Uninvented Book Review: Paul Among the People

Uninvented Book Review: Paul Among the People

Jul 17, 2022 | Uninvented

I just finished a book I wish I’d read when I was writing Uninvented. The subtitle made me curious: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in his Own Time. The Author, Sarah Ruden, is a classics scholar, and an impressive one at that. Although she is a Quaker and not an Evangelical Christian, as I am, and does not believe in the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture as I explain it in the book, she is clearly a passionate Christian. The theme of the book fits an Uninvented perspective perfectly, although she never addresses why the Bible and Christianity are true. If it isn’t true, I don’t much care what Paul had to say, Apostle or not. However, as I argue in the book, the Apostle could not be invented, especially his teaching, which is what she addresses in her book.

To set up the theme of Uninvented, we’ll need to address the proverbial elephant in the room, Paul’s conversion. She glosses over his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus in a couple paragraphs in her preface, but never directly addresses the historicity of the event. No one disputes something happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, but many dispute something supernatural happened. Was Paul actually confronted by the risen Jesus, or not.  Ruden seems to believe the historicity of the events in the Bible isn’t as relevant as our perceptions of those events, however they were recorded or whatever happened. Be that as it may, there is much valuable in her book that lends credibility to the argument of Uninvented. In the vernacular the conclusion is, you just can’t make this stuff up!

Since what has come to be known at “the 60s,” the secular anti-biblical narrative broke out of academia and among intellectual elites in general, into the wider culture. The Apostle Paul in this telling is a big meanie, anti-misogynist bigot, among other things. I might be overstating the case a bit, but not by much. Needless to say, the text doesn’t support such conclusions about Paul, but broader secular culture isn’t much concerned with the text. Ruden most definitely is, in the original language and the Greco-Roman cultural context. Her knowledge of that context is impressive, and she quotes extensively from writers and thinkers of the time to try to understand the real societal situation Paul was writing to and for.

Many people since the Enlightenment carelessly read modern assumptions into the biblical text, including many of the most influential biblical critics of the last several hundred years. For much of that time, critical scholarship almost ignored the Jewish context of Jesus’ world and claimed much of what we read in the gospels was written back into the gospels by Greek speaking, non-Jewish Christians. For them it was the needs of the Christian communities much later that in effect created the gospel stories from a kernel of historical events. For these scholars with an anti-supernatural bias, this was a way to explain away the miracles as having actually happened because their bias wouldn’t allow them to happen. Miracles can’t happen, but they must be explained some way, and this was their way. The same thing, but without the bias, happens when people read Paul about women or homosexuality or slavery. Knowing little about the Jewish and Greco-Roman context of the gospels, they misinterpret what Paul says, and miss its world altering genius.

Ruden tackles these and a few other issues, and shows how those who know nothing or little of the ancient world will never understand Paul. His teaching was radically novel at the time, and it was largely Paul’s teaching based upon the implications of the gospel that created the modern world. Her premise makes the point:

To me, even the first efforts at setting Paul’s words against the words of polytheistic authors helped explain why early Christianity was so compelling, growing as no popular movement ever had before.

Speaking of marriage, she claims Paul’s teaching was “as different from anything before or since, as the command to turn the other cheek.” After Paul, men and women and marriage could never be viewed the same way it was in the ancient world. For Paul, “faithfulness in marriage now applied equally to both men and women” which was “a real shocker.” The fruit of such shocking novelty took a long time to develop, but it was because of Paul that women eventually became equal partners at the marriage table. Everything about the new Christian conception of marriage “was entirely against Greco-Roman norms.” Even Jews, who should have known better, often treated women as second-class citizens, and sometimes worse.

This all raises a question I talk often about in Uninvented: where did such unique teaching come from? And both from the lips of Jesus and Paul. Ruden is not a secularist and believes in a spiritual reality, and at times hints it can only come from world beyond this one, but her focus is more sociological. That is of course valuable, but I’m more interested in truth, if the Bible is what it declares itself to be, God’s inerrant authoritative revelation about himself and the ultimate meaning of all things. If it’s not, I’m not interested. So, I argue, what Paul and Jesus taught was so radical, so contrary to every Jewish and Greco-Roman teaching and expectation at the time, that it could not possibly be merely human invention. It is more plausible to believe that such teaching had behind it a divine source which Paul was confronted by on the road to Damascus: the risen Jesus!

Uninvented: Can Moses See God’s Face or Not?

Uninvented: Can Moses See God’s Face or Not?

