God, Reason, and the Evangelicals, Chapter 7
University Press of America, 1987
copyright held by author
by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, University of Idaho
Ph.D. in philosophical theology at the Claremont Graduate University
Coordinator of Religious Studies from 1980-2003
The Hebrews did not at all raise themselves to the standpoint of properly historical contemplation, and there is no book of the Old Testament, however much it may contain material that is otherwise objectively historical, that deserves the name of true historiography.
–W. Vatke
The faith of Israel is not a historical faith, in the sense of a faith based on historical event; it is rather a faith within history…its justification is not in the evidence of past events …but in the assertion of future promise.
–Thomas L. Thompson
It is therefore not necessary to try to reconcile the course of events described in the Old Testament with the archaeological evidence, and it is in fact very difficult to do so.
–Kathleen Kenyon
As a source of history Ezekiel’s oracles are worthless; to main¬tain their historicity, one must reject all of the rest of the biblical record.
–Yehezkel Kaufman
The Romans were a practical race, skilled in the art of govern¬ment. It is incredible that they should have taken a census viz., Lk. 2 according to such a fantastic system.
–E. W. Barnes
Luke’s census is all outside the plane of reality….It is incredible that such an unusual and disturbing proceeding, as the census spoken of by Luke must necessarily have been, should have escaped all notice in Josephus….
–Charles Guignebert
We have no way of reconciling the two genealogies of Luke and Matthew completely, but there is no particular reason why we should try. To a considerable extent both are artificial.
–Bruce Vawter
SCRIPTURE AS HISTORY
Most scripture is generally suspect from the standpoint of histori¬cal accuracy, although these writings have now been found to be more accurate than formerly assumed. The reign of the Budd¬hist emperor Asoka (3rd Century B.C.E.) was thought to be legen¬dary until archaeologists discovered the artifacts which proved his existence as well as some facts about the Buddha’s life. Krishna has long been thought to be a mythical being until recent scholarship has proposed a genuine, historical Krishna. But it is evangelical Christianity, more than all the others, which has claimed the historical accuracy and significance of its scrip¬tures. When Luther pro¬claimed that “faith rests upon history,”1 he was not assuming the meth¬ods of modern historical science. Luther made this statement in an argu¬ment against the allegorical methods of early church fathers. In his search for the literal sense of biblical passages, Luther made it clear that this was the “saving” sense and not any scientific or modern historical sense.
Francis Schaeffer also believes that “faith rests upon his¬tory,” but Luther would have had none of what Schaeffer calls “historic” Christian¬ity.2 Schaeffer’s choice of terms is unfor¬tunate because the first idea that comes to mind with the word “historic” is “relic.” Even the term “historical” is misleading, because we then might think of any number of movements, both Protestant and Catholic, as “historical” expres¬sions of the Christian faith. While the phrase is an infelicitous one, Schaef¬fer does make it clear what he means, and it is here where he and fellow evangelicals part company with “historical” Christianity. Earlier Christians would have agreed that God entered history and performed saving acts, but they would have simply not un¬derstood Schaeffer’s extra epistemological baggage. Schaeffer is thor¬oughly modernist, thus out of step with historical Christian¬ity, when he assumes that Christian truth is verifiable from the stand¬point of historical science.
The science of history as we know it is a fairly young disci¬pline. Even some of the histories done as recently as the l9th Century are woe¬fully inadequate from the standpoint of con¬tempor¬ary methodology. For example, the l9th Century biographers of George Washington (in particular Jared Sparks) used little or no documentation and took no precautions about the credibility of their sources. Thanks to “historians” like Sparks and Weems, there are dozens of legends about Washington (e.g., his praying at Valley Forge) which are still widely accepted as fact. Not only is history one of our youngest sciences, it is also one of our weak-est. Even the other social sciences, like sociology and psychol¬ogy, usually have the benefit of repeatable evidence. But his¬tory’s evi¬dence is nonrepeatable and most historical documents contain the inher¬ent bias of the observer.
The problem becomes acute with scripture which, although sometimes in the guise of historical fact, is primarily a vehicle of faith with no intrinsic commitment to historical accuracy. Indeed, the first two epigraphs for this chapter indicate that such a commitment would have been impossible for the ancient Hebrews. The “historical” theology of evangelicalism makes two initial mistakes: (1) it imputes a modern view of history to biblical writers and (2) it takes quasihistorical material as a basis for strong religious belief. In terms of our discussion of Swinburne in Chapter Two, knowledge based on ancient scripture will be among the “weakest” of all beliefs.
