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Did the early church invent the divinity of Jesus over a long period of time?

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How early is the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus? When I answer this question, I only want to use the earliest, most reliable sources – so I can defend them on historical grounds using the standard rules of historiography. The 4 sources that I would use are as follows:

  • The early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, and 1 Corinthians 1
  • A passage in Philippians 2
  • Two passages from Mark, the earliest gospel
  • A passage from Q, which is an early source of Matthew and Luke

So let’s see the passages.

1 Corinthians

I’ve written before about the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, which skeptical scholars date to 1-3 years after the death of Jesus, for a variety of reasons I covered in the previous post. Here’s the creed which definitely makes Jesus out to be more than an ordinary man. Ordinary men don’t get resurrection bodies after they die.

Here’s the passage: (1 Cor 15:3-8)

3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,

4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

5and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.

6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,

8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Additionally, 1 Corinthians 1:21-25 talks about Jesus being “the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Paul is identifying Jesus with the divine.

21For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

22Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom,

23but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,

24but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

25For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

But it gets even stronger! You all probably already know that the most important passages in the Old Testament for Jews is the famous “Shema“, which is found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. The Shema is a strong statement of Jewish monotheism.

Here’s the passage:

4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.

7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

So how does Paul fit Jesus in with this strong statement of Jewish monotheism?

Paul alludes to the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6.

4So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one.

5For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”),

6yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

Holy mackerel! How did that get in there? Paul is splitting the roles of God in the the Shema and identifying Jesus in one of the divine roles! Jesus is not an ordinary man. That passage “through whom all things came” foreshadows John identifying Jesus as “the Word of God”, which “became flesh and dwelt among us”. Holy snark – did you guys know that was all in here so early?

The date for 1 Corinthians is 55 AD. It should be noted that skeptical scholars like James Crossley accept these passages, and you can check it out in the debate audio yourself.

Philippians

Check out Philippians 2:5-11.

5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

6Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

7but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

8And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!

9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,

10that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The date for Philippians is 60-61 AD. Still within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, and written by an eyewitness who was in contact with the other eyewitnesses, like Peter and James, whom Paul spoke with numerous times on his journeys to Jerusalem.

Mark’s gospel

Mark’s gospel is the earliest and atheists like James Crossley date it to less than 40 AD, which is 10 years after the death of Jesus at most. When you read the gospel of Mark, you are getting the earliest and best information available about the historical Jesus, along with Paul’s epistles. So what does Mark say about Jesus? Is Jesus just a man, or is he something more?

Check out Mark 12:1-9:

1He then began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey.

2At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard.

3But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed.

4Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully.

5He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed.

6“He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’

7“But the tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’

8So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

9“What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.

And Mark 13:32, talking about the date of the final judgment.

32“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

And again, this passage is establishing a hierarchy such that Jesus is being exalted above all men and the angels, too. And the passage is embarrassing to the early church, because it makes Jesus look ignorant of something, so they would not have made this passage up. Jesus is not an ordinary man, he is above the angels – God’s unique Son.

The “Q” source for Matthew and Luke

Here’s Matthew 11:27, which is echoed in Luke 10:22:

27“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

22“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Since this passage is in both of Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark, scholars believe that it is in the earlier “Q” source used by both Matthew and Luke. Q predates both Matthew and Luke, and so it is also fairly early (maybe 67-68), although not as early as Mark and Paul. Bill Craig writes that this passage is also embarrassing because it says that no one knows Jesus.

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New study: stunning example of sudden, rapid genetic change in worm fossils

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Normally in a post with a title like that, I would be linking an intelligent design web site, like Evolution News. But in this case, I didn’t even find this story at Evolution News, I found it at Science Daily. The author of the article definitely takes the side of Darwinian evolution. But remember, as we discussed with Dr. Günter Bechly, evolution has to work gradually, if it is going to work at all.

If you remember the episode of Knight and Rose Show with Dr. Bechly, he talked about how natural mechanisms could only introduce change very gradually, and that sudden leaps of complexity in the fossil record are better explained by intelligent design. Why? Well, consider the task of writing an essay on paper with a pen. You can understand how a human could come up with a 1000 word essay in an hour, but you wouldn’t be able to get the same result by dropping a bowling ball on a keyboard over and over.

