The title of this blog post is not meant to be disrespectful. It reflects my sincere quest, as a non-Christian, to understand what Christians believe.

Some of the best people I know are Christians. They are not merely good people: they are also smart people who think deeply about their faith.

They talk a lot about Jesus being the son of God, dying for the sins of mankind, and so forth.

Most of the time, I literally don’t know what they’re talking about. But I do know that whatever it is, it’s important to them. It helps them be the good people that they are.

For that reason alone, I want to understand it. In addition, of course, I want to understand it because they’re my friends.

As a college student, I was kind of a low-rent Richard Dawkins, full of logic and superiority, sneering at those benighted souls who believed in God. I thought that if you couldn’t understand something clearly in human terms, then it didn’t exist. I had no patience with the mysteries that arguably form the heart of human life.

Over the years, I came to believe that I’d been wrong. There are all kinds of realities that we don’t understand, and that we might be unable to understand. But they still exist. However vaguely, we can sense their presence beckoning to us from beyond the cosmos. We can also talk about them, but since we don’t understand them, we shouldn’t expect to make much sense when we do talk about them.

So I’m perfectly at home with the idea that some realities transcend human understanding. At the same time, Christians seem to think they’re saying things about Jesus that are quite literal and definite, not vague and metaphysical. Can I make any sense of what they’re saying?

For example, take one of the central tenets of Christian belief: “Jesus is the son of God.”

That was a controversial idea in the early years of Christianity, but it’s now accepted as a defining belief.

If you tell me that William is the son of James, then I understand what you’ve said. William and James are human beings with physical bodies. They stand in a certain biological relationship as well as a social relationship. I know what that relationship is.

But if you tell me that Jesus is the son of God, it’s not quite that easy.

That kind of statement made more literal sense in ancient times, when people believed that gods had physical bodies and often visited earth to cavort with human maidens. However, if God is conceived as an immaterial, infinite, transcendent, incomprehensible Being, it’s not at all clear what you mean when you say that someone is His son.

I’ll go further than that: As far as I am able to determine — and perhaps someone will correct me — the statement has no literal meaning. It’s a metaphor that suggests ideas different from the literal meaning of its words.

I think what it actually means to Christians is this:

• Two millennia ago, there was a Jewish man named Joshua (referred to as “Jesus” by the Greeks).
• He was able to perceive the love of God more profoundly and completely than other people could.
• Because of that, his character and his teachings reflected how God wants us to live.

More generally, not specific to Christianity, I think that saying one believes in God means:

• There is a transcendent moral and spiritual dimension to our lives and our world.
• That dimension is benevolent and is based on love.
• We commit ourselves to live according to the loving and benevolent nature of that dimension.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to Christianity and theism than I’ve discussed here. But it seems to me that those are two of the most central issues.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

A friend asked, “what is the soul?”

It’s a worthwhile question. My answer is that you can’t have a mundane answer to a question about a reality that is wholly or partly transcendent. It’s the same reason that no one can come up with a conclusive proof for the existence or non-existence of God.

We know that some things are mental and others are physical, but we can’t define the terms very well and we aren’t sure how they are related to each other. Materialist attempts to reduce everything to physical phenomena tend to be just as tautological and arbitrary as early 20th-century idealist attempts to reduce everything to phenomena of consciousness.

G.E. Moore pointed out that however we explain reality, “mental” and “physical” are categories that we use to organize our experience. In a discussion with an idealist (a person who thinks that only consciousness is real and that physical objects don’t exist), Moore once held up his right hand, pointed to it, and said “This is a physical object.”

Many people have regarded that argument as simpler than it really was. Moore, who was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, did not believe that he could refute a metaphysical theory simply by holding up his hand. No, his point was twofold, and much more interesting.

First, regardless of their metaphysical views, people deal with physical objects all the time. No matter how we explain the nature of physical objects, they are part of our daily lives. “Physical object” is the name we give to certain types of phenomena. Talk to an idealist on the street, outside of a philosophy seminar, and ask “What’s the difference between a rock and a mathematical theorem?” The answer will be that one is a physical object and the other is an idea.

Second, Moore was making an epistemological point. Idealism is a theory about the nature of reality, and it denies the existence of physical objects.* This part of his argument was simplicity itself: “Which is more certain: that idealism is true, or that my hand exists and it’s a physical object?”

The same applies to materialist arguments that the soul does not exist. Neuroscientists often breathlessly announce that changes in mental states can be caused by changes in the brain and vice versa. They act as if it were a new insight provided by modern science. But the correlation between mental states and brain states was old news when Plato and Aristotle were alive. Back then, it didn’t prove that mind was reducible to brain activity, and it still doesn’t.

So, which is more certain: that materialism is true, or that you are conscious and reading this sentence?

What the question about the soul really amounts to is not, “Do I exist as something distinct from the physical aspects of my body,” but:

“Do I exist as something independent of the physical aspects of my body, and which will continue to exist when my body dies?”

The answer to the first question is obviously “yes,” for as Descartes observed, “cogito ergo sum.” The answer to the second question is unknown and probably cannot be known in terms of this frame of reference.

As St. Augustine said, “In this world, we live by faith, not by sight.”
______________________________________________
*Meaning, as objects that can exist independently of consciousness.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

By N.S. Palmer

In today’s New York Times, its column “The Stone” asks what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything:”

What is the meaning of life?

The British comedy troupe Monty Python devoted an entire movie to that topic. At the end of the movie, John Cleese summarized the meaning of life as follows:

• Be nice to people.
• Don’t eat too much fat.
• Try to get some walking in.
• Read a good book every now and then.
• Live in peace and harmony with people of all races, creeds, and nationalities.

