Formal Debate - El and Yahweh Are Separate Gods Redacted Into One

[MarkRohfrietsch]

1. Title: El and Yahweh Are Separate Gods Redacted Into One
2. Topic: The truth of Christianity is dependent on the literal historicity of the Torah.
3. BlueLightningTN will be taking the affirmative position and will post first; GratiaCorpusChristi will be taking the negative position.
4. This debate will consist of 5 alternating rounds (5 posts each, a total of 10 posts)
5. Maximum lengths of posts will be 1000 words.
6. Maximum time between posts will be one week from the time a post is approved and made visible.
7. Outside quotes will be allowed, but will be subject to the 20% rule.
8. Start date: Any time.
9. The Peanut gallery for all members to discuss this debate can be found here: Formal Debate Peanut Gallery- El and Yahweh Are Separate Gods Redacted Into One

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Obviously, this topic has evolved since your initial proposal. What I’ll try to do in this first post is focus on the topic using the title as the primary example.

So that said, I’m going to provisionally accept that El and Yahweh were originally two separate gods in the southern Canaanite pantheon of the proto-Israelites that were redacted into one, for the sake of argument. I don’t actually think that the (northern?) E document thought of the god they called El as being any different than the god that the (Judahite?) J document called Yahweh; and I think the arguments in the debate proposal thread- that El is/became a title for the Most High God rather than a separate god is his own right- is true not only for Second Temple Judaism with its redacted Torah but for later (divided kingdom or post-northern exile?) First Temple Judaism with its various documents. In other words, even if the legends that eventually went into J and E thought of those gods differently (and this may be your position, I’m not sure), J and E thought of Yahweh and El as the same god (and E is doing something with his narrative).

That said, I’m going to assume that J and E were dealing with two basically different gods that were only redacted into one during the era of Hezekiah and (first) Isaiah, just to accept the more radical position for the sake of argument.

Essentially, my position boils down to this: I believe Christianity is centered on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, and that we primarily know the identity of God by knowing God-as-revealed in the person and work of Jesus, especially his crucifixion and resurrection.

An example: The God of Christianity is not known through rational argument. The character of faith as saving faith is not established through the ontological, cosmological, or teleological arguments- although I believe all three can provide collateral verification for Christianity’s claim that there is a Being Greater Than Which None Can Be Conceived, a creator-deity of the cosmos, and a purposeful God with a plan for the cosmos. So, too, I happen to believe that there was a historical Moses (a surprising name for the ancient Hebrews to invent) who historically led a population of slaves out of Egypt and into Israel, and who catalyzed the series of social revolutions vaguely remembered in the book of Judges. But for Christianity, God is not primarily identified as the Entity/Identity that led the people of Israel out of Egypt and into Canaan under the leadership of Moses; God is primarily identitfied as the Father of the Son Jesus the Messiah who leads the people of God out of death into new life through the agency of that same Son, the historical personage of Jesus of Nazareth. (Note: This is basically the thesis of contemporary theologian Robert Jenson, echoing insights from Karl Barth.)

Let’s return to Yahweh and El by way of example. Assuming, for instance, that the El of the Torah is to be identified with the El of Ugaritic literature, and the Yahweh of the Torah is to be identified with the Yahweh that (I think) shows up in southern transjordanian epigraphy, what does this matter? The idea that various proto-Israelite and Canaanite tribes worshipped various gods- not only El and Yahweh, but also the latter’s consort Asherah- doesn’t call into question the validity of the Christ-event or its salvific significance. All it really calls into question the literal historicity of early Israelite monotheism professed by biblical characters like Moses and Joshua and Deborah and Samuel and David- although I’m not as confident that the biblical text even makes clear that these (pseudo-)historical figures were as monotheistic as Second Isaiah and the Deuteronomist. It in no way calls into question the actual truth of monotheism as a concept, or even whether the God known to us as the Father of Jesus Christ didn't guide that progressive, evolutionary process. In any case, decades of redaction, narrative, and rhetorical criticism on the texts has made clear that even the so-called historical books have particular ideological purposes that go beyond the chronological retelling of Israel’s historical. The kingship theology of 1 Sam-2 Kings (which, I take it, supports a Davidic monarchy that is unconditionally Davidic but is only successful through the fidelity of the kings toward the Deuteronomic torah “discovered” by Josiah and proclaimed by Jeremiah) is not dependent upon a literal encounter between Yahweh and David, even if the writer thought it was, so long as the sacral Israelite kingship finally participates is the establishment of the kingship of Jesus of Nazareth.

This is, in other words, a further working out of the standard Christian confession that Jesus of Nazareth was the Word of God incarnate, the definitive revelation of God to humanity, especially in his crucifixion and resurrection. The Word of/from God, speaking definitively to humanity from its very creator, does have to be historically factual, yes. I am far more invested in the historical factuality of the existence, ministry, death, and yes, resurrection and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth than I am in the events in the lives of Abraham and Moses. But Christianity operates in a sphere of personal encounter in which the continued preaching of the word- the words “Jesus is Lord” and “Jesus saves”- delivers realities to the believer that historical analysis- always in the realm of the probable and not the certain, and always subject to the vicissitudes of scholarly discussion and overturned consensuses- can never deliver. Historical reconstruction must always condition our reading of the faith, but if Christian claims to access the transcendent can be taken seriously then that cannot, ipso facto, be dependent on analysis of the immanent/phenomenal (Kant). So Christian truth cannot be established by historical analysis; but can it be overturned by it? That I’m not much more certain of, but that takes us pretty far afield from the topic under discussion.

 

[BL2KTN]

El and Yahweh Were Two Gods Redacted Into One

Before beginning, I'd like to thank Mark and GratiaCorpusChristi for the debate. If others would like, they can view my prior two debates by clicking on the links in my signature. One is to a debate called "The Bible Is Not the Inspired Word of God." A decisive debate, I demonstrated that the bible just meets no standard that could possibly cause us to think that it is inspired by the creator of the universe. The other debate, "Does Yahweh Force Male Rapists to Marry Their Voiceless Female Victims", was another win on my part, though I wish now that I had gotten into the Hebrew behind the commands we discussed (some in the peanut gallery tried to defend Yahweh through Hebrew, though after review it could be seen they didn't understand Hebrew in the least).

An Accepted Premise
So that brings us to this debate about El and Yahweh being separate gods redacted into one. And... GratiaCorpusChristi accepts that premise. That probably infuriates those who wish the opposing view to deny the obvious, but that will not be the case in this debate. Instead, Gratia will be arguing that a polytheistic Judaism is not a problem for the divinity and authenticity of Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth as a God-man savior.

So let's boil down the argument by Gratia into a bullet point list so that I can counter it. I'm doing this to help the reader, certainly not to misrepresent Gratia (that would be a disservice to all).

1) Gratia accepts that El was the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon.
2) Gratia accepts that Yahweh was a child of El in the Canaanite pantheon.
3) Gratia believes that although El and Yahweh were made into one God (Adonai) in the bible, and although this represents an evolution of Jewish religion, Yeshua (Jesus) is the thing that really matters.

