Overwhelming odds? Odds are 1 in 1,099,511,627,776

In my circle of friends and family and people I've known over the years, whether in daily life or on-line, I've known quite a few adamantly anti-Christian Jewish people. That is, they are people who take seriously all things Jewish and any thing Jewish precisely because it is Jewish, but who are determined to know nothing about Jesus, to the point of not reading the New Testament, or bragging about having thrown gift Bibles in the trash. I've read a few explanations of the fall of Jerusalem written from this mindset, and the one explanation that is completely off the table is that it had anything to do with rejecting Jesus. Any other explanation is given a fair hearing; that one is not open for discussion. This is written from the perspective of pondering ways to respond to these very adamantly anti-Christian Jews that I have known, particularly when some of them (as some of them have done) attack the faith of Christians.

According to the nearest calculator, 2 to the 40th power is 1,099,511,627,776. So the odds are 1 in 1,099,511,627,776 ... that would be the odds of flipping a coin and coming up "tails" 40 times in a row. It would also be the odds of what was reported in the Talmud about the years before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70 A.D.:

Our Rabbis taught: During the last forty years before the destruction of the Temple the lot [‘For the Lord’] did not come up in the right hand (Talmud; Yoma 39b)

The Talmud explains the casting of lots on the Day of Atonement. When the lot "For the Lord" came up in the right hand, it was considered a sign from God that the sacrifice of the Day of Atonement had been accepted by God, and that the sins of the people were atoned for by that sacrifice. This sacrifice dated back to the days of Moses, and was instituted as part of the covenant at Sinai.

So according to the Talmud, there's an overwhelming probability that something vital changed in the relations between God and man, and in the usefulness of the ancient covenant sacrificial system, and in the relevance of the Temple in Jerusalem, forty years before the destruction of the Temple. That would place this pivotal change in the year 30 A.D.

Something so vital must have left a record. What record do we have of something pivotal happening in 30 A.D. that affected Judaism as a whole, making the Temple and its sacrifices no longer recognized by God for atonement? The only candidate I'm aware of is Jesus' death and resurrection. If there's another candidate -- something that major in the history of Judaism in the year 30 A.D. -- there should be a record of it. Are there any other candidates? Because the odds that "nothing of significance happened in God's eyes" in 30 A.D. are 1,099,511,627,776 to 1 against.

Just going by the Talmud alone, the odds are overwhelming that Jesus is a deal-changer in God's eyes, making a shift of the relations between God and man that are on the level of a new covenant.

It is good news. The sacrifice, once for all, has been accepted.

Problems in forgiveness

Some things are harder to forgive than others. This year for Lent I worked on "keeping no record of wrong". The little accidental daily wrongs that don't leave much track on our lives, those are easy to forget. Here are the kinds of things I struggled with:

• They knew it was wrong, and what effect it would have, and did it anyway.
• They knew I was having to shoulder extra burdens that should rightfully have been theirs, and they kept on shirking.
• They know they are making a mess that they intend for someone else to clean up, and it doesn't trouble them.
• (In one case) They knew full well they were managing things so badly that the law was already involved, and show no inclination to change.
• (On older wrongs that still come to mind) When an old injury still sometimes causes trouble, it's hard to forget how I got that injury.

The things that are harder to forgive are the things where we don't have to keep a record of wrong -- our lives are marked by that wrong, or our lives are still being shaped by an ongoing wrong. Every day that wrong -- or its after-effect -- is part of our daily routine. The injuries that keep on hurting, or keep being renewed by the wrongdoer, these are the ones that really challenge our love. It's only love that can keep no records of wrong, so I have to think it does not challenge my memory or my determination to forget so much as it challenges my love.

Christ is risen. I have a long, long way to go. But it comforts me that Jesus -- risen indeed! -- still bore nail marks and the mark of a spear wound after his victory over death. Some of the ancient mystics are said to have had the stigmata -- that their union with Christ was so close that the scars of his wounds imprinted on their flesh. I'm not quite sure that I believe that. But it comforts me that Christ himself may bear eternal wounds and yet still loves, and still forgives. He still forgives me.

