The Bible and Second Grade Spanish

I once saw a comical skit on a TV show in which the actors made a mock, Spanish-speaking soap opera. All the characters had the fiery passion of the typical soap opera lovers and betrayers, but they only spoke with 2nd grade Spanish. They would blurt out phrases to each other with red-hot zeal. Phrases like, “Que hora es!?” or with bold emphasis on a few well-chosen syllables, one might look at the other and proclaim, “Como te llamos!?” This went on for a while, with the silliness building. Then at the end a man burst into the room and fervently spoke to the rest of the characters in flowing, eloquent Spanish, which, of course, caused the rest to stare at him in dismay.

This is much like the way people often handle the Bible. Many Christians tend to express fervently the few individual concepts and stories in the Bible they know, assuming the familiar points to be characteristic of every other part of the whole. This confident ignorance is often seen in Christians and their opponents when that all familiar phrase, “the Bible says…” is thrown around in debate by each side. The well meaning, but less-than-knowledgeable Christian might argue against his more liberal counterpart that “the Bible says homosexuality is sin, and that’s that!” referring to the very adamant condemnation of homosexuality in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6. The rebuttal may then be given that another condemnation of homosexuality is given in Leviticus 18, a chapter which also forbids having relations with a woman while on her menstrual period. It might also be said that “the Bible says” in Exodus 35 that a person should be put to death for doing work on the Sabbath (which is Saturday). The opponent may then point out that the one so adamant about forbidding behavior “the Bible says” is sin doesn’t heed the other prohibitions, and so apparently is very selective in heeding what “the Bible says.”

This is a common type of exchange. Many who are passionate about their convictions and about the small parts of the Bible they are familiar with, are thrown into confusion when they hear references to passages such as the ones from Leviticus and Exodus cited above. For many newcomers to the Bible, the descriptions of warfare, sexual practices, and seemingly obscure religious rituals in the Old Testament are disconcerting. One of the main factors causing the dismay is the assumption that the familiar parables in the Gospel narratives, and a few prominent Old Testament stories like the Flood and the crossing of the Red Sea are indicative of all that’s to be found in the Bible.

It needs to be emphasized that when one understands the nature of the different literary genres and their historical and cultural contexts, much of the confusion caused by references to seemingly obscure or scandalous passages is resolved. If one understands the genre and purpose of the ancient piece of Hebrew Scripture called Leviticus, and its place in the overall story of the Bible, many of its apparently troublesome points are no longer so troublesome. A fundamental problem arises, however, when a person is only familiar with the genre of the Gospels and Acts, and in turn, perhaps unknowingly, tries to homogenize the entire Bible along the same lines, expecting books like Leviticus to be read the same way—to teach the same way—as books like Matthew, which are a very different type of literature. Many try to impose their idea of what they think the Bible should be onto the text, when that idea comes from somewhere other than the text. Another common form of this mistake is seen when people go to the historic accounts of Jesus’ life written in the 1st-century Middle East, and expect them to read like 21st-century, journalistic documents, as if the historical events recorded in two very different cultures separated by two millennia and half a globe would be articulated the same way. To put this in perspective, just try telling someone you have a historical account for her to read and then, without showing her the cover or introduction, give her the owner’s manual to your computer. The reader would expect things from the literature it never intends to offer, and in the end she would not know the history she intended to study and would have a rather odd understanding of computers.

MM

Tenacious Stupidity

I recently watched the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, based on a true story about three civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 for trying to help blacks register to vote. As one born and raised in the Deep South, much of this film hit all too close to home. One of the portrayals in the movie I thought most accurate were the sound-byte interviews with the common local people during the search for the three bodies. One man says something to the effect of, “I don’t think those boys were murdered, but if they were, they brought it on themselves.” Some might be quick to observe that helping American citizens exercise their right to vote wouldn’t be an outrageous enough act to warrant being murdered. But then citizens are actually people, and in the minds of many Southerners, those being helped were blacks, and thus not really people (remember the Three Fifths Compromise?), a point made all the more clear when one local woman describes blacks along these lines: “They ain’t like us. They don’t bathe regular and they stink.” Don't get me wrong, by no means do all Southerns hold to this view, but too many do, and it was exactly this type of thinking that created the moral crisis that culminated in the civil rights movement.

