How Bart Ehrman Misreads the Gospels (Part I)

(Note: this preliminary critique of Bart Ehrman's approach to the gospels is slightly updated from an early chapter in Jesus is No Myth: Fingerprints of God on the Gospels, by David Marshall, 2016.  Ehrman's anti-Christian posts keep coming up on my Facebook feed, so this may come in handy. Subsequent chapters criticize (even mock) the parallels Ehrman attempts to draw between Jesus and the traveling 1st Century Greek guru, Apollonius of Tyana, and the magical early modern Polish rabbi, Baal Shem Tov.  My first substantive critique of Ehrman in this forum covered a few of the same bases in some detail ten years ago.  You will notice a lack of substance among critiques of that article in the comments section: hopefully his supporters will offer more factual details, if they choose to defend him again.  Of course Ehrman is also welcome to join any conversation that emerges.)  

Bart Ehrman projects, for millions of Americans, the face and voice of respectable, informed, calm and judicious Jesus-scholarship.  Author, co-author, or editor of more than two dozen books, including several New York Times best-sellers, Ehrman often “gives his testimony” about how he converted to evangelical Christianity, then de-converted as his education progressed, and doubts crept in.  In lectures and books, he argues that Jesus did not see himself as the “Son of God,” rather as an end-times prophet.  Ehrman has crossed swords with mythicists like Richard Carrier by arguing forcefully that there is a solid core of historical truth to the gospels, and with numerous Christian scholars by arguing that Jesus was not much as the gospels depict. 

I won’t attempt to survey or evaluate all of Ehrman’s books, still less ideas, in this chapter.  I shall continue to focus on questions we have pursued thus far: “Who was Jesus?  Can we trust the gospels to give an accurate portrait of him?  Can we find any genuine parallels?”  Other aspects of Ehrman’s critique of early Christianity will arise as we consider how he tries to answer these key questions. 

Ehrman believes he has found several valid parallels to the life of Jesus, which he describes in books and debate.  His anthology Lost Scriptures is a collection of “gospels,” hagiographies, and other early “Christian literature” that was left out when the New Testament was compiled.  But Ehrman most often compares the gospels to a work already mentioned: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. 

 

Apollonius of Chapel Hill

Ehrman begins How Jesus Became God, which Anne Rice is quoted as praising in Chapter One, by relating how he introduces Jesus to undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina.  Where should one start to talk about the man everyone has been talking about for two thousand years?  With Paul, author of more books in the New Testament than anyone else?  (Though not, of course, the “bulk” of the New Testament as Aslan claimed.)  With the gospels, which relate Jesus’ life?  No, Ehrman concludes, to introduce Jesus one should first nudge his contemporary Apollonius onto the stage to take a bow.  Why should anything in the gospels shock us after reading how much of the Christian story also appears in the life of a First Century pagan thinker? 

“Before he was born, his mother had a visitor from heaven who told her that her son would not be a mere mortal but in fact would be divine.  His birth was accompanied by unusual divine signs in the heaven.  As an adult he left his home to engage on an itinerant preaching ministry.  He went from village to town, telling all who would listen that they should not be concerned about their earthly lives and their material goods; they should live for what was spiritual and eternal.  He gathered a number of followers around him who became convinced that he was no ordinary human, but that he was the Son of God.  And he did miracles to confirm them in their beliefs: he could heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead.  At the end of his life he aroused opposition among the ruling authorities of Rome and was put on trial.  But they could not kill his soul.  He ascended to heaven and continues to lives there till this day.  To prove that he lived on after leaving this earthly orb, he appeared again to at least one of his doubting followers” (12).

The reader may suspect by now that I will have words to say about Ehrman’s methodology.  Ehrman is lining up “parallels” like ducks in a row to shock students and readers into an instant of satori: a blast of ground-shaking, faith-toppling relativistic enlightenment.  His thesis is that Jesus did not claim divinity, but had it imposed on him after the fact.  Rather than set in advance a balanced menu of traits and then compare them objectively, however, he selects alleged facts that seem to support his point, shooing what would obscure, or more accurately gut, skin and roast that thesis over a flame-fired barbecue, into the bushes.      

That Ehrman is cherry-picking, and knows better, is shown by his parallel description of Apollonius in Did Jesus Exist, two years earlier.  There, he offers the same arguments, but then adds this tell-tale caution (emphasis added again):

One difference in style: 
Apollonius incited stoning of
the marginalized. 

“My view is that even though one can draw a number of interesting parallels between the stories of someone like Apollonius and Jesus (there are lots of similarities but also scores of differences), mythicists typically go way too far in emphasizing these parallels, even making them up in order to press their point.”[1]

Does Ehrman bring these “scores of differences” up when he is trying to “shock and awe” his students into seeing Jesus and Apollonius as similar?  Apparently not.  He does not seem to give readers or students the full picture one would expect from so eminent a scholar, a glance at methodology or a word about any of that “score” of differences.  And even more shocking, with some of his alleged similarities, the eminent Dr. Ehrman comes close to “making things up,” as we shall see.    

 

Bad Timing

I once debated Robert Price, one of the more colorful and better-informed mythicists Ehrman criticizes, on an atheist web site.  Price also brought up supposed parallels between Jesus and Apollonius, but neglected to mention that the author of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus, wrote some 150 years after the gospels were produced.  As a member of a powerful literary salon, commissioned to pen Apollonius’ life story by the empress Julia Domna, whose husband and son both actively persecuted Christians, Philostratus had both opportunity and motive to pilfer from the gospels, if he felt any Christian motifs might add luster to the chest of wonders and wisdom he had collected, and allow his guru to better compete for disciples.

Ehrman refers to that competition, but like Price, he overlooks the calendar:

“Christian followers of Jesus who knew about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud.  Both groups could point to the authoritative written accounts of their leader’s life to score their debating points.”[2]

The words “in response” imply that the Apollonians critiqued Jesus only after the Christians took on their man.  But three pages later, Ehrman admits the point / counterpoint between the two communities actually played in reverse order.  In the early fourth Century, “a pagan author named Hierocles wrote a book called The Lover of Truth” comparing Apollonius favorably to Jesus, and deriding Peter and Paul as “liars and devoid of education and wizards.”  (This was before schools like Hogwarts had been established to provide wizards with standardized book-learning.)  Eusebius fired back, venturing that while the real Apollonius may have been a “kind of philosopher,” the hero of Philostratus’ tale was “an ass concealed in a lion’s suit,” lacking “integrity and good sense.”  So by Ehrman’s own account, followers of Apollonius did not respond to Christian insults, as Ehrman claimed, rather a Christian responded to Hierocles’ insults.  (And Hierocles did more than insult: he also zealously lobbied for and enacted state persecution of Christians.) 

Was Ehrman’s slip an innocent misstatement?  Then why, like Price, did he also neglect to point out that Life of Apollonius of Tyana was written long after the gospels, and commissioned by an opponent of Christianity?  Scholars have an obligation to note a writer’s dates and such overwhelming biases.  Ehrman merely says that Philostratus did “considerable research” for his book, and notes that the author claimed his Life was based on eyewitness accounts. 

Ehrman accuses followers of both teachers of seeking to score debating points, but who is more guilty of that than Ehrman himself?  The point he attempts to score is relativistic.  Both Jesus and Apollonius were wandering sages with similar ministries and teachings who were elevated after death to deity.  (Whether as eternal Creator of all things, or as a kind of Greek Mr. Incredible.)  According to Ehrman, it was nip and tuck which team would win the competition.  Furthermore, “There were a lot of people like this in the ancient world.”

Why, then, do so many modern scholars make such a fuss about Apollonius?

We hear about Apollonius of Tyana from Aslan, Carrier and Ehrman.  Robert Price touts him.  He features prominently in the writings of members of the Jesus Seminar.  Harvard scholar Paula Fredriksen invokes him.  John Loftus even speaks for “all atheists” in saying: “Atheists all agree that the miraculous Jesus we read in the gospels never existed.  His virgin birth was not unlike Hercules and Plato, and his life had a very striking resemblance to Apollonius of Tyana.”[3] 

Which raises a question.  If there are so many excellent parallels to Jesus in the ancient world (as such skeptics also often insist), why does everyone concentrate on the same one?  And why do they forget to mention that Philostratus wrote when the gospels were widely available, was sponsored by an opponent of Christianity, and had every reason to draw on Jesus’ good name?  Even if the supposed parallels turned out to be genuine (we shall see otherwise), this might be like wondering at the resemblance between Elvis and the impersonators who sway and croon in his footsteps.  As we saw, new religions often borrow from successful old ones.  So when comparing two famous religious teachers in one civilization, an honest scholar should carefully note which arrived first and therefore may have influenced the other. 

