Write to Life blog

Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

Here’s the link to this article by Merle Hertzler.

The Mysteries of the Passion: The Resurrection

We turn now to the central issue of Christianity. Did Jesus rise from the dead?

First, can we agree that this is an extraordinary claim? People that were dead for several days don’t rise again. If your claim is extraordinary, I would like extraordinary evidence, please.

You may think I have just set the bar too high. After all, Peter didn’t have a smart phone or even a printing press. He could not take a movie clip or print a book. Give the guy some slack!

But I am not asking anything different then you would ask when faced with extraordinary claims.

For instance, consider the many tales about the legendary lumberjack, Paul Bunyan. People said that he could chop down a full forest with one swing of his ax, and that he personally dug out Lake Michigan. People have reported that he made the Grand Canyon when he drug his ax along as he walked. Do you believe these stories? I am sure you don’t. Why not? Have you personally reviewed the sources to see if they are credible? I doubt if you have. But you do know that the claim that he made the Grand Canyon by dragging his ax is not credible. It’s not worth taking the time to investigate. He didn’t do it.

When faced with such incredible claims, we would want very strong evidence before we believed it. We would want the evidence to be so overwhelmingly convincing that we would find no choice but to suspend our natural skepticism and accept the claim about Paul Bunyan’s ax.

One would think the same skepticism would apply when faced with the claim of a resurrection.

As I have explained earlier I don’t find the gospels to be reliable history. So if your evidence consists of what the Gospels say, you might not get far in convincing me.

The most likely explanation

Nevertheless, it would be important for us to ask what explanations for the phenomenon of early Christianity are more likely than an actual resurrection. So here I will lay out what I see as the most credible explanation.

PAUL’S VIEW

Yes, I know you usually begin at the Gospels, but I find them to be written late and untrustworthy. So, I will turn to the most prolific writer of the early church, Paul, to see what the early Christians actually thought.

Paul says that Christ rose from the dead ( 1 Corinthians 15: 3-5). But the Christ of which he speaks seems to be a spirit. For instance, he writes, “I am crucified with Christ, “ nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20) Obviously he does not mean that the body of the Jesus who walked on earth now lives in him. Jesus would not fit. No, Paul must be referring to some spirit being who somehow indwells him.

Colossians goes on to say that all Christians have Christ in them (Col 1:27). So, if Christ Jesus is now a spirit that dwells in many people, he really cannot now have an earthly body. So what need was there for the earthly body to resurrect? Would it not be better to leave the stinking body behind, and ascend in spirit?

After all, that is how Christians think they will live on after death. The body decays, but the spirit moves on.

So, when I read Paul I want to ask him, “How was Jesus raised? With what body did he come?”

Fortunately for us, Paul asks and answers those very questions:

35 But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?” 36 You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies; 37 and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own. 39 All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of mankind, another flesh of animals, another flesh of birds, and another of fish. 40 There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. 42 So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.I Corinthians 15:35-44

What is his answer? Paul tells us the earthly body, the terrestrial body, is different from the celestial body. The terrestrial body perishes at death. The celestial body lives on. He compares it to sowing wheat. The grain that we planted never comes out of the ground. But somehow springing up from the inside of that seed comes another plant, with a different body.

Paul seems to be saying this is the way all resurrections work. So, he must also have been saying the same thing about Jesus. When he says that Jesus rose and was seen by witnesses (I Cor 15:3-8), he apparently is saying that the inner spirit of Jesus, the soul, ascended from the physical body, and moved on to glory. Then people supposedly saw visions of that risen spirit.

And that does not require an empty tomb, a missing body, or physical interactions with a human in a body.

Yes, I know, you have read all about a bodily resurrection in the Gospels, but remember, we are starting strictly with the early record. If we turn strictly to Paul, without forcing preconceived notions from reading the later Gospels, we are not seeing a bodily risen Jesus mentioned.

When Paul says Jesus “appeared to me,” is that convincing? According to Acts, that sight consisted only of seeing a bright light and hearing a voice. Is that enough to convince you of a bodily resurrection?

If somebody told you she saw a bright light and heard her deceased grandfather last night, would you take that as proof that the corpse of the grandfather was now alive? Or would you suspect that this person had been drinking too much?

So, if Paul tells us he saw a bright light and heard Jesus, does that make Paul a credible witness to the bodily resurrection? No.

What of the others that Paul mentions seeing Jesus? What did they see? Paul does not tell us. If we are going to read I Corinthians 15: 3-8 at face value, I think we need to conclude that Paul was claiming they saw the same type of thing he apparently was claiming: a vision.

Ah, but you have read all the stories of Peter and the other apostles interacting with a bodily risen Jesus. Yes, but those stories come from the Gospels, which come later. We will discuss those later. Here we are looking only at the earliest record, at Paul. It appears that he claimed nothing more than a vision of a spirit Jesus. One would expect that he thought the other apostles also saw nothing more than he did.

Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once! by Richard Carrier
PETER’S VIEW

We have several books of the New Testament that claim to be written by the other apostles. We don’t know if any of these are genuine. Let’s assume for now that 1 Peter really was written by Peter as claimed. If he interacted with a risen Jesus, we would expect that story to flow spontaneously from his writing. It doesn’t. Here is what he says about the resurrection:

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;1 Peter 3:18-19

We find no passion of a man who had recently witnessed a bodily resurrection. Rather, we see a theological statement about Jesus being raised by the Spirit and going to preach to spirits. That sounds much more like a spirit Jesus than a Jesus in a body. So, this book does not confirm a bodily resurrection. We are not finding that confirmation in any of the earliest writings.

We have looked at the earliest record, at books by Paul and reportedly by Peter. All are consistent with belief in a spirit resurrection.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE EARLY CHURCH?

But what about the great explosion of resurrection-believers we hear about in Acts? Again, Acts is late, and is doubtful as history. If we turn to secular history for verification, we find no signs of a massive following of a resurrected Jesus in the first century. If the great explosion of resurrection-believers really happened, as Acts records, how is it that all these secular writers were unaware that this was happening? Earl Doherty wrote:

The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, who lived until about 50 CE and wrote of unusual sects like the Therapeutae and the Essenes, has nothing to say about Jesus or Christians. Justus of Tiberias, a Jewish historian who wrote in Galilee in the 80s (his works are now lost), is reported later to have made no mention whatever of Jesus. Pliny the Elder (died 79 CE) collected data on all manner of natural and astronomical phenomena, even those which were legendary and which he himself did not necessarily regard as factual, but he records no prodigies associated with the beliefs of Christians, such as an earthquake or darkening of the skies at a crucifixion, or any star of Bethlehem. The first Roman satirist to scorn a sect which believed in a crucified Judean founder who had been a god was not Martial at the end of the first century, nor Juvenal in the first half of the second century, but Lucian in the 160s. Reports of Epictetus, the great Stoic philosopher of the early second century who preached universal brotherhood to the poor and humble masses, record no knowledge on his part of a Jewish precursor. Nor does Seneca, the empire’s leading ethicist during the reign of Nero, make reference to such a figure. Other historians of the time, like Plutarch and Quintilian, are equally silent.Source: The Jesus Puzzle

There simply is no need to explain the surge of people preaching a bodily resurrection in Judea in the first century. If it happened, where is the evidence? Only the later book of Acts details it, and there are reasons to be skeptical about that book.

How successful was Christianity? by Richard Carrier

I contend that the early church was only proclaiming a spirit resurrection and was making no stir about a bodily resurrection.

MARK

All this changes around 70 AD with the writing of Mark. As we saw earlier, Mark believed Daniel’s promise about the Son of Man coming shortly after the Abomination of Desolation applied to his day. Thus, he was looking for Jesus shortly after the fall of Jerusalem.

Mark tells the story of Jesus on earth and the crucifixion scene. Where did he get his information? We don’t know. But we have no record of anybody saying much of anything about the earthly story of Jesus until he writes.

The original book ends at Mark 16:5-8 with 3 ladies visiting the tomb:

5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting at the right, wearing a white robe; and they were amazed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen; He is not here; see, here is the place where they laid Him. 7 But go, tell His disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Him, just as He told you.’” 8 And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.Mark 16: 5-8

That may seem like an odd place to stop, but it fit Mark purposes well. He is telling his audience that Jesus will see them soon in Galilee. That is consistent with his interpretation of Daniel as found in Mark 13.

If the earlier Christians were only speaking of a spirit resurrection, as I contend, how can Mark explain to his audience that it really was a bodily resurrection? If it was bodily, why did nobody notice? Why was nobody talking about it? Mark apparently came up with a neat trick. He declares that an unknown man told some women that the body of Jesus was not there. The women told nobody. So why was nobody talking about it? Mark had a ready explanation. Nobody knew about it but these women, and they were too scared to tell anybody.

The theme of it all being a secret is consistent throughout Mark. Repeatedly Mark had Jesus tell people not to tell others what was happening. (e.g., Mark 3:12, 5:43, etc.) Could it be that Mark was just throwing this in to explain why nobody else had heard these things?

At any rate, we don’t see the original Mark as much evidence for the resurrection.

MATTHEW

With these things in mind, we come to Matthew’s story of the resurrection. Matthew apparently thinks he needs a better witness than the stranger the women found at the tomb in Mark.

