The Differences Between Jesus and Mohammed

While it's not exactly the theme of this post it is in the background:

The Appeal of Islam in a Poorly Catechized World:

Are We Losing the Apologetics War with Islam?


Islamic cultures are honor cultures, and the religion of Islam might justly be described as an honor religion. Allah is in charge and he...

Read the whole thing.

(Via .)

Why Jesus is God: A Response to Bart Ehrman | Catholic World Report - Global Church news and views

Besides the brief critique of Hume's reasoning on miracles (circular) Father Barron uses a wonderful term: Semiotics.

Why Jesus is God: A Response to Bart Ehrman | Catholic World Report - Global Church news and views:

...In this most recent tome, Ehrman lays out what is actually a very old thesis, going back at least to the 18th century and repeated ad nauseam in skeptical circles ever since, namely, that Jesus was a simple itinerant preacher who never claimed to be divine and whose “resurrection” was in fact an invention of his disciples who experienced hallucinations of their master after his death. Of course Ehrman, like so many of his skeptical colleagues across the centuries, breathlessly presents this thesis as though he has made a brilliant discovery. But basically, it’s the same old story. When I was a teenager, I read British Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot, which lays out the same narrative, and just a few months ago, I read Reza Aslan’s Zealot, which pursues a very similar line, and I’m sure next Christmas or Easter I will read still another iteration of the theory.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Insight Scoop|The Ignatius Press Blog.)

What I Believe

The recent attempt at a dialogue with a Bible-only commenter hasn't borne fruit, yet. That's ok, not everyone is into discourse.

Perhaps what is needed is to first establish the common ground that we have. To effectively disagree with someone you must first have something you both agree on. Otherwise you have no common terms or concepts which you can both appeal to. The debate ends up being two unrelated soliloquies interrupting each other. So what, potentially, do I have in common with most Bible-only Christians?

First and foremost, we have Jesus Christ, Lord and Saviour. No one and nothing takes precedence, once you have recognized Him. As a Catholic I feel obliged to point out that this includes, logically speaking, the Bible. Not that they are opposed to each other or in tension somehow. Rather, that the Bible only stands–directly and indirectly–on Jesus Himself:

“[S]cripture cannot be broken”


(John 10:35 RSV)

And I find the ancient Roman baptismal formula (via Tertullian) to be an excellent summary of Christian beliefs about Jesus:

We,...believe that there is one only God...that this one only God has also a Son, His Word, who proceeded from Himself, by whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. Him we believe to have been sent by the Father into the Virgin, and to have been born of her-being both Man and God, the Son of Man and the Son of God, and to have been called by the name of Jesus Christ; we believe Him to have suffered, died, and been buried, according to the Scriptures, and, after He had been raised again by the Father and taken back to heaven, to be sitting at the right hand of the Father, and that He will come to judge the quick and the dead.

Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds., Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (ANF III; Accordance electronic ed. 9 vols.; New York: Christian Literature Company, 1885), n.p.

This testimony [circa A.D. 213] is an early example of the ancient belief of those who eventually defined for us the canon of Scripture. Of course the remainder of the formula will refer to "the Holy Church". And examining what the First Christians meant by that may well divide us.

Second, we have the Scripture, though my Protestant brethren have a truncated version. We will both profess, I hope, verbal plenary Inspiration of Scripture. For the meaning of this the Wikipedia gives a good summary:

This view gives a greater role to the human writers of the Bible, while maintaining a belief that God preserved the integrity of the words of the Bible."[18] The effect of inspiration was to move the authors so as to produce the words God wanted.[17] In this view the human writers' "individual backgrounds, personal traits, and literary styles were authentically theirs, but had been providentially prepared by God for use as his instrument in producing Scripture."[18]

Admittedly that might actually separate me from some Catholics today but it doesn't have to. This language is generally associated with Evangelicals but is fully compatible with orthodox Catholic thought.

If my interlocutor avers the Dictation Theory of Biblical Inspiration then we must part ways and begin our conversation there.

Is that enough to begin with?

Evangelization and Arguments

I recently deleted a comment because it had no relationship the post it was allegedly commenting on. I’ve been thinking about the comment, the writer’s purposes, his assumptions and his method.

