Jesus: Fact or Fiction
JESUS: Fact OR Fiction?
Mario
D’Couto
For those of you who have read my article about Jesus –
The Man (both parts, 1 and 2) you would have seen how I have tried to explore
the humanity of Our Lord and Saviour. This article is a result of a ‘frustration’
that I had while reading a chapter from Joseph Murphy’s book, “The power of the subconscious mind”.
With all due respects to the author and the power of the human mind, it would
be unfair or a bit of an extreme to exaggerate what the human mind can do and
in as much as I would like to admit the power of positivity, I think, in my
humble opinion, that life is not like a vending machine where because I have
positive thoughts all the time that my life is going to be perfect. Yet, this
is not the point that I am trying to drive at but rather through this article,
I intend to show who Jesus truly is. In the 4th Chapter of the book,
“The power of the subconscious mind”,
Dr. Murphy says that the miracles of Jesus were a result of an appealing to the
subconscious mind. If this were to be true, was Jesus truly the Son of God or
was He a hypnotist? Let’s find out.
The first thing to understand is that Jesus is God. How
do we prove it? We have ample evidence to prove it. To an atheist, agnostic or
a believer in some other religion, the persona of Jesus may at prima facie seem
like a gross form of egomania since He claims to be God while some may even
contest it saying that He did not claim so. However, we have enough evidence to
prove that Jesus is God. To begin with, I would like to quote 3 people (although
there are many who have written about Christ’s divinity) who explain the
uniqueness of Christ,
“Not one recognized religious
leader, not Moses, Paul, Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius nor any other religious
leader has ever claimed to be God; that is, with the exception of Jesus Christ.
Christ is the only religious leader who has ever claimed to be deity and the
only individual ever who has convinced a great portion of the world that He is
God.”
Thomas Schultz, “The Doctrine of the Person of Christ”
“His (Christ) teachings
were ultimate, final – above those of Moses and the prophets. He never added
any afterthought or revisions; He never retracted or changed; He never guessed,
‘supposed’ or spoke with any uncertainty. This is all so contrary to human
teachers and teaching.”
Fred John Meldon, “101 proofs of the deity of Christ from the
Gospels”
“I am trying here to prevent
anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him, ‘I
am ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim
to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. As man who was merely a man
and said the sort of things Jesus said, would not be a great moral teacher. He
would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg
or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this
man was and is the Son of God or else He must be a mad man or something worse.
You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or
you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with
any patronizing non-sense about Him being a great moral teacher. He has not let
that open to us. He did not intend to.”
C.S. Lewis, a
former agnostic, “Mere Christianity”
We come to know about the life of Christ from the
Gospels. So, in a sense, the Gospels could be deemed as His biographies. Of
course, this is not to be understood in the more standardized sense where the
biography talks about His birth and His childhood. Although it is mentioned in
brief, the main focus is given to His ministry.
There are 4 Gospel writers namely Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John of which Mark is attributed as the first Gospel writer. The authenticity
of the Gospels lies in the fact that these were all based on eyewitness
accounts. If you compare the timeline between the death of Jesus and the
writings of the 4 Gospels, it is pretty short. The shorter the gap in the
timeline, the higher the credibility. In fact, the Gospels have a very
confident eyewitness perspective as if they had a camera. Any one of the 4
Gospels is inexhaustible. Libraries of books have been written about them and
saints and scholars, alike have devoted lifelines to reading, praying and
studying them. Even if the whole human race meditated on one of the Gospels for
a 1000 years, they could not exhaust its riches.
All 4 Gospels share common features in their structure,
Ø They
centre totally on Christ.
Ø They
present Him as both human (Son of Man) and divine (Son of God)
Ø They
present His work as both words (teachings) and deeds (miracles)
Ø They
present His most important work as dying and rising form the dead.
Ø They
present Him as ‘Jesus’, that is, the Saviour from sin and ‘Christ’ or ‘Messiah’
(promised One)
Ø They
begin no later than John the Baptist and end no earlier than the Resurrection
Ø They
are written based on eyewitness accounts
The Gospels can be used in at least 3 different ways.
First, they are the data for enquiring sceptics, providing historical evidence
for the faith. Second, they are primary devotional, meditational reading to
deepen our faith as Christians. It is here that we meet Christ. St. Teresa of
Avila said she never found anything as powerful as the Gospels for growing in
holiness, not even the deepest writings of the greatest saints and mystics. Third,
they are literary masterpieces. They take their rightful place among the
classics of world literature. They need to be read with imaginative and human
sympathy and wonder as well as faith. All 3 are legitimate but not to be confused
with each other.
