Freke and Gandy argue this on the basis of the similarities between Jesus’ biography and those of many of the gods of the ancient pagan religions. Jesus’ biography, they suggest, is so similar to the myths told of these other gods that it cannot be anything but a copy of them. If Jesus’ biography is a copy of the biographies of these other gods, though, then there is no more reason to think that there existed a historical Jesus than there is to think that there existed a historical Mithra or a historical Dionysus.

Some of the parallels drawn by Freke and Gandy, however, are not between Jesus’ biography and the biographies of the pagan gods, but between Jesus’ biography and the biographies of the pagan sages. One such parallel concerns Socrates and Jesus’ third-day resurrection. They write:

Socrates was fearless before his death for he had been told in a dream that three days after his death he would be reborn. Jesus, likewise, goes to his death with confidence and foretells that after three days he will be resurrected.
[The Jesus Mysteries, p57]

The endnote appended to the claim about Socrates reads:

Plato, Crito, 44b. Socrates quotes from the Iliad, 9.363, to imply that three days after his death he will return to his true home.

In the Crito, Socrates describes his dream like this:

I dreamed that a beautiful, fair woman, clothed in white raiment, came to me and called me and said, ‘Socrates, on the third day thou wouldst come to fertile Phthia’.

Socrates’ comment is indeed an allusion to a line in the Iliad where Phthia stands for home, and Socrates does indeed expect to be in the metaphorical Phthia on the third day.

In reading this as talk of a third-day resurrection, however, Freke and Gandy have imposed their own agenda on the text. As will be seen, Socrates’ interpretation of the dream is not at all that claimed by Freke and Gandy.

The relevant passage of the Crito runs as follows:

SOCRATES: … Has the ship come from Delos, at the arrival of which I am to die?
CRITO: It has not exactly come, but I think it will come today from the reports of some men who have come from Sunium and left it there. Now it is clear from what they say that it will come today, and so tomorrow, Socrates, your life must end.
SOCRATES: Well, Crito, good luck be with us! If this is the will of the gods, so be it. However, I do not think it will come today.
CRITO: What is your reason for not thinking so?
SOCRATES: I will tell you. I must die on the day after the ship comes in, must I not?
CRITO: So those say who have charge of these matters.
SOCRATES: Well, I think it will not come in today, but tomorrow. And my reason for this is a dream which I had a little while ago in the course of this night. And perhaps you let me sleep just at the right time.
CRITO: What was the dream?
SOCRATES: I dreamed that a beautiful, fair woman, clothed in white raiment, came to me and called me and said, ‘Socrates, on the third day thou wouldst come to fertile Phthia.’
CRITO: A strange dream, Socrates.
SOCRATES: No, a clear one, at any rate, I think, Crito.
[Plato, Crito, 43c-44b, Heinemann Harvard (1914), pp153-155]

Socrates’ inference from his dream, then, is that the ship from Delos will arrive not today, but tomorrow, ‘on the second day’. He draws this inference because he is due to die the day after the ship arrives, and the dream implies that he will die on the third day. Three minus one is two; the day before the third day (on which the says he’ll die) is the second day (so that’s when the ship will arrive). This is not one of Socrates’ more complicated arguments.

Freke and Gandy, however, understand Socrates’ dream as signifying that three days after his death Socrates will be resurrected. If this were correct, though, then it wouldn’t provide Socrates with any information regarding the timing of the arrival of the ship. Socrates’ inferences, then, would be incoherent ramblings, which doesn’t sound like him at all.

These days, the word “faith” is often used to mean something essentially irrational. Faith, in this sense, is belief in the absence of (or even in the face of) evidence. It is, by definition, unfounded.

This understanding of faith opens Christianity up to ridicule. Why would anyone embrace a religion than flies in the face of reason in this way?

It also undermines apologetics. If faith cannot be based in reason, then to go around reasoning with people in the hope of bringing them to faith is a waste of time, because if someone is persuaded to believe on the basis of evidence then they don’t have faith.

The above view of faith, however, isn’t the Christian view of faith. When Christianity speaks of the virtue of faith, it is not speaking of the virtue of irrational belief in God.

To see this, consider the paradigmatic case of a biblical figure who refused to have faith in the modern, irrational sense of the word: Doubting Thomas. When Thomas heard reports of Jesus’ resurrection, he insisted that he would not believe it until he had seen the evidence first-hand. Testimony wasn’t enough for Thomas; he wanted proof. He got it. Jesus showed himself to Thomas, and Thomas felt Jesus’ wounds, and he believed.

