Way after than promised, I have finished reading the New Testament, also
known as Bible II: The Adventures of God Junior. For details about the edition
I chose, see my previous post: Antiquum
Testamentum.
While it should come as no surprise to readers with a Christian background,
the New Testament is radically different from the Old Testament. Rather than
tales of the previously-mentioned endless warfare in the meat-grinder of
civilization, the New Testament covers a time of relative peace in the Middle
East, the so-called Pax Romana or Roman Peace. The God of the New Testament is
less about crushing your enemies, adhering to a long list of rules, and
wrecking false idols than he is about loving one's fellow man, forgiveness, and
"faith".
I put faith in quotes because the Latin word for faith, fides, has
a broader meaning than the typical modern English usage. When we say faith, we
tend to mean belief, or even blind belief. But the sense of the Latin
equivalent is more a reciprocal relationship of loyalty and honesty.
Fides is the same word we see show up in variant forms in phrases like
bona fide and semper fi. It is the faith of "good faith". And
it's interesting to see this contrasted with what we tend to translate as
"works". The Latin opus (plural opera) is fairly translated
as work or works. When I consider what Paul says in the larger context of
Jewish law, one of the things he seemed to be saying was that it is important
to follow Jesus and God's teachings honestly rather than simply going through
the motion. I can think of two good examples of what I believe is meant by
works rather than faith. First, consider the issue of the disciples picking
wheat on the Sabbath or Jesus healing the sick on the Sabbath. Technically this
is against the rules since the Sabbath is a day of rest. However, as Jesus
says, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." What rest is
there in hunger or illness? These things may violate the letter of the old law,
but not the spirit of it since a starving or sick man can have no rest. To take
another example, among modern Jews, there are certain people who believe in a
long list of things that should not be done on the Sabbath. One of these things
not to be done on the Sabbath is dialing a telephone. To overcome limitations
like this, less faithful Jews have developed various devices and tricks. For
example, I saw a video once of a man who had bought a fake hand on a stick that
he would use to dial his phone. He argued that the hand dialed the phone, not
him. Therefore he claimed that he had no broken any rule. That is not a
faithful adherence to God's old law. Thus it is easy to see the point of the
argument that works without faith mean nothing.
Non-Christians may find it odd that I make reference to the "old law". By
that I mean the laws given in the Old Testament, the ones Jews adhere to in
varying degrees to this day. These laws were superseded with Jesus' arrival.
When asked about what laws people should adhere to, it is said in the gospels
that Jesus only explicitly listed a few things: do not murder, do not steal, do
not commit adultery, do not give false testimony, honor your mother and father,
and love thy neighbor. Acts and the epistles of Paul further clarify that
dietary restrictions and circumcision definitely do not apply to converts. This
is important to keep in mind when common criticisms about the "hypocrisy" of
Christians are thrown around. The majority of such criticisms depend on
citations from Leviticus in the Old Testament. Aside from those things which
also appear in the New Testament, nothing in Leviticus is prohibited to
Christians. And many things in Leviticus are, arguably, not even prohibit to
non-priestly Jews. Take for example homosexuality. In Leviticus, death is the
punishment for homosexuality. In Romans, it is said to be a sin but it is in a
list of sins so broad that all of us our guilty. Paul's point, a point commonly
reiterated in the modern Catholic church but less so in Protestant churches, is
that we are all sinners and our only potential redemption is through God's
grace. In other words, homosexuals are just like the rest of us: forgiven
through Jesus and damned without him. This difference between Romans and
Leviticus is not a contradiction for Christians. The rules of Leviticus simply
do not matter anymore. Thus there is no hypocrisy or contradiction here. Let he
who is without reading comprehension go back to getting stoned.
On the topic of inconsistency and contradiction, there is some truth to the
fact that the gospels do not all tell the same story of Jesus' life. However,
having studied both medieval manuscript transmission, oral transmission, and
history more generally, parallel accounts like this almost never have this
level of consistency. The differences are primarily in the level of detail. For
example, if I'm not mistaken, the story of Lazarus shows up in both Mark and
John but only John goes into enough detail to actually give Lazarus' name.
Faithfully recording the gospels must have been very serious business in the
early church and that seems only natural given the obvious importance of God's
son showing up, delivering the new law, raising the dead, healing the sick, and
then coming back from the dead himself. Similarly, the idea that there is "no
evidence" that Jesus ever existed is farcical unless one arbitrarily decides
that the Bible somehow does not count. I think most people would be surprised
how little evidence we have for people and events in antiquity. It is not that
rare to know of something from a single manuscript copy of a single work. And
yet we accept those things as historical fact. If you want to start saying that
Jesus did not exist at all, you need to start questioning half of the things
you think you know about the ancient world.
More generally, most of the criticisms of Christianity that I personally had
or had read that lead me to become an atheist as a teenager simply fall apart
with a single honest reading of the Bible as a trained historian. It really
comes down to a few simple questions, which correspond very nicely with the
affirmations in the Nicene Creed. Do you believe there is a God who created the
universe? Do you believe that he became man in the form of Jesus? Do you
believe that Jesus was killed and came back from the dead? Do you agree with
his teachings that we should probably not murder, steal, and so on? Most people
can agree to the last question easily. A lot of people have no problem with the
first question, though it is quite the sticky wicket. It is those middle two
questions that I find the most difficult. Did the apostles and disciples really
see what they think they saw? Was human incarnation really the best method God
could come up with? If one accepts that we live in a created universe with some
driving force behind it, these things certainly seem possible. Unfortunately,
without witnessing them, I can not, thus far, come up with an ironclad argument
for why these things would be so. Still, this is progress. When reading the
Great Books, I am often left with more questions than I started with. I think
the Bible is the first time where I have read something and eliminated more
questions than I gained. And I have definitely vastly narrowed down the doubts
I may have about the Christian faith.
In any case, next up should be Euclid, as I had originally planned. Stay
tuned.