophets to be mocked. I concluded that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were not holy prophets since I had often mocked them but had not yet been mauled by she-bears.

Then there is the passage in I Samuel 15 where the prophet Samuel, speaking in the name of the Lord, orders Saul to utterly destroy the Amalekites: "Spare no one; put them all to death, men and women, children and babes in arms, herds and flocks, camels and asses" (I Samuel 15). What did the Lord have against camels and asses (not to mention babes in arms)? Were the Amalekites so evil, even their infants and animals, that they merited utter extirpation? Scripture is full of such atrocities. Tom Paine spoke truly:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon rather than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest all that is cruel (Paine, 1974, p. 60).

There is nothing to add to this but "amen."

When confronted by such passages in debate, Dr. Craig has offered two sorts of responses: (a) God has the right to do whatever he wants to humans and (b) that this argument counts only against Biblical literalism, not Christianity per se. I find both replies woefully inadequate. First, it strikes me as monstrous to suggest that God would have the right to do anything whatsoever to us. What would give him that right? Surely not his omnipotence, since might does not make right. Is it the alleged fact that God created us? Suppose I were to create a race of sentient androids, fully as capable of suffering as humans. Would I then have the right to inflict capricious cruelty upon them? If Dr. Craig insists that I would, he must be moving in a moral universe that does not intersect my own.

The second sort of reply raises the question of just how literally we should take the Bible. Dr. Craig and other apologists often want parts of it to be taken very literally indeed (e.g., the discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning by women followers of Jesus). Apologists cannot take scripture literally when it is ideologically convenient but as myth, allegory, or symbol when it is not. We need a consistent and independently justified set of interpretive principles. However, even if we do take the horrific passages as myth or metaphor, their spirit is still cruel and vindictive, and they still merit the censure so eloquently expressed by Paine.

The Christian Bible bequeathed a legacy of cruelty; the Church wasted little time in acting on that legacy. Even Christian historians such as Paul Johnson grow eloquent recounting the persecutions, pogroms, crusades, witch-hunts, inquisitions, and religious wars whereby countless persons were burned, butchered, tortured, or thrown into dungeons by God-fearing fanatics (Johnson, 1976). In his recent best-seller Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen traces the long disgraceful record of Christian anti-Semitism (Goldhagen, 1996). The hatred sown in Martin Luther's rabid anti-Jewish diatribes was reaped at Auschwitz. Forrest G. Wood's book The Arrogance of Faith details Christian complicity in the genocide of American Indians and the defense of slavery (Wood, 1990). (See Chapter One of this monograph for supporting details.)

But haven't Christians repented of their past evils and grown into a force for tolerance? Did not Pope John Paul II recently express sorrow for the Catholic Church's past persecutions? In 1983 (350 years after the occurrence) the Church even repented its treatment of Galileo. Is this not (belated) progress?

Public pronouncements by Christian spokespersons have changed; blatant expressions of intolerance are no longer fashionable. Some Christian activists have glibly mastered the language of inclusiveness and pluralism and have turned such language to their own uses. For example, even radical-right moralists, with nauseating hypocrisy, claim not to despise gay people; they "hate the sin" while "loving the sinner." Still, one does not have to dig very deep to hit the hard bedrock of bigotry beneath the shifting sands of rhetoric. Religious Right activists, caught with their guard down, are a wonderful revelation. Listen to Pat Robertson talking politics when he thinks the microphone is off or to D. James Kennedy's sermons to his choir as he spits hatred at anybody who disagrees with him. Recall the head of the Southern Baptist Convention who just a few years ago said that God does not hear the prayers of a Jew, or the more recent Baptists who say that women are unfit to serve as ministers.

When confronted with the "holy horrors" of Christian history, the standard apologetic line is that the perpetrators of such horrors were not acting in the "true spirit of Christ" or according to the "true" Gospel message. This line always rings hollow. It sounds like the strained apologetics of academic Marxists who admit the horrors of the Gulag but who deny that the Soviet Union was a true communist society.

One thing Marx and Jesus definitely had in common was their insistence that what matters is not abstract theory but how a scheme works out in practice. As Jesus said of false prophets "By their fruits shall ye know them (Matthew 7:15)." Communism may sound great on paper, but if every society that attempts to implement it becomes a totalitarian nightmare, so much for Marxist theory. When Poland suffered under General Jaruzelski, the Poles had a bitter joke: "Where does the true socialist society exist? On the moon." The same may be said of the "true" Christian society. If anyone wonders what a society run by the Robertsons and Falwells would really look like, they should read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986).

Still, someone might object that Christianity should be judged in its pure, revealed form rather than by its admittedly shoddy practice. But the monstrous doctrine of hell is part of that alleged revelation. The greatest Christian teachers exhausted their vast powers of eloquence offering lurid depictions of hell (see Bernstein, 1998). Surely these revolting fantasies are the most misshapen progeny of the human imagination. All the most orthodox divines, Calvinist as well as Catholic, taught that one of the chief joys of heaven is the viewing of the torments of the damned (Johnson, 1976, p. 342). Tertullian cackled with glee as he anticipated seeing pagan philosophers writhing in the flames. Surely Paine was right. Such doctrines have corrupted and brutalized humanity. Cruel dogmas make cruel people. (See Chapter Two for supporting details.)

More fundamentally, the Christian concept of human nature is at odds with the aims of an open, democratic, and pluralistic society. Christianity insists that human nature is depraved, a beast that must be caged. Since humans are evil, they must be controlled by higher authority imposed from above. Christians talk about faith, hope, and love, but obedience is the prime Christian virtue ("There is no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey" says the old hymn). Since submission to authority, whether human or divine, is the chief Christian duty, Christianity lends itself naturally to authoritarian political schemes. We should not forget that the Church supported Franco in Spain and King Leopold in the Congo. In short, the City of God does not run on democratic principles.

So, will Christianity improve society? I guess it turns on what we regard as "improving" society. If we want the regimented, authoritarian society of The Handmaid's Tale, the answer is "yes." So, when the pundits tell us that religion will improve society, they need to be frank about the fascism they are recommending.

To sum up the argument so far, the Christian Bible if full of atrocities ordered or committed by God. Christianity produced St. Francis, but it also produced Grand Inquisitor Torquemada and the authors of Malleus Malleficarum, the witch-hunter's handbook. Today's Religious Right dreams of a golden age when we will truly have one nation under (their) God. History shows that a Holy Inquisition would be more likely than a golden age. Christianity has preached hatred, soaked the earth with blood, and filled the mind with supernatural terrors. It seems clear that my first point is established: A rational, conscientious person may doubt the beneficial effects of Christian preaching and practice. A pragmatic apologetic based on the alleged good effects of Christianity therefore fails.

Of course, many Christians are as appalled by the "holy horrors" of Christian history as I am. Some, such as the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, the Right Reverend Shelby Spong, are strong opponents of fundamentalism. Others, such as the Reverend Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, have fought the good fight against the theocratic efforts of the Religious Right. Further, there is no doubt that many ordinary people have found strength and inspiration in their Christian faith. So, can there be a sort of Christianity that preserves the good things while getting rid of the bad? I do not know. I do know that, as Voltaire, Paine, Ingersoll, Russell, and others showed, the "old time religion" was often very bad.

We turn now to the central question of this essay: Is Christianity true? St. Paul lays it on the line. In I Corinthians 15:14 Paul states unequivocally "if Christ was not raised, our faith is null and void." No one can ask for fairer than that. I do not believe that Christ was raised from the dead so I regard the Christian Gospel as null and void.

My argument against the Resurrection is simple:

(1) To be made credible, extraordinary claims must be extraordinarily well supported.



(2) The alleged Resurrection of Jesus is a very extraordinary claim.



(3) The supporting evidence is not good, so we should remain skeptical of the Resurrection.

I regard the first premise as uncontroversial. No rational person believes everything he or she is told. Some things are discounted, even when told with a straight face by persons who are otherwise presumed reliable. Why? Well, there are some things we just regard as too implausible to accept unless we are told by a very reliable source. We can imagine cases where the claim would be so outrageous we would not even believe a most trustworthy person. Suppose that saintly Mother Teresa had told a reporter that she flew to pick up her Nobel Peace Prize, not in an airplane, but simply by flapping her arms. Could the reporter be blamed for not believing in flying nuns, even when told by so respectable and (heretofore) credible a person?

The lesson is that if we rationally regard a claim as extremely implausible, we will rightly demand very strong evidence before we accept it. How should we approach the claim that Jesus was resurrected from the dead? With an open mind, certainly, but as one wag put it, if your mind is too open, your brain will fall out. In other words, being open minded does not mean that we must empty our minds of preconceptions or suspend critical judgment. On the contrary, we can only rationally evaluate a claim in the light of what we already regard as true and reasonable.

