"Something Big Must Have Happened"

[Thackerie]

In the Style section of today’s Washington Post, there’s an interesting article about Bart Ehrman, the author of Misquoting Jesus. The article, which describes him as “the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether,” is online at

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...369.html?sub=AR

 

It includes a brief quote from a faculty member of the Dallas Theological Seminary who offers this as a counter argument: “Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after Christ died that is very hard to explain away. There was no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from? How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful religion?”

 

I’ve heard this “something big must have happened” argument before, mainly from more moderate Christians who are willing to admit that the bible is less than 100 percent literally accurate but who still cling to their belief in Jesus’s divinity. They claim that the rapid rise of Christianity as a major religion cannot be explained in the absence of something miraculous having happened on that first Easter.

 

Personally, I’m not so sure that Christianity did rise all that rapidly, and I question why there are no contemporaneous accounts of a dead man coming back to life. (Seems like it would have been big news throughout the entire known world!) I’m also not sure that there was no previous resurrection mythology for the inventors of Christianity to draw upon.

 

I would like to know what other ex-christians make of the “something big must have happened” theory and, especially, if you can point me toward any particularly good books on this subject. Thank you!

[pandora]

Oh yeah... this is a fun one to comtemplate.

 

I can answer your question on two levels. Politcally and socially, the reason why Christianity got so big in numbers was because of Constantine. He made Christianity the religion of the entire Roman empire. He also integrated some portions of the pagan religion into Christianity.

 

On the other hand, at the more immediate time of immediately after the supposed Resurrection, the answer is a little harder to find. I imagine that for one, these "fisherman" were aware of other religoins at the time. Contrary to what that guy says, raising from the dead was beieved to be possible and was believed to have happened with various people throughout history. So yes, I agree with you on this point. Plus, even if the discples existed and the account in the gospels is close to truth, it could very well be that they had a group hallucination... that they were so emotionally distraught that they started seeing things. I don't think it happened the way the gospels tell it. Making new religions was en vogue those days... a few of them probably just sat down and said, "What is the meaning of all this?" and then they made up some shit that had meaning to them, but got lost somewhere along the way and then a bunch of hippies from their time decided it was a cool outlook on life and decided to follow it too. I mean, look at all the crazy religions people make up today, and all the gullible people that follow them because they want to be different and separate themselves from the average person and normal society. People like to feel special.

 

Plus, if one uses this kind of argument to prove Christianity, one must say the same about Buddhism and Islam and any other religoin that is centered around a particular figure. "Something must have happened." The Buddha's followers were converted just be hearing the Buddha speak the Dharma, according to Buddhist scripture.... so what happened? Why are there so many Buddhist monks and nuns today? Why does Buddhist doctrine still speak to so many people, including westerners? It is as universal as Christianity.

 

My short answer is that people are nuts. People look for meaning where there is none. People are gullible. People want something to run their lives. That is why we have religion.

[cathuria]

1) Ehrman, I'm sure, doesn't buy into that argument because he's intimately familiar with the first centuries of Xianity's growth and he knows what went into the writing of the biblical documents. These show beyond any doubt that nothing big happened at all.

 

Pandora's right... a scheming emperor is the real "reason for the season".

 

2) the whole "something big" argument is just irrational; it is nothing more than mental delf-defense for liberal Christians.

[Mythra]

This "something big must have happened" theory relies on a faulty version of history.

 

It says that Jesus rose from the dead, was witnessed by hundreds of people, then the Holy Spirit came and empowered the disciples, and Christianity exploded with a single voice. This is the version as presented in the fourth century by Eusebius, who had a vested interest to present his version of Christianity as the official one. Eusebius is the one who established Tertullian, Martyr, Origen and Irenaeus as the early church fathers. And of course, it took the backing of Emporer Constantine to make sure that all other versions of the story became heretical.

 

Nothing could be further from the truth. It took literally hundreds of years of sifting through various ideas and writings to finally come to the point where a dominant theology won out over all of the others. Just read Irenaeus' "Against Heresies" and you'll see just how many other concepts were out there concerning Jesus. You've got the Montanists, the Valentinian Gnostics, the Basilides group in Egypt, Marcion, the Carpocratians, the Nassenians, and many others.

