Justified True Belief

(P1) The First Believers Were All Jewish: the church began inside Israel and grew there by thousands before Gentiles came in at all. + The question usually arrives with a picture attached: a Jewish world that heard the claim and turned away as one. The earliest records do not describe that. (1) The numbers in the first weeks are not small. - Peter finishes his first public sermon in Jerusalem, and the count that day is not modest: "So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls." (Acts 2:41) - A little later the figure has grown again: "But many of those who had heard the word believed, and the number of the men came to about five thousand." (Acts 4:4) - Then it reaches the one group in the city with the most to lose: "the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith." (Acts 6:7) Those were men whose living, whose standing and whose daily work were all bound up with the temple. (2) Twenty-odd years later, it was still a Jewish movement. - Paul comes back to Jerusalem after years away, and James greets him with a report on what has happened in the meantime: "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed. They are all zealous for the law," (Acts 21:20) - The Greek behind "thousands" is myriades, meaning tens of thousands. It was the word Greek reached for when a crowd had grown past counting, and whatever the exact figure was, the men using it were describing their own city. - Notice what the sentence is actually worried about. Nobody in that room is anxious about whether Jews are joining. The anxiety is that so many have joined while keeping the law of Moses that Paul, rumored to teach otherwise, now has a reputation to repair. (3) There was no other kind of Christian at the start. - Every apostle was Jewish. Paul was a Pharisee and never stopped saying so. The mother of Jesus, his brothers, the women who found the tomb empty, the crowd at Pentecost: Jewish, every one of them. • The Pharisees were the movement most committed to keeping the law of Moses in ordinary daily life, and their training in the Scriptures was the best available anywhere in the country. Paul had that training, and it shows on every page he wrote. • Pentecost was a Jewish pilgrim festival held seven weeks after Passover. That is why Jerusalem was packed that week with Jews who had travelled in from across the empire. - The first serious council in the church's history met to settle whether Gentiles could join without becoming Jewish first (Acts 15:5). That is a question a Jewish movement asks. Nobody would think to ask it about a Gentile religion. • A Gentile, in Jewish usage then and now, is simply anyone who is not Jewish. - Paul's own account of going up to Jerusalem over that question dates it fourteen years after an earlier visit (Galatians 2:1). He is not leaning on Acts, he has no growth figures to report, and he gives the same picture anyway: years of a Jewish movement first, then the argument about Gentiles. - The New Testament itself is a Jewish library, written almost entirely by Jews, quoting Jewish Scriptures on nearly every page. (4) Tens of thousands was never a majority. - Calling it one would be dishonest. Estimates of the Jewish population of the Roman world run to several million, and historians differ widely on the figure. Take Acts at its word, read its numbers as generously as you like, and the believers still come out at something like one Jew in a hundred. Quite possibly far fewer. - The numbers also come from Acts, which is a Christian book with an interest in reporting growth (D4). - What survives all of that is narrower, and it is still worth having. The claim was heard first by Jews, argued first among Jews, and accepted first by Jews, in numbers large enough to worry the leadership of their own community. Therefore, the rejection was never total, and the movement that is said to have been rejected was itself Jewish.

(P2) What Was Actually on Offer: the Messiah being proposed had been executed in a manner the Law itself calls accursed. + Whatever difficulty the texts held, a much larger obstacle stood in front of them. The fulfillment on offer was close to the most repellent thing that could have been proposed. (1) Crucifixion put a man under a written curse. - Deuteronomy is blunt about a body left hanging: "for a hanged man is cursed by God." (Deuteronomy 21:23) • Deuteronomy is one of the five books of Moses, which Jews call the Torah and which the New Testament usually calls the Law. A sentence there is not one opinion among many. It is part of the foundation everything else in the Hebrew Bible is built on. • Strictly, the law is about a corpse hung up after execution rather than about crucifixion, which Israel never practiced. Jews in the centuries before Jesus made the connection anyway. The Temple Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, turns the same sentence on a man hanged alive, which is exactly what crucifixion was. - Paul, a trained Pharisee, does not dodge the verse. He quotes it about Jesus: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree—" (Galatians 3:13) - Think of it this way. A man is put forward for the highest office in the country, and his one public act on record is a conviction for treason and a hanging. Whatever is standing in the way of that candidacy, it is not an unclear job description. (2) Paul says the offense out loud, to his own converts. - "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles," (1 Corinthians 1:22-23) - Skandalon, the word behind "stumbling block," means the trigger of a trap, the thing that snaps shut underfoot. Paul is not describing a small hurdle in the road. - A movement writing recruitment material does not describe its own central claim as the thing its audience will trip over. Paul does, in a letter he expects to be read aloud in church. (3) The expectation running strongest was royal. - Israel was waiting for a king who would end foreign rule and reign from Jerusalem, and the texts behind that hope are real texts rather than a misunderstanding anyone talked himself into. - A man crucified by the occupying power is the photographic negative of that hope. He did not end Roman rule. Rome ended him, in public, beside a road, in the manner it used to advertise what became of men who tried. - Just how varied Jewish expectation was in the first century is a large question with a literature of its own, and only the part nobody disputes matters here: a crucified Messiah was in nobody's plan. Therefore, the offer carried an obstacle large enough to explain refusal, whatever anyone made of the texts.