Some people may find that the minor differences found in
the Gospels account for its inauthenticity. But the truth is quite the
opposite. It is the very minor differences that we find in the Gospels that
prove it is authentic. If they all had to be the same, it would seem that the
truth was fabricated. So, the main thing is consistency as has been mentioned
above.
As for the Gnostic Gospels, they come much later and have
no connection with the actual Christ. With this being said, let us now turn our
attention to the miracles of Jesus, which is the focus of this article. But
first, allow me to quote the words of Joseph Murphy on his interpretation of
Mark 11:24,
“The
inspired writer tells us to believe and accept as true the fact that our
desires has already been accomplished and fulfilled that it is already
completed and that its realization will follow as a thing in the future.
The success of this technique depends
on the confident conviction that the thought, the idea, the picture is already
a fact in mind. In order for anything to have substance in the realm of mind,
it must be thought of as actually existing there.
Here in a few cryptic words is a
concise and specific direction for making use of the creative power of thought
by impressing upon the subconscious the particular thing, which you desire.
Your thought, idea, plan or purpose is as real on its own plane as your hand or
your heart. In following the Biblical technique, you eliminate from your mind
all considerations of condition, circumstances or anything, which might imply
adverse contingencies. You are planting a seed (concept) in the minds, which,
if you leave it undisturbed, will infallibly germinate into an external
fruition.
The prime condition, which Jesus insisted
upon, was faith. Over and over again you read in the Bible, ‘according to your faith
is it done unto you.’ If you plant certain types of seeds in the ground, you
have faith they will grow after their kind. This is the way of seeds and
trusting the law of growth and agriculture, you know that the seeds will come
forth after their kind. Faith as mentioned in the Bible is a way of thinking,
an attitude of mind, an inner certitude, knowing that the idea you fully accept
in your conscious mind will be embodied in your subconscious mind and made
manifest. Faith is, in a sense, accepting as true what your reason and senses
deny i.e. a shutting out of the little, rational, analytical, conscious mind
and embracing an attitude of complete reliance on the inner power of your
subconscious mind.”
He quotes Matthew 9:28-30 and uses that as an example of
how Jesus appeals or uses the subconscious mind to heal. He further writes,
“When the sick came to be healed, they were healed by their faith together with
his faith and understanding of the healing power of the subconscious mind.
Whatever he decreed, he felt inwardly to be true. He and the people needing
help were in the one universal subjective mind and His silent inner knowing and
conviction of the healing power changed the negative destructive patterns in
the patients’ subconscious. The resultant healings were the automatic response
to the internal mental change. His command was his appeal to the subconscious
mind of the patients plus his awareness, feeling and absolute trust in the
response of the subconscious mind to the words which he spoke with the
authority.”
Was Jesus psychologically balanced? This question is
obviously a very silly question to ask but yet for the benefit of some, it
would be worth probing the personality of our Lord from a psychological
perspective. The Gospels clearly testify that Our Lord was psychologically
balanced. He treated people with respect, especially women and children who did
not have a place in society at that time. He cried at the death of His friend,
Lazarus, He got angry with the money changers at the temple. These and a host
of other instances from the Gospels clearly testify to it.
To make the argument more substantive, it would be worth
reverting the question and asking as to what are the signs of an imbalanced
psychological person? To answer that in one word, it is “inconsistency”. The very sign that a person’s behaviour is erratic
is clear evidence that a person is psychologically imbalanced.
Was Jesus a hypnotist? NO! There have been accusations that Jesus was a hypnotist of the
highest order and hence was able to work many miracles and attract many people
towards Him. But this is false. According to Gary R. Collins, one of the
leading experts of psychology in America, he says that not everyone is
susceptible to hypnotism.
He states that stage hypnotists will talk in a certain
soothing tone of voice to the audience and watch for people who seem to be responding
and then they’ll pick those people who seem to be responding and then they’ll
pick those people as their volunteers because they are readily susceptible to
hypnosis. In a big group, it is quite obvious that there would be people be
resistant. When Jesus multiplied the bread and fish, there were 5000 witnesses.
Could He have ‘hypnotized’ all of
them? The answer is obvious.