2 And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone, and sat upon it. 3 And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. 4 The guards shook from fear of him and became like dead men.Matt 28:2-4

Mark had said the women saw a man. This angel described in Matthew is not a man. This is not even an angel that looks like a man. No, this is an angel that looks like an angel. Had Mark been referring to this angel, how could he call this a man? But Mark had written only about a man. The accounts contradict.

Mark says the women ran with fear and told nobody, but Matthew says they ran to tell the disciples. Both cannot be correct.

Remember Mark had said the disciples would later see Jesus in Galilee. But he tells no story of them seeing him there. When we consider that Mark was claiming Jesus would triumphantly appear in power in Galilee a few years after he wrote, this could well be what he was talking about. His reported stranger at the tomb (a gardener?) could have been saying that when people find themselves scattered in the mountains of Galilee after the fall of Jerusalem, Jesus will arrive there to lead them to victory.

But Matthew, a decade or two after Mark, seeing that this did not happen, comes up with the explanation that the disciples actually saw Jesus in Galilee years before, right after the resurrection. A creative change to the story, but what is it based on? Seeing Matthew’s propensity to insert things into the story, such as many dead people rising and appearing to many, some of us don’t trust him.

So, we find creative changes to the book of Mark, but no reason to believe any of those changes came from an actual witness. We are again left empty.

LUKE AND JOHN

Luke and John come along and add additional stories of resurrection appearances. The four gospels accounts however, are hopelessly incompatible.

Parallel Gospels- Resurrection by Glaises Baptist Church. See the gospels side by side. They contradict.

This has all the appearance of people adding stories decades later, rather than telling what happened.

Growth of a Legend
(Approx. dates. Actual dates are unknown)

So, I find this as the most likely scenario: Paul and the early Christians spoke of a spirit resurrection. Years later the gospel writers came along and added increasingly dramatic tales of a physical resurrection.

Other possibilities

Of course, it could be that there really was a story of a bodily resurrection in apostolic times. Let’s look at a few ways such a story could have originated other than through a physical resurrection.

A LOST BODY

One possibility is that the Easter story could have developed after some women had mistakenly searched the wrong grave, or if the body had been removed for some reason. “They have taken away the Lord,” exclaimed Mary after seeing the empty grave, “and we do not know where they have laid Him.” (John 20:2) Of course! Mary had street-smarts that is oddly missing in modern times. The body is not where she expected it to be? Who took it? Where did they put it? It could well be that Mary was right, that somebody did indeed take the body.

Some have argued that the tomb of Joseph could well have been a temporary tomb to hide the body during the Sabbath, and that the body was moved early the next day. If so, this would explain why the women could not find the body.

The story of the missing body could have passed on to others, who could have wondered about it and talked about it frequently. The story could have grown with each telling, until 40 years later the legend had grown to the point where it involved a physical resurrection, leading to the story found in Mark.

RESUCITATION

A second possibility is that Jesus might not have actually died but had been mistakenly thought to be dead. He could have revived and left the grave. Josephus tells us of a man who survived crucifixion (see this offsite link). The Romans were not experts in diagnosing death, and they could have been mistaken. Jesus could have revived and walked off, only to later die in hiding in the wilderness. The stories of the missing Jesus could have circulated and grew, until they developed into a legend of the resurrection.

Now the possibility of an unconscious Jesus that revived may be unlikely. Few people are ever proclaimed dead and then are found to be still alive. But it has happened. If you hear of a man in a third world country who was thought to be dead, and was later found to be alive, which is more likely: that the man was mistakenly thought dead, or that the man actually resurrected? It seems to me that the mistaken diagnosis is far more likely. So, isn’t a mistaken diagnosis of Jesus’s death more likely than the possibility that he rose from the dead?

STOLEN BODY

A third possibility is that somebody could have stolen the body. No, it does not need to be an elaborate hoax in which all 11 remaining disciples were involved. We are told Joseph of Arimathea owned the tomb. He and a helper could have stolen the body and hid it to make it look like Jesus had risen. The disciples could have all been fooled. Only Joseph would have known, and he wasn’t about to tell.

So, we have listed four options here, all of which I think are more likely than a bodily resurrection.

  1. A perceived spirit resurrection.
  2. A lost body
  3. A resuscitation.
  4. A hoax.

I find Mark’s account was most likely not the result of an actual resurrection. The stories added by the other gospel writers appear to be nothing more than fiction.

Are there Creditable Witnesses to the Resurrection? by Merle Hertzler My favorite online debate.
Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story by Richard Carrier
Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply

So, did the resurrection occur? If the first five books ohttps://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/15182f the New Testament are seen for what they probably are, later fabrications, we have no real evidence for it. Since the evidence is shaky, and the story is implausible, are we not justified in doubting the story?

What if I am wrong?

What if I am wrong? I frequently am. Do you think that God will condemn me for using my intellect to arrive at this conclusion? I don’t think so.

Can you imagine that you and I will be confronted with a history exam at the pearly gates? Imagine that we are asked to tell what happened at that grave to gain admittance to heaven. Why would a question of history be so important? People differ about history. People differ about whether George Washington cut down the cherry tree; about whether the Trojan Horse story really happened; and about what exactly caused the collapse of the Maya civilization. And isn’t that okay? Can’t we still be friends, even though we may have different interpretations of the past record?

If somebody thinks all three persons of the Godhead remained in heaven, with the resurrection happening in spirit in the heavens, and his view turns out to be historically false, should that person be condemned forever for misunderstanding history?

And will the final exam ask how many persons are in the Godhead? If we answer four, one, or even zero persons, then what? Will people be cast from heaven if they have the wrong count? So perhaps it is okay for you and I to honestly look at history, and come to our own conclusions. I have done that, and I now do not believe in the story of the earthly resurrection.

Let’s move on. If there is no resurrected savior, is there any reason to believe that you and I will survive death? Let’s look at that question next.

03/25/23 Biking & Listening

Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.

Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.

Here’s a link to today’s bike ride. This is my pistol ride.

Here’s a few photos taken along my route:

This is what I’m listening to: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

A preeminent scientist — and the world’s most prominent atheist — asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.

With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe’s wonders than any faith could ever muster.

Is The Rapture in the New Testament?

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

March 23, 2023

This post is immediately relevant for me in two ways.  My book on Revelation has now appeared (I kept *saying* it was “coming soon”!)  AND I will be doing a lecture soon, April 15, on the idea of the “rapture,” the belief that Jesus is soon to return to take his followers out of the world before the Antichrist arises and all hell breaks out on earth.  You don’t wanna be here for that.  You don’t want to be “Left Behind”!   The lecture is not connected with the blog per se; you can find out more about it on my website, http://www.bartehrman.com/courses

Here, to titillate your interest on both fronts, is a bit of what I say about the rapture in ch. 1 of my book (I say much more about it in a later section):

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Almost everyone today thinks that Revelation provides a blueprint of what is to happen in the near future—at least those who think about it at all. There are, of course, some holdouts, even among conservative Christians, who maintain the book needs to be read another way. But the popular perception is that, whether absolutely right or terribly wrong, the book of Revelation tries to describe what is going to happen to us here in the twenty-first century.

Why does this seem to be the natural, commonsensical reading? Because the fundamentalists have won. It is not that fundamentalists have won over the great bulk of society to the entire panoply of their religious views. The vast majority of the human race decidedly does not think the Bible is completely inerrant in everything it says, that the world was created in six days some six thousand years or so ago, that there really was an Adam and Eve, and that . . . well, make your list. But fundamentalists have succeeded in convincing everyone (or at least those who are remotely interested) that Revelation describes what will happen in our own future, and probably soon. Possibly starting next year, or, well, next Thursday.

But here is a little-known factoid: The word “rapture” never appears in the Bible. Here’s another: Even apart from the actual word, the book of Revelation never says anything about the followers of Jesus being taken out of the world before it all goes up in flames. The idea of the rapture has not been taken from the Bible; it has been read into the Bible.

Here is an even more interesting factoid: No one had even thought of the idea of a “rapture” until the 1830s. Of the many, many thousands of serious students of the Bible throughout Christian history who pored over every word—from leading early Christian scholars such as Irenaeus in the second century; to Tertullian and Origen in the third; to Augustine in the fifth; to all the biblical scholars of the Middle Ages up to Aquinas; to the Reformation greats Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin; on to, well, everyone who studied or simply read or even just heard passages from the Bible— this idea of the rapture occurred to no one until John Nelson Darby came up with the idea in the early 1800s (as we will discuss in chapter 3).

Even so, back in my fundamentalist days, I, too, was completely certain the rapture was in the Bible, right there in black and white. The key passage was 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, a letter by the apostle Paul to his converts in the city of Thessalonica, written to provide assurance and comfort because they were about “those who have fallen asleep.” That’s a euphemism in the Bible for “those who have died.” When Paul converted the Thessalonians, he had taught them that the end of the present age was coming very soon: God was about to bring a utopian world to the world, the glorious kingdom of God. Now, some of the Thessalonians had died before this could happen, and the survivors were very upset: Had those who were no longer living lost out on their chance for the coming kingdom?

Paul writes to assure these people that they do not need to “grieve as the others who do not have hope” (that is, the non-Christians; 1  Thessalonians 4:13). When Jesus returns from heaven, the very first to be rewarded will be the believers who have already died. They will be raised up from their graves to meet Jesus on his way down; then those still living on earth will also rise up to meet him in the air.