That’s a good answer, considering that the question itself is badly stated. As the supercomputer Deep Thought observed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you can’t understand the answer unless you understand the question.

So you can’t answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” unless you can answer “What is the meaning of the question?”

The New York Times column has some good ideas in it, but largely misses the point. It approvingly quotes Jean-Paul Sartre‘s remark that without God, life has no meaning. But then it disputes the idea that life has meaning with God, either.

The Meaning of Meaning

In logic and linguistics, meaning typically refers to intentionality, the property by which an object refers to something other than itself.

If I say “there is an elephant in the living room,” my statement is not self-contained. It refers to something beyond itself, that is, to the presence of an elephant in the living room.

In fact, intentionality is one of the defining characteristics of consciousness, and therefore of us. To be conscious is to be conscious of something.

That isn’t too far removed from people’s vague sense of what it means for their lives to have meaning. We want our lives to be about more than just themselves. We want them to be in relation to something else.

Most people want to live for something beyond themselves: for God, for their spouse, for their children, for their political ideals, for music, and so forth. They want their lives to be in accordance with their objects (God’s wishes), pleasing to those objects (God’s approval), or beneficial to those objects (the welfare of their children, the success of their political ideals, and so forth).

In that sense, God does give meaning to people’s lives, both:

• In an absolute, metaphysical sense (whether people believe in God or not), and
• In a psychological, moral sense (if people choose to devote their lives to following God’s directions as they understand them).

But you can’t make sense of the answer unless you can make sense of the question. That’s how I make sense of it.

Your answer might differ: but if it makes sense to you, that’s what counts.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Harold supposedly didn’t know jack. Poor Harold.

Based on his interpretation of the Bible, radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted that “the Rapture” would occur on May 21, 2011.

He was wrong. But in today’s New York Times, Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting argues that Camping didn’t know the Rapture was coming even if he had turned out to be right.

The Rapture is an evangelical Christian idea based on a few passages in New Testament. It asserts that when Jesus returns, believers will be snatched off the earth’s surface to “meet Jesus in the air.” They will then be taken to Heaven to sit out the Tribulation, during which all hell will break loose on earth. Meanwhile, the unsaved people left on earth will have to struggle against the Antichrist (either Michael York or Sam Neill, depending on which movie you watch).

One could say a lot of things about Camping and the idea of the Rapture.

Camping seems to make money on his predictions. Hmm. It doesn’t mean he’s insincere, but hmm.

As for the Rapture, the Catholic Church historically didn’t want the Bible to be available in common languages for everyone to read. Interpreting Biblical passages requires a certain amount of knowledge and context. As long as it was only available in Latin and Hebrew, only priests, rabbis, and other clergy could read it. The Church feared that if just anyone could read and interpret the Bible, then some people were likely to come up with uninformed and dubious ideas.

But that’s not why Gutting claims that Camping didn’t know about the Rapture.

Gutting’s argument is based on the definition of knowledge. Traditionally, knowledge has been defined as justified true belief. Suppose I say that there is an elephant in the living room. Do I know it? That amounts to asking:

• Can I justify my statement by giving reasons and evidence to support it?
• Is it true? Is there really an elephant in the living room?
• Do I in fact believe it?

If all those conditions are fulfilled, then I know it.

Gutting argues that Camping’s belief, even if true, would not have been knowledge because it was not justified. He bases his argument on the unstated premise that support from Bible passages cannot justify beliefs. If beliefs aren’t justified, then they aren’t knowledge (justified true belief).

However, the notion of “justifying a belief” can include many kinds of evidence: scientific, logical, mathematical, and, of course, Biblical. That’s where Gutting goes wrong.

In the early part of the 20th century, physicist Paul Dirac predicted the existence of positrons based solely on the results of some mathematics he had done to describe electrons. No one had ever seen a positron. Fifteen years later, they were detected. Was Dirac’s belief unjustified? It wasn’t based on observation. The same applies to some of Einstein’s theories, and even to string theory, which is the current darling of subatomic physics. It’s not based on observation. Is it not knowledge? (Physicist Lee Smolin thinks it’s not knowledge, but he’s in a tiny minority.)

Likewise, it’s arbitrary to say that Camping’s beliefs were unjustified merely because they were based on his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. That applies whether or not we think it’s okay to base knowledge claims on the Bible.

Gutting applies a different argument to other evangelical Christians who believe in the Rapture but don’t try to predict when it will occur. In their case, he argues that without a date attached, predictions of the Rapture are not “falsifiable” and are therefore not knowledge.

That’s an idea popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper argued that statements about the world qualified as “knowledge” only if they could be proven false. But consider the following statement:

On the evening of October 25, 1946, at the meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club, Karl Popper had precisely three shillings in his pocket.

Or:

Whatever is coloured is extended.

Those are both statements about the world that cannot be proven false. Even so, it is possible for someone to know the first, and impossible for anyone (who understands it) not to know the second.

So it’s just as arbitrary for Gutting to claim that other evangelical Christians’ beliefs about the Rapture (and by implication, Orthodox Jews’ beliefs about the Messiah) aren’t knowledge.

To justify a belief means simply to give reasons for it. The reasons might be good or bad, adequate or inadequate. Some justifications are better than others. But if you can cite supporting reasons for a belief, and you can answer objections to the belief, then you’ve justified it.

Notice, of course, that justifying a belief isn’t the same as proving it. When you justify a belief, you show that you can reasonably hold the belief. It might still be false, and future evidence could prove that.

