MUST-READ: What does the Bible say about forcing pro-lifers to perform abortions?

Story from the New York Post. (H/T Hot Air – Cassy Fiano)

Excerpt:

A Brooklyn nurse claims she was forced to choose between her religious convictions and her job when Mount Sinai Hospital ordered her to assist in a late-term abortion against her will.

The hospital even exaggerated the patient’s condition and claimed the woman could die if the nurse, a devout Catholic, did not follow orders, the nurse alleges in a lawsuit.

“It felt like a horror film unfolding,” said Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, 35, who claims she has had gruesome nightmares and hasn’t been able to sleep since the May 24 incident.

The married mother of a year-old baby was 30 minutes into her early-morning shift when she realized she had been assigned to an abortion. She begged her supervisor to find a replacement nurse for the procedure. The hospital had a six-hour window to find a fill-in, the suit says.

Bosses told the weeping Cenzon-DeCarlo the patient was 22 weeks into her pregnancy and had preeclampsia, a condition marked by high blood pressure that can lead to seizures or death if left untreated.

The supervisor “claimed that the mother could die if [Cenzon-DeCarlo] did not assist in the abortion.”

But the nurse, the niece of a Filipino bishop, contends that the patient’s life was not in danger. She argued that the patient was not even on magnesium therapy, a common treatment for preeclampsia, and did not have problems indicating an emergency.

Her pleas were rejected, and instead she was threatened with career-ending charges of insubordination and patient abandonment, according to the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court.

Feeling threatened, Cenzon-DeCarlo assisted in the procedure.

She said she later learned that the hospital’s own records deemed the procedure “Category II,” which is not considered immediately life threatening.

WARNING: I am now going to be really mean. Please don’t read the rest of this if you don’t like me being judgmental against atheists.

I was thinking about the kinds of things that atheists think are “moral” and interpreting those things within a Biblical framework. I know that atheists support abortion because they don’t want to be compelled to diminish their own happiness by tending to the needs of their own baby, conceived as a result of their own irresponsible sexual behavior. So when they force a pro-life nurse to perform an abortion, what they are really saying is “I don’t want anyone punishing other people with the unhappy consequences of their own selfish pursuit of happiness, because then no one will judge and punish me when I do the same as they did”.

The problem is that atheists don’t want to be thought of as people who are willing to go as far as killing others in order to avoid facing judgment and consequences for their own actions. They have to invent some myth that justifies the abortion, instead. If they could only invent some plausible-sounding myth that would convince other people, and themselves, that their abortion was justified by some greater good. With the right myth, they could continue their pursuit of pleasure unimpeded by consequences and social disapproval. What possible myth could possibly provide moral justification for something as extreme as abortion?

Well, atheists decided to invent several myths to provide rationalization for abortion:

• Darwinism – animals do it, and we’re just animals, so let’s do it!
• overpopulation – we’ll all starve by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
• resource exhaustion – we’ll be out of oil by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
• global warming – too many people are driving cars so some have to go away!
• embryonic stem-cell research – it will turn lead into gold, you’ll see!
• rising crime rates – who cares about what economists say!
• etc.

So basically they are inventing myths in order to justify abortion as a legitimate means of pursuing happiness in this life. And this made me think of how child sacrifice was used by pagan nations in the Bible. It’s exactly what is predicted in Romans 1:18-32, which is arguably the most useful passage in the Bible for understanding what our existence here is really about. They didn’t want to take responsibility for those demanding, expensive children they conceived during unmarried sex, because those children would reduce their selfish pursuit of pleasure. So they invented a variety of baseless myths in order to make abortion appear “moral” to themselves and to others.

The Bible mentions the habit of inventing “speculations” in order to avoid having to obey the moral law. Atheists feel that they are too “smart” to be restrained by authentic morality, especially one that is constantly under fire in the public schools, the mainstream media and pop culture. So they do destructive things and then are surprised to feel guilty about it. They want to be happy while sinning, and to avoid the natural consequences of sin that serve as warning signs of the judgment to come. If anyone dares to imply that there is any morality higher than selfishness, (say, by wearing a cross in public or by questioning Darwinism), then they use the power of the state to silence them.

That’s atheist “morality”. The Bible’s diagnosis of sin really hasn’t changed in 2000 years. The people who rebel against God have just found more sophisticated myths to justify their selfish pursuit of pleasure. Before, it was Molech. Today, it’s overpopulation causing global warming. And they are not afraid to enforce these myths on religious people using the power of the state. Anything to make everyone celebrate their destructive actions as though they were in fact good. And if they have to kill many people to pursue happiness, well, that’s fine on atheism – there is no “right to life” on atheism. It’s survival of the fittest. Morality is just an illusion created by evolution.

