DONALD TRUMP AND JESUS

 I'm seeing memes which compare the conviction of Donald Trump to the conviction of Jesus. The argument goes like this: (1) Jesus was falsely convicted; (2) Donald Trump was falsely convicted; therefore (3) Donald Trump is a Jesus figure. The comparison is fallacious. Other than the fact that both convictions occurred as a result of a criminal prosecution, there are no parallels between the conviction of Jesus and the conviction of Trump.

First, Trump is not now, nor has he ever been, the Son of God.

Second, if Jesus had been a mere human being, instead of the Son of God, Jesus’ conviction would have been lawful. It was a violation of the lex iulia maiestas for a citizen or subject of the Roman Empire to go around claiming to be a king without the permission of the Emperor. Violation of the lex iulia maiestas was a capital offense. If a merely human Jesus had claimed to be a king, he would have been guilty of a capital crime. But Jesus wasn’t merely human; he was the Son of God. God’s jurisdiction is superior to the Emperor’s; therefore God’s Son can claim to be a king without violating a law which applies to mere humans.

Third, Trump loudly proclaiming that he was railroaded does not make it true. I prosecuted and convicted several thousand criminals, and most of them claimed to have been railroaded.

Fourth, Jesus was not allowed to appeal his conviction, but was immediately crucified. Donald Trump has the right to appeal his conviction to a higher court. In due course, an appellate court will determine whether Trump’s conviction was proper or improper.

So, how is Donald Trump like Jesus Christ? Not at all.

WHEN WAS JESUS CRUCIFIED?

 I just finished listening to an excellent series of lectures from the Great Courses on the New Testament. The professor is Bart D. Ehrman, who thinks that the writers of the Gospels (whom we shall call the Evangelists) botched the story of Jesus because they got inaccurate information about what Jesus said and did, and then they changed the details of the flawed information that they got in order to conform the story to their particular theology. He even goes so far as to say that the Evangelists told stories that they knew to be untrue.

Ehrman begins his analysis by positing that none of the Evangelists had any personal knowledge of the details of Jesus’ life. He then says that the stories about Jesus were transmitted orally for some 35-65 years before they were written down by the Evangelists. Anyone who has played the parlor game “gossip” knows what happens to twice and thrice told tales.

He offers as an example Mark’s and John’s conflicting dates of the crucifixion. Mark firmly fixes the crucifixion on Passover. John just as firmly dates it to the Day of Preparation, the day before Passover. Ehrman says that John knew the date was Passover but knowingly changed the date to the day before. Why? Because that’s when the Passover lambs were slaughtered and Jesus is the Lamb of God. So according to Ehrman, John told a lie to convey what he believed to be a spiritual truth. I don’t think so. As I discuss why I don’t think so, I will accept Ehrman’s assertion that none of the Evangelists had personal knowledge of Jesus, but I can’t accept his second assertion that they had only oral sources because one of the Evangelists (Luke) tells us he used multiple written sources. 

Ehrman compares Bible scholarship to police investigation, in that they both involve searching for and evaluating clues. I don’t claim to be a Bible scholar, but I do claim to know something about criminal investigations. Ehrman speaks of three evaluative tools that Bible scholars use when attacking the Gospels. He calls them independent attestation, dissimilarity, and contextual credibility.

(1) Independent attestation—If a story is told by multiple independent sources, it is more likely to be true. E.g. John, Mark, Paul, Tacitus, and Josephus are independent sources. They all say Jesus was crucified. Their agreement makes it probable that Jesus was in fact crucified. The same sort of analysis is true of criminal investigations. The more witnesses we have to an event, the greater the likelihood of the event.

(2) Dissimilarity—If the Gospels say something about Jesus that is dissimilar to what later Christians believe, it is more likely to be true. E.g., in Mark’s story of the Syro-Phoenician Jesus referred to non-Jews as dogs. This doesn’t sound like what later Christians thought about Jesus’s attitude toward non-Jews. Jesus probably referred to non-Jews as dogs. In criminal cases we use a similar criterion: when a party comes forward with evidence that is contrary to the party’s position, it is considered more credible.

(3) Contextual credibility—When various persons in the Gospel stories act as we would expect Second Temple Jews to act, these actions have more credibility. If they act like people from a later stage in Christian history, then that action is suspect. Once again, a similar yardstick is employed in evaluating evidence in a court of law.

Here are some additional yardsticks we use in a court of law which might have some application to the question of Gospel interpretation:

(1) You should never call anyone a liar unless you have an ample evidentiary basis for doing so. Forman v. Wallshein, 671 So.2d 872, 875 (Fla. 3d DCA 1996).

(2) The mere fact that two witnesses disagree does not mean that either of them are lying. Boatwright v. State, 452 So.2d 666 (4th DCA Fla. 1984).

(3) When confronted by conflicts in the testimony of witnesses, you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that somebody is lying. McLeod v. State, 128 Fla. 35, 174 So. 466 (1937).

The conflict between Mark and John about the date of the Crucifixion is not an ample evidentiary basis for calling either Mark or John a liar.  One of them, of course, has to be wrong, unless different sects of Second Temple Jews celebrated Passover on different days—a resolution of the conflict which has been put forward by some students of the Gospels.

Interestingly, I once had a case in which the credibility of a key witness depended on the date of Easter. He said that his girlfriend couldn’t accompany him on a drug smuggling run because it was over the Easter weekend and she needed to be in church on Easter. Big problem. The weekend of the drug smuggle wasn’t Easter weekend. It looked as though our witness was discredited until further investigation showed that the girlfriend belonged to some minor denomination of the Eastern Orthodox Church which celebrated Easter on a different Sunday than Protestants did. Turned out nobody was lying.

