God: The Failed Hypothesis (24 page)

Since ancient times, many authors have commented on how the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as described in the Gospels are similar to those of savior-gods in various mystery cults and religions of the ancient world
¹⁴
. True, this remains an issue in much dispute. In his exhaustive study of the background of the early Church, Everett Ferguson warns us that many of these generalizations are fraught with methodological problems and that the similarities between the mystery religions and Christianity is exaggerated
¹⁵
. He admits, however, that much of that exaggeration came from Christian writers themselves. The Jesus story sure looks just like you would expect it to look if it were patterned after other god-men
¹⁶
.

Early Christian Church fathers such as Justin Martyr (d. 165), Tertullian (d. 225), and Irenaeus (d. 202) felt compelled to answer the pagan critics of the time who claimed the lesus story was based on earlier traditions. The fathers claimed that the similarities were the work of the devil, who copied the Jesus story ahead of time to mislead the gullible.

Lacking any independent corroboration, we cannot take the New Testament as evidence for a single fulfilled Old Testament prophecy, much less sixty-one. The story of Jesus, as related in the Gospels, with all its unconfirmed miraculous happenings, is more plausibly explained as largely a fiction, written to not only conform to Judaic traditions but also to move Christianity beyond being a tribal religion. The story appealed to gentiles as well, with the incorporation of many of their god-man myths
¹⁷
.

This is not to say that the myth of Jesus is not based on a real person, although some scholars have tried to make that case
¹⁸
.

That assumption is not necessary for the case against God. We have seen that the Gospels cannot be used as evidence for the success of various Old Testament predictions because we have no independent confirmation that those events ever occurred.

Old Testament Prophecies

A similar conclusion can be drawn about Old Testament predictions of events within that document itself. On his Web site
Reasons to Believe,
physicist Hugh Ross lists a number of Old Testament prophecies that he claims were fulfilled. In addition to the predictions of a Messiah that have already been discussed, Ross lists several predictions where the predicted event occurs in the Old Testament. For example, quoting Ross, “One prophet of God (unnamed, but probably Shemiah) said that a future king of Judah, named Josiah, would take the bones of all the occultic priests (priests of the ‘high places’) of Israel’s King Jeroboam and burn them on Jeroboam’s altar” (1 Kings 13:2 and 2 Kings 23:15-18). This event occurred approximately three hundred years after it was foretold
¹⁹
. In his book
Bible Prophecy,
Tim Callahan notes, “1 Kings 13:2 refers to the northern kingdom as Samaria and since Israel was not referred to by the name of its capital until after it had fallen to the Assyrians in 721
BCE
, the prophet crying out against Jeroboam’s idolatry, which took place around 900
BCE
, was inserted by Deuteronomists hundreds of years after the fact
²⁰
.” All Ross’s examples, like those of McDowell, have no corroboration outside the Bible. Rather than making the extraordinary claim that something supernatural has happened and future events were foretold, the far more plausible, ordinary explanation is that the “prophecies” were inserted after the fact.

The Old Testament has numerous failures of prophecy as well. Here are just a few:

• Isaiah 17:1. Damascus is predicted to cease to be a city. In fact, Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities.

• Jeremiah 49:33 predicts that Hazor will become an everlasting wasteland in which humans will never again dwell. The King James Bible says it will become inhabited by dragons. None of this has happened.

• Zechariah 10:11. The Nile is predicted to dry up. This has not yet happened.

• Ezekiel 29, 30. The land of Egypt will be laid waste by Nebuchadnezzar, all its people killed and rivers dried up. It will remain uninhabited for forty years. This did not happen.

Biblical scholars will argue endlessly about these issues, but it is not necessary to enter into their conflict. We need to seek evidence that will stand up under the kind of scrutiny scientists give to predictive claims of extraordinary events in any field. The fact is that no independent evidence exists that any biblical prophecy has been fulfilled, despite the insistent claims of apologists such as McDowell, Craig, and Ross.

Physical Evidence

Events recorded two thousand years ago and longer by superstitious people accustomed more to mythological tales than objective observations cannot be taken literally. The scriptures look exactly as they would be expected to look if they were written without the deep insight of divine revelation.

But, again, it might have been different. Evidence might have been found that could not be dismissed as yet another myth in an ancient world filled with myths. Physical data, examined under the microscopes of modern science, could still provide for the type of verification of extraordinary claims that can be found in laboratories all over the world today.

In 1995 I walked into the mummy room in the Cairo Museum and gazed down on the earthly remains of Pharaoh Ramses II. I could see the hawkish facial features of the great king who reigned over Egypt for sixty-seven years, dying at age ninety-six in 1213 BCE—well over three thousand years ago! Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, and the numerous monuments (to himself) that Ramses had built during his reign, we know much about his life.

While no doubt many of the exploits depicted on the walls of temples were exaggerated, we can be sure this man existed and that many of the details of his life are known.

A few months later, I visited a museum in Thessalonica, Greece. There I saw bones that I was told at the time belonged to King Philip II of Macedon (d. 336
BCE
), the father of Alexander the Great. These remains had been discovered in Macedonia just a few years earlier, and my guide was a physicist involved in their dating. Since then, the remains have been reidentified as those of Alexander’s half-brother, Philip
III
Arrhidaeus, who was assassinated in 317 BCE
²¹
.

So, here we have detailed, identifiable physical evidence for the existence of men who lived long before Jesus. Now, Jesus never ruled a worldly kingdom, but we have been led to believe he was a person of some local renown. In principle, we could have found either bones or some tablet from his time that confirmed Jesus’ existence. The Shroud of Turin
²²
, and the more recent discovery called the James Ossuary, have turned out to be likely forgeries
²³
. They might not have been. And, in fact, these issues are still being debated. Perhaps someday a discovery will be made, especially since the region where Jesus lived is the most heavily excavated by archaeologists in the world.

