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Monday, June 06, 2011

Separating the supernatural from the natural in the story of Jesus--the point behind the trilemma

It is popular to disconnect the plausibility of naturalistically acceptable claims made by the New Testament writers from those involving a supernatural commitment. This kind of an issue has come up before, when people have argued that no amount of accuracy on the part of the New Testament writers in recording mundane matter (such as we find in the Book of Acts), provides any evidence that the supernatural claims are also true.

It is interesting that some of you who are very eager to affirm the unity of the New Testament when you are arguing against the claim that the New Testament provides independent, or even partially independent strands of evidence for the claims of the New Testament, seem to want to argue that the New Testament is a diverse source when arguing that maybe we can accept the non-supernaturally involved claims while rejecting any element of the supernatural.

First, accurate reporting is a habit of mind. Even in mundane matters, you have people who take varying degrees of effort to get things right. If we conclude that a good deal of what our sources have to say is false, then that reflects poorly on everything they have to say, in much the way that evidence that a witness in a court case is untruthful about one thing can damage their credibility in other matters.

Admittedly, there are differences amongst the scenarios which conclude that the miracle claims are false. On some views, the writers experienced what they said they experienced, but were wrong about the causes of what they experienced. Hallucination theories of the Resurrection fit into this category. If the disciples hallucinated the risen Jesus, then they were "appeared to Jesus-ly," but were mistaken in supposing that the real risen Jesus was the cause of their being so appeared to. Or,t they might have seen lepers walking away from Jesus apparently cleansed, when the cause of this recovery was psychosomatic rather than divinely caused.

But other views treat the claims to be pretty much made up out of the whole cloth. If the New Testament contains a lot of material that was just made up, then it seems to me it would then be hard to credit passages that say Jesus taught that you should turn the other cheek.

I think the Gospels record actions on the part of Jesus that are mostly connected to his supernatural claims in one way or the other. Telling someone their sins are forgiven isn't directly supernatural, but if we accept it, we give ourselves the problem of figuring out how someone could believe that he had the prerogative to do so. Even Jesus's manner of teaching is a little odd from a naturalistic standpoint, in that you have a Jew who speaks on his own authority and even puts his own words (But I say unto you...)
in the place of the Law of Moses.

Now, you can argue, of course, that there are some good moral ideas that you can take from the New Testament even if Jesus didn't do or say much of anything he is supposed to have said. That's a different issue. I think something stronger can be claimed here; I believe that there is an ethical mind behind the Gospels that possessed true moral greatness, and that that is something that would have to be explained by any naturalistic theory. But that is a subject for another time.

But what I do maintain is that an easy separation between the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic is going to end up being a whole lot harder than it looks to carry off. It is indeed what the Trilemma argument is driving it.

10 comments:

Telling someone their sins are forgiven isn't directly supernatural, but if we accept it, we give ourselves the problem of figuring out how someone could believe that he had the prerogative to do so.

Probably the same way Catholic priests believe that they can forgive sins in the name of Christ. Jesus felt that he could forgive sins in the name of Yahweh. There is little doubt that Jesus considered himself to be Yahweh's agent on earth.

Could it be, Victor, that the Gospels simply were not intended to be hyper-accurate historical documentaries, but were instead something more along the lines of "hero tales" that were meant to aggrandize the life of Jesus?

You can clearly see a progression where the story becomes more fantastic from the earliest Gospel of Mark to the latest one in John (and on through the apocryphal gospels written much later).

VR: "It is popular to disconnect the plausibility of naturalistically acceptable claims made by the New Testament writers from those involving a supernatural commitment. This kind of an issue has come up before, when people have argued that no amount of accuracy on the part of the New Testament writers in recording mundane matter (such as we find in the Book of Acts), provides any evidence that the supernatural claims are also true."

Well, of course, unless there is some logical dependency, the plausibility of *one* claim -- whether "supernatural" or mundane -- doesn't generally affect the plausibility of a *second* claim (again, whether "supernatural" or mundane). Though, the trustworthiness of the claimant may influence one's readiness to ascribe plausibility to the claim. After all, "the boy who cried wolf" made a strictly naturalistic claim, and one very plausible on its face; but he had already blown his credibility.

VR: "It is popular to disconnect the plausibility of naturalistically acceptable claims made by the New Testament writers from those involving a supernatural commitment."

Yet, those same persons do not generally object to frankly absurd claims made in The Name Of Science! just so long as the absurdity is sugar-coated in a package of naturalism. I've discussed (and mocked) this particular form/instance of intellectual dishonesty here

Walter you wrote, "You can clearly see a progression where the story becomes more fantastic from the earliest Gospel of Mark to the latest one in John (and on through the apocryphal gospels written much later)."

Could you be more specific or at least give an example? John lacks important material found in the synoptics such as Jesus' birth, baptism, transfiguration, and exorcisms. Yet these events seem more amazing than many of the miracles reported in John. With such a lack of the more "extraordinary" claims how can you see such a progression?

Could you be more specific or at least give an example? John lacks important material found in the synoptics such as Jesus' birth, baptism, transfiguration, and exorcisms. Yet these events seem more amazing than many of the miracles reported in John. With such a lack of the more "extraordinary" claims how can you see such a progression?

I see a purely human Jesus who was adopted by the spirit of God in Mark's gospel. This Jesus went to his death in silence, and he cried out is despair on the cross, like any ordinary person would. By the fourth gospel, Jesus is the quasi-divine incarnation of the Logos who is large and in charge, calmly going to his preordained execution, which was all part of the master plan. He's been described as acting like the "boss on the cross" by the fourth gospel. The baptism by John would have been removed for obvious theological reasons--namely that it was an embarrassment to the faith community that produced the fourth gospel due to their "high" Christology. Between the first and the fourth gospel we have Matthew and Luke adding a virgin birth story--most likely to counter Mark's adoptionist Christology. They also tended to rework some of Mark's stories such as the one where he could do no miracles in his homeland due to people's lack of faith. By Matthew's gospel the story was changed to read not that he could not but that he would not do miracles in his home country. These changes were theologically motivated due to the ever-changing view of Jesus, and the exact nature of his relationship to Yahweh.

To sum it up, I see the story being molded by the particular community's Christological views on Jesus. I believe these accounts are theologically motivated propaganda pieces written to instill faith in the reader, and not hyper-accurate historical documentaries.

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About Me

I am the author of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, published by Inter-Varsity Press. I received a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.