Apples Are Not Bananas, Theology Is Not History

How do ex-Christians lose their faith? There are too many paths to count, but a primary way is to become disillusioned when they find out that the Bible isn’t what they thought it was. I wanted to outline some common arguments I hear from Christians-turned-atheists and why I think typical Christian apologetics fails to answer these doubts as well the ways I would converse about these doubts.

I am sympathetic toward and even agree with the atheists on a lot of these points and I often disagree with traditional apologetics. Yet, instead of making me lose my faith, I find it drives me deeper into my faith, opening an ever-widening appreciation for the complexity of scripture. My instinct would be to tell the doubtful atheist that these issues are just straw-man arguments. They are protesting made-up scenarios that I don’t think reflect the way a thinking Christian approaches these issues.

That hot take is unhelpful on two levels.

First, if I simply disregard their doubts as made-up strawmen, I am showing disrespect that will shut down engaging conversations about these issues. Second, I may think they are strawmen but the apologetical answers one finds on the Internet seem to reinforce them as positions to defend.

A good metaphor for my general line of argument here involves fruit pies. I personally do not like fruit pies except for banana cream pies. I am allowed that opinion. However, I am not allowed to criticize an apple because it is not a banana. Likewise, you can disagree with Christianity, its main principles, and its theology. But you shouldn’t be disappointed in the Bible because it isn’t trying to be something you wish it were. The gospels were not meant to be perfect historical accounts, or even scripture. They were canonized into scripture much later. The gospels were written to give voice to certain theological viewpoints. You may not like the apple (theology), but you cannot criticize an apple for not being a banana (theology is not science or history).

The problem with many atheist arguments and Christian apologetical arguments is that they are arguing from an incorrect view of scripture, ontology and faith. I hold that both the occasion of doubt and the traditional apologetical response come from a place of shallow understanding.

Note: my main point is not to argue on behalf of the atheist claims below; my inner jury is still out on many of these issues. My point is to show that even if you take them as fact, it shouldn’t affect your faith.

Most of the arguments below could be summarized by the common atheist assertion that once you study actual Christianity — what the Bible says, the historical evidence and literary analysis — the beliefs of Christianity fall apart with no support. Someone asked the once brilliant biologist turned cringingly underwhelming philosopher Richard Dawkins for book suggestions for budding atheists. His suggestion? Read the Bible. Funny, and it suggests three approaches:

1. The atheist approach: The flaws and contradictions in the Bible prove faith is unwarranted.
2. The fundamentalist apologetics approach: We need to demonstrate a way to harmonize these conflicting accounts and ideas.
3. The third way: Both the atheist and the fundamentalist are expecting something from the Bible that was never intended.

Argument: The Gospels Are Not Eyewitness Accounts

Something that seems to really bother ex-Christians who were raised fundamentalist or evangelical is that the gospel books were written between 50-100 CE and so cannot be trusted.

I think you must be coming from a place of faith and belief in the supernatural to accept different dates. That is fine for believers but unconvincing to modern physicalists. There are many Christians who believe that the earliest gospel was written sooner or that a later timeframe is unkind because we have references to early Christian ideas in Paul’s letters that must be part of the tradition. Many, if not most scholars would refer to this as the Q material, which has been lost to history, but probably directly influenced the synoptic gospels.

Thanks to some friends and their study Bible, I have very recently become sympathetic to the counterargument that Mark may have been written by an actual follower of Peter in the 50s. My theology nerd friends will find this idea loathsomely vieux jeu, but I think there could be real apologetical arguments that the gospels were in some basic form by the mid 60s. The main argument against this is that in Mark, Jesus predicts the fall of the temple, an event that did not happen until the 70s. I think this could be a little shaky in terms of dating. Dating Mark earlier doesn’t require belief in a supernatural prophecy by Jesus, although, if one embraces the supernatural, this is not ruled out. It isn’t too hard to imagine that Jesus — a political and theological genius — would be able to predict the fall of the temple. It seems that Mark influenced Matthew and Luke, so most scholars would support an earlier dating for Mark than the other gospels anyway.

