by Charles Kluepfel
4/13/. Friends' Helpful Caring
Well meaning religious friends reinforce error posing as tradition
What is Truth?
Summary
- Arguments for Christianity are presented here, together with my refutation of them
When I "lost the faith" some of those who know me and my wife, who is still a Catholic, decided that I needed prayer, and of course encouragement to rejoin the fold. Even a self-described agnostic asked "what harm" can religion do; it's such a comfort, and helps build morals in the young. Well, how much value do we place on rationality? How can we best plan our actions without knowing what reality is? If the morals inculcated by religion are not really valid, they can unnecessarily hinder our daily lives (see "But What About Morality?").
A Catholic friend from my wife's prayer group even lent me a book called Compelling Evidence, by Floyd C. McElveen. It gives me a chance to expound on some of my differences with Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. The book was written from a Christian, non-Catholic, perspective.
Chapter 1 begins with a quotation from Charles Wesley:
"The Bible must be the invention of either good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God. (1) It could not be the invention of good men or angels, for they neither would or could make a book, and tell lies all the time they were writing it, saying, 'Thus saith the Lord,' when it was their own invention. (2) It could not be the invention of bad men or devils, for they would not make a book which commands all duty, forbids all sin, and condemns their souls to hell for all eternity. (3) Therefore I draw this conclusion, that the Bible must be given by divine inspiration."
This argument also was put to me by my parents at an early age, as well as by catechism teachers. Jesus surely was holy. Jesus wouldn't lie. Jesus claimed to be God. Therefore Jesus is God. Interestingly, we could apply the same arguments to the Catholic Church's teachings - its entire magisterium. McElveen, a non-Catholic as was Wesley, as we'll see below, would be surprised at such a use.
This argument assumes that all men (neglecting the possibility of even some female writers of the Bible, or even one) are either good or bad. People like Mother Theresa or Adolf Hitler come to mind at the extremes, but most lie on a continuum, having good points, bad points, and individual quirks that can't really be classified one way or the other. I'm sure even Hitler had some good points (maybe he was kind to his dog; the German people who elected him must have seen some good to elect him; he had a lover, Eva Braun, who must have seen something in him, to die with him in the end); I'm sure even Mother Theresa has some bad points (In conformity with her Catholic Church, she rejects birth control even in the most squalid areas of the world. Even with all the generosity the rest of the world could provide, there must be a limit to people. If the population doubles every 30 or 50 years, there is bound to be insupportable billions within a couple of centuries at latest.).
But arguing on the good or bad points of Hitler or Mother Theresa is beside the point; most persons are neither good nor bad; they just have more or less of good or bad characteristics. And some observers may even disagree about an individual's particular characteristics being good or bad.
Also, since the Bible was not written by one person, the people who wrote it can be, and most likely were, of varying degrees of what one may call good or bad. The Psalms are attributed to David, who had one of his generals murdered so that he could take that general's wife for his own. Either Samuel or God does not come out looking too good in the following:
1 Sam 15:2 Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt.
1 Sam 15:3 Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'
Samuel has God directing the murder of innocent children and infants. Similar slaughters are claimed to have been ordered by God in various parts of the Old Testament Of course the author is just being patriotic, leading his nation on to justified conquest.
As for the good, I'm sure I don't have to point out that the Bible does have some edifying stories, ideas, thoughts, prayers..., put in by thoughtful people.
Now, different people have different ideas of what God wants them to do. Modern-day ministers and priests have blessed armies going to war, and I'm sure that the author of Samuel thought in his heart of hearts that vengeance against the Amalekites was a God-ordained right thing to do, as today Muslim fundamentalists believe in holy Jihads.
It is in childhood that we categorize people as good guys or bad guys. We must know by now that it is not that black and white. But for the sake of argument let's start out with the "good guys".
What good person has not told little white lies in the defense of a higher truth? Many well-intentioned parents help their children enjoy the Christmas season by telling stories of Santa Claus. If a parent tells a young child that a monster lurks in the basement and thereby prevents the child from hurting himself on the rickety basement stairs is that parent deemed not good because of the lie? John says
1 John 5:13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.
When the stakes, in the eyes of the author, are as high as eternal life, some white lies (exaggeration of miracles, etc.) are worthwhile in getting an unbelieving soul to believe. Paul shows the savvy of a current-day politician, in saying one thing to one group, another to another:
1 Cor 9:19 For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.
1 Cor 9:20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law.
1 Cor 9:21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law) so that I might win those outside the law.
1 Cor 9:22 To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.
After all, it's all in a good cause.
