California Christian Apologetics Conference (II)

Lee Strobel (author of The Case for series, the newest of which is The Case for the Real Jesus) kicked off the second session of Friday night by telling us how much he loves evangelism. (And you know what that means – I love him!) He loves evangelism because he finds it simply amazing that God can use us to draw His own to Himself, and he gets to use apologetics too! Lee let us know about a time he was invited to come to a young lady’s house to talk to her entire family over dinner about Jesus. He was ecstatic about an opportunity to share his (new found) faith with some people. However, as soon as he walked in, he noticed sizable stacks of books piled up all around the house which all aimed to refute the claims of Jesus and Christianity. He began to worry, and as he sat down to dinner his fears were confirmed. As he took his place and began the conversation about Jesus, the father of the young girl who had invited him began firing as many of the toughest questions as he could muster. And they were difficult. So difficult that Lee had no answer for them… So he had to tell the man: “You’re questions are tough, and I don’t have an answer for them. But I suspect that in 2000 years, you won’t be the one to bring Christianity to its knees. Give me some time, and I’ll get you some answers.”

At this point, he introduced the concept of “Spiritual Vertigo” that we apologists are especially prone to. Spiritual Vertigo is when someone asks you questions that you can't answer and your head begins to spin and you begin to doubt your faith. He warned: “If you don't feel this, you will soon. If you never feel this, your kids will.” Why? Because there are 3x as many atheist/agnostics professors in the universities as there are in the general public. He told us about an email he got once from a young man where it was especially evident that he was experiencing spiritual vertigo: "Please help me… I was raised in the church and I'm now 26 years old. This book has devastated my faith. I don’t want to be kept in the dark: I want to know what really is going on in the Bible and what I should believe, even if it goes against what I've believed since I was a little boy."

It’s no wonder, then, that 1 Peter 3:15 commands us to “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…" – 1 Pet 3:15 (NIV). Lee also encouraged us with this verse: "The first to speak in court sounds right - until the cross-examination begins." - Pr 18:17. This is why we should "Test everything. Hold on to the good." - 1 Thess 5:21. Because someone may sound right when they get up and give testimony, but once the cross-examination begins, they don’t look so good. That is why the title of Lee’s talk was “Cross Examination.” And I’m sure there was some sort of pun intended, given that it’s about Jesus!

For this one, Lee stepped through 3 rising theories about who Jesus was and then cross-examined them. I’m pretty sure I got some flavor of all of these at Stanford this past year, so I know how closely Lee is hitting it on the head, and he does it quite well.

First, Lee addressed the mythological theory of Jesus. The story goes that the disciples borrowed beliefs about Jesus from earlier “mystery” religions, especially that of Mithraism (the worship of Mithras). The battle cry here is that “Nothing in Christianity is original” (The DaVinci Code). The story goes that Mithras was born of a virgin in a cave on December 25, that he was a travelling teacher with 12 disciples, and that he was sacrificed for world peace, buried in a tomb, and raised 3 days later. Does this sound like anyone you know? Of course it does! That’s Jesus! But no… it’s actually the god Mithras. All this information is from a god who came before Jesus, so obviously the Christians plagiarized other religions to make theirs more palatable!

Enter the cross examination. When one goes back to the sources of information that you can gather about Mithras, we find that he was born fully grown out of a rock wearing a hat. There is no virgin involved, and the only cave to be spoken of would be the hole he left in the side of the rock from being born out of it. Not that it would matter anyways; Jesus wasn’t born in a cave after all! The claim that Mithras was born Dec 25 is irrelevant, because no one who knows any better would claim that this is the actual date of birth for Jesus of Nazareth. We don’t know when He was born, so touting Dec 25 as a similarity is simply… irrelevant. The idea that he was a teacher with 12 disciples is completely false as well. He was thought of as a god, but in the Roman story he has only one follower and in the Iranian version, he has two in total. He was neither sacrificed for world peace; all he’s known for is killing a bull. By the way, Jesus wasn’t sacrificed for “world peace” either, so that “similarity” is also irrelevant. Lastly, his touted burial and resurrection is simply false. There is in fact no record of Mithras ever having died, let alone buried in a tomb and risen on the third day.

Furthermore, when we research Mithraism, we find that it didn’t even exist in the west until after Christianity. The “resurrection” myths entered the scene after Christianity started gaining ground, so if anyone is plagiarizing anyone else, it is Mithraism doing that to Christianity. There is simply no “mystery religion” that serves as a parallel to Christianity whatsoever! So when push comes to shove, the Mithras theory simply doesn’t hold up.

At this point, Lee moved on to tackle the Gnostic theory of Jesus. He started by comparing classical orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism. In the historic Christian faith, believers have claimed that Jesus is a Redeemer. In Gnosticism, Jesus is treated as a Revealer. The world and physical things are inherently evil, created by an evil (!) creator. All of these ideas come from one of the Gnostic gospels called the Gospel of Thomas, which the Jesus Seminar scholars accepted as just as accurate as the 4 standard works! It teaches that we each have a little divine spark in us. Furthermore, as opposed to salvation being forgiveness of sin for all who would believe, it teaches that salvation is for an elite few who are smart and cunning enough to figure out the secret information necessary to gain salvation and escape the evil world.

