Jeff Epler jepler@inetnebr.com
After I wrote an essay about my own transition from a Christian to an atheist for an english class, one person in that class took a personal interest in the state of my soul. He asked me out to lunch to talk about our differing views, and I agreed. I brought an issue of my favorite atheistic publication, suspecting that I would get some sort of Christian literature from him. Sure enough, after we had both finished our Subway sandwiches, he reached into his bag for a book. I almost said ``I hope that's not a Josh McDowell book,'' because I've read scathing reviews of many of his books, and know how popular they are among Christians. I'm glad I didn't, because the book did turn out to be by McDowell. We exchanged literature, and I resolved to actually read the book rather than ignore it.
The book, More than a Carpenter, is typical of Christian literature. The overall thesis of McDowell's book is that Christianity is true--that it is rational to believe the Bible as a literal, factual history book, and that adherence to some kind of Christianity is necessary to enjoy an eternal afterlife. It is a farily typical example of current Christian literature, both in thesis and flaws. If this is the best that Christian apologists can offer--and this seems to be the best it gets--then there is no rational reason to believe that the Bible is anything but a flawed, false creation of human beings.
There are three main failures in this book: McDowell gives inadequate proof that the Bible is an accurate book, he shows ignorance of other religions, and he even shows ignorance of some of the things his own holy book says.
McDowell's claim in the first chapter, What Makes
Jesus So Different? is that ``[Other religious leaders]
didn't claim to be God, but Jesus did. This is what makes
him so different from other religious leaders.'' (page
10
) In fact, at least
one of the religious leaders he names as not claiming to be
god, Buddha, did claim to be god.
Stephen Van Eck's Hare Jesus: Christianity's Hindu Heritage points out some startling similarities between the Hindu and Christian traditions.
The deification of Christ is a phenomenon often attributed to the apotheosis of emperors and heroes in the Greco-Roman world. These, however, were cases of men becoming gods. In the Jesus story, the Divinity takes human form, god becoming man. This is a familiar occurrence in Hinduism and in other theologies of the region. Indeed, one obstacle to the spread of Christianity in India, which was attempted as early as the first century, was the frustrating tendency of the Hindus to understand Jesus as the latest avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu.It is in the doctrine of the Trinity that the Hindu influence may be most clearly felt. Unknown to most Christians, Hinduism has a Trinity (or Trimurti) too: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, who have the appellations the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer (and Regenerator). This corresponds to the Christian Trinity in which God created the heavens and the earth, Jesus saves, and the Holy Spirit is referred to as a regenerator (Titus 3:5). It is interesting to note, furthermore, that the Holy Spirit is sometimes depicted as a dove, while the Hebrew language uses the same term for both ``dove'' and ``destroyer''!
Furthermore, while Christ said, ``I am the Alpha and the
Omega, who is, and who was, and who is to come,'' and ``Do not
be afraid. I am the First and the Last'' (Revelation
1:8,17), Krishna said, ``I am the beginning, the
middle, and the end'' (Bhagavad-Gita 10:20).
There are more similarities in the teachings in the
Bhagavad-Gita and those found in the Bible, and I recommend
that anyone interested read Van Eck's article and a reply
to it in a later issue of The Skeptical Review.
Similarly, the article
Is Jesus a Counterfeit?
talks about Osiris (Egyptian), Dionysis (Grecian),
Mithra (Persian) and others who share some aspects of the
Christ legend but predate it by centuries. Farrell Till
ends the article:
Christians, of course, will dismiss the tales of these pagan saviors as mythology while adamantly insisting that it is rational to believe that the story of Jesus' virgin birth and resurrection is factual. They can offer no reasonable explanation for their inconsistency, but until they do, skeptics will have to insist that they are worshiping a counterfeit savior.
The second chapter, Lord, Liar or Lunatic? suggests that there are only three possible alternatives for the identity of Jesus Christ. However, surely no man would lie when that lie would get him killed; surely no lunatic could give the same good advice. Therefore, Jesus must have been the Lord. McDowell repeats the trilemma in chapter 7 of Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and a more complete response to it can be found in The Jury Is In. McDowell's argument depends on the assumption that his three alternatives are the only alternatives for the identity of Jesus, and that the other two of those alternatives are more far-fetched than the alternative of Lord. However, the Liar and Lunatic alternatives do not seem as impossible as McDowell seems to think they are, and there still exists the possibility that Jesus was a mere man whose teachings and exploits were exaggerated by his followers after his death. If even one of these possibilities is only half as strong as the possibility that Jesus was the Savior, then it is irrational to claim with certainty that ``Jesus is the Lord.''
