Justified True Belief

(P1) Two accounts of Jesus' birth agree on Bethlehem and on almost nothing else. + Both put the birth in one small village. The stories they tell on the way there have almost nothing in common. (1) Micah named one village, centuries early. - "O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old." (Micah 5:2) • Ephrathah is the town's older name, marking this Bethlehem off from another village of the same name up north in Zebulun. - Judah held dozens of settlements and the prophet picked the one he calls too small to count. Naming Jerusalem would have been the safe guess. - On the traditional dating Micah preached in the eighth century BC, seven hundred years and some thirty generations before the birth. • Critical scholars who assign chapters 4 and 5 to later hands shorten that gap. Even the latest serious proposals leave four hundred years. The Minor Prophets, the twelve short books that close the Old Testament, were in Greek by the second century BC, and a translation that old means the Hebrew was older still. (2) Matthew and Luke reach the village by different roads. - Matthew has magi following a star, a frightened Herod, chief priests consulted about the birthplace, and a family already in a house there. (Matthew 2:1-11) • The magi are the star-watchers of the Christmas story: astrologers from the east, not kings, and only Matthew mentions them. - Luke has a census, a ninety-mile journey up from Nazareth, no room at the inn, a manger, and shepherds. (Luke 2:1-20) No magi, no Herod, no star. (3) The shared wording that runs through the rest of both Gospels disappears here. - Elsewhere the two often agree word for word for a whole sentence, because both draw on shared written material. Here it is gone. - Two witnesses count as independent when neither took his account from the other. Think of two neighbors describing the same accident: their statements match on the street address and diverge on everything else. - What survives is a short list: Mary betrothed to Joseph, Joseph traced to David, the name Jesus given by an angel, the reign of Herod, the village, and Nazareth afterward. Agreement that broad with no wording in common marks two traditions, not one story copied twice. - The same fact cuts the other way. Accounts this different are why the contradiction charge exists, and whether these two chapters are genuinely independent is contested in the scholarship, not settled. (4) Opponents used the same expectation as a weapon. - "This is the Christ. But some said, Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?" (John 7:41-42) • "Christ" is the Greek word for Messiah, the king Israel was waiting for. The crowd is checking credentials, not asking about a name. - That is a crowd turning Micah's prophecy against Jesus. John shapes his scenes, and this is no transcript. What it shows is an expectation a writer could count on his readers knowing. - A movement inventing a birthplace to fit a prophecy does not then record its opponents using that prophecy against him and leave the objection hanging. (5) A birthplace is the one biographical fact nobody arranges. - Nobody chooses his own birthplace. Yours was settled by a due date, by wherever your father was working that year, and by paperwork you never saw. - Jesus' was settled the same way, with an emperor's clerks and the timing of a journey besides. Thirty years later, when there was a case to be made for him, the fact was past anyone's reach. - So the charge cannot be that he arranged this one. It has to be that two writers with no wording in common named the same village falsely, or that one copied the other. Therefore, one small village named centuries in advance turns up in two accounts that agree on almost nothing else, with Jesus' own opponents wielding the same expectation against him.

