The Galilee question

While reviewing Andy Stanley’s set of talks entitled ‘Who Needs God’ – https://whoneedsgod.com/ – I was promted to research the likely reliability, or otherwise, of one of the accounts of Jesus appearing to his disciples after his resurrection.

He summarises the first believers’ testimony very simply as: ‘We saw him killed, then a few days later we had breakfast with him on the beach’ – a reference to the story in John 21 in which Jesus appears to his disciples while they are fishing on Lake Tiberias (another name for Lake Galilee), causes a miraculous catch of fish, and cooks breakfast for them on the shore. Unfortunately for the argument for the resurrection, researching this story quickly leads to uncovering one of the major discrepancies between the gospels when it comes to their resurrection narratives – whether Jesus appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem or in Galilee.

On first inspection, the Galilee breakfast in John 21 fits with the narrative presented in Matthew and Mark, in which the angel gives the following instruction to the women at the tomb:

“Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.” (Matthew 28:5–7)

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” (Mark 16:6–7)

The implication of this instruction is that the disciples won’t see Jesus in Jerusalem. Accordingly, in Matthew, while Jesus himself does appear immediately to the women, it’s in Galilee where Jesus appears to the male disciples and gives them his last instructions:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16–20)

However, in Luke, the words of the angel(s) have been subtly altered. They still mention Galilee, but this time it is a reference to the time Jesus was there with the disciples in the past:

“Why are you looking in the place of the dead for someone who is alive? Jesus isn’t here! He has been raised from death. Remember that while he was still in Galilee, he told you, ‘The Son of Man will be handed over to sinners who will nail him to a cross. But three days later he will rise to life.’” Then they remembered what Jesus had said. (Luke 24:5–8)

And so in contrast with Matthew, in the remainder of Luke (and in its second volume, Acts) Jesus appears to his disciples while they are still in Jerusalem, before giving them his final instructions and ascending to heaven from the Mount of Olives just outside the city. There is no return to Galilee; the disciples are instructed to stay in Jerusalem until the day of Pentecost. It seems Luke, generally reckoned to have used Mark as a source, subtly altered the words of the angel because he wanted to place the appearances of Jesus to the disciples in and around Jerusalem instead of in Galilee. If Matthew and Luke cannot agree on where the disciples saw the risen Jesus how can we trust either as composed from eye-witness accounts?

To further complicate things, coming back to John where we started, John 20 has Jesus appearing to his disciples in Jerusalem, but then John 21 includes this breakfast appearance in Galilee. John 21, however, is widely recognised as being a later postscript, the original conclusion being at the end of chapter 20. Maybe the author of the postscript is trying to harmonise both sets of stories from Matthew and Luke, but in doing so he only succeeds in highlighting the discrepancy.

In an attempt to harmonise Matthew and Luke it is claimed that the disciples simply must have travelled to Galilee and then back to Jerusalem again, between Passover and Pentecost, and that Jesus appeared to them in both locations. It just happens that each gospel only records some of these occasions. But if that were the case, why does it also happen that each gospel, as originally written, only selects one of the locations? Even more to the point, why does each gospel structure its narrative to the point of apparently excluding the possibility of appearances in the other location? Matthew excludes the possibility of any Jerusalem appearances by means of the words of the angel, while Luke excludes the possibility of any Galilee appearances by keeping the disciples in Jerusalem until the ascension.

This attempt at harmonisation also has to imagine there were two separate sets of ‘last words’ of Jesus on a mountain – in Galilee recorded by Matthew, and on the Mount of Olives recorded by Luke. This stretches credulity to breaking point.

It seems clear that each author has their own agenda when it comes to their resurrection narrative, to set the focus either on Galilee or on Jerusalem, for theological or political reasons, and that they place this agenda more highly than reporting accurately. We therefore have to conclude that we do not have unspoilt access to any original eye-witness accounts.

Review - 'Who Needs God' - part 3

I’m reviewing a series of six talks called ‘Who Needs God’, by Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Atlanta — https://whoneedsgod.com/ — and we’ve reached the third talk.

Talk 3: ‘The Bible Told Me So’

In this third talk, Andy hopes to reach a turning-point in his appeal to those who were brought up in the church but have since left it. To start with, he continues in the same vein as the second talk, carefully (and I think successfully) dismantling some erroneous foundations of Christianity that the church has taught in the past. This helps to continue his argument that many people who have left the church may have left needlessly, because all they have done is to reject a belief in what was in fact the wrong version of Christianity, based on faith rather than evidence. But this third talk is also the first point at which he starts to introduce a positive argument for what he claims is a more authentic version of Christianity, centred on what he claims are more reasonable arguments.

But first, the dismantling of old foundations: Andy quotes the well-known children’s song:

Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so.