And that is why a pro-life nurse was forced to perform an abortion – because she made people who reject God feel guilty by calling attention to a real standard of objective morality which defies atheistic efforts to rationalize hedonism with speculative myths. She was telling them that we should not take the life of an innocent unborn human being just because it makes us happier to do so. She was opposing their hedonistic purposes, and the speculative myths that they had invented to justify their selfish, irresponsible pursuit of pleasure. Christian morality isn’t a headlong pursuit of selfish pleasure. It’s about self-denial and self-sacrifice – which is not pleasurable.

As I wrote before:

The great moral accomplishment of atheists in the last 100 years has been to murder 100 million people. And this is not counting the millions of deaths caused by abortion, and environmentalist bans on DDT. It also doesn’t count the millions of broken homes caused by the sexual revolution, or the social costs of raising children without fathers who go on to commit crimes.

When the intuitive awareness of God’s moral requirements conflicts with the atheistic desire for selfish happiness, atheists first do the crime, then they search around frantically for some fig-leaf to justify it as “moral”. Any speculation will do, and the “evidence” can be manufactured (at taxpayer expense) to fit the myths. They believe that if they could just get everyone to see that evil is really good, and to celebrate their selfish hedonism, then their feelings of guilt would vanish, and their happiness level would increase. Their attempts to demonize Christianity and Christians is also part of their plan – they want to celebrate their own behavior as moral and deride the behavior of authentic Christians as immoral.

The very concept of morality is illusory on an atheistic worldview.

And lest anyone think that I can’t defend the Christian worldview as true, click here and start engaging.

Filed under: Polemics , Apologetics, Abortion, Moral relativism, Moral equivalence, Morality, Human Rights, The Bible, Right of Conscience, Conscience, Irresponsibility, Sin, Ethics, Mass Murder, Speculation, Sex, Immoral, Guilty, Hell, Overpopulation, Suppress, Secular Humanism, Secular Humanist, Quality of Life, Christian Apologetics, Rebellion, Sexual Activity, Unborn Children, Romans 1, Guilt, Damnation

MUST-READ: What does Climategate really prove about global warming?

In my opinion, the most important thing to come out of the e-mail scandal is the source code for the graph generation program.

What does the CRU source code really say?

Here’s the source code for the file “briffa_sep98_e.pro“.

It contains this section of the code which defines an array of adjustments that will be applied to the raw data. The purpose of the adjustments according the programmers own comments (lines that start with ; are comments) is to hide the decline in temperatures, so that the graph will look like a hockey stick. In the words of the programmer, the adjustment is called a “fudge factor” and is “very artificial”.

Here’s the adjustment, called a fudge factor by the programmer:

;****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

Line 3 creates the 20 subsets from the raw tree ring data, with each subset spanning 5 years. The subsets start in 1904. Line 4 (which wraps to the line 5) creates an array of 20 adjustments that will be applied to the raw data to change the original values. The data is stored in a variable called yrloc and the adjustments are stored in a variable called valadj.

The data is left alone from 1904-1928, adjusted downward from 1929-1943, lowered for 1949-1953 and then raised at the end.

Year	……..	Fudge Factor
1904		0
1909		0
1914		0
1919		0
1924		0
1929		-0.1
1934		-0.25
1939		-0.3
1944		0
1949		-0.1
1954		0.3
1959		0.8
1964		1.2
1969		1.7
1974		2.5
1979		2.6
1984		2.6
1989		2.6
1994		2.6
1999		2.6

And then the adjustment is actually applied to the data here, and stored in a variable called yearlyadj (line 3).

; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

The true believers respond

I notice that on Science Blogs, they are claiming that the adjument is never applied because the line that applies it is commented out. But they are using the briffa_sep98_d.pro file, not the briffa_sep98_e.pro file. Someone actually pointed that out to them in the comments, but they haven’t printed a correction.

Here’s a sample comment from the post showing how the global warmists respond:

Apparently similar code appears in another snippet the results of which weren’t commented out, but still, it doesn’t matter.

Well, it certainly doesn’t matter to the mainstream media since they didn’t report the story for two weeks.

Other comments in the source code explain that data is omitted

You should also know about comments in the source code like this:

(Click for larger version)

When the missing data is added, the decline appears

Here’s the graph of temperatures with the full data set used.

There’s the decline they’re trying to hide in red.