(P2) The earliest Christian summary of the message was fixed within a few years of the crucifixion. + Paul quotes a fixed summary here instead of composing one, and he says so himself. That summary already contains the claim that these events fulfilled Scripture. (1) Paul flags the words as handed to him. - "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve." (1 Corinthians 15:3-5) - "Received" and "handed down" are the standard pair of words for passing on fixed tradition, the way a recipe goes down through a family: the point is that the wording is not yours to invent. • Jewish teachers used the matching pair of verbs for handing on Torah, the Law of Moses. Avot, a tract in the Mishnah (the earliest collection of rabbinic teaching), opens by tracing that chain of custody from Moses to Joshua to the elders in exactly that vocabulary. Paul's Greek pair is doing the same work. • A summary like this is called a creed or a formula: a few lines a movement memorizes and repeats word for word, the way a congregation recites the Apostles' Creed on Sunday without anyone composing it fresh that morning. (2) The wording does not sound like Paul. - Start with the vocabulary. "The twelve" appears nowhere else in his letters. Neither does the clause about the third day, nor the phrase "according to the Scriptures," which is not how he normally introduces an appeal to Scripture. • He also writes "our sins," in the plural, where he usually treats sin as a single power holding people down. - The rhythm points east. Four clauses hang off a repeated "and that," the way a thing built to be recited aloud does, and Peter is named in the Aramaic form, Cephas. • Try it in English. Anyone who drops "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer" into the middle of a paragraph is quoting, and every reader hears the seam without being told. • Aramaic was the everyday speech of Jerusalem, not of the Greek-speaking cities where Paul worked. Cephas is also his own usual name for Peter, so on its own it proves nothing about borrowed wording. Taken with the rest, it fits a formula born in Jerusalem. - Scholars across the spectrum, including several who reject the resurrection outright, treat this as material Paul inherited and did not write. A minority disputes it, and the judgment is still about as widely shared as any in the field. (3) The formula reaches back to within a few years of the crucifixion. - The crucifixion falls in AD 30 or 33. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians around AD 55, some twenty-five years later, and he tells the Corinthians he had already handed them this material when he founded their church. He had received it earlier still. - That founding can be dated from a stone with no stake in the question. An inscription at Delphi fixes the year Gallio governed Achaia, the Roman province that contained Corinth. Acts has Paul dragged before that same Gallio at Corinth, which lands the founding around AD 50. - Paul's conversion falls in the mid-thirties, within a few years of the crucifixion, and three years after it he spent fifteen days with Cephas in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:18). - The window is narrow enough that the tradition is commonly dated to the first few years after the event, and some critical scholars put it inside the first two. (4) "According to the Scriptures" is inside the formula. - The phrase appears twice, attached to the death and to the rising, and both times it sits inside material Paul is quoting. He did not write it. - So the conviction that these events fulfilled Israel's Scriptures is not a later literary layer added by Gospel writers with time on their hands. It sits in the earliest summary anyone can reach, in the movement's first attempt to say what it was about. Therefore, the claim that the death and resurrection fulfilled Scripture is as early as anything in Christianity, and older than every Gospel.

(P3) A crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms to Jew and Greek alike. + The movement's central claim was the one most likely to lose the audience it needed, and its own writers say so. (1) Israel's Law put a curse on a man hung on a tree. - "his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God" (Deuteronomy 21:23) - Messiah means "anointed one." Israel's kings were installed by having oil poured over the head, so the word names the king God had promised to send. Anyone arguing to a Jewish audience that the Messiah had been executed on a cross was arguing that God's chosen one died under God's own curse. - Put the two words side by side and they cancel each other out. "Crucified Messiah" landed on a first-century ear the way "the king we crowned was hanged as a traitor" lands on ours. Not a hard saying. A contradiction, and it struck Greeks and Romans that way as much as Jews. (2) The first preachers quoted the curse against themselves. - A man doing damage control buries the inconvenient verse and hopes nobody looks it up. Paul does the opposite. He quotes it: "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree" (Galatians 3:13), in a letter, to congregations who could go and check. - Then he builds his theology out of it. That is not the behavior of a man managing a public relations problem. It is the behavior of a man stuck with a fact. (3) Paul concedes the message repelled both audiences he had. - "but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23) - Gentiles means everyone who is not Jewish, which in Paul's world meant the Greek and Roman population of the empire. He had exactly two audiences, and he reports losing both on this one point. - Crucifixion was a slave's death, a public torture Rome kept for rebels and runaways. Cicero, defending a Roman citizen in court, told the jury that the very word for the cross should be kept away from Roman eyes and ears. No Greek was looking for a crucified savior either. (4) Inventors pick claims that help them. - Historians have a name for this reasoning. The criterion of embarrassment says that material which caused a movement trouble is unlikely to have been invented by that movement. It is a claim about where the material came from, not a proof that the material is true. • The standard textbook case is Jesus being baptized by John. The Gospels visibly find the scene awkward and keep explaining it, which is why historians take it as something they inherited and not something they composed. - The messianic hopes in circulation ran toward a king who would win. Anyone free to design a fulfillment had every reason to design that one. Therefore, the central claim is the one a movement inventing its own fulfillments would have been least likely to choose.

