Evangelical Realism

(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 10.)

Imagine, for a moment, that Jesus has been accused of rape, or child molesting, or some other nasty crime. You, as judge, need to decide whether or not Jesus is guilty of the charge, and you ask to see the evidence. The evidence, however, consists of a book written by a man who was not present when the crime occurred, in which the crime is described. You are asked to convict Jesus on the grounds that the man who wrote the book named a couple dozen well-known political and religious leaders, a comparable number of important cities and trade routes, and a few observations about the weather. Since he has spelled all the names right, you are asked to conclude that the man is a meticulous historian who must have been, or had access to, actual eyewitnesses.

Is this enough evidence to convict Jesus of the crime?

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 10.)

The first time I heard the term chutzpah, it was defined in terms of a man who has just murdered his parents, asking the judge to be lenient on the grounds that he’s just lost his mom and dad. It’s a kind of breathtaking outrageousness that substitutes brash boldness for common sense, and it’s a term that seems almost tailor-made for certain apologetic arguments.

You see, some apologetic arguments are just plain poor. They overlook obvious facts, they beg the listener to jump to credulous and superstitious conclusions, or they just don’t make any sense. Yet despite what might seem like fatal problems, they manage to be quite popular and enduring. They are effective because they have that special chutzpah that makes you want to believe that the apologist must have some kind of valid point to make, because nobody could possibly expect an argument like that to stand on its own.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 10.)

We’re continuing to look at Geisler and Turek’s argument that Luke and other New Testament writers ought to be believed uncritically because of such feats of historical accuracy as spelling the names of local cities and political leaders correctly. As we saw last week, God’s failure to show up in real life means that all of our faith must be based on trusting men, and Chapter 10 works hard to establish the claim that we shouldn’t entertain any doubts or suspicions about what Luke and other NT writers tell us, no matter what they tell us, because they are “eyewitnesses” (or at least have some sort of access to eyewitnesses), even if it’s not always clear what they’re supposed to be eyewitnesses of.

Geisler and Turek make the same argument with respect to Luke’s gospel as for the book of Acts: Luke correctly identified specific historical figures, and therefore we should accept, without any doubt or skepticism, all of his other claims as well. In a way, they are to be commended: they are basing their argument on the principle that the truth is consistent with itself, and that a witness, even an eyewitness, should be judged in terms of how consistent their testimony is with the real-world facts. That’s a good, reliable standard of evidence, but if we apply it equally to all of Luke’s testimony, we find that there are some problems.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 10.)

God’s consistent and universal failure to show up in real life is an undeniable fact with an inescapable consequence: we have no choice but to rely upon men to tell us about God, in His absence. For this reason, Christian apologists like Geisler and Turek have to put a lot of effort into making sure we’re willing to believe what men tell us. Chapter 10 gives us the full treatment.

Do the New Testament documents contain eyewitness testimony? Let’s begin by taking a look at the eyewitness claims of the New Testament writers.

If you accept the plain reading of the text, the New Testament certainly contains eyewitness testimony. Notice how many times various apostles claim to be eyewitnesses:

G&T follow this with a list of NT verses where the speaker or writer claims to be a witness or to have seen and heard something. But notice how this particular argument begins: “If you accept the plain reading of the text…” As I’ve mentioned before, the field of apologetics is not intended to convince unbelievers, it’s intended primarily to convince believers. The conservative, evangelical Christian, upon reading these words, will be encouraged to embrace the conclusion because conservative evangelical Christians are committed to what they see as the “plain reading” of the text. In a way, it’s a sort of rallying cry, a way of saying, “Everybody on our side, get over here.” Given what follows, it’s not surprising that G&T would want to make sure their target audience is rooting for the right side from the very beginning.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 9.)

In examining the documentary evidence for the text of the New Testament, Geisler and Turek have consistently blurred the distinction between having an accurate record of what Christians were saying early on, and the accuracy of the sayings themselves. Reacting to the suggestion that the New Testament is unreliable because the documents weren’t written until long after the events they describe, G&T seem to be assuming that if they can make the documents sound close enough to the A.D. 30’s, they will have proven that the documents are reliable. That’s a logical fallacy, however:

If my pet is not a mammal, then my pet is not a dog.

My pet is a mammal.

Therefore my pet is a dog. (Oops, my pet is a ferret!)

If the New Testament documents were not written before 100AD, then they are not reliable. Geisler and Turek are saying that the manuscripts were written before 100AD, and therefore they are (allegedly) reliable—the same logical fallacy as is illustrated above. In trying to answer the skeptics, however, they accidentally betray the fact that there is indeed good reason to doubt the reliability of the testimony within the documents. And not just because they portray God as behaving in ways that are markedly different from what we see in real life.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 9.)

