IS CHRISTIANITY A FRAUD? A Preliminary Assessment of the Conder Thesis third edition By Eric V. Snow AUTHOR'S PREFACE/ABSTRACT This essay defends the New Testament as historically accurate, as not being dependent for its doctrinal content on pagan religions and philosophy, and as having properly used the messianic texts of the Old Testament. It attacks Darrell Conder's Mystery Babylon and the Ten Lost Tribes in the End Time, which advocates conversion to some type of Judaism. This document was originally in WordPerfect 5.1 format for Windows 3.1, with elite (12 point) type and six lines of text per vertical inch, with footnotes. I wish to thank John Wheeler, a Global Church of God laymember who can read Hebrew, for his assistance on interpreting the messianic prophecies. TABLE OF CONTENTS Using the Ideas of Higher Critics and Jews, Conder's Ideas Aren't New......................................................2 Conder's Views of the Old Testament Opens the Doors to Deism or Agnosticism.....................................................2 The Book of Daniel Attacked?!......................................3 1. THE HISTORICITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT DEFENDED..................5 The Bibliographical Test as Applied to the New Testament...........6 How Can You Know If the New Testament is a First-Century Document........................................................7 Scholars Move Away from a Second-Century Date for the NT...........8 How People in Cultures More Dependent on Oral Tradition Have Better Memories.................................................8 How the Book of Acts Implies the NT was written before c. 63 A.D...9 The NT Wasn't Subject to a Long Period of Oral Tradition..........10 The NT Has a Shorter Gap Between Its Original Writing and Oldest Extant Copies...........................................11 Some Problems with Form Criticism, which Conder Implicitly Uses...12 The NT's Eyewitness Testimony Undermines Form Criticism...........13 Why Should This Eyewitness Evidence Be Believed...................14 Ancient People Knew the Difference Between Truth and Fables.......15 The Battle Between the Received and Critical Texts of the NT......16 The Average People of Judea Could Have Know Greek.................19 The New Testament Was Not Written in a Highly Scholarly Greek.....22 How Can Anyone Be Certain that the Right Books Are in the NT?.....23 Was the Canon Determined from the Top-Down by the Catholic Church's Hierarchy?............................................25 The Nature of the Sunday-Keeping Church Before C. 313 A.D. Reconsidered...................................................26 How Other Historical Information Confirms the New Testament.......29 The Reliability of Luke as a Historian............................30 The Date of Christ's Birth and the Census by Quirinius............31 Such Roman Censuses Not Absurd....................................33 Early Pagan Sources Which Refer to Jesus..........................33 Josephus as Independent Testimony for the NT and Jesus's Life.....35 i Conder's Reconstruction of Jesus' Trial Reconsidered..............37 The Romans' Indifference to Doctrinal Disputes Among the Jews.....38 Conder's Use of the Argument from Silence.........................40 Conder's Use of an Ancient Jewish Slander: Jesus Ben Panthera....42 The Internal Evidence Test: Does the NT Contradict Itself?.......43 Does an Addition or Subtraction of Detail Create a "Contradiction"?...............................................43 Supposed New Testament "Contradictions" Briefly Examined..........45 Conder V. Stephen: What Is the Verdict?..........................46 Did Matthew Misquote Zechariah?...................................49 Do Certain Messianic Prophecies Contradict the New Testament?.....50 How Does God Reconcile Justice and Mercy Concerning His Law?......51 How Did Judas Iscariot Die?.......................................52 Are the Genealogies of Christ in Luke and Matthew Contradictory or False?......................................................54 Was God's Curse Against Jeconiah Lifted?..........................56 The Great Trilemma--Jesus Christ: Lord, Liar, or Lunatic?........57 The Problems of the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection...............59 Why Denying the Tomb Was Empty Is Implausible.....................61 Were the Resurrection Appearances Hallucinations?.................63 Did the Disciples Steal the Body?.................................64 The Swoon Theory Weighed and Found Wanting........................66 How Is the Transformed Behavior of the Disciples to be Explained Otherwise?...........................................67 Conder's Attacks on the NT's Reliability Faulty...................68 2. CHARGES THAT PAGANISM INFLUENCED EARLY CHRISTIANITY MADE BY