“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.”
Ashley Montagu (1905 - 1999)
According to Wikipedia, “The soul, in many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions, is the incorporeal and, in many conceptions, immortal essence of a living thing. According to most of the Abrahamic religions, only human beings have immortal souls.” What is a soul? Do all animals have souls? What happens to a soul at death? These are all scientific questions with theological implications. Where is the soul located? Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci were followers of the cardiocentric model believing the soul is located in the heart. Pythagoras was the first person to propose the cephalocentric model (placing the soul in the brain). Both Plato and Socrates were cephalocentric advocates. Some Christians believe the soul resides in the stomach. Regardless of the location of the soul, researchers throughout history have made various attempts to prove its existence, including attempts to weigh dying patient’s just prior to death and again at the “moment” of death. Any loss of weight was then attributed to the soul exiting the body.
For example, Dr. Duncan MacDougall (1866 – 1920), an early 20th-century American physician, sought to measure the weight lost of human patients (and dogs) as the soul departed the body at the moment of death. He measured the weight loss of six patients at the moment of their deaths. His first subject, the results from which MacDougall felt were the most accurate, lost “three-fourths of an ounce,” which has since been popularized as 21 grams. MacDougall later measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances and reported the results as “uniformly negative,” with no perceived change in weight. He took these results as confirmation that souls had weight, and that dogs do not have a soul. To date, modern researchers have not been able to produce any evidence of a soul exiting the body of a patient at the moment of death.
MacDougall’s efforts of weighing the soul (as well as others) was doomed to failure, not because of deficiencies in the instruments used, but because of the inability to determine the actual moment of death. Dr. Sam Parnia, one of the world’s foremost resuscitation physicians, has concluded that death is a process and more an analogue event than a digital one. Death begins with cardiac arrests, pulmonary failure, traumatic brain injury, or any other event that stops the flow of oxygen to the vital organs such as the brain, heart, and cells. The process of death ends when the body has reached a state beyond which recovery or resuscitation is no longer thought possible. Dr. Parnia calls this, actual death. In this sense, a patient is dead when the attending physicians and medical staff give up on resuscitation. In many cases this decision depends on the ability of the patient to pay for continuing efforts.
The history of science is rich with examples of widely accepted imaginary substances, including luminous ether, phlogiston, ectoplasm, and homunculus. All of which were later found to be nonexistent and no longer accepted. Until the nineteenth century virtually all scientists believed that the universe was filled with luminous ether, a colorless, odorless, and undetectable substance that provided a medium for light to travel through space in a manner similar to sound bouncing off the molecules in the air. In 1887 Albert A. Michelson performed a series of experiments proving that there was no such thing as luminous ether. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work and became the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in science. In 1667 Johann Joachim Becher identified phlogiston as the constituent substance of fire. Phlogiston remained the dominant explanation of fire until 1778 when Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier demonstrated the role of oxygen in combustion relegating phlogiston to the dustbin of incorrect widely-held ideas.
Immediately following WWI, there was an increased worldwide interest in Spiritualism, especially by mediums promising (usually for a fee) to receive messages from the graves of recently departed loved ones. Grief, of course, was rampant during the 1920s due to the over thirty-eight million lives lost during WWI. Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle became a leading advocate for Spiritualism after his son Kingsley Doyle died from pneumonia on October 28, 1918 while recovering from wounds suffered during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Doyle used mediums to communicate with his dead son and during these seances ghostly apparitions of Kingsley would appear. Doyle and others claimed that these apparitions consisting of a substance called ectoplasm. It was allegedly produced by mediums and was the means that allowed the spirit or soul of dead people to appear during a seance. Countless research groups, including the Scientific American magazine (in the 1920s) studied the leading mediums and concluded they were all fakes scamming the vulnerable and the gullible out of their money. The antics of mediums, conjurers, and fortune-tellers was so egregious that in 1926 Congressman Sol Bloom introduced a bill that “would effectively outlaw mediumship for profit as well as all forms of divination for hire.” In modern times, ectoplasm is just another discredited imaginary substances.
The homunculus myth is the most unbelievable example of an nonexistent substance. It was universally believed that a man’s sperm contains a fully-formed miniature human being. Women were viewed simply as birthing vessels. They were denied any genetic role with the child growing in their womb. It should be noted that gender bias against women played a big role in the readily acceptance of an obvious bogus idea. Homunculus was still accepted by medical authorities as late as the 17th century. Science, especially biology, was about to cross a Rubicon.
February 28, 1953 marks a major milestone in the history of biology. At 12 noon two men walked into the Eagle pub, a favorite luncheon spot and hangout for students, staff, and researchers from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. James Watson, a twenty-five year-old American bacteriologist and Francis Crick, a thirty-seven year-old British physicist made a bold and unbelievable announcement: “We have discovered the secret of life.” What they actually discovered was the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid better known as DNA which is now familiar to virtually everyone on the planet. DNA is a recipe for building a living entity such as a human being, chimpanzee, or a carrot, and is contained in a number of chromosomes as part of what is called a genome. All manuals including humans and chimpanzees get half of their chromosomes from their mother and half from their father. The human body contains 100 trillion cells (the number 100 followed by 12 zeroes), and each one contains a copy of two complete genomes (one from each parent). There are two exceptions to this: Sex cells only contain a copy of one genome (a mixture of the parent’s genome) and red blood cells do not contain either. Females have two X chromosomes and males have one X and one Y. Many women in history have been thrown aside or even put to death for failing to produce a male offspring when the “fault” lies with the father who is the only source of the male determinate Y chromosome. This one of the very few examples where men get the last word over women!
On October 22, 1996, Pope John-Paul II released a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He argued that somewhere between the ancestral apes and modern human beings there was what he described as an ontological discontinuity. According to Pope John-Paul this was the point at which God inserted the human soul. Thomas Aquinas said the soul is acquired at the moment of conception through a process called ensoulment. How would this work with identical twins? Recall that identical twins develop from one single zygote which then splits into two embryos. If the soul was inserted at conception into the zygote, what happens when it splits into two? There are at least two possibilities: the soul also divides with each twin receiving half a soul, or one of the twins retain the original soul leaving its sibling without a soul. This problem could be solved theologically by proposing a second ontological discontinuity thus allowing for another insertion of a new and separate soul. What about our close relatives, the chimpanzees? Do they have souls?
What is the difference between a human genome and a chimpanzee genome? The most startling difference is the number of chromosomes. Chimpanzees have twenty-four pairs, whereas humans have only twenty-three pairs. We have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes because somewhere between five and ten million years ago two chimpanzee chromosomes fused into one. Thus chromosome 2 (the second largest human chromosome) was formed by the fusion of two medium-sized ape chromosomes! Evidence of this is quite convincing for evolutionary biologists, molecular geneticists, and other specialists. Matt Ridley in his book Nature Via Nurture demonstrates man’s close genetic relationship to chimpanzees with the following example: If you hold your mother’s hand who in turn holds her mother’s hand (your grandmother) and then repeating the process until a chain of mothers stretching back thousands of generation reaches from Washington, D.C. to New York City, then the last link in the chain would be a chimpanzee. A theologian with some understanding of evolution could argue (without any evidence) that the soul resulted from the fusion of two chromosomes millions of years ago.
Genome analysis has transformed the problem of determining the ancestry of any two entities on the Tree of Life. Molecular biology provides a simple, direct, and more powerful way to determine evolutionary relationships. The complete DNA sequence of an organism defines the species with almost perfect precision and in exhaustive detail. Moreover, this specification once determined, is in a digital form (a string of letters) that can be entered directly into a computer and compared with the corresponding DNA profile of any other living thing (plants and animals). Matt Ridley in his 1999 book, Genome noted that humans are approximately 98% chimpanzees and “. . . we are more chimpanzee-like than are gorillas.” In other words, chimps are closer-related to humans that they are to gorillas! It is, however, important to note that humans did not descend from chimps or gorillas, but share a common relative “higher” in the tree of life. “Higher” denotes the fact that the Tree of Life is usually depicted as inverted with earlier evolved species at the top. However, given the similarity of the human and chimpanzee genome and the tremendous role the genome plays in their respective biological development, it is higher unlikely that only humans have a souls leaving the chimpanzee without a soul.
What theologians and religious leaders call a soul, scientists refer to as elan vital, consciousness, or mind, but regardless what metaphor they use, they see it as a function of the brain and dependent on it. Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili summarize this idea in their 2015 book, Life On The Edge, The Coming Age of Quantum Biology as follows: “In one way or another, most people probably subscribe to the notion of dualism–the belief that the mind/soul/consciousness is something other than the physical body. But dualism fell out of favor in scientific circles in the twentieth century, and most neurobiologists now prefer the idea of monism–the belief that mind and body are one and the same thing.” In other words, whatever it is called, soul or elan vital it is dependent on a functioning living body to support the brain and cannot survive death. Or, as Dr Parnia wrote in his 2013 book, Erasing Death, “The ULTIMATE QUESTION AS to how long consciousness (or soul) continues after death can only be definitively determined when science has discovered a scanning machine (like a brain scanner) that can detect the entity of thought and consciousness.”
Sources:
1. Life On The Edge, The Coming Age of Quantum Biology (2014) by Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Al-Khalili
2. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968) by James Watson
3. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999) by Matt Ridley
4. Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human (2003) by Matt Ridley
5. Erasing Death (2013) by Dr. Sam Parnia
Monday, November 23, 2015
Monday, October 19, 2015
Of Apples and Men
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
Albert Einstein
The story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple is one of the best-known and endearing stories in all the history of science. After observing an apple fall from the tree at Woolsthorpe Manor (his mother’s farm), he developed the mathematics answering the question, “Why do apples fall?” He published the answer (the theory of gravity) in his monumental work, Principia Mathematica in 1687. His equations were used by NASA to navigate Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin safely to the moon and back in July 1969. Newton did not realize that the bigger question was, “How the apple get up in the tree in the first place?” Answering that question is the objective of this essay and is indebted to Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Al-Khalili's wonderful 2014 book, Life On The Edge, The Coming Age of Quantum Biology.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was founded in 1861 (during the Lincoln presidency) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is one of the world’s premier citadels of science and technology. As of 2014 there were nine Nobel Prize winners among its one-thousand professors. Its alumni include astronauts (one-third of NASA’s space flights involved MIT graduates) and a host of prominent scientists and technology leaders, including Richard Feynman, a 1939 graduate and 1965 Nobel Prize winner in Physics. According to Wikipedia, “As of 2015, 84 Nobel laureates, 52 National Medal of Science recipients, 45 Rhodes Scholars, 38 MacArthur Fellows, 34 astronauts, and 2 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT.” Not surprisingly MIT attracts more than its share of the brightest young people allowing it to be very selective with a selection rate of only 7.9% in 2014.
In spite of MIT’s abundance of super intelligent professors and students, its most illustrious resident is not a human at all, but an apple tree albeit not an ordinary one. Growing (since 1977) in the President’s Garden is a cutting from another apple tree kept in England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, a direct descendant of the actual tree that Isaac Newton allegedly sat under when he observed his famous apple fall from the tree. Newton’s apple tree growing in Cambridge, Massachusetts is poetic given all the years Newton spent at Cambridge, England as a student and professor. In October 2006 MIT’s hero-tree produced its first apple.
MIT has a long history of pushing science and technology to its outer limits. For example, MIT scientists have been working on developing a quantum computer starting with Richard Feynman’s 1981 proposal to build a computer that takes advantage of Quantum Mechanics (QM). Peter Shor's 1994 quantum factoring algorithm constituted another step forward, but there is a major gulf between theoretical quantum theory and the engineering required to build a quantum computer. Technical problems have defeated the best efforts of some of the world’s brightest scientists as of 2007.
Therefore, in April 2007 when an article appeared in the New York Times suggesting that “plants” were quantum computers, the MIT quantum group understandingly exploded into laughter. Seth Lloyd said it was “quantum hanky-panky” and “Oh, my God, that’s the most crackpot thing I’ve ever heard.” A the same time they were laughing their ‘quantum socks’ off, a photon of light was traveling at 186,000 miles per second toward the famous apple tree setting off a series of steps in the process of putting an apple in the tree. To appreciate the source of the laughter and continue the trip from Cambridge, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts it is necessary to examine QM in some detail. Since it takes a photon eight minutes and twenty seconds (on average) to travel from the sun to the surface of the earth and the MIT apple tree, there is ample time
Albert Einstein observed “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough” and it is in that spirit that the following explanation is attempted. The underlying dynamics of QM (also called Quantum Theory or Quantum Electrodynamics) is sufficiently confusing even before invoking Groucho Marx’s famous adage, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?” First, it is important to understand the difference between waves and particles. Sound and ocean surface perturbations (water waves) are two examples of waves. When waves move they diffuse (spread out). Particles in contrast move in a stable and consistent trajectory. Throw a ball and its path is easily seen at a reasonable speed. Balls, bullets, and atoms are three examples of particles. The following graphic (the famous sine wave) will be familiar from high school mathematics and is useful to see what is meant by ‘peaks’ and ‘troughs.’
Waves have peaks (highest point) and troughs (lowest point). Since waves spread out in what is called diffraction, they can interfere with each other. If they collide ‘in phase’ that is ‘peak to peak’ their strength (amplitude) is doubled in what is called constructive interference. If they collide ‘out of phase’ or ‘peak to trough’ they cancel each other out and in what is called destructive interference.
In classical physics (Newtonian) light was always thought of as being a wave. It is now known that light can behave both as a wave and also as a particle, and particles can also behave both as particles and as waves in what is called the wave–particle duality. This wave-particle duality lies at the heart of QM and can be demonstrated by one of the most famous experiments in science, the two-slit experiment. The apparatus required for the two-slit experiment is quite simple, consisting of two screens The first screen acts as a barrier and the second as a detector. The first screen has two vertical slits cut out and spaced some distance apart of a size large enough to permit waves or particles to pass through them when ‘fired’ at the screen with a device that can be thought as a gun. The second screen has a surface that can record or detect any wave or particle that manages to pass through the slits and strike the screen. As will be seen, sometime the researcher will open just one slit and at other times open both slits. The experiment is conducted in stages in order to contrast waves from particles. In the first stage a series of bullets (particles) are fired toward the barrier with one slit open. As expected a vertical pattern of bullet holes will appear behind slit 1. After opening the second slit and firing another volley, a second vertical pattern will appear right next to the first one. In other words the bullets behave just like particles in accordance with classical physics as would be expected.