Re-considering the hockey stick graph

Take a look at this post from JoNova which re-caps the work of Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre.

Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph needed to be corrected:

Jo writes:

In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph that scared the world — tree rings show the “1990’s was the hottest decade for a thousand years”. Now temperatures exactly “fit” the rise in carbon! The IPCC used the graph all over their 2001 report. Government departments copied it. The media told everyone.

But Steven McIntyre was suspicious. He wanted to verify it, yet Mann repeatedly refused to provide his data or methods — normally a basic requirement of any scientific paper. It took legal action to get the information that should have been freely available. Within days McIntyre showed that the statistics were so flawed that you could feed in random data, and still make the same hockey stick shape nine times out of ten. Mann had left out some tree rings he said he’d included.

[...]Astonishingly, Nature refused to publish the correction. It was published elsewhere, and backed up by the Wegman Report, an independent committee of statistical experts.

And Keith Briffa’s hockey-stick graph that used cherry-picked data also needed to be corrected:

Jo writes:

In 2009 McIntyre did it again with Briffa’s Hockey Stick. After asking and waiting three years for the data, it took just three days to expose it too as baseless. For nine years Briffa had concealed that he only had 12 trees in the sample from 1990 onwards, and that one freakish tree virtually transformed the graph. When McIntyre graphed another 34 trees from the same region of Russia, there was no Hockey Stick.

The sharp upward swing of the graph was due to one single tree in Yamal.

Skeptical scientists have literally hundreds of samples. Unskeptical scientists have one tree in Yamal, and a few flawed bristlecones…

The CRU e-mails also reveal that CRU “scientists” sought to marginalize and persecute (Expelled?) individuals and scientific journals that disagreed with them. Is that science? Hiding your data and methods, and threatening people who disagree with you. Is that science?

So what does the graph of temperatures really look like?

Here’s what global temperatures have really done over time:

Does this graph show that global warming is man made? Do medieval knights drive around in SUVs too much? Well, if you are getting billions of dollars of taxpayer funding, then maybe they do. Maybe the data that shows that knights don’t drive SUVs is wrong. Maybe the data needs to be adjusted to show that knights DO drive SUVs. Maybe the sample needs to be tailored to prove that global warming is man-made.

Consider Melanie Phillips writing in the UK Spectator.

Melanie cites this e-mail about the Medieval Warming Period from Phil Jones, the director of the now disgraced Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.The Medieval Warming Period is a period during the Middle Ages when the Earth’s temperature was higher than it is today.

Phil Jones writes:

Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.

This is the director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This lab forms the backbone of the the case for global warming alarmism. Is this science? Is this how a scientist is supposed to treat the data?

Follow the money

Billions of dollars in funding are at stake.

Excerpt:

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

Popularizers like Al Gore would also benefit if the majority of non-scientists can be convinced that there is global warming, that global warming is man-made, and that government control of individuals and corporations is needed to fix the problem.

Here’s a simple explanation of how it works:

And the media covers up for them – they are lazy, ignorant of science, and they are overwhelmingly biased in favor of socialism.

Problems in the United States and New Zealand

Note: Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is suing NASA in order to get them to release their data. And in New Zealand, climate “researchers” have been caught modifying the raw data to show global warming that isn’t there. Take a look at this UK Telegraph article that tells the story so far.

Related posts

• Climate Research Unit servers hacked, e-mails made public
• Comparison of hockey stick graph data to a larger data set in the same area
• Government-funded research unit destroyed original climate data
• The state of the debate about catastrophic man-made global warming
• Peer-reviewed article in journal Science says solar activity impacts climate
• Famous UN IPCC hockey stick graph is based on cherry-picked data
• Princeton physics professor testifies to Senate about global warming
• Global warming advocates refuse to give their data to skeptics
• Peer-reviewed article in journal Science says prior ice melting caused by solar variation
• Oceans are not warming now
• Polar ice caps are not melting now
• Polar bear populations are not decreasing now
• Global warming is not caused by humans

Consider Melanie Phillips writing in the UK Spectator.

Melanie cites this e-mail about the Medieval Warming Period from Phil Jones, the director of the now disgraced Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.The Medieval Warming Period is a period during the Middle Ages when the Earth’s temperature was higher than it is today.

Phil Jones writes:

Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.

