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Miracles around the world (podcast)

In May Craig was interviewed by Bill Campbell, host of the Vital Connection broadcast. You can download this 52-minute podcast here.

Vital Connection describes the interview as such:

Are the miracles described in the New Testament trustworthy accounts of God’s activity in the world, or are they mere relics of superstition, left on the pages of the Bible as shadows of a religion built on empty hopes? Seminary professor and best-selling author Dr. Craig Keener, who has written the most comprehensive and well-researched study on this topic, shares his insights.

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Minding Christ’s body—Romans 12:1-6

Paul summons believers to present themselves to God as a living, holy, and pleasing sacrifice to God (Rom 12:1). That is, he calls for total consecration, what some nineteenth-century Holiness preachers called, “laying all on the altar.” Moreover, he identifies this sacrifice as one’s “rational service,” a form of worship offered by a mind that thinks about reality in the right way. (Though some translations render the Greek word here as spiritual, the term more often involves the intellect.)

This consecration to God contrasts with blending into the world and its values that dominate the present age: “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Too often the world around us sets our agendas for what we value: status, wealth, convenience, sex, honor, and so forth.

Worldliness takes different forms in different cultures. One example in much of Western culture is that most of us cannot readily understand the concept of a “Lord.” While there are definite advantages in having a president rather than a king, U.S. culture is accustomed to voting for or against presidents, and then criticizing them afterward even if we voted for them. Voters expect them to work for (or against) our special interest groups. But Jesus is not our president; he is our Lord. We have often reduced God to a means to give us what we want, instead of considering how we may serve God.

Yet Paul tells us the outcome of our minds being renewed: we perform our rational service of yielding our lives to God’s service (Rom 12:1-2). We also learn to recognize God’s will: that which is “good, pleasing, and perfect” (12:2). Paul here describes God’s will with three adjectives, one of them carried over from the three adjectives describing the living sacrifice in 12:1. The renewed mind recognizes what is good, and acts accordingly, for that is God’s will. Paul goes on to show that the renewed mind is not self-centered, but thinks about how to use God’s gifts to serve others (12:3-6). Sometimes we need to pray for the Spirit’s guidance, but sometimes God has already given us guidance and we just don’t want to recognize it. If I see needs, and God has equipped me to help meet those needs, I don’t need to pray for guidance; I already have guidance. We must use our bodies to serve Christ’s body (12:1, 4-5).

What we choose to meditate on, what we deliberately fill our minds with, will be what shapes our understanding of our identity, mission and activity in this world. As early programmers said about computers, “garbage in, garbage out”: what you put in is what you get out, whether data or nonsense. If we use our free time to imbibe more deeply the values of the present world, we will inevitably conform to those values. If instead we fill our thoughts with God’s Word and God’s values, God might just use us as prophetic voices to speak God’s heart to our world and his church today.

This adapts an article originally written for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer. Craig Keener is author of a commentary on Romans (Cascade 2009).

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When miracles don’t happen

Miracles have often been associated with missions. In both Acts and the history of missions, miracles have often been reported on the cutting edge of ground-breaking evangelism. In the early medieval period, examples include Augustine of Canterbury’s early work among the English, Columba’s among the Scots, and Boniface’s among the Germans. They are reported especially frequently in the past half-century in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America (though they also appeared in times of revival there earlier, such as in India in the 1850s and the Korean revival of the early twentieth century).

One could offer only samples of such miracle reports in many places where the gospel is breaking new ground today. An eyewitness shared with me, for example, how he witnessed the instant healing of one nonbeliever’s arm, which had been paralyzed for decades. Local witnesses of this one event sparked a revival among a long-resistant people group in Suriname, leading to tens of thousands of conversions over the next few years. Likewise, many reports surround the spreading of the gospel in previously unevangelized villages in Mozambique, where a number of deaf non-Christians were healed when Christians prayed for them. A team from the United States documented some of these cases to the best that conditions allowed and reported on them in Southern Medical Journal in September 2010. (Objections were answered in Candy Gunther Brown’s book Testing Prayer, published by Harvard in 2012.)

But what happens when miracles do not occur? What happens when we pray and nothing physically changes? Jesus healed all who came to him, but the Bible does not lead us to expect that God will do extraordinary signs every time people pray. Jesus proclaimed the kingdom, or reign of God, and demonstrated God’s reign by his authority over sickness, spirits, and storms. Jesus warned his detractors that if he was driving out demons by the finger or Spirit of God, then God’s kingdom had come upon them (Matt 12:28/Luke 11:20). Jesus also described his miraculous ministry in language that evoked Isaiah’s picture of the future era of restoration (Matt 11:5//Luke 7:22). In his ministry, the promised restoration of the kingdom era had begun.