In stage two a monochromatic light (light with just one wavelength) is emitted toward the screen. This is in contrast to the light from a normal light bulb that is composed of many differing wavelengths (making it difficult to observe the interference pattern). The second screen is coated with a chemical that illuminates when impacted by light. When the monochromatic light is emitted with only one slit open, a pattern of brightness appears just behind the slit. But with both slits open an interference pattern is observed consisting of bright bands where constructive interference occurred and dark bands where destructive interference occurred. Again, this is just what is expected.
In the third stage electrons (particles of tiny bits of matter) are fired at the screen with one slit open resulting in a pattern just like the one the bullets made in stage one with only one slip open. But when the second slit is also opened, a interference pattern develops just like what happened with the monochromatic light with two slits open. In other words the electron particles are behaving like waves in an example of wave-particle duality. Some early investigators thought maybe the electrons being fired in a volley were ‘bouncing’ off each other causing the interference pattern. To eliminate this as a possibility the electrons were fired, one at a time with both slits open. Surely this would eliminate the interference pattern. After all, how could a single electron interfere with itself? After repeating the test by firing one electron at a time repeatedly with two slits open, the same interference pattern was produced meaning a single particle was transforming into a wave passing through both slits at the same time and interfering with itself creating an interference pattern exactly like the monochromatic light in the earlier test. Richard Feynman said that the two-slit test “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics.” Physicists refer to the electron’s ability to be in two places at the same time as superposition and is just one part of the weirdness of QM.
Physicists, however, are very clever people and they were not going to surrender to QM weirdness easily. They set up another detector near slit 1 positioned so it could ‘see’ and record the electron if it enters slit 1 and repeated the experiment. The result only demonstrated another aspect of QM weirdness, the measurement effect. With the detector “watching” slit 1 the electrons reverted to behaving just the way particles are expected to behave! Yes, the mere act of observing the experiment changes the outcome. Feynman once famously described the universe in one sentence, “Everything is made of atoms and they are always wiggling.” The detector that was used in an attempt to see if the electron passed through slit 1 is, of course, made of atoms and their wiggling causes what physicist call decoherence.
Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Al-Khalili aptly described decoherence as follows: “This complex interaction causes the delicate quantum coherence to leak away very quickly and be lost in the incoherence noise of its surroundings. This process is called decoherence. . . but decoherence does not need a measuring device to come into effect. It's taking place all the time inside every single classical object as its quantum constituents–the atoms and molecules–undergo thermal vibrations and get buffeted around by all the surrounding atoms and molecules, so that their wave-like coherence is lost. In this way we can think of decoherence as the means by which all the material surrounding any given atom, say–what is referred to as its environment–is constantly measuring that atom and forcing it to behave like a classical particle. In fact, decoherence is one of the fastest and most efficient processes in the whole of physics.” Please note that coherence means that some physical system is exhibiting the wave–particle duality of superposition.
It is the fragility of coherence was the source of the laughter of the MIT group working on building a quantum computer which had to be maintained in a state of superposition in order to make quantum calculations. The advantage of a quantum computer over the familiar digital computer is it can be in three states called qubits (on, off, and both) whereas the digital computer has only two states (on and off). The MIT group at the time (October 2006) was combating decoherence by lowering the temperature in their quantum computer to extremely low temperatures to combat the heat caused by atoms colliding with each other in what is called thermodynamics. This enabled them to maintain the coherence necessary to perform quantum computing. The idea that coherence could be maintained in the leaves of the apple tree with its high temperature was beyond laughable, but as they soon learned, was true. The idea of an apple tree maintaining coherence gives a deeper appreciation to Leslie Orgel’s famous quip, “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” Before leaving QM behind and moving on to the apple tree, the last two bits of its weirdness must be mentioned, Entanglement and Tunneling.
Entanglement is perhaps the strangest and most difficult to accept. A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. They have various intrinsic properties including spin. When a pair of particles is generated in a way that their total spin is known to be zero, and if one particle is found to have a clockwise spin, then the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis will always be counterclockwise. If the spin of one of the quarks is changed (for example by being measured), its partner quark will automatically and instantly change its spin to be opposite. Entanglement occurs because each particle of an entangled pair “knows” what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there are not any known means for such information to be communicated between the particles which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances. Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance” and could never accept QM in spite of playing a large role in its development. As McFadden & Al-Khalili observed, “Einstein was skeptical because entanglement appeared to violate his theory of relativity, which stated that no influence or signal can ever travel through space faster than the speed of light. Distant particles should not, according to Einstein, possess instantaneous spooky connections. In this, Einstein was wrong: we now know empirically that quantum particles really can have instantaneous long-range links. But, just in case you are wondering, quantum entanglement can’t be invoked to validate telepathy.” To date, none of the world’s greatest minds have been unable to unravel this paradox.
Tunneling is the ability of a particle to break through some barrier in a fashion that would not be permitted by the laws of classical physics. A tennis player would not expect his ball to pass through a concrete wall while practicing his serve hitting the ball repeatedly against the wall. It must be mentioned that it is possible (but extremely unlikely) that the ball would pass through the wall just as easily as if there existed a large hole in it. If (the mother of all big ifs) all the electrons in the atoms in the tennis ball and all the electrons in the atoms of the wall were to align in a precise manner, the ball would pass right through the wall! The probability of this happening is so low that the tennis player would have to continue hitting the ball against the wall continuously for over five billion years. The sun is consuming hydrogen at the rate of 620 million metric tons each second, and at this rate will exhaust its hydrogen fuel supply sometime in the next five billion to seven billion years causing it to collapse into its core. At this time the sun will expand into a red giant as its atoms of helium undergo fusion and swallow the earth in a great fireball thus putting an end to the persistent tennis player.
Without quantum tunneling, the principal player in the story of the apple, the photon (the basic component of light) would not be available to make its journey to the earth. The hydrogen atom consists of a single positively charged proton and a single negatively charged electron. The sun’s energy is produced in three steps whereby four hydrogen atoms are squeezed together in a process called nuclear fusion into two helium atoms. The mass of the resulting two helium atoms is less than the mass of the original four hydrogen atoms with the difference released as energy in accordance with Einstein’s famous E=mc2 where e=energy, m=mass, and c2=the speed of light squared. According to the Law of Attraction, “opposites attract” and “likes repel.” An extreme force is necessary to force a pair of hydrogen atoms close enough to fuse together. Scientists have calculated that the gravitational force and heat found in the core of the sun is not sufficient for hydrogen fusion to occur without the assistance of quantum tunneling.
OK, how did the apple get up in the tree? The short answer is photosynthesis and the longer answer is, well, a bit longer. Photosynthesis and DNA are two of the most efficient processes found in nature and this efficiency is difficult to explain strictly in terms of classical physics. According to McFadden & Al-Khalili, every leaf on every plant or tree contains an incredible piece of machinery that creates “. . . about 16,000 tonnes of new organic matter in the form of trees, grass, seaweed, dandelions, giant redwood, and apples” every second. This photosynthesis process starts when a photon of light strikes the surface of a leaf activating chlorophyll and creating an exciton (“an electron that has been knocked out of its orbit in an atom, together with the hole it leaves behind.”) Excitons can be thought of as “a tiny battery with positive and negative poles capable of storing energy for later use.” The exciton must now travel through a maze of structures to reach a molecular manufacturing unit called a reaction center. To accomplish this feat it must solve the problem faced by all power plants: energy lost during transmission. For example, in 2003 the US lost up to 5% of the electricity generated during transmission. Just a small reduction in that loss would be worth billions of dollars.
Excitons are unstable and have to travel quite a distance, in molecular terms nanometer distances (measured in billions of a meter) from the excited chlorophyll molecules to the reaction center (the organic manufacturing plant). The energy has to be transferred from one antenna molecule to another within the chlorophyll forest to reach the reaction center. As McFadden & Al-Khalili wrote, “This can happen thanks to the tightly packed nature of the chlorophyll. Molecular neighbors of the one that has absorbed the photon can themselves become excited, effectively inheriting the energy of the initially excited electron, which is then transferred to their own magnesium atom’s electron. . . The problem, of course, is which route this energy transfer should take. If it heads in the wrong direction, randomly hopping from one molecule to the next in the chlorophyll forest, it will eventually lose its energy rather than delivering it to the reaction center. It doesn’t have very long to find its way to its destination before the exciton expires.”
The exciton must somehow travel through a forest-like maze of chlorophyll and reach the reaction center before its energy is lost. Its problem is very similar to the famous traveling salesman’s problem. A salesman needs to visit the capitals of all the lower 48 states and is allowed to start his trip from the capital city of his choice and continue on until passing through all 48 capitals. The idea is to plan the route so as to travel the least total distance. It took a supercomputer to find the shortest route of 10,628 miles. There is, of course, “many” other routes that could solve the problem and some of them might even be shorter than 10,628 miles (the shortest route found to date).
The problem facing the exciton is equally daunting and a leaf hardly has the space to house a supercomputer. At one time it was thought that plants utilized a statistical technique known as a random walk. In the author’s words, “This is sometimes referred to as a ‘drunken walk’ because it resembles the path taken by an intoxicated drinker exiting a bar, wandering this way and that until he eventually finds his way home. But random walks are not a very efficient means of getting anywhere: if the drunk’s home is far away, he may well wake up in the following morning in a bush on the other side of town. An object engaged in a random walk will tend to move away from its starting point by a distance proportionate to the square of the time taken. If in one minute a drunk has advanced by one meter, then after four minutes he will have advanced by two meters, and after nine minutes, only three meters. Given this sluggish progress, it is not surprising that animals and microbes seldom use a random walk to find food or prey, only resorting to the strategy if no other options are available. . . Drop an ant onto unfamiliar ground and as soon as it encounters a scent, it will abandon a random walk and follow its nose.”
Given the fact that photosynthesis is the second (only to DNA) most efficient biological system in nature, it is rather obvious that the exciton is not using the random walk. Almost all the energy absorbed by a chlorophyll molecule finds its way to the reaction center. How this energy can find its way to the reaction center so much better then drunkards, or ants searching for a meal, or even technologically advanced power plants is one of natures greatest puzzles. In an application of Arthur Conan Doyle’s observation, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Scientists now believe (with considerable experimental data) that only QM is capable of solving the search problem facing the exciton in finding the shortest path (in time) to the molecular manufacturing unit supplying the energy necessary to manufacture the apple in our story.
Much research and experimentation has taken place since the progeny of Newton’s apple tree produced its first apple in MIT’s President’s Garden. On January 9, 2014, Edward J. O’Reilly and Alexandra Olaya-Castro published an article titled, Non-classicality of the molecular vibrations assisting exciton energy transfer at room temperature in the journal in Nature Communications. In their abstract they state, “Our results therefore suggest that investigation of the non-classical properties of vibrational motions assisting excitation and charge transport, photoreception and chemical sensing processes could be a touchstone for revealing a role for non-trivial quantum phenomena in biology”. Of course, as we have learned, “Non-classicality” refers to QM.
When will science be able to state that photosynthesis utilizes QM to enable the exciton to find its path through the chlorophyll jungle and reach the reaction center before losing its energy at the level of a Scientific Theory? When will there be a Theory of Quantum Photosynthesis similar to the Theory of Evolution or the Theory of Relativity? To date, there exists considerable evidence indicating that is the case and classical physics does not appear to be up to the job, but that alone does not reach the standard demanded of any scientific theory which, after all, is the highest degree of truth possible in science. The hypothesis is the heart of any scientific theory.
When Pierre Laplace presented his definitive work on the properties of the solar system (Celestial Mechanics published in 1799) to Napoleon, he was asked if it was true that there was no mention of the solar system’s Creator (God) in his opus magus. Laplace’s famous answer , “I had no need of that hypothesis” provoked a challenge from Joseph Lagrange, another great French mathematician and physicists, who replied to Laplace saying, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace replied, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions. This is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing.” And that is the gold standard of a hypothesis, it must make verifiable predictions and they must come to pass and be independently observed.
In contrast to “The Theory of Quantum Photosynthesis” the Theory of QM (or Quantum Theory) is a proven scientific theory by virtue of both the inductive and deductive methods of the Scientific Method. The two-slit test is an example of the inductive method where observable and replicable data is accumulated suggesting that coherence, decoherence, superposition, measurement effect, tunneling, and entanglement are all taking place. But this does not explain how it is happening. A hypothesis must provide an explanation for what is happening, and also make predictions. In the case of the QM the task was fulfilled by Richard Feynman, who used the deductive method of science to develop the mathematics that explained the experimental results. He was awarded the Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1965 for his work. When asked, “What did you do to earn the Nobel,” he answered, “If I could explain it to you, they wouldn’t have given it to me.”
As has been suggested, Quantum computing is well-suited for solving search-problems because of its ability to take all possible paths at the same time. Finding the factors (especially for large numbers) is a major motivation for developing a quantum computer. According to phys.org/news/2014-11, Nike Dattani & Nathan Bryans broke the record (on 11/28/2014) for factoring the largest number (56,153) on a quantum device. The previous record was 143.
The role of QM in photosynthesis is only one story about this amazing fundamental feature of the universe found in Life On The Edge, The Coming Age of Quantum Biology. The story begins with the creation of the universe and continues to the story of nuclear fission taking place in the core of the sun and the birth of the photon that took just over eight minutes to travel 93 million miles to set off the process that put an apple in that famous MIT apple tree. Life On The Edge also tells the story of how enzymes, magnetoreception (animal navigation), and even consciousness depend on QM. Newton once said that “a midget standing on the shoulders of a giant, sees further.” The question that needs to be asked is, “Where will we find the 'midgets' ready to climb on the shoulders of the likes of Newton, Einstein, and Feynman?” It is estimated that 3% of the school children in the world are gifted. Our only hope is that each one receives a quality education, because our future on earth depends on them.
