Recovering Evangelicals

A close look at how this is quite different from mere resuscitation of a dead body, and how it’s the crucial evidence for Christianity being “the true myth.”

For millennia, we humans have been making myths: stories of heroes, villains, tests-of-character, conflicts, rescue missions, and more. It’s a distinctly human trait, and the foundation for the many world religions that we’ve constructed. One recurring theme is that of the dying-rising god. In last week’s episode, we looked closely at the claim that “Christianity is the one true myth,” the fulfillment of the deepest yearnings of the human heart, expressed in all those other myths, and distinguished from all of them by a preposterous sign: the resurrection of Jesus.

If there’s any truth to that sign, that puts a very powerful spotlight on a very unique story that actually took place on the world-stage, in real-time, in full view for close inspection and rational inquiry!

So we had to investigate this claim of the resurrection of Jesus. What kind of evidence is there for it? Are there alternative explanations? Why did so many claim this, even upon the threat of martyrdom, and why do so many believe it today. What are the main skeptical arguments against the claim?

A methodical, logical approach says there are only two possible outcomes: it either did not happen, or it did.

We started with the first of those two outcomes: why so many people at the scene claimed it happened, when in fact it never did. And we found only two explanations that are popular among skeptics: either those early believers hallucinated it, or they lied about it. And we saw how neither of those explanations are consistent with the historical data at hand.

Another possibility would be that they did see a living, breathing Jesus … but there was no resurrection because, in fact, Jesus never died in the first place. Either he recovered from the execution done at the hands of trained and expert executioners, or the living, breathing “Jesus” was in fact an exact twin brother that those early believers and the opponents to their preposterous claim didn’t know about. Once again, neither of those explanations are consistent with the historical data at hand.

That leaves only one outcome for us to consider: that Jesus of Nazareth was executed, killed, and … resurrected. As Sherlock Holmes famously said: “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” One can still choose to reject that claim, but is the underlying reason for doing so more of a philosophical/emotional one than a rational one?

Near the end of our discussion, we needed to clarify what we mean by “resurrection.” Is it simply making a dead body start living again? That would sound miraculous at first; a violation of the Laws of Nature. Until one starts to realize that even we humans are already starting to learn how to do that … millions have been brought back to life using CPR, cardio-electric shock, adrenaline infusions, cryopreservation, and more. We’re even starting to use genetics to revive species which went completely extinct a long time ago! But in all those cases, the revived body goes on to grow old, get sick again, and eventually die. This was also what happened to everyone in the Bible who was supposedly brought back to life: Lazarus … Jairus’s daughter … Tabitha/Dorcas … Eutychus … and several others in the Old Testament. Except, some claimed (even at great personal risk), for one other person: Jesus of Nazareth.

But their claim wasn’t that Jesus was simply resuscitated. Instead, that he was resurrected. Transformed into something completely different. Into a whole new way of being human. A good analogy for resurrection is the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, or a tadpole into a frog. If caterpillar’s could speak, they would all shout adamantly that: “Caterpillars just don’t fly! No caterpillar in all of history has ever been able to fly!”

And those caterpillars would be right.

And yet, so very wrong!?

So when skeptics reject the Resurrection on the basis that: “dead bodies don’t just come back to life again … that just doesn’t happen,” they would be mostly right. Usually, that does not happen.

And they would be partly wrong: sometimes even we humans can bring people back from the dead, and we’re getting better at it all the time.

And … it needs to be said … those skeptics would also be barking up the completely wrong tree: in the case of Jesus, we’re not talking about resuscitation, but about resurrection.

I think this topic deserves much more than a casual glance followed by a disgruntled rejection.

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about our interview guest Dr. Mike Licona, go to his faculty page and his website.

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Literary scholars such as JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis see Christianity as not only the fulfillment of ancient Hebrew prophecies, but also the deep-seated yearnings of the human heart, expressed through a multitude of myths and religions.

Our previous episodes looked at hominids a few hundred thousand years ago acquiring cognitive abilities which equipped them to think abstractly, symbolically, and religiously (episodes #75, #76, #77, and #78 ), which they [we] used to create a long list of religions. And then over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at the evolution of two particular world religions: Judaism (episode #80) and Christianity (episodes #81, #82, and #83).

