God’s Truth
Jesus ab Initio
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
No Assumptions
Dr Ernest Phibber now invites us to make a study of Jesus Christ from the gospels, “making no assumptions".
The gospels might be true or false or a bit of both but, just to offer a little bias, we are invited to note that the famous unbeliever, Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, did accept the historical reality of Jesus, claiming that “the doubts that have been cast upon the historical reality of Jesus are unworthy of serious attention”.
Our tutor wants us to consider the hypothesis that the Jesus of the gospels must have been a historical figure because such a man could not have been invented at the time the gospels were written. “Nearly all the Jews had no time for him.” Phibber, the analytical brain, tells us that “Jews were bigots, completely set in their religious ways”—it reminds you of the old expression, “It takes one to know one!”. The Jews wanted a conquering hero and Jesus was nothing like this.
Anyway, Jews were bigots. All Jews? Does he mean “all Jews”? These are not the words of a man who is careful with words. Is he any more careful with his experiments?
Plainly, all Jews were not bigots. Jesus was a Jew! It still shocks some Christians. His twelve apostles were Jews! His seventy disciples, if they were not a fiction invented by Luke, were Jews! Before the apostle Paul took it on to himself to preach to gentiles, Jesus’s followers were all Jews. When you read blatant nonsense like Phibber’s it becomes difficult to believe that this instructor of ours understands anything of what he reads. We might discover that Jesus is a historical person but it is difficult to accept that the author described in the blurb of Phibber’s book is.
It is true to say that the Jews wanted a conquering hero but whether Jesus was like this or not remains to be proved. Whether it is true or not, Jesus was crucified by the Romans as a king of the Jews. We can all accept that the gospels say this. Thus we can all agree that Jesus gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he was a king and might therefore have seemed like a potential conquering hero.
Our tutor’s view of gentiles is as infantile as his assessment of Jews. They were cruel, lustful and selfish. Pleasures were immoral ones, watching gladiatorial contests and worshipping at idolatrous temples to screw the temple virgins—the temples were brothels really, says Phibber. No gentile could have invented Jesus, we are told, because his teachings were so opposed to their way of life.
There were no noble Jews and there were no noble gentiles either.
What about Pilate then? He was a gentile and he could find no wrong in Jesus. What about Pilate’s wife who urged him to have nothing to do with this righteous man? Surely she was a gentile? What about the centurion at the foot of the cross who recognised Jesus as a Son of God before anyone else? What about the other centurion, Cornelius and his family? Were they not gentiles?
I stick to the accounts of the gospel writers so that there can be no argument with our guide about the facts. This “intellectual” paints cartoon characters of two dimensions all over the place so that his god will look three dimensional by comparison. This too must be God’s Truth.
Phibber gives us a few more excerpts from unbelievers who nonetheless accept that Jesus was historical to complete this section of argument.
Not Fiction but Skillfully Co-operating
Now our tutor takes us into a lesson on Jesus’s sublime character. First, he tells us that he will be quoting from all four gospels. So, if Jesus was invented, he was invented by four inventors all “skillfully co-operating” to produce a realistic result.
It is remarkable how dazzled our guide is, but this statement indicates it precisely. It is hard to imagine how the four gospels can be seen as skillfully cooperating. Three of them are related to each other, Matthew and Luke are based on Mark. They are therefore not independent but even so they find it difficult to agree on many things. The fourth gospel differs almost totally. It is hard to believe it is describing the same man. The gospels agree that Jesus was tried and crucified as a king but thereafter they differ greatly.
Dr Ernest Phibber urges us to dig beneath the surface to find some of the facets of Jesus’s character. Novelists, he tells us, do not hide their best points. So the gospels are not novels. … Oh! Right! The lesson begins. We get a few clips from the Last Supper taken variously from the gospels, as he promised, all of which serve to show Jesus’s humility and “superhuman” love and the gospel writers’ “superhuman” artistry. That’s it!
Is that it? What was all that about no assumptions, the gospels might be true or false? Having said all that he gives us a lesson that depends upon us accepting the gospels as true.
More strongly than ever you get the impression that the doctor’s qualifications are as false as Dr Gillian McKeith’s. Did they both buy them from American newspaper adverts?
An account of Gethsemane now follows. Its objective, like the last one seems to be to astound us into accepting that the gospel writers were not writing novels. The point is happily conceded but where does that get us?