(C1) Therefore, the fulfillment claim is early, independently attested, and inconvenient. + Three things are true of the fulfillment claim at once, and none of them has to be granted before the others can be checked. None of them asks anyone to trust a Gospel writer's good intentions either. (1) The claim is early. - That Jesus died and rose "according to the Scriptures" is as early as any Christian material anyone can reach, older than the Gospels that supposedly manufactured it (P2). (2) The claim is independently attested. - "Independently attested" means reported by witnesses who did not take it from each other. The village comes from two accounts that agree on it and on almost nothing else, and the same expectation turns up in John as a weapon in the hands of Jesus' opponents (P1). - Two of the three strands run through Paul's letters, which is a real overlap and worth admitting. - It counts for less than it looks, because the shame of the cross needs no Christian source at all. Roman writers treat crucifixion as the death not to be named in decent company, and somebody scratched a cartoon on a wall near the emperor's palace in Rome mocking a Christian called Alexamenos for worshiping a crucified figure with a donkey's head. (3) The claim is inconvenient. - The centerpiece of the whole thing is a Messiah executed under the curse of his own Scriptures, which is the item a movement designing its own case would have avoided (P3). (4) The question is which account covers all three without inventing extras. - Picture a woman coming home to a broken kitchen window. There is a baseball under the table, a gap in the hedge, and the children next door are being unusually quiet. - She cannot prove what happened, and she knows it. What she can do is lay the possibilities beside each other and ask which one accounts for the ball and the hedge and the quiet all at once, without her having to invent anything extra to make it work. - Two questions are doing the work in her head, and neither of them needs any training. Does the story cover everything on the table, or only one item of the three? And does the story expect what she found, or does it merely allow it? A bird could break a window. A bird would not leave a baseball under the table. - Philosophers call this inference to the best explanation. It is how a jury reaches a verdict, how a doctor reads a set of symptoms, and how most questions get settled outside mathematics. Therefore, any account of how these claims arose has to cover an early date, an agreement on one village reached from two directions, and a curse the movement could not shake off.

(P4) Staging, invention, legend, and selective reading each cover only part of the evidence. + Four ordinary explanations are on offer, and serious people hold every one of them. (1) "He staged what he could." - Some of it was staged. Zechariah had written: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey." (Zechariah 9:9) - Riding into Jerusalem on a donkey fulfills that, and it does so precisely because a man can arrange it. - John reports the scene and then undercuts his own case for it: "His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and." (John 12:16) A writer manufacturing a staged fulfillment does not add that nobody present grasped it. - Staging runs out at everything in (P1) and (P3). A man cannot arrange to be born in a particular village, and nobody chooses to be executed in the one manner his own Scriptures call accursed. (2) "The writers wrote the fulfillments in." - The academic version holds that the church knew a few bare facts, searched the Scriptures for what must have happened, and wrote the results up as narrative. Scholars call it prophecy historicized: a prophecy turned into a story about events. - Grant that the evangelists (the old word for the four Gospel writers) knew these texts and wrote with them in view. They say so themselves. - Two writers working the same prophecy into a story tend to converge, because the prophecy is doing the steering. The birth accounts do the opposite, agreeing on the village and diverging on every road to it. - The date is not what answers this one. The earliest summary was fixed before any Gospel existed (P2), so the evangelists inherited the fulfillment claim instead of originating it. But the strongest version of the theory has the searching beginning at once, well before the creed was fixed, so an early creed is no embarrassment to it. The divergence is what that version cannot produce. (3) "It grew by legend over several decades." - This is the most natural explanation of most religious material, and it should not be waved away. Stories grow, details harden, and forty years is time enough for a great deal. - What it needs is time, and the creed does not leave any. A fixed formula circulating within a few years is not a legend that