The Theme Song of Our Lives by Jethro Tull: Nothing is Easy!

The Theme Song of Our Lives by Jethro Tull: Nothing is Easy!

Sep 21, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

To my family the title of this post is nothing new. I’ve quoted the title of the song so many times by this point all I get is eye rolls. I used to call it the Disney eye roll when my kids were younger, but I would think Woke-Disney no longer has characters do eye rolls; that’s so 90s. It’s amazing to me that we as Christians allow the hardness of life to mess with our faith, and by “faith” I mean the Greek word for it, pistis-πίστις, or trust. God through Isaiah (26:3) says, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.” How often do you have “perfect peace”? Yeah, me neither. It’s also amazing to me how often we allow circumstances, or more accurately our perception of them, to determine whether we have “perfect peace” or not. Of course, this should surprise none of us because we are all of Adam’s seed, fallen creatures through and through. And it’s hard! Ian Anderson says so. Chances are he didn’t know the reason why is found in Genesis 3, when Eve believed the serpent that if she just ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she could “be like God knowing good and evil.” Uh, no you won’t.

The message of the song, Ian Anderson being the good stiff-upper-lip Brit, is in the title of another popular song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” And why should we not worry according to Anderson? Just “smile in a while” and you’ll get happy his way. The reason this can only work to a limited degree and not ultimately is related to one of my favorite words and concepts: telos, a Greek word from which we get our word teleology, which is the study of purposiveness or of objects regarding their aims, purposes, or intentions. I’m going to get a bit philosophical, so bear with me. I trust the payoff will be worth it.

To Aristotle there were four causes for why things come to be.

1. First is the formal cause, or the idea of the thing in the mind before it comes to fruition. Someone can’t build a chair until they have the idea of the chair in their mind.
2. Second is the material cause, or the thing out of which the chair will be made, the wood.
3. Then there is the efficient cause, or the person making the chair.
4. Finally is the formal cause, or the telos, the purpose for which the chair is made, to sit on.

Today we only think of the efficient cause as the reason something comes to exist, but for Aristotle it was a far richer concept. In Aristotle’s concept of cause, we find the answer to dealing with life being hard, and it isn’t just making a decision to not worry, smile, and be happy. It’s hard to ignore getting hit in the face with a brick—deciding it doesn’t really hurt isn’t going to help. Sometimes when it gets really hard life can feel like a pile of bricks falling on your head, or it can be just run of the mill hard like those pesky mosquitos that won’t leave you alone. We find the ultimate answer in the first question and answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the formal cause of human existence:

What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

And not only the formal cause, but the three others as well. We existed in the mind of God before the world was created; He is the formal cause of our existence. He made earth so out of that He might create man; as David says, we are fearfully and wonderfully made; the material cause is the earth on which we live. The efficient cause is God making us through the vicissitudes of life, the hardness of it, the person He wants us to become. The formal cause, the telos of our existence is given in the pithy answer by the Westminster divines: to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The question is, do we really believe this, do we fully buy into it. Do we accept what Paul says, that in God “we live and move and have our being.” Do we really believe there are no accidents, that when it comes to our lives chance doesn’t exist? That God is truly in control of all things?

The ultimate cause is of course Jesus Christ. In him it doesn’t matter how hard the hard gets, we’re promised the ultimate telos (Rom. 8:28):

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

And notice: we can know this, not wonder or speculate, but have certainty that every single thing that happens in our live works for our good and God’s glory. Every. Single. Thing. Not most things, or ninety-five percent of things, but all things. And what is this purpose Paul speaks of? He continues:

29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

God is the all-powerful, all knowing, all knowledgeable, all creative, all wise, all loving, all good efficient cause transforming us into the image of His Son. Talk about living a life of meaning, purpose, and hope! Talk about waking up every day excited to see what God has planned for us for the day. And as Christians we are the ultimate realists. Paul implies that all things are not good, but God works them all together for our good, even the hard stuff, especially the hard stuff. We have the encrusted barnacles of sin that are attached to our fallen natures, and it hurts to have God scrape them off. And sometimes we sing with Anderson, “Nothing is easy!” But in expecting and accepting that the hardness is necessary for the telos of our existence makes the hard things so much easier.