That sequence of episodes might have misled some listeners to conclude (or think that we ourselves have concluded) that Judaism and Christianity are no different from the many other religions that humans have concocted from large collections of myths. However, some modern literary scholars have concluded that Christianity is separate from all those other myths: in fact, that it alone is the “True Myth” which not only fulfills ancient Hebrew prophecies, but also the inner yearnings of humans going back tens of millennia, expressed through mythic tales that go back to the dawn of recorded history. Those scholars include JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis … as well as today’s guest: Dr. Louis Markos.

We talked to Dr. Markos about what myths are, and how we modern humans in the 21st century are no less prolific in myth-making than our ancient ancestors, and that all those myths draw on common themes expressed through archetypal characters.

We also looked at the possibility that our evolving ancient brains contained key ideas/impulses which we’ve been processing over millennia into mythic tales, which in turn pointed us and drew us toward the Divine in a driven-search for truth … somewhat like migrating birds and butterflies being born with an innate navigational sense and a comparable subconscious drive to fly thousands of miles to a particular destination every year.

And we explored some intriguing questions, like:

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Louis Markos, go to his faculty webpage, his Amazon author page, or his Youtube channel.

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… and find us on Twitter or Facebook.

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Paul and John seem to paint a different portrait of Jesus than those who walked and talked with him (last week’s topic).

Last week, we looked at the first half of that paradoxical Christian expression: Jesus was “fully human and yet fully divine.” We learned that the people who walked and talked with him found him to be a fully human, Jewish Messiah who would redeem Israel. But the Apostle Paul and the author(s) of the Gospel of John paint a very different portrait. John refers to Jesus as “the Logos” (a universal, impersonal, cosmic force of reason) and as a universal Savior of all mankind (the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world). Likewise, Paul also refers to him as something much more than human.

We asked a New Testament scholar  — Dr. Christopher Zoccali — to help us reconcile these two different perspectives. We picked away at some unsettling questions:

We ended with a thought-provoking scenario of Paul essentially acting like a time-traveller, in the sense that:

Is this the kind of paradox that always comes up in movies that involve time-travel: someone goes backward through time to influence earlier events, so that now the outcome of the story is changed (sometimes radically!?).

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Christopher Zoccali, go to his personal web-page or to his faculty web-page.

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The people who actually walked and talked with Jesus in the first century clearly saw him primarily as a Jewish Messiah.

One particular Christian tenet that has been the hardest to wrap my brain around is the idea that Jesus was “fully human, and yet fully divine”. This week, we look at what the people who walked and talked with him thought, and whether that thinking changed over the course of his time on earth. So we grouped them into five different categories:

(1) before he was born: Mary and Joseph (his parents), Zechariah (temple priest), and the wise men from the east talked about this baby being the king of the Jews, being given the throne of David to reign over Jacob’s descendants forever, and restoring the covenant with Abraham. Note the very heavy emphasis on him coming to Jews and doing what a Jewish Messiah would do, rather than a cosmic, universal Savior sent to take away the sins of the world.

(2) at his birth: the shepherds were told he was the Messiah … Simeon, who had been waiting for “the consolation of Israel”, saw this baby as the Lord’s Messiah … and the prophetess Anna said the baby would bring the redemption of Jerusalem. Again, I’m hearing “Jewish Messiah”.

(3) Jesus himself said he came only to the lost sheep of Israel. How does this fit with him being a cosmic, universal Savior sent to take away the sins of the world? Or did he also see himself as the Jewish Messiah? (note: our guest this week will shed some light on this “false dichotomy”)

(4) during his public ministry: John the Baptist, Andrew, Philip, the Samaritan woman, Peter, the people at “the triumphal entry”, one of the two thieves on the cross, the Roman soldiers, and even unclean spirits … they all specifically referred to him as the Jewish Messiah (aka: king of the Jews … the Chosen One … the Christ).

