Challenging Times

Good points

Omaar makes some good points in this last programme:

Jesus’ resurrection is ‘perhaps the greatest miracle told in the Bible.’ It was as strange and unbelievable in the first century as it is today (something that skeptics today routinely deny).

The first people to see Jesus risen were women, and women’s testimony did not count for much in the ancient world (This is evidence for the resurrection – why base your account on the testimony of ‘unreliable’ witnesses, if you are making up a story?)

It was the combination of his followers encountering the risen Christ, and of Jesus’ body being missing, which convinced the disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Omaar explores the possibility that Jesus’ body was just dumped on a rubbish tip, to be scavenged by dogs and vultures. However, Omaar rightly points out that there is no historical evidence to suggest that this happened. The Dead Sea Scrolls say that bodies must be properly buried – even the bodies of criminals. Until recently, there was no solid archaeological evidence for the burial of crucified criminals, until the discovery of the remains of Johanan, the crucified man. Victims of crucifixion were indeed given a proper burial. Jesus’s body was not just heaved out onto a rubbish tip to be destroyed by scavengers.

Poor research

I don’t like to be picky (well, sometimes I do), but this is a BBC programme, put forward as a serious documentary. In places, the research is shoddy: Omaar says that Jesus appeared to Thomas before he appeared to Peter. He talks about the women at the tomb ‘hearing a voice.’ (The visuals at this point are all shrouded in mist and mystification.) But the women didn’t hear a voice; they saw angels, who spoke to them. There’s nothing in the accounts to suggest that this was dark or creepy or mystical. Omaar says ‘we’re not told if they [the disciples] went to check for themselves.’ (on the women’s story). Yes we are. Yes they did. In places, it sounds as if his script is based on a hurried and casual reading of the text.

He also says that there is ‘nothing to say that the resurrection was caused by God.’ This is an odd thing by any standard: who else does he think might have caused it? Darth Vader? Aliens? As far as I know, no-one (whether believer or unbeliever) has ever suggested that if the resurrection really happened, it could have been caused by anyone other than God himself.

Weakest

The programme is at its weakest when it starts to explore what happened after the resurrection – particularly the events of Pentecost and the conversion of Paul of Tarsus. He says of Pentecost, ‘until then, Jesus had been a memory.’ But now ‘a new faith flickered into life.’ This is sort of true, but needs a lot of unpacking. He also talks about the Gospel stories being written down in the 60s AD, as the Church faced persecution. Yes, again, it’s probably true, but this doesn’t challenge their historical basis.

Postmodern

Omaar focuses on what the disciples made of Jesus’s resurrection, and deliberately skates round the question of whether it actually happened. This, he tells us, is a question of personal belief. Well yes. So is the question of whether the earth is flat – but there is still a right answer and a wrong answer. With most other historical questions, we don’t just bracket out the facts as being somehow inaccessible to us.

Omaar returns again and again to the question what the miracles mean: what they meant to Jesus’s first followers; what they mean to us today. His conclusion is that there is ‘no single answer to their meaning.’ It’s all very postmodern. They mean whatever you want them to mean.

Between his refusal to address the central question of whether the miracles actually happened, and his postmodern dithering about what they mean, Rageh Omaar has managed to make three programmes which obscure, rather than clarify, what the miracles were about.

Omaar works hard to give the impression he is a fair and objective seeker after the truth. Of course, the reality is that no-one is ‘objective’ in that sense, least of all a BBC reporter.

Miracle worker

Omaar (rightly) notes that both Jesus’ friends and his enemies believed that he was a miracle worker. In fact, in Jesus’ own life time, and for many years afterwards, no-one denied that he had done the miracles. They couldn’t deny it: there were too many witnesses.

As in the first programme, Omaar continues to offer explanations of the miracles that explain them away – for example, the demon-possessed were actually suffering from mental illnesses, many of the people healed were suffering from psycho-somatic illnesses, and so on. There is nothing new in this.

He points out that healers and exorcists were (if not exactly common) a well-known phenomenon. He visits the tomb of Henina Ben-Dosa, a Jewish healer and exorcist from the same time as Jesus.

He says that ‘miracles were part of the fabric of life.’ I really question this. It portrays the people of Jesus’ time as primitive, superstitious and ignorant, gullible enough to believe anything. But this is just nonsense. They knew as well as we do that the dead don’t normally come back to life, that you can’t usually walk on water, and that water doesn’t just turn into wine. If they had taken this kind of thing for granted, there would have been no reason for them to see Jesus’s miracles as anything special. The whole point is that they knew that things like that don’t usually happen.

Son of God?

Omaar says that the belief that Jesus is God’s only Son is the defining belief of Christians – which, of course, it is.

He says that in this second programme, he is trying to get behind what Jesus’ contemporaries believed about him, to what Jesus himself believed. Did he think he was the Son of God?