 

No one has ever been able to prove definitively whether the Gnostic Christians were an offshoot of the Historicizers, or whether it was the other way around. And, according to many of these groups' concepts, Jesus was never actually a human being.

 

It took a lot of heads getting lopped off before an Orthodox Christian position was finally honed down in the fourth through the sixth century.

 

A great, unbiased source is "A History of Christianity" by Paul Johnson.

[Lycorth]

Yes, Constantine is for the most part that "something" that happened to lead to Xianity's big rise. Other factors play a part, too, and without which I don't think the cult would've gotten the control it did, at least not right off. As has been said, creating new religions was more in style then than now, often it was socially advantageous to convert to the new religion if your rulers do the same - and especially when they physically enforce this conversion, and for some the grass may have seemed greener on the other side of the Xian fence.

 

There's no one single reason Xianity grew to such strength as it did, but one thing we can be sure of - it didn't grow because of Jesus! As has also been said, everyone else could claim the same about their religion also. The only thing that happened and is common to all religions is that someone made it up and someone else liked it enough to buy into it.

[Mythra]

As has been said, creating new religions was more in style then than now,

 

Of course, we still have new religions being started. Look at Mormonism. Less than 200 years have gone by since a 14 year old boy named Joseph Smith started it off with golden plates and his chats with angelic beings. It has had a much more explosive beginning than christianity did. Close to 20 million members now.

 

And, no one witnessed Joseph Smith rising from the dead and flying up to heaven.

 

Once a ball gets rolling, people will fall for anything.

[Mythra]

Hey Thackerie - thanks for that link. Good article. Ehrman would fit right in here, for sure. Looks like I gotta buy another book, too.

[thunderbolt]

Of course, we still have new religions being started. Look at Mormonism. Less than 200 years have gone by since a 14 year old boy named Joseph Smith started it off with golden plates and his chats with angelic beings. It has had a much more explosive beginning than christianity did. Close to 20 million members now.

Exactly.

 

How quickly a cult can spread has a lot to do with the socio politics of a region. Given the right mixture and circumstances, it can spread very quickly. As is the case with Falun Gong who only started about ten years ago in China and already have millions of followers. When people are desperate enough to escape the oppression of their environment, then almost any message that sounds good will do, take root and take off. Christianity was just that for the time.

 

I read Misquoting Jesus, and it was honestly a great read, and I like people who “teach” instead of spout of their opinions. Ehrman is a teacher.

[Alexandrian]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6030401369.html

 

It's nice to see an Ex-Christian get a nice big article in a major newspaper such as the Post. Maybe if people can see a bonafide ex-fundamentalist preacher who turned agnostic after examining the evidence, it'll lead them to question their faith too.

 

 

 

Topics merged. -Reach

[Gnosis of Disbelief]

That was a good article, thanks for the link! I actually purchased Ehrman's

book a couple of weeks ago, but haven't had time to crack it open. I think

I just may pop this to the top of my reading stack.

 

Incidentally, I do love this quote from the fundy at Dallas Theological

Seminary (appearing in the article just after the "something big must

have happened" quote above):

 

 

"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."

 

Ummm, well, I dunno, what exactly are we supposed to ask the

supposed word of God to do? Tell the truth, the whole truth, and

nothing but the truth, maybe?

 

[pandora]

I think we have another thread on this article... a particular part of it, at least... http://www.ex-christian.net/index.php?showtopic=7458&hl=

[Mythra]

Thanks for posting that Alexandrian. And welcome to Ex-C.

 

There is another thread just started with this link, too. Shows you what a great article it is.

 

Doubt if fundies will like it much, though.

 

Maybe Bill O-Really will slam the Washington Post for running it.

[Mythra]

Actually, it is quite true that Christianity experienced an explosion of growth. What is completely groundless is that it was due to people seeing a resurrected Jesus. This explosive growth occurred 300 years after the time when "jesus" died by cruci-fiction.