As for the possibility of being the invention of "bad" men, Wesley claims they could not command all duty. But the duty they see includes killing Amelekite babies. Someone who likes killing babies would have no trouble condemning, in word, people to eternal torture.
After describing individuals' "Bibles", McElveen says that "by contrast, the Christian's Bible is God's Word - certain, infallible and proven in a thousand battles". This is begging the question. It has not been shown that this is God's word.
As for the claim in 2 Timothy 3:16 that "all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness," it is well to remember that the official canon (list of accepted books) of the Bible was not set until a couple of centuries after that was written. There was no Bible. The Gospels we know had not even been written. But there were certainly other scriptures, many of which did not make it into the Bible, as being too much in disagreement with the beliefs at the time (take for example the Gospel of Thomas, or the infancy narratives of Thomas). Are we to believe the things in those scriptures - things Christians would find blasphemous? If we take Paul at his word we should.
McElveen asks us to be impressed with the unity of the Bible - in particular a perfectly unified book "portraying one perfect person - the Lord Jesus Christ".
Alluding to "forty authors, working over a period of nearly 1,600 years, writing sixty-six books," he clearly refers to the whole Bible as being unified. How can this be called a miraculous unity when the old testament cannot decide whether the number of each animal brought upon the ark was two (Gen. 7:8-15) or fourteen (Gen. 7:2) for "clean" animals. Luke has Mary and Joseph leave Nazareth for Bethlehem to be recorded in a census for a tax, while Matthew has the family leaving their hometown of Bethlehem to flee to Egypt, then return to make their new home town Nazareth (Matt. 2:23).
You may look upon complaining of the discrepant numbers of animals as being picky. But the difference in accounting for a Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus, despite a known home in Nazareth, is certainly of the essence in showing the disunity of the Bible. This ties in with Christianity's claim that Jesus is foretold in the Old Testament. The old testament said the Messiah would come from Bethlehem. The early Christians are stuck with the fact that their Messiah was Jesus of Nazareth. With all the good intentions in the world, to save souls, to spread the word, stories originated that "Hey, maybe he was actually born in Bethlehem". Remember, the Gospels were written at least 60 years after the traditional dating of the death of Jesus. Remember the game of "Telephone" where a story told to one person is completely distorted after five or so tellings, even in the course of one evening. Sixty years allows time for much distortion in word-of-mouth communication. That is why I pick this lack of unity in the Bible as important. In any instance, it does not look like there is miraculous agreement between even Matthew and Luke, any more than there was miraculous agreement between the Yahwist and Priestly versions of the Noah story.
Also, if the Bible is a unity, how does one reconcile the following with Christianity's lack of following the laws of the old testament, such as kosher laws?:
Mat 5:17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Mat 5:18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.
Note that says all is accomplished, not just part of "salvation history."
For another example of changed law, see Dennis McKinsey's excellent chapter on the change in sabbath from Saturday to Sunday (chapter 19 in his Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy), also in two parts on his website: part 1 & part 2. What he does not mention there, which I believe is pertinent, is that the sabbath was changed to suit pagans who were used to worshipping Mithra on Sunday. The Vatican hill was even the former site of a pagan temple, and holy sites (and days) have a way of staying "holy" even through religion changes.
On page 8, McElveen's paragraph Archaeology, claims that "25,000 sites have been excavated verifying the existence of cities, kings, kingdoms, events, officials, etc. proving the historicity and incredible accuracy of thousands of Biblical references." If someone writes a novel today, and mentions existing cities, like New York, Tokyo, New Orleans, and mentions presidents Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and refers to World War II veterans, etc., does that mean that an archaeologist 2000 years hence can take the novel to be a reliable historical record? Not only that, but the biblical writers wrote about things in the distant past even then. Sequences could be mixed up (and have been shown to have been). In any instance, any match in one part does not imply other parts are true. A book saying that Sun Myung Moon is the sun of God can refer correctly to World War II, the cold war, and various historically accurate things, and still may get some of its history wrong, and, more to the point, be wrong about Rev. Moon.