Moving to the second premise, how implausible should one initially (i.e., before examining the specific evidence) regard the claim that Jesus was resurrected from the dead? Well, as I note in my opening remarks that depends crucially upon what other beliefs one already has. Perhaps it would be simpler to start by saying why I begin with a high degree of incredulity.

The Resurrection claimed by Christians is a physically impossible event. That is, unaided nature could not have accomplished such an occurrence. It could only have been accomplished by the miraculous intervention of a supernatural being--the God of the Bible in this instance. The previous three sentences do not express my stipulation but my understanding of what Christians are claiming. Now I do not believe in a God who can perform miracles. I have considered what seem to me to be the strongest arguments for the existence of God and have found them wanting (Mackie, 1981; Parsons, 1989; Martin, 1990). Also, the existence of so much apparently gratuitous evil in the world seems to me excellent reason not to believe in an all-powerful, all-good God (Parsons, 1989; Drange, 1998). Therefore, I regard any claim that God has brought about a particular physically impossible event as having a prior probability of close to zero. So, given my background beliefs, I have every right to demand very good, even compelling evidence before I accept the claimed Resurrection.

It would be easy enough for Christians and atheists to draw lines in the sand, take refuge in their own ideological fortresses, and damn the other side to prove them wrong. However, we live in an intellectual milieu already severely balkanized, so it is salutary, for the sake of argument at least, to start with a less extreme position than my thoroughgoing atheism. Further, I have stated my aim to invoke shared assumptions and background knowledge. Here I shall have to depart from that aim a bit.

Michael Martin has recently argued that the Resurrection must be considered initially improbable even by Christians (Martin, 1998, 1999). Christian philosopher Stephen T. Davis strongly disagrees (Davis, 1999). I think Martin is right, but I shall not enter into this dispute here. I shall concede to Davis that the Resurrection need not be initially improbable for Christians. Still, Christians must surely recognize that it is reasonable for non-Christians to be initially quite skeptical of the claimed Resurrection. Insofar as Christian apologists aim to address the beliefs of non-Christians, their arguments must therefore presume the non-Christians' prior beliefs, not their own. So I shall assume that Christian apologists, for the sake of argument, will grant me premise two.

Again, how low should we initially assess the likelihood of Jesus's alleged Resurrection? Let us ask how a non-Christian theist--one who definitely believes in a God who can and has performed miracles--should approach the question of the Resurrection. Let us imagine a conservative but open-minded person who has practiced Judaism throughout his or her life and who now decides, for the first time, to consider the purported evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. With what attitude will such a person approach this study?

Even for such a theist, an initially deep skepticism would be appropriate. Even those who believe in a God who can and has performed miracles will regard any particular miracle claim with skepticism. After all, miracle-claims come a dozen for a dime. Hucksters and hoaxers abound, as do false prophets and false religions. Also, as Hume remarked, humans have a natural love for the marvelous; a glance at the "New Age" or "occult" section of any bookstore confirms this. In a classic essay T.H. Huxley notes that many ancient and medieval documents calmly and matter-of-factly present first-person reports of miracles (Huxley, 1893). We would be credulous indeed if we accepted each of these. So, even theists will regard false miracle reports as vastly outnumbering true ones. Prima facie there is nothing distinguishing Christian miracle stories from those that abound elsewhere.

Further, religious people refrain from jumping out of upper-story windows the same as atheists. A scientist in the laboratory follows the same procedures and expects the same laws to hold whether he or she is religious or not. In general, religious people take the same sorts of precautions and make the same sorts of practical plans as non-religious ones, so clearly they do in fact expect the usual regularities of nature to hold in the overwhelming majority of cases. Hence, they also should be initially deeply skeptical of reports that such regularities have been suspended. After all, when Mary conceived asexually, was not Joseph, presumably a deeply religious person, rightly scandalized--until the angel set him straight (Matthew 1:20)?

So, it is entirely in order for us non-Christians, whether theists or not, to approach the Resurrection claim with a deep degree of initial skepticism. Why should Christian miracle-claims, from the beginning, be regarded any differently from the plethora of other such claims extant in historical records? We have every right to demand very good evidence indeed before we accept the Christian claim. Of course, if we are reasonable, our beliefs will change if we are given such excellent reasons, so let us now turn to the purported evidence.

All of the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus derives from human testimony (the so-called "Shroud" of Turin is a medieval forgery). Now David Hume's famous argument against miracles in Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding has often been interpreted as claiming that human testimony, in principle, cannot establish a miracle claim. I think in principle it could (in practice difficulties abound, as we shall see), but the burden of proof will be on the person claiming the miracle and the burden will be quite heavy since, as we saw, such evidence must overcome a high degree of initial skepticism.

Does the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus meet this heavy burden of proof? Nearly all of the so-called evidence comes from the four canonical gospels. But let's be honest. What confidence can we have in documents, (1) authored by persons unknown (with the possible exception of Luke, who admits he was not an eyewitness), (2) written four or more decades after the events they purportedly describe, (3) drawn upon oral traditions, and hence subject to the unreliability of human memory, (4) each with a clear theological bias and apologetic agenda, (5) containing many undeniably fictional literary forms, (6) inconsistent with each other (except where one gospel plagiarizes another), (7) at odds with many known facts, (8) with virtually no support from independent sources, and (9) testifying to events which, in ordinary circumstances, we would regard as unlikely in the extreme? (See Chapter Three for supporting details.)

Allow me to pause to note that the above nine claims are supported by a very broad consensus of Christian New Testament scholars. Each of these claims is old hat for a practitioner of higher critical studies of the gospels.

Professor Craig believes that three main points of evidence support the historical case for the Resurrection of Jesus: The post-mortem appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the Christian faith. I shall explain why I reject each of these pieces of purported evidence. (See Chapter Four for supporting details.)

The post-mortem appearances: Professor Craig places much emphasis on the formula recited by Paul in I Corinthians 15:3-8, where Paul lists various alleged witnesses of the risen Jesus: Cephas (Simon Peter), "the twelve," over 500 at once, James (Jesus's brother), all of the apostles, and finally Paul himself. This passage is important because (a) it is very early, (b) it names or refers to numerous alleged witnesses of the risen Jesus, and (c) it gives Paul's own testimony, the only undisputed first-person report of an encounter with the risen Christ in the entire New Testament.

The early date of the formula is irrelevant. Contrary to a claim frequently made by Professor Craig and other apologists, legends can and do spread almost immediately, despite the opposition of eyewitnesses, and sometimes even with the connivance of eyewitnesses. Consider Elvis and Bigfoot sightings, "Bermuda Triangle" disappearances, alien abductions, crashed saucer stories, and other such goofy legends. Such stories spread quickly, often despite the testimony of eyewitnesses and the efforts of would-be debunkers. Surely people are not more credulous now than they were in the First Century. In short, it is a demonstrated, abundantly documented fact that legends do develop and spread quickly. (See Chapter Five for supporting details.)

Getting back to Paul's testimony, in this passage he is not arguing with skeptical unbelievers. He says that he is passing on (paradidomi in Greek) a tradition that he has received. Paul is not trying to convince the Corinthians by adducing objective historical evidence, he is reminding them of a tradition which they already accept as authoritative. In fact, Paul was simply re-asserting the kerygma, the basic Christian proclamation that, in accordance with the scriptures, Christ died "for our sins," rose on the third day, and appeared to various witnesses.

Paul's formula gives no details as to where, when, or under what circumstances the appearances supposedly occurred. It does not mention the empty tomb; the phrase "was buried" in no way implies independent knowledge of an empty tomb tradition. It gives no place or date for the alleged Resurrection. The Gospels and Acts know nothing of an appearance to 500; surely they would have reported such a remarkable event. Paul does not make clear whether the appearances were physical or visionary--the Greek text is entirely ambiguous on that point. More importantly, we know nothing of the reliability of any of the so-called witnesses. How reliable were Peter or James? How do we know that the "500," if they really existed, did not suffer a mass hallucination?

But does not the very existence of such a tradition at such an early date imply its historicity? Does not the very fact that the list of witnesses had been definitely formulated before Paul indicate that there must be a kernel of historical truth here? Essentially this is an argumentum ad ignorantiam--an appeal to ignorance. We simply do not and cannot know how that list got formulated. As so often happens with historical investigation, the trail runs cold just at the point of greatest interest. Without begging many questions, apologists cannot assume anything about the nature of the "appearances," the reliability of the alleged witnesses, the lack of legendary accretion, or anything else that would support the historicity of that tradition.

What then about Paul's own "eyewitness" testimony? As noted earlier, if we accepted all of the "eyewitness" reports of miracles from old texts, we would be credulous indeed. Is Paul, then, particularly credible? On the contrary, Paul himself states that he was given to ecstatic visions. In II Corinthians 12 Paul tells of being "caught up as far as the third heaven" (verse 2) and not knowing whether he was "in the body or out of it" (verse 2, repeated in verse 3). He reports that when he was "caught up into paradise" (verse 4) that he "heard words so secret that no human lips may repeat them" (verse 4). Clearly, this is an account of a mystical vision. Why not conclude that Paul's experience of the risen Christ was of a similar kind?

