Critique of BBC Documentary "Did Jesus Die?"

My Ahmadiyya colleagues have been urging me to watch the BBC documentary Did Jesus Die? for a long time now. I finally got around to it, and as I have done so, I have reviewed and commented on the contents of the documentary, which I have posted here below:

(00:40-00:45) - "...throughout history, people have responded differently to this [the Gospel] story." Somewhat true. The Jews and the Pagans denied that Jesus rose from the grave, but they didn't deny that Jesus died. Instead, they claimed that his body was stolen by His disciples (as has been recorded in Matthew 28:11-15 and is mentioned around 31:30-31:40).

(01:00-01:17) - "...There have been heresies that suggested that Jesus survived the crucifixion..." Uhh, no. No such theory has ever existed until around the 18th/19th centuries, during the advent of German liberal higher criticism. Funny enough, nowadays this view is not taken seriously anymore, save by various conspiracy theorists and certain Islamic sects/schools of thought (the Ahmadiyya being one of the most prominent of them).

(02:35-02:50) - "Many modern scholars and theologians... now seem to doubt the historical accuracy of the gospels" There will always be dissenting views, though admittedly they are more prominent now than they have been centuries before. However, the figures tend to be inflated, and there are still many scholars and theologians who view the gospel accounts as reliable, even inerrant, and can articulate good reasons for believing so (I can give a boatload of names if anybody would care enough to ask me).

(02:55-04:00) - Elaine Pagels, John Dominic Crossan... why do they always pick the most far-left liberal scholars and use them as the spokespersons of "contemporary biblical scholarship?" This kind of skewed presenation is so patently dishonest, especially when considering the expert replies made by less radical scholars who do in fact view the gospels as historically accurate in their reporting of Jesus' story.

The next several minutes features some rather cheap diatribes against supernatural events, such as the miracles. Of course, you have to presuppose Naturalism in order for this tactic to actually work. Now, it's not all without merit, as they are also spot on in pointing out some of the nonsense promulgated by Roman Catholics, particularly the Filipinos who reenact the Crucifixion back home, but the blatant skewing of facts.

(13:15-13:25) - "The gospel accounts of it [the resurrection]... are full of inconsistencies and curious contradictions." The supposed "incosistencies and contradictions" are brought up later in the video (14:08-15:10). The apocryphal ending of Mark is already well known among biblical scholars (both liberal and conservative), so bringing it up is beating the dead horse.

Notice, also that the video doesn't mention actual conflicting details, but only mention how certain stories appear in one or two gospel accounts but not in the rest. If the four gospel writers were intending to complement each other's reports (which they most likely were), then there isn't really a problem with this.

Nevertheless, if anybody is really worried about "inconsistencies and contradictions" in the resurrection stories, why not look up the various harmonies proposed by biblical scholars who actually have taken the time to carefully study the gospel narratives (The best harmony, I think, would be the one proposed by Simon Greenleaf).

As a side note, thank God they put N.T. Wright in there. He's probably the only voice of reason present in this whole documentary.

(17:40-18:00) - Unnecessary tangent on Roman Catholicism's papal claims. Duhh, of course they're spurious, but what's the point of comparing such a questionable belief with the more attestable doctrine of the resurrection?

(19:00-20:50) - Yet another unnecessary tangent. The Toronto "Blessing" is so far out there, it's an embarrassment even for many of the sane(r) Charismatic churches. Also, what does believing in the "literal truth of the bible" have to do with the mania that goes on in the Toronto Airport Church? Tearing down strawman is also a dishonest debate tactic, you know.

(23:00-24:10) - Scare tactics. As though believing in orthodox Christianity somehow automatically placed you in the ranks of those who indiscriminately burned all dissenters as heretics. How does that even affect the accuracy of the gospel stories anyway? Besides, the matter concerning the Cathars isn't as simple as the documentary makes it out to be, but I am not an expert at that particular field of church history, so I will have to pass it over for the time being.

(26:10-26:25) - People come up with conspiracy theories involving the Knights Templar all the time. There isn't really any solid evidence (the actual bones?). Besides, wouldn't this do violence to the Ahmadi theory that Jesus' remains are in Kashmir?