A different perspective: ethics and arguments

Have you ever eaten a piece of fruit and looked at the seed, and thought about the possibilities before throwing it away? Have you ever looked at an orange or apple or cherry seed and thought, "If I planted this, and all the seeds that came from it, it could be a grove, an orchard, a forest"? How many trees could be grown with a seed's children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren? I have sometimes looked at a seed in a piece of fruit and imagined a whole countryside planted with its offspring, beautiful and thriving. A seed thrown away has killed a forest that might have been.

I don't think it's possible to understand the Roman Catholic views on birth control without seeing humanity in the same way: good, and thriving, and full of possibility with each new birth.

I'm not here to convince anyone of the Roman Catholic views of birth control. I'm here to say: if we haven't really listened to each other, there are thoughts we might never have. (I sometimes wonder if thoughts are the same way. The seed of an idea, given time, might produce a great many other ideas. But if we don't listen ... if we throw it away ... our hard-heartedness and habitual disrespect might cause us to miss out on a whole forest of ideas. And on a whole forest of friends, while we're on the subject.)

Christ is risen!

You will not abandon me to the grave, nor let your holy one see decay. (Psalm 16:10)

There is ultimately only one hope for us: that God raises the dead. There is one key event in the history of the world that shows us we are not abandoned, not forsaken.

Today, of all days, we see the reason for the hope that we have.

Christ is risen.

My God, why have you forsaken me?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? - Jesus, on the cross

This year it is an especially urgent, focused question for me. This year, one thing weighs heavily on my mind: How do I offer support to someone who is asking that exact question? Someone I have known for a long time, but has always been skittish about church, has told me why: He blames God for his abuse during his early years at the hands of a vicious and sadistic parent. I will not go into details, but I will say: This is Good Friday, the day we look evil and human brokenness in the face. This grown man -- once a helpless child -- only had one question: Why had God forsaken him? If God protects us, why hadn't God protected him?

I know Jesus was much in the same situation: Innocent, but treated like dirt. Had the hatred of the hateful taken out on him, and blamed on him as if he had somehow caused it. Attacked and beaten without apology by those who thought they had right on their side. And not protected from it by God. Though with Jesus, at least, there was a greater good being accomplished, and for that he consented. As for the rest of us -- I have not heard of a greater good being accomplished by our being mistreated.

Of course this man blames the vicious and sadistic parent first of all. But he also blames his father, who didn't protect him as far as he can tell. And he also blames God, who didn't protect him as far as he can tell. Is it because he was "a worm and not a man", not worth protecting? "Worm" is probably kinder than anything his abuser called him.

For my own part, I have been on the receiving end of serious and intentional harm, too. And that's far from the whole of the evil I've received in this world. So I have struggled with similar questions. I expect many of us have struggled with that question: My God, why have you forsaken me?

I never did find an answer to the question, "Why have you forsaken me?" But I did find a willingness to trust Jesus, and then hope through him. It's because of Jesus that I know that suffering is not a sign that God has no love for us. It's because of Jesus that I know there is hope even after suffering injustice, brutality, and evil like that. And this hope is because of God's goodness.

It is God's goodness that makes it even more difficult to understand the evil around us.

May Jesus be blessed for joining the helpless, the despised, and the powerless. Without him, what hope would there be?

The Cross: Challenging how we think about God

One of my Sunday school classes once told me that God was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnivorous. They were teenagers, and the big words confused the less bookish among them; they meant "omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent" like the philosophers of religion have long said. They were telling me, they thought, what I wanted to hear. But where exactly did they get those ideas about God?

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God of the philosophers. - Blaise Pascal

I have heard it taught that if God ever stopped being omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent, he would not truly be God. I have heard it said that God is the being such that it is impossible to imagine a greater being. Who knows; that may be true, but the Bible does not say that. The Bible teaches us of a God who creates, a God who adopts a people, a God who acts to save humanity from our own wretchedness. The philosophers are interested in "omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent"; the Bible is not too interested in that. To construct that God, someone had to be looking for those attributes and chase down texts from which they could be deduced. The Bible is interested in God's faithfulness, his mercy, his compassion, and his love. If we're looking at what the Bible teaches about God, those are the plainer things.