What about the "appearances" to the disciples? All except the most conservative scholars agree that Mark, the oldest gospel, originally ended with verse 16:8 and included no account of appearances to the disciples. As G. A. Wells noted, the appearance stories recounted in the other two synoptics are full of inconsistencies:

Matthew, following hints by Mark, sites in Galilee the one appearance to them that he records: the risen one has instructed the women at the empty tomb to tell the disciples to go to Galilee in order to see him (28:10). They do this, and his appearance to them there concludes the gospel. In Luke, however, he appears to them on Easter day in Jerusalem and nearby on the Emmaus road (eighty miles from Galilee) and tells them to stay in the city "until ye be clothed with power from on high" (24:49; Acts 2:1-4 represents this as happening on Pentecost, some fifty days later). They obey, and were "continually in the temple" (24:53). Luke has very pointedly changed what is said in Mark so as to site these appearances in the city (Wells, 1996, p. 100).

So the synoptics give no coherent account of the post-mortem "appearances." Apologists often insist that the gospel authors wrote in close consultation with the original eyewitnesses and that this ensures their accuracy. In that case, why are the accounts so inconsistent?

Suppose that, shortly after the crucifixion, one or more of the disciples did experience an "appearance" of the risen Jesus. Why not regard these experiences as hallucinations or visions? Psychologists tell us that hallucinations by normal, non-psychotic persons are much more common than most people think. Often they seem very real. People suffering severe reactive depression and a sense of loss and isolation are especially prone to hallucinations. Given their state of mind after the crucifixion, it would not be surprising if one or more of the disciples experienced a vivid hallucination of Jesus. Biblical scholar Gerd Lüdemann carefully examined the post-Resurrection "appearances" and concluded that they can all be explained as visions (Lüdemann, 1995). (See Chapter Six for supporting details.)

Now for the empty tomb legend: Professor Craig adduces Paul's testimony in the I Corinthians 15 formula that Jesus was buried as evidence for the empty tomb. Presumably, this phrase shows that Paul, or whoever composed the formula, had knowledge of an independent empty tomb tradition. But reciting such a liturgical formula no more implies knowledge of an empty tomb than singing "John Brown's Body" implies knowledge of where John Brown is buried. So, Paul's use of the phrase does not indicate any such knowledge on his part. As for the origination of the phrase, Kee, Young, and Froelich offer a plausible hypothesis: "The minor observation is that he was buried--possibly an apologetic note introduced to attest that Jesus had really died, rather than having merely swooned or disappeared, as enemies of the Christian faith sometimes claimed" (pp. 56-57). So the phrase may have entered the formula as an apologetic aside rather than as a reflection of an empty tomb tradition.

Professor Craig also argues that, had the stories of the empty tomb been fictitious, the prejudices of the day would have dictated that men be portrayed as the discoverers of the empty tomb. But the gospel accounts say that the disciples fled into hiding with Jesus's arrest. Among the closest followers of Jesus, only the women were left to care for the body. Further, it was customary for women to be involved in the process of preparing bodies for burial (Schroeder and Nelis, 1963, p. 287). Therefore, it is not very surprising that female followers of Jesus would be depicted as discovering the empty tomb. Besides, for the gospel writers, the discovery of the empty tomb was not nearly so important as its subsequent confirmation by the (male) disciples.

More fundamentally, as the Right Rev. Shelby Spong states:

[T]he discovery of an empty tomb would never have issued in an Easter faith. If there had been a tomb, and if that tomb had been found empty, it would have meant only that one more insult had been delivered to the leader of the tiny Jesus movement. The disciples, whoever they were, would have concluded that not even the dead body of this Jesus had been spared degradation. No Easter faith would have resulted from an empty tomb. Therefore such a tradition could not have been primary. It was but a story incorporated later into the narrative (1994, p. 228).

In other words, the empty tomb, by itself and considered apart from the post-mortem "appearances," would only have been evidence of desecration, not resurrection. It becomes evidence for resurrection only when joined to the appearance claims, and, as we have seen, those are unreliable.

Professor Craig's third main piece of evidence for the Resurrection is the origin of the Christian faith itself. He argues that the Christian faith in a resurrected Jesus has no precedent in Jewish thought. The Jewish conception of resurrection is a general raising of the dead at the end of time, not the raising to glory of a single individual as an event in history. Further, the Christian idea that the resurrection of the righteous will somehow hinge on the Messiah's resurrection, was wholly unknown. Professor Craig concludes that these new Christian ideas were so radical that only the actual Resurrection of Jesus can account for so extreme a conceptual shift.

But according to the gospels, Jesus's ministry contained many heretical elements. In Mark 2 Jesus claims authority for the forgiveness of sins, which elicits a charge of blasphemy from the scribes. In Mark 7 he sets aside the traditional dietary distinctions between clean and unclean foods. In Mark 2:28, he even claims to be sovereign over the Sabbath. Further, Jesus's preaching was full of apocalyptic content. He famously said "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power" (Mark 9:1). In Mark 8:31 and 10:34 he predicts that the Son of Man will die and rise three days afterward.

Given the heretical and apocalyptic nature of their master's teachings and the experiences, whatever they were, that convinced them that Jesus had risen, the emergence of radically new concepts in the disciples' minds hardly seems to require supernatural explanation. For the early Christians, the Resurrection of Jesus was the first eschatological event, an event that ushered in the New Age, the coming of the Kingdom. They believed that they were in the end times. As a standard textbook puts it:

[Christianity] ... shared with much of Judaism the hopes for the New Age that God had promised through the prophets and seers. But it differed from the rest of Judaism in one crucial point: It was convinced that the New Age had already begun to dawn. More specifically, it believed that God had acted in Jesus of Nazareth to inaugurate the New Age, and that the community itself was the nucleus of the People of the New Age. The basis for this conviction was the belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead (Kee, Young, and Froelich, pp. 52-53).

In other words, early Christians believed that they were in the end times and that the Resurrection of Jesus was the eschatological event that ushered in the New Age, the coming of the Kingdom. Further, Jesus's Resurrection was not conceived as an event separate from the general resurrection, but only as the first resurrection, soon to be followed by the others at the time of Christ's Second Coming. Thus Paul calls Jesus as the "firstfruits of the harvest of the dead" (I Corinthians 15:20). Paul continues: "As in Adam all men die, so in Christ all will be brought to life; but each in his own proper place: Christ the firstfruits, and afterwards, at his coming, those who belong to Christ" (I Corinthians 15:22-23).

In all honesty, I simply do not see a gaping, unbridgeable conceptual chasm between belief in a general resurrection at the end of time and the belief that Jesus's Resurrection was the first event of the coming of the end times. In the presently fashionable lingo, paradigm shifts do occur. If Professor Craig insists that, nonetheless, such a conceptual shift requires supernatural intervention, I simply have to ask: What are his criteria? At what point are concepts so alien that it would require a miracle for someone to shift from one to the other? We need some such guidelines before the discussion can proceed.

In conclusion, I have argued that there are no grounds for regarding Christianity as either good or true. Christian scripture, doctrine, and practice have sanctioned cruelty and made vindictiveness a virtue. The arguments concerning the alleged Resurrection of Jesus cannot bear even a modest burden of proof, much less the fairly heavy one we have placed on them. Throughout I have endeavored to appeal only to premises that Christian apologists can accept or ought to concede. I have nowhere assumed atheism, naturalism, or extreme skepticism. My appeal was to common sense, common knowledge, and scholarly consensus, not to a methodology dictated by Enlightenment ideologies. I therefore take my second point, and the main point of this essay, as now established: Given only shared background knowledge and expected concessions, it is unlikely that the alleged Resurrection of Jesus occurred, and so it is unlikely that Christianity is true.

Chapter One: The Sins of Christianity

This chapter documents my claims about the "holy horrors" perpetrated in the name of Christ. First a quote from Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. of South Carolina, famous for heading the Senate committee that investigated Watergate:

The ugliest chapters in history are those that recount the religious intolerance of the civil and ecclesiastical rulers of the Old World and their puppets during the generations preceding the framing and ratifying of the First Amendment.



These chapters of history reveal the casting of the Christians to the lions in the Coliseum at Rome; the bloody Crusades of the Christians against the Saracens for possession of the shrines hallowed by the footsteps of the Prince of Peace; the use by the papacy of the dungeon and the rack to coerce conformity and of the fiery faggot to exterminate heresy; the unspeakable cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition; the slaughter of the Waldenses in alpine Italy; the jailing and hanging by Protestant kings of English Catholics for abiding with the faith of their fathers; the jailing and hanging by a Catholic queen of English Protestants for reading English Scriptures and praying Protestant prayers; the hunting down and slaying of the Covenanters upon the crags and moors of Scotland for worshipping God according to the dictates of their own consciences; the decimating of the people of the German states in the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants; the massacre of the Huguenots in France; the pogroms and persecutions of the Jews in many lands; the banishing of Baptists and other dissenters by Puritan Massachusetts; the persecution and imprisonment of Quakers by England for refusing to pay tithes to the established church and to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance; the banishing, branding, imprisoning, and whipping of Quakers, and the hanging of the alleged witches at Salem in Puritan Massachusetts, and the hundreds of other atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion.



