Jesus Hypotheses: The Beginning
Today I'm going to begin a series of short posts I hope to finish by the end of this week. Each post will examine one of the hypotheses advanced to explain the activity of Jesus in the New Testament and rate each for likelihood. My hope is that I'll say something interesting to you, my valued readers, but I'm also doing this in an attempt to work through my own thoughts on the issue. Once they're all done, I'll probably wrap it all up with a conclusion with my final thoughts.
Today, because I don't have much time, I'm going to begin with perhaps the most common explanation among most of the world's religious: the New Testament is an accurate historical portrayal of a real man named Jesus of Nazareth, who is the son of God and who literally performed all of the miracles attributed to him, died on a cross, and rose again from the dead.
I think it goes without saying that I find this particular Jesus hypothesis to be...somewhat wanting. The idea that the New Testament is an accurate historical portrayal of anything is thrown into immediate concern by the discrepancies between the various gospels. Did Jesus ride an ass into Jerusalem, or was it a colt? Did he baptize anyone, or didn't he? What was his exact lineage from David? Who went to the tomb, and what exactly did they find there?
If we were looking at real history, these complications would not be such an issue. We would simply accept that none of the records were fully accurate and attempt to come up with the most likely story. We would recognize that stories change down the years and two millennia later it's hard to know what exactly is the truth, especially without strictly contemporary records.
Christians that advance this hypothesis, however, do not do that; they simply say the Bible is literally true, full stop. These contradictions are hand-waved or ad hocked away, and the writers of the gospels are assumed without proof to have been contemporaries of Jesus, when historians and biblical scholars all know this to be patently false. These stories were not taken down until, at the earliest, at least twenty years after Jesus' purported death.
It is also important to note that real contemporary sources do not corroborate the tales told in the New Testament. The Bible, then, lives in an evangelical vacuum, and its stories, with no objective history to back them up, are questionable at best.
But what about the miracles? Well, Hume's maxim must be applied. What is more miraculous: that the stories were mistaken, embellished, or wholly made-up, or that there was a man who could heal the blind and raise people from the dead? Clearly, any of the former, and probably more besides, are far more likely than the latter.
We have no evidence whatsoever outside the Bible that any such things happened anywhere; you would think that a dead man walking would be big news to some Roman scholar somewhere, but apparently not. More importantly (to me, at least), is that we have no evidence that anything like the miracles described in the Bible can happen at all. They fail not only the all-important evidential test, but they don't even have prior plausibility. There is no reason to suppose that it is even possible to use the laying-on of hands to cure disease or blindness or what have you, and plenty of evidence (see Emily Rosa's study on healing touch) to suppose that it is not possible.
If all Jesus did was walk around preaching, I'd be hard-pressed to question that; it requires no extraordinary evidence to believe that an itinerant preacher existed in Judea about 2000 years ago. To believe that he performed such miracles as walking on water and curing the sick with just his hands? That's something different.
Rising from the dead after almost two days in a tomb, post-crucifixion with a nasty spear-wound in his side? That's something even more different.
And, finally, what about that "Son of God" bit? Well, God has the same problem as miracles: we have no evidence for his existence and no evidence that it is even possible for such a being to exist. To ask me to accept Jesus as the Son of God presupposes a deity, and a rather specific deity at that, and I don't accept the deity-claim, so I cannot therefore accept that Jesus was the son of said deity. With this also goes his ascension into heaven to sit in glory at the right hand of the Father, where His Kingdom will have no end.
In short, this hypothesis can be rejected on the grounds that the Bible is not an accurate historical document, and in fact is internally inconsistent on many facts; it can be rejected on the grounds that miracles do not and probably cannot occur; and it can be rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence for a God in the first place, therefore the claims of godhead made for Jesus of Nazareth are without basis in reality and can be dismissed. To accept this claim, one must make a bevy of untenable assumptions and ignore volumes of good, hard, real evidence, historical and scientific.
Final Summation: Though nothing can be said to be absolutely impossible, this hypothesis has such a small probability of being true that it can be considered functionally 0%.
More to come...
