Consistency

When watching, listening to, or reading religious debate, you will need to look for one thing: consistency. It is one of the marks of a good argument. Holding one standard for evidence that supports your view and another standard for evidence that opposes your view is a fallacy so common in bad argumentation that it has its own name: special pleading.

When attacking the New Testament, the anti-missionary will engage in special pleading in a variety of ways. Hyper-literalism, the Bible Difficulties game, accusations of altering and misquoting the Tanakh, raiding the higher criticism of liberal scholars, and finally through the Zeitgeist game, where they try to connect the New Testament to pagan mythology.

On what consistent basis can an anti-missionary reject the inspiration of the New Testament? I have yet to meet a consistent Orthodox anti-missionary, one who is willing to hold one and only one standard of criticism, one set of presuppositions, one level of skepticism to apply to both the Tanakh and the New Testament. It intellectually dishonest to assert without question that the Tanakh is the infallible word of God and then put the New Testament on trial for its life, presuming it guilty until proven innocent. I believe most anti-missionaries are aware of the difference between humanistic and naturalistic scholarship that begins with the assumption that God has not and cannot speak, and scholarship that does not determine what God cannot do right from the start.

If the anti-missionaries want to hold the New Testament to the same standard as the Tanakh, they will be willing to harmonize the text, give flexibility in its interpretation, and give the authors the benefit of the doubt when assessing their motives, as they do with their own Scriptures. If they are unwilling to do so, then we know the anti-missionary position is untenable. Inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

If the words of the New Testament are to be contradicted in regards to their validity and historical value, the anti-missionary will have to do more than point out that liberal, secular scholars tend to disagree with works that claim to be inspired. That is a given. Without hard, manuscript evidence that the text has been altered, accusations that certain parts of the New Testament were changed later on remain nothing more than pure speculation.

In attempting to discredit the New Testament, the anti-missionary will apply inconsistent standards being flexible and gracious when interpreting the Tanakh, Talmud, and Rabbinic writings while offering no flexibility when interpreting the New Testament. They will use quotes such as "If your eye causes you to sin, cut it out" or "Give away everything you have" then fault us for not following it. They will suggest that accounts such as the resurrection are hopelessly contradictory and cannot be historical. They will also accuse the New Testament writers of misquoting the Tanakh, and sometimes even deliberately changing the Word of God.

However, all of these issues have parallels in the Tankah itself. The opening chapter of Genesis indicates a 6 day creation process, and the Talmud interprets day as a 24 hour period of time. The Torah declares an eye for an eye, allows slavery and orders the extermination of the Canaanites. How literally do you want to take these passages? If you want some flexibility in interpretation so you are not chopping people's hands off, please give the same courtesy to the New Testament.

As far as the Bible Difficulties game is concerned, placing Samuel and Kings on one side and the Chronicles on the other, an uncharitable interpreter can alledge all sorts of contradictions. Did Jesse have eight sons or seven sons? Did Solomon have 40,000 horses or 4,000? Did Jehoram son of Jehosophat begin his reign before or after Jehoram son of Ahab? It depends on which account you view. In fact, imagine a world in which these books of the Chronicles do not appear in the Tanakh but instead appear in the New Testament. Is there any doubt these would be the focal point of anti-missionary attacks? While I beleive all these issues in the Chronicles are able to be harmonized by a charitable interpreter, the same goes for the New Testament.

Does paraphrasing a text mean that you are maliciously altering it? If you think so, then you will have to throw the Tanakh away as well. 2 Chronicles 25:4 is written slightly differently than Deuteronomy 24:16. Also, remember Matthew's quote "he will be called a Nazarene" Is this evidence of misquoting the prophets? Not unless you are willing to discredit Ezrah 9:10-12 as well.

The Zeitgeist game basically is the assertion that the life of Jesus in general and his resurrection in particular is derived from pagan mythology. This is not a new theory, but is characteristic of the old history of religion school of thought at the beginning of the 20th century. Scholars in comparative literature ransacked pagan mythologies to try to find parallels to Christian beliefs. The movement soon collapsed for two reasons:

1. Scholars realized that the supposed parallels were superficial. The ancient world was filled with mythologies of every kind. When you look at these myths carefully, you find great diversity among them. Some are mythical symbols of the crop cycle, in the case of Tammuz and Osiris and Adonis. Some are apotheosis tales of the assumption of the hero into heaven, as in the case of Hercules. Some are emperor woship stories as is the case with Caesar. None of these are parallel to the Jewish idea of resurrection. None of them are true parallels to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Describing pagan myths using New Testament vocabulary as we see in conspiracy movies like Zeitgeist is nothing more than pure charlatanism.

2. There is no causal connection between pagan myths and the New Testament writings. Jews found these pagan myths abhorrent. This is why Jewish writers such as Philo and Josephus refused to immortalize or deify Moses. This is why there is no evidence of cults of dying and rising gods in first century Palestine.

What the anti-missionary forgets is that the same line of reasoning was applied to the Tanakh. Scholars such as Joseph Campbell believed that the Pentatuch was borrowed from ancient semitic literature and was reactionary against rival mythologies, such as the stories of Marduk in Babylon as well as the epic of Gilgamesh to name just two. Is the anti-missionary willing to apply that kind of scholarship to the Tanakh? If not, why not?

Aah, but liberal branches of Judaism such as Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic Judaism are willing to hold Rabbinic literature and the Tanakh to the same standard of criticism as the New Testament, and have consistency in that area. However, in another area, they are even more inconsistent than the anti-missionaries. A common question Reform rabbis receive is "why don't Jews believe in Jesus" but to me a more interesting question is "why aren't Jews allowed to believe in Jesus" Why is it that members of liberal Jewish congregations lose positions of leadership and even their membership in a movement where belief in God (the first and most important commandment) is usually optional, and is generally forbidden in Humanistic Judaism?

Besides, most of the courses I have taken with Reform and Conservative rabbis have stressed again and again that Judaism is not about what you believe but about action. It is about identifying as part of a people group and adopting a choice of lifestyle, culture, language, food, and cycle of holidays. Christianity, particularly Evangelical Christianity, is not about culture but is mainly about creed. So why can't you adopt the creed of Christianity and place it within the culture of Judaism. How would that be any less legitimate than humanistic Judaism at least? I asked one Modern Orthodox Rabbi, who told me that in Modern Orthodoxy, you can adopt any interpretation of the Bible, and pretty much any theology you want. You just have to follow the lifestyle prescribed by the Rabbis (which now allows being both gay and orthodox), and not believe in the deity of Jesus...or Schneerson. In other words, it's arbitrary. It's inconsistent, and inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

Finally, it is important that we Christian apologists be as consistent as possible when we criticize other religions. In future videos when I criticize Talmudic Judaism, I will not give liberal critics of Rabbinic writings such as Jacob Neusner a free pass when they apply higher criticism to these texts. I am more than willing to allow for harmonization of the texts, and demand hard manuscript evidence whenever higher criticism asserts that the writings changed over time. Arguments that cut both ways and prove too much aren't of much use to anyone.

So in conclusion, when you hear an anti-missionary attacking the New Testament, you need to ask yourself "Would he be willing to do the same thing to his own scriptures?"