Gospel Truth

Answering New Atheist Attacks On The Gospels

Paul W Barnett

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781844747238
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Strident New Atheists who seek to disprove God make historical attacks on the New Testament Gospels as a major part of their strategy. According to the late Christopher Hitchens, in God Is Not Great, 'The case for biblical consistency or authenticity or 'inspiration' has been in tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research, and thus no 'revelation' can be derived from that quarter.'In responding to Hitchens and others, Paul Barnett concedes that their instincts are correct: destroy the credibility of the Gospels and you destroy the credibility of Jesus and thus the credibility of God and the structure of Christian belief. The issue of 'gospel truth', that is, of the Gospels' historical truth, is of critical importance.Barnett surveys the main issues and questions, offering historical arguments in response to the critics and sceptics: New Testament dating and history, hostile witnesses to Jesus, his immediate impact, wider world history, archaeology, contradictions in the Gospels, the stories of Jesus' birth, miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, and other 'gospel' texts. He concludes with a clear affirmation of true and trustworthy revelation from God in the Gospels and in the person of Jesus Christ.This helpful, accessible volume will be of lasting value to all with an interest in the issues and debates.

1. INTRODUCTION: NEW ATHEISM AND GOSPEL TRUTH

If I give you a rose, you will not disdain its creator.

Tertullian

Philosophers debate whether to define atheism in negative terms, as a lack of belief in God, or positively as the declared disbelief in God. The derivation of the word ‘atheist’ does not help us since the two Greek words a (without) and theos (God) mean only ‘godless’. For the purpose of this book atheism is understood in the positive sense, as the asserted disbelief in God.

At the popular level atheists based their disbelief on the invisibility of God. A schoolboy said to a friend, ‘Show me a photograph of God and I will believe,’ and an acquaintance said to me, ‘I will believe only what I can see, smell, hear or touch.’

Beyond that, however, atheists point to the evils in the world that deny the existence of a God who is both all-powerful and good. Besides, they say, many of these evils were caused by religious wars.

There is nothing new about atheism. The ancient Epicureans were ‘atheists’.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) dismissed the idea of God or the gods and directed all his attention to the material world, on things that can be seen and touched. Ironically the Romans, who worshipped hand-made gods, called the early Christians ‘atheists’ because they did not believe in gods that could be seen.

Since the Enlightenment there have been prominent atheists, for example Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw. Communist Russia of the twentieth century was avowedly and determinedly atheistic.

The first years of the third millennium saw the rise of those who called themselves ‘new’ atheists. ‘Old’ atheists were content to mock and ridicule believers, but the ‘new’ atheists aggressively seek to drive them out of the public square. Its militancy distinguished it as ‘new’. The unifying concept of the New Atheists is their decision that ‘the traditional atheist policy of diplomatic reticence [towards religion] should be discarded’.1

The main protagonists of this anti-religious movement are the self-styled ‘four horsemen’: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.2 There are other New Atheist writers,3 but it is primarily the ‘four horsemen’ who have captured public attention and are visibly identified as the leaders of this movement.4

Rise of ‘New’ Atheism

How can we explain the sudden rise of ‘New’ Atheism? The views of leaders such as Richard Dawkins are not new, but they seem to have developed their momentum during the first decade of the new millennium. Is this because it was a new millennium, a time to instigate radical departures from the old ways of thinking? If so this would indeed be ironical since western calendars date millennia from the birth of Jesus! One related suggestion is the unwelcome and unexpected upsurge of religion – Christian, Islamic, Buddhist – that was evident in the latter decades of the twentieth century. According to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, it was these ‘retrograde’ revivals of religion that provoked the secular fury of Dawkins and his colleagues to argue that all religion is based on superstition and has no place in science-informed modernity.5 Christopher Hitchens was typically trenchant:

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made.6

Or, is this hostility explained by a terrible event at the beginning of the new millennium, an event inspired by religion? On 11 September 2001 a small number of convinced Muslim believers launched devastating attacks upon buildings and people in the United States, the reverberations of which will continue for decades.

Whatever the catalyst was that inspired the crusade of the ‘New’ Atheists, their credo is that all religion is evil and a danger to be driven from society.