(P3) The Insiders Missed It Too: the men who had lived with Jesus did not read the Scriptures this way until after the resurrection. + If failing to see a suffering Messiah in the Hebrew Bible were a mark of hardness, the first men convicted by it would be the twelve disciples Jesus chose himself. (1) Peter hears the prediction plainly and rejects it on the spot. - "And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him." (Mark 8:31-32) - The answer Peter gets back is the harshest sentence Jesus speaks to any follower: "Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." (Mark 8:33) - Look at who that is. The leader of the movement, told to his face, in plain words, with no parable to work out first, and he will not have it. Nobody had to be dull to miss this. The man standing closest to the source missed it. (2) The Gospels go on reporting the same failure. - After a second prediction, Mark does not tidy anything up: "But they did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him." (Mark 9:32) - On the road to Emmaus, a village a couple of hours' walk from Jerusalem, the risen Jesus is still walking two of his own followers through the argument: "And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27) - And once more in Jerusalem, after that: "Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures," (Luke 24:45) (3) Nobody inventing a case writes himself up as slow. - Luke's own word for the disciples, put on the lips of Jesus, is not a flattering one: "O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!" (Luke 24:25) - A movement manufacturing prophetic fulfillment has every reason to portray its founders as the men who saw it first. These documents portray them as the men who had to have it explained to them twice. - Think of it this way. A company that fabricates a safety record does not open its own report with an account of the three times it missed the fault. Therefore, not seeing this in advance was the ordinary condition of everyone involved, including the men who wrote the books.

(P4) The Text Expects to Be Disbelieved: Isaiah's poem about the suffering servant opens by asking who has believed the report. + Isaiah's poem opens by expecting to be disbelieved. That is a delicate thing to claim, because a prediction of disbelief can be stretched into a claim that no evidence could ever count against, and a claim of that kind is worth nothing. (1) The line is the passage's own opening, not a later rescue. - Before a word about the servant, Isaiah asks a question: "Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?" (Isaiah 53:1) • The passage runs from Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12, and it describes a figure the prophet calls the LORD's servant: despised, wounded for other people's sins, killed, buried, and then somehow alive to see the outcome. • Whether that servant is one man or the nation of Israel itself is the oldest disagreement between Jews and Christians about any passage in the Hebrew Bible, and there are real arguments on both sides. - It is a rhetorical question with an implied answer, and the implied answer is: hardly anyone. Whoever wrote the line expected the report to be met with disbelief. - That sentence has stood at the head of the chapter for as long as there has been a chapter. Nobody slipped it in as a footnote once the numbers came in disappointing. - Who is speaking the line is itself disputed, and the answer changes what the line is evidence of (D14). (2) Isaiah's own commissioning says the same thing about his whole ministry. - At the moment he is sent out, the prophet is told what his preaching is going to accomplish: "Go, and say to this people: Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive." (Isaiah 6:9) - These are hard words, and they belong to Israel's own prophet, speaking to his own people, in a book Jews have read as their own for twenty-seven centuries. They are not a Christian description of Jews. Christians who have used them that way were misusing their own Bible. (3) The New Testament reaches for those same two verses. - Facing the same problem, John writes the sentence any honest account has to write: "Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him," (John 12:37) and then quotes Isaiah 53:1 and Isaiah 6:10 back to back as his explanation. - The choice of texts is what matters. Confronted with a low rate of belief, the earliest Christians did not reach for something new. They reached for the passage that opens by asking who has believed the report. (4) The most this can do is remove a surprise. - It cannot turn every possible outcome into a confirmation. If everyone had believed, that would have been an argument for the claim. What a text predicting unbelief does is take unbelief out of the column of evidence against, and that is the whole of it. - Nor does it license calling anybody blind. Isaiah says a report will be widely disbelieved. He does not hand the people who happen to believe it a verdict on the people who do not, and a reader who takes it that way has picked up the wrong thing. - This is the weakest part of the case, and it is offered as one line of evidence rather than as a proof. Therefore, disbelief of this report is not the surprise the objection needs it to be.