Evangelical Stephen Neil correctly observes that “history deals with the unique, the unpredictable, the unrepeatable, the unalterable, and the irreversible.”3 Historical process is of course contingent and mutable, but these qualities are dramati¬cally compromised by a traditional theological view of history. If Neil is correct that history is basically unpredictable, then he cannot hold divine prescience at the same time. Indeed, omnipre¬science–especially if it is connected with divine time as the simultaneity of past, present, and future–destroys our ordinary concept of the future as something not yet actualized. Such a view also threatens the freedom of the will. If future history is already fixed by virtue of God’s plan for it, then human agents can do nothing except follow history’s predetermined course. His¬tory’s contin¬gent flow of events (i.e., the all-present possibil¬ity that the events could have been otherwise) becomes a theologi¬cally necessary flow of events.
History is a sound enough science so that we are probably certain that Jesus and Gautama Buddha were historical men. But there is no mode of reasoning, deductive or inductive, that can support the claims that these men were also God. The deity of both Jesus and Gautama is based on a religious confession of faith and could never be formulated as a belief, strong or weak. Let us consider another example that clearly shows the limits of the his¬torical method in supporting traditional Christian claims. Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Resurrection of Jesus has been established as a historical fact as certain as the fall of Richard Nixon. Given this hypothetical historicity of the Resurrection, we now ask whether there is any logically neces¬sary connection between this fact and the Christian doctrine of the satisfaction of Jesus’ work; that is, that his death and resurrec¬tion were satisfaction for all human sin. It should be immediately clear that there is no logical connection between the two: the gap between a historical fact and such a theological claim can be bridged by faith only. In a similar vein, I find it significant that Stephen Neil admits that there is no necessary connection between the Resurrection and the deity of Jesus.4 Neil is correct: one must always keep separate the logic of necessity and the logic of contingency.
In his excellent book Christian Faith and Historical Under¬standing Ronald Nash agrees with Norman Perrin’s concept of “faith knowledge,” a type of knowledge which is interpersonal, transhis¬torical, and soteriological. Nash agrees with Perrin and evangel¬ical I. H. Marshall that it is possible to conceive of some faith knowledge as independent of or incorrectly connected with histori¬cal facts. An example of the former is the Mithraists’ faith in their savior, and pious adherence to myths about George Washington is an instance of the latter. Nash’s rejoinder is that these are ob¬viously examples of pseudofaith, or at least faith that cannot possibly redeem us. Nash tells a story of a son who has idolized his deceased father all of his life but then finds incontrover¬tible evidence that all the ennobling stories he has heard about him are false. Nash concludes: “Dare we hold in this case, as theologians like Bultmann appear to suggest in the case of Jesus, that the historical truth is irrelevant to the son’s faith in his father? In the case of any normal and reasonable person, we would expect that the correction of the man’s false historical knowledge about his father would destroy his faith knowledge in his father.”5
In Chapter Two I essentially agreed with evangelicals like Nash who insist that the trust dimension of faith is inseparable from cognitive content. The major difference between us lies in the general evangelical claim that the Bible’s history is reliable enough for the evangelicals’ “historical” theology. This chapter is an attempt to demonstrate that it is not. I shall concentrate on four areas: (1) Old Testament history, particularly the fall of Jericho; (2) the reliability of Old Testament prophecies, with an emphasis on Ezekiel; (3) the claims of Luke as historian, with a focus on the Christmas census; and (4) inconsistencies in the ac-counts of Jesus’ life and ministry.
JERICHO’S WALLS TOO OLD
Evangelicals admit that their history-based theology is a risky enterprise. It is especially fragile in that it sets itself up to be de¬stroyed by any number of archaeological and historical studies which challenge the accuracy of the Bible. But critics have to be careful not to be as dogmatic in their denial as some evangelicals are in their af¬firmation. As we have noted, history and archaeology are “soft” sciences and their con¬clusions are provisional and always open to alteration. I have there¬fore chosen only examples where the evidence is especially strong.
There are many historical puzzles in the Old Testament which could be chosen to show that the claim of complete accuracy is unfounded or open to question. For example, it appears that the date implied for the Exodus in 1 Kings 6:1 (1437 B.C.E.) is prob¬ably a century and a half too early. There has been a long-standing consensus–established by great scholars like William F. Albright–that the Exodus must have happened in the early 13th Century.6 Most of the evidence is circumstantial, but the strong¬est support comes from 13th Century archaeological data attesting to violent destruction of some Canaanite cities.
