Jesus is Lord of the Bible Too

Continuing to reflect on differences between Christianity and Islam (for background see previous post) I've been struck by the fact that although Christians often say that they "start with the Bible" they really don't.  At least, most of them don't, and those that do are usually a little unhinged.  This is because the Christian faith starts for most of us with an encounter of Christ through his Spirit and/or through his community and/or through his word.  We are not called as Christians primarily to submit to a book, however inspired, but to submit to Christ.  It is not that Muslims submit to a book, per se, but their submission to Allah is controlled and completed by their adherence to the Q'ran.  That is because the Q'ran was written to codify a religion, in Muslim belief dictated by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed.  In many ways while there might have been muslims, there was no religion of Islam until the Q'ran was written to codify it (I realise that the Q'ran was received over time, but the essence of what I say is, I hope, correct.  If it is not please correct me).

But because Christianity, while "a religion of the book," is first and formost a religion of a person: Jesus the Christ, it is more than possible to be a Christian without knowing or having access to the Bible.  Indeed, many Christians throughout history and even today had and have no access to the scriptures.  The New Testament was collected subsequent to the emergence of Christianity, and most of the documents it contains are not self consciously intended as scripture.  The works that comprise the New Testament were collected and recognised only on the basis of their adherence to an unwritten "rule of faith," that is the oral testimnoy and teaching of the apostolic and sub-apostolic church about Christ.

So here is another fundamental contrast in Islamic and Christian approaches to their scriptures.  For the Muslim Mohammed was the receiver of the the Q'ran, and consequently the greatest and seal of all the prophets.  But Christ did not give Christians the Bible, it was written about him, to testify to him.  Mohammed's authority came from the Q'ran as Allah's dictated word.  But, in Christian belief, Jesus does not derive his authority from the scripture but the other way round.  Scripture is only authorative as and in that it testifies to Christ.  This is important and true, for Christians, not just of the New Testament, but of the Old also.  For when Christ talks of fulfilling scripture, or the NT describes ways in which he does, it is not meant that the OT has prescribed who and what Jesus must do to be the Christ, but rather it describes the one who is to come, whose reality gives shape to all creation and the whole story of God's salvation.

And here we, the Christians, might start an argument for Jesus' divinity (and from there the Trinity), because it is the very shape of scripture that testifies that Jesus was not just a man who happened to fit the necessary mould to be the Christ, but that the whole of God's work of salvation, starting with God's promises to Abraham, has been moulded around Jesus Christ, predicated on his reality.  Jesus Christ did not come into being to complete the plan.  The plan came into being to express the reality of Jesus Christ.

Let me know what you think :-)

Contradictions in the Resurrection Narratives?

Well after ETB's insane gibbering 5 comment flame of my earlier post I thought maybe it was not so obvious to some people why the differing Resurrection accounts in the Gospels do nothing to suggest that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth couldn't have happened, and so I should do a post on the subject. It is important to point out that this is not an argument why any one must believe it did happen, only that the differing accounts are evidence in favour rather than against it. Another blogger, Michael Bird, writes in How Did Christianity Begin?,

According to Paul, again in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, the risen Jesus was seen by individuals and groups . . . This early tradition interlocks with the multiple accounts in the Gospels that narrate persons seeing, hearing and touching the resurrected Jesus. There are clear divergences in the details provided by the Evangelists that do not appear to add up; indeed, we can speak of an excited bewilderment as to exactly where, when and who saw the risen Jesus and in what order, but this only adds to the realism. In the words of E.P Sanders: 'Calculated deception should have produced greater unanimity. Instead there seems to have been competitors: "I saw him first!" "No! I did."' [The Historical Figure of Jesus, 1993, p280] As we investigate the various stories of the appearances at the tomb, in a locked room, on a road out of Jerusalem, in Galilee and by the Lake of Tiberius we are led to the conclusion that several individuals and groups believed that they had genuinely seen Jesus alive in a physical mode of existence after his death.

There is often the idea in people's heads, it seems to me, of a monolithic early Christian group agreeing on a fiction or delusion on which will rest the substance of their faith and then producing or selecting only those documents that seemed to substantiate those claims. But what is evidenced by the narrative in Acts and the composition of the NT itself is that from an early stage the church as a whole was scattered to different localities and although there would have been contact between the different groups (especially through relationships to significant figures) to some extent they evolved independently of each other. This is seen most clearly in the Gospel of John which relates a very different tradition to the other three gospels.

Instead the NT is something of an "ecumenical" document representing a number of different strands of early Christianity (e.g. Matthean, Johanine, Pauline, Petrine, etc). This is why each gospel shows evidence of having access to different sources than the others, although Mathew and Luke both seem to have had access to both Mark and a sayings tradition, "Q". The scattering that took place near the start of Church history meant that no harmonized authoritative version of events could be established. Instead, different communities independently recorded their best version of events. And this is exactly what the "contradictions" in the Resurrection narratives display, competing versions of an event that these different communities are nonetheless absolutely convinced took place. A convincing that was probably the result of hearing eye witness testimony and having it verified in their own personal religious experience. The fact that the gospel Resurrection accounts contradict each other in the details does not stop them all confirming the same event in its essentials.

To conclude: I couldn't give a tinker's fart how many angels were present or who saw him first, but if Jesus of Nazareth really was raised from the dead then that is something worth knowing about!