Filed under: Polemics , ACGW, Adjusted Data, AGW, Al Gore, Alarmism, An Inconenient Truth, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Australia, CAGW, Cap, Cap and Trade, Carbon, Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Emission, Carbon Emissions, Cause, Cherry-Picking, Climate Change, Climate Change Skepticism, Climate-gate, Climategate, CO2, Consensus, Corruption, Crisis, Energy, Energy Policy, Energy Tax, Environmentalism, Fear, Fraud, Global Cooling, Global Warming, Global Warming Skepticism, Greed, Green, Greenhouse, Hide the Decline, Hoax, Hockey Stick Graph, Ice, Inconvenient Truth, Indoctrination, Initiative, James Hansen, Keith Briffa, Melting, Michael Mann, NASA, New Zealand, NIWA, Obstruction, Ocean, Official Data, Penn State, Phil Jones, Polar Bear, Politicization of Science, Population, Propaganda, Raw Data, Regulation, Steve McIntyre, Weather Station

Doug Groothuis explains the correspondence theory of truth

Check out this short paper on truth and postmodernism by Christian philosopher Douglas Groothuis.

Excerpt:

The correspondence view of truth, held by the vast majority of philosophers and theologians throughout history, holds that any declarative statement is true if and only if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality, with the way things are. The statement, “The desk in my study is brown,” is true only if there is, in fact, a brown desk in my study. If indeed there is a brown desk in my study, then the statement, “there is no brown desk in my study,” is false because it fails to correspond to any objective state of affairs.

The titanic statement, “Jesus is Lord of the universe,” is either true or false. It is not both true and false; it is not neither true nor false. This statement either honors reality or it does not; it mirrors the facts or it does not. The Christian claims that this statement is true apart from anyone’s opinion (see Romans 3:4). In other words, it has a mind-independent reality. Minds may recognize this truth, but minds do not create this truth. This is because truth is a quality of some statements and not of others. It is not a matter of subjective feeling, majority vote or cultural fashion. The statement, “The world is spherical,” was true even when the vast majority of earthlings took their habitat to be flat.

The correspondence view of truth entails that declarative statements are subject to various kinds of verification and falsification. This concerns the area of epistemology, or the study of how we acquire and defend knowledge claims. [2] A statement can be proven false if it can be shown to disagree with objective reality. The photographs from outer space depicting the earth as a blue orb (along with prior evidence) falsified flat-earth claims. Certainly, not all falsification is as straightforward as this; but if statements are true or false by virtue of their relationship to what they attempt to describe, this makes possible the marshaling of evidence for their veracity or falsity. [3]

Therefore, Christians — who historically have affirmed the correspondence view of truth — hold that there are good historical reasons to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead in space-time history, thus vindicating His divine authority (see Romans 1:4; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11). [4] The Apostle Paul adamantly affirms this view: “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:14-15). Without the correspondence view of truth, these resounding affirmations ring hollow. Christianity cannot live and thrive without it.

This is a great article from a very smart guy who has written extensively about truth and postmodernism. Doug also has a blog, in case you want to pay him a visit.

Filed under: Polemics , Christianity, Correspondence Theory of Truth, Douglas Groothuis, Emotion, Emotivism, Empirical Verification, Epistemology, Experience, Faith, Feminism, Intuition, Knowledge, Law of Non-Contradiction, Laws of Logic, Logical Consistency, Moral equivalence, Moral relativism, Objective Truth, Objective Truth Claims, Philosophy of Religion, Postmodernism, Reason, Relativism, Religion, Resurrection of Jesus, Tolerance, Truth, Warrant

Can atheists ground objective moral values and duties, just like theists?

Consider this article from Thinking Matters in New Zealand.

Excerpt:

There is an objection to the moral argument for God’s existence, specifically the premise which states the best explanation for the foundation for objective moral values and duties is God. It is the idea that moral values and duties can be plausibly anchored in some transcendent, non-theistic ground. That moral values and duties exist objectively, but as brute facts, not needing an explanation for their existence. They are sort of eternal unchanging ideas that are necessary features of the universe. This position we shall call Atheistic Moral Platonism, and there are three ways we could respond.

Click here for the three ways to respond.

I actually used to hold to Deistic Platonism before I became a Christian, and that’s all documented in my testimony. To learn more about this topic, here is my series on how morality cannot be rationally grounded by atheism, and the series includes links to lectures and debates for further study. The relationship between a cosmic designer and objective moral values and duties is the easiest topic in the world to discuss with non-Christians. It takes only a little preparation, compared to more difficult issues like scientific evidence and the historicity of the resurrection.