Omaar says (rightly) that Jesus believed his relationship with God was unlike that of any other Jew in history.

When Jesus stilled the storm, he was making an implicit claim to be God (or at the very least, to have a special relationship with God). In the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament), only God could calm the storm (See, for example, Psalm 65:7, Psalm 107:25-30, Proverbs 30:4)

With the paralysed man let down through the roof, Jesus told him ‘your sins are forgiven.’ (Mark 2:5) Omaar (rightly) sees this as an implicit claim to be God. Only God could forgive sins.

The second episode ends with Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem. Rageh (again, rightly) identifies Jesus’ riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as being an implied claim to be the Messiah (Zechariah 9:9). He asks whether Jesus expected to die, and asks, ‘if he believed he was God, what purpose could his death have?’ Omaar identifies the ‘Suffering Servant’ from Isaiah as the picture that was central in Jesus’ thinking, and the only way to make sense of his behaviour. He closes the episode by hinting at a discussion next time of the greatest miracle of all – the resurrection.

So far, so good: Jesus apparently really did believe he was the Son of God – or at the very least, that he had a unique relationship with God.

Bewildered and frustrated?

But there is another strand which is not so positive: In this second programme, Omaar gives a lot of attention to Jesus’ baptism by John, and the temptations that followed it. (Incidentally, we know about John the Baptist from the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, as well as from the Bible). The key question is: did Jesus change at his baptism? And if so, how much did he change? According to Omaar, his baptism was the point at which he first became clear about his mission – but it was also followed by a period of doubt and confusion. He talks about Jesus retreating to the wilderness, ‘bewildered and frustrated.’

In the incident with the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:24-30), Omaar rightly says that the central issue is that this woman was not Jewish. However, he portrays Jesus as having doubts in his own mind about his mission. This is certainly a strange and ambiguous event. Did Jesus change his mind? Or was his purpose to get his followers to think? There isn’t really any need to assume that he was full of doubt and muddle.

In spite of Omaar’s implied objectivity, there is a specific viewpoint here: his psychological portrait of Jesus only makes sense if Jesus was just a mortal man who somehow came to believe he was the Son of God (but was mistaken). On the other hand, if he really was the Son of God, then the psychology is all wrong.

Omaar portrays Jesus as learning more about himself and his role as he went along. He talks about Jesus being on a ‘journey of self-discovery.’ All very contemporary, but not very true to the evidence available in the Gospels. There is some ‘spinning’ of the historical data going on here.

The picture’s worth a thousand words

Alongside Omaar’s commentary, there is a kind of ‘visual subtext’ which amplifies this spin. While the words may appear to be striving for objectivity and balance, the pictures often say something more objectionable. It is these objectionable images, rather than the words, that are likely to stick in people’s minds:

• The images portray Jesus during his temptation as being afraid of the devil.
• Omaar talks about Jesus’ ‘violent approach’ to exorcism – he ‘shouted at’ the demons. The images for the exorcism of Legion show Jesus grabbing the man’s face and shouting at him. But this is pure fiction. It has no basis at all in the documentary evidence.
• When Jesus heals the paralysed man let down through the roof, the images show him forcibly throwing the man off his pallet onto the ground. Again, this is pure imagination.
• In the encounter with the Canaanite woman, Jesus shouts at her angrily and repeatedly. Again, this is pure fiction.

This kind of fiction really is not appropriate in something that claims to be a serious documentary.

My conclusion, at the end of the second episode, is that this series strives to portray Omaar as an honest seeker after truth, but in fact it is heavily slanted towards a skeptical, modernist view of Jesus and the miracles. This is seen particularly in:

1. the way it spins some of the historical data, and
2. the way the visual images present Jesus

‘There are very few books or courses today which I feel could benefit everyone involved in teaching in our churches, from Sunday school teacher through to pulpit proclaimer, but I think this DVD would!’

This comment comes from a new review of our ‘Teaching the Bible in Challenging Times’ course, by Trevor Lewis, just published in the August 2006 isse of ‘Evangelicals Now.’

Go here to read the full review

The first part of this three part series, presented by the Muslim reporter Rageh Omaar, was broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 6th August 2006.

In this first part, Omaar talks mainly about four of Jesus’ miracles:

• bringing back to life the widow’s son at Nain
• feeding the five thousand
• walking on water
• turning water into wine

This programme was not as hostile to Christianity (or the miracles) as I expected it to be, based on the press publicity.

Omaar does briefly offer alternative explanations for the miracles:

• maybe the young man at Nain wasn’t dead, but only in a coma
• at the feeding of the five thousand, perhaps the people had saved their meagre lunches, and then been prompted to share when they saw each other’s generosity – or perhaps they weren’t really fed at all, it was just mass hysteria
• there have been ‘many possible explanations’ of Jesus walking on the water – perhaps it wasn’t real. Maybe the disciples just saw a religious vision.