It is not surprising that Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, was moved more than three hundred years ago to proclaim this tragic truth: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction" (quoted by Peter McWilliams, 1996, p. 125).

Forrest G. Wood put it more concisely:

There are contradictions in every religion; but the missionary quality of Christianity magnifies the consequences of its contradictions. The history of Christianity may be the serene and saintly story of Jesus of Nazareth, and the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., leading nuns and clergymen in nonviolent resistance. But it is also the cruel and bloody story of crusaders and conquistadores, Pope Innocent II and Torquemada, the Salem witch trials and cross-burning Klansmen. "Kill a Commie for Christ!" bumper stickers shouted in the 1950's (Wood, 1990, p. 26).

Apologists sometimes boast of Christian opposition to slavery. Many of the leading abolitionists were devout Christians. However, many equally devout Christians argued just as vehemently in defense of slavery. Wood, in his book The Arrogance of Faith, documents some of these pro-slavery arguments. As Wood shows, Christian doctrine and scripture were often adduced in support of slavery:

[I]f freedom meant only freedom from sin, then it was fair to raise questions about the definition and use of the word. When Paul told the Galatians that "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," more than a few slave holding ministers concluded that he was simply pointing out that the only freedom that mattered was freedom in salvation in Christ. Life on this earth was brief and temporary; the hereafter was forever. "The freedom of the Soul for Eternity is infinitely preferable to the greatest freedom of the Body in its outward Condition upon Earth," Anglican minister Benjamin Fawcett told a group of slaves in 1755. When Christ told the Jews in the temple square "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," they said they could not be set free because they were no one's slaves. But every sinner, Christ replied, is a slave to sin. "If the son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."



In other words, true freedom came from "the emancipation of the will from the power of sin," southern Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell argued. Salvation grants freedom from the grip of Satan, not freedom from the secular chains of slavery. Nor was it a lesson used only by southern clergy. Both George Junkin, a prominent Ohio Presbyterian, and C.F.W. Walther, head of the conservative Missouri Synod of the Lutheran church, argued publicly that biblical freedom meant only freedom from damnation and that it "could be preserved within the framework of a servant-master relationship." It was a universal Christian blind spot; when salvation was at issue, it mattered not if one was a slaveholder or abolitionist. Although he was an outspoken critic of slavery, Congregationalist Jedediah Morse insisted that "belief in Christ, which freed men from sin, the worst kind of slavery, was the supreme good, far greater than all temporal blessings." Since it was the Christian master who kept the bondsman in chains and the Christian minister who defended that bondage, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the problem was Christianity. (Wood, 1990, pp. 75-76).

Contemporary theologians would of course deny that the problem was Christianity per se, and charge that the pro-slavery apologists had twisted Christian doctrine. Notoriously, though, neither the Old or New Testaments contains an outright condemnation of slavery. Parts of the Bible tell us in great detail how we should live, right down to how we should wear our hair. Yet it omits to tell us that owning another human being is wrong. Of course, masters are admonished to treat their slaves well--and slaves are told to obey their masters. Abolitionists felt that slavery was ungodly, but there simply was no unequivocal scriptural support for their view.

What about the famous passage where Paul says that in Christ there is no Greek or Jew, slave or master, male of female? This is a marvelous passage, but as Wood notes, for many Christians this means that others are equal only if they accept Christianity:

Modern churches have done as much as any philanthropic institution in the world to ameliorate hunger, poverty, disease, and ignorance, but the fact remains that most Christians have perceived the African, Indian, or any other nonbeliever as an equal--if they have done so at all--only after he has been converted. It was impossible for a missionary to accept the heathen for what he was and consider him an equal. That would have been real charity (Wood, 1990, p. 29).

A classic work of Victorian scholarship was W.E.H. Lecky's 1869 work History of European Morals. In this and other works, Lecky again and again showed the pernicious effects of Christian doctrine on morality. Some of his most powerful writing concerned the rise and influence of asceticism in late antiquity. Here is a sample:

There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato. For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence.



St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration, how he had seen a man, who for thirty years had lived exclusively on a small portion of barley bread and of muddy water; another who lived in a hole and never ate more than five figs for his daily repast; a third who cut his hair only on Easter Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who never changed his tunic till it fell to pieces, who starved himself till his eyes grew dim, and his skin 'like a pumice stone' and whose merits, shown by these austerities, Homer himself would be unable to recount. For six months, it is said, St. Macarius of Alexandria slept in a marsh, and exposed his body naked to the stings of venomous flies. He was accustomed to carry about with him eighty pounds of iron. His disciple, St. Eusebius, carried one hundred and fifty pounds of iron, and lived for three years in a dried-up well.



St. Sabinus would only eat corn that had become rotten by remaining for a month in water. St. Besarion spent forty days and nights in the middle of thorn-bushes, and for forty years never lay down when he slept, which last penance was also during fifteen years practiced by St. Pachomius.... The cleanliness of the body was regarded as a pollution of the soul, and the saints who were most admired had become one hideous mass of clotted filth. St. Athanasius relates with enthusiasm how St. Antony, the patriarch of monachism, had never, to extreme old age, been guilty of washing his feet ... a famous virgin named Silvia, though she was sixty years old, and though bodily sickness was a consequence of her habits, resolutely refused, on religious principles, to wash any part of her body except her fingers.... An anchorite once imagined that he was mocked by an illusion of the devil, as he saw gliding before him through the desert a naked creature black with filth and years of exposure, and with hair floating to the wind. It was a once beautiful woman, St. Mary of Egypt, who had thus, during forty-seven years, been expiating her sins.... The examples of asceticism I have cited are but a few out of many hundreds, and volumes might be written, and have been written detailing them (Lecky, 1955, Vol. II, pp. 107-113).

Naturally, the ideal of asceticism included a hatred of sex, and, since woman was the temptress whom the Church "fathers" blamed for their own lust, it led to misogyny as well. German scholar Uta Ranke-Heinemann was trained as a Catholic theologian but lost her academic chair when she denied a piece of bizarre nonsense--the Church's dogma of the biological reality of the virgin birth of Mary. In 1988 she published Eunuchen fur das Himmelreich, translated as Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. In this powerful work, backed by enormous scholarship, Ranke-Heinemann demonstrates that fear of sexuality and hatred of women were built into the foundations of Christian theology. She notes that Augustine's attitudes were codified by Aquinas and continue to influence Christianity today:

Women may well have been astonished to know that they were good only for reproduction, and unqualified for anything having to do with mind and intelligence. This idea was formulated by Thomas Aquinas ... in connection with Augustine as follows: Woman is simply a help in procreation ... and useful in housekeeping. For a man's intellectual life, she has no significance. Thus Augustine was the brilliant inventor of what Germans call the three K's (Kinder, Kuche, Kirche--children, kitchen, church), an idea that still has life in it, in fact it continues to be the Catholic hierarchy's primary theological position on women (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 88).

Is such sexism today restricted to the desiccated celibates of the Roman Catholic hierarchy? Not at all. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, recently declared that women should submit to the "servant leadership" of their husbands. Even more recently, the Baptists have strongly urged that women not become senior pastors. Pat Robertson gave the fundamentalist view of the role of women: "God has established a pattern. He is the head of man and man is to be the head of woman, and together they are to be the head of children ... in the government of the family and the church, men are to be the leaders" (quoted in Nava and Dawidoff, 1994, p. 95).

Baptist apologists were quick to emphasize that husbands, the "servant leaders," are not to behave in a dictatorial manner but must practice Christ-like agape love. They imply that any woman should be struck dumb with gratitude for the opportunity to submit to such leadership. No matter how you slice it though, Baptist doctrine makes the man the boss. "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" is still the Southern Baptist ideal of womanhood. What reasons justify such strictures? Baptists offer none, at least none that would make sense to a non-fundamentalist.

For Augustine, sexual pleasure was so horrible that even married couples should endure it only if, both before and during the sex act, they are wholly motivated by the desire for children (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 92). As he put it with casuistic precision: "What cannot occur without lust should not, however, occur because of lust" (quoted in Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 92). Ranke-Heinemann comments on such doctrine: "It has warped the consciences of many men and women. It has burdened them with hairsplitting nonsense and striven to train them as moral acrobats instead of making them more humane and kinder to their fellow human beings" (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, quoted on back cover).