Sources:
1. Life On The Edge, The Coming Age of Quantum Biology (2014) by Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Al-Khalili
2. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1998) by Stephen Hawking
3. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick
Saturday, September 12, 2015
The Historical Jesus
There are over two billion Christians in the world today and very few have any idea about the history of the New Testament (NT). Many think that it was dictated by God to the prophets who then precisely reduced it to writing all at one time in its current form. Nothing could be farther from the truth. After the death of Jesus and for centuries the various ideas about his life and death were so diverse that the NT scholar and Professor of Religion, Bart D. Ehrman coined the word “proto-Christian” to describe the religion that would eventually become orthodox Christianity in the fifth century with the meeting of bishops at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451 C.E. In the words of the historian and Princeton Professor of Religion, Elaine Pagels, Christianity “had flourished for generations–even centuries before Christians formulated what they believed into creeds.” The NT came together over a period of over 300 years in a manner strikingly similar to biological evolution. This similarity can be realized by reading the words of Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Future of Life: “Over a lifetime the details of real events are increasingly distorted by editing and supplementations. Across generations, the most important among them turn into history, and finally legend and myth.” The evolution of Christianity reflects a gradual change in the nature of Christ from a rabbi and prophet to being God himself as a fully equal partner in the Godhead.
This essay attempts to reveal (as much as possible) the historical Jesus using the same methods employed in researching any other historical figure such as Shakespeare or Newton. The key to deciphering history is the availability of sources. The most important and reliable ones are called primary sources and are defined as direct witnesses to the events under consideration. Multiple independent first-hand witnesses (particularly if they are in agreement) are the gold standard of historical sources. Secondary ones are the next most reliable sources and are defined as those people who had personal access to a primary source. The least reliable source can be described as an oral tradition compiled over a long period of time and handed down from generation to another. In a legal environment they would be called “hearsay.” In the case of the NT there are not any primary or secondary sources. It may come as a surprise to many Christians to learn that the NT is based entirely on an oral tradition that developed over a period of at least forty years after the death of Christ. What about the disciples and the apostles (Jesus’ closest associates)? Didn’t they leave a record of their experiences with Jesus?
The answer is a resounding, ‘No,” and the reason is very simple; they were illiterate (could not read or write). NT scholar Bart Ehrman described the disciples as “rural peasants from the backwaters of Galilee” and according to Acts (4:13) both Peter and John are described as “unlearned and ignorant men.” The low literacy rate in Palestine is well known to historians. Education during first-century Palestine was the exclusive privilege of the wealthiest citizens and was concentrated in the cities where less than 10% of the population could write by the low standard of being able to copy the letters. The literacy rate was even lower in rural areas such Galilee. There is only one passage in the NT indicating that Jesus knew how to write (John 8:3-9) and there is not any record of anything he wrote. Also Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and the earliest known NT was written in Greek, a language only spoken by the educated classes of Palestine.
The authorship of the twenty-seven books of the NT is uncertain or unknown. Most NT scholars are in agreement that the writers of the gospels were anonymous. The gospel writers explicitly acknowledged this by their choice of titles. For example, Mark’s Gospel is titled The Gospel According to Mark and the other three Gospels are titled similarly and all are written in the third person. According to noted biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman The Gospel of John explicitly states that it was not written by an eyewitness. Writings attributed to the Apostle Paul constitute over 50% of the NT; most of which are letters he wrote to the various churches throughout the Roman Empire. Scholars agree that Luke and Acts were written by the same person with some believing it was Paul, but it is not certain.
The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) all tell a similar story about the life of Jesus, whereas John (written last) renders a different account. It should be noted that John and Matthew were disciples whereas Mark and Luke were apostles (associates). Tradition holds that Luke was a companion of Paul, and Mark was a secretary to Peter. All the Gospels were written in the first century (in Greek) from within thirty-five to sixty-five years after the death of Jesus, and with Mark being written first. Other Gospels had been written earlier still, but only Mark is extant. According to Luke (1:1-4) “many predecessors had written accounts of Jesus’ life.” Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source with some changes. John was written last, most likely at the end of the first century.
Although the synoptic Gospels tell a similar story, there are many differences. For example, only Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus’ mother Mary was a virgin. Matthew establishes Mary's virgin birth by quoting (Isaiah 7:14) and mistranslating the Hebrew word “alma” (maiden or young unmarried woman) to the Greek word, “parthenos” (virgin). Some of Matthew’s obvious zeal to portray Jesus fulfilling OT prophecy is humorous. For example, in (Zechariah 9:9) the author writes poetically, “See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Matthew anxious to show Jesus fulfilling prophecy writes in (Matthew 21:6-7) that Jesus rode on two donkeys, a mother and foal. John, Luke, and Mark all record Jesus as riding on only one donkey, although they don’t explicitly refer to Zechariah. The synoptic Gospels all depict Jesus in very human terms; in Matthew, as an appointed king, in Luke as a priest, and in Mark as God’s prophet. John alone makes the claim that Jesus is divine.
The Gospel of Matthew is the first Gospel based on the order it appears in the NT, but in fact was written from fifteen to twenty years after Mark, which is the primary source for Matthew and Luke. Careful analysis of the synoptic Gospels indicates that 97% of Mark is reproduced in Matthew and/or Luke. Matthew is considered the most “Jewish” of the Gospel in two significant ways. First, he stressed the importance of Jewish law insisting that converts to Christianity must keep the Jewish law (including circumcision) to enter the Kingdom of heaven. He quotes Jesus in (Matthew 5:17) “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” The message is clear in Matthew, to become a Christian, converts (pagans) must first become Jews and follow all the requirements of the Jewish religion including circumcision. This eventually becomes a major issue in the early church because of the reluctance of adult pagan men to undergo a very painful procedure.
The second reason Matthew is considered the most “Jewish” Gospel is the extent that he goes to blame the death of Christ on the Jews. In (Matthew 27:24) Pontius Pilate washes his hands and says “I am innocent of this man’s blood” and in (Matthew 27:25) he writes, “His blood be on us and our children.” And so it came for Christians to blame all Jewish people for the murder of Jesus into perpetuity. It should be noted that Judas is portrayed as the prototype Jew in the most unflattering terms in the Gospels. Anti-Semitism was a major theme of many of the most prominent Church fathers. For an example, Irenaeus is quoted in Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Elaine Pagels) saying “God disinherited the Jews and stripped them of their right to be his priests. Although they continue to worship, God rejects their offerings as he rejected Cain’s, since, just as Cain killed Abel, so the Jews ‘killed the Just One,’ Jesus, so that ‘their hands are full of blood.’”
With all the contradictions in the four gospels, the question as to Jesus’ birth place would appear to be of little doctrinal importance. In (Mark 1:9) Jesus was born in Nazareth, but in (Matthew 2:1) he was born in “Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king.” Matthew as a Jew was well aware of the OT prophecy found in (Micah 5:2) that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem and given his proclivity to demonstrate OT prophecies being fulfilled, it is not surprising that he would place Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. But this presents a severe challenge to the notion that Mary was a virgin. In (Luke 2:4), Joseph left Galilee and went to the “City of David which is called Bethlehem (because he was of the house and lineage of David).” In this verse Luke is attempting to fulfill the prophecies of both Daniel and Isaiah predicting that a messiah will be sent by God in accordance with the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. But for Jesus to be the Messiah, he would have to be born into the bloodline of David as the son of Joseph thus making it impossible for Mary to be a virgin.
It is important to understand that the word “messiah” means “anointed” in Hebrew, and when translated to Greek becomes “Christ.” In Jewish history the future king was always anointed to show God’s favor. Also, within the Jewish apocalyptic tradition as predicted by Daniel and Isaiah, God will send a warrior-king, who will defeat the forces of evil, including the enemies of Israel (think Romans) and establish the Kingdom of God (an actual kingdom on earth) ruled by God’s representatives which in the NT is Jesus and his twelve disciples. Jesus makes it very clear this will happen very soon. In (Mark 9:1), Jesus teaches that this Kingdom will come during the lifetime of his disciples: “There are some of you standing here who will not taste death until you see the kingdom of God come in power.”
In (Matthew 26: 31-35) after Jesus was arrested all the disciples deserted him because they feared for their lives, except Peter who was being questioned by the authorities. While they could be criticized for being cowards, it is fair to think that they did not fear for Jesus’ life. As Jews, they believed that Jesus was a warrior sent by God to destroy the forces of evil and as such could not be any danger in the hands of the Romans. Strangely, according to John, he was the only disciple present at the crucifixion.
Paul’s contributions to the NT were written perhaps as many as twenty years earlier. The conversion of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus is one of the seminal events in the NT. Paul who never met Jesus claimed that Christ appeared to him in a vision while he was on the road to Damascus (Acts 9) and revealed the truth to him and this was his only source of information about Christ. For this reason it was necessary for Paul to claim that he had not met with any of the Disciples in Jerusalem. However, in (Galatians 1:18), he admits to going to Jerusalem three days later and staying for fifteen days, but in (Galatians 1:19) he says “But I did not see any other of the apostles except James, the Lord's brother.”
Only John has Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. This contradicts Elaine Pagels account found in her book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas: “According to Luke’s account, written ten to twenty years after Mark’s, Peter dares announce to the ‘men of Jerusalem’ that Jesus alone, of the entire human race, returned alive after death. . .” From Paul’s “writings,” Luke and Acts we learn the following things about Jesus: 1. He was born of a woman, 2. He was Jewish, 3. He had brothers, including James, 4. He had twelve followers, 5. His mission was to the Jews, 6. He held a last supper, and 7. He was crucified. Paul’s major sayings were “Do not divorce and pay the preachers.” The crucifixion and the resurrection was what was important to Paul, and in his zeal to convert the pagans he not only contradicted Jesus on the matter of being bound by Jewish law, he went so far as to prohibit circumcision by saying anyone who has been circumcised is going to hell in (Galatians 5:2): “Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.”
The resurrection of Christ is the sine qua non of Christianity, yet inexplicably, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter is the only gospel that gives an account of the resurrection. The synoptic gospels do not even mention it, but begin their different accounts surrounding the “women” arrival to anoint Jesus’ body and find the tomb empty. What women? According to Mark they are Mary Magdalene, Mary (mother of James) and Salome. Matthew lists the women as Mary Magdalene and another Mary (presumably the mother of James). Whereas, Luke names them as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary (mother of James), and “the others with them.” What did the women see when they arrived at the tomb? According to Mark, they saw one man, in Luke they saw two men, but according Matthew they saw an angel.
The alleged resurrection of Christ is a prime example of the literary device deus ex machina being used to resolve the problem of the failed return of Jesus during the lifetime of some of the disciples as prophesied in (Mark 9:1). It is also an example of history being concerned with what is likely and faith with what is possible. The first-century history of the Roman empire provides the most-likely explanation for the empty tomb discovered by the women in the Gospels. The Romans never permitted the burial of anyone sentenced to death by crucifixion. Part of the punishment was leaving the body on the cross to be eaten by various scavengers as a warning to anyone else who might challenge the Roman authorities. There is not any evidence of a crucifixion victim being permitted a burial. The best historical evidence strongly suggests that the reason the women found the tomb empty was because his body was never placed there in the first place. His body was thrown into a common grave after three days in accordance with Roman law and custom.
Christian apologists offer a number of sightings of Jesus after his death as evidence of his resurrection from the grave. In the Gospel of Matthew he appears to Mary Magdalene and another Mary at his empty tomb. Later, he appeared before eleven of the disciples on a mountain in Galilee. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus appears to the disciples and eats with them and tells them to wait in Jerusalem for the start of their mission to the world, and then he ascends into the heavens. In Acts, Jesus appears to his disciples after his death and stays with them for forty days before ascending to heaven. Acts also describes Jesus' appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus. Assuming, for argument’s sake that in all the above cases the people sincerely believed that they saw the resurrected Jesus, what is the most likely explanation? From a historical perspective illusions offer the best answer. Psychologist estimate that 25% of “normal” people experience at least one illusion in their lifetime. They also distinguish illusions from hallucinations resulting from mental disease or a drug-induced state. Illusions are both common and not indicative of mental illness. Illusions are commonplace, and occur almost daily; researchers have discovered that epileptics have flashes of vision that are a mere neurological defect.
Countless people report seeing Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson years after their death. It is not unusual for people to have visions of recent departed loved ones, thought by medical authorities to be the result of extreme stress. Certainly the disciples were deeply bereaved and stressed over the terrible death of their beloved Jesus. Gatherings of large groups of people routinely report sightings of the Virgin Mary. For example, in 2003 an image of Mary appeared on the side of a financial building in Clearwater, Florida and attracted a large crowd who witnessed the event. From 1990 through October 1998 Nancy Fowler of Conyers, Georgia claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared at her small farm. As the word spread about Mary’s apparition, the roads to Conyers were clogged with pilgrims. The author personally knew a woman who traveled from Miami to Conyers, seeking a cure for an inoperable stomach tumor. Upon her return home she claimed that additional x-rays indicated that the tumor disappeared. Sadly, she died of stomach cancer in less than one year after being “cured.”
Bart D. Ehrman, biblical scholar and professor of religion writes in his 2009 book Jesus, Interrupted writes, “Despite the prominence of miracles in the Gospel traditions, I don’t think historians can show that any of them, including the resurrection, ever happened.” Another prominent bible scholar Reza Aslan wrote in his 2014 book, Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth “Despite two millennia of Christian Apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.” In order to better understand the NT miracles, it is helpful to consider the predominant view of the residents of Palestine at the time of Jesus’ mission.
According to Reza Aslan the people in first-century Palestine “viewed magic and miracle as a standard of their world.” Jesus was only one of many miracle workers operating in Palestine at the time. Others included Eleazar, Rabbi Simon ben Yohai, and Apollonius. Paul also performed miracles by invoking Jesus’ name. This was considered standard practice at the time since illness was thought to be the result of divine judgement or demonic activity. This explains why NT miracles were fully accepted by the early followers of Jesus and never became controversial like the virgin birth, resurrection, or the divinity of Christ. In fact, most historians including bible scholars Aslan and Ehrman agree that none of Jesus’ miracles can be historically confirmed.
The natural tension between historians and theologians (and people of faith) explain the difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels. Historians are concerned with what most likely happened, whereas theologians are concerned with what is possible and ultimately rely on faith more than evidence. Faith in this context is defined as “trust.” Faith can also be defined as accepting some religious doctrine as truth. There is a more universal understanding of faith as being the feeling that all is right in the world and eventually everything will work out for the best. Voltaire coined what he called the Panglossian Theorem in his 1759 novel Candide as, “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” This universal faith is necessary for any degree of emotional stability in healthy people. It appears that all people are born with an impulse for mystery, transcendence, and mysticism. Part of this impulse is to seek out an agency or cause for all the important happenings in nature and life. As recent as 10,000 years ago virtually all the answers to man’s questions were satisfied by an appeal to supernatural agents called gods. As man’s understanding and knowledge of the world around him increased, his reliance on gods diminished not to disappear, but to evolve and adjust to the man’s increasing knowledge of nature and the universe.