There is an even stronger consensus that the invasion ac¬counts recorded in Joshua are seriously out of line with what histori¬cally hap¬pened. The best evidence comes from the archaeo¬logical digs at Jericho and Ai. Kathleen Kenyon has done the most defini¬tive work on the excava¬tions at Jericho. Her conclusions are that at one time at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, Jericho was de¬fended by a high wall, but it was de¬stroyed violently by fire ca. 1560 B.C.E. Later a town, without a wall, was rebuilt during the 14th Century but was then abandoned ca. l325 B.C.E. The implica¬tions are quite obvious. Even with the biblical date for the Exodus, there might have been a town for Joshua to attack, but no high wall to “come tumbling down”; indeed, there is no evidence that the Late Bronze Age city experienced any sudden demise.7 With the scholarly consensus date of 1200 for the inva¬sion, there would not even have been a town to capture.
The evidence from Ai, the next town taken by Joshua, is even more embarrassing. Excavations here reveal that Ai was destroyed in 2200 B.C.E., a full millennium before the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Some have speculated that the writer(s) of Joshua could have confused Ai with Bethel, a town which was violently de¬stroyed during the time of the conquest. Part of this speculation in¬cludes the suggestion that Bethel’s warriors set up forward positions in the ruins of Ai, which literally means “heap of stones.”
An author for The New Bible Dictionary proposes a hypothesis in support of the biblical account of Jericho’s walls. It accepts the dating of the fall of the original walls, but suggests that another wall was built which then completely eroded away.8 This theory must meet the challenge of Kathleen Kenyon’s own conclu¬sions: “It is a sad fact that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age,…not a trace remains”; and “it is therefore not nec¬essary to try to reconcile the course of events de¬scribed in the Old Testa¬ment with the archaeological evidence, and it is in fact very difficult to do so.”9 Two outstanding Old Testament scholars, Martin Noth and J. A. Soggin, are even more emphatic about the unhistorical nature of the biblical account. In his Westminster Commen¬tary on Joshua, Soggin points out general prob¬lems with the story of Jer¬icho (e.g., the anachronistic use of the ark), and then declares that the archaeological data is “totally incompatible” with the biblical record. There are adequate remains of the l6th Century wall; one would think that a l3th Century wall would have been better preserved. As Soggin states: “There is no example in the history of archaeology of a stratum which has completely disappeared.”10
THE PROPHETIC MISCALCULATIONS OF EZEKIEL
There is much to be said about the systematic misuse of the Old Testament, not only by modern evangelicals but by historical Christianity as well. The author of Matthew set the precedent for the detailed christologizing of texts that were totally alien to the idea of an incarnate triune God. Conservative commentators still want to discern the Trinity in the “Let us make…” of Genesis 1:26 or insist that Christ is the “angel of the Lord.” Much is made of the prophets not only foretelling Jesus’ life but also predicting future events in general.
Of all the evangelical writers it is Clark Pinnock who has the most re-freshing view of this problem. Like Bruce, Pinnock accepts many of the conclusions of historical-critical scholar¬ship, in particu¬lar the hypothesis that many biblical books have multiple authors and were written later than the major figures involved. Pinnock contends that in order to protect the freedom of God we must consider the prophets to be fallible witnesses. “The prophets did not have so divine a viewpoint as to make their words absolute”; furthermore, as they were preachers and not writers, verbal inspir¬ation should apply only to their oracles and not the writings added to them at a later time.11
The prophecies of Ezekiel are favorites among conservatives, but as I shall demonstrate, Ezekiel has an incredibly poor record for accuracy. Yehezkel Kaufmann, a scholar highly respected by some evangelicals, lists a number of Ezekiel’s prophetic miscalcu¬lations: the Judean exile lasted more than forty years (4:6); the exiles of 586 B.C.E. did not die by the sword (5:2, 12); and Zede¬kiah was condemned in Riblah, not Babylon (17:20). Ezekiel also was incorrect about the following: Nebuchadnezzar did not destroy Egypt, nor were the Egyptians ex¬iled and restored after 40 years (29:8ff); the “horns of the house of Is¬rael” did not sprout either at the time of Egypt’s conquest (29:2l) or at any other occasion in Egypt’s history; the twelve tribes never re¬turned, and those which did, did not settle according to the prescrip¬tions of Eze¬kiel. Kaufmann’s conclusions are devastating: “As a source of history Ezekiel’s oracles are worthless; to maintain their his¬toricity, one must reject all of the rest of the bib¬lical record.”12
Ezekiel’s most famous prophecy concerns the fall of Tyre. Chris¬tians who call this an amazing confirmation of God’s fore-knowledge and the Bible’s inerrancy do not seem to realize that Ezekiel himself admits that Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign against Tyre was a failure and that “nei¬ther he nor his army got anything from Tyre to pay for the labor that he had performed against it” (29: l8). Extrabiblical evidence also confirms that the Babylonian siege of Tyre (585-572 B.C.E.) was a failure, even though the Tyrians did finally pay tribute to Nebuchadnezzar. Old Testament Scholar Moshe Greenberg summarizes: “Ezekiel himself lived to see the failure of his prophecy that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy Tyre and amended it (29:17ff.); but his amendment also proved wrong.”13
If Ezekiel’s words are to count as prophecy at all, we must first determine with certainty whether Chapters 26-28 were written before 572 B.C.E. Even though conservatives glibly assume that Ezekiel wrote down every oracle when he received it, good Bible scholars have other opinions. The Talmud indicates that the “men of the Great Synagogue” wrote the book, not Ezekiel himself.14 Modern scholars have various opinions. C. C. Torrey and Millard Burrows hold, mainly because of internal linguistic evidence, that the book is a Pales¬tinian forgery written ca. 230 B.C.E. (perhaps by “men of the Great Syna¬gogue”?). More recent scholarship gener¬ally supports authorship by Eze¬kiel, but with considerable addi-tions and editing.