(5) after the Crucifixion: at the Ascension, his followers asked “is this when you restore the kingdom to Israel?”, something that a Jewish Messiah was expected to do. Their sermons almost always took place in the synagogue (where Jews meet) rather than the city square (where everyone would hear) and regularly used very Messianic language. The writer of Acts sometimes specifically summarizes their speeches by simply saying they “showed how he was the Messiah”.

Clearly, the message that everyone was getting and giving was: Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

I had thought that the Jewish Messiah was only ever going to be a human. But this Jesus as the Jewish Messiah sounds quite different from the cosmic divine being (the Logos) that we find in the first chapter of the Gospel of John (we learned last week that this was written over half a century after Paul saturated the region with his own cosmic divine view of Jesus), or in the rest of the New Testament (written mostly by Paul). So, what do I do with that?

To answer that question, we talked to Dr. Richard Middleton, a theologian with expertise in Old Testament theology and Christian worldview. He showed me a whole different perspective on what it meant to be a Jewish Messiah … on this idea of a “cosmic, divine Jesus” … and on the idea that Jesus was “fully human, and yet fully divine”.

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Richard Middleton, see his blog-site, faculty page, profile at Biologos, and his Amazon book page.

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Did decades of apostolic teaching of a cosmic divine universal Savior influence the eyewitness accounts — recorded in the Gospels many decades later — of a very human Jewish Messiah?

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at how the first century Christian church evolved its understanding of Jesus. To do that, we’re going to rely heavily on what they said and did about Jesus. But our only source of that kind of information comes from the Gospel accounts and the Book of Acts. So before we start that part of the conversation, we’ll want to look at how that eyewitness testimony itself evolved over the course of many decades.

We’re going to hear from a New Testament scholar — Dr. David Carr — about how the first Gospel account of Jesus was written a couple decades after Paul had been writing and preaching about Jesus being a cosmic divine Savior (and that the story that Mark wrote about was yet another decade or two in the distant past before Paul even began teaching this new narrative). And that the next two Gospel accounts (Matthew and Luke) were recorded after yet another decade or two of more apostolic teaching and further theological development of this new view of Christ. And then finally John’s Gospel — the one who easily portrays the most cosmic, divine portrait of Jesus — was written after yet another decade or two of that apostolic teaching.

A lot can change over the course of even just one decade, especially when the whole cultural zeitgeist around you is changing. Think how your memories and impression of any politician, or rock star, or favorite actor from ten years ago has changed. Now try to remember someone from forty or fifty years ago.

So imagine yourself as one of those people who had walked and talked with this person who was very much human, but now for the past forty or fifty years everyone was saying was very much a cosmic divine being. Wouldn’t that shape your recollection and interpretation of events when some interviewer/writer comes through town and asks you to tell your favorite Jesus-story?

There are hints of that re-shaping in the Gospel stories themselves. That internal thoughts (which are very subjective) were not quite lining up with external actions (which are very concrete and objective):

These and other details in the stories tell me that they didn’t “always know” that Jesus was the cosmic being that, decades later, they professed to follow.

None of my questions and statements here are intended to disparage the Gospel message, but rather to bring the Gospel texts themselves into tighter focus: if they are the foundation on which one builds an understanding of who Jesus is, then wouldn’t it be good to fully understand that foundation? To know its limits? Its strengths … and weaknesses?

This week, we’re going to come to grips with what the Gospels are — a collection of stories and interpretations that were shaped and revised over the course of decades — before we use those texts to unpack the bigger question of “who is this Jesus of Nazareth?” over the next few weeks.

Stay tuned …

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. David Carr, see his faculty pages at Roberts Wesleyan College and at Northeastern Seminary.

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Was this religion dropped onto a unified nation that had just marched out of Egypt, or did both the nation and its religion evolve over the course of millennia?

We’ve been looking at hominids over the past couple hundred thousand years, paying particular attention to the evolution of cognitive abilities which contributed to the emergence of a religious streak: external agency detection, assigning intention and purpose (“promiscuous teleology”), and religious thinking (perception of the future; belief in an afterlife; creating statues/idols; music).  They migrated out of Africa and established religions every where they went around the globe: we have remnants of these at Stonehenge, the Aztec/Mayan ruins, temples in South Asia, markings on cave walls as far east as Australia and as far west as North America.

