God’s Truth
Introduction
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, December 12, 1999
The Sort We Can Trust?
Evangelical Christians—by which I mean those who have an overdeveloped missionary instinct—always have huge confidence that they know precisely what God’s intentions are. They trap you on doorsteps, in thoroughfares and at work determined to tell you what you are missing. They are certain that they can convert you, and even if you are a worldly wise old sage and they are only twenty and a half, as they often are, they are convinced they have something you have missed.
If you have the patience to talk to them, they will, sooner or later, tell you to read such-and-such a book—the book that changed their lives and, of course, they expect will change yours. If, again, by curiosity or some other form of self-flagellation you actually turn to such a book, you are either bored into slumber or astonished at the absolute nonsense it contains.
Not long ago, while researching a book about the origins of Christianity, I came across such a book. It purported to be by a scientist and former government official. Entitled, A Scientist Shows the Bible is True, its author, Doctor Ernest Phibber, besides being a scientific expert was an expert on God’s truth.
Phibber flaunts his qualifications which include a doctorate. He lists it after his name together with strings of letters to prove he has the scientific credentials—though any scientist reading them would have realised that most of them were bought annually by subscription to some learned society or another.
The jacket blurb tells us that he has studied the bible all his adult life “with the same spirit of analytical inquiry that he applies to his work” and that he has been taught never to believe anything without examining the evidence. The result of all of the doctor’s accumulated scientific wisdom is that the bible is the truth and it cannot be proved untrue—it is indeed the Word of God.
Yet despite the impressive qualifications of this Christian scholar his book is full of unbelievable garbage. It is intended to prove to the gullible that they should take up their crosses now and is unashamed at using any sin of omission or commission to do so. To the critical reader, the effect is that the God’s Truth of Dr Ernest Phibber is anything but truth. It is whatever serves to preserve Christian beliefs, whether it is true or otherwise.
Matey
Much of the book is quite matey. By this I mean it is written in a patronising style in which we are treated like small children. This is a characteristic of this genre. The assumption is that our attention span is only about two minutes so the main arguments are broken up or gently supported by little digressions intended to make us go—“Ah!” or “How sweet”, or “Goodness me, isn’t that amazing!” Evangelical Christians want to prove that they are informed, are not a threat and are caring—they are our chums! Phibber is like this.
Thus, at the beginning, Phibber blathers on for a page or so about blood and blood cells surging ceaselessly around our bodies carrying hormones, plasma and what not, presumably to prove to his readers that he really is a scientist and knows his stuff. Then we get a few pages of matey chit-chat about paying bills, salesmen and confidence tricksters, television aerials and so on. He is convincing us that he’s an everyday, down to earth sort, despite his vast qualifications—just the sort of chap we can trust. So when, on page four, he tells us that the bible is the world’s best selling book but so many fantastic untruths have been told about it that no one today wants to read it, we nod in agreement.
Then we wake up and do a double take. Phibber means that today the bible is unfairly and dishonestly treated. Is it? Even in these enlightened days you will read vastly more by Christians advocating the bible than by the bible’s critics. Newspapers and television include regular slots for Christians but never have regular slots for those critical of Christian teachings, or indeed for those pursuing alternatives like Buddhism, various types of old paganism or Druidism. If there are so many fantastic lies told about the bible then it must be the bible believers like Dr Ernest Phibber who tell the lies about it. They are the only ones to get the chance.
In the last few hundred years there have been some critics of the bible and not all have argued validly. But if bible critics have sometimes been wrong, the shear weight of pro-Christian propaganda over 1700 years renders the imbalance immeasurable. With the growth of rationality in the scientific and industrial era one notes a greater inclination to question the indisputable truths of the bible, but the critics of the bible remain vastly outnumbered, in print at least. Phibber has begun the way he intends to continue—dishonestly.
Ignoring the huge historical imbalance in favour of his fancy that the bible is under a hail of critical fire, Phibber tells us that given a “fair chance” the bible can defend itself. All that it needs are a few facts which have only one explanation—the bible is true! It is the infallible message of God to mankind. As long as we have a thoughtful and inquiring mind we shall be able to see this.
