17AR22-18

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AR 22:18 - Good uses of the Qur'an when discussing the Bible

In this issue:

CHRISTOLOGY, OCCULTIC - is resurrection "the rising from the death of self?"

EHRMAN, BART - stacking the deck by strictly "judging the Gospels according to modern criteria"

ISLAM - using the Qur'an to support belief in the Bible

Apologia Report 22:18 (1,338)

May 12, 2017

CHRISTOLOGY, OCCULTIC

"The Resurrection: Jesus and the greatest story ever told" by Adyashanti, New Age author/teacher <www.goo.gl/wQnPCG> aka Steven Gray -- significant in two ways: 1) it includes the acknowledgement that "Jesus' resurrection ... has no exact parallel in spiritual literature - especially in contrast to many forms of eastern spirituality," and 2) it's a classic example of how occultic worldviews recklessly read much into Scripture. (Were there awards for creative license, occultists would win every time.)

There are numerous examples of such text-twisting in this piece. Adyashanti prefers Mark 16:8 as the book's abrupt ending instead of the extension found in many ancient manuscripts. Why? Because he believes that Mark intended an intense conclusion - for doing so "opens the mind and heart to the mysteriousness of life" and may leave the reader "open to your own presence of being, the divine being that we all are" where spirit will "reveal that nothing is separated from divinity; nothing is actually other than the divine itself."

Adyashanti explains that "The goal in these other [eastern] forms of spirituality is literally to leap off of the wheel of the dualistic world and transcend it so you don't have to come back into form.

"Jesus' story is just the opposite. Jesus descends directly from the kingdom of Heaven; he descends from enlightenment into the human condition." His life "culminates in the resurrection. ... In the journey of awakening, when self has been annihilated and dropped away, we experience a kind of resurrection.

"Resurrection is the rising from the death of self, but there's no hierarchy in it. ...

"As Jesus said, 'I'm in the world, but not of it.' I think this is the best possible description of the resurrection: to have an absolute intimacy with the world of time and space and things and people and events - but not be of the world. You are of the world of eternity, the Kingdom of Heaven." Parabola, Sum '14, pp16-21.

You'll likely find much more in Adyashanti's recent book, Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic [1]. (And note the sad irony in the publisher’s name - see source credit.)

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EHRMAN, BART

Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior, by Bart D. Ehrman [2] -- a one-sided contrarian introduction to biblical reliability. Robert Gundry, scholar-in-residence and professor emeritus at Westmont College, gives us an important review. "Emphasis falls ... on what Ehrman takes to be the unhistoricity of stories that evolved in oral traditions prior to the writing of the canonical Gospels and that then made their way into them."

Gundry explains that "Ehrman's argument [makes] a number of distinctions." He speculates on ...

• "the actual, unknown authors of the canonical Gospels"

• a "distinction between Palestine, the location where Jesus' first disciples lived, and ... where the Gospels' true authors lived"

• "Jesus and his first disciples as all uneducated, illiterate peasants and the true authors of the Gospels as highly educated literates"

• "Jesus' first disciples as Aramaic-speakers who knew little or no Greek and the evangelists as Greek-speakers who knew little or no Aramaic"

• "Jesus' first disciples as having lived for the most part before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the actual evangelists as having written not until c. AD 70 and the decades following"

• the "true details known about Jesus at first and untrue details that came about through messy storytelling," and

• a "distinction between writing what probably took place and writing what probably did not take place."

Gundry impressively finds room to "point out Ehrman's repeated failures to mention for uninitiated readers even the existence of arguments countering the assertions."

Ehrman is proud of his focus on "modern secular studies of human memory," which have "exposed the unreliability of memories. Not total unreliability, but astonishing unreliability. So we cannot trust the Gospels entirely, says Ehrman, and probably very little....

"Ehrman cites outlandish, post-canonical stories about Peter, Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus as a baby, a boy, and an adult - stories that everybody, including evangelical Christians and hidebound fundamentalists, considers unhistorical. Why? Because they're … well, just plain silly. An excess of the miraculous for its own sake, for example. But Ehrman adds that modern people reject the historicity of those apocryphal stories because they don't want or expect to see historical reliability in them. Conversely, they accept the historicity of canonical stories about Jesus, including those about his miracles, exorcisms, and resurrection, because they do want and expect to see such reliability in them. Thus Ehrman sows a seed of doubt...."