I now live in another part of the country and every now and then someone will ask me if many people in the South still think that way? —as if to say, “They don’t really, do they?” In response, I’m always tempted to quote the T-shirt I saw which said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in mass numbers,” but that would probably be too harsh in light of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 5: 21-22, so I just say yes, some but not all, and comment on how tragic it is when people choose to think that way. I was reminded of this all the more when I went back to Alabama to visit family last Thanksgiving. I noticed on my way to the airport an elaborate new monument. Waving gallantly along I-65 between Montgomery and Birmingham was a Confederate flag. I couldn’t read the inscription at the base of the monument, but if it were authentic, I imagine it saying something like, “This Confederate flag monument is to commemorate and celebrate the aspect of our Southern heritage characterized by dehumanizing arrogance and utter stupidity.”

With all this in mind, the whole issue of racism in the South brings an extremely import ethical principle into focus, a principle centered on this question: Is right and wrong ultimately determined by one’s culture or by something greater—something to which (or to Whom) everyone in the culture is subject? (See the appendix of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man for clarity on this) For Christians, the answer to this question should be as obvious as the sun, but somehow many of us have a hard time seeing it.

A former professor of mine graduated from Yale and later moved to Mississippi. He was, and is, a strong Evangelical Christian and was teaching a Sunday school class in his Mississippi church when he commented on the fact that regardless of racial dynamics in Southern culture, a Christian’s concern, of course, is not whether the man who marries his daughter is black or white (apparently it was an all white church), but whether or not he is a Christian. Mistakenly thinking those in the Sunday school class actually thought like Christians, he didn’t expect this to cause much of a controversy, but for some in the class, his point was not well received.

Keeping in mind that the term Samaritan was, to a Jew, probably more derogatory than the “n” word is today, apparently these dissenting people in the Sunday school class knew more than most about textual criticism and thought that Jesus’ shattering of the cultural norm by his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 was a section of Scripture added in to the text by evil scribes centuries after the fact, and thus shouldn’t be heeded. Maybe they thought the same about that part at the end of Galatians 3 where Paul says, in Christ, there are no more race and class distinctions, but all are one in him. Or maybe they just thought that even though Jesus is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe (Col. 1:15-20), allowing one’s thoughts and feelings to be conformed by him and his teaching would not be worth the awkwardness and discomfort of alienation from the culture.

To say that following Christ means one might be required to live at odds with popular culture is much like saying running for President means one might be required to do a lot of public speaking. And though the sentiment of pop culture (outside the South) is typically in agreement with Christians on the issue of racism, there are many moral issues on which the Christian view is anything but popular, and these issues are the points at which Christians decide who holds the ultimate moral authority.

MM

The Need for Real Debate

Debating important issues is too often a counterproductive, frustrating pursuit. There are two fundamental reasons for this. The first being that one of the first things that happens in the minds of people who hold strong beliefs on a certain issue when they hear an opposite view proposed is to see those with the opposite view as enemies, and thus not worth listening to. If there is any doubt about this, just stop and think of one issue on which you have deep convictions—abortion, political parties/candidates, justification for war, etc. Now think of the one word used to label the opposition of your view: pro-life or pro-choice; Democrat or Republican; war-supporter or protester. Automatically walls go up, and the one who holds the opposite view is “one of those” people. If we are not careful, this process results in the demonizing of the other, usually without truly understanding what he or she actually believes. This type of thinking is easily maintained and constantly reinforced when we isolate ourselves among people of like views and fail to sincerely listen to “those” on the other side.

