He wrote:
I take the story of Jesus metaphorically too, like many biblical stories in the old testament. I take it as a story that wants to give us a theological message, which in the end is the important thing, wheter or not it happened.
The people who report the story, and who died for it in gruesome ways, neglected to make this clear to the people who crucified them, stabbed them, and stoned them to death. The key to understanding a text is not to ask, “What does it mean to me?” but “What did it mean to the people who wrote it?” Those people very obviously meant to say that they had seen Jesus Christ alive bodily after his death and had eaten fish with him and poked their finger in his wounds. Spiritualizing that away is rubbish. It’s either true or a lie.
He replied:
Interesting way of seeing it. True, we have to look at what it meant to the people of the time, it’s just that Jesus’ story has so many pagan parallels it is very hard to overlook, and I really feel that whether or not he resurrected or perform miracles is inconsequential to the christian or even catholic faith, because, again, what matters is it’s message. I never said I don’t believe in the Resurrection, though, because I do, I just think it’s not essential.
That the story of Jesus has a few “pagan parallels” means absolutely nothing about the historicity of the resurrection. The story of the Titanic has a few pagan parallels too (see every Greek myth warning of the danger of hubris). Indeed, a novel published 14 years before the Titanic disaster describes a ship called the "Titan" (about the size of Titanic) striking an iceberg (while going roughly 22 knots, like Titanic) on her maiden voyage (in April) and sinking at great loss of life because she only has half the number of lifeboats necessary but all the lifeboats required by law (like Titanic). What this means is not "Therefore the Titanic disaster is a myth based on previous tales" but rather "Human beings are sometimes capable of intuiting things about the nature of reality that later on find fulfilment." The pagan parallels to the resurrection are quite inexact and take place in cloud cuckoo land once upon a time. Nobody ever says Osiris actually lived. Corn gods who represent the cycle of the crops and the turn of the seasons were never taken for historical figures. In contrast, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth takes place in broad daylight during the reign of a Roman bureaucrat named Pontius Pilate and in front of 500 eyewitnesses, most of whom are still alive when Paul writes his first letter to the Corinthians in the mid-50s AD. What you get from Paul and the gospel writers is, extremely clearly, a claim of a personal encounter by multiple witnesses with a living, breathing person alive after death, not a hazy reverie about a myth from faerie land:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed. Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. - 1 Corinthians 15;3-20
What matters is indeed the message. And the message is nothing other than that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in time and on earth was found to be alive three days later and was seen and spoken with by many witnesses who were not concocting a myth but describing that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands” (1 John 1). If you do not grasp that the Resurrection is not only essential to the Christian message, but virtually all the news the Christian message has to give, you simply do not understand the Chrisian message at all. The gospels are accurately described as “passion narratives with long introductions”. The core of the gospels is not Jesus' miracles (which, yes, are also eyewitness accounts of things which actually happened and not mere morally instructive tales), nor his parables and sayings. All these things are spokes on the wheel. They gain meaning from the hub of the wheel: namely, the fact that Jesus, who is God in human flesh, died for our sins and rose again for our justification, so that we could receive his Holy Spirit and become partakers in the divine life. It is only in light of his resurrection and the power he gives us to live his life that his sayings and actions become intelligible. That some pagan myths (not to mention the entire Old Testament) anticipate this proves, not that it never happened, but that Jesus is the fulfilment of the longings of the human heart, both pagan and Jewish. Which is, by the way, precisely what he claimed to be.
Ask yourself: if the passion, death and resurrection are “inconsequential” to the message of the gospels, why does every gospel spend one quarter of its ink on a 72 hour period in the life of Jesus? Quite obviously, it’s because that 72 hour period is absolutely the essential core of the story. Everything else in the gospel is just preface, preparation, and commentary. The apostles do not go into the world with the message that Jesus the Nice Man gives us certain mythic underpinnings for an interesting new moral theory. They go into the world preaching, with almost monotonous insistence, "Jesus is God's Son and has been crucifed and raised from the dead. That, and only that, is the news they have.
