The Case of the Four Gospels, Part II: Undesigned Coincidences

How the gospels accidentally fit together

This week, Jordan Peterson released an extended conversation with young atheist Alex O’Connor on Christianity, skepticism, and what it means to “believe Christianity is true.” Alex came with the goal of forcing Peterson to sharpen and clarify his answers to various nagging questions Peterson’s fielded from Christians over the years (typically deflecting them, with various degrees of patience). Personally, I think it’s been clear for a while roughly where Peterson sits here, but Alex did a very good job blowing away any lingering fog. Blowing away fog has become a specialty for Alex as his profile rises, a skill I appreciate very much even if I don’t find his own conclusions compelling. He's similar to the New Atheists, but subtler and better able to grasp opposing views, which makes him a more genial conversation partner in the age of “dialogue versus debate.”

It’s a long and leisurely chat, with some tangents and sagging in the middle (I might have nodded off during an interminable tangent on the Gnostic Creation Myth), but I think the first and last thirds were especially helpful. Essentially, what emerges is that Peterson is—and always has been—utterly convinced that it’s impossible to “extract the historical Jesus” from the text of the gospels, where “the historical and the mythological” are inextricably intertwined. Christians irritate him by asking whether Jesus “really” rose from the dead, because he believes the question reveals an impoverished “modernist Enlightenment” metaphysic, which he even provocatively calls “non-Christian.” The entire attempt to drill down on physical, historical particulars is, in his mind, analogous to putting one’s nose up to an essay and analyzing the loops and swoops of the handwriting, in lieu of analyzing what they mean. The same goes for questions about the Old Testament, like “Did the Exodus really happen? Did the Jews really walk through the Egyptian desert?” “Well,” Peterson likes to say, “They’re still walking through it.” Who cares if you would have recorded them making their trek if you took a Panasonic camera back in time? That’s not the interesting question.

Very nice, Alex says, but if Peterson wants to interact with true believers in good faith, then he should recognize when they’re just asking a “rather banal” historical question and give a simple yes, no, or most likely I don’t know reply. Oh, but they “don’t get to do that,” Peterson answers, because these things aren’t “banal.” In one sense, this is true, but in another sense, this seems to miss Alex’s point, much like the way he sort of missed Sam Harris's point when they had their more aggressive dialogues six years ago. And as for all the stuff about how being fussy over historical particulars is a “modernist” invention, that's…well, I'll be polite and just say it's completely wrong. Whenever I hear a scholar talk solemnly about not imposing a “modernist Enlightenment view” on the Bible, the odds are good that he's not taking his own advice, sort of like how people who complain about “deism” tend to be incorrigible deists. Let ancient people speak for themselves.

There’s an especially funny moment where Jordan and Alex are discussing the historicity of Cain and Abel, which moves into a discussion of the Columbine high school shooting (a case study going all the way back to Peterson’s first book). The shooting was an event that took place at one particular moment in time, but you could also see it as an event with timeless significance—as Peterson puts it, “the continuation, a sort of a punctuation, in the long paragraph of the cosmic drama that is our human existence.” Once again, Alex doesn’t disagree. But suppose that Peterson had been an eyewitness of the crime, and suppose there had been a manhunt for the killer, and the police had approached him for a statement. “Dr. Peterson,” we imagine them asking, “what happened?” And if at this point Dr. Peterson says, “Well, I think what happened was the continuation, a sort of a punctuation, in the long paragraph of the cosmic drama…” Alex proposes that the police are not going to be thrilled.

Speaking for himself, Alex repeats here what he’s said elsewhere—that he does think these questions matter very much, and unlike the New Atheists, he even wishes that something like the Christian answer was true. He simply doesn’t think it is. And unlike Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he can’t make the mental move that allows him to “choose to believe,” even after reading all the right books, making all the right friends, and doing all the things one is supposed to do while waiting for a conversion experience to happen. So here he sits, perfectly understanding the stakes, but as unbelieving as ever. I've already written a bit on Alex's comments about divine hiddenness, so I won't dwell on that here, because as you'll see, this isn't really about Alex.

This past Easter, I teased a series where I would assemble some of the reasons I think the gospel texts are still, in fact, best explained by the hypothesis that Christianity is actually true. Then, of course, I failed to follow up after my first entry, where I bluntly surveyed the state of traditional Christian apologetics and gave a less than positive report. I think now is a good time to circle back. This post will mark the beginning of my attempt to pick up where I left off. I hope it’s of interest for Christian and skeptical readers alike. This is where the free preview ends and the paid part begins, because I want to give paying supporters their money’s worth. But if you’d like to read on, please consider supporting my work! This is how I pay the bills, and it wouldn’t be possible without you.