But let’s breathe a sigh of relief that, at least for the moment, we don’t have to contend with the Rapture.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

By N.S. Palmer

I’ve been reading Christopher Moore’s excellent book Lamb. It offers a light-hearted but surprisingly respectful “alternative Gospel” about the early life of Jesus.

The story is told by Biff, Jesus’ boyhood best friend. On the orders of the Most High, the archangel Raziel resurrects Biff in the present day (2010) to write the new Gospel. The two of them live in a hotel room in New York while Biff writes about his experiences with Jesus. The Gospel narrative is interspersed with scenes in the present day, as when (a) Biff finds a Bible in the hotel room and tries to read parts of it without letting Raziel find out, and (b) Raziel becomes obsessed with TV soap operas but doesn’t realize they are fictional.

The idea of telling about Jesus’ boyhood is not a new one. One of the Gospels that did not make it into the Christian canon was the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which recounts stories about the childhood years of Jesus. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas has Jesus striking his playmates dead on at least one occasion, but Biff’s Gospel in Lamb paints a kinder, gentler picture of Jesus that is more in keeping with our traditional view of him.

Apart from recommending the book to anyone except those who would find any non-canonical Gospel offensive, I’d like to make two points of interest.

First, you might have noticed that I wrote “Jesus’ boyhood.” According to the authoritative writing manual The Elements of Style by Willard Strunk & E.B. White — a book that writers regard as a “Gospel” of correct English — the normal rule is to form singular possessives by adding apostrophe-s. That applies even to words ending in the letter ‘s’.

Thus, for example, you’d normally write “James’s brother” instead of “James’ brother,” the latter of which is incorrect. But there’s one exception, and only one: when you form the possessive of “Jesus,” referring to the Biblical Jesus, you only add an apostrophe. No ‘s’.

All right, it’s not earth-shaking, but it is interesting. It’s a linguistic remnant of the culture in which we used to live, which in the last 70 years has been bulldozed and plowed under by Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart and Britney Spears and Halliburton. Even in punctuation, the name of Jesus got special treatment.

Second, in the book Lamb, the angel Raziel refers to another angel as “a Seraphim.” Unless you know Hebrew or have studied theology, you might not recognize that as incorrect. But the “-im” is a masculine plural ending in Hebrew. You can have one Seraph or multiple Seraphim, but you can’t have “a Seraphim.”

Besides singular and plural, Hebrew also has a “dual” ending that refers only to pairs of things, such as hands or eyes. I don’t recall if there’s a dual ending that applies to two angels, but there might be.

Angels are an interesting topic in themselves. If you believe in them, then their interest is theological; if you think they’re mythical, then their interest is cultural and psychological. The Thomist philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who was editor of The Encyclopedia Britannica for many years, wrote a good book about The Angels and Us.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Two basic forces shape the universe: Law and Love, or if you prefer, Rules and Results.

Those forces also generate the two basic viewpoints about human and Constitutional rights. Both are currently on display in a dispute over gun control laws.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the “Bill of Rights,” states:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Opponents of gun control laws latch onto the part that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Supporters of gun control laws argue that “the people” refers to Americans collectively rather than as individuals, so the right to keep and bear arms applies only to people in government-organized military organizations.

Frankly, I think that opponents of gun control laws have the better Constitutional argument. The text says what it says. And via the Fourteenth Amendment and later court decisions, the Constitution applies to states as well as to the federal government. Therefore, one can make a good case for an individual right to own guns.

But that’s not the only question involved. The larger question is whether rights are an end in themselves, or are justified because they produce good results.

Consider Timothy Egan’s recent column about the January 2011 shootings in Tucson. After avowing that he grew up around gun owners and supports private gun ownership, he starts talking about results. He cites statistics showing that more gun ownership leads to more gun deaths, more often of the innocent than the guilty.

Conservatives and libertarians argue that gun ownership makes everyone safer, but they really see that point as irrelevant. Their main response to Egan’s argument is to say that results don’t matter. Only rules matter. And according to what they say are the rules of the U.S. Constitution and “Natural Law,” the government has no business restricting or discouraging gun ownership of any kind. You can probably even find a conservative or two who thinks it’s in the Ten Commandments.

As usual, the dispute between rules and results leads to further questions:

• If rights are an end in themselves, how do we know that? How do we know what rights we have? And if respecting rights in a particular case would lead to terrible consequences, should we still respect them in that case?

• If rights are justified because they produce good results, then results for whom? “The greatest good for the greatest number?” Or just for the Wall Street sharks and corporate billionaires who bankroll libertarian think tanks and publications? How much good does a right have to produce, and with what degree of reliability, in order to qualify as a right?

Because the choice between emphasizing rules and results is so fundamental, there’s no way to prove that one choice is right and the other is wrong. Different people make the choice based on their personal history, psychology, and the dominant viewpoint of their society. And the choice itself is a false dilemma: you need both law and love, rules and results. Having only one of them would be like trying to do mathematics with only odd numbers.

It’s peculiar that many evangelical Christians, as conservatives, think that rules are more important than results, because Jesus taught that rules should be guided by love.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.”
–F.H. Bradley

Theists and atheists argue about a lot of things, but most of the issues that divide them are derivative. They almost never* address the fundamental point of disagreement:

Is this universe a manifestation of something else, or is this universe all that exists?

The “something else” can be imagined in different ways, such as:

• The will of God.
• A cosmological multiverse of which our universe is one of an infinite number of variants.
• The virtual reality depicted in the “Matrix” movies.
• The surface world described by Plato in his book The Republic.

Based largely on the spiritual insights of great men and women as recorded in religion, theists (a group that includes me) argue that this world is just a temporary residence where we live until we’re ready to go someplace else, variously defined.