The Error
Gratia, here's my question for you:

If we see that El and Yahweh were divine ripoffs of the Canaanite religion, and if Yeshua is represented as being the son (or trinity partner) of these two combined gods, then why are we to think that Yeshua might not just be a similar evolution of religion? If the text of the Hebrew Bible is a transitioning, edited, series of documents that demonstrate a religion based on opinion rather than fact, why should the New Testament be viewed any differently?

I am far more invested in the historical factuality of the existence, ministry, death, and yes, resurrection and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth than I am in the events in the lives of Abraham and Moses.

And here is a major problem for Gratia. While we would both like to know much about the factual historicity of Yeshua, the truth is we have little to base it on. We have essentially a historical reference to Josephus that gives us no details. Then we have four gospels that were canonized based on the idea of the four corners of the Earth, with nearly all the other twenty-plus gospels not just left out, but instead destroyed. The gospels that we do have are contradictory, full of demonstrably false historical events, and are not written in an authoritative or convincing time.

If you are concerned with the historical nature of Yeshua, how can you possibly think you have enough information to make an accurate description of said man?

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

I apologize for being late in getting back to you. This just got buried for a while until I realized that I hadn’t gotten back to you in a timely fashion. Moving on:

Let me begin by answering your question, Why should the New Testament be treated any differently from the Old.

I answer: It shouldn’t. Both the Old and New Testaments should be fully open to critical historical and literary analysis of just the sort that (as you think, and I tacitly agree for this debate) exposes ancient Israelite polytheism.

In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, this means that the full panoply of redaction, source, form, and tradition-historical criticism should be brought to bear on the canonical gospel texts, and that the resultant kernels of pre-gospel material should be evaluated for historical authenticity on the basis of the standard criteria of multiple attestation, double dissimilarity, embarrassment, coherence, and the nature of Jesus’ death. And anyone who has done that work- for instance, John P. Meier in A Marginal Jew, or N.T. Wright in Christian Origins and the Question of God, or James D.G. Dunn in Jesus Remembered- knows that your dismissal of the evidence in favor the general historical accuracy of the synoptic portrayal of Jesus is not warranted by the evidence. However, that’s really neither here nor there, and here’s why:

Let me draw an important distinction: There is a difference between rational arguments for the Christian faith and the personal experience of the Christian faith. Thus a person may believe in Christianity simply because her parents were Christians and raised her as a Christian, and have no rational argument for being a Christian. In that case, ‘my parents were Christian’ is not an argument for the truth-claims of Christianity, but neither is it an argument against it. That person’s experience of the Christian faith (which may be false, but may be true) is independent of their ability point to rational arguments in favor of their faith commitments.

Now, a mature Christian faith will probably search for arguments in favor of Christian truth-claims. Yet even if we were able to completely demonstrate, using controlled observation (impossible in the study of history, but I’ll allow it), that Christianity were true, that would not necessarily be the reason any particular person might hold it; indeed, many people hold many positions long before they develop any kind of rationale. Perhaps demonstrating the truth of Christianity might cause some people to believe in truth-claims of Christianity, but even then, propositional belief is emphatically not what historic Christianity (and in particular, Lutheranism) means by ‘faith.’ Belief that two thousand years ago Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead is something that, conceivably, should be provable or falsifiable by historical evaluation (and I think this has been done convincingly by Wright, Dunn, and others); however, belief that Jesus’ resurrection means he is now present to offer you the eternal benefits of his life, death, and resurrection is not at all open to historical analysis. But that present experience of forgiveness and life within the worshiping community, hearing the proclamation of the gospel, is also what well-informed mature Christians mean by faith. It is what Luther called the ‘for me’ character of faith. ‘Jesus died’ is a historical datum. ‘Jesus died for you’ is promise we believe.

What this means for the historical reliability of Scripture is twofold. First, it means that any mature Christian faith must A. recognize the epistemological distinction between the experience of faith and the knowledge of history B. recognize, conversely, how the faith of Christianity is tied up in historical events.

Point A was essentially the project of Christian existentialism, especially by theologian and critical scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann fought long and hard for the trasncendence of faith from history to the extent that only the bare historical existence of a man named Jesus from Nazareth who was crucified at some point in the first century- and that’s it- really mattered for Christian faith. Not many people were quite as radical as Bultmann, but it’s worth recognizing that I’m not pulling this out of nowhere; this is a very commonly recognized point in modern and contemporary theology.

Point B, on the other hand, is the recognition (against Bultmann) that while ‘Jesus died’ is a bare historical datum without ‘Jesus died for you,’ the latter is dependent on the truth of the former in a way that isn't true, for say, Buddhism. Buddhism isn't dependent on anything Buddha ever actually did, because his teachings may be true independent of his entire life. However, Christian faith is dependent on the idea that God the Son entered space-time reality two thousand years ago through incarnation in the womb of a Jewish village woman and accomplished something. If Jesus did not accomplish anything on the cross, and “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).

But of course, as I said, I do think the Jesus of Nazareth known through historical investigation is congruent with the Lord Jesus Christ experienced in faith.

The second upshot, following on the first, is that the historical claims that really matter in the Bible that those that have that for me character. This doesn’t mean the Bible can only be reliable when addressing the particularly existential/personal character of Christian faith (the Assyrians weren’t turned back from Jerusalem in 722 BCE ‘for me,’ but those events are historical); nor, importantly, does it mean mature Christians aware of historical-critical problems just get to fall back on historical inerrancy whenever the Bible begins addressing matters that have relevance for Christian faith (for instance, I don’t believe think Jesus said all of the ‘seven last words’ on the cross). What it does absolutely mean, however, is that it needn’t trouble me to think that the proto-Israelite hill tribes were polytheists.

 

[BL2KTN]

A Peculiar Discussion

This has become a very odd debate. What was originally a critique of Christianity's polytheistic roots became something different when the polytheism of the Hebrew Bible was accepted. Then, when the debate transformed into a discussion about the New Testament representing a continued evolution of thought from the Old Testament (rather than eternal, objective truth), that point was likewise ceded. Now GratiaCorpusChristi has planted his flag in the ground: Christianity's truth is not damaged by whether or not its origins are flawed or by whether its recordings are flawed and engineered... Christianity's truth rests solely on whether or not a 2,000 year old Jewish man existed and died for people.

This appears to me to be incredibly weak. Few scholars think that a man eventually titled "Christ" is completely imaginary. At the same time, and as I've discussed, we have very little reliable information to determine what he was like or what he did in a factually accurate manner. We have four books, chosen based on a belief in the four corners of Earth and the four winds, and all other information was destroyed as best as the ancient editors could do so. Because we know this information was selected based on human desire for Jesus to fit what they wanted (otherwise why destroy the Jewish gospels cited by early Church fathers), all we can cobble together are a few basic facts about Yeshua. Yeshua was baptized by John the baptist, he had followers, he was killed by the Romans, he was from Galilee, and he had followers after he died.

When it comes to what Yeshua actually said, what he taught, etc, it would be incredibly difficult - if not impossible - to determine such a thing. The edited, specifically chosen gospels are even themselves contradictory. Mark is generally thought to be the most accurate, but the truth is we don't know where Mark came from... we don't know who wrote it, we don't know their biases, we don't know where their information came from, and we don't have any original text.