William Neil states that “the original oracles of Ezekiel have been revised, augmented, and otherwise edited to such an ex¬tent that it be¬comes difficult, if not impossible, to secure even some measure of agree¬ment among the experts as to the actual con¬tribution of the prophet him¬self.”15 As to the famous chapter 26, which contains the oracles about Tyre, scholars generally agree that they are not from Ezekiel’s hand, and therefore come long af¬ter the Babylonian siege, perhaps even after Alex¬ander’s victory.
Even if we grant Ezekiel’s authorship, it is very unlikely that Gleason Archer is correct in claiming that “the predictions of chapter 26…were duly fulfilled to the letter….”16 How Archer can speak so confidently about confusing oracles preserved in a corrupt text is puzzling. Using the distinction between a mainland and island Tyre, Archer claims that verses 3-11 report a mainland Babylonian campaign which failed and verses 12ff. deal with Alexander’s final destruction of the island city. There are a host of problems with this interpretation. First, the phrases “she shall be in the midst of the sea” (v. 5) and “her daughters on the mainland” (v. 6) seem to refer to the island city. Second, the Babylonian siege is described in terms of victory not defeat. Third, the mention again of the slaughter of “your daughters on the mainland” (v. 8) as a prelude to the siege and the city’s “mighty pillars” indicates that it was the island city that was conquered. Fourth, although it seems that “make her a bare rock” (v. 4) is poetically repeated at verse 14, Archer’s strict divi¬sion of the oracles would imply that the mainland Tyre was com¬pletely destroyed, which Archer himself denies. Fifth, Archer continues his two-Tyre theory to the present day, even though they were joined permanently by Alexander’s causeway. Archer’s hypoth-esis that the island city was completely engulfed by a geological subsidence finds no support in the source books I consulted. In¬deed, an evangelical book called Science Speaks proudly prints a picture which shows portions of the island city as a huge, weedy field.17
Ezekiel’s dramatic account of the complete destruction of Tyre is literary and theological hyperbole (“descend into the Pit” v. 19), and even he may not have intended a factual account. In any case Tyre recovered rapidly and reasserted its maritime domi¬nance in the area. Eighteen years after Alexander’s conquest, Tyre was again re¬built only to be destroyed by Antigonus in 314 B.C.E. By 125 B.C.E. it was thriving again, strong enough to be granted autonomy by the Seleucid ru¬lers. Tyre prospered under Roman rule, especially in the time of Pompey. Even Jesus traveled there (Matt. 15:21-28), and one finds no account of him telling Tyre’s inhabitants: “Don’t worry, Ezekiel’s prophecy will yet be fulfilled.” A Chris¬tian com¬munity established itself there (Acts 21:3-6), and the great church father Origen was buried there.
Tyre fell to Moslem invaders in 636 C.E. In 1124 it was captured by the Crusaders, but the Arabs destroyed it again in 1291. Contrary to Ezekiel’s predic-tion, the ruins of ancient Tyre are clearly visible and right next to the modern town whose popu¬lation now is 60,000. (The population at the time of Alexander was only 30,000.) In the most recent Israeli in¬vasion of Lebanon, Tyre fell once again, but contrary to Ezekiel’s harsh judgment, it will most surely be built again. One must conclude that neither Ezekiel nor the editors who stitched his oracles together had any firm historical sense about the materials with which they worked.
SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITH LUKE’S CENSUS
Much has been said about Luke’s excellence as an historian. Luke did indeed emulate the models of historical narrative which were current in his day. But to claim that Luke is a consummate historian by modern standards–as many evangelicals do–is a position which cannot be maintained. In a letter to me, F. F. Bruce concedes that conservative apologists have been too eager to declare Luke’s inerrancy. So eager was W. M. Ramsey to prove Luke correct about the enrollment in Bethlehem that he, according to Bruce, “unwisely dam¬aged his well-founded reputation as a very considerable scholar.” In his Anchor Bible commentary Catholic scholar J. A. Fitzmyer lists other historical mistakes in Luke’s writing and of¬fers the most definitive argument against Ramsey’s claims about the famous Christmas census.