However, upon cross examination, we find that assuming this gospel to be totally on par with the 4 standard works is an unwarranted assumption. One rule of thumb when deciding which text to trust to give you facts about history is to figure out how close to the actual events the text was written. Now, even liberal scholars will admit that all 4 gospels were written in the first century. On the other hand, the gospel of Thomas was written late second century (AD 175) at the earliest. We know this based on various internal evidences such as word patterns, familiarity with the other gospels, and similarities between it and the Diatessaron – an AD 175 “harmony” of the 4 gospels written by Tatian. Furthermore, there are some outright ridiculous statements attributed to Jesus found within its pages, a few of which I’ll give you right here:

"Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human."

Does this make any sense to you? Me neither.

"If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will (hurt yourselves)."

Sounds like a good Jewish Rabbi to me! Oh wait…

"Simon Peter said to them, ‘Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the domain of heaven.’"

This does not sound like the Jesus we know, or ANY of his followers! Considering all these evidences, there’s no reason to worry that Jesus actually subscribed to the Gnostic view of Christianity.

Lastly, Lee addressed the misquoted theory of Jesus. This view has been popularized by the likes of Bart Ehrman, whose book I reviewed a while ago. You might be interested to know that this book is the one that caused the young man to doubt so harshly. The idea here is that no one has any idea what Jesus was really like, because the records we have are so damaged by unavoidable changes, whether accidental or intentional, changes introduced in the process of copying and passing down the texts. Furthermore, we do not have access to the originals, so it’s impossible to check how accurate the copies are. To make matters worse, there are an estimated 200,000 – 400,000 discrepancies between the available New Testament manuscripts, surely a number that absolutely destroys the perceived reliability of the New Testament. The New Testament texts are simply unreliable, certainly too unlike the originals to bank your eternity on their message.

Or are they? There is a side of the story that hasn’t been mentioned, so let’s begin the cross-examination. One pertinent fact to keep in mind is that the New Testament has far more partial or whole manuscripts than any other ancient document. And even if we had lost all copies of the New Testament, we have millions of quotations from early church fathers. Furthermore, many of the copies we do have are centuries closer to the original writings than other comparable ancient manuscripts. For example, we have 9 copies of the writings of Josephus, and the earliest copy is dated approximately 1000 years after the original writing! The next most reliable text next to the New Testament is the Iliad, which we have 2000 copies of (part or whole). I’m blanking on how close to the original they were. By comparison, of the New Testament we have 30,000 manuscripts in part or in whole, with the earliest copies dating to within, if I remember correctly, 1-2 centuries from the original. Furthermore, 99% of the “discrepancies” between New Testament manuscripts are completely irrelevant. Many of them don’t even come out in translation. Also, the reason 200 – 400,000 is a reasonable estimate is because we have so many fragments. Where one is different, the discrepancy is multiplied by however many manuscripts contain that passage or section, hardly much to worry about.

Lee then told us about an experiment that was done (I have yet to verify this) where groups of lay “scribes” and lay “textual critics” were gathered and there was an attempt to replicate the process of documents changing due to copying errors and then the process of textual criticism by which you attempt to reproduce the original (without having the originals on hand of course!). This experiment was performed a substantial number of times (50 is the number that comes to my mind) to check for consistency. These copies had far higher error to word count ratio in them than the copies of the New Testament. The results were that the “critics” always had outstanding success. The reconstruction was never off by more than three words, and that only happened once! Keep in mind that these people are completely untrained in the art of textual criticism. If amateurs untrained in textual criticism can reconstruct so quickly a text so terribly corrupt, can trained textual critics slaving over these issues for life not figure out with sufficient accuracy the original text of the New Testament which is far less riddled with errors?

I think so. And this is the same conclusion that Bruce Metzger, the leading expert of New Testament textual criticism came to during his lifetime. When Lee asked him whether it had damaged his faith, he responded: "On the contrary, it has built [my faith]. I've asked questions all my life, I have dug into the text, I've studied this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well placed… Very well placed."

In conclusion, the Mythological Jesus is just that, mythological. The Gnostic Jesus fails the test of history. And the Misquoted Jesus is much ado about nothing.

To finish the story of the man who asked all the tough questions of Lee - questions that made him doubt, questions that apparently had no conceivable answer – after doing some research, Lee found that there were answers for every single one of the man’s questions. “You’re just going to have to deal it!” Lee told him. Soon after, that man became a Christian.

The moral of the story? When you get Spiritual Vertigo, don’t freak out; check it out! The research you do will deepen your faith and prepare you to answer objections later on. I hope this post has been encouraging to you, to know that we serve and know Christ in truth. Go and proclaim him all the more boldly!