All Christian scholars accept that the gospels were written to persuade people to believe. They are not novels which are written to entertain but neither are they biographies written to describe the true facts of someone’s life. The gospels are so inconsistent in respect of the detail that they could quite easily be consistent with a legendary person of whom little was known other than that he died on a cross. Previously he had drawn sufficient attention to himself to make his death a more significant crucifixion to some people than the thousands of others that occurred in first century Judaea.
A Felon’s Death
Jesus died a felon’s death, a traitor to the ruling power in Rome. According to the gospels themselves Jesus was a traitor and Dr Ernest Phibber agrees because he concurs that Jesus deliberately entered Jerusalem on an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass. From Zechariah, this indicated that Jesus was admitting that he was a king. He therefore was a traitor to Imperial Rome and merited the ultimate punishment under Roman law. Christian apologists, if that word is not too noble for Phibber, who argue from the gospels that Jesus was a wonderful man are arguing God’s Truth—it simply has to be believed. It doesn’t have to be true.
The critic of Christianity wants to begin with something Christians and sceptics can agree on, and find out how far we can get from there. One thing it is not possible to agree upon is the claim our guide makes that Jesus’s captors in the Garden of Gethsemane at first fell back and fell to the ground (John 18:4-8) because Jesus’s face momentarily shone like an angel. A man in a garden, illuminated only by the moon, starts to glow like a lightbulb at a time when people only had oil lamps for illumination! It would be like someone meeting an alien in the same circumstances. Can you imagine anyone arresting him? They would have legged it!
If the guards at first fell back it was because the disciples resisted arrest not because Jesus had an angel’s face. The gospels admit that Jesus’s men were still armed and indeed Peter lops off a man’s ear. Plainly, there was a skirmish but no Christian can admit it because it confounds their image of Jesus as a pacifist.
Our professor takes us now to the cross. Immediately, he tells us that an “innocent man” had been led away to be sentenced on a trumped up charge with the aid of bribed witnesses. That indeed is the impression Sunday school teachers give to their charges. But any intelligent adult especially one with a PhD and claiming an analytical mind could not accept that from his gospel studies. Jesus was guilty. The gospels admit it, yet for two thousand years Christians, applying God’s Truth, have maintained otherwise.
Our mentor lists for us the many examples of concern Jesus had for others while he was labouring to the place of the skull or hanging on the cross. He tells us that he quotes from Psalms 22, says, “It is finished” and expires saying, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”. Take no notice of it! It is God’s Truth.
In Mark, the earliest of the gospels, he cries in despair, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He is offered vinegar on a sponge, makes a loud noise and dies. Our teacher tells us that this was not despair because he was quoting Psalms 22. But the first half of Psalms 22 is a long plea for help. The second half is probably another psalm that has been tacked on. Only a bigot who can find no blemish at all in his hero could deny that this is despair. He does not then whisper, “It is finished”, he groans loudly and dies.
Turn to John’s gospel, the last and most refined of the four, and you find Jesus acting more like a perfect man, perhaps even a god. He takes the vinegar, whispers, “It is finished” and expires with dignity. In Luke’s gospel we get the remaining statement, “Father, into thy hands I commend thy spirit”. A fundamentalist has to believe that all are true and so combines them as our teacher has.
Well, it is possible, I suppose, but it requires too much gullibility that the three statements apparently made by Jesus as he died should be reported in three accounts written by different people. It is even more difficult to understand when Luke certainly had Mark at hand as he wrote his gospel and could therefore have included the line from Psalms 22, and John probably had Mark and possibly Luke as well.
The real reason for the different last words was that the church was refining its image of Jesus. Despairing was not a suitable way for a god to die. Luke made it sound more composed. But John made it sound as though a carefully executed plan had reached its climax.
Not Fact and Fiction
Having satisfied us that the gospels are not pure fiction, Phibber next addresses the question that the gospels might be a mixture of fact and fiction. He then gives us four reasons why the gospels are purely factual.
- The gospel writers are reliable men because:
- they write in a simple unsensational style
- they sometimes show Jesus in an unfavourable light (but on careful study, it only seems unfavourable
- each tells the story from his own viewpoint, regardless of the others, so that sometimes it seems as if they are contradicting themselves (but they are not—on careful study!).
- Their stories hang together as a whole. They are not a patchwork but a consistent record. Take away the parts depicting Jesus as having superhuman character and very little remains. The four gospels consistently depict Jesus as a uniquely righteous man and so he must have been!