The second problem with debate—one too common in our politically correct, western culture—is that of the soft, artificial (and self-contradictory) attitude of agreement which many administrators try to impose on college campuses and work environments. With slavery, genocide, and large-scale war marring the last hundred and fifty years of western history, that history has often been characterized by gross abuses of human rights. The reality of these abuses are beyond question, and should never be repeated. But in what seems to be a means of absurd overcompensation, we often fall into what I like to call the warm, shallow pool of affirmation, in which the only real error is to claim that there is such a thing as error. This is a vague perspective in which all views are affirmed regardless of whether they contradict each other or not, and the ultimate expression of respect for another is to be nice and never question anything he or she holds dear.

Within such an environment, the really meaningful issues in life are rarely discussed, and when they are, they are discussed in a way that either undermines their value by affirming an idea while affirming with it something that is mutually exclusive, or they are discussed within the fortress of familiarity in which “those” on the other side are never truly heard.

As long as we recognize our equal worth as persons, we should be able to debate without it being so personal. If I am aware of the fact that I and the person with whom I disagree are of equal value simply because we are both human beings, I can safely disagree--even passionately--without abusing or demeaning. What is, in fact, demeaning is to observe some intellectual or moral error in one's self or another person and gloss over it in the name of niceness. The real issues in life--the moral and religious ones--are not going any where, even if we choose to tap them with the magic wand of political correctness. The differneces that really matter are too heavy to be drowned in that warm, shallow pool of affirmation.

MM

The Foreignness of Evil

“Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”


I once gave a group of high school juniors and seniors a writing assignment in which they had to respond to this quote from G.K. Chesterton’s essay, “A Piece of Chalk” by expounding on a specific example of acute, powerful goodness—overwhelming goodness that has the power, as Eleonore Stump says, to crack our heart open in contrast to the power of evil to close our hearts in defensive hardness.

Several students came up with great examples, the most salient to me being the story of two starving child brothers somewhere in Africa. Though both were emaciated, one was stronger than the other. Once he acquired food, the stronger one would put the food in his mouth, chew it for his brother who was too weak to do so, then put it in the brother’s mouth for him to swallow. Eventually the stronger brother died of starvation, but the weaker was nursed to health and lived because of his brothers loving sacrifice. (Sorry I can’t cite the specific time and location of this. It’s a fairly well-known story. I’d appreciate it if someone who knows would post the details on the comment board).

One particular student, however, wrote an essay explaining how she could not think of any examples of the type of acute, powerful goodness Chesterton and Stump describe, and this struck me as a very enlightening response.

It may seem grandly pessimistic at first for one to say she simply can’t think of any examples of goodness that could be on the same magnitude as the great evils in the world (the class had been reading literature of the Holocaust), and no doubt the piercing, white-hot type of goodness makes an eternal impression on us, but I think this seemingly pesimistic response reveals something very fundamental about our nature—at least our ideal nature—as human beings. It is true we often don’t notice kindness and courtesy as much as we do unkindness and evil. Imagine two scenarios: In the first, two people are walking—one several feet in front of the other—across a school campus. The first trips, falls to the ground and scatters her papers and folders. The one behind rushes up, asks if she’s alright, and helps her gather the papers. In the second, the fall and paper scattering happen just the same, but the person behind pays no attention and then even brushes the bottom of his shoe against the fallen woman’s head as he steps over her continuing on his way. Which of these two scenarios would get more attention from others on campus? Which would generate more comments about the behavior? In short, which would be most noticeable? The second, of course. The hard-hearted, inconsiderate act is the one which would impact people more, probably the one they would remember longest, by far.

Some might be tempted to say this is so because our tabloid hearts just naturally like to see bad things and hear bad news because it’s sensational. There’s certainly some truth to that, but I believe there is something more indicative and positive about human nature to be seen. Perhaps we don’t give as much attention to acts of kindness as we do acts of meanness because kindness is expected as a norm. We don’t make as big a deal out of one person going out of his way to help another as we do a person going out of his way to hurt another, because hurting is such an anomaly to human nature, or at least what should be an anomaly.