Miracles, however, are signs of the kingdom, and not the fulness of the kingdom itself. The first century apostles died, and so far as we know, no one raised them. Even those whom Jesus or others miraculously raised eventually died again later; unlike Jesus’s resurrection, these raisings were not meant to be permanent and eternal. Believers through history have continued to die; healings are real, but when they happen they only delay the inevitable that all people through history have faced. Jesus admonished his followers to give special honor to people who were blind and disabled (Luke 14:13), presumably implying that such conditions would often continue in this age.

God often does miracles. I have collected hundreds of miracle reports from eyewitnesses in my recent book on the subject; although I cannot verify the reliability of every claim, many came from witnesses that I know and trust, and some are well-documented. Whereas some are recoveries that could possibly be attributed to natural immune responses (which are also God’s gift), some, such as the instant disappearance of cataracts, reversal of auditory nerve damage, raisings of persons believed to be dead for hours, the instant healing of severe burns or closing of a large wound overnight, are dramatic signs of God’s activity. Hearing these reports encouraged my own faith and motivated me to believe that God can do anything. I pray with renewed confidence and am more prepared to recognize answers to prayer.

At the same time, the world’s suffering continues. In places like Congo, where my wife is from, people have to depend on God and often see miracles, but the rate of mothers dying in childbirth, of children losing limbs, of babies dying of malaria or typhoid fever or meningitis, are unacceptably high. Miracles are not meant as an easy panacea for the world’s problems. Jesus multiplied the fishes and loaves, but then commanded the disciples to gather up the fragments that remain, because they would not need a miracle for their next meal. In a world where health care, clean drinking water and other resources are inequitably distributed, Jesus’s miracles speak an uncomfortable word to us. They show us what Jesus cares about: people’s health and deliverance. They therefore invite us to use all means possible—prayers for healing, medical missions, work for political and economic justice, and the like—to help people. Sometimes we don’t need a miracle—we need to use what God has already given us. Praying for our daily bread, for example, does not mean that we don’t also work for a living if we’re able to.

We pray for miracles that only God can do, and work for transformations that he has given us the ability to do. In both cases, we help people to have a foretaste of God’s coming kingdom, when he will wipe away all tears from our eyes and there will be no more sorrow or sighing or death. There is a message in the Gospels that runs deeper than miracles: the message of the Cross. In the Cross God shows that even in the deepest tragedy, God still has a plan. Miracles are samples of the future, meant to keep hope kindled; but the deepest sign of hope is the cross that gave way to the resurrection. Even when God does not do a miracle when we think we need it, the future is secure.

This is adapted from an article for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer. Craig S. Keener is author of the award-winning Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (2 volumes; Baker Academic, 2011).

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A personal perspective on intolerance

When I first converted from atheism to Christianity, some people did not mind, but some others ridiculed my newfound faith. In my early excitement, I was as eager to share what I had discovered as they were to criticize it; some merely loudly denounced me as “weird,” but one peer pulled a knife on me.

The third time I was beaten for expressing my faith was actually in the Bible Belt. The only provocation I offered (which some today might consider sufficient) was that I told the man, “Jesus loves you.” Although I intended those three words to encourage him, I was not yet socially adept enough to recognize that he might resent them. (Nevertheless, critics who would suggest that I deserved the ensuing beating might wish to consider whether their suggestion illustrates my general point. Those who believe that abuse is inappropriate only if people keep to themselves, their views — whether Christian, atheistic or other — in essence consent to abuse rather than supporting freedom of speech and of religion.)

After he finished pummeling me and I managed to stumble away onto a side street, he shouted that he would kill me if he ever saw me again. Then again, had he seen me the next day, with my two swollen black eyes, he might not have recognized me! Happily, apart from the eyes, some lost blood, and a few days with a sore head, I survived fairly well.

Much more common in this country is probably simple prejudice or discrimination. When I was applying for jobs at fast-food restaurants, a manager, learning that I was a ministerial student, terminated the interview. “I’ve had problems with people like you,” he explained. That was a rare experience, but my point is that whatever one’s views, one will find some people who dislike them, sometimes strongly, and express that prejudice in concrete ways. Such treatment is certainly underreported. During the times was beaten, I simply expected that experiencing hostility was par for the course. I suspect that much religious discrimination or opposition goes unreported, especially among groups whose theology explains such experiences as the norm.

