Subject: A Rejoinder to "Jesus-- God's Son"
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A Rejoinder to Josh McDowell's Evidence
That Demands a Verdict: "Jesus-- God's Son"

Robert M. Price

This chapter is typical of Evidence That Demands A Demands a
Verdict, in that it presupposes a kangaroo court. McDowell is preaching to
the converted. As generally throughout the long history of apologetics, the
arguments of the defender of the faith seem not really to be aimed at the
outsider in order to overcome his opposition to the faith. Rather, they seem
intended to shore up the vulnerable faith of those already within the camp. The
old saying that "the best defense is a good offense" applies here. The
fundamentalist reader, whose faith has either simply been inherited from a
church upbringing or embraced in a moment of emotional crisis and repentance,
gets the impression as he or she reads McDowell that there must not be much
reason for doubt if Josh, like his Old Testament namesake, is eager to carry the
battle into the enemy camp. But the battle is by no means headed there. It is
more like the Ayatollah Khomeini's use of the American hostage crisis and the
futile war against Iraq to divert the attention of his own people from the
problems of his government. Apologetics is shadow-boxing.

And this is only too evident from several factors. For one, McDowell and his
brethren everywhere employ the worst kind of special pleading, what Freud called
"kettle logic." This is the marshalling of any and every possible argument,
whether consistent with one another or not, whether cogent on their own or not.
All that matters is whether all the gums are aimed in the right direction. "I
did not break your kettle! It was all in one piece when I returned it last week!
And besides, I never borrowed your stupid kettle in the first place! So
there!"

The vast majority of the arguments McDowell uses (every one of them culled
from the works of previous writers, and by McDowell's seminary students in a
kind of research scavenger hunt) function merely as cheer-leading. By setting
them forth and "demanding a verdict" sophomore apologists are just getting all
charged up, as in a high school pep rally. That is about the only real utility
of them, as they are incapable of impressing an outsider for a minute.

It is only too apparent to anyone who has ever tried having a discussion with
an evangelical apologist that these people are able to remain oblivious to their
arguments' utter lack of cogency only because their faith has a different origin
altogether. As I have already anticipated, it is usually quite plain that the
apologist was himself never convinced by these or any other rational arguments.
More likely, he was converted at a Billy Graham Evangelistic Crusade, or a local
counterpart. He would not know what it felt like to be convinced by these
arguments. He is using them merely because they have been presented to him as a
new and effective tool for winning his friends to Christ. He approaches them in
the spirit of a gardener trying out a new weed-killer chemical.

Otherwise, how is it that apologetics coaching (e.g., Paul Little's popular
manual, Know Why You Believe) usually includes the advice to duck
difficult questions by parroting "Say, that's a good question! I'll have to ask
my pastor and get back to you. But in the meantime, wouldn't you like to get
born again anyway?" Anyone who says such a thing is signalling that his mind is
already made up and that he does not intend to let any new facts confuse
him.

When the evangelist/apologist is confuted at one point he merely switches to
another. This is not the strategy of truth-seeking dialogue or honest
intellectual inquiry. It is instead, obviously, the slimy tactic of the
spin-doctor, the party hack, the obsequious sophist who is ready, after every
election debate or losing primary election, to explain why his candidate really
won if you look at it right. Christ becomes a product one sells by hook or by
crook, with all the honesty and sincerity of a used car salesman. This is
obvious to outsiders who conclude that apologists are either scary,
propaganda-spouting fanatics or pathetic neurotics so tenaciously committed to
something they want to be true that they dare not stop to seriously consider any
opposing view.

It will come as no surprise when I confess to having pursued the apologetics
racket for some years, both as an eager reader of Inter-Varsity Press books and
as a student at a major evangelical Seminary. My experience is not at all
unusual. It is repeated again and again. Virtually every radical New Testament
scholar one meets turns out to have rejected his or her evangelical past long
ago, often after having seen through the same arguments McDowell and company
keep retreading and daring the heathen to refute. Why do all those "bigoted"
religion professors on secular campuses or liberal seminaries persist in
ignoring McDowell and his allies? Simply because they have all been there
before. They used to play on the same team McDowell coaches, only, unlike him,
they realized long ago it was an unwinnable game.

Why do so many apologists wind up dropping out, switching sides? Simply
because they (we) "made the mistake" of taking the apologetical arguments
seriously. Here's how it happens. Even if the arguments were valid, they would
still be useless so long as the would-be apologist/evangelist failed to
understand them. To be able to persuade another to see the truth in a position,
you must see (or at least think you see) the truth in it yourself. Try teaching
Calculus or Greek or hang-gliding if you yourself have not mastered it! This
means you must try to follow the arguments through, let them register on you,
give them a chance to prove their cogency to you. The perceptive
witness/apologist realizes that the nonbeliever is not going to be willing to
allow the benefit of the doubt to a lame-sounding argument. Remember, it sounds
good to the believer already, just as a new weapon sounds good to a general as
long as the defense contractor tells him it will help him win the battle. But
the apologist who takes his business seriously has to, in effect, suspend his
belief and put himself in the unbeliever's shoes in order to imagine how the
argument is going to strike him. This is the only way to judge whether it is an
argument worth using. "If I didn't already believe in Jesus, the Bible, etc.,
would I find this convincing?" Okay, so one did not first come to faith via such
arguments. But the next best thing is to imagine yourself a fair-minded
unbeliever and to see if this apologetic would sound compelling to you. Only if
it does can you convincingly relay it to a genuine unbeliever.

Forgive a sweeping statement, but many years of arguing on both sides at one
time or another have led me to conclude that there are two types of apologists.
First, there are the used car salesmen who are mere and pure opportunists. They
wouldn't know a cogent historical, philosophical, intellectual argument if it
bit them on the fanny. These people sound like what they are, and they convince
no one. They only confirm outsiders' suspicions that fundamentalism has no real
interest in the truth, only in a dogmatic party line.