Another reason is hypnosis does not generally work on
people who are sceptics and doubters. So how did Jesus ‘hypnotize’ James who doubted Him but later saw His resurrected? Or
how did He ‘hypnotize’ Saul of
Tarsus, the opponent of Christianity who never ever met Jesus until he saw Him
after His resurrection? Or how did He ‘hypnotize’ Thomas who was so sceptical
he would not believe in the Resurrection until he put his finger in the pierced
hands of Jesus (John 20:25). Even at the miracle at Cana, Jesus never addressed
the wedding guests. He didn’t even suggest to the servants that the water had
turned into wine – He merely told them to take some water to the master of the
banquet. He (the master of the banquet) is the one who tasted it and said that it
was wine with no prior prompting.
For the person who does not believe in God, miracles are
not possible. Miracles make sense in a religious context and the reason
precisely is because a miracle would not be a miracle if it could have been
proven by the laws of science which is why Dr. William Lane Craig, would say, “A
miracle is one event which is not producible by the natural causes that are
operative at the time and place that the event occurs.” Of course, just
because they are outside the realm of science, that does not mean it goes
against it. One may or may not be able to prove it, but one would be able to
make sense of it.
Hence, while a person like David Hume would say that
miracles are violation of the laws of nature, Dr. Craig, tells us that natural
laws have an implicit ‘cetera paribus’ which in English is translated as ‘all
other things being equal’. In other words, natural laws assume that no other
natural or supernatural factors are interfering with the operation that the law
describes. For instance, it is observed that when oxygen and potassium combine,
they combust. Now if this is the case, how is it that our bodies do not burn?
The point to be noted over here is that oxygen and potassium burn only under
idealized conditions assuming no other factors are interfering. However, in the
case of the human body, there are other factors interfering with the combustion
and so it doesn’t take place. This is not a violation of the law of nature.
To use another example, J.P. Moreland explains in his
book, “Christianity And The Nature Of
Science”, if an object is dropped, it will fall to the earth and if an
apple falls from a tree and you reach out to catch it before it hits the
ground, you’re not violating or negating the law of gravity; you’re merely
intervening. That is the implication of ‘ceteris paribus’. The law of gravity
states what will happen will happen under idealized conditions with no natural
or supernatural factors intervening. Catching the apple does not overturn the
law of gravity or requires the formulation of a new law. It’s merely the
intervention of a person with free will who overrides the natural causes
operative in that particular circumstance. This is what God does when He causes
a miracle to occur.
Hence when Hume argues that just because it is nature’s
law for humans to die and not come back to life, the resurrection of Christ,
therefore, cannot be true, he forgets, though, to consider the fact that it is
God who raised Jesus from the dead. St. Paul speaks about the resurrection of
Christ in his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:4-8) which was
written around 56 A.D and given the fact that Jesus died in 33 A.D. it is hard
to imagine that this could be a hoax for as mentioned earlier, the shorter the
gap in the timeline, the stronger the credibility. This letter talks about the
life of the early Christian Church in the middle of the 1st century
which is based on eye witness accounts for the resurrection of Jesus. If ever
the resurrection Jesus had to be a hoax, why is it then that the early
Christians (and even today) gave their lives for Christ? Did they give their
lives up for a lie? Rest assure, they had nothing to gain from it. It is absurd
to think that somebody would give their life for something that was not true.
Another interesting thing was that despite the persecution, the numbers
continued to grow. None of this was seen in any of the other religious
movements.
Now there may be some people who may want to downplay the
fact that Jesus was not better than the rest as there were other rabbis who did
exorcism or prayed for rain and it came. But the reality was quite the contrary.
According to George A. Boyd, the radical nature of Jesus’ miracles is what
distinguishes him. It didn’t just rain when He prayed for it. We are talking
about blindness, deafness, leprosy, scoliosis being healed, storms being
stopped, bread and fish being multiplied, sons and daughters being raised from
the dead and much more. There are 37 miracles recorded in the Gospels although
Jesus did many more as is seen in John 21:25.
Jesus’ miracles were not some kind of magic tricks. They
were transformative. Through His miracles, Jesus revealed Himself. It not only
healed the person physically, but it gave the person a whole new meaning of
life and there are so many accounts in the Gospels that testify to it.
He did things with authority. In the Gospels, we see that
in the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, He knew for what He came for (John
8:14) (the ‘I AM’ found in Exodus 3:14 is the same ‘I AM’ found in John
18:5-8). Jesus is God incarnate as He said, “I and My Father are One” (John
10:30). This is very evident from the incident when He opens the scroll and
reads the book of Isaiah in the synagogue. This and many other instances in the
Gospels, Our Lord asserts His authority. We don’t find any other rabbis talking
like this anywhere. He does give God the Father the credit for what He does but
you will never find Him asking God the Father to do it. He does it in the power
of God the Father.
With this being said, how do we understand Jesus, our
Lord and Master, as being the Son of God? Was Jesus created? In John 3:16, the
word ‘begotten’ is used because of which it may seem as though Jesus was a
‘created’ Being. Elsewhere, in Colossians 1:15, the word ‘firstborn’ is used.
This word too gives the impression that Christ was a created being.
To respond to this, one thing we must be clear about is
that when it comes to interpreting a particular text, we must always do it by
considering the context in which it is written. The word ‘begotten’ is a word that
is used in the King James version of the Bible. However, in the original Greek
version, it is translated as the ‘unique one’. This gives a clearer idea of who
Christ was. He was and is the fullness of Deity in bodily form which is why
Christian doctrine teaches us that Christ was fully human and fully divine.
This also answers the question about the ‘firstborn’ mentioned’ in Colossians
1:15.
Further, when Jesus said, “The Father is greater than I”
(John 14:28), He was not downplaying His divinity. Jesus knew and was fully
aware of who He was. To understand this a little more in detail, we have to
keep in mind what was mentioned previously. When Jesus became human, it is
written that He emptied Himself (Philippians 2:7) and was born in the likeness
of men. This statement gives us an indication that He ‘stripped’ Himself of His
God-like qualities. In Philippians 2:6, it is written, “Though He was in the
form of God, Jesus did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped.”
Notice, that it is written, “in the form of God”, which is to say that it is
referring to the essence of God. To put it philosophically, the essence of God
is pure Spirit. Hence, when Jesus said, “If you loved Me you’d be glad for My
sake when I say I am going away because the Father is greater than I” (John
14:28), it meant that He was returning to the glory that was properly His, so
if they (the apostles) really knew who He was and really loved Him properly,
they would be glad that He was going back to the realm where He is really
greater.
If I were to use an example, it is like saying the
president of the United States is greater than me, but this does not mean that
he is an ontologically superior being. This in other words implies that while
he is certainly greater in military capacity, political prowess and public acclaim,
he is not more of a man than I am. Hence, in other words, he is still a normal
human being just like any other person. The same can be said with regard to the
relationship between God the Father and Jesus.
Another example we can consider is water. Water has 2
atoms of hydrogen and 1 atom of oxygen (chemical formula is H20). In whatever
form or state, it may be, H2O will still remain the same. For instance, if I
heat water above 100 degrees Celsius, it becomes steam (gaseous state) or if I
freeze it to 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes ice, which is a solid state. Hence,
in whatever state one may find it, be it solid, liquid or gas, H2O, remains the
same in all 3 forms.
Today, with quantum physics, scientists are becoming more
aware of the fact that there is something beyond this reality we live in. As it
is popularly defined in physics that energy can neither be created nor can it be
destroyed, it has been found that energy is present everything. Whether this
energy is actually the spirit of God is something that is another vast topic to
looked into. However, there may be some truth in it for in as much as God is
transcendent, He is always immanent in His creation. This, however, should not
be confused with pantheism.
I
know that this may have been perhaps one of the longest articles that I have
written but I firmly believe that we should all know the truth or if I may put
it in another way, we should have a good reason as to why we believe in what we
believe. Yet with that being said, I
also believe that when we come to know the truth about someone we begin to
learn and cherish who the person really is. Believing in Jesus and saying that
He is true is a bit like loving someone. If you love a person, your love goes
beyond the facts of that person, yet it is rooted in the facts about him or
her. For example, you love a person because of him/her qualities, be it that
he/she is nice, sweet and kind. All these things are facts about the person you
love but, yet your love goes beyond that. It could very well happen that you
could know all the qualities of a person and you may not love or trust him/her,
but you do. The point that I am trying to highlight, therefore is, your
decision goes beyond the evidence and yet it is rooted in the evidence. In the
same way, having a relationship with Jesus Christ goes beyond just knowing the
historical facts about Him, yet it is rooted in the historical facts about Him.
I pray and hope
the good Lord continues to bless you in your daily life just as He has in mine.
May the glory of the risen Lord always be with us, now and always. Happy
Easter!