Even more striking, when we analyze Life of Apollonius of Tyana, we shall find that Eusebius’ phrase, “an ass dressed up as a lion,” aptly summarizes the real situation.  The two men could hardly be more different.    

 

Preliminary Oversights  

Not to anticipate my later, more thorough analysis, but in addition to confusion about time, cherry-picking and failure to mention “scores” of dis-analogies, which as we will see are of far more significance than his cherry-picked analogies, many of Ehrman’s facts are baldly wrong.  The visitor at Apollonius’ birth did not come “from heaven.”  The “god of Egypt,” Proteus, was the “Old Man of the Sea” who slept on the island of Pharos in the Nile Delta where the great lighthouse had been built, shifting shapes to avoid being forced to reveal hidden truths to mortals.  Proteus visited his mother in the guise of a demon, suggesting that he himself was the son about to be born.  In Odyssey, Menelaus and three shipmates dress up as seals, wrestle with Proteus, and force him, after he has appeared as lion, dragon, leopard, boar, film of water, and tree, to reveal many secrets, including what has happened to Agamemnon and Odysseus.  Rather than “from heaven,” “Out of Egypt” (the title of Anne Rice’s own book about Jesus) would describe Mrs. “Of Tyana’s” pre-natal visitor more accurately. 

“Unusual divine signs in the heaven” is also misleading, since there was only one such “sign.”  After his mother was led into a field to pluck flowers, a thunderbolt rose into the sky and disappeared.  Scholars should recognize the difference between singular and plural. 

“Itinerate preaching ministry” also makes the two sagely careers sound more alike than they really were.  Apollonius wandered much of the known world, from Egypt to India, while Jesus stayed mostly (and more plausibly) in Galilee and Jerusalem.  Apollonius was not particular evangelical, and didn’t often do open-air preaching, since he found the masses a bore.  Ehrman seems to imply that Apollonius’ message of “living for what is spiritual and eternal” is comparable to Jesus’ “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!”  But nothing could be more different than the spiritual messages of the two men, as we shall see.  Nor was Apollonius called “Son of God” or even “son of the gods,” so far as I can tell.  And Philostratus does not really claim that he raised anyone from the dead, as we shall also see.  Nor, again, did Roman officials try to kill him.  Since so many skeptics cite Apollonius as the most credible parallel to Jesus, we shall allot two chapters to analyzing the alleged parallels, and the vastly more significant differences Apollonius’ fans often neglect to mention.  We shall see that Bart Erhman has grotesquely and rather shamelessly misrepresented facts as he accuses mythicists of doing, and in the same cause – to undermine the uniqueness of Jesus.  But I will argue that this plan backfires. 

So like Aslan and Carrier, Ehrman is not content to pick and choose (like Apollonius’ mother in the field of flowers) to “press his point.”  He may not quite be inventing facts “out of nothing at all,” but he is certainly not representing sources accurately.  At best, he is trimming, framing, hanging ribbons here, covering with newspapers there, to make Jesus and Apollonius appear similar enough to startle readers and students.  And of the “scores” of differences we shall indeed discover lie between the two men, some are so important that they change everything.      

Bart Ehrman is a well-educated, knowledgeable, and intelligent scholar.  So why does he misrepresent Philostratus’ work so badly?  Why not compare these two bodies of works by means of more careful and systematic methodology?

Perhaps Ehrman feels that on his own premises, he ought to find numerous analogies to Jesus, and is frustrated that he can’t locate any good ones.  

Exoplanets and False Messiahs

Consider an analogy from astronomy.  In 2011, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez wrote in Faith Seeking Understanding, which I edited, that a little less than 1800 potential exoplanets, worlds circling other suns, had been tentatively located.  Five years later, the number has more than tripled.  (2026 update: now over 6200.)  But the search for Earth-like planets circling other stars still lies in its infancy.  Living in a galaxy of 300 billion or so stars, itself one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, we have only begun to poke around a tiny corner of the cosmos for conditions analogous to Earth, seeking foreign worlds that might be hospitable to life. 

By contrast, the search for Jesus-like teachers on this planet is now almost two thousand years old.  Most surviving ancient books have been surveyed.  (I have read hundreds myself.)  The spiritual lives of most plausible candidates have been examined for centuries, if not millennia.

Skeptical scholars point to Apollonius because other analogies are even worse. 

Ehrman does offer other really ancient parallels.  Like Carrier, he discusses Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome.  His Lost Scriptures provides a tantalizing service for those fishing in this derby, by planting thirteen alternative “gospels” into the easily-fishable pond of one volume.  Unlike Elaine Pagels in the Gnostic Gospels, the Jesus Seminar, Harvard’s gullible Karen King and others,[4] Ehrman readily confesses that those works are late, non-Jewish, and of marginal if any relevance to the historical Jesus.  Still, these alternative Jesus stories show us what a gospel might look like if it were the product of imagination.  I described numerous telling differences between canonical gospels and Thomas in my 2007 book, The Truth About Jesus and the ‘Lost Gospels.’  I chastised Ehrman there for (in my view) falsely identifying Gnosticism as a form of Christianity[5] and for acting as if orthodoxy were merely one of many equally valid interpretations of Jesus’ teaching in the ancient world.  But Ehrman does not at least confuse the dubious historical value of so-called “Gnostic Gospels” with that of Matthew, Mark, or Luke, if not John. 

Several more orthodox early hagiographical works can also be found in Ehrman’s anthology.  These tell entertaining tales about the apostles John, Peter, Paul, Thomas, and a female disciple named Thecla.  In one, John orders bedbugs from his hotel room at night, and they march out, then march back in to resume their “posts” the next morning.  In another, an evil magician flies around Rome like Bellatrix.  In some, the torture of faithful virgins is told in titillating detail.  These tales show how an early Christian with a flair for fiction who lived during the age of the budding Greek novel might relate the story of a Christian hero.  Both Gnostic and early Christian works provide “control groups” to see if the characteristics we find in the gospels really do demonstrate their historicity. 

Ehrman recently offered a fuller argument for a novel “parallel Jesus” when he debated philosopher Tim McGrew on Premier Radio’s Unbelievable program in London.  He pointed listeners to Medieval Poland and introduced listeners to the wandering rabbi, Baal Shem Tov, who helped found Hasidic Judaism, and is said to have worked many miracles during his ministry.  He mentioned him again a year later in Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. 

But Apollonius remains most popular, both among scholars and ordinary skeptics like Loftus, because, frankly, nothing better has shown up.  The fact that responsible, even eminent scholars like Ehrman feel the need to omit or alter details of timing, affiliation, or origin is telling.  And we still find little hint of systematic method in Ehrman’s comparison.  The Search for a Parallel Jesus often seems more like a holiday in a cherry orchard, or like the Monkey King’s rampage through the orchard of the peaches that lend immortality, than a systematic harvesting of the fruits of scholarly investigation. 

Ehrman does offer historical criteria which may, however, help us judge between historical fact and fiction.  We will consider his suggestions later, along with Carrier’s criticism of such traditional criteria. 

Who was Jesus?  Ehrman relies on “criteria” to answer that because, in common with most scholars, he does not accept a straight-forward reading of the gospels.  What are his grounds for rejecting the portrait those four books draw of Jesus? 

 

A Liberal Creation Myth

Ehrman believes the “real Jesus” was an apocalyptic prophet who thought the end of the world was just around the corner.  While the gospels are the best sources we have for his life, and careful application of criteria can extract true historical facts from them, he doubts they are very reliable.  That is because the stories of Jesus were not written by his original followers, certainly not by eyewitnesses.  In fact, they were passed around the Mediterranean for many years before finally being written down, by people who not only did not personally know Jesus, but had not even met his friends.  Thus we need wise critical scholars (Ehrman refers to Dale Allison, John Meier, Paula Fredriksen, E.P. Sanders, and Geza Vermes as important peers, and indeed Fredriksen wrote a blurb for his book) to sort fact from fiction:

”The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.”[6]

Ehrman presses the fact that “you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.”  Given that he defines “critical scholarship” as that scholarship which does not take the gospels “at face value,” and fundamentalism as the act of doing so, his list of leading scholars becomes a bit circular.  Of course scholars who take the gospels largely at face value are unlikely to be found leading the ranks of those who do not take the gospels at face value.  Nor would one expect the head of the Steak Venders of America to be a vegetarian.  Ehrman does not mention scholars like Craig Blomberg, Richard Bauckham, Craig Evans, Craig Keener, Larry Hurtado, Ben Witherington, or N. T. Wright here, top scholars who keenly defend a strongly (if not naively) historical read of the gospels. 