Of course, today's hip, worldly-wise fundamentalist would deny that sexual pleasure is bad but would insist that it must be enjoyed only within the "sacred bond" of heterosexual marriage. Why? Consider spontaneous, joyful, mutually respectful sex between two mature, responsible, but unmarried (gay or straight) people. Why is this a terrible sin? Again, we get no reasonable answer, only dogma. One suspects that something like Augustine's sex-phobia simmers not too far down in the psyche of many of today's allegedly enlightened Christians. (See the appendix on C.S. Lewis's views on sex and marriage.)

Instead of attacking sex per se, today's churches prefer to persecute sexual minorities, especially gay and lesbian people. Here is what the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention said about homosexuality and gay rights:

The CLC opposes homosexuality, because it is clear in the Bible, God condemns it as a sinful lifestyle harmful to the individual and society. Therefore, the CLC opposes the granting of civil rights normally reserved for immutable characteristics, such as race, to a group based on the members' sexual behavior.... The CLC proclaims the gospel because the Scriptures declare the Lord Jesus can change homosexuals. To accept homosexuality as an appropriate lifestyle would betray the life-changing sacrifice of Christ and leave homosexuals without hope for a new and eternal life (quoted in Nava and Dawidoff, 1994, p. 98).

Allow me to urge that the Baptists reword their doctrine in more honest language. Here is a suggestion: "We urge continued discrimination against degenerate queers, who are damned to hell unless they abandon their perverted 'lifestyle.'" There. That gives the Baptist position much more succinctly and clearly and I urge the CLC to adopt this more honest phrasing.

Finally, I quote from Lecky on the often-heard claim that Christianity has promoted peace and discouraged war:

It had been boldly predicted by some of the early Christians that the conversion of the world would lead to the establishment of perpetual peace. In looking back, with our present experience, we are driven to the melancholy conclusion that, instead of diminishing the number of wars, ecclesiastical influence has actually and very seriously increased it. We may look in vain for any period since Constantine, in which the clergy, as a body, exerted themselves to repress the military spirit, or to prevent or abridge a particular war, with an energy at all comparable to that which they displayed in stimulating the fanaticism of the crusaders, in producing the atrocious massacre of the Albigenses, in embittering the religious contests that followed the Reformation.... It is possible--though it would, I imagine, be difficult to prove it--that the mediatorial office, so often exercised by bishops, may sometimes have prevented wars; and it is certain that during the period of the religious wars, so much military spirit existed in Europe that it must necessarily have found a vent, and under no circumstances could the period have been one of perfect peace. But when all these qualifications have be fully admitted, the broad fact will remain, that, with the exception of Mohammedanism, no other religion has done so much to produce war as was done by the religious teachers of Christendom during several centuries. The military fanaticism evoked by the indulgences of the popes, by the exhortations of the pulpit, by the prevailing hatred of misbelievers, has scarcely ever been equaled in its intensity, and it has caused the effusion of oceans of blood, and has been productive of incalculable misery to the world (Lecky, 1955, Vol. II, pp. 254-255).

Still, might not Christians reject as irrelevant most of the examples I adduce in this chapter? Can't they say that fanaticism belongs to the bad old days and that Christianity has outgrown its earlier intolerance? For instance, the days of fervid self-denial and mortification of the flesh are long gone. Today's fundamentalist is an enthusiastic hedonist whose conspicuous consumption of worldly goods and pleasure would shame any publican or sinner of Biblical days. Solomon in all his glory never had a Lexus in the garage, a Rolex on the wrist, Italian loafers on the feet, and capped teeth as white as the pearly gates. Where are the ascetics when we need them? But seriously--two doctrines of orthodox Christianity make sure that it will always be intolerant in spirit if not in practice: (a) exclusivism, and (b) the doctrine of hell.

Christianity claims to be the Truth, Truth with a capital "T." It claims to be the final, complete, exclusive revelation of God to humanity, both necessary and sufficient for salvation. Further, the consequence of willful non-belief is eternal punishment in hell. If orthodox Christianity is the only true doctrine and the consequences of not believing that doctrine are so dire, then Thomas Aquinas was entirely logical in demanding that heretics be "shut off from the world by death." As Aquinas observed, murderers only destroy the body; heretics lead people away from the true doctrine and thus into eternal perdition. Heresy is therefore much more reprehensible than murder and much more deserving of death.

Most Grand Inquisitors were probably not sadistic brutes. Often they must have been educated, cultivated men who found their tasks distasteful if not repugnant. Yet they were convinced that the agonies they inflicted with the rack, strappado, or stake were nothing compared to the eternal pains of hell. So if torture could redeem even one sinner or burning eradicate one unregenerate heretic, the cost was worth it. Montaigne observed "We rate our conjectures too highly if we burn people alive for them." Christians have rated their conjectures highly indeed.

Logically, if there is one and only one True Doctrine and hell is the penalty for not believing it, tolerance of anything that leads towards unbelief cannot be a virtue. So Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, feminists, gay activists, atheists, evolutionists, humanists, and any others who teach things contrary to the One True Doctrine, must be opposed. Active intolerance is the only reasonable attitude towards such persons. Pluralistic and multicultural ideals must be energetically opposed.

Let's face it though: except for a handful of nutty "Christian Reconstructionists" (and those guys are scary), today's Christians have no stomach for real persecution. The rack and the stake probably will not make a comeback. (You can never be sure, though.) Intolerance today takes more subtle forms.

Allow me to illustrate with a personal experience: In June 2000, at a public high school in the metropolitan Atlanta area, I attended a fundamentalist religious service disguised as a graduation ceremony. The service opened with prayer--not the ritual invocation of a generic deity, but a passionate, emphatically Christian prayer. The principal delivered a sermonette urging students to read the Bible and to accept Jesus Christ as their savior. Each graduate was given a copy of the Ten Commandments with his or her diploma. The service ended with another prayer, again explicitly "in Jesus' name." I was amazed when the evening did not end with an altar call.

To disguise a fundamentalist religious service as a commencement ceremony and foist it on a captive audience is an exercise in intolerance (not to mention extreme rudeness). The whole purpose of such an in-your-face display is to flaunt the dominance of the majority's creed and intimidate those otherwise persuaded. What better way to keep unbelievers "in their place?"

So no, Christianity has not gotten tolerant over the years; it has merely gotten smarter. You catch more flies with sugar than salt, and you get more converts with slick rhetoric and high-tech propaganda than you do with dungeon, fire, and sword. Who needs Grand Inquisitors when you have gone on-line and satellites broadcast your message worldwide? So Christian intolerance no longer wears the mask of the Inquisitor; it wears the "aw shucks" grin of Pat Robertson and the oleaginous simper of Jerry Falwell.

Chapter Two: Kreeft and Tacelli on Hell

Of course, I am aware that many modern Christians have cooled the fires of hell, often interpreting hell as purgatorial or even as merely metaphorical. However, more orthodox thinkers argue that rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell is tantamount to the rejection of the entire Christian revelation. For instance, Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics, insist that the exact same grounds for believing that God is love, Biblical revelation, also teaches the reality of hell (Kreeft and Tacelli, 1994, p. 285). So Kreeft and Tacelli throw down the gauntlet to someone like me: either I accept Christianity and the doctrine of an eternal, punitive hell or I reject hell and Christianity, too. If that is my only choice, I reject hell and Christianity, too.

The problem is that when Kreeft and Tacelli come to defending the traditional doctrine, their arguments are woefully weak. They claim that God is not to blame for the pains of hell since hell is freely chosen by those who go there. The obvious rejoinder is that anyone who consciously chooses eternal punishment over eternal joy would have to be insane, and lunatics clearly need treatment, not punishment. The reply of Kreeft and Tacelli is astonishing:

[T]he Christian replies that that is precisely what sin is: insanity, the deliberate refusal of joy and truth.... Perhaps the most shocking teaching in all of Christianity is this: not so much the doctrine of hell as the doctrine of sin. It means the human race is spiritually insane (p. 290).

However, if an act is insane it is not a deliberate choice; this is entailed by the meaning of the words "deliberate" and "insane." Is the bizarre behavior of the schizophrenic deliberately chosen? Does the paranoiac freely opt to believe that the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, Jewish bankers, the CIA, and the Martians are persecuting him? Maybe Kreeft and Tacelli intend something different by "insane" and "deliberate" than what those words normally mean, but one hesitates to accuse two distinguished philosophers of such blatant humpty-dumptyism.

Even if sin is freely chosen, it is God who decides what the consequences of that choice are. It is God who decides that unrepentant sinfulness must bear the consequence of eternal pain. The obvious objection is that finite and temporal sin, no matter how gross, do not merit infinite and eternal punishment, and so hell contradicts divine justice. Kreeft and Tacelli reply (a) that eternity is not endless time but an entirely different dimension than time, so there is no problem of endless punishment, and (b) that hell's punishments are eternal but not infinite; there are degrees of joy in heaven and degrees of misery in hell.

