A few answers

I Cor 15: 1 – 14

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday evening, 07 Oct, 2007

PEOPLE ARE raising serious questions about Christianity. They deserve careful responses. But many are based on simplistic theories and misunderstanding of what Christianity really says.

I have chosen a few which arise regularly. I admit that most of these topics deserve far more detailed answers than I can give in 10 minutes.

My three questions tonight are:

• Are missionaries a bad thing?
• Is the New Testament reliable?
• Have they found Jesus’ grave?

ARE MISSIONARIES A BAD THING?

Jesus said,

As you go, make disciples of all people groups...

Since two months after his resurrection, Christians have been obeying that command.

We all know how bad that is for the world. We have seen it on TV, and TV doesn’t lie.

Missionaries are harsh and cruel. They destroy the local culture. They steal the religion of happy natives and substitute the stern God of the Christians.

Everything you have heard is true — in part. It is far from the complete story, though.

Do you remember the Monty Python sketch?

The Palestinian revolutionaries are having a pity party about the wicked Romans?

“What have the Romans ever done for us?” one asks.

“Nothing!” they all chorus.

One voice pipes up.

“There are the roads,” he says. “They have built a lot of good roads.”

“Yes,” the leader says, “They have built roads, but what else have they done for us?”

“There are the aqueducts...” and so it goes on. The Romans have done nothing for the people of Palestine — except provide just about everything they have.

In many parts of the world all the schools, all the hospitals, all the community facilities — they are there because missionaries have provided them, developed them, staffed them and finally trained local people to take over.

So let’s leave people in bliss, dying of what we consider trivial diseases, so ignorant they don’t know what some mining company or wood chipping consortium is talking about. It is harsh to try to change them, isn't it? “

When missionaries went to a certain part of Africa in the 19th Century, being rather prudish, they encouraged women converts to put on tops so that they didn’t go aroujnd bare–breasted. Oppressive to women?

In fact, there was an upsurge in conversions among the women. The authorities began pressuring the missionaries. And the local men began to treat their wives with greater respect.

You see, upper class women in the towns wore blouses, and the missionaries were unwittingly saying, “We think you tribal women are as good as any upper class woman!”

Whenever cultures meet, there will be change. You can’t always predict whether that change will be positive or negative.

One thing — there is no way that any cutlure can avoid mixing with the rest of the world today, and they can do much worse than being in contact with missionaries.

Some missionaries have certainly done bad things. I don’t deny that. Missionaries have often been used as magistrates and administrators by the colonial powers, which compromised their neutrality. That inevitably will lead to bad things.

On the other hand, missionaries have often stopped colonisers from going as far as they wanted to go.

I am not a Catholic. But I have to praise  Catholic missionaries in South America who worked tirelessly to keep the Spanish powers from exploiting the local people. That's partly how Catholicism became such a popular religion in South America.

In India, Baptist missionaries translated the Bible into Bengali. The also translated Indian writings, including religious texts, and published them. This preserved these writings from destruction.

Elsewhere in India, Lutheran Missionaries were employed by the Anglican Church because the English Government banned English Missionaries from areas controlled by the East India Company. They feared that Missionaries might influence Parliament to stop exploitation of the local people. The German missionaries documented the lives and attitudes of Indians. The specific aim was making sure that Indians got heard and understood by Europeans.

In Australia, Methodist missionaries worked more for recognition of Aborigines than just about anyone else.

Some missionaries have done wrong; the vast majority have been a positive influence.

But the question usually really boils down to whether anyone should preach Christianity.

Most of the areas where Missions work follow animist religions. That means that they believe in spirits inhabiting certain areas and objects. They live in fear of these spirits, and spend a lot of time trying to appease them so as to avoid bad luck.

Christianity comes to them as a liberating idea — that there is one God who rules over all, and who is vastly more powerful than any of these local spirits.

If you don't believe in Christianity, you probably still won’t like the idea of anyone promoting it, but that's a different question.

I think people should be honest about these things and say what really concerns them. But I think the balance is weighted towards missionaries generally being a positive influence.

IS THE NEW TESTAMENT RELIABLE?

Dan Brown has popularised the theory that the four gospels are merely a select few of the many which circulated, and that they give a biassed and unreliable account of Jesus and the early church.

This theory contains elements of fact.

Certainly, there were gospel–like books circulating before the four gospels were written.

One is known as Q — which comes from a German word, Quelle, meaning “source”. It apparently contained many of the sayings of Jesus in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels. They know Q existed because both Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark’s Gospel, but they both also borrowed from somewhere else. That somewhere else is what we know as Q.

Interestingly, Matthew’s Gospel translates so easily back from Greek into Aramaic, that many scholars agree that it was originally written in Aramaic, perhaps within a few years of the crucifixion.

Dan Brown says that there were hundreds of Gospels, and Contantine picked four.

It’s true that, by the mid second century, around 150AD and later, there definitely was a growing industry of production of “gospels” among the Gnostic sects of the time. They combined sayings and deeds from the four recognised gospels to create their own literature which supported Gnostic teachings. Most of these originated in Egypt.

However, only four gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — ever made it into officially recognised collections, and they were the basic texts for debates between Christians even before Constantine’s time.

Even Marcion’s heretical, cut down version of the New Testament never mentions any of these other fake gospels. He cut the New Testament back to less than half, but he introduced no new features.

It’s just that many people accept a late 19th Century view that the gospels were written very late, near in time to the Gnostic writings.