This brings us to the cross. This week, Holy Week, we who follow Jesus face the heart of our faith: Jesus' radical challenge to our man-made ideas about God's glory. If God is defined as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent -- and immortal, while we're on the subject -- then that guy dying on the cross can have nothing to do with our ideas about God. And the philosophers who follow Christ often hurry to protect their glorious hypothetical idols from the threat of the reality of Jesus' cross.

What is essential to God's being? What is God's real nature? Is it "omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent" -- or is it his overwhelming love for his people? Which is the real nature of God, and which is just accidental and could have been otherwise? If Jesus' birth did not answer the question clearly enough, his execution does. The cross says that the essential part of being God is not being omnimax -- power without limit, knowledge without limit, presence without limit. The cross says that the essential part of being God is love without limit. Even to the extent of giving up the power, and the immortality, to reach a weak and dying world.

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For those who are interested in philosophy: Yes, without getting into technical jargon in the main post, I am questioning whether the essence of God involves his omnimax characteristics, or whether those are what the philosophers would call "accidents" -- non-essential traits that might have been otherwise, that can be lost without really altering the nature of things. Or to be more exact, I think the cross -- the necessary end of the incarnation -- challenges whether the omnimax characteristics are really essential to what it means to be God. If God intends to reveal himself to the world through Jesus, then God means that who he really is can be revealed better in the cross than in another way. And if we look elsewhere for the glory of God, we do it at the expense of what God wanted to show us.

Alternative Explanations for the Resurrection?

This is the final installment of a response to Michael Martin's article, "Why the Resurrection is Initially Improbable," Philo, 1, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1998): 63-73.

Mr. Martin argues that it is not necessary for him to provide an alternative explanation for the historical evidence of the resurrection. But during his writing about other explanations, he placed a precise mathematical figure on the probability of alternative explanations. How is it possible to calculate an exact mathematical probability value for another theory without having any specific alternative theory in mind? How can anyone else assess whether that probability figure is valid? As someone I know has jokingly said, "86.7234% of all statistics are made up on the spot." Without any basis for the figures that Martin quotes, his numbers will inevitably seem to be of this sort. The precise mathematical values seem hollow, if not downright misleading, when there are no supporting details given to show their basis.

It is also necessary that those who reject the resurrection at least look at alternative theories for this simple reason: if someone claims that some alternative explanation for the facts is more likely, that claim depends entirely on there being an alternative explanation for the facts in the first place. For some types of miracles such as a mysterious healing, the facts can be explained in various ways: the fact that first someone was sick, and then someone was well, could be explained by natural causes. Even in cases where no cure is known for a disease, it may yet be possible (in theory) that a naturalistic explanation exists but has not yet been discovered.

In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, the facts include that first he was dead – having been executed in public – and buried, then three days later he was alive again. Naturalistic explanations may be imagined for healing miracles, but at the point of death, nature no longer works to restore health. There is no natural process that restores the dead to life; that’s why naturalists’ insistence on opposing the resurrection is so strong.

There is only one explanation of the facts that he was dead before, then alive after: he was raised from the dead. All the alternative explanations of the facts are not actually alternative explanations of the facts, but selective denial of the facts. Some alternative explanations deny that Jesus died in the first place, such as the swoon theory. Some alternative explanations deny that he was alive afterwards, such as the stolen body theory, or the theory of mass hallucinations by the disciples.

The evidence that Jesus was seen alive again is strong enough to prompt opponents of Christianity to create theories in which Jesus never died; the skeptical community attests to the strength of the evidence for Jesus being alive whenever they argue for the swoon theory. The evidence that the tomb was empty is strong enough to prompt opponents to create a theory of a stolen body to explain it; the skeptical community attests to the strength of the evidence for the empty tomb whenever they argue for the stolen body theory. The evidence that many people did in fact see Jesus alive is strong enough to prompt opponents to create a theory of extended, shared hallucinations to explain it.

