Why would we assume the bible is even historically accurate, particularly the New Testament?
Here we go: John 8, 54-59:
Discuss.
Very important passage. As you remember, “I AM THAT I AM” (which to me means sort of, “Who am I? I defy description in terms you can understand. I transcend anything you can imagine. You can’t call Me ‘good’ because your understanding of ‘good’ is derived from Me. You can’t call Me anything, because your understanding and your language can only capture the barest shadow of My nature. Who am I? I Am That I Am.” Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this) when Moses asked “I don’t know your name. Who should I say sent me?” after God told him to go before Pharoh, the reply was “I AM THAT I AM. Tell them ‘I AM’ sent you.” I don’t speak Hebrew, but I’ve both read and been told that Yahoweh (or however you prefer to transliterate it) actually means “I AM THAT I AM.”
The greek is [symbol]amen amen legw umin, prin abraam genesqai ego eimi[/symbol]. The root of [symbol]genesqai[/symbol] is [symbol]ginomai[/symbol], which means “begin”, “come to pass”, or “come into being.” So he said “before Abraham came into being, I Am.” So basically, it was a play on words, both saying “yeah, I was there before Abraham was ever thought of,” and “I AM,” taking the Name of God Almighty upon Himself, which, if you are not actually God Himself, is utter blasphemy.
This is language that any Jew would understand, and it is an obvious claim to be not just a god, but THE God. This is far more blatant than saying to a man, “your sins are forgiven.” Everybody standing around knew exactly what He was saying and was going to kill him for it. Why else would they try to stone Him to death? It certainly wasn’t for bad grammar. Failing to make your verb tenses match definitely was never a stoning offense.
That is the reason I’m always baffled when people say “Jesus never claimed to be God.” Just look at the reactions of the people around him who spoke the same language with the same idioms and slang. They knew what He was saying. Which brings us full circle back to the original question at hand:
If we assume that this incident actually took place as described, there are only three options. Either it’s true, or He’s lying, or He’s deluded. No mere “good teacher” could make a claim like this.
(This is probably just going to sound like nit-picking, but I’m not sure how else to approach this. So, apologies in advance.)
John’s Gospel was the last written. More than half a century after Jesus (probably) lived. This leaves him with the most chance that something got changed in the telling, since it’s fairly likely he wasn’t even hearing from an eyewitness anymore.
His is the Gospel is the one that begins “In the beginning was the Word. And the word was towards God, and the Word was God.” (Roughly translated from my Greek NT). John’s main theme was that Jesus was the Word of God incarnate. Of course he would have Jesus saying he was God. A lot of events and sayings that John has in his Gospel aren’t mentioned in any of the others. This leads me to believe that he took the most liberties with the facts
His Gospel is also the one that places the strongest blame for Jesus’ death on the Jews, which is certainly a rather … loose interperetation of the facts, probably influenced by the rift between Jews and Early Christians in John’s own time.
Not that I think that John or the other evangelists were being willfully deceitful; they were writing because of their faith, not because of their burning desire to tell the straight facts. But that doesn’t mean one can’t believe that Jesus said some true and useful things without believing he said he was God. Just because their faith colored the facts, doesn’t mean there were no facts there to begin with.
I agree that this is the argument’s fatal flaw, and that it’s much more persuasive than questions about the authenticity of the Gospels.
Just because it’s the last written doesn’t make it unreliable. If we look at biographies today, we’ll recognize that often it takes time for an authoritative biography to be produced, because so many of the eyewitness testimonies and much of the writers agenda are affected by the controversies of the day. A perfect example would be all the books written over the past few years about Bill Clinton. In my opinion, it’ll take at least 30-40 years before any of those books will be reliably objective.
You say it’s a loose interpretation of the facts, but none of us really know the facts here. And the rift between Jews and Early Christians existed not only in John’s time, but in the times of the other Gospel writers.
Joe_Cool wrote:
You leave out the possibility that he was misquoted.
As arisu notes, John was the last gospel written. Is it possible that John added the I-am “quote” to solidify the concept of Jesus as a deity?
Why doesn’t the quote appear in the other gospels? If Jesus said it, it seems like a powerful, nay, a monumental statement, certainly important enough for the authors of the other gospels to record, no?
In the other gospels, Jesus is more cagey about his relationship to God. If I recall correctly, only in Matthew does he come close to claiming godhood, and even there, rather than say it himself, he elicits it from his followers:
The book of Matthew was also written a considerable number of years after Jesus’s death, BTW.
In the book of Mark, the earliest gospel, I don’t believe there is a claim by Jesus himself that he was the son of God. (Please correct me if I am mistaken about this.)
Jefferson (and many others) concluded that Jesus never claimed to be God or the son of God, but that the concept of Jesus-as-deity had been created by his followers after his death.
While these three are all possible, I question whether opponents would go to such lengths to use them as arguments against any other ancient document were it not the bible.
On what evidence did they base this conclusion?
Why should the New Testament be any less accurate than the Old?
