The Wake

Hannah Storm, anchor for The Early Show, got a taste more bitter than coffee in her mouth the morning that she reported the news about the supposed discovery of Jesus Christ’s bones. Titanic director James Cameron, a statistician and some hopeful anthropologists were sure that a group of bones labeled “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” belonged to the Christian messiah and his family. “Well,” Hannah concluded, her voice full of a high school girl’s locker-room-gossip passion, “I think we can all agree that religion is a matter of faith and not science.”

As I watched the show over my bowl of Special K, I found myself bothered on multiple levels. For one thing, why had I only heard about Jesus’ bones on the type of crappy morning news show that has news tickers like, “New HPV vaccine will make teenage girls have more sex,” and blatantly promotes eyelash transplants? More importantly, where does this anchorwoman get off assuming that religion is a matter of faith and not science to everyone? Luckily for me, Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists (or CASH, as I’m sure they prefer to be called) had organized a debate between a Caribbean preacher and a Scholar of Criticism to argue the exact matter that I was questioning: had Jesus risen from the dead?

The debate took place at Smith Hall on a Thursday, Mar. 29. A large crowd showed up, chatting with each other freely, usually asking, “Which side are you on?”

Looking through the program, my inner high school debate nerd was excited to see that the debate was in traditional format, including cross-examinations and rebuttals. On the affirmative was Reverend Dwight Knight, with the kind of Southern preacher style and smooth, non-rehearsed speaking voice that suggested many a sermon given. On the negative was Robert Price, a man with a slight mountain-dweller’s beard and a voice created by too much cigarette smoke and soda fizz. Each had the tools necessary for a fierce battle of Christian philosophical sensibilities: a Bible and a mini Dasani.

Reverend Knight began, speaking of his personal relationship with Jesus. According to Knight, the Bible is “infallible when it comes to Christ,” and has been one of the most widely verified sources in history. Anticipating the argument that religious belief was merely wishful thinking and escapism, he pointed out that Christians could have easily found something more plausible on which to carry out those functions.

Price’s constructive was read from a pre-typed speech, and was full of prepared criticisms of the validity of the Bible. It became apparent that Price knew his scriptures, lining up various passages in order to show their contradictions. Clearly, the hours in his office writing books like The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man had educated him well. Finally, he proposed that, even if the sources seemed true, the event of the resurrection itself could have been a “collective hallucination.”

At one point, Price mentioned that two areas of the Bible were in disagreement about whether or not Jesus had risen physically or spiritually, one gospel claiming that his flesh had been touched, yet a passage in Corinthians claiming that Jesus had no postmortem usage for things as simple as human bones. I felt that this matter should have gotten more attention than it did, for if it truly didn’t matter that Jesus brought his bones along with him to heaven, then our previously mentioned Early Show host should have had nothing to worry about. Jesus could have risen and still left a nice excavation site behind for ambitious documentary producers to exploit.

The only follow up for this matter came during audience questions, when one member asked about the James Cameron film. Surprisingly, both parties agreed that the film was routine Easter-time propaganda, milking people’s annual interest in the matter.

“Jesus is living in France; Jesus founded the first McDonald’s,” Price jokes, writing off the ridiculous rumors. Apparently, the bones were found in 1981, and have been making an annual reappearance in headlines, each time to written off by secular authorities.

By the end, no winner had been declared, and the moderator, a Greek scholar who looked like an aged Precious Moments doll, looked like he wanted to fade into the blackboard.

I found myself leaving the debate with an explanation for my Early Show queries, yet just as clueless about the truth as before. Picking through the passages of the Bible can unearth a few contradictions, but as someone who doesn’t give the Bible the ultimate authority on truth, I didn’t think it was the only place to bother looking. For instance, one could look at Jesus’ moral maxims in the light of modern neurology and evolutionary psychology in order to see if his methods of judgment had predicted things about behavior that were later proven to be true. For example, taking a forgiving stance on behavior later found to be controlled by schizophrenia would denote an insight that was miraculously rare in the days when many schizophrenics had holes pounded into their skulls to “let the demons out.”

There are certainly enough odd scientific explanations for behavior to allow the claim that people 2,000 years ago would not have been able to hypothesize them by simply connecting A to B. For example, male gorillas often invade a new group by killing all the infants, which makes the female gorillas go into heat. As strange as this seems at the surface, the system suits a society that survives the best when led by a male stronger than all invading males, i.e. it is a self-accelerating system. However, a preceding and paradigmatic knowledge of evolutionary theory is needed in order to deem the male gorilla’s behavior morally permissible.

Thus, if a prophet came along that was making astoundingly counter-intuitive and verifiable claims about the ethics and metaphysics of the current era, it would be much more convincing that they truly were of divine origin. A dead man escaping from a rocky tomb and being touched by followers is surely a miracle, if it did happen, but there remain other ways of examining if one’s religious figure actually exhibits whatever qualities of godliness that particular religion deifies.