One might argue that this is all pie in the sky—that the reason why we notice evil so much is that there is so much evil to notice. But this only reinforces my point. If it’s true that evil makes the news because the world is so full of it, why then would it still be news? No matter how common evil becomes, it never becomes “normal.” Might this be because we were created to be good, and thus no matter our surroundings, nothing else will ever quite seem normal? You can take mankind out of the garden, but you can’t take the garden out of mankind!

MM

Super Intellectual Oblivious to the Obvious

In the March 5th edition of the Washington Post there is an article by Neely Tucker called “The Book of Bart,” on the New York Times best-seller, Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. Former Christian, now agnostic and chair of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ehrman argues that the textual variances in the many New Testament manuscripts are so numerous and significant that upon examining them an honest person will have to realize the sea of ambiguity and contradiction into which orthodox Christianity sinks.

Ben Witherington has a lucid critique of Ehrman’s book posted on his blog: benwitherington.blogspot.com, under the March 2006 archives. In it he reprints a great review of Ehrman's book from Daniel Wallace of bible.org. I hope everyone familiar with Ehrman and his arguments will read these.

But my concern here is not Ehrman’s arguments on textual criticisms but on his reasoning for ceasing to believe in God.

The WP article says the following about his losing faith:
“For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while teaching a class at Rutgers University on ‘The Problem of Suffering in Biblical Traditions.’ It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was there a God paying attention.
‘I just began to lose it,’ Ehrman says now, in a conversation that stretches from late afternoon into the evening. ‘It wasn't for lack of trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this mess . . .’”

But then it goes on to describe Ehrman’s lifestyle and what compensates for his sense of emptiness now that he no longer believes:
“Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a ‘happy agnostic.’ That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.
He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.
‘I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday.’"

Certainly one doesn’t have to be a super scholar to see a discrepancy here: Perhaps if Ehrman sent some of the excess money he spends on a convertible BMW and other “finer things” to people in places like Ethiopia there would be less poverty and disease in the world to blame God for.

But then again, perhaps his financial reasoning is sound. After all, if our existence is no more eternally significant than “the mosquito you swatted yesterday,” then how important could it be to help those starving “mosquitoes” in Africa?

MM

Book Review of Da Vinci Code by Dr. Craig Blomberg

The follwing is a book review of the Da Vinci Code by Dr. Craig Blomberg of Denver Seminary
(I, Mike, have put some salient sections in bold)


Denver Journal
An Online Review of Current Biblical and Theological Studies.
Brown, Dan The Da Vinci Code: A Novel. New York: Doubleday. 2003 454 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-385-50420-9

The most important word in this entire book is the noun in the subtitle; this is a "novel"-a work of fiction. That is important to remember, especially after the statements on page 1, which move the work slightly into the arena of historical fiction, but only slightly. The organization Opus Dei is caricatured; the Prior of Sion existed only from 1956-84 as a right-wing French political hoax.
It is true that the author has worked hard to describe accurately the contemporary European locations, including city layouts, buildings, and artwork, in which the plot is set, though errors do still appear there too. The statement that "all descriptions of . . . documents. . .in this novel are accurate" is, however, highly inaccurate!

It didn't take me very long in reading this book to understand why it was the #1 bestseller on the New York Times list of fiction for a large portion of 2003. It is well-written, fast-paced, with surprising turns of plot and intrigue regularly shocking readers, especially when they start to think they have things figured out. It contains all the elements of a good murder mystery, enough vivid portrayals that one can imagine the events depicted on location, especially if one is familiar with France and Britain, and bite-sized chapters that regularly end with a "cliffhanger" begging one to read more. Couple all that with regular implicit criticism of organized religion, especially traditional European Catholicism, along with explicit feminist and even goddess-worship ideology, and one understands why many post-Christian readers will approve of the message and virtually all readers will find the plot riveting. I could hardly put the book down myself, wanting to know what would happen next.