So why should we caucus with the former set of scholars against the latter and doubt the general historicity of the gospels?  Ironically, Ehrman’s complaint is in part just the opposite of that which Aslan and Carrier lodge.  The problem with the gospels is not that their authors were poorly-educated, but that they were well-educated and far-removed from the class consciousness of Jesus’ first followers:

“The followers of Jesus, as we learn from the New Testament itself, were uneducated lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews from Palestine . . . (The authors of the gospels) were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation.  They probably wrote after Jesus’ disciples had all, or almost all, died.  They were writing in different parts of the world, in a different language, and at a later time.”[7]

But in fact, the gospels never suggest that Jesus’ first followers were “uneducated.”  One is described as a tax-collector, and another was married to an important servant in the high priests’ family.  In pointing to upper-class links, the gospels are credible: sociologist Rodney Stark argues that most successful new religious movements are founded by members of the upper classes.  Nor is there any reason to deny that Jesus’ first followers spoke Greek: surely many did, given their proximity to centers of Greek culture.   

Ehrman is engaging in a popular bit of skeptical parlor magic here, trying to create space between Jesus and the gospels.  One common way to create that space is by exaggerating the gap between Jesus’ life and the writing of the gospels.  Fredriksen, for instance, wrote that the Gospel stories were “told and retold” by generations” that died off, one after the other, before being written down.[8] And indeed, Ehrman attempted to create chronological space in his debate with Timothy McGrew:

Bart Ehrman: "If you want to talk about the kind of evidence in the New Testament, what we have are documents written fifty years later, by people who . . . "

Tim McGrew: "I'd put them a bit earlier."

Ehrman: "By people who are not eyewitnesses."

McGrew: "I'd disagree there, too."

Ehrman: "OK, so let's say they're written by eye – by people who have gotten their stories 20 years later from eyewitnesses."  

McGrew: "Or who were eyewitnesses themselves."

Several times here, McGrew checks Ehrman as the latter attempts to stretch out space between Jesus and the authors of the gospels.  Ehrman assumes a later date than is conventional, at least for Mark – most scholars put the writing of the first gospel from thirty to forty years after the events they record.  (A few say ten.)  He also assumes that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses.  McGrew challenges him on both points, and Ehrman said “OK,” as if he were ready to concede those points for the sake of the argument he was preparing, a “parallel Jesus,” the Polish rabbi, Baal Shem Tov.  (The abuse of whose story in Ehrman’s hands we shall describe later.)  But having said “OK” to McGrew, and begun the word “eyewitnesses,” Ehrman suddenly remembers that the story he is preparing to tell – of Tov – is actually not by eyewitnesses at all, and so changes in mid-sentence to “by people who have gotten their stories from eyewitnesses.”  (Which is also not true in Tov’s case, we shall see.) 

How many generations can die out in three to four decades?  Are we talking about human beings, or mayflies?

Ehrman creates more literal, geographical space, as well as positing cultural gaps in First Century social networking.  He suggests the following theory of how the written accounts of Jesus’ life came into being (tripling Aslan’s estimate of the ancient literacy rate in the process, incidentally, though in debate with Bauckham he also used the 3% figure):

“These stories circulated.  Anyone who converted to become a follower of Jesus could and did tell the stories.  A convert would tell his wife; if she converted, she would tell her neighbor; if she converted, she would tell her husband; if he converted, he would tell his business partner; if he converted, he would tell his wife; if she converted, she would tell her neighbor . . . And on and on.  Telling stories was the only way to communicate in the days before mass communication, national media coverage, and even significant levels of literacy (at this time only about 10 percent of the population could read and write . . . “)[9]

The authors of the gospels had no chance to check facts before writing, removed as they were from those facts not only by class and language, but by distance, time and social connections: 

“The stories were being told by word of mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control what one person said to the next . . . Eventually, an author heard the stories in his church – say it was ‘Mark’ in the city of Rome.  And he wrote his account.  And ten or fifteen years later another author in another city read Mark’s account and decided to write his own, based partially on Mark but partially on the stories he had heard in his own community.  And the Gospels started to come into existence.”[10]  

Elsewhere, Ehrman tells the story this way:

"You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game, 'telephone'. . .  Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone has a good laugh . . . Imagine playing 'telephone' not in a solitary living room with ten kids on a sunny afternoon in July, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across!), with thousands of participants, from different backgrounds, with different concerns, and in different contexts, some of whom have to translate the stories into different languages over the course of decades.  What would happen to the stories?"[11]

Like many myths, the charm of Ehrman’s account of how the gospels came to be lies in its simplicity.  I call it a “myth” not just in the anthropological sense that it is a “story about origins,” but also in the common sense of “certifiable nonsense.”

Mind you, I agree with Ehrman’s premise that stories passed from person to person and across cultures are likely to become corrupted.  The historian Polybius said he “either witnessed events myself, or talked to people who witnessed them,” for fear of writing “hearsay based on hearsay.”[12]

But consider.  As we pass these stories about Jesus from country to country, editing, inserting, mixing and dosey-doing while engaging in the world’s longest chain of hearsay whispering (involving thousands of players over thousands of miles, several decades and multiple languages), how high a priority would Mark’s church in Rome place on getting names of minor characters in Palestinian Israel correct?  A bit below “getting signatures from all the Roman gladiators before they left for the eternal Coliseum in the Sky” but above “visiting sailor bars in all the cities named for Alexander the Great,” one would think.  One would not expect a gospel written in the haphazard, twenty-rounds of musical-chairs-then-pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey manner Ehrman describes, to accurately record exact names in use among Palestinian Jews.

(Indeed, to illustrate this point when publicly speaking on Jesus is No Myth, I sometimes set audience members into circles of 10-15 and then sent a message around the mostly-American groups which included the names of one or more of my Chinese students.  Almost inevitably, the part of message that was most scrambled, were those culturally-unfamiliar names.  On Ehrman’s hypothesis, foreign names – not stories of Jesus’ miracles, not his parables, not his debates with critics, not even his pithy aphorisms – would have been the first element in the gospels to suffer degradation.)

And yet, as Cambridge historian Richard Bauckham shows, the gospels do record 1^st Century Palestinian Jewish names accurately. 

Neil Shenvi borrows data provided by Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 39-92) to turn Ehrman’s argument on its head.  Here is his chart of the most common names in the gospels and Acts, and as found in ossuaries from that century in Palestine:[13]

·        

·        

So the frequency of the three most popular male names in the earliest books of the New Testament appear in the same order as archeological data shows those names did, indeed, appear at that time in Palestine.  Furthermore, the percentages are remarkably close.  In addition, three of the next five names also appear among the five next most popular names.  Even the respective percentages are tight.  Are we really supposed to believe some anonymous Matthew, Luke or Mark in Rome ten or twenty rounds of telephone tag removed from Palestine got all these names correct?  Shenvi argues:

“If this analogy really is a good one, then we could also ask ‘What would happen to the names of people in those stories?’  The answer would not be: ‘We'd see 1st century Palestinian names reproduced with the proper frequencies across all four gospels.’  So I think Bauckham's work shows fairly definitely that this picture of how we got the gospels is wrong.  Either oral transmission is far more accurate than Ehrman describes, or the gospels originated close to Jesus, both temporally and geographically.  In neither case does the 'telephone' analogy seem accurate.”

Ehrman’s objection thus collapses to dust, and confronts us with the opposite challenge, as Shenvi implies.  Evidently the gospels are not the product of the corrupting processes proposed.  Evidently they transmit data from First Century Palestine with remarkable fidelity.  If rumor was that reliable on minor details, why not on the main events that the gospels report? 

By making hagiographies easily available in one “pond,” and by searching for new parallels, Bart Ehrman helps broaden, then winnow, our search.   We shall examine his claims carefully.  Despite his soft voice and genuine expertise, his arguments tend to be highly biased against Christianity, sometimes to the point of falsifying or obscuring important facts.  More examples shall appear in coming chapters. 