Years later, as I was nearly ready to finish my doctoral program, one professor suggested that I might not be permitted to graduate because I was too “openly religious.” Other professors dismissed such a remark and treated me fairly, but the comment did raise my anxiety level. In more recent years, a minority of people have dismissed what I thought were my fairly neutral scholarly arguments by making claims about my personal faith. Some of these critics associated all religious people — Christians, evangelicals, Pentecostals and so forth — with popular stereotypes of televangelists, apparently unaware that most scholars from these groups would share their disdain of televangelists. These particular critics showed no cognizance of the scholarly study of American religion or the actual diversity within the groups they were stereotyping or about which they were pontificating. (Some also assigned me to the wrong group.) Some generalized based on bad experiences that they had had with some members of these groups in ways that they would never think to do with members of some other sorts of groups (such as, for example, their own).

Nevertheless, stereotypes, insensitivity and outright hostility obviously do not apply only to variations of religious faith. It was around 1986 when I first began to understand this point. I had temporarily ended up on a politically conservative Christian mailing list, which incited fear about secularists taking over the United States and persecuting Christians. At about the same time, my French professor, a very courteous and kind agnostic, pulled me aside after class one afternoon with an expression of terror on his face. Knowing that I was a Christian, he needed to ask me an important question. “Craig – -can you tell me if it is really true that Christians plan to take over the United States and persecute secular humanists?” My unfortunate professor was on someone else’s mailing list. Both organizations stereotyped “the enemy” to mobilize constituencies and raise funds.

Mistreatment is not, of course, limited to religious issues. One gay friend, for example, shared with me how he as a boy was stoned by classmates because of his sexual orientation.

Stereotypes flourish pervasively. One attorney I knew, lamenting a recent news story about a crooked lawyer, complained, “Everyone thinks we’re unethical! The media report only the scandals!” I fidgeted uncomfortably; I had shared that stereotype. Of course, it is the media’s job to report what is unusual, and at least in most professions and circles, scandals are what are exceptional. But when we form stereotypes based on those worst examples instead of engaging others as individuals, we are prone to evaluate them based on the alleged category. And when civility fails, we ridicule or fear each other instead of communicating and understanding one another’s concerns.

If all of us who have experienced others’ insensitivity to our beliefs could sympathize with those marginalized for beliefs different from our own, we could make the world a more tolerant place. Substantive points of disagreement with one another notwithstanding, we can learn to disagree respectfully and graciously. A number of us, in fact, follow faiths that should demand no less of us.

(Note: this post is a condensed version of an article originally published as part of Craig’s ongoing blogging on the Huffington Post website. See more of his articles here.)

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The Spirit as a divine person — John 14:16-17, 26

Christians honor God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet we may not always recognize the biblical foundations for what we believe.

That the Father is God goes without saying. That Jesus is divine in the New Testament would be equally obvious to its first readers, and would be to everyone today if we recognized ancient literary devices. For example, New Testament letters open with blessings from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, even though ancient blessings invoked deities. Old Testament descriptions of God are often applied to Jesus (e.g., Phil 2:6, 10-11; Rev 7:16-17). Even his title “Lord” would often imply his deity no less than the title “God,” especially in passages like 1 Cor 8:5-6, which evokes Deut 6:4 (one God, one Lord). Many passages are even more explicit, such as John 1:1; 8:58; and 20:28, framing the heart of John’s Gospel.

But what about the Spirit? This is more explicit in some passages (treated below) than in some others. In contrast to Jesus’s deity, the Spirit as a divine person was not a primary issue of contention with the earliest church’s contemporaries, so it received less attention at first. Jewish people recognized the Spirit as divine, although not as a person within God distinct from the Father. In the Old Testament, God was more concerned about defining himself as Israel’s one God as opposed to the false gods worshiped by other nations. At best there are possible hints that the Spirit could be distinguished from the one whom Christians call God the Father (cf. perhaps Isa 48:16). God was schooling his people in monotheism, but the term for God’s oneness is also the term for the oneness of husband and wife (Gen 2:24). That is, the necessary emphasis on God’s oneness does not exclude the later revelation of different persons sharing the nature of the one God.