Let's take a moment to look at a quote from your last post:

And anyone who has done that work- for instance, John P. Meier in A Marginal Jew, or N.T. Wright in Christian Origins and the Question of God, or James D.G. Dunn in Jesus Remembered- knows that your dismissal of the evidence in favor the general historical accuracy of the synoptic portrayal of Jesus is not warranted by the evidence. However, that’s really neither here nor there, and here’s why:

I'm not sure what evidence you think I am dismissing. I think it is most likely that Yeshua of Nazareth was a real person, teaching a new and radical form of Judaism, who was baptized by the more popular John the Baptist, and who was killed by the Romans. That's what I conclude based on the evidence we have left. And, as we've seen in this debate, whatever he taught came from a religion and a world view that had evolved over time... a religion which followed flawed cosmology, flawed theology, etc.

A Useless Standard

If the standard for accepting Christianity (which seems to be where GratiaCorpusChristi has shifted this debate) is in accepting that a 2,000 year old Jewish man died for us, then the standard is useless. If a 1,000 year old Jewish man died for us, is that any less impressive? What about a 3,000 year old Chinese man? Unless Yeshua was divine or connected to divinity in some way, what power is there in him dying? And as we've seen, the divinity he likely believed in was based on imaginary gods of the Canaanite religion.

Do we believe that Baal is a real god? What about Molech? Are these real divine creatures living beyond the cosmos? If not, then why should we accept Yahweh or El? And if we do not accept that Yahweh and El are real gods, then why should we accept that their supposed human son, Yeshua, had any sort of supernatural power? It would be akin to believing in Hercules' divinity while accepting Zeus as a myth.

I acknowledge that a man named Yeshua, who we know very little about, lived 2,000 years ago and died. I acknowledge that a man named Mohammad, who we know much about, lived 1,400 years ago and died. I see no reason to think that either had any connection to imaginary gods from Canaan, but I do think Yeshua was almost certainly a more moral person (it would be hard to find oneself as immoral as the murderous pedophile, Mohammad).

Do you have any information which should lend more credence to your claims about Yeshua?

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

BlueLightningTN seems to believe that the ground has shifted in the debate, and seeks to pin that on me. For my part, given that the topic is whether Christianity is dependent on the literal historicity of the Pentateuch narratives, I don’t think it’s odd that I have clarified my position by insisting that Christianity is dependent, rather, on the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. What I do find odd is that my opponent has not explained (until now, somewhat) why Christianity is dependent on the literal historicity of the Torah and his (albeit idiosyncratic) understanding of proto-Israel’s polytheistic origins. Fortunately, we seem to be getting there, but he apparently still does not understand my point.

Based on the final sentence of his first paragraph, he seems to believe I think:

Christianity's truth rests solely on whether or not a 2,000 year old Jewish man existed and died for people.

He elaborates on this by saying:

If the standard for accepting Christianity (which seems to be where GratiaCorpusChristi has shifted this debate) is in accepting that a 2,000 year old Jewish man died for us, then the standard is useless. If a 1,000 year old Jewish man died for us, is that any less impressive? What about a 3,000 year old Chinese man? Unless Yeshua was divine or connected to divinity in some way, what power is there in him dying? And as we've seen, the divinity he likely believed in was based on imaginary gods of the Canaanite religion.

I’m not sure whether my opponent is being disingenuous- implying that I find Jesus impressive simply because got himself killed and early Christians found some significance in that death for them- or if I simply haven’t been clear that the death of a

random person

isn’t at all what I’m talking about. Obviously- or at least it should have been obvious- I believe Jesus’ death has significance because Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah expected by Judaism and was in fact the Creator (known to Israel as Yahweh) coming from eternity into history in order to accomplish his purposes on creation's behalf.

Again, my belief is grounded in my present life and experience of faith- an existential encounter with the presence of the living Christ. But I do also believe that belief can be defended through historical inquiry (this dual point formed a large chunk of my last post). BLTN insists that:

...all we can cobble together are a few basic facts about Yeshua. Yeshua was baptized by John the baptist, he had followers, he was killed by the Romans, he was from Galilee, and he had followers after he died.

When it comes to what Yeshua actually said, what he taught, etc, it would be incredibly difficult - if not impossible - to determine such a thing.

These statements demonstrate that he is obviously not conversant in the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus and the scholars I cited. While he protests that he is not dismissing them out of hand, anyone who has read them knows that this bare outline sketch of Jesus is the beginning, not the sum, of knowledge about Jesus, established a quarter of the way through Dunn’s first volume, by the end of Meier’s first volume and Wright’s first volume, etc., and that Dunn spends the rest of his first volume, and Meier spends the next three volumes (with two more to come) and Wright spends the next two volumes doing exactly what BLTN says is incredible different or impossible: Determining, using the historical criteria I have already listed, with varying degrees of probability, what Jesus said and did. Their results are not always comfortable for the Christian faith, and they often require significant adjustments in the reader’s theology, but they just as well enhance and enrich personal belief as undercut it.

Of course, one confirmed traditional belief of historical Jesus research is that Jesus was a Jew who believed that he somehow had a key role in furthering the eschatologically purposes of Yahweh. What that looks like will mean different things to different Christians and different scholars, but for the purposes of this debate, it brings us, finally, to my opponent’s most salient and interesting point:

And as we've seen, the divinity he likely believed in was based on imaginary gods of the Canaanite religion.... why should we accept Yahweh or El? And if we do not accept that Yahweh and El are real gods, then why should we accept that their supposed human son, Yeshua, had any sort of supernatural power? It would be akin to believing in Hercules' divinity while accepting Zeus as a myth.

I’m pretty certain I never conceded that the ancient Israelites didn’t worship a real God. I simply conceded that their knowledge of that God came about through a historical process whereby their fallacious belief in multiple gods was gradually replaced with correct belief in a single god. The process of redaction- whether we’re talking about texts or oral legends- involves a repudiation of earlier patterns of belief, even if the external forms of those beliefs remain. If the identity of the god Yahweh or El- an identity, say, formed around a myth a primordial defeat of Leviathan- isn’t the identity of the god worshiped in late Israelite religion or in Second Temple Judaism (the God who brought Israel out of Egypt or back from exile) or of Christianity (the God who raised Jesus from the dead for the salvation of humanity), then how does the earlier source of later beliefs in any way discredit those beliefs? In mature Israelite religion, as you know, El is used as a term referring to any number of gods (as can Ba’al) and the term Elohim (Great God) refers to Yahweh. It wasn’t always the case, and these words had previous referents, but that doesn’t mean that mature Israel’s belief doesn’t reflect some truth- namely, that the creator-God of the universe has a special purpose he wants to work out through the people of Israel, and ultimately through the Messiah. Denying that the latter can be the case because the name by which later Israelites and Jews refer to their patron deity is ‘Yahweh’ is a historical form of the etymological or diachronic fallacy.

 

[BL2KTN]

A Belief Hanging By a Thread

GratiaCorpusChristi (GCC) has arrived at some key points for why he feels that a 2,000 year old Jewish man's death is significant in his life... and validating for Christianity's authenticity. Of course, this is prefaced with the understanding that the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is a highly edited, redacted, evolved grouping of texts representing a flawed religion's changes over time. It is in this backdrop that we arrive at "the Messiah."

So why does GCC think that a 2,000 year old Jewish man is a god-man? Why is he the messiah/messenger?

