The Jesus Inquest; Further Lessons on Christian Contentment; and Kicking the Dog

The Jesus Inquest: The Case for - And Against - The Resurrection of the Christ by Charles Foster

Charles Foster is a pretty amazing bloke by the sounds of it: a barrister and author on many subjects, teacher of medical law and ethics at Oxford, and many other impressive sounding things. Here he turns his hand to a barrister’s examination of the evidence for the resurrection of Christ. He goes through the principal topics - sources, death, burial, empty tomb, post-resurrection appearances - producing the best arguments against and for how they might corroborate the resurrection in either case.

Reading this really reminded me of NT Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Foster cites it several times and many of his arguments are echoes of those made by Wright. One of the absolutely central parts of Wright’s big green book is the idea that nobody would have been expecting the Messiah to rise from the dead in the middle of history. Therefore it can’t have been made up because nobody would have thought of such a thing nor would it have been accepted by anybody. The only way that would have been possible is if it really happened and if the appearances of Christ were so convincing that they actually generated the belief for many people.

Discrepancies in the Gospels

One of the interesting things about Foster’s book is that he approaches it in a specifically non-theological manner. For example, many of the arguments for the reliability of the Gospels is based upon the idea that, if there was a primitive body of Christian scribes who had edited and airbrushed history to make some kind of coherent theological and historical case for the resurrection, they would not have produced the Gospel documents that we have. They are too messy, counterintuitive, and there are too many apparent discrepancies between them. They are much more like valid eyewitness testimonies in court than anything else. That is, they all share a kernel of agreement about the main facts, but there are also the differences that are always characteristic of human memory and perception.

That’s one way of approaching it and it’s certainly the one Foster embraces. It was also the area in which I felt that the book was a little lacking. For example, when the opponent of the resurrection - X - puts his case against the post-resurrection appearances by showing the discrepancies between the different Gospel accounts (which appear very significant), the advocate of the resurrection - Y - simply say that harmonisation is impossible and then he moves on.

I understand that this is Y’s (and presumably Foster’s) argument, but could he not also argue that some sort of harmonisation is possible based partly upon putting together non-contradictory events (say one angel in one account and two angels in another account) and bringing forward at least some theory about the elements of the Gospels that are not intended to be historical but which are in fact theological? Even if Y doesn’t advocate that, he could still suggest it as a possibility.

It is beyond the scope of the book admittedly, but it also raises the theological question of the inspiration of Scripture: In what sense can we say that Scripture is inspired if many of the Gospels have factual errors in them? And is there any way of telling which ones are erroneous and does it even matter in that case anyway?

I have to say that I am unsure what I think about all of this. I’m inclined to think that some kind of theological harmonisation must be possible because, if it were not, it would seem to me to undermine the inspiration of Scripture. But I admit I haven’t look into it much further than that. What do you think?

Other interesting things: Jesus in India and the Turin Shroud

Two other interesting things: firstly, there is a section in the book in which the possibility of Christ’s surviving the crucifixion (either through being taken down from the cross before death or never being crucified at all) are considered. One of the theories is that Christ went to India and became known as Yuz Asaf, settling in Kashmir. Some believe that his tomb is buried in the Khaniyar quarter of Srinagar. The tomb is known as “the sacred tomb” and attracts many pilgrims from the major world religions, including Christians. There is a folk story that the tomb was originally painted the Jewish colours of blue and white and there is a stone carving on the floor of two footprints with marks on each foot that are consistent with the marks of crucifixion:

In a nearby temple called The Takhat Sulaiman (The Throne of Solomon) there is an inscription on a monument that (although now illegible) used to read: ‘Khawaja Rukun son of Mirjan erected this pillar. During this period Yusu Asaph declared his ministry. He was Yusu, the Prophet of the Children of Israel’.

Interesting.

More plausible, perhaps, is the Shroud of Turin. I’ve never really looked into this before, but the evidence is quite amazing. I’ll simply quote Foster’s final paragraph on it.

There is a good case that the Shroud is that of a scourged and crucified man bearing the wounds the gospels described Jesus as having…It has at some stage been in the Jerusalem area…The flowers most represented by the pollen sampling (taken from alleged imprints of flowers around the head of the image) flower around Passover. The Shroud may date from around the fist century AD. The body image operates as a photographic negative. It contains coded three-dimensional information which cannot be produced by any known technology. The way in which the image was put onto the cloth is wholly mysterious. However it founds its way there, the blood stains were there first.