Various passages in the New Testament provide much fuller hints, connecting the Spirit with the Father and the Son in special ways that presuppose their deity (1 Cor 12:4-6; 2 Cor 13:14; Eph 4:4-6; most explicitly, Matt 28:19). Sometimes in Acts the Spirit also acts in personal ways.

That the Spirit acts as a person becomes most clear in Jesus’s final discourse to his disciples in John 14—16. This is not so much because Jesus uses a masculine pronoun for the Spirit here; the masculine pronoun fits the gender of the Greek word paraklêtos (“counselor,” “advocate,” “comforter”) used in this context. That use no more makes the Spirit male than the feminine and neuter pronouns for the Spirit associated with the feminine Hebrew (ruach) and neuter Greek (pneuma) terms for “spirit” make the Spirit female or neuter.

The reason we recognize the Spirit as personal in these passages is that he carries forward Jesus’s mission after his ascension, working as “another advocate” (John 14:16-17, 26; 16:7-15). The Spirit convicts the world concerning sin and judgment (16:8-9, 11) just as Jesus does (3:19-20; 8:46; 12:31); he acts in Jesus’ place after Jesus’s exaltation (14:16; 16:10). He comes and speaks to the disciples whatever he hears (16:13), just as Jesus did (15:15). It is not surprising, then, that once Christians began considering these questions they recognized the Spirit as a divine person like the Father and the Son.

Christians today sometimes treat the Spirit—or even the Father and the Son—as an impersonal force. But God comes to us in a personal way, a way that invites us into a personal relationship with him. As we worship God together, let us remember and embrace that invitation.

(This post is adapted from my article for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer; more details are in my book Gift & Giver and in my two-volume commentary on John, both with Baker.)

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The fruit of the Spirit — Galatians 5:22-23

At a time when many teachers and members of churches misunderstood grace, John Wesley rightly emphasized that salvation by grace is a transforming experience. That is, we do not earn salvation by behaving righteously; rather, we are saved from sin by God’s power and therefore able to live more righteously.

Wesley’s insight fit well a central emphasis in Paul’s theology. Paul emphasized that it is God who saves us in Christ, that it is God who gifts us by his Spirit to minister to one another, and God who empowers us by the Spirit to live for him. In other words, Paul’s theology focused on God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This did not mean that Christians had nothing left to do; rather, it meant they had power in Christ and by the Spirit to do what they should.

Not everyone was so convinced that Christ’s transforming power was sufficient. Specifically, some insisted on imposing their own culture’s customs on new believers in Galatia. Paul warned his Galatian converts that we are saved not by our works, not by our own flesh, but by God’s Spirit (see Gal 3:5). It is the context of such an extended argument in his letter to Galatians that he speaks about the Spirit’s fruit. He contrasts here the “works of the flesh”—which are sinful (Gal 5:19-21)—with the “fruit of the Spirit,” against which is no law (5:22-23).

Works of flesh are what we can do in our own strength; fruit of the Spirit comes from a new nature and new identity in Christ. God had promised to someday empower his people to obey his commands by putting his Spirit within them and making them new (Ezek 36:26-27). The fruit of the Spirit exhibits the reality of this promise. God has not only given us a new identity, but also the renewal of the Spirit in our lives so we can learn to believe that new identity, to act out of who God has called us to be rather than out of what we had been in our own strength alone.

We do not nail fruit onto trees; it grows there, based on the nature of the tree. As Jesus pointed out, good fruit grows on a good tree; the nature of a tree determines the nature of its fruit. When God’s Spirit comes to live inside us (when we accept Christ), he gives us a new character in his own image. Second Peter 1:4 speaks of being made partakers of the divine nature. This does not of course mean that we become God or become omnipotent or lose our humanity; it means instead that we are transformed into his likeness, into what we were designed to be. The fruit of the Spirit is the moral character that flows from Christ’s image placed in us. In the language of John 15, as we dwell in him, fruit grows on us because we as branches are connected with the vine.

Paul lists nine examples of this fruit, but pride of place goes to the first fruit on his list, love (Gal 5:22). Paul has been explaining that love is the chief commandment and characteristic of the Christian life (5:13-14). Now he emphasizes that it flows naturally from God’s presence in our lives, and we can choose to depend on him to bring forth that fruit in our lives.

All of this fits Paul’s emphasis in Galatians. Such love fulfills the law (5:13), and no law legislates against the fruit of the Spirit (5:23). Those who are led by the Spirit are not subject to the law (5:18), but that is not because grace ignores holiness