That’s the rapture, right? It sure seems to be if you read the passage with fundamentalist eyes:

For we tell you this by a word of the Lord: we who are living, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not go before those who sleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God—and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are living, who remain, will be taken up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord. (1  Thessalonians 4:15–18)

How can this not be referring to the rapture?

(I’ll explain in the next post!)

Are the Gospels Historical?

Here’s the link to this article by Merle Hertzler.

religious artwork

It is difficult to convince a skeptic to take the Bible as God’s Word. And so Christian apologists often take a different tack. Their goal is to convince unbelievers to first accept that the gospels are historical. Once this is agreed to, they argue that this historical Jesus–who is said to have risen from the dead–must therefore be God, and that the sayings attributed to him in the gospels should therefore be taken seriously. They argue that this Jesus believed the scriptures, including Genesis. But I must stop them at their first point. Are the gospels historically accurate?

Who Wrote the Gospels?

First, we don’t know who wrote the gospels. None of these authors identifies himself. Who were they? Were they honest? Did they have first-hand knowledge or accurate sources? We don’t know.

The first record we have of anybody clearly associating the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John with these books was Irenaeus in 180 AD, a century and a half after the reported events. Is it possible that he was mistaken or made up the names of the authors? This was a long time after the events reportedly happened.

Yes, there was one earlier mention of books by a Matthew and a Mark. Papias mentions this around 130 AD. We have only an excerpt of his book as recorded by Eusebius centuries later. The books Papias describes seem to be very different from our copies of Matthew and Mark, so we don’t know what books he is talking about.

So, we really don’t know who wrote the gospels. If we do not know the authors, how do we know they can be trusted?

By convention we continue to name the books as Irenaeus did: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That does not mean we think these are the names of the authors. It is simply the names that we give to the books.

When Were they Written?

Not only are the authors unknown, but they appear to be writing long after the events they record.

The book we call Mark was most likely first. We have good reason to believe it was written after 70 AD. Mark 13 describes in detail the destruction of Jerusalem, which happened in 70 AD. How did Mark know about this? The skeptic would say he must have written after this event. Thus, he knew all about the fall of Jerusalem.

“Ah,” you might say, “but Jesus was a prophet. Mark was recording the words of one who knew all this before it happened.”

However, if we carefully read all of Mark 13, we can see that Mark is not writing as one that now accurately knows the future. Yes, Mark does say Jerusalem will be destroyed, but he also prophesies,

in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.Mark 13:24-26

Mark says this will happen “in those days”, that is, immediately after the fall of Jerusalem that he just described. Elsewhere in this chapter, he specifically says the disciples he is speaking to will see these things. He also specifically says these things will happen before the disciples’ generation has passed away, that is, in their lifetime.

Mark was wrong. These things did not happen. So no, Mark 13 was not reporting the words of an infallible prophet.

If Mark 13 was not reporting the words of an infallible prophet, how did he know the details of the destruction of Jerusalem that happened in 70 AD? The most likely answer is that he wrote after this date.

Up until 70 AD, the supposed prophecy of Mark 13 is accurate. After that, he is completely wrong. Why? Most likely the events of 70 AD were history to him, but the predictions of events after that were Mark’s failed predictions.

Other reasons for dating Mark after 70 AD include the fact that Mark has an anachronism about hand washing that would have been irrelevant 40 years earlier. And Mark’s portrayal of the crucifixion sounds far more descriptive of the turbulence of 70 AD rather than the peaceful period around 30 AD. All this indicates he wrote sometime after 70 AD.

I discuss all this further at When Were the Gospels Written?

So, there must be at least 40 years from the supposed time of Jesus to the writing of the gospels. Memories can change over time. When the gospels say that Jesus said something, how can we be sure they are quoting Jesus accurately? Did Jesus really say he was the way, the truth, and the life? Did he really state support for the Hebrew scriptures? Did he speak of the flood as though it really happened? Did he really promise heaven and warn of hell? We don’t know.

Another reason this late date is important is that it would now have been hard for anybody to disprove what was written. When the gospels were first circulating, the disciples probably were no longer alive. If they had actually survived the destruction of Jerusalem, they were likely scattered in the hills. If in the meantime the gospels came around with fictional accounts, how would anyone disprove them? Who would you talk to? Would you dig around for a 40-year-old corpse to prove it is still there?

So, the late date gives the opportunity to slip things into the story that never happened.

Kooks and Quacks

And by the way, why would one even want to bother to disprove these things? People would not have had time to disprove every myth that they heard. There were too many kooks and quacks. Would you be running around looking for evidence to show every kook wrong?

Even if somebody did find Peter and hear that this wasn’t quite how it happened, why bother to write that down? Would people be documenting the error in writing every time a quack said something? So, absence of an early rebuttal of the resurrection story is not proof that the resurrection happened.

Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: a look into the world of the gospels  by Richard Carrier

Mark

The book we call Mark, which was probably first, may have never been intended as history. Many have observed that his book appears to have been derived from the Old Testament and from previous epic tales. How do you know that Mark intended his book to be interpreted as history? Mark never tries to represent his book as history. He calls it a gospel. If Mark meant it as fiction, why should you and I think it is true? And if other writers expanded on his story, why should we think their accounts are true? So, unless you can show that Mark thought it was historical, it has limited value as history.

Review of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark by Richard Carrier. Evidence that Mark was writing fiction.

Matthew Copied from Mark

Matthew and Luke copy much of Mark, often word for word.

For instance, in Mark 13, Mark pauses in the middle of Jesus’s speech to say “Let the reader understand” (Mark 13:14). Obviously, this is Mark’s insertion. Had Jesus said this in his speech, he would have said something like, “Let those who hear understand.” But Mark here is putting in a comment to the readers –“Let the reader understand”. He thinks this is important, so he emphasizes that the reader needs to understand this.

Matthew repeats the same speech, complete with the same parenthetical– “Let the reader understand”. (Matthew 24:15) Why did Matthew decide to insert the same comment right where Mark did? Are we to believe that, at the exact same point in the speech, both Matthew and Mark decided to insert the exact same comment to the readers? It certainly looks like Matthew was copying Mark.

If you lay Matthew and Mark side by side, you find Matthew repeating 90% of Mark’s verses, often word for word. For instance, here is what it would look like if you took Mark 2:14-17 and edited it to make Matthew 9: 9-12. The base text below is Mark’s. Strikethroughs indicate where Matthew deleted from Mark, and brackets indicate additions.

Mark 2:14 And as he [Jesus] passed by from thence, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus [a man, called Matthew,] sitting at the place of toll, and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him.

Mark 2:15 And it came to pass, that [as] he was sitting [sat] at meat in his [the] house, and many publicans and sinners [came and] sat down with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him.

Mark 2:16 And [when] scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with the sinners and publicans [saw it, they] said unto his disciples, How is it that he [Why] eateth and drinketh [your Teacher] with [the] publicans and sinners?

Mark 2:17 And when Jesus [he] heard it, he [saith unto them] [said], They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

If Matthew and Mark were handing in their work as a school project, and the teacher saw this, he would know instantly that one was copying, or perhaps both were copying from a common source.

Matthew adds additional stories and teachings, yes, but where he tells Mark’s story, he basically copies with edits. He is not telling it from scratch from his viewpoint. He is copying. This seem to discredit Matthew as an eyewitness. Wouldn’t an eyewitness tell it from his own viewpoint?

If the writer really was Matthew, the very man being called to follow Jesus in these verses, surely this story would have been burned into his memory. This was the moment he personally was called to be a disciple of Jesus! Why doesn’t his own account flow freely here? Why doesn’t he tell it in his own words? But he does not do that. He simply copies Mark –“he [Matthew] arose and followed him.” Really Matthew? That is all you have to say about your life-changing event?

So, it is hard to take the book we call Matthew as a credible witness. The author is plagiarizing. The author hardly qualifies as an independent witness to what Mark says.

By the way, there are many reasons to think it was Matthew that copied Mark, and not the other way around. Matthew often cleans up needless repetition found in Mark. That’s a logical thing to do. Matthew adds stories about the birth and resurrection, and a lot of teachings of Jesus, which is also a logical thing to do. But it doesn’t make much sense for Mark to copy Matthew, completely leaving out much important content, while inserting needless redundancies. So, we think Matthew came later and copied from Mark.

Luke’s Sources

Luke, like the previous gospels, is completely anonymous, so we really don’t know who wrote it. We still call the book Luke, because that is what everybody calls it, but we don’t know the writer’s name.

Luke copies over 50% of the verses in Mark with minor changes. And so, just like Matthew, he must have written significantly after 70 AD.

Also, Luke shows signs that he was using Josephus, so that puts him after Josephus. The book is commonly dated at 80 – 130 AD by critical scholars. I put it after 95 AD. That probably puts the book too late to be a reliable document unless the author had good sources. What were his sources? Let’s look at his introduction:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us,

just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word,

it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent The-oph’ilus,

that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed(Luke 1:1-4)​

Luke simply does not tell us his sources. He does tell us that there were many books about Jesus that had been written. He does not tell us whether he used any of the books we know, or even that he used any books. He just says that he knows and is writing to tell us the truth. This could be implying that the former accounts (e.g., Matthew and Mark) were not always truthful.

What books is Luke talking about? We know of the book of Mark, and the book of Matthew. The early church fathers have quoted a few other books, including Secret Mark, Gospel of the Narzoreans, and the Gospel of the Ebionites. None of these books exists today, but we know enough about them from quotes of the early church fathers to say that they were probably close to our Matthew and Mark.