You’re coming at it from the wrong angle. If someone claims godhood, or if one of his followers claims godhood for him, I’d say the evidentiary ball is in their court.
However, to answer your question, just look at the progression from the earliest gospel, Mark, where Jesus does not claim godhood for himself, through the gospel of Matthew, where he still does not claim godhood for himself, but blesses those who claim it for him, on down to John, the last gospel written, where Jesus claims to be the great “I AM.”
Now what is the most likely explanation for this progression? The most likely explanation is that the later gospels were written as defenses (and reinforcements) of an existing faith, and that the authors fudged on the biographical facts to bolster their pre-existing belief that Jesus was God. (If not, why doesn’t Jesus claim godhood in the earliest gospel?)
Your apparent explanation, that the writers were becoming “more objective” as time passed, doesn’t wash.
The analogy to modern biographies does not hold for a couple of reasons. First, literacy is much more common today, and so later biographies may become more accurate as researchers sift through mountains of documentation. Documentation of the life of Jesus would have been scarce to non-existent. Reports of the life of Jesus would become less accurate, not more so, as they were passed orally from generation to generation.
Second, biographies of US political figures become more accurate over time as documents which were classified during the lifetime of the person in question become available to researchers. The details of the life of Jesus would not have been a matter of national security.
I see your point, but I don’t really think it’s a reasonable comparison. In the 30 years the strong opinions and controversies surrounding Clinton will will lessen. But as I see it, the controversies and strong opinions about Jesus grew as time went on.
You’re confusing two separate questions here.
The first question is “Is Jesus God?” In this case, I agree with you. If someone claims godhood, it’s up to them to prove it.
The second question is “Did Jesus claim to be God?” In this case, it is up to those who say he didn’t make that claim (Jefferson and others, in your example), to provide evidence more compelling than the Gospel accounts to prove he didn’t make that claim.
Yeah, I agree, I was just making the point that just because something was produced earlier doesn’t necessarily make it more authoritative.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
If these other ancient documents you speak of report ordinary things like armies marching or battles fought or crops harvested, then we do not concern ourselves quite so much with alternate possibilities.
But the moment any document, ancient or modern, claims to be a communication from an invisible omniscient superbeing, well, then that’s subject to a little more scrutiny.
Recently, I’ve been seeing stories that suggest that Matthew and Mark were working from the same, earler souce, called “Q,” IIRC. Therefore, arguing that Mark is more authoritative that Matthew may be a mistake.
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Now what is the most likely explanation for this progression? The most likely explanation is that the later gospels were written as defenses (and reinforcements) of an existing faith, and that the authors fudged on the biographical facts to bolster their pre-existing belief that Jesus was God. (If not, why doesn’t Jesus claim godhood in the earliest gospel?)
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Another likely explanation is that John is working from a source that wasn’t available to Matthew and Mark. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that six of the twelve disciples wrote down their experiences with Jesus at some point in the future. Matthew and Mark, writing early versions, would have access to say two of them. But John, writing much later, would have access to all six. Which of them would be more accurate?
(I’m not arguing that this is what happened, I’m just saying that something like this is just as likely, if not more likely, than the ideal that John was simply embellishing.)
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Your apparent explanation, that the writers were becoming “more objective” as time passed, doesn’t wash.
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That wasn’t my explanation of what happened. I was just pointing out that earlier doesn’t necessarily mean it’s closer to the truth.
Another possible explanation that occurs to me is that the earlier Gospel writer could have left out the godhood claim because the Christian community was weaker, and less able to defend themselves against those would find such a claim blasphemous. But by the time John’s Gospel was written, the Christian community was strong enough to deal with any possible negative repercussions such a claim would bring down on them.
Just throwing out possible theories.
davidw, you’re missing the original point, which is that Lewis omitted the possibility that Jesus was misquoted.
I have now provided you with a logical analysis to show how and why that might be so.
Ergo, Lewis’s logic is flawed because his list of possibilities is incomplete.
I addressed that point earlier in the thread.
I should address this.
The existence of “Q” is deduced from the fact that the various gospels each contain certain identical or very similar quotes from Jesus. The presence of the identical or closely similar quotes suggests that the authors of the gospels were working (at least in part) from some unknown written collection of the sayings of Jesus.
But here’s where you miss the boat:
The quotes that the gospels have in common are presumed to have been a part of the ur-Gospel, Q. On the other hand, quotes from Jesus which appear in the later gospels, but which are not included in the earlier gospels, are suspected (suspected, mind you) of being embellishments.
Moreover, the fact that many quotes from Jesus in the Bible are similar, but not identical, is evidence that if the authors of the gospels were working from an earlier source (Q), they were prone to paraphrasing Jesus. (Do not confuse these authors with modern journalists or biographers, who are professionally bound to get the quotes right. The authors of the gospels were more willing to play fast and loose with the facts to make their points.)
Have you considered the possibility that Matthew might have been working from the text of Mark? (And adding material to bolster the Christian position?)