On the same page the paragraph Science says
Although skeptics have claimed that the Bible contains scientific errors, none of the allegations have been proven. This is true of no other ancient religious book. In fact, many times science has been proven wrong and the Bible right. Science books are changed frequently and often hopelessly contradict one another after a few years. The Bible never has to be changed. It is accurate where it touches on science. For example, in a day when most people thought the earth was flat, even up to the voyage of Columbus in 1492, the Bible stated in Isaiah 40:22a, "It is he that sitteth upon the circle [italics McElveen's] of the earth." The word for "circle" is the Hebrew word meaning "round" or "sphere". In other words, the Bible revealed that the earth was a sphere about 2,200 years before man found it out, even though Marco Polo had made some strides in that direction a few centuries before Columbus. But Isaiah wrote about 700 years B.C.! How did Isaiah know? He didn't, the word came from God!
From a Catholic perspective, we know that it is not only the Bible that provides the faith, but the teachings of the Church. The 17th century inquisition certainly saw that the Bible shows the earth to stand still, and Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy for saying otherwise. Joshua 10:12 has Joshua command the sun and the moon to stand still, on the clear assumption that ordinarily it moved across the sky. McElveen complains that science corrects its own misperceptions. But this is the only way things get corrected. It took the Catholic Church 350 years to get it right on Galileo.
To say that "circle" only meant "sphere" would imply that the translation as "circle" was incorrect. If the same word could apply to both, there is no assurance that indeed a flat circle is not what is meant. The apparent view outside is of a dome of sky sitting on top of a flat circle of ground bounded by the horizon, and a circle is a plane figure - flat. Also, educated persons did know that the earth was a sphere. Ptolemy cataloged longitudes of places around the earth, and showed a map projection of the known world clearly indicating it was a sphere. And if the Bible were so clear on the matter, wouldn't the monks have set people straight, even if they did not know already?
The scattering and return mentioned in The Jews, had already been fulfilled in the sixth century B.C. as the nation's elite had been sent to Babylonian exile, and returned upon Cyrus's conquest of Babylon. And the "prophesy" was added afterward to bolster belief in the scriptures. Considering the author's amazement at the survival of Judaism, one would think he could make a great case for practicing that religion, as the prophecy is a Jewish one. As for the scattering being referred to in Luke 21:23, it is in a clear context that the scattering itself is not to take place until "end times" - the end of the world, not a scattering that took place before the 20th century and is now coming to an end. (And, I'm sure many Jews are not returning to Israel, and the scattering continues.)
On page 11 in Jesus Christ - God's Living Word, McElveen implies that Isaiah refers to Jesus in these lines:
Isa 9:6 For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Isa 9:7 His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.
Compare that to how Jesus is said to have seen himself:
Mat 10:34 "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Mat 10:35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
Mat 10:36 and one's foes will be members of one's own household.
Mat 10:37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
Mat 10:38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
To quote Robin Lane Fox, in The Unauthorized Version,
Here were people who claimed that Isaiah, addressing King Ahaz in the later eighth century B.C., had predicted the birth of Jesus (Immanuel), when all he had meant was the birth of a royal prince in the later eighth century B.C. They ignored the surrounding context and the forced meaning of the words. In Hebrew, Isaiah's word for the child's mother meant 'young woman', not virgin: when a translator later turned it into Greek, his Greek word, at a pinch, could have the same double meaning. Christians, however, began to read it one-sidedly as a prophecy of Jesus's virgin birth. They were doubly misguided: it did not concern Jesus nor did it concern a virgin.
And how does honoring one's father and mother square with
Luke 14:26 "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
The section continues with claims made in the New Testament. Miracles are attributed in the zeal of trying to win converts. The oral stories are then written down, and centuries later put into a Bible. That Thomas recognized Jesus as his Lord and his God is put forth as a reason to believe; but one must believe in the inerrancy of the New Testament before one can believe that Thomas did this. McElveen quotes C.S. Lewis as saying "either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse." That of course depends on the truth of every saying attributed to him. If he didn't say all these things he need be neither. Remember the game of Telephone. A lot gets added in the course of one evening, let alone the 60 years or so before the Gospels were written down. Great moral teachings and lunatic claims and everything in between can be attributed to someone without making that person either one. Of course this does not rule out the category of great moral teacher, as the claims of Godhood can be added later, like the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. Or, indeed, it may be like the stories of Paul Bunyon - all a legend. The record is not compelling.
In Consider the Miracle of Jesus' Life, page 12, we are asked to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin just because Luke says so. Luke was trying to gain converts. Any Old Testament reference was tried to be fitted into a prophecy of Jesus, even with a bad translation of Isaiah.