Geisler and Turek have been looking at the manuscript evidence for the New Testament, and they cite 1 Cor. 15 as proof that the resurrection story goes back as to within a few years, and possibly only 18 months, of the events it purports to describe. As we saw last time, however, 1 Cor. 15 might actually suggest that the Gospel evolved, from an early version in which Jesus rose spiritually, to the eventual orthodox story we have today. Geisler and Turek follow this conclusion with a promise to look into the skeptical objections to Gospel authenticity, but this problem is not one that they happen to address. And with their answers to the objections they do deal with, they only dig them in deeper.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 9.)

Last week we looked at 1 Cor. 15, which Geisler and Turek hail as being a record of a very early version of the resurrection story. Unfortunately for their apologetic, the reason Paul wrote chapter 15 is because, as verse 12 tells us, he was unhappy with the number of believers who did not buy this whole resurrection business. His response was first to emphasize that the resurrection was central to the gospel, and second to argue that a spiritual resurrection was better than merely bringing back the original, perishable body. And that’s a pair of arguments that’s actually more consistent with the idea that the resurrection story was originally about a spiritual resurrection, and only later morphed into an orthodox dogma of a literal, physical resurrection.

Obviously, Geisler and Turek didn’t explore any of that, and talked about something else instead. They see the 1 Cor. 15 account has having a different significance entirely.

Why is this important? Because, as Gary Habermas points out, most scholars (even liberals) believe that this testimony was part of an early creed that dates right back to the Resurrection itself—eighteen months to eight years after, but some say even earlier. There’s no possible way that such testimony could describe a legend, because it goes right back to the time and place of the event itself. If there was ever a place that legendary resurrection could not occur it was Jerusalem, because the Jews and the Romans were all to eager to squash Christianity and could have easily done so by parading Jesus’ body around the city.

Notice that Geisler and Turek are preaching a literal resurrection, so right away they bring up the empty tomb argument that is so conspicuously absent from Paul’s early testimony about the content of the gospel. If the issue is whether or not Jesus’ physical body returned to life, the most direct and obvious place to start is with the current disposition of the corpse. And, while it’s a bogus argument—given the climate, it wouldn’t be too hard for the disciples to keep the body out of Jewish/Roman hands until it had decayed to the point of being unrecognizable—it’s still quite effective in persuading the unwary, which is why Christians keep using it.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 9.)

We’ve gone back as far as the AD 50’s, and found that at least some of the New Testament documents are likely to have been written within a couple decades (give-or-take) of the death of Jesus. Today, Geisler and Turek want to push this back even further, and give us a glimpse into what they see as testimony dating back to within a mere eighteen months of the Crucifixion.

Some New Testament Books Were Penned in the 40s and 50s A. D., with Sources from the 30s (Only a Few Years After the Death of Jesus)—As certain as we are about the date of Luke’s records, there is no doubt from anyone—including the most liberal of scholars—that Paul wrote his first letter to the church at Corinth (which is in modern-day Greece) sometime between 55 and 56. In this letter, Paul speaks about moral problems in the church and then proceeds to discuss controversies over tongues, prophecies, and the Lord’s Supper. This, of course, demonstrates that the church in Corinth was experiencing some kind of miraculous activity and was already observing the Lord’s Supper within 25 years of the resurrection.

The “miraculous activity,” it should be pointed out, consisted of people talking. Some people were babbling and claiming to have been inspired by the Holy Spirit to babble. Others spoke plain language and claimed to be revealing the mysteries of God (none of which, sadly, were preserved for our edification). But talking, nonetheless. Geisler and Turek are quick to leap to the conclusion that “miraculous activity” was being historically documented in 1 Corinthians, but the documents themselves do not actually support anything more than the kind of hokum you can watch on the 700 Club any day of the week.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 9.)

It’s time to put the New Testament documents to the test. Geisler and Turek have composed a list of seven questions which, as we saw before, are intended to make the documents look like they pass the test of history. The first question posed is, “Do we have early testimony?” The answer is, “Yes—depending on how you define ‘early’…”

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 9.)

Geisler and Turek are ready to begin their arguments for why the New Testament documents should be regarded as accurate history, but first they want to look at some general objections and try and get those out of the way. The objections are:

1. History cannot be known.
2. The NT documents contain miracles.
3. The NT writers were biased.
4. Converts are not objective.

Geisler and Turek take each of the above objections in turn, and show how they are not valid objections. Or at least, they show that the first one is not valid, and they try to show that the other three aren’t, either.

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