Second, there are sincere apologists who, by trying to test the arguments for
themselves (rather in the spirit of Luke 14:28-31, one might add), have
unwittingly accustomed themselves to weighing arguments, not simply accepting
things on faith. Having learned to take the unbeliever's side for the sake of
argument (becoming one's own intellectual sparring partner), simple faith is no
longer as easy as it once was. Doubt becomes a familiar habit, however miserable
it makes one. Sooner or later the honest apologist winds up looking back
nostalgically to the days of childlike naivete before he got into apologetics
and apologetics made everything more complicated! He may realize the irony of
his position: he has learned strategies for promoting saving faith, "simple
faith," which however, have made it less and less possible for him to rest easy
in such faith.

Worse yet, the longer one scrutinizes the apologetical arguments, the more
one tests their merit in actual debate, the more holes one is brought inevitably
to see. And, unless one feels able to descend to a level of complete cynicism in
the interests of promoting faith (!), one simply cannot maintain one's own faith
any longer. If, as you used to tell unbelievers, they ought to believe
Christianity only insofar as it makes sense to do so, you realize the jig is up
once it no longer makes sense to you. It is too late to fall for the old saw
that "the foolishness of God is wiser than men."

This second type of apologist will sooner or later be exiting the faith. He
will have tested all things and held fast to what is good: the method of
rational thinking, weighing evidence, and being intellectually honest. By
contrast, the apologist who continues in his ministry is a man of faith, but of
what Sartre called "bad faith" (the opposite of "acting in good faith"). It will
be insincere and hypocritical faith, mere adherence to a party line. I do not
claim to have proved this. It is just the way of things as I have come to see
it. If you happen to be an apologist, you will find out for yourself sooner or
later if the shoe fits.

As we approach the specific arguments McDowell uses to "demand the verdict"
that Jesus claimed to be the divine Son of God, we will see again and again how
he not only constantly resorts to blatant logical fallacies, but also frames
arguments that could hardly make sense to anyone but a died-in-the-wool
fundamentalist and biblical inerrantist! This circularity is the result of his
reliance on the stale apologetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
when the Orthodox had mainly the Protestant Rationalists to deal with, a strange
breed who granted the inerrant accuracy of scripture but denied supernatural
causation! This was the origin of all the silly arguments over whether Jesus
"knew where the stepping stones were," or whether Mary Magdalene went to the
"wrong tomb," or how the disciples could have sneaked past the Roman guards to
steal the body. It is fairly easy to win an argument with supposed "critics" who
start by affirming the accuracy of the gospel accounts. But they're all dead!
McDowell is going to need to bring in a channeller to raise one of those ghosts
to argue with!

IA. Direct Claims

I will follow the outline of McDowell's syllabus, focussing on some points,
skipping some minor ones. This is why, though I retain his (confusing) outline
notation, I do not have all the subheadings. I will begin with the direct claims
of divine status supposedly made by Jesus.

1B. Introduction

Introducing the section, McDowell quotes a statement by Albert Wells which
drips with typical fundamentalist doting upon Jesus, as well as with the
novelistic psychologizing that besets discussions like this. "One marvels at the
way in which [Jesus] draws attention to Himself, placing himself at the center
of every situation that arises." This observation already presupposes a
Christological estimate of Jesus; otherwise, it might be evident to Wells and
McDowell that Wells is making Jesus sound like a self-promoting jerk, something
he certainly did not intend. Rather, the statement breathes "That's m'boy!"

An equally serious problem is that the comment tacitly treats the gospel
episodes as disinterested, impartial footage shot by someone on the scene, as if
Jesus had been caught debating with the scribes on the local Seven Eleven's
security camera in the motzah aisle. Again, this only seems to work if you are
already a biblical inerrantist. The rest of us might be excused for wondering
whether, at a remove of decades from the events, in accounts written to convert
people to faith in Jesus as a divine being, we are really dealing with straight
reporting. I am not saying we definitely are not dealing with accurate
reporting, just that this is really the whole point at issue and McDowell just
takes it for granted. No wonder he thinks he can demand a verdict: he has
stacked the jury box with inerrantists!

Next Thomas Schultz is invoked as rehashing the old claim that Jesus alone of
all religious prophets and founders claimed to be God. In case you hadn't
noticed, whether Jesus made any such claim is the very thing we are supposed to
be trying to decide! You can't jump the gun and wheel in his supposed divinity
claims as one of your major arguments! And the fact that McDowell does just this
makes it all too clear that the whole pretense of setting forth a cogent chain
of reasoning is just that: a pretense.

I think there is zero evidence that Jesus claimed to be divine, but suppose
he did. It is simply false to say none of the others made such claims. We can
produce a catalogue of Hindu, Sufi, and Hellenistic holy men who made such
claims, not to mention Mizra Ali Muhammad (the Bab) and Hussein Ali
(Baha'Ullah), founders of the Babi and the Baha'i Faiths respectively. My guess
is that your average apologist, thinking that it is some advantage to his case
to attribute to Jesus unique claims, will want to quibble at this point, perhaps
urging that al-Hallaj or Baha'Ullah was presupposing a rather different
God-concept than Jesus would have. For, e.g., a Pantheist or a Monist to claim
to be "God" is not precisely the same thing as a monotheistic Jew claiming to be
God. But this, too, is question-begging.

First, it is to assume that we know what God-concept Jesus held! The
apologist implicitly supposes Jesus to have been an Athanasian before
Athanasius. He must have held the same opinions on the Hypostatic Union and the
Trinity that the apologist does! Fundamentalists, even fairly sophisticated
ones, tend to have an anachronistic and essentialist view of the history of
dogma that envisions no real evolution of theology. No, the eternal verities
were once and for all delivered unto the saints, and so Jesus must have believed
it, too. Again, this is the thinking of a party-line spin doctor.

Second, it does not occur to the apologist that if a man did think himself to
be God on earth, it would no longer be so clear that he was in fact a
monotheist! Jews and Muslims certainly do not deem incarnationism compatible
with monotheism. Again, the apologist implicitly assumes a whole intricate
conglomeration of theological constructions, in this case blithely equating
trinitarianism with biblical monotheism, something that, while it might be true,
is not obvious enough to be taken for granted at a controversial point.

