Kreitsauce's Musings

I got the title of this post from my favorite line from Stargate: SG-1. Jack O’neill always says it when he gets frustrated by people who waste time on stupidity, wrong-headed thinking, or inane political mumbo-jumbo. Frankly, I’ve noticed a lot of Christians that deserve a good “Oh, for crying out loud,” from the Colonel himself, followed by my second favorite line. My reason for this is that it seems like so many Christians have their heads firmly planted in the sand.

I say this because I have met so many Christians who naively think that they are not responsible for what happens in the world around them. Their attitudes and words, they think, do not influence those around them. Their choice of entertainment, they suppose, is entirely a matter of personal preference, devoid of any deeper meaning and incapable of creating unintended consequences. Whether or not they vote or are involved in government and law (one hesitates to use the word “politics”) is of little consequence. Worldview, apologetics, and philosophy have no meaning to them, and they would just as soon have everyone avoid this area of reality altogether. And, oh, the excuses they use to justify these ideas. Some of them even use Bible verses to bolster their position.

Personally, I prefer Wesley’s original lyrics to the version currently in our hymnals:

Hark, how all the welkin rings,
“Glory to the King of kings;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!”

Joyful, all ye nations, rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
Universal nature say,
“Christ the Lord is born to-day!”

Christ, by highest Heaven ador’d,
Christ, the everlasting Lord:
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of a Virgin’s womb!

Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see,
Hail the incarnate deity!
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus! Our Immanuel!

Hail, the heavenly Prince of Peace!
Hail, the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
Risen with healing in his wings.

Mild He lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth;
Born to give them second birth.

Come, Desire of nations, come,
Fix in us thy humble home;
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.

Now display thy saving power,
Ruined nature now restore;
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface;
Stamp Thy image in its place.
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in thy love.

Let us Thee, though lost, regain,
Thee, the life, the inner Man:
O! to all thyself impart,
Form’d in each believing heart.

Lucy, the small australopithecus afarensis, is supposed to be our ancestor. Standing at around three feet tall, she doesn’t look like much. It’s obvious that if we’re supposed to get from a chimp-like creature to our current standing of Homo sapien, there’s going to have to be a lot of changing going on throughout the years. We are supposed to have gone through the Homo habilis stage, followed by Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and finally Homo sapiens sapiens (that’s not a typo.)

It all sounds so tidy, doesn’t it? Well, it seems that way until one realizes that there is no clear-cut definition of any of these categories, at least not one that is universally accepted by the scientific establishment. There is some degree of consensus, but certainly not the degree one would expect. There’s also little consensus on how long it takes a new species to evolve. Some estimates place it at 250,000 years per new species of human. Lucy is dated at 3 million years. Homo habilis is dated from 2 to 1.5 million years. Homo erectus is dated at 1.6 to .4 million years. Homo sapiens and so forth remain in the present. With so many unknown factors, who can tell what one should believe about evolutionary science? Of course, it gets much more convoluted than that.

The Taung Can No Man Tame

In 1924, Professor Raymond Dart acquired a fossilized skull from the lime works at Taung. He knew it was unique, and determined that it was a young primate which he named Australopithecus africanus. You can see pictures of Taung in many school textbooks due to its fame. Until Lucy was discovered in 1974, Taung was considered to be our oldest evolutionary ancestor, dating around to 2 million to 3 million years old. Then, in 1973, geologist T. C. Partridge rocked the evolutionist’s world. He determined that the cave that the Taung skull came from could not be more than 870,000 years old. Since it could take up to a million years, according to evolutionary theory, for a new species to evolve,  going all the way from africanus to modern-day humans in 870,000 years is out of the question. Plus, even evolutionists date true humans back to 750,000 years. There’s no way for africanus to be an ancestor.

So what is an evolutionist to do? They tried to fit the Taung skull into the line of habilis. Of course, some were honest. Phillip Tobias wrote in response: “Although nearly 50 yr have elapsed since its discovery, it is true to say that the Taung skull has never yet been fully analyzed and described.” I guess it stinks for all the people duped by the scientific establishment all those years! Some have seen fit to remove the Taung skull from the line of humans altogether, classifying it as P. robustus.