HIs topic was the Catholic honouring of the Saints. He argued against it by citing Bible passages that contain the words Saint or Saints and showing that none of these passages refer to a dead saint. HIs purpose, seemingly, would be to lead me from Catholic “error” into Biblical truth. There’s nothing wrong with trying to increase the amount of truth on the Internet.

The assumptions he makes about the Bible are interesting. He seems to assume that the Protestant canon of Scripture is correct and so ignores the clear testimony of 2 Macc 15:11-17. But that book is one of those which isn’t in his canon so he ignored it. And I’m wondering if he’s assuming the Perspicuity of Scripture based on his doing an English word search and basing his conclusions on that. That is not at all unusual amongst "Bible Only” Christians.

I assume that he didn’t do this study especially for me since it wasn’t related to the post. So how to rate his effectiveness? In the end my intellectual curiosity was aroused by his comment, even if I deleted it. But what chance did he have of persuading me when we’re so far apart in some key beliefs?

 The kinds of issues he would need to deal with would include: 

• The process and authority of the closing of the canon of Scripture;
• The clear Scriptural reference to the difficulty of interpreting Scripture (2 Pet 3:15-16);
• The failure of Scripture to claim for itself the authority that “Sola Scriptura” claims for it;
• The fact that both written and oral Tradition are honoured in Scripture.
• The ultimate circularity of the Bible-Only position.

That’s a lot of ground to cover. Perhaps you would like to comment on this post.

A Little Ecumentical Dialogue

This is an interesting exercise:

Dialogue between Christ and a Muslim:

Very enjoyable read.

H/T Foolishness to the World

Read the whole thing.

(Via SoCon Or Bust.)

A Little Ecumentical Dialogue

This is an interesting exercise:

Dialogue between Christ and a Muslim:

Very enjoyable read.

H/T Foolishness to the World

Read the whole thing.

(Via SoCon Or Bust.)

Jesus as Myth: a Losing Battle

I love the analogy employed here. In any case this is the least troublesome aspect of Christianity's claims: There was a man named Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. I especially appreciate the criticism of Dawkins for relying on an inappropriate authority (German language?) who has since retracted his position.

A fight they can't win: The irreligious assault on the historicity of Jesus – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):

It is time for the evangelists of unbelief to give up the nonsense that the figure at the heart of Christianity may have never even lived.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Links.)

A Follow-up on TLRJ

*The Latest Real Jesus:

Of Gnostics and Religion Professors:

In September, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King ignited an international controversy when she claimed to have found a piece of what she claims is a fourth-century papyrus that refers to Jesus’ “wife”.[1] (To be fair, she doesn’t claim that she believes that Jesus was married, only that whomever wrote the scroll believed He was. Of course, most of the media coverage didn’t make the fine distinction and played it up as evidence that orthodox Christianity was wrong and/or hiding the truth.) There’s been plenty of criticism of King and her claim and even the way she went public about it.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Bettnet.com - Musings of Domenico Bettinelli.)

The Latest Real Jesus

There are a few lessons we can learn from this latest debacle:

First, scholars when working according to their professions standards:

thoroughly research their thesis

submit this thesis to a peer-reviewed journal

which is then reviewed by experts in the field before publication to avoid obvious problems

then it is published and submitted to general review by scholarship as a whole

From this it follows that something which is first announced in a press conference with a tv special on the Smithsonian channel being quickly organized you should prepare yourself for some blowback. Scholars don't like being ignored while the scandal-hungry press and money-grubbing media are feted.

The usual caveats are appropriate for Christmas and Easter-themed "Real Jesus" stories.

It's bad enough we have this shoddy stuff coming at us twice a year. Givest me a break!

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife…:

…is now a confirmed forgery. Replicates blunders from an online version of the gospel of Thomas it was ripped off from.

Will the media learn from this Latest Real Jesus incident not to instantly fall for the next Latest Real Jesus? Have fish, since the invention of fishing, ever learned not to bite a hook with bait on it?

It’s what they *do*.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Did Muhammed Exist?

(subtitle: "An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins") a book by Robert Spencer. A quick review with just a couple of observations.