Where did these books come from? Probably there was an original book of Mark that evolved into Secret Mark, Mark, and a Proto-Matthew. This Proto-Matthew then appears to have evolved into our modern Matthew and also the other two gospels listed above.

Likely Synoptic Gospel Family Tree.
There were probably many other intermediate stages and parallel variations.

Early versions of some of these may have been available to Luke. These may be what he is referring to. Or he could be referring to early versions of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, or other books. At any rate, we have the testimony of Luke that there were many books about Jesus.

One can easily see how the story would spread with changes. Matthew and Mark were apparently written to Jews who were scattered around Galilee and Syria, many of them having fled after the recent fall of Jerusalem. These books may have been available at community centers, where people clung to the idea of a Jesus coming to Galilee and leading them to a new age free of the Romans.

We don’t know if they thought the stories were even true. Perhaps those in charge knew that these were mostly religious fiction. But as these books built up hope, folks copied the gospels. As they copied, they made changes. We ended up with the many similar books of which the early church fathers spoke.

The copies likely experienced something similar to biological evolution. Many changes were probably being made to the copies. After all, these folks would have been amateur scribes on the run. Those copies that were the most popular were copied the most. Hence, we have “speciation” and “survival of the fittest”. We really don’t know which of the many copies were most like the original. What we have left are those popular copies that survived.

A book that wins in the contest to be copied and preserved by scattered folks in the hills fleeing the fallen Jerusalem is not necessarily the truest. It it the one that was most liked.

Luke

Luke had a unique purpose. He was writing to a more general audience of Christians spread throughout the Roman Empire. They were likely followers of Paul. Paul wrote little if anything about the earthly life of Jesus. It was not his concern. His later followers might have heard of the gospels floating around Galilee and would have wanted a book that gave them the straight scoop. So, Luke tells them that he is now giving them the real story. However, he does not tell us how he knows he has it right.

Luke ends up using some version of Mark as a source, but also uses a lot of the sayings of Jesus that are found in Matthew. The sayings are usually word for word, so some book must be the source. Some have suggested that both Matthew and Luke got these sayings from a proposed book we call Q. Recently this idea has been losing popularity. Instead, it is being recognized that Luke likely had been using both Mark and Matthew, or perhaps just an early version of Matthew. So, there is no need for Q. (See links table below). Luke appears to have selected Matthew and Mark, or something close to them, and set out to write his book. He could have gotten all the “Q” sayings straight from Matthew.

When Were the Gospels Written? I examine this issue in more detail.
Synoptic Problem by Daniel Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary. He argues that Luke and Matthew copied from Mark. I disagree with his early dates but agree with his analysis that Matthew copied from Mark.
The Case Against Q by Mark Goodacre. Luke may have known about Matthew, and wrote contradictory things anyway.
Why do we Still Believe in Q? by Richard Carrier
How Matthew used Mark’s Gospel This site lists the texts side by side for easy comparison.
Luke and Josephus by Richard Carrier. Why we think Luke and Acts were written after Josephus

Synoptic Gospels Links

Luke respects Mark and follows him fairly closely when he tells the same story. But he freely changes Matthew.

Matthew, for instance starts out with a genealogy, tracing the line of Jesus down through the kings of Judah, leading to the claim that Jesus is the rightful heir. Luke’s readers would not be looking for a Jewish king, so Luke traces Jesus through a different line, through a different son of David. Matthew and Luke cannot both be telling the truth. Luke likely knew what Matthew wrote, and flatly contradicted him anyway. That blatant contradiction, knowing that Matthew had written differently, leaves both Matthew and Luke in question.

There are other differences. Matthew interpreted scripture as saying Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Thus, he needed some way to get Jesus, who is reported to be from Nazareth, born in Bethlehem. And so, he tells how the family of Jesus in Bethlehem had to flee to Egypt, and later to Nazareth, as fugitives from Herod, who wanted to kill Jesus. But Luke will have none of that. Perhaps he knew, if such an event as the mass killing of babies by Herod had happened, he would have surely heard about it.

So, Luke, having found out about a census under Quirinius, decides the family was actually native to Nazareth, and had gone to Bethlehem specifically for the census. When they finished their trip, they had simply returned home.

Incidentally, the forced travel of everybody to the home of their ancestors as described by Luke is also historically bogus. The Romans would never do something like that. Such a disruption of everybody’s life would have had no purpose.

So, were Joseph and Mary fugitives coming from Bethlehem to Nazareth to escape Herod as Mathew writes? Or were they local natives of Nazareth, who, having taken a short trip to Bethlehem, were now coming back home, as Luke writes? Luke simply does not care that his story differs with Matthew. He writes a different, contradictory story to get the Bethlehem-born Jesus to grow up in Nazareth

As another example of Luke contradicting Matthew, consider that, if Luke is true, then Jesus had to be born after 6 AD, in the time of Quirinius. But Matthew has him born under Herod, who died in 4 BC. Both cannot be true.

Differing stories after Easter

Mark had promised that the disciples would see Jesus in Galilee to establish his kingdom shortly after the fall of Jerusalem (Mark 13). The original Mark, which ends at 16:8, says nothing about Jesus actually appearing before this promised appearance after the fall of Jerusalem.

Matthew, writing perhaps a decade or two later, sees that it did not yet happen as Mark wrote. So Matthew tries to explain the delay in the coming. (Matthew 24:42-25:13) He also adds a story of an appearance in Galilee a few weeks after Easter (Matthew 28:19-20). So, Matthew finds a way to write that Jesus had already appeared in Galilee as Mark had promised. How did Matthew know this? He doesn’t tell us. If it really happened, why did Mark say nothing about it?

But Luke has no need to discuss an appearance in Galilee. He is not writing to a limited set of Jews in Galilee. Instead, he is writing to the empire. He has no need to tell his diverse audience that Jesus is coming to the hills of Galilee. Luke has the disciples stay in Jerusalem until Pentecost, where, miraculously, they start speaking many different languages. Thus, they begin a ministry throughout the empire. Luke says that Jesus appeared to them in Jerusalem on Easter day. There, he commands them to stay in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36-49). Luke continues in Acts to confirm that the disciple had indeed stayed at Jerusalem until Pentecost. This is a flat disagreement with Matthew, which says they went to Galilee.

So, how is it that Matthew speaks of the appearance in Galilee? If Luke is correct, the disciples had already seen him in Jerusalem, and had been commanded not to leave Jerusalem.

So, Luke adds details that simply are not in the earlier gospels, details that in fact contradict the earlier gospels. Yet he gives no source of information that he used to overrule the other books. Many of us conclude that he made up the stories that he adds about Easter.

So I don’t find in Luke the credible history we need.

John

Then we come to the book of John. It adds many fantastic stories and statements of Jesus that are not mentioned anywhere else.

Once again, we find the author of this book does not identify himself. He does however, hint at a source. John 21:24 says, “This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true.” In context, this refers to a mysterious “disciple whom Jesus loved” that appears only in the book of John. We don’t know who he was, but the book of John claims him as a source. Some have claimed he is John, but they cannot prove that.

Note that the author is not saying “I am the disciple whom Jesus loved”. No, he says “he is the disciple that testifies these things”, that is, the writer of John claims to have a witness, a source, the disciple whom Jesus loved.

Again, we will call the author by the name John since that is what everybody calls him, but we do not know the author’s real name.

Neither do we know when the book was written. Since the author appears to be aware of the other books, especially Luke, and the other books appear to not know of John, John probably was the last to be written. The concepts expressed in John are quite advanced. Critical scholars date John typically in the range of 90 -120 AD.

For most of his book, John at least speaks for himself rather than copy from Mark. John apparently reads the others and decides he can do better. Starting with a plain piece of papyrus, he writes a different gospel. John simply ignores much of the other gospels up until passion week. Instead, he inserts new stories. In John, for the first time, we learn that Jesus turned water into wine, that the first person getting into a certain pool after an angel stirred the water was healed, and that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. But are these stories true?

Tall Tales

Let’s break here and talk about new stories. Mark had let the cat out of the bag. Not only were people copying Mark with changes, but people started to come up with all sorts of different stories about Jesus.

For instance, in the Infancy Gospel of James, we learn that Joseph won Mary’s hand in marriage because a dove flew out of his staff. We read that Salome lost her hand performing an exam to prove Mary a virgin, but it was later restored. And, in the Infancy Gospel of John, we learn:

At the age of 5, Jesus formed twelve sparrows out of mud, clapped his hands and told the birds: “Off you go!“. They flew away. Later, Jesus collected some water. Another boy, Annas, scattered the water. Jesus cursed Annas and he instantly withered up. Later, Jesus and Zeno were playing on the roof of a house. Zeno fell to the ground and was killed. Jesus restored him to life.(See The Gospels of Mary and Judas. The infancy gospels of Thomas and James )​

And in the Gospel of Peter we read, that the cross itself follows Jesus out of the tomb, and answers a question. (See Gospel of Peter – Wikipedia )

I mention these stories, not because I think they are true, but to illustrate the new phenomenon of people trying to outdo each other in their tales of Jesus. I think most Christians will agree that many of these new stories are simply wrong. And yet a new cottage industry has sprung up, and people are busy spinning tales about Jesus. In light of that, when we start to see new stories like we read in John that have never been told before, should we believe them?