There is another sense in which Ehrman is more useful than Aslan or Carrier.  Ehrman offers a few positive criteria for telling historical truth from error.

 

Historical Criteria

Even if the gospels were written by eyewitnesses or friends, as Bauckham argues, rather than being produced by the haphazard and distant method Ehrman describes, the question remains: how do we know that they tell the truth?  After all, some eyewitnesses lie or forget, while even Ehrman and the Jesus Seminar before him admit quite a bit in the gospels to be historically accurate.  Here Ehrman represents the majority of mainstream scholars in thinking that there are positive criteria by which to separate historical sheep from mythological goats.  

Ehrman emphasizes three criteria.  I will describe his argument for two of them here, then defend those criteria against Carrier’s attacks in a later chapter.  The third criteria, chronology, will appear in my chapter on the setting of the gospels. 

The first criteria Ehrman mentions is independent attestation.  (Also called multiplicity.)  Ehrman notes that John is usually considered to have been written independently of the other gospels.  So, too, is the material that Luke and Matthew share in common (so-called Q), and material unique to both Matthew (M) and Luke (L).  Thus we have “numerous streams of tradition that independently all go back, ultimately, to the life of Jesus . . . (this is) taken as a fact by almost all critical scholars” (95).  Therefore, one should probably believe that Jesus really was crucified, as all five sources report, and that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, as reported by Mark, John, and “Q.” 

Let me repeat a quibble first.  When describing a book written within the plausible lifespan of eyewitnesses (as the gospels were), that shows evidence of close knowledge of the facts (as we have already begun to see that they do), one need not use words like “tradition” or “ultimately.”  Such loaded terms appear to be another artificial attempt to distance the gospels from Jesus. 

But Ehrman is of course right in thinking more witnesses are better than few.  That’s even true when we see something remarkable for ourselves.  We blink our eyes and ask those around us to confirm our sighting, “Did you see that king-fisher plunge into the pool?” “Did she really wink at that scoundrel?” “Did Trump really say what I think he said?” 

Ehrman’s second criterion is commonly called the criterion of dissimilarity or embarrassment.  He writes:

“Any stories that seem to run directly counter to the Christians’ self-interests in telling them, can stake a high claim to being historically accurate . . . Christians would not have made up stories that work against their views or interests” (96).

Ehrman offers the example of Jesus’ youth in Nazareth, which he says passes both criteria:

“Jesus is said to have grown up in Nazareth in Mark, M, L, and John; so it is multiply attested.  But it also is not a story that a Christian would have been inclined to make up, because it proved to be an embarrassment to later Christians.  Nazareth was a small town - a hamlet, really – that no one had ever heard of.  Who would invent the idea that the Son of God came from there?”[14]

We shall ponder Carrier’s critiques of these two criteria shortly.  We will also consider British historian N. T. Wright’s Double Similarity, Double Dissimilarity, which fine-tunes the criterion of “dissimilarity” or “embarrassment” into an even more powerful historical tool.  But as we shall see, these few criteria are just the tip of the iceberg of evidence for Jesus’ authenticity.   

Ehrman spoke of “scores” of differences between Life of Apollonius of Tyana and the gospels.  That one can find differences is trivially true of almost all stories: for instance, Oliver Twist grows up in an orphanage in London, while Pip grows up, as an orphan, in the home of a blacksmith by the sea.  The question is, what differences are historically significant?  Which are clues, like DNA extracted from blood on a knife, or fingerprints taken off a refrigerator door, that point us to what really happened? 

In our search for such tell-tale traits, we now confront the gospels directly, and scrutinize the extraordinary tale they tell between, as well as within, their lines. 

---

[1] Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist, 210

[2] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 13

[3] John Loftus, “Deconstructing Christianity,” 12/30/2015

[4] Ariel Sabar, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’ Wife,” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/485573/

[5] David Marshall, The Truth About Jesus and the ‘Lost Gospels,’ 57

[6] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 88

[7] Ibid, 90

[8] Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews, 20

[9] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 91

[10] Ibid, 92

[11] Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, 51-52

[12] Polybius, Histories, 4.2 

[13] Neil Shenvi, http://www.shenvi.org/Essays/EhrmanResponsePart1.htm

[14] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 97

Jesus Liberates Women. Zoe Williams and the Guardian Should Take Notes.

The day after International Women's Day this March, London journalist Zoe Williams posted an editorial in The Guardian provocatively entitled, "Why do we need International Women's Day?  Apart from misogyny and Christian nationalism, you mean?" 

Williams had won a “columnist of the year” award, and been short-listed for the Orwell Prize.  But having almost put the finishing touches on a two-volume series arguing that "Jesus has Liberated Women," I was shocked by how ill-informed and incoherent her contrary arguments proved to be.  

Williams began her “analysis” by complaining about the names of women in the Bible:

"On Women’s Day Eve, though – yes, that is a thing – I was attending evensong at a university college, maybe for the first time ever, and it was definitely the first time I’d heard an IWD (International Women's Day) sermon.  The Rev Marcus Green had set himself the challenge of feministly reading a book, the Bible, in which almost none of the women have a name. There are a bunch called Mary, but so few other names that 'Mary' was basically Bible-speak for 'Karen.'"

Which makes me wonder: why, in the year 2026, should a paid journalist go to the excruciating trouble of fact-checking her claims?     

I set myself the Herculean task of typing "how many women named in Bible?" and hitting the pound key.  The result?  180 women are said to have been named.  Which I can believe, since I analyzed the treatment of women throughout the Old Testament and most of the New, verse by verse.  And yes, those 15 dozen ladies do include several Marys, who however in no way resemble modern "Karen" stereotypes.  (Though I had to actually read the gospels to learn that.)  Or has some major religion led by a pope taken to calling Karen the "mother of God" while I had my nose in history books?  Or built magnificent campuses in Oxford and Cambridge and named them "Karen College?"  (As both have for Mary Magdalen?)

Girls are still given names like Anna, Deborah, Elizabeth, Esther, Eve (a person, not just a “thing”), Hannah, Leah, Miriam, Rachel, Ruth, Sarah, or Sophia, since the people they originally referred are portrayed in the Bible as remarkable ladies.  (Even Jael, the housewife who ran a tent peg through an enemy general's temple, after tucking him into bed and giving him warm milk, though her name has yet to catch on, for some reason.)     

Yes, far more men are named in the Bible, given that political leaders were almost all male, and families were traced through male lines.  Others go unnamed – Joseph's prison-mates, the Ethiopian eunuch, the centurion at the cross, the thief on the cross.  Biblical scholar Richard Bauckham suggests that some names were omitted from the New Testament to protect still-living witnesses from possible reprisals.  But I think women are mentioned positively more often than men.  One often encounters a “dull husband, clever wife” motif in the Old Testament, for instance, along with women who save their country or their city when men fail to step up. 

Perhaps the most admiring sketch of female character in ancient literature – the Woman of Noble Character, at the end of Proverbs – is not given a name, because she remains an ideal.  Entrepreneur, real estate mogul, wise teacher, kindly philanthropist, publicly praised by husband and children – try finding a mate with that sort of character and executive talent, prospective lovers who read the Bible are told.  

But Williams seems to care more about damning rhetoric than getting even the most basic facts straight:    

"The meat of the sermon was about a woman who wasn’t given a name. A Samaritan and the first female evangelist, she was the one with the five previous husbands whose relationship status, at the time of meeting Jesus, was ‘with some guy who wasn’t her husband’.  It crescendoed with the son of God telling her that she is loved, to which she inexplicably does not reply: 'Mate, I know that. Have you not seen how many husbands I’ve had?'  As a feminist parable, it lacked something in the sense-making department, but, as a Christian message of the sheer contagiousness of love and acceptance, it was a useful interruption of the drum beat."

If Williams is reporting the sermon correctly, it makes me worry even more about progressive preachers.  Because the only reason the story of Jesus and the woman at the well doesn't make sense in Williams' telling, is that either the preacher or the award-winning journalist – or both – utterly botched the story.  And again, five minutes’ scan of the original source could have kept Williams from driving over that cliff.    

Jesus did not "tell the woman at the well that she is loved."  Rather, after asking for water from her, he offered "living water" in return.  He did not patronize her, but spoke to her respectfully, if rather dangerously, across cultural and gender lines, carefully drawing back the curtain a few inches on her troubled life, but allowing her to direct the conversation onto less personal issues when she felt pressed.   