There is no record of Caesar Augustus’ decree that “all the world should be enrolled” (Lk. 2:1). The Romans kept extremely detailed records of such events. Not only is Luke’s census not in these records, it goes against all that we know of Roman economic history. Roman documents show that taxation was done by the various governors at the provincial level. As we shall see later, the property tax was collected on site by travelling assessors, thus making unnecessary Joseph’s journey away from what little property he must have owned. Glea¬son Archer quotes a census expert who claims, without documenta¬tion, that “every five years the Romans enumerated citizens and their property to determine their liabilities. This practice was extended to include the entire Roman Empire in 5 B.C.E.”18 This goes against the four¬teen-year cycle which Archer himself uses to argue that Quirinius was pulled from his busy duties in Asia Minor to do a Syrian census in 7 B.C.E., fourteen years earlier than the one recorded in Josephus and Acts 5:37.
Many have joined Archer in the hypothesis that Quirinius had an unrecorded term as Syria’s governor during the time of Jesus’ birth. Some misuse the “Tivoli” inscription which they say proves that some Roman official served twice in Syria and Phoenicia. First, the name is missing, so this is no proof that Quirinius is involved. Second, the inscription has been mistranslated. It should read: “legate of Augustus for a second time” not a second legate in Syria as the harmonizers insist. Archer does not refer to the Tivoli inscription directly; but still argues that since Luke knew of the census of 6 C.E., he correctly called this one Quirinius’ “first” (prote). But Fitzmyer shows conclusively that the grammar clearly indicates that this was the first census in Judea, not Quirinius’ first enrollment.19
It has long been known that Tertullian held that S. Sentius Saturninus, not Quirinius, was governor at the time of Jesus’ birth. Saturninus ruled from 9-6 B.C.E., the period most likely to be Jesus’ birth time. P. Quintilius Varus was governor during the next most likely period of 6-4 B.C.E. M. Titius was in Syria ca. 10 B.C.E. Quirinius himself was very much occupied during this time, having been assigned to the campaign in Cilicia in Asia Minor from ca. 11-3 B.C.E. Archer’s theory is that Quirinius was given a special assignment to do the census in the interval between Saturninus’ and Varus’ terms. There is of course no extant evidence for this, but this does not seem to be necessary for the harmonizing that takes place in evangelical “historical” theology. In fact, there is much to say against it. Fitzmyer paraphrases one authority: “…It was unheard of that a proconsul would become a legate…twice in the same province.”20
F. M. Heichelheim speculated that Herod himself took the census to which Luke refers.21 Realizing the problematic nature of his solution, Heichelheim takes great pains to qualify his pro-Luke interpretation. He describes Luke 2:1-5 as “an extremely difficult passage,” and then proceeds to give it an interpretation that has no basis in the text. Heichelheim uses the 4th Century church historian Eusebius to support Joseph’s presence in Bethle¬hem at the census. Eusebius speculated that Joseph’s family “most probably had a small holding near Bethlehem up to the reign of Domitian.” Heichelheim interprets the idios in “each to his own (idios) city” as meaning the private possessions of the Jewish royal family, who would collect the poll and land taxes and send them to Rome. This rendering of idios is supportable, but it is not compatible with Jesus’ own use of the word. In each of the places where we find the famous saying “a prophet has no honor in his own country (en ten idia patridi)” (Jn. 4:44; Matt. 13:57; Mk. 6:4; 4:24), the adjective idios is used in a way quite differ¬ent from Heichelheim’s proposal. And from the context it is also clear that Jesus claimed the country of his father to be Galilee and the town to be Nazareth.
Heichelheim’s thesis is highly speculative and open to the following general objections. (1) Given the conflicting geneal¬ogies of Matthew and Luke (which cannot be gratuitously solved by giving one to Mary), the descent of Joseph from David is highly problema¬tic. (2) The idea of Joseph owning property in Bethlehem stands in stark contrast to his destitute status and Jesus’ birth in a strange stable. Matthew does have Mary and Joseph living in a house in Bethlehem (2:11), and only after the flight to Egypt do they settle in Naza¬reth. (3) It would not have been necessary for Mary, nine-months pregnant, to make the arduous three-day journey. (4) Not all descendants of David would have owned property in Bethlehem, and yet Luke would still require them to return from distances far greater than from Galilee. (5) E. W. Barnes states that “any such census under Herod is highly improbable, inasmuch as it would be made for purposes of taxation; and Herod managed, and showed great skill in managing, his own finances.”22 Finally (6), even if there had been a Herodian census, Luke would still have been wrong about Augustus’ universal census and wrong about Quirinius administering it.