(C1) Therefore, the unbelief has visible causes that do not require the messianic texts to be obscure. + The low rate of belief is explained, and none of the explaining depends on the messianic texts being hard to make out. Four separate facts do that work, and they hold together the way a rope does rather than the way a chain does. A chain fails at its weakest link, which is why a critic only has to break one. A rope keeps its load when a strand frays, because the strands were never depending on each other in the first place. A jury runs on the same principle: a fingerprint, a receipt, a witness and a motive each settle nothing on their own, and together they convict. (1) The four facts are about four different things. - The movement was Jewish and grew among Jews by the thousand (P1). That comes out of first-century documents anybody can pull off a shelf and read. - What was being proposed was a crucified man, and the Law calls a hanged man accursed (P2). That is about the content of the offer rather than about anybody's reading habits. - The insiders missed it as thoroughly as anyone did (P3), and the men who tell us so are the founders' own biographers. - One sentence at the head of Isaiah's chapter says in advance that the report will not be believed (P4). - Knock out any one of the four and the other three stand where they were. None of them is inferred from any of the others. - One qualification is owed here, because independence can be claimed too cheaply. A critic who says the first Christians shaped their records to account for unbelief has a single objection that presses on (P3) and on the New Testament half of (P4) at the same time (D9). - So independence here means the four do not all rest on one fact. It does not mean that no single suspicion could ever reach two of them. What no such suspicion reaches at all is Isaiah's opening question, which stands in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, copied about 125 BC, a century and more before there were any Christians to shape anything. (2) The four do not carry equal weight. - The strongest is (P3), because it is testimony against the interest of the people giving it. A witness who volunteers something that makes him look bad is the kind of witness a court treats as unusually reliable, on the plain ground that nobody invents a story in which he is the slow one. - That strength is not unconditional. It holds only if the picture of the slow disciples is reporting rather than a literary device, which is exactly what the sharpest critics deny (D9). - The plainest is (P1), which corrects a picture of the first century that almost everybody carries around. - The weakest is (P4). It takes away a surprise. It does not add a proof. (3) Two senses of "clear" have to be kept apart. - Think of a will that nobody in the family reads as leaving the house to the nephew, until the lawyer sits them down and walks them through the clause. Then they can all see it. The clause was not obvious, and it was not silent either. - That is the distinction. A text is clear in the first sense when a reader coming to it cold sees the meaning at once, and clear in the second sense when it will carry the meaning once somebody puts it forward. - The first sense is conceded outright. The men who lived with Jesus did not see a crucified Messiah in Isaiah in advance, and neither did anyone else on the record (P3). - What follows concerns the second sense only. The low rate of belief has visible causes, and none of them requires the messianic texts to be unable to carry the reading. - What does not follow is that the Christian reading of those texts is correct. That is argued on the texts themselves, one passage at a time (C2).