Gundry concludes: "What we have in the Gospels, then, isn't historically messed-up memories - rather, theologically dressed-up portraits. When it comes to further historical implausibilities, discrepancies, and contradictions among the Gospels, evangelicals and other conservatives would do well to engage in the foregoing hermeneutic rather than in text-contorting harmonizations for the sake of pure historicity. The same is to be said against pleas that we would see harmony if only we had more information than is presently at hand. ...

"Ehrman pays no attention to [crucial] arguments." For example, those "of contrary higher critical opinions and the arguments supporting those opinions." He also uses "a preference for oral reports over books." He "tries to dissociate" contrary arguments based on the contribution of other New Testament authors. ...

"So regarding Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Ehrman says, 'Those are the apostolic names that came to be associated with these books all over the Christian map,' the implication being that such names were mistakenly attached to the Gospels to give them authority. But neither Mark nor Luke was an apostle, as Ehrman quickly admits. And given geographical spread on the Christian map, why the absence of diversity in authorial ascriptions if Irenaeus's are false?"

Gundry notes that "the amount of historically worthwhile material that the evangelists worked with looks to have been very much larger than the minimal amount suggested by Ehrman's thesis of messed-up memories. ...

"Inferring that Jesus never performed miracles, Ehrman writes that 'with the passing of time Jesus's miracle-working abilities became increasingly pronounced in the tradition, to an exorbitant extent.' In the apocryphal Gospels, to be sure. But increasingly in the canonical Gospels? The reverse, I think. ...

"Ehrman declines to discuss in this book any evidence for the historicity of Jesus' miracles and resurrection." The real problem? Ehrman is "judging the Gospels almost exclusively according to a modern criterion of strictly factual accuracy." It's a lonely hill to defend with little available support. Books & Culture, Nov/Dec '16, pp14-16. <www.goo.gl/2URhpw>

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ISLAM

Christian Exegesis of the Qur'an: A Critical Analysis of the Apologetic Use of the Qur'an in Select Medieval and Contemporary Arabic Texts, by J. Scott Bridger [3] -- reviewer Scott Hedley (Bible translator for 16 years in Southeast Asia) <goo.gl/jFiCPe> explains that "The basic contention of this book is that there is biblical, historical, and theological justification for the Christian who makes positive use of the Qur'an when discussing the Bible and Christian doctrines in Arabic-speaking milieus.

"Bridger rightly notes that our recognition of the truths in the Qur'an makes the Muslim much less defensive and more open to read our Scriptures. Since the Muslim has been taught that the Bible has been corrupted, it is an enormous step forward for him to read the Bible alongside the Qur'an.

"Bridger suggests guidelines for the use of the Qur'an as a point of contact," such as another "way of explaining the divinity of Christ is by explaining that God's Word is said to be inseparable from his being, indicating that it is appropriate to attribute to God's Word all that is attributable to God himself. These same verses in the Qur'an can be used to support the concept of the Trinity. Christ is identified as God's Word and 'as spirit from him.' ...

"This book is also a bit hard to follow in that many Arabic words are only defined once and then don't appear in the index.... But those willing to read carefully will learn how to use portions of the Qur'an as points of contact in presenting and explaining certain biblical doctrines, and I commend this book to the reader for these reasons." Missiology, 44:4 - 2016, pp501-2.

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic, by Adyashanti and Cynthia Bourgeault (Sounds True, 2016, paperback, 264 pages) <www.goo.gl/xMzalw>

2 - Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior, by Bart D. Ehrman (HarperOne, March 2016, hardcover, 336 pages) <www.goo.gl/SCNRNy>

3 - Christian Exegesis of the Qur'an: A Critical Analysis of the Apologetic Use of the Qur'an in Select Medieval and Contemporary Arabic Texts, by J. Scott Bridger (Pickwick, 2015, paperback, 200 pages) <www.goo.gl/bGjthl>

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