Early Christian Writings by Peter Kirby. An exhaustive source of text and commentary.
Overview of the Gospels

Early Christian Writings

John’s Message

Getting back to John, not only are the stories that John tells very different from the other known gospels, but the message is very different. Whereas the other gospels have Jesus dispensing simple folk wisdom, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the book of John really has no moral teaching other than to love. Instead, we find John’s Jesus giving endless lectures on theology and his own greatness, proclaiming himself the way, the truth and the life; declaring himself the light of the world; and even claiming “before Abraham was I am”. And John has a constant emphasis that all one needs to do is believe. (e.g., John 3:16) Where is any of that in the other gospels?

One can understand how different authors might emphasize different things, but how can the other three authors show no interest in these grand statements of Jesus, while John shows no interest in their folk morality? It sure looks like people may have been writing that Jesus said whatever they wanted him to say, rather than accurately reporting what happened.

And what about the signs? Mark had reported that Jesus gave no signs. Matthew ups that to one, saying that they Jesus gave them the sign of the prophet Jonah. But when we get to John, we read that Jesus gave many signs. So how many signs were there? Was the story developing with time?

John writes a lot of comments about Jesus, which sound very much like what he quotes Jesus as saying. Since John is the only one that has Jesus making these claims, and since the quotes John gives for Jesus sound very much like what John himself writes, it looks to many like John is just putting words into Jesus’s mouth. That is not reliable reporting.

So, I don’t find John to be reliable history.

Why You Should Not Believe the Apostle John Wrote the Last Gospel by Richard Carrier

The book of John

Historical Consistency

The books are not verified by other sources. Other historians were writing during this time, but nobody seems to have noticed the life of Christ. Why do none of these secular historians note that Herod killed all babies up to two years old in Bethlehem? How could they miss it? Jesus supposedly did many miracles and preached to many. Nobody outside of the small religious group seems to have noticed. Could that be because these stories are just made up?

Josh McDowell’s “Evidence” for Jesus by Jefferey Jay Lowder
Historicity Of Jesus FAQ by Scott Oser
History’s Troubling Silence about Jesus

Historical Jesus Links

Matthew tells a fantastic tale: “The graves were opened,” he writes, “and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” (Matthew 27:52-53) Think about it. This is not a claim of one isolated resurrection. Oh, no. Many dead people came out of their graves and appeared to many. Surely people must have been talking about it. Yet no historian mentions it. None of the other gospels mentions it. Only Matthew writes about it. Did other writers not notice that many people were reporting that they were seeing dead people walking?

By contrast, the book of Acts records the difficulty the apostles supposedly had in trying to convince the people of Jerusalem that Jesus had risen from the dead. If Matthew is to be believed, many in Jerusalem had just seen many of the other dead that arose when the graves were opened. Why was it hard to convince people of a resurrection? If you had just seen your grandfather rise from the dead, would it be hard for you to believe that Jesus also had resurrected that week? Jesus would have just been one of the many that resurrected. And yet the disciples in the book of Acts, as Luke tells the story, don’t even mention it. They ignored their strongest argument that resurrections occur. Everybody seems to be unaware that this mass resurrection even happened.

Are There Credible Witnesses to the Resurrection. I discuss the credibility of the gospels in detail in this online debate. I discuss much of the content of this page.

Implausible Stories

In addition, the accounts are often implausible. In John 8, for instance, we find Jesus having a conversation back and forth with the Jews. How can you hold such a detailed conversation with an entire crowd? With different people, yes, but with the crowd? Notice how the crowd responds in John 8:52-53 :

The Jews said to Him, “Now we know that You have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets also; and You say, ‘If anyone keeps My word, he will never taste of death.’ Surely You are not greater than our father Abraham, who died? The prophets died too; whom do You make Yourself out to be?”

Did they speak in unison?

Perhaps the author was merely writing a drama years later. Perhaps he made up this conversation to compare Jewish thought with Christian thought. It seems implausible that such a conversation ever took place between Jesus and a crowd of people. The author must have made it up.

Many other things are implausible. How could a star lead the wise men to a particular building? Look up at the night sky and tell me which building those stars are over. And as the stars move along as the night progresses, how can they continue to point to the same building? But Matthew tells us a star stood over the building where the baby Jesus was, and that it guided the wise men to this exact building. That is not plausible, is it?

Is it likely that many dead people got out of their graves and appeared to many? Is it really plausible that a swarm of demons would leave a man and enter a herd of pigs, causing the pigs to all stampede into a lake and kill themselves?

Later Edits

Even if the original accounts were accurate, we do not know what was changed in the gospel texts after the original writing. The four gospels were apparently never widely distributed until more than 100 years after Christ. Rather, they were passed along by people in the hills and in small communities. Outside documents seem to be unaware that the gospels existed. What changes were made to them in that period? We do not know. Could there have been major changes?

We do not know who had custody of these books. We do not know if any effort was made to keep them unaltered. But we have reasons to suspect that some people were changing them.

Ah, but what about the thousands of manuscripts we have? They are from the Middle Ages. Ten thousand manuscripts from the Middle Ages mean nothing. What is important is the line of transmission in the first two centuries.

Conclusion

What really happened? The gospel accounts were written late by unknown authors with unknown sources. They conflict with known history and contradict each other. They are often implausible. They were kept in unknown custody for years. There are good reasons to doubt that they can be trusted as accurate history.

This brings us to the resurrection. Despite the reasons for doubt, do we have enough evidence to at least establish the possibility of that story having a core of historical truth? We will ask that question next.

Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters

Here’s the link to this article.

“One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters

Culled from the 600+ pages of Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 (public library) — the same fantastic recently released tome that gave us Calvino’s prescient meditation on abortion and the meaning of life — are the beloved author’s collected insights on writing spanning more than four decades of his career, a fine addition to this master list of famous writers’ wisdom on the craft.

On March 7, 1942, writing from university to his best friend and literary-minded comrade-in-arms, Eugenio Scalfari, in the typical tone of irreverent facetiousness the two shared, 18-year-old Calvino extols the joy and art of writing letters::

A fine thing it is to have a distant friend who writes long letters full of drivel and to be able to reply to him with equally lengthy letters full of drivel; fine not because I like to plunge into captious polemics nor because I enjoy getting certain ideas into the head of some idiot from the Urbe, but because writing long letters to friends means having a moral excuse for not studying.

In the same letter, Calvino admonishes Eugenio about the mixed motives of the publishing world — at least as an 18-year-old aspiring writer saw it:

Don’t trust the big names that support youth movements: it’s fashionable to show you’re favoring youth.

Several weeks later, Calvino — who had gone to university to study agriculture but found himself increasingly drawn to literature as he immersed himself in the dullness of his major — shares with Eugenio an intense expression of the inner contradiction that defines being human, the increasing inner tug-of-war between the disinterested agronomist and self-conscious poet:

It will perhaps please you to know that, as regards the famous italcalvinian dualism, the agronomist is about to lose out, and the poet will emerge as the clear winner. My revision for the exams is still today in a deplorable state and offers no hope of recovery. The Easter holidays, which were filled with the pleasures of cheerful cycling trips along the Via Aurelia and daring but unsuccessful pursuits of Riviera Amazons, have long disappeared. The poet, on the other hand, has been more productive: he has finished the famous Brezza di terra (Land Breeze) and would now do well to go off and hide. The work is solemn rubbish and I don’t think I’ll have the courage to present it, not even in Florence. Rhetoric, artifice, and trite Pirandellian ideas grafted onto pompous D’Annunzian language. But also daring, warmth, enthusiasm and, what counts above all, real poetry.

In early May of 1942, after Eugenio sends Italo one of his poems, Calvino echoes Wordsworth as he articulates his budding philosophy on poetry, then trails off in a meta-affirmation:

I’ve read your poem. I too, if you remember, wrote a Hermetic poem in my early youth. I know that gives enormous satisfaction to the person who writes it. But whether the person who reads it shares this enthusiasm is another matter. It’s too subjective, Hermeticism, do you see? And I see art as communication. The poet turns in on himself, tries to pin down what he has seen and felt, then pulls it out so that others can understand it. But I can’t understand these things: these discourses about the ego and the non-ego I leave to you. Yes, I understand, there’s the struggle to express the inexpressible, typical of modern art, and these are all fine things, but I …

Later in the same lengthy letter, Calvino, sharing in Bukowski’s assertion that writing should come “unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut” and dissenting from Coleridge’s view that “the mere addition of meter does not in itself entitle a work to the name of poem,” engages in his usual self-derisive conviction:

I’m a regular guy, I like well-defined outlines, I’m old-fashioned, bourgeois. My stories are full of facts, they have a beginning and an end. For that reason they will never be able to find success with the critics, nor occupy a place in contemporary literature. I write poetry when I have a thought that I absolutely have to bring out, I write to give vent to my feelings and I write using rhyme because I like it, tum-tetum tumtetum tum te-tum, because I’ve got no ear, and poetry without rhyme or meter seems like soup without salt, and I write (mock me, you crowds! Make me a figure of public scorn!) I write … sonnets … and writing sonnets is boring, you have to find rhymes, you have to write hendecasyllables so after a while I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

In July of the following year, still in school and approaching his 20th birthday, Italo grumbles to Eugenio in frustration over his creative process, which seems to disobey the general principles of intuitive incubation and unconscious processing:

I’m still too ignorant to write articles and as for my output of short stories, a famous summer of overproduction has been followed by years of crisis. … All the ideas currently in my head are subject to a strange phenomenon: while I work on them and perfect them continuously from the philosophical point of view, they stay rudimentary and barely sketched on the dramatic and artistic side. In my creativity thought has the upper hand over imagination.

