Does Bauckham = Behe?

In the midst of reading Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham right now. It's a 2006 book that marshals evidence to argue that the Gospels (including you, John) were written by those who had witnessed the events, not by anonymous communities many years later. I find it interesting (and the only time I've skimmed was when he spent a chapter talking about the psychology of memory -- the irony is, that's the scientific chapter!).

Part of my difficulty in approaching this literature is a lack of current context. I poke around a little when I find a new author, to tell the NT Wrights from the Ben Witherington IIIs from the Lee Strobels (reporters, that is) from the Bible Code aficianados. So when I heard about Richard Bauckham, I assumed he was somewhere in the middle of that list (between Witherington and Strobel). Turns out he's actually more in the league of Wright, perhaps beyond, in terms of scholarly respectability. So I'm excited to read his book -- some of which is fascinating, some of which is based on scanty evidence and I don't quite buy. But he's no hack.

Last night I stumbled across a message board of scholars who had participated in the recent Society for Biblical Literature meeting, and under discussion was a panel in which Richard Bauckham discussed his work with three critics (wish I could get a transcript of that). The thread was instigated by one of the academic critics complaining about the evangelical "cheering section" for Bauckham and being worried about the fact that after the section people came up to him (the critic) and tried to persuade him to believe in miracles. He worried that the SBL is losing its objectivity and critical thinking, which set off a great back-and-forth. I mean, is believing that the resurrection happened automatically excluded from academic research? Are these "cheering sections" partisan and uncritical? (Never mind that Bauckham just deals with the subject of the writing of the Gospels in his book, not at all with the miraculous nature of what is written there!)

To me the question has extra resonance because I admire and am intrigued by the arguments of Bauckham and NT Wright, but I explicitly reject the intelligent design arguments of Michael Behe (in my opinion, the only ID arguments that are even addressable scientifically). When NT Wright talks about the the historicity of the miracle of resurrection, is that like Michael Behe talking about the (possible, although I don't buy it) historicity of the miracle of special creation of protein flagella? How is it that I buy NT Wright's arguments for the miraculous but not Michael Behe's? Am I being inconsistent?

Now, I've only had a bus ride to think about this, so I have more questions than conclusions right now (although I did also think about this topic when reading NT Wright's first volume of Christian Origins and the Question of God, where he talks about epistemology). However, here is my draft argument for why I think God physically raised Jesus from the dead, but also why I think the earth is very old and animals were created through a long, bloody development process of descent with modification:

In a sentence, the type of evidence and the mechanism of development, given the time frame, make all the difference in the world.

Biological evidence: Every animal uses the same amino acids, the same type of DNA molecules, the same DNA code, and has similar genes in similar orders. Every animal. I can't say there aren't acts of special creation out there but I can say it would be very easy to provide evidence for such acts, and we have no evidence. Also, there are old broken-down genes and old broken-down viruses all over our DNA, fitting in precisely with the long development over time. This is an ecosystem-wide conclusion based on the biochemistry, publically accessible in genomic databases across the web.

On the other hand, the evidence we have for Jesus (the Gospels + Josephus + Paul's letters + physical evidence of names on tombstones and archaelogical details) at least claims to be history written by people who saw what happened in many cases, and to argue against that you have to start from some form-critical assumptions that people very early on made very big mistakes, and then you lose that evidence because you assume it's lying. So you end up with less evidence because of your a priori assumption that, for example, 500 people couldn't have seen a physically resurrected Jesus (or been available for inquiry like Paul implies), so Paul or someone else must have developed that story within 20 years after Jesus' death, and added false evidence deliberately!

My point is you have to have a mechanism for the falling away from the truth and yet presenting yourself as the truth. It has to be a very fast mechanism to work over decades and be in place in 40-60 years or so, or 20 years in the case of Paul's strong check-it-out-if-you-doubt-it statements (for timescale comparison, think of The War by Ken Burns. Those vets are telling stories that are 60+ years old now, so Ken Burns is sitting down now and capturing their stories before they die. This seems similar in tone to the end of John's Gospel). For evolution there's time and a molecular mechanism that would work over millions of years, and Behe takes the most extreme case and says you have to prove it to convince him. That's not a good argument: millions of years is a lot of time, and the evidence of broken-down genes gives genetic drift a physical credibility. Not much evidence of broken-down non-canonical gospel stories: all the good ones are 200-400 years later, with the possible exception of the Gospel of Thomas, which regardless of its age is 1 witness against 4. It's nothing like the fact that there's more broken-down viruses than functional genes in your genome.

For the development of the Gospels I don't see how there is time for the drastic changes to the story that the form critics propose (this is part of Bauckham's argument so GOOOOO BAUCKHAM!! -- sorry, my evangelical cheering section just miraculously appeared out of nowehere). I simply don't see a mechanism, and the mechanism proposed by Wright and Bauckham actually makes sense within the timeframe, just with this itty-bitty catch: you have to think that Jesus walked out of the tomb and did some very strange things with a select number of people that he then left to tell everyone about it. The "experiment" is hidden by time, but we do have what claims to be the resulting written evidence. I buy that mechanism just like I buy the mechanism of genetic changes over time. It's the difference between the years in a lifetime and millions of years, and it's based on evidence.

So I don't see a miracle, or at least an abrupt now-you-see-it-now-you-don't miracle, in the development of life on this planet (I do see one in the creation of the universe, as my entry on Day 1 makes clear!). I do see a miracle in the sudden appearance of strong resurrection stories that people told as eyewitness truth and that some of these people died for. I also see a miracle in the exponential spread of an anti-imperial theology at the height of the Roman Empire's powers, without coercion or war, just by the spread of the news itself. Does that make me an a priori credulous investigator? Does it make me a "cheering section" because I hesitantly accept Bauckham's idea that the reason the gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts is because, you know, they are? That the reason Luke talks about the resurrected Jesus eating fish is because he did? (Just a side question: was it Friday or not, and was the Pope notified?)

In any case, I want to be consistent with my beliefs. I follow a God who took a step into history, necessarily kicking up dust at the time and leaving footprints. I believe his primary mode of evidence is the life of Jesus, and I want to be able to critically evaluate the possible mechanisms of who saw what, how they reacted, and what it means. Even though I have never seen a resurrection, I believe that one happened because of what history tells me (and also because of the present work of the spirit in the church and the lives around me, and I understand that such evidence is not technically peer-reviewable).

So I'm not going to go to Richard Bauckham's next talk and Do the Wave with the other evangelicals, but I will continue look at historical evidence with my best attempt at an open mind, and then commit to a conclusion as a result. It just leads me to different conclusions for the second part of Genesis 1 than it does for the first part of Genesis 1, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20. Isn't that what different evidence in different cases is supposed to do?