Truth
Edwin Yamauchi and the Heart of Evangelism
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
He that Believeth
Edwin M Yamauchi is a Christian who is a professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He is obviously not a simple man and yet he can write as a conclusion to two articles in Christianity Today (March 15 and March 29, 1974):
For the Resurrection of Christ to be more than a beautiful Easter story, each person needs to believe in his heart that God has raised Christ from the dead and to confess with his mouth Jesus as Lord.
He is not just talking about Christians. He is saying that every individual should be Christian then the biblical myth of Easter will mean something! His reason for saying this is that the apostle, John, wrote in his gospel:
I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.John 11:25
This highly intelligent and well placed man apparently cannot see that he is inviting everyone in the world to buy a pig in a poke. If you believe an incredible and—all Christians agree—unprecedented, unique and quite impossible tale, then you will get eternal life but not otherwise. Why should an educated man want to talk such nonsense? Is he a crook? Is he stupid after all? Does he think that by doing it he will improve his own chances of eternal life even more?
What Motivates a Christian?
It is hard to say what motivates any particular Christian. Most are ignorant and superstitious, but we cannot expect a university professor to be ignorant or superstitious, surely. Many have been crooks. That is certain—history shows it. Christianity is the perfect scam. No one can prove it is a scam unless they die, and when you die your days of proving anything have ended. So unscrupulous people have become Christians to exploit the gullible ever since the Galilaean breathed his last. Why can the Christians not see through the trickery?
The answer is that they are scared! They persuade themselves it is safer to believe than not to believe. By believing, they make sure that their souls are secure in the life after death, but if they do not believe they think they will be consumed forever in the fires of hell. Better then to believe and be on the safe side.
The trouble then arises for them that God knows! The Christian myth is that God is omniscient—he knows everything! He therefore knows that Christians who are just hedging their bets are not sincere and so do not really believe. They are just adopting belief as a posture to be on the safe side! God knows this so they are doomed to hell fire anyway.
At this point any rational person will say to themselves, “Right. Well, I’ll just lead as good a life as I can and leave you to judge, God”—which is just what any good God surely expects of us. But the psychology of Christianity is that God is a bad-tempered tyrant who demands to be worshipped!
Christians have to fawn to him and cringe to him as if God were not a good and rational God but a crazed megalomaniac who will not save anyone unless they physically and mentally bow and scrape before him. Christians, having realised that this megalomaniac God knows their attempt at deception, feel they have to prove to Him they are sincere. This is the heart of evangelism.
They prove that they are sincere by devoting their lives to recruiting more souls to the cause. It is like a chain letter and the reason Christianity is so missionary and so successful. The punters themselves do the recruiting! By so doing they feel that they can show God they really mean it when they say they believe, and by getting even more souls lined up, God might nod them through at Judgement Day, or at least stop concentrating on them as sinners.
Largesse
Curiously, this appeals particularly to intelligent people because they have the wherewithal to persuade the gullible masses of the benefits of Christianity for souls. They can set themselves targets and cut notches to mark their converts. They become respected within the church and get perks, kudos and esteem from the church leaders. They might even become a church leader and start to skim off a little of the largesse that the simple keep putting into the church in the hopes of buying eternal life.
Does Professor Yamauchi do this? I do not know, but many do, and many more have done in the past. I repeat, it is difficult to understand why intelligent and educated people deliberately try to fool others, for that is what it is. Yamauchi might be a professor but he has no more evidence than anyone else alive that there is any extension of consciousness after death. All experience and common sense tells you there is not.
The only thing that persuades anyone there is, is the reluctance of most people to die. Mostly people want to remain conscious—that is, alive. Yet death, on all the evidence we have, is the end of the person. Death is psychologically hard to face but it would be far more honest for intelligent people, if no others, to face it and not to persuade people to put themselves in the hands of people who pretend they can mediate the path to eternal life to take advantage of others.
All it can possibly do is give those mediators a comfortable life on earth for exploiting the fears and simplicity of the bulk of human kind.
If God really is good then they had better start worrying again about the destiny of their souls, because He must know all of this too. What should be His response when He sees these deceivers living comfortably off the mites of widows?
The truth is that most of these evangelists don’t care because they do not believe their own tales. They are for the consumption of their gullible flocks. The evangelists are smarter. They know that they can live comfortably in this life—the only one anyone is sure of. They do it off the backs of the poor and simple, the insecure and the depressed.
Really they are the demons to be cast out.
So is Yamauchi one of these people? Without knowing him personally it is hard to tell. He might just be one of those with a soul of jelly, trembling before his Lord in abject fear. All there is to be said is that he is not to be trusted because, whether he personally is sincere or not, he is on the side of those who sell magical quack ointments for unhealthy souls. You can buy it, if you think your soul needs it, but you will never know that it works.