Unfortunately, these replies raise far more questions than they answer: If hell is not endless suffering--indeed, if it lasts no time at all--why should we fear it? What would it be like to experience "eternal" as opposed to "endless" suffering? Is eternal suffering worse than endless suffering? If so, the problem of apparent injustice arises again. If Kreeft and Tacelli argue that these questions are out of order since eternal suffering is strictly incomparable with temporal suffering, I begin to wonder about the intelligibility of their concept of hell. The only kind of suffering that I have experienced or can imagine is temporal suffering, so Kreeft and Tacelli's hell, with its concept of eternal, atemporal punishment, is utterly incomprehensible to me.

Kreeft and Tacelli seem to suspect that they have moved beyond rationality and intelligibility here since they conclude this section with the remark "To refuse to believe [in hell] is to measure God's thoughts by ours (p. 300)." Allow me at once to plead guilty to "measuring God's thoughts" by my own! As I see it, I have no other choice. If my intellect and my deepest moral convictions tell me that hell is a monstrous dogma, unworthy of belief by decent human beings, then I can think of no greater sin I could commit than to accept such a doctrine. It is a sad but edifying spectacle to see how intelligent defenders of the indefensible tie themselves in ethical and conceptual knots.

It is easy to see why Kreeft and Tacelli are loath to give up the concept of hell despite the conceptual gerrymandering and ethical contortionism it requires of them. Hell is Christianity's most powerful instrument of control. Religious instruction ensures that the fear of hell is implanted in the mind in early childhood. When that fear is planted deep enough, the adult cannot entertain honest doubts without catching a whiff of brimstone. Dr. Johnson said "knowledge that one is about to be hanged clears the mind marvelously." Fear of hell has the opposite effect; rational thinking becomes impossible when that fear is strong.

Remember, you cannot escape hell by being good; for Christians, everybody is bad. No matter how hard you strive to live a virtuous life, if you lack certain beliefs, you go to hell. That is what makes hell such a pernicious doctrine. Hell is the penalty for disagreeing with Christians! It is hard to imagine a more potent tool for propaganda or one more subversive of rational thought. An appeal ad baculum is an attempt to persuade by intimidation or the threat of force. Hell is the ultimate ad baculum: Believe or suffer consequences too horrible to contemplate. In short, the doctrine of hell is Christianity's campaign of psychological warfare against the human mind.

Chapter Three: Historicity of the Gospels

This chapter gives supporting evidence for the nine claims I make (shown in bold) about the canonical gospels.

(1) Gospels written by persons unknown (not eyewitnesses):

It is highly questionable that any of them [the gospels] was written by an eyewitness. Not only did Jesus himself write nothing, but the attribution of the gospels to his disciples did not occur until the late first century at the earliest. The one gospel for which the strongest case can be made that it was written by the man whose name it bears, Luke, acknowledges that its author was not himself an eyewitness of the events he portrays (Luke 1:1-2). (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 55).

As for the author, [of Mark] we do not know who he was. The Mark to whom the gospel is attributed is a legendary figure from the second century (Mack, 1995, p. 153).

As with the other narrative gospels, we do not know anything about the author [of Luke] except what can be inferred from the writing itself. Later in the second century, the work was attributed to Luke, the co-worker of Paul ..., just as other anonymous literature from earlier times was attributed to either apostles or their companions in order to validate their truth (Mack, 1995, p. 167).

The articles on the Gospels in the Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993) give the following information on their authorship:

Matthew : Written by an unknown Jewish Christian of the second generation; probably a resident of Antioch in Syria.

: Written by an unknown Jewish Christian of the second generation; probably a resident of Antioch in Syria. Mark : Notes confusion in the traditional identification of the author but offers no hypothesis.

: Notes confusion in the traditional identification of the author but offers no hypothesis. Luke : Possibly written by a resident of Antioch and an occasional companion of the apostle Paul.

: Possibly written by a resident of Antioch and an occasional companion of the apostle Paul. John: Composed and edited in stages by unknown followers of the apostle John, probably residents of Ephesus.

According to the editors of The New English Bible, the identity of the author of John is unknown; it was ascribed to John the son of Zebedee late in the second century (Sandmel, et al., 1976). G.A. Wells comments on John's claim to be an eyewitness:

That the final chapter 21 of the fourth gospel, where the eyewitness claim occurs, was written by the author of chapters 1-20 is maintained only by the most conservative commentators. The whole of this final chapter comes after a direct address to the reader clearly meant as a solemn conclusion to the gospel.... Just before this solemn end, the risen Jesus has instructed the disciples to go out as missionaries. . . and has given them the Holy Ghost so that they can forgive sins, or withhold such forgiveness. But in the appended chapter that follows, they seem to have forgotten this, and are represented as having returned to their old profession as fishermen in Galilee (Wells, The Jesus Legend, 1996, pp. 87-88).

In sum, the authors of the gospels seem to be at least one generation removed from the original eyewitnesses. They did not reside in Palestine and had no firsthand acquaintance with the events they describe.

Kee, Young, and Froelich (1965, p. 472): Mark (70), Matthew (85-100), Luke (85-100), John (90-110)

Burton L. Mack (1995) : Matthew (late 80s) (p. 161). Luke (around 120) (p. 167), John (90s) (1995, p. 176).

Editors of The New English Bible (Sandmel, et al. 1976): Mark (around 70); Matthew (about 90); Luke (about 90); John ("Shortly before the end of the First Century").

As the above references show, New Testament scholars agree fairly closely on a rather late date for the writing of the gospels. Mark, generally recognized as the earliest, was seldom dated much before 70, approximately 40 years after the crucifixion. Lately there has been a conservative backlash, an attempt to date the gospels prior to 70. For conservative apologists, the advantage of an early dating are obvious: the gospels, or at least the earliest of them, could have been written by eyewitnesses, thus greatly increasing their credibility. Let us take a look at these conservative arguments.

Pamela Binnings Ewen, a Houston lawyer, has recently (1999) written Faith on Trial. The book is described on the cover as "an attorney analyzes the evidence for the death and Resurrection of Jesus." She argues for an early date of the composition of the gospels. One argument is that the gospels reflect the circumstances prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by a Roman army in the year 70:

The silence of the Gospels with respect to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple is strong circumstantial evidence that they were written before, not after, A.D. 70. The Gospels reflect the social, cultural, and economic background of the period prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Levitical system, not after. They reflect a delicate but still tolerable relationship with Rome, not the hostile servility of a nation enslaved and broken. Logic does not permit a conclusion that the Gospels could have been written after the year A.D. 70 without mention of the Jewish revolt and the resulting destruction of the city, the temple, the Jewish culture, and the new hostility with Rome (Ewen, 1999, p. 39).

She claims further internal evidence of an early date:

[T]he Gospels affirmatively reflect the need to distinguish the new message of Jesus from Jewish law as it existed prior to A.D. 70 on such subjects as fasting, the relationship to the temple, and the requirement of sacrifices, all of which disappeared after the destruction of Jerusalem. John A.T. Robinson, a well-known biblical scholar, has given the example, among others, that the Gospel of Matthew seven times warns against the influence of the Sadducees, a group whose power totally disappeared after the destruction of the temple. The Gospel of Matthew also reflects a continued need to coexist with a Jewish culture that was no longer in existence after the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70. Historians have recognized that after A.D. 70 Christians and Jews separated into two completely different camps, and that fact is reflected in many Jewish and Christian writings. Based on this reasoning, the situation described in the Gospels corresponds to what is known about Christianity in Palestine prior to A.D. 70 (Ewen, 1999, p. 40).

She concludes:

The facts and analysis described above are completely inconsistent with a theory that the Gospels were written at or near the end of the first century or in the early second century. Reason requires a date prior to A.D. 70 for the writing of the four Gospels on that basis alone (Ewen, 1999, p. 40).

Ewen must have an odd idea about what "reason requires." In my view, reason requires that you at least consider the arguments for the other side before issuing such pronouncements. Generations of New Testament scholarship have produced a very broad consensus that the gospels date from around 70 to as late as the early second century. For instance, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993) dates Mark from 65-70, Matthew from 85-90, Luke around 80-85, and John around 85. Other standard sources are listed above. Ewen dismisses the scholarly consensus with barely a nod to the evidence underlying it.

First, are the gospels silent about the destruction of the Temple? Consider a passage from Mark:

And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings." And Jesus said to him "Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down (Mark 13:1-2)."

In verse 14, Jesus warns of a desecration in an unnamed sacred place. However, the parallel passage in Matthew (24:15) specifically identifies the place as the one prophesied by Daniel, i.e., the Temple of Jerusalem. Luke, in his version of these passages, specifically refers to armies surrounding Jerusalem (Luke 21:20; see Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, pp. 254-255).