Having long left school and working on his second novel, Calvino found himself no less full of inner contradiction and resistance to the calling of the writing life and its grueling routines. In a November 1948 letter to his friend Silvio Micheli, he voices, as if in a desperate effort to reconcile, his conflicted desires :

When you’re working you get buried, drowned under things. You’ve no more friends nor art. Only when you’ve an evening or afternoon free can you roam the streets or court a girl. That’s all. In short, working is pointless. I mean, from the point of view of education. But it’s essential. I cannot — and I don’t want to — live the writer’s life, that is to say write for a living. The novel I was writing, which for months and months had sucked all my blood (because, stubborn as I am, I was determined to finish it even though I no longer felt it was going anywhere), is dead, awful, full of wonderful clever things but desperately bad, forced, it’ll never work and I must not finish it. And I must not write for some time now otherwise I’d make more mistakes. I hope that Einaudi will publish my short stories eventually, they’re the only thing I believe in and which I believe are useful.

A few weeks prior, Calvino had written to another friend:

For seven or eight months now I’ve been mucking about with a novel that I began in a moment of weakness and it’s turning out to be very bad, causing me to waste lots of my time. But at least it’ll get rid of my desire to write novels for four or five years, which is what I dream of doing, and will allow me to study kind of seriously and learn to write decently.

On July 27, 1949, Calvino writes to Cesare Pavese:

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being just as Proust, Radiguet and Fitzgerald did: what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.

In early December of the same year, Calvino writes to literary critic Geno Pampaloni, who had just reviewed the author’s second major published work, the short-story collection The Crow, expressing once again his inner turmoil:

My problem today is how to escape from the limits of these books, from this definition of me as a writer of adventures, fairy-tales, and fun, in which I can’t express myself or realize myself to the full.

In a lengthy letter to literary critic Mario Motta dated January 16, 1950, Calvino addresses the alleged death of the novel, a death toll still nervously resounding today:

There have been so many debates on the novel in the last thirty years, both by those who claimed it was dead and by those who wanted it to be alive in a certain way, that if one conducts the debate without serious preliminary work to establish the terms of the question as it has to be set up and as it has never been set up before, we’ll end up saying and making others say a lot of commonplaces.

Calvino echoes Herbert Spencer’s admonition that “to have a specific style is to be poor in speech” in a March 1950 letter to Elsa Morante, one of the most influential postwar novelists, whom he had befriended:

The fact is that I already feel I am a prisoner of a kind of style and it is essential that I escape from it at all costs: I’m now trying to write a totally different book, but it’s damned difficult; I’m trying to break up the rhythms, the echoes which I feel the sentences I write eventually slide into, as into pre-existing molds, I try to see facts and things and people in the round instead of being drawn in colors that have no shading. For that reason the book I’m going to write interests me infinitely more than the other one.

As dangerous as the blind adhesion to a style, Calvino writes in a May 1959 letter, is the blind reliance on tools, the cult of medium over message — but harnessing the power of tools is one of the craft’s greatest arts:

One should never have taboos about the tools we use, that as long as the thought or images or style one wants to put forward do not become deformed by the medium, one must on the contrary try to make use of the most powerful and most efficient of those tools.

The creative process, however, is an entirely different matter for Calvino, one where efficiency and merit aren’t necessarily correlated. In August of the same year, he complains to his friend Luigi Santucci about his creative block and sluggish daily routine — and yet he accepts that state, resigns to it as a given of the writing life. Above all, he adds to other famous meditations on why writers write — including ones from George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Mary Karr, Isabel Allende, Susan Orlean, Joy Williams, and Charles Bukowski — and speaks to the difference between a career and a calling, that profound and unshakable sense of purpose that is the mark of good art:

You can imagine how slowly my fictional output has been going this summer, you who know how much labor, dissatisfaction, irritability, uncertainty this work costs … However — and this is the point — it is worth it. Or rather: one does not ask if it’s worth it. We are people, there is no doubt, who exist solely insofar as we write, otherwise we don’t exist at all. Even if we did not have a single reader any more, we would have to write; and this not because ours can be a solitary job, on the contrary it is a dialog we take part in when we write, a common discourse, but this dialog can still always be supposed to be taking place with authors of the past, with authors we love and whose discourse we are forcing ourselves to develop, or else with those still to come, those we want through our writing to configure in one particular way rather than another. I am exaggerating: heaven help those who write without being read; for that reason there are too many people writing today and one cannot ask for indulgence for someone who has little to say, and one cannot allow trade-union or corporate sympathies.

In the same letter, he returns to the question of the novel and his relationship with fiction:

Even more annoying are those who theorize that the novel has to be like this or like that, that one must write the novel, etc. Let them go to hell! How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate books that are open, without a preconceived plan.

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end. I try to write them as they best come to me, depending on what I have to say. We are in a period when in literature and especially in fiction one can do anything, absolutely anything, and all styles and methods coexist. What the public (and also the critics) require are books (“open” novels) that are rich in substance, density, tension.

Three years later, in April of 1962, Calvino returns to his conception of fiction, this time with more dimension and more sensitivity to the inherent contradictions of literature:

One cannot construct in fiction a harmonious language to express something that is not yet harmonious. We live in a cultural ambience where many different languages and levels of knowledge intersect and contradict each other.

In October of the following year, feeling yet constrained by that “cultural ambience,” Calvino fantasizes about freely and wholeheartedly immersing himself in modernism:

Secretly I dream that soon, once the kingdom of literature has been divided between the two opposing factions of traditionalists and innovators, who are united by a common and equal insensitivity to words, I will be able finally to write works that are clandestine, pursuing an ideal of modern prose to hand down to the generations which eventually, God knows when, will understand …

But he is far from conceiving of the writer as a solitary creature working in isolation, in service of some egoic genius. In a December 1967 letter, he parenthetically acknowledges the labyrinth of literature:

One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise.

Similarly, in a letter penned a few months later, he recognizes the writer’s mind — like that of any great thinker — needs to be a cross-disciplinary one:

Every field of writing cannot be indifferent to other fields.

Much like H.P. Lovecraft argued against the distinction between “amateur” and “professional” journalists and Greil Marcus negated the divide between “high” and “low” culture, Calvino admonishes against the toxic dichotomy between “major” and “minor” writers and echoes Anaïs Nin’s defense of the fluid self”:

As a young man my aspiration was to become a “minor writer.” (Because it was always those that are called “minor” that I liked most and to whom I felt closest.) But this was already a flawed criterion because it presupposes that “major” writers exist. Basically, I am convinced that not only are there no “major” or “minor” writers, but writers themselves do not exist — or at least they do not count for much. As far as I am concerned, you still try too hard to explain Calvino with Calvino, to chart a history, a continuity in Calvino, and maybe this Calvino does not have any continuity, he dies and is reborn every second. What counts is whether in the work that he is doing at a certain point there is something that can relate to the present or future work done by others, as can happen to anyone who works, just because of the fact that they are creating such possibilities.

Calvino, in fact, is largely uncomfortable with the conventions of literary fame. In September of 1968, in a warm letter to John Woodhouse, who had just written the first book on Calvino, he reflects on the perils of prestige:

The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the “personality-cult” of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself. In short, if a critic writes about a problem and makes reference to one (or more) of my works in relation to that problem, this gives me the sense that my work is not pointless. Whereas the prospect of my bust crowned with laurel appearing along with the other busts in the hall of famous writers gives me no joy at all.

In an August 1970 letter, Calvino adds to history’s noteworthy meditations on criticism:

The only kind of literature that is possible today: a literature that is both critical and creative.

In the summer of 1973, he returns to the idea that all literature is interconnected or, as Virginia Woolf memorably put it, “words belong to each other,” and laments the literary landscape of the time:

I am very discouraged by this general dearth of books coming out, a desert that also affects me, removes my desire to write, because books cannot grow if they don’t find around them the company of other books their same age and that are congenial to them.

One of his most prescient and timely meditations comes from a November 1975 letter and, once again, dissents against the artificial and detrimental hierarchies of the literary world:

The distinction between journalists and writers put in those terms does not distinguish anything at all: one cannot say a priori that a writer just because he is a writer is more capable of handling ideas and of seeing what is essential than a journalist when we are dealing with a good journalist.

In late 1979, having just turned fifty-six, Calvino reflects on his nature as a writer, reflecting also on the era’s evolution and presaging our present culture of compressed timelines:

The fact is that I have always been more a writer of short stories than a novelist, and it is second nature to me to close — both in formal and conceptual terms — even a story that remains open; to condense into a short narrative space all the elements that give a sense of completion to the story. However, I do not mean by this that I am in favor only of short time-spans — or rather, there is no doubt that we are living in a period in which time has been shattered, there is no room to breathe, no possibility of foreseeing and planning ahead, and that this rhythm is imposed on what I write — but ideally I believe more and more that the only thing that counts is what moves in long, very long time-spans, both in geological eras and in the history of society. Trying to work out the directions in which these things are moving is very difficult; for that reason I feel more and more incapable of understanding what really is happening in a world which does nothing but prove each model wrong.