Discussion
From I Yama Defender
First of all I would like to say that I have no idea who you are or what your creditials are, but I find your anonymity somewhat cowardly since you seem to feel inflated enough to criticize one of the greatest biblical scholars of all time.
Well, you do not begin by giving any indication that you are intelligent, so how am I supposed to react? The page that you read is part of a large website full of evidence from many sources and including a biography and a personal account of the author, but you have not checked it out, and even confess your stupidity. I doubt that anything you say after this could be respected by anyone.
Personally, I am an agnostic, and I reserve judgement about the existence of any god because I feel that there is not enough evidence one way or the other to convince me. Yet I have studied extensively with Dr Yamauchi and I can tell you a few things about him. One—he is one of the most intelligent men I have ever met, that is, he has studied over 22 languages, published over 200 articles, participated in at least 16 books. What this means is that in a way, he does have more evidence for his opinions simply because he has studied them for the last half century.
Well, it does not matter if Yamauchi has written a thousand books if they are all crap, and Yamauchi, however intelligent he might be, is convinced of God and his aim in life is to defend Him. I do not believe in supernatural almighty ogres, but if there were one, I cannot see why He needs a human being to lie for Him. Yamauchi is not scientific and therefore his views are not merely to be disregarded, they are to be disdained!
Two—he has complete respect for other people’s beliefs. He has never once in the time that I have known him tried to convert me, a class, or anyone else. He teaches from a neutral perspective and lets the evidence fall where it may.
You prove yourself to be at best naïve. I have read what Yamauchi has to say. It is not neutral! If you think it is, then you either lack discernment, or you are a liar. You are either a Christian in which case you are a liar, or you cannot see what is plainly put before your face, that Yamauchi is not neutral, so you are not discerning!
The article you cited is of course geared toward the christian reader—it was written for a christian journal! He was not trying to convert us all, but giving other christian readers examples of faith.
You are now saying that he is an opportunist, who will make a buck anyway that suits him. But he is not a Christian! This is childish. No neutral scholar could write such a tendentious article. It would quite obviously ruin his reputation for neutrality. Yamauchi has no such reputation. Besides that, as you say, Yamauchi has written more than this one article, and some of it I have read myself. Yamauchi makes his views utterly plain, but evidently you cannot see them. You are lacking something.
You have a right to your opinion, but you should express it in an intelligent and researched way.
You need to show that you know what intelligence is before you criticise it in others. The website that you logged in to to read the Yamauchi article has over 200 long pages which you are not intelligent enough to have checked out before you make your fatuous allegations. You might have studied with Yamauchi, but he taught you nothing about scholarhip. Scholars check things! Only Christians get over excited and yap like dogs.
You imply that your article is for those who are intelligent enough to not believe, but what you don’t understand is that faith, knowledge and intelligence are all wholly different. Some of the “smartest” men in history have been religious so it is not a matter of mental ability.
Knowledge and intelligence are incompatible with faith! Just to believe requires evidence to be discounted or ignored. In history, people had no option but to be Christian or be incinerated. It follows that intelligent people chose not to be incinerated. In more recent years, when people have had a fairer choice, intelligent people by a large margin choose not to be Christian unless they are rogues out to get a comfortable living out of widows and cretins. I constantly point out that Christians come in two varieties, the shepherds who take from the platter and the sheep who put into it. Where do you suppose the funds for these Christian colleges in the US that employ people like Yamauchi came from? Do you seriously think Yamauchi would cut off the branch upon which he comfortably sits by declaring that he has evidence that Christianity is a fraud. Wake up!
In my opinion, if you want your articles to sound intelligent I suggest you do the footwork of research behind them and not simply spout off at the mouth.
You do not even know what intelligence is, but think you can tell others. You cannot even check the pages you are on before you spout your inanities, and yet think you have the authority to criticize. You are a liar or a dunce. What you cannot understand is that I am interested in exposing Christian frauds like Yamauchi in no uncertain terms. If you do not like it, do not read it, but if you want to engage in a discussion, at least have the brains to check that what you are saying has any basis first. You say you are agnostic, but sound like a Christian. Christians typically spout what they “know” before they know what they are spouting about.
In any case, I hope that you can see Dr Yamauchi in a different light, because as I said, I am not a believer and I have the utmost respect for the man. He is truly one of the greatest living scholars on the ancient near eastern world.