Luke also speaks of Jerusalem as abandoned (13:35) and portrays Jesus as saying of Jerusalem:

For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation (Luke, 19:43-44).

In Matthew 22 a parable is given in which the king sends troops to burn a city whose citizens have spurned his invitation to celebrate his son's marriage feast (22:7). Matthew seems to be saying that the Jews deserved the destruction of Jerusalem because they rejected God's son. These passages certainly seem to have been written with the knowledge of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. An account of these passages must be given before we can conclude that the gospels are silent about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Of course, conservative Christians could say that such passages do refer to the destruction of Jerusalem but are a faithful record of prophecies of Jesus which were fulfilled 40 years later. However, this is not Ewen's claim. She maintains that the gospels make no reference or allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Ewen claims that the gospels reflect the social, cultural, and economic circumstances of the time before the Jewish War (66-70). In fact, the gospels contain many hints that they were written by gentile or Diaspora Jewish Christians after 70 rather than by Jews residing in Palestine before that date. Mark occasionally pauses to explain Jewish words or customs, and his knowledge of Palestinian geography is vague at best. This strongly suggests that Mark was written for a community of gentile Christians living outside of Palestine. As for Matthew:

[T]he author exhibits a theological outlook, command of Greek, and rabbinic training that suggest he was a Jewish Christian of the second rather than the first generation.... Also, Antioch of Syria commends itself as the place where he may have been at home, because the social conditions reflected in his story correspond with those that seem to have prevailed there: the city was Greek-speaking, urban, and prosperous, and had a large population of both Jews and gentiles (Kingsbury, 1993, pp. 502-503).

The author of Luke, whoever he was, indicates in the opening address of his Gospel that he is a latter-day compiler who is putting together traditions coming from the original eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-2). This and the above-noted apparent references to the destruction of Jerusalem pretty definitely mark Luke as composed after 70.

Ewen makes a number of very dubious assumptions. She assumes that the gospel writers, had they written after 70, would not have included material reflecting the cultural or religious situation in Palestine before the Jewish War. However, this is highly questionable. New Testament scholars have long recognized that the gospels draw upon a variety of traditions and sources. The consensus view is that the gospels, written from around 70 on, had access to a variety of oral traditions as well as a written, now lost, "sayings gospel" referred to as "Q" (see Mack, 1993, for a reconstruction of "Q."). If the gospels drew upon traditions that began to take shape well before the destruction of Jerusalem, it is hardly surprising if they retain something of the flavor and tenor of those earlier times. In particular, if some of the recollected sayings of Jesus were originally directed against the Pharisees and Sadducees, it is not improbable that the gospels would retain that information.

There is no reason to think that the intended audience of the gospels, whether Jewish or gentile, would be wholly unfamiliar with or uninterested in the pre-70 context. The Temple (and the associated Levitical system) played a fundamental role both for Jews in Roman Palestine and in the Diaspora (Tanzer, 1993, p. 395). Further, the idea of the Temple, as an ideal in the minds of the Jewish people, long outlasted its physical presence. Long after the destruction of the Temple, the Mishnah continues to speak as if it were still standing (Tanzer, 1993, p. 395). In general, the destruction of a religiously important site only enhances its symbolic significance for believers.

So it is fair to say that in the decades immediately following 70, the Temple, the Law, and the Levitical system remained prominent concepts in the religion of Diaspora Jews. Therefore, the gospel writers contrast Christianity with those concepts because (a) that is the tradition that they received and are passing on, and (b) those concepts remained familiar and significant for Diaspora Jews after 70. In fact, the attempt by the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jews, which Ewen herself highlights, is itself strong evidence of a later date for composition of the gospels. Jesus was a Jew. So were the disciples and the earliest converts. However, as the Christian communities became increasing gentile, and as confrontations with the Jews escalated, the anti-Jewish rhetoric became shrill. The harsh, blatantly anti-Semitic diatribes in the gospels show that they were written when the Church had become largely gentile and the schism between Christians and Jews had already grown wide.

The main reason for thinking that the gospels are not eyewitness accounts is that many years of critical scholarship, using the tools of source criticism, have shown the gospels to be re-worked composites of earlier sources and traditions. The overwhelming consensus is that the gospels were not firsthand reports, but products of a fairly lengthy process of accumulation and synthesis of various oral and written sources.

Consider the famous "synoptic problem." The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, share many passages, down to small details of phrasing, as G. A. Wells notes:

[A]ny synopsis, where parallel passages are set out in adjacent columns, will show that the first three of the four canonical gospels have passages which are identical, down to the same Greek particles. For instance, Matthew's account, in the material it shares with Mark, is abbreviated and Mark's 11,078 words are represented by 8555 yet of these 4230 are identical both in form and in sequence.... [T]he enormous number of identical phrases is not to be explained as being due to the community's good memory of Jesus's teaching, as more than half of such phrases are in the narrative, not the words of Jesus (Wells, 1996, p. 95).

Clearly, Matthew and Mark are not independent narratives. Any student submitting a paper sharing so much with a published source would immediately be convicted of plagiarism. So Matthew draws upon Mark, or Mark upon Matthew, or both from a common source. Luke also shares large blocks of material with Mark and has some in common with Matthew that is not found in Mark.

The standard solution is to view Mark, itself a synthesis of earlier materials, as a source for both Matthew and Luke, which also have access to their own particular sources. It is also thought that "Q," the hypothetical sayings gospel, was used by Matthew and Luke, and accounts for materials they share with each other but not with Mark. The upshot is that the synoptics cannot be independent, firsthand witnesses of Jesus's ministry or Resurrection. This, of course, does not mean that they are wholly unreliable or worthless as sources of historical information, but it does make the identification of a stratum of pristine, original eyewitness testimony very difficult if not impossible.

Of course, Ms. Ewen will have none of this. She argues that each of the gospels is an original and independent witness (Ewen, 1999, pp. 71-83). She contends: "As to the assertion that the Gospels were copied one from the other, a more straightforward response to this challenge is that the similarity among the three Gospels arose out of the fact that they all derived from, or based upon, the same oral teachings of Jesus (Ewen, 1999, p. 73)." However, this simply ignores the point, made above by Wells, that more than half the words identical in form and sequence in Matthew and Mark are in the narrative, not the recorded words of Jesus.

Worse, the original words of Jesus were in Aramaic. Ewen's claim entails that each synoptic gospel contains an independent Greek translation of those original Aramaic sayings. It is simply absurd to think that three independent translations would agree in wording and sequence to such a degree. To illustrate, consider three different English translations of the same passage from Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (lines 442-446):

Now listen while I tell of mortals' pain, how primitive they were till I fired their wits. I tell you, not from disgust at men, but showing how much they owe me. Before then, they had eyes that blankly gazed, ears hearing empty sound.

What I did for mortals in their misery, hear now. At first mindless, I gave them mind and reason.--What I say is not in censure of mankind, but showing you how all my gifts to them were guided by goodwill. In those days they had eyes, but sight was meaningless; Heard sounds, but could not listen...

...but hear what troubles there were among men, how I found them witless and gave them the use of their wits and made them masters of their minds. I will tell you this, not because I would blame men, but to explain the goodwill of my gift. For men at first had eyes but saw to no purpose; they had ears but did not hear.

That is how translation works: very different phrasing, different sentence structure, shared words different in form and/or sequence. There just is no way to explain the parallels in the synoptics other than collusion or interdependence of some sort.

Much of Ms. Ewen's case relies on what John Dominic Crossan calls "the mystique of oral memory," the supposition that the original hearers of Jesus would have been especially careful to memorize his exact words and pass them on verbatim. According to Ewen, many of the shared passages are best explained by the allegedly meticulous habits of memorization characteristic of cultures emphasizing the oral transmission of religious teachings (Ewen, 1999, p. 73). Crossan demonstrates that such a view is simply at odds with our scientific knowledge of the nature of memory and our anthropological knowledge of how preliterate groups preserve oral traditions. This issue takes us to the next sub-section.

(3) Gospels based on unreliable oral tradition:

This literature [the Gospels] was oral before it was written and began with the memories of those who knew Jesus personally. Their memories and teachings were passed on as oral tradition for some forty years or so before achieving written form for the first time in a self-conscious literary work, so far as we know, in the Gospel of Mark, within a few years of 70 A.D. But oral tradition is by definition unstable, notoriously open to mythical, legendary, and fictional embellishment. We know that by the forties of the first century traditions already existed which we would now label orthodox and traditions coming to be recognized as heretical--teachings about what Jesus said and meant that even then were being called (though in a different vocabulary) "fictional" (Helms, 1988, p. 12; emphasis added).