The other option in our secular culture is to believe we’re cosmic accidents, products of chance with no inherent telos other than what we can conjure up in our own imagination and hope to nothing that it works. Darwin gave us the gift of meaninglessness, and as we witness all around us, it is the gift that keeps on giving. We live in the most prosperous and powerful society in the history of the world, but last year almost 50,000 people killed themselves. How many more tried? How many others just live lives of quiet desperation and loneliness going from experience to experience hoping to find “happiness” and fulfillment, thinking the God shaped vacuum at the center of their being can somehow be filled by something other than God. It can’t.

Meaning is ultimately impossible to conjure up living in between poles of meaninglessness. In the secular view of reality, we come from nothing and we are headed to nothing; oblivion is our destiny. When life gets hard it has no other purpose or meaning than it’s just hard, and nobody likes that! No wonder so many people are so miserable. For Christians, though, Paul prefaces the above verses with this blessed truth that gives all things meaning for us:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

If we really, truly believe this, and trust in God, we can sometimes have a semblance of peace and even if it’s not perfect, it glorifies God and is good for us. But nobody said it would be easy!

 

Uninvented: John the Baptist Beheaded—You Don’t Make That Up!

Uninvented: John the Baptist Beheaded—You Don’t Make That Up!

Sep 18, 2023 | Apologetics

We read of John’s beheading in Matthew 14:1–12 and Mark 6:14–29. Matthew’s account is more concise, while Mark gives us much more detail, as his consistent with Mark. He covers fewer events in Jesus’ life, but gives more details of those he does address. Christians believe what we read in our Bibles are actual historical events that happened in space and time, not mythical or fictional stories. What Christians often don’t know, however, is how extra biblical literature confirms that. John the Baptist is a good example. We learn a lot about his life and ministry from first century Jewish historian, Josephus. One thing neither Matthew nor Mark tell us is the name of Herodias’ daughter who asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and got it! Many Christians know the name, though, Solome. We only know that because of Josephus.

Apart from Josephus, John’s life and death also give us evidence of the historicity of the gospels from an Uninvented perspective. He could never have been invented because of first century Jewish Messianic expectations, something biblical critics (i.e., those in the scholarly profession of biblical criticism) ignored for two hundred years. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the Jewish nature of Jesus’ world became a topic of scholarly study. This is critically important because a Jewish Jesus would in my opinion have been impossible to make up, and the life and death of John is a good example why. No Jew at the time expected the 400-year-long awaited Messiah to be like Jesus, not his personality, or teaching, or miracles, or his life, and most certainly not his death. This is all part of the reason the Jesus we read about in the gospels confused everyone. As I call him in the book, the conundrum that was Jesus.

Right out of the gate, John gets Jesus right and wrong. In Matthew 3, prior to meeting and baptizing Jesus, John preaches these fiery words:

11 “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

In John’s first century Jewish mind the messiah was coming to pronounce judgment on Israel’s enemies    and basically wipe them out. The Jewish people had been under various oppressors’ thumbs for almost 800 years by the time of Christ, first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then various other kingdoms, and finally the Romans at the time John and Jesus came on the scene. The Messiah they expected would be a king, a military conqueror in the mold of the great King David. John is proclaiming judgment against Israel’s enemies because that’s what the Lord’s Anointed (Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek) was coming to do. All the kings of Israel were anointed, and thus the Lord’s Messiah, which is why all first century Jews were expecting a king, not a suffering servant a la Isaiah 53. I use the word “all” intentionally. Not a single Jew in the first century connected Isaiah 53 with the coming Messiah.