In the summer of 1980, he returns to the tension between career and calling and, echoing Tchaikovsky’s letter on commissioned work vs. creative purpose, confesses that freelance writing for literary journals leaves him vacant:

This jack-of-all-trades kind of writing does not give me any satisfaction at all, even though, yes, it is also a vocation of mine, but it is certainly the most time-consuming and least useful activity I could be doing, and what’s more in recent times what I manage to come up with are only boring things and my conscience is only at peace if I manage to entertain people.

And still, for all his tremendous insight and wisdom, Calvino is also a relentless devil’s advocate against himself, brimming with mischievous self-consciousness and self-derision that bespeaks one of the grand truths of creative life: No great artist can afford to take himself too seriously. Even in his formative years, Calvino intuited this: 19-year-old Italo tells Eugenio after writing his friend a lengthy letter full of youth’s typical early grapples with philosophy:

I found this letter that I had started to write yesterday evening and I reread it with interest. Dammit, what a lot of drivel I managed to write! In the end it’s impossible to understand anything in it. But better that way: the less one understands the more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought. In fact, let me say:

POSTERITY IS STUPID

Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that!

And yet we’re far more amused than annoyed, and infinitely delighted, for Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is an absolute treasure trove in its entirety — the most profound intersection of writing, philosophy, and literary voyeurism since Susan Sontag’s journals and the diary of Anaïs Nin.

Random reading/listening–03/24/23

“Beethoven’s cause of death revealed from locks of hair.” Here’s the link.

“John Wick Sure Has a Lot of Friends for a Lone Assassin.” Here’s the link.

“If We Don’t Master A.I., It Will Master Us.” Here’s the link.

“Daniel Ellsberg’s Life Among Secrets.” Here’s the link.

“Does Prayer Work?” Here’s the link.

“Have Christians Accepted the Scientific Conclusion That God Does Not Answer Intercessory Prayer?” Here’s the link.

03/24/23 Biking & Listening

Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.

Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.

Here’s a link to today’s bike ride. This is my pistol ride.

Here’s a few photos taken along my route:

This is what I’m listening to: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

A preeminent scientist — and the world’s most prominent atheist — asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.

With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe’s wonders than any faith could ever muster.

What Happens to Unbelievers?

Here’s the link to this article by Merle Hertzler.

Christian friend, you may be open to questions about errors in the Bible. You might be open to exploring concepts like evolution. But suppose we were to turn to questions about Jesus. Are you open to questioning him? Can you question his life, as recorded in the gospels? Can we question the resurrection?

Some of you may hesitate at this point. I understand. There was a time when I tried to avoid such questions. I feared what might happen if I allowed my faith in Jesus to be questioned.

And yet there is tremendous benefit in allowing our beliefs to be questioned. Albert Einstein once wrote, “The important thing is to not stop questioning.” I agree. When we entertain questions about our opinions, we sometimes find that our reasoning stands firm even under challenging questions, and our confidence increases. Other times we ask questions and find that our understanding could advance to a higher level. Either way, questioning has great value.

So maybe it would be okay to question even one’s belief in Jesus.

A Rule with Many Exceptions

But first, let us look at why some might be nervous about continuing. You are probably aware that the Bible has some stern warnings about unbelief. For instance, John 3:18 says, “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” That’s a harsh warning. Should we be concerned?

I personally don’t believe John 3:18. Perhaps you do. Even if you do believe this verse, I suspect that you find ways to make exceptions to that rule, “He who does not believe has been judged already.”

For instance, are babies exempt from this rule? Most believers think so. They don’t think that God would condemn babies who had no ability to believe. So, they make an exception. Apparently, that verse doesn’t apply to everyone that doesn’t believe.

Are there other exceptions? How about those who do not ever reach the mental capacity to understand such things? Are they doomed? Again, many believers make an exception here.

How about folks in the Old Testament? Were they without hope because they were born too early? Again, many people make an exception here. There was hope for them, apparently, even though they never heard of Jesus.

So, we have already found three exceptions to the rule that dooms all who do not believe in Jesus. Many Christians acknowledge all three exceptions. They find other verses and various arguments to override this verse. It has exceptions, or so they say.

Then there is another possible exception: those that have never heard. What happens to them? There are many tribes that Christians did not even know about for the first 1500 years of Christianity. What happened to them? Were they doomed, no matter how sincerely they sought God? Many are uncomfortable saying that. And so, they find a way to add yet another exception.

It doesn’t matter if somebody tells us a few stories of spiritually hungry natives who somehow heard the story. What about the many that did not?

Christians differ on this issue. Some take the hard line and say that those who have not heard are lost forever. What kind of a God would do that? But others acknowledge that, if these uninformed people had sincerely sought God, God may forgive them, even if they had never heard about Jesus. So here we find many Christians make a fourth exception to the rule that without belief we are doomed. They will allow that the uninformed heathen have a chance of heaven without specific belief in Jesus.

The rule is leaking like a sieve. If there are so many exceptions, why wouldn’t there be an exception for the one that honestly thinks a particular story–the life of Jesus as recorded in the gospels–never happened? Why would God condemn the one who honestly thinks the gospels were works of fiction? If God can accept babies and savages, why not accept the one who differs on a question of history?

And if God makes exceptions for those who differ on questions of history, then it would be okay for you to questions the gospels and go wherever the facts lead.

How correct must we be?

But suppose you take the hard line and say I do not get an exception. Then I would ask another question. Exactly what do I need to believe?

We need to define what it means to believe in Jesus. How far can you be from the biblical Jesus and still be safe? Let’s suppose you think Jesus died in Bethlehem. The Bible, of course, says it was in Jerusalem. Are you forever condemned for making this mistake in geography? Can God forgive you for this error?

Similarly, what would happen if you thought it happened in Damascus? In Rome? In darkest Peru? Surely God would overlook that mistake, wouldn’t he? What if you thought it happened in heaven? Should a soul be tortured for countless ages because he misunderstood and thought the crucifixion happened in heaven?

It seems to me that the location has nothing to do with it.

Similarly, suppose somebody is mistaken about the time of Jesus’ death. Most scholars say the crucifixion happened around 30 AD. (Some, however, think it never happened.) Suppose somebody thinks it was 100 BC. Is this person in eternal danger for making this historical error? How about 1800 AD? How about 4004 BC? How close does one need to be to the actual date? Is there a cutoff date, beyond which you are forever cursed? It seems that it would be silly to even suggest it.

Next let’s ask about the nature of his death. If we think the instrument of death was something other than a cross, are we doomed? Is a man a filthy heretic if he thinks Jesus was killed with a stake, a noose, a sword, or a grenade? Surely that detail cannot condemn one for eternity.

How about the pronunciation of the name? If we pronounce the name Hay-sus or Jay-thus or X-thus are we lost? What if we spell it Jethus or Jithus or Mithus or Mithas or Mithras? Are we doomed if we commit the social error of misspelling the name? I don’t think so. How close do we need to be?

How about the story of his life? Must we believe that Jesus walked on water? Must we believe that he told the women condemned in adultery to “Go and sin no more?” Probably not. After all, many Evangelical scholars now believe that this last story was inserted into the Bible many years later and might not have ever happened.

If we need to know the exact details of his life, all are in peril. For we can never be sure exactly which stories, if any, were altered. If today’s gospel texts were altered, how could we be expected to know what was in the original so we could believe it?

And if God just wants us to believe whatever is in the Bible today, what about those Christians who lived before John 8: 3-11 was inserted? Did they need to believe that story?

What about Jesus’ characteristics? Must we believe that his body was made of molecules? That he was of Jewish descent? Must we believe that he was physically male? Must we have the correct understanding of the nature of the incarnation? Surely, the answer is no. Surely these things do not condemn a person.

Now let’s put it all together. What if somebody believes that the Son of God was named Pedro and was killed with a sword in Peru in 1950? Can he be saved by trusting in Pedro? Or is he condemned forever because he got so many details wrong?

How many details can somebody have wrong without receiving condemnation? And why would it matter to God if a sincere person was mistaken on certain trivia? Would God cast a person out forever because he was mistaken on a question of history?

However, if you think that God could accept such a person, then it seems that your Christianity is not so exclusive after all. And it would seem that you agree that one need not believe the gospel stories to have salvation.

What if somebody mistakenly thinks that the Son of God was named Mithras or Horus and died in the spirit world? Is that close enough? If not, then exactly where was the line crossed? On the other hand, if these beliefs are close enough, then understand that, in ancient Egypt, many believed in Horus, a savior-god who supposedly died and rose again to bring salvation. So, did ancient Egyptians who trusted in the salvation provided by Horus truly receive salvation through Horus?

Some Christians will tell me, “No, Jesus saves but Horus doesn’t.”

In that case, what if those Egyptians had used the name Jesus instead of Horus? Would they then have received salvation by accepting that Jesus? Many will tell me that this would not be sufficient, that this would be a different Jesus.

But why is their Jesus not considered to be the same? Some will say he is different, for the details of the life of Horus differ with the gospels. And yet the story of Horus is surprisingly close to the story of Jesus in the gospels. Both are said to have had twelve disciples; both preached a Sermon on the Mount; both died of crucifixion; and both arose, according to the stories. So, if the ancient Egyptians had changed the name of the dying savior from Horus to Jesus, would that have resulted in eternal salvation?

​Mithras by David Ulansey. The story of Mithras
The Virgin Birth by James Still
Were events in Jesus’ life copied from earlier saviors/god-men/heroes?by B. A. Robinson.
Were the stories of Jesus’ life copied from the Egyptian God Horus’ life?
by B. A. Robinson.

