Looking for help analyzing a charged book argument

Faith & Science Conversation
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(Just a small note: besides just talking about the substance of his claims, I’m also hoping for some analysis of his logic and also fallacious reasoning, so that way this isn’t just another Christian question but also has some interesting knowledge involved to. For example, he uses conflation to try and compare the Bible to Harry Potter).

I’ve previously asked this forum for help regarding a Medium writer who seemed to have an axe to grind against the Christian faith:

https://discourse.biologos.org/t/last-post-for-a-bit-criticisms-of-an-angry-spanish-guy/57956/105

For some reason, this writer came back into my mind and a friend of mine recommended that, to finally close this chapter of my old faith problems, I need to look at his major arguments in his literature. He has several books available on Amazon:

The one I’m currently trying to look at is “Gibíblia, A fábrica de absurdos: A História de Jesus Sob uma Lente Ateísta (Estudos Bíblicos para ateus Livro 1) (Portuguese Edition).”

Although I don’t have the book, I do have this excerpt that I would like to share and see what you guys take away from it:

(Just a note: I believe the argument being made here is that the Bible is, simply put, a completely ridiculous human contribution).

Page 1

At the launch of his book Cain, a biblical character, José Saramago, an atheist, commented on the constant question:

“If you’re an atheist, why do you care so much about the Bible?”

This question may seem serious or innocent, but it hides the idea that only Christians can read the Bible.

Leandro Karnal is an atheist who has very complete and lengthy courses on the Bible. Despite being an atheist, he is clearly respectful of the biblical texts.

I have never seen an intelligent analysis of the Bible coming from religious people.

Richard Carrier, an atheist, is one of the best-known historians when we talk about the history of Jesus and biblical texts.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou is one of the best-known scholars of the Bible.

Page 2

I cannot speak for all atheists who are interested in the Bible, but I am interested in various questions:

  • as a literary text,

  • as a text widely accepted as the Word of God,

  • as a text that I am forced to encounter everywhere.

My interest in the Bible is no different from my interest in, say, Dom Casmurro if it were widely discussed and people hated each other because someone dared to say that Capitu never cheated on Bentinho.

If there were churches and institutions whose goal was to make Dom Casmurro required reading, with prison for those who do not read it and prison for those who do not “read it correctly,” I would have the same interest.

(Dom Casmurro is a famous Brazilian novel. The Capitu/Bentinho issue is a long-standing literary debate.)

Page 3

Imagine if I said that the condition for reading Harry Potter was being a fan.

That would be absurd.

A person can read Harry Potter out of curiosity, for research purposes, or to learn how to write fiction.

The idea that reading a book must be conditioned by certain views and beliefs is absurd.

A person can read a book and dislike it, or become a fan of it.

In other words, reading cannot be conditioned on the final outcome.

I am reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago.

I became curious because of why a book would lead the Portuguese state to persecute someone.

I am curious to know why people talk so much about José Saramago.

Page 4

As we will explore in this work, this was not by chance—the way the Bible is treated.

Among the gospels that never made it into the Bible, we have Thomas.

Thomas is portrayed negatively in John (John 20:29).

However, Thomas has his own gospel, discovered in 1945.

In this war of gospel narratives, as we will learn, John defeated Thomas.

If Thomas had won, chances are atheists would be welcomed with open arms when criticizing the texts.

John won because without John there would be no Church; there would be no hierarchy.

With Thomas, salvation would be internal, and Jesus would not be the only way, as John says (John 14:6).

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What is the argument we are supposed to analyze? I can’t find one? That the author of John didn’t like Thomas? That the Gospel of Thomas was written by Thomas and should have the same standing as John?

There is nothing in your post to actually analyze. Am I supposed to read a book, analyze and post his arguments for you then critique them? Stop giving this guy free advertising.

And here you are going out of your way to find objections against Christianity from amateur atheists on the internet.

Take @St.Roymond advice about detecting counterfeit bills and study the real thing. This will help you identify bad arguments for and against Christianity. Start with this. It’s three hours and though I rarely do YouTube videos, I watched it all.

Vinnie

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There are an untold number of “gospels that never made it into the Bible” for a variety of good reasons. Read a good book on the formation of the canon. I like Lee Martin McDonald’s The Formation Of The Biblical Canon or The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority. And BTW, there are a few that made it into the canon for not good reasons. So this is a two edge sword.

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Thank you for the book suggestion!

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Hi Max,

I really don’t see an argument of any kind here. Pires (He’s the Medium writer, yes?) is clear about his interest in the Bible: as a literary text, as a text widely accepted as the Word of God, and as a text he is forced to encounter everwhere. Those things are interesting to me as well. They should be to any Christian, yet the atheist is ahead of most of us.