Monkeying Around with the Family Tree

Fortunately for evolutionists, Lucy was found the year after Patridge dated the cave. The family tree was revised, and A. afarensis (Lucy) replaced africanus (Taung) as our nonhuman ancestor. Africanus was moved to the australopithecine branch of the tree and became the link between Lucy and P. robustus.

In 1985, the famous “Black Skull” was found. Dating back, according to evolutionists, to 2.5 million years ago, it seems to be a blend of P. robustus and Lucy, leaving Taung as the odd man out. So scientists have begun to move Taung back to the line of humans (again), between Lucy (A. afarensis) and H. habilis. The problem, of course, is that Partridge’s dating of the cave makes that impossible. The dating was based on thermoluminescence analysis of calcite and uranium-series dates of 942,000 years ago and 764,000 years ago on limestone. Richard G. Klein of Stanford University writes: “A date for Taung of 2 million years ago or more may seem most unreasonable, but the argument is obviously circular and the true age remains uncertain.”

What is my point in all of this? My point is that there is nothing solid or certain about the supposed family tree. Dating methods aren’t entirely reliable, but even when they are used, they are often ignored or twisted to make the fossil record say what the evolutionists want it to say. Lucy, Taung, and the rest are being moved haphazardly about the family tree just to make one that works. To place your trust in the soft science of paleoanthropology is a mistake. I love Lucy because she is a reminder that there are far more problems than solutions offered up by a Darwinistic interpretation of the fossil record. It needs to be reinterpreted. That’s where the problem lies. The flaws are not with the fakes (like Piltdown Man), the genuine fossils, etc. The flaws are in the way evidence is interpreted and with the scientific establishment’s mad dash to put something believable together.

Aren’t you glad there are much more firm foundations out there?

You’d probably assume that a blog post about biological evolution would deal with biology or some other related study. However, that’s not where I’m taking this discussion today. Today, I’ll be looking at the poetic and artistic aspects of the Darwinism movement. To be honest, it makes sense that a believable, coherent theory would have elements of the Arts, because humans have a way of describing anything that matters in with particular eloquence. It’s true, we often tell someone we care about simply “I love you,” but we all know there are much more creative ways of saying those three words. The music industry has blossomed thanks to that creativity.

Darwin’s Day in Court

Andrew Hill has written: “Compared to other sciences, the mythic element is greatest in paleoanthropology.” (in American Scientist, March-April 1984) Speaking sympathetically of that same phenomena in the same article, Ian Tattersall admits: “Paleoanthropologists are fond of telling each other ‘Just-So’ stories; and once in a while a little needling of this kind does no harm at all.” Milford Wolpoff is much less forgiving: ” When the only people who can comment are the discoverers or friends of the discoverers, there is no sense of independent observer. We’re not practicing science. We’re practicing opera.” His reasons for making that statement can be found here.

Two books, written by law professors, may be instructive at this point. Norman Macbeth, a Harvard-trained lawyer and non-creationist studied evolution for years and wrote a book Darwin Retried in which he demonstrated that evolution was a religion and was not of high enough quality to stand up in a court of law. Philip E Johnson, a law professor of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote Darwin on Trial. In his book, he came to four important conclusions about evolution:

1. Evolution is grounded on naturalism, not scientific fact
2. A belief that a large body of empirical evidence supports evolution is nothing but an illusion
3. Evolution is a religion
4. If evolution had been subjected to a rigorous study of the evidence, it would have been abandoned long ago

In response to Roger Lewin’s description of the Ancestor’s Exhibit in 1984 in which he spoke of the awe and emotion of the experience, Johnson commented:

“Lewin is absolutely correct, and I can’t think of anything more likely to detract from the objectivity of one’s judgment. Descriptions of fossils from people who yearn to cradle their ancestors in their hands ought to be scrutinized as carefully as a letter of recommendation from a job applicant’s mother…. The story of human descent from apes is not merely a scientific hypothesis; it is the secular equivalent of the story of Adam and Eve.”

Raining on Darwin’s Parade

Let’s turn now to Darwinism and graphic media. In the March 1998 edition of Antiquity, David Van Reybrouck, a student of the role of drawings in the propagation of Darwinism has made five observations:

1. Illustrations always go beyond the archaeological data
2. Illustrations always involve speculation on the part of the fossil discoverers, who advise the artists
3. Illustrations involve interpretations that rely heavily on unproven and sometimes doubtful theories
4. Illustrations are always nonobjective, yet they are trusted in a visual society such as ours
5. Illustrations are used extensively because they sell evolution effectively.