Notice, please, that it is supposed to make some difference that it is only
founders of "recognized," i.e., successful religions that Thomas Schultz's
argument considers, as if he is perhaps aware that some saints and gurus have
made divine claims, but that he thinks they don't count unless a lot of people
believe in them. This is the fallacy of appeal to consensus, a favorite but
utterly fallacious argument used by apologists, as when they invoke the success
of Christianity as a world religion. Truth by majority vote? They are quick
enough to brand this a fallacy, and rightly so, when it is adduced on behalf of
some rival belief.

And did Jesus manage to "convince a great portion of the world that he is
God"? Here Schultz betrays an implicit substitution of Christian devotionalism
for historical judgment. A great portion of the human race believes Jesus is God
for precisely the same reason a virtually equal percentage believes Muhammad was
the Seal of the Prophets: they were raised to think so in a culture where
virtually everyone else around them took it for granted because they, too, had
been indoctrinated with the belief. No one "convinced" most Christian believers
of the Godhood of Christ. They were simply "obedient to the faith" (Romans 1:5).
And to say that Jesus himself managed to convince, e.g., the suburban Baptist
deacon, the Italian or Polish or Spanish Catholic peasant is to smuggle into a
supposedly objective argument a doctrine of the continuing work of Christ as
personal savior by the mediation of the Holy Spirit, etc. It's not like Jesus
managed to gather two millenniums' worth of people into a stadium somewhere and
present his claims.

And so what if Jesus were the only religious founder to claim to be God?
Would that make it true? Was Gautama necessarily the only man to have gained
Buddhahood just because he alone said he was? A unique claim might be false. A
claim often made might just as easily be true in one case and false in all
others. Uniqueness just doesn't make any difference.

Someone named F.J. Meldau is quoted to the effect that Jesus must have been
God incarnate because he never spoke with hesitation or provisionality. He never
retracted an opinion or changed his mind. "This is all so contrary to human
teachers and teachings." It never seems to occur to McDowell that such a
portrait sounds good only to a dogmatist who sees no merit in considering all
sides of an issue and insists he knows the ultimate truth right now. Indeed,
this is contrary to the ways of teachers who rightly dismiss such a posture as
that of a cock-sure, obnoxious adolescent. It is truly sad that such is the
image of "Christlikeness" to which fundamentalists exhort us to aspire.

But do the gospels so depict Jesus? He is indeed said to have spoken with
authority, and not as the Jewish scribes (Mark 1:22), who judiciously appealed
to legal precedent and preserved varying opinions on cases of halakha. But far
from contrasting Jesus with the Jewish prophets as Meldau says ("His teachings
were ultimate, final - above those of Moses and the prophets."), this apodictic
certainty simply associates Jesus with their ranks. They, too, were sure they
spoke with divine authority, though there is no reason to suppose Isaiah,
Jeremiah, or Amos believed he was God! Remember, Meldau's point is that Jesus'
attitude of certitude, even on matters not relating directly to his own status
and role, is itself a claim to divinity. Hegel, too, one must suppose, believed
himself to be God. And why stop there? McDowell, too, would seem to merit
insertion into the divine plurality, as would most of his fans.

Meldau infers from the fact that no statement on record features Jesus
saying, "Wait a minute, I'm afraid I misspoke there...," that Jesus' teaching
was completely consistent. If it was self-contradictory, then his (supposedly)
never correcting himself becomes more of an embarrassment than an endorsement.
And the gospels do have Jesus contradicting himself on various points, as, for
example, whether or not to fast (Mark 2:18 vs. Matthew 6:16), and why (Mark
2:20) or why not (Mark 2:19 vs. Mark 2:21-22), whether to divorce (Mark 10:11
vs. Matthew 19:9), to preach to Gentiles and Samaritans (Matthew 10:5 vs.
Matthew 28:19 and John 4:35-42), whether the near approach of the End may be
gauged by apocalyptic signs (Luke 17:20-21 vs. Mark 13:28-29), whether religious
obligations supersede filial duties (Mark 7:9-15 vs. Matthew 8:21-22 and Luke
14:26), etc.

Critical scholars, whom McDowell judges to be agents of Satan, also assume
that Jesus was a consistent thinker, but this causes them to try to sift the
things Jesus actually may have said from the plainly contradictory sayings later
attributed to him by various factions of the early church. Refusing to entertain
this approach, McDowell and his colleagues leave us with a Jesus who may be
quoted on either side of any debate, as the history of Christian theological
disputation has shown again and again.

Others, whose declamations McDowell serves up stale, urge us to reckon with
the fact that Jesus was put to death for claiming that he was "in reality God in
the flesh." Some skeptics may question whether Jesus really made such I claims
for himself, suggesting rather that the disciples gratuitously portrayed him
this way. ;seemingly granting that such is possible, McDowell's sources go on to
say that secular historians agree that Jesus made such claims, and that this is
sufficient proof. But where in either the New Testament or in Josephus, Tacitus,
Pliny, Suetonius, or whomever else McDowell may have in view, is Jesus said to
make such a claim? That Pliny attests an early Christian worship of Jesus tells
us nothing we wouldn't have known otherwise: that Christians worshiped Jesus.
Granted, but was this Jesus' intent? Pliny says nothing of this.

2B. The Trial

As he habitually does throughout this book, McDowell relies here upon the
fallacy of appeal to authority, calling in supposed experts whose opinions we
are to accept just because McDowell tells us they know what they are talking
about. This is something no careful student in any field of study ever does.
Scientific inquiry in any field is ever a matter of scrutinizing and weighing
the judgments of one's honored predecessors and colleagues, none of whose
opinions are to be accepted except on their own merits, not merely for the sake
of their propounders' reputations. McDowell and his minions, religious
propagandists with only the most transparent pose of scholarship, seem
unacquainted with genuine scholarly work, or they would know this. But why
should they when their only goal is to spread the "truth" they feel sure they
have lucked into. They have not a thought to seek the truth, since this would be
to admit that, as mere mortals, they do not yet have it.

