Truth
What Fundamentalists Know about God’s Brain
Abstract
Fundamentalists? A more self-willed, self-satisfied, or self-deluded community cannot be imagined. They hope against hope, scorning all opposition with ridiculous vehemence. Two thousand years have not advanced them one step in compassion or justice.Bartle Loughran
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Evangelist Confidence Tricksters
The biggest combined mass of evangelical bible thumpers that exist today is in the USA. Robert J Miller, of Midway College tells us that Fundamentalist evangelists—confidence tricksters is a truer phrase—of the mould of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, had long been the only “experts” on the Bible for the American public. A divine being could not have been wrong and for Fundamentalist Christians Jesus was never wrong.
Since the 80s this mass of believers has been confronted with books and TV documentaries telling them that their cherished beliefs do not hold water. Biblical discoveries had shaken their belief by showing differences between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. So, though these Christians believed Jesus was divine, they needed their own type of biblical scholars to confirm that Jesus believed it himself. Thus arose a peculiar breed of scholars gallantly stepping forth on a quest to prove that the historical Jesus believed himself to be a pre-existent divine being incarnated on earth.
More honest scholars had not found the gospels historically reliable and were happy to accept that they were not written as accurate history. Students in seminaries and theological colleges had known all this for a long time but had not felt it necessary to tell their uninquisitive punters. Indeed, most were not willing to undermine their sinecures by doing so.
Now New Testament scholars and even bishops were telling believers in television documentaries and popular books about Jesus that the historical Jesus was a different figure from the one shown in the gospels. These troublemaking scholars were denounced from the pulpit for disturbing the equanimity of Christian America, serving to prove once and for all that Christians are not interested in truth. Yet what they wanted was someone to prove unequivocally that their view was really the correct one and the critics were wrong. Such a man would be an impeccable scholar, at least to their way of thinking, who would demolish critical scholarship with God-given surety.
He would be, in Robert Price’s phrase, a stained-glass saviour of Christian dogma, sure that historical fact could be made to fit the constraints of faith, and recover the “real Jesus”. There was such a man because faith required it! He would find what all believers knew, that the facts of history pointed to the Christ of Faith. The Fundamentalist party line would ensure it.
Christian Knights
Where there’s a buck there’s a prophet, in latter-day America, and to answer this call, Christian knights in holy armour have sallied forth to publish vigorously in print and on the net for the last few years. They find a historical Jesus that is perfectly compatible with evangelical theology—but they have to torture scholarship to do it. They reassure those persons troubled by critical scholars like Borg, Crossan, Funk and other Jesus Seminar types, who are accused of misreading texts, ignoring evidence and making judgements based on prejudice or ideology. Not only are they accused of denying the Christian faith, they are accused of being intellectually dishonest or at least inaccurate,and of failing as scholars.
The Fundamentalist barren knights refer to their task as a “quest” or a “search” to give their readers the illusion of an enquiry but such enquiries are a charade because no one doubts what they will find. It is not a quest to discover the historical Jesus. For these apologists parading as scholars, historical research is irrelevant—the propping up of Christian belief is its real purpose, and the historical Jesus must be the divine figure of Christian belief. For them, the correct understanding of Jesus was never “lost”—it was there all along in the creed—and so had no need to be found except as a pretence.
Naturally they succeed in their self-imposed task of horrific difficulty, at least to the satisfaction of their readership and the lightening of their pockets and purses by a few more dollars, all to be tipped into the evangelical bag. Their achievement is not judged by scholarly criteria but by finding the presupposed right answer. When they find it, the following flocks of sheep baa praises to God.
A belief in the literal historicity of every verse in the bible excludes critical judgement of any of it. The fundamentalist perspective on the historical Jesus must exclude historical-critical scholarship. Fundamentalists, in their “quest” for the historical Jesus, do not question the historical reliability of the gospels, but merely try to harmonize them.
Any credible religious belief must, by the best exercise of our mental faculties, be acceptable as true. We are enitled to expect answers to our best questions. Was Jesus really like the New Testament picture? Did he say the things attributed to him in the New Testament? Was he the only begotten Son of God? Did he perform miracles and raise people from the dead? Did he return from the dead himself? Are there good reasons for thinking any of these things is true? If the answers are “yes”, then Jesus Christ has the right to require of us an unqualified allegiance to him. If the answers are “no”, then Christianity should not be believed or taught.