This is the first novel that has been reviewed in the six years of the Denver Journal's existence. I am not presumptuous enough to claim to be an expert critic of contemporary American fiction. And more than the barest description of the plot would destroy the fun for prospective readers. The following will have to suffice. The main character, Professor Robert Langdon, a supposed expert in "symbology" from Harvard, while in Paris as a guest lecturer, has plans to meet with the curator of the Louvre, Jacques Saunière. Before the meeting can happen, Saunière is murdered under bizarre circumstances, and Langdon is seemingly about to be charged with his killing. Strange codes scrawled at the murder scene bring on stage one Sophie Neveu, an expert cryptographer, who turns out to have secret messages for Langdon, leading the two to flee on a trip that begins as an attempt to save Langdon's life and eventually enmeshes them in the famous medieval "quest for the holy grail"-except that the grail is not the chalice that Jesus used at the Last Supper but. . . Well, I really can't tell you any more than this without spoiling too much. (Hints of a possible romance between Langdon and Neveu remain only that until the very end of the book and the only sex scene in the novel is a briefly described flashback in Sophie's mind of a grotesque ritual she observed as a young woman.)

Much of what could mislead the careless reader involves the history and contemporary manifestations in Brown's narrative of the two societies, the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei, which prove to be antagonists to each other in his story. Apart from their very general religious objectives and the names of a few famous leaders in the former, almost everything crucial to the plot-line about these two groups is made up. A competent church historian is needed in places, however, to help people understand just where the boundary is crossed between fact and fiction. But what concerns me most, as a New Testament scholar, are the number of people who think that the occasional comments about Jesus, his associates and the literature and events of first three Christian centuries are at all accurate. Put simply, they are not, and even very liberal biblical scholars (as in, for example, the famous Jesus Seminar) agree (see their two books, The Five Gospels [New York: Macmillan, 1993} and The Acts of Jesus [San Francisco: Harper, 1998]).

Specifically, there is not a shred of historical evidence that Jesus ever married Mary Magdalene (or anyone else) or ever fathered children. As Darrell Bock points out in his recent Christianity Today review (January 2004, 62), such information would certainly have been included in 1 Corinthians 9 where Paul appeals to the fact that Peter and various other apostles had wives when they received material help from the churches. In supporting his right to receive such help, Paul would have wanted to appeal to an even more convincing example-Jesus-if it were available. I would add also that with the very early veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Roman Catholicism, largely out of a desire to have a quasi-divine female figure along with God the Father, had Jesus ever been married, such a woman could scarcely have disappeared without a historical trace. She would have been celebrated and venerated instead, especially in the very strands of Catholicism that The Da Vinci Code pit against the revelation of "the truth" of Jesus' marriage. Brown instead stands this logic on its head when he has Langdon allege that it was so unusual for a Jewish man not to be married that, if he were celibate, that is what the Gospels would have had to call attention to (p. 245). But in a sense that is precisely what they do, at least as Jesus counterculturally approves of a single, celibate lifestyle in Matthew 19:10-12, even if he does not explicitly apply it to himself. And numerous other features in the Gospels call attention to certain ascetic tendencies in Jesus' life (see esp. the survey in Dale Allison's Jesus of Nazareth [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998],172-216), making his celibacy less surprising. Morevoer, it is not true that "according to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned"-the Jewish sects known as the Therapeutae and at least some of the Essenes in fact promoted celibacy as a spiritual ideal.

Another blatantly fictitious portion of The Da Vinci Code is the claim that "more than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament." Add up everything that was ever called a gospel in the first half-millennium of Christianity (most of which are small compilations of esoteric sayings ascribed to Jesus and not narratives of any portion of his life) and you come up with about two dozen documents. About half of these are known only from quotations in early church fathers or small scraps or fragments that have been discovered, and there is little that is unorthodox in them. Others are clearly Gnostic and equally clearly "Christian" mutations of earlier apostolic tradition. The only apocryphal "Gospel" that any sizable number of scholars of any theological stripe gives serious credence to is the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, of which approximately 1/3 are roughly paralleled in the canonical Gospels, another 1/3 are clearly Gnostic and non-Christian, and the remaining 1/3 are neither necessarily unorthodox nor demonstrably Gnostic. It is in this last group where intriguing questions about what else Jesus might have actually said, not preserved in the canon, primarily emerge. But Brown's characters do not appeal to the Gospel of Thomas at all! For a complete survey of the real apocryphal Gospel literature, see the standard English translation and introduction of W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster, 1991).

