How A Miracle Turns Mundane

There is a great and terrible danger in being a strict immovable literalist and in insisting every word in the Bible as written is the inerrant absolute word of God. Find even one small, even seeming trivial, discrepancy or contradiction and your entire edifice of belief comes crashing down.

Such happened to Bart Ehrman who, we learn in a long and fascinating interview with New York Times employee Ross Douthat, was born and raised Episcopalian and at fifteen became “born again”, indicating becoming a “committed evangelical Christian”. He was “very gung-ho about [his] religious faith”, went to Moody Bible Institute and became “a Bible nerd there”.

In his words, a fundamentalist is one who believes “that the Bible is inerrant, in a really strong understanding of the term. Any contradictions should be reconcilable.” As Douthat asked, the seeming contradictions apply not just the text with itself, but with the text and world, too. Ehrman agrees:

Six-day creation, Adam and Eve, the flood — it all historically happened. Everything about the Gospels literally happened. So yeah, it was fundamentalist in that sense. And I bought into it.

The breaking point for Ehrman came in a staff. A simple walking stick.

On a basic level, Mark’s Gospel is usually thought to be the first Gospel. Jesus is sending out his disciples and telling them to go heal the sick and cast out demons and preach the good news. He says, when you go, don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take any money, but do take a staff.

OK, you have to take a staff because you’re going to be walking.

Matthew’s is exactly the same episode, word for word in some places. But in Matthew, he says to the disciples, don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take any extra money — and don’t take a staff.

Wait a second. This is an obvious thing where he either said take a staff or don’t take a staff, but he probably didn’t say both.

If you are a literalist (as of course most atheists are), insisting on every word being, as it were, dictated by God himself, and you have done the homework ensuring the staff-business is not some scribal error or the like, then we have here an irreconcilable contradiction. Which means you must, as Ehrman did, reject one of the premises in your argument for belief.

Ehrman did not reject literalism, but did God. Because to him the existence of God necessitated literal inerrant scripture, in his strictest sense of that term.

Douthat pointed out it’s possible to reject literalism and maintain belief in God, and that “inerrant” can mean other things. Like this: God inspiring men, who were just men, to write about what they saw and heard. Literalism, in Ehrman’s strict sense, would not then be expected.

Though there would then be required a body to first decide what counts as scripture, and then to have a (perpetually, really) debate about its meaning. Such a body has always existed, but Ehrman was able to reject it because of his literalism: a correct decision if literalism is true. The body is not needed, it’s true, if his version of literalism is true, because every man can be his own priest. But literalism cannot be true because of that staff (and many other examples; he has books cataloging them). Ehrman concludes no man should be a priest.

Which brings us to miracles, or rather just one, mentioned below. Ehrman rejects all miracles, because if the staff is an error, so must be all reports of miracles, he says. Yet if we, like Ehrman, reject events when there is imperfect witness agreement on even minute details, then we must reject all history, not just miracles. That’s the short, incomplete answer to Hume’s argument against miracles. Which today I do not want to spend time on (as that would take a full post).

Let’s instead discuss how evidence works in two other matters that came up in our pair’s discussion: the dating of Acts (this is far from as dull as it sounds), whether people saw Jesus in the flesh, as it were, after he was crucified. We’re not trying to solve these questions, but to see how evidence for and against it used.

ACTS

The Acts of the Apostles, commonly attributed to Luke, recounts the history of the very early Church (the first chapter has a nice probability example, incidentally), beginning with the Ascension of Jesus into the Clouds. It ends with Paul arriving in Rome, vainly trying to teach Jews there the Good News. The last sentence of the book is: “He [Paul] remained for two full years in his lodgings. He received all who came to him, and with complete assurance and without hindrance he proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.” No hindrance, you see.

You will of course remember that Paul was later hindered. He was executed. A rather large detail in the life of the man to leave out of the book. That Acts does not contain this interesting story is taken to indicate the book was finished, and in circulation (such as it was then), before Paul was killed. Most sources estimate Paul died somewhere in 64 to 67 anno Domini. Thus it is reasoned Acts is dated some time before this.

