Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
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Reply to Smart 185<br />
makes some general comments about the character of the Gospels <strong>and</strong> illustrates<br />
the possibility of naturalistic explanations by drawing on the thesis<br />
(advanced by S.G.F. Br<strong>and</strong>on <strong>and</strong> others) that Jesus was a revolutionary<br />
Zealot put to death for threatening insurrection against the governing Roman<br />
authorities.<br />
Let me reply in order, beginning with some broad points about scriptural<br />
scholarship. First, the New Testament is the main, <strong>and</strong> by <strong>and</strong> large the only,<br />
source for the events it purports to describe. There are some places where<br />
external evidence is available, but apart from helping us with very general<br />
features of the period extra-scriptural sources contribute little. This fact, however,<br />
is neither surprising nor problematic. Most of what is described in the<br />
Gospels, Epistles <strong>and</strong> Acts of the Apostles concerns events that only the<br />
followers of Jesus would have been witness to or had an interest in. That said,<br />
the combination of internal <strong>and</strong> external evidence for the life <strong>and</strong> teachings of<br />
Jesus is very much better than for most figures in antiquity. For example, he<br />
merits several lines in the only remaining history of Judaism in first-century<br />
Palestine, viz. Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. 13 Also, while it is clearly the<br />
case that the Gospels are composite works put together in stages from sayings<br />
<strong>and</strong> episodes this technique is not of itself unreliable. Far from diminishing<br />
the evidential value of scripture it encourages the idea that certain events<br />
were so securely fixed in the minds of Christ’s followers <strong>and</strong> so compelling to<br />
hearers that they survived in oral form until the passage of time <strong>and</strong> the<br />
growth of Christianity made it necessary to commit them to paper. Something<br />
of the flavour of these circumstances is conveyed by the very matterof-fact<br />
opening of Luke’s Gospel:<br />
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which<br />
have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those<br />
who from the beginning were eyewitnesses <strong>and</strong> ministers of the word, it seemed<br />
good to me also, having followed all things closely, for some time past, to write<br />
an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the<br />
truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. (Luke 1: 1–4)<br />
The task of dating the earliest Christian documents is problematic. Given<br />
that they probably evolved from anecdotes <strong>and</strong> aphorisms into comprehensive<br />
texts, there is a theoretical question as to what to count as an early version of<br />
a Gospel; <strong>and</strong> given the circumstances of the early Christians it is not to be<br />
expected that anything from the first century will be found. Nonetheless,<br />
there is a widespread consensus among theist, agnostic <strong>and</strong> atheist scholars<br />
that Paul’s Epistles were written in the 50s <strong>and</strong> 60s of the first century <strong>and</strong><br />
that the Gospels, in more or less the form in which we have them today, were<br />
composed between 70 (Mark) <strong>and</strong> 90 (John) AD. Smart remarks that the