In Josephus’ account of the census in 6 C.E., he explicitly states that those people taxed were assessed of their possessions, including lands and livestock. In other words, the census takers were also the tax assessors. In Egypt these tax assessors went from house to house in order to perform their duties. With this in mind, let us look at a crucial error in Luke’s account. Luke has Joseph and Mary making a three-day journey away from their home in Nazareth to register in his alleged ancestral home Bethle¬hem. But an Egyptian papyrus recording a census in 104 C.E. ex¬plicitly states that “since registration by household is imminent, it is necessary to notify all who for any reason are absent from their districts to return to their own homes that they may carry out the ordinary business of registration….”23 Unlike Matthew, who does not mention a census nor Nazareth as Mary and Joseph’s home, Luke describes Nazareth as “their own city” (Lk.2:39). If the rules of this Egyptian census applied to Palestine, then Joseph and Mary should have stayed in Nazareth to be enrolled.
Imagine a system of taxation based on people returning to their ancestral homes, going back a thousand years in the case of Joseph. By this time the Jews were spread out all over the known world. Can we seriously believe that the Romans would have re¬quired them to come back to Palestine, carrying everything they owned? How would the tax officials have assessed their land? In The Rise of Christianity the former Bishop E. W. Barnes remarks: “The Romans were a practical race, skilled in the art of govern¬ment. It is incredible that they should have taken a census according to such a fantastic system. If any such census had been taken, the dislocation to which it would have led would have been world-wide. Roman historians would not have failed to record it.”24
In his famous book entitled Jesus, Charles Guignebert states: “It is all outside the plane of reality….It is incredible that such an unusual and disturbing proceeding, as the census spoken of by Luke must necessarily have been, should have escaped all notice in Josephus….” Guignebert continues:
We will not unduly stress the peculiarity of the mode of census taking implied in our text, but it is to be noted that it is a very strange proceeding. The moving about of men and families which this reckless decree must have caused throughout the whole of the Empire is almost beyond imagination, and one cannot help wondering what advantage there could be for the Roman state in this return, for a single day, of so many scattered individuals, not to the places of their birth, but to the original homes of their ancestors. For it is to be remembered that those of royal descent were not the only ones affected by this fantastic ordinance, and many a poor man must have been hard put to it to discover the cradle of his race. The suspicion, or rather, the conviction, is borne in upon us at first sight that the editor of Luke has simply been looking for some means of bringing Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, in order to have Jesus born there. A hagiographer of his type never bothers much about common sense in inventing the circumstances he requires.25
We can now understand why Jesus never mentions his birth in Bethlehem; and that, except for the birth stories, Jesus is always connected with Nazareth. The writer of John apparently does not know of Jesus’ alleged birth in Bethlehem. Nathanael does not know it (7:46) and no one answers the crowd when they say “Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scriptures said that the Christ…comes from Bethlehem?…” (7:42). In Evidence That De¬mands a Verdict evangelical Josh McDowell challenges skeptics to assess the evidence for the Christian faith. McDowell uses the mistranslated Vatican inscription and ascribes it to Quirinius without good scholarly reasons. He even cites the Egyptian papy-rus above, but astonishingly enough implies that it required peo¬ple to return to their ancestral homes.26 Concerning the birth stories of Jesus, the evidence demands this verdict: most of the details are legendary and Jesus was in all probability born in the Galilean town of Nazareth.
DISCREPANCIES IN THE GOSPEL RECORD
In Table I there is a detailed list of inconsistencies in the accounts of the Resurrection, the most important event in the Christian religion. Another general problem is the conflict about where Jesus would first appear in resurrected form. In Mark the angel tells the women that Jesus will appear in Galilee, but by Mark’s own account, Jesus appears to the disciples the same day in Jerusalem and ascends (from indoors!) out of Jerusalem that same evening. Only Matthew and John have resurrection appearances in Galilee, but Mark and Luke preclude any Galilean appearances by having Jesus’ ascension on Easter evening. In Luke and Acts Jesus tells his disciples not to depart from Jerusalem, again precluding any Galilean appearances. Most Christians would attribute this confusion to human error in recollection and transmission, but these inconsistencies are devastating to the claims of detailed inerrancy.