Phibber’s book is a couple of decades old, probably out of print and the author must be elderly or dead. You might say there is no purpose in addressing its arguments today. But no doubt the arguments, if not the book, are still in circulation so I propose to examine them. By so doing I aim to give you an introduction to the invalid, reactionary and dishonest reasoning used by people who claim to be God’s servants. It might be an indulgent exercise but it should be instructive.
Notions
Despite the “scientific” credentials Phibber is not keen on reason and logic. Some scientists believe that “everything has to be measured”. “If it cannot be measured it doesn’t exist”. In this way Phibber sets up one of his famous Aunt Sallys. “In what units would they measure love?” he gloats.
Well now, strange though it may seem, real scientists know that some things cannot be measured—directly at any rate. Love cannot be measured directly for several reasons, one of which is that there are many different definitions of it—it is not a single concept. If there is lack of agreement about what something is then it stands to reason that it cannot be measured. Once there is agreement about what we want to measure we can begin to think about how to do it.
Since it is also an abstract concept—another reason why it cannot be directly measured—we have to seek a proxy for it. Temperature is in some ways like love—we feel it but we are not sure what it is. We can tell something is warm by touch and we can feel warmly towards someone else. On the other hand, we can be cold. Scientists now have a very good idea of what temperature is physically and can measure it in many ways. But originally mankind could only use qualitative measures—this is hot; this is cold; this is freezing.
Then someone realised that expansion is a proxy for temperature. Most things expand as they get hotter. If we have two fixed points, such as the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water, when the temperature is always the same in the same conditions then we can devise a scale and measure intermediate temperatures. The scale is arbitrary—that is why there are several scales of temperature—but they serve their purpose of allowing us to measure temperature.
In principle we could devise proxies for measuring love—once we know what we are talking about—and it has been done for some concepts of love. Of course, Dr Phibber is surely thinking of the love of God and a scientist must agree that there is no way of measuring that though one might imagine that a rational being would display His love in a pleasant way and not by introducing disease and death into the world as Christians believe. “The wages of sin are death”, Paul tells us (Rom 6:23) but, if they are, then God has made it so, and he needn’t have.
Phibber, at one point, decides to show to us that reading the bible can be immensely beneficial and cites four worthy people who were Christians—William Wilberforce, Elizabeth Fry, Lord Shaftesbury and William Gladstone. No doubt this will impress the readership he expects but it does not impress anyone with a brain cell left. Four people is hardly a scientific sample.
One does not have to think much to realise that, while there have been outstandingly good and humane Christians there have also been hypocritical and evil ones to match. Try:
- Tomas de Torquemada who revived the Spanish Inquisition under which thousands of his fellow Christians were tortured as heretics
- Charles Edward Trevelyan, Head of the British Treasury at the time of the famine in Ireland whose policies led to the death by famine or disease of a million people
- Joseph Stalin who was training in a seminary to be a Christian priest before revolutionary politics and dictatorship beckoned; a large number of Bishops in the British House of Lords who opposed legislation improving social conditions at a time when children pulled coal trucks in mines.
But it is a game which is pointless, either way round.
Phibber is fond of giving us the baldest assertion of questionable “facts”. Moses, for example, wrote the Pentateuch about 1500 BC. There is as much evidence for Moses as there is for Jason who sought the Golden Fleece. No scientist could be so gullible as to accept unproven “facts”.
Throughout the bible, we are told, there is an unfolding of the message of God’s redemption of man, culminating in the sacrifice of God’s Son, God himself in one of his three aspects. I have never been able to understand this whole pointless exercise, if it is considered true. Why should man need redeeming? Because of Adam’s sin. But God knew that Adam was going to sin so why did He let him? Because He wanted men to have free will. But God still knew—because he is omniscient, Christians tell us—that letting Adam have free will meant he would choose sin, so why did he still allow it.
There is no escaping the fact that the Christian god knew what would happen yet still let it. And what of all those poor humans who suffered before God decided to do something by sending his son? They are all resurrected at judgement day and granted eternal life to make up for the horrid lives they led on earth. Unless during their horrid lives they happened to sin. Then they are eternally burnt forever more in a sulphurous fire.