Religion is then the way that this universal impulse is institutionalized into doctrine and ritual. Reza Aslan captures this idea nicely in his (2005) No god but God: “Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provide a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.” The idea of a conflict between religion and science is relatively very recent one. Prior to the eighteen-century European movement, the “Age of Enlightenment,” scared texts were not considered history and were not intended to be read literally.
It was only after eighteen-century philosophers and intellectuals started challenging the existence of God, that religious apologists such as William Paley and others began to formulate elaborate proofs of God’s existence building on the work of St Thomas Aquinas. In fact the current (modern) understanding of truth is less than three hundred years old. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes an important distinction between two “truths” in telling the story of watching television with his young children. If they ask if some event on television actually happened, he answers “No,” but concerning the same event, if they ask if it’s “true,” he sometimes answers “Yes.” He is teaching his children an important lesson: some things are literally true and others although not literally true reveals some truth. For example, when Jesus said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God,” he was not speaking literally but metaphorically. In fact Saint Jerome (editor of the most widely used Bible) suggested a literal interpretation for the illiterate masses and an allegorical one for more advanced minds. The issue of any allegorical truth ultimately rests on the freedom of conscience of each individual to decide. The role of the historian and the scientist is to provide evidence for literal truths and leave the interpretation of allegorical truths to others.
There is both the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the gospels. The historical Jesus was a Jewish man born in the small farming Palestinian village, Nazareth close to the beginning of the first century CE. He began a social, religious movement that was perceived both as a threat to the Temple authorities and the Roman state. He was executed by the Romans for the crime of sedition. The Jesus of the gospels was born in Bethlehem of the virgin Mary. At the age of thirty he was baptized by John the Baptist and after John’s death, he gathered together twelve disciples and began his ministry, preaching the Kingdom of God was at hand everyone needed to get right with God in preparation. During his ministry he performed many miracles, including curing the sick, feeding the hungry, and raising Lazarus from the dead. He was arrested for the crime of sedition against the Roman empire and executed by crucifixion and buried in a private tomb only to be resurrected three days later.
Sources:
1. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003) by Elaine Pagels
2. Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code (2004) by Bart D. Ehrman
3. The Lost Gospel Of Judas Iscariot (2006) by Bart D. Ehrman
4. The Great Transformation (2006) by Karen Armstrong
5. The Closing Of The Western Mind (2002) by Charles Freeman
6. Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2014) by Reza Aslan
This essay attempts to reveal (as much as possible) the historical Jesus using the same methods employed in researching any other historical figure such as Shakespeare or Newton. The key to deciphering history is the availability of sources. The most important and reliable ones are called primary sources and are defined as direct witnesses to the events under consideration. Multiple independent first-hand witnesses (particularly if they are in agreement) are the gold standard of historical sources. Secondary ones are the next most reliable sources and are defined as those people who had personal access to a primary source. The least reliable source can be described as an oral tradition compiled over a long period of time and handed down from generation to another. In a legal environment they would be called “hearsay.” In the case of the NT there are not any primary or secondary sources. It may come as a surprise to many Christians to learn that the NT is based entirely on an oral tradition that developed over a period of at least forty years after the death of Christ. What about the disciples and the apostles (Jesus’ closest associates)? Didn’t they leave a record of their experiences with Jesus?
The answer is a resounding, ‘No,” and the reason is very simple; they were illiterate (could not read or write). NT scholar Bart Ehrman described the disciples as “rural peasants from the backwaters of Galilee” and according to Acts (4:13) both Peter and John are described as “unlearned and ignorant men.” The low literacy rate in Palestine is well known to historians. Education during first-century Palestine was the exclusive privilege of the wealthiest citizens and was concentrated in the cities where less than 10% of the population could write by the low standard of being able to copy the letters. The literacy rate was even lower in rural areas such Galilee. There is only one passage in the NT indicating that Jesus knew how to write (John 8:3-9) and there is not any record of anything he wrote. Also Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and the earliest known NT was written in Greek, a language only spoken by the educated classes of Palestine.
The authorship of the twenty-seven books of the NT is uncertain or unknown. Most NT scholars are in agreement that the writers of the gospels were anonymous. The gospel writers explicitly acknowledged this by their choice of titles. For example, Mark’s Gospel is titled The Gospel According to Mark and the other three Gospels are titled similarly and all are written in the third person. According to noted biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman The Gospel of John explicitly states that it was not written by an eyewitness. Writings attributed to the Apostle Paul constitute over 50% of the NT; most of which are letters he wrote to the various churches throughout the Roman Empire. Scholars agree that Luke and Acts were written by the same person with some believing it was Paul, but it is not certain.
The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) all tell a similar story about the life of Jesus, whereas John (written last) renders a different account. It should be noted that John and Matthew were disciples whereas Mark and Luke were apostles (associates). Tradition holds that Luke was a companion of Paul, and Mark was a secretary to Peter. All the Gospels were written in the first century (in Greek) from within thirty-five to sixty-five years after the death of Jesus, and with Mark being written first. Other Gospels had been written earlier still, but only Mark is extant. According to Luke (1:1-4) “many predecessors had written accounts of Jesus’ life.” Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source with some changes. John was written last, most likely at the end of the first century.
Although the synoptic Gospels tell a similar story, there are many differences. For example, only Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus’ mother Mary was a virgin. Matthew establishes Mary's virgin birth by quoting (Isaiah 7:14) and mistranslating the Hebrew word “alma” (maiden or young unmarried woman) to the Greek word, “parthenos” (virgin). Some of Matthew’s obvious zeal to portray Jesus fulfilling OT prophecy is humorous. For example, in (Zechariah 9:9) the author writes poetically, “See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Matthew anxious to show Jesus fulfilling prophecy writes in (Matthew 21:6-7) that Jesus rode on two donkeys, a mother and foal. John, Luke, and Mark all record Jesus as riding on only one donkey, although they don’t explicitly refer to Zechariah. The synoptic Gospels all depict Jesus in very human terms; in Matthew, as an appointed king, in Luke as a priest, and in Mark as God’s prophet. John alone makes the claim that Jesus is divine.
The Gospel of Matthew is the first Gospel based on the order it appears in the NT, but in fact was written from fifteen to twenty years after Mark, which is the primary source for Matthew and Luke. Careful analysis of the synoptic Gospels indicates that 97% of Mark is reproduced in Matthew and/or Luke. Matthew is considered the most “Jewish” of the Gospel in two significant ways. First, he stressed the importance of Jewish law insisting that converts to Christianity must keep the Jewish law (including circumcision) to enter the Kingdom of heaven. He quotes Jesus in (Matthew 5:17) “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” The message is clear in Matthew, to become a Christian, converts (pagans) must first become Jews and follow all the requirements of the Jewish religion including circumcision. This eventually becomes a major issue in the early church because of the reluctance of adult pagan men to undergo a very painful procedure.
The second reason Matthew is considered the most “Jewish” Gospel is the extent that he goes to blame the death of Christ on the Jews. In (Matthew 27:24) Pontius Pilate washes his hands and says “I am innocent of this man’s blood” and in (Matthew 27:25) he writes, “His blood be on us and our children.” And so it came for Christians to blame all Jewish people for the murder of Jesus into perpetuity. It should be noted that Judas is portrayed as the prototype Jew in the most unflattering terms in the Gospels. Anti-Semitism was a major theme of many of the most prominent Church fathers. For an example, Irenaeus is quoted in Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Elaine Pagels) saying “God disinherited the Jews and stripped them of their right to be his priests. Although they continue to worship, God rejects their offerings as he rejected Cain’s, since, just as Cain killed Abel, so the Jews ‘killed the Just One,’ Jesus, so that ‘their hands are full of blood.’”
With all the contradictions in the four gospels, the question as to Jesus’ birth place would appear to be of little doctrinal importance. In (Mark 1:9) Jesus was born in Nazareth, but in (Matthew 2:1) he was born in “Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king.” Matthew as a Jew was well aware of the OT prophecy found in (Micah 5:2) that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem and given his proclivity to demonstrate OT prophecies being fulfilled, it is not surprising that he would place Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. But this presents a severe challenge to the notion that Mary was a virgin. In (Luke 2:4), Joseph left Galilee and went to the “City of David which is called Bethlehem (because he was of the house and lineage of David).” In this verse Luke is attempting to fulfill the prophecies of both Daniel and Isaiah predicting that a messiah will be sent by God in accordance with the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. But for Jesus to be the Messiah, he would have to be born into the bloodline of David as the son of Joseph thus making it impossible for Mary to be a virgin.
It is important to understand that the word “messiah” means “anointed” in Hebrew, and when translated to Greek becomes “Christ.” In Jewish history the future king was always anointed to show God’s favor. Also, within the Jewish apocalyptic tradition as predicted by Daniel and Isaiah, God will send a warrior-king, who will defeat the forces of evil, including the enemies of Israel (think Romans) and establish the Kingdom of God (an actual kingdom on earth) ruled by God’s representatives which in the NT is Jesus and his twelve disciples. Jesus makes it very clear this will happen very soon. In (Mark 9:1), Jesus teaches that this Kingdom will come during the lifetime of his disciples: “There are some of you standing here who will not taste death until you see the kingdom of God come in power.”
In (Matthew 26: 31-35) after Jesus was arrested all the disciples deserted him because they feared for their lives, except Peter who was being questioned by the authorities. While they could be criticized for being cowards, it is fair to think that they did not fear for Jesus’ life. As Jews, they believed that Jesus was a warrior sent by God to destroy the forces of evil and as such could not be any danger in the hands of the Romans. Strangely, according to John, he was the only disciple present at the crucifixion.
Paul’s contributions to the NT were written perhaps as many as twenty years earlier. The conversion of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus is one of the seminal events in the NT. Paul who never met Jesus claimed that Christ appeared to him in a vision while he was on the road to Damascus (Acts 9) and revealed the truth to him and this was his only source of information about Christ. For this reason it was necessary for Paul to claim that he had not met with any of the Disciples in Jerusalem. However, in (Galatians 1:18), he admits to going to Jerusalem three days later and staying for fifteen days, but in (Galatians 1:19) he says “But I did not see any other of the apostles except James, the Lord's brother.”
Only John has Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. This contradicts Elaine Pagels account found in her book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas: “According to Luke’s account, written ten to twenty years after Mark’s, Peter dares announce to the ‘men of Jerusalem’ that Jesus alone, of the entire human race, returned alive after death. . .” From Paul’s “writings,” Luke and Acts we learn the following things about Jesus: 1. He was born of a woman, 2. He was Jewish, 3. He had brothers, including James, 4. He had twelve followers, 5. His mission was to the Jews, 6. He held a last supper, and 7. He was crucified. Paul’s major sayings were “Do not divorce and pay the preachers.” The crucifixion and the resurrection was what was important to Paul, and in his zeal to convert the pagans he not only contradicted Jesus on the matter of being bound by Jewish law, he went so far as to prohibit circumcision by saying anyone who has been circumcised is going to hell in (Galatians 5:2): “Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.”
The resurrection of Christ is the sine qua non of Christianity, yet inexplicably, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter is the only gospel that gives an account of the resurrection. The synoptic gospels do not even mention it, but begin their different accounts surrounding the “women” arrival to anoint Jesus’ body and find the tomb empty. What women? According to Mark they are Mary Magdalene, Mary (mother of James) and Salome. Matthew lists the women as Mary Magdalene and another Mary (presumably the mother of James). Whereas, Luke names them as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary (mother of James), and “the others with them.” What did the women see when they arrived at the tomb? According to Mark, they saw one man, in Luke they saw two men, but according Matthew they saw an angel.
The alleged resurrection of Christ is a prime example of the literary device deus ex machina being used to resolve the problem of the failed return of Jesus during the lifetime of some of the disciples as prophesied in (Mark 9:1). It is also an example of history being concerned with what is likely and faith with what is possible. The first-century history of the Roman empire provides the most-likely explanation for the empty tomb discovered by the women in the Gospels. The Romans never permitted the burial of anyone sentenced to death by crucifixion. Part of the punishment was leaving the body on the cross to be eaten by various scavengers as a warning to anyone else who might challenge the Roman authorities. There is not any evidence of a crucifixion victim being permitted a burial. The best historical evidence strongly suggests that the reason the women found the tomb empty was because his body was never placed there in the first place. His body was thrown into a common grave after three days in accordance with Roman law and custom.
Christian apologists offer a number of sightings of Jesus after his death as evidence of his resurrection from the grave. In the Gospel of Matthew he appears to Mary Magdalene and another Mary at his empty tomb. Later, he appeared before eleven of the disciples on a mountain in Galilee. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus appears to the disciples and eats with them and tells them to wait in Jerusalem for the start of their mission to the world, and then he ascends into the heavens. In Acts, Jesus appears to his disciples after his death and stays with them for forty days before ascending to heaven. Acts also describes Jesus' appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus. Assuming, for argument’s sake that in all the above cases the people sincerely believed that they saw the resurrected Jesus, what is the most likely explanation? From a historical perspective illusions offer the best answer. Psychologist estimate that 25% of “normal” people experience at least one illusion in their lifetime. They also distinguish illusions from hallucinations resulting from mental disease or a drug-induced state. Illusions are both common and not indicative of mental illness. Illusions are commonplace, and occur almost daily; researchers have discovered that epileptics have flashes of vision that are a mere neurological defect.
Countless people report seeing Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson years after their death. It is not unusual for people to have visions of recent departed loved ones, thought by medical authorities to be the result of extreme stress. Certainly the disciples were deeply bereaved and stressed over the terrible death of their beloved Jesus. Gatherings of large groups of people routinely report sightings of the Virgin Mary. For example, in 2003 an image of Mary appeared on the side of a financial building in Clearwater, Florida and attracted a large crowd who witnessed the event. From 1990 through October 1998 Nancy Fowler of Conyers, Georgia claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared at her small farm. As the word spread about Mary’s apparition, the roads to Conyers were clogged with pilgrims. The author personally knew a woman who traveled from Miami to Conyers, seeking a cure for an inoperable stomach tumor. Upon her return home she claimed that additional x-rays indicated that the tumor disappeared. Sadly, she died of stomach cancer in less than one year after being “cured.”
