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Sorry to interrupt your Christmas cheer as you celebrate the coming of our Lord and Savior, but The New York Times is here with a fresh batch of bah humbug and I couldn’t let it pass.

BEHOLD:

Because I only have time for so much stupidity, let me focus on the last one.

The New York Times published the digital version of that op-ed on December 21. In it, writer Nicholas Kristof interviews Elaine Pagels, “a prominent professor of religion at Princeton University and an expert on the early church.”

You note that Matthew and Luke both borrowed heavily from Mark’s account but also seem embarrassed by elements of it, including the paternity question. Is your guess that they added the virgin birth to reduce that embarrassment?

Yes, but this is not just my guess. When Matthew and Luke set out to revise Mark, each added an elaborate birth story — two stories that differ in almost every detail. Matthew adds a father named Joseph, who, seeing his fiancée pregnant, and not with his child, decides to break the marriage contract. Luke, writing independently, pictures an angel astonishing a young virginal girl, announcing that ‘the Holy Spirit’ is about to make her pregnant.

I’m going to stop the illustrious professor right there, because that’s all you really need to read to know her position on things.

The other alternative – the most obvious and simple explanation – is that it actually happened that way.

Matthew, also known as Levi, was a tax collector who was despised by his people. He had nothing to gain for following the crucified religious opponent of Jewish leaders. Neither did Luke, a Greek physician.

In fact, none of Jesus’s disciples gained money or power or fame for continuing to talk about Jesus after he was executed. Heck, one disciple, Paul, was imprisoning Christians and had a bright future ahead of him if he would have stayed the course, but he kept claiming that Jesus had appeared to him and spent the next few decades enduring prison, hatred, beatings, and shipwrecks because he believed it!

Only a crazy man would be willing to be ostracized from all polite society, and death, suffering, and untold stress by continuing to say things like “This dead guy is actually the son of God, the fulfillment of the Law of Moses and the Prophets, and came back from the dead.”

And yet the people who followed Jesus weren’t crazy. Consider the Jewish leaders when they questioned Peter and John:

Then Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit and said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders: If we are being examined today about a good deed done to a disabled man, by what means he was healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified and whom God raised from the dead — by him this man is standing here before you healthy. This Jesus is

the stone rejected by you builders,
which has become the cornerstone.

There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved.’

When they observed the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed and recognized that they had been with Jesus. And since they saw the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in opposition.

And Paul, while he was under house arrest in Caesarea under the Roman governor, Festus, and had to make his defense to Rome’s puppet king in Israel, Herod Agrippa, as a legal formality before he could be sent to stand trial in Rome:

‘…To this very day, I have had help from God, and I stand and testify to both small and great, saying nothing other than what the prophets and Moses said would take place — that the Messiah would suffer, and that, as the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light to our people and to the Gentiles.’

As he was saying these things in his defense, Festus exclaimed in a loud voice, ‘You’re out of your mind, Paul! Too much study is driving you mad.’

But Paul replied, ‘I’m not out of my mind, most excellent Festus. On the contrary, I’m speaking words of truth and good judgment. For the king knows about these matters, and I can speak boldly to him. For I am convinced that none of these things has escaped his notice, since this was not done in a corner. King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know you believe.’

Agrippa said to Paul, ‘Are you going to persuade me to become a Christian so easily?’

‘I wish before God,’ replied Paul, ‘that whether easily or with difficulty, not only you but all who listen to me today might become as I am — except for these chains.’

Also consider Luke, who wrote the above account and thoroughly researched everything he wrote in his book about the earthly life of Jesus and the events that happened afterward.

From the very beginning of Luke’s first book:

Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us. So it also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first, to write to you in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed.

And the second book:

I wrote the first narrative, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken up, after he had given instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After he had suffered, he also presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.

Luke has an accurate account of places, names, years, and even nautical navigation and positioning. His account corroborates that stories written by Matthew and John, two of Jesus’s closes friends and disciples, as well as the account by John Mark, who likely drew the material for his short, “punchier” account from Peter.

Consider it: That very last part is historical speculation, but even the speculation about the Bible is more solidly rooted than any other historical or religious document in history.

After Peter was arrested by the Jewish leaders and scheduled to be executed (again, for refusing to recant his belief in what this Princeton “expert” thinks was a fabrication), he goes to the house of John Mark’s mother first, where people were gathered to pray for him.

After that, John Mark traveled on missionary journeys with Barnabas and Paul, but John Mark abandoned them in Pamphylia along the coast of modern-day Turkey. Barnabus later split with Paul in an argument because he believed John Mark deserved a second chance.

In Peter’s first letter, he calls John Mark “my son,” indicating the close relationship they had.

This brings me to my last point about the garbage that Ivy League professors and The New York Times thinks is smart and groundbreaking in 2024, after several centuries of Western “experts” trying to prove the Bible is all made up.

The Bible isn’t friendly to its “characters.” That is, we see the full measure of the sins of patriarchs, prophets, kings, and apostles. In those very same accounts where Professor Pagels thinks Luke and Matthew added “elaborate” details to avoid embarrassment and make the mythos more compelling, they left in all the details that made the disciples look foolish, dumb, and cowardly.

One of my favorite:

Jesus turned and told Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me because you’re not thinking about God’s concerns but human concerns.’

When Peter went all yellow-bellied and denied he knew Jesus after Jesus had been arrested in order to save his own skin, Luke even went the extra mile and added this unique detail in his account:

About an hour later, another kept insisting, ‘This man was certainly with him, since he’s also a Galilean.’

But Peter said, ‘Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Immediately, while he was still speaking, a rooster crowed. Then the Lord turned and looked at Peter. So Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went outside and wept bitterly.

The Passion of the Christ captured this haunting and poetic moment of betrayal and cowardice very well:

To the New York Times and washed-up Princeton professors:

The atheistic, post-modern grift is done. We’re done with it.

Your arguments have expired. They’re worn out and lame. Begone!

The Bible has thousands of manuscripts – more than any other document in history – that have been accurately preserved for thousands of years. It has eyewitness testimony and the account of Christ fulfills thousands of years of prior prophecy.

Millenia-worth of peasants, artisans, artists, warriors, and kings have believed in what the Bible has to say – not because they were uneducated hicks with less “refinement” than a NYT reporter or Ivy League expert, but because they had thoroughly researched the claims, studied the marvels of the universe around them, and come to this simple conclusion:

‘Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ – The Prophet Isaiah, 800 years before Jesus was born, in a response to King Azah of Judah

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