The most substantial discrepancy is found in the Ascension ac¬counts, especially the prima facie contradiction in Luke’s own writings–first in Luke 24:50-51 and then in Acts 1:9. The RSV does not actually indicate a heavenly departure but that “he parted from them.” Fitzmyer, however, argues that “he was carried up into heav¬en” (close to Mk. 16:19 and listed as an alternative in the RSV) should be “regarded as part of the original text of the Lucan Gos¬pel.”27 He suggests that it was omitted either in transmission or because of outright harmonizing by the early church. I have heard some evangelicals, who also reconcile John and the Synoptics by saying that Jesus stormed the temple twice, propose that there were two ascensions. Just as unsatisfactory is the suggestion that Luke meant for there to be a forty-day break between verses 49 and 50. But Fitzmyer answers that the “temporal adverbs and prepositional phrases in the course of chapter 24 leave no doubt that they (Res¬urrection and Ascension) took place on Easter Sunday.”28 Fitzmyer also cites passages from extra-canonical texts that demonstrate that an Easter Sunday Ascension was a tradition in the early church.
The genealogies given by Luke and Matthew do not agree, not even on the father of Joseph. It has been argued that the early church split on the question of the use of genealogies. Adoption¬ists and Jewish Christians who denied the deity of Jesus favored the use of genealogies, while those who stressed Jesus’ heavenly origin and virgin birth found the use of genealogies misleading or even blasphemous. Mark and John do not have genealogies for Jesus, and the widely used Syrian harmony of the gospels (written by Tatian) left out the genealogies. Perhaps the author of 1 Timothy is on the side of the antigenealogists when he warns that people should not “occupy themselves with myths and endless gene-alogies…”(1:4).
Some commentators have attempted to give one of the genealogies to Mary, but there seems to be no agreement about which one to give to her.
Tertullian thought that Matthew’s was Mary’s, but some modern commentators have decided that it is Luke’s. Even the conservatives cannot decide on a solution. There are solid objec¬tions to the giving of Luke’s genealogy to Mary. If the latter is so, then Luke is still incorrect, because he explicitly states that Joseph was the son of Heli, not the son-in-law. More signi¬ficant, however, is that Mary’s name is not mentioned at all in Luke’s genealogy. As F. F. Bruce puts it: “In any case, it is strange that, if the Lucan list intended to trace the genealogy through Mary, this was not stated expressly. More probably both lists intend to trace the genealogy through Joseph.”29 Further¬more, we know that Mary was a Levite and therefore could not have descended from David. Mary was a kinswomen of Elizabeth (Lk. 1: 38), a daughter of Aaron, and the mother of John the Baptist. There is no evidence that John descended from David; indeed, if he had, we certainly would have heard about it from the gospel writers.
In the Synoptics the Last Supper is a passover meal on the eve of the day before the Sabbath (Mk. 14:12). Jesus dies on the eve of the Sabbath, probably April 2, 33 C.E. Jesus explicitly asks the disciples to prepare a passover supper, but during the meal there is no paschal lamb and the wrong bread is eaten. In John, on the other hand, Passover and the Sabbath coincide, the Last Supper is not a passover meal, and Jesus dies simultaneously with the slaughtering of the paschal lambs (13:1; 18:28; 18;39; 19:14; 19:31), probably April 7, 30 C.E. Talmudic sources defi¬nitely support John’s account: “Jesus was hanged as a false teach¬er and beguiler on the eve of the passover which was also a Sab¬bath.” Apologists go to amazing lengths to harmonize the passion chronologies of John and the Synoptics. For example, the word “Passover” in the phrase “day of Preparation of the Passover” is reinterpreted as a seven-day festival, thereby avoiding the ob¬vious conclusion that it was really passover eve. C. C. Torrey intro¬duced this thesis back in the 1930s, and although quickly dismissed by scholars,31 it is still used by some evangelicals.
The passage which secures the disjunction of the two accounts is one in which “day of Preparation” is used together with “that sabbath was a high day” (19:31). Brown and others have shown that “high day” meant “double holy holiday”–i.e., a day in which the Sabbath and Passover coincide.32 We have already cited Sanhedrin sources above which confirm this chronological coincidence with direct reference to Jesus’ death. The most convincing evidence is the fact that the early church celebrated 14th Nisan as the day on which Jesus died. (The Synoptics had him dying on 15th Nisan.) This tradition lasted until 164 C.E. at which point a major con¬tro¬versy broke out about when to celebrate Easter. Around 200 C.E. Hippolytus of Rome condemned an unnamed Christian for daring to suggest Jesus ate a passover meal before his cruci¬fixion.33 Hip-polytus insisted Jesus could not have eaten the rit¬ual meal because he himself was the sacrifice. Paul implicitly confirms this view in his declara¬tion that “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacri¬ficed” (1 Cor. 5:7). In this section we have demonstrated that there are basic problems with accounts of the Crucifixion, the Res¬urrection, and the Ascension, the crucial events in the Christian religion. Christians should therefore be wary of any theology which over¬emphasizes the role of exact his¬torical truth in its doctrinal formulations.