If the entire nation awaited his birth, how could not all Jews of the time have been Christians?
As far as the virgin birth story goes, Justin Martyr in his Dialog with the Jew Trypho, states that some Christians reject the virgin birth and divine paternity of Jesus because it sounds too much like pagan myth, specifically mentioning the myth of Danaë, impregnated by Zeus. Other mythic heroes were given virgin births as well as famous persons of the ancient world, such as Plato, Alexander, Perseus, Asclepius, and the Dioscuri. In Diogenes Laertius's biography of Plato, there is a story of Apollo's fathering Plato:
Ariston (the putative father of Plato)...had a vision in which Apollo appeared to him, and in consequence guarded her pure of the relations of wedlock until she brought forth Plato.
I have no idea how McElveen sees a precise time of the birth of Jesus in:
Dan 9:24 "Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.
Dan 9:25 Know therefore and understand: from the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed prince, there shall be seven weeks; and for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with streets and moat, but in a troubled time.
Dan 9:26 After the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing, and the troops of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed.
It's like some people seeing prophecies of the current day in sayings of Nostradamus.
McElveen claims that Christ's whole life was foretold in detail. The whole old testament does not contain the words crucify, crucifixion, etc. (the only word beginning cruci- is crucible, found in Proverbs). As for whether Jesus had committed any sin, I ask you, if someone were to walk into the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., and be offended at the souvenirs, missals, statues, rosary beads, etc. for sale in the gift shop, and then proceeded to overturn the racks, counters, and cash registers, would one not attribute some label of wrong to this activity? This is what Jesus in effect is said to have done, with the tables of those selling offerings needed for the current worship services.
"Never did another man make such stupendous, specific claims" - These claims were said in Gospel stories to have been made by Jesus. They are the work of poetic individuals seeking to put into words the exuberance they feel to make others believe.
In Never did another man die as this man died, McElveen implies (practically claims) that the old testament predicted Jesus would be crucified, which he implies is amazing as the method of punishment was not current then. But the reference he gives shows no mention of crucifixion or a cross:
Psa 22:14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;
Psa 22:15 my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.
Psa 22:16 For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. My hands and feet have shriveled;
Psa 22:17 I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me;
Psa 22:18 they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.
Of course the early Christians, before the writing down of the Gospels, knew the scriptures. They attributed these lines to their Jesus. When the writing took place, in the new testament, the quotation about casting lots for his clothing was remembered and included. The company of thieves is also an idea that could have been borrowed. The King James version shows Psalm 22:16 as having "pierced" hands and feet; however, the note in the Jerusalem Bible shows that the translation of the Hebrew original is not known; that Bible translates this passage as 'they have tied may hands and feet'. It is amazing however that McElveen does not see that the people forming the traditions that the Gospel writers wrote down had these texts available, to draw ideas from, in their stories of Jesus, and are not at all independent of the old testament writings.
Does the borrowing of ideas sound like plagiarism? Not at all; it is storytelling. The current series of Joshua books is based on Jesus ideas, and no one claims plagiarism. The idea is to produce edifying stories and no one objects.
Never did any other man die for such a purpose as this man again relies on circular reasoning. We are asked to trust the Gospels because Jesus died for us. But the only reason for believing he died for us is by trusting the Gospels. The idea of Jesus's death for us does not really make sense with the idea of justice. To punish an innocent person for the sins of the guilty dishonors the idea of justice. To say that God's ways are mysterious and we do not know the hidden reason for it does not help, when the whole idea is to show that we should believe this. God should be all-powerful, able to remove man's guilt without the sacrifice of his son, who is in no way guilty, if Christianity is to be believed. It is a hindrance to belief rather than an aid to say that no other man died for such a purpose. But in any instance, human sacrifice has not been unknown in other cultures for appeasing the gods.
Concerning No other man ever rose from the grave, conquering death: Ancient legends of Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, and Mithra all make this same claim.
On page 13, the argument against the resurrection that "the disciples stole the body" is countered with "In truth, however, the chief priests and elders bribed the soldiers with money to say that the disciples stole the body while the soldiers were asleep (Matt. 28:11-15)." However, this again requires a belief in the Bible in order to accept what is claimed to be "the truth".
