“True facts” about Jesus

November 5, 2014 • 1:35 pm

I wish ZeFrank would do a video on this. . .

Four days ago, I posted about an NPR piece by Tonia Lombrozo, and its source, a paper by Neil van Leuuwen, which both maintained that the “truths” believed by religious people differ profoundly in character from the “truths” that scientists or laypeople hold about the world. As van Leuuwen said (p. 706 of his paper), “Religious attitudes are not factual beliefs,” and on the next page claims that the factual belief of scientists that “the world is not billions of years old” differs from the “religious credence” or creationists that “the world is not billions of years old.”

The differences, he says, lie (among other things) in the fact that believers don’t really think stuff like that, which they consider only “fictional imaginings” that help hold their group together. Further (and this is true), religious credences (aka religious “truths”) are not easily dispelled by evidence.

With the exception of religious truth’s immunity from disproof, Van Leuuwen’s and Lombrozo’s statements are, I think, largely nonsense. Of course believers think that many creedal assertions are true in a factual sense. Creationists believe the world really is young, and that God created things ex nihilo. Many Christians don’t see it as a fictional imagining that Jesus was crucified and resurrected. And Muslims certainly don’t see it as a fictional imagining that God dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad.

For proof you can look at statements of what people believe, at the tenacity and truth value they give them, and so on. And really, do creationists want their views taught in public schools because they think that creationism is a “fictional imagining”? Why are they still looking for Noah’s Ark, or trying to document miracles? Why do people flock to Lourdes: because a fictionally imagined God will give them a fictitious cure?

If you need any more proof, read this piece from the On Faith website: “10 things I wish everyone knew about Jesus,” by the Jesuit James Martin. And see if you think Martin realizes that these things he wishes we all knew are only “fictional imaginings”:

  1. Jesus was poor.
  2. Jesus saw income disparities at first hand, and condemned them.
  3. Jesus had close friends.
  4. Jesus instructed his disciples not to judge.
  5. Jesus didn’t say anything about gays and lesbians.
  6. Jesus always reached out to those on the margins.
  7. Jesus can’t be tamed.
  8. Jesus really did perform miracles.
  9. Jesus struggled, even in prayer, and
  10. Jesus rose from the dead.

Of course, the “evidence” for all of these claims resides solely in the New Testament, yet the beliefs aren’t fictional imaginings by any stretch. Martin really, really sees these things as true in the same way that we see the details of Abraham Lincoln’s life as true.

And these aren’t the kinds of statements that one sees as mere “fictional imaginings” (they’re Martin’s):

Jesus’ ability to perform miracles was never in doubt in the Gospels. Even his detractors take note of his miracles, as when they critique him for healing on the Sabbath. The question posed by people of his time is not whether Jesus can do miracles, but rather the source of his power. The statement that Jesus was seen as a miracle worker in his time has as much reliability as almost any other statement we can make about him.

Jesus really and truly rose to the dead. For me, that’s the most important thing to know about Jesus.

We tend to think of Jesus as interacting with his apostles, disciples, and followers. But he also had friends. The Gospels describe, for example, Jesus’s relaxing at the house of his good friends Mary and Martha, who lived in Bethany, just outside of Jerusalem.

Van Leeuwen’s claims show how far up his fundament a philosopher can go to prove an insupportable thesis. Ask a diehard Southern Baptist whether his view of Jesus is only a fictional imagining, or a fundamentalist Muslim whether he saw Muhammad as a made-up character (run quickly after you ask the second question!).  I could give lots of evidence beyond this article, but it’s superfluous. If you want more, see my Faith vs. Fact book coming out in May.

h/t: Diane G

 

85 thoughts on ““True facts” about Jesus”

      1. I don’t know what’s worse…that I could mess up my signature blasphemy so badly, or that y’all would notice and catch me on it….

        b&

  5. Technically we don’t know any true facts about Jesus, right down to whether he even existed. We have parables and mythology written long after the time he is said to have lived.

    Now you could say we have true facts about the story of Jesus…

  6. I thought that Jesus’s brother James was established so strongly that it should single-handedly establish Jesus as an historical figure. Yet that didn’t make the list, curious.

    I notice that the rising from the dead was left out of the first gospel, yet this guy thinks it’s one of the best established facts.

