Saturday, October 18, 2025

From agnosticism to belief

From Barton Swaim's review of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously:
.... A Christian friend, asked by Mr. Murray how he had come to faith, named C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis’s argument that Jesus couldn’t have been a “great moral teacher” if he wasn’t the Son of God, as he claimed to be, grabbed Mr. Murray’s attention. The usual response—that the Gospels don’t record what Jesus said and did, and that belief in his divinity was a much later invention—led Mr. Murray to read an array of books on the four Gospels’ origins. (In a series of vignettes, Taking Religion Seriously lists all the books the author read in his journey from agnosticism to belief.)

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened? .... (more)

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