Do Evangelicals Ignore Scholarship?

KEVIN HARRIS: We have an article by Tanner the Humanist called “7 Truths Christian Scholars Acknowledge, But Evangelicals Reject.”^[1] Let’s take a look at the seven truths and see if they are indeed true. And, by the way, he says the scholars to which he is referring all identify as Christians who study history, the Bible, and ancient text. Tanner is a skeptic of this.

DR. CRAIG: This whole article is something of a puzzle to me. Tanner acknowledges that the scholars he's going to cite are themselves Christian. So what's the point in showing that lay people often have beliefs which are at odds with Christian scholarship? This is precisely the sort of problem that a ministry like Reasonable Faith recognizes and seeks to rectify by educating Christian laymen. But there's just no point in bashing Christian laymen for not being familiar with scholarship. Moreover, it's very telling that Tanner opposes Christian scholars to evangelicals. “Christian scholars acknowledge these truths . . . evangelicals do not.” That's a false dichotomy since many Christian scholars are evangelicals! He seems to equate being an evangelical with being a layman which ignores that vast community of evangelical Christian scholars.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here is number one: the Bible has many errors. He writes,

One of the first things most Christian scholars will tell you is that the Bible, despite being divinely inspired, is still a product of human hands. That means it has errors — and they believe that’s totally fine. Scholars have long agreed that there are inconsistencies in the Bible — whether it’s a difference in numbers, names, or stories. These aren’t problems for people who understand the Bible as a collection of ancient texts with historical and cultural context. . . .

But don’t expect the average evangelical to be on board with this idea. For them, any mistake is proof that the Bible isn’t the inerrant Word of God, and that would shake the foundation of their entire belief system. So they continue to pretend the contradictions don’t exist or get really creative trying to explain them away.

There's the first one. It's just an assertion, but as you answer perhaps you can tell us what the proper response is when someone, maybe in a casual conversation, says bluntly, “The Bible has many errors.”

DR. CRAIG: I think that it would be true to say that the average evangelical layman has a more rigid and inflexible understanding of biblical inerrancy than do evangelical scholars. Evangelical scholars have a less wooden understanding of what it is to be inerrant than do typical lay people. This whole issue turns on what one means by “an error.” What constitutes an error? You notice that in the article Tanner doesn't define what an error is. My own view is that Scripture is truthful in whatever it teaches. 1 Timothy 3:16 is the classic text – all Scripture is inspired by God, and therefore profitable for teaching and for correction. That allows for there to be inconsistencies and factual falsehoods in Scripture so long as these are not taught by Scripture. The question here is: What does Scripture teach? To give a an illustration, take the story in the Gospels of the three-fold denial of Peter on the night of Jesus’ arrest. The Gospels tell this story in different ways. Different persons in these stories approach Peter and say, “You're one of the disciples aren't you? You were with that man." And Peter says, "No, no, I'm not." And in each one of the stories he denies Jesus three times exactly as Jesus predicted that he would. Well, now, it's extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize all of those differences and have the same three people challenge Peter and have him deny knowing Jesus. One author, Cheney was his name, wrote a book called The Life of Christ in Stereo where he tried to put the Gospel accounts together. His distinctive claim was that Peter actually denied Jesus six times! The way in which he harmonized the narratives was to say that Peter actually denied Jesus six times. Evangelical scholars responding to this said that what he's done then is to falsify the prediction of Jesus! All of the Gospels agree that Peter denied Jesus three times on the night of his betrayal, and so what Cheney did in an attempt to have this sort of wooden literality was to falsify Jesus' prediction and its fulfillment. The better way to go is to say that within the bounds of the way oral tradition works, the same story could be retold in different ways, and as long as the central point is preserved that's perfectly all right. So there can be different oral retellings of the story of Peter's betrayal so long as you get the point right that Jesus predicted the betrayal before the cock crows and that Peter did indeed deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed thereby exhibiting Jesus’ prescience over the future and Peter's pride and weakness in saying he would never fall away when in fact he had feet of clay. That would be the teaching of Scripture that I would say is perfectly truthful and inerrant, and that doesn't require the sort of wooden literality that I think many lay people believe in.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's number two: Jesus wasn't really a Western. He writes,

A major problem in evangelical Christianity is that it has often adopted a version of Jesus that looks more like a European man than someone born in the first-century Near East. This makes no sense, but it doesn’t stop evangelicals from pushing the image of a fair-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus. Most scholars, though, are quick to point out that Jesus was an ancient Near Eastern Jew, born in Palestine, and almost certainly had darker skin, black or brown hair, and looked nothing like the depictions we see in Western art.