``By the character of his teachings, we know that Jesus was an uncommonly moral person,'' McDowell would argue. ``An uncommonly moral person would not lie and say he was God when in fact he was not. Therefore, Jesus did not lie when he said he was God.'' (page 28) However, well-known televangelists have given the same moral teachings as Jesus but were very immoral in other ways. It is perfectly possible that I should tell a lie on one issue but truth on another; it's a very human thing to do. But since McDowell insists that Jesus never lied, surely just one example of this will cast serious doubts on his assertion that Jesus was not a liar. The Bible itself gives this evidence that Jesus lied. In his hearing before the high priest, Jesus claimed, ``I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in the synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together; I never spoke secretly'' (John 18:20, emphasis mine), but in Mark 4:10-12, Jesus secretly instructed his apostles on the meaning of his parables. The Sermon on the Mount, as well as other of Jesus' acts of teaching didn't take place in either a synagogue or a temple. Jesus lied, he perjured himself. Biblical Inconsistencies by Donald Morgan also lists some remarks attributed to Jesus which are contradictory when considered together. If Jesus says something and then later says its opposite, one time he must have been telling a lie.
McDowell neglects the case that Jesus might be a completely fabricated figure, or that he did exist, but performed none of the miraculous events he was reported to--he assumes that the Bible is true in its reporting of the events of Jesus' life. Is the Bible an accurate history book as well as the perfect revelation of god's word?
In chapter four, McDowell suggests several methods that can tell us how reliable the biblical records are. First, the Bibliographical Test suggests that there is a relationship between the number of manuscripts existing and the extent which we can be sure of its accuracy to the original. Since ``over 20,000 copies of New Testament manuscripts are in existence today,'' (page 48) we are assured that what we have today is close to the original manuscript. However, McDowell doesn't cite a source for this fact, and doesn't seem to mention concerns about how different these 20,000 manuscripts are from one another--check the footnotes of any Bible and it will tell you that certain portions are missing or different in different manuscripts. For instance, the footnotes accompanying the Book of Mark in the NIV translation of the Bible say, ``The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20''--in other words, the oldest and the most reliable versions of one of the gospels do not say that Jesus rose from the dead in physical form and was seen by people. The Great Commission, so important to Christians, is missing. If these important cornerstones of Christianity were not even present in the earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark, how confident can we be that Mark--or any other book of the Bible--is an accurate reflection of the original, or an accurate reflection of what actually happened?
The Internal Evidence Test suggests that a document is reliable
when it is free from internal contradiction. A story could fail to be
self-contradictory but still be false--any good novel has this quality.
But the Bible fails this test anyway. Many books and articles have been
written on the Bible's lack of internal consistency. For instance, the
genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 don't give the same list of ancestors
for Jesus, and a footnote for Luke 3:33 appearing in the NIV notes,
``Some manuscripts Amminadab, the son of Admin, the son of Arni;
other manuscripts vary widely.''
Biblical
Inconsistencies
by Donald Morgan lists internal inconsistencies in the Bible, more than
three hundred of them. For instance:
The External Evidence Test says that when an
historical document is in agreement with other accepted
sources, that document is probably accurate in its
non-corroborated testimony. McDowell claims the Bible was
reasonably accurate at describing the world as other
contemporary historical records did, in terms of geography
and contemporary events other than the main story of the
Bible. However, McDowell again fails to bring up any
extrabiblical, contemporary sources that substantiate the
New Testament's main claim, that Jesus is god--or that he
even existed. Once more, a good novel satisfies the
criteria McDowell has set up. Any good work of historical
fiction will relate itself to well-known historical events
and will certainly get facts of geography right. External
evidence would support the Bible if there were credible secular sources
that said, ``A man named Jesus who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah
was put to death'',
but there little support for the Bible's ordinary events
in external sources, and none for its extraordinary events--just like
there is no evidence outside of The Hunt for the Red October
that the events described inside really happened. Furthermore,
the Bible often fails to display a knowledge of the contemporary
geography--for instance, Touring the Middle East Jesus
Style exposes some
geographical confusion in the passages Mark 7:31 and Matthew 15:21-29, on
par with saying ``I traveled from Lincoln to Omaha via Kearney and Ohio.''
