19. Evidence: Magic, memory, and making it up

One of the concerns that plagued me through my theological examination of the Bible is how I can know if any given scripture is true. If I see it happen in my own life—say, if it tells me that healing will happen if you pray a certain way, and then I get healed praying that way—then that’s pretty good evidence.

But if the scripture is telling me something I have never seen or never experienced, such as “if you do this you will be saved and if you do this other thing you will be punished,” and I have no first hand experience of either the rewards or consequences of certain kinds of living after death, I’m going to have to have some other criteria for knowing that the scripture is true (or not).

Or I’m going to have to take a leap of faith.

The sum of its parts

And now that I knew that the Bible had so many moving parts—so many authors, times, situations, machinations between when the words were first spoken or written to finding themselves in their final printed form on the page or screen that I’m reading—that this process had to be applied—separately—to each part of scripture individually.

In discovering the Bible’s heterogeneity, I had found the perfect answer to the people who said, “If one part of the Bible is not true, then none of it is true.”

Basically, that’s nonsense.

There are enough different parts of the Bible from different origin sources that one can be true and one can be false. It can be untrue that slavery, making raped girls marry their attackers, making women shut up in church, celebrating the destruction of enemies’ babies in battle, angels mating with humans, and so on. There’s some troubling stuff in there, but it doesn’t mean that the overall Gospel message isn’t true.

On top of that you have things that aren’t necessarily proven by science such as the Earth being created in 7 24-hour days, or things that are historically inaccurate, such as multiple timelines for Jesus’ ministry. It can still be true that God loves us and wants to redeem us, and that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the 3rd day to fulfill the promises of the Kingdom of God.

So let’s get that “it’s all gotta be true or none of it’s true” idea out of our heads.

However, scrutinizing each part of the Bible separately is a lot more work. It would be so much easier to accept it all uncritically, or throw it all out uncritically. However, the truth requires more attention than that.

The way the Bible was built

When I heard about how the New Testament was constructed, I was both worried and excited that I had found the final bit of evidence that would prove it was all fake. For one, the Gospels—the 4 stories of Jesus life, death, and resurrection—were written decades after Jesus’ death. John was written 100 years later.

All of this happened in an age with no news footage, with not so much as a tape recorder, no internet, no Wikipedia, no microfiche, nothing but word of mouth to corroborate a story that may have shifted and changed over the years, passing from mouth to mouth until someone finally wrote it down.

The fact that the Gospels weren’t written until after the letters of Paul were written meant that there was this influential preacher—who had never even met Jesus when he was alive—who was affecting what people thought and believed about Jesus, and helping steer the story, which may have also affected the Gospels themselves.

Then learning about the construction of the Gospels—that sections of Mark were contained in Matthew and Luke, and that Matthew and Luke also shared material from another unknown source, and that John came much later with a Greek-influenced poetical/philosophical take that changed the circumstances and timeline, and was very mannered and structured, and that there were details added obviously to bolster the theological story and show fulfilled prophecy, even when they were unlikely to be scientifically or historically true, all added up to something too artificial for me to believe at face value.

This may have all been just another legendary story, where a story of the mundane—such as another preacher shouting about the end of the world—becomes miraculous, and people start believing Jesus rose from the dead and was the savior of mankind.

It made me think of a news story I head once read in one of the aliens and sex-scandals tabloid magazines at the grocery counter. It was about a small town where someone saw a faint image of Jesus on the side of their barn. People came from miles around to come and revere this miraculous image that appeared in the white paint of the barn’s clapboard siding.

It was only after word got out that a man came along and revealed that months before, he had put up a Willie Nelson concert poster on that wall, which had subsequently been painted over enough to look like the faint image of Jesus coming up through the whitewash.

But my professor gave me some hope that we were reading more than a fantasy story about a messianic preacher who just turned out to be Outlaw Willie.

The evidence communicated face-to-face

We would have to build the evidence slowly, from the bottom up, but it turned out that at least some of what the Gospels said was solid.

The first thing to notice were the things about Jesus that were embarrassing. These were the events that were most likely true. If the apostles had been making up stories about Jesus, and trying to prove that he was the Messiah, the true Son of God, they would not have included these bits. They must have had to include them because they were true, and there were still people alive when these stories were circulating who would have remembered they were true.

For instance, when Jesus rebukes Peter—who later became one of the primary leaders of Christianity, the Rock upon which Jesus built his church—and calls him “Satan,” this would have been an embarrassing detail to include. Which means it must have happened, because somebody remembered it, and they had to include it.

When Peter denies Jesus 3 times. When Jesus gets rejected by the people of his home town and can do no miracles there. When Jesus is kind of racist and tells the gentile woman she can’t be healed, and she convinces him otherwise. When Jesus tells everybody that he will be back for the second coming before that generation passes away, and then he didn’t. When Jesus got mad at a fig tree because he was hungry. The parables that didn’t make sense—shepherds leaving their safe flocks to save one, mustard seeds turning into mighty trees.

These are likely the things that really happened, thus supporting the fact that there was a Jesus, that he preached, and that he had followers. Furthermore, this supports the fact that Jesus’ death was also a known fact, as the story of Peter’s denial is tied to it. (In fact, between his falling in the water, cutting that dude’s ear off, and the foibles we’ve already mentioned here, Peter offered a lot of the comic relief that tells us this story has some truth to it.)

The fact that there were other people around who also remembered the events of Jesus ministry—evidenced by the passages above—also minimizes the idea of a game of “Telephone,” in which the whispered clue gets changed from person to person as it’s passed down the line. You can change some things—the order of events, the general timeline, add in some prophecy and philosophy, but it is hard to change some of the main events if there are people around to corroborate or deny it.

In fact, I was also reminded by my professor that the storytellers were not just cultists and gossips, making things up as they told the next guy what happened. These were people whose culture had gone through centuries of persecution and dispersion. They were also a culture who relied heavily on their scriptures to maintain a strong identity. As such, the memorization of stories, of creeds and prayers, were supremely important. Memorization was a holy task, and there were religious people who dedicated their days to being the memory vessel for entire swaths of scriptures.

So far from being invented by people on the street, these Gospels had been transmitted by people who remembered them word for word, good or bad, in a context of others who had also been there.

These weren’t stories invented by just a single person or a handful of people in a conspiracy. These were stories that were shared and accepted by the entire community, across cities, countries, and traditions.

The Apostle Paul said that there were hundreds of people who saw Jesus after his resurrection, including 400 people who saw him ascend into Heaven.

I suppose it is possible that this is somehow a “I have a girlfriend who lives in Canada and you’ll never meet her” type of story, and with the lack of mass communication, it was easy to go to one town and say, oh yeah, there are a lot of people in that OTHER town who saw Jesus.

But were people really so gullible—just because they lived in the 1st century—that they wouldn’t have at least TRIED to check this out?

Were they really that willing to accept a persuasive preacher’s word for it that a guy had risen from the dead, when such a thing had never been recorded happening before in real life?

If it was totally made up, I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that first conversation—the first time Paul convinced even ONE person that Jesus had been resurrected, if there really was no evidence, no witnesses, no FEELING that this was somehow true, just something made up.

“Hey, let me tell you about my Lord and Savior who came back from the dead. You can tell he changed my life because I changed my name and I don’t kill people any more.”

“Oh yeah, Paul. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but that sounds totally legit.”

What a salesman Paul must have been if he and the others really made it up.