Bart D. Ehrman, biblical scholar and professor of religion writes in his 2009 book Jesus, Interrupted writes, “Despite the prominence of miracles in the Gospel traditions, I don’t think historians can show that any of them, including the resurrection, ever happened.” Another prominent bible scholar Reza Aslan wrote in his 2014 book, Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth “Despite two millennia of Christian Apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.” In order to better understand the NT miracles, it is helpful to consider the predominant view of the residents of Palestine at the time of Jesus’ mission.
According to Reza Aslan the people in first-century Palestine “viewed magic and miracle as a standard of their world.” Jesus was only one of many miracle workers operating in Palestine at the time. Others included Eleazar, Rabbi Simon ben Yohai, and Apollonius. Paul also performed miracles by invoking Jesus’ name. This was considered standard practice at the time since illness was thought to be the result of divine judgement or demonic activity. This explains why NT miracles were fully accepted by the early followers of Jesus and never became controversial like the virgin birth, resurrection, or the divinity of Christ. In fact, most historians including bible scholars Aslan and Ehrman agree that none of Jesus’ miracles can be historically confirmed.
The natural tension between historians and theologians (and people of faith) explain the difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels. Historians are concerned with what most likely happened, whereas theologians are concerned with what is possible and ultimately rely on faith more than evidence. Faith in this context is defined as “trust.” Faith can also be defined as accepting some religious doctrine as truth. There is a more universal understanding of faith as being the feeling that all is right in the world and eventually everything will work out for the best. Voltaire coined what he called the Panglossian Theorem in his 1759 novel Candide as, “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” This universal faith is necessary for any degree of emotional stability in healthy people. It appears that all people are born with an impulse for mystery, transcendence, and mysticism. Part of this impulse is to seek out an agency or cause for all the important happenings in nature and life. As recent as 10,000 years ago virtually all the answers to man’s questions were satisfied by an appeal to supernatural agents called gods. As man’s understanding and knowledge of the world around him increased, his reliance on gods diminished not to disappear, but to evolve and adjust to the man’s increasing knowledge of nature and the universe.
Religion is then the way that this universal impulse is institutionalized into doctrine and ritual. Reza Aslan captures this idea nicely in his (2005) No god but God: “Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provide a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.” The idea of a conflict between religion and science is relatively very recent one. Prior to the eighteen-century European movement, the “Age of Enlightenment,” scared texts were not considered history and were not intended to be read literally.
It was only after eighteen-century philosophers and intellectuals started challenging the existence of God, that religious apologists such as William Paley and others began to formulate elaborate proofs of God’s existence building on the work of St Thomas Aquinas. In fact the current (modern) understanding of truth is less than three hundred years old. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes an important distinction between two “truths” in telling the story of watching television with his young children. If they ask if some event on television actually happened, he answers “No,” but concerning the same event, if they ask if it’s “true,” he sometimes answers “Yes.” He is teaching his children an important lesson: some things are literally true and others although not literally true reveals some truth. For example, when Jesus said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God,” he was not speaking literally but metaphorically. In fact Saint Jerome (editor of the most widely used Bible) suggested a literal interpretation for the illiterate masses and an allegorical one for more advanced minds. The issue of any allegorical truth ultimately rests on the freedom of conscience of each individual to decide. The role of the historian and the scientist is to provide evidence for literal truths and leave the interpretation of allegorical truths to others.
There is both the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the gospels. The historical Jesus was a Jewish man born in the small farming Palestinian village, Nazareth close to the beginning of the first century CE. He began a social, religious movement that was perceived both as a threat to the Temple authorities and the Roman state. He was executed by the Romans for the crime of sedition. The Jesus of the gospels was born in Bethlehem of the virgin Mary. At the age of thirty he was baptized by John the Baptist and after John’s death, he gathered together twelve disciples and began his ministry, preaching the Kingdom of God was at hand everyone needed to get right with God in preparation. During his ministry he performed many miracles, including curing the sick, feeding the hungry, and raising Lazarus from the dead. He was arrested for the crime of sedition against the Roman empire and executed by crucifixion and buried in a private tomb only to be resurrected three days later.
Sources:
1. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003) by Elaine Pagels
2. Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code (2004) by Bart D. Ehrman
3. The Lost Gospel Of Judas Iscariot (2006) by Bart D. Ehrman
4. The Great Transformation (2006) by Karen Armstrong
5. The Closing Of The Western Mind (2002) by Charles Freeman
6. Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2014) by Reza Aslan
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Reincarnation
“Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” Carl Sagan
Reincarnation is the belief system claiming that the souls of long-deceased persons can begin life again but in a new body. Although reincarnation is part of many religions, including Hindus, Buddhists, and some Celtic pagan sects, it is also popular among mystics and New Age thinkers.
Reincarnation stories abound on the Internet such as a two-year old boy who was a fighter pilot killed in Iwo Jima more than 50 years earlier in a previous life. Another example, has a man claiming he was a serial killer in a past life (perhaps best kept a secret).
One famous case involved eighteen-year-old Gladys Davis, a stenographer who worked for Edgar Cayce. In 1923 Cayce performed a “life reading” on her and discovered that she had been the second daughter of Louis XIV in one incarnation, and at age seventeen was seduced by the Duke of York who became King James II of England. As a result, she became pregnant and gave birth to Edgar Cayce in his fifth incarnation. Cayce said that in an earlier incarnation he was one of Jesus’s disciples! The vast majority of reincarnation cases are based entirely on anecdotal evidence only, and cannot be proved or disproved, but the Davis/ Cayce claim could be easily resolved with a simple DNA test indicating that either Gladys and Edgar are blood relatives or they are not. Of course in most claims of reincarnation DNA is not available, but there are other tools available to assess their credibility.
Karl Popper’s Falsifiability Principle provides a quick test for the probable truth of any claim, that is, a hypothesis must be falsifiable. If there is not any way for a hypothesis to be false, it cannot be shown to be true. I am a very knowledgeable admirer of Charles Darwin and quite familiar with his biography and could easily claim that in another life I was part of the HMS Beagle crew during Darwin’s 1826 voyage around the world. At some point, I could even begin to believe my own story. Since there is not any way to indicate that my claim is false, it cannot be scientifically true.
Another useful tool is David Hume’s Test for Miracles. Keep in mind that a miracle is any event that cannot be reconciled or explained by the four forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force). In this context, reincarnation has to be considered a miracle and subject to Hume’s test. The alternatives to any miracle (reincarnation in this example) would have to be more miraculous than any alternate explanations. There are numerous alternate explanations for my reincarnation claim. I could be joking or lying. I could have an over-active imagination and sincerely believe that I served on HMS Beagle. I could also be suffering from some brain impairment resulting from an injury or even drug use. To pass Hume’s test all these alternatives would have to be more miraculous than my claim of reincarnation. Since miracles by definition are at best very rare, my claim must be false. As with all claims, after the facts have been elaborated the conclusions, however plausible they may seem, must be subjected to experimental corroboration.
Shankar Vedantam’s 2010 book, The Hidden Brain provides a natural explanation for reincarnation. In addition to our conscious mind, we also have an unconscious mind that he calls the “hidden brain.” The hidden brain functions automatically and does not rely on conscious reasoning, but serves as a screening device for all the sensory inputs using rules, algorithms, and heuristics to govern our response. In a real sense the hidden brain acts like a gatekeeper freeing our conscious mind to deal with events requiring reason. The hidden brain operates much faster that our conscious mind. For example in my neighborhood, there are not any poisonous snakes, but we do have a large number of black racers (a large and harmless snake). As their name implies they move very fast. I often see them on my daily walk alongside a wooded area. As soon as I see one, my hidden brain yells out, “poisonous snake, run for your life” frightening me out of my wits until my slower conscious mind catches up and says, “Slow down dimwit, you know black racers are harmless!
The hidden brain has been “programmed” by evolution over millions of years with the “objective” of increasing our survival chances. Using the snake example, no one has ever been harmed by thinking that a harmless snake is poisonous (except in a Hitchcock film), but many have died by mistaking a poisonous snake for a harmless one. Thus our hidden brain considers all snakes dangerous, even dead ones. In short the hidden brain is pre-loaded with many “apps” that some time in human history were useful for survival. Another hidden brain algorithm can be called the “Stranger Danger” app and was an extremely valuable survival tool back when we lived in small tribal groups. Anytime a member of one tribe encountered a member of another tribe, someone would most-likely die. This proposition can easily be tested by simply walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood late at night and taking note of your first reaction after unexpectedly encountering a stranger. Fear is the universal reaction along with activation of the “fight or flight” response. Stranger danger is an excellent explanation for why George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed Trayvon Martin on February 2012.
Agency, another hidden brain app, provides an explanation for the reincarnation belief. It is the default reaction to believe that some agent is responsible for all events where we lack a rational understanding. Before man understood germs, they believed that disease resulted from some member of the group disrespecting one of their many gods. As soon as children began to talk, one of their first words is “mama” followed quickly by “Why.” Asking why, has a tremendous survival value not to mention being the key to science. Anthropologists have long thought that agency is the spark that gives birth to the religious impulse buried in the human hidden brain. Since some belief or hope in the afterlife is an integral part of religion, it is logical to see how reincarnation is a manifestation of the desire for salvation. I am sure that a study of those who believe in reincarnation would include very few atheists and very few scientists. I am not saying that people who believe in reincarnation are stupid. But, I am saying that those trained and disciplined to recognize the power of the hidden brain are more likely to reject supernatural claims and rely on their conscious brain and science as the best way to probe the many mysteries of life. Agency is so powerful that research psychologist Michael Shermer refers to it as the “believing brain.”
A new born human animal is the most vulnerable for the longest period of time of any of the other members of the animal kingdom. Their survival demands that they follow all instructions from the adults in their group without thinking. Don’t pick that up, don’t put that in your mouth, and don’t go near that, are just a few of life or death admonishments that must be quickly obeyed. In other words, the default position of the hidden brain is belief first, and perhaps question later. Interesting the male human brain is not fully formed until about the age twenty-five. Indoctrination takes advantage of this belief imperative to impart the culture of any group to its youth. The Jesuit maxim “Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give you the man” is stark testimony of the power of the belief impulse resting in everyone’s hidden brain.
The subject of reincarnation is a subset of human consciousness and subconsciousness (the hidden brain). The most difficult questions is, Can consciousness survive the death of the brain? If the answer is “No,” how would reincarnation be possible? Advocates must provide some plausible explanation. If consciousness constitutes the human spirit and remains after the death of the host body, that would open the door for the spirit to float around until taking up residence in a new body. There has to be some model that provides an explanation as to how a conscious mind or spirit of a long dead person could take up residence in someone alive at the present time.
Ptolemy in the first century CE constructed a model in an attempt to explain what the majority of his fellow citizens believed about the universe, including the earth, sun, stars, planets, God, heaven, and hell. It was a beautiful model, albeit a bit clumsy, but was unfortunately untrue in part because he based it on the false heliocentric premise. In science, even a false model is preferable to no model at all, because others can even use a faulty model as a starting place for testing and looking for predictions that can be reconciled with new evidence and tools. In this sense the lack of any reincarnation model makes it difficult for serious thinkers such as scientist to take it seriously.
Reincarnation is the belief system claiming that the souls of long-deceased persons can begin life again but in a new body. Although reincarnation is part of many religions, including Hindus, Buddhists, and some Celtic pagan sects, it is also popular among mystics and New Age thinkers.
Reincarnation stories abound on the Internet such as a two-year old boy who was a fighter pilot killed in Iwo Jima more than 50 years earlier in a previous life. Another example, has a man claiming he was a serial killer in a past life (perhaps best kept a secret).
One famous case involved eighteen-year-old Gladys Davis, a stenographer who worked for Edgar Cayce. In 1923 Cayce performed a “life reading” on her and discovered that she had been the second daughter of Louis XIV in one incarnation, and at age seventeen was seduced by the Duke of York who became King James II of England. As a result, she became pregnant and gave birth to Edgar Cayce in his fifth incarnation. Cayce said that in an earlier incarnation he was one of Jesus’s disciples! The vast majority of reincarnation cases are based entirely on anecdotal evidence only, and cannot be proved or disproved, but the Davis/ Cayce claim could be easily resolved with a simple DNA test indicating that either Gladys and Edgar are blood relatives or they are not. Of course in most claims of reincarnation DNA is not available, but there are other tools available to assess their credibility.
Karl Popper’s Falsifiability Principle provides a quick test for the probable truth of any claim, that is, a hypothesis must be falsifiable. If there is not any way for a hypothesis to be false, it cannot be shown to be true. I am a very knowledgeable admirer of Charles Darwin and quite familiar with his biography and could easily claim that in another life I was part of the HMS Beagle crew during Darwin’s 1826 voyage around the world. At some point, I could even begin to believe my own story. Since there is not any way to indicate that my claim is false, it cannot be scientifically true.
Another useful tool is David Hume’s Test for Miracles. Keep in mind that a miracle is any event that cannot be reconciled or explained by the four forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force). In this context, reincarnation has to be considered a miracle and subject to Hume’s test. The alternatives to any miracle (reincarnation in this example) would have to be more miraculous than any alternate explanations. There are numerous alternate explanations for my reincarnation claim. I could be joking or lying. I could have an over-active imagination and sincerely believe that I served on HMS Beagle. I could also be suffering from some brain impairment resulting from an injury or even drug use. To pass Hume’s test all these alternatives would have to be more miraculous than my claim of reincarnation. Since miracles by definition are at best very rare, my claim must be false. As with all claims, after the facts have been elaborated the conclusions, however plausible they may seem, must be subjected to experimental corroboration.
Shankar Vedantam’s 2010 book, The Hidden Brain provides a natural explanation for reincarnation. In addition to our conscious mind, we also have an unconscious mind that he calls the “hidden brain.” The hidden brain functions automatically and does not rely on conscious reasoning, but serves as a screening device for all the sensory inputs using rules, algorithms, and heuristics to govern our response. In a real sense the hidden brain acts like a gatekeeper freeing our conscious mind to deal with events requiring reason. The hidden brain operates much faster that our conscious mind. For example in my neighborhood, there are not any poisonous snakes, but we do have a large number of black racers (a large and harmless snake). As their name implies they move very fast. I often see them on my daily walk alongside a wooded area. As soon as I see one, my hidden brain yells out, “poisonous snake, run for your life” frightening me out of my wits until my slower conscious mind catches up and says, “Slow down dimwit, you know black racers are harmless!