Influence of ‘New’ Atheism

In addition to their prolific writings, the prominent ‘new’ atheists have criss-crossed traditionally Christian countries giving lectures and setting up debates with church leaders, frequently before large audiences. Formerly sleepy rationalist societies, whose members now flood the correspondence columns of daily newspapers at every opportunity, have been emboldened and empowered. Their members lobby politicians to dispense with religious teaching in public schools and for the removal of Christian festivals such as Christmas and Easter from the public calendars. The academic atheists have influential friends within the media who take pleasure in expanding on every mistake by prominent Christians. At their inspiration there is a sustained attempt to secularize Judeo-Christian societies. Christians in particular are a soft target, for non-retaliation is a fundamental teaching of Jesus.

Their strategy

In brief the ‘New’ Atheists use three main arguments against religion – philosophical, scientific and biblical (yes, biblical). These arguments are, in effect, arguments against Christianity; other religions do not get the same attention. Philosophical and moral issues are fully dealt with elsewhere,7 but I will make brief reference to the scientific issues here, before devoting the remainder of this book to the biblical concerns.

Let me admit immediately that I am a layman in the realm of science. Nonetheless, there are – as there have always been – many highly accomplished scientists who are convinced Christians whose views are worth hearing.

Scientists who are Christian

In 1978 Professor Graeme Clark rewrote the rules of hearing by inventing and implanting the world’s first bionic ear. Clark is now exploring the same understanding of electric stimulation of nerves for helping paraplegics, even for the development of the bionic eye.

In 2007 Clark delivered the Boyer Lectures for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.8 He observed that there are

100 thousand million nerve cells in the adult human brain, roughly the same number as the number of stars in the Milky Way. Each brain cell is connected to between 10 and 10,000 other brain cells, so that there are 100 million million connections in the brain. So there are an amazing number of possibilities in the brain for sensing and processing information. Our conscious experiences depend not only on the vast network of brain cells and connections but also on their interaction with the complex chemistry of the cell.

Clark asks:

could the physical universe, which physicists now show had only the remotest chance of producing carbon-based life, have evolved into human consciousness by mindless chance? I think not. The human brain is so sophisticated a mechanism that scientists have still not been able to design engineering systems that can match its crucial functions. For me that means a supernatural entity, namely God, was responsible, rather than saying it assembled itself by mindless chance. In any case, a human being would have to know everything to know there is no God!

Clark refers also to

vision as another remarkable sense. More than a million nerve fibers are needed for the visual pathways to represent a scene....The spinal cord also is very complex. At all levels the sensory and motor stimuli interact, and can influence each other, often without your knowing it or being able to control it. For example, when you step forward with say your left leg, the muscles in the right leg are kept rigid, so that you don’t overbalance.

Clark points to the thumb as

an outstanding example of the integration of the senses. To give it such fine control, its muscles have more receptors than other muscles in the body. The thumb is so unique that two sculptors in communist and atheistic Russia were in such awe that they set up an altar and worshipped the god of the thumb.

Originally an agnostic, Francis Collins progressed to atheism during his PhD studies in physical chemistry at Yale. En route, however, he also broadened his interests to biochemistry and became seized by the principles of DNA and protein. Collins then transferred to medical studies, during the course of which he was confronted by the quiet faith of an older woman who was dying and who asked Collins about what he believed. This began a process of enquiry that reached a climax in his conversion to Christianity.9

I had started this journey of intellectual exploration to confirm my atheism. That now lay in ruins as the argument from the moral law (and many other issues) forced me to admit the plausibility of the God hypothesis. Agnosticism, which had seemed like a safe second-place haven, now loomed like the great cop-out it often is. Faith in God now seemed more rational than unbelief.10

Francis Collins went on professionally to become the head of the prestigious Human Genome Project. By any measure, Collins is one of the world’s leading scientists.

Another eminent scientist, John Lennox, Professor of Math­ematics at Oxford University, also addresses the arguments of the New Atheists.11 Lennox systematically engages with the issues in cosmology, biology, the origins of life and genetics. He cites the arguments of sceptics and sets out scientific reasons for an Intelligent Mind as the source of the universe and of life. He summarizes his conclusions as follows:

although science with all its power cannot address some of the fundamental questions that we ask, nevertheless the universe contains certain clues as to our relationship to it, clues that are scientifically accessible. The rational intelligibility of the universe, for instance, points to the existence of a Mind that was responsible both for the universe and our minds. It is for this reason that we are able to do science and to discover the beautiful mathematical structures that underlie the phenomena we can observe. Not only that, but our increasing insight into the fine tuning of the universe in general, and of the planet earth in particular, is consistent with the widespread awareness that we are meant to be here. The earth is our home.12