Based largely on the undisputed usefulness of science and a considerable amount of hubris, atheists argue that Goddammit – excuse me, that should be only “dammit” — this world is all that exists, and that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot.

Neither side has proof. Theists usually cite their sacred books, which they believe without evidence to have been written by God, a being they cannot define. Atheists cite the ability of physical science to explain processes within the physical world, which they fail to see is irrelevant to explaining the existence of that world in the first place.

It occurs to me that there’s a reason for all that fruitless disagreement.

I tend to think of this world as being like a metaphor: a poetic use of words that is related to their literal use.

When Homer says in The Iliad that the goddess Athena seized Achilles‘s arm to prevent him from killing Agamemnon, we understand that it means Achilles restrained his murderous rage. We’ve seen people go into a rage and restrain themselves, so we’re familiar with the situation to which the metaphor refers. We don’t believe that the gray-eyed goddess flew down from Mount Olympus and grabbed someone’s arm.

When Alfred Noyes says in his poem “The Highwayman” that “The moon was a ghostly galleon,” we understand the imagery he is using and the emotional mood he is trying to create. We’ve seen the moon look spooky at night, so we know the situation to which the metaphor refers. We don’t believe that a sailing ship was flying around in the sky.

But suppose that we didn’t know who Athena was, and that we didn’t know what “galleon” meant? Suppose that we’d never seen someone go into a rage and we’d never seen the moon at night. Would we be able to start from the metaphorical use of those words and deduce their literal meaning?

No. We could guess. We could cite evidence and reasoning. We could argue. We could exhort. And we might be right, but we couldn’t prove it.

The same thing applies in other areas.

In mathematics, if one thing is a projection of something else, we can identify precisely what the “something else” is — but only if we know the values and system of equations that generated the projection. In physics (except for quantum physics), if one event is caused by another event that is unknown, we can work backwards to the cause if we know the exact forces, masses, and physical processes that led to the effect.

If we lack the relevant knowledge to connect the original element of a mathematical system with its projection, or to connect a physical event with its cause, then we can guess, argue, and exhort. We might even be right. But we can’t prove it.

The same thing applies to our universe. Whether you think of it as a metaphor, or as a mathematical projection, or as a metaphysical effect of an unknown cause, all we see is the result. We not only don’t see the cause, we also have no experience or knowledge of what the cause might be like. And we have no discursive knowledge of the nature of the poetic imagery, the equations, or the processes that might lead from something to end up with our universe.

As a result, we latch onto hypotheses, clues, and intuitions. Then all of us — theists and atheists alike –  decide what we’re going to believe about our world and about ourselves. As a matter of ego, we don’t like to be “wrong,” so we defend our beliefs against all comers. But ultimately, all we have is the metaphor and what we make of it.

What are you going to make of it?

If I may invoke my own version of the metaphor, don’t worry too much about your verbal answer: God loves you no matter what you believe about Him. Answer with a life of love, truth, generosity, and forgiveness. The rest will take care of itself.

_________________
* An outstanding exception is John F. Haught’s book Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Moses (Charlton Heston) parts the Red Sea during the Exodus.

Note: Some good people, including friends of mine, will most likely disagree with what I write here. I mean no disrespect to them or to their beliefs. This article examines the Bible in terms of verifiable historical fact and mainstream scholarly opinion, not to promote any religious or anti-religious viewpoint. As always, dissents and factual corrections are welcome.

Introduction

In our time, many people of Europe and North America are almost completely ignorant of the Bible. They see it  either as irrelevant to their lives or as a pernicious collection of primitive fables and supernatural myths.

That’s unfortunate, because it’s impossible to understand Western civilization without knowing about the Bible and being familiar with its contents. That applies to believers and non-believers alike.

In almost every area of life — in religion, literature, politics, painting, music, even in psychology — Western civilization is influenced by the Bible. From Shakespeare to Freud, from social justice to the rule of law, Western civilization either follows Biblical ideas or disputes them. If you’re ignorant of the Bible, then in a very real sense, you don’t know yourself or your own society.

This blog article will explain the basics of what the Bible is, how it developed, and who wrote it. It will also discuss, though not systematically, some of what the Bible says.

The Content of the Bible

Although it’s not the main subject of this blog article, the content of the Bible is even more important than how it was written, edited, and compiled.

First, the Bible contains important truths about our lives, our world, and our Creator. Though the Bible’s transcription by fallible human beings communicates those truths inconsistently, and sometimes in primitive terms, the truths are still there to be found.

Second, as noted previously, much of Western history consists of conflicts about what the Bible means and of attempts to implement its precepts. Western philosophy, art, music, and literature virtually overflow with references to Bible stories and verses. If you don’t know the Bible, you can’t understand any of that.

About Terminology

Christians refer to the canonical books about Jesus and Christianity as the “New Testament.” They refer to the Hebrew Bible as the “Old Testament” because of their belief that the New Testament supersedes it. Similarly, Muslims believe that the Qur’an supersedes both the Old and New Testaments. Mormons believe the same thing about the Book of Mormon.

“Testament” means a solemn contract, in this case between either the Jewish people and God (the Old Testament) or between Christians and God (the New Testament). I will sometimes use those terms, but without the theological implications.

People usually refer to dates either as “B.C.” (before Christ) or “A.D.” (anno domini, which means “year of our lord”). Those designations refer specifically to the Christian calendar.  The neutral terms preferred by scholars are  “B.C.E.” (before the common era) and “C.E.” (common era). Therefore, I will refer to dates as either “BCE” or “CE.”