Filed under: Polemics , Atheism, Theism, Moral relativism, Epistemology, Christianity, Morality, Ontology, Non-Judgmentalism, Objective Morality, Warrant, Immorality, Moral Values, Christian, Atheist, Moral, Grounding, Judging, Being, Ground, Ammorality, Agnostic, Platonism, Moral Duties, Moral Subjectvism, Ontological Foundation, Rational Justification, Moral Rules, Moral Intuition, Moral Obligations, Christian Theism

Did the divinity of Jesus emerge slowly after many years of embellishments?

How early is the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus?

When I answer this question, I only want to use the earliest, most reliable sources – so I can defend them on historical grounds using the standard rules of historiography.

The 4 sources that I would use are as follows:

• The early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, and 1 Corinthians 1
• A passage in Philippians 2
• Two passages from Mark, the earliest gospel
• A passage from Q, which is an early source of Matthew and Luke

So let’s see the passages.

1 Corinthians

I’ve written before about the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, which skeptical scholars date to 1-3 years after the death of Jesus, for a variety of reasons I covered in the previous post. Here’s the creed which definitely makes Jesus out to be more than an ordinary man. Ordinary men don’t get resurrection bodies after they die.

Here’s the passage: (1 Cor 15:3-8)

³For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,

⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

⁵and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.

⁶After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,

⁸and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Additionally, 1 Corinthians 1:21-25 talks about Jesus being “the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Paul is identifying Jesus with the divine.

²¹For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

²²Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom,

²³but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,

²⁴but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

²⁵For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

But it gets even stronger! You all probably already know that the most important passages in the Old Testament for Jews is the famous “Shema“, which is found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. The Shema is a strong statement of Jewish monotheism.

Here’s the passage:

⁴ Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

⁵ Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.

⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

So how does Paul fit Jesus in with this strong statement of Jewish monotheism?

Paul alludes to the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6.

⁴So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one.

⁵For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”),

⁶yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

Holy mackerel! How did that get in there? Paul is splitting the roles of God in the the Shema and identifying Jesus in one of the divine roles! Jesus is not an ordinary man. That passage “through whom all things came” foreshadows John identifying Jesus as “the Word of God”, which “became flesh and dwelt among us”. Holy snark – did you guys know that was all in here so early?

The date for 1 Corinthians is 55 AD. It should be noted that skeptical scholars like James Crossley accept these passages, and you can check it out in the debate audio yourself.

Philippians

Check out Philippians 2:5-11.

⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
⁶Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
⁷but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
⁸And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!
⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The date for Philippians is 60-61 AD. Still within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, and written by an eyewitness who was in contact with the other eyewitnesses, like Peter and James, whom Paul spoke with numerous times on his journeys to Jerusalem.

Mark’s gospel

Mark’s gospel is the earliest and atheists like James Crossley date it to less than 40 AD, which is 10 years after the death of Jesus at most. When you read the gospel of Mark, you are getting the earliest and best information available about the historical Jesus, along with Paul’s epistles. So what does Mark say about Jesus? Is Jesus just a man, or is he something more?

Check out Mark 12:1-9:

¹He then began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey.

²At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard.

³But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed.

⁴Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully.

⁵He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed.

⁶“He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’

⁷“But the tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’

⁸So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

⁹“What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.

And Mark 13:32, talking about the date of the final judgment.

³²“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

And again, this passage is establishing a hierarchy such that Jesus is being exalted above all men and the angels, too. And the passage is embarrassing to the early church, because it makes Jesus look ignorant of something, so they would not have made this passage up. Jesus is not an ordinary man, he is above the angels – God’s unique Son.

The “Q” source for Matthew and Luke

Here’s Matthew 11:27, which is echoed in Luke 10:22:

²⁷“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

²²“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Since this passage is in both of Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark, scholars believe that it is in the earlier “Q” source used by both Matthew and Luke. Q predates both Matthew and Luke, and so it is also fairly early (maybe 67-68), although not as early as Mark and Paul. Bill Craig writes that this passage is also embarrassing because it says that no one knows Jesus.

Learn more

You can learn more about the early belief in the divinity of Jesus by listening to a lecture by William Lane Craig and reading the related paper, and by listening to the debate between Richard Bauckham and James Crossley on that topic. The first link contains other scholarly debates on Jesus.

Filed under: Polemics , Apologetics, God, Jesus, William Lane Craig, Historical Jesus, Christianity, 1 Corinthians 15, Mark, Gospel, Identity, Divinity, Richard Bauckham, James Crossley, Q, Jesus Resurrection, Divine, Christology, Divinity of Jesus, Early Christianity, Early Christian Belief, Who Was Jesus, 1 Corinthians 1, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Luke, Bible Study, Q Source, Was Jesus God, Was Jesus Divine