Mithras and Horus links

Many will tell me, “No, the real Jesus is the one from Nazareth. This Horus is from somewhere else.”

But is one to be condemned forever for getting the mailing address of the Christ wrong?

The story of salvation is losing all of its plausibility. It is starting to sound like believers are saying that whoever is close to their opinions of the savior will have eternal happiness, and those who have other views will be condemned. Why would God condemn people based on trivia?

On the other hand, if you allow that one could differ on the location of the savior’s life; differ on the name; differ on the date; differ on certain other details, and still have salvation, you have conceded salvation to the ancient Egyptian believers in Horus. Belief in the gospels would lose its importance.

It seems to me that a loving God, if he exists, could not condemn a man who differed on what happened in history provided he really wanted to be forgiven for his hurtful actions. How could God judge a man simply because he disagrees about whether a particular event is historical?

Was the crucifixion necessary?

Perhaps you will reply by saying that we do not need to believe all the details, that we only need to believe that God’s son died for our sins.

Think about what the requirement for a dying savior means. Surely this is one of the most unusual demands that anybody could make before he will forgive.

Let me illustrate. Suppose you do something that upsets a good friend of yours. You find out that he is angry. You do not want to lose his friendship. You go and apologize. Now suppose that this friend tells you that he would like to forgive you, but since what you did made him very upset, somebody will need to suffer. You watch as he pulls a whip out of his closet and asks his son to lean over a chair. Then he hands the whip to another man who begins to whip the boy. You beg for the man to stop. Blood is everywhere. You are horrified as the lifeless body of your friend’s son falls to the floor.

Then your friend retrieves the whip, puts it away, turns to you with a smile, and announces that you are now forgiven. He says that his son has died for you and has paid the price in full. Your friend tells you that his wrath is satisfied, and that you are now reconciled to him.

What do you do? Would you embrace this man? No, I don’t think so. You would not want to be friends with that man. He must be a lunatic.

And yet how does the gospel story really differ from this? Are we to believe that God needed to do something very similar to what this lunatic did? We are told that God could not forgive until he had left his innocent Son suffer and die. I thought God was supposed to be able to do anything. If I can forgive people without resorting to such an act, why can’t he?

How do you know that Calvary was necessary? Yes, I know it is in the Bible, but as I have discussed earlier, that book may be mistaken. Is there any other reason to believe this is necessary? I cannot think of any.

So, suppose somebody wants God’s forgiveness, but is not sure that the story of a bloody death was necessary. After all, demanding that one’s own innocent son be killed before forgiving somebody else is a demand that no normal human would make. Does God make this demand? Perhaps the divine world is so different from ours that this makes sense to him. Yet somehow, I doubt it. Why would God demand that we believe this story to be forgiven? Personally, I do not think he would make such a demand.

I conclude that you do not need to believe all the details of Jesus’s life to escape doom. You do not need to believe in a sacrificial death. You will not be doomed for sincerely asking questions. It is safe to get out of the bunker. It is safe to question–even the gospels. You can read Matthew and ask if it really happened this way.

And as you question, it is safe to go wherever the facts lead.

What about Hell?

There is a little word that is seldom heard in church anymore–hell. The concept of eternal torment in an inescapable fire does not fit well with the culture of self-esteem, unconditional acceptance, and a personal relationship with a compassionate God. Can you relate to a God who would treat his creatures thus?

Could you, for instance, hold a dog’s paw on a hot frying pan for hours, ignoring its yelps?

Could you torture a person with fire for hours? No? You are too compassionate to do that? So how could God keep a man forever in unimaginable fire?

If you were God, would you condemn your decent, moral atheist neighbor to eternal hell without chance of parole? Are you that kind of person? Or would you show mercy?

If you would show mercy, and you have a close personal relationship with a God who would condemn people forever, shouldn’t you tell him that you disagree with hell the next time you two have a chat? Do you have that kind of intimate, open relationship with God?

And if you tell God you disagree, shouldn’t you also tell your pastor you want your church doctrinal statement corrected? If, instead of objecting, you sign a document that says you will support a doctrinal statement that includes hell, then people will need to assume that you are the kind of person who approves of tormenting people forever without mercy. If you sign it, people will assume you mean it.

I hope you understand why I am confused when someone says belief in eternal torment without mercy is compatible with the teaching of unconditional acceptance that is so popular in the church today. To me, those are completely incompatible.

Just in Case?

You may have another question: What if I am wrong? Should I follow anyway, just in case it might be true? But if I were to do that, which way should I follow? Should I follow Catholicism, just in case? Should I follow the Eastern Orthodox practice, just in case? Should I also follow Islam, Mormonism, Satanism, Hinduism, Bahai, Judaism, and the long-bearded robed hippie at the airport, just in case they are right? I would never be able to follow all of these religions, for they conflict with each other.

Oh, do you want me to follow just yours? So, your way is better? How could I know that your way is better if I do not ask questions? So, I ask questions. And the answers I get do not validate dogmatic beliefs.

Some suggest that I should believe anyway. They will tell me I have too much to lose if I am wrong. The payoff for Christianity is infinite, or so I have been told. Should I follow it on the outside chance that it might be true?

This argument is known as Pascal’s wager. It is faulty.

Suppose I elect to believe just in case, and select your religious views–ignoring for the moment that many religions conflict with yours–and somehow, I manage to “believe,” even though I am not convinced it is true. What does it even mean to believe something you are not convinced is true? Would God honor this kind of belief? Would God honor me for going through the motions of belief and acting as though I believe, even though I doubt? Wouldn’t that be dishonest?

Does God honor dishonesty? If your God promotes such dishonesty about our opinions, then how do you know you can trust him? For a God who wants me to pretend to believe might himself be pretending when he makes a promise. A God who blesses lying might himself be lying. A God who loves intellectual dishonesty might himself be dishonest. If such a God exists, we are all in peril. Nobody could know what a dishonest God would do.

There is another possibility. Perhaps God, if he exists, desires intellectual honesty. Perhaps he wants us to examine things openly and truthfully, and then to be honest about what we find. If this describes God, then I am doing the right thing by being open with my views.

I would not want to face an honest God after living a lifetime of pretending to believe something I don’t. So, if I must step up to the table and place my bets, I will bet that, if God exists, he wants me to be honest. I will call it as I see it. I see no value in doing it any other way.

Pascal’s Wager by Alan Hájek
Pascal’s Wager by B. A. Robinson
Pascal’s Wager by Richard Carrier

Pascal’s Wager links

Can we choose to believe?

Let’s assume for a minute that it really is true that we have to believe certain historical statements to escape doom. Let’s assume that we need to believe these assertions, even if we think there is no evidence. What is the poor unbeliever to do? Can he force himself to believe something that he thinks is not supported by evidence?

By illustration, suppose I told you that you must believe that John F. Kennedy was the first president of the United States. Suppose I told you that, if you thought it was George Washington, you would be tortured. Can you believe it was Kennedy? Try very hard. Do you believe that John F. Kennedy was the first U.S. president? You can pretend to believe it. That’s not the challenge. Can you believe it?

If you have any knowledge of American history, you will not be able to believe it. It is like telling a leopard to stop having spots.

Even if an informed unbeliever wanted to believe Christianity, he could not truly do it. He would not believe it in his heart. The best he could do is pretend to believe it. And pretending to believe is hypocrisy and is not good enough according to most Christians.

So, the informed unbeliever does not even have the option. He could not believe it just in case.

Why would God demand that we believe something that we do not think is true? Wouldn’t he want us to believe the evidence, wherever that takes us? We have a mind. Why not use it?

As Robert Ingersoll put it, “If God did not intend I should think, why did he give me a thinker?”

So let us boldly question.

Some would tell us that there is indeed good evidence for Christ. Very well, let us look at the evidence. But let us do it with an open mind. Let us not worry that we will be lost if we misunderstand. Let us honestly search for the truth.

03/23/23 Biking & Listening

Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.

Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.

Here’s a link to today’s bike ride. This is my pistol ride.

Have you heard of Bard? By Google? It’s their artificial intelligence program. I have it a try today.

My query: Help me describe today’s bike ride in the rain.

Bard’s response:

Sure, I can help you describe today’s bike ride in the rain.

It was a cold and rainy day, but I was determined to go for a bike ride. I put on my waterproof jacket and gloves, and I set off into the rain. The roads were slippery and the wind was strong, but I was enjoying the challenge. I rode for about an hour, and by the time I got home, I was soaked to the bone. But I felt great! I had had a great workout, and I had enjoyed the feeling of the wind and the rain on my face.

Here are some tips for biking in the rain:

  • Dress in layers so you can adjust your clothing as needed.
  • Wear a waterproof jacket and gloves.
  • Use a helmet with a visor to protect your eyes.
  • Be extra cautious when braking and cornering.
  • Be aware of your surroundings and be prepared to stop suddenly.
  • Enjoy the challenge and the feeling of the wind and the rain on your face!

Not bad, says I!

Here’s a few photos taken along my route:

Today, while biking, I listened to this episode of The Book Review podcast. I also listened to Episode 48 of The Essential Guide to Writing a Novel podcast.

Finally, I listened to forty minutes of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

A preeminent scientist — and the world’s most prominent atheist — asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.

With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe’s wonders than any faith could ever muster.