- The authors of the gospels, the all time best sellers of the world, did not keep on writing to produce more best sellers.
- It is adduced as important evidence that the gospels do not tell us what Jesus looked like. His explanation is a quotation from 1 Samuel 16:7 where the successor to Saul is to be chosen from the sons of Jesse, and Eliab is rejected in favour of David “for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for the man looketh on the outward appearance but the Lord looketh on the heart”.
It is difficult to answer these arguments because there is so little substance in them.
I do not understand how the three points given in evidence of reliability shows anything of the sort. The style of the gospels is unsensational but they were not written to attract people to the theatre or the Hippodrome. Despite our tutor’s opinion of gentiles—he means Romans—there were as many pious Romans as there are in any civilised society. Christians might abhor the pagan religions favoured then by the Romans but they offered the same in ritual and liturgy as any Christian church and offered similar benefits to society in terms of honesty and concern, and for the individual in terms of spirituality and everlasting life.
Christians, even those claiming intelligence, have always had this remarkable arrogance that all other religions are the work of the devil. It is a belief that only the Devil could benefit from, if God is truly the Creator of the world. Until Christianity was adopted as the state religion, the Roman Empire was increasingly liberal in its religious outlook. The Christians stopped all that. Curious, isn’t it?, that the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent in the time of Trajan shortly after the time of Christ and as Christianity grew the power of the Empire waned. Christianity finally ousted the pagan religions by about 400 AD just as the Empire split into two parts and within another hundred years the Western Empire had collapsed. Bigotry stultifies creative thought. That, in part, is what happened to Rome.
Unfavourable Light
Showing Jesus sometimes in an unfavourable light is another reason why our gospel writers were reliable. I find this totally incomprehensible coming from a Christian. Surely anyone who can depict a putatively perfect man as having imperfections is manifestly unreliable. Dr Ernest Phibber keeps telling us that Jesus was perfect and yet his biographers are commended for making “mistakes” that show him as fallible. The only way to interpret his conclusion that these reliable chroniclers have depicted Jesus unfavourably is that sometimes Jesus behaved badly. Oh! There I go again. His behaviour only seemed unreasonable. Then the gospel writers did not reliably depict the perfect man, Jesus.
The third proof of their reliability was that they sometimes contradicted themselves. Ah yes! This time I remembered, but they only seemed to contradict themselves. Careful study showed they had not. Well, of course, if they only seemed to contradict themselves then they didn’t really so they were reliable. But in that case why did they look as though they contradicted themselves? It’s all getting a bit tortuous and I suspect that this is the problem. Like Ptolemy’s epicycles, eventually absurd complexity demands a simpler answer.
It is that the gospel writers actually do sometimes depict Jesus in an unfavourable light and sometimes they actually do contradict each other. But for a fundamentalist who regards the bible as itself perfect, God’s Truth has to be admitted to get rid of the blemishes. So when the gospel writers seem themselves fallible as human beings, they end up being infallible because all their foibles turn out to be explainable. We now have an infallible Jesus, an infallible bible and four infallible gospel writers. It is all getting a bit silly but never mind we’ll admit that the gospel writers are fallible by showing Jesus badly and contradicting each other and explain it later—no one will notice!
The stories, we saw above hang together as a whole—they are not a hotch-potch, according to our mentor. He tells us that if we take out the miracles then the rest makes no sense, so even the miracles are necessary. And it was quite “natural” that he should do a few “miracles for the good of mankind” whilst he was here. It is curious that any man let alone a scientist should regard a miracle as natural but never mind. The man whom our guide worships himself says to the tempters who sought a sign from heaven:
There shall be no sign given unto this generation.Mark 8:12
Now I am puzzled why the tempters, the Pharisees, apparently did not consider all the miracles that Jesus was performing, according to the gospels, as signs. Even more puzzling is that Jesus denies that any signs would be given even though he seems to be giving signs all over the place. And no mean signs either! He wakens people from death! If that it not a sign, what is? But neither Jesus nor his questioners regard these miracles as signs.
The obvious reason is that there were no miracles, no signs, and Jesus himself tells us so. Despite the assertion of Phibber, many of the miracles have been added as an afterthought to put Jesus in the same category as any other god, that of the superhuman. The others are really parables or distortions of unpleasant events which were too difficult to report unadorned.