But their first steps out of Africa took them into the region we now call Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. This is where we find the earliest human writings (Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets) and the oldest temple structures (Gobekli Tepe; pyramids of Egypt), complete with religious stories and myths. From these and other artifacts, we can piece together the world’s earliest religions: Babylonian, Egyptian, Zoroastrian … and Judaism.

Today, we’ll talk to Dr. Aren Maeir, a world-leading archaeologist who works in the sands of modern day Palestine, about the emergence and evolution of Judaism and the people who created that religion.

Or did you think that Yahweh dropped the religion of Judaism on some of those early people at the foot of Mount Sinai?

The archaeological evidence tells us that Israel did not emerge from Egypt as a unified nation. It did not conquer Canaan through the major battles described in the Old Testament. It did not worship one God … Yahweh … exclusively. Instead, that early nation of Israel comprised a mixture of people groups  — including some who may have come from Egypt, migrated into Canaan peacefully and settled in together, and worshiped a variety of Canaanite gods  — until they became a nation with a monarchy and one national religion. This version of Israelite history is supported by extensive archaeological research (layers in the soil; pottery; weapons; tools; texts).

The alternate version that we find in the Old Testament — the traditional story of a monotheistic Israel marching as a nation out of Egypt — is supported almost solely by …

… the Old Testament itself.

We already heard from Dr. Peter Enns (episode #57), an Old Testament theologian, about how those documents were written by the Israelites themselves, and were later massively edited by them, many centuries after their story introduces them as new-comers to the Promised Land. This massive reformulation of their texts, their religious practices, and their religious thinking occurred when they were in captivity in Babylon and trying to re-discover who they were, where they came from, and why Yahweh seemed to have abandoned them. 

This does not mean that the Old Testament is merely a human fabrication, nor that Judaism is a false religion. Nor that neither were Divinely-inspired (we will have to do an episode on what that concept means … and doesn’t mean). Again, that conclusion would be yet another example of what philosophers call “the Genetic Fallacy”.

But it does mean that we need to be more careful and more fully informed about this religion when we contemplate what it means to/for us today. Especially when we also contemplate the major world religion which emerged out of it … Christianity.

More on that later.

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Aren Maeir, see his web-page and project overview.

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Many Christians will say: “I’m OK with evolution, in general …. as long as you leave humans out of it”.

It’s only been four weeks since we summarized our discussions in this podcast series that began four months ago (episode #74). But during the four weeks since then, we’ve crossed that line: we’ve added humans to the list of evolved beings. For many people, this will raise all sorts of very unsettling questions. For them, it’s a game-changer. A step too far. For them, humans were “created in God’s image”, so they can’t possibly have evolved from ancestors shared by the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans of today… as well as the Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. floresiensis (aka “Hobbit Man”), and many other Homo species of the past.

So we need to carefully pull together the various threads from the last four weeks. We’ve learned that:

The evidence for the biological, cognitive, behavioral … and religious … evolution of humans is undeniable! The question is: what should Christian believers do about that?

Does this naturalistic explanation for the origin of religion invalidate a religious belief? Three of the four scholars we talked to are committed Christians themselves: they do research in these areas because they see themselves exploring the human-Divine relationship. Who’s to say that this evolutionary journey wasn’t divinely inspired? That our tendency for promiscuous teleology got us looking for the Divine, and the hypersensitive agency detection system helped us find the Divine.

Does this scientific view of human evolution impact our “traditional Christian worldview”? Of course it does! I can no longer see the arc of the human story as a downward one: that we started in perfection, and with an intimate relationship with the Divine, but then fell downward from both. Instead, I see the arc as an upward one: humans climbing up towards that perfection and that relationship with the Divine through a divinely inspired search. And we’re still climbing!

As always, tell me what you think …

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Hypersensitive agency detection and promiscuous teleology in human brains make a powerful religion-making machine

Millions of years of evolution have produced a powerful neural reflex within animals: we immediately assume there’s a being behind every rustling in the grass. We see faces in puffy clouds and random patterns on the ground. If we hear a sound in a dark room, we cautiously ask: “who‘s there?” Some refer to this reflex as a hypersensitive agency detector. Is this reflex behind humanity’s tendency to find divine beings all around us: gods in nature … demons causing bizarre psychological or medical problems … dead relatives materializing in the corner of our bedroom … anthropomorphizing our pets?