Again, my belief is grounded in my present life and experience of faith- an existential encounter with the presence of the living Christ. But I do also believe that belief can be defended through historical inquiry (this dual point formed a large chunk of my last post).

GCC's first reason for his belief is that it comes from him experiences. And the experience that he specifically references is "an existential encounter with the presence of the living Christ." Now GCC isn't saying that he physically speaks with and meets with a 2,000 year old Jewish man... no, what he means is that he "encounters" this fellow inside his mind. Let's take that for a moment and compare it to how a Christian might think if it weren't specifically Jesus:

A random man named Bob approaches you and tells you that he has miraculous news. A 2,000 year old Chinese man named Xi Hang has a real relationship with Bob. Xi Hang died but came back to life, and after flying above the clouds, he speaks with Bob inside Bob's mind on a daily basis.

Now, is Bob insane?

Yes. Yes, Bob is insane. Bob believes that a 2,000 year old Chinese zombie man who floated above the clouds now speaks to him in his mind only. Bob is insane.

However, GCC has been taught to believe that this argument is not completely crazy. He believes it because many people also believe it. He's not the first to think a 2,000 year old Jewish man speaks to him inside his mind, nor will he be the last. Yet the 2,000 year old Jewish man tells him nothing which could show that the voice is real. It never has and it never will. And despite thousands of people believing that they have a personal connection with this man-god, not a single time has he ever warned someone that their house was about to be hit by a tornado. Meteorologists filled the gap for the omniscient, omnipresent voice inside GCC's head who never gives us verifiable new info. And for all those who were killed by tornados before meteorology came along, the compassionate voice inside their heads apparently was away doing something at the time.

In summary, GCC cites something as credible as an imaginary friend as a reason for his beliefs. If GCC's voice inside his head would like to prove to the entire forum that it is divinely derived, it can tell him my middle name. It won't, and it won't provide him with any other novel information beyond intuition. Charlatan psychics have more power.

These statements demonstrate that he is obviously not conversant in the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus and the scholars I cited.

Reason number two from GCC is belief that the "third quest for the historical Jesus" has validated historical data showing Jesus to be the messiah. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because the reader can research all they need to know about these "quests" (basically scholarly movements) at Quest for the historical Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia .

While GCC may believe there are reasons to believe that Yeshua was the messiah based on scholarly work, he has not provided those reasons to us. Instead, he has flippantly mentioned the work without telling us what it is he finds meritorious. That said, there is one quote that you will find among more than one reference in regards to the "third quest" that GCC touts:

"The third quest has thus witnessed a fragmentation of the scholarly interpretations in which no unified picture of Jesus can be attained at all." -- The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria by Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter (Aug 30, 2002) ISBN 0664225373 page 5, and Jesus Research: An International Perspective (Princeton-Prague Symposia Series on the Historical Jesus) by James H. Charlesworth and Petr Pokorny (Sep 15, 2009) ISBN 0802863531 pages 1-2

It wasn’t always the case, and these words had previous referents, but that doesn’t mean that mature Israel’s belief doesn’t reflect some truth- namely, that the creator-God of the universe has a special purpose he wants to work out through the people of Israel, and ultimately through the Messiah. Denying that the latter can be the case because the name by which later Israelites and Jews refer to their patron deity is ‘Yahweh’ is a historical form of the etymological or diachronic fallacy.

GCC says this is his most salient point. Let's review what he's saying.

GCC believes that although the ancient Hebrew people believed in the Babylonian pantheon of gods (Ba'al, Molech, Ashterah, El, Yahweh, Yam, etc), numbering seventy gods in all, the Hebrews ended up figuring it all out in the end. It turns out that one of the seventy Iron Age gods they believed in happened to actually be the creator of the cosmos... the other sixty-nine were pretend. But on a planet that circles one of 200,000,000 stars in a galaxy of billions of galaxies, an ancient people group was contacted by the creator of the cosmos, and he happened to be the same god that was coincidentally their patron god all along! What luck!

Engraving of Yahweh:

So thankfully, the Hebrew people finally figured it out. Their version of Yahweh, the son of El, who had evolved within the Babylonian religion, and who was their patron god, was actually the creator of everything. According to GCC, this ancient god would later have a son, who was also his own dad, who would save us from a curse that never actually happened.

Is there any evidence for this? Nope. Not except for the confirmation bias happening inside one little voice saying nothing new inside his own head. And amazingly, the voice in all the other people's heads have the accents of the people it speaks to, saying conflicting things, and never providing new information either. Apparently it's descended from an Iron Age god, from a people who had a terribly flawed theology/cosmology, and which if the god had just waited a measly 2,000 years, could have helped us all out by appearing in a time with recording devices.

Funny how the miracles stopped about that time...

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

BlueLighteningTN seems to be under the impression that I hear voices in my head. Wow. Talk about assuming the worst about your opponent.

First, allow me to assure him that I do not hear the voice of Jesus in my head, or have visions of Jesus, or have ever had any other sort of auditory or visual experiences which would most often be classified as hallucinations. Of course, if Christianity is true, then it is entirely possible that a person could have audio-visual experiences without being insane, just as if Bob’s visions of Xi Hang (in BLTN’s example) do indeed provide authentic knowledge about that “2,000 year old Chinese zombie man” then he is insane if we first assume that he is incorrect. In other words, by applying this example to Christians who have such audio-visual experiences, BLTN is engaging in yet another straightforward logical fallacy: he is begging the question.

But in any case, I haven’t claimed to have any such audio-visual experiences. BLTN writes:

And the experience that he specifically references is "an existential encounter with the presence of the living Christ." Now GCC isn't saying that he physically speaks with and meets with a 2,000 year old Jewish man... no, what he means is that he "encounters" this fellow inside his mind.

I suppose I shouldn’t have used the technical philosophical language of existence without defining my terms, but I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt (more on this later). To clarify, then, when I talk about an “existential encounter with the resurrected Christ,” I mean primarily that which evangelicals describe by having a “personal relationship with Christ,” although I think their description is rather trite. It isn’t a means for validating or verifying Christianity, but it is the touchstone for a person’s faith. It means that, for the individual, Christianity is all about encounters with Christ through the receiving forgiveness in the rite of confession, the hearing of the proclamation of the good news, and partaking of communion. These are not arguments for the Christian faith, because they are nonetheless central to the person’s experience of Christian faith, because the Christian faith does not center on arguments for the Christian faith. The point here is merely that his ready assumption that Christian belief in the present reality of the living Christ encountered by all believers is primarily a mental exercise is not only wrong, nor only a misinterpretation of what I’ve said, but goes to the heart of what he doesn’t understand about this discussion (or Christianity).

Which brings me to my second point: I’m not trying to say that Christianity is a purely rational religion, or that I can validate it in this discussion, or that (in particular) the Christian’s present encounter with Christ through faith is in any way the grounds for that validation. Just as BLTN assumes that when I talk about existential experience, I’m talking about what goes on in my “mind,” so too he assumes that the core of Christianity must line up with rational arguments for it. That is, if the experience of the living Christ is central to my Christianity, then it must somehow be central to my argument for it, and that therefore I need to engage in the sort of ridiculous prophetic games he concocts in his irrelevant parody:

Yet the 2,000 year old Jewish man tells him nothing which could show that the voice is real. It never has and it never will. And despite thousands of people believing that they have a personal connection with this man-god, not a single time has he ever warned someone that their house was about to be hit by a tornado. Meteorologists filled the gap for the omniscient, omnipresent voice inside GCC's head who never gives us verifiable new info. And for all those who were killed by tornados before meteorology came along, the compassionate voice inside their heads apparently was away doing something at the time.