Many scholars question that idea. Bishop John A.T Robinson was a very liberal theologian who had always accepted that the New Testament was written decades, maybe even 80 or more years after the events.

Around 1970, he realised that no research on New Testament dating had been done for around 75 years, so he decided to look into the question.

In his book, Redating the New Testament, he wrote that most scholarship since the late 1800s had suffered from the “tyranny of unexamined assumptions” and an “almost willful blindness”. He concluded, on the basis of internal evidence, that the gospels were written between 40 AD and around 65 AD. He went on to add that all of the New Testament could be dated to before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, mainly because there is absolutely no evidence that any of the writers knew of the destruction of the Temple as something already done.

This is important, because the early Christians all believed that Jesus’ death was the supreme and final sacrifice, so that the Temple sacrifices were no longer necessary. If the Temple had been destroyed when the writers wrote, it would have been the best argument they could produce for the sacrificial value of Jesus’ death. So why not mention it, if it was already old news when these people wrote?

Other scholars, like C.H Dodd and John Wenham agree with Robinson.

We have no other historical evidence for the detail of Jesus’ life, but the gospels and the other New Testament writings are good, reliable history. If we rely on a single book, in many cases, to tell us about some accepted historical person, why not rely on the 23 individual writings that make up the New Testament, when they tell us about Jesus?

HAVE THEY FOUND JESUS’ GRAVE?

Laurence Gardner, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, claims that a box found in the 1980s in an excavation in a Jerusalem suburb is the ossuary in which the bones of Jesus were placed after his death. Is that true? It would be proof that Jesus did not rise from the dead and would disprove one of the most basic premises of Christianity. St Paul says,

If Christ is not risen, then I am the most unhappy of men.

He lived his adult life preaching that Jesus is alive. He suffered for his faith. If that was wrong, he had wasted his entire life.

Did Paul waste his life? Have the millions since those days wasted their lives? It is a vital and basic question.

In Jesus’ time, after a body had decomposed for about a year, the bones were collected into a special box called an ossuary. It was marked with the name of the person whose remains were in the box, and was stored in the family tomb. Jesus died on the cross, and his family came from up north, so they had nowhere to leave the body to decompose. So Joseph of Arimathea loaned them his tomb.

The inscription on the box found in Jerusalem may say that the bones are those of Jesus, son of Joseph. Is this the final resting place of Jesus of Nazareth?

You can’t argue this one on theology. You can’t say, “Of course, it isn’t Jesus. He rose again, so it can’t be his tomb.”

The gospel is based on historical evidence. If Jesus is not risen, that is the historical fact, and it would rule out any theological theory about Jesus and resurrection. Fact comes before theory!

Christianity starts from historical fact, not the theories drawn out of those facts.

So is this the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth?

• First, it is possible.
• Second, it is unlikely.
• Third, the supposed proofs are very weak.

The box comes from around the right period. The writing style is a give away, and there are other clues, like the style of the box.

The box also bears an inscription which is hard to read, but probably says, Yeshua, son of Yehoseph. There is a rough cross scratched on the box near the inscription, and other boxes appear to have contained the bones of two women named Mary, someone named Matthew, and someone named Yehuda, son of Yeshua.

So there are a few clues which might support the idea that this is Jesus of Nazareth’s final resting place.

But how many people named Jesus died in Jerusalem in the period around 30 – 40 AD? Yeshua, Yehoseph and Maryam were three of the most common names in Palestine in those days. This is a suggestive association of names.

However, statistical analysis of Israelite names suggests that there were probably around 20 men named Jesus whose father was named Joseph living in Jerusalem at that time. In fact, many ossuaries have already been found, bearing the name Jesus!

The association with the known names of other family members only narrows down the chances a little.

Gardner claims that a cross scratched on the box is proof. Apart from the fact that a fish was used as the Christian symbol in the early days, this mark is not a Christian cross, but a mark to show how the lid should line up! Similar marks appear on many ossuaries.

But there are other issues.

We know that Jesus’ family was from Nazareth. Why would his remains be kept in Jerusalem? Surely they would be taken home, where the family could visit the grave!

Also, the fact that one box bears the inscription, Yehuda, son of Yeshua, works against the theory. There is no prophecy to say that Jesus couldn’t have married and had children. But the Bible never suggests that he did have a son. If Jesus had a son, the gospel writers had no cause to hide the fact. So this is really evidence that this tomb belonged to some other man named Jesus, whose father was Joseph and who did have a son named Judah.

On the other hand, the New Testament clearly says that the disciples and many who joined with them were convinced that the tomb was empty and they had seen the risen Christ. Did any family member ever try to debunk the Gospel message by pointing to the remains of Jesus? In fact, Jesus’ brother, James, changed from being sceptical about Jesus to being a leader in the new Church. Something convinced him!

So it is possible, but extremely unlikely, that this ossuary contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth.

On the other hand, the evidence is strongly against its being his box. And, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation remains the one of the New Testament, that Jesus died on the cross and, several days later, was alive again.

CONCLUSION

Missionaries can be, and often are, a good influence on the societies they go to. They proclaim a faith that has a reasonably historical basis. They need not be ashamed to proclaim that Jesus died and rose again.

There are not too many religions which set so much store by historical accuracy and verifiable truth.

I would urge Christians to be secure in their belief that the Christian message is worthy of acceptance, and those who don’t yet believe to change their mind today.

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)