The Bible as “Ta Biblia”

The authors of the various books of the Bible did not call it “The Bible.” In fact, they worked separately and did not know that their writings would later be collected into a single volume.

Our name for the Bible comes from the Greek ta biblia, which means “the books.” The Bible is a collection of books composed over many centuries by many different authors and editors. The books of the Tanak (what Christians call the “Old Testament”) and of the New Testament were collected separately and were written in different languages: Hebrew for the Old Testament, Greek for the New Testament.

Copying Errors and Historical Questions

Most of the Bible’s content originated as oral tradition and was written down only later. Once written down, the books of the Bible were copied and re-copied by hand over the centuries, leading to errors of various kinds. (The printing press wasn’t invented until the 15th century.) In the 19th century, two kinds of “Biblical criticism” emerged.

Lower Criticism

Lower criticism tries to determine how closely our current texts of the Bible match the original texts. None of the original texts still exist. Our oldest texts are hand-written copies, most of which date from the Middle Ages. Those copies were made from earlier copies, made from still earlier copies. At each stage, copying errors changed the text slightly. Sometimes, the changes were trivial; other times, they were important.

For example, the oldest text we have of the New Testament is a small fragment from the Gospel according to John that scholars believe was made about 125 CE. In 1707, an Oxford University Biblical scholar named John Mill studied 100 manuscripts from the Middle Ages and found 30,000 discrepancies between them. Of the 5,000 or so ancient and Medieval Bible texts we have, no two are exactly alike.

The story in John 8:3-11 of Jesus and the woman accused of adultery does not appear in the earliest copies of that Gospel, so Biblical scholars think it was added later. If you imagine yourself as the copyist, it’s not hard to see how that could happen. You’d heard that story about Jesus, but it’s not found in the Gospels. It has a good moral point, and it certainly sounds like something Jesus would have done. So you assume that it’s true, and with the best intentions in the world, you add it to the text.

Likewise, the earliest copies of Mark end at verse 16:8, when the women see the risen Jesus but are so frightened that they don’t tell anyone about it. The final 12 verses, in which Mary Magdalene tells the disciples that Jesus is alive, and then Jesus appears to them, seem to have been added later on. The copyist most likely “completed the story” by filling in events that he was sure were true but which weren’t in the text before him.

When all we have are copies of copies of copies, made over the centuries, it’s not easy to know what the original texts said. Lower criticism tries to determine that.

Higher Criticism

Higher criticism compares the Bible’s descriptions of events to other historical and archaeological evidence. The goal is to determine when the events occurred and how accurate the Bible was in describing those events.

For example, independent historical evidence suggests that the exodus might not have occurred exactly as described in the Book of Exodus: it might have taken more time, involved fewer people, and so forth.

Likewise, Luke 2:4 states that Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem because everyone in the Roman Empire had to return to his ancestral home for a census. Such a census would have required a huge migration of people across the Roman Empire, but there is no non-Biblical record that it took place. Matthew does not mention the census, and simply has Joseph and Mary living in Bethlehem when Jesus is born. Therefore, Biblical scholars and historians doubt that the census described in Luke actually happened.

The Issue of Biblical Inerrancy

Higher criticism often upsets people because it assumes that there are errors in the Bible: not merely copying errors, but factual errors in the original texts. Such people believe that to admit errors of any kind in the Bible is to deny its Divine inspiration or even to question the existence of God.

I think that this view is mistaken. Unless God Himself wrote the books of the Bible with His own hand, they passed through the hands of human writers and copyists who could make mistakes. They were often based on oral traditions that had been told, re-told, and embellished at each re-telling. To say that these accounts contain historical errors implies nothing about the accuracy of the moral and spiritual message they carry.

As Marc Brettler notes in his book How to Read the Jewish Bible:

Much writing in the ancient Near East was anonymous. There was no conception that a work must be copied exactly. The copyist played a role in the transmission of texts, often adding to them. In many ways, the Bible is like modern texts that circulate on the Internet. Their original author is often unknown, and many users who forward the texts revise them or add to them in significant ways. (p. 34)

How Ancient People Wrote History

There is another, more substantial reason not to worry about historical inaccuracies. Modern readers don’t realize that in ancient times, people did not think of history as we do today. Ancient writers were relatively unconcerned about getting the details correct. They were mainly concerned about two things:

Getting the Big Picture Right

If ancient historians knew that the Greeks fought the Persians at a particular place and time, and the Greeks won, that was good enough. The details were incidental and could be made up in the interest of telling a good story.

When the Greek historian Herodotus (484 – 425 BCE) writes that Croesus said, “Do not always act on the passionate impulse of youth,” he doesn’t mean to imply that anyone was transcribing what Croesus said; nor would it bother him if Croesus said nothing of the kind. As a historian, Herodotus was not worried about whether this or that detail was correct; he was telling a bigger story. The same applies to Biblical writers.

Getting the Moral Message Right

When the ancient Roman historian Livy (59 BCE – 17 CE) wrote his History of Rome, he said that one of his main goals was to provide examples of good Roman behavior. He tried to get the facts correct, but he admitted that many of his stories were impossible to verify and might not have happened at all. He wrote:

To antiquity we grant the indulgence of making the origins more impressive by co-mingling the human with the divine.

My wish is that each reader will pay the closest attention to the following: how men lived, what their moral principles were; then let him follow in his mind how, as discipline broke down bit by bit, morality at first foundered; how it next subsided, then began to topple headlong in ruin until the advent of our current age, in which we can neither endure our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.

History Then and Now

This is not history as we think of it in the 21st century: objective, dry reporting of facts. Herodotus makes up some of the details in his story. Livy offers a mixture of fact, legend, and moral preachment, “co-mingling the human with the divine:” exactly what we find in the Bible.