You’d think he hadn’t even read the second major paragraph in post #4, in which I made clear the distinction between rational arguments for Christianity and various reasons why individuals may be Christians. But I shouldn’t expect less from a deist, a worldview which brings with it the assumption that all religious claims must be purely rational. But humans, while we are rational beings, are not simply rational, and Christianity, while rational, is not reducible to rational deductions.

So third, yet another word about the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus. BLTN misattributes a quote he found on Wikipedia to the authors of The Quest for the Plausible Jesus and Jesus Research: An International Perspective, attempting to show that there is little to no consensus on how Jesus is viewed by scholars of the Third Quest. But if he actually cared to read Theissen or Charlesworth (as I have; and if he wants a graduate student of the latter to confirm this, I’ll give him a call), he would know that both books actually have a positive view of the contributions by the third quest and attempt to contribute to that discussion. Moreover, both quotes are discussing the third quest as a period in scholarship including everyone working in the post-Käsemann era (mid-80s onward), including members of the sensationalistic and fringe Jesus Seminary, as opposed to the discrete scholarly movement that includes those I’ve mentioned above (Dunn, Wright, Meier), as well as other Christians (Chilton, Sanders, and of course, Theissen and Charlesworth) and importantly, for the first time, Jews (Neusner, Vermes, and Flusser).

But as it so happens, I never actually claimed what BLTN says I claimed about the Third Quest: That it demonstrates Jesus was the Messiah. Indeed, Dunn attempts to show that Jesus repudiated the title of Messiah because of its militant overtones; but is that actually a problem for how Christians have traditionally (re)conceived Jesus’ peaceful Messianic role? Of course not. And that’s a good example of my overall point: New Testament scholarship, be it the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus or the New Perspective on Paul, does not trouble me as a Christian any more than the Old Testament “scholarship” to which I’ve tacitly agreed for the sake of this debate. He chides me for not going into details, but I must again emphasize: That’s not the debate we’re having. Of course, if I went into the details, he would chide me for altering the debate (as he did back in #5).

So, to the debate! And here I have to insist that we stop playing this game where we all pretend BLTN is a credible authority on the Ancient Near East. I accepted in the debate proposal that for the purposes of determining whether the historicity of the Torah mattered for Christianity that his specific example- that El and Yahweh were two gods redacted into one- could be accepted for the sake of the debate. He then expanded that to Yahweh being El’s son, which I’ve never accepted but kept silent about. Then he came up with his weird theory that the four gospels were canonized because of some parallel to the four winds, which is not at all how canonization worked but I let that slide, too. Now, finally, I’m calling him out: “Ba’al, Molech, Ashterah, El, Yahweh, Yam, etc.” are NOT Babylonian deities. Ashterah is the closest you can get, and she’s the West Semitic version of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar.

But even if I were going to accept this nonsense as a valid historical reconstruction of proto-Israelite religion, it still wouldn’t matter because if the creator-God of the universe at some point revealed himself to the Israelites in the form of their native creator-god, altered their worship of that god, changed the mythology of that god, and eventually came to his people in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, then the proto-history of Israelite religion is no more disturbing to Christian faith than Boyle's alchemy to chemistry or Newton's astrology to astrophysics.

 

[BL2KTN]

A Change in Tone
GCC seems to be a very intelligent and thoughtful person. We obviously disagree on the issue of Christianity, but I never like to see someone who is respectful and considerate become irritated in a conversation such as this. Let's try to dial it back a bit and find common ground as we end. And as we do so, I'll pretty much just be responding to GCC... I really don't have much more to contribute to the debate other than strengthening what I've already presented.

So let's begin:

Voices in My Head

BlueLighteningTN seems to be under the impression that I hear voices in my head. Wow. Talk about assuming the worst about your opponent.

The problem here is that previously GCC said he has "an existential encounter with the presence of the living Christ." So does GCC encounter the presence of the living Christ via sight? No. Does he encounter the presence of the living Christ via smell? No. Touch? No. Sound? No. So how does GCC experience an existential encounter with Yeshua???

Many Christians would say that they experience Yeshua through the Holy Spirit. They will cite a voice inside their head as being such. When GCC said that he experiences Yeshua in an existential way, I wrongly assumed that he believed the Yeshua communicated to him in some way. I apologize for erring in this way. It's easy to see why I would think that if all other senses were impossible for GCC to experience Yeshua in an existential manner, then he must be experiencing it mentally... just take a look at the statements of other Christians on this site in support of such a thing:

Jesus said that his sheep hear him because they know his voice. Presumably they learn to recognise his voice and they also learn to avoid the voices of hirelings and robbers. That is a significant thing to keep in mind.

*Note: Many more quotes were and can be found in more explicit terms of auditory experience by Christians. These have been removed by combined decision of Mark and BLTN so as not to offend.

The point here is that although GCC is offended that I should think he hears voices in his head, there are plenty of Christians on this site who think he should be hearing a voice. Such is the difficulty in figuring out how to debate Christians - there are so many different beliefs that sometimes you offend thinking you're accurately responding to a specific belief.

But all of this leaves us with one question. What the heck, then, is GCC's existential experience?

Existential?

To clarify, then, when I talk about an “existential encounter with the resurrected Christ,” I mean primarily that which evangelicals describe by having a “personal relationship with Christ,” although I think their description is rather trite. It isn’t a means for validating or verifying Christianity, but it is the touchstone for a person’s faith. It means that, for the individual, Christianity is all about encounters with Christ through the receiving forgiveness in the rite of confession, the hearing of the proclamation of the good news, and partaking of communion

And there you have it. GCC's existential encounter with the real, living Jesus Christ are as follows:

1) Asking forgiveness through confession to someone substituting for Jesus.
2) Hearing somebody who isn't Jesus tell good news.
3) Drinking wine and eating bread.

If this is a personal relationship - an existential encounter - with Yeshua, then perhaps I have a personal relationship that is an existential encounter with Frodo every time I watch Lord of the Ring.

Christianity is Irrational

But I shouldn’t expect less from a deist, a worldview which brings with it the assumption that all religious claims must be purely rational. But humans, while we are rational beings, are not simply rational, and Christianity, while rational, is not reducible to rational deductions.

First, I don't think I've ever been criticized for being rational before. Guilty as charged I suppose. Putting the word "religious" before the word "claim" doesn't somehow free the claim from requiring it be rational/logical/provable. If someone tells GCC and myself that they have a religious claim about unicorns, he'll share my viewpoint about requiring that claim be rational. In this debate about Christianity, however, it's suddenly a flaw in my thinking that I require claims be as such.

Second, GCC says that Christianity is rational, but it is not reducible to rational deductions. In other words, it's rational, but... it's not rational. Any rational claim can be examined and deduced - Christianity doesn't get a special waiver. If you ask me what color the sky is and I reply "three," I don't get to say, "my answer is rational but not reducible to rational deductions." The parts either add up or they don't. That GCC doesn't want rational deductions applied to Christianity tells you everything you need to know about this debate.