There was nothing in Jewish literature of the intertestamental period (between OT and NT) that would lead anyone to think a Messiah like Jesus was coming. Jewish historian Geza Vermes says in his book, Jesus the Jew, that “neither the suffering of a Messiah, nor his death and resurrection, appear to have been part of the faith of first century Judaism.” Nineteenth century Jewish Christian Alfred Edersheim in his book, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, concurs: “There is one truth which, we are reluctantly obliged to admit, scarcely any parallel in the teaching of Rabbinism: it was that of a suffering Messiah.” In the 400 years from Malachi to John a connection of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 to a crucified Messiah never emerged. J. Gresham Machen writes, “[T]here is not the slightest evidence that the pre-Christian Jews interpreted Isaiah 53 of the vicarious sufferings of the Messiah, or had any notion of the Messiah’s vicarious death.”

Which brings us to John’s gospel to see how the Baptist got Jesus wrong and more right than he knew. In the previous passage in Matthew, John was right that Jesus was coming in judgment, just not a judgment he could have ever imagined. How Jesus would defeat sin and death, and begin to conquer all the suffering in this fallen world was inconceivable to first century Jews. Yet this passage in John 1 very much seems to relate to what we read in Isaiah’s message about the suffering servant: 

29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.”

I’ve heard this passage interpreted as related to Isaiah 53 several times over the years, recently in a sermon. The problem with that interpretation is that it’s wrong. If you read commentaries on this verse, most of them will take what I call the facile interpretation, that John is declaring Jesus as a sacrificial lamb a la Isaiah 53:7. The first time this occurred to me was in 2017 hearing the pastor at our church make this connection. Having been immersed in apologetics by this time for eight years I thought to myself, “There is no way John could have known that Jesus as the Messiah would die for our sins.” I had learned about Jewish Messianic expectations, and how unexpected Jesus was. Even after Jesus rose from the dead some of his disciples refused to believe he could be the Messiah. It is only in theological hindsight because of Jesus telling us the entire Old Testament is about him, that we know Jesus was indeed the lamb of Isaiah 53.

John, however, had the same expectations as every other Jew in the first century because when he was in prison he told his disciples to ask Jesus if he is the one to come, or should they expect someone else (Luke 7). The last thing he expected was to be in prison facing death as he proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of heaven and the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. Jesus confused him just as he confused everyone else. So his reference to Jesus as the Lamb of God needs to be explained. My first thought when I was listening to that initial sermon was that maybe John put those words in The Baptist’s mouth, but my conviction that Scripture is the inspired word of God made that a non-starter. There had to be some other explanation. It wasn’t long after that I came upon a talk by D.A. Carson explaining what John possibly thought as he was saying those words.

Carson addresses this in his commentary, The Gospel According to John. Carson spends two and a half pages discussing this, but this passages explains it best:

Whether we assume the category lay readily at hand for the Baptist to use, or that he was one of the first to think it up, the impression gleaned from the Synoptics is that he thought of the Messiah as one who would come in terrible judgment and clean up the sin in Israel. In this light, what John the Baptist meant by ‘who takes away the sin of the world’ may have had more to do judgment than with expiatory sacrifice. p. 150.

He adds John probably had in mind the apocalyptic lamb, the warrior lamb, found in some Jewish texts, and which John used in Revelation (the word lamb is used by John 31 times).

Since the Baptist couldn’t have had the Isaiah 53 lamb in mind, he likely meant the warrior lamb, and John writing in risen-Jesus hindsight knew, and knew his readers would know, who Jesus as the Lamb of God was. John also later in the gospel (chapter 11) reports Caiaphas saying to the Sanhedrin, “that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” In both cases the men spoke better than they knew.

 

Greek Gum and my Ongoing Health Epiphany

Greek Gum and my Ongoing Health Epiphany

Sep 15, 2023 | Truth

As I often tell people, when Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, something profound happened. For me, like many people, it was the beginning of an unknown red-pill experience none of us asked for. I had no idea at the time because I thought it was a joke. Trump president? Don’t make me laugh. To say the least I wasn’t a fan. I explore some of the consequences of that experience in the book I’m finishing, but one of the significant ongoing of those consequences for millions of Americans is health. It started with the Covid catastrophe, which would have never happened if there was no Trump. It caused millions of Americans to question modern medicine, and the medical-Big Pharma industrial complex. Even for those who haven’t had this experience and still believe everything America does about health, they probably don’t trust the “experts” like they once did.