In the Bible, consider Psalm 19 or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Do their exact location, timing, or wording have anything to do with their transparent moral and spiritual truth? Of course not. So why worry about those things?

The Authors of the Bible

In most cases, we do not know who originated or wrote down the books of the Bible.

The books of the Jewish Bible contain oral traditions passed down through the generations of the ancient Jews. Many of the traditions are similar to those of other Middle Eastern cultures of that time. The Biblical story of Noah, for example, includes some passages that closely match passages in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. The stories of Moses and Joseph have parallels to the story of Sargon. As infants, both Sargon and Moses were found in baskets floating down the river; as adults, both Sargon and Joseph interpreted dreams for the king.  The Jewish Bible was compiled from earlier documents some time after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE.

The books of the Christian Bible contain oral traditions about the life and ministry of Jesus, theological and moral preachments, accounts of the early Christian church, and an apocalyptic vision attributed to John.

The books of the New Testament were written between 20 and 65 years after Jesus’ death by people who had probably never seen him. They were not written in Aramaic, which was the language of Jesus and his disciples, but in Greek, which was spoken by educated people in the Roman Empire.

Apart from the 13 epistles of Paul, seven of which are believed actually to have been written by Paul, we don’t know who wrote the books of the Christian Bible.

The Biblical Canon

Most people also don’t realize that the decisions about which books to include in the Jewish and Christian Bibles came relatively late. Many documents were considered scriptural by some Jews and Christians but were excluded from the Canon. Even today, different versions of the Christian Bible are used by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches. Likewise, there are differences between versions of the Jewish Bible that follow the Masoretic text and those that follow the Septuagint.

As Michael Coogan observes in his book The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction:

By the end of the first century CE, there was considerable agreement among Jewish groups on which books were scriptural, but the status of some books continued to be debated.

The Christian canon — the choice of which books to include in the Christian Bible and which books to leave out — was decided in debates that lasted from the second to the fourth centuries CE. Many putative Gospels were excluded for various reasons, such as the Gospel of Peter and two different Gospels attributed to Thomas. An apocalyptic book attributed to Peter was excluded from the canon as well.

The Tanak (the “Old Testament”)

Long before Christianity came on the scene, Judaism was already established as a monotheistic religion with sacred writings and an advanced (for the era) moral code. The Jewish Bible is called the “Tanak,” which is an acronym for the Hebrew names of the three parts of the Jewish Bible:

• The Law (Torah). Called the Pentateuch in Greek, this consists of the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It contains stories about the creation of the world and early interactions between God and the Jewish people. It also contains the commandments (mitzvot in Hebrew), of which the 10 Commandments (or 15, if you believe Mel Brooks) are the best known. By careful analysis of the text, Orthodox Jews find that there are actually 613 commandments: 365 “negative commandments” that forbid certain actions and 248 “positive commandments” that require certain actions.
• The Prophets (Nevi’im). This continues the historical account started in the Torah.
• The Writings (Ketuvim). These are miscellaneous writings, such as the Book of Psalms, that didn’t fit into other sections of the Bible.

The Torah

The Torah (the first five books of the Jewish Bible) is the most sacred scripture of Judaism. It seems to be derived from four earlier documents, each from a different Jewish community and time period. After the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE, an unknown editor combined the earlier documents into the Torah. In order of their composition, the source documents were:

• J: Scholars call this document “J” because in the Book of Genesis, it uses the most sacred name of God.  When this name occurs in sacred texts, modern Jews substitute the Hebrew words Adonai (Lord), Elohim (God), or Ha Shem (the name). This document probably came from the Southern kingdom of Judea and embodied Judean oral traditions.
• E: This document is called “E” because in the Book of Genesis, it refers to God as Elohim. This document probably came from the northern kingdom.
• D: This document appears almost entirely in the Book of Deuteronomy and was written sometime in the 7th century BCE.
• P: This focuses on religious observance and rituals of primary interest to priests. It dates from the middle of the first millennium BCE.

This account of the Torah’s origin is called the Documentary Hypothesis. Though it remains a hypothesis and cannot be conclusively proven, Biblical scholars think it best explains the content and history of the text. It explains, for example, why there are two creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. The first story ends at Genesis 2:3. The second story goes on for the rest of Genesis 2.

The Prophets and the Writings

Still canonical but of somewhat lesser status than the Torah are the Prophets and the Writings.

The Prophets continues the history of the Jewish people, starting with God’s choice of Joshua to succeed Moses. In Jewish Bibles, this section contains eight books; Christians divide the same material differently to end up with 21 books.

The Writings consists of sacred works that didn’t fit into the first two sections, including Psalms, Proverbs, and the Book of Job. Most people have at least heard quotations from Psalms and Proverbs. The Book of Job grapples with the fact that being a good person does not necessarily lead to a pleasant life: that misfortune can fall on the just and the unjust alike. A good contemporary meditation on that issue is Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which I recommend.

The New Testament

The New Testament consists of 27 books that it presents in an order different from the order they were written:

• The Gospels. Attributed to but not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, these describe the life and ministry of Jesus.
• The Epistles. These are 21 letters written by Christian leaders to various churches they established in other cities.
• The Acts of the Apostles. Apparently written by the same author as the Gospel according to Luke, this describes the development of Christianity in the first century CE.
• The Apocalypse of John. Also known as the Book of Revelation, this presents the author’s metaphorical vision of a conflict between good and evil.

As noted previously, the books of the New Testament were not written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his disciples. Instead, they were written in Greek, which was the language of educated people in the Roman Empire.