On page fifteen, the rhetorical question of how 500 people could have the same hallucination again begs the question. It presupposes that 500 people did indeed see the risen Jesus, and ignores the possibility of exaggeration taking place in the oral transmission of the story. Remember the game of telephone. Add in the typical fish story, how it grows with each telling.
The remaining pages of this section rely on unquestioning acceptance of Gospel statements as support for belief in those statements, which is circular logic: the empty tomb, the appearances to 500 at a time. How can McElveen say that "This event had to have happened or it would never have been included in the scriptures"? The texts (scriptures) which were included in the Bible (fourth century AD), were determined by what agreed with acceptable church opinion. Other scriptures were deemed to be apocryphal, because they disagreed with the opinion. Scriptures exist in which Jesus's childhood is depicted, in which he strikes his playmates dead when he has childhood arguments with them, and strikes their parents blind when they complain to Joseph about this. Fantastic indeed, but included in a scripture. Does that make it true?
It is only a Christian assertion that chapter 53 of Isaiah refers to the same person as the one who is to reign forever.
It takes a strong imagination or long indoctrination to find, as McElveen does, in the following a reference to Jesus's death on the cross, with a bird representing Jesus:
Lev 14:1 The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
Lev 14:2 This shall be the ritual for the leprous person at the time of his cleansing: He shall be brought to the priest;
Lev 14:3 the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall make an examination. If the disease is healed in the leprous person,
Lev 14:4 the priest shall command that two living clean birds and cedarwood and crimson yarn and hyssop be brought for the one who is to be cleansed.
Lev 14:5 The priest shall command that one of the birds be slaughtered over fresh water in an earthen vessel.
Lev 14:6 He shall take the living bird with the cedarwood and the crimson yarn and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was slaughtered over the fresh water.
Lev 14:7 He shall sprinkle it seven times upon the one who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease; then he shall pronounce him clean, and he shall let the living bird go into the open field.
Again, that Jesus foretold his resurrection, is a claim of the Gospels, written at least 60 years after any possible fact.
That Jesus is said to have risen on a Sunday, in analogy to the first fruits festival mentioned in Leviticus, can even be seen as a bending of the New Testament witness to match the Old Testament predecessor. It requires a shortening of the period of death:
Mat 12:40 For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.
This does not say merely "on the third day"; it says "three days and three nights". This correspondence is not even true, given the Sunday that matches the first fruits festival. If you paid a hotel for three days and three nights, you wouldn't expect to check in on a Friday afternoon, and out before dawn on Sunday. Remember the miraculous unity the Bible was supposed to have?... where is it?
A Sunday resurrection could well have been invented to justify changing the sabbath to Sunday, rather than the other way around.
If it took much courage for Jews to observe Sunday sabbaths, think how much courage it took the Israelites to worship the golden calf, against all their Jewish culture. Does that make the calf worthy of that worship? People have strong ideas, whether they are right or wrong. And sometimes a change is felt to be necessary, but does that make it right? As for the changes in the lives of the apostles, again we are hearing the story as written down after 60 or more years of oral transmission. And even then, people do go off and join cults such as David Koresh's, or Jim Jones's. Something gets into them. It doesn't make Koresh or Jones real Messiahs.
How do people see the miracle of a changed life through Jesus Christ?
The story of Josh McDowell on page 20 shows a person longing for love:
Josh McDowell was a brilliant young man. However, he had a very sad childhood and was an unhappy young man. His father was a town drunk. His friends laughed at his father's drunken escapades. When Josh's friends came over, he would even take his father out to the barn and tie him up. Then he would park the car near the silo and tell his friends his father was not home! While laughing on the outside, Josh cringed on the inside. In a small town, few things are worse than having your father be the town alcoholic.
Josh was generally an angry young man, but he especially hated his father. On one occasion he had seen his mother lying in the manure behind the cows in the barn. Josh's father had beaten her so badly that she could not even stand up. One can only imagine the rage and hate that filed Josh's heart.
Slowly the years passed. Josh went off to college and met some genuine born-again Christians. He saw in them something for which his hungry heart longed, yet his intellect was not ready to accept. So Josh purposed to "intellectually refute" Christianity and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He dug determinedly into the evidence. The battle for his mind and heart was monumental. Finally, convinced but still reluctant, Josh did what he felt was the only honest thing he could do. While alone in his room, he invited Jesus Christ into the his [sic] heart and life on December 19, 1959 at 8:30 p.m. It was a quiet unemotional conversion, based on evidence and the reality of the risen Christ. But what began as a relatively uneventful conversion, later became an explosive transformation. Josh tells of debating the head of the history department at a midwestern university when the professor challenged him to name some concrete changes Christ had made in his life. Forty-five minutes later the professor asked him to stop!
