If you’re following along at home you know we’re now out of the science chapter and have moved to the bible chapter. This seems much less fun to me, but where Keller goes I will follow. You also might have noticed that this first section is very large, so I’m going to have to take a broad strokes approach.
Keller decides to only focus on the four canonical gospels, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. Keller makes several core claims to back up the gospels as historically accurate. First, he says that scholars believe they were written around 40 – 60 AD. He says this would be within the lifetime of eye witnesses to the life of Jesus. He says the gospels are counterproductive to the causes of the early church leaders, that if they were just making up whatever they wanted they would have made it more useful and flattering of themselves. He also claims that the details of the gospels provide evidence that they were not fictionalized, because fiction of the time lacked details.
Keller finishes this long section by defending the bible culturally. He first explains that 1st century Roman slaves were not at all like more modern slaves that we think of and that is the slavery referenced by the bible. He then argues that any moral fault you find in the bible is because of your temporal bias, the notion that the values of today are superior to values of all other times. He argues that this bias should be avoided, just as cultural bias is.
Okay, well, Keller doesn’t give rigorous sources for his claims, but to my understanding his time frame for the writing of the gospels is extremely conservative. Just check wikipedia… that should have a general picture of what most scholars think. Even if you take Keller’s earliest number, 40 AD, and assume that the authors were about 25 when Jesus died… they were still really old for the time. Seems strange that they would wait until the end of their lives to write down the most important thing ever.
His point about the writings being counterproductive to early church leaders, like the apostles, only matters if his dates are right. If the mainstream is correct, and the apostles were all dead, then making them look bad in the pursuit of other goals would be no problem. His points about women be prominent and Jesus himself not looking perfect in the gospels seem flimsy. Maybe women feature prominently in the gospels to attract female converts. Maybe the early Christians could rationalize Jesus’s apparent infirmities just as modern one can.
There are similar possible explanations for the idea that the gospels have too many unnecessary details to be fictionalized. Perhaps the authors wanted to make it seem like and eye witness account after the fact. Maybe the gospels are the earliest example of “found footage”. Remember how people thought the Blair Witch was real? Maybe the authors recorded the stories of many witnesses, or witnesses once removed, to get such details. Maybe someone was insane, and thought they were recounting things they had seen, but were actually just making things up. Keller frequently, in this section, asserts that there is “no reason” for something in the gospels other than the gospels being true accounts. Whenever you read that, be careful. There’s always at least one other reason, that someone wanted to make it seem like it was a true account, and there are usually many more reasons than that if you think about it.
And as for his argument against cultural or moral displeasure with the bible, it makes no sense to me. He mentions that we today think many of the ideas of our grandparents as antiquated and regressive, and says that there is not reason to think this won’t continue, that our grandchildren won’t think our ideas outmoded. He makes no argument to suggest that this process is cyclical, though. If he believes that, I don’t know why he would. There is no historical pattern of cyclical moral leanings on say, individual liberties or the rights of women. I agree that the currently held norms will be improved upon and soon, and when I am an old man some of the notions I hold now may seem antiquated. This seems like a great reason not to use a 2000 year old book to get moral guidance, though.
Keller again in this section encourages readers to ignore minor qualms, like the treatment of women or the acceptance of slavery (which btw wasn’t exactly great in the 1st century either) and focus on the core messages of bible. This is problematic for me. The reason people get hung up on “small” things in the bible is because they are asked to take it as the sole “evidence” that the whole Jesus story happened. Keller asks that you ignore all the things that make you question the credibility of the bible when deciding whether it is true. That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
So what if you believe everything Keller says and don’t care about any of my arguments above? What you are left with, in the best case of Keller’s argument, is four guys telling you some other guy came back from the dead. If four random people came up to you on the street and told you some guy in Venezuela had risen from the dead would you believe them? If they said, ask this other guy, Rupert, and Rupert corroborated their story, would you believe them? What if they had ten friends that corroborated them? You still wouldn’t believe them. And that’s not even how good the evidence is. Really the four guys would be writing a story forty years after the fact, 2000 years ago, in a language you don’t speak, and since then it has been translated and copied countless times. That’s what Keller’s arguing for, that’s the best case.