Although the New Testament begins with the Gospels, the earliest Christian writings in the canon are the epistles of Paul, which scholars believe were composed beginning in 50 CE, about 20 years after the death of Jesus. The Gospels were written between 65 and 95 CE, with John’s Gospel coming last. The Book of Acts was written in the same time period as the Gospels, as was the Apocalypse of John.

The Gospels

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the “synoptic Gospels” because they tell many of the same stories, often using the same words. Biblical scholars believe that Mark was composed first, around 60 to 65 CE. The authors of Matthew and Luke appear to have used it as one of their sources of information about Jesus. Though they tell roughly the same stories, Matthew and Luke differ on some points, such as why Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem and what happened after Jesus’ birth.

Mark starts with Jesus already an adult and does not mention his birth. Both Matthew and Luke give birth stories of Jesus, adding that he was born of a virgin. Paul’s epistles, written earlier than the Gospels, do not mention the virgin birth.

Some early Christians, such as Marcion of Sinope and his followers, did not want to keep the Jewish scriptures as part of the Christian canon. Marcion thought that the God of the Jewish scriptures was stern, cruel, and judgmental. He taught that the God of the Jewish scriptures was a different god from the loving, forgiving God of Jesus.

The author of Matthew, however, did want to keep the Jewish scriptures, so he translated the Hebrew word “almah” in Isaiah 7:14 as referring to a virgin, though “almah” in fact means “young woman” and there is a different Hebrew word for “virgin.” Thereby, he argued that the Jewish scriptures predicted the birth of Jesus. Other attempts to find Jewish scriptural predictions of Jesus’ birth and ministry were similarly strained.

One thing of which most Christians are unaware is that the Jewish concept of the Messiah is different from the Greek concept of the Christ. The Jews thought of the Messiah as either a warrior-king or as a great teacher, not as a God who would come to earth and die for the sins of mankind.

In the Jewish scriptures, the Hebrew word for Messiah (Moshiach) means “deliverer” and is also used to refer to Moses. Christian writers who were eager to find continuity between the Jewish and Christian scriptures blurred together the Jewish concept of the Messiah with the Christian concept of the Christ.

The Gospel of John was written last, some time around 90 or 95 CE. It tells different stories about Jesus than the synoptic Gospels and is more theologically oriented.

The Epistles

The Epistles are 21 books, each a letter from Paul or another church father, that provide guidance to Christians. Thirteen of the letters are nominally from Paul, though Biblical scholars believe only seven of them were actually written by Paul: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, and Philemon. Biblical scholars believe that the others, called “deutero-Pauline epistles,” were written by followers of Paul who attached his name to give the letters credibility. That was not an uncommon practice in ancient times.

Most of the authentic Pauline epistles were written to address specific problems that Christians had encountered in churches that Paul had established. Paul’s epistle to the Romans gives more theological exposition. Galatians gives Paul’s response to Christians who believed that they had to convert to Judaism to be followers of Jesus.

Interestingly, Paul mentions the birth of Jesus in Galatians 4:4, but says nothing about it being a virgin birth. This lends credence to the theory that the virgin birth story was added later on to Christian lore about Jesus, and was then embodied in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Paul has been called “the first Christian” because, it is said, he transformed Christianity from the religion of Jesus (a version of Judaism that emphasized love more than law) into a religion about Jesus (Christianity). Paul’s epistles were written around 50-60 CE, so they are the earliest Christian writings to be included in the New Testament.

The Apocalypse of John

The Apocalypse of John, also known as the Book of Revelation, gives a metaphorical and poetic account of a battle between good and evil. Because it’s metaphorical, this book is hard to interpret.

Evangelical Christians usually believe that it foretells the end of the world, the Anti-Christ, and what they call “the rapture,” in which faithful Christians will meet Jesus in the sky. That’s certainly one interpretation. Some Biblical scholars think that it refers instead to events in the writer’s own time: that the number “666″ refers to the Roman emperor Nero because it’s the number of his name in Hebrew, and that the beast refers to Rome. But given the nature of the writing, many interpretations are possible.

Believe It or Not, the Bible Is Important

Whether you believe in its Divine inspiration or not, you should make a serious effort to become familiar with the Bible. Apart from its formative role in Western civilization, it contains insights, moral precepts, and spiritual encouragement that is unsurpassed in human religious literature.

If you read your Bible and think about it what it says, you will not merely become better educated. You might also become a better person.

Copyright 2010 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

In Douglas Adams’s brilliant novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was ’42′.”

The novel’s characters who asked the question found that answer a little obscure. Therefore, in my capacity as a philosopher, I’m going to give you a clearer statement.

But I can only state the question and describe what the answer is like. The answer itself is different for everyone, though “42″ isn’t a bad approximation.

The simple fact is that we can never know for sure what the universe and life are about, if anything. We don’t have certain knowledge of their purpose or even if they have a purpose.

We don’t know for certain why we live, or even if there is a reason. We don’t know why things happen to us, or even if there is a reason. We don’t know why we die, or what happens to us when that occurs.

We don’t have certain knowledge, in the scientific sense, that God exists and even less do we have any certain knowledge of what He is like.

We don’t have certain knowledge of right and wrong. We can’t prove our moral beliefs to anyone who doesn’t already partly agree with us: which means that we can’t prove them logically to ourselves, either. All our moral arguments are either:

• Emotional persuasion, or

• Attempts to show people that their moral beliefs are inconsistent, and that adopting the belief we recommend would make their beliefs consistent.