(34:40-35:00) - "The question of clinical death is certainly raised by the fact that the herbs that Joseph of Arimathea took into the tomb with the body of Jesus were aloes. These are healing, not embalming herbs." Admittedly, aloes are indeed used to treat minor burns or wounds. However, The kind of wounds sustained by Jesus during the Crucifixion and the tortures He endured before it are way beyond the capacity of aloes to treat.

Besides, 75 pounds? You do not place 75 pounds of herbs with a person in a burial cloth unless you believe that person to be deceased.

(37:55-38:55) - More beating the dead horse. Stop bringing up the apocryphal ending of Mark, seriously.

Also the Luke reference is authentic: The theory of Western non-interpolations, on which the idea of the Luke passage being a later addition is based, is no longer taken seriously by most biblical scholars (save for a minority). Besides, the author of Luke also wrote about the ascension in Acts 1:9-11, so it's not that far-fetched that he would have had that idea in mind in writing the gospel.

(39:00-40:00) - Does anybody really still take seriously the idea of Jesus having a sexual/marital relationship with Mary Magdalene? Also, who are the "historians" who support this idea? Michael Baigent? Richard Leigh? Give me a break, this kind of crackpot theory is hardly even worth going over, since it's been debunked to death countless times before.

(42:00-42:15) - Questionable relics like this have been floating around for centuries, especially during the medieval period. Even if it was authentic, it is likely to have been transported from some other region of the world. The relics don't really prove much.

(49:10-49:20) "Could Jesus have been taken to India as a child and taught to be a Buddhist?" Problem is, there is no evidence that the magi ever took the infant Jesus with them to India. That is just sheer eisegesis. Jesus' teachings on humanity, salvation, etc. are contradictory to Buddhist principles.

(50:00-50:05) - "Certainly the later teachings and miracles of Jesus have uncanny parallels with the teachings and miracles of the Buddha." LIKE???

(50:05-51:00) - "Loving your enemies and the idea that the meek will inherit the earth have absolutely no tradition or precedent in Judaism, but they are entirely consistent with Buddhism." Try Leviticus 19:34, Psalm 22:26 and Psalm 37:11 on for size. It helps to do some research before spouting off nonsense such as this.

Also, it is quite dishonest to highlight those few places where Christianity and Buddhism do happen to have similarities (which is usually in the moral aspects), and ignore the numerous places where they conflict (which is usually in the theological aspects).

(51:10-52:20) - Finally, we get to the tomb in Kashmir. Surprising... the Ahmadis seem to put a lot of stock into this documentary., yet their beloved Kashmir tomb theory is barely discussed at all in the video, and has been relegated to the very end.

Furthermore, if this theory is as groundbreaking as it is made out to be, why don't scholars actually pay attention to it? Even the crackpot theories in the Da Vinci Code and Talpiot Tomb received some scholarly attention (mostly critical). It is telling that the Ahmadi theory does not get even a peep out of the academia.

(54:05-55:15) - "But this is a sacred site, and short of exhumation, there is no way of discovering whether the body buried here is that of a man who once survived crucifixion." There you have it: Nobody has ever really demonstrated that the person buried in Srinagar is Jesus as we can't even get to the body. The footprint doesn't count for much, as such kinds of things are falsified all the time, and are not considered good evidence at all.

(55:30-End) - "...The end of Christianity as we know it..." It would be indeed, IF the case being made throughout the video had any validity to it. But it doesn't, so better luck next time. PS - Pagels' theory at the end is somewhat...cute... but there are way too many factors that cannot be accounted for by it, such as the sudden change in disposition by the apostles, or the conversions of Jesus' brother James and the apostle Paul.

In conclusion, I was not at all impressed by the documentary. The bulk of it is just plain bad history and skewed information. I am nowhere nearer to being convinced by the Ahmadis' theory that Jesus survived crucifixion than when I first encountered this idea.

Jesus, the Gospels, Gnosticism and Historical Revisionism (Part 2)

(Continued from Part One)

Not many people are aware of the history of the New Testament documents. It is thus not too surprising that skeptics and conspiracy theorists would want to capitalize on the general ignorance of the masses by claiming all sorts of strange, unhistorical ideas regarding the formation of the biblical text. The conspiracy theories center around 1) The books that make up the New Testament, and 2) the actual text of the aforementioned books. So we shall concentrate on these two things

First off, there are two main reasons why we consider the four gospels to be the canonical gospels. First, there is the issue of dating: All four gospels are dated to around the second half of the first century, which makes them very close to the time when Jesus walked the earth, and situates them within the apostolic age. This means that they reflect the actual teachings and beliefs of Jesus' apostles better than any gospel text that has come afterward. By contrast, all of the apocryphal gospels (with the possible exception of portions of the Gospel of Thomas) are dated to later centuries, and some have even been found to be modern forgeries (eg. Secret Mark).

