Curiosity, Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Faith

Can a critical thinker also be a person of traditional religious faith? It is true that many are, or at least appear to be, but who knows what goes on in another’s mind. As a purely theoretical question, the answer must be: perhaps. Two variables skew the response: the thinker’s curiosity and the reasonableness of the article of faith. Faith may not demand that critical thinkers affirm something they know to be patently false. Critical thinkers by their very nature are curious. Leading them to evaluate and critique the evidence before making a decision, or making a faith commitment. Curiosity is the mother’s milk of critical thinking. Without it there will be little critical thought.

            Religion in Western culture is generally conservative and offers its propositional truths as paradigmatically absolute; they are the product of divine revelation, we are told, to be questioned only at the risk of one’s immortal soul. Nevertheless, critical thinkers are not typically so generous as to affirm without critiquing. Regardless of the stakes, an individual who suppresses curiosity and affirms a religious proposition without serious challenge is not thinking critically.

            The real difficulty with religious truths, however, is that the absolute religious truth of one group frequently refutes the absolute religious truth of another group. Here is an example of one divine truth canceling another. Catholics regard the wine and bread of the Mass as transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Lutherans reject this view but affirm that in some way Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Baptists and others, on the other hand, regard the bread and grape juice (for Baptists certainly not wine!) of the Lord’s Supper as only symbolical. The bread and grape juice only represent the body and blood of Christ. As long as such ideas as these are considered simply different “beliefs” between religious groups, it is merely an oddity prompting the response, “how odd. How can people in the same religion who use the same holy books believe such remarkably different things?” But when it is remembered that these three groups hold that their respective views are absolutely binding on their memberships as the product of divine wisdom, it should strike a critical thinker as a curiosity for further investigation, particularly into the rationale of each group. Of course, they cannot all be the result of divine revelation! But the solution is not as easy as determining which is the correct view and eliminating the other two.

            The problem really goes to the nature of “religious truth.” Religious truth is not objective like mathematics—like 2+2=4, for example. Rather religious truth is only subjective truth in every case. Like beauty, religious truth lies in the eye, or in this case mind, of the beholder. That the character of the propositional truth is absolute is only true for the one who believes it is true. It is unlike Einstein’s theory of relativity E = MC², which is universally true—although true believers are scarcely apt to agree. Such an uncritical perspective is apt to strike the critical thinker as suspicious—if not worthy of complete skepticism.*

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*This essay first appeared in Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 39–41. It appears here newly edited and under a new title.

How did Moses come by the Torah (Law)?

Most everyone knows the Biblical tradition portraying Moses as the great “lawgiver” of the Israelite people.  In Exodus and Deuteronomy he is described as receiving the Torah directly from God.  He tells the Israelite people: “When I went up to the mountain to receive the tables of stone . . . And the Lord gave me two tables of stone written with the finger of God” (Deuteronomy 9:9-10; and for the second giving of the tablets to Moses see Deuteronomy 10:1-5; remember, Moses broke the first set).  Imagine my surprise a few weeks ago to learn that the apostle Paul did not agree that God had given the law directly to Moses.  According to Paul (Galatians 3:19) and other New Testament writers (Acts 7:38, 53; Hebrews 2:2) the law was “ordered through angels”!  This tradition was also shared by Josephus, a first century Jewish writer in a statement attributed to Herod (Antiquities of the Jews 15.5.3): “We have learned the noblest of our doctrines and the holiest of our laws from the messengers [angels] sent by God.”

       This tradition of an indirect passing of the Law to Moses is unknown in the Hebrew Bible, although angels are part of the coterie of God in the Septuagint version of Deuteronomy 33:2, where God comes with his “holy ones” and “on his right hand were his angels with him.” In one of the Apostolic Fathers, Shepherd of Hermas (Similitude 8.3.3), the Archangel Michael was said to have “put the law into the hearts of those who believe.”  Angels were long thought to act as mediators between God and human beings (see, for example, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: TLevi 5:5-6; TDan 6:1-2; Philo, On Dreams, 1. 141-142; Jubilees, 1.27-2.1; 32:21-22).  Cerinthus, an early Christian heretic according to Epiphanius (Panarion 28.1,2),claimed “that the Law and prophets have been given by angels though the law-giver is one of the angels who made the world,”and these angels did an evil act by creating the world.  Barnabas (9:4), another of the Apostolic Fathers, reports that an evil angel misled the Israelite people into thinking that circumcision was an actual fleshly act.

       Obviously we have here an interesting contradiction between the Old Testament and the New Testament: did Moses actually receive the Law directly from God or was it “ordered through angels”? Both assertions cannot be correct at the same time!  The situation is much more complicated, however.  These claims about the Law are traditions validating the authority of the Torah.  A tradition is a “handing down” orally of a belief from generation to generation.  Traditions are living “things,”and as such they change, evolve, and mutate.  Because they exist in memory and surface in oral communication, no sequential history of the evolution of an ancient tradition survives.  Each generation inevitably modifies what they receive, because it is not written in stone (if you will permit me to put it that way). If there ever had been a point of origin and an original form of the tradition, it would have long since vanished into the fog of the past.  With time, written stories do emerge explaining the origin of this or that particular belief. These various written forms of the tradition often represent diverse contradictory versions of the tradition.  These versions represent what individuals or groups believed about them at a given moment in time.  The oral tradition, however, goes on evolving into still later multiple forms, as interpreted by those who receive it and pass it on to other auditors.