Let's Quest

BLTN misattributes a quote he found on Wikipedia to the authors of The Quest for the Plausible Jesus and Jesus Research: An International Perspective, attempting to show that there is little to no consensus on how Jesus is viewed by scholars of the Third Quest.

You are incorrect. The quote I have provided is found in the book I cited, and it is also cited from that book on the Wikipedia article.

And that’s a good example of my overall point: New Testament scholarship, be it the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus or the New Perspective on Paul, does not trouble me as a Christian any more than the Old Testament “scholarship” to which I’ve tacitly agreed for the sake of this debate.

So after GCC introduces the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus to the debate as evidence in his favor, then after providing no details for why it should be evidence in his favor (he says that's not part of the debate), and after trying to deny a quote that shows the third quest debunks his position... how does GCC conclude? Well, the third quest he originally touted doesn't trouble him as a Christian anyway. Thus when it is proof it is used and when it is disproof it is discarded. Beautiful.

Back to the Debate

GCC ends his last post by returning to the discussion about Yahweh and El being separate gods redacted into one deity. I'll respond to each of his objections quickly before ending my round four contribution with a message to the Peanut Gallery.*

And here I have to insist that we stop playing this game where we all pretend BLTN is a credible authority on the Ancient Near East.

It doesn't matter if I am a credible authority... I can cite credible authorities whenever you wish.

He then expanded that to Yahweh being El’s son, which I’ve never accepted but kept silent about.

“When ‘Elyon gave each nation its heritage,
when he divided the human race,
he assigned the boundaries of peoples
according to Isra’el’s population;
but Yahweh’s share was his own people,
Jacob his allotted heritage. -- Deu 32:8-9 (CJB w/ Adonai and Yacov written in modern English)

Here you can see that El divides up the the human race. He gives Yahweh Israel as his allotted heritage. In other words, Yahweh inherited Israel from El, and it's right there in the bible.

Then he came up with his weird theory that the four gospels were canonized because of some parallel to the four winds, which is not at all how canonization worked but I let that slide, too.

"But it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the church has been scattered throughout the world, and since the 'pillar and ground' of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life, it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing incorruption on every side, and vivifying human afresh. From this fact, it is evident that the Logos, the fashioner demiourgos of all, he that sits on the cherubim and holds all things together, when he was manifested to humanity, gave us the gospel under four forms but bound together by one spirit." -- Irenaeus, the first to canonize the bible (Against Heresies 3.11.8)

Now, finally, I’m calling him out: “Ba’al, Molech, Ashterah, El, Yahweh, Yam, etc.” are NOT Babylonian deities. Ashterah is the closest you can get, and she’s the West Semitic version of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar.

Because Babylon controlled Canaan off-and-on throughout ancient times, I sometimes refer to the Canaanite deities as being Babylonian. Technically that's true, but it isn't as specific as I should be. I concede that is more accurate to describe them as Canaanite deities. The readers can take a look at the Canaanite deities here (including Yahweh): Canaanite religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But even if I were going to accept this nonsense as a valid historical reconstruction of proto-Israelite religion, it still wouldn’t matter because if the creator-God of the universe at some point revealed himself to the Israelites in the form of their native creator-god, altered their worship of that god, changed the mythology of that god, and eventually came to his people in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, then the proto-history of Israelite religion is no more disturbing to Christian faith than Boyle's alchemy to chemistry or Newton's astrology to astrophysics.

And that sort of does it, right? No matter what evidence exists or may be discovered against the ancient Hebrew god(s), your belief is based completely on Yeshua. And though we've found out your once touted third quest for Yeshua no longer concerns you, you still have that existential encounter with the living Jesus that sustains your belief. By apologizing to someone not named Jesus, by hearing someone who isn't Jesus tell you good news, and by eating a grape-liquid and a cracker, you know that a 2,000 year old Jewish man died, floated above the clouds, and is waiting on you. It begs the question:

If no information can affect your belief, why did you want to debate information?

* This post has been jointly edited by Mark and BLTN to avoid offending Christians. Per moderator request, statements to the peanut gallery are withheld until contributors are able to post in said gallery.​

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

The topic is whether the truth of Christianity is dependent on the literal historicity of the Torah. My opponent has not shown why that is true; he has, as far as I can tell, barely made the attempt. Rather, he has reduced himself to the assertion that if El and Yahweh are two gods who were subsequently redacted into one, then Jesus cannot have been the incarnation of that God. Why past error prohibits all possibility of correction. Presumably he calls planets by their Roman names without believing in the Roman gods; how can he possibly believe in the planets? Again, how can he believe in astrophysics when Newton practiced astrology, or in chemistry when Boyle practiced alchemy?

He begins his second section with the heading “Existential?” The question mark is apropos, because he apparently does not understand existentialism as a school of thought. In existentialism (or phenomenology), there is no qualitative difference between the experience of non-existent imaginary realities (whether publicly knowable, as with Frodo, or purely subjective, like a hallucination) and objective realities (say, a fire). And because existentialism/phenmonology deals with the nature of subjective or personal experience, 1. it doesn’t have to deal with the question of the reality of the thing experienced (a significant advance in the history of philosophy following Kant’s devastating critique of metaphysical thinking), and 2. it views even realities we think of as objective as acted upon by the viewer through the categories and processes of perception (again following Kant but taking his thought in a different direction). This second point goes right to the heart of his objection that the present experience of Christ happens through hearing a human being announce the gospel to me, hearing a human being proclaim my sins forgiven, and partaking in the Christian ritual of eating bread and wine; I experience those as true interactions with Christ because I have faith in their “for me”-character. Again, not an argument. I think there are arguments, but once again, that’s not the debate we’re having as much as you want to make it into that debate. But it is that aspect of Christianity that is actually of critical importance to the faith- and one that could not be overturned simply by finding out that El and Yahweh were once separate gods redacted into one- just as a person who experiences a burn from a fire is not alleviated because another person experienced only the light of the fire and not the burn, while another explains the chemical composition of the elements being consumed, while yet another person trumpets that fire harmless because sensory-reality is an illusion.

Once again, the assumption seems to be that all claims must be rationally or empirically justified in ways that purely objective, even though there is absolutely no way to go about living in that manner. We are not Vulcans, Mentats, or androids. A person must act on probabilities; if she does not, she will ultimately find herself unable to act at all. Instead, we rely in instinct, desire, and intuition. We should always strive to be rational, and avoid instincts, desires, and intuitions that are expressly irrational. But we cannot reduce human experience to the purely rational; our beliefs should be within the bounds of rationality, but that doesn’t mean they must be reducible to the barest logically necessities. Christianity, both postmodern and premodern, is in this sense more realistic about the nature of human knowledge than Enlightenment/modernist deism. It is rational, while not being reducible to rational deduction; it is historical, while not being reduced to a historical phenomenon. It is a worldview that takes stock of the totality of human life.

What, then, you ask, could possibly count as evidence? Or, in your own words:

No matter what evidence exists or may be discovered against the ancient Hebrew god(s), your belief is based completely on Yeshua….

If no information can affect your belief, why did you want to debate information?