For example, suppose some bones are found that can be identified as those of Jesus by means of accompanying physical evidence. This would disprove the doctrine that he rose bodily into heaven, which at least demonstrates that the hypothesis of Jesus’

bodily resurrection is eminently falsifiable. Such a discovery would not ring the death knell of Christianity (although William Lane Craig seems to think so) where, today, most Christians think in terms of immaterial spirits as the entities that survive the grave and dwell in heaven or hell. A discovery of physical evidence for the Jesus of the Gospels would at least put to rest the doubts that have been expressed about the very existence of the carpenter from Galilee. If they showed signs of crucifixion, then that part of the biblical narrative would be confirmed. Following a suggestion of Richard Dawkins, we might even imagine that the
DNA
found in the bones did not represent those of an earthly human, providing confirmation of Jesus’ otherworldy nature.

Of course this is all very hypothetical and not likely to ever happen. And the apologist can easily invent a host of reasons for why we have found no evidence. My point is simply that obtaining incontrovertible physical data confirming the validity of events as related in scriptures is not out of the realm of possibility. It could happen. Someday it may happen. So far, it has not.

Unearthing Nothing

The lack of physical evidence does not prove necessarily that some person or event described in ancient chronicles is purely mythological. However, in the case of a number of biblical events, the absence of supporting physical evidence that
should
have been found with high probability allows us to draw a strong, scientific conviction that those events never took place.

Such is the case for several of the most important of Old Testament narratives that describe people and events surrounding the very foundations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The details and references to the sources of data may be found in the startling book
The Bible Unearthed,
by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
²⁴
.

Perhaps the most important figure in the Old Testament (besides Yahweh himself) is Moses, who supposedly led the Jews out of captivity in Egypt and wandered the Sinai Desert for forty years. During his wanderings, according to the scripture, Moses often talked to God, obtained the Ten Commandments, and made a covenant between the people of Israel and Yahweh. With God’s guidance, Moses finally brought his people to the Promised Land, which, as modern Israeli prime minister Golda Meir once remarked, was the only place in the Middle East with no oil.

Finkelstein and Silberman report that no recognizable archaeological evidence has been found of an Israelite presence in Egypt prior to the thirteenth century
BCE
, when most scholars believe the Exodus took place. This was around the time of Pharaoh Ramses II, whose remains I viewed in Cairo in 1995
²⁵
. According to the biblical account, six hundred thousand Jews participated in the escape from Egypt. Even if this is wildly exaggerated, Finkelstein and Silberman argue that some archaeological traces of their wandering should have been found by now.

Despite extensive searching, “not a single campsite or sign of occupation from the time of Ramses II and his immediate predecessors and successors has even been identified in Sinai
²⁶
.”

Finkelstein and Silberman note that modern archaeological techniques are capable of tracing even the very meager remains of small bands of far more ancient hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world. They say, “The conclusion—that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible—seems irrefutable
²⁷
.”

Finkelstein and Silberman are part of a school of biblical archaeologists called “minimalists,” who argue that many biblical accounts of early Israel have little, if any basis in factual data.

They are opposed by the “maximalists,” who still claim that Bible accounts are generally confirmed by archaeology. One highly respected scholar, William Dever, has tried to straddle the two positions. But he has to agree with the minimalists on the questions of Moses. “Absolutely no trace of Moses, or indeed of an Israelite presence in Egypt, has ever turned up. Of the Exodus and the wandering in the wilderness—events so crucial in the Biblical recitation of the ‘mighty acts of God’—we have no evidence whatsoever… Recent Israeli excavations at Kadesh-Barnea, the Sinai oasis where the Israelites are said to have encamped for forty years, have revealed an extensive settlement, but not so much as a potsherd earlier than the tenth century B.C
²⁸
.”

The minimalists also cast considerable doubt that the great battles in Canaan, which the Bible describes as happening after the death of Moses, actually occurred. The cities in the region were poor and unfortified at that time, and excavations show no signs of destruction. Jericho had no walls to come tumbling down at the blast of Joshua’s trumpet. In fact, it was not even settied at that time, having been destroyed around 2400
BCE
, some nine hundred years before Joshua’s alleged conquest
²⁹
.

In short, the stories of Moses and his immediate successors are surely myths. In science, the absence of evidence that is required by a hypothesis constitutes a falsification of the hypothesis. The hypothesis of a God who selected out a small desert tribe as his chosen people and communicated the law to them while they wandered the Sinai Desert is falsified by the absence of evidence required by that hypothesis.

After Moses and Abraham (who is also probably a mythological figure
³⁰
), the next most important personages in the Old Testament are David and Solomon. They are described in the Bible as rulers of great wealth, presiding over the Golden Age of the briefly united kingdoms of Israel and Judea. Yet there is no mention of either king in Egyptian or Mesopotamian texts. No physical evidence has been found for David’s conquests or his empire. Archaeological support for Solomon’s great temple in Jerusalem or other building projects there and in other locales is nonexistent
³¹
.

At a recent meeting in Rome, archaeologist Niels Peter Lemche declared, “Archaeological data have now definitely confirmed that the empire of David and Solomon never existed
³²
.”

In 1993 a fragment of a black basalt monument was found at Tel Dan in northern Israel. It contained an inscription in Aramaic describing an assault on the northern kingdom of Israel by the king of Damascus around 835
BCE
and his defeat of the “House of David.” Some scholars now think this may be a forgery; in any case, it does not prove the existence of a united kingdom
³³
.