This kind of ‘explaining away’ of the miracles is not new. It has been around for centuries. On the other hand, Omaar does seem to allow for the possibility that the miracles could be real. At one point, he asks

‘If you believe that God exists, why couldn’t such a miracle take place?’

However, Omaar is more interested in the symbolic significance of the miracles – a significance that is rooted in the Old Testament. He is also interested in the claims that are implied in the miracle stories. Hee says that the miracle stories are important for what they show us about how people saw Jesus – and even about how Jesus saw himself:

• When Jesus raised the widow’s son, he is repeating something that Elijah did in the same locality eight hundred years earlier. Jesus is a new prophet like Elijah. The people of Nain recognise this when they say ‘A great prophet has appeared among us.’ (Luke 7:16)
• The feeding of the five thousand is full of allusions to the Israelites in the desert being fed with quail and manna. Jesus is the new Moses, who can give his people military deliverance from their Roman overlords.
• When Jesus walked on water, this alludes back to the Israelites crossing the river Jordan, under the leadership of Joshua – the man who established the Israelites as a nation. Jesus is the new Joshua who can re-establish the nation.
• When Jesus turned the water into wine this linked back to the Old Testament picture of the kingdom of God as a wedding feast. Implicitly, Jesus was claiming that the kingdom of God had already arrived, in him.

Putting all this together, Omaar says that we see that Jesus was not the ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ that is so often portrayed in sanitized western Christendom. Rather he was a deeply subversive, radical figure, making claims that had a huge political dimension.

The media always hype things up, and always try to make things look more controversial – and interesting – than they are. After all, it’s controversy that sells papers, and improves viewer ratings.

This series exaggerates the importance of what it says. It presents as new things that have been known for hundreds of years. It portrays as controversial material which is widely accepted. (I’ve even preached some of it. You don’t get much more conservative than that!)

For example, Omaar says that the feeding of the five thousand is symbolic of Moses providing manna in the wilderness. What’s new or controversial about that? It’s right there in the Bible. Jesus even called himself the ‘bread from heaven.’ (John 6:32-35)

Quite simply (at least as far as the first episode is concerned) this series is not as important as it thinks it is.

On the other hand, Christians should be encouraged to watch it, to see how Jesus’s words and actions relate to the Old Testament, and to understand why during Jesus’ lifetime people saw him as subversive – subversive enough that they crucified him.

When Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ‘ came out, it ignited a firestorm over its extreme violence and apparent anti-semitism. A lot of people around the world – including ourselves – leapt to Gibson’s defence: of course the film wasn’t anti-semitic. How could it be?

Last week in California, Gibson was stopped on suspicion of drink-driving, and responded with a tirade of anti-semitic abuse (for which he has since apologised, describing his own words as ‘harmful.’)

Nice one, Mel.

You just managed to shoot yourself in both feet – as well as shooting the rest of us who defended ‘The Passion.’

Is there anything useful to learn from what has happened?

* Whatever Mel Gibson’s views, and whether or not the film was intended to be anti-semitic, the true story of Jesus’s crucifixion is not anti-semitic, and should never be used as an excuse for anti-semitism. We’ll say it again: Jesus was a Jew (still is, for that matter). His best friends were also Jews.

* We are all deeply flawed and fallen – that’s why we need a saviour. I’m not justifying Mel Gibson’s words; if they were as reported, they were reprehensible. What I am saying is that we should not put anyone on a pedestal. We’re naturally sinners. If we ever become saints, it’s only as a result of God’s mercy.

* Gibson has had the guts to admit that he was wrong, and to ask for forgiveness. This doesn’t make what he said right – but it is the only right way to deal with it.

The 2005 revival of Doctor Who has been one of the most successful television resurrections ever.

One reason for the success of both the classic series and the new version is that the Doctor is – as Christopher Ecclestone describes him – a ‘moral force’ for good in the Universe.

Another is the series’ ability to re-invent itself – both within the classic series, and between the classic and the new series.

But the new series is different from the classic version in some significant ways. This is science fiction for postmodernity:

In the new series, much more is done with a knowing wink to the audience – it is full of contemporary cultural references.

In both the classic series and the new, science is the path to truth, and the Doctor is the expert who can always bring the true scientific explanation to bear- except that, in a typical postmodern twist, in the new series, science is not the only path to truth.

Another change is that in the new series there is some overt hostility to religious faith that was absent from the classic version.

Relationships in the new series are much more intense than they were in the classic version. Perhaps one of the biggest changes is that the character of the Doctor has been sexualised – in subtle, if not necessarily overt, ways.

A series of new pages by Dave Ferguson on the ‘Facing the Challenge’ web site explores the differences. Read more…