In terms of anonymity, there are a few early Christian traditions that support the idea that John Mark was the author of the gospel of Mark. I won’t go into those arguments here because I don’t think they matter. There are also plenty of reasons to believe otherwise as well. For instance, why would an author named Mark call his book, “The Gospel According to Mark?” The words, “according to,” seem to imply someone else is writing the book based on what they heard from Mark. Of course, you could easily argue that we don’t know when the book was titled this way or by whom. Maybe it was added much later. Most scholars believe these books were compiled and edited over a long period of time by many people. That only underscores my main point that authorship doesn’t matter more than the theological content of the book.

I am utterly unconcerned with whether the earliest gospels came from the 50s or the 70s and whether the authors were named or anonymous. If an anonymous author or group of authors named the Gospels for Mark, or Matthew, doesn’t that clearly indicate the existence and influence of a real and legitimate Mark and Matthew tradition associated with those names? Why would you name something for Mark unless Mark and the story he was known for telling were already circulating and important?

Further, it shows early Christians were wrestling with theology from the early days. The reason to have different gospels with different pseudo-graphical authors is to promote different theological viewpoints. Instead of watering down faith, this makes theological discussions more interesting. The early gospel writers were concerned with demonstrating that their theological viewpoint was correct, and so they wanted to attribute it to a famous Christian. That means that people like Matthew, Luke, Mark, John the beloved, and others like James and Peter — who are directly referenced by Paul in early letters – were strong figures in the early church with cherished messages. Why would this weaken someone’s faith instead of shoring it?

Very little that we accept from 2000-year-old history is based on eyewitness accounts. That is not how history was written. While I believe that a lot of the gospels are historically accurate, I also believe there are many metaphorical and theological overlays that the readers in the early church would have understood to be theological and not historically accurate. Whether these are eyewitness accounts is irrelevant. They speak to the theology that the earliest Christians were fervently espousing. You are free to become an atheist if you disagree with that theology, but the provenance of the gospels should not sway you.

Consider the movie Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino. Without spoiling it, the ending is both delightful and completely unhistorical. Yet, despite the unhistorical ending, it would make no sense to tell such a story unless there was actually an evil person named Adolf Hitler and there were actual Nazis running around actual forests of Germany. The only reason the many fun embellishments in the film have any purpose and meaning at all is because they play upon an actual history. The embellishments of the gospel are extremely interesting to me because they point out various theological points of view. I’m not looking to the gospels for a kind of CNN-style report, I am looking to see how my ancestors in faith wrestled with many of these ideas considering Christ’s resurrection.

Argument: The Gospels Contradict Each Other

You can of course find many large and small contradictions in the Bible. If you think the Bible is supposed to be some sort of perfect single-sourced book, without any error and perfectly harmonized, then you are in for a big disappointment. This is not what scripture is about at all. Again, you may not like apple pies, but you can’t be mad at an apple for not being a banana. Scripture has many contradictions, and that is part of what makes a rich and diverse wisdom tradition so valuable.

It’s widely accepted that the author of the gospel of Luke used Mark as well as the Q material as sources for his gospel. In other words, Luke had access to Mark and Mark was probably well circulated amongst early Christians. That makes the following introduction to Luke more interesting.

Luke 1:1–4

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

Having read Mark, the Q source, and probably many others that are lost to time, Luke sets out to get the story straight. Luke is telling us there are contradictory gospels floating around in the first century, one of which is undoubtedly Mark. The point is not to ignore the contradictions and differences, but to learn from them. If someone went out of their way to change a story or otherwise rewrite something that was well known, it highlights a very important theological statement. Rather than try to excuse these differences as a typical apologist might, it is better to embrace the contradictions and learn from them.

Many apologists set out to harmonize the various gospel stories instead of admitting that these are ancient stories that weren’t originally considered to be scripture and are flawed and contradictory. Some apologists would say that the contradictions are small and overblown in the atheist’s mind or they are due to misunderstandings we have about cultural context. I find this less than convincing. Some of the contradictions are glaring in the gospel stories.

Harmonizing or otherwise excusing conflicting stories is to miss out on the richness and diversity in your scriptures. Apologists who try to paper over the conflicts and flaws are disrespecting what the Bible is offering. Stories should conflict if they are authentic. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. These stories are told from different authors with different points of view, trying to make different theological points.