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There are the 4 senses of scripture: literal, allegorical, moral & anagogical. If a person simply skips cherry-picks what they want out of a passage, then they’re not really reading scripture, they’re using it as a tool, or maybe a weapon. And that’s not what scripture is about.
Wonderful response…....clear, to the point yet respectful
Ah, yes. This is the mistake that almost all atheists and/or secular humanists make when I discuss the gospels with them. Presuming to know much about Jesus they instead show their ignorance. It’s all a charade anyways so that they can disbelieve in order that they might be excused for their ill behavior.
That’s my experience anyways. YMMV.
Quick note on the book you reference, “Futility.” While it was published long before Titanic sank and had some crazy similarities to the event, I looked into it years ago and walked away under the impression that the book had been revised after the Titanic sank. So there may not be so much of a great trick in that.
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” – Mere Christianity - C.S.Lewis
It sounds like this person has bought into what Andrew Sullivan wrote about in Newsweek a few weeks ago: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/andrew-sullivan-christianity-in-crisis.html
Sully,
The novella Futility (Wreck of the Titan) was revised slightly after the Titanic disaster. However, the changes were mostly to the description of the ship’s size and weight. The events of the book, the description of the ship as unsinkable, the fact of carrying only half the lifeboats needed, and the particulars of shipwreck by iceberg were all present in the original. It’s similar enough that Mark’s comparison to pagan myth still works.
Excellent article and response, Mark. I think we add to this confusion somewhat when we declare with capital letters that the Bible is “THE WORD OF GOD”. I wince when I see this sometimes proclaimed at Mass. It is incomprehensible to me that anyone who has actually read the Bible would believe that every word is of the same character. In some ways we mimic certain Protestant sects who worship the Bible and believe in “Sola Scriptura”. As Catholics we understand that the Bible is a collection of various works with various “degrees” of inspiration. Clearly, when Jesus is quoted by one of the Evangelists we are getting as close as we can to “THE WORD OF GOD”. But all of the rest requires much more interpretation and qualified understanding. I am happy to rely on our Church: its scholars, its clergy, and its saints to communicate what the Bible should mean to me.
This person maybe grew-up in one of the parishes I have attended. (Faith parishes for lack of sound doctrine.) How many times do we hear homilies, about these cute “stories” in the bible or worse a story from the Readers Digest or some Norman V. Peale crap? It’s no wonder people are confused. And as far as parallels from the bible to pagan tales in other cultures…people need to learn that all nations, tribes and people descended from Adam and Eve/Noah. So the prophecies and words that our common ancestors received from our first parents would naturally have been woven into the eventual myths of the ensuing societies.
I like your title referencing “a good-natured confused person.” I was once such a person, and I said such things—not because I wanted to ditch Christianity but because I was trying to find a middle ground that would make everyone happy and not demand too much of anyone. The compromise that I came up with was, “who cares if it really happened, as long as you end up in the same place in terms of how you behave?” It takes a lot of thought and a certain kind of seriousness to get past this pleasant and undemanding “compromise,” because it is so very consonant with everything one is told by our culture and every popular way of thinking: Believe whatever you want but don’t insist too much on its being true, because ‘What is truth?’” Of course, we all know who said THAT. At least in my case, this kind of thinking was on the whole positive, because it led me to eventually grapple with truth. I was partway there. And when life showed me that one does not, after all, “end up in the same place”—because being nice is not the same thing as being good and/or being holy—I had not rejected Christ. I had put Him on the back burner, so to speak. And while that’s not good, and I would never recommend it, neither is it hopeless. When I talk to such people now, they are very uncomfortable with any discussion about truth. They are wary of truth, because they have been taught nothing is really true. To say that Jesus Christ really did live, die, and return from the dead is to say that all sorts of other things might be true (once you admit SOMETHING might be true, you open the door to the idea that many things might be true—and many things might be FALSE). These days, about the worst thing you can do is say that some things are wrong in and of themselves. People don’t know what to do with that.