All of these alternative theories have something in common: they resort to altering the facts which they are supposed to explain. As such, they do not fully count as alternative explanations of the facts, besides being unlikely themselves. The swoon theory denies Jesus’ death; the stolen body theory denies the post-resurrection appearances; the mass-hallucination theory may explain Jesus' post-resurrection appearances but denies the reality of the empty tomb, something any of Jesus' highly-motivated opponents could have easily checked.

These are examples of the risk discussed earlier: when someone assumes it is always irrational to believe in a miracle, even granted that miracles are possible, then this anti-miracle view will necessarily lead to denial of facts or distortion of reality in the face of an actual miracle. Martin himself stops short of Hume's "always irrational" view of miracles, and stops short of the far-fetched theories which try to provide alternate explanations for the facts. But he does this at a cost: he has no viable alternative explanation, which is required for his assertion that there is a hypothetical alternative explanation that is far more probable than Jesus' resurrection. In how many arguments could someone claim that they have won because their explanation is more probable, but not have to provide that explanation? It would be like playing a poker game, and a person claims to have the winning hand; would anyone believe it if he refuses to show?

Rather than putting any hypothetical alternative explanation to the test so that someone else could evaluate his claim that it is far more probable, he wants that evaluation to be made simply on the fact that the resurrection is a miracle so something else must be considered more probable even if it happened. He wants his readers to follow his argument to deny the resurrection even if it is true, simply because it is a miracle. Granted it is a miracle; but if it is true, would you really want to deny it?

Is it really possible that everyone who claimed Jesus to be dead was mistaken about it, from those who watched him breathe his last, to the executioner who pierced his side to make sure of his death, to those who pried him off the cross, wrapped him in a cloth and laid him in the tomb? No, it is not; we can be certain of his death when he was buried. Is it really possible that everyone who claimed Jesus to be alive on the third day and after was mistaken about it, from the women outside the tomb to the close friends who gave him dinner the first night, the same who saw him come back again to show his wounds as proof to Thomas, those same close friends who cooked broiled fish with him by the lake, to Jesus’ brother who had been skeptical before but afterwards became a leader in the church? No, it is not; we can be certain of his life. There is only one explanation that explains the facts rather than denies them: Jesus rose from the dead.

Conclusion

I appreciate the job that Mr. Martin has done in setting out a number of different lines of thought that bear on peoples’ perceptions of the reality of Jesus’ resurrection. I believe his most valuable contribution to the discussion is actually choosing a relevant topic: he gets to the heart of the matter when he asks whether it is likely, whether we can really believe it, rather than arguing about endless side issues as is sometimes done. He added much to the conversation by acknowledging the importance of God’s purpose, and by his recognition that miracles can have value as a sign.

The omissions of Mr. Martin’s article are not unique to him, and I would not wish to fault specifically him for them. It is typical that non-Christians, assessing the probability of the resurrection, do not take into account the solidness of evidence for earlier miracle claims associated with Jesus and do not consider that when thinking about the resurrection. It is also typical that non-Christians do not take into account how few people have been founders of major religions when considering the probability of Jesus’ resurrection; it is typically assessed no differently than the probability of my next-door-neighbor’s resurrection. Again, it is typical that non-Christians' grasp of atonement is incomplete, and this mainly because it is a large subject with many aspects, where any one given explanation is almost sure to be incomplete by itself.

However, the historical evidence is solid, and God has clear reasons to raise Jesus from the dead as outlined previously. This puts the resurrection of Jesus on solidly trustworthy ground. While disputes against Jesus' resurrection will no doubt continue, it is largely a dispute waged against the evidence, fueled on the one hand by those who oppose the idea of Jesus’ uniqueness in God’s purposes, and on the other hand by those who have not yet ventured to hope that God would truly do what so many have asked all along: give a clear sign that this world is not all there is, that he has not abandoned us to the grave, and that he will raise us up at the last day. I'm concerned whether an amateur like myself has given a good enough account, but I hope I have shown why Christians hold to the certainty of Jesus' resurrection.