But for evangelicals, letting go of the white Jesus would mean confronting centuries of cultural and racial biases within Christianity. Instead, they’d rather continue to push the image of a Eurocentric Christ because it fits their rhetoric better.

Personally, I haven't really noticed that this is a problem among evangelicals, but I'm not surprised he included it because everything is about race these days.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. When was the last time you saw Jesus portrayed with blonde hair? Current art about Jesus tries very hard to capture his Middle Eastern look. So this is just, I think, a spurious claim. Moreover, we can actually turn the tables on Tanner here and accuse him of a racial bias because many evangelical lay people are black! He's ignoring the black church! Is he saying that they conceive of Jesus as this blond-haired blue-eyed person? That would be absurd. So I think that this claim is without any merit.

KEVIN HARRIS: Just watch The Chosen. There's not a blonde hair in sight in that TV series.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Number three, he says the Gospels aren't eyewitness accounts.

This claim is one of those you hear so often online from evangelicals: the Gospels are firsthand, eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life. They’ll insist that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were right there with Jesus, writing down exactly what happened. Ironically, the writers of the Gospels attributed to Mark and Luke don’t even claim to be eyewitnesses.

On the other hand, scholars have long agreed that the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death by authors who probably weren’t direct witnesses to the events. They were more like second- or third-hand accounts, written to communities who were struggling to understand who Jesus was and what he meant. . . . they were more like theological interpretations written well after the fact.

Your response, Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Again, I have to ask: Do evangelical laymen really think that Luke was an eyewitness of the events of Jesus' life? Luke says in his Gospel that he interviewed those who were eyewitnesses. Again, do evangelicals think that Mark was an eyewitness of these events? Who says that? Give me some examples here. I think that most people are not under that misimpression. Now, most people probably do think that Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, and the case for John's being “the beloved disciple” is pretty strong and therefore would be an eyewitness. This case has scholarly defenders.

KEVIN HARRIS: Number four: Paul wasn't a founding father of Christianity. He writes,

It’s common in evangelical circles to see Paul as the architect of Christianity. After all, he wrote a huge chunk of the New Testament. However, most scholars will point out that Paul wasn’t the one who invented Christian theology — he was simply a missionary and theologian who interpreted the teachings of Jesus and spread them throughout the Roman Empire. Paul was a self-proclaimed and self-authorized apostle who had his own agenda and sometimes seemed to clash with the original teachings of Jesus and Jesus’ handpicked and authorized disciples.

But in the evangelical world, Paul is often put on a pedestal, as if he had a direct line to God and everything he said was gospel truth. It’s easier to align with Paul’s letters because they give more clear-cut rules and ideas. But when scholars dig deeper, they see a more complicated picture of early Christian thought.

So do we kick Paul off the pedestal there?

DR. CRAIG: This claim by Tanner really amazed me because it used to be claimed by scholars that Paul was the inventor of Christianity and that therefore Christianity is a perversion of the simple message of the historical Jesus! Tanner's point is that Paul is not the originator of the Christian message but he is passing on the Jesus tradition. And that supports the credibility of those traditions. So this point, far from being a detraction of Christianity's credibility, actually supports it – that scholars no longer think of Paul as the originator of Christianity but simply as one of the tradents of the Jesus tradition to his churches and the people he evangelized. Moreover, it is certainly not true, as Tanner says, that Paul was self-proclaimed and self-authorized. All you have to do is read Galatians 2:2-9. In this letter Paul describes his visit to Jerusalem where he met privately with the chief apostles. This is what he says,

I laid before them (but privately before those who were of repute) the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, lest somehow I should be running or had run in vain.  . . . when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised . . . and when they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised;

So Paul was very concerned, very earnest, that he was not somehow getting things wrong preaching a false Gospel but that what he was sharing was in harmony with the Gospel proclaimed by the disciples of Jesus themselves, like Cephas and John. They authorized Paul as well as Barnabas to pursue their ministry and mission to the Gentiles. So it's completely wrong to characterize Paul as self-proclaimed and self- authorized.

KEVIN HARRIS: We're up to number five: The resurrection isn't as clear-cut as they say. He writes,

Ask an evangelical about the resurrection, and chances are you’ll get a pretty straightforward answer: Jesus died, rose from the dead, and that’s the foundation of our faith. End of story. But scholars, especially those who study ancient texts and the historical context of the time, know it’s not that simple. The resurrection story in the Gospels differs across accounts . . .

The Gospels give conflicting reports about [the resurrection] . . . And then, of course, there’s the matter of whether or not the resurrection was a literal, physical event or a theological one.

Most scholars lean toward the idea that the resurrection was something experienced within the community of Jesus’ followers — whether it was a spiritual or symbolic resurrection, that’s up for debate. But for evangelicals, the resurrection has to be a literal, bodily resurrection, and any suggestion otherwise is met with fierce resistance.