Phibber implies that the gospels hang together so well that nothing can be removed without breaking up the sense. And yet biblical scholars, many of them Christian, have analysed the texts and find clear evidence that they are made up of previous works which have been conflated. Certain parts can be removed and what remains is a coherent narrative. It seems clear that the additions have been made to expand or explain a terser earlier version. The gospels therefore are a patchwork. No one claims they are like a patchwork quilt put together at random but they nonetheless come from a variety of different sources. If you do not believe me read the gospels. Luke admits it!
Did not Continue to Write!
Dr Phibber also claims that the fact that the gospel writers, having written blockbuster best sellers, did not continue to write—hoping to win the Pulitzer Prize?—proved that the gospels were in no way fictional. Get it? No? Look, these men were so single minded that they did what they had to then stopped. Phibber says this even though he admitted a few lines before that John and Luke wrote other works—works which are preserved with the gospels in the New Testament. Nevertheless, he claims, such literary giants would have had all their works preserved if they had written them.
Whatever the original apostles ever wrote, and it probably was not the gospels, it has mainly been lost. Even if that which is attributed to apostles is genuine it is inconceivable that the remaining apostles and some seventy disciples sent out by Jesus did not write anything at all, or have their words taken down by a scribe as Jesus’s apparently were, and thus recorded for posterity. None of this has survived.
We know for certain, from ancient references to them and in some cases from having found them or fragments of them, that other gospels existed besides the four in the bible. These have been or had been lost. They were gospels like the gospel of Thomas, the twin brother of Jesus according to tradition. If apparently important works like these could have been lost then why shouldn’t lesser works by the gospel writers have been lost. Phibber is talking nonsense as usual, trying to compare the gospel writers with a best selling novelist. It is absurd and childish but appears to be God’s Truth, and so it is offered to us
For Dr Ernest Phibber, the final prove that the gospels tell the truth is the fact that they give us no description of Jesus. Phibber tells us we have no idea whether Jesus was “short or tall, fat or thin, dark or fair, handsome or ugly”. But any novelist would give us a description of their heroes and heroines. So the gospels are not fictional. Well we have already conceded long ago that the gospels are not novels. They are devotional tracts intended to win people to Christianity. John 1:7 makes it absolutely clear lest any Christian should dispute that the gospels are not objective accounts of the ministry of Jesus. Now if people are writing “that all might believe” it does not follow that they will tell the truth. Evidently they tell God’s Truth which is quite a different matter.
The simplest way not to tell the truth and yet feel that you have not told a lie is to omit details that might be distasteful. We saw above that in one prophecy quoted by Phibber, the prophesied person was rather unbecoming. Now, if in fact Jesus were rather unbecoming it would be God’s Truth to miss out anything that would indicate it. If the original gospels included a description, and as Phibber says, it would be natural to do so, it has been excised because it did not suit the image sought. Our guide repeats often that his god was a perfect man. He was depicted as morally good but he was not so depicted physically. Christians therefore presume he was perfect physically as well.
The only evidence (if you can call it that) that he was of classic Christian depiction is a forged letter called the Letter of Lentulus, supposedly Pilate’s superior. Yet even that letter gives the measure of Jesus’s stature as being only four and a half feet. The gospels admit this in Luke 7:28 and 19:3 though not without ambiguity allowing the Christians to deny it. Celsus, an early critic of Christianity tells us that Jesus was short and Tertullian, a Christian, confirms it. These and other sources suggest that Jesus was dark, bent and elderly. It would be more likely that Jesus, a Jew, living in a hot climate in a country next to Africa would be dark rather than fair like a Scandinavian, yet he is customarily depicted as a red haired Viking.
Why did Simon of Cyrene have to carry the cross for Jesus? Presumably the struggle carrying the heavy post that was to lead to your death was a deliberate indignity and the effort needed, part of the punishment, yet in the bible this indignity is removed. The most plausible explanation is that Jesus was crook-backed making it too difficult for him to carry the cross. Finally, Jesus might have been older than the 30 years that the gospels assert explicitly. Jesus was considered the Son of David and David started his exploits at the age of 30. It seems likely that the gospel writers wrote that Jesus also was thirty to match the Old Testament. But John’s gospel lets out the truth when the Jews say to Jesus: “thou art not yet fifty years old”. Why would anyone choose fifty unless that was the next landmark in his age. Forty would have been used for someone in their thirties. The implication is that Jesus was nearly fifty. So far from our gospel writers saying nothing about Jesus’s appearance because “the Lord looketh on the heart”, they say nothing about it because it did not suit their image of a perfect man. It is God’s Truth.