Equally false is Langdon's claim that "The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the great" (p. 231). While historians do debate how serious Constantine's conversion to Christianity was, he certainly didn't remain a pagan. And he had nothing to do with the canonization of the New Testament. That was a process the roots of which can be documented as early as the mid-second century, culminating in the 39th festal letter of the bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, delivered on Easter of A.D. 367, proclaiming the exact 27 books of the New Testament agreed on by all branches of Christianity. It is true that there was dispute from the second to the fourth centuries over seven of the NT books, for various reasons (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, Jude, 2 and 3 John and Revelation), but there is no evidence that there was ever any proposal not to include the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John or to include any other Gospel (for the full story see F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture [Downers Grove: IVP, 1987]). Brown further confuses the truth by alluding to the Dead Sea Scrolls as if they included Gospels (p. 234), when in fact they contain no Christian documents whatsoever-only Jewish (and a few Greek).

In marshalling support for Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife, Langdon avers that "the Gospel of Philip is always a good place to start" (p. 246). Hardly, since even very liberal scholars agree that this is a late, third-century Gnostic collection. Thus there is little if anything in it that is likely to be historical. What is more, this "Gospel" exists only in Coptic, not Aramaic (and if there had been a predecessor in another language it would have been Greek not Aramaic, as is demonstrated from other Coptic Gnostic literature), so that it is irrelevant when Langdon goes on to claim that the word "companion" (which Mary is deemed to be of Jesus) means "spouse" in Aramaic. It is also worth pointing out that no Aramaic or Hebrew words for "companion" normally mean spouse! The very short collection of sayings known as the Gospel of Mary (the next plank in Langdon's platform for marrying the Magdalene to Jesus) claims only that Jesus loved her more than various apostles and it comes from an even later (fifth-century) date, though fragments of this document in third-century Greek have been found (but not of this claim).

The enigmatic "Q-document" has been a favorite among writers of fiction over the years. Scholars use it to refer to material common to Matthew and Luke not found in Mark and many believe that an original Greek collection, largely of sayings of Jesus, called Q for the German word "Quelle" (in English, "source"), accounts for the verbal parallelism between Matthew and Luke where they are not following Mark. Scholars hypothesize many other things about Q, most of which are more speculative. None has ever argued that Jesus himself wrote it, but the Da Vinci Code does (p. 256). But even if he did, there is nothing secret or scandalous in it; we know what it would have contained by reading the relevant sections of Matthew and Luke!

At several points in various ways Brown's novel makes the claim that Jesus was not considered divine until the fourth century. This, too, is patently false-the claims emerge already in the first-century canonical gospels, as again every biblical scholar of every stripe recognizes. Of course, a lively debate continues as to whether those claims were deserved, but that's quite different from what The Da Vinci Code avers. Larry Hurtado's quite recent Lord Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) in fact demonstrates in massive detail how shockingly early the claims for Jesus' divinity arose-within a few years of his life, something unprecedented in the history of world religions, and something inexplicable unless Jesus himself did and said things that gave rise to those perspectives.

The most sweeping of all the fictitious claims in this book is the idea that the Priory of Sion has preserved "thousands of ancient documents as scientific evidence that the New Testament is false testimony" (p. 341). Such documents simply don't exist. This is part of Brown's fiction. The apocryphal and legendary post-New Testament material that does exist has been scrutinized intensely by biblical scholars and is available in English translation (see above; the New Testament Apocrypha has a second volume devoted to "acts," "epistles" and "apocalypses") for all to read (published in 1992). Nothing in them undermines the New Testament. There is no hidden cache (earlier novels accused the Vatican itself of hiding such documents, not an organization fighting against the Vatican!) being suppressed from the general public.
For readers who want actual scholarship pointing to the reliability of the New Testament, I invite them to consult my books on The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP, 1987) and The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel: Issues and Commentary (Downers Grove: IVP, 1991). For an excellent study of what can truly be known about Jesus outside the New Testament, see the book with that title by Robert E. Van Voorst (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). For an in-depth response to the small number of scholars who do put stock in apocryphal documents besides Thomas, see Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a survey and debunking of modern legends and fictions of various kinds (there are ample predecessors to The Da Vinci Code, and none of them agrees with another!), see especially Douglas Groothuis, Jesus in an Age of Controversy (Eugene: Harvest House, 1996).