The reply Williams wishes to put into this woman's mouth makes no sense, because it depends on Jesus using the ambivalent English word "love."  (And on Jesus and the woman both being so stupid as to conflate “romantic or sexual flings” with “love.”)  But Jesus was speaking Greek or Aramaic, not English.  And no synonym for "love" is mentioned in the conversation, however vague or distorted, in English or in the original Greek.  So again, Williams' point depends on not taking the elementary precaution of reading a famous Bible story for herself, before misrepresenting it to thousands of people.  

Yet the Guardian ranks, in polls, as a highly-respected news outlet, with more than 80% of its readers expressing trust.   

Then Williams launches her most critical (and poorly-aimed) bombardment: 

"It was not just commercialized business as usual this International Women’s Day: the global backdrop was that misogyny, Christian nationalism and white supremacism have conjoined to create storyboards on the world stage that flash before your eyes, disappear and return in darker, weirder forms.  One minute, the ultra-conservative Christian US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, is retweeting a video of the pastor Doug Wilson arguing for 'household voting,' in which married women would submit to their husbands; the next, the influencer Nick Fuentes is advocating 'breeding gulags' for all women, who would be imprisoned first and released on a case-by-case basis."

I am going to follow William's example here, and not find out what that ridiculous punk Fuentes actually said.  His opinion is to the Gospel as Norwegian rats rummaging through garbage outside a concert hall are to the music of Vivaldi.      

As for Hegseth, he is important in the Trump administration, and a few churches seem to agree with him about the male "head of household" voting for the family.  I have never heard anyone offer such an argument myself, having spoken in or visited hundreds of churches. 

Apparently Hegseth also doubts men and women should serve together aboard submarines.  The question of how to mix genders has also come up among those planning space missions.  I'll leave that issue for sociologists and psychologists to weigh in on.  Being old-fashioned, I think there is something to be said for the ancient division of labor, so to speak, by which women ran the risk of having babies, while men wrestled barbarians and wooly mammoths.    

But I am aware of no biblical mandate on females in submarines.  Deborah, one of those 180 named women in the Bible, led an army to victory on solid ground.  Jonah, the only biblical human with known diving experience, seems to have been male, but we don't know what gender was the "great fish" that swallowed him.  We only know that it listened to God's commands better than the prophet did.  

"Who’s to say what the through line is from Wilson to Fuentes? Is there a coherent reading of Christianity that takes you from the disenfranchisement of women to their (our) incarceration?"

On the contrary, I argue in How Jesus has Liberated Women that there is a "through line" from Jesus to the worldwide emancipation of women, and enrichment and lengthening of their lives -- a line called "overwhelming, well-evidenced historical causation."  I also show that G. K. Chesterton was right: "Men are mad about sex," and that that madness continues to afflict both misogynists and radical feminists.  But I bet Williams won't read my argument, either, as presumption and abiding ignorance seem to define her award-winning brand of journalism. 

As with many progressives, her contempt for and ignorance of western civilization bring about a curious contradiction in her relative attitudes towards Christianity and Islam:

"When the Reform candidate Matt Goodwin opines on the right age for women to have children, what is really animating him?  Birthrate anxiety that is really great replacement theory by another name? Or the thrill of a Handmaid’s Tale future, in which any given electoral loser is invited to pontificate on the fertility of strangers?"

Goodwin is a former political science professor who ran for office in the UK.  Williams seems to be asking whether he fears that Muslims will take over his country, or if he feels a Taliban-like desire to control women.  

The bizarre thing about these musings -- aside from William's failure to furnish evidence, again – is that one reason some Brits fear Muslim "replacement" is that Pakistani and other Muslim men have been caught abusing thousands of British girls in horrible ways.  One would think that if the well-being of her fellow females were her top priority, Williams wouldn't want men who share a certifiable "rape culture" moving next door, either.  

Williams’ confusion comes to a head in the strangely self-contradictory argument that climaxes her article:

"Is there any connection between these developments in the US and the bizarre global spectacle of gen Z men being twice as likely as boomers to think a wife should always obey her husband?  That survey was conducted across the UK, the US, Brazil, Australia and India."

Typically, Williams seems to have been too lazy to follow the link she herself provided, or else didn't read it carefully.  Do so, and you find that the percentage of people who answer "yes" to this question varies dramatically by country.  Note in which three countries people are most and least likely to say a wife should always obey:  
 
Indonesia 66%
Malaysia 60%
India 52%

Netherlands: 4% 

Hungary: 4%

Sweden: 4%

The least "macho" countries (if we read this survey that way) all have a Christian background.  (Including that international pariah, Hungary.)  The three most "macho" countries, which together have a population of 1.8 billion people, about the same as all others surveyed combined, are Muslim, Muslim, and Hindu, respectively.  And the citizens of those countries say “yes” many times as often as citizens of the United Kingdom (at 13%). 

So why is Williams attacking Christianity?  And why does she express contempt for the fear that immigration might radically alter the demographics of Great Britain, and bring with it a flood of people who disagree with her on the very question she finds so telling?  

I do not trust the survey, mind you.  I find many questions on it vague or misleading, and suspect some flaw in questions, sampling, or methodology.  But this is Williams’ prime piece of evidence.  She ought to have looked at it.  Yet here is her amazing conclusion: 

"What Christianity has to say about gender relations never used to feel like an atheist’s business. It took a feminist sermon, of all things, to remember that this is now all our business, all the time."

How bizarre that this remark should be presented as a rational conclusion from a survey that shows that men and women from countries with a Christian heritage are multiply LESS likely to say men should make all the decisions, than people in Muslim or Hindu countries!         

The full evidence that the life, teachings, and example of Jesus have liberated women around the world is vastly stronger than such simplistic surveys, I argue.  So yes, atheists should care for what Christianity says about gender relations.  Because the Gospel raised women around the world.  Even the survey you appeal to, Mrs. Williams, faintly reflects that fact.  

“Why do you eat what is not bread?”  Asked the prophet.  “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”  Asked the angel. 

 Zoe Williams proves that there is a vast, credulous audience for the non-living-bread of misinformation about religion.  Many positively love sloppy journalism that justifies scorn of the most life-giving aspects of western tradition, while displaying utter naivete towards harmful strands of Muslim or Hindu thought. 

 

New Book: How Jesus has Liberated Women

After arm-wrestling Jeff Bezos for four months, How Jesus has Liberated Women, Part I: Before Christ, is finally available on Amazon!

This is our little secret. I think it's a big secret, because this is one of the most important stories ever told. And many of the best Christian thinkers -- Rod Stark, Don Richardson, Frederica Matthewes-Green, Louis Marcos, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Craig Keener, Paul Brand, Timothy McGrew, Ralph Winters -- have loved books on which I spent months, not years, like this one. But my new book is a secret, because no major publishing company, no ministry, no rock star, no big podcast, in fact no one at all, besides our family, stands behind it. These books will have to sell by word-of-mouth -- which means you, I hope -- or not at all.

So please give it a shot! I think you'll find it worth your while.

Your thoughtful reviews are also welcome, even if you find things to criticize. If your shot hits the target, the second edition will be so much the better. Even if it glances off the bow, that might tell me what I need to make more clear. And of course if you really like the book, let the world know!

Next round with Jeff will be for the Kindle version. Hopefully this time he'll fold more quickly!

Christ, Marx, and the Liberation of Slaves

I have received some pushback on my previous article, which argued that Karl Marx was, indeed, largely to blame for the horrors of communism.  A young philosopher named Eric DeJardin wrote a rebuttal on my Facebook page, which I will answer later.  But first, let me respond to a second and closely-related challenge he issued:  

DM: "And my demonstration of how Marx was to blame for the Gulag, which enslaved tens of millions, remains untouched."

ED: "I responded to it pretty extensively on your FB page. We're in the middle of discussing it, so it's not exactly 'untouched.'  Anyway, by your own criteria a better case can be made for holding Christianity responsible for slavery in Christian nations than can be made for holding Marx responsible for atrocities in Marxist nations.  Heck, we can point to texts plainly supporting slavery in the Bible while, as you have admitted, you can't even say that Marx would have supported what was done in his name." (emphasis mine)

My mistake.  Eric did try to rebut my arguments.  Good for him.  This is a better forum for more in-depth discussions, so I intend to answer his arguments here.  (Though one gets the feeling, with Marx and these young philosophers, that pushing them away from Marx, is like trying to talk Juliet into keeping from Romeo, after she has been smitten by Cupid's arrow.)