       Neither of these two attempts to explain how the Torah came to Moses (i.e., directly from God or ordered through angels) is a historically verifiable datum about the origin of theTorah; they are rather ancient traditional beliefs, and as such do not provide a historical description of origins. Rather each is a then current religious belief representing what people thought at the time.

       Many, if not most, statements about origins in the Bible work the same way—for example, early Christians validated the divinity of Jesus by narratives of a physical birth (Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 1:26-55; 2:1-20), the infusion or mutation of the preexistent heavenly Christ into flesh (John 1:1-14), and a baptismal Theophany (Mark 1:9-11) – an interesting contradiction between New Testament writers.

       Which of these two contradictory traditions about the Torah, if either, makes more sense to you?  Or to put it another way: with whom do you agree: “Moses” (directly from God), Paul (ordered through angels), or Hedrick (traditions, not history)?

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

The Gospel of Mark is Wrong—and other Quibbles!

Perhaps I should say Mark is clearly incorrect in at least two places, and that fact has been known since the late second century.  Jerome (4^th/5^th century) in a letter (57.9) cites the writings of early critics of Christianity (Celsus, On the True Doctrine [late 2^nd century], Porphyry, Against the Christians [3^rd/4^th century], and Julian, Against the Galilaeans [fourth century] ) on a number of errors, which according to Jerome these critics of Mark called "falsifications."  Probably many of my readers will be unfamiliar with the two errors I describe here, but they are well known to most historians of Christian origins.
 

Jerome calls Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian "impious men," but he does not deny the errors.  One well known error is Mark's citation (Mark 1:1-3) of a passage supposedly from Isaiah, but which turns out to be a collage of Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3.  A second error is even more glaring.  In Mark 2:25-26 Jesus cites the actions of David who "entered the house of God when Abiathar was High Priest."  When this event happened, however, actually Ahimelech was high priest (1 Samuel 21:1-6); Abiathar was his son and met David only after the bread incident in the house of God (1 Samuel 22:20-23).
 

            Jerome in response to the first error simply solicits the indulgence of the reader for Mark's error, and for the second he argued that the evangelists were more concerned with the sense of Old Testament passages than with giving the literal words (Letter 57.9).  Matthew and Luke correct Mark's errors in the following ways: Matthew (3:3) and Luke (3:4-6) correct Mark by eliminating the words of Malachi and then the reference to Isaiah (40:3) is correct—Luke also adds more material (40:3-5) to the Isaiah quotation.  Both Matthew and Luke also correct Mark's historical error in naming the wrong high priest by simply eliminating Mark's erroneous phrase: "when Abiathar was high priest" (Matt 12:4; Luke 6:3).
 

            Strictly speaking, the ascription of Mark 1:1-3 to Isaiah is wrong, for the passage contains statements from both Malachi and Isaiah.  Strictly speaking, David took the dedicated bread from the altar when Ahimelech was high priest; so Mark was wrong when he says the incident took place when Abiathar was high priest.
 

            What do these obvious errors suggest about Mark's reporting of his narrative of the public career of Jesus?  Perhaps nothing!  But since we have no way of verifying his narrative and its details, we should take it very seriously when we catch him in an error.  These obvious errors suggest that we should read the gospel closely and not give Mark a pass when other questionable statements are reported in his account.  For example, Mark egregiously exaggerates in reporting that John, the baptizer, baptized "all the county of Judea and all the people of Jerusalem" (Mark 1:5) and exaggerates again at Mark 1:33 in reporting that the "whole city was gathered at the door."  Mark is simply not reporting responsibly in these instances.  Accuracy in historical detail is not in itself a signature of historical narrative, but inaccuracy in historical detail is a clear warning of the possible historical unreliability of the narrative.
 

            Questions can also be raised about some of the sources of the narratives Mark reports—specifically with respect to how Mark knows about things he reports.  Here are two narratives that are clearly challengeable as historical narration.  How does Mark know the precise words of the conversation he reports in the story of Jesus in the high priest's home (Mark 14:53-72)?  His only likely source is Peter who was not present, but was out in the courtyard of the high priest's home, and not privy to what was happening inside the house (Mark 14:54, 66).
 

In Mark's story about the beheading of John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29) Mark has used the narrative technique of time compression to create the fanciful story about the dance of Herodias' daughter and her dramatic request for the head of the Baptist in front of Herod's guests (Mark 6:24-25).  Mark situates the narrative in the Galilee area (Mark 6:1, 14, 21, 45); so the banquet for "his courtiers, officers, and leading men of Galilee" took place at his palace in Tiberias.  According to Josephus (Antiquities  18.5.2), however, John the Baptist was imprisoned and beheaded in the fortress at Machaerus  located in modern Jordan (at that time Nabatea) a number of miles east of the Dead Sea and at a level near its mid-point.  Mark's compression of time (6:25-27: "with haste," "at once," "immediately") forces the reader to understand that John the Baptist was near at hand, and hence his beheading takes place while the dinner party was continuing—a much more dramatic story than sending a soldier of the guard on a long trip to Machaerus for the head!  And, of course, there is always the question of how Mark knew the precise words of the conversations during the party—was it actually oral tradition or simply Mark's imaginative recreation, or simply whole cloth invention?

 

Such problems suggest that Mark is not early Christian history; rather it has all the earmarks of historical fiction—that is to say, much of the gospel is due to Mark's imagination and inventive recreation.

 

What are your thoughts?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University