Argument: The Gospels and Jesus Himself Seem Ignorant of Facts

I hate to break this to you, but much of the Bible was written by geocentric flat-earthers. They will get the science wrong. Jesus incarnate, in full humanity, must also be a product of the culture, language, worldview that he was born into. To assume Jesus had some sort of supernaturally perfected knowledge would be to deny his humanity. Consider this verse:

Mark 13:24-25

But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

I’ve seen a lot of apologists try to get around this with varying levels of convincing rhetoric. Maybe Jesus is being poetic. Maybe Jesus knew that stars don’t fall from the skies, and that the moon doesn’t give its own light, but it was more important to use a culturally appropriate metaphor for his day than to teach a science lesson. Fine.

The point that I would prefer to make is that there is no theological problem with Jesus only having access to the current worldview he was incarnated into. That is why we must consider all scriptural content in light of its cultural context and also reexamine and reimagine it according to what we have learned about the world, astronomy, biology, human relationships, anthropology, and more over the last 2,000 years.

There are plenty of events in the gospels that may not be historically accurate such as a Roman census during Jesus’ birth. Maybe it happened in a different time. Maybe it was important to demonstrate Joseph’s lineage and connect cities in Jesus’ story. Maybe the gospel writers, having themselves experienced a living Christ after the resurrection, looked back through scriptures and assumed the stories were connected even if there was no historical basis. The theology is important not the history. One doesn’t negate the other. Again, apples are not bananas.

Argument: Jesus Prophesied Things That Didn’t Happen

I find this argument a kind of false alternative. I don’t think it has any weight whatsoever, yet I see it pop up so regularly with my atheist friends and on the Internet that I’m going to address it briefly. It goes something like this: Jesus seems to have predicted his second coming in several places in the gospels and assumed that his return would be very soon — obviously that didn’t happen so either Jesus was wrong, or Jesus was a bad communicator.

As an aside, as I delved deeper into the Markan dating arguments, I found it funny that many scholars would date prophetic stories differently depending on whether they came true or not. If Jesus got the story right (the temple fell) it must have been written after the fact. If Jesus got the story wrong (his early return) it must have been a true statement from earlier. Setting aside the much larger issue that prophecy is not future-telling, and that we can’t be sure what Jesus was talking about with regard to many of these statements, I think it shows that we all bring our biases into the discussion. I bring a supernatural bias, an atheist friend will bring a material bias.

I will say that there seems to be a lot of evidence that the early apostles, including Paul, were anticipating a fast return of Christ; however, that anticipation of an early return is not univocal. When Jesus tells the disciples in The Great Commission that they are to go out to all nations and baptize them, it seems this would take an enormous amount of time.

Argument: The Trinity is Not an Early Christian Idea

The argument here is that Jesus never thought of himself as God. Calling himself the son of God or the son of man means something different prior to the formulation of the Trinity doctrine. I agree. I think Jesus calling himself the son of man or son of God was not a reference to divinity.

The typical apologetical response would be to point to Paul’s letters and gospel stories for early references to Trinitarian thought. The problem with this is many scholars are unclear on what Paul thinks about the Trinity. Verses that are traditionally used to support the trinity from Paul’s letters may in fact be our own Trinitarian views crowbarred back into those texts. And one could argue that, since the gospels were written at least 20 to 30 years after Jesus, or in the case of John, as late as 90 CE, that any references Jesus makes to his own divinity are later theological overlays.

What matters is that Christians in the first century were forming Trinitarian ideas, even if they weren’t entirely explicit. In the gospels Jesus accepts worship and prayer, Jesus refers to himself as I am, and Jesus forgives sins. These ideas are radical enough that I have a hard time imagining they were made up outside of a community that already embraced an emerging trinitarian theology, even if it was not yet fully formed. And I have more news for you, it’s still not yet fully formed. But going a step further, making up a Jesus who accepts prayers and forgives sins would not be very attractive at the time —blasphemy isn’t a great way to win over new converts. So I think Jesus probably said and did things that identified with a divine self-concept.