Andy picks this song as a simple example of the erroneous belief that the Bible is the foundation of Christianity. He criticises churches and pastors for preaching a version of Christianity that stands or falls on the reliability of the whole Bible. It’s a version of Christianity that people have only naturally turned away from, once they have found any reason to doubt the accuracy of even just one single part of the Bible. It’s the idea that the whole Bible must be literally true, otherwise the whole of Christianity comes tumbling down like a house of cards.

But in fact, Andy says, Christianity doesn’t exist because of the Bible; it’s the other way around. He laments the fact that the church has over the years got sidelined into defending the accuracy of the Bible as the main way of defending itself. I can’t help but agree that the church seems to have done more to turn people away than attract them by attempting this defence, and I applaud Andy again for addressing the issue so clearly, in a church context, at what has proved to be substantial risk to his own reputation.

Andy goes on to give a very brief history lesson to prove his point. Drawing a timeline on screen, Andy explains that while the events of the life of Jesus and the birth of the church took place in the 1st century, it wasn’t until the 4th century that what now call the New Testament was first brought together in a single volume, and published together with the Jewish scriptures, which then became known as the Old Testament. Prior to that, the New Testament documents were being circulated between churches, copied individually and gradually collected. During this time many non-Jews became converts to Christianity without easy access to the Jewish scriptures, which they knew only from quotations in the new Christian writings. Andy concludes that original Christianity was not based on a belief in either the Old or New Testaments as we know them today. So far, so good. Any scholar investigating the origins of Christianity would agree, and Andy wishes all churches and pastors would acknowledge this.

What then was the original basis of Christianity? Andy identifies it as the belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Or rather, as he claims, not a belief but a historical fact. He states quite boldly that the first Christians didn’t have faith in the resurrection; they had seen the risen Jesus, and that didn’t need faith at all. To put it another way, early Christianity wasn’t a religious belief, but the outcome of a historical event. But this is where things get much harder for scholars, and anyone else, to find the truth behind the origins of Christian belief. We are dealing with the largely unknown period between the events of the life of Jesus himself, ending in about 30CE, and the earliest known fragment of a Christian gospel, dated to around 125. The process of uncovering what happened in that period is fraught with difficulty, and prone to subjective interpretation depending on one’s prior faith position.

Andy makes the claim that all the documents that now make up the New Testament were written prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. He doesn’t identify his sources for this belief, but he seems to be following the arguments of scholar John A.T. Robinson and apologist William Lane Craig, among others. The main reason both he and they give for this opinion is that the gospels do not refer to the events of 70CE, but Andy fails to address any of the many counter-arguments. He mentions in passing that many scholars date the gospels after 70CE, but fails to admit that these scholars are in fact in the majority. He simply takes the early dating of the gospels as a given, and concludes from this that the four gospels contain eye-witness accounts of the life of Jesus, including therefore the resurrection appearances. But there are many more questions that the conscientious reader will want to investigate before making the same simple conclusion. These questions relate to the nature and purpose of the gospels, as well as their dates. There are many hurdles to overcome before anyone can demonstrate beyond doubt such an unlikely event as the resurrection.

Aside from any argument over the dating of the gospels and whether they contain first-hand testimony, there still remains the question of why Christianity grew after the first generation. It is unlikely that later generations could really be said to have become Christians on the basis of evidence for the resurrection. The first-generation testimony, if it had existed at all, had now vanished, retained only in writings, and the later believers must have had other reasons to join the new religion. The same even applies to first-generation believers who were remote from Jerusalem. Like it not not, Christianity certainly was a religion, with beliefs, rituals, and ecstatic experiences — witness the letters of Paul. It is much more likely that these later generations, especially of non-Jews, were converted by the appeal of the religion, including its ecstatic experiences, rather than by documents, which then casts doubt on the claim that it can only have been the resurrection of Jesus that convinced the first generation too.

Ultimately Andy is right that Christianity doesn’t stand or fall on the reliability of the whole Bible. But it does stand or fall on the dating and nature of the gospels, a topic which is far from resolved, and on gaining an understanding of why people converted to the new religion.

As in the previous talks I congratulate Andy on deconstructing the erroneous foundations of Christianity that the church clings onto, but query whether he has successfully replaced them.

Postscript – into the fourth talk

It’s no surprise that Andy received some backlash from more conservative Christian quarters for this talk, condemning him for ‘not believing the Bible’. It seems some Christians are not amenable to rational argument, and see any attempt to base Christianity on something other than the reliability of the Bible as heresy. As a result, he spent about half of his next, fourth, talk going back over the reasons for giving this series of talks in the first place, and re-iterating why he sees the gospels as evidence for the resurrection firstly, and as scripture only secondarily.

He refers to the first believers’ testimony very simply as: ‘We saw him killed, then a few days later we had breakfast with him on the beach’ – a reference to the story in John 21. Unfortunately for his case, he has picked an example of a supposed resurrection appearance that demonstrates very clearly why these accounts cannot be taken at face value. Researching this event quickly leads to uncovering one of the major discrepancies between the gospels when it comes to their resurrection narratives – the Galilee question – which I’ll write about separately.