Endnotes: Chapter 7
1. Rogers, Jack B., and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row: 1979).
2. Schaeffer, Francis, The God Who is There (Downer Grove, Intervarsity Press, 1975).
3. Neil, Stephen, “Jesus and History”. The Truth of God Incarnate, pp. 71-88.
4. Ibid, p. 69.
5. Nash, Ronald H., Christian Faith and Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984).
6. Albright, William F., From the Stone Age to Christianity (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1957). Gleason Archer’s theory that some earlier pharaoh, not Ramses II, was the pharaoh of the Exodus is an attempt to solve this problem; but it seems that not even conservative scholars are willing to join Archer in revising ancient chronology to this extent. Archer’s earlier date does not help the Jericho dilemma at all. See Archer’s Encyclo¬pedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: MI, Zondervan, 1982).
7. “A note on the miraculous elements in the old traditions: the archaeological evidence does not provide us with any indica¬tions that the end of the Late Bronze Age town of Jericho was brought about by unusual agents” (Franken, H.J., and C. A. Franken-Battershill, A Primer of Old Testament Archaeology, p. 80.) Using Kenyon’s evidence these authors also state that “there is no archaeological evidence that there was a walled town in the Late Bronze Age at Jericho… In fact, nothing suggests the strong city, pictured in the books of Joshua” (pp. 77, 79). To the contrary, all the evi-dence indicates a very modest settlement over a span of less than 75 years. The editors of Biblical Archeology Review (March-April, 1979, p. 6) also support this interpretation.
8. The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas (Dowers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1962, 1982).
9. Kenyon, Kathleen, Digging up Jericho (New York, NY: Praeger, 1957).
10. Soggin, J.A., Joshua: A Commentary (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Pres, 1971). See also Robert G. Boling’s The Anchor Joshua.
11. Pinnock, Clark, The Scriptural Principle (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1984).
12. Kaufmann, Yehezkel, The Religion of Israel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
13. Greenberg, Moshe, The Anchor Bible: Ezekiel 1-20 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983). Greenberg adds more mistakes to Kaufmann’s list above.
14. The Cambridge History of the Bible, eds. P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans (Cambridge: The University Press, 1960).
15. William Neil, Harper’s Bible Commentary, p. 264.
16. Archer, Gleason An Encyclopedia of Biblical Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982).
17. Stone, Peter W. and Robert C. Newman, Science Speaks (Chicago, IL: The Moody Press, 1968).
18. Archer, Gleason, An Encyclopedia of Biblical Differences (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982). Such an empire-wide census, if it did indeed happen, would still have been too late for Ar¬cher’s 7 B.C.E. date.
19. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to Luke. Two Volumes. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1981, 1985).
20. Ibid., p. 403. Fitzmyer also counters Archer’s attempt to demote Quirinius to something less than an official legate. Fitzmyer shows that the use of hegemon as real legate is found also in Josephus (p. 402).
21. Frank, Tenney, ed., An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1938).
22. Barnes, E.W., The Rise of Christianity (London: Longmans, Green, 1947).
23. Fitzmyer, Joseph A., The Anchor Bible: The Bible According to Luke. Two Volumes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1981, 1985).
24. Barnes, E.W. The Rise of Christianity (London, Longmans, Green, 1947).
25. Guignebert, Charles, Jesus (London, Kegan Paul, 1935).
26. McDowell, Josh, Evidence That Demands a Verdict (San Bernadino, CA: Campus Crusade for Christ, 1972).
27. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Anchor Bible: The Bible According to Luke. Two Volumes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1981, 1985).
28. Ibid., p. 194.
29. The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J.D. Douglas (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1962, 1982). Bruce Vawter states: “We have no way of reconciling the two genealogies complete¬ly, but there is no particular reason why we should try. To a considerable extent both are artificial” (The Four Gos¬pels, vol. 1, p. 94). Fitzmyer observes that Luke and Mat¬thew have “two strikingly different genealogies of Jesus, which resist all harmonization” (op. cit., p. 496). Marshall D. Johnson has done a thorough study of the problem and has dismissed all the historical solutions as unsuccessful. He does mention one significant fact about the Jewish Midrashic use of geneal¬ogies: their function was to “comfort, exhort, and to edify” (The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies, p. 145). Again, we are worlds away from the detailed inerrancy of modern evangel¬icalism.
30. Kee, Howard C., Jesus in History (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 2nd ed., 1977). Michael Arnheim shows that John is probably also correct about the details of Jesus’ trial (Is Christianity True?, p. 88).
31. Brown, Raymond E. The Anchor Bible, The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
32. Ibid., p. 934.
33. Richardson, Cyril C. “A New Solution to the Quartodeciman Riddle”, Journal of Theological Studies 24 (1973).