First of all, I deny the premise. You’ve implied that I don’t actually care about the scholarship of the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus, when I’ve expressly said I do (in fact, I brought it up, and have doubts that you’d ever heard of it before our debate), and you haven’t actually shown that the present state of scholarship closes the door to Christian belief. Although it would be difficult- painfully and personally difficult- to accept historical conclusions that demonstrated that Christ is not risen, is not God, did not rescue humanity, and cannot come to us under the forms of water and bread and wine,it must be the case, by definition, that historical investigation should be able to at least demonstrate that Jesus is not risen, did not believe he was God, did not seek to save humanity, and had no intention of regularly visiting his people under bread and wine, and that those beliefs openly contradict the intentions of the historical Jesus (proving he was not God is, of course, outside the limits of possible historical investigation and enters the realm of the philosophical). These possibilities must be the case because saying that Jesus was a real genuine person who lived in a precise time and place and engaged with his specific human culture necessarily implies that reports about Jesus is historically conditioned and therefore open to the historical process of validation and refutation.

That sort of information can affect my belief, and it has. Themes that are not usually part of Lutheranism but that are central to the Third Quest (and yes, largely agreed-upon; that specific quote really isn’t in those books- prove me otherwise with a screen capture; and what’s more, Theissen and Charlesworth are both members of the Third Quest!) - kingdom of God, inaugurated eschatology, remnant theology- have changed the shape of my theology, as they have for thousands of well-informed and historically-conscious Christians. And the conclusions of, say, John P. Meier- that Jesus did not walk on water, did not calm a storm on the Sea of Galilee, and did not declare all foods ritually clean- substantially affect my reading of those passages and their integration into the larger picture of gospel-formation and early Christian religious development. But I see nothing in the contemporary search for the historical Jesus that would cause me to doubt Christianity as a worldview (and certainly not some claim about the canonization of the gospels based on a quote that is not an argument for canonization, but is about the symmetrical beauty between the four winds and the four gospels that were already used canonically in Irenaeus' church).

How much more with the possibility that El and Yahweh were two separate gods worshiped by the Canaanites, include the proto-Israelites, whom the later Israelites redacted into one. Previous error in no way prohibits correction, even when the correction makes positive reference to the error. The later view could perhaps be counted incorrect if it were “based” on it, as BLTN has put it, but even there that’s simply not the case; Israelite monotheism is a specific repudiation of Israelite polytheism, and not only polytheism in the strict sense of having multiple gods but in the broader sense of the attendant myths of those gods. I don’t know any reasonable Christians who think that during creation Yahweh actually battled a cosmic serpent (even though there are echoes of that myth in redacted text). And even if Israelite monotheism were "based" on it Israelite polytheism (however that works), it still would no more a guarantor of falsehood than a geocentric cosmology would guarantee the falsehood of botany.

Of course, there’s also the sense in which some form of preservation also affirms elements of earlier Yahweh-and-El worship. But those elements that are affirmed (namely, the worship of Yahweh/El as a creator-god) are specifically those elements which not only Christians affirm but most people in the world affirm (the creation of the world by some sort of divine force with a moral purpose for humanity). They are no unique to proto-Israelite polytheism.

(n.b. Thank you for conceding on the terminology of Babylonian/Canaanite, but I still have to insist that the usage of Babylonian isn’t only unspecific, but entirely improper. The Canaanite pantheon was over a thousand years, and the redaction of Yahweh and El quite complete, before the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the Levant from the Assyrians c. 600, and there were only in control of the area until 539 BCE.)

Oh, and as for Deuteronomy 32:8-9, you can only really read that as describing a relationship between two separate deities if you’re assuming that they’re there, but as every Pentateuchal scholar knows (at least, Pentateuch scholars who would never be caught dead using the Complete Jewish Bible), Deuteronomy is not a redactional text and is very likely a literary composition of the seventh century, well after the redaction of J and E into a single text and specifically designed to reinforce exclusivistic monotheism (Friedman, The Bible With Sources Revealed). The text simply uses Elyon to refer to the one true God in his capacity as a cosmic creator and ruler over all nations, and Yahweh to refer to God in his specific relationship with Israel.

To sum up: I have no in any way proven- or sought to prove- that Christianity is grounded in historical fact. I have attempted to show, because you asked, that I think the New Testament should be equally open to historical investigation as the Old. And in consequence I have attempted to demonstrate, because BLTN seemed incredulous, that the contemporary quest for the historical Jesus does not undermine the experience of the Christian faith or the truthfulness of the Christian worldview. These elements took up an unusual amount of the debate, because BLTN seems practically unable to understand a Christian viewpoint that is not fundamentalist. But for the purposes of this debate, I think I have not only attempted to show, but have indeed shown- not only by rational argument, but simply by the fact that I exist as a rational being who holds both positions simultaneously- that Christianity is not dependent on the literal historicity of the Torah and can go on, and has gone on in tandem with two hundred years of historical criticism, no matter how complicated and sullied the pre-history of Israel’s gods.

 

[BL2KTN]

Is Christianity Dependent on the Historicity of the Torah?

Does it matter for Christianity that Yahweh and El were two gods redacted into one? That was the question for this debate. The debate wasn't about whether or not Yahweh and El were two separate gods - GCC accepted that from the very beginning. GCC got the first swing on the debate as well... it was his job to show that Christianity's authenticity was independent of Judaism's polytheistic roots. Let you the reader decide if he has accomplished the task. I would encourage the reader to rid herself of preconceived biases... do not root for either side, but instead only look for the truth.

GCC originally said that Christianity only depended on Christ and his resurrection. He cited his own existential experience and the academic Third Quest for the Historical Jesus as reasons to believe in Jesus despite him being a messiah for a flawed religion. When pressed for what constituted an existential experience, GCC has only this:

In existentialism (or phenomenology), there is no qualitative difference between the experience of non-existent imaginary realities (whether publicly knowable, as with Frodo, or purely subjective, like a hallucination) and objective realities (say, a fire). And because existentialism/phenmonology deals with the nature of subjective or personal experience, 1. it doesn’t have to deal with the question of the reality of the thing experienced (a significant advance in the history of philosophy following Kant’s devastating critique of metaphysical thinking), and 2. it views even realities we think of as objective as acted upon by the viewer through the categories and processes of perception (again following Kant but taking his thought in a different direction).

Thus, Jesus is as real as Frodo, Frodo as real as elves, elves as real as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson as real as Spongebob, and Spongebob as real as Jesus. No sane person actually lives this way. In order to salvage a belief in Christianity, GCC has employed a sophist argument to validate his life experiences. If you, the reader, believe that the imaginary and the real are equal in terms of reality, then perhaps GCC's argument is powerful. I suspect, however, that as you read this final post, you would find it difficult to believe Scrooge McDuck and President Obama are equally real.

So that's one of two defenses GCC gives which is out the window. The vast majority of people would agree that if GCC says an existential experience with the living Christ is a reason for believing in Christianity, that reason is much less convincing if it requires us to believe in Oz as much as we believe in New York City.

