The God Who Wasn’t There?
So last weekend I was teasing my family with lines from the documentary The God Who Wasn’t There even though I hadn’t seen it. Since I was stealing it’s material and I’ve seen more ads for it than I could shake my alt key at I figured I should sit down and acutally have a look, which I did this afternoon. I watched the trailers and knew what was in store so I wasn’t too dissapointed, but most of the film is farily obnoxious. It was way too bitter and disengenous for a documentary, although it did have about fifteen minutes of brief, interesting arguments–not positive how valid–against the existence of Jesus Christ and the literal interpretation of the New Testament. I made a list of points and thought it might spur some conversation here:
Jesus lived everyone forgot then rememberd. There is a large, forty year gap between when Jesus died and any accounts of his life, if you place the writing of Mark at around 70 AD, which is a strangely long period of silence.
Allegorical literature extremely common back then. Mark–the first gospel–was writing a symbolic message.
Ceasar Agustus is often mentioned by secular historians but very seldom Jesus.
Supreme council meeting on Passover Eve is out of the question.
Letting Barabas go and throwing Jesus to the wolves defies historical verisamilitude.
Paul, the most influential early church founder, never mentions details of Jesus’ life.
Paul’s Christ lived in a mythical realm not a human — Hebrews 8:4
Jesus conforms to the hero pattern.
Other saviour figures in the same time frame. (rober m. price said this)
Osiris, Mithra, Dionysus are super similar earlier “Christsâ€
Sounds like an interesting watch; did you buy/rent it or download?
Without seeing it, I’m not sure how best to respond to some of the points above, but some have some obvious flaws, as is usually the case with questions designed with the answer already in mind.
The first one (regarding the gap in time between Jesus’ death and the “first writing” about his life) is easily answered. Firstly, just because Mark may be the earliest scriptural account, doesn’t mean there weren’t others that didn’t make it into the Bible and were therefore lost in history, as were a great many other documents from that period. This goes along with the point about Caesar; it is easy to understand that records of the leader of a government would be numerous and well preserved (by that government), whereas records of most other people of the time were probably lost. You might even consider it a miracle that we have as much in scripture as we do, preserved for this long.
The allegory thing isn’t much of a point really to me. Just because there are other similar stories that someone made up doesn’t mean that anything that resembles aspects of those stories is also.
The accusation that letting Barabas go in exchange for the prosecution of Jesus being hard to believe is interesting. Not knowing much about it, historically, I’d always assumed that people who were insanely intent on a particular goal (arguably even driven / influenced by other forces) will often do illogical things. On the other hand, to say that this part of the story is not believable is not consistent with the accusation that the story is a well crafted lie, because if the story was made up, why would the perpetrators of the deception include a detail which would make it more difficult to believe?
Paul probably didn’t write a lot about the day to day details of Jesus’ life because he never met him (in person, as far as I know). He certainly spoke a lot about his relationship with him after his death, and the principles that he taught.
Paul definitely talked about Jesus living a life here on earth, in the flesh (Philippians 2:6-8 among many); the Hebrews 8:4 reference is pretty obscure and it’s a stretch at best to interpret that passage as saying that Christ was never human.
As for a hero pattern, and other similar figures that seem to fit in a similar mold, I would suggest that there is a common theme in human imagination of a “hero”, which could easily have been planted by our creator to reflect back on (from our perspective in the future) or point to (from the perspective of those before Christ’s life) the “real thing” which did eventually occur in space/time.
JaredB
23 Dec 05 at 1:23 am
Sounds to me that the writer of this movie just doesn’t think the story of Jesus “seems” believable for reasons that he fabricated to support hos chosen belief. (As Jared said). Evidently he has not ever watched the Discovery Channel. There are tons of events that have occured in human history and in nature, that unless you were there to see them, they would be hard to believe, because they don’t “seem” reasonable.
ma ma j
23 Dec 05 at 7:03 am
Netflix. I should have linked to the movies website so you guys can preview it: http://www.thegodmovie.com/
Nate
23 Dec 05 at 8:53 am