UNINFORMED.....................................................69 Ignoring Chronology in Order to Say Mithraism Influenced Early Christianity...................................................70 Ignoring Chronology to "Prove" Christianity's Dependence on the Mysteries..................................................72 The Need to be Specific When Comparing Between Christianity and Paganism...................................................73 Was the Taurobolium, a Pagan Rite, a Source of Christian Doctrine?......................................................74 Surface Similarities Do Not Prove Dependence......................76 Some Standard Differences Between Most Mystery Religions and Christianity...................................................77 The Fundamental Differences Between Pagan and Christian Miracle Accounts.......................................................78 The Unreliable Nature of the Miracles Attributed to Buddha........80 Is the Christian Passover Pagan?..................................81 Were Mithraism or Dionystic Rituals the Source of the Christian Passover?............................................83 Did the Pagans Have Savior-Gods Who Died as Jesus Did?............84 How the Death of Dionysus Was Different from Jesus'...............85 How Prometheus's Sufferings Were Different from Jesus' Death......87 Specifically How Jesus' Death Differed from the Pagan Gods' Deaths Summarized........................................88 Frazer's Thesis Ties the Vegetation Cycle to the Pagan Gods' Deaths and "Resurrections".....................................90 Did the Dying Savior/Sun-Gods Really Rise from the Dead?..........91 Reasons for Faith: Are the Parallels to Paganism Necessarily So Problematic?................................................93 ii Did Platonism or Hellenistic Philosophy Influence First- Century Christianity?..........................................96 Did Gnosticism Influence First-Century Christianity?..............99 Christianity Did Not Depend on Pagan Religions for Its Doctrines: A Summary.........................................101 3. THE MESSIANIC PROPHECIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT AS QUOTED IN THE NEW: WERE THEY TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT?.........................102 What Is the Foundation of Our Faith in the New Testament?........102 What Types Are, and How They Differ from Direct Predictive Prophecy......................................................104 The Suggestive Type Found in Abraham's Near Sacrifice of Isaac on the Altar............................................105 Conder on Micah 5:2--OT Prophets Can Suddenly Change Subjects and Times Without Warning.....................................106 Does Micah 5:2 Have to Refer to a Family/Clan Instead of a Specific Place?...............................................107 David as a Type (Forerunner) of Christ in Psalm 22...............108 Was "They Pierced My Hands and My Feet" in the Original Hebrew?.......................................................110 Zechariah 12:10--Will End-Time Jews Look Upon the God They Pierced?......................................................111 Isaiah 7:14--Does It Refer to Jesus' Birth?......................112 Isaiah 9:6--The Messiah is Born and Called "Mighty God"..........114 Just Who Is the "Servant" In Isaiah? Jesus or Israel?...........116 The Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52-53 Points to an Individual, Not Israel....................................................118 The Mournful and Conquering Messiahs: Is the OT Self- Contradictory?................................................120 When Was the Messiah to Come? The Potential Implications of Genesis 49:10.................................................121 Was the Second Temple to Be Standing When the Messiah Came?......124 The Seventy Weeks Prophecy Shows the Messiah Came by the First Century.................................................125 The Inserted Punctuation in Biased Jewish Translations of Dan. 9:25.....................................................126 The Battle Between Two Schools of Prophetic Interpretation over Dan. 9:24-27..................................................127 The Case for Jesus Being the Messiah Summarized..................128 Is the New Testament Anti-Semitic?...............................129 The Problems with the Conder Thesis Summarized...................131 For Further Reading..............................................132 iii IS CHRISTIANITY A FRAUD? A Preliminary Assessment of the Conder Thesis third edition by Eric V. Snow The New Testament's descriptions of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem and his ancestry being from the House of David "were clearly fabulous tales, contrived solely to connect Jesus to that place and family because of a simple misunderstanding by the Gentile forgers