accumulated over decades. - Legends also grow in the direction of what an audience wants. This one grew toward a cursed Messiah, which is the wrong direction. (4) "Christians read their Scriptures until something fit." - The instinct is sound, and it names a real hazard. Read a long enough body of text with an outcome in mind and something will match. - Test it: does the method turn up anywhere else? Judea produced other leaders with a following in the same period, and Josephus, a Jewish historian writing later that century, tells their stories at length. • After Herod's death a slave named Simon and a shepherd named Athronges each put a crown on his own head and was hunted down. • Judas the Galilean raised a revolt against the Roman census, and Acts 5:37 remembers his followers scattering. • Theudas promised to part the Jordan and was beheaded. The Egyptian gathered a crowd on the Mount of Olives and lost it, and Acts 21:38 has a Roman officer mistake Paul for him. • Not one of those movements went back through the prophets afterward to show it had been written down in advance. - Selection has a gap it cannot close. A reader free to select selects what helps, and the one thing this movement could not stop repeating was the detail that cost it most. Therefore, staging accounts for the donkey, composition for the wording, legend for the growth and selection for the searching, and none of them for why the earliest and most awkward part of the claim was there from the start.

(C2) Therefore, the fulfillment claim is best explained as reported rather than manufactured. + The people who first made these claims were describing what they thought had happened, and they were not free to arrange it. That is the best explanation of the three features together. (1) The conclusion is narrower than it may sound. - It does not say that every detail in every account is exact. Luke's dating of the census may be wrong and this still stands. - It does not yet say that God stood behind the prophecies. That is a further question and it is argued from other evidence entirely. - What it does say is that the first Christians reported a fulfillment they had run into and did not assemble one they wanted. (2) It covers all three features where the rivals each cover one. - Staging reaches the donkey and stops there. Composition reaches the wording and stops there. Legend needs decades the creed does not leave. Selection explains the searching well enough, though it has nothing to say about what the search came back with. - Back at the broken kitchen window, this is the story that accounts for the ball and the hedge and the quiet at once, with nothing invented to hold it together. (3) It expects the awkward parts instead of merely putting up with them. - An explanation that fits the evidence and an explanation that expects it are different animals. The second one predicts what you find. The first has to be adjusted afterward to survive it. - Take the curse in Deuteronomy 21:23. On a manufacturing account it is a problem to be explained away, a piece of bad luck the theory has to absorb. On a reporting account it is exactly what turns up when a movement is stuck with a real execution and has to make sense of it. (4) What would tell against it. - Show that the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is Paul's own composition after all, and the early date goes. - Show that Matthew and Luke's birth accounts share a source, or that one of the two writers had the other's chapter open in front of him, and the two-witness point goes with it. - Produce a comparable cluster of fulfillment claims around another first-century claimant, and the charge of selective reading wins. (5) The limits here are real costs. - Luke's census dating remains a genuine historical difficulty. A reader who finds none of the published solutions convincing has found something that counts. - The donkey carries no weight at all. A man can arrange a donkey ride, and that is the end of it. - None of this shows that the prophecies came from God, and none of it establishes the resurrection. Both are argued on other evidence entirely. Therefore, a claim that arrived too early to be a legend, converged on one village from two directions, and put a curse at the center of its own message is better explained as something the first Christians ran into than as something they built. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Did the Old Testament Describe the Crucifixion? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Does the New Testament Quote the Old Testament Out of Context? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Was Israel Already Waiting for a Messiah? • CE / New Testament Criticism: Early Dating and Eyewitness Proximity of the New Testament • CE / New Testament Criticism: Convergence of Independent New Testament Traditions