The hidden brain has been “programmed” by evolution over millions of years with the “objective” of increasing our survival chances. Using the snake example, no one has ever been harmed by thinking that a harmless snake is poisonous (except in a Hitchcock film), but many have died by mistaking a poisonous snake for a harmless one. Thus our hidden brain considers all snakes dangerous, even dead ones. In short the hidden brain is pre-loaded with many “apps” that some time in human history were useful for survival. Another hidden brain algorithm can be called the “Stranger Danger” app and was an extremely valuable survival tool back when we lived in small tribal groups. Anytime a member of one tribe encountered a member of another tribe, someone would most-likely die. This proposition can easily be tested by simply walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood late at night and taking note of your first reaction after unexpectedly encountering a stranger. Fear is the universal reaction along with activation of the “fight or flight” response. Stranger danger is an excellent explanation for why George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed Trayvon Martin on February 2012.
Agency, another hidden brain app, provides an explanation for the reincarnation belief. It is the default reaction to believe that some agent is responsible for all events where we lack a rational understanding. Before man understood germs, they believed that disease resulted from some member of the group disrespecting one of their many gods. As soon as children began to talk, one of their first words is “mama” followed quickly by “Why.” Asking why, has a tremendous survival value not to mention being the key to science. Anthropologists have long thought that agency is the spark that gives birth to the religious impulse buried in the human hidden brain. Since some belief or hope in the afterlife is an integral part of religion, it is logical to see how reincarnation is a manifestation of the desire for salvation. I am sure that a study of those who believe in reincarnation would include very few atheists and very few scientists. I am not saying that people who believe in reincarnation are stupid. But, I am saying that those trained and disciplined to recognize the power of the hidden brain are more likely to reject supernatural claims and rely on their conscious brain and science as the best way to probe the many mysteries of life. Agency is so powerful that research psychologist Michael Shermer refers to it as the “believing brain.”
A new born human animal is the most vulnerable for the longest period of time of any of the other members of the animal kingdom. Their survival demands that they follow all instructions from the adults in their group without thinking. Don’t pick that up, don’t put that in your mouth, and don’t go near that, are just a few of life or death admonishments that must be quickly obeyed. In other words, the default position of the hidden brain is belief first, and perhaps question later. Interesting the male human brain is not fully formed until about the age twenty-five. Indoctrination takes advantage of this belief imperative to impart the culture of any group to its youth. The Jesuit maxim “Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give you the man” is stark testimony of the power of the belief impulse resting in everyone’s hidden brain.
The subject of reincarnation is a subset of human consciousness and subconsciousness (the hidden brain). The most difficult questions is, Can consciousness survive the death of the brain? If the answer is “No,” how would reincarnation be possible? Advocates must provide some plausible explanation. If consciousness constitutes the human spirit and remains after the death of the host body, that would open the door for the spirit to float around until taking up residence in a new body. There has to be some model that provides an explanation as to how a conscious mind or spirit of a long dead person could take up residence in someone alive at the present time.
Ptolemy in the first century CE constructed a model in an attempt to explain what the majority of his fellow citizens believed about the universe, including the earth, sun, stars, planets, God, heaven, and hell. It was a beautiful model, albeit a bit clumsy, but was unfortunately untrue in part because he based it on the false heliocentric premise. In science, even a false model is preferable to no model at all, because others can even use a faulty model as a starting place for testing and looking for predictions that can be reconciled with new evidence and tools. In this sense the lack of any reincarnation model makes it difficult for serious thinkers such as scientist to take it seriously.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Mere Christianity (1952) by C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity is considered a classic work in the field of Apologetics, the defense of the belief in God in general and specifically in Christianity. Lewis, an Oxford Don is a master of language and uses his mastery of language and his understanding of human nature to construct a compelling argument in favor of Christianity. Like all good salesmen, he begins his argument with something that most people can accept and then builds on that idea in small steps until it reaches a grand conclusion: Jesus is God and Christianity is the only true religion. Lewis uses what he calls the Law or Rule about Right and Wrong or the Law of Human Nature to make a case for the existence of the God of theism followed by the Lewis Trilemma in an attempt to show that Jesus is divine.
The Law of Human Nature states that every person is born with some sense of what is right or wrong or fair or unfair, and everyone is born with it without the need to be taught it. This inherent feeling of what is fair is evident when observing young children. For example, if a mother cuts two slices of cake for her four-year old twins, she knows to be very precise assuring that each piece of cake is identical in size for any perceived difference will elicit howls of protest by the child with the “smaller” piece. Conscience then is that inner voice that makes people feel good when they do the right thing and feel bad when they do the wrong thing. The details of what is right or wrong may vary somewhat among different cultures, but there is universal agreement on many acts including murder, rape, and robbery.
The general form of Lewis’s argument is that anything that cannot be explained by natural laws must be the work of some supernatural force or deity. Darwin’s theory of evolution provides an answer that does not rely on a deity. Stated simply, having an “inborn” sense of right and wrong provides a survival value in as much as people tend to respond in kind, and what is done to others will be received back; kill a member of another group and there is a good chance they will kill a member of your group in retaliation. In other words, there is a survival advantage in having a conscience (a result of the Law of Human Nature) and a disadvantage in not having one such that over time the group of people with a conscience will dominate. This is not to say people will always do the right thing, but they will feel guilty if they do not.
John Bordley Rawls (1921 – 2002), an American moral and political philosopher provided another explanation for the Law of Human Nature; it came about after years of trial and error. He begins with the argument that “the most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position” and that these principles were developed over thousands of years of experience of trial and error. For example, over time man learned that killing your neighbor was not a good idea for a host of reasons and it became part of the moral culture without the need of any supernatural deity.
Lewis followed his argument for the existence of the God of theism with his famous Trilemma as a “proof” that Jesus is divine. The Lewis Trilemma asserts that there are three possibilities concerning Jesus’ claim of divinity. It is sometimes described as the “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord”, or “Mad, Bad, or God” argument. In his words,
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something else.”
Since Jesus obviously was not a lunatic or the “Devil of Hell,” he must be the Son of God. Alister McGrath, the author of the Lewis biography CS Lewis: A Life and a great admirer of Lewis called it “a weak argument.” It is actually an invalid argument. First, it commits the Fallacy of False Choice by, restricting the reader to three choices when there are many others. For example, Jesus could have been simply mistaken or the Divinity of Christ could be an invention of the early Christian movement, seeking to glorify Jesus. Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said, “there could be a fourth option–legend.” Lewis himself described myths as “lies breathed through silver.” Second, Lewis never established his major premise, that Jesus claimed to be the “Son of God,” or what it meant in his time to be called the “Son of God.” As the holder of the chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, Lewis must have known that in Jesus’ time the “Son of God” was a title indicating a king and did not imply a filial relationship with God. In fact, Jesus referred to himself not as the “Son of God” but as the “Son of Man,” a title indicating a mere mortal. According to biblical scholar Reza Aslan in his 2013 book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, “The phrase ‘the “Son of Man”’ (ho huios tou anthropou in Greek) appears some eighty times in the New Testament, and only once in a positively operatic passage from the book of Acts, does it occur on the lips of anyone other than Jesus.” Therefore, the Lewis Trilemma fails logically and scripturally and cannot be accepted as a proof that Jesus was or claimed to be Divine.
It is interesting that Lewis does quote any scripture to support any of his arguments, but he does make a number of bold assertions without any authority. For example, he says that God is delaying “End Times” so that more people can be saved. At another point he asserts that “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist.” This is a real whopper. After all “unsatisfied desires” form the foundation for economics and capitalism. One last example: He states that “Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.” To the contrary, it is not necessary to guess that Christianity would happen because it was totally predictable based a host of earlier religions that contain all the major features of Christianity such as the virgin birth and resurrection. For example, various ancient Egyptian statues and writings tell of Horus, a creator sky God. He was worshiped thousands of years before the first century.
Theistic religious tradition (a belief in a personal God) attributes four characteristics to God: omniscience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnibenevolence (all-loving), and omnipresence (present everywhere). The Greek Philosopher Epicurus (341 - 270 BCE) created what is called the Epicurean paradox as a way of demonstrating that these alleged characteristics of God are logically inconsistent. In his words:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Others have pointed out that there is a contradiction between omniscience and “Free Will.” They argue if God knows everything that will happen in a man’s life, even before he is born, then that man cannot have “Free Will” because if any aspect of his life differed from God’s advanced knowledge, that would violate God’s omniscience. Moses Maimonides, the famous twelfth-century Rabbi, described the “paradox of free will” as follows:
“Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest ‘He knows’, then it necessarily follows that man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God's knowledge would be imperfect.”
C.S. Lewis make a rather awkward and illogical attempt to reconcile the “paradox of free will” by asserting that since God exists outside of time, he can view any point in time with any other point in time simultaneously. “What we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what call ‘today.’ All the days are ‘Now’ for Him.” Please note that this simply defines omniscience. He then states that “He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him.” In his words, “And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.” Obvious to whom? This argument requires accepting that ‘seeing’ into the futures is not the same thing as ‘foreseeing’ the future, and therefore cannot constitute a violation of “free will” or “omniscience.” His argument is unworthy of a man with his education and command of language.
Peter Schuck in his book, Why Government Fails So Often argues that while the self-interest hypothesis explains everything, it predicts nothing. The alleged God “hypothesis” also explains everything while predicting nothing. While Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749 - 1827), the famous French mathematician was presenting his definitive work on the properties of the solar system, Napoleon interrupted and asked, if it was true that there was no mention of the God in his opus magus? Laplace replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Joseph Lagrange (1736 – 1813), another great French responded to Laplace’s comment to Napoleon by saying, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace’s reply was, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions. This [the God hypothesis] is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing.” Although Christianity is not a valid scientific hypothesis for the reason all ready stated, prophecy is certainly a prediction and the Bible contains many failed prophecies. For example Mark (9:1) quotes Jesus saying “There are some of you standing here who will not taste death until you see the kingdom of God come in power.” Careful reading of the New Testaments indicates an evolutionary-like moving away from an earthly Kingdom of God to a celestial one in the hereafter because of the failure of Jesus returning to earth while some of his disciples were still living.
Stuart Chase (1888 – 1985), an American economist and social theorist said, “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.” It is equally true that the existence of a supernatural deity (theistic or deistic) cannot be proved or disproved. We can, however, use the same reasoning tools that we enlist to probe other life questions to form a probabilistic view as to the existence and nature of the God. This view can range from a “stone cold” atheist to Carl Jung’s statement, “I don’t believe, I know.” Mere Christianity might boost the confidence of believers, but is unlikely to convince many non-theists.
The Law of Human Nature states that every person is born with some sense of what is right or wrong or fair or unfair, and everyone is born with it without the need to be taught it. This inherent feeling of what is fair is evident when observing young children. For example, if a mother cuts two slices of cake for her four-year old twins, she knows to be very precise assuring that each piece of cake is identical in size for any perceived difference will elicit howls of protest by the child with the “smaller” piece. Conscience then is that inner voice that makes people feel good when they do the right thing and feel bad when they do the wrong thing. The details of what is right or wrong may vary somewhat among different cultures, but there is universal agreement on many acts including murder, rape, and robbery.
The general form of Lewis’s argument is that anything that cannot be explained by natural laws must be the work of some supernatural force or deity. Darwin’s theory of evolution provides an answer that does not rely on a deity. Stated simply, having an “inborn” sense of right and wrong provides a survival value in as much as people tend to respond in kind, and what is done to others will be received back; kill a member of another group and there is a good chance they will kill a member of your group in retaliation. In other words, there is a survival advantage in having a conscience (a result of the Law of Human Nature) and a disadvantage in not having one such that over time the group of people with a conscience will dominate. This is not to say people will always do the right thing, but they will feel guilty if they do not.
John Bordley Rawls (1921 – 2002), an American moral and political philosopher provided another explanation for the Law of Human Nature; it came about after years of trial and error. He begins with the argument that “the most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position” and that these principles were developed over thousands of years of experience of trial and error. For example, over time man learned that killing your neighbor was not a good idea for a host of reasons and it became part of the moral culture without the need of any supernatural deity.
Lewis followed his argument for the existence of the God of theism with his famous Trilemma as a “proof” that Jesus is divine. The Lewis Trilemma asserts that there are three possibilities concerning Jesus’ claim of divinity. It is sometimes described as the “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord”, or “Mad, Bad, or God” argument. In his words,
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something else.”
Since Jesus obviously was not a lunatic or the “Devil of Hell,” he must be the Son of God. Alister McGrath, the author of the Lewis biography CS Lewis: A Life and a great admirer of Lewis called it “a weak argument.” It is actually an invalid argument. First, it commits the Fallacy of False Choice by, restricting the reader to three choices when there are many others. For example, Jesus could have been simply mistaken or the Divinity of Christ could be an invention of the early Christian movement, seeking to glorify Jesus. Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said, “there could be a fourth option–legend.” Lewis himself described myths as “lies breathed through silver.” Second, Lewis never established his major premise, that Jesus claimed to be the “Son of God,” or what it meant in his time to be called the “Son of God.” As the holder of the chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, Lewis must have known that in Jesus’ time the “Son of God” was a title indicating a king and did not imply a filial relationship with God. In fact, Jesus referred to himself not as the “Son of God” but as the “Son of Man,” a title indicating a mere mortal. According to biblical scholar Reza Aslan in his 2013 book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, “The phrase ‘the “Son of Man”’ (ho huios tou anthropou in Greek) appears some eighty times in the New Testament, and only once in a positively operatic passage from the book of Acts, does it occur on the lips of anyone other than Jesus.” Therefore, the Lewis Trilemma fails logically and scripturally and cannot be accepted as a proof that Jesus was or claimed to be Divine.
It is interesting that Lewis does quote any scripture to support any of his arguments, but he does make a number of bold assertions without any authority. For example, he says that God is delaying “End Times” so that more people can be saved. At another point he asserts that “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist.” This is a real whopper. After all “unsatisfied desires” form the foundation for economics and capitalism. One last example: He states that “Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.” To the contrary, it is not necessary to guess that Christianity would happen because it was totally predictable based a host of earlier religions that contain all the major features of Christianity such as the virgin birth and resurrection. For example, various ancient Egyptian statues and writings tell of Horus, a creator sky God. He was worshiped thousands of years before the first century.