It drives me crazy when my liberal friends want to use Jesus’ messages about feeding the poor or healing the sick, but they totally ignore the way more important one about THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN. They don’t get that Jesus cares way more about sin than “free healthcare”.
Great article, but you didn’t address Confused Person’s idea that the Resurrection is not essential. C.P. believes in it, but doesn’t think it is that important.
This misses the whole story of salvation. The Son of God became man, the second Adam. Because of Adam, sin and DEATH entered the world. The Lamb of God triumphed over BOTH.
Not only did the resurrection happen, it was essential!
Keith, the Bible is most definitely the “WORD OF GOD”, and I don’t think there are any “degrees of inspiration”. I think you’re trying to get at a couple of different points that people often miss. First is that the Bible was inspired, not dictated. Each author put the message in his own words and chose words suited to his own audience. The second, is that while the Bible is one book, in the sense that it is all bound together, it is at the same time 73 different books, covering many different types of literature. In this sense it is more of a library than just a book, and each different type of literature must be read in a different way.
St. Augustine wrote, 16-centuries ago:-
It is incredible that Jesus Christ should have risen in the flesh and ascended with flesh into heaven;
it is incredible that the world should have believed so incredible a thing;
it is incredible that a very few men, of mean birth and the lowest rank, and no education, should have been able so effectually to persuade the world, and even its learned men, of so incredible a thing.
Of these three incredibles, the parties with whom we are debating refuse to believe the first;
they cannot refuse to see the second, which they are unable to account for if they do not believe the third.
City of God XXII. 5
Gail:
For what it’s worth, this person is basically in your old shoes. He’s not an atheist, just a young Catholic who wishes to think of himself as “not extreme”. That’s generally a healthy Catholic instinct, but he is applying it, not to the extremes the world proposes, but to the teachings of the Church. He is, as I say, confused.
mkc: I’ve actually been hoping that one of the bloggers here would address that article! Of course, none of the points that Sullivan so fondly makes are even close to being anything new, but his story being on the cover of Newsweek is pretty prestigious, thus I would think that it warrants some commentary.
Newsweek was recently sold for a dollar. Not the magazine. The whole corporation. Prestigious is not the word I’d use for it.
Lea S., here is a brilliant response by Fr Robert Barron: http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2012/04/07/andrew_sullivans_non-threatening_jesus_106468.html
Sorry, don’t mean to hijack your blog post, Mark, but I think the connection here is very relevant. The beliefs Confused Person express aren’t new. Faithful Catholics’ adherence to the One True Church founded by the Son of God Himself is one of the things that has kept them out of the public realm for the most part.
Another point to make about this is that part the “message” of Christianity is that the real Jesus is currently at the right hand of God, ruling and reigning over all of creation, not only as God but in his risen and glorified humanity. “The Lord said unto my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” This is, of course, all hogwash if the story of Jesus is an elaborate hoax. I love the point that N.T. Wright makes about all this: post-Enlightenment humans dispute the historicity of the Resurrection precisely because Jesus actually reigning as King on earth as in Heaven is quite inconvenient and challenging for people who wish that he would just stay in heaven. A risen Christ, actually reigning as King, demands our total allegiance, the obedience of faith!
Kreeft: “the unbeliever almost always believes that Jesus was a good man, a prophet, a sage. Well then, if he was a sage, you can trust him and believe the essential things he says. And the essential thing he says is that he is the divine Savior of the world and that you must come to him for salvation. If he is a sage, you must accept his essential teaching as true. If his teaching is false, then he is not a sage.”
http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/christ-divinity.htm
It’s good that you argue with these types of people, I used to be one, but good-natured or not, like the earlier posts you’ve done, there is one thing that always stands out: they have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Their direct knowledge is rock-bottom 0%, it is always second hand. If he had just read one “metaphorical” story from the Old Testament and one of the Gospels he wouldn’t be able to hold the stance he has on Jesus Christ. This is all things he’s “thought up” (or rather read on the internet and thought it sounded smart so he adopted it) without doing any actual research himself. The pagan parallels for example, do you believe he actually read those pagan stories and the Gospels and compared? Do you think he read something opposite to the anonymous user on the internet from whom he first read it? Forget about it! He just accepted it! Hey, a pagan God died and then came back? Well, that’s exactly the same thing as the Resurrection then. The end.