Meanwhile, enjoy The Da Vinci Code. It's a fantastic novel. I'm so glad I read it. Just keep reminding yourself throughout, "It's only a novel. It's only a novel."
Craig L. Blomberg, Ph.D.Distinguished Professor of New TestamentDenver Seminary

Thoughts on Lewis' "Myth Became Fact" essay

Thoughts on Lewis’ “Myth became Fact” essay.

When I (and I think most modern thinkers) hear the word “myth” it automatically connotes the idea of something that is false—something closely akin to a lie, if not a lie out right. This is largely so because of the Cartesian Rationalism that has so thoroughly shaped our modern thinking. Because a “myth” is not something empirically verifiable or scientifically accessible, the Cartesian thinker instantly sees it as something that is of no substance and therefore of little, if any, value in connecting us to what’s real, because—according to the Cartesian way—only that in the empirical realm of rational calculations and scientific observations is real. Anything outside this realm or inaccessible to it is seen as dreamy, insubstantial, and false.

But all this is a product of Enlightenment thinking; those before the Enlightenment didn’t see things this way. The question of the empirical nature of a myth was immaterial (pardon the pun) to the pre-modern thinker. As Lewis explains, “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level…myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.”

The ancient myths about the dying gods are true but not factual—which is a contradiction only within a Cartesian paradigm. The Incarnation is that point at which “myth became fact.” Of course, facts are reality; and truth is that which points to reality. The ideas (or “myths”) about a god dying and resurrecting as seen in many ancient pagan religions, are true. The fact that truth points to is the person and actions of Christ. Jesus is the point at which the truth-realm of myth and the truth-realm of empiricism intersect. In the story of Christ, we have the factual, historical occurrence of a myth that has been proposed by different pagan thinkers throughout the previous centuries. The Incarnation is the consummation of the myth:

“The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”

As for the objection that Christianity is only another version of ancient pagan myths (like that of Mithras and others), first of all, those myths all lack the historical grounding of the New Testament (See Luke 3:1 “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea…”). This is the case because those were only myth and not fact—Christianity is both. Also, it would have been ludicrous not only for anyone to have dated the death and resurrection of a mythical pagan god with the reign of particular, historical political figures, but even more so to have done this within the very generation in which those figures lived. But this is exactly what the New Testament writers did.

Lewis is right in his argument: “We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t,” largely because, as many Christians say, “All truth is God’s truth.” If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob really is the Creator and Master of the universe, it makes a lot of sense that he would have implanted in the minds and hearts of the those he created the reality of his character and even his method—though, for pagans, in a very general way—for redeeming people, feeding it in though our imaginative mythologies, and then consummating it in our history in the person of Christ.

MM

Intro to the Thinking Allowed blog

Too often Christians abdicate their responsibility to think.

I believe the atheist Bascombe's charge to Thomas Wingfold in George MacDonald's excellent novel The Curate's Awakening is applicable to many who wear the name Christiain:

"And what sort of churches are they you refer to? All imitations. You are indebted to your forefathers for your would-be belief, as well as for whatever may be genuine in your churches. You hardly know what your belief is...In truth, I do not believe that even you believe more than an atom here and there of what you profess."

With this in mind, the purpose of this blog is to foster thoughtful discussion on theological, philosophical, and moral issues among Christians and anyone else who would like to join in. As the title indicates, all questions are allowed. All that's required is mutual respect and thoughtfulness.

MM