I have not the slightest doubt that Yamauchi can be personally charming. No confidence trickster is going to aim to be unpleasant. A scholar is not just someone who knows a lot about something. To be a scholar, the person also has to be objective. It is impossible to be a Christian scholar because a Christian has already adopted a position irrespective of any scholarship. That is what shines out of every word that Yamauchi writes. If you cannot see it, then he has beguiled you, as he and his evangelic friends have no doubt beguiled many others. As I said, you seem naïve.
Christians have always been liars. “Christians are the best liars. They lie innocently”, as Nietzsche put it. Yamauchi happily leads the tradition. But innocence? No way! A scholar is a skeptic, not a believer. That is how scholarship works. It demands proof, not excuses.
Your position is in the realm of the absolutely hilarious. Can you not see that your own views, including the views of science, also involve their own presuppositions—no different from the christian views you are denouncing.
Now that really is funny!
Look, I agree that I didn’t read your entire website, and in reality, I have no desire to. But it is plain that you have convictions—convictions that are just as founded or unfounded as the ones you despise.
Are they just as founded or just as unfounded? I cannot see how they can be both. You are trying to equate founded convictions with unfounded ones. Christian convictions are unfounded. You are confounded.
Science wholly trusts the senses—something which Berkeley argued to be impossible without a god.
I assume you mean Bishop Berkeley and not Busby Berkeley—this hilarity is getting out of hand. Why should I be impressed by the musings of a Christian bishop, and especially one from 300 years ago and who was somewhat crackers?
On the other hand religion wholly trusts the soul, or reason (in a Cartesian sense), which as we all know has been denounced by its lack of physical evidence, but has been argued for by the likes of Plato, Kierkegaard, Kant, etc.
After a millennium or more of Christian newspeak preventing any thought at all, it is not surprising that those who began to think when they could, couched their ideas in religious notions. We now have no need of them.
I realize that you have been convinced of the superiority of your views, but the matter of the fact is that relativism pervades and since the beginning of history the arguments on either side balance each other. For instance—is it any different to say god created the universe or that at one point everything was infinitely condensed into the size of a proton and that before this point nothing can be said? They both require a leap of faith.
Consider what you are saying. Science has been able to discover that the universe seems to have started as a singularity in space-time. Those discoveries were based upon observation and reasoning. Christianity has no notion of God creating the universe from a singularity. Pinching their ideas from the Jewish scriptures, whose authors pinched them from Babylonian sources, the Christians believe God had a quite a different way of creating things. Only the Christian ideas require a leap of faith, not the former.
Just the same with science. Science has never even answered basic questions such as—is the object we perceive the same as the object in itself?
Why do you say this? Science says that what is sensed in the brain is not the object itself. Science, not theology has discovered photons and explained how photons reflect from ordinary objects into the eye where they send electrical impulses into the brain, allowing the object to be perceived. It is quite impossible to equate these hypotheses based on observation and experiment with theological conjecture which is founded on nothing and ends up with nothing.
These are some of the reasons why I am agnostic—not a christian as your fierce email tried to insinuate.
I have to go on what you tell me, and that led me to think you were pretty slack for a critic taught by a great evangelical intellect.
In reality you are no different from the christian missionaries you so hate—you simply follow another group under another label and at the same time violently accuse every one of being beguiled, disillusioned and uninformed when you are of the same stock. The fact is, I have been on your side of the argument before and I realize the motives behind what you are saying. I too have been a hate-monger towards religions. But after much study, I have realized that no one has yet to figure it all.
Well, you can sit on your fence, if you wish. It is your prerogative, but despite what you say about my being the same as Christians, I have never burnt one at the stake. Nor can I see that I am of the same stock as people who believe in a horde of utterly unproven entities. Scientific entities like fields might seem as unreal as demons to the man on the Clapham omnibus, but fields are proposed to explain observations that can be made, measured and reproduced. No one has yet been able to do the same with souls or spirits. They are empty words meant to beguil simpletons, and they work extremely well because there are a lot of simpletons about. That is why Christianity has always been against scientific knowledge.
As for hate-mongering, I fear you are being absurd—like a Christian in fact. Christians still do not like to be criticized at all, and anyone who does so is hate-mongering to them. What I do is frankly put forward as much evidence as I can find to show that Christianity is not only ill-founded, it is lies. Professional Christians, in other words, know full well what they are doing. They seek comfort and power without responsibility, and so long as people are superstitious and gullible they will get away with their roguery. So, to reprise your final words, after much study I have come to the opposite conclusion from you. But then I have not been under the baneful influence of the evangelical archaeologists—clever men those!
From David Race
I read your views and one wonders why Edwin Yamauchi was even mentioned.
It seems to me that I could have used the name David Race just as well as Edwin Yamauchi, except that no one knows who David Race is. The article applies to all of you frauds.
