[Faith-talk] Men Who Were Converted Trying to Disprove the Bible - Part 1 of 3

[Linda Mentink via Faith-talk]

Hi all,

This was a blessing to me, so I'm going to share all three parts.


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Men Who Were Converted Trying to Disprove the Bible - Part 1 of 3

April 7, 2014

__________

Above all other books, the Bible has been hated, 
vilified, ridiculed, criticized, restricted, 
banned, and destroyed, but it has been to no 
avail. As one rightly said, “We might as well 
put our shoulder to the burning wheel of the sun, 
and try to stop it on its flaming course, as 
attempt to stop the circulation of the Bible” 
(Sidney Collett, All about the Bible, p. 63).


In A.D. 303, the Roman Emperor Diocletian issued 
an edict to stop Christians from worshipping 
Jesus Christ and to destroy their Scriptures. 
Every official in the empire was ordered to raze 
the churches to the ground and burn every Bible 
found in their districts (Stanley Greenslade, 
Cambridge History of the Bible). Twenty-five 
years later Diocletian’s successor, 
Constantine, issued another edict ordering fifty 
Bibles to be published at government expense (Eusebius).


In 1778 the French infidel Voltaire boasted that 
in 100 years Christianity would cease to exist, 
but within 50 years the Geneva Bible Society used 
his press and house to publish Bibles (Geisler 
and Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, 1986, pp. 123, 124).


Robert Ingersoll once boasted, “Within 15 years 
I’ll have the Bible lodged in a morgue.” But 
Ingersoll is dead, and the Bible is alive and well.


In fact, many who set out to disprove the Bible 
have been converted, instead. The following are a few examples:


Gilbert West (1703-1756)


Gilbert West was included in Samuel Johnson’s 
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. As a 
student at Oxford, West set out to debunk the 
Bible’s account of Christ’s resurrection. 
Instead, having proved to himself that Christ did 
rise from the dead, he was converted. West 
published his conclusions in the book 
Observations on the History and Evidences of the 
Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1747). On the 
fly-leaf he had the following printed: “Blame 
not before thou hast examined the truth.”


West concluded his book with these words:


“If Christ had not risen, and proved himself by 
many infallible tokens to have risen from the 
dead, the Apostles and Disciples could have had 
no inducement to believe in him, that is to 
acknowledge him for the Messiah, the Anointed of 
God; on the contrary, they must have taken him 
for an impostor, and under that persuasion could 
never have become preachers of the Gospel, 
without becoming euthusiasts or impostors, in 
either of which characters it is impossible they 
should have succeeded, to the degree which we are 
assured they did, considering their natural 
insufficiency, the strong opposition of all the 
world to the doctrines of Christianity, and their 
own high pretensions to miraculous powers, about 
which they could neither have been deceived 
themselves, nor have deceived others. Supposing 
therefore that Christ did not rise from the Dead, 
it is certain, according to all human 
probability, there could never have been any such 
thing at all as Christianity, or it must have 
been stifled soon after its birth. This is a fact 
about which there is no dispute, but Christians 
and Infidels disagree in accounting for this 
fact. Christians affirm their religion to be of 
divine original, and to have grown up and 
prevailed under the miraculous assistance and 
protection of God; and this they not only affirm, 
and offer to prove by the same kind of evidence, 
by which all remote facts are proved, but think 
it may very fairly be inferred form the wonderful 
circumstances of its growth and increase, and its 
present existence. Infidels, on the other hand, 
assert Christianity to be an imposture, invented 
and carried on by men. In the maintenance of 
which assertion, their great argument against the 
credibility of the Resurrection, and the other 
miraculous proofs of the divine original of the 
Gospel, founded in their being miraculous, that 
is, out of the ordinary course of nature, will be 
of no service to them, since they will still find 
a miracle in their way, namely, the amazing 
birth, growth, and increase of Christianity.Which 
facts, though they should not be able to account 
for them, they cannot however deny. In order 
therefore to destroy the evidence drawn from them 
by Christians, they must prove them not to have 
been miraculous, by shewing how they could have 
been effected in the natural course of human 
affairs, by such weak instruments as Christ and 
his Apostles (taking them to be what they are 
pleased to call them, enthusiasts or impostors) 
and by such means as they were possessed of and 
employed But this I imagine to be as much above 
the capacity of the greatest philosophers to 
shew, as it is to prove the possibility of 
executing the proud boast of Archimedes (even 
granting his Postulatum) of moving and wielding 
the globe of this earth, by machines of human 
invention, and composed of such materials only, 
as nature furnishes for the ordinary use of 
man” (Observations on the History and Evidences 
of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, pp. 442-445).