The supposed authority cited here is one "Judge Gaynor, the accomplished
jurist of the New York bench" who rules that the real complaint against Jesus at
his trial was blasphemy, his "making himself God." Why McDowell thinks a modern
New York judge would necessarily have any expertise on the procedures of the
Jerusalem Sanhedrin in the first century is beyond me. The level of
argumentation here and throughout Evidence That Demands a Verdict is on
the same level with that whereby Paul Galey "demands the verdict" that Mr.
Kringle is really Santa Claus in the movie Miracle on 34th Street.

McDowell's sources mislead him in that they pay no attention whatever to the
gaping problem of the historical implausibilities in the trial accounts. It has
been a subject of scholarly debate for decades, for at least two reasons. First,
how are the evangelists supposed to have found out what happened at the trial?
All of the disciples had fled, except for Peter who hoped to avoid detection
among the crowd in the high priest's courtyard. But the interrogation of Jesus
did not transpire where Peter could hear it. Indeed, Peter is busy undergoing
his own interrogation in the courtyard at the same time! One might propose that
Jesus filled the disciples in on the trial after his resurrection, but this is
frivolous. Picture the scene: Jesus is ready now to vouchsafe to the eleven the
final teaching of the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). "Sure, sure, Lord," Peter pipes
up, "in a moment! But first, let's hear what happened to you during the trial,
huh? I'm really curious!"

The second problem with the trial narratives is that virtually every detail
of them seems to fly in the face of everything we know of rabbinical
jurisprudence. They are convening on Passover eve for a capital trial? Not
likely! And why would a claim to be messiah, even if deemed false, amount to
blasphemy? It sure didn't some years later when no less a personage than Rabbi
Akiba endorsed the ill-fated Simon bar Kochba as the messiah.

One begins to suspect that the gospel writers had no real idea of what
transpired at Jesus' trial and did the best they could to fill the gap from
their imaginations, simply assuming that the point of contention between Jesus
and the Sanhedrin had any role in the trial and death of debating in their own
day: Jesus' divine status, an belief which later Jews certainly did consider
blasphemy once Christians began viewing Jesus as divine.

It even becomes an open question whether the Sanhedrin had any role in the
trial and death of Jesus, simply because of the manner of execution. He was
crucified, a Roman penalty inflicted on pirates, seditionists, and runaway
slaves. A.N. Sherwin-White, though not an accomplished judge in the State of New
York, was an authority on Roman law, and he argued in Roman Society and
Roman Law in the New Testament that the Sanhedrin would have needed
Pilate's permission for Jesus to be executed, as the gospels say. Other scholars
dispute Sherwin-White's opinion. I am by no means in a position to take sides on
the matter. But even if Sherwin-White is correct, the real difficulty remains
unresolved: if Jesus were to be executed for blasphemy, why did Annas and
Caiaphas not simply seek Pilate's permission to have Jesus stoned to death,
since stoning was the required penalty? That they did not raises the real
possibility that the grounds for the execution were entirely different, perhaps
political, as many scholars have held.

Personally, I do not believe the surviving evidence can ever settle the
question, so I do not have a favorite theory to defend. My point here is that
the trial narrative is a matter of just as much debate as the question of what
Jesus may have claimed of himself. To treat the gospel trial accounts, and one
particular interpretation of them, as undeniably factual, and to base on this a
case for Jesus' claiming to be God, is to build a house on sand.

One last apologetical distortion connected with the trial requires our
attention. McDowell tries to minimize the fact that the Synoptic trial
narratives do not have Jesus say precisely the same thing in answer to the
question of the high priest. Asked, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the
Blessed?" Jesus replies, according to Mark, "I am," but in Matthew and Luke,
"You say that I am." First there is the problem of whether the two versions
contradict one another. Second, there is the problem of whether "You say"
implies evasive ambiguity.

McDowell tries to harmonize the two versions, as apologists commonly do.
McDowell tries to make us believe that the ambiguous reply in Matthew and Luke
really means the same as Mark's forthright "I am." He quotes various previous
apologists as saying that "You say that I am" is actually a forthright
affirmation, despite appearances. Frank Morison (author of Who Moved the
Stone?, an ex-skeptic turned apologist, a Damascus Road reversal that seems
to apologists to validate everything Morison says) writes, "These answers are
really identical. The formulae 'Thou hast said' or 'Ye say that I am,' which to
modern ears sounds evasive, had no such connotation to the contemporary Jewish
mind. 'Thou sayest' was the traditional form in which a cultivated Jew replied
to a question of grave or sad import. Courtesy forbade a direct 'yes' or
'no.'"

But Morison's own explanation refutes itself. If "thou sayest" could conceal
either a "direct 'yes' or 'no,"' then how, pray tell, is the hearer to know
which of the two, yes or no, is meant? It would certainly make things a good bit
easier for the apologist who wants to use Jesus as a ventriloquist dummy to
mouth fourth-century Athanasian dogma if "Thou sayest" were an unambiguous "You
said it!," but it is not. And to make Matthew and Luke's ambiguous version
tantamount to Mark's unambiguous affirmation, simply because Mark has the one in
the same spot where Matthew and Luke have the other, is pure harmonization. It
is like saying that if I answer "maybe" and you answer "yes" to the same
question we must be giving the same answer.

But in fact, there is a way to iron out the apparent contradiction in this
case, though I don't think McDowell and his fans would like it much. As it
happens, there are a couple of early manuscripts of Mark which agree with
Matthew and Luke in attributing to Jesus an ambiguous answer: "You say so."
There is obviously no way to be sure how the original autograph manuscript of
Mark read at this (or any other) point, since manuscript evidence from the first
century or so of copying is practically non-existent (a crucial factor minimized
to the vanishing point by apologists). But ask yourself which is more likely,
that, faced with a clear affirmation of Jesus' messiahship in Mark's trial
scene, Matthew and Luke would both, independently, deem it better to befog the
issue by introducing the ambiguous "thou sayest" business? Or that Mark, too,
originally had the ambiguous "thou sayest," which Matthew and Luke both
faithfully reproduced, but which some later copyist of Mark found theologically
inadequate and changed to a nice, juicy "I am"?