Some of the changes that Jesus Christ has made in Josh McDowell's life include taking away his fierce temper and giving deep peace to his restless mind, and replacing his insecurity with assurance. God also gave Josh a passion to reach other people for Jesus Christ.
Josh experienced another astonishing change after he had accepted Christ. Slowly but surely God began to replace the burning hatred in his heart for his father. About five months after receiving Christ, the love of Christ so overpowered Josh that he looked his father in the eye and told him, "Dad, I love you!"
Josh was generally an angry young man, but he especially hated his father. On one occasion he had seen his mother lying in the manure behind the cows in the barn. Josh's father had beaten her so badly that she could not even stand up. One can only imagine the rage and hate that filed Josh's heart.
Slowly the years passed. Josh went off to college and met some genuine born-again Christians. He saw in them something for which his hungry heart longed, yet his intellect was not ready to accept. So Josh purposed to "intellectually refute" Christianity and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He dug determinedly into the evidence. The battle for his mind and heart was monumental. Finally, convinced but still reluctant, Josh did what he felt was the only honest thing he could do. While alone in his room, he invited Jesus Christ into the his [sic] heart and life on December 19, 1959 at 8:30 p.m. It was a quiet unemotional conversion, based on evidence and the reality of the risen Christ. But what began as a relatively uneventful conversion, later became an explosive transformation. Josh tells of debating the head of the history department at a midwestern university when the professor challenged him to name some concrete changes Christ had made in his life. Forty-five minutes later the professor asked him to stop!
Some of the changes that Jesus Christ has made in Josh McDowell's life include taking away his fierce temper and giving deep peace to his restless mind, and replacing his insecurity with assurance. God also gave Josh a passion to reach other people for Jesus Christ.
Josh experienced another astonishing change after he had accepted Christ. Slowly but surely God began to replace the burning hatred in his heart for his father. About five months after receiving Christ, the love of Christ so overpowered Josh that he looked his father in the eye and told him, "Dad, I love you!"
The story goes on to show how Josh's father recovered from his alcoholism.
Is there any doubt that a group offering that love will be attractive to him, despite protestations that one is seeking to "intellectually refute" Christianity?
People have inner strength. It comes from inside. But if the predominant philosophy/religion/outlook of the culture they find themselves in attributes all good things to Jesus, they will see Jesus as the source of the strength. If at a certain point in life, one gains a grip on things, and someone presents a good sales pitch for Jesus, and furthermore has the backing of the predominant culture, it is not surprising that the change will be attributed to Jesus, rightly or wrongly. Also consider that all medical experiments on new drugs compare their effects to those of placebos, treatments that have no intrinsic value, but help nonetheless, as they are perceived to be of value. A treatment must do better, statistically, over large populations, than the placebo at producing cures - as even placebos do "produce" cures.
On page 23, McElveen quotes Josh McDowell, going back to the black/white dichotomy:
Jesus Christ had to have been either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord God. It is impossible that Jesus Christ was a liar. He was the epitome of honesty, and demanded that people be honest at any cost [Is a Christian who tells a white lie unChristian? ...is it OK to tell a kid there is a Santa Claus? - CK]. Everything He said came true [See Matthew 24:34, below, about this - CK]. He gave His own life for what He said was true.
He was no lunatic. Rather He was the essence of sanity and tranquillity [remember the expulsion of the money changers from the Temple? - CK] under intense pressure, false accusations, persecution, and death [Mark 15:34: At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"]. His impeccable character and serene demeanor negate this possibility.
The only other viable alternative? Jesus Christ was and is the Lord God! [who has forsaken himself? - CK].
He was no lunatic. Rather He was the essence of sanity and tranquillity [remember the expulsion of the money changers from the Temple? - CK] under intense pressure, false accusations, persecution, and death [Mark 15:34: At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"]. His impeccable character and serene demeanor negate this possibility.
The only other viable alternative? Jesus Christ was and is the Lord God! [who has forsaken himself? - CK].