It was a skeptical tirade, and not a very good one at that.
You are entitled to your views, but I do not think they are “very good” either.
It sounds like you latched onto Dr Yamauchi because you ran across his name on the internet without really caring about why he is a Christian or considering his scholastic background.
I really do not see what the relevance of this is to the plain fact that he is a Christian fraud. The fact that he has a “scholastic background” makes his deception worse, because it inclines uncritical people to believe him.
He has written, co-written and edited various works in his field of study. Persia and the Bible, Pre-Christian Gnosticism, Stones and the Scriptures, and Jesus Under Fire (contributing author) are just a few.
I have not read these works and have no inclination to do so, because I have read other works by him, and in my view they are not scholarly. Scholarship requires objectivity, a quality that Christians cannot have and remain Christians. Yamauchi does not have it. No one other than Christians would read his books if they knew the truth.
Actually it is hard to imagine that you read anything but the last couple lines of his two part article. After all the title was Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History?
(http://www.leaderu.com/everystudent/easter/articles/yama.html)
It is hard to imagine that you can understand English, but I have to assume you can. The article illustrates that evangelism is part of the Christian fraud. It does not matter who the evangelist is, or why he is deluded enough to believe it. Rational examination shows that it is a confidence trick.
“I have tried to show that theories attributing the Resurrection of Christ to the borrowing of mythological themes, to hallucinations, or to alternative explanations of the empty tomb are improbable and are also inadequate to explain the genesis and growth of Christianity. To be sure, the Resurrection of Jesus is unprecedented, but Jesus himself is sui generis, unique. As Tenney remarks: ‘Although the resurrection was without precedent. it was not abnormal for Christ… He rose from the dead because it was the logical and normal prerogative of the Son of God.’ The historical question of the Resurrection of Christ differs from other historical problems in that it poses a challenge to every individual. Christ said (John 11:25): ‘I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’ For the Resurrection of Christ to be more than a beautiful Easter story, each person needs to believe in his heart that God has raised Christ from the dead and to confess with his mouth Jesus as Lord”.
I have tried to show that this is bullshit, and have devoted a lot of pages to so doing. It is bullshit, and intelligent men that propagate it are crooks and shysters. They have no excuse for it.
Assertions without a factual basis. I don’t think your ad hominem tactics, charged rhetoric and profanity merit further comment. I am sure Dr Yamauchi has better things to do then respond to the rantings of an intellectually dishonest skeptic, but one never knows. I am sure that there are far more respectful and thoughtful skeptics to direct a response to. Good day.
From Alicia
Concerning Edwin Yamauchi and the Heart of Evangelism—God’s Truth or Pious Lies? Science or Religion? AskWhy! Publications. After reading your article and the two email conversations that followed it, it saddens me that you completely blow your credibility by sounding like the one who “spouts what he ‘knows’ before he knows what he’s talking about”. Yours is the uninformed, emotional response. The people who wrote you come across as rational thinkers who have researched and considered their point of view. Every time you respond, you destroy your credibility as a real and critical skeptic, and you undermine your own arguments. Your responses did more to convince me that your views are illogical than anything the other writers said. You would do your cause a great service if you would cease to argue your point until you have become a true researcher and rational thinker.
It is impossible to answer this for the reason you criticize in me. It is “an uniformed, emotional response”. You like my critics’ message better than mine, but you say so merely as an opinion with no reasons. You say the critics were more rational but do not say why or give examples. I do not have to restate in my replies what I have already said in the article. I point out that Yamauchi’s claim to be a scholar is bogus. He is no scholar but uses a disguise of scholarship to uphold the view he holds with no scholarship at all. My arguments cannot be optimal for all readers, but many of those who do not like them have their own presuppositions—mainly Christian ones. I therefore suggest you consider your own standpoint.
If you want to pick on specifics that I can answer properly, please do so, and let us discuss them, but I can only answer an emotional response in general terms.
Regardless of my views, I can’t find any specifics in your viewpoint to pick on. I do hear a lot of anger—not sure where that comes from. Usually its come out from being hurt, and if that’s the case I’m sorry. Have a great day,
Thank you. I will. But if you cannot find anything specific to argue with in tens of megabytes of criticism of biblicists, then you are not concentrating. I am surprised that Christians get angry when Sun Moon or some other barmy sect wins over their children to their cranky views, but they cannot see that Christians began it all. If I am angry, it is because Christians tell people that they know things they do not, and weak and naive people are inclined to believe them. When people tell you things for which they have no proof or even evidence, then they are dangerous liars and confidence tricksters. I do not like seeing people tricked.