    1. I don’t believe there’s anything outside of the Bible or later other than non-canon gospels (also written long after the time period) about him. In other words, just as much information as there is about Jesus and from the same sources.

    2. It’s only late that James is identified as Jesus’s brother. Paul only writes of him as the brother of the Kurios, which is the same word he and the Septuagint both use for both “Lord” and “YHWH.” If Paul wanted to identify him as Jesus’s brother, he would have identified him as Ioseus’s brother, which he never does. Additionally, Origen makes this explicit in the same passage (written before Eusebius was born) in which he not only makes plain that Josephus never wrote of Jesus but in which he strongly indicates that he’s confused and it was Hegesippus (rather than Josephus) he was referring to in the first place.

      b&

      1. Sorry, I should have stuffed my tongue in my cheek harder 🙂

        I find it curious that even these short lists can still be so controversial. Richard Carrier cuts the list down to just a few and still pokes gaping gashes into them. Doesn’t stop people like this from declaring wildly inflated certainty in their pet idea of Jesus.

          2. Yes — my point. It makes no sense to describe Santa Claus as an historical figure, but at least there’s (perhaps) an historical figure to whom you can trace one of the dozens of threads of his story (though, granted, a rather minor and irrelevant thread). Santa has far more to do with various Teutonic and other European myths than the Bishop of Smyrna, and even “Saint Nicholas” in this context comes more from Satan than from the Bishop of Smyrna…but there is that faint smidgen of one person off in a corner of the room somewhere.

            Jesus doesn’t even have that much going for him.

            b&

          3. Nicholas – famous for assaulting an opponent during a debate at the Council of Nicaea(?), one of those sedate, contemplative meetings where early sophisticated theologians competed to see who could pull the biggest ‘true facts’ out of their posteriors.

  8. “Jesus saw income disparities at first hand, and condemned them”

    As doomed when judgement day came, maybe, because the rich will go either to everlasting Hell or to oblivion. Neither seems like a constructive way to deal with the situation, especially when any real Jesus (i.e. non-miraculous, non-divine) – if he existed – would almost certainly be either deluded or a con man in any case.

  9. I agree that if you examine religious beliefs, they’re nothing like “fictional imaginings”; my first thought was from the other direction, that if you examine standard fictional imaginings, they’re nothing like religious belief.

    We all consume countless fictions, after all, and some of them can be quite central to our lives. Among my favourite books is Great Expectations: I often think about it, I re-read it frequently, and when I do I often find – disconcertingly – how many catchphrases and patterns of speech I’ve taken from it.

    But the difference between my attitude to this book and a Christian’s to a story about Jesus is obvious: I don’t believe that the events recounted by Dickens really took place.

      1. Probably not the time to get into this discussion, but I would say rather that he transformed some of his life into some of his fiction (and a small proportion in each case). There’s little one-for-one correspondence. The closest approach to autobiography is David Copperfield – and if you compare that book with the later Great Expectations (his only other first-person coming-of-age book) you can see he’s not only changed all the details, he’s changed his basic attitude to them.

        1. …On reflection, I think I put in too much discussion after “Probably not the time to get into this discussion”.

  10. The statement that Jesus was seen as a miracle worker in his time has as much reliability as almost any other statement we can make about him.

    Well…he’s not wrong.

    1. I thought that was a weird one. I guess it means he does what he likes, not what you want him to do. But still curious, people are not generally thought of as being tamed in the first place.

    2. Yeah that sounds more like something you would say about a male supermodel or a boorish politician. Doesn’t it go without saying that you can’t “tame” the only begotten son of the Creator of the Universe?

      Oh, you can put him in jail and execute him, sure, but taming … ? Nuh-Uh! You. Can’t. Do. It.

      1. Sure it doesn’t have something to do with the difficulty housebreaking him and him still pooping all over the kitchen floor after all these years?

        b&

          1. Or, if he inherited his tricks from Mom, maybe she could turn poop into sawdust. That would sure be a most handy trick for my own Mom to use with her hens….

            b&

          3. It does make one wonder, though, just what would be the most bizarre scam you could get the religious to swallow whole. Maybe the section of Jesus’s intestine that Thomas fondled?

            b&

          4. There was a dead saint whose toes were surreptitiously bitten off by a noble devotee during a foot-kissing session, and smuggled to a distant city that was short of pilgrimage-fodder.
            I don’t see any reason why Thomas couldn’t have managed a similar feat with a penknife…

          5. Or, even better, why the local butcher couldn’t carve up a slice of hog intestines and sell them for a pretty penny with the story you just made up….

            b&

    3. I thought it made him sound more like a horse.

      “Why do you keep that one horse over in a pen by himself all the time and never try to ride him?”