George Lyttelton (1709-1773)


George Lyttelton was an English statesman, 
author, and poet who was educated at Eton and 
Oxford. Among other things he published a History of Henry II.


As a young man he set out to prove that Paul was 
not converted as the Bible states. Instead, he 
wrote a book containing evidence that Paul was 
indeed converted and that his conversion is 
evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The book 
was titled Observations on the Conversion and 
Apostleship of St. Paul (1747). Lyttleton 
observed that from an earthly perspective Paul 
had absolutely nothing to gain and everything to 
lose by testifying that he had seen the risen 
Christ. Giving up his position and prestige as a 
Jewish religious leader, he joined the despised 
Christian sect and was hounded, mocked, and 
persecuted for the rest of his life, finally 
paying the ultimate price for his Christian faith, death by beheading.


Lyttlelton began his book with these words:


“In a late conversation we had together upon 
the subject of the Christian religion, I told 
you, that besides all the proofs of it which may 
be drawn from the prophecies of the Old 
Testament, from the necessary connection it has 
with the whole system of the Jewish religion, 
from the miracles of Christ, and from the 
evidence given of his Resurrection by all the 
other Apostles, I thought the conversion and the 
apostleship of St. Paul alone, duly considered, 
was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove 
Christianity to be a divine Revelation. As you 
seemed to think that so compendious a proof might 
be of use to convince those unbelievers that will 
not attend to a longer series of arguments, I 
have thrown together the reasons upon which I 
suppose that proposition” (page 4).


The famous British lexicographer Samuel Johnson 
said “infidelity has never been able to 
fabricate a specious answer” to Lyttelton’s book.


Albert Henry Ross (Frank Morison) (1881-1950)


Albert Ross was a lawyer, journalist, and 
novelist who grew up in Stratford-on-Avon, 
England. He was deeply affected by the skepticism 
of the times, particularly the attacks on the 
Bible by theological liberalism and Darwinism. 
After becoming a lawyer, he set out to write a 
book to disprove the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. Instead, he was converted and wrote a 
book in defense of the resurrection entitled WHO 
MOVED THE STONE? -- which is still in print 
today. He wrote the book under the name of Frank Morison.


“If you will carry your mind back in 
imagination to the late nineties [1890s] you will 
find in the prevailing intellectual attitude of 
that period the key to much of my thought. ... 
the work of the higher critics -- particularly 
the German critics -- had succeeded in spreading 
a prevalent impression among students that the 
particular form in which the narrative of His 
life and death had come down to us was 
unreliable, and that one of the four records was 
nothing other than a brilliant apologetic written 
many years, and perhaps many decades, after the 
first generation had passed away.


“Like most other young men deeply immersed in 
other things, I had no means of verifying or 
forming an independent judgment upon these 
statements, but the fact that almost every word 
of the Gospels was just then the subject of high 
wrangling and dispute did very largely color the 
thought of the time, and I suppose I could hardly escape its influence.


“But there was one aspect of the subject that 
touched me closely. I had already begun to take a 
deep interest in physical science, and one did 
not have to go very far in those days to discover 
that scientific thought was obstinately and even 
dogmatically opposed to what are called the 
miraculous elements in the Gospels. Very often 
the few things the textual critics had left 
standing science proceeded to undermine. 
Personally I did not attach anything like the 
same weight to the conclusions of the textual 
critics that I did to this fundamental matter of 
the miraculous. It seemed to me that purely 
documentary criticism might be mistaken, but that 
the laws of the universe should go back on 
themselves in a quite arbitrary and 
inconsequential manner seemed very improbable. 
Had not Huxley himself declared in a peculiarly 
final way that ‘miracles do not happen,’ 
while Matthew Arnold, with his famous gospel of 
‘Sweet Reasonableness,’ had spent a great 
deal of his time in trying to evolve a non-miraculous Christianity?


“It was about this time -- more for the sake of 
my own peace of mind than for publication -- that 
I conceived the idea of writing a short monograph 
on what seemed to me to be the supremely 
important and critical phase in the life of 
Christ -- the last seven days -- though later I 
came to see that the days immediately succeeding 
the Crucifixion were quite as crucial. The title 
I chose was ‘Jesus, the Last Phase,’ a 
conscious reminiscence of a famous historical study by Lord Rosebery. ...