Theistic religious tradition (a belief in a personal God) attributes four characteristics to God: omniscience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnibenevolence (all-loving), and omnipresence (present everywhere). The Greek Philosopher Epicurus (341 - 270 BCE) created what is called the Epicurean paradox as a way of demonstrating that these alleged characteristics of God are logically inconsistent. In his words:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Others have pointed out that there is a contradiction between omniscience and “Free Will.” They argue if God knows everything that will happen in a man’s life, even before he is born, then that man cannot have “Free Will” because if any aspect of his life differed from God’s advanced knowledge, that would violate God’s omniscience. Moses Maimonides, the famous twelfth-century Rabbi, described the “paradox of free will” as follows:
“Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest ‘He knows’, then it necessarily follows that man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God's knowledge would be imperfect.”
C.S. Lewis make a rather awkward and illogical attempt to reconcile the “paradox of free will” by asserting that since God exists outside of time, he can view any point in time with any other point in time simultaneously. “What we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what call ‘today.’ All the days are ‘Now’ for Him.” Please note that this simply defines omniscience. He then states that “He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him.” In his words, “And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.” Obvious to whom? This argument requires accepting that ‘seeing’ into the futures is not the same thing as ‘foreseeing’ the future, and therefore cannot constitute a violation of “free will” or “omniscience.” His argument is unworthy of a man with his education and command of language.
Peter Schuck in his book, Why Government Fails So Often argues that while the self-interest hypothesis explains everything, it predicts nothing. The alleged God “hypothesis” also explains everything while predicting nothing. While Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749 - 1827), the famous French mathematician was presenting his definitive work on the properties of the solar system, Napoleon interrupted and asked, if it was true that there was no mention of the God in his opus magus? Laplace replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Joseph Lagrange (1736 – 1813), another great French responded to Laplace’s comment to Napoleon by saying, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace’s reply was, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions. This [the God hypothesis] is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing.” Although Christianity is not a valid scientific hypothesis for the reason all ready stated, prophecy is certainly a prediction and the Bible contains many failed prophecies. For example Mark (9:1) quotes Jesus saying “There are some of you standing here who will not taste death until you see the kingdom of God come in power.” Careful reading of the New Testaments indicates an evolutionary-like moving away from an earthly Kingdom of God to a celestial one in the hereafter because of the failure of Jesus returning to earth while some of his disciples were still living.
Stuart Chase (1888 – 1985), an American economist and social theorist said, “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.” It is equally true that the existence of a supernatural deity (theistic or deistic) cannot be proved or disproved. We can, however, use the same reasoning tools that we enlist to probe other life questions to form a probabilistic view as to the existence and nature of the God. This view can range from a “stone cold” atheist to Carl Jung’s statement, “I don’t believe, I know.” Mere Christianity might boost the confidence of believers, but is unlikely to convince many non-theists.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Jesus of Nazareth
Notes
All date references are in the “Current Era” and are written without the customary “CE” except for dates before the Current Era, which are written as “BCE.” For example Jesus’ birth date is written as ‘3' indicating the third year of the first century. “A.D.” and “B.C.” will only be used if part of quoted material. Although there was no such thing as a “Christian” until the Council of Nicea in 325, this essay will use “Christian” instead of the awkward and more correct term, “proto-Christian.” Please note, “The first recorded use of the word ‘Christians’ to describe Jesus’ followers comes not from Jerusalem but from Antioch in Syria (Acts 11:26).”
Introduction
Jesus of Nazareth is certainly one of the best-known, beloved, and revered figures in history. There are over two billion Christians in the world today who worship Jesus as God and their personal savior. He is also held in high regard by non-Christians. For example, he is considered one of the great prophets by Muslims and is mentioned in the Qur’an twenty-five times. Jews consider Jesus a great teacher and moral leader, but not divine. Albert Einstein was an admirer and professed, “I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene . . . No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus.” On the other hand, scholars recognize two Jesuses: the Jesus of the gospels and the historical Jesus. Reza Aslan, religious scholar and author of the best-selling book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013) makes the point that history is concerned with what is likely, while faith deals with what is possible. Aslan’s idea is useful when comparing the Jesus of the gospels to the historical Jesus, remembering that historians cannot attest to the veracity of any given miracle; they can only document how the people of the time reacted to them.
Sources
Secular sources of information about the historical Jesus are scant and are limited primarily to three persons: Tacitus (56 - 117), a Roman senator and a historian, Flavius Josephus (37 -100), a first-century Romano-Jewish scholar and historian, and Pliny the Younger (62 - 113), a Roman governor. Although all three were born after the death of Jesus in 36, they lived relatively close to Jesus’ lifetime. Other sources include the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), the New Testament, the oral tradition, and the writings of the early Church fathers such as Tertullian (160 – 230), Origen (185 -254), and Eusebius (265 -340). Also, much can be learned about the times Jesus lived from the over fifty non-canonical texts that were rejected by the church fathers. Edward Gibbon’s monumental six-volume work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) is another rich source of information about the period when Jesus lived. Biblical scholars have learned three (and only three) facts about Jesus from the historians of his time: He was Jewish, he led a movement against the Roman state, and he was executed by the Romans for treason. However, from these three facts and the backdrop of the history of Palestine it is possible to arrive at what is the most-likely truth about the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth which differs from the Jesus depicted in the modern versions of the New Testament.
First Century Palestine (The Holy Land)
Palestine in the first century was dominated by conflict between the Jewish people and the Roman state, an extremely low level of literacy and education, and a wide gulf between the wealthy and the poor. Jews incurred the hostility of their pagan neighbors and government officials after they “invented” monotheism and their subsequent refusal to respect the old gods still favored by the majority. They were resented for their exclusivity and their claim that they were God’s “chosen people.” The Hebrew Bible is in part the history of the repression of Jews by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Romans. Out of these experiences came the apocalyptic tradition, the belief that as God’s favored people he was going to send a messiah to drive the Romans out of Jerusalem and establish the Kingdom of God on earth with the messiah serving as king.
The low literacy rate in Palestine is well known to historians. Education during first-century Palestine was the exclusive privilege of the wealthiest citizens and was concentrated in the cities where less than 10% of the population could write by the low standard of being able to copy the letters. The literacy rate was even lower in rural areas such Galilee. Biblical scholar and student of antiquity, Bart Ehrman described the disciples as “rural peasants from the backwaters of Galilee” and in (Acts 4:13) Peter and John are both described as “unlearned and ignorant men.” There is only one passage in the New Testament indicating that Jesus knew how to write (John 8:3-9), and there is not any record of anything he wrote. The disciples spoke Aramaic whereas the earliest known New Testament was written in Greek, a language spoken only by the educated classes of Palestine. Also, the gulf between the rich and poor was extremely wide in Palestine at this time. The poor, mostly lived in rural areas and depending on farming for a living. They were heavily taxed both by the Roman state and the by the high priest of the Temple who lived in luxury causing much resentment. In short, revolution was in the air that Jesus was breathing.
At the same time as Jesus and his disciples were traveling throughout the rural areas of Palestine preaching his message of the coming of the Kingdom of God, there were scores of other evangelists, self-proclaimed messiahs, and miracle-workers performing healings, exorcisms, and other magical acts in Palestine. This was in spite of the fact that The Law of Moses prohibited “magic-working” and was punishable by death in accordance with (Deuteronomy 18:10-11) calling for anyone who engages in “divination, or is a witch, an enchanter, or a sorcerer” to be cast out. In the words of words of Reza Aslan, “Again Jesus was not the only miracle worker trolling through Palestine healing the sick and casting out demons. This was a world steeped in magic and Jesus was just one of an untold number of diviners and dream interpreters, magicians and medicine men who wandered Judea and Galilee.” However, it was Jesus who out of all of the other itinerant preachers who was unique because he performed his service free while all the others charged a fee.
The Oral Tradition
After the death of Jesus in (approximately) 36, the record of Jesus’ life and death was entirely oral and is referred to as the “oral tradition” or as “Q,” a hypothetical writing. Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul) wrote his first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, in 48. The four gospels are thought to have been written in the following years: Mark in 70, Matthew and Luke from 90 to 100, and John from 100 to 120. These dates represent a consensus of scholars and historians and must be considered approximate, but the important fact to keep in mind is that all the books of the New Testament were written long after the death of Jesus by anonymous authors who attributed their work to someone else. For example the titles of all four gospels are The Gospel According to followed by the names Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John. It may come as a surprise to many Christians to learn that the gospels are based entirely on the oral tradition that developed over a period of almost forty years after the death of Christ. What about the disciples and the apostles (Jesus’ closest associates)? Didn’t they leave a record of their experiences with Jesus? The answer is a resounding, ‘No,” and the reason is very simple; they were illiterate (could not read or write).
Importance of Language
Language and translations from one to another are a major consideration for biblical scholars. It is very important to keep in mind the original language of any document and the chain of translations leading to any current version. The original Old Testament, of course, was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, whereas Jesus and the disciples spoke Aramaic. St. Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus in 382 to translate the Greek New Testament into Latin resulting in the Latin Vulgate Bible after three years of effort. The importance of translation can be realized by a simple example. It is traditional to say that Jesus was a carpenter based on (Matthew 13:55) and (Mark 6:3) that indicate that his “adoptive” father Joseph was a carpenter. In Jesus’ time most men followed their father’s occupation. Their conclusion rests on the definition of the word, Tekton, an ancient Greek noun, and a common term for an artisan/craftsman, and in particular a carpenter, wood-worker, or builder. It is highly unlikely that Jesus would have been a carpenter in Nazareth for the simple reason that Nazareth was a small village without any trees or wood and where most houses (huts) were made of mud or stone. The word Tekton also meant a common manual laborer or even “uneducated or illiterate.” Nazareth was a small village of less than one-hundred very poor families who could not afford expensive wood. Historically, Jesus was most likely a laborer, but to the faithful he was a carpenter. This is just one of many examples where it is critical to understand the history of the time Jesus lived and the New Testament was first written.
The date and birthplace of Jesus
December 25th has long been the unquestioned and accepted birth date of Jesus in Bethlehem. It has become a tradition without any scriptural basis. Celebrations of Jesus’ birthday are not mentioned in the Gospels or Acts; the date is not given, not even the time of year. However, the historical facts strongly suggest that the “Christmas Story” although admittedly charming is not true. First, only Matthew and Luke claimed Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Second, in the first century people did not have last names and were referred to as being 'of' their birthplace or place of residence. Thus, “Jesus of Nazareth” strongly suggests that he was born in Nazareth. Third, early Christians celebrated the day that they were baptized as their birthday and Jesus was thought to have been baptized on January 6th. Fourth, December temperatures in Bethlehem make the idea of shepherds tending their flocks in the middle of the harsh Galilee winter ludicrous. Fifth, and perhaps most important, it was not until the fourth century that December 25th was observed as Jesus’ birthday at the instigation of the emperor Constantine, who prior to endorsing Christianity was a Sol Invictus (Sun God) worshiper. Sol’s birthday had always been observed on December 25th which falls close to the winter solstice around December 22th. Christians borrowed the date December 25th from the pagan religion Sol Invictus. Borrowing from the pagans was not an unusual practice as was noted by Oxford scholar and historian, Charles Freeman: “Christianity, through its initiation rites (baptism), communal meals and the promise of a blessed afterlife, had much in common with these cults, not least in the idea that a priestly elite had privileged access to the cult’s secrets and the absolute right to interpret them for others.”
According to (Mark 1:9) Jesus was born in Nazareth as his name would suggest. Why then did Matthew insist that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? The reason; Matthew of all the gospel writers was intent on demonstrating Jesus fulfilling Old Testament prophecies such as the virgin birth at Bethlehem, Jesus’s sojourn in Egypt, and his death and resurrection. Christian apologists have a long history of mining the Old Testament for prophecies and then showing Jesus fulfilling them in the New Testament. In (Matthew 2:1) he writes, “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem.” In this verse Matthew is attempting to fulfill the prophecies of Daniel and Isaiah predicting that a messiah will be sent by God in accordance with Jewish apocalyptic tradition. For Jesus to be the messiah, he would have to be born in the bloodline of David as the son of Joseph in Bethlehem. It should be mentioned that even if the New Testament confirmed some of the Old Testament Prophecies, it would hardly be probative, since the authors of the New Testament were very familiar with the Old Testament at the time they were writing. It is similar to predicting the score of a baseball game after the game was completed.
The Messiah
Here again the importance of language and translation become paramount. "Messiah" is a Hebrew word meaning the “anointed one” and when translated to Greek becomes “Christ.” The title refers to the practice of pouring or smearing oil on someone charged with divine office such as king, like Saul, David, or Solomon. The primary role of the messiah, popularly believed to be a descendant of King David, was to rebuild David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. To call oneself the messiah was tantamount to declaring war on Rome. There were scores of messiahs in Galilee (before and after Jesus) in the first century and they were all executed for treason by the Romans. Hezekiah and Judas the Galilean were only two of twelve such ‘failed’ messiahs mentioned in the Bible. In the Jewish tradition a dead messiah was no longer a messiah, but simply an executed criminal. The most important historical fact about the messiah is the fact that he was a mortal man sent by God to liberate Israel and establish the Kingdom of God on earth and not a divine person. It is important to remember that Jesus never said publicly that he was the future King of the Jews. According to the Apocryphal Gospel of Judas it fell to the apocalyptic Judas to reveal what had been private (the fact that Jesus was the messiah) to the Jewish authorities who in turn notified the Romans who then arrested Jesus. There was no kiss on the cheek as depicted in (Mark 14:45). According to Mark, Judas kissed Jesus in order to identify him to the Roman and Church authorities, an idea that lacks credulity given the fact that Jesus was well-known to the Temple priests and had no need for him to be identified. What was not publicly known, but known only to his disciples, was the fact that he claimed to be the messiah. And, this was the secret that Judas betrayed to the Romans that led to his arrest for treason and crucifixion.