The most blatant lie ever told to help promote evolution is the “parade” of stages in supposed human evolution that we are all familiar with. The origin of this parade- or should I say charade?- of characters is an illustration in F. Clark Howell’s book Early Man, originally published in 1965. The parade was originally on a 36-inch foldout page within the book. What most people don’t realize that the parade is pure propaganda. It doesn’t exist. The original book makes it clear that the parade doesn’t tell an accurate story, and the author and publishers knew it. Evolutionists knew that the apes and ape-like creatures they had theorized did not walk on their back feet. The book clearly states in the text, but not on the chart: “Although protoapes and apes were quadrupedal, all are shown here standing for purposes of comparison.” Sizes of each proposed ancestor were not to scale, and they were shown walking, not simply standing as the author states. These small details make a world of difference when it comes to the believability of the theory. It’s clear deception. Yet it was- and still is, in some cases- included in advertisements and eventually became its own poster in classrooms around the world.

Holding Out for a Hero

Finally, I’d like to call your attention to Misia Landau’s book Narratives of Human Evolution. In her book, Miss Landau makes an interesting assertion: paleoanthropology is storytelling. She compare folk-stories and epics to Darwin, Huxley, Keith, and Haeckel’s descriptions of human evolution. Here’s some similarities she’s noticed:

• The Hero’s Origin- The hero is typically leading a safe and untroubled life. He may be smaller or weaker than others. Think “Frodo Baggins.” In the story of evolution, the hero is a nondescript primate, perhaps living in the trees. Like Frodo Baggins heading out from the Shire with the Ring, the primate leaves the safety of the trees to walk on the ground, perhaps because of a larger brain or changes in the availability of food.
• The Hero Tested- In myths, the Hero is tested by predators, opponents, or his environment. In the Darwinistic myth, similar situations occur. “Indeed, the tests are specifically designed for that purpose: to bring out the human in the hero”, Landau writes.
• The Hero Transformed- Myths and even modern fantasy always add a sacred or magical object- a Ring of Power, the Master Sword, and Invisibility Cloak- to help a man become more than he was. In evolutionary theory, natural selection or a “magic twist” of genetic mutations (those are the words of Jared Diamond, who wrote an article about the movement of modern humans out of Africa in the May 1989 edition of Discover magazine) bestow upon the hero the intelligence or abilities necessary to become more than his ancestors.
• The Hero’s Death- The fatal irony of the average hero is that he dies due to pride through success. Most evolution tales include a warning to humans that we could become like our supposed ancestors if we aren’t careful. Richard Leakey devotes an entire book to that subject entitled The Sixth Extinction.

Frankly, I think J. R. R. Tolkien is a much better writer of this sort of material than the Darwinists. Let’s just leave it to the experts, ok, guys?

At the AAAS convention in San Francisco, Carl Sagan once explained in his lecture “Velikovsky’s Challenge to Science” that science works in this way: “The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged.” The hypothesis “must survive confrontation with observation. Appeals to authority are impermissible. Experiments must be reproducible.”

That’s a pretty strange statement when you think about it. Evolution isn’t observable. It can’t be challenged in the scientific establishment without some serious ridicule taking place. Evolutionists appeal to the authority of the scientific establishment. There aren’t any experiments that are able to confirm evolution. It’s ironic to me, then, that Sagan would also make a very profound statement in that same lecture: “Not all scientific statements have equal weight.” How right he is. Direct observations of, say, the laws of physics, are far more weightier because of the tremendous amount of data verifying them. Unfortunately, the scientific establishment does not appear to behave this way, and the general public certainly isn’t aware of this concept. What we have are Darwinists acting as the high priests of our society. People- even highly-educated people- believe in Darwinism because scientists can’t be wrong.

How is Darwinism a sort of lesser science? Consider our interest in chimps. We study chimpanzees- their behavior, genetic makeup, and anatomy- because Darwinists believe that we are very closely related to them. Darwinists then use superficial similarities between humans and chimps to prove their assumptions. That is called begging the question in logic. They assume to be true the very thing they are trying to prove. Bereft of anything that Sagan would call a good basis for scientific study, a philosophical assumption has been foisted upon us as science. In reality, such studies on chimps would only attempt to shed light on humanity if evolution had first proven to be a correct assumption. Unlike Darwinism, intelligent design bases its theories on the evidence around us: information provided for our world through physics and DNA as well as the incredible complexity of the universe.