But first, let's tackle Eric's claim that by my six criteria for historical causation, given in that article, Christianity is more responsible for slavery than Marx is for communist atrocities.  The evidence points overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, I will argue.  

I. Judging Christianity and Marxism, Half a Dozen Criteria

1. Precedence.  "First, A must precede B, to cause it . . ."

"Christianity cannot be blamed for the general phenomena of inquisitions, or credited for the institution of marriage, since people were abusing others, marrying, or doing both at the same time, long before the first noel range out . . . 

"What belongs to our species as a whole cannot be credited to or blamed on any particular belief system . . . "

Nothing about slavery in Christian countries was unusual, except its ending.  Human beings had been enslaving one another since the dawn of time.  And the particular forms slavery took in Christian countries (including chattel slavery) were not unusual, either.  So by the criterion of precedence, it is hard to say Christianity caused slavery -- though easy to argue that it caused the abolition of slavery.  Slaves had often been set free before Christianity, but abolition movements were unusual.  (One finds hints of them here or there, such as under the rebel Wang Mang who temporarily overthrew the Han Dyansty.)      

Communism combined common and original elements, as I said: 

"KKK-like secret societies, and scapegoating, are common in world history, especially in the wake of a cataclysmic conflict like the Civil War.  So neither Christ nor Marx could have invented scapegoating or secret societies as a whole, but could have inspired or influenced the form a particular such phenomenon took . . . 

"Some other aspects of communism-in-practice were also common: dictatorship, mass murder, scapegoating, mass human bondage (when technology allowed).  But other parts of the system were fairly unusual.  Communes were established in most communist states.  They were not the first communes in history, but they were unusual in being established on a top-down basis, and the extreme to which, say, the Maoists and Kmer Rouge took them.  The attempt to put the proletariat in charge (or intellectuals in the name of the proletariat) was also unusual.  Attacks on one religion or other are not unique, but wholesale destruction represented a stark break from the past.  Rule by the communist party, and party organization from the top down to the village, school, and platoon levels, did not I think have close parallels in prior Russian or Chinese societies."  

So the Criterion of Precedence does not encourage us to blame Christ for slavery.  But it is easy to see how Marx's teaching may. in theory, have caused many of the evils of communism.  

2. Proximity.  "Second, like magnetism, the closer you stand, the harder a social influencer pulls.  Mohammed preached against idols, and before his death, Mecca had been cleared of them.  Marx advocated revolution, and seventy years later, the October Revolution erupted.  Most often, we are influenced by teachings we see lived out around us.  A hurricane spawned near Africa may break on Cape Cod, but only when warm water lies between source and destination.  Similarly, an ancient scripture may build great force over millennia, but only when the “warm water” of a practicing community of believers keeps it going . . . Proximity matters."

Early Christians did not, so far as I know, bring about any upsurge in slave-trading, or in slave ownership.  Indeed, in another post on this site, "Abolition of Slavery: The Early Years," I describe opposition to slavery in the Early Church.  And a reader cited a letter (which I have now verified) telling how St. Augustine's congregation liberated 120 slaves, a common sort of thing for them to do, Augustine implies:  

"About four months before I wrote this letter, a crowd of people collected from different regions, but particularly from Numidia, were brought here by Galatian merchants to be transported from the shores of Hippo (It is only, or at least mainly, the Galatians who are so eager to engage in this form of commerce). However, a faithful Christian was at hand, who was aware of our practice of performing acts of mercy in such cases; and he brought the news to the church. Immediately, about 120 people were set free by us (though I was absent at the time), some from the ship which they had to board, others from a place where they had been hidden before being put on board. We discovered that barely five or six of these had been sold by their parents. On hearing about the misfortunes that had led the rest of them to the Galatians, via their abductors and kidnappers, hardly one of us could restrain their tears." 

So there is no positive link between early Christianity and an increase in slavery: on the contrary, some push-back already occurred, including from the greatest early Christian thinker after St. Paul, and from others whom I cite, like Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Patrick.  

By contrast, as mentioned, revolution followed Marx within decades.  And after revolution, communes, abolition of private property, attacks on "religion," Dictatorship of the (alleged) Proletariat, secret police, mass arrests, and all the rest.  Not all of this was unique to communism (Point One), but much of it was highly unusual in European history, as was widely recognized at the time. 

So by the Criterion of Proximity, too, Marx can be credibly blamed for the Gulag, but Christ cannot reasonably be blamed for any increase in slavery.  (Which did not, it seems, occur for 1500 years.)    

3. "Third, duration.  Sometimes a religion is quickly accepted, but its deeper implications take generations to sink in." 

I should have made a distinction with this criterion, which is in some conflict with Criterion Two.  If the agents of social change gain great political power, change is often instituted quickly.  For instance, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young overthrew American tradition within their community, and instituted polygamy from the top down.  Chairman Mao overthrew the "Four Olds" and Confucian traditions within three decades.  However, both reforms proved short-lived: Mormon polygamy, because the larger American culture refused to admit Utah until they banned it, Maoism, because in later years, the Chinese Communist Party began to find Confucius useful.  (Though some reforms stuck, for instance, few Chinese now burn incense to ancestors.)  

I would argue that abolition of slavery was one of those "deeper implications" that took a while to sink in among Christians.  It was not imposed top-down when Christians finally took power, centuries after Christ.  But as shown above, and in the rest of that article, the anti-slave logic of the Gospel began having an effect early on through thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and even (in a less sweeping manner) St. Augustine, an effect which grew, though there was often push-back, due to various forms of self-interest.  

Because Marxists gained dictatorial power, the effect of their thinking revealed itself early on, when zeal was still fiery, and then began to die down.  Early social experiments tended to be far infused with radical ideology, early in the revolutionary periods in Russia, China, Peru, Vietnam, and Cambodia.  Then reality began to set in.  People became exhausted by revolutionary fervor, and old ways reasserted themselves.  

Read The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, for an account of how that process played out in   

North Vietnam.  

4. An active ingredient.  "Fourth, something in the alleged cause should explain its supposed effect.  If Islam is blamed for encouraging prepubescent marriages, one should find something in the life of Mohammed or early Muslim teaching that encourages or allows men to marry young girls.  (Such as records of his consummating marriage to the nine-year-old Aisha.)  If Christianity is credited for saving girls from foot-binding in China, that claim will be strengthened if we find Jesus or the apostles helping women in analogous ways in the New Testament . . . "

Eric addresses this important criterion by claiming that the Bible clearly justifies slavery, while Marx opposed it.  (Forgetting, perhaps, that my argument against Marx does not particularly focus on slavery, though yes, his followers did resurrect it on a massive scale, for fairly predictable reasons.)  

So this is a key criterion, which I will focus on a little more than the others.  (But don't worry, I will be brief -- a thorough treatment would take a book!)   

In that previous article, I pointed to many "active ingredients" in Marx's personality and teaching which led to the Gulag and other horrors.  I need not repeat or explain them all again here.      

What does the Bible say about slavery?  Many think that the Bible is all over the map on the subject.  I wrote: 

"Perhaps religious texts are mere Rorschach ink blot tests: Mother Theresa and the Grand Inquisitor read the same Bible, then depending on their character or upbringing, reach opposite conclusions about how to treat folks.  Yet as novelist Tom Wolfe noted in The Kingdom of Speech, from Mohammed to Marx, history demonstrates the power of words to shape society.  A linguistic artist himself, Wolfe recognized Jesus as one of five men whose words have cut most deeply . . . " 

As for words that cut deeply, note how Jesus' sayings struck: (a) A black slave in a pre-Civil War novel; (b) a white traveler in the same novel; (c) the author, and (d) Americans outside the South.  

Uncle Tom's Bible

Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited with helping form an anti-slavery consensus in the North before the Civil War, surprised me when I first read it.  I knew several men in Harriet's family were famous preachers and Bible teachers, and vocally opposed slavery.  (I had even spoken in a forum at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, where one brother served as pastor.)  But I didn't know that the novel was actually a kind of theological debate and a Bible study, not just a story.  

In Chapter 12, for instance, two white Christians on a boat on the Mississippi which is transporting slaves cross swords over slavery, as onlookers take the side that suits their interests: 

A. “It’s undoubtedly the intention of Providence that the African race should be servants,—kept in a low condition,” said a grave-looking gentleman in black, a clergyman, seated by the cabin door. “‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be,’ the scripture says.” 

"I say, stranger, is that ar what that text means?” said a tall man, standing by.