Scholarship
Christian scholars often display not scholarship in command of a better knowledge of the historical Jesus, but scholarship that is unwilling to raise the question of the historical Jesus. What is a matter of principle to those who are committed to the ethic of critical judgement and historical knowledge is an offense to those who are devoted to the ethic of belief and the authority of tradition.
If history aspires to be knowledge not just belief, historian must give reasons for what they assert. Reasons go beyond mere authority or testimony. Historians cannot permit their authorities to stand uncriticized or they become a mediator of past belief and not a seeker of knowledge—not an enquirer but a propagator of tradition.
For centuries the traditional view was that the historian’s task was the editorial and harmonizing one of compiling and synthesizing the testimony of so-called authorities or eyewitnesses. The historian believed another’s report of an event—he regarded his witnesses as authoritative. Christian “scholars” find it hard to move from this anachronistic outlook. Many Christian scholars abdicate their role as critical historians to perpetuate traditional belief.
A critical scholar committed to judgement and historical knowledge sees people, whose testimony provides us with our knowledge of the past, not as authorities whose word is to be believed, but as fallible humans whose perceptions and judgements reflect the culture of their world and their own position in it, interests and beliefs. The critical historian has to assess the inferences and assumptions of his sources, to judge their meaning and their truth. To assume that the reports mean what Christians take them to mean ignores both the witnesses’ conditioning and the readers’.
So, what distinguishes “scholars” from scholars is not their criteria of authenticity, but their understanding of it as a devotion to the authority of tradition and religious belief, on the one hand, and a commitment to critical judgement and historical knowledge, on the other.
When we read, as we can in the introduction to one book purporting to use historical scholarship to discover the gospel Jesus:
The authors of this volume are serious scholars deeply committed to the “truthfulness and rationality of historic, biblical Christianity” and the spiritual implications that follow from such a commitment,
we know this traditional view of historical evidence and of the historian’s task is to be used to buttress the Christian idea of Jesus in the gospels—pure devotion to the authority of tradition and religious belief, and distortion and omission of critical evidence.
Biblical Evidence
If scholars find only a fifth of the sayings of Jesus convincingly genuine, Fundamentalists, certain of it all, say four fifths of the evidence has been rejected. Fundamentalists take biblical “evidence” to mean affirmative evidence and true evidence. They cannot accept that biblical evidence can be unreliable or even false or negative evidence. Some sayings of Jesus might confidently be traced to the historical Jesus but many are only evidence for the beliefs of early Christians, who, even if Jesus were divine, were not themselves divine or infallible, and put their own words in the mouth of Jesus.
The apocalyptic Jesus expresses himself clearly in Mark 13:30, where Mark relates that Jesus unequivocally announced that the End was nigh:
Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.Mark 13:30
“All these things” include the coming of the Son of Man. Now, Fundamentalists want Jesus to be talking about the End of the World, but not as it being nigh, because that would make the perfect man wrong. So, they say, with no evidence, this means the end of the temple, not the End of the world. Fortunately two verses later, in Mark 13:32 we find:
As for the exact day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor even the son, no one, except the Father.
Although this saying is not attested independently of Mark, Fundamentalists believe it is authentic because the early church would not have fabricated it. And though Jesus as an Essene can be seen saying it, if he had not, there is an excellent reason why the early church might have wanted to add it—precisely to explain why Jesus had not returned as expected. Unsurprisingly, the conclusion of the Fundamentalist pseudo-scholars is that Mark 13:32 can only mean that Jesus did not proclaim that the end was sure to be imminent.
Since the End was only possibly imminent, Jesus’s message must have been:
The End is nigh! …Er, well, …it could be, couldn’t it?
Though Fundamentalists argue that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, he was one who wasn’t sure when the End was due. Plainly an infallible man cannot have gone around saying, “The End is nigh”, when 2000 years later it has still not arrived. Presumably when earnest evangelical types go around e-mailing us all with the message that Jesus is “coming soon”, they omit “Well, he still could be”.
Just a few years after this death, some of his followers were indeed anticipating the End within their own lifetimes. But Fundamentalists explain that the future Son of Man sayings led “some Christians to the erroneous conclusion that Jesus had spoken of a necessarily imminent end”.