Jul 14, 2022 | Uninvented

Some Uninvented arguments are stronger than others, meaning certain passages and stories in the history of Israel can appear more easily made up, while others would require a leap of faith to believe they were. Much is in between, or simply doesn’t apply, like Proverbs, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, the non-historical books. I would say Exodus 33 fits somewhere in the middle. There seems to be a blatant contradiction which needs to be explained in some way, and we’ll find the Uninvented explanation is much more plausible.

In verses 7-10 we read about the Tent of Meeting, where Moses went to talk to the Lord, and the people went to place their inquiries of the Lord. The pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites through the desert would park in front of the tent so the people knew the Lord was there. Then we read:

11 The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent.

At the end of the chapter, though, this face-to-face meeting possibility seems as if it’s completely contradicted:

18 Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”

19 And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.

21 Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”

As we read this chapter through Uninvented eyes, we think this has to be true because it’s a total contraction on the face of it, pun intended. Since Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, he had to see the apparent contradiction. In one encounter he’s sitting down with the Lord as with an old friend, and in the other such an encounter will kill him. Yet Moses reported it this way because it really did happen, and he saw no need to not report it even with the apparent contradiction. In other words, someone making up the story would never report such a contradiction because it would destroy the credibility of the story. That’s the argument, anyway, and to me it’s a powerful one. We might file this under the criterion of embarrassment. This is a crucial concept to understand if we’re to read the Bible through Uninvented eyes.

I was originally going to call my book “Psychological Apologetics,” but nobody would have had a clue what that meant. I was thinking one of the ways we should train ourselves to read Scripture is through human psychology, so the mental and behavioral characteristics of both the authors and the characters they write about, how they think affecting how they act. When we read the Bible, we can ask ourselves, does this read like real people doing and thinking like real people from what we know of human nature? Or does it read like the myths and legends its critics have claimed it is for the last three hundred plus years? (Spinoza, 1632-77, was the first thinker in Western history to claim the Pentateuch was not written by Moses). One of the key ways to identify if it was made up or not is the criterion of embarrassment.

If you are trying to write a story you want people to believe is true, generally you will not want to contradict yourself, at least not in ways too obvious to the reader. When Moses wrote Exodus 33 the contradiction was so obvious that it must be true because a writer doesn’t want to contradict himself so obviously if he wants to be believed. Unless, of course, it’s only an apparent contradiction, as we have in this case. From what I’ve read, there are plausible explanations for this. One comes from Numbers 12, where Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ sister and brother, are challenging his authority because he married a Cushite woman. How dare he! She could possibly have been a dark-skinned woman, and while we might immediately think of the word “racist,” skin color in the ancient world wasn’t “a concept.” That came much later with American antebellum slavery and its aftermath. People have always been and still are threatened by cultural differences, and the ancient world was no different.

The Lord is not happy with Moses’ siblings for questioning the one clearly chosen by God to lead his people out of bondage to the promised land, and in no uncertain terms he calls them on the carpet. It is a scenario that reads real, as Scripture always does. He says, having declared Moses a prophet two verses prior:

8 With him I speak face to face,
clearly and not in riddles;
he sees the form of the Lord.

How this worked is described earlier in Numbers 7:

89 When Moses entered the tent of meeting to speak with the Lord, he heard the voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the atonement cover on the ark of the covenant law. In this way the Lord spoke to him.

We can see “face to face” as an idiomatic usage like it is in the first part of Exodus 33, and not literal as later in the chapter. Whereas here the Lord is communicating information to Moses, the latter is an ontological encounter with the fearsomely holy God. Moses had asked of the Lord, “Now show me your glory.” It must have taken some serious chutzpa to ask such a thing of Yahweh, but Moses wanted to see, visually, the true nature of Yahweh. For sinners, before Christ, that was not possible. Now, in him, we can see Yahweh’s glory, as Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

Notable Quotation

Notable Quotation

Jul 11, 2022 | Notable Quotations, Uncategorized

Semantics, like skepticism and empiricism, is a direct consequence of the disappearance of epistemology and the subsequent discovery of the inadequacy of rationalism. The rationalists believed that the truth could be found by the use of reason and logic alone because they had assumed that the world was rational and logical. Because the world is not rational and logical, they had failed. The skeptics accordingly doubted the capacity of the mind to know; the empiricists rejected the use of reason and tried to deal with the world by the senses alone; the semanticists tried to deal with the world by bringing its lack of logic and rationality into the mind itself. They did this, not by rediscovering the rules of epistemology but by changing the rules of logic. To them the old logic—Aristotelian logic, as they called it—was the source of all modern confusion, error, frustration and insanity. Accordingly, they tried to replace it by a non-Aristotelian logic whose basic innovation was that it rejected the principle of contradiction. The abandoning of this principle—which they called the “either-or principle”—meant that they rejected all rigid categories or definitions and were prepared to act with vague, variable and over-lapping definitions whose content varied during use in order to reflect the admitted dynamic quality of the external world.

