Q&A 156
Q. All three previous hypotheses - Lord, liar and lunatic - assumed that Jesus claimed divinity. Suppose he didn't. Suppose this claim is a myth (in the sense of fiction). Suppose the liar is not Jesus but the New Testament texts.
A. Have to admit this is becoming perhaps the most common intellectual reason why Christians have lost their faith in the twentieth century much more than the problem of evil or the progress of science.
Q. Hehe! You haven't answered my question - why couldn't Christ's divinity be neither a lie nor a lunacy but a myth, like the myths about Buddha being a god - myths that grew up after the historical Buddha, who claimed only to be a supremely enlightened man?
I mean, overdone hero worship easily tends to divinize the hero; isn't this the simplest and most reasonable explanation for the data about Jesus?
A. No. And there are a good two hands-full of reasons.
Q. I'm very interested in hearing all of them. Don't leave out any.
A. Ok. So. The data themselves make the myth hypothesis impossible. Here's how.
1. If the same neutral, objective, scientific approach is used on the New Testament texts as is used on all other ancient documents, then the texts prove remarkably reliable. Complex, clever hypothesis follows another with bewildering rapidity and complexity in the desperate attempt to debunk, "demythologize" or demean the data - like declawing a lion. No book in history has been so attacked, cut up, reconstituted and stood on its head as the New Testament. Yet it still lives - like Christ himself.
2. The state of the manuscripts is very good. Compared with any and all other ancient documents, the New Testament stands up as ten times more sure. For instance, we have five hundred different copies earlier than A.D. 500. The next most reliable ancient text we have is the Iliad, for which we have only fifty copies that date from five hundred years or less after its origin. We have only one very late manuscript of Tacitus' Annals, but no one is reluctant to treat that as authentic history. If the books of the New Testament did not contain accounts of miracles or make radical, uncomfortable claims on our lives, they would be accepted by every scholar in the world. In other words, it is not objective, neutral science but subjective prejudice or ideology that fuels skeptical Scripture scholarship.
The manuscripts that we have, in addition to being old, are also mutually reinforcing and consistent. There are very few discrepancies and no really important ones. And all later discoveries of manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, have confirmed rather than refuted previously existing manuscripts in every important case. There is simply no other ancient text in nearly as good a shape.
(To be continued)
7th July 2017