I often inwardly chuckle when I read agnostic-atheistic philosophers who try to decontruct the Bible with their reason. For instance Diarmaid MacCulloch, wrote a book on Church History, and he makes claims in his book Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part II: One Church, One Faith, and One Lord?: The Crucified Messiah to Crucifixion and Resurrection, that the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John disagree on the reason Jesus was crucified. He states that Luke puts blame on the Jews, Matthew on Rome, and John on the Jewish leaders. Mcculoch is unable to fathom, much like Bill O’Rilley in “Killing Jesus”, that the answer is holistic: all of them combined, Christ was rounded up by the Jewish leaders (Matthew 26:57-67), was condemned by the Jewish crowd “crucify him!” (Luke 23:21) and Rome did the actual crucifying via Pilate’s order and the Roman Centurions (John 19:1-42). The true answer to why Jesus was crucified is two pronged: spiritually, to die for our sins and save us (Romans 5:8-9) and politically because the Jewish leaders were jealous (Matthew 27:18, Mark 15:10) and threatened Pilate, “From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the Jewish leaders kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.” (John 19:12). The Sanhedrin makes Christ crucified, their threat (Jewish) and Pilate cow-towing to it (Roman) is actually historically true. Another historian points out that at the time of Jesus’ Crucifixion, there were two camps of Romans, those loyal to the Cesars and those loyal to the Senate. Pontius Pilate was loyal to the Senate, and so when Caiaphas threatens Pilate that he will tell Cesar, Pilate’s politics enemy, Pilate acquiesced (A History of the Early Church to 500 A.D., Chapters I-IV, John William Charles Wand).
MacCulloch also tries to deconstruct Christianity by saying Jesus genealogies in Matthew and Luke do not match, so then they are forgeries in his estimation. To MacCulloch I say, if you read Luke and Matthew’s genealogical lists, some of the names differ because some of patriarchs died and their brothers married their wives and became fathers to the next generation; in ancient Judaism the new father is equal to the deceased father, and his adopted child is truly his son by Levitical law, and so Joseph adopts Jesus, making the point this is a common customn (Matthew 1:25). Diarmaid MacCulloch errors again when he proposes that the Birth Story, The Nativity, was made up later because its only in two of the four gospels: Matthew and Luke. To this I offer the explanation that Luke, a greek physician, trained in Alexandria (Dear and Glorious Physician, Taylor Caldwell), and comes from a culture that honors women, look back fo Alexander the Great and you will see Hellenistic society values women and their accounts, while Judeo culture at the time of Jesus was more like Islamic culture, where women are not valued for their views but to procreate and manage a house; Jesus broke this and restored The daughters of Eve when he made Mary Sister of Martha a disicple (Luke 10:39) and taught the Samaritan Woman (John 4:1-54). To MacCulloch’s misguided view of the Nativity, Luke spoke to the women, Mary the Mother of Jesus who Scripture says “but Mary kept all these things in her heart and thought about them often,” (Luke 2:19, cross ref. Luke 2:51) and shared them with Luke, because Luke comes from s culture that honors women; Matthew or Levi opts for Joseph’s account over Mary’s. The Gospels of Mark and John omit the Nativity because Mark, written by John Mark who wrote what St. Peter dictated, was telling the gospel from when Peter and the disciples join into the events (Mark’s gospel wants to jump right to the point, to the gospel narrative, rather than Luke’s more chronological approach), and John’s gospel which is the latest of the-written gospels (circa 99 A.D.) was only written because the Apostle John was begged by a church to write what he saw and heard, and most Bibles use to have forward or prologue where John shares that he knows there already are accounts and gospels that sum up what happened well, but he felt they were missing some details; afterall John was the only disciple at all the trials of Jesus before Sanhedrin (John and Pilate(John, Chapters 18 and 19) and at the cross (John 19:26), so John knows more details than the disciples who had fled at Gethsemane (Mark 14:50). So the point to why all four gospels differ in some details is that they are perspectives of the people who witnessed what happened: Matthew, Peter (Mark), Mary (Luke’s Gospel), and John; and an example is this; if you saw Jesus carry his cross most of the way to Golgotha, you write “Jesus carried his cross,” but if you show up near the end of the Via Del Rosa and see Jesus handing his cross to Simon Cyrene, you are inclined to focus on “Simon helped Him carry His cross.” Put the gospels together you get the whole picture, “Jesus carried his cross, then when he was near Simon Cyrene, the Romans had Simon help carry Jesus’ cross.”
The ‘rationalists’ as they call themselves cannot seem to use common sense and piece together that accounts will differ because of the perception of the witness, hence why in the courts of law they want two or three witnesses, and what they agree on becomes fact, and what they differ on is discarded or omitted in the court. In fact, in antiquity if four eyewitnesses did describe events identically without variations or details that differ, those accounts were suspected of forgery and invention; but if four accounts confessed the same thing, Jesus carrying his cross and dying and rising from the dead, but differ in details if the robe was purple or crimson, and some mention Jesus before Herod, and others Pilate talks to Jesus privately twice; these accounts are to be trusted because it means the authors did not get together and try to make their accounts be perfect and deceive. The fact that the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have some different details proves their authenticity; the message is the same, Jesus is God and died on a cross and raises from dead and all who believe in Him are saved; but what trials, colors of robe, and etc differs on where and when the eyewitness sees Jesus; example where on Via Del Rosa did you see him; when he carried His cross or when Simon Cyrene helps.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, and the ‘rationalists’ doubt because they do not believe. No matter how much evidence you show them they refuse to see. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “To the one with faith, no explanation is necessary. To the one without faith no explanation is possible”, so are men like Diamand McCulloch. They are as Jesus said “unable fo see, for they have not eyes to see or ears to hear.” (Matthew 13:9-17, Mark 18:8, Mark 4:12). Only through fide, faith can a person see. One of the top philosophers of Yale said this, “you cannot prove or disprove the God of the Bible exists with science, for science deals with and can only examine the seen world, it tests and makes judgements on matter we can see and touch, so it is inadequate to judge the unseen, Transcendent, and spiritual, for science is not meant to examine the spiritual world, only spirituality can see the spiritual world.” (The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Brad S. Gregory). Other areas MacCulloch errors in in saying Jesus tells us not to bury the dead by misquoting The gospel, Jesus was telling a man who wanted to be disciple that he must leave all to follow Him just as the other disciples did (Luke 5:11) and “let the dead bury their desd” (Luke 9:60) is a loaded sentence to say “let the spiritually dead who do not want to be my disciples bury the dead” or more plainly let others bury the dead, you come follow me. Jesus elsewhere said a quizzical statement to a rich young man, “sell all you have and follow me,” (Matthew 19:21) which was a test for that rich young man (ruler) only, because Jesus has no qualm with Zaccheus who does not sell all to follow Him (Luke 19:1-10), nor with the women of Galilee who support Him and the apostles needs with their wealth (Luke 8:1-3). Diarmaid MacCulloch fails to discern between an individual directive to a person in a specific situation,, and a pluralistic/holistic directive to the whole church like “this new command, love one another as I have loved you. They will know you are my disciples by your love for one another” (John 13:34-35).
MacCulloch and his ‘rationalists’ want not to see the truth, so they invent and deconstruct with faulty thinking and arguments that are flawed even in reasoning. We as Christians are charged to challenge authors, theologians, and philosophers who error, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Amen.
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