Indoctrinated is a strong word with negative connotations I want to use, but am hesitant because it implies people doing the indoctrinating are doing it in bad faith. We use it as a synonym for brainwashing. We can also use the word programmed, which also comes with negative connotations. Whatever we call it, we have been taught to see the world in a certain way. I often refer to this as a plausibility structure, the mental building in which we live that causes us to see certain things as real or believable whether they are or not. It causes us to take what happens in life for granted as just the way things are. There is nothing inherently nefarious about this process. It doesn’t imply some kind of cabal of people perpetrating conspiracies, a word now used to silence anyone who questions the leftist “narrative.”

This natural human process of creating a plausible world is not only inevitable in every culture in every time and place, but necessary. The late sociologist Peter Berger discusses this concept in his 1960s books The Sacred Canopy and The Social Construction of Reality. Whatever our worldview comes to be, there are an infinite number of influences that make it so. Which is the reason it’s so hard to change. In previous times we referred to a radical change in our perception of something a paradigm shift, now thanks to the movie The Matrix, we call it being red pilled, and boy of boy have I been red pilled since Trump came on the scene. Modern medicine and health has been a huge one, in fact so big I have no idea how I was able to swallow it, but swallow it I did. If I were to boil down what I’ve learned over the last three plus years I think it would be this:

God created our bodies to heal themselves.

For those of us who are Christians that’s kind of anticlimactic, right? That’s it? Yep, but this new understanding proverbially turned my world upside down, or more accurately right side up. It is impossible to convey how profoundly those seven little words changed my understanding of everything to do with health, and still are. What makes this revelation from Almighty God himself so revelatory? The current perspective we all have, or had, of modern medicine is the answer.

As I’ve learned over the last few years this is a long story, but to put it simply, we’ve been programmed/indoctrinated/taught to see what heals us is medicine, something that comes from outside of us and is made by human beings in a lab. We see diseases like rolling snake eyes or getting a pair of twos, just bad luck, and only medicine can heal us. While it can treat symptoms it can do nothing for underlying causes, and therein lies the disaster that is modern medicine and the dismal state of American health. But this is what I believed until God used the response to Covid to open my eyes.

On October 3, 2021, I wrote a post titled, “How I was Programmed by Modern Medicine” using the Netflix series The Last Kingdom to show just how programmed I was. I look back at that and I’m shocked. I really believed that? I state in the piece, “It never occurred to me, literally, that things that grow out of the ground could have healing effects on the human body. That’s what medicine did.” As I say, I believed in the amazing God-created human immune system, but thought without modern medicine the body really couldn’t heal itself. And I thought it was pure “Hollywood” that implied things growing out of the ground could heal us. Ugh.  In the summer of 2020 I started to learn about the foundation of modern medicine, something called germ theory. Like everyone else I’d heard of it, but I had no idea what the implications were of accepting this as our mental architecture for what health means.

There are certain things in our culture that we dare not question lest we endure the wrath of “the consensus,” and one of those is germ theory. I recently read a book called Good-Bye Germ Theory by Dr. William P. Trebing, and I highly recommend it if you want your health paradigm completely messed with. Trebing is more cynical than I am and the subtitle of the book indicates that: “ending a century of medical fraud and how to protect your family.” As I’ve told my own friends and family, if someone read this prior to spring 2020, nothing about the Covid catastrophe would have surprised them, nothing. I believe almost everyone involved in modern medicine is well-meaning and is convinced they are helping people, and often they are. But modern medicine is doing incalculable damage to millions of people all over the world. If that statement makes you angry with me, or makes you think I’m off my rocker, I would just encourage you to be open and read a book like this. You may not agree with everything he says, I certainly don’t, or come to his conclusions, but at the least it will cause you to question where you hadn’t before, and be more discerning about the health of you and your family. What you do with it is all your choice.