A new study about worm genetics

Check out this article (archived) from Science Daily entitled “Defying Darwin: Scientists discover worms rewrote their DNA to survive on land”. The subtitle is “A comparative genome study of earthworms and their marine relatives could challenge Darwin’s theory of evolution by showing that worms colonized land in evolutionary jumps.”

Now for some excerpts, and please pay attention to the bias of the author. There’s a lot of could have, would have, should have in there. And a lot of assuming a mechanism that there is no evidence for. Remember, only designers can dump out functioning words and code in a short time. Natural mechanisms can’t do it.

The article says:

[…][A] research team led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a mixed research centre belonging to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), points for the first time to a mechanism of rapid, massive genomic reorganisation which could have played a part in the transition of marine to land animals 200 million years ago. The team has shown that marine annelids (worms) reorganised their genome from top to bottom, leaving it unrecognisable, when they left the oceans.

I remember Dr. Bechly telling us in the podcast that naturalists cannot help themselves to jumps in complexity, because natural mechanisms can only work if there are no jumps at all. The latin phrase from philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is “natura non facit saltus” which means “nature makes no jumps”. Naturalists sometimes like to help themselves to jumps, and call it “punctuated equilibrium”, but punctuated equilibrium is not a mechanism for the rapid generation of genetic complexity. Rather, it merely describes what we find in the fossil record – long period of statis, and VERY short periods of huge jumps in complexity. Or “biological big bangs” as Dr. Bechly called them in his article about it.

The Science Daily article explains the findings of the study:

The analysis of these genomes has revealed an unexpected result: the annelids’ genomes were not transformed gradually, as Neo-Darwinian theory would predict, but in isolated explosions of deep genetic remodelling.

“Isolated explosions of genetic remodeling”. I can do that at work, when I refactor the code. But I’m an intelligent designer. Evolution can’t do refactoring like that.

Evaluating the Science Daily article

I asked Grok whether the article explained any specific naturalistic mechanism that explained the “isolated explosions” in genetic complexity, and Grok said:

In short, the article uses vivid phrasing to describe the fossil record and genetic findings but does not articulate a clear, plausible naturalistic mechanism for the sudden genetic changes beyond the general idea of genomic rearrangement.

About the supposed designing ability of “punctuated equilibrium”, Grok said:

Punctuated equilibrium is primarily descriptive. It characterizes the fossil record’s pattern—long periods of little change punctuated by rapid bursts of morphological innovation. It does not, by itself, provide a detailed mechanistic explanation for how sudden jumps in genetic complexity occur.

The theory posits that rapid evolutionary change happens in small, isolated populations over relatively short geological timescales (thousands to tens of thousands of years), which may not leave many transitional fossils. However, it relies on standard evolutionary mechanisms (mutation, selection, drift) operating faster in these contexts, without specifying unique genetic or molecular processes to account for dramatic increases in complexity.

Keep in mind that the best experiments on the speed of naturalistic mechanisms, such as the LTEE experiments by Richard Lenski, show that mutation and selection produce steady, incremental changes, not sudden explosions of complexity.

The best explanation for biological big bangs

In the article about biological big bangs, Dr. Bechly says:

The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record.

The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses.

This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.

I do think it’s important for everyone to be clear on what the science shows. Naturalists have to have the evidence that naturalistic mechanisms can do all the creating in the brief time available. We know that intelligent agents can make explosions of specific complexity (functional information) in brief periods of time. But we don’t know that naturalistic mechanisms can do it.

If you would like to watch a nice lecture featuring Dr. Bechly explaining the fossil record, and the biological big bangs, then you can find that here:

If you want something to listen to, check out our podcast episode on the fossil record with Dr. Bechly.

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When I was a child, I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and it changed my life

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Since I mentioned “The Hobbit” in my biographical page at the top of the blog, I thought it might be worth explaining what I like about it. I still listen to my favorite chapter from it quite often before bed, to put me to sleep. If it doesn’t work, I listen to other chapters. But why choose that book? Well, because The Hobbit had a huge impact on me when I was growing up.