I think the latter scenario makes the more sense, but really, who knows?
Again, my point is that the facts are anything but clear, whereas they would
have to be crystal clear to serve McDowell's purpose. You see, scholarly New
Testament criticism can afford to live with uncertainties, unable to decide
between possible theories. But apologetics "demands a verdict." It is not
scholarship at all, but propaganda. If you want a secular analogue to
apologetics, don't look to the work of historians. Look to the "research" funded
by the American Tobacco Institute. Or if you prefer, as McDowell does, to invoke
modern legal parallels, forget about Judge Gaynor and Simon Greenleaf. O.J.
Simpson's "dream team" would be a better fit.

3B. Further Claims

lC. Equality With the Father

lD., 2D.

Attention shifts now to a pair of verses in John's Gospel in which Jesus
supposedly claims to be equal to God. One is John 10:33, where the enemies of
Jesus say he is "making himself God." The other is John 5:18, where they say he
is "making himself equal to God." We see here a good example of a universal
tendency in fundamentalist apologetics to take at face value the opinions of the
opponents of Jesus in the Gospel of John. I marvel that, of all the voices in
the gospel, that of the stone-throwing haters of Jesus should be considered the
most fundamental for understanding him! One might as well argue that Jesus was a
glutton and an alcoholic (Matthew 11:19) and that he was in league with
Beelzebul (Mark 3:22), was a Samaritan and demon-possessed (John 8:48), out of
his mind (Mark 3:21), that he proposed offering himself as the main course at a
feast for cannibals (John 6:52), that he thought he was physically older than
Abraham (John 8:57), that he proposed to rebuild Herod's temple in three days
(John 2:20), or that like Superman he had descended bodily from the sky (John
6:42), all examples of what the enemies of Jesus think of him or think he is
claiming. In every case, surely, the point of the gospel writers is that Jesus'
opponents have woefully misunderstood and caricatured him.

This is made clear in the case of the John 11 passage from the simply fact
that Jesus issues a rejoinder to their accusation that he makes himself God. He
does not say, "You got that right, folks!" Rather he shows how Psalm 82 does not
hesitate to apply the very honorific "gods" to those who were merely readers of
scripture, whereas he makes for himself a more modest claim, that, in that he is
God's chosen envoy, he can be called God's son. Is not Jesus here presented as
correcting the way his hostile hearers misunderstood his language about sonship?
McDowell quotes another apologist as saying, "Jesus did not try to convince the
Jews that they had misunderstood him." But that seems to be precisely what John
has him doing in John 10.

It strikes me as perverse that apologists, supposed zealots for the
scriptures, will opportunistically quote the slanders of Jesus' opponents when,
taken out of context, they will sound superficially compatible with later
Christian dogma.

When McDowell turns his attention to John's numerous instances of Jesus
calling God "My Father," he raises, implicitly, a different point, that of the
fidelity of gospel "reporting." As Joachim Jeremias points out (The Central
Message of the New Testament, p. 22), we find a dramatically increasing
tendency for Jesus to call God "Father" as we move from earlier to later gospel
source documents. In Mark we find but 3 instances, 4 in Q, 4 in the material
peculiar to Luke. In the uniquely Matthean material we suddenly jump to 31, and
John is practically off the scale at 100! If we narrow our search to instances
of Jesus referring to God as "My Father," we find not a single instance in Mark,
I in Q, 2 in material unique to Luke (and one of these is a redactional addition
absent in Matthew's version: compare Luke 22:29 with Matthew 19:28), and then 12
in Matthew's special material and 32 in John. What all this would clearly imply
to anyone but the apologetical spin doctor (who feels more secure mouthing his
assent to Athanasian Christology if Jesus had already believed it himself) is
that, while "My Father" is indeed language denoting the speaker's divine status
(though not necessarily as more than a demigod), it appears to be theological
language that has crept into the gospel portraits of Jesus at first slowly and
sparingly, but then in full flood the farther from the historical Jesus we get.
The massive later use of this language makes the nature of it clear even in
those strata of the gospel tradition where its presence is more modest: it is
theological language about Jesus only subsequently placed in his own mouth. I
ask any apologist to be honest with himself: wouldn't you really find this the
most natural way to read the evidence if you weren't just trying to get out of a
tight spot?

Ironically, the idea of early Christians ascribing to Jesus clear
Christological self-references he did not himself actually make should hardly
sound peculiar or implausible, especially to fundamentalists, since they do it
themselves. For example, the fundamentalist Targum variously marketed as The
Living Bible, The Way, Reach Out, The Book, etc., shows a number of
instances where paraphraser Ken Taylor apparently thought Jesus was being a bit
too coy about his own messianic claims. Taylor regularly substitutes for "the
Son of Man" phrases like "the Man from Heaven" or "the Messiah." He even makes
Jesus say, "I am the Messiah" in John 4:26! By contrast, in the Greek text of
the gospels, or even in a straight English translation like the New American
Standard Bible, there is no such explicit self-identification. (By the way, what
Ken Taylor has done with John 4:26 is exactly the same sort of thing I suggested
happened when an early copyist changed Mark's original and ambiguous "Thou
sayest" to a ringing affirmation, "I am.")

In fact, it seems to me that apologists themselves are doing the same thing
when they constantly say that "Jesus claimed to be God." Hearing that Jesus
"claimed to be God," what sort of statement would you expect to find in the
gospels? Presumably something like "I am God" or perhaps "I am he whom you call
your God." Every apologist secretly wishes the gospels did contain such texts,
but there are none. The ambiguous passages we have been discussing certainly do
not justify loaded and over-explicit language like "Jesus claimed to be God."
What apologists are essentially doing, then, is to place their own
Christological inferences onto the lips of Jesus. Why couldn't the gospel
writers have done the same thing? (Ironically, as we have just seen, none of the
New Testament writers goes so far in this direction as the apologists do!)