The logical fallacies don’t stop there, however. There’s a difference between historical and scientific evidence. In spite of the fact that scientists have performed numerous experiments on animals in an attempt to prove evolution through mutation, the obvious must be declared: just because mutations can be made to happen or engineered in a lab does not mean that they did happen in the past. That is a logical fallacy. That genetic engineering is possible in the present does not mean that it certainly did happen in the past. Scientists have proven it is possible; they have not proven that it occurred.

Suppose I gave you a pile of hammers and asked you to arrange them in a potential evolutionary sequence. You could start with small ones and work your way to larger ones, arrange them by claw types, group them into families based on what they are made of, etc. You could argue that you showed a pattern from simple to complex. The whole assignment, of course, would be bogus. There was no actual evolutionary relationship between the different hammers. They were designed with a particular function or purpose in mind. Curved and straight claw hammers, sledge hammers, ball pein, mason’s hammers, upholsterer’s hammers, and mallets are different because they are designed that way. Just because scientists can superimpose an evolutionary order on things does not mean that the evolutionary order is fact.

We should all be very grateful for what science has allowed us to achieve. The medical fields have provided us with the ability to heal many wounds and diseases previously thought to be untreatable. Technology has allowed us to communicate and travel efficiently. Yes, because of scientific principles and dedicated men and women willing to spend years of their lives researching, writing, and peer-reviewing what has already been written, you and I are able to enjoy very different lives from our forbears. We can be confident in scientific discovery because it is based on solid evidence and a desire to “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” as Carl Sagan once famously said. Would it surprise you, then, to learn how little evidence we have of human evolution?

HIDE AND SEEK

Have you ever seen an actual fossil of a human ancestor? Probably not. I haven’t. The vast majority of the authors of textbooks on paleontology haven’t. Curators of the museums of natural history around the world usually haven’t. Only a very, very small handful of people have ever been privileged enough to see such fossils. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy afoot. I’m saying that, because they are so rare, so valuable, and so fragile, human ancestral fossils are very unlikely to be on display or studied. In fact, most of us have never even seen a picture of an actual fossil. According to Marvin L. Lubenow, whose book Bones of Contention provided many of the “diving in” points for this series of blog posts, the total number of people who have access to ancestral fossils is fewer than the heads of state in the entire world.

William King, the man who declared Homo neanderthalensis to be a different species than modern-day humans in 1864, never saw the actual fossils. He did so after reading a description of them. Darwin never saw a single human fossil. Thomas Huxley never saw original fossils either, but he took great pains to describe them in his 1863 work Man’s Place in Nature.

People publish vast amounts of research with unverified data! Germany built a two-story museum to celebrate the discovery of Steinheim Man in 1933. Visitors never saw the actual fossil though. They viewed plastic replicas. The actual fossil was kept in a safe set into a stone wall in an old military outpost several miles away. In their article in the October 1995 edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Braun, Hublin, and Boucher note: “While it was never described in great detail, this fossil played a central role in various evolutionary models.”

Of course, there is a good deal of politics in this field as well. Teuku Jacob, former curator of Gadjah Mada University, was known for his jealousy of the Homo erectus fossils from Java in his possession. Swisher, Curtis, and Lewin write:

“These fossils, the prized objects of Jacob’s collection are rarely seen, even by professionals in the fossil-hunting business. Scholars with serious research programs have to apply to Jacob for permission even to see them, let alone touch them, for scientific study. And even those few who succeed in obtaining official permission have to wait for Jacob’s final OK, for he alone is permitted to remove the fossils from the safes.”

Donald Johanson, the discover of Lucy, agrees that “only those in the inner circle get to see the fossils; only those who agree with the particular interpretation of a particular investigator are allowed to see the fossils.”

CIRCLING THE WAGONS

There’s one exception to this almost xenophobic protection of the fossils. In 1984, the American Museum of Natural History in New York sponsored an exhibit in which more than forty of the original fossils were brought together for the first- and probably last- time ever. There were special guards over the fossils and the curators that traveled with the fossils. The fossils were placed in special cases. Work on the subway line beneath the museum was halted to avoid vibrating- and possibly damaging- the fossils.