I guess I'm one of those fierce resisters.

DR. CRAIG: On this score, Tanner is definitely out of touch with scholarship. Yes, it's true that the resurrection accounts differ in what they relate. Nevertheless, the vast majority of scholars hold to at least four fundamental facts concerning these narratives. Number one, that after his crucifixion Jesus’ corpse was interred in a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea. Number two,that on the first day of the week following the crucifixion that tomb was found to be empty by a group of Jesus’ female followers including Mary Magdalene. Thirdly, that thereafter various individuals and groups under a variety of circumstances and at different locales experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death. Finally, number four, that the first disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary. Those are the facts, and they are agreed upon by the wide majority of New Testament scholars. So it is simply not true, as Tanner says, that most scholars lean toward the idea that the resurrection was merely a subjective experience or a symbol.

KEVIN HARRIS: A couple more to look at. There's number six: Early Christians had diverse beliefs about Jesus. He says,

One of the hardest pills for evangelicals to swallow is the fact that early Christianity wasn’t one unified belief system and that there were many different ideas about who Jesus was, what he represented, and how salvation worked. In fact, the “official” Christian beliefs we hold today weren’t fully established until centuries after Jesus’ death. The early church was full of Gnostics, Ebionites, Marcionites, and other groups that had vastly different views about Jesus and Christianity.

Evangelicals, however, in the universe of evangelical Christianity has always been what they believe it to be: a clear, unbroken chain of beliefs handed down from the apostles.

I’ll add that evangelicals usually nuance this by claiming that the early Christians were united on the essentials of the faith but differed on side issues. Tanner the Humanist is having none of that.

DR. CRAIG: He seems to be talking about aberrant movements in early church history because he mentions Gnostics, Ebionites, Marcionites, and other groups. He's not talking about the diversity that existed within New Testament Christianity. Certainly there was diversity there. For example, between those who thought that the Gentiles when converting to Christianity had to submit to Jewish boundary markers like circumcision and law-keeping, and then those who thought that, no, you should not lay that burden of becoming Jewish on the Gentiles in order to be Christians. So, yes, there was diversity but as you said they were united in the core beliefs that are listed by Paul in the tradition that he hands on in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 where he says, "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received." And then he quotes this old tradition, “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the Twelve.” These were the core beliefs that were preached by all of the apostles and were believed in the early New Testament church.

KEVIN HARRIS: Finally, number seven: The Old Testament is not a prophecy about Jesus. He writes,

Another point that many evangelicals will fight tooth and nail over is the claim that the Old Testament “prophesies” the coming of Jesus. Scholars, however, agree that many of the so-called prophecies are actually not even about the prophesied Messiah. For example, the “prophecy” about Jesus being born in Bethlehem is really just a creative reading of Micah 5:2. It wasn’t a prediction about Jesus, but rather a message about a future king in Israel.

But for evangelicals, these “prophecies” are seen as a solid foundation for their beliefs, so they continue to push them, even though scholars can easily dismantle them.

Give us your response to that one, and let me ask: Do we need to educate ourselves on the difference between genres like prophecy and typology? I think that does trip us up sometimes.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think you're quite right. There's a difference between seeing an Old Testament passage as a prophecy of some future event and looking back in retrospect to events in the Old Testament and seeing them as types to which Christian events are similar. I think it is true that Christian laymen have a very naive view of Old Testament prophecies. Christian scholars tend to see the Old Testament as being read through Christian lenses to perceive new meanings and nuances that were not apparent in the texts themselves.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's his conclusion.

In short, Christian scholars have been honest with the history, the context, and the complexities of Christianity for a long time. They understand that the Bible isn’t a magic book full of perfect, inerrant truths. They know that the early church was messy, diverse, and conflicted. They’re okay with the idea that history is complicated and that faith is about wrestling with these complexities. Evangelicals, on the other hand, often reject this in favor of a simplistic, idealized version of Christianity that aligns with their personal beliefs.

As we conclude, Bill, I know you're a little perturbed by his allegations here. I certainly am. This whole thing is like a rant, I think. My observation is that mainstream Christians avail themselves of many of the resources that are available on these things. There are so many great study Bibles out today, for example, that deal with these seven areas. Everyone seems to have a study Bible. Of course, there's Reasonable Faith as well and the resources we have there.

DR. CRAIG: I think you are right. Tanner doesn’t seem to realize that many of the scholars are themselves evangelicals. Throughout this article he says again and again, “scholars say . . . but evangelicals believe,” and he completely ignores what evangelical scholars are saying. Evangelical scholars, I think, can rightly complain that they are tired of being ignored.^[2]