Apologists love to quote John 10:30 as a clear declaration by Jesus of his
faith in Chalcedonian Christology: "I and the Father are one." If Jesus (or, as
I should think, the evangelist) so clearly and unambiguously, conveyed by these
words the Christological orthodoxy of the fourth and fifth centuries, it is hard
to explain why it took so many centuries of debate for the churches to settle
these very issues! McDowell quotes A.T. Robertson in an amazing attempt, worthy
of Paul in Galatians 3:16, to squeeze Christology out of a lexical stone. "One
(hen). Neuter, no[t] masculine (heis). Not one person (cf.
heis in Gal. 3:28), but one essence or nature."

Fair enough, if all he means is to exclude the Patripassian heresy, that
Jesus was the Father incarnate. But it is not so clear that "I and my Father are
one" would exclude something like the Monothelite heresy, that the oneness of
Jesus and the Father was simply that of harmonious will and moral purpose. In
fact, another verse in the same chapter of John seems to push 10:30 in this very
direction: "This is why my Father loves me; I do always that which pleases him"
(John 10:17).

I should even say that "I and the Father are one" must mean something like
this given that John 17:22-23 seems to predicate precisely the same oneness of
Jesus and the disciples: "that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and
thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that
thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me."

It is vain to say this oneness of Jesus and the disciples refers to his
consubstantiality with them in his human ousia as he is consubstantial with the
Father in his divine ousia. Why? First, because this is to read absurdly too
much into the text, which seems oblivious of such fine distinctions. If you can
find this in the text, you can have no quarrel with Martin Luther's papist
opponents and their multiple-sense exegesis of scripture!

Second, for Jesus' Chalcedonian consubstantiality with human beings in
general to be all that is in view in John 17:22-23 would grossly trivialize the
prayer Jesus is shown praying, for this abstruse metaphysical consubstantiality
would unite Jesus with Judas Iscariot, Pilate, and Herod Antipas equally with
Peter, Andrew, and the Beloved Disciple! Is this likely the intent of the
passage? Again, no one but the sophist and the spin-doctor will think so.

2C. "I AM".

John 8:58 has Jesus' opponents ask the exasperated rhetorical question, "You
do not have fifty years, and Abraham has seen you?" He answers, "Amen, amen, I
tell you, before Abraham became, I am." This may very well be a claim by the
Johannine Jesus to divine preexistence. Indeed, I should judge that the most
natural reading, though the odd juxtaposition of tenses sets a question mark
beside any interpretation. That is, there is no really "natural" reading of a
peculiar construction. It is not out of the question that the passage is
intended as a parallel to the contrast between Jesus and Jacob in John 4:12
("Are you greater than our father Jacob?"), and that the point is tantamount to
the Matthean sequence, "Something greater than the temple/Jonah/Solomon is here"
(Matthew 12: 6, 41-42). And in view of the statement that prompted the indignant
reply to Jesus, "Abraham rejoiced to see my day," perhaps we ought rather to
take 8:58 to mean not so much that Jesus existed prior to Abraham but rather
that "Jesus' day" was available in the foreknowledge of God for Abraham, as a
prophet, to see (cf. I Peter 1:10-12, 20; Luke 17:22).

But let us assume that the traditional interpretation captures the scriptural
writer's intent, and that this is a claim to preexistence. This should not be
too surprising in view of John 1:1, which no one doubts is a Johannine claim to
the preexistence of the divine Logos. But McDowell and the apologists he quotes
beg two key questions. The first is that of whether the Fourth Gospel should be
read as a source of historical recollection and reportage. McDowell simply takes
it for granted that we are reading a transcript of Jesus' words. Lurking behind
such confidence is the fundamentalist doctrine of inerrancy, a vestige of the
origin of all these arguments back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
when the opponents were fellow biblicists, Rationalist Protestants and Christian
Unitarians. McDowell's arguments on behalf of the authenticity of Jesus' sayings
in the gospels, which he sets forth in a previous chapter, are nothing but a
tissue of desperate rationalizations of something he really believes for a
priori dogmatic reasons. You may consult the corresponding chapter in the
present volume or my own book Beyond
Born Again, where I deal at great length with McDowell's arguments on
the point.

After trying for years to accept the argument of William Temple (subsequently
warmed over by George Eldon Ladd and others) that, despite its radical stylistic
and theological differences from the Synoptics, John's Gospel should still be
read as genuine recollections of Jesus' teaching, I found myself finally unable
to deny the force of a simple point: the Johannine Jesus not only sounds nothing
like the Synoptic Jesus; he sounds exactly like the narrator of the Fourth
Gospel, all the other characters in the Fourth Gospel, and the author of the
three Johannine Epistles. Thus the words attributed to Jesus in the Fourth
Gospel are John's, not Jesus'.

Reading the Fourth Gospel is much like reading Kahlil Gibran's Jesus the
Son of Man, in which Gibran adopts the device of having a number of Jesus'
ancient contemporaries share their recollections of what he said and did. The
result is, l have found, a profound and beautiful book, just as the Gospel of
John is. And, as in John's Gospel, one notices that all Gibran's characters
sound just alike, like Jesus, and like the writer of all the other books by
Kahlil Gibran. No one would argue that, oh, let's say, Gibran has preserved a
genuine set of teachings of Jesus which Jesus spoke using a special idiom, a
group of sayings strangely missing from the other gospels, and that Gibran was
so pervasively influenced by these sayings that the same stylistic idiom went on
to permeate all of his own writings! No, no one would have the slightest
difficulty in recognizing that in Jesus the Son of Man we have Gibran's
own personal vision of Jesus expressed in Gibran's own thoughts and words. Why
can we not use me same common sense in the case of the Gospel of John? Critical
scholars can and do. For them the implication is quite clear. This book
represents the theological reflections of its author, set in narrative form, and
utilizing the literary device of divine epiphany monologues like those found in
contemporary Isis aretalogies (see Philip B. Harner, The "I Am" of the
Fourth Gospel) and the revelation discourses of the Mandaean
scriptures.

