"The God Who Wasn't There"

There's a new movie coming out by this title that makes the argument that Jesus never existed. You can find trailers at thegodmovie.com. Anyway, I viewed the trailers and there's really nothing new in this movie that hasn't been argued before, and it's typical of the muddled thinking the "Jesus Seminar" and its members. By that I mean, they tell part of the Christian story and then attack that part standing alone, then attack another part standing alone, misportray aspects of Christianity, and selectively put up straw men as the defenses that Christianity has to these arguments.

They never have, and can't, attack an accurate portrayal of the entire Christian story.

Anyway, the main premise of the movie seems to be that because there were lots of gods prior to Jesus who healed people, rose from the dead etc, etc, that therefore the Gospels were written not as historical documents, but mythological ones. The historicity of Jesus came later.

What they forget to tell you is that the Gospels are not the only Christian documents. There is Acts, and the letters. Acts tells the story of the followers of Jesus after his resurrection. Well, gee, want to tell me who these followers were following if "He Wasn't There"? And the scholarship says that Acts was in fact, as Christianity has always asserted, written by the same guy who wrote the Gospel of Luke. And the letters of Paul tell of his personal experience of Jesus, and occasionally asks his readers to check his words with the still-living witnesses in their midst. Who's Paul talking about?

So, that's the kind of stuff they leave out because it can't be answered. Which, if you think about it, is just flat dishonest scholarship.

For a straw-man example, they say that the Christian answer to this "prior Christs" "problem" (which as I will shortly argue isn't a problem at all) is that the devil knew what was going to happen and so put it into people's heads thousands of years prior in order to give less credibility to the story when it actually happened. They quote one guy from 300 A.D.

Frankly, I had never heard that explanation before, and I read a lot about this kind of stuff. It sounds like a wrong-headed explanation, but I'm not going to get into that.

In fact, I think (and I probably got this from Chesterton, Barth, Lewis or A.W. Tozer, I just don't recall) that the "prior Christs" fact actually enhances the story of Jesus. Remember -- all things were created through him. So, shouldn't it be the case that the natural world has imbedded into it so deeply "who Jesus is" that all people all over the world were able to look at the world and glean from it the idea of a suffering and ultimately triumphant savior? In other words, these prior Christ stories don't make the Jesus story less likely to be true; they simply show that even the natural world breathes with that story; that even pagan tree worshipers understood that something was awfully wrong and needed to be fixed, and it could be done only through something much like what actually happened.

The movie doesn't (or at leasst not in the trailers) bring this argument up -- because I don't think they can defeat it, and these days it seems this kind of intentially deceptive omission is everywhere. Instead, the movie simply says that "the devil did it to trick people" argument "is the same answer the Church gives today."

Honestly, I've never heard that argument before and I have been going to Church for 45 years and read just about everything. And, it's a weak straw-man argument that the movie then dutifully sets about disarming. Because they can't assail the real response.

Here is a recent photo of the movie's director: