Against the “Jesus” of the Journalists

Published shortly before Christmas, Dr Deavel reviews a book that debunks all the articles and TV shows  trying to 'debunk' the Christmas story. You might also enjoy Horus Manure: Debunking the Jesus/Horus Connection.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By David Deavel, PhD

Readable, with scholarly backing, well-organized, and relatively short, Brant Pitre’s “The Case for Jesus” is a handbook for Christians faced with the academic-journalistic war on Jesus’ lordship at Christmas. It cannot give faith of itself, but it does what the best works of apologetics do: It clears away intellectual objections and provides a balanced and reasonable account of the evidence that Jesus is neither liar, lunatic, nor the subject of tall tales.

The Case for Jesus by Brant Pitre (Image, 242 pages, 2016)

Brace yourselves. Though the Christmas decorations have been up in the stores since October, the fullness of Christmas in an increasingly post-Christian west will not be completed until our newsfeeds are filled with articles purporting to debunk the reason for the season.

You would think that the American media, so angry when called “the enemy of the people,” might think to themselves, “Hey, maybe we don’t have to run an article this year on December 24 telling people that the Gospels weren’t written by the people whose names are on them and Jesus, the son of a Roman soldier who impregnated a young Palestinian girl (#metoo!), never claimed to be God but was really crucified for his dedication to gender nonconformity, BLM, and the separation of plastics and aluminum in the recycling bins.”

You would be wrong. To paraphrase Albert Schweitzer, those in the journalistic quest for the historical Jesus looked down the well of history and saw the reflection of University of North Carolina professor Bart Ehrman and a dropped phone playing weird speculations from the History Channel.

That’s why a good gift for Christmas—or perhaps a good read for serious Christians during Advent—is Brant Pitre’s The Case for Jesus. Though the book was published in 2016, I didn’t get around to reading it until this fall. It was on the list of possible readings for a core course I am teaching at my new university titled “Faith, Reason, and Revelation,” and I jumped at the chance to assign it because lazy professors such as moi like to be forced to do what we want to do anyway.

How did it go? My students who were serious Christian believers—Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants—were strengthened in their faith while unbelievers found themselves much more open to the possibility of Christian faith than they were beforehand. There is a reason for that.

Pitre’s book begins with an open and confessional air. Once a young Catholic college student, he had been shocked to find that his religion professor at Louisiana State University said that we have no idea who the writers of the canonical Gospels were because the original Gospels were anonymously written decades after the events that happened by people with no real connection to the historical Jesus, then circulated until finally somebody put names on them. He later learned there and at Vanderbilt University that the claims to divinity in the Gospel of John (for many claimed there is no claim to divinity in Matthew, Mark, or Luke) were simply the results of the child’s game of “telephone,” whereby one child whispers something in the next child’s ear who then repeats this to the next person and so on until after getting to the end of the circle we discover that the original message has been grossly distorted.

With this as the accepted history for the Gospels, scholars such as Professor Ehrman are able to evade C. S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” trilemma. In their view, Jesus doesn’t have to be any of these because he never said he was God! In fact, the non-canonical Gospels are probably closer to the truth anyway.

Pitre says he was on the brink of losing his faith because of this fairly standard academic conventional wisdom about the Gospels when he realized that no matter what he had been taught, he still believed that Jesus was God. So he continued his studies, moving on to Notre Dame, where he threw himself into learning: Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Coptic; the Old and New Testaments; ancient non-biblical Jewish writings, and the works of the Church Fathers. This book is the result of his own quest—and is presented in such a way as to aid those who are themselves on a quest.

What he found was that the modern academic conventional wisdom is. . .baseless. There are no anonymous copies of the Gospels and Jesus does claim to be God, not merely in John’s Gospel but in the Synoptics as well. Not only that, but the claims for the craziest event in these books—his own Resurrection—have quite a bit of evidence suggesting their truth.