Second is the fact that the first four gospels have an identifiable Vox Dei due to their reflecting what the church has believed all along even before these traditions became "enscripturated." This is in contrast to many of the apocryphal gospels, that contain obvious legendary developments (eg. a talking cross) and lack any historical background (some of these apocryphal gospels don't even have a narrative, but are just "sayings" texts eg. The Gospel of Thomas).

Against this, it is claimed that the four canonical gospels really are on the same level or even inferior to the apocryphal gospels, and that it was only during the Council of Nicaea that they became canonical. First, there is the obvious problem that Nicaea had nothing to say on the canon of scripture. Second, there is plenty of evidence that the ante-Nicene church considered the four gospels to be the canonical gospels.

There is the muratorian fragment, which is widely considered to have been written around the late 2nd century due to internal cues within the text of the fragment itself. The text mentions Luke as the third gospel, and John as the fourth. The names of the first two gospels are cut off from the preserved fragment of the text, though there is very little doubt that it is Matthew and Mark.

There are also the writings second century church fathers Papias, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Papias refers to both Mark and Matthew, identifying them as accepted apostolic writings. Justin Martyr quotes from the gospels, though he doesn't mention them by name, and refers to them as the "memoirs of the apostles" (link). The most explicit statement, however, comes from Irenaeus. In Against Heresies, he writes,

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the “pillar and ground” of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh.
(Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. III:XI:8)

All of this furnishes abundant proof that the fourfold gospel was already well in place long before the fourth century. There is no historical evidence for the assertion that the four gospels did not become canonical until Nicaea.

Now that we have that out of the way, there is also the claim that the text of the New Testament has been deliberately tampered with, "embellished" as Dan Brown puts it, in order to make Jesus "godlike." Of course, this simply ignores the mountains of manuscript and patristic evidence to the contrary. We have dozens of manuscripts from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and all of the major texts asserting the deity of Christ (eg. John 1:1 John 1:18, John 20:28, Titus 2:13, Hebrews 1:8, 2 Peter 1:1, etc.) are there, exactly as we have them in our present day New Testament text.

And even if we didn't have these manuscripts, we can still extrapolate these passages from the patristic quotations. Various early church fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, etc. have commented on the scriptures in question and we can validate our current reading of the scriptures from their writings.

Given these two lines of evidence, there is no justification whatsoever for the claim that the modern day Christian New Testament is not the same text that the first and second century Christian Church had received from the apostles.

(Continue to Part 3)

Jesus, the Gospels, Gnosticism and Historical Revisionism (Part 1)

Because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man. To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke. From this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history... Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.
(Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. Doubleday, 2003. p. 234)

The above quote, taken from the popular (and controversial) Da Vinci Code, echoes a popular sentiment that has been oft-stated by conspiracy theorists, skeptics, certain liberal theologians and even Muslims (the Islamic propaganda video The Divine Book quotes the above passage nearly verbatim, as though Dan Brown was somehow a scholarly source). Yet pretty much every single statement that has been packed within that single paragraph is fraught with historical errors, and almost none of it is factually accurate.

First off, Constantine lived three centuries after Jesus walked this earth. He did not "upgrade Jesus' status." In fact, Constantine didn't even care what the results of the council of Nicaea would be to begin with. He just wanted the clergy to agree. As Philip Schaff notes,

In the year 325, as patron of the church, he summoned the council of Nice, and himself attended it; banished the Arians, though he afterwards recalled them; and, in his monarchical spirit of uniformity, showed great zeal for the settlement of all theological disputes, while he was blind to their deep significance.

(Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church, Volume III: Nicene and Post-Nicene Christianity. A.D. 311-600.)