So, what has this to do with Greek gum? My cousin, Dr. Greg Brannon, was instrumental in guiding me through this journey of discovery. We grew up together, almost exactly the same age, and he knew he wanted to be a doctor from when we were five years old. He was an OB-GYN for thirty years, and then founded Optimal Bio, a bioidentical hormone replacement business eight or nine years ago. He went through his own health epiphany some time ago as well—it didn’t take Covid.

 

This video from their Optimal Bio podcast explains the Greek gum, and Greg’s daughter, Tyler, interviews the young man who started the business selling said gum. She also runs the business. It’s impossible to convey how much this short discussion about gum, and so much more, put yet more things together for me. You’ll hear them mention something I never heard in sixty years prior trusting modern medicine, gut health. Back in 2021 listening to their podcasts and also heard a phrase I’d never heard before, and which took me a while to wrap my mind around: food is medicine. Indeed it is! And the way God intended it to be. Modern medicine can absolutely be a blessing when you really need it. It’s awe inspiring what God has allowed human beings to invent and learn, but every health indicator in America has gotten worse over the last several decades because we’ve come to trust the medical profession and not the human body and immune system for our health care. I very much encourage you to listen to this, and learn.

John Calvin Believed in Free Will: Who Knew!

John Calvin Believed in Free Will: Who Knew!

Sep 12, 2023 | Theology

For the Calvin haters, and they are legion, I might have just uttered a heresy. I can imagine the reply in their fevered brains: No he does not! It’s been interesting since I became a certified Calvinist in 1985 to witness how some people respond to the name Calvin or the word Calvinism. It’s an alien concept to most, and even if they know nothing about it, they do know for sure they reject it. I’ve seen visceral responses to Calvin that make him out to be a Christian tyrant who wants people to be controlled and miserable, or that he believed human beings are robots without “free will.” I would often say or think to myself, if you had read any Calvin you would not think such things. Everything I’ve read by the man implies he believes people are volitional beings who have agency, whose choices matter and come with consequences. Now I can say with indisputable proof, he believed in “free will.” 

Let me give a little background before I get to that. Back when I decided as a snot-nosed 25 year-old that I was going to seminary, I purchased Calvin’s commentaries. These voluminous writings take up 22 hard bound volumes. And this didn’t include his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion which clocks in at over 1500(!) pages. Mind you, this was before computers and lightbulbs. I’m sure much of it was written by candlelight. Writing utensils in the early to mid-16th century were likely quills dipped in ink. It’s hard to fathom that kind of productivity with that technology. The same can be said for people like the prolific Aquinas three hundred years before Calvin, and Augustin seven hundred years before Aquinas. Those guys spent a lot of time writing! I don’t know if Calvin was the most productive writer up to his time, but if not he was among them.

So, how do I know Calvin believed in free will? Before I prove he does, I’ve written here about the topic. In one post I argue that “Free Will Does Not Exist,” by which I mean a certain concept of free will. The idea is that our choices exist in a vacuum of complete independence from any influence other than our own choosing. Such a thing does not exist. There are almost an infinite variety of causes that act upon our will, upon our choosing, so in that sense we most definitely are not “free.” In another post on “Calvinism and Free Will,” I discuss the implications of sin for our choosing God. Sinners are enemies of God, so in no sense are we “free” to choose him. That only happens because the Holy Spirit transforms our hearts from spiritual stone to flesh so that we can trust him for our salvation. Our brains are not floating in a vat of neutral liquid where we are presented with information and then decide of our own volition what to do with it. Given the choice without God’s intervention, we would never choose Christ, never.

Then, in what sense does Calvin believe in “free will”? I’m reading some of Calvin’s commentaries on the Psalms. It seems those who interacted with him in his ministry as a pastor encouraged him to commit his lectures on the Psalms to posterity in writing. He mentions other writers who he feels have done such work that he doesn’t feel like he has anything to add, but then he writes this in the introduction:

One reason which made me comply with their solicitations, and which also had from the commencement induced me to make this first attempt, was an apprehension that at some future period what had been taken down from my lectures, might be published to the world contrary to my wishes, or at least without my knowledge. I can truly say that I was drawn to execute this work rather from such an apprehension, than led to it from my own free will. I began to perceive more distinctly that this was by no means a superfluous undertaking, and I have also felt from my own individual experience, that no readers who are not so exercised, I would furnish important assistance in understanding The Psalms.