Thomas’s new-found confidence in the resurrection is repeatedly described using the language of faith. The word used in the New Testament for faith is “pistis”. This noun has a cognate verb, “pisteuo”, which, because “faithing” isn’t a word, is translated into English as “believe”. When we read about Thomas believing, we’re reading about him having faith.

Jesus says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” The word translated ”doubt” here is “apistos” (“without faith”); the word translated ”believe” is “pistos” (“faith”).

When Thomas has declared his belief, Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” The word for believed here is “pepisteukas”; the word for believe is “pisteusantes”.

Thomas, as a result of seeing evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, came to have faith; Jesus said so himself. This shows very clearly that faith in the Christian sense need not be irrational. Whatever people are talking about when they say that faith is irrational by definition, it isn’t the same thing that Christianity commends.

Lest people forget that the Oxford Professor is not an expert on theology, here’s an example, taken from the point in The God Delusion where Dawkins is considering two possible explanations of our origins — respectively natural selection and God — and arguing that natural selection is the simpler of the two and therefore the more likely to be true.

There Dawkins suggests that Keith Ward is inconsistent on the question of whether the hypothesis that God exists is a simple hypothesis. In fact, Ward is perfectly consistent, but Dawkins doesn’t have the background knowledge to understand him, despite Ward’s clarity.

First, Dawkins quotes Ward’s God, Chance and Necessity, in which Ward clearly states that the God hypothesis is simple (or “economical”):

“As a matter of fact, the theist would claim that God is a very elegant, economical and fruitful explanation for the existence of the universe.”

Dawkins then quotes John Polkinghorne quoting Ward, with Ward writing of the thought of Thomas Aquinas:

“Its basic error is in supposing that God is logically simple…”

What are we to make of this? Does Ward believe that the God hypothesis is simple or not? Dawkins doesn’t know what to think:

“I am not clear whether Ward really thinks God is simple…”

The reason that Dawkins doesn’t know what to think is that he isn’t familiar with the doctrine of divine simplicity. This doctrine holds (very roughly) that God is logically indivisible, which means not just that God can’t be chopped up into bits but that there is no distinction between any one part of God and any other.

In the passage quoted, Ward rejects Aquinas’s understanding of divine simplicity, as the full quotation makes clear:

“Its basic error is in supposing that God is logically simple — simple not just in the sense that his being is indivisible, but in the much stronger sense that what is true of any part of God is true of the whole. It is quite coherent, however, to suppose that God, while indivisible, is internally complex.”

All that Ward says here is that it is coherent to say both that God is indivisible and that what is true of one part of God is not necessarily true of the whole. He does not deny that the God hypothesis is economical. The passage simply isn’t about whether the God hypothesis is economical. Dawkins, despite his willingness to present himself as one, isn’t an expert on religion, and so he misunderstands Ward, leading to his insinuation that Ward is inconsistent.

Dawkins may be an authority on certain areas of science, but on matters theological he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

This idea has become important enough to Christianity that some people now reject Christianity on the ground that the Bible contains errors. I think that this is a mistake. I don’t think that biblical inerrancy is central to Christianity, and I don’t think that biblical errancy (the view that the Bible does contain errors) is a good reason to reject Christianity.

The argument seems to be that once you admit that the Bible is wrong about one thing, you can’t trust it on anything else. Either the Bible is God’s perfect and infallible word, or we might as well bin it.

However, we learn from books that are fallible all the time. Every text book that you used at school was written by a fallible human being, but you used and trusted it. If we only trusted infallible sources of information, then we wouldn’t believe a thing.

Pretty much everyone has used and trusted a phone book at some point. I’ve got bad news for you: phone books contain errors. I know this because I once looked up the number for a local Catholic church, The Church of the Sacred Heart, and it was listed as The Church of the Scared Heart. I still use and trust the phone book. Even having read this, so will you.

When we’re ready to believe other books that are fallible, why do we insist on holding the Bible to a different standard? Why the false dichotomy: infallible or useless?

What matters is not whether a source of information is infallible but whether it is reliable. By all means, let’s discuss alleged contradictions and mistakes in the biblical record, but we mustn’t think that a single biblical error would spell the end for Christianity. The focus should be on biblical reliability, not on biblical inerrancy.