Does this suggest anything about the conflict between John and Mark? Could it be that neither Evangelist was lying but that both were reporting the facts as they sincerely believed them? Maybe Ehrman has it backwards. Maybe John called Jesus the Lamb of God because he sincerely believed Jesus was crucified the day before Passover with the rest of the Passover lambs. Or maybe John only knew that he was crucified around Passover and decided it must have been the day before because Jesus was the Lamb of God. Or maybe he was just mistaken about the date—that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus was crucified.

In my blog on Memories of Murder Weapons I talked about how memory works and how witnesses retell events they’ve seen. I won’t rehash everything I said there, but the bottom line is that we only truly remember the major points of an event and when recalling the event, we “remember” the details by filling in plausible inferences about what happened. For instance, I remember seeing John shoot Mary. When I describe John shooting Mary I say that John pulled the trigger on his firearm. I didn’t see John pull the trigger, but guns won’t fire unless you pull the trigger, therefore I “remember” John pulling the trigger. It’s a subconscious process, and I truly believe that I saw John pull the trigger. Psychologists call this process “confabulation.”

When I wrote The Last Murder, a book about a case I prosecuted, I was remembering events that had happened over three decades in the past. Checking my recollections against newspaper accounts, police reports, and the memories of others involved in the case, I found that I was frequently wrong about the nuances of a transaction but never wrong about the major events of the transaction. When I wrote The Almanac Trial, I wrote it using letters and statements of many of the participants in the trial, but these letters and statements were written three decades or more after the trial. There again, the witnesses were in conflict on the details of the trial, but not the main facts of the trial.

When the Evangelists wrote, they would have had at their disposal both written accounts of the life of Jesus and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. In other words, they’d have been in pretty much the same situation I was in when I wrote The Last Murder and The Almanac Trial. That means that they had accounts which agreed as to the major details but were in conflict as to the minor details. They would therefore have had to make judgments about which minor details were more accurate. E.g. In the story of the healing of the paralytic, his friends tore open the roof of a house that Jesus was in and lowered the paralytic through the hole to get him to Jesus. Mark said they dug a hole in the roof and Luke said they tore up the shingles to the roof. Does it really matter which they did? They made the hole. By the way, Mark was more likely right. First Century Judean houses didn’t have shingled roofs. Be that as it may, I’m not prepared to expel Luke from the New Testament because he was mistaken about the construction of Judean roofs in the time of Jesus.

I’ve worked with the testimony of thousands of witnesses, and I’ve seen all kinds of conflict in testimony. Like Ehrman, I see conflicts in the testimony of the Evangelists. I outlined some of them in The Case against Christ. But in my estimation the conflicts (1) are minor, (2) give no valid reason to doubt the honesty of the Evangelists, and (3) give no valid reason to think that their account of the life of Jesus is untrue.

ST. AUGUSTINE: MORE THAN JUST THE NAMESAKE OF FLORIDA'S OLDEST CITY

When St. Augustine became the Bishop of Hippo in 396, he began to write On Christian Doctrine, a book on how to interpret scripture. The book, which he did not complete until 427, reveals him to be one of the most profound thinkers in the history of Western philosophy.  The cornerstone of his system of Biblical interpretation comes from Matthew 22:35-40:

Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  (KJV).

St. Augustine wrote that “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures, or any part of them so that it does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand it at all.” On Christian Doctrine, 1:XXXVI:40 (D.W. Robertson, Jr., translator).

Building from this cornerstone, St. Augustine worked out a systematic method of reverently interpreting the scriptures which anticipates and refutes many of the jibes of the modern day atheists such as Richard Dawkins and his ilk. St. Augustine's system is not, however, a fundamentalist or literalist system. He welcomed the discoveries of heathen science as an aid in scriptural interpretation, despite the fact that he could read well enough to see that some things in scripture seemed to be contradicted by science.

He taught that these seeming contradictions were a signal to engage in deep, protracted study of the passages so as to try to discern their true meaning. He even gave a set of rules for reconciling these contradictions. If the contradictions could not be reconciled by careful exegesis, then he held that the passage in question should be interpreted figuratively rather than literally. “[W]hen the words taken literally give an absurd meaning, we ought forthwith to inquire whether they may not be used in this or that figurative sense which we are unacquainted with; and in this way many obscure passages have had light thrown upon them.”    On Christian Doctrine, 3:XXX:41 (Marcus Dods, translator).

 

I just finished the Teaching Company's audio course on the history of Christian theology. In the course I learned that St. Augustine engaged in a study of the book of Genesis which extended over several years and produced a theory of creation which anticipated modern science’s Big Bang theory by over 15 centuries. St. Augustine was a remarkable philosopher and theologian. I have put his study of Genesis on my list of books to read. If it is as well reasoned as On Christian Doctrine, it will be a very interesting read.

 

 

You may want to stop reading now, because I am going to say some things which most people will find dull beyond endurance. (Maybe you find what I have already said to be dull beyond endurance).

 

Interestingly, from my study of the trial of Galileo, it seems that Cardinal Bellarmine used St. Augustine's system of scriptural interpretation to censure Galileo. Bellarmine was quite content to have the sun at the center of the solar system if there were sufficient scientific proof of the proposition, but when Galileo wrote, Tycho's geocentric system for the solar system worked as well as Galileo's heliocentric system. Until Tycho's system could be refuted, it was to be accepted because it conformed more to scripture than Galileo's. Galileo did not live to see his system triumph. When science conclusively proved Galileo's system to be superior to Tycho's, then scripture was reinterpreted in conformity with St. Augustine's teaching in On Christian Doctrine. This is a grossly oversimplified explanation of a complex controversy, but it is far closer to the truth than the grossly oversimplified explanation given by the partisans of the "Science versus Religion" school of thought.