We humans also have a tendency to identify meaning and purpose behind events and phenomena. Accidents and diseases are a punishment for some transgression. People suffering a misfortune claim to “have bad karma” and ask questions like: “why did this happen to me?” … as if there’s a reasonable answer to that. Mushrooms growing in a circular pattern are called a “fairy ring”. We see something unusual and we quickly come up with a story to explain it, including who did it and why. This cognitive tendency has been referred to as “promiscuous teleology”.

Put these two ingredients together, and you have a very powerful religion-making machine. It explains why humans all around the globe, all through recorded history, and from every demographic slice of the pie, all have different religions.

Is this natural built-in mechanism out of control in people who are hyperreligious … superstitious … worried about demon-possession?

Is this natural built-in mechanism broken in people who call themselves atheists?

Does this naturalistic explanation for religion de-legitimize religious belief?

Or were we designed with this built-in mechanism to help us find the Divine? Could God have used these to make agape-capable being in the same way he used the Big Bang … thermodynamics … quantum physics …. stellar, chemical and biological evolution … cognitive development?

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about our guest, Dr. Justin Barrett, go to the web-page for his new professional outlet … Blueprint 1543 … as well as to a video library in which he explains a variety of aspects of cognitive anthropology.

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Signs of symbolism, abstract thinking, compassion, and even a religious streak becoming visible in hominids hundreds of thousands of years ago.

We talked to Dr. Marc Kissel (PhD, Anthropology) about his work looking at the evolution of higher cognitive functions in ancient hominids — our ancestors  — hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were a lot smarter than many modern people give them credit for:

Envisioning the transformation of a rock into an arrowhead … a pile of logs into a fire … birch bark into glue … requires forethought, planning, abstract thinking, and intelligence. And they passed on the details of their technology to their descendants … and to surrounding tribes. This not only takes intelligence and memory, but probably also some kind of language.

And then there are other signs of advanced cognitive thinking that could be the earliest seeds of something even more surprising, and quite controversial:

Language, abstract thinking, symbolism, a belief in the afterlife, and music are all key ingredients in all major religions around the world today. Could these ancient hominids have been forming a religious streak deep within them … flexing a religious muscle in their brains … for hundreds of thousands of years before we modern humans descended from them and cultivated those religious buds into full bloom?

Marc also told us about his work looking at how ancient hominids were exceptionally compassionate and peace-loving, quite different from the aggressive, murderous brutes that we tend to make them out to be. They took care of their wounded, and of members who were too old to take care of themselves. They worked together, collaborated, and built societies together.

Is all this starting to sound like the imminent arrival of the agape-capable beings we’ve been talking so much about?

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Marc Kissel, visit his faculty web-page or his personal web-page.

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Evolution produces organisms who find more and more ways to work with each other to survive: the origin of the agape love we’ve been talking about?

As soon as life appeared on earth roughly four billion years ago, its survival was driven by two opposing forces.

One was entirely self-oriented, and commanded things like:

The second force was other-oriented. It found strategic value in cooperating, and promoted very different outcomes:

These two forces were operating long before living organisms developed a level of self-awareness that we would call consciousness, and continued as those life forms progressed into higher and higher cognitive levels.

Dr. Jeffrey Schloss will talk about how these two subliminal driving forces rose to the conscious level in our emerging agape-capable beings … the newest branch on the evolutionary tree of life … hominids. We’ll also look at hominids as inherently teleologists (we see a purpose in/for everything) with a twitchy agency detection (we sense beings lurking everywhere) and pattern recognition (we connect dots that aren’t there).

More importantly, we’ll see how those characteristics, together with some powerful cognitive abilities (language; memory; abstract thinking and symbolism), helped us hominids begin to develop a religious streak.

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Jeffrey Schloss, go to his webpages at Westmont or at Biologos or at the Faraday Institute.

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