I write this because it disturbs me so much. We live in sick times.
I’m a Catholic, fairly conservative at that, but I can’t make sense out of this argument. People died for Jim Jones, people died for David Koresh. That didn’t prove anything. So some disciples died rather than admit to making the whole thing up - so did Jones and Koresh, who died along with their “disciples.” The argument will not persuade a non-believer, so why bother?
I believe through faith that the disciples were telling the truth. If someone doesn’t have faith, they have no evidence that they were.
Koresh’s followers didn’t die voluntarily. Some of Jones’ didn’t either. Koresh died in the same accident that claimed his followers. Jones shot himself, and thus got to go out at least partly on his own terms.
None of them knew for certain their teachings were false, AND we’re killed by others who would have been quite happy for them to tell the truth instead.
The latter is the situation of the Apostles and other witnesses of the Resurrection. Might they have been deluded? Sure. But the idea that they were knowingly lying when doing so put them in danger of terrible death, and they knew that the heavenly reward they preached was false, is considerably harder to swallow.
Stacy F.
I guess that depends on an atheist’s consideration of what is “hard to swallow.” Cults and war prove that mankind will kill and die for delusional ideas. From the atheist point of view (which I know fairly well, I was one for a few years before returning to the faith), it is much harder to believe that someone rose from the dead, or that God even had to permit the murder in the first place. Rising from the dead has no verifiable precedent in human history, but mass delusion has numerous examples, many of them recent. Thus, the atheist views the resurrection as “harder to swallow” than the idea that the disciples were deluded.
Tom R—
I think you’re right, but to my understanding the point of the argument being advanced is that the apostles were sincere in their belief in the literal resurrection. They may have all been deluded, sure, but they weren’t dying for a merely metaphorical reality or something they thought was a hoax.
Hear! Hear! “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” The Truth is not a “message,” the Truth is a Person.
I used to think just like this guy - then I started reading the Bible, reading about the Bible, and generally trying to make myself sound more sophisticated on ‘religious’ topics, so I could look down on folks for their ‘parochial’ take on the “Message” Jesus had to say; it totally backfired.
Anybody with half a brain - even somebody like me, with only the pretense of half a brain - can see that the Gospel is about something that happened.
“In contrast, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth takes place in broad daylight during the reign of a Roman bureaucrat named Pontius Pilate and in front of 500 eyewitnesses”
And yet there are no contemporaneous accounts. Either it was so commonplace that it was not important or else it never happened.
“If you do not grasp that the Resurrection is not only essential to the Christian message”
But it doesn’t make any sense. There was never an Adam and Eve, never a Garden of Eden, never any “Original Sin”. So there was not a “Fall” and no need for “remission of sins”.
So it’s just the way that a religion tries to control the actions of both its believers and non-believers. The proper goal of every religion is theocracy.
IVF is “evil”? - that’s simply an insane attempt at control.
“He would either be a lunatic——or else he would be the Devil of Hell.”
Or it’s a completely made-up mythology for religious purposes - control of thought and deed.
“Because of Adam, sin and DEATH entered the world.”
Pure mythology.
“people need to learn that all nations, tribes and people descended from Adam and Eve/Noah.”
Pure mythology.
“they totally ignore the way more important one about THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN.”
Because that’s completely irrational. There is no such thing as “sin”.
“Anybody with half a brain - can see that the Gospel is about something that happened.”
Or else it’s simply a very well-made piece of fiction. With a wonderful motivation - eternal life.
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