—Carroll Quigley, “Epistemology, Semantics, and Doublethink”

 

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Jul 10, 2022 | Culture

We live in very strange times. For all recorded history the peoples of the world, no matter what their view of the universe and religious outlook, from the most rank deranged heathens to the most pristine moralistic religious people, believed in the fundamental duality of biology. In other words, there is man and there is woman, nothing in between, two sexes. I used to wonder why certain conservative intellectuals warned us against using the term gender. I didn’t understand what they meant until the transgender insanity broke out of Western academia into wider Western culture. Since gender is a sociological construct and not tied to biological reality, it is ultimately malleable. The concept would have mystified anyone who lived before the current post-modern generation, as would a related concept unknown in all of human history until now, same-sex “marriage.” The two ideas are connected by the same moral framework, which does not, cannot, include our Creator God.

The inspiration for this post is a piece in Life Site News about popular conservative political and cultural commentator Dave Ruben, and the decision he made with his “husband” to have a baby. Thus, same-sex surrogacy, meaning a woman has agreed to have “their” baby. The title of the piece was click bait for me: Why is the Daily Wire promoting same-sex surrogacy? That is a very good question! The subtitle of the piece reflects my opinion as well: “Same-sex surrogacy is a grave distortion of the family, and intrinsically evil.” Surrogacy is morally problematic in general, but to put a child into a “marriage” without a mother and father is morally reprehensible. And in case you don’t know, The Daily Wire is a conservative website founded by Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing, and I wanted to know why they were promoting something that is clearly not conservative. I was surprised to find out this promoting came during an interview with none other than Jordan Peterson, who I gather is a new contributor to The Daily Wire. Before I address the moral framework, I stumbled upon this short video of Doug Wilson basically eviscerating the arguments of both Ruben and Peterson:

I’ve known since I first realized I was a conservative when Reagan was elected (just between you and me, I voted for Carter, but not a word to anyone) I was not a libertarian, but I’ve struggled ever since to explain exactly why. The debate between conservativism and libertarianism has existed since the dawn of the modern conservative movement with the founding of National Review by Bill Buckley (RIP to both). Out of that came something called fusionism whcih held traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism together for decades. It’s been a marriage of convenience, but something fundamental separates the two so the marriage could never be consummated. The author of the Life Site piece in critiquing the argument Ruben and Peterson make explains why fusionism ultimately doesn’t work. The justification they are making for same-sex surrogacy comes “from the faulty libertarian emphasis on choice over morality.”

The reason libertarians believe choice is more important than morality is because, they argue, without the choice to be moral or immoral, one’s action can’t have any moral meaning. This is of course true. If someone points a gun at my head and threatens to kill me if I don’t walk the little old lady across the street, my doing so has no moral value; I was coerced. We are, however, rarely confronted with any kind of coercion to be moral or immoral, but constantly confronted with choices whether to be moral or not, do right or wrong, be good or bad, tell the truth or lie. Putting my self-interests and self-fulfillment over the interests of children is deeply immoral, and that is exactly what Ruben and his “husband” are doing. Wilson’s assessment of their arguments demonstrates their weakness, and futility, but also why there is nothing conservative about them. As the author of the Life Site piece points out, “there is no conservatism when you eschew moral tradition and natural law,” and both come primarily from one source, The Bible. Without God there is nothing to conserve. Libertarianism, to the contrary, can do just fine without God because the liberty to choose is in effect their God, their highest good.

The founders of America were most definitely not libertarians. They fought a revolution, gave their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of liberty, but it had nothing to do with libertarianism. They knew without “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” there could be no liberty, and they held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Every person who read these words at the time had no doubt Jefferson, maybe the most Deist among the founders, meant the Creator God of the Bible. He knew without the moral compass of Christianity there could be no “nation conceived in liberty,” in the words of Lincoln. The supreme law of the land depended on Christianity as it’s moral North Star. As John Adams, the second President of the United States declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He too meant the religious people of the Old and New Testaments.

I’m grateful for the many liberals, like Ruben and Peterson, who have moved to the political and cultural right over the last five or ten years, and who believe in truth over “The Narrative.” I’m happy to be co-belligerents with them against the Marxist woke left and the globalist elites who despise our liberty, and hate America as founded. That, however, doesn’t mean we call evil good, and good evil, even if it comes from those who claim the mantel of “conservative.” The homosexual and transgender agenda come from the same evil source, the same (im)moral framework, and you can’t accept one and reject the other; they are a package deal. Conservatism without the package is not conservative.

