Posted on 12/04/2013 3:17:41 PM PST by servo1969
A sixty-seven year old proud atheist friend of mine recently interjected the sweeping statement “all religion is irrational” into one of our conversations. I replied, not with a direct rebuttal but, instead, with the unexpected question, “who is Jesus Christ?” He replied, “I don’t know.” If I were to ask some of you why I pulled that question out of left field you might also reply with a bewildered “I don’t know.” So keep reading. Please.
If you have never really pondered the question “who is Jesus Christ?” then you simply cannot consider yourself to be a committed intellectual – at least not yet. Let me say that in a different way: if you have never given serious thought to the true identity of the most important individual ever to walk the face of the earth then you are either a) suffering from severe intellectual hernia, or b) possessed of an intellect impaired by a fear of knowing the true answer to the question.
Let me begin by defending the assertion that Jesus Christ was the most important individual ever to walk the face of the earth. 1) We divide time using the date of Jesus’ birth. 2) More books have been written about Jesus than anyone else in recorded history. Case closed. Now we can move on to the issue of fear and intellectual curiosity.
The options we are given for understanding the identity of Jesus are so limited that no one who is truly intelligent can be behaving rationally if he just avoids the question altogether. Take, for example, my friend who has lived 2/3 of a century on this planet without so much as attempting to work through the options. I don’t want you to be one of those irrational people so let’s get to work.
When addressing the question of Jesus’ identity, there are only four available options. Anyone who has ever read C.S. Lewis or Josh McDowell knows that Jesus was either: 1) A legend, 2) a lunatic, 3) a liar, or 4) the Lord.
The idea that Jesus was merely a legend, as opposed to someone who actually lived, is simply not an option we can take seriously (at least not for long). Independent historical accounts, by that I mean accounts written by non-Christians, are enough to put this option to rest. Jesus is cited by 42 sources within 150 years of his life, and nine of those sources are non-Christian. By contrast, the Roman Emperor Tiberius is only mentioned by 10 sources. If you believe Tiberius existed, how can you not believe in a man who is cited by four times as many people and has had an immeasurably greater impact on history? You can believe that if you wish. But then you risk forfeiting any claim to be considered rational.
Nor is it rational to consider Jesus to have been a lunatic. Perhaps you could maintain that belief if you’ve never read the Bible. But how can a person claim to be educated if he’s never read the Bible?
World Magazine editor Marvin Olasky once entertained the notion that Jesus was a mere lunatic. But, then, in the early 1970s, as an atheist and a communist graduate student, he examined the words of Jesus for the first time. He was traveling to Russia on a ship and wanted to brush up on his Russian. But all he had with him to read (that just happened to be written in Russian) was a copy of the New Testament. And so he read. And he was transformed.
Marvin recognized immediately that the words of Jesus represent a profound level of moral understanding that rises above anything else that has ever been written. Read for yourself the words of Jesus. Then read the words of Charles Manson. Try to convince me that they are one in the same – merely two lunatics who mistakenly thought they were the Messiah. You have a right to that opinion. But you don’t have a right to be considered rational if you cannot detect a glaring difference between the teachings of Christ and Manson.
So, now only two options remain. And this is where the real trouble begins. If we call Jesus a liar (who falsely claimed to be God) then we cannot also call him a great moral teacher. One cannot be both. But many look at the final option of calling him Lord and panic. To go there means to accept belief in the supernatural. And surely that couldn’t be rational. Or could it?
Science has taught us a lot since the Bible was written. For one thing, we know that the universe had a beginning. It is expanding, it is finite, and it was not always here. Put simply, Carl Sagan was wrong. In fact, he was dead wrong. The cosmos is not all that is or was or that ever will be. It had a beginning. It is irrational to dismiss the obvious implications of this: that the universe was caused by a supernatural force existing outside of space and time.
People have to let go of the idea that the natural world is all there is because that is not where the science leads us. It instead leads us away from the philosophical commitment to only considering naturalistic explanations for the things we observe in the physical universe. This also leads us to one very important question: if a supernatural force was great enough to create the universe could the force or being not also reenter creation? And another related question: is the force or being responsible for creating life not also able to conquer death?
Arguably, the resurrection is a pretty small accomplishment in comparison with the creation of the universe. But that doesn’t mean it happened. The evidence must be judged on its own merits. I recommend that serious intellectuals start here.
Of course, you could just keep avoiding the question while judging others to be irrational. But there’s no avoiding the plank in your own eye.
The other point donmeaker glaringly [probably knowingly] misses is just how does one control for the events prophesied leading for Jesus’ conception, birth in Bethlehem and early life both as a Nazarene and one who comes out of Egypt.
