Miscellaneous Missionary

Jesus was a homosexual, Jesus never existed. We cannot trust the biblical record. Israel and Jews never existed before very recently. The Bible was written as a super secret conspiracy to take over the world. Religion is an old-fashioned attempt to control you. Christians are stupid. I hear this all year long, but why do these attempts to destroy biblical Christianity always crest at this time of year? Simply, it is considered the most sacred time of year, and the religious are doing battle. Atheists are fighting to prove their case that God does not exist. Pagans are celebrating the spring renewal of earth. Christians are arguing just as strongly for the historical validity of the Bible and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Jews are arguing for the historical validity of their escape from Egypt and establishment as a nation.

What bothers me the most about this is that all of these people live in the same world, but see radically different things. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of the historical record. The ever present issue of the biblical record (claiming a young universe created by a eternal God) and the evolutionary record (claiming an eternal universe in which the people created gods) is particularly troubling. How can two people look at the same data and come to such opposite conclusions? Is one of them just super ignorant?

I am troubled by that assumption. I think they have a faith, which they are trying to apply consistently and intelligently. The problem with all these debates is that they do not focus on the presupposed framework by which all the other data is interpreted. One good example of this is the geological layers. The evolutionary presents them as proof of his theory, and the creationism presents them as proof of his.

Today, launched by National Geographic, is a document that claims a different historical record for Jesus' life and a different understanding of who He was and what happened surrounding His death. This document has been around for some time, has undergone varying analysis, and has hit the news wires with amazing promotion.

Being a bit cynical, I suspect that the whole issue was raised on the news wires today to accomplish two major things. The first, is to attack Christianity with an attempt to hurt or discredit the various celebrations in the week to come. The second, and here I go really cynical, is to promote the soon release of the Davinci Code movie and try to give its fictional portions some validity.

Being a cynical reader, I am clearly not an expert. I leave you with many links today. Some go to very anti-Christian sites, with which I disagree almost completely. Some go to very ecumenical sites, with which I disagree on many things. Some go to what you might call conservative sites, with which I agree almost completely. The point is to see what I was talking about in the beginning. Different people are looking at the same data and coming to different conclusions. This is because they are all coming into the arena of debate with a bag full of assumptions that are changing the way they interpret the data. I am showing you some of mine right now.

Here are some of my thoughts directly on the document. Thousands of ancient manuscripts exist consistent with the Old and New Testaments which Christians hold as Scripture. These documents, being hand written and spanning generations of time show tremendous consistency. The consistency is particularly marked with respect to the Old Testament, since it spans much more time in authorship and many more men wrote the books. The existence of ancient documents to the contrary does not prove these documents wrong or illegitimate. It only proves that even in those times people were partisan, interpreting history according to their own presupposed framework.

Does the New Testament accurately describe the history and interpret it? I do not know. In the first place, I was not there to be able to judge by experience. In the second place, I would be judging anyway based on my presupposed framework, just as I am now. In the third place I am not alone in this problem (in other words, dear reader, you and everyone else have the same problem). I do know this: as a basis for knowledge, gnosticism is an inconsistent system, making their documents less convincing. I know that the people presenting the document as authoritative evidence of any kind hold very partisan views, and that needs to be taken into account before one goes off into blind acceptance of what they say.