Well that used to be the story, but as of the last July of the millennium, the Pope has declared that the fire is a metaphor for eternal separation from God! Neither is heaven a balmy place with a narrow gate, but an ineffable union with God. So for two millennia, the greatest scholars of the church have all been fibbers, or, at the kindest, did not know what they were talking about. Now that the church has decided to admit its failings, perhaps they is a remote possibility that it will eventually admit that the whole caboozle is also metaphorical, and the entry of God into earth is a myth.
Jesus is considered to be the Paschal Lamb, a sin offering for the whole of humanity. But first you have to believe it is true. Well I am not Jewish and do not believe in sin offerings or any other type of offering because any omniscient God could not possibly be interested in having humans killing or burning other animals on his behalf. It is a totally primitive idea to offer an animal as a sacrifice, and it is totally grotesque for an almighty God to want a human sacrifice of any kind.
Dr Phibber complains at one point that some historical novels actually distort history, for example, by pretending to be written by someone who was not there in reality. Curious this one. It shows Phibber’s assumption that all the books of the bible are actually written by those who claim to be their authors. Scholars are convinced that many biblical books are not written by their named authors. Daniel is an excellent example. Any unbiased scholar would accept that the book was written 300 years after the period it describes and yet is written as if it were autobiographical. You will not get Phibber or his supporters to accept it, but it was common to do this. It is politely called pseudepigraphy, though it could more properly be called fraud or forgery.
At one point Phibber tries to establish the reliability of the bible in comparison with other works of about the same time such as Roman and classical scholars. He shows that there are a lot more surviving bibles than the classical works and that they are closer in time to the originals than the classical works. He quotes F F Bruce, a noted scholar of the bible, who writes:
No classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authority of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest manuscripts of their works which are any use to us are over 1300 years later than the originals.
This is fine as far as it goes but no one can think of any reason why these works should have been altered, but lots of reasons why the bible should have been.
We have a lot of material to substantiate the accuracy of the bible from about the time when Christianity became the Roman state religion. By then Christianity was, of course, a fully developed religion. It had had 300 years since the crucifixion of the Christian God in which to get its story straight. In other words, the wealth of material at our disposal does not help us to know whether the events recorded in the gospels are reliable. It only shows the Christian texts have been copied more or less faithfully since Christianity finally succeeded.
There might have been lots of reasons for editing the earliest versions of accounts which purport to be factual and are to be used for purposes of religious devotion. If the plays of Euripides were altered, it would have been to improve their reception by the audience. The gospels might have been altered for similar reasons but, if they have, we want to know—people’s beliefs depend upon them. They do not depend upon Euripides.
False Equations
Phibber sums up saying that no one would say that Plato’s Republic was not worth reading because it s text was not reliable. True enough, say I. But Phibber then fails totally to see what I have argued above and claims:
Similarly, no one can say the New Testament documents are not reliable versions of the originals which were written in the first century of the era.
He equates a book of political theory with a book setting out a new religion. There is every reason why the second should evolve to an acceptable form whereas the first would remain broadly in its original form. The higher critics are despised by Phibber, the supposed scientist, because they find evidence in the texts that just such an evolution occurred.
All of this is buried in vast tables of figures of dates, works, numbers of manuscripts, numbers in Greek, in Hebrew, years past, and so on. All of it is intended to make you feel that a huge weight of evidence favours the accuracy of the gospels. But all of it ignores our main points that the original revision of the true story of Jesus occurred in the earliest manuscripts in the first few centuries of their transmission, so the accuracy and numbers of later ones is irrelevant, and that there is no particular reason why works which are not intended to rule the lives of millions should be altered. The opposite is plainly not true. When the books are intended to alter the way people behave, as religious bookks are, there are excellent reasons for changing them to get the most effective version.
Christians like Dr Ernest Phibber have their own views on evidence and it is not honest, though they are not themselves ignorant men. It is God’s Truth.
Dr Phibber persuades us that the Jewish scriptures are totally accurate by giving us pages about the rules which had to be followed by Jewish scribes. If there were the smallest error the whole copy had to be “buried in the ground or burned”, he tells us. Careful accounting methods were devised to make sure that “not one jot or tittle” was lost from the scriptures. He tells us that these rules were devised by the Massorites but does not tell us that they devised their rules long after the fall of Jerusalem. The keepers of the Dead Sea Scrolls seemed keen to keep copies of variant texts. And some were used by the translators of the Greek version of the scriptures which did not agree with the Jewish version.