Normal dead bodies don’t do this. It would be unsafe to say more than that.

Jesus Inquest, p.222

If the image had been made by pressing the cloth against a body then it would be terribly distorted when laid flat. But it is a perfect three-dimensional image when laid out. Nobody has any idea how it was made. Its being painted on has been ruled out and efforts to date it to a much later time period than the first century have been exposed as seriously flawed.

Of course, the pious explanation is that this Shroud really is the burial shroud of Christ, and that this image was produced at the point of his resurrection from death. An amazing thought.

The Shroud of Turin. By the way, if you Google this, you’re only going to get one answer…

The True Myth

One of the objections to the resurrection is that it is simply one of many dying and rising gods stories. It’s a motif that is repeated throughout religious mythology: Isis, Osiris, Dionysius, Romulus, etc.

There’s a famous story about the conversion of C.S. Lewis (who was very much into myth and legend as you might know) when he went for a walk with JRR Tolkien, who convinced him that Christianity was “the true myth”. Foster references this obliquely in Y’s reply to X’s objection that Christianity (and specifically the resurrection) is just one more example of this myth. And he does it rather well:

Christianity is a myth. But it is a true myth. It is not surprising that there are echoes of the Christian truths in the great myths of the world. As human beings grope towards the truth, they don’t get nowhere. They get somewhere. As they strain their ears for divine music, they get faint, distant, broken melodies. But then Christianity comes, and suddenly the melodies are all there, played so clearly and so sweetly it breaks the heart. For many of the listeners the response will be: “I’ve heard something like that before: I’ve been looking for this all my life.” That is why the ancient myths of men and the True Myth sometimes sound alike.

Jesus Inquest, p.217

That makes a lot of sense to me. What doesn’t make sense is the idea that the disciples derived their idea of the resurrection from mystery religions from places Egypt and Syria. There’s no evidence that any of them had any exposure to these things and to believe such a thing is crazy.

So why are there so many stories about dying and rising gods? It is because, in some mysterious way, we can access something of the mystical truth that underlies all things, the story beneath and beyond all other stories: and it gets told in a different and incomplete way in many myths and legends and even in stories that are invented today. Sometimes this is intentional, of course, but a lot of the time it just happens. Perhaps there is some kind of Jungian subconscious archetypal realm that we have various degrees of access to. I don’t know. But it does seem to me to be a real thing.

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‘Can you not sit down and be merry now?’ - More on Christian Contentment

You will find a noteworthy story in Plutarch to illustrate this: In the life of Pyrrhus, one Sineus came to him, and would fain have had him desist from the wars, and not war with the Romans. He said to him, 'May it please your Majesty, it is reported that the Romans are very good men of war, and if it please the gods that we overcome them, what benefit shall we have of that victory?' Pyrrhus answered him, 'We shall then straightway conquer all the rest of Italy with ease.’ 'Indeed that is likely which your Grace speaks,' said Sineus, 'but when we have won Italy, will our wars end then?' ‘If the gods were pleased', said Pyrrhus, 'that the victory were achieved, the way would then be made open for us to attain great conquests, for who would not afterwards go into Africa, and so to Carthage?' 'But', said Sineus, 'when we have everything in our hands what shall we do in the end?' Then Pyrrhus laughing, told him again, ‘We will then be quiet, and take our ease, and have feasts every day, and be merry with one another as we possibly can.' Said Sineus, ‘What prevents us now from being as quiet, and merry together, since we enjoy that immediate without further travel and trouble which we would seek for abroad, with such shedding of blood, and manifest danger? Can you not sit down and be merry now?' So a man may think, if I had such a thing, then I would have another, and if I had that, then I should have more; and what if you had got all you desire? Then you would be content-why? You may be content now without them.

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Precious Jewel of Christian Contentment, pp.73-74

I found that very instructive. It’s so easy to have in the back of your mind all of these plans, thinking to yourself, ‘Once I’ve achieved this and this and this then I will be happy.’ But you can actually choose to be happy now, to enjoy the things that the Lord has given you now.

When you think about it, you can apply this to almost everything:

My children don’t behave the way I want them to.

The Church is not as it should be.

My writing project isn’t finished.

I’d like more people to listen to the podcast.

