Hi {Professional Theologian}, Great to hear from you. It sounds like you are living a full life! And thank you again for engaging with me. You asked why I focus so much on this idea of the “God of the mind” of evangelicals. Why don’t I leave aside all these more abstract arguments and focus on the historical person of Jesus as described in the gospels. That, you seem to suggest, is the true source of knowledge about God. It is more concrete and historical. But it seems to me that the human brain tends to work the same way regardless of the bodies or times in which it is embedded. So, if I think that contemporary people have a “God of the mind”–an entity that seems real only because it is vividly imagined, but for which there is no incontrovertible evidence–then I also think that people in the ancient world had gods of the mind too. In fact, we modern people live in the age of enlightenment rationality, so that just about any person alive today has a more sophisticated understanding of the place that reason ought to play in verification than ancient people did. Given that, Jesus’ followers also had a God of the mind, and so their descriptions of this person named Jesus are just as suspect to me as the descriptions of modern people when they describe their God and their miraculous worldview. One of the epistemological challenges that the enlightenment laid at the feet of antiquity and medieval thinking was the weight that was given to eye-witness testimony. Before the enlightenment, eye-witness testimony was considered the end of the discussion. If someone said they witnessed it, then they must have! And this is of course an emphasis in certain scholarly takes on the NT, thinking of Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: as if the existence, or the claim of the existence, of eyewitnesses was a compelling corroboration, perhaps even amounting to proof. But reason is a kind of time travel machine because we can appeal to universal principles and we can push those principles back into history (and to the future too!). And we can say, for an easy example, that fire is produced by the same chemical process today as it was 3000 years ago. So, if someone says that three thousand years ago they saw a bush that kept burning and never turned to ashes, it is appropriate to be skeptical. That’s not how chemistry works and it is not how chemistry worked. And in this way, scientific knowledge can trump historical eyewitness accounts. The added factor that I’m bringing is to say that the same cognitive distortions that we can see at work today in people were also more likely than not at work in ancient people. So if an ancient witness states the sun stood still for a day, I am compelled by reason to ask two questions: First, is it physically possible that such a thing could happen? The answer to that is a resounding no. The physics are impossible. Second, I also have to consider the foibles of the human mind. Is it conceivable that people might come to believe that the sun stood still when that never happened? The answer is yes. In fact it is trivial to affirm this. Clearly, many people (perhaps most!) have believed things which were obviously not true. This has come home to me in an unexpected way, living through the insanity of American politics, in which modern educated people believe the most abject nonsense. Are we really going to say that ancient people were above such cognitive distortions? I think not. It is only with a great deal of effort that we humans can overcome our cognitive biases, and then only partially. This is where the scientific method comes in: by insisting on reproducibility and consistency, we take the question of verification outside of the human mind. Am I saying that miracles can’t happen by definition? No. But I am saying that if someone claims to have broken the laws of physics in such a spectacular manner, I’m going to need more than one single religious text that tells me so. Further, it seems naive to me to pretend that the question is whether, for example, Moses or Joshua experienced a day in which the sun stood still. That is not really the likely scenario. The question is whether a legend grew over time, not whether eyewitnesses in the moment experienced a supernatural event. Because to us that moment of the miracle (if there ever was such a moment) is only accessible via retellings which can’t be shown to be close to the event. Similarly, when it comes to the resurrection, the question is not merely (though it is partially) whether Mary saw the risen Jesus. The question is whether a story about Mary seeing the risen Jesus could have developed. And it seems to me that the answer is, again, trivially obvious: yes. A story about Mary seeing the risen Jesus could have developed, just as a story about 500 people seeing Jesus could have too, and it could even have been believed by Paul. But that doesn’t mean it happened. So the question when it comes to the Bible is not just “were there trustworthy eyewitnesses.” It is also whether there were manufactured stories about trustworthy eyewitnesses. Given their importance in the ancient world, it would not be surprising at all if such stories circulated. To summarize the entire thing, what I’m saying is that if modern people can be gullible and irrational, ancient people can be too. So why treat the testimony of the gospels as if it is above such considerations? Now, am I being overly skeptical? I don’t think so. I’m just applying well-understood and vetted methods of verification. If someone insists that I ought to be more open to supernatural phenomena, then my answer is this: don’t show me an ancient text that describes a miracle. There is too much noise between me and that event. Just show me a miracle now. Unfortunately, it seems that no one can do this, and to make matters worse, my request for evidence is seen as impertinent. I appreciate your sensitivity to my personal journey. There are issues there to be sure: a spouse who committed adultery, a vision of life never quite achieved. On the other hand, do they really matter? I might be “angry at God” (who I don’t believe exists). Does that change the chemical properties of fire? Does that make people less gullible? I don’t think so. My arguments should stand on their own, regardless of my motivations. And if they don’t, I want to understand why not. This is all I ask, and it seems to be a legitimate posture. I can’t think of a good reason to think otherwise. My personal history has brought me to this place, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean this place is illegitimate. That determination depends on reason and evidence. I’m also troubled by the transmission of the Jesus story between his life and death and its codification in the gospels. All we know about this is what can be deduced by an analysis of the texts themselves. That’s it. And that analysis brings up many questions–enough to keep New Testament scholars employed for several generations! Is the Jesus of the Q material the same as the Jesus of Matthew or Luke? How much did ideas about Jesus’ identity evolve after his death? To what extent are the gospels a product of the theological creativity of its various authors (or perhaps of other voices which have influenced them but not survived)? The truth is that we have nothing to go on except this one single thing: the mere text of the gospels. That’s it. Nothing more. It seems to me that we are putting an inordinate amount of weight on what a few religious authors from the first century said if we use those works to claim that everyone in the world today must become a follower of the individual they describe. And then there is the theological structure that they bring to the task. To what extent was the Jesus story just the vessel for a late-first century theological vision? The reliance on the structure of Hebrew scriptures to tell the story could be read as a propensity for theological license. I’m not saying I have the answers here, but the questions themselves are enough for me to withhold belief. We simply don’t know. And where knowledge is lacking, the appropriate response is caution. To do otherwise would be to give into confirmation bias. My view at this time is simply that we can’t know enough about Jesus to “believe in him.” We can certainly admire him, and even admire the theological and ethical vision of the authors of the gospels! But to accept their claim that he is the only source of salvation and ought to be followed and obeyed as though divine? This is a bridge too far. Cheers, Rob