Evidence exists about all of those issues, but is insufficient to prove things one way or another. We can speculate, we can hypothesize, we can interpret the evidence in this way or that, but we can’t prove any of it.

Religion Gives Equivocal Answers

We can look to the Bible, or the Qur’an, or our religious traditions for guidance, but they don’t give us unequivocal answers. Some passages seem to command love and forgiveness; others seem to command hatred and mayhem. That’s why believers in the same faith often disagree about what their faith means. They latch onto different parts of the tradition to justify different world-views and different moral beliefs.

None of this is news. Sixteen centuries ago, St. Augustine said that in this world, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” In the 20th century, Rebbe Menachem Schneerson said, “G-d created the universe in a manner in which we perceive our own existence as the intrinsic reality.”

Science Gives Equivocal Answers

We can look to science for guidance, but that’s no help, either. Science studies the physical universe and how it works, so scientists are experts about that subject. As human beings, scientists also have opinions about God, the purpose of life, and why the universe exists.

Because they think in scientific terms, that’s how scientists express their religious and moral beliefs. But it’s important to understand that their religious and moral beliefs are not based on scientific evidence and are not supported by science. Atheism is a belief held by some scientists, but it is not a scientific conclusion. It’s a personal belief.

That’s why some eminent scientists don’t believe in God while other eminent scientists do believe in God. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, denies God’s existence and wrote a book to argue for his viewpoint. Francis Collins, a physician-geneticist who directs the Human Genome Project, believes in God and wrote a book to argue for his viewpoint. Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest physicists of our time, denies the existence of God. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, spent much of his life trying to understand the Bible and what it revealed about God’s plan.*

All those scientists look at the same evidence. The atheists interpret the evidence as denying God’s existence. The theists interpret it as supporting God’s existence. If the evidence can be interpreted equally well to support contradictory conclusions, then it doesn’t prove anything about those conclusions.

What I Believe

Here’s my faith. I have reasons for believing these things, but the reasons are not logically conclusive. I can’t prove any of these beliefs to people who disagree with them:

• God exists. He is the infinitely good, infinitely loving, infinitely intelligent, infinitely powerful creator and sustainer of the universe.

• Our intelligence is so feeble compared to God’s that it’s not even comparable to His. We cannot understand God’s plan, nor should we expect to understand it beyond the baby-talk version He gives us in the Bible and other sacred texts.

• Our identities as people transcend our physical existence in a manner of which we cannot be certain and probably can’t understand.

• God put us into this world where we can experience and share love, joy, kindness, and even physical pleasure. But it’s also a world where we are exposed to hatred, sorrow, cruelty, pain, and death.

• And it’s also a world where we can’t know for sure that God exists, what He wants us to be, or how He wants us to live.

• Those are the basic facts of our lives, and they’re not going to change as long as we are in this world.

Those facts put us in a situation of radical freedom. If we knew for sure that God was looking over our shoulders and that He wanted us to live in a certain way, then we’d pretty much have to do it. What sane person would pick a fight with the creator and sustainer of the universe?

But we don’t know for sure. In the vernacular, “we don’t know jack.”

And Now: The Ultimate Question

Nobody with real authority will tell us how to live. We have to choose what kind of people we’re going to be and how we’re going to treat other people. We have to choose what moral and spiritual values we’re going to follow, if any.

And that leads to the ultimate question:

How do you choose to live?

Will you lay up treasures on earth? Will you treat other people just as things to satisfy your own selfish desires? Or will you thirst for righteousness more than riches, treating other people with love and kindness?

Will you see the world as meaningless, or meaningful?

Will you see each person, including yourself, as nothing more than an intelligent animal? Or will you see each person as an infinitely important child of an infinitely good and loving God?

Will you treat each encounter with another person as a chance to get something for yourself at his or her expense? Or will you treat it as an opportunity to share love and joy with that person?

I can’t give you the answer, because the answer has to come from within you. It has to be your own free and authentic choice.

What will you choose? For you, that is the answer to the ultimate question.

I can’t prove that you should, but I hope that you will choose the path of love, joy, kindness, and faith in God.

———————————————–
* Interestingly, Hawking held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge University: a position established in 1663 for, and first held by, Isaac Newton.

A Muslim family in America. Source: The New York Times.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page article titled “U.S. Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?“

The family described in the article seems perfectly nice, so I’d like to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.”

But sadly, the truthful answer is, “yes and no.”

To the extent that Muslims adopt Western culture, customs, values, and behaviors, yes, they do indeed belong. A society is a group of people who share those things.

And there’s the rub. Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, Islam is not a significant part of Western history and culture except as an antagonist. Muslims stand outside the Western tradition.

It’s important to understand what that means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Muslims are bad people or that they are necessarily our enemies. It does not mean that they can’t contribute to our society and be accepted in most contexts. It doesn’t even mean that Islam itself has nothing to offer us in religious insights or examples of faith and courage.

What it does mean is that by their answer to one of the most important questions of life, “What’s it all about,” Muslims stand apart. They do not belong. And depending on how they interpret their faith, it means that they disagree with some of Western civilization’s fundamental conclusions about justice, individual rights, freedom of religion, the role of government, and the relationship between humanity and God.

It also means that most Western people will regard them with just a little bit of doubt. The more values and beliefs that people share, the more they feel confident that they understand each other and can trust each other. Don’t blame me for it: that’s just the fact. There are both valid and invalid reasons for it.

And it has nothing specific to do with Islam. It applies to all differences between people. The more extensive and important the differences, the greater is the potential for distrust, misunderstanding, and hostility.

Difference is not a license to treat anyone with less than the respect and love that all people deserve. But it’s foolish to pretend that the difference doesn’t exist.