The Case for Christ

I recently watched “The Case for Christ”, and as you might expect, it got me thinking. If you’re not familiar with it, it was first a book and then a movie about an atheist who decides that he’s going to ‘objectively’ research Jesus and see what he comes up with. After a couple of years of investigation he finds himself compelled by the evidence and is now a true believer. Touching.

Now, I’ll admit that I did not invest the time to read the book, and only have experience with the >2 hours of movie that explains his journey. That said, it’s amazing the number of biased or otherwise improper research techniques he employs in the short amount of time he had to work with. It’s also amazing how he could ask a few good questions, and then abandon the reasonable thought that brought him to those questions. As an example, and probably the one that bothers me the most, he trots out many different ‘authority’ figures for whatever he’s researching throughout the movie. Not once did a person’s background not look something like this:

I. B. Right – Professor of Divination, Nutjob Bible ‘College’

It was a sea of people who have dedicated their lives to the study of Jesus, but not an objective study. There may be hints of real research in these places, but overall they are colleges founded with the answer already in mind. They undoubtedly have school charters that mention the first rule of following God. This is not objective research.

Another example: math blasphemy. I don’t recall the group of researchers he mentions, but he smugly quotes a probability that makes me almost want to cry. They somehow tried to calculate the probability that one man could fulfill all of the prophecies that Jesus would have to (and did, apaprently) in order to be the messiah, and this number was some fantastically small probability (1:10^30, or something). What? How do you pretend to make a calculation like that? Are we saying that a man living a random life doing random things would only fulfill all of those things? Are we including “rise from the dead” as one of them, and how exactly do you get a probability for being able to do that? The biggest problem I have is that in this case Jesus knew exactly what would be expected of him if he was to be the messiah. He undoubtedly spent his childhood learning all of the scriptures and their predictions, just like all other boys. But the difference is that he had his mother telling him from the start, “You are the son of god.” So it’s not a random life that happens to fulfull a bunch of predictions. It’s a guy living his life thinking about them all the time, and finding ways to make it happen. My guess is that if you’re trying to do this stuff, the odds get quite a bit smaller.

Lastly, I have a big problem with all the gospels that didn’t make the cut. It’s especially bad in The Case for Christ, because he uses one argument to try to get me to accept the 4 official gospels, and the opposite argument to get me to reject the rest. A not-insignificant amount of time is devoted to reminding us how accurate these 4 gospels really can be even though they were written decades after Jesus actually lived. We’re told to understand that oral tradition was a huge part of life back then, and people devoted their lives to memorizing the exact words and getting it right. Also, it was a huge community of people memorizing the same stuff, so it would be a “self-correcting process”, since your friends would let you know if you screwed something up (really? How sure are we about that?). So, what if I accept this argument? Well, then I might feel the same way about those dozens of gospels that weren’t included. What’s the problem there? Not 5 minutes later, he asks the same question and answers it by saying how old that writing is, even as old as a couple of hundred years! Wait, I thought being old wasn’t a problem? I don’t think they were in some sort of ‘information age’ by the second or third century yet.

As you may have gathered, I was not convinced. Really, it didn’t change my mind about anything except journalists (what he claims for a day job). I hope they don’t all report like this, but how would you know if they did? Even-handed reporting is not a trivial task, but this is just ridiculous.