I think his interest in the political-cultural power of the Bible, or any potential book, is also fascinating:

How does the Bible, or any book at all, carry such weight that people are required to read it, and their reading of it or failure to read it, could lead to persecution by others or by the state? Or even the church (in Jesus’ name, of course)?

My approach to these questions, and my answers to them may be different from Pires’, but I think they are outstanding questions for Christians to consider. I would frame that last one something like:

In the Bible do we ever see Jesus demanding the religious requirements that the church, the “christian” state or a culture does? As we don’t, why? What is different about Jesus’ demands, commands, expectations and life from those of the church/state/culture we observe now? Why do we esteem the Bible and revere it differently from how Jesus did the scriptures he had? Etc.

Pires is not saying that the Bible is or is not like Harry Potter. As an atheiest he sees the Bible as not much different from any literary text. He is using a popular, well-known book as an example for a thought experiment. The point is not about the validity of the Bible at all, but the way cultures handle it in absurd ways.
Although Christians understand the Bible to be a different kind of book from *Harry Potter, we should be asking ourselves similar questions to Pires’. We should be considering the human source of all the aura we have created around the Bible that the Bible itself does not require. If the Bible itself doesn’t require or even encourage such things, then why do we do them? If the reasons don’t hold up against what the Bible is telling us, then we should reconsider what we are doing.

I would take this further: once we have revered the Bible in all the ways our various cultures demand we do, are we even bothering to obey the words of Jesus that we venerate?

I am grateful for thoughtful atheists like Pires, who put a mirror in front of us and ask good questions. And specifically thoughtful Marxist atheists. They can smell an unjust, hipocritical rat from 1000 miles. Use their questions for self-examination.

If we put down our defensiveness - trying to justify the Bible as the Word of God to a person who doesn’t believe in God at all, for example - trying to justify injustice in the name of God - and take their questions as something we can work with in order to see ourselves and our own failures to live up to what we claim we believe, we will be much better at following Jesus.

Thank them for sharing their perceptiveness and for giving you something valuable to consider.

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And thank you for shedding some light on this author!

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I don’t know more about him than what you posted, Max. I am reading him differently from you and thinking very differently about what his motives could be.

Really, his actual motives are not important to me. What is important is the way I use his stated interests as insightful tools to analyze something important to me.

In this piece I don’t see him making any objective claim about the Bible or religion. He is just talking about how things look from his perspective. And in doing that he exposes stuff that should make Christians cringe and change

Those are valuable insights no matter their source

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I personally am not interested in throwing him a parade nor do I consider his objections some noble task to admire. Just another atheist on the internet to me. This may seem harsh but I think the same of a lot of Christians: just another Bible thumper in the internet.

At any rate, you will find no questions or objections from him that have not been also posed by millions of Christians throughout history and treated at length by many members of the Church. For example, in one article Pires complains or talks about hell being blackmail. I agree the way many modern Christians (theistic personalists) present it, God often looks terrible. Love me or burn. Of course classical theologians like Aquinas addressed these issues long ago and have outlined what hell is.

Which is to reiterate the point of studying true bills to identify counterfeits. Instead of chasing down atheists on the internet, try chasing down the greatest theologians throughout Church history and learn from them. I assure you virtually every question about the Bible possible has been asked and discussed in the Church at length. No atheist is asking questions Christians haven’t. Some of us study our Bible… like really study it. And throughout history more ink has been spilt over the Bible than anything else.

Not saying you have to agree with Aquinas but at least read what most of the heavy hitters in the Churdh throughout history have said. Also, don’t limit yourself to popular Protestant Christianity the last 100 years or so—especially the conservative variety. It might be the loudest voice where you grew up or online but it’s hardly representative of Christianity as a whole or most of us. Also don’t limit yourself to the loving Jesus who only tells everyone to look at the lilies of the field and love your neighbor. To be sure, Jesus said both of those but to limit him to that is a made up modern portrait of him (anti-Semitic?) and certainly not one of a first century Jewish apocalyptic prophet speaking a lot about wrath, judgment and the necessity of repentance.

Vinnie

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The first statement is either ignorance or an admission of bias.

I’m not familiar with Karnal, who is evidently a Brazilian historian and not a biblical scholar. Carrier is a “Jesus Mythicist” who argues Jesus never existed. It’s a silly argument that not even secular historians believe is true. Stavrakopoulou is a serious scholar of the Hebrew Bible. She mainly writes about the intersection of history and the biblical text. Her opinion that most of the OT isn’t factual history is unremarkable, as are her opinions that Moses and David never lived (though she waffles a bit on David). She also points out that the Hebrew authors “twisted” even verifiable history to score theological and political points. Sure. That’s how the ancients wrote history. I can point to a whole host of “religious people” who’ve written books expressing similar views.