There you go! Calvin was just like you and me believing his choices were not an illusion, that what he did or didn’t do for the reasons he did them really mattered, and actually determined the direction of his life this way or that, one way or the other. Calvin also believe these choices as free as they are, however, are always in the context of God’s sovereign ordaining of all things. To me that is true freedom because I never have to worry that God’s sitting up on his throne in the heavens and is taken by surprise by anything that happens. If he is not absolutely in some way in “control” of all things, then Romans 8:28 cannot be true: 

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Not 99%, but all. How is he sovereign and ordaining all things for his perfect ends, and we’re still actual free beings whose choices matter? We have no idea because, well, we’re not God. We get into trouble thinking we can figure that out or can some way understand it. We can’t! What we do know is that His sovereignty doesn’t mean He’s a cosmic puppet master and we’re all on strings He’s pulling to move us one way or the other. When the Bible says He is “the ruler of all things,” it means He directs human action and choosing in the context of how human beings exist without ever violating their nature. We are accountable and we know it! We have significance because we are choosing beings and our choices matter. We have agency. We can change things! Scripture, God Himself through His inscripturated word implores us to choose wisely.

Back to Calvin’s voluminous commentaries. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve almost ignored them these almost four decades, although more sad because I’ve left all that wisdom I could have been learning sitting on the shelf gathering dust. Shame on me it took this long, but God is merciful and gracious to us in his Son! Please don’t tell anybody this, but I even wanted to sell them amidst our several moves over the last number of years. Thank God my longsuffering wife talked me out of it! There are two reasons they are no longer on the shelf gathering dust.

As you may know, Calvin was a Frenchman, so when he preached or lectured it was in French, or as a scholar he sometimes wrote or lectured in Latin. The commentaries we have were translated in the mid-nineteenth century, and as you can see the English from that time is kind of stilted and foreign to our ears. It takes a little more work to get at the meaning, and I guess I was too lazy to do it, doggone it! No more! Which brings me to the second reason.

I recently read a biography of one Calvin’s contemporaries, the great Scottish Reformer John Knox, and it helped me realize what a treasure I have right under my nose. Knox and other British Protestants fled England to Calvin’s Geneva from the wrath of the Catholic “Bloody Marry” from 1553-1558. Over 300 Protestants who didn’t flee were burned at the stake. These sentences from a paragraph in the book blew my mind:

Many of the city’s exiles came to listen to Calvin, and a system had been organized with a speed writer to transcribe his sermons as they were preached. The text was copied and circulated and, after Calvin had revised it, formed the basis of his printed Biblical commentaries.

And they’re sitting on my shelf! And in English! And by God’s grace, no longer taken for granted.

 

Uninvented: Who Is the Greatest and the Criterion of Embarrassment

Uninvented: Who Is the Greatest and the Criterion of Embarrassment

Sep 9, 2023 | Apologetics

One of the most powerful arguments for the veracity of the historical accounts of the Bible is the criterion of embarrassment. The idea is simple: Nobody tells stories to make themselves look bad. Nor do they tell stories making themselves look bad to try to prove what they are conveying is historically true. Human nature doesn’t work that way. We tend to the opposite, wanting to make ourselves look good, excuse our foibles and faults, and we’ll even be tempted to lie to cover up things we don’t want others to know. Yet if you read the Bible the people portrayed almost never come up looking good with a few exceptions. I heard Tucker Carlson in a recent interview make this point. He’s been red pilled with the rest of us since Trump came on the scene, and he’s had an awakening of his Episcopalian faith. He decided not too long ago to read the Bible from cover to cover, something he’d never done, and was shocked at how horrible most of the characters were. That’s because they are real, flawed people like we all are, and the authors are writing about real people doing real things in real time. It doesn’t read at all like the fairy tales and myth ignorant critics think it is.