“'Undoubtedly. It pleased Providence, for some inscrutable reason, to doom the race to bondage, ages ago; and we must not set up our opinion against that.'

“'Well, then, we’ll all go ahead and buy up niggers,' said the man, “if that’s the way of Providence,—won’t we, Squire?'”

Here a preacher, obviously part of the Establishment, cites an obscure Old Testament passage which actually has nothing to do with slavery, to justify what the South wished to see justified.  Then slave-traders echo that reasoning to justify their lucrative line of work.  (Which they would have gone on doing without such help, or found other ideological support for.)  

Then a young man, whom Beecher may model on one of her brothers, or her theology-teaching husband, responds:

B. "A tall, slender young man, with a face expressive of great feeling and intelligence, here broke in, and repeated the words, 'All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ I suppose,” he added, “that is scripture, as much as ‘Cursed be Canaan.’”

Beecher is greatly understating her point, as she no doubt intends readers to recognize.  (Thus the satirical, "Is that ar what the text means?" Followed by the glib, "Undoubtedly.")  

"Do unto others" are the words of Christ himself.  And they obviously apply to the pitiful case described onboard, of an old lady whose only remaining child is snatched from her arms and sold to another owner.  (While the first passage is, again, not about slavery at all.)  Beecher knows that the words of Jesus trump a mis-cited and irrelevant Old Testament passage. She then satirically goads her readers not to be hardened to such evil for the sake of national unity, even: 

"The trader had arrived at that stage of Christian and political perfection which has been recommended by some preachers and politicians of the north, lately, in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness and prejudice.  His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper effort and cultivation. The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed one less practiced; but he was used to it. He had seen that same look hundreds of times. You can get used to such things, too, my friend; and it is the great object of recent efforts to make our whole northern community used to them, for the glory of the Union."

This passage satires how Scripture is abused to justify what Beecher shows it cannot justify.  Later in the same chapter, Beecher shows her hand more clearly, through the Christ-figure of Uncle Tom himself: 

C. "Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had a perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is the vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.” But Tom, as we see, being a poor, ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these."

Beecher's point is that a hardened, establishment preacher, motivated by social standing, money, or national interest, can indeed find warrant for slavery in the Old Testament, even if he has to twist things a little.  And some verses, taken out of the full context of Scripture, may help even more.  But Christians are supposed to look to Christ for their example, and interpret Scripture through him.  And no one with any sense could read the New Testament -- not just this one verse, but hardly any of it -- and deny that the practices of American slavery were the opposite of what Christ taught and modeled -- and his disciples. 

For Augustine's animus against slave traders is explicitly affirmed in the New Testament, and would apply to those on that boat in Uncle Tom's Cabin, if the preacher were courageous enough to tell the truth:  

"We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers . . . "

There is nothing in the New Testament to explain any upsurge in slave-trading under the Christian watch, which would in fact not occur for more than a millennia, and then only after the Muslim slave trade had primed that pump for centuries.  

Eric cites the verse that instructs slaves to obey their masters, not to kill them.  And really, would Christianity be Christianity, if it instructed people to kill their bosses?  Hierarchy is part of life, and must be observed, within the bounds of Christian law.  But Eric omits this following set of instructions: 

"And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him."

This is pretty revolutionary, in itself.  Masters should treat slaves "in the same way" as slaves treat masters?  And not only don't beat them, but don't even threaten them?  What's to keep them from running away, then?  

And slavery is not, a la Aristotle, a fundamental marker of human character.  We are all equal before God, who is the real boss.  

I already showed that there are many "active ingredients" in the life and teachings of Marx that explain the evils of communism: Marx's violent, arrogant character, his self-worship, his justification of class violence, his naivete about human nature, his over-generalizations, his absurd prophecies, his talk about the "dictatorship of the proletariat," his refusal to admit error, his hatred of God, etc.  

So by the fourth criterion, too, Marx can very reasonably be blamed for tyranny.  But Christ should be credited for the liberation of slaves, which began earlier than most people realize, and is still not complete.  

I might add that as a young missionary, I was inspired to try to liberate sex slaves in Asia, by passages in the Old Testament.    

5. Energetic motion. "Fifth, causation is also clearer if change moves uphill against so powerful an element in human nature.  Why would any man sleep with more than one woman?  The answer is too obvious, to most men, to need stating.  Lust and philandering need no explanation, nor do rape, conquest, polygamy, or enslavement of the weak . . . It takes moral energy to move society uphill against the gravitational resistance of political power."

This criterion, too, helps explain why Marx was in fact to blame for the Gulag.  Just to take one instance: common ownership of property, which led to so many millions of deaths and so much misery in China, was emphatically not normal for Chinese. They had to be forced into it, by Marxist ideologues.  The communes moved radically against human nature, and thus demonstrate ideological causation. 

By contrast, as noted, it has been normal since the dawn of time for the powerful to exploit the weak, including by enslaving them.  This requires no explanation by itself.  Chesterton, indeed, said early in the 20th Century that enslavement was very human, and could be expected again.  Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler would soon prove him a prophet.  

Of course, it did take some ideological energy to upset what had become European norms against slavery by that time, and Marx and Hitler did provide that energy.  But having established a dictatorship, demonized whole classes, and destroyed the economy by communizing property, mass slavery became a fairly natural expedient.  You have to blame someone for your mistakes!  (When did Marx ever accept blame?)  You have to make someone do the work once incentive is gone!  

Slavery was ubiquitous in the world in which Christianity first appeared.  Half of ancient residents of Athens were slaves.  If anything, early Christianity began fitfully to apply some brakes to human enslavement. 

So by this criterion, too, Eric has things backwards.  Marx's life and teachings help explain the radical, often anti-human, policies of his followers, which fairly quickly led into the old grooves of tyranny and slavery.  But Christ's disciples acted against human nature and interest to free slaves against opposition, then bring about abolition or effective near-abolition of slavery.  (The first time during the "Dark Ages.")       

   

6.  Citations.  "Finally, if reformers cite or allude to a text while instituting reform, that may indeed point to the source of their inspiration."

As I showed, Marx' disciples did cite Marx extensively, and translate and print his works, to justify and explain their actions. 

Yes, as mentioned above, Christians who wished to justify slavery also looked for, and found, verses which helped them do so.  Some of those citations were, no doubt, stronger than the one Stowe quoted.  

But I agree with Stowe, as did Wilberforce, and as did northerner abolitionists who were inspired by Scripture to risk their lives (against interest and Nature) to liberate slaves.  Read honestly, as Uncle Tom did, it is impossible to justify slavery from the life and teachings of Jesus, which are for Christians the heart of the Bible, from which all else must be interpreted.  Not just that one verse, but the tone and implications of the entire New Testament, and a deeper understanding of the Old, set world civilization up for what in fact occurred: a worldwide abolition movement, led by pious Christians like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom.    

So five of the six historical criteria I mentioned clearly show why Marx's teachings and example led to so much misery, so quickly, under the lead of his radical disciples.  Solzhenitsyn points out that some of the "losers," like Trotsky, were if anything worse!  The other criteria is ambivalent, and analyzed carefully, also indicts Marx.  But Jesus liberated slaves, he did not capture or mistreat them.  

Is Capitalism Moral?

Is Capitalism Moral?

Here's a thoughtful challenge to capitalism that came up on Facebook last year on this day, which I don't think I've answered yet. It was posed by Eric DeJardin in response to my description of slavery as an inherently "corrupt-making" institution. Doesn't capitalism also corrupt the capitalist?

"Would you say that the imperative of viewing labor power as a commodity doesn't carry with it the danger of viewing people as commodities? If so, the latter is surely potentially soul-corrupting, especially if it tends to lead us to view them as mere commodities (in which case it very plausibly runs afoul of Kant's humanity formula of the CI)."

If Kant has something interesting to say about capitalism, I'll let the Eric DeJardin bring him in. Here are my thoughts:

1. Our relations with others can be divided, as Martin Buber did, into "I-It" and "I-Thou" perspectives. (But this will be my analysis, not his.)

2. "I-Thou" means (as I take it) that we enter into full personal relations with one whom we recognize and treat as a dignified and intrinsically valuable being.

3. "I-It" is more functional, treating the "other" essentially as a means to some goal.