The author's avowed aim of subjecting Muhammed and the Quran to the same sort of rigorous analysis that Jesus and the Christian and Jewish Scriptures have been experiencing for more than a century intrigued me. Given that, as a believing Catholic Christian, a lot of this so-called analysis seems tendentious and poorly grounded in reason, I was curious to see what the author would make of Islam's founder and principle scriptures based on his survey of scholarship.

To recap the classical Muslim understanding of the events: Muhammed is called by Allah from the middle of Arabia to preach a re-purified message to everyone. His locutions are given to him by the Angel Gabriel in perfect Arabic which sayings, stories and pronouncements are gathered together a few decades after his death into the Quran as we now know it. It is perfect and complete and there are no variant versions, such as Christians deal with. And it is perfectly comprehensible.

This is roughly parallel to some Protestant systems of thought that treat the Scriptures as if they were dictated by God, word for word. While Catholicism has the highest regard for the Scriptures (Inspired and, therefore, Inerrant) it doesn't regard the authors of Scripture to be mere transcriptionists. Nor does it deny the thousands of variant versions from the ancient world.

The author aims, in part, to contrast the facile view that Mohammed, the Quran and early Islam happened in the "clear light of history" with his view that, in fact, we know very little about any of them and have little reliable information to base any firm conclusions on.

I was particularly struck by the author's dismissive attitude towards oral tradition, comparing it to the children's game of telephone. First of all, scholars have been and are continuing to study oral tradition in relation to history. In cultures where oral tradition predominates, such as First Century Judea, it can be a highly developed system for reliably transmitting information from one generation to the next. If scholars were to turn their attention to the first three centuries of Islam and study the oral transmission they might come to more meaningful conclusions than the author. The Quran, the biography of Mohammed and the Hadith might all be analyzed in a sober manner. From these studies we could then talk about what we can and can't know about early Islam, its Scripture and it's founder.

Alas, the threats of violence will probably keep most scholars away from any such project. At least for raising these issues, albeit in a flawed manner, the author deserves credit.

Latest Real Jesus Discovered!

I sometimes wonder if these endlessly invented Jesus' aren't celebrated because they offer yet another excuse to ignore the Jesus of Christianity. He is, after all, a very discomforting Person who requires us to surrender our ego and comfort for His Love. The Gospel of no suffering and self-affirmation can't hold a candle to Him.

Aa Mark Shea says in the article he links to at the bottom of this post:

Every Latest Real Jesus at variance with the constant tradition of the Church is always a reflection of the obsessions of the discoverer, not a revelation of who Jesus really was.

Latest Real Jesus Discovered!:

Turns out that in addition to being a robust heterosexual who married Mary Magdalene, he was also gay.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

One Man's Meat

is another's cult:

Pot meet Kettle...

...Rock meet glass house.

Michael Voris:

Pot meet Kettle...

...Rock meet glass house.

Michael Voris deconstructs Pastor Jeffres criticism of Mormonism.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Lex Communis.)

The Probability of God

Wow. There's a 99% probability that God exists? Who knew that kind of calculation was possible?

The Probability of God:

Betrand Russell, famous for his agnostic views as much as for his theories on logic, was once asked how he would answer if he turned out to be wrong about God. Russell was delighted with the question and answered, “Why, I should say, ‘God, you gave us insufficient evidence.’”

I suspect that upon their meeting, God corrected the ol’ Brit, showing how the evidence was there and that Russell had simply chosen to ignore it. But it does raise the question of why different people when presented with much the same evidence, come to such varying conclusions about the existence of God.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

Persecution

isn't a subject in many sermons nowadays. (I'll omit ranting a out abortion, contraception and the other elephants in the room.) But my growing sense of unease in our culture of comfort and self is tweaked by little signs of a coming storm.

“Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
(Matt 5:10-12 NAB)

We are too comfortable, too sheep-like in the presence of the increasing hostility of the world elite towards Jesus, His teaching and His disciples. We need to prepare ourselves and our children for the troubles that are coming.

Ok, sermon over. Now to the news:

Catholic prof fired for giving Church teaching on homosexuality:

Our good friend and fellow Catholic convert, Dr. Kenneth Howell, who worked for St. John's Catholic Newman Center as Director of the Institute of Catholic Thought, and taught Introduction to Catholicisim and Modern Catholic Thought at the University of Illinois, Urbana, has been fired for relating the Catholic teaching on homosexuality in his class:

• "Illinois professor fired for giving Catholic teaching on homosexuality" (CNA, July 9, 2010).
  
