Consider The Gospel

Justin, your comments on External Evidence were so insightful I thought conversation should continue around them in a blog post.  You summarized my intent behind this
session quite well by surmising

I guess your main aim was to convince us that the Bible’s content is not ‘mythical’ in the sense that it was not entirely made up, and I agree with that (except in the case of the creation story)…

And that indeed was my aim.  I was not trying to prove or state that the Biblical account is true, proven or inspired, but that it sits on a tight historical framework.  So why do I think that to be significant?  Permit me to draw upon my university experience to illustrate.

When I started out in Forest Engineering I took courses like statics, dynamics, physics and mathematics.  They were rather tough courses for first year students and the failure rate was high.  “Why are they loading us down with so many hard assignments and killer tests?” we would complain to each other.  The word spread that in fact the professors intentionally structured things this way to ‘weed out’ students.  And in fact that is what happened.  We ended that year with about half the number of students that started.  A high percentage was ‘weeded out’.  Those of us who remained were still not ready to graduate and get our engineering rings – other difficulties lay ahead and not all would make it – but now the professors would continue our education with smaller, more focussed classes.

Truth claims and Flying Spaghetti Monsters

This illustrates my first reason for looking at external evidence – it ‘weeds out’ many candidates.  And you will find that there are many contestant worldviews in this ‘class’.  There are enough to make us wonder if we can make any sense of it.

For example, if you google ‘flying spaghetti monster’ you will find that the FSM (to use the acronym) is touted by some as a deity.  Now they do so in parody and satire (they are pastafarians of the church of the FSM!).  But with their satire they are asking a very pointed question: “Why should anyone take a scriptural account more seriously than how you take the FSM deity (which you dismiss)?  If you dismiss the FSM out-of-hand why not dismiss any other scriptural account out-of-hand?”  For me, applying external evidence is my ‘first cut’ by which I rationally weed out pretenders from contenders.  Why do I dismiss the FSM?  There is not one shred of evidence that the FSM has interacted through history in any way.  This is not the case for other scriptures.

To raise the bar a bit higher, I have friends who claim that Jesus never existed.  External evidence shouts that this is nonsense.  I know others who worship pagan deities such as Thor.  External evidence allows me to ask, “Has this god/figure ever intersected with humanity in a historical way?”

My Mormon experience

When I was an undergrad, Mormon believers met with me over multiple weeks to explain and help me assess their ‘news’.  I learned that their founding prophet, Joseph Smith, had discovered scriptures in the early 19th century buried in the ground in New York State that told the history of a clash of civilizations in North America.  These civilizations stemmed from a small Jewish community that left Jerusalem around the time of its first fall (586 BC) and immigrated to North America.  This discovery by Smith was written in a book made of golden plates in a language of ‘Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics’.

External evidence allowed me to assess and ask some questions to myself.  Why would Jewish people write in ‘Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics’ when in all their other writings they write in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek?  In fact, there is not one shred of any historical document in existence in the world today written in ‘Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics’ (the scripture book that Smith discovered was ‘lost’ just after he translated it into English), so there is no external evidence, in a sea of data from that era, that such a language ever existed.  All other writings from that era were written on scrolls made from animal skins or papyrus plants.  Why would these Jews start using gold plates?  There is no archeological evidence of any civilization in North America having a Jewish distinctive (and remember that Jewish people have been dispersed throughout the world for millennia and have always maintained their Jewish distinctive customs and scriptures).  The lack of external evidence allowed me to ‘weed out’ this news.

Krishna and External Evidence

The significance of the external evidence supporting the Gospel may perhaps be better appreciated by comparing it with a non-Western scripture.  The central figure in Hinduism is Krishna who is the incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu.  The pivotal event in his incarnate life was when he was a charioteer in the Kurukshetra War, and he gave wise advice and indispensable aid to one of the armies in this war.  So historically, when did this pivotal war for the central figure in Hinduism happen?  Wiki sums it up well:

The Kurukshetra War is believed to date variously from 6000 BCE to 500 BCE, based on the astronomical and literary information from Mahābhārata…. The historicity of the Kurukshetra War is unclear… The reconstruction of the history of Vedic India is based on text-internal details.

There is no external evidence at all to help us find this most important event of the Hindu scriptures in history, and thus there is about a 5000 year range in (basically) guessing when this may have happened.  In comparison with this, the external evidence from both extra-biblical writers and archeological artefacts concerning the Gospel, as we saw in Session 4, is stunning.

Substantiating the Supernatural in the Biblical record?

But I suspect Justin that you have already done your ‘weeding’ and have your ‘short-list’ and you are perhaps feeling stuck because external evidence did not help you further at this point.  In particular you are asking whether the biblical account is a “distortion of the truth, rather than ‘mythical’”, and whether (or not) the Gospel writers fabricated details around a historically verifiable kernel of truth.  I think you wonder about this because the Bible contains accounts of supernatural events.  As you ask:

The main issue at hand, I think, is the apparent impossibility of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection…can that really be addressed in this way?

Now those ‘weeder’ first-year courses that I took also served another purpose.  They provided foundational knowledge which I could build upon in my upper-year courses.  In the same way, armed with the information from Session 3 and 4 we can begin to address this question that really bothers you.  Let me explain in my next post.