McElveen, on page 28, again refers to Daniel 9:24-26 (see quote above) as pinpointing the birth of Jesus, just as the description of a physically outlandishly dressed, unique person, pinpoints an unmistakable hypothetical date. This violates Jesus's demand for honesty. There is no pinpointing of Jesus in that selection. As for any of the other 333 signs, again, remember, the oral history of the Jesus story grew over decades, adding attributes, by people familiar with scriptural predictions, having those predictions in mind, before the story was written down. These were people in good faith, saying, well, that's the way it must have been in the life of Jesus, because that's what the scriptures predicted. Then they wrote it down as having taken place.
Here comes the surprise: I think Jesus was the son of God. (See the last chapter of this book, on "What Am I?" where I describe myself as a skeptical theist.) But I also am the son of God and you the son or daughter of God. All persons who ever lived are sons and daughters of God. In that fine prayer that is attributed to Jesus by the Gospels, we are taught to address God as "our father", not "Jesus's father". We are strong, being small parts of the infinite God. Those who see this have a hard time explaining it, and may sometimes distort this truth in the telling. Thus the Bible, in part written by those who had an ineffable idea in mind, and in part by people with axes to grind, is not inerrant, any more than any other book that seeks the truth, whether it be the Bible, the Koran, science texts, Shakespeare, Greek plays, philosophy books, etc. Jesus was one small person just as any son or daughter of God is. Each of us gets our strength from being part of the one God. The words attributed to Jesus are the wisdom of many, gathered over the half century between Jesus's life and the writing of the Gospels, and attributed to Jesus, as the central figure to Christians, incorporating wisdom of an even longer time period, along with the possibility of some mistakes here and there. With the presence of all that wisdom, plus the appeal of hope and love, it of course attracts followers, regardless of any truth to the physical resurrection of one man or the divine nature of that man.
Sometimes I am told, even by skeptics, "You don't know the Bible/Christianity is not true." Considering that I do have faith in God, they say How do I know that the biblical faith is wrong. The above lays out what my thoughts are on that faith. An analogy could be that someone comes up to me and says he knows the six numbers that will come up on the following week's lottery. I am skeptical. Someone says, well, he could be right. But he is more likely wrong, and has no reason for choosing this particular set of numbers. While I do believe that there will be a lottery next week, I have no idea what the numbers will be. Just so, while I do believe in God, I don't know what his plan is, and can only grope to find out a few pieces. On the lottery side of the analogy, the predictor may come back next week and say how right he was on a couple of the numbers, but that partial correctness is to be expected, given the nature of the choices available for lottery numbers. It's designed so you can come tantalizingly close, but really have a hard time getting it right.
The 2000-year Game of Telephone
And just why do I look at the odds against Christianity being true like the odds against me if I were to play the lottery? If you have ever played the game called "telephone" you see how a message gets distorted at each retelling. The message that comes out the end after just a handful of retellings is nothing like the message that goes in. Then consider that the Christian message has been in the retelling for 2000 years. And what was at the beginning of those 2000 years? Our knowledge of human behavior tells us it's something like what I describe in my chapter "Elvis."
Falsification
Note what Jesus is said to have said, in Matthew 24:34:
Mat 24:29 "Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.
Mat 24:30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see 'the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven' with power and great glory.
Mat 24:31 And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
Mat 24:32 "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.
Mat 24:33 So also, when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates.
Mat 24:34 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.
That generation has passed away, but the events have not taken place. McElveen says that "every prophecy of the Bible is always accurately, literally fulfilled" (page 28).
This concludes chapter 1, where McElveen tries to convince us to believe. Chapter 2 is the exhortation to live a good life. Some interesting pieces come along the way.
Page 30: "God was never man": amen, but Catholic doctrine teaches Jesus was true God and true man, not a hybrid God-man. Even Christians cannot agree.
"God never progressed, earned or attained His way to being God, He was always God.:
Luke 2:40 The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
Luke 2:52 And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.
On page 38 he asks us to believe that if Romans 10:13 were not true, God would be lying. But here it is Paul quoting Joel, not God or Jesus talking, and specifically referring to the predicted "end days":
Rom 10:13 For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."
Joel 2:32 Then everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls.
If this is untrue we can blame Paul or Joel, it does not depend on Jesus's or God's truthfulness.
Page 43: "The waters of baptism cannot wash away one sin." The Catholic who lent me this book must recognize that to accept this she must really consider the need to revise Catholic doctrine as taught in Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. But I'm sure McElveen means to say that Catholic doctrine is wrong - more intra-Christian squabbling.