  
• "University of Illinois Instructor Fired Over Catholic Beliefs" (FOX News, July 9, 2010).
  
  
• [Advisory: this article is vile, anti-Catholic, and illustrates why a secular academic climate today could get a good and decent Catholic professor fired]: P.Z. Myers, "Honesty about sex is going to disqualify a lot of professors of Catholic dogma" (Pharyngula, July 9, 2010).

Read the whole thing.

(Via Musings of a Pertinacious Papist.)

The Koran Versus The Bible

The multiplicity of Scriptural texts over a thousand years and more and the large number of textual variants are viewed by Muslims as a scandal. How could God's Word be variant or doubtful? For them, the Qur'an is the perfect counterfoil to the Scripture Text: uttered from the mouth of the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed, who memorized it and passed it on to be written down, incorrupt.

For an educated Christian, however, the multiplicity of Scriptural texts and the hundreds of variants are a major blessing. First off, try drawing straight, parallel lines on a piece of paper. In elementary school I was taught that you needed at least three points to make sure a line was correct. By analogy, the thousands of Scripture texts (complete and partial) provide abundant evidence ("points") of the state of the original texts (the autographs).

What about all those variants? Don't they undermine confidence in the text? Not really. No significant doctrinal or historical divergence appears in any of the surviving manuscripts. The Good News of Jesus Christ is the same in every one. For thousands of texts over a thousand years in multiple languages, this is strong evidence for the reliability of our present text.

But is this not still inferior to the Muslim claim of a perfect, invariant text? No, because there is no such text. A great deal of the Qur'an's history has been destroyed thereby reducing the number of "points" we could test the present text against. Enough variants exist, however, to show that there was a history to the Qur'anic text which Muslim apologists are unaware of. Consider the following:

The Yemeni Qur'an:

To quote Puin: "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Qur'an is just God's unaltered word... They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Qur'an has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Qur'an has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this."



[snip]



One early Muslim declared, "Let none of you say, 'I have acquired the whole of the Qur'an.' How does he know what all of it is when much of the Qur'an has disappeared? Rather let him say 'I have acquired what has survived'" (As-Suyuti, Al-Itqan fii Ulum al-Qur'an ).

Read the whole thing.

(Via Jihad Watch.)

Schism!

Amongst the Atheists. The lamentable drop in quality of the "new atheists" is being noticed even by atheists:

Schism! Denial! Infighting! Name calling! And that's just among the atheists...:

The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist...

Read the whole thing.

(Via Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog.)

The Crazies Are Coming Out

to critique the Pope's impending offer of reconciliation for those Anglicans who have been requesting it for years. And the resulting display is revealing:

Lex Communis:

In regard to Dawkins' bigotted rant, Damien Thompson at the Telegraph asks a pertinent question:

The peg for this piece? The Pope’s offer to make special arrangements for Anglicans converting to Rome, a matter I would have thought was none of Prof Dawkins’s business. But I’m not going to bother to argue with any of his points, because these are the ravings of a man who appears to have lost all sense of proportion. Seriously: is there something wrong with him?

The answer is clearly yes.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Lex Communis.)

Post-Christian Britain

is mirrored by British TV. A favourite program of mine was the Inspector Morse series with John Thaw in the title role. I used to compare the books by Colin Dexter to the tv series and found that the Colin Dexter's clear questioning of Christian belief (through Morse) was watered down. Sergeant Lewis gave a simple, sincere Christian witness to Morse's world-weary cynicism in the books.

In the tv the Lewis character was muddled and muted. Now with the resurrected series they have made Lewis world-weary and cynical, while his Oxford-educated sergeant represents a post-Christian Christianity. The elite that produces tv and movies in Britain are no longer able to represent, much less engage the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of Christianity.

This thought was inspired by Rich Leonardi:

The abolition of Britain:

"On the road from Gethsemane to Calvary I lost my way."

So reads a suicide note in tonight's Inspector Lewis episode on Masterpiece Mystery!

Read the whole thing.

(Via Ten Reasons.)