Before one parrots the ludicrous dictum of C.S. Lewis (in "Modern Theology
and Biblical Criticism") that the Johannine discourses bear no resemblance to
ancient, non-historical genres, one owes it to oneself to read the Gnostic and
Mandaean revelation soliloquies abundantly quoted in Bultmann's commentary on
John, something I rather doubt any apologists take the trouble to do. (I find it
amusing that Lewis preferred to compare John's discourses with Boswell's
"reportage" of Samuel Johnson's table-talk--which, as has recently been argued,
seems itself to have been a literary stylization of the kind critics suggest we
find in the Fourth Gospel!)

In much of what I have said on the interpretation of various Johannine texts,
my assumption is not that the apologists are putting the wrong construal on the
words of the historical Jesus, but rather that they are misinterpreting the more
modest Christology of the Fourth Evangelist. Just so in the case of John 8:58.
My point is not that the verse does not imply ambient pre-existence of the
Logos. It is rather to say that, first, the verse represents the view of the
gospel writer, precisely as John 1:1 does, and not necessarily that of Jesus;
and second, that this Christology may as easily be Arian as Athanasian in its
slant.

But doesn't John 8:58 have to mean that Jesus is not only the (possibly
created) "Arian" Logos, but the eternal "I am" of the burning bush? Again, let
us not read in anachronistic Christology and theology, whether Jewish or
Christian. Jewish angelology swarmed with figures like Metatron, Yahoel,
Melchizedek and others who were referred to as "your Elohim" and as "the little
Yahweh"! "My name is in him." (See Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in
Jewish Mysticism; Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven; Margaret
Barker, The Great Angel:
A Study of Israel's Second God; Fred L. Brown, Jr., The Melchizedek
Tradition). Is something like that going on in John 8:58? Again, I don't
know. The ancient evidence is at once too fragmentary and too suggestive of a
wider range of options than McDowell's argument implies.

6C. He Who Has Seen Me.

I am afraid the reply of the Johannine Jesus to Philip in John 14:9 ("Have I
been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me? He who has seen me
has seen the Father; so how is it you ask, 'Show us the Father'?") is of no more
help to the apologist's case. Granted, if this is all the text said (and it all
McDowell cites), it would seem to constitute a pretty strong claim on the part
of the Johannine Jesus to be God. In fact, it would be a bit too strong for the
apologists' palate, since it would imply Patripassianism, that Jesus is not only
divine by nature, but is God the Father himself, something A.T. Robertson was
just as glad to see ruled out in John 10:30.

However, the hydra-head of heresy, thus momentarily raised up, sinks back
into the abyss as soon as we read on, for John's Jesus, as if sensing the need
to prevent apologist and Patripassian alike from going astray (not that it did
any good in the long run!), immediately qualifies his statement (and thus
renders it uselessly vague for Christology): "Do you not believe that I am in
the Father and the Father in me? The words which I say to you I do not speak on
my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me
that I am in the Father and the Father in me." Paul says the same sort of thing
of every believer, and no one thinks it implies that all believers are
incarnations of God.

I recall how, as an apologist myself, I felt let down at reading this
continuation, since it seemed to let the air out of what had sounded at first
like the strongest possible Christological self-revelation. I am reminded here
of Schleiermacher's Christology. He sought to justify and maintain traditional
incarnation language while redefining it in essentially naturalistic terms.
David Friedrich Strauss had little patience with such efforts, as he deemed
them, at equivocation. Here is a comment from Strauss on Schleiermacher's
Christology that I believe applies with equal force to the apologists' attempts
to find Athanasian Christology in John 14:9-11. "If we think of the divine in
Christ according to this analogy [or in terms of John 14:9-11], then we no
longer think of it in personal terms, no longer as a divine being united with
the human, but only as an effective impulse working on it, that is, as a
heightening of its natural powers, especially of its God-consciousness, which we
assume in Christ to be something absolute, powerful, and exclusively
determinative of all aspects of life. As is known, Schleiermacher [as, by
analogy, the apologists] also called this 'constant potency of the
God-consciousness' a 'veritable existence of God in him,' but the very fact that
he calls it a real existence shows that he rather senses that it is an unreal
one" (The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History, 24-25).

7C. "I Say Unto You"

McDowell cites the Matthean antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount, in which
the Matthean Jesus contrasts his own maxims with what "you have heard... was
said to the men of old." McDowell sees Jesus as pulling rank over Moses,
something he could do only if his rank were that of God himself. This argument
is not holy but only full of holes.

First, as most critical New Testament scholars admit, the antitheses are
Matthew's own redactional creations. One reason for thinking so is that a couple
of the examples of Jesus' supposedly "counter"-teachings, contrasted with Jewish
commandments, appear in the Lukan parallels standing on their own, without
reference to any teaching "of the men of old," which implies they were not
originally uttered with such a contrast in mind.

Second, even where such Jesus-Moses contrasts may be original, it is a wild
leap to conclude that Jesus must have believed himself to be God to dare draw
such contrasts. For instance, when in Mark 10:5 Jesus is shown rejecting scribal
opinions on divorce does he set aside the force of the Deuteronomic divorce law
because he is God, or simply because he sees the will of God better represented
in Genesis 2? In Jesus' judgment, Deuteronomy represented merely God's
permissive will, a compromise with the stubbornness of the human heart. This
conclusion may have been simply an inference on Jesus' part, as when some today
feel sure that pacifism would be more in accord with Jesus' teaching than
militarism, or that Jesus would oppose abortion. Or Jesus may have claimed, as
did the ancient Micaiah and other prophets, to be privy to the secret councils
of God. But until we can eliminate such possibilities let us not jump to the
conclusion Jesus believed himself to be God.

Third, McDowell is undoubtedly unaware of it, but the very same set of
contrasts the Matthean Jesus draws between the literal Torah commands against
adultery, oath-breaking, and murder on the one hand, and, on the other, a
"higher righteousness" of the pious heart that renders such prohibitions
superfluous, is an important ancient feature of rabbinical Jewish ethics and
piety. (See Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology,
chapter XIII, "The Law of Holiness and the Law of Goodness," pp. 199-218). There
is nothing distinctly Christian about it, much less anything requiring the
authority of an avatar of Jehovah to establish such contrasts. Not that the
Sermon on the Mount says there is! The urgency that Jesus' teachings (the vast
majority of which are paralleled, often word for word, in ancient Jewish and
Hellenistic sources) should be new and unique is an inference drawn from the
Christian belief in Jesus as a unique divine revealer. It is not that the
sayings were so unigue that they led anybody to think their speaker must have
been God. To argue that way would seem to lead apologists in the direction of
yet another heresy, Marcionism.