What prompted this gathering of the fossils? In his book Ancestors: The Hard Evidence, Eric Delson tells us that there were those in the scientific community who were concerned about the rising popularity of creationism. Delson, who was a scientist at the American Museum, tells us that creationism was a “great and growing concern” at the museum. The primary purpose, then, was to show professionals and lay people the evidence for evolution, and they avoided making any statement concerning creationism at the museum so that they would not “dignify…creation science.” Their words, not mine. What are these guys afraid of?

BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

Paleoanthropology is in a strange position. Unlike most- if not all- other areas of science, workers in this field rarely have access to the material their science is based on. They are usually one step or so away from the actual evidence. Too often, creationists have been guilty of downplaying the importance of human ancestral fossils. In reality, they are unique and valuable, but because of their value, an insufficient number of scientists have been able to study them in depth.

What do they work with then? They work with casts and descriptions others have written of the fossils. Casts may be reliable if the molds used are detailed enough and if the materials maintain their intended shape. However, casts can be far from ideal. They lack the detail of the original. Becky A Sigmon of the University of Toronto says that there is a general consensus among paleoanthropologists  that “casts should not be used as resource material for a scientific paper.” (See her collection of papers on the subject for more information.) She has a good reason for saying this. At the American Museum exhibit in 1984, when the original fossils were to be placed into their mounts (which had been based on the casts available), most of them did not fit. Casts simply aren’t substitutes from the originals. Lubenow further complains that “casts of only a small percentage of the total fossil material and less than half of the most important fossil material are available for study.”

Scientists are then forced to turn to description of fossils in scientific literature, which is the most common form of source material for scientific work. How can a field of science continue to function and inform public opinion if there is so little readily-available information? How can we be expected to believe what few have seen? As John Fleagle of the State University of New York, Stony Brook has said: “The big awkwardness right now is when someone announces they have found a specimen that overturns everything we know, but almost no one has seen it.”

Talk about blind faith! My point is this: if we are to believe that humans evolved in the manner most Darwinists claim, there must be more evidence. Right now, there’s just not enough out there for me to buy into.

We’ve seen how biblical creeds and archeological finds are both types of proof for the Gospel message. In this last section,  we turn to ancient writings by secular historians and their Christian counterparts. This will reveal the most clear details of early Christian belief and also provide further evidence for the historicity of Jesus Christ. The Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote of the reign of Nero and the infamous fire that burned Rome during his reign, records the following in his Annals, written in AD 115:

“Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome.” (Tacitus, 15.44)

From this we can confirm the biblical message that Christians were named after Christ, who was sentenced to death under Pilate during the reign of emperor Tiberius. The execution ended the “superstition” of belief in Him for awhile, but the claims of Christ and His followers reasserted themselves shortly thereafter. This agrees completely with Matthew through Acts in the Bible. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillas, another Roman historian who was also the chief secretary of Emperor Hadrian with access to imperial records, writes that Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because they “caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Christus.” (Suetonius, Claudius, 25) Of Nero’s time in power, Tranquillas wrote: “Punishments were also inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief.” (Nero, 16)

Josephus mentions James “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ” in his Antiquities. Many are also familiar with a much-debated passage in Josephus’ Antiquities which seems to state that Jesus resurrected the third day and appeared to many. In this passage, Josephus makes use of quite a bit of Christian language, which is unusual since Josephus, a Jew, was stated to not be a believer by the church father Origen. While as a Christian I would love to believe Josephus actually wrote these words, I have to look at things as they are. Most likely this is a Christian interpolation, as there are translations of the Antiquities into other ancient languages that do not include the subject of the resurrection. However, even after removing the interpolation and evaluating the remaining words for grammatical and historical consistencies, one can look at Professor Schlomo Pines’ translation and commentary on an ancient Arabic edition of the Antiquities which reads:

“At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. His conduct was good and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.” (Quoted in Charlesworth’s Jesus Within Judaism, p 95)

Not too bad, Joe! We can turn also to Julius Africanus’ mention of Thallus’ writings concerning (super)natural events surrounding Christ’s crucifixion. Thallus wrote around AD 50, before the New Testament had been penned. Africanus tells us:

“On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down. This darkness Thallus, in the third book of his History, calls, as appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun.”