So Phibber means deliberately to mislead gullible, particularly young, people into believing that there is an immense “scientific” argument justifying their belief that the scriptures are the provable word of God. It is deliberate dishonesty—deliberate sins of omission. He misses out important facts that have an important bearing on the truth.
Phibber even dishonestly uses the Dead Sea Scrolls to prove his point when they actually do the opposite, since there were versions of Isaiah which were considerably different among them. Failing to mention this Phibber merely says that the Scrolls give us a copy of Isaiah dated to 125 BC which is substantially the copy in the Greek and Hebrew Bibles. Nevertheless, he has to spend several pages convincing us that the differences which do occur are only trivial. Shoddy work by the Holy Ghost again!
But the relative absence of errors in the Old Testament according to Phibber is a boon because it allows us to track down the original error free text. And, what is more, the translation into Greek in the third century BC prevented deliberate alteration of the texts. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (third edition) this is an irrefutable argument.
Of course, we are getting nowhere towards proving that these old writings or the newer ones are the infallible word of God. They are sacred texts and since they were presented in their present form have been faithfully copied. All of us can accept this. But despite it all they contain differences and, even counting the Dead Sea copies they are no earlier than the second century BC.
Scholars consider that the editions we now have of the Jewish scriptures stem from sometime in the “post exilic” period of 500 to 100 BC give or take a few decades—hundreds of years before the earliest extant Isaiah, but they were not written by Isaiah himself or even anybody contemporary with him. Most of us would consider it remarkable enough that the work of Isaiah had got to us even through the hands of editors but not Phibber and his fundamentalist Christian pals. For them it has come to us directly from Isaiah whose hand was guided by the Holy Ghost and all we have as a penalty are a few unimportant copying errors.
Phibber gives us more figures. He or his fellow scholars have counted over 36,000 quotations from the bible in the works of the Church’s earliest apologists up to around 300 AD. He does not however tell us what proportion were accurate but merely says, in summary, that “the case for the reliability of the New Testament is infinitely stronger than that for any other record of antiquity”.
Phibber, as usual, betrays his tendency to non-scientific hyperbole—infinitely stronger? Yet looking at the figures he gives we find that whereas Origen in the third century AD could quote from the New Testament over 17,000 times, Justin Martyr a hundred years before quotes only 330 times. The authority of the New Testament canon was not strong initially, Holy Ghost or no Holy Ghost, but later it strengthened as the canon became accepted.
The early gentile Christians would have had no more idea than a modern day unbeliever what books were authoritative and what were not. In general, they would believe whatever their local bishop told them. And each church would have preferred its own tradition. Eventually the Church of Rome asserted its power and the canon came into being.
One suspects that Phibber still sees a problem in that 100 year gap at the beginning of Christianity. He asks in his rhetorical mode—“Did the events recorded in the gospels really take place?” To answer it he tells us he has proven that the text of the bible that has come to us is original so, if the events recorded therein are not true then there would have been no purpose in maintaining such accurate records.
Now lest you did not notice, this is a somewhat eccentric argument. Phibber seems to want to believe that the events which are undoubtedly recorded in the gospels are true because such care was taken to preserve them. But equal care would have been taken to preserve them by anyone who believed them to be true. And who believed them to be true—the Christians!
Phibber brings us now to two so-called skeptical criticisms of the bible:
- if there is no external corroboration of a biblical event then it did not happen;
- if external sources give a different version from a biblical version then it is the biblical account that is in error.
Phibber calls the first “silly” and the second “illogical”. But surely it is Phibber who is silly or illogical. It would seem quite natural to me for a shaman or hierophant, trying to persuade people of the correctness of his religious outlook, to make up a few “facts” that would “help” potential converts to believe. Christians cannot, of course, see this because they cannot see Christianity arising like any other religion. “The apostles of Jesus, make things up? Nonsense, they were all honest to God!” Just as they have been ever since? God’s Truth!