I am not bothered that theology develops over time. I am thrilled that theology continues to develop today. God is very far from done with us. Some Lutherans I love like to say, “the Reformation never ends,” meaning we’re constantly reshaping our theology. The United Chruch of Christ is famous for stating, “God is still speaking.” How could this not be true? To assume that Jesus would need to systematically spell out all Christian thought once and forever in the first century is simply the wrong assumption to make. Jesus seems unconcerned with systematic theology.

The Trinity points to great mystery. Getting overwhelmed by literalism about the Trinity can take away its power for some believers. You may believe in the Trinity in a very traditional way. I do. But there are many other approaches. Marcus Borg refers to Jesus as the mask of God, or the way we experience God as Christians. Theophany. Perhaps God adopts human activity, such as scripture, churches, funerals, and worship of Jesus as ways to become incarnational in our experience. Atheists like a literal take on the Trinity because it is an extreme position that is easier to argue against. But the beauty of the Trinity is that it is so multifaceted that literalism fails to grasp its truth. To say that the Trinity is a mystery is not to say it is impossible to understand. It means that, with meditation on the doctrine, it reveals ever more and more spiritual truth, something that a single literal definition cannot do.

Argument: The Resurrection Is Impossible

I would categorize the three most common styles of arguments I hear against the resurrection of Christ this way:

1. Nonsense and muckraking: things like the tomb was not empty, the disciples stole the body, it was a story made up to create a religion and many other figures in history had stories where their dead bodies were resurrected. These positions are easily debunked and not taken seriously by mainstream scholars. Anyone who wishes to do the simplest bit of honest research will find that these are nonsensical arguments.

2. Matters of historical fact-finding: what constitutes eyewitness testimony, how many of the facts seem to come from early tradition, are there other explanations for the emergence of the early church and more. Some people are just unwilling to take such a supernatural claim seriously based on tradition.

3. Materialism: if you are simply unwilling to explore a supernatural explanation of the events of early Christianity, then you are predisposed to throw out any evidence that contradicts naturalism.

I can’t help you with materialism. I believe that there are many witnesses, including myself, to supernatural events. Whether near death experiences, contact from deceased loved ones, experiences of a risen Christ, visions of saints, Tibetan rainbow bodies and the like impact your worldview is dictated by your philosophical stance toward consciousness and matter. If you have closed yourself off to at least the potential for a non-material reality, then you have closed yourself off to an entire set of data. Granted, much of this data is internal and not measurable. But if 1,000 monks meditate and have a similar experience, is that not evidence? When there are thousands of well-documented near-death experiences that recall similar properties in the experience, is that not evidence?

Further, most materialists I know are happy to ridicule religious belief based on their assumed naturalism. Yet they haven’t really explored the illogical and dreary conclusions of their own philosophy. They think materialism is the default state – it is not. Life in the living God is the natural state and so we can never see eye to eye.

In terms of historical facts, there are plenty of historical arguments that support belief. None of these, however, are enough to persuade any skeptic. I don’t blame the skeptics. I personally think that a core belief in the actual resurrection is the only explanation that makes sense of the historical data. I also personally believe in the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, I am very comfortable with any Christian who doesn’t believe the resurrection is literal and still wants to follow Jesus. In the New Testament, there are many shades of gray when describing experiences of the risen Jesus. How physical was the resurrection? Jesus eats and is touched by Thomas, yet he can appear through walls. Paul experiences Jesus as a vision so bright that it temporarily blinds him. What then are we to make of these various resurrection experiences? Who knows? But the evidence seems to support that the early apostles were so driven by belief in Jesus’ resurrection that they gave up everything including their lives to spread the gospel.

By way of conclusion, I think the main point that I want to make is that a literal, fundamentalist and forced interpretations of the Bible probably only leads to a loss of faith. It is also the wrong way to approach the Bible in the first place. If you are expecting the Bible to be perfect in every way, you will be disappointed. Don’t be afraid of the diversity and humanity that is apparent in the Bible. Don’t try to force mental contortions to harmonize what are actual contradictions. The contradictions themselves are full of beauty and meaning. An open and honest understanding of our tradition reinforces faith. So don’t be afraid to embrace the flaws and contradictions in the Bible. Instead, see where they lead you in your theological discovery.