So, the first thing to say is that I didn’t grow up in a home with parents who had any plan for me. They were not involved in engineering me into anything. They just wanted good grades, and their method of getting that was yelling at me on report card day, then forgetting about school entirely, a few days later. As a result, I had to find my own morality and wisdom. The main things I read for that were the Bible, and later on, British literature, like Shakespeare and Spenser. But I’ll always remember the first “big” book that I ever read, and that was the “The Hobbit”.

The Cover

I noticed that there was a new printing of the book with the same cover design as the one that I read when I was small. I managed to get a gift copy of it from Desert Rose for my birthday. What I liked about the cover was the trees. If you look at the cover, there are multiple levels of trees, and you can see that the forest is deep, and you can’t see very far into it. I really liked that as a child. Somehow, that picture on the cover made me think about adventure, and then when I read the book, that really inspired me with the idea of going far away to earn my fortune. I remember that I didn’t read this book for school. I got it from the library.

My favorite chapter

My favorite chapter of “The Hobbit” is “Barrels Out of Bond”. That’s not the most popular chapter. But there is a phrase that appears in that chapter that’s also in the cover blurb from the first edition:

Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who wanted to be left alone in quiet comfort. But the wizard Gandalf came along with a band of homeless dwarves. Soon Bilbo was drawn into their quest, facing evil orcs, savage wolves, giant spiders, and worse unknown dangers. Finally, it was Bilbo, alone and unaided, who had to confront the great dragon Smaug, the terror of an entire countryside

Did you notice that phrase, “alone and unaided”? I have it on my Twitter profile for my location. It comes from the “Barrels out of Bond” chapter.

So, let’s talk about the overall plot of the book. The plot is that a famous wizard named Gandalf asks Bilbo the hobbit to accompany a group of dwarves on an adventure. His job is to be the burglar, because hobbits are small and sneaky. They travel along until they reach a dark forest called Mirkwood. The dwarves are captured by the inhabitants of the forest – a band of wood elves. Bilbo is able to avoid capture, by slipping on his ring of invisibility that he found earlier. He follows the dwarves into the cave of the wood elves, because he doesn’t want to leave them behind. So, he gets stuck in the cave, wandering around, stealing food, and trying to keep from getting discovered and caught. All while trying to think about how to help the dwarves escape, and get on with their journey.

And then we find this passage:

“I am like a burglar that can’t get away, but must go on miserably burgling the same house day after day,” he thought. “This is the dreariest and dullest part of all this wretched, tiresome, uncomfortable adventure! I wish I was back in my hobbithole by my own warm fireside with the lamp shining!” He often wished, too, that he could get a message for help sent to the wizard, but that of course was quite impossible; and he soon realized that if anything was to be done, it would have to be done by Mr. Baggins, alone and unaided.

You can listen to the whole chapter here.

Bilbo isn’t your typical hero. He isn’t tall. He doesn’t have big muscles. He doesn’t beat up monsters because of his martial training. He doesn’t always know what to do. He sometimes makes mistakes. His strength is his character, especially his humility and selflessness. He isn’t motivated by the same selfish desires as many people are these days. He’s not motivated by greed. He’s not trying to impress anyone.

When I was small, it was important for me to be able to not fall into the traps of my environment. Finding out how to be different was important for me, because I was stuck in a home filled with negative talk and neglect, going to government schools, trapped in an socialist country. So, by reading books like the Hobbit, I was able to find virtues that were nowhere else in my environment.

More than the character was the idea of going on an adventure. That was one of the reasons why I left the country where I was born – so that I could come to America on a work permit, and seek my fortune. And keep seeking it, despite a lot of mistakes and setbacks. And not because outside people were leading me or helping me or engineering me to succeed. No family, no friends, no donations.

So the big lesson from the book  is that an adventurous spirit isn’t free – it has to be put into a boy by what he reads. You should make your children read “The Hobbit”. Put into their minds at a young age the idea that life is an adventure, that dangers and hardships are normal, and that character counts. Put into their minds that all goodness requires sacrifice. And to not worry so much about appearing important to other people.