Africanus accepts Thallus’ history, but rejects his rationale that the darkness was caused by the sun. It’s interesting that secular history can provide so much verification for the Scriptures. In my last post on this subject, I’ll look at what Christian historians have said.

In the last post, we talked about the historical church creeds recorded in the Bible. Now we turn to further evidence for the historical Jesus. First, let’s take a look at the birth of Christ. Luke gives  us a historical account of Jesus’ birth, and he includes a number of clues that are helpful in approximating when the first Christmas took place. In Luke 2:1-5 we read:

^“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.”

Did people really return to their hometown to be taxed? Was Cyrenius (also spelled “Quirinius”) really govern in Syria during a taxation in Israel? We’ll have to look to historians and archeology for some of these answers. It turns out that the Titulus Venetus, an ancient Latin inscription, explains that a census did in fact take place in Israel and Syria around AD 5-6, and that it was fairly normal for such censuses to take place during the reign of Augustus up until the third century. In his book Christian Origins, Bruce notes that a papyrus dating to around AD 104 records that people were required to return to their hometown for the purposes of taxation and census-taking. What about the subject of Cyrenius? Did he govern Syria when a census took place? It turns out Cyrenius did govern Syria at two separate times. In his book Tells, Tombs, and Treasure, Robert Boyd gives evidence that he governed during an early taxation in 10-4 BC, and he also governed in Syria around AD 6. So we now have a few dates that could legitimately be chosen for the year of Christ’s birth. Historically speaking, Luke builds a very solid foundation for acceptance of the details of Christ’s birth.

Next, let us turn to the subject of Jesus’ crucifixion. Can we establish Pilate’s reign in Israel? Are the details of the crucifixion consistent with what we know from archeology? Is there anything in archeology to indicate that Rome had to deal with the rumors of a resurrection? Boyd’s book notes that coins have been discovered which were minted to commemorate the inception of Pilate’s rule around AD 31. Outside of the Bible, Tacitus and Josephus both record Pilate’s involvement in the crucifixion of Christ. Of course, biblically speaking, the question of who killed Jesus is much more complex.

At this point, I’d like to introduce you to Yohanan Ben Ha’galgol. Well, I would introduce you to him, but, sadly, he is quite dead. His skeleton was found in a stone ossuary about a mile from the Damascus Gate in 1968. Archeologists believe he was killed in AD 70 during the Jewish uprising against Rome. It’s the manner of his death that interests us today, though. According to Dr. N. Haas, a pathologists at Hebrew University, Yohanan (whose name was inscribed on his ossuary) was crucified. He still had a seven-inch-long nail pierced though his heel bones, since apparently Roman soldiers twisted a prisoner’s legs to nail them to the cross. Small pieces of olive wood from the cross were still attached to the nail, which was bent backward to keep the victim in place. Nails had also been driven between the radius and ulna bones in the lower arm. The radius bone was scratched and worn smooth at this point due to the Yohanan’s repeated attempts to pull himself upward to breathe. His lower leg bones were broken, the tibia and fibula bones crushed by a common blow. This sounds stunningly familiar, does it not?

I want to turn to one final piece of evidence which I will risk speculating on. In 1878, a marble slab was discovered in Nazareth. It was an ordinance of Caesar which scholars generally agree was issued by Claudius around AD 41-54. It is translated in its entirety in P. Maier’s First Easter:

“Ordinance of Caesar. It is my pleasure that graves and tombs remain perpetually undisturbed for those who have made them for the cults of their ancestors or children or members of their house. If, however, anyone charges that another has either demolished them, or has in any other way extracted the buried, or has maliciously transferred them to other places in order to wrong them, or has displaced the sealing on other stones, against such a one I order that a trial be instituted, as in respect of the gods, so in regard to the cult of mortals. For it shall be much more obligatory to honor the buried. Let it be absolutely forbidden for anyone to disturb them. In case of violation I desire that the offender be sentenced to capital punishment on charges of violation of sepulchre.” (emphasis mine)

Maier notes that all previous Roman indictments against grave-robbing prescribe only a fine. Why the sudden jump to capital punishment? In AD 49, he expelled the Jews from Rome, and Suetonius remarks that the reason behind the expulsion was because of Christ (see Suetonius’ Claudius for more information, and cross-reference with Acts 17-18, for example.) If Claudius had indeed investigated the beliefs of Christians, he would have quickly discovered the Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection due to the tomb being empty in spite of it being sealed. Jewish leaders, of course, tried to explain the event by saying that Jesus’ disciples had stolen the body, an event Claudius would have no doubt also uncovered.