Uninvented: Exodus and the Building of the Tabernacle

Uninvented: Exodus and the Building of the Tabernacle

Jul 6, 2022 | Uninvented

I recently finished eight years of a “walk through the Bible,” a very slow walk indeed. I also recently finished a book called Uninvented: Why the Bible Could Not be Made Up, and the Evidence that Proves It. Having spent so much time mining for gold in the infinitely rich soil of God’s word, I decided I needed a big picture view again, so I started at Genesis 1 and have been reading 2 or 3 chapters a day. I had become so addicted to writing about my thoughts on the Bible, it has been hard not to jump on to my computer and type away. I have resisted that temptation, until now. However, I’m not going back to a daily grind of chapter-by-chapter analysis, as tempting as that is. Rather, I’m going to connect Uninvented to my current reading so I can continue to write about Scripture and promote my book as well.

Speaking of promoting, I would be grateful if you might share my posts on social media and with friends and family, if you think they’re worthy, because promoting a book when you’re a “nobody” is really hard, even a book as worthy of the attention as Uninvented. There is nothing like it out there, and most Christians don’t know why uninvented as a concept is such a powerful defense for the veracity of the Bible. If you’ve read it, a comment on Amazon would be much appreciated as well.

In Uninvented one of my objectives is to encourage Christians to read the Bible apologetically, specifically related to the psychology of the characters and the authors. That means in layman’s terms for those who are not “into apologetics,” that the veracity of the text, it’s truthfulness as history, is revealed in what the characters do and say, and how they act. In the book I encourage readers to see the verisimilitude in the text, which simply means does this read real, like it could have actually happened, as real people thinking and doing real things, not like fiction merely made up to further a religious agenda. And we must remember as we’re reading our Bibles that fiction (historical or otherwise) didn’t exist in the ancient world. Myths and legend did, as did epic poems like The Iliad and The Odyssey, but the Bible reads like none of those.

As I’ve been reading through the Pentateuch, as in the rest of Scripture, I see verisimilitude everywhere, including how many times the author (traditionally, Christians believe it is Moses) refers to the Lord, or Yahweh. According to biblegateway.com the numbers in each book are as follows:

  • Genesis (183)
  • Exodus (354)
  • Leviticus (281)
  • Numbers (358)
  • Deuteronomy (442)

If my math is good, and my fingers and iPhone work, the Lord is referred to 1,618 times in the first five books of the Bible. If these references are not true, if the Lord did not in fact speak to Moses and his people, then we must believe whoever wrote these books is a liar, or are liars because going all the way back to Spinoza biblical critics declared Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, but numbers of people did much later in history. This came to be called by liberal biblical scholars the documentary hypothesis. I find this hard to believe given one of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” Yet, if we’re to believe the critics over the last three hundred plus years whoever wrote the first five books of the Bible were in fact liars. Does that pass the smell test to you?

The reason these references to Yahweh stood out to me was not only that there are so many of them, but that Yahweh is telling the Israelites through Moses what to do. Another word added to Yahweh and repeated stood out to me later in Exodus as the Israelites were building the tabernacle, the place where Yahweh is to dwell. Over and over Moses says, “As the Lord commanded.” Doing a word search we see the following:

  • Genesis (12)
  • Exodus (48)
  • Leviticus (24)
  • Numbers (29)
  • Deuteronomy (33)

Most of these 146 references are the Lord commanding. Again, if as the critics insist this is myth and legend, then all the references to the Lord commanding or doing anything are made up, pure invention, or in other words lies. The reason they would be lies, and not just inspiring stories of a people’s founding, is that the author(s) clearly intend to convey these things really happened.

As I argue in the book, skeptical critics come to the text with a “question-begging anti-supernatural bias,” which means before they ever come to the text, they assume miracles can’t happen. If they can’t, then of course the Lord didn’t actually speak to Moses, or command him to do anything. The entire Exodus narrative would have to be fiction because, well, miracles can’t happen. Understanding where this anti-supernatural bias comes from is important for us to understand so we can see how arbitrary it is. In the first chapter of the book, I do a short historical overview of biblical criticism, and how it is based on philosophies, like rationalism and empiricism, that will not allow even the consideration of something outside of the so-called natural world. Such assumptions are nothing if not arbitrary and should be rejected by any honest observer. If we let the text speak for itself we can draw the most plausible conclusions, and will likley find in the text something historically reliable, and thus uninvented.