It’s been quiet around here. Thank you all for your patience. I’ve just spent two weeks participating in a couple of intensive seminars in Cambridge, MA, courtesy of the Abigail Adams Institute. I’d optimistically hoped to put something out while I was there, but time and energy were in short supply. My personal highlight was getting to meet the great and powerful Mary Harrington in the flesh. I don’t always agree with Mary, but I find her social criticism endlessly interesting and vital in an age where we’ve forgotten what it means to be human. (Buy her book Feminism Against Progress here.)
Now that I’ve come back down to earth, I’m happy to assure everyone that I have a number of pieces percolating, including some thoughts I’ve been wanting to jot down for a while on artificial intelligence and intelligent design. But they need some more time in the oven, so I’m going to ease back into things with a subscriber-exclusive piece picking up my leisurely series on the four gospels. I hope you enjoy. As always, if you’re paying to read this, heartfelt thanks for your support. I don’t take it for granted. Some free content is also in the works for those of you who don’t feel like helping me pay rent. (I jest. You’re great too.)
As a refresher, my first entry in this series (not paywalled) sketched out some academic frustrations with the Christian side of the Christian-atheist debate. I yield to none in my criticisms of New Atheism, but Christians are no less prone to uncritically elevating celebrities, shutting down inconvenient criticism, and recycling bad scholarship. Christian apologetics is a cottage industry unto itself, capable of being every bit as clubby (and sloppy) as the cottage industry of atheist apologetics. Of course, I still think there’s a place for Christian apologetics, otherwise I wouldn’t write things like this. I just tend to think it’s best unfolded in contexts where the power of the cumulative case can be appreciated. So, not two-hour debates. (I tried to watch some of this new one between Alex O’Connor and Dinesh D’Souza. I’m not Catholic, but I’d count it as penance if I were.)
Since I didn’t want this little corner to become a one-stop apologetics shop, I decided to focus just on the reliability of the four gospels. I say “just,” but it’s a vast topic, fraught with confusion and poor arguments on both sides. My simple contention is that the gospels are pieces of fairly unadorned reportage by Jewish writers who knew whereof they spoke, whether because they were themselves eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life (likely Matthew, John) or spoke with eyewitnesses (Mark, Luke). This is not a popular hypothesis, and it’s commonly accepted that even conservative scholars who value their academic integrity will inevitably drift away from it. Which is a shame, because I think it’s true.
C. S. Lewis famously proposed a “trilemma” for people trying to decide who Jesus was: Either he was a liar, or he was a lunatic, or he was telling the truth. The one thing he couldn’t be was sincerely mistaken. But this presupposed that the gospels preserved a reasonably accurate record of what Jesus did and said. Lewis sketched his intuition that they did, though he never fleshed it out in rigorous detail, because he wasn’t a biblical scholar per se. But plenty of others have put in that work, and it’s on that work that this little series draws. I’m suggesting that as we study the gospels, we will come down to a similar trilemma for the gospel writers: liars, lunatics, or truth-tellers. The one thing they couldn’t be was sincerely mistaken.
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