Continuing
on with my rebuttal to Lee Strobel's The Case For Christ where I am going through the book page by page, section by
section, to rebut bad arguments (and accepting good arguments).
Please
don't take this as an atheist being po-faced for the sake of it, but so far, there just aren't ANY arguments in this section of the book
that would convince skeptics.
It's
like this book was written before rational skepticism became cool, so
the arguments may have been slightly convincing in 1990, but are really lousy in 2018.
But
The Case For Christ has to answer a hard question: is it a
book to convince atheists, or is it a book to shore up
Christian belief? Right now, it is reading like a book to shore up
Christian belief, which means it's not trying hard to convince atheists.
Anyway,
on with the rebutting:
-----
On
pages 30-31, Lee Strobel calls Dr. Craig Blomberg:
"...one of the country's foremost authorities on the biographies of Jesus, which are called the four gospels..."
Now,
is it right to call the gospels biographies of Jesus, since
the gospels give only some page space to his birth and infancy years,
much less space to his adolescent years, and absolutely
zero space to the twenty years of his life leading up to his
public ministry?
I
may be speaking from a 21st century mentality here, but to
use the modern word 'biography' and then call the gospels
'biographies' is eating your cake and having it too.
The
problem is further compounded when we read actual biographies written
by other professional writers/historians of Roman antiquity and find that those texts incredibly detailed and reliably accurate.
So
then, why are the biographies written by Roman historians detailed
and accurate, yet the biographies written by early Christians so
lacking and haphazard?
The
only rational conclusions I feel we can reach are that either a)
early Christians weren't, or didn't have access to, professional writers, or b) that they
weren't writing professional biographies.
One answer to this question is answered by looking at the textual
style of Mark. We can see Mark wrote in fluent Greek prose (though deliberately in an
low dialect) – Mark wasn't no dummy – so the only other conclusion left is that Mark wasn't writing a professional biography.
Which
then means that the Synoptic Gospels have a problem - only 3% of the
text of Mark is unique only to Mark, meaning 97% of Mark's non-biography has
been cribbed/borrowed/reworded by the other gospel writers.
To look at it another way - it's
like Jesus, the walking, talking incarnate son of
God, did virtually nothing of note after he was a child (save for an incident here or there), absolutely nothing of note as a young adult, but then Jesus hits 30 and all of a sudden people take interest and rush to pump out literature.
-----
My
second issue with this part of The Case For Christ relates to
Lee Strobel's portrayal of Dr. Craig Blomberg.
In
my opinion, Lee Strobel writes such a glowing appraisal of Dr.
Blomberg, including what the man hangs on his office walls and his
long list of academic credentials, that I am left with two overwhelming
thoughts:
1) Lee
Strobel was not trying to grill Dr. Blomberg - not at all.
The questions Strobel raises are just swatted away by Dr. Blomberg,
and Strobel rarely presses Dr. Blomberg for anything more than a
“How convinced are you about [x]?”, “Very”,
“Oh, OK!”.
There is nothing that could even be
considered skeptical in this interview. It's like Strobel is
looking to justify his own faith, rather than try convince skeptics
of it.
2) Given
that I don't have the interview transcripts it is very hard for me
to comment, and I don't want to detract from anyone's character, but
the very soft-ball nature of the questioning leads me to think that
there is more than meets the eye.
Either Strobel was indeed
a skeptical attack dog but left it out of his book; Dr. Blomberg
only agreed to the interview on the condition that it was a soft/friendly interview; or Dr. Blomberg knew the interview was going to be
soft/friendly because he knew Lee Strobel wasn't a skeptic
attack dog.
I
can only hope that in the following chapters, Strobel gets his attack
dog on, finds that there is indeed a rational case for Christ, and is
able to put it into his book to convince rationalist skeptics like
me.
-----
Until
next time, stay skeptical, stay rational, stay healthy, love yourself
and others.
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