The second of GCC's defenses was that a historical Christ could be found through the academic Third Quest for the Historical Jesus. However, he provided us no reason to think that the Third Quest had given any concrete historical findings... he didn't even tell us what the findings might be. We were just told, carte blanche, "hey, this third quest thing saves Christianity from the same flaws of Judiasm." Then I presented this quote:

"The third quest has thus witnessed a fragmentation of the scholarly interpretations in which no unified picture of Jesus can be attained at all." -- The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria by Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter (Aug 30, 2002) ISBN 0664225373 page 5, and Jesus Research: An International Perspective (Princeton-Prague Symposia Series on the Historical Jesus) by James H. Charlesworth and Petr Pokorny (Sep 15, 2009) ISBN 0802863531 pages 1-2"

I gave this quote with references to two books it is found in. Here's GCC's response:

That specific quote really isn’t in those books- prove me otherwise with a screen capture; and what’s more, Theissen and Charlesworth are both members of the Third Quest!

So I provide two references for a quote, from some of the people involved in the Third Quest, which shows the Third Quest reduces Jesus to unknowable... and GCC's only response is to require that I provide him with a screen capture of the books. This is silly. The quote has two references with the exact page, it is featured on the Wikipedia article for the Third Quest, and it is congruent with other opinions about the third quest. Rather than give you a screen capture, I'll quote another piece of text from page 5 of The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria by Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter:

"In the meantime, the "Third Quest" has has sprouted numerous branches. A unified picture of Jesus has by no means been attained. The differences between the various authors are even greater than among the authors of "The New Quest."

If anybody wants to know what is basically agreed to about the historical Yeshua, here it is:

In addition to the two elements of baptism and crucifixion, scholars attribute varying levels of certainty to six other aspects of the life of Jesus, although there is no universal agreement among scholars on these items:[80]

Jesus called disciples: John P. Meier sees the calling of disciples a natural consequence of the information available about Jesus.[12][80][81] N. T. Wright accepts that there were twelve disciples, but holds that the list of their names cannot be determined with certainty. John Dominic Crossan disagrees, stating that Jesus did not call disciples and had an "open to all" egalitarian approach, imposed no hierarchy and preached to all in equal terms.[12]
Jesus caused a controversy at the Temple:[12][80][81]
Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was born between 7 and 2 BC and died 30–36 AD.[82][83][84]
Jesus lived only in Galilee and Judea:[85][86][87] Most scholars reject that there is any evidence that an adult Jesus traveled or studied outside Galilee and Judea.[88][89][90] The Talmud refers to "Jesus the Nazarene" several times and scholars such as Andreas Kostenberger and Robert Van Voorst hold that some of these references are to Jesus.[91][92] Nazareth is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospels portray it as an insignificant village, John 1:46 asking "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?"[93] Craig S. Keener states that it is rarely disputed that Jesus was from Nazareth, an obscure small village not worthy of invention.[93][94] Gerd Theissen concurs with that conclusion.[95] The Qur'an mentions "Jesus son of Mary" fourteen times, and depicts him as a distinguished prophet, though not the "Son of God", nor does it refer to Nazareth.
Jesus spoke Aramaic and that he may have also spoken Hebrew and Greek.[96][97][98][99] The languages spoken in Galilee and Judea during the 1st century include the Semitic Aramaic and Hebrew languages as well as Greek, with Aramaic being the predominant language.[96][97] Most scholars agree that during the early part of the 1st century, Aramaic was the mother tongue of virtually all women in Galilee and Judea.[100]
After his death his disciples continued, and some of his disciples were persecuted. -- Historical Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And that's it. If you want to go beyond those findings, you're just picking and choosing from opinions to form your own subjective Jesus. You want to believe in a resurrection? Fine, but you're not doing it based on any consensus from the Third Quest, nor from any historical consensus of any kind.

So there you have it. GCC says Christianity isn't dependent on the Old Testament being accurate about God because Jesus proved the authenticity of Christianity. Jesus proved it through existential encounters and through findings of The Third Quest. And, as we've seen, the existential encounters require us to believe fiction and non-fiction are the same, while The Third Quest gives us nothing new. The truth is that Christianity is dependent upon its foundations in the Old Testament, and just as the Old Testament is flawed under scrutiny, so are the gospels.

I think it is good now to review some of the critiques I have received from GCC during this debate. Ask yourself if you find these to be weaknesses in my debate, or strengths:

But I shouldn’t expect less from a deist, a worldview which brings with it the assumption that all religious claims must be purely rational. But humans, while we are rational beings, are not simply rational, and Christianity, while rational, is not reducible to rational deductions.

Once again, the assumption seems to be that all claims must be rationally or empirically justified in ways that purely objective, even though there is absolutely no way to go about living in that manner. We are not Vulcans, Mentats, or androids.

It is odd that GCC has touted academic work that tries to provide rational/empirical truth about Jesus, while at the same time criticizing me for requiring claims be backed up rationally and empirically. It is furthermore bizarre when GCC makes statements such as:

But even if I were going to accept this nonsense as a valid historical reconstruction of proto-Israelite religion, it still wouldn’t matter because if the creator-God of the universe at some point revealed himself to the Israelites in the form of their native creator-god, altered their worship of that god, changed the mythology of that god, and eventually came to his people in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, then the proto-history of Israelite religion is no more disturbing to Christian faith than Boyle's alchemy to chemistry or Newton's astrology to astrophysics.

I've quoted this from GCC, and I quote it again because of how important it is. GCC has determined that Christianity is true based on the two reasons he provided, which I've shown are utterly vacuous. Yet because he has come to an absolute conclusion, nothing can shake him from position. He comes right out and says that no evidence could matter.

Is that the case for me? No. Should it be the position of the reader? No. We should all search for the truth, using evidence to determine our stances. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. GCC's claim that despite Jesus coming from a religion with polytheistic roots and edited content, he should be believed as having died, came back to life, floated above the clouds, and lives somewhere still, requires some serious proof. Eating bread and wine and citing a scholarly movement devoid of findings is not sufficient proof.

Conclusion

Obviously Christianity can exist in the face of Judaism's polytheistic roots - GCC is proof of that. What it cannot do is exist rationally/logically. And, as we've seen in GCC's protests against my own rational/logical position, requiring Christianity explain how it operates authentically in the face of such polytheism is difficult for moderate/liberal Christians. GCC and I are actually quite alike, even if this debate has necessarily polarized us. He believes that the Old Testament was edited and redacted, as do I. He believes that the New Testament doesn't provide a realistic view of Jesus, as do I. The difference in GCC and myself is that he still needs to project unprovable attributes upon Yeshua in order to hang on to Christianity. He needs a resurrection, he needs some sort of current experience for a relationship of some kind. And I've put away such things... I no longer need to believe in that which has no evidence. My bread doesn't turn into flesh and 2,000 year old Jewish men do not float above clouds.

Jesus was a Jew. He believed in Judaism - he taught from its scriptures. Those scriptures are flawed redactions with polytheism still visible from within. In the end, if you're like GCC, you can still accept Christianity while knowing that, but it's going to require you jettison logic and reason when necessary.

Much thanks to GCC for the debate and Mark for facilitating. It was a pleasure, and GCC was a gracious sparring partner. I hope there are no hard feelings after such a vociferous dialogue. And, thank you, the reader for taking it all in. Whatever your conclusion, I'm sure you pulled in new information from both debaters, sharpening your own understandings.

 

[MarkRohfrietsch]

BlueLightningTN asked me to place an addendum; as per his request:

Although I still have major concerns about the bible, I have had a change of heart on some things. Please <know> that I believe in a loving God and finding truth wherever it is found.