I’d like to be more knowledgable about certain things.

And these are just some of the desires that I’m willing to share with you. I’m aware of much more egotistical and sinful things that I secretly desire.

And life will always be like this. It’s folly to assume otherwise. Things might get slightly better in some ways, but then there will be other problems, that come out of nowhere.

What’s the solution?

Just be happy with what you have now, and see it as a gift of God’s grace. As Burroughs says, ‘Certainly our contentment does not consist in getting the thing we desire, but in God’s fashioning our spirits to our conditions’.

I’m writing this in the afternoon, having just spent several hours doing administration. Admin is a thing that literally has no end, and can never be as one wants it to be. It’s just an endless vortex of ever-proliferating work.

So, one has to leave it behind.

I’m having dinner with the two small children shortly. I’m hungry. I’m a bit tired. My brain is fogged from all the emails.

Time to sit down and to be happy with what I have. But not just that, but to recognise that (as I think I wrote last week): ‘Every good thing the people of God enjoy, they enjoy it in God’s love, as a token of God’s love, and coming from God’s eternal love to them’ (p.27). And not only this, but ‘when you sit at your table, and rejoice with your wife and children and friends (or whomever), you may look upon every one of those as a forerunner, yea the very earnest penny of eternal life to you’ (p.29).

That is, Christians don’t just enjoy things, but we enjoy them in a double-way: as the thing in itself is enjoyable, but also as a gift that is given to us by God. And, not only that, but as a pledge of eternal life. Like an engagement ring that is not only beautiful in itself, but is a gift and a token of what is to come. These are all contained in every good and perfect gift that comes down to us from above.

So we can be happy with them all now, even above the Stoics, who themselves recognised the futility of continually longing for more.

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Journal - Kicking the Dog, General Election, The England Football Team, Alex’s 2nd Birthday

Last week marked perhaps the final time we will have our dog Quentin come and stay with us.

Some background: we got Quentin eleven years ago before we had any children. He was a very cute white-golden Sprocker Spaniel. There was an incident on the first day when I was in the kitchen. It all happened without my conscious thought: I felt something grab my trousers and instinctively I kicked out my leg. I turned and saw a spinning flash of gold flying through the air, then there was a whimper and he ran away into another room.

Not a good start. But then things were very positive after that. Until, that is, Lorna got pregnant the first time and we started having children. It’s a long story but it essentially began a process of Quentin going from a normal dog with an obedient and calm disposition to being a neurotic wreck who barks and howls at the slightest noise and seems to be constantly on the verge of violence against infants.

It is a metamorphosis that has taken time.

Essentially, when we got to child number three, he had become sufficiently difficult for us to entrust him into the care of Lorna’s parents on a semi-permanent basis. We have had him back for periods every now and then, but the same problems have asserted themselves.

Recently, I thought to myself that it’s been a while and that there would be advantages in having a dog here: good reason to exercise, opportunity to be out and about and meet parishioners. Plus, I am much more relaxed and in control of myself now. So we got him back for a while.

I think it was bad for the whole time. But in the past week to ten days, it really became horrendous. Every time one of the children went near him, he started growling and would often bark at them. Every noise that was made around the house was liable to send him into a howling frenzy.

When Lorna and I were sitting outside on an evening, Rafe came down to tell us something and Quentin ran straight at him barking loudly. Rafe was terrified and ran away and Quentin pursued him without relenting. At that point, I went and grabbed him and shouted at him to lie down. Instead of obeying me, he stood there snarling and growling. I, of course, did not refrain and we found ourselves in a face-off with him growling and me shouting at him and commanding him to lie down. Eventually he gave in I think. But this was the first time this had happened between us and it really marked a low point in our relationship.

It happened again in an even more stressful situation. Lorna was showering one of the children whilst I was cooking burgers in two frying pans full of hot fat on the stove. Rupert and Mary rushed in arguing over the emery board from the Twister game. Rupert was holding it aloft and Mary was chasing him and screaming. Then Alex our two-year-old came in and started touching Quentin’s mouth. Then Quentin started growling and snarling at him. By that point, I think I had grabbed the emery board from Rupert, so I went over to Quentin, shouted at him to stop and then hit him on the nose with it. (It’s only cardboard so it wouldn’t have hurt.) But then we got into another face off with him growling me commanding him in my most serious voice to lie down.