The first chapters are dedicated to dismantling the claims about the Gospels because they get in the way of unbelieving professors the most. Professor Pitre shows in chapter two that for all the ancient manuscripts of the Gospels, not only are there no anonymous copies but all ascribe authorship of each Gospel to the same person whose name is on it in every Bible we have now. Moreover, even if (hypothetically) there had been such copies, how likely is it that anonymous documents circulated for a hundred years or so would somehow manage to end up having the same authors’ names on them whether “in Rome, Africa, Italy, and Syria”?

It’s not just that the ancient documents bear the writers’ names, however, as he shows in chapters three through five. Nobody, Christian, Jew, or heretic, ever ascribed these works to anybody but the authors in question. And the internal evidence from the Gospels themselves and other New Testament books shows that there is nothing unbelievable about those particular authors having written the Gospels, either by their own hands or by use of a scribe. In fact, the whole idea that the early Church cooked up the authorship of these Gospels to prop up their claims doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to begin with. Mark and Luke were not in Jesus’ inner circle, so what would have been the forgery value in such ascriptions? Wouldn’t you pick somebody like Thomas, as the gnostics who wrote in the second century did? Pitre covers these apocryphal Gospels in a chapter (five) showing why the case for their greater historical reliability is pretty much nil.

It is the Gospels that show historical reliability, having been written in the same manner as other ancient biographies (chapter six). That they were likely written well within the lifetimes of the figures to whom they are ascribed and certainly within the lifetimes of many who knew Jesus in his earthly ministry, adds to the case for their reliability (chapter seven). Professor Pitre breaks down the rather shaky claims for late authorship of the Gospels, but shows that even if such claims were correct, the Gospels would be well within the living memory of eyewitnesses of the events depicted in them. Though some might say Pitre’s work is “popular,” it is done with references to and knowledge of all the best scholarship on the New Testament. It notes where even unbelievers such as Professor Ehrman admit that their case is not backed by evidence.

Having established the case for the Gospels’ reliability, Professor Pitre addresses the claims in these Gospels in chapters seven through twelve. Did Jesus claim he was God? Yes, Pitre says, but Jesus claimed to be God “in a very Jewish way”: “just because Jesus did not go around Galilee shouting, ‘I am God!’ does not mean that he didn’t claim to be divine.” All that study of the Old Testament and ancient Jewish writings comes in handy as he shows how Jesus’s own actions and depiction of himself—in all four Gospels—fits with writings on an expected Messiah, or anointed Davidic king, as well as prophecies of a divine figure from the book of Daniel. In fact, in chapter eleven on the Crucifixion, he shows why it is not the case that Jesus was handed over to the Romans for political reasons, for example, for claiming the Temple would be destroyed. It is precisely because of his claims to divinity that he was convicted of blasphemy.

I had my students write a paper on chapter twelve (on the Resurrection) because I found that it provided as clear a case as possible for why Jesus’ followers—and many others then and now—were convinced that he had indeed risen from the dead. The claims of early pagans, recycled by biblical critics many times in the last few hundred years, that Jesus’ body was stolen by the Disciples or perhaps revived after a near-death experience don’t make sense out of the situation. Nor do the modern claims that the first Christians were merely claiming some sort of experience of his continuing spiritual presence. No, the Resurrection was believed because the best explanation of the empty tomb was the Resurrection and it was bolstered by the many eyewitnesses who encountered this risen and glorified figure. Finally, most intriguingly, Professor Pitre explains what the rarely understood “sign of Jonah” line by Jesus himself meant—and why audiences familiar with the story would have been bolstered in their belief that Jesus had given it.

Readable, with scholarly backing, well-organized, and relatively short (242 pages), this book is a vademecum for Christians faced with the academic-journalistic war on Jesus’ lordship at Christmas. It cannot give faith of itself, but it does what the best works of apologetics do: it clears away intellectual objections and provides a balanced and reasonable account of the evidence that Jesus is neither liar, lunatic, nor the subject of tall tales.

The featured image is “The Doubting Thomas” (1654) by Leendert van der Cooghen, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.