If, as Ms. Ewen and other apologists insist, the gospels contain a pure, pristine Christian message, preserved against corruption by the flawless memories of the original eyewitnesses, scholars should be able to identify that message in the texts. Instead, scholars find a welter of oral traditions, varying from place to place. It is highly doubtful that all early Christian communities even proclaimed a unified kerygma, i.e., the basic proclamation that Christ died for our sins and rose again on the third day. As one standard textbook puts it: "It is not possible to identify even a short list of specific themes or beliefs that are expressed in all forms of the kerygma preserved in the New Testament.... The content of the kerygmatic statements varies with each writer and often with the occasion. (Kee, Young, Froelich, 1965, p. 58)." In short, the idea that there once existed a single, pure form of the Christian proclamation, untainted by myth and legend, is itself a myth.

Crossan on the nature of memory:

[M]emory is creatively reproductive rather than accurately recollective.... [O]rality is structural rather than syntactical. Apart from short items that are retained magically, ritually, or metrically verbatim, it remembers gist, outline, and interaction of elements rather than detail, particular, and precision of sequence. "Even in cultures which know and depend on writing but retain a living contact with pristine orality, that is, retain a high oral residue, ritual utterance itself is often not typically verbatim," as Walter Ong noted. "The early Christian Church remembered, in pretextual, oral form, even in their textualized rituals [words of the last supper], and even at those very points where she was commanded to remember most assiduously".... That is a very striking example: the words of eucharistic institution from the Last Supper are not cited word-for-word the same within the New Testament itself (Crossan, 1998, pp. 54-55).

Experiments have shown that simply repeating a false statement over and over leads people to believe that it is true. Likewise, when we repeatedly think or talk abut a past experience, we tend to become increasingly confident that we are recalling it accurately. Sometimes we are accurate when we recount frequently discussed experiences. But we are also likely to feel more confident about frequently rehearsed experiences that we remember inaccurately. Retrieving an experience repeatedly can make us feel certain that we are correct when we are plainly wrong. The tenuous correlation between a person's accuracy and confidence is especially relevant to eyewitness testimony. Witnesses who rehearse their testimony again and again in interviews with police officers and attorneys may become extremely confident about what they say--even when they are incorrect. This consequence of rehearsal is especially important because numerous studies have shown that juries are powerfully influenced by confident eyewitnesses (Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory, p. 111; quoted in Crossan, 1998, p. 59; emphasis added).

I do not suggest that we never remember anything correctly. That would be absurd. Neither do I suggest that memory is but another name for imagination, or that we make it all up under the influence of suggestion and society. That would also be absurd. But [numerous cited cases have served] .... to mitigate the serene complacency of common sense about memory and, second, to warn us that, while we do certainly remember, we remember by a reconstructive process. That reconstructive process mixes recollected facts from an actual happening with ones seen, heard, or imagined from similar happenings. That reconstructive process recalls gist rather than detail, core rather than periphery--and somebody must then decide which is which. (In an eyewitness identification of a murderer, for example, is a beard gist or detail, core or periphery?) That reconstructive process often claims equal accuracy and veracity for what we actually recall and for what we creatively invent (Crossan, 1998, p. 67).

Even more significantly, Crossan recounts studies of illiterate Balkan singers of epics (Crossan, 1998, pp. 69-78). These studies show that, in the absence of a written text serving as an absolute criterion of accuracy, the oral transmission of epics is a creative performance rather than a verbatim recounting. With the exception of certain formulaic phrases, each singer delivers a different version of the epic, with very different details and embellishments. Even the same singer will give different versions at different times. Of course, there are mnemonists who can perform the trick of memorizing written texts word-for-word. However, the very concept of a verbatim reproduction is a concept of literate societies, not ones in which oral traditions prevail. The oral traditions of illiterate peasants--like the original witnesses of the ministry and words of Jesus--preserve gist or essence with many differences in precise wording.

Ewen thinks that the apostle Matthew, traditionally identified as a tax-collector, would have been literate and must have had the ability to write shorthand. She speculates that Matthew could thus have recorded Jesus's exact words (Ewen, 1999, p. 74). This speculation is precisely that--a speculation. Her evidence for the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of Matthew is extremely weak. For instance, she cites the confusing report by Papias, supposedly writing around 130, that names "Matthew" as compiling sayings in the "Hebrew dialect."

First, we do not have Papias's claim firsthand; he is quoted by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in a fourth century work. Second, the quote implies that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, a view rejected by nearly all scholars. Further, Papias's association of the name "Matthew" with gospel writings may have been based on nothing more than the fact that the disciple Matthew is mentioned twice in the Gospel (Overman, 1993, p. 502). Ewen seems to think that Papias, whoever he was (we have none of his writings), would have conducted a rigorous examination of the authorship of the Gospel in the manner of a modern critical scholar or historian (see her treatment on pp. 54-56 of her book). Needless to say, there is no basis for such an expectation.

It is important to remember also that there were a number of early Christian communities, often in conflict and each with its own favored interpretation of Christ's message. One way to promote one's own preferred gospel was to attribute it to apostolic authorship. The attribution of anonymous works to historical figures was a very common practice in Greco-Roman times (Mack, 1995, p. 7). Once a gospel became widely accepted, the manuscript tradition of adding an attributive superscript, e.g., "According to Matthew," would have been hard to repudiate, no matter how tenuous the original association.

Ewen also stakes a great deal on Carsten Thiede's highly questionable redating of the Magdalen fragments, three tiny papyrus fragments of Matthew 26, to the mid-first century. Burton L. Mack points out the weakness of Thiede's claims and comments:

[T]he mass of detailed scholarship on the origins and history of early Christian movements and their writings has been swept aside in the eager pursuit of a chimera. From a critical scholar's point of view, Thiede's proposal is an example of just how desperate the Christian imagination can become in the quest for the literal facticity of the Christian Gospels (Mack, 1995, pp. 9-10).

At a common sense level it just is hard to see how anybody could mistake the Gospel of Matthew for firsthand testimony. The Gospel does not claim to be written by an eyewitness, and certainly not one named Matthew (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 274). It is a consciously crafted narrative composed from a well-thought-out theological perspective and with a clear apologetic agenda (see below). Matthew is clearly an interpretation, based on long reflection, of previously given materials, not a presentation of raw data or unembellished eyewitness reports.

Finally, Kee, Young, and Froelich make an excellent point:

For the task of interpreting the will of God, first century Jews and Christians considered the living word of oral communication preferable to the preparation of a written record. As long as there were first-hand witnesses of the event of Jesus' ministry, who could report personally on what he did and said, the living word was a preferred vehicle for communicating the Gospel (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 252).

In short, written records of Jesus's words or ministry were simply not needed or wanted until the end of the apostolic age with the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in 64. The writing of Gospels was a task for second-generation Christians.

The upshot is that, contrary to the claims of Ewen and other apologists, the word-for-word similarities of the synoptic Gospels are very unlikely to be due to the verbatim recollection of the original eyewitnesses. Oral traditions simply do not form that way. Rather, those precise parallels are much more likely due to common use of written sources. Hence, the synoptic gospels are not independent eyewitness accounts but textually interdependent syntheses of earlier oral traditions.

(4) Gospels have theological bias and apologetic agenda:

[I]t must be acknowledged ... that they [the gospels] cannot be considered nonpartisan reports about Jesus. They are in the truest sense of the term propaganda literature. If one had to provide a single statement of purpose that would suit all four of the gospels he could probably not find a better one than the explanation given by the author of the Gospel of John: "These were written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31). (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965 p. 55).

As we have learned, the gospels do not claim to be (and in fact ought not to be) classified as attempts at writing biographies. The intention of the Gospel is to flesh out the kerygma--to show that the power of God that brings men of faith a foretaste of the life of the Age to Come was already at work in the ministry of Jesus.... There was no interest in preserving archives of Christian origins for posterity, since it was still believed that the present age was very soon coming to an end. The writer was concerned rather to meet the needs of the Church--that is, to provide Christian preachers and teachers, as well as interested inquirers into the faith, with a document that would show forth in Jesus' words and works the redemptive meaning that faith discerned in him (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, pp. 252-253).

[The gospels] can no longer be read as direct accounts of what happened, but rather as vehicles for proclamation. Such was their original intention (Reginald H. Fuller, 1971, p. 172).

(5) Containing fictional forms:

The gospels are clearly not biography in the modern sense:

First, it must be acknowledged that neither the gospels nor any other source provides us with the kind or quantity of information about Jesus that would make possible the preparation of a biography. A serious modern biography tries to understand a man not only against the background of the times in which he lived, but in the light of the specific personal and psychological forces which helped to shape his decisions and to affect his response to the challenges and opportunities that confronted him. No such materials are available to us for preparing a psychological study of Jesus. We cannot determine with any certainty the order of events that are reported by the tradition, apart from the obvious fact that his baptism by John the Baptist came toward the beginning of his public career and the Crucifixion came at the end. It is impossible, therefore, to trace with any confidence a pattern of development or change in the life or thought of Jesus--another factor which would be indispensable in writing a biography (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 59).

Each of the four canonical Gospels is religious proclamation in the form of a largely fictional narrative. Christians 