These three criteria that McDowell gives are not adequate
ones to judge a document as historically accurate.
This is not surprising, since these criteria come from
An Introduction to Research in English Literary History,
in a chapter on the subject of deciding authorship and
authenticity of literature, not the truthfulness of an
historical document. Furthermore, McDowell misunderstood
the Bibliographical Test in order to repeat a fact that
sounded good for his cause, that 20,000 Bible manuscripts
exist today.
For another account of
what is necessary for historical evidence to be good, read
the first part of Jeff Lowder's McDowell's
``Evidence'' for Jesus--is It
Reliable?
or the book from which the material on historical evidence
is drawn.
The best case reading of Chapter Four is that the Bible is as believable as a nice work of fiction, but one must ignore much evidence, both from inside the Bible itself and from outside, that it is not even this. As you read what is below, remember that McDowell bases all his arguments on nothing but biblical ``evidence,'' which he has hardly shown to be more true than the newest Tom Clancy novel. Furthermore, other religious texts stand up to McDowell's tests at least as well as the Bible. McDowell neglects to tell us upon what rational basis we would wish to reject Islam and Buddhism in favor of Christianity.
If the Bible really is the word of god, shouldn't it be held to a higher standard than those against which works of humans are judged? There is no logical impossibility for god to have created a perfect Bible which was free of internal contradictions, scientific errors, and conflicts with external historical sources. It would seem that if god wishes us to believe in him, he would have caused such a Bible to be written--or perhaps caused it to descend from the clouds, with error-free translations to all human languages. How can a god-inspired Bible fail to even live up to human standards? The only reasonable explanation is that it is not an inspired work, and is not even a very good history book. For a more in-depth exploration of this idea, read the second part of Theodore Drange's Arguments from Evil and Nonbelief, Niclas Berggren's The Errancy of Fundamentalism Disproves the God of the Bible, or The Skeptical Review.
Chapter nine, Will the Real Messiah Please Stand Up? brings up the often used claim of Christians that Jesus is the only person to fulfill specific Old Testament prophesies. On page 108, McDowell asserts that there is a chance of 1 in 10^17 that a certain eight prophecies could be fulfilled by one man. Consider that there are about 6*10^9 people living today, and perhaps half that many people dead, call it 10^10 people total who have lived. This means that there's about a 1 in 10^7 chance for someone to have fulfilled all these prophecies. The odds of winning the lottery are much more remote than this, yet people buy tickets for it every day. Anyway, where did McDowell get his figure of 1 in 10^17? Besides, if the Bible is just a story, it can easily tell of a one-in-trillions person without him having actually existed.
The prophesies themselves are rather suspect. Farrell Till has written an interesting article, Prophecies: Imaginary and Unfulfilled which addresses several New Testament references to prophecies that cannot be found in the Old Testament at all. Furthermore, he casts serious doubts on the ``thirty pieces of silver'' prophecy, shows that the prophecies of Jesus being born of a virgin really talk about a young woman ('almah) not a virgin (bethulah), and brings up the ludicrous image found in Matthew 21:1-7 (compare to Mark 11:1-10 and Luke 19:29-40) where Jesus rides on a colt and a donkey at the same time to fulfill what Matthew seemed to believe was an Old Testament prophecy found in Zechariah 9:9.
McDowell ends his book by praying to his god, ``Make me the type of person You created me to be. In Christ's name. Amen.'' (page 128) One final question, for McDowell and those who believe like him: How is it that all-powerful god did not manage in the first place to make Josh McDowell the type of person he created him to be, but had to gruesomely kill his son to achieve it?
If the Bible is true, then all of history is centered around two events: god's creation of imperfect man six thousand years ago, and god's murder of his son two thousand years ago. If you accept the Bible as true, this is how you have to think of god. I find it more comforting to believe that god does not exist than to believe that I live in a universe created by a cold-blooded murderer. And, aside from the mere desire to believe a comforting thing, I also have many factual and rational reasons to believe that the Bible is false.