(P5) The Debate Was Rarely Free: for most of two thousand years, wherever Christians held power, a Jew could not weigh this question without cost. + This is the part Christians should find hardest to say, because the record here is a record of what Christians did. (1) The most famous public debate ended with the winner in exile. - In July 1263, King James I of Aragon convened a disputation at Barcelona between the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani, himself a convert from Judaism, and Moses ben Nachman, the rabbi of Girona whom later writers call Nachmanides. The question set for them was whether the Messiah had come. • A disputation was a formal public debate staged by a ruler. The topic was chosen for the participants, the audience was assembled by the crown, and the Jewish side attended under orders. - By Nachmanides' own account the king gave him three hundred coins and told him he had never heard an unjust cause so nobly defended. The short Latin record kept by the other side reports a Christian victory instead, and the two cannot both be right. Either way, that was the high point. - Afterwards Nachmanides wrote up his own account of what had been said. In 1265 he was prosecuted for blaspheming Jesus, the king moved to banish him, and the account was condemned to be burned. - So in 1267 he left Aragon for the Holy Land. He reached Jerusalem, found the city in ruins, and started a synagogue there. That is what happened to the man the king had praised for defending his cause so nobly. (2) The conditions of the argument were set by the side holding the power. - Similar proceedings were staged at Paris in 1240 and at Tortosa in 1413, with rabbis compelled to attend and the terms fixed in advance. Two years after Paris, the confiscated copies of the Talmud were burned in the city, twenty-four wagonloads of them by the count Jewish sources preserved. • The Talmud is the enormous collection of rabbinic law and debate that Jewish study has been built on since late antiquity. Burning it in a public square was not the loss of a book. It was the burning of a whole tradition's working library. - England expelled its Jews in 1290 and Spain in 1492. Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543, urging that synagogues be set on fire. The Shoah was carried out in the heart of Christian Europe, by the baptized, against a people the churches had spent centuries teaching Europe to despise. • Shoah, meaning catastrophe, is the Hebrew name for the Nazi murder of six million European Jews, and it is the name most Jews use for it. - Set beside that record, the persistence of Jewish counter-argument is not evidence of closed minds. It is evidence of extraordinary intellectual courage, sustained under conditions no Christian community has ever had to work under. (3) What this does and does not explain. - It explains why for most of this history there was no free market in the question, and why a position held under those conditions cannot be read as the outcome of unpressured inquiry. - It does not reach the whole Jewish world. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled under Persian rule, and for centuries the largest Jewish communities lived under Islam, out of reach of Christian power whatever else they lived under. The argument was worked through in those places too, and (P5) says nothing at all about them. - It does not explain the present either. Jews in free societies today, with full access to the texts and no penalty of any kind for changing their minds, overwhelmingly still say no. That is the honest state of the question, and it is answered on its own terms (D1, D8). - Nor is any of this offered in mitigation of Christian conduct. Nothing mitigates it. Therefore, wherever Christendom held power the disagreement was conducted under duress, and the duress ran one way.

(C2) Therefore, whether the prophecies point to Jesus is settled on the passages rather than by the count. + Counting heads is a poor way to read Isaiah, and the five facts already on the table are why (P1 through P5). (1) Every cause of the low count is something other than the texts. - The count was never zero. In the first generation it ran to tens of thousands, all of them inside one people (P1). - Where it stayed low, the causes are on the record: the offense of a crucified Messiah (P2), the ordinary difficulty of seeing it in advance (P3), and centuries in which the question could not be asked freely (P5). - Isaiah 53:1 is not one of those causes. A sentence in a scroll caused nobody's unbelief. What it does is take away the surprise, so that a low count is not by itself a mark against the reading (P4). - Not one of those causes is "the texts do not say it." (2) Informed Jewish rejection is real evidence. - The people who have read these texts in Hebrew, continuously, for longer than anyone else, and who have produced two thousand years of careful argument about them, mostly conclude that the Christian reading is wrong. Pretending that carries no weight would be a bluff. - It is evidence, and it is not decisive, because the disagreement is not a technical one that expertise settles. Both sides come to it committed, and a Christian who thinks his own commitments do not shape his reading is not paying attention. (3) The passages are not the whole of the disagreement. - Whether Jesus rose is a question about an event in Jerusalem rather than a question about Isaiah, and the Christian case has always leaned on it at least as hard as on any prophecy. - Whether a man may be worshiped without breaking Israel's confession that God is one is a question about God, and no amount of work on the Hebrew of Isaiah touches it (D7). - Whether Jesus asked of Israel what only God may ask is a question about the Gospels, and a thoughtful Jewish reader can refuse him on that ground without ever opening Isaiah (D16). - So the conclusion stays narrow. The count is not the place to settle any of those questions, and for the ones that do turn on the prophecies, the passages are. (4) Each passage has to be argued on its own. - Isaiah 53, Isaiah 7:14, Psalm 22, Daniel 9, Micah 5:2: each one is a text with a case to make and objections to answer, and each has to be argued on its own merits. - If the Christian reading of those passages fails, it should fail there, on the Hebrew, in front of anyone who wants to check. That is a better place to settle it than a headcount. (5) The tone this subject requires. - Paul, writing about his own people's unbelief, does not begin in triumph. He begins in grief: "I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart." (Romans 9:2) - He then turns and warns Gentile Christians directly against exactly the attitude this question tends to produce: "do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you." (Romans 11:18) - And he refuses to write Israel off: "As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable." (Romans 11:28-29) See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Who Is the Servant of Isaiah 53? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Was Israel Already Waiting for a Messiah? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Was the Virgin of Isaiah 7:14 a Mistranslation? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Did the Old Testament Describe the Crucifixion? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: The Messiah Had to Come Before AD 70 • CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas)