I said in my post here
that I might blog about Gilbert West and George Littleton this week.
West and Littleton were two eighteenth century thinkers whom my pastor
talked about in his sermon last Sunday. West and Littleton attempted to
disprove Christianity: West would disprove Jesus' resurrection, and
Littleton would disprove the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (or Paul).
But West and Littleton became Christians as a result of their study. I
wanted to read their writings, which I found online, to see how they
sought to justify Christianity.
I probably
won't get their books read and blogged through this week, since they are
long books. West's book about the resurrection is over 400 pages!
Granted, the print is pretty big on each page, but 400 pages is still a
lot! I got through 50 pages last night. I'll probably play by ear how
(or even whether) I'll read their books and blog about them. I was
hoping to find summaries of their arguments on the Internet.
Unfortunately, it appears that the apologists and preachers I came
across in my Internet searches are more interested in the fact that two
intellectuals converted to Christ after trying to disprove Christianity,
than they are in the substance of what these two intellectuals actually
argued.
Just giving you my impressions so
far, what I read last night of West's book surprised me, somewhat. Thus
far in my reading, West is attempting to demonstrate that the
resurrection stories in the four Gospels do not contradict each other,
even if they do tell the story differently. I'm not sure why a person
wanting to argue that Jesus' resurrection happened would start
there. My impression is that people who try to harmonize the
resurrection stories do so because they already have a Christian faith.
I have a hard time believing that a skeptic would read the resurrection
stories and become a believer because he thought that they could be
harmonized. My hunch is that he would conclude that the resurrection
stories happened for other reasons, then he would try to
harmonize them. But I could be mistaken. There are apologists who
argue that the differences among the resurrection stories actually
attest to their historicity, for the differences show that there was not
collusion among Christians, plus authentic eyewitnesses accounts tend
to differ, in areas.
Something else that
interested me was West's beliefs about the Gospels. West says that
Matthew was written soon after Jesus' ascension (though I'm not sure how
soon West thinks that was----modern scholars believe it was written
decades after the historical Jesus), and it was for Jewish converts to
Christianity. Mark's Gospel came later, as a condensed version of
Matthew's Gospel, and Mark's Gospel was for Gentiles (either in Egypt or
Rome). According to West, Mark has details that Matthew lacks because
Mark has to explain things to his Gentile audience: Matthew does not
have to say explicitly that women went to Jesus' tomb to anoint Jesus'
body, since his Jewish audience would already assume that was the case.
Mark, however, does say that explicitly because his Gentile audience would lack that familiarity with the Jewish custom of anointing a dead body.
Another
item that intrigued me was how West characterized the Gospel authors.
West is struggling to understand where Mary Magdalene was during the
events surrounding Jesus' resurrection. Was she with the other women
when a young man told them that Jesus was risen, after the women came to
anoint Jesus' body, as some of the stories seem to indicate? Or was
she alone at Jesus' empty tomb, baffled at where Jesus' missing body
could be, until Jesus comes to her as a gardener, which is what we see
in John's Gospel? The impression that I'm getting----and I'm open to
correction on this----is that West thinks that the women went to the
tomb at different times, rather than all at once. But West makes this
interesting statement, on pages 24-25 (and I have altered the spelling
and punctuation to make it more readable for modern readers): "But let
it at the same time be remembered, that the greatest part of the
evangelical writers were illiterate men, not skilled in the rules of
eloquence, or grammatical niceties, against the laws of which it is easy
to point out many faults in the writings of most of them." West may
not buy into a notion that the Gospel stories about Jesus' resurrection
contain God's direct and perfect words; but he may believe that early
Christians had a genuine experience, and that they conveyed that in
their different, flawed, human ways.
We'll see how this book plays out!