“Such, briefly, was the purpose of the book I 
had planned. I wanted to take this last phase of 
the life of Jesus, with all its quick and 
pulsating drama, its sharp, clear-cut background 
of antiquity, and its tremendous psychological 
and human interest--to strip it of its overgrowth 
of primitive beliefs and dogmatic suppositions, 
and to see this supremely great person as He really was.


“I need not stay to describe here how, fully 
ten years later, opportunity came to study the 
life of Christ as I had long wanted to study it, 
to investigate the origins of its literature, to 
examine some of the evidence at first hand, and 
to form my own judgment on the problem it 
presents. I will only say that it effected a 
revolution in my thought. Things emerged from 
old-world story that previously I should have 
thought impossible. Slowly but very definitely 
the conviction grew that the drama of those 
unforgettable weeks of human history was stranger 
and deeper than it seemed. It was the strangeness 
of many notable things in the story that first 
arrested and held my interest. It was only later 
that the irresistible logic of their meaning came into view.


“I want to try, in the remaining chapters of 
this book, to explain why that other venture 
never came to port, what were hidden rocks on 
which it foundered, and how I landed to me, an 
unexpected shore” (“The Book That Refused to 
Be Written,” chapter 1, Who Moved the Stone?).


Morison concluded that the only explanation that 
can satisfy all of the historical facts was that 
Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead. Morison 
became a C.S. Lewis-type Christian, believing in 
Christ’s divinity and resurrection but not 
believing in the infallible inspiration of 
Scripture, and his book Who Moved the Stone? is 
handicapped by this position. While Morison 
accepted the four Gospels as basically 
historical, he believed that some statements are 
more trustworthy than others and some things 
might have been added later. Thus, though he 
threw off the shackles of theological modernism 
pertaining to the person of Christ, he did not 
throw off the shackles of the equally erroneous 
“principles of modern textual criticism.” He 
held, for example, to the fallacy that Mark’s 
Gospel should end at chapter 16 verse 8.


Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853)


Simon Greenleaf, Royall Professor of Law at 
Harvard University, was one of the most 
celebrated legal minds in American history. His 
Treatise on the Law of Evidence “is still 
considered the greatest single authority on 
evidence in the entire literature of legal procedure.”


As a law professor, he determined to expose the 
“myth” of the resurrection of Christ once and 
for all, but his thorough examination forced him 
to conclude, instead, that Jesus did rise from 
the dead. In 1846 he published An Examination of 
the Testimony of the Four Evangelists by the 
Rules of Evidence Administered in the Courts of Justice.


Thus, one of the most celebrated minds in the 
legal profession of the past two centuries took 
the resurrection of Christ to trial, diligently 
examined the evidence, and judged it to be an 
established fact of history! And this was in 
spite of the fact that he began his investigation as a skeptic.


One of Greenleaf’s points is that nothing but 
the resurrection itself can explain the dramatic 
change in Christ’s disciples and their 
willingness to suffer and die for their testimony.


Consider an excerpt:


“Their master had recently perished as a 
malefactor, by the sentence of a public tribunal. 
His religion sought to overthrow the religions of 
the whole world. The laws of every country were 
against the teachings of His disciples. The 
interests and passions of all the rulers and 
great men in the world were against them. The 
fashion of the world was against them. 
Propagating this new faith, even in the most 
inoffensive and peaceful manner, they could 
expect nothing but contempt, opposition, 
revilings, bitter persecutions, stripes, 
imprisonments, torments, and cruel deaths. Yet 
this faith they zealously did propagate; and all 
these miseries they endured undismayed, nay, 
rejoicing. As one after another was put to a 
miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted 
their work with increased vigor and resolution. 
The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an 
example of the like heroic constancy, patience, 
and unblenching courage. They had every possible 
motive to review carefully the grounds of their 
faith, and the evidences of the great facts and 
truths which they asserted; and these motives 
were pressed upon their attention with the most 
melancholy and terrific frequency. It was 
therefore impossible that they could have 
persisted in affirming the truths they have 
narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the 
dead, and had they not known this fact as 
certainly as they knew any other fact. ... If 
then their testimony was not true, there was no 
possible motive for its fabrication” 
(Greenleaf, An Examination of the Testimony of 
the Four Evangelists by the Rules of Evidence).


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