The Virgin Mary
Matthew again uses a mistranslation in (Isaiah 7:14), “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel [God is with us]” to establish the Christian idea that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin. The original Hebrew version of (Isaiah 7:14) used the word “alma” meaning maiden or young unmarried woman. When translated to the Greek, Matthew changed “alma” to “parthenos” meaning virgin. Bible scholar Reza Aslan notes that, “. . . outside of Matthew and Luke’s infancy narratives, the virgin birth is never even hinted at by anyone else in the New Testament: not by evangelist John the Baptist, who presents Jesus as an otherworldly spirit without earthly origins, nor by Paul, who thinks Jesus literally God incarnate.” The lack of definitive confirmation of Jesus’ virgin birth in all four gospels has even led to speculation that the story was invented to conceal the embarrassing truth that Jesus was born out of wedlock. Remember, in Mary’s time unwed pregnant women were stoned to death, thus providing ample incentive for the teenager Mary to concoct a story to escape her predicament.
The nature of Christ
After Constantine enacted The Edict of Milan in February 313, (a declaration of tolerance for all cults, including Christianity), church fathers freed of persecution turned their attention to defining Christian orthodoxy (“right thinking”). Philip Jenkins, Cambridge scholar and author, in his 2010 book, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500, writes “What ultimately became accepted as Christian orthodoxy was hammered out in a process that was painfully slow, gradual, and often bloody.” “Painfully slow,” is a bit of an understatement given that it took two-hundred and forty years after The Edict of Milan to finalize Christian doctrine at the Council of Constantinople in 553. And it was “often bloody” as “Christian on Christian” violence was commonplace rivaling if not exceeding the torture and murder of early Christians by Roman authorities. The issue split the Church into two factions over the nature of Jesus. The Monophysites (the Greens) argued that Christ had one nature (divine) while the Chalcedons (the Blues) argued he had two natures (divine and human). The Greens were led by Arius (250 - 336) and the Blues were led by Athanasius of Alexandria (296 - 373), a renowned Christian theologian and Church Father.
It would be a mistake to think that the “Greens” and “Blues” were a monolithic body of belief; they were in fact rifled with strife and contention. For example, the Monophysites had to be careful not to be thought as totally denying the human aspect of Jesus necessary for him to suffer and die on the cross for the sins of mankind. The margin of error was razor-thin and one could easily be declared a heretic (“wrong thinking”) and then suffer everything from excommunication, exile, imprisonment, torture, or even a painful death of being burned alive. The Chalcedons faced an equally daunting task of finding the “sweet” spot between Jesus’s divinity and humanity with the danger of slipping too far in one direction or the other and then labeled a heretic. The fascinating story of the various factions of early Christianity is well beyond the scope of this essay. However, interested readers should consider the following three excellent books on the subject: The Closing of the Western Mind (Charles Freedom), Jesus Wars (Philip Jenkins), and When Jesus Became God (Richard E. Rubenstein).
Modern readers, both religious and non-religious find it very difficult to understand why (what appears to be a trivial and rather unimportant issue), would take over two-hundred years to find a compromise. The answer is a simple one. All the people living in the first-century Roman state including, Pagans, Jews, and Christians treated religion dead-seriously, and attributed any and all misfortunes a result of angering or disappointing one or more of the gods. For example, if they experienced crop failures due to a drought, it was standard practice to seek out an individual or group of people whose behavior angered the gods and then punish them in the most brutal way in hopes of appeasing the gods. To the people of the first century, embracing the “right” religions and following their dictates was a matter of utmost importance.
Son of God
In the face of so many people making claims about “Who Jesus was,” it is informative to read (Matthew 16:15) where Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say I am?” They answered, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” Jesus responded, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Remember “Christ” is the Greek word for messiah and there is not any doubt that all of the disciples believed that Jesus was the Messiah. However, Jesus did not openly refer to himself as the Messiah, and for good reason. Calling yourself king was considered treason against the Roman state and was a capital offense. Jesus and his disciples were all quite aware of the fate of scores of previous failed messiahs who were crucified at the hand of the Roman authorities. Also, Jesus did not call himself ‘Son of God,’ another title that others used to describe him. The title ‘Son of God’ did not imply a family connection to God, but was simply a traditional title of Israel’s kings.
Son of Man
According to Reza Aslan, “The phrase ‘the Son of Man’ (ho huios tou anthropou in Greek) appears some eighty times in the New Testament, and only once in a positively operatic passage from the book of Acts, does it occur on the lips of anyone other than Jesus.” It comes in (Acts 7:56) concerning Stephens, the first Christian martyr, as he was stoned to death for proclaiming Jesus as the promised messiah. The title Son of Man simply meant a human being. (John 18:36) is the only passage in the gospels that has Jesus making claims of a future celestial kingdom. To evolve from a earthly kingdom to a heavenly kingdom, John mistranslates the Greek phrase, “ouk estin ek tou kosmou” which is better translated as “not part of this order/system.” Keep in mind that by the time the Gospel of John was written (at least sixty years after the death of Christ) it was obvious that the promise that Jesus made in (Mark 9:1), that some of the disciples would not “taste death” before they would see the “Kingdom of God come with power” would not happen.
Saul of Tarsus: The Father of Christianity
After Jesus died in 36, leadership of the his movement fell to James (his brother), John, and Peter who became the spokesman for the movement. The question of how Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul) was able to take control of Jesus’s movement is one of history’s most fascinating stories. Paul had never met Jesus and claimed that he never met with any of the disciples in Jerusalem before his conversion, because he wanted people to believe that his knowledge about Jesus was obtained solely and directly from Jesus in the form of a vision. According to Charles Freeman, in his book, The Closing Of The Western Mind, “It has to always be remembered that Paul is the only major Christian theologian never to have read the Gospels . . .” (Paul died in 67 before any of the gospels were written.) The book of Acts records Paul on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus when his journey was interrupted by a blinding light followed by the divine voice of Jesus whereby Saul of Tarsus was converted to Christianity and then became the self-designated Apostle Paul. Paul calls himself an apostle over 13 times in the New Testament and starts a majority of his epistles off with this title. Nowhere in scripture does any other apostle refer to him as an apostle.
Prior to Paul, the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, led by James, Peter, and John regarded Jesus as the Messiah and rejected his divinity and insisted that all converts had to follow Jewish law and all its rites including circumcision. This was totally consistent with Jesus’s teaching, for in (Matthew 15:24) he is quoted saying “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” And in (Matthew 5:17), he said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” After the fall of Jerusalem in 70, the Jews had to flee in what became known as the Diaspora resulting in a split between the “Hebrew” movement led by James, and the “Hellenist” group led by Paul. Prior to Paul, the movement strictly preached to the Jews.
Both the “Hebrew” group and the “Hellenist” group were not having much success in attracting Jewish converts for a number of reasons. First, the Jews rejected the story of Jesus’ divinity and considered the thought of God having a son a gross blasphemy. Second, in their eyes a true messiah could not die as a crucified criminal; to the Jews, Jesus was a simply a prophet and teacher sent to reform the Temple. Paul quickly realized that the Jews were not receptive to the his message and the gentiles (Pagans) were not receptive to the Hebrew message requiring them to convert first to Judaism before being allowed to become a Christian. Not surprisingly, the Hebrew circumcision requirement was unappealing to adult males.
The scholar and best-selling author Reza Aslan asked the following question, “How could a failed messiah who died a shameful death as a state criminal be transformed, in the span of a few years, into the creator of the heavens and earth: God incarnate?” The answer is best understood within the context of Paul’s biography. He was a Roman citizen, a Pharisee Jew, a tent-maker and a traveling salesman. He was also a bachelor just like Jesus, Augustine, and Jerome. As he traveled throughout the Roman empire preaching the teachings of Jesus to the pagans, he quickly realized that they were not willing to give up the protections and miracles of their numerous gods in favor of a crucified state criminal. Paul countered this resistance with the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection and the simple message that faith in the resurrection alone provides the gift of salvation and eternal life. James and Peter were rural and uneducated where as Paul was urban, educated, and spoke Greek. In Reza Aslan’s words, “As these extraordinary men and women, many of the immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’ message so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanticized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.”
Paul moved quickly to divorce his ministry away from all things Jewish. He even went so far as to say that anyone circumcised was going to hell, and wrote in (Galatians 5:2) “Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.” Charles Freeman in his brilliant 2002 book, The Closing Of The Western Mind noted that Tertullian (160 - 240) the early Church Father and theologian, and the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, backed Paul’s views by insisting that “God had shown that circumcision was unnecessary by creating an ‘intact’ Adam.” Tertullian went on to write, “And so truly in Christ are all things recalled to their beginning, so that faith has turned away from circumcision back to the integrity of the flesh as it was in the beginning.” This was just one more step in splitting Christianity from Judaism as Paul gave up on converting Jews and actively recruited converts from the ranks of the pagans (a much larger population). Paul also separated his message from the Jewish message of James and abandoned the requirement to observe Jewish law and absolved the Romans of any blame for Jesus’s death placing the responsibility totally on the Jews taking advantage of their unpopularity.
The Burial of Jesus
According to New Testament scripture Pontius Pilate allowed the body of Jesus to be removed from the cross and released to the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea where he was buried in his personal private tomb. If true, this would have been a most extraordinary and unlikely event given the Roman history of execution by crucifixion. Crucifixion was used almost exclusively for those convicted of the crime of treason against the Roman state. It was intended to be the most severe and painful punishment with the objective of discouraging other people from threatening the absolute authority of the state. Part of the punishment was to leave the bodies of the victims on the cross for three days after death to be ravaged by the birds and mongrel dogs, and then thrown in a common pit and covered with dirt. Pontius Pilate hated the Jews and executed so many thousands of Jews without a trial that the people of Jerusalem lodged a formal complaint with the Roman emperor. In the words of Reza Aslan, “. . . Pilate was best known for his extreme depravity, his total disregard for Jewish law and tradition, and his barely concealed aversion to the Jewish nation as a whole.” In light of what is known of Pilate and the Roman practice of execution by crucifixion, it is preposterous to think that Jesus would have been afforded any special treatment or consideration. All the historical evidence suggests that Jesus was buried in a common grave along all the other crucified victims and was never allowed a proper burial.
The Resurrection of Christ
Since the centerpiece of Pauline Christianity is the resurrection of Christ from the grave three days after his death, it is instructive to examine the Bible for scriptural confirmation that the resurrection actually happened. Concerning the Old Testament Reza Aslan writes, “Despite two millennia of Christian Apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.” Furthermore not one historian of the time ever mentioned the resurrection of Christ in any of their writings. According to religious studies scholar Reza Aslan, “. . . the fact remains that the resurrection is not a historical event.” In fact the British biblical scholar Hugh J. Schonfield in his 1965 book The Passover Plot makes a compelling argument the crucifixion was staged and Jesus did not even actually die on the cross. According to Freeman, the Church Father Origen (185 - 254) rejected the idea that there would be a bodily resurrection and argued that “God’s committing a soul to hell would be an admission that he been thwarted by a mere human being, something inconceivable if God was truly all powerful.”
In light of the above it is necessary to turn to the New Testament for a possible account of the resurrection of Jesus, either in the four Gospels or in Paul’s writings. The fact of the matter is the Gospels do not record any witnesses to the actual resurrection, and biblical scholars agree that no one witnessed the resurrection of Jesus. Therefore the entire resurrection story rests solely on the “empty tomb” and each Gospel tells a different story about it. In (Matthew 28) Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (thought to be Jesus’ mother) came to see the grave and found that an earthquake had moved the stone and an angel sitting on it told them that Jesus had risen. In the Gospel of Mark (Chapter 16) it was “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome” who found the stone already moved and a young man sitting inside told them that Jesus had arisen. According to (Luke 24) it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and some other women who found the stone moved. They saw two men standing there who reported Jesus had risen. In (John 20) Mary Magdalene came alone and found the stone moved. She then ran and summoned “Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved” who accompanied her to the grave site. The disciples left Mary was crying at the grave and two angels appeared as asked why she was crying. She turned her back and when she looked back, she saw Jesus. She then left and told the disciples that Jesus had returned.
Visions of the risen Jesus
Since scripture does not record any witnesses of the resurrection, Christians rely on a number of reported visions of the risen Christ in the New Testament. They include both individual and group sightings of the risen Jesus. This should not be surprising since it is not uncommon for people to have visions of recently departed loved one. According to Bart Ehrman, it is well documented phenomenon for people to have visions of their loved ones after they died and it is estimated that 25% of people even today report having visions. Richard Smoley wrote in his 2006 book Forbidden Faith, “. . . as the clergy have long since learned, many supposedly mystical revelations are little more than symptoms of mental disorder.” When the person having mystical revelations has a charismatic personality, some times a new religion is born. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church is a good example.
In summary, there is a major difference between the Jesus of scripture and the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus was a Jewish man born in Nazareth, who led a movement against the high priests of the Jerusalem Temple and the Roman authorities, and was executed for treason and buried in a common grave. The Jesus of the gospels was born in Bethlehem of a virgin, was crucified, buried in a tomb, and was resurrected three days later with the promise that he would return and establish the “Kingdom of God” on earth. The gulf between the historical Jesus and Jesus of the gospels is wide, but not an unbridgeable one depending on how one reads scripture.
It is important to remember that the idea of reading scripture literally is a relatively recent practice, less than two-hundred years. For example, Saint Jerome (editor of the most widely used Bible) suggested a literal interpretation for the illiterate masses and an allegorical one for more advanced minds. And John Calvin believed that the “. . . stories of the Bible must be seen in context, as a phase in an ongoing process,” and even went so far as to call the creation story in Genesis balbative ‘baby talk,’ “which [according to Karen Armstrong] adapted immensely complex processes to the mentality of uneducated people .” St. Augustine is quoted in Jon Meacham’s American Gospel saying, “If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning, this must mean that the person [who interprets scripture] does not understand it correctly.” Fundamentalism then is the barrier that separates the historical Jesus from the Jesus of the gospels, and the source of two current problems: anti-science and unnecessary hostility between people of good will, but with different religious views. Professor Sarah Coakley of the Harvard Divinity School expressed the idea of fundamentalism when she said, “The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”
Sources:
1. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013) by Reza Aslan
2. The Closing Of The Western Mind (2002) by Charles Freeman
3. Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (2010) by Philip Jenkins
4. The Lost Gospel Of Judas Iscariot (2006) by Bart D. Ehrman
5. Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005) by Bart D. Ehrman
6. The Bible (2007) by Karen Armstrong
7. American Gospel (2006) by Jon Meacham
8. Forbidden Faith (2006) by Richard Smoley
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