Also, the deity of Christ did not originate with Constantine, or with Nicaea. It has always been affirmed by the early church. For example, within the epistles of the apostle Paul, one may find multiple affirmations of Christ's deity:

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.
(Colossians 2:9, ESV)

...waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ...
(Titus 2:13, ESV)

Though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
(Philippians 2:6-8, ESV)

And lest anybody object to the citing of Paul, it must be remembered that Paul was actually in contact with the other apostles. The apostle Peter, for one, approved of Paul's writings (2 peter 3:15-16), and even made his own affirmation of the deity of Christ:

To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.
(2 Peter 1:1, ESV)

Also keep in mind that Paul wasn't really adding any innovations, but was rather repeating what had already been handed down to him by the Jewish Christians he met in Antioch and Jerusalem. In fact, it has been recognized that Philippians 2:5-11, also known as the Carmen Christi, is actually from a tradition that predates Paul's conversion. It is most likely an early Christian hymn. If so, this is strong evidence that Jesus was acknowledged as God in human flesh from the very beginning. (For more information on this one, I strongly recommend getting a copy of The Forgotten Trinity by Dr. James White.)

Aside from the New Testament epistles, the writings of the early church fathers also provide strong evidence for the antiquity of the belief in deity of Christ. For example, there is the testimony of Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 35-108 or 117 AD). In his epistles, he writes:

There is one Physician who is possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God; first passible and then impassible,— even Jesus Christ our Lord.
(Ignatius of Antioch. Epistle to the Ephesians. Ch. VII)

Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life.
(Ignatius of Antioch. Epistle to the Ephesians. Ch. XIX)

For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. For our God, Jesus Christ, now that He is with the Father, is all the more revealed [in His glory].
(Ignatius of Antioch. Epistle to the Romans. Ch. III)

(Important note: There are quite a few forged epistles floating around that are alleged to have been written by Ignatius of Antioch. For this reason, I have taken care to quote only from those epistles which are considered to be his real writings.)

And then there is ante-Nicene epistle known as 2 Clement. Admittedly, this is not regarded as a genuine epistle of Clement, as Clement died around the end of the first century, whereas 2 Clement was written until around 140-160 AD. Nevertheless, this epistle is still early enough to be considered a valid witness to the faith of the Apostolic church. In it, the author writes,

Brethren, we ought so to think of our Lord Jesus Christ as of God, as of the judge of quick and dead, and we ought not to think meanly concerning our salvation.
(2nd Clement. Ch. I:2)

And then there is the witness of Justin Martyr (Ca. 100-165 AD), who is considered to be one of the first of the great Christian apologists. In his First Apology, he writes,

Our teacher of these things is Jesus Christ, who also was born for this purpose, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judæa, in the times of Tiberius Cæsar; and that we reasonably worship Him, having learned that He is the Son of the true God Himself, and holding Him in the second place, and the prophetic Spirit in the third, we will prove.
(Justin Martyr. First Apology. Ch. XIII)

It is interesting to note that the quotation above is an early expression of the Holy Trinity. Although the structure of the doctrine did not fully develop until the fourth century, we can see that primitive strands of Trinitarian thought already existed in the earliest days of the church.

And finally, we have Melito of Sardis (? -180 AD). Much of his work has been lost, though we have been able to locate one of his sermons, which is now known as the Peri Pascha. This sermon is quite significant, as it displays an elevated Christology:

The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel.
(Melito of Sardis. Peri Pascha. V. 96.)

He continues,

This is the one who made the heavens and the earth, and who in the beginning created man, who was proclaimed through the law and prophets, who became human via the virgin, who was hanged upon a tree, who was buried in the earth, who was resurrected from the dead, and who ascended to the heights of heaven, who sits at the right hand of the Father, who has authority to judge and to save everything, through whom the Father created everything from the beginning of the world to the end of the age.

This is the alpha and the omega. This is the beginning and the end–an indescribable beginning and an incomprehensible end. This is the Christ. This is the king. This is Jesus. This is the general. This is the Lord. This is the one who rose up from the dead. This is the one who sits at the right hand of the Father. He bears the Father and is borne by the Father, to whom be the glory and the power forever. Amen.
(Melito of Sardis. Peri Pascha. Vv. 104-105.)

Thus, we can see that the proof is irrefutable that Christ has always been acknowledged as God. This was not an invention of the 3rd or 4th centuries, but is the apostolic witness, and is thus part and parcel of the faith which has been delivered to the saints.

So much for the "thousands of documents already exist[ing] chronicling His life as a mortal man."

(Continue to Part Two)