Pages 2-3 are about this question, but as a Christian, why am I even asking it? The Bible is the most influential text in Western literature. Of course it will spark interest and debate among educated people.

Thomas is the only one with guts in John 11: Therefore Thomas, who was called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let’s also go, so that we may die with Him!”

It’s a spurious argument to pit John against Thomas. Nothing he says on Page 4 is true. The Gospel of Thomas was rejected by the early church because its theology was gnostic. The Gospel of Thomas ends with Peter requesting that Jesus send away Mary Magdalene because “women are not worthy of life.” Jesus replies, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Can you imagine that passage being read from the pulpit on Sunday morning? Laughable.

The other apocryphal gospels are similarly laughable. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which purports to relate Jesus’ childhood, depicts him making clay birds and bringing them to life, instructing his teachers, cursing a misbehaving boy whose body immediately withers, and striking the boy’s parents blind when they complain to Mary and Joseph. The resurrection account of the Gospel of Peter has two angels assisting Jesus out of the tomb, followed by a cross. When they emerge, Jesus, the angels, and the cross become massive figures that stretch into the heavens, and the cross actually speaks to the guards stationed at the tomb. These are what ancient legends look like. The canonical gospels are models of restraint in comparison.

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And even if one were to question traditional authorship, they fit the category of ancient bios (see Richard Burridge), not mythology or folklore, and were written well within living memory of the events (under the standard critical dating) which is exceptional in comparison to some ancient history (e.g Bios of Alexander the Great). There is also external corroboration of the major substance of what they relate about Jesus (healer, teacher, movement starter, crucified, belief persisted after) by two non Christian historians (Josephus and Tacitus). If a single one of the gospels is written by its namesake, the reliability of the substance of its individual stories and events increases substantially.

We have plenty of hard sayings in our own canon (apparent slavery/misogyny/genocide) so this might not be a deal breaker. I’ve heard the end of Thomas is less about male/female and more about a return to the primordial origins (androgynous human before the split into male and female). When taken that way I’m not saying it excuses it, but under standard interpretation, our own canon has its own misogyny (women saved through child-baring, learn at home in submission) that I’ve seen worse defenses of.

The argument of some scholars (e.g. Patterson, Crossan) about Thomas is probably along the lines of it containing a layer of early sayings that were added to that were independent of the 4 gospels (like Q). This is a much more technical area. Patterson is convincing to me that some of Thomas is independent of the Gospels but Goodacre has argued and demonstrated the opposite effectively. In its extant form, a lot of Thomas seems secondary to the Gospels. Was there an independent kernel originally? Possibly. As a sayings document it could have simply grown over time. There is no need to assume this original core, if it existed, was mutually exclusive with the kerygmatic theology of the early church. Same with Q which may have started as a missionary list.

Vinnie

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I had done a small amount of research on my own and found a similar understanding. I’ve plopped a lot of his articles into ChatGPT to help me analyze (by the way, ChatGPT of today is a whole lot different than ChatGPT of March) and I like how it put it: with any of his articles, videos, or books, he begins with an actual debate regarding the Bible, then takes one interpretation (usually the most skeptical or negative) and then turns around and says that said interpretation was the original observation. If you want, i linked that thread below if you wish to see some of those discussions:

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That’s one that bothered me for years until I came up against the Babel account: there’s an excellent match for it archaeologically, detail for detail, but the order of things doesn’t match.

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I should have added, though, that this was the translated title of the book:

Gibíblia, The factory of absurdities: The Story of Jesus Under an Atheistic Lens (Biblical Studies for Atheists Book 1)

I don’t know if you had seen the title or were able to translate it, but I have an unfortunately bad history with this writer. I understand that these sorts of questions do prompt more in-depth thought and analysis, but the way he presents these questions is that considering the question would essentially be accepting his point and the Bible is wrong (pretty much all of his Medium posts operate with this same end goal: trying to show that Christianity is flawed in the most fundamental way, and that so much of its teachings are absolutely baffling, anti-scientific, or clearly contradictory to the most open minded of people). Thus, not wanting to “accept” his view, I sometimes feel loose I have to be weary around deeper analysis now because asking these deeper questions makes it seem like I’m just making excuses as to why my faith is correct and not just accepting the facts and leaving it. I would love to do a deeper Biblical analysis, but Jorge says that, at that point, you aren’t a Christian anymore.

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Do not fall for medium articles of polemics as anything relevant to make up your mind about. The reason that chap is ignored by reputable scholars is that he isn’t worth their powder.

