Fairly often, I hear atheists offer some argument against Christianity that they clearly think is going to leave Christians stammering and bewildered. Often they state these arguments like they think that they are the first person to ever think of it and that Christians never heard it before. But in most cases, the argument has been around for decades -- or centuries -- Christians have heard it a million times, and it has long since been answered.
Let me give a few examples. The examples I give here are all very lame arguments. There are arguments against Christianity that Christians find difficult to rebut ... but these aren't among them. That's what makes these arguments particularly lame. Not only are they easy to rebut, but we've heard them a million times.
We have proof that the four Gospels in the Bible were not written independently! Scholars have discovered many sections that are very similar, sometimes even exact duplicates, between the four Gospels!
Umm ... yes. Christians noticed centuries ago that Matthew and Luke include sections that are very similar or in some cases even identical to Mark. As Mark was written first, it appears that Matthew and Luke read Mark before writing their own books and quoted from him. And there are a few places that are common between Matthew and Luke that aren't found in Mark. So apparently there was some other book that has not survived, that both Matthew and Luke copied from.
Not only are Christians aware of this, but many modern English translations of the Bible include footnotes referencing the matching passages. Christians have made charts that they label "Gospel Parallels" or "Harmony of the Gospels", identifying the matching sections.
It's difficult to see how this is an argument against Christianity or the accuracy of the Bible. So someone setting out to write a biography of a famous person studied one or more other biographies that had been written earlier and quoted from them. (Need I point out that 21st century American scholarly conventions about quotes and citations did not exist at the time, so the Gospel writers can hardly be faulted for not following them? That would be like criticizing them for not registering their copyright with the US Copyright Office.) For any other book, doing research and checking sources is considered good scholarship. Only when it comes to the Bible does the fact that the writers did research suddenly become some kind of cheating.
According to the Bible, Adam and Eve and only three children, all of them boys. So how could everyone in the world be descended from them?
The Bible only names three children of Adam and Eve: Cain, Able, and Seth. But read the next page of the book before you jump to conclusions. Genesis 5:4, "After Seth was born, Adam ... had other sons and daughters." In English translations, as well as in the original Hebrew, "sons" and "daughters" are both plural, so at least two of each, possibly more. So Adam and Eve had at least 7 children: Cain, Able, Seth, two more un-named sons, and two un-named daughters. Cain, Able, and Seth are named because they figure in the story of the first murder: Cain the killer, Able the victim, and Seth because when he was born his mother saw him as a sort of replacement for the murdered son. The other children do not appear in any specific stories and so they are not named.
Some versions of this objection say "only two children, both boys". So the people who say this didn't even read far enough to get to the part that mentions Seth.
Logically, Adam and Eve's children had to marry and reproduce with each other, brothers marrying sisters. Yes, that would be incest, but (a) God did not forbid incest until thousands of years later. And (b) Under the circumstances, if they had not married each other, the human race would have died out in a generation. Surely God would make allowances for such extreme circumstances. If humanity was wipied out by a war or an epidemic or whatever and the only two people left were a brother and sister, I think few would condemn them for marrying each other and having children to keep humanity alive.
Archaeologists have found that ancient Israelites worshipped a goddess along with Jehovah-God. Appparently this goddess was viewed by at least some as being God's consort, that is, his girlfriend.
As anyone who has studied the Bible can tell you, her name was Asherah. The Bible tells us her name and tells us that the Jews worshipped her. (Most English translations say "Asherah". The King James just refers to her as "an idol".)
So what? She is condemned throughout the Bible as a false god. For example, Judges 3:7, "So the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord. They forgot the Lord their God, and served the Baals and Asherahs."
Anyone who has read the Old Testament at all knows that a continuing theme is that the Jews kept abandoning Jehovah and worshipping pagan gods -- like Baal and Asherah. They even tried to mix worship of Asherah with worship of Jehovah. 2 Kings 21:7, "He [King Mannasseh of Israel] even set a carved image of Asherah that he had made, in the house of which the Lord had said to David and to Solomon his son, “In this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put My name forever."
This is not a shocking revelation to Christians. The Bible condenmns worship of her, so by any reasonable definition of "true Judaism" and "true Christianity", she is not a goddess that Jews or Christians should worship. The fact that some Jews worshipped her anyway ... so what? Some people today worship Buddha. That doesn't shake my faith in God at all.
© 2024 by Jay Johansen
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