4. For practical purposes, I-It relations are the norm. We may smile at the woman who takes our money at Burger King and wish her a good day, but we're mainly wondering why burgers have gotten so expensive, or whether we should order a side salad. She is mainly an instrument for a transaction, and you are mainly a customer through whom her paycheck will come, while she wonders whether she can afford a trip to Mexico this spring.

5. All big corporations, clans, or kingdoms see millions of such pragmatic transactions a day, in which one primarily views the "other" as a means to an end, or a roadblock (say, a slow driver in the left-hand lane) preventing you from reaching your goal.

6. Christians are called to recognize the "Thou-ness" of those with whom they interact, as we see from Jesus, both in his stories (Good Samaritan, etc), and in how he treated those he met. While the disciples often saw people as categories (harlot, Pharisee, old woman, etc), Jesus looked people in the eye.

7. Yet we cannot raise our hats, like Crocodile Dundee, to everyone in Manhattan. "Who touched me?" The disciples wondered why Jesus asked, because the crowd was pressing on all sides. Humans are also bodies which obey the laws of physics, such that one may need to get into a boat to separate oneself from their "it-ness" even to speak more clearly to their "thou-ness." If you pray for everyone who does 50 in a 60 or tailgates you when you're doing ten over the speed limit, you may be on the slow road to sainthood. Or you may crash, and arrive there more quickly.

8. Capitalists face these same trade-offs. We are called, by Christ, to treat both employees and customers as "thous," as persons made in the image of God, not as mere machines or money-sources. Yet if an employee fails to work productively, or a customer fails to pay, the "its" one produces will fail, which will harm other "thous" -- self, family, stock-owners, employees, devoted customers. This is a genuine dilemma for a believing businessman, exemplified by Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, who is trying to run businesses and help people, but then an employee falls through the cracks and is forced (out of his sight or knowledge, he's a busy man) into prostitution.

9. Trying to find the proper balance is inherently tricky. But so are moral choices in general -- an art, not a science, and an art that none of us practices perfectly.

10. Given that there is always a "quanta" of power in every society (Burke), those with great power will always find this balancing act more difficult, because their actions will impact more people, whose rights and needs will conflict.

11. Freedom is an absolute good. Adam and Eve in the Garden were given a choice. Jesus preached without compulsion or manipulation.

12. Free enterprise is therefore good in and of itself, though like the Garden, may act as a stage on which good or evil acts are taken.

13. The New Testament does warn: "If a man will not work, he should not eat." I think this implies that firing a lazy or dishonest employee is acceptable, as is giving lower wages to a less efficient employee -- though with an eye to mercy, and hoping that the "Thou" will repent or learn his job better. (Possibly by providing him with more schooling.)

14. There are incentives built into capitalism which can go either way. One may see it as effective to squeeze every last drop of blood out of one's employee, then drop him. Or one may recognize it as in one's "enlightened self-interest" to make her happy and healthy so she'll work harder and more honestly.

15. When one sees a capitalist treating employees as "thous," then, one may cynically, and perhaps correctly, suppose that he is merely acting in "enlightened self-interest," and despite the dogs-at-work policy, or the long holidays, he still sees employees essentially as "its."

16. Conversely, a genuinely compassionate manager may be forced by the demands of production and the many "thous" whom she cares for (children, aged parents, stock-holders, customers), to be very strict towards employees, to give less than they feel they need (one lump of coal, Bob Cratchit!), even to fire them in economic downturns.

17. In both cases, one should be careful in judging motives. God knows the heart.

18. In two parables, Jesus compared God to an employer who paid different wages to his managers, or paid laborers the same, even though some worked much longer hours than others. We are or should be equal before the law, but equality of outcome lies in tension with freedom and justice, since we are not equal in skill, honesty, luck, or value in I-it transactions, nor do we share equal needs or relationships with other workers or the boss.

19. The employers in both those stories seem to have been close enough to the action to know what was going on. In a large company, still more in government, it is often hard to figure that out.

20. Government rightly establishes rules to constrain those with power from abusing them. A just government (Madison recognized) must also recognize and make allowance for its own tendency to abuse power -- thus, "checks and balances."

21. Limited government is moral not only because it prevents the concentration of power, and therefore allows more freedom. But also, in countries where civilized norms of interaction are accepted, it is usually better to let people close to the situation figure the situation out and seek a just resolution. Outside intervention is sometimes necessary when local power has become corrupt, however, as in the South after the Civil War, or in lawsuits.

22. Freedom is not only an absolute good, it is also a relative good, because all else being equal, free competition encourages the production of more good things. By hypothesis, a Darwinian struggle tends to maximize the amount of life on a coral reef, or in a jungle. A struggle between companies likewise encourages a lively, rich, productive ecosystem of productive concerns.

23. But in a market in which competition is key, it is tempting to see competitors, or even employees and customers, as mere "its," bodies to drive off the road so one can get ahead.

24. At the same time, as Joseph Henrich shows in The WEIRDest People in the World, free markets have proven, even in remote regions of Africa, to encourage people to trust one another more. A strong correlation has been demonstrated between the presence of markets and how willing people are to trust strangers.

25. Competition occurs in non-capitalist societies as well. People will compete for food, sex, housing, fame, power, and living space regardless of whether cash is on the table. In New York City, for instance, there is it seems fierce competition for fixed-rent properties, which are a kind of wealth, hoarded by those rich enough in some sense to acquire them. In a communist Gulag, where money does not exist, competition is at its most ruthless, "Who-to-Whom," as Solzhenitsyn related.

26. Socialist countries may take cash off the table, or spread it around, but tend to concentrate power far more than countries with a free market. That is an empirical fact, demonstrated (I think) by history: no genuinely socialist society that I know of, has been very free, and most have been dictatorships, often governed by cruel tyrants.

27. Concentration of power is a necessary consequence of even democratic socialism. By taking money or stock away from "billionaires," (they used to say "millionaires," but those are now too common in capitalist countries to make a politically-auspicious target), the state necessarily concentrates power in its hands.

28. Even if the leader is elected by the people (democratic socialism), that concentration of wealth and power will draw unscrupulous people. "Power corrupts." It also attracts corrupt people, who become more corrupt by wielding it.

29. So while we always have a choice between seeing those around us as "thous" or "its," and both perspectives are to some degree valid at times, at least four systems emerge which create different practical incentives:

a. Capitalism without democracy. Here power is distributed economically, but concentrated politically.

b. Capitalism with democracy. Here power is distributed both economically and politically. However, growing wealth increases the relative political power of the wealthy. (Which can be offset by regulations, trust-busting presidents, and competition between capitalists.)

c. Socialism with democracy. Here power is distributed politically, but concentrated economically.

d. Socialism without democracy. Power is concentrated in both realms, and bad things tend to happen.

30. Yet all these systems also vary depending on culture, which ultimately derives from belief.

31. Both empirically, and theoretically, I think "b" is most moral, because it distributes power on two axis, and because market relations encourage people to trust one another more. We give strangers money every day, even let them into our homes (as I did an electrician yesterday), without compunction.

32. So no, capitalism does not make people corrupt, not more than other systems, though the rich of all kinds are tempted in special ways. It is as Jesus said of foods, money enters the pocket and is eliminated, but corruption creeps out of the heart.

33. Nor does capitalism save our souls, or make us genuinely moral beings. We can game any system. We can pretend to treat people as "thous," like the Pharisees, to seek the praise of men, while really only thinking of the bottom line.

33. Ironically, this past week, conservatives (including me) attacked a rich, white, male, 1% singer, and the rich, 1% capitalist TV and football executives who hired him. And then the Left rushed to defend that man. Some justified this by noting that he speaks Spanish, or because (I saw one say) to protect "brown" people from racist conservatives.

So now even "Christian" progressives are now celebrating a rich, white male 1%-er who sings in pornographic language about his many sexual conquests -- justifying it because he sings in Spanish, the language of some of the world's greatest imperialists.

An amazing inversion. And my criticism of that rich man is just what socialists say of capitalists in general -- that he treats "thous" (women) as "its," and encourages others, male and female, to do the same.

So clearly, capitalism does not ensure even minimal virtue, or protect society from the reward of its own twisted values. But while as a conservative, I have no problem with banning smut from public airwaves, or fining those who violate basic standards, I don't think the ultimate solution to America's moral problems can come from the top down. A society that winks at such exploitation, has become corrupt, and will corrupt all institutions, regardless of the structure of society.

In short, beginning with Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel, freedom is a necessary, but insufficient, quality to allow us to recognize the Imago Deo in those around us, and respond to them as "thous," not mere tools for exploitation.