      “Jesus can’t be tamed.”

  12. “The statement that Jesus was seen as a miracle worker in his time has as much reliability as almost any other statement we can make about him.”

    True fact!

    /@

  14. If Peter existed, then probably Jesus existed too (Peter after all was supposed to be the first bishop of Rome and to have been crucified for his beliefs – or at least as one of the scapegoats for the fire of Rome).

    But there are no contemporaneous records of Peter, which there should have been. Rome was the centre of political power, and little would have escaped the attention of the authorities compared to the boondocks such as Gallilee.

    The first mention of Peter is in the writings of Clement, a later bishop of Rome, not exactly the most reliable of sources.

    So – does the lack of contemporaneous records of Peter make the existence of Jesus more likely (because if Peter doesn’t get mentioned in Rome it makes it more plausible that a distant Jesus would not be mentioned too) or less likely?

    I’m inclined to think less likely.

    Anyway. A book recommendation. If you can read German, the German author Andreas Eschbach has a new novel out ‘der Jesus-Deal’ which has a real historic Jesus, who is capable of miracle healing (it’s necessary for the plot)), and time traveling Christian fundamentalists.

    It’s great fun with a great joke at the end when one of the time travellers suffers a conflict with his belief that dinosaurs didn’t exist (and that evolution isn’t true) and reality.

    1. As I recall, there was an old L Sprangue De Camp short story involving a time-travel dinosaur hunting safari and a creationist who wanted to prove that evolution wasn’t true… and was promptly eaten by a Phorusrhacid because he assumed it was a stork.

  15. Certainly people believe that Jesus ‘facts’–and other contents of the Bible–are literally true. Speaking from experience, not only do they believe them, they feel privileged to know them. Many Christians think that it is by god’s mercy that they have the capacity to ‘know’ what they believe are profound truths. I have known Christians who thanked god they weren’t born in a strange place where god’s word is less known, or a place so ‘fooled by Satan’ that they might worship a false god. Some people feel that they have been chosen to be “saved”. It sounds absurd. It is absurd, but no less true for it. Theologians and apologists can smear lipstick on the pig, but the truth of what some people believe cannot be disguised.

    1. True that. It’s an utterly bizarre and somewhat frightening experience to have a conversation with somebody like that, especially somebody who in other contexts seems perfectly rational. But, suddenly, the subject touches on Jesus and it’s like…woah…back away slowly and be careful about the eye contact….

      b&

    2. Well, duh.

      Mary: Aramaic ܡܪܝܡ Maryam or Mariam; Greek Μαρία or Μαριάμ. Presumably Μαρία would be pronounced as in “Black Maria” rather than as in _West Side Story_.

      Martha: Aramaic מַרְתָּא Martâ. Koine Greek Μάρθα.

      Happier?

      /@

      PS. Roger: Anglo-Saxon (Teutonic) Hroðgar : ‘fame and spear’. Also found in the Netherlands and Normandy in the forms “Rutger” (e.g., Hauer) and “Rogier”.

      PPS. Ant(hony): Latin Antonius, the nomen of the gens Antonia, one of the most important families in ancient Rome, claimed by Marcus Antonius to be descended from Anton, a son of Heracles.

      1. Do me! Do me!

        Just kidding, I’ll do myself.

        Paco Pico Piedra – friend of Crackity Jones, the crazy roommate of Black Francis when he was a student in Puerto Rico.

    3. I don’t know what “Martha” works out to, but Mary is just the Anglicization of “Miriam”, which is pretty common there.

      This generalizes – James is anglicized Yakov (as is Jacob, for example), John is Yannis (but from the Greek), etc.

  18. If Martin really believes that Jesus was a real historical person, then he can’t possible know the truth of #5 (“Jesus didn’t say anything about gays and lesbians”). All he can say is that the New Testament doesn’t record whether Jesus ever said anything about gays and lesbians.