So far, unless you’re a scholar, this doesn’t sound particularly fascinating. But it is because some are desirous of and produce arguments for late dates for the Gospels, just as some are desirous of and produce arguments for early dates. And that is because the sides in this debate both accept the premise earlier dates are better confirmation for the events depicted in these books. Memories flag, you see.

Ehrman wants late dates, Douthat early ones. Douthtat gives as evidence for the early dating of Acts, which implies Luke’s Gospel is therefore also early:

Soon after [the end of Acts], a lot of incredibly crazy stuff happens. You have the martyrdom of Paul and Peter, you have Nero’s first persecution of the Christians, and then you have the Jewish war and the destruction of the temple. So it’s a very action-packed decade.

It has always seemed to me that the most straightforward reading of Acts ending where it does, without any detail of those subsequent events, is just that the writer wasn’t aware of those subsequent events and was ending his story roughly where he was — it’s the early 60s, Paul is still alive, and this is the end of the story because this is when he is writing it.

And that one of the key reasons that scholars reject that sort of intuitive conclusion is that they don’t want to give Jesus credit for a prophecy [about the destruction of the Temple].

My point is not to settle this debate, but to show how desire drives the hunt for evidence. Douthat does not mention his own, but does that of academics (“scholars”). Ehrman also does not mention his own, but it is anyway clearly inferred from the conversation.

This is proved by how Ehrman handles Douthat’s excellent point about the curious abrupt ending of Acts, which is curious if Acts was, as Ehrman claims, written well after Paul was executed and so forth. I quote now over several answers (read the original to see if I cut too much):

Well, then, why does the Book of Acts end while Paul’s in prison in Rome in the sixties?

Two things about that. One, I agree that Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, so I don’t late date them because of that [but not because of supernatural knowledge, but keen appreciation of the politics of the day]…

There are good reasons for thinking why the author of Luke—Acts would have wanted an Act before Paul was finally put on trial and executed. The whole point of the Book of Acts — for those who don’t know, the book of Acts begins after Jesus’ resurrection. He ascends to heaven, then the day of Pentecost happens and Christianity starts spreading throughout the world.

It covers about a 30-year period of the early spread of Christianity.

One of the major theses of Acts, one of its themes, is that this is a movement that cannot be stopped. Paul, in particular, cannot be stopped. Paul goes into a town and he gets persecuted and they beat him, and he just goes to the next town and starts another church. They try to stop him there; they can’t stop him.

At one point, they stone him. He gets up, goes to the next town. There’s nothing you can do because the spirit is behind this whole thing.

That Paul was killed meant, as all students of logic can deduce, that he was not in fact unstoppable. That execution, you see. What a terrible way to ruin a good story! Luke knew all about it, because he wrote late, but he chose not to include facts which ruined his narrative. Which is how we know the book was written at a late date.

Douthat counters with Martin Luther King, who was also seen unstoppable in the great civil rights revolution (that like all revolutions caused vast unmeasurable damage). Nobody writing stories of King leaves out his assassination. Indeed, the parallel goes the other way, because King is now a martyr, with even a holyday named after him.

Ehrman:

The Martin Luther King thing is an interesting analogy, but I don’t think it quite works because that’s really kind of the point — the assassination.

For Paul, according to Luke, that’s not the point at all. For one thing, we don’t have a lot of records of people being martyred at the time. We actually don’t know a lot about Paul’s death. The earliest reference we have to Paul experiencing martyrdom is around the year 95 by a book called First Clement.

So, we don’t have records. We don’t know what this author even knew, actually.

This is weak; one might even say grasping. But he must, because that is where his desire leads him. He needs to fit the facts he has with the theory he wants to believe.

Jesus In The Flesh

Again, we will not solve the debate whether Jesus appeared as a physical being to many after his crucifixion. I only want to examine a few key pieces of evidence and how they are handled.

Ehrman (no mythicist) allows “Jesus was arrested and he was put on trial and was crucified publicly — humiliated and tortured to death.” Then:

I think it’s absolutely the case that some of his disciples afterward thought that he had been raised from the dead. My sense is that some of them thought they saw him alive afterward.