When one loses a debate because their argument is full of emotional lies, they inevitably turn to personal insults.
I will leave it at that.
He does not deserve my response.
I’ll leave it at that.
Thanks for defending me though.
Especially since we now know the copy of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls is, other than a few punctuation differences or an and if or but, exactly the same as the one we use today.
The Isaiah copy of the Scrolls precedes the birth of Christ by over 100 years. If he desires to read Isaiah 53, he will learn that 600 years before the execution of Christ on the Cross, Isaiah wrote a better account than john who was present did.
Do you not find it interesting that those who attack the credibility of the Bible never ever mention the dead sea scrolls?
Lighten up pal, I wasn’t speaking to you. I was speaking to donmeaker. I just pinged those who were already part of the discussion to bring my comment to him to your attention.
But I was not speaking about your comment so much as his response to everyone.
So you can now apologize for your over the top rude and disgusting comment to me anytime.
Yes, I wonder if he even know if that passage is from the New or Old Testament, and if he know what Luke’s profession was.
Many have read a passage or two of the Bible and then claimed they know what it says, but all they do it take things they read of context.
I wonder what he would have to say about the phrase, “I AM”, and if he could even knows where it was used for the first time, and what is the importance of that phrase.
I could go on and on about various small instances of the Scriptures that have huge implications to Christians that those claiming to know what the Bible says would never have a clue about.
Not to mention the many instances of secular history that have huge implications with things that are mentioned in the Scriptures.
I wonder if he know of which Roman scholar wrote about Christians and the way they lived as peaceful individuals while the roman Government was persecuting them?
A little knowledge without facts can be a dangerous thing, just look at the mass confusion that permeates in the minds of millions of Americans who were educated by today’s public school system.
One accounts for it by saying “Where ever Jesus was born, (the author of Mark didn’t seem to think it important) Bethlehem was tagged as his birth place because of the presumed prophecy, by the authors of Luke and Matthew who were so personally unaware of Jesus actual life that they used Mark (or Q) as a reference.”
I suppose that if G-d is the same yesterday, today, tomorrow, that it would be jam yesterday, today and tomorrow. So let that be a hypothesis for a test of the supernatural.
We are told that miracles happened in the past, and will happen in the future, but is is wrong to expect miracles today as that would be ‘testing G-d’. Well yes, it is a test for G-d, and G-d fails.
Actually I learned about “Q” in bible school when I attended Evangel College (now Evangel University) back in the 1970s. It was standard materiel in the New Testament Literature course.
Nice to know that Wikipedia has an article on that. I will stop by to see it some day.
The professors at Evangel College didn’t have a problem with the Q hypothesis, but then, they were religious AND educated.
Sometimes I have doubts about the ‘more advanced’ part.
Was I incorrect?
As a former attendee of Evangel myself, I wasn’t too impressed with them.
If I question the provenance of the bible, calmly imagine what I think of the pretended sources of the Book of Mormon.
Jesus did not come to create any religion, much less a new one. Jesus condemned religion. He came to restore a broken relationship between God and man. And religion can't do that.
However, this does not matter to Christians, because in their view, Jesus wrote his own rules and was not bound to Jewish traditions of what they thought he should be.
Jesus did not write His own rules. He came to fulfill prophecy and that means fulfilling the Law perfectly and completely, absolutely flawlessly.
So what?
Then all of history is suspect to you, is it not?
Prove George Washington lived and that he is not the product of some scam by forgers to create a pretend George Washington.
Or pick ANY historical figure.
For that matter prove YOU exist and are not some computer program posing as a human being.
I've never met someone in real life named donmeaker. All I see is a screen name and some posts.
How do you know?
Did Paul tell you?
Were you there?
Did you see it yourself?
The cambrian explosion is currently understood to be an artifact of the technology used to detect fossils.
Now that we have better technology, we detect precambrian fossils that were previously missed, so the edge previously detected is fuzzed.
A smiling ass is only moderately more collegial than a braying ass.
Politically I am a bit right of Attilla the Hun.
I spend most of my days trying to loot and pillage my fingers to the bone. Little barbarians and multiple wives take a lot of feeding.
Leftist! Wait until my friends hear of that! They will laugh!
Well, that’s it. You’ve convinced me to drop my faith of 43 years and stop going to church. I had no idea.
PLEASE. The point is that Jesus is so important that most of the civilized world bases time on the birth of Christ, give or take 4 years. To the Romans, the most important thing was the city’s founding. To modern, western man, the most important thing is the birth of Christ. And THAT’s Mr. Adams’ point.
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