    The only way #5 as written can be a true fact about Jesus is if Jesus is a fictional character with no existence outside the text of the New Testament.

    4. Even as a fictional character, it falls into “fictional gap” I’d think. For example, what day of the week did certain events take place? The text does not say.

  19. Jesus can’t be tamed? Whoa!

    I do know someone who tells me that her son, an Orthodox Jew, feels the Earth was created recently according to the Torah, and billions of years ago, according to science. He believes… both are true. I don’t get it. Can he simply compartmentalize in a different way from you and me? shrug. maybe.

    1. The reasoning probably involves something about how to d*g, time is different and a billion years are a day.

      1. I was told this years ago, so I didn’t question closely, but it wasn’t that simple. The way she put it, he believes both. At the same time. They are just true in different contexts.
        The closest I can come is that as as kid, reading Greek and Roman and Egyptian myths while a student at a Catholic school, I had this idea that they were all true, for those particular people at that time. And none of it had anything to do with me.

  20. “Jesus’ ability to perform miracles was never in doubt in the Gospels. Even his detractors take note of his miracles…”

    Even his detractors? Even his detractors?! The detractors from the same collection of stories? I has no idea. Consider my mind changed. Clearly he existed and performed magic if even his fictional enemies took note of the magic!

    This bit of reasoning is so great, because now every work of fiction that includes magic-performing protagonist and a magic-noting antagonist is totally true! I can’t wait to meet Harru and Frodo.

    2. Ummmmmmm, John 12 calls bullshit on this:

      37 Even after Jesus had performed so many signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him. 38 This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet:

      “Lord, who has believed our message
      and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”[h]

      39 For this reason they could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere:

      40 “He has blinded their eyes
      and hardened their hearts,
      so they can neither see with their eyes,
      nor understand with their hearts,
      nor turn—and I would heal them.”

      and:

      47 “If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. 48 There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day….”

  21. Van Leeuwen’s claims show how far up his fundament a philosopher can go to prove an insupportable thesis.

    Indeed. This is especially true for philosophers who are also religious apologists. Especially amusing are the ones who need “sophisticated philosophical arguments” about the nature of reality in order to make their ideas work.

    Even if I cannot give a philosophical watertight definition of what constitutes reality somehow everybody seems to intuitively understand the meaning of statements like “my car exists”.

    You would think that it constitutes a really big clue that you are holding an empty bag if you feel the need to clarify (or obfuscate – depending on your particular viewpoint) what you mean by “existence”.

  22. Hey Jerry,

    I do believe (although others don’t) that Jesus indeed existed; if this is the case, then perhaps we may stumble upon his remains one day. Of course this is hypothetical, but what if we found these bones and were somehow able to confirm that they were indeed Jesus’? Could we then extract some DNA from the bones, clone Jesus and fulfill the miracle of resurrection and the prophecy of his return with science? We may not quite have the tech yet to clone a human, but I imagine it’s not too far off.

    I imagine if this happened, evangelists’ heads would explode in confusion of whether they should be happy or seriously pissed. My guess: they would proactively try to end the world (and fulfill the prophecy the Bible foretold of Jesus’ return), cuckolding themselves into a subsection of culture that extreme Muslims now find themselves in.

    Also, it would be really funny when Jesus voted Green party. But this is obviously all just speculation (or is it truth, because I tell myself it is?).

    Jon

  23. “Why are they still looking for Noah’s Ark…”

    I’ve run into so many Christians who fervently believe that Noah’s ark has been found, that I’ve stopped being surprised that people can believe such foolishness.

    A lot of them point to Noah’s Ark being found as the reason why the believe in Christianity. No matter how much I try to disprove them and show them evidence that some of the people who found the so called Noah’s ark is not Noah’s ark, they still cling to their belief. Not terribly shocking to me.

    I tend to compare them to the alien astronaut crowd.

    “7. Jesus can’t be tamed.”

    Just like a wild animal or a bad fungal infection.

    1. Every few years someone claims to have found Noah’s ark; then we never hear any more about it until a few years later when someone else claims to have found it. I never hear anyone ask, “Wait a minute–what happened to the ark that was found a few years ago?”

Comments are closed.