The chatty summary was quite good - apart from chatty still confusing the supernatural with the world of magic instead of the world of logic - but then so do most humans :slight_smile:

About hiddenness read my chatty chat

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Then why are you bothering with his stuff? You don’t have to. You are making a choice,
I don’t know how you even run across his stuff. I never did.

I’m reading a neat book right now by Mark Noll, “Turning Points” where a real historian examinies significant points in church history. Would be super for you. I think Anything by Noll would be good.

I think we’ve talked about some of NT Wright’s stuff. His engagement with the influuences of historic threads of philosophies on Christian thought is excellent.

Work your way throigh some of Kierkegaard’s discourses (the “easier” of his pirces). Start with the little paperback translated by Bruce Kimmse called “The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the air.”

Esau McCaulley’s “Reading while Black” is hugely important for white Christians to read in the US. He discusses the development of his own theological views as a Black man going through theological training in the US.

Start reading real, serious, demanding Christian writers who make you think.

Stop reading stuff that just erodes your faith, when you are entirely unequipped to deal with the challenges they pose.

You are making a choice.
Make better ones and then propose a book discussion here. We have done a few. They were a great way to hammer things out with people here.

Get a notebook and decent mechanical pencil with extra lead and a good eraser. And get reading. From a book or book on an ereader of a book on your computing device.

Set some rules for what you will not read for now. And obey them.

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That is his opinion.

American Evangelicals today largely have little or no serious intellectual formation. Add Mark Noll’s “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” to the top of yoir list, and take his exhortation to heart.

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A really solid analogy from Genesis! Thank you for the insight!

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Okay. I didn’t really mean to come across this writer. I vaguely remember trying to look up some theological question and, instead of Christian websites coming up, I guess this guy was the top suggested source. Usually, whenever I see an argument like his (especially if it were for politics or science), I would say “oh he is very obviously biased.” However, I guess in my “search for truth” I cannot dismiss this man until I have “come to terms with every objection he has raised.” Why my mind had decided that course of action, I do not know. However, I’m glad that I have people like you to help me understand these questions :smiling_face_with_tear:.

(Also, I wasn’t exactly reading this guy’s works. I remember when I first saw them and flipped through a few, I was so distraught and with no one to go to that I decided to just stop thinking about him or faith for a bit; hopefully, I though, the fear would eventually go away. These questions he has raised have just been swimming in the back of my head ever since, and I’ve just been unloading them like a patient to a therapist).

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Let me repeat what you’ve already heard from multiple ones of us already I think: You should not just search for random voices on the internet. I’ll try to say this without sounding like the very people I criticize for doing this - because they will carefully avoid any “unapproved” (by their own tribe) voices which is what helps keep them in ignorance. Here is how I will differentiate what I am saying, though. Yes - be careful whose voices you let disciple you as you are struggling to cultivate some sort of healthy faith basis. Stick with reputable scholars such as many who’s names have already been recommended to you here. Find out how they approach the hard questions and the posture they have towards fringe internet claims - and then seek to mimic that. To which every quack site ever replies … ‘yeah - we recommend that too; only we want you to use our list as your formative starting list. … and then stick only with us.’ And that is where my advice here differs from theirs. You by all means do not need to stick only with ‘us’ (Biologos … or whomever); sure - once you have some confidence and background to know something about well-grounded reality and sober appraisals of claims, then by all means, rummage around in the internet wilds to see what’s out there. And then evaluate and compare! What evidence do they offer? How does it compare with scientifically informed voices here? Or if regarding theological beliefs and claims of faith, what kind of posture do they adopt towards their readers? Is it a “we’ve got God all figured out, and let us tell you everything is” kind of posture? Or do they show any evidence of actually having wrestled with and do they respect real faith challenges? The former (we’ve got everything figured out for you) type will not encourage you towards any exploration outside of their own carefully approved/controlled voices because they know their claims don’t hold water and can’t stand up to any real scrutiny. We don’t need to have that sort of fear around here because we want the truth. If there is something of a “Biologos way” that you want to latch on to: I would nominate something like this: “All truth is God’s Truth.” Believers here typically subscribe to something pretty much like that. And then off to the races where we all still have our differences about various details from all our various faith traditions and denominations. But at least we have in common an interest in remaining as grounded as possible in reality.

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Does that make you just another Bible thumping exclusivist Christian on the internet? This kind of sorting can really shrink the world down to just the sort of reality you already start off embracing. I guess if I reconsider my not a Christian stance I could possibly become just as close minded.

Don’t get me wrong, most online atheists are just as close minded but I’m not interested in a race to the bottom.

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