Whenever he might have been coming, Fundamentalists think Jesus knew about it because he saw himself as the Son of Man of Daniel 7. The gospel sayings about the future Son of Man all come from the historical Jesus because they meet the criteria of double dissimilarity and multiple independent attestation.
Son of Man
They meet the criterion of dissimilarity because the coming Son of Man was neither a Jewish expectation nor part of early Christian theology. In Daniel 7, the “one like unto a son of man” stands for Israel’s heavenly champion, Michael, the archangel, and the beasts going before it are the nations of Israel’s oppressors. Daniel 7 makes its symbolism quite clear (Dan 7:17-18, 23-27). Nevertheless, we know that Essenes took on board curiously idiosyncratic interpretations of the scriptures as the need took them, even if other Jews did not, but if Jesus did this, it would mean that he was an Essene of some sort. Do the Fundamentalists mean to take on a theory that would place Jesus among or alongside the Essenes?
Otherwise, what was the passage in Daniel supposed to have meant to Jews and early Christians and why was Jesus the only person who read “one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven” as meaning that someone like a son of man was coming on the clouds of heaven?
Fundamentalist pseudo-scholars claim that the coming Son of Man is not part of early Christian theology because there is no evidence of it outside the gospels. But the gospels are the only evidence we have about what the earliest Christians believed. The problem for Fundamentalists is that the gospels are considered by them as God-given truth, independent of the beliefs of the early Christians, and these beliefs came from the gospels and not vice-versa. So, disregarding this and since no one has anything else for over a century, they dishonestly say that early Christians did not believe in the imminently coming son of man.
Furthermore, the future Son of Man sayings are not multiply attested. Some occur in Mark and some in Q, but none of the sayings are attested in two independent sources. So, Fundamentalists say they should be taken as authentic because the general category is multiply attested even though individual sayings are not. Again the Fundamentalist argument essentially begs the question of which sayings are genuine by presuming that all of them are.
That some early Christians misunderstood or deliberately changed what Jesus meant is acknowledged among critical scholars. That early Christians reinterpreted or misinterpreted the career and teaching of their master is accepted as likely.
Not only did Jesus predict the coming of the Son of Man, he believed that he himself was that Son of Man. Jesus knew he was the Son of Man who was going to return to earth on the clouds, it is just that he didn’t know quite when.
According to Fundamentalists, Daniel 7 was essential to Jesus’s understanding of who he was and what God wished him to do and proclaim. Since only Jesus himself could explain quite how he came to believe this—if he did—the Fundamentalists demonstrate their remarkable facility to see into the mind of God in such a way that makes saviours superfluous.
Fundamentalists point out that Jesus’s main way of talking was in wisdom sayings. No one disputes that Jesus was influenced by this tradition. According to Fundamentalists, however, Jesus not only taught wisdom, he was Wisdom, even though wisdom was traditionally depicted as female.
When Jesus said, “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds (Mt 11:19)”, he meant himself. In Q 13:34-35, the lament over Jerusalem, Jesus saw his rejection by Jerusalem as the rejection of God’s Wisdom. When Jesus quotes Wisdom (“The Wisdom of God said…”) in Luke 11:49, he “may have identified himself directly as God’s Wisdom”. Fundamentalists explain Jesus sayings are often sapiential in form, content, and style. So, Jesus’s self-understanding was not innate but something he had to learn. Wisdom incarnate, who has an intimate knowledge of God’s brain, had to read wisdom literature to pick up clues about his career!
In John’s gospel (Jn 20:28), Thomas addresses Jesus as “my God”. Fundamentalists believe that Jesus would have agreed with Thomas that he was God. Since Jesus was a Jew, the God that Jesus believed himself to be must have been the God of the Jews, Yehouah, the creator of the universe. While this came to be the Christian view, no sane Jew could have countenanced such a blasphemy.
For Fundamentalists, the task of biblical scholarship is to provide exegetical cover for the truth of theological tradition. Using their methods of seeking the historical Jesus leads to an incarnate divine being called Wisdom—effectively the brain of God. But God’s brain is unsure when the End of the World might be and his message to humanity was only that the End of the world might be coming soon. If this was at the center of Jesus’s message, then Wisdom had nothing wise to say, and God has played us all for fools.
Based on a review by Robert J Miller in the Higher Critical Review