The examples in Scripture are plentiful, but Jesus’ disciples are great fodder for this argument. They come off looking clueless most of the time, and are consistently confused by most things Jesus says and does. And keep in mind the gospels were the foundational books for the growth of a new religion built on a very old one. You would think those who wrote and promoted them would want to make themselves look good, or at least less embarrassing, but that’s not the case. Recently reading through Mark I was reminded of how this argument gives the biblical stories verisimilitude, which is the quality of appearing to be true or real. That is the argument of Uninvented in a nutshell. It’s an important reason when people read the Bible for the first time they’re surprised, like Tucker was, because it’s nothing like they expected. I wrote a post a year ago about the conversion of Shia LaBeouf, and if you listen to his interview with Bishop Barron he says how blown away he was when he read the gospels for the first time. Jesus was nothing like he expected.

When I first started thinking about and then writing the book I was going to call it Psychological Apologetics, but nobody would have known what that meant. Not a good thing for the title of a book. The idea in my brain was that if you look at the characters and how they are portrayed in the Bible from a psychological perspective, it reads absolutely real. People act and react exactly the way real people act and react. And keep in mind a critical point: fiction as we know it today did not exist in the ancient world. That is a modern phenomenon of the last few hundred years. Yes, ancient people made up and told stories, but they had no illusions they were creating verisimilitude. Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, the foundational works of ancient Greek literature, are perfect examples to contrast with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. There likely was a Trojan war something like Homer presents it, but nobody thought he was writing “history.” The reason this is a good comparison, and not the histories of ancient historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, or Livy is because of the super-natural elements in both. Skeptics think they are comparable—they are not. A cursory read of both makes that very clear.

Read the Bible and it’s apparent the writers of the biblical books were attempting to write history, while Homer was taking poetic license with the history involving the Greek gods. Nobody really believed Achilles, for example, was the son of the mortal Peleus, and the sea nymph, Thetis. While the ancients certainly believed in the reality of their gods, none of them saw the gods like the Hebrews saw Yahweh, the one true God. The religious texts of ancient pagans do not read anything at all like the religious texts of the Hebrews, what Jesus and the Apostles called the graphé- γραφή, the writings, our Old Testament. And just as there was no fiction in the ancient world, there wasn’t what we call today historical fiction, or writing history with made-up stuff to make it appear real. Knowing all of this makes the criterion of embarrassment all the more powerful to have in our apologetics tool kit.

I’ll briefly discuss the mark passage as a great example. It comes from chapter 9:

33 They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” 34 But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.

35 Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

36 He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, 37 “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

I love  how the Apostles, the Twelve, are so cowered by Jesus because they know how stupid it was to argue which of them is the greatest. This happens to Jesus’ closest followers a lot. They either do something they’re embarrassed by like this, or are afraid to ask Jesus questions when they don’t understand what he says or does. Another example along the same lines comes when James and John, the sons of Zebedee (and their mother) ask Jesus if one can sit at his right and the other at his left in his kingdom.  

In both cases, instead of rebuking them directly for being self-centered idiots, as if Jesus’ ministry is about them, he teaches them something so counterintuitive nobody in the Roman or Jewish world would make it up. All influence in the ancient world was a form of the will to power, might makes right. The stronger as well as the more affluent upper classes had all the benefits in that society. A large portion of the population were slaves, and the rest common laborers, few of whom had politics rights of any kind. Women and children weren’t all that far above slaves, and it must have been confusing when Jesus used a child as an example of what it means to be first in his very upside down kingdom. The absurdity of that in the culture of the time is difficult to convey because we’re too familiar with Christianity living in light of 2000 years of it. As we say in the vernacular of our time, you just don’t make that stuff up! Jesus says something just as absurd in the incident with James and John. The other ten were furious when they heard what the brothers had done, which is funny, then Jesus teaches them more craziness:

42 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.

What? Again, given our familiarity with the stories it’s difficult to read this with the shock Jesus’ disciples must have felt when they heard it. Jesus’ teaching here is so counterintuitive, so inside out and upside down that no Jew or Pagan of the time could have made it up. It had to come from Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, Jewish Messiah, Risen Lord.