It was all very unpleasant. After that incident, we decided it was time for him to go because it seemed a matter of time before he simply bit one of the children (or me) and we could have been into more serious territory. So I think that’s it now. No more Quentin. If we want a dog, we’re going to have to get a new one. I have to say that, coming downstairs the day after he’d left, I simply felt relief that I didn’t have to deal with his neurotic personality.

A personal reflection: I thought this time that I could handle the stress of his barking and other annoying behaviour. I really couldn’t. I don’t know if it was the best thing to confront him when he was being threatening with the children, but I did it instinctively in order to protect them but also with a degree of real anger towards him. His barking is something that I literally cannot help but find extremely irritating, and I should at him many times when he did it.

Maybe, by the Lord’s grace and assistance, I am growing in patience with my children and in other areas in life. But I definitely failed this time when it came to the dog. In some ways, it’s a shame that we can’t have him anymore, because it gave me an opportunity to grown in gentleness and patience, and maybe I would have made some progress eventually. It’s a lot more peaceful though.

Bye-bye Quentin.

I don’t feel any anxiety about the General Election, but I think what will probably happen is that Labour are going to get a massive majority and the Conservative are going to be decimated, perhaps beyond what anybody is expecting. I expect Reform to do well. I am writing this before the General Election, and I will not change this paragraph. I promise. So you’ll know, when you read this, if I was right or wrong.

I am most concerned about what I call in my forthcoming book “The Culture of Death” (a phrase associated with John Paul II) and how it is increasingly manifesting itself in the modern world. I think that, during this Labour term, we will see the tragic misstep of the legalisation of euthanasia. Because of the tone I try to maintain in this blog, I won't go into detail about what this might mean, but anyone who is familiar with the situation in a country like Canada will know something of the future for our once God-fearing nation.

I very much hope that home-schooling continues to go under the radar and that any future attempts to regulate it (as there always are from time-to-time) will come to nothing. From a political perspective, I assume it’s fairly pointless: there’s not a strong feeling in the population and home-schoolers like us pay that same taxes as everyone else but we don’t cost the state by taking up school places. I just want them to leave us alone to raise our children as we see fit. Lord-willing they will.

There are many other things I could say, but I’ll leave it there, so as not to bring the tone down too much. My (political) hope is that, out of the detritus of this election result, some genuinely conservative (and perhaps even Christian) alternative will arise. But, overall, I think we just need to pray that our nation will turn back from its rejection of Christ and the truth, and once again embrace the faith of our fathers.

Child No. 3 exercising her democratic rights…

On the subject of the Euros, I have to say that I have once again this feeling that I actually want England to lose because I dislike them so much. There is an analogy with the General Election: I actually desired them to lost catastrophically against Slovakia the other day because I would like to see Southgate fired and a new manager who is not totally incompetent come in. He was saved by an extremely talented man who generated something amazing at the last moment. I was very upset. The sight of the players dancing to Sweet Caroline at the end was awful: they should have been hanging their heads in shame at their performance and congratulating the Slovakians on a wonderful display of grit and teamwork. Jude Bellingham’s crotch gesture is just the icing on the cake.

Alexander was two on Saturday. It seems like only yesterday I was writing on here about him becoming one. That was just after we moved to Winchester. Which means we’ve been here for a year. On Saturday, we had a Harris/Hillman (Lorna’s side) family gathering. It was very hot and a lovely time. I overate, particularly some delicious ham hock quiche that someone had brought from Cook. That was…moreish. So, I’m back on the abstemious diet this week.

Anyway, here’s a picture of Alex, looking cool in some Irreverend merch:

Coming up, I’m just finishing reading Michael Heiner’s Supernatural, which is a popular-level version of The Unseen Realm. This has been really good actually, and it’s clarified a lot of the themes of The Unseen Realm for me. So I’ll be writing about that.

When I go on holiday in a couple of weeks, I’m looking forward to reading Tom Wright’s Paul: A Biography and I’ve also just bought Kenneth Bailey’s Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. I’ve also decided to read about The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library, so I’ll do that at some point.

Also I’m sneaking in a book about Mary (as in Jesus’ mother, not my Mary) because we’re talking about her at catechesis group at the moment. That one is called Mary for all Christians by Anglican theologian John MacQuarrie.

Thanks as ever and have a great weekend whatever you are doing!