 

From Center of Theological Inquiry:

 

At the beginning of the third century Christians numbered less than one percent of the population of the Roman Empire of some 60,000,000. By 300 there may have been 6,000,000 Christians in the Empire, but by mid century the numbers had risen to over 30,000,000, that is fifty percent of the population. This rapid growth, the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity, his vigorous program of building churches, changed public practice. Significantly the Christian calendar became a civic calendar. In 321 Constantine made Sunday a public holiday. It is shallow and petulant to rail against the political aspects of Constantinianism while ignoring the efforts of Christians of ancient times to stamp the face of Christ on the mores of society, in the ordering of time, in architecture, and law (e.g. prohibition of the exposure of infants, an ancient form of birth control). The purpose of making Sunday into a holy day was to provide time for Christians to attend public worship, but it had the secondary effect of making Sunday a day of leisure, thereby laying the groundwork for a Christian Sabbath.

[Ouroboros]

Since Islam had a rapid and strong growth too, and is the second largest religion in the world, it must have been something big that happened, like Mohammed actuall met an angel from God.

 

Arguments "by majority" is ridiculous, because people only look at one part of the formula, and skip the parts that don't fit. Excluding unwanted data, and only filter to see data that support their ideas. Other events have caused great and rapid growth. The Internet Stock boom for instance, the so called "new economy", which was nothing but ignorance and ballooned investments. But 99.999% of Americans believed it. So was it true? No. It was the stupidity of the masses following the latest fad. As humans we are extremely guillable.

 

By the way, could we as an opposite then say, that since Judaism is NOT as big as Christianity, then something big did NOT happen with Moses, Joshua etc? Moses never met God, because Judaism is not as "great" as a religion! What would that mean to Christianity?

 

*sigh* People are getting dumber by the minute in the world.

[Toxic]

In the Style section of today’s Washington Post, there’s an interesting article about Bart Ehrman, the author of Misquoting Jesus. The article, which describes him as “the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether,” is online at

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...369.html?sub=AR

 

It includes a brief quote from a faculty member of the Dallas Theological Seminary who offers this as a counter argument: “Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after Christ died that is very hard to explain away. There was no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from? How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful religion?”

 

I’ve heard this “something big must have happened” argument before, mainly from more moderate Christians who are willing to admit that the bible is less than 100 percent literally accurate but who still cling to their belief in Jesus’s divinity. They claim that the rapid rise of Christianity as a major religion cannot be explained in the absence of something miraculous having happened on that first Easter.

 

This is what some members of my family who don't interpret the Bible absolutely literally say to me. The argument I've heard is something like: "it must have some truth in it or else how did it become the world's biggest religion?" To which I reply that at one point a third of the World's countries were Communist, this must mean that there is truth in Marxist-Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism-Pol Potism as well.....

[spamandham]

HanSolo hit the nail on the head. Arguments from popularity are fallacious, even when they are true. How many Scientologists are there today in the US? Is that proof of 'something big', or simply of 'a bunch of suckers'?

[RHEMtron]

here is an apologists review of ehrman's book.

 

bible.org Review of Misquoting Jesus

 

i bet the criteria, logic, and reasoning that's used to criticize misquoting jesus and other fundie-hurting books, isnt used on christian books and on what else... the bible.

 

this guy just sounds retarded. whatchall think?

[quicksand]

I would like to know what other ex-christians make of the “something big must have happened” theory and, especially, if you can point me toward any particularly good books on this subject. Thank you!

 

Check out The Closing of the Western Mind : The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, by Charles Freeman. Freeman's anaylsis is wide in scope - tracing the development of the tradition of Greek reason, its subsequent incorporation into Christianity (that is, not only was Greek religion absorbed by Xianity - resurrecting godmen, but Pagan philosophy as well) and the theological struggle between rival camps of Christians it took to establish the dogmas through the Middle Ages to our day and the role of Imperial Roman decree to settle those theological disputes. (Namely, the trinity... which the incoherence of the doctrine is ignored to this day and where faith invoked as the cure-all.)

 

Freeman does presents a brief life of Jesus, however, he does leave out all the extrodianry claims and reminds the reader that Jesus was Jewish. Might help you gain some perspective on it.

 

 

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

Stunning.