And must we conclude that for Jesus to preface his sayings with the formula
"Truly I say to you" instead of "Thus says the Lord" means he thought himself to
be none other than the Lord? McDowell thinks so. But this is absurd for two
reasons. First, when Paul uses the phrase "I say to you," he explicitly
contrasts it with having a divine revelation, which his very use of the phrase
implies he does not have! "I say, not the Lord" (I Corinthians 7:12; cf, verse
25). How do we know Jesus did not mean the same thing? What if he were humbly
disclaiming the thundering divine authority which the apologists, with all the
self-abnegating arrogance of Eric Hoffer's "true believer," would like to grant
him?

Second, McDowell ignores the fact of which he is ready to make so much when
it suits him: namely, that the gospel writers attributed divine authority to
Jesus (whether Jesus himself did or not). Thus for them to preface a saying with
"Jesus said, 'Truly I say to you..."' is exactly tantamount to an Old Testament
prophet saying "Thus saith the Lord." In fact the gospel writers, every time
they have Jesus say "Verily I say to you," are saying in effect "Thus saith the
Lord Jesus..." The relevant analogy is not between Jesus and the Old Testament
prophets, but between the New Testament evangelists and the Old Testament
prophets.

Much is made both by apologists and by pious New Testament critics like
Joachim Jeremias (whom, for his other opinions, despite his tender piety,
McDowell would see as roasting in Gehenna) of Jesus' use of the simple Aramaic
word Abba in prayer to God. Jeremias (The Central Message of the
New Testament, pp. 9-30) observed that so far no ancient Jewish source had
yet surfaced attesting such direct address to God whereas surviving ancient
Jewish prayer language addressed God in terms of grand formality (like Matthew's
"Our Father which art in heaven" as opposed to Luke's plain and unadorned
"Father"). Despite the fact that both Mark 14:36 and Galatians 4:6 translate
Abba simply as "Father," Jeremias contended that Jesus intended a warm
current of loving intimacy between himself and his Father such as could be
appropriate only between divine Father and divine Son. This inference is based
on the common homiletical fallacy of confusing etymology with definition.
Abba originated as the Aramaic version of "Dada" or "Papa," but by New
Testament times, it had come simply to mean "Father" (as Jeremias himself
admits, p. 21).

But it is the oddest inference to attribute to the historical Jesus a
consciousness of unique divine sonship on the basis of the use of Abba
in Mark 14:36 and Galatians 4:6. First, Galatians says nothing whatsoever about
Jesus ever having used the word. It simply says that since we have now received
sonship we may address God as Abba. Contra Jeremias ("there can be no
doubt at all that this primitive Christian cry is an echo of Jesus' own
praying," p. 18), Galatians 4:6 says nothing about our imitating Jesus in this
regard.

Second, we have to ask how Mark could have known what Jesus prayed in the
Garden of Gethsemane, since Mark has taken care explicitly to eliminate any
witnesses from the scene. As Jesus prays he is far enough away from even the
three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, not to know that they are
asleep till he returns to where they await him, and the other eight are even
further away. Mark "knows" what Jesus prayed in Gethsemane because he made it
up. He is the typical "omniscient narrator" of a piece of fiction. McDowell and
company never even notice such things because, deep down, they cannot bring
themselves to look at the Bible through any other lenses than those provided by
the doctrine of biblical inerrancy which presupposes that the Bible's statements
are all factually accurate because they are the product of a literally
omniscient narrator-God Almighty. Here as everywhere, apologists can hardly veil
the fact that what they are really doing is to offer after-the-fact
rationalizations for a position taken on other grounds entirely.

Virtually all the rest of McDowell's sixth chapter is taken up with defending
what no one challenges: that various New Testament writers believed Jesus Christ
was a heavenly being come to earth. That McDowell can for a moment imagine that
such scripture prooftexting even begins to address the objections of
nonbelievers shows once again that he really has no intention of engaging them.
He is simply a cheer-leader for fundamentalism, preaching to the choir.

Works Cited

Margaret Barker. The
Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God. Philadelphia:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992.

Rudolf Bultmann. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. Translated by G.
R. Beasley-Murray, R.W.N. Hoare, and J.K. Riches. Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1971.

Kahlil Gibran. Jesus the Son of Man: His Words and Deeds as Recorded by
Those Who Knew Him. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928.

Philip B. Harner. The "I Am" of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Johannine
Usage and Thought. Facet Books, Biblical Series, Gen. ed., John Reumann.
26. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970.

Fred L. Horton, Jr. The Melchizedek Tradition: A Critical Examination of
the Sources to the Fifth Century A.D. and in the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series. Gen. ed. Matthew Black, 30.
NY: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Joachim Jeremias. The Central Message of the New Testament. NY:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965.

C.S. Lewis. "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" in Walter Hooper (ed.)
Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1976, pp
152-166.

Solomon Schechter. Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology. NY: Macmillan
Company, 1910.

Gershom G. Scholem. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. NY: Schocken
Books, 1973.

Alan F. Segal. Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About
Christianity and Gnosticism. Studies in Judaism and Late Antiquity Ed.
Jacob Neusner. 25. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977.

A.N. Sherwin-White. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New
Testament. NY: Oxford University Press, 1963.

David Friedrich Strauss. The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A
Critique of Schleiermacher's The Life of Jesus. Translated by Leander E.
Keck. Lives of Jesus Series. Gen.ed. Leander E. Keck. Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1977.

"A Rejoinder to Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict:
'Jesus -- God's Son'" is copyright © 1997 by Robert M. Price. All rights
reserved.
The electronic version is copyright ©1997 by Internet Infidels with
the written permission of Robert M. Price.