I don’t know how many people had the visions. I don’t know whether there were groups, whether there were few individuals who eventually convinced the others — and people came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead. They started proclaiming that and they convinced people of it, and that’s the beginning of Christianity.

So it’s visions for Ehrman, necessarily false visions for him, thus hallucinations. And therefore occasional mass hallucinations, for there were times, it was reported, many gathered together and saw, talked, and ate with Jesus.

Only there are no such things as “mass hallucinations”. This is the same level of science as “you only use 10% of your brain”, and coming from about the same era (the 1970s; ahem). Individual people can hallucinate, but people do not share hallucinations. Brains don’t break simultaneously.

People instead can as a group be mistaken about what they have seen and heard. That’s easy enough, depending on the degree. Or they can jointly, or in separate groups also jointly, lie. That’s a lot harder. Not impossible. But harder, because it’s hard to keep stories straight the more people that are involved. Then you can’t trust there won’t be defectors who won’t blab. Especially when they have ever incentive to defect, as for instance when Nero began his murders of Christians.

Or you can, if you are writing the history, simply make the stories up. That’s the version Ehrman is committed to: “I don’t think Jesus appeared to 500 people at one time,” he said. Yet this was what was reported (among many other things). Therefore, he does not say, but it follows, the reports are a deliberate fiction.

But the other interesting thing is that all the resurrection narratives are filled with doubt. In the Book of Acts, one of the strangest verses in the New Testament is Acts 1:3, where it says that Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples proving to them with many proofs that he was alive.

And you think, how many proofs does he need? And why does it take 40 days? But that is the interesting thing, is that in all of these accounts, you have these doubt traditions. What are those doubt traditions about?

I don’t think Ehrman thought these questions through. Imagine Jesus provided only one such proof, say, meeting the two men walking. And that’s it. These two later report what they saw to the apostles, and Luke writes it down. Would we not then hear Ehrman saying, “Look, Jesus was supposedly raised from the dead and appeared to these two guys. How come he didn’t appear to more? Why not to a whole group so we can be sure it wasn’t just a couple of guys making it up or having some shared illusion?”

And so forth.

Conclusion

Ehrman is no Doubting Thomas, and cannot be. Thomas believed after he touched. Which touching cannot be done in a vision. It can be hallucinated, but the men with him could not have shared in that hallucination, so the whole thing has to be either a deliberate lie from Luke, one he would have had a hard time getting away with since the other men were there with him and could have countered it by saying “Luke made it up.” Or, solving the problem for Ehrman, Luke had to write after everybody’s dead (except Luke). Hence the Acts dating tie-in.

That is not impossible. But it strings together events difficult to be stitched into one.

Those who want to believe Ehrman’s theory will counter that, aha, the alternative is to believe reports of a man rising himself from the dead. And that it’s much easier to believe people would lie about that than for a man to come back to life from the grave. (It’s not just one reported rising, of course, given Lazarus and the many others.) Maybe it was politically or personally advantageous for Luke to end the story as he did, assuming the late date for Acts. There aren’t a lot of corroborating documents, after all. Maybe Luke ran out of paper.

I’m not picking on Ehrman, because he displays a mechanism of argument every one of us uses: we start with a desired theory and try to find evidence which fits it, and then try to find how the evidence which doesn’t fit it can be “explained away”. The cleverer or more intelligent you are, the better you will be at this. Or at least the more intricate will be your hand-stitched web of evidence.

That is why the adversarial nature of theory testing is crucial. Few men can work the trick on themselves, and even then they can usually do so only for mundane things, and only rarely in controversial matters when they are doing their utmost to judge all evidence the best they can. In other words, having the ability to prove oneself wrong is a superpower.

Hence the necessity of debate. Though it has to be structured to be of any value (it was in the interview). Else it’s just chaos and noise. But that is a story for another day. However, it is easy to see that the only way to talk yourself out of any theoretical hole, if you are in one, is to listen and consider those taking sides other than your own.

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