So we’ve given a few examples of archeological evidence for the trustworthiness of the Gospels. Do secular historians provide corroborating evidence?

You’ve probably run across someone who challenged your belief in Jesus Christ on the grounds that He is a made-up figure in a religious text. If they’ve been mildly open-minded, they may have asked you for some historical proof that He was real. That’s not easy for believers to do when we’re used to trusting in the Bible as our sole authority for faith and practice. Hmmmm…..where have I heard that before: “sole authority for faith and practice”? Well, there’s no singular answer since that statement is found in numerous statements of faith, confessions, and…..creeds. Let’s check out a few of those creeds.

How about “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh“? Sound familiar? Oscar Cullmann, author of a classic on early creeds entitled The Earliest Christian Confessions, identifies this statement as a concise creed on the subject of Christ’s deity and nature. That’s what most creeds were about, happily. It is creeds, therefore, that offer us some of the best evidence for the existence of Christ. The reason for this is that even though they are included in the New Testament, creeds like the one I just mentioned existed before the books of the New Testament were written. The various human penmen of the New Testament quoted these creeds on occasion to summarize doctrine, but they didn’t create them.

Here’s another creed that may sound familiar, though it is somewhat more complex.

“Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

This creed should found familiar to most believers, since it is written out for us in Philippians 2. It is identified as a creed not only by Cullmann, but also Bultmann, Neufeld, and Fuller. Ironically, these scholars, who are not exactly conservative, point out this creed in particular as proof to a very early belief in Christ. If Christ’s death and resurrection did take place around AD 33, and the various books of the Bible did not begin to be written until AD 50 or so, then the creeds became standardized less than 17 years after the events actually happened. Obviously, this is significant because that means the very people who popularized the creeds were those who had witnessed events in the life of Christ. They know of Whom they spoke!

Another early confessional creed is found in 1 Timothy 3:16:

“And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness:

God was manifest in the flesh,

Justified in the Spirit, seen of angels,

Preached unto the Gentiles,

Believed on in the world,

Received up into glory.”

Moule points out that the early date of this creed (before Paul’s ministry) plus the rhyme-pattern that is made clear through a study of Greek literature are evidence of this creed’s use in pre-Pauline hymns. When we read this passage, we are given a glimpse of ancient Christian worship!

The two passages most clearly identified as creeds by the majority of New Testament scholars are 1 Corinthians 11:23-24 and 1 Corinthians 15:3-7. Paul essentially declares them to be creedal in nature by using the terms “delivered” and “received”, both of which are technical terms for the passing on of Scripture in the rabbinical tradition. Do a quick word search of the New Testament. They aren’t used by Paul or anyone to describe simple communication. Paul is passing along information from another source, a source which uses parallelism through the “and that” of Hebrew narrative tradition and Peter’s Aramaic name (“Cephas”) in the place of his Greek name. We can therefore easily surmise at this point that this creed originates in Israel. This is significant since this means that the people who created the creed were very near the events of the gospels in terms of time (less than two decades) and space (Israel as opposed to somewhere else in the Roman Empire.) Because of this we must take the following statements, at least, to be factual:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion
2. Jesus was buried
3. Jesus’ death caused despair on the part of His disciples
4. Jesus’ tomb was found empty
5. The disciples believed they had seen Him alive and well
6. The disciples were transformed from faithless doubters to bold witnesses
7. This message was the center of the early church, which was founded in Jerusalem
8. The early church was born and grew
9. James, who had been a skeptic, converted
10. Paul, another skeptic, also was converted

That’s the minimum any thinking skeptic would have to accept. A number of creeds believed by hundreds, perhaps thousands, so geographically and chronologically close to the events of the Gospels make it hard to believe that at least these items are not true. Whatever else your conclusion, you have to deal with all of these items somehow. Hopefully an honest skeptic will realize that there is something else going on here and eventually embrace the full message of the Gospel by faith grounded in reason.

But is there more evidence from other sources? Glad you asked….