Scientific studies, however, have their limitations in relationship with God. Lennox quotes many prominent physicists, cosmologists, biologists and geneticists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, who affirm the existence of the Mind who is the source of the material universe and the human mind. Nonetheless, we depend upon the Bible for the ‘revelation’ of the identity of that Intelligent Mind, his character and his manner of relationships with the created order, including with us humans. This makes the Bible uniquely and indispensably important in the quest for truth and meaning, a subject to which we will return at the conclusion of this chapter.13

Atheists and gospel truth

Crusading atheists who seek to disprove God make historical attacks on the Gospels as a major part of their strategy. According to Hitchens, ‘The case for biblical consistency or authenticity or “inspiration” has been in tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research, and thus no “revelation” can be derived from that quarter.’14 This book responds to the claims of Hitchens and other sceptics that the Gospels are inconsistent. Their instincts, however, are correct: destroy the credibility of the Gospels and you destroy the credibility of Jesus and thus the credibility of God.

This prompts the question about the competence of the atheists to pass judgment on the Gospels. Dawkins and Hitchens, for example, are leading figures in their respective fields; Dawkins is an eminent evolutionary biologist and Hitchens was a brilliant political commentator. Distinction in these fields of scholarship, however, does not qualify them as authorities in Gospels studies.

Dawkins refers to anecdotes about the boy Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas that he confuses with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. In any case, these are apocryphal works written centuries after Jesus.15 Worse, he attributes the story of the wise men (Magi) to the Gospel of Luke, when it actually appears in the Gospel of Matthew!16 Dawkins also makes the ludicrous claim that the Gospels are as much works of fiction as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.17 One of the results of painstaking research into ancient biographies and the Gospels has been to reveal that the Gospels belong to the genre of biography, not fiction.18 All credit to Dawkins for his accomplishment in his chosen area of scholarship, but his basic errors about the Gospels diminish his credibility to pass historical judgments on them.

History, the Gospels and God

These atheists are, indeed, right in their attacks on the historical consistency of the Gospels. To destroy that consistency would mean a serious issue of credibility about Jesus and the God he claimed to represent and reveal. American scholar George Eldon Ladd understood this well:

The uniqueness and scandal of the Christian religion rests on mediation of revelation through historical events...And if those facts should be disproved, Christianity would be false. This, however, is what makes Christianity unique because unlike other world religions, modern man has means of actually verifying Christianity’s truth by historical evidence.19

Accomplished scientists such as Clark, Collins and Lennox are able to point to a deity outside the creation who is the source and origin of creation, and who is infinitely intelligent and powerful. The claim of the Gospels, however, is that in the Son of God, his words and works, we see fully the Father from whom he came. ‘No one has ever seen God,’ wrote John, ‘the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known’ (John 1:18). Furthermore, the Son of God not only fully reveals the otherwise imperfectly known God; he also connects that God to us humans and makes us his children.

The issue of gospel truth, that is, of the gospel’s historical truth, is of critical importance. Destroy that truth and the whole structure of Christian belief and practice crumbles and collapses. The vindi­cation of gospel truth, however, demands that we give it our close attention. It is good to begin with the ‘big picture’, however, and to that we now turn.

2. GOSPEL TRUTH AND THE BIG PICTURE

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’

Revelation 1:8

This book is about the importance of gospel truth, without which it is impossible truly to know God, or, as St Paul more precisely says, to be known by God. The conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity illustrates this point.

Formerly an aggressive atheist, Lewis had gradually be...

Table of contents

• Gospel Truth
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1. INTRODUCTION: NEW ATHEISM AND GOSPEL TRUTH
• 2. GOSPEL TRUTH AND THE BIG PICTURE
• 3. HOSTILE WITNESSES TO JESUS
• 4. THE IMMEDIATE IMPACT OF JESUS
• 5. GOSPEL TRUTH AND WORLD HISTORY
• 6. ARCHAEOLOGY AND ARTEFACTS
• 7. GOSPEL TRUTH AND CONTRADICTIONS
• 8. THE BIRTH STORIES
• 9. MIRACLES
• 10. THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS OF NAZARETH
• 11. OTHER GOSPELS?
• 12. THE TRANSMISSION IS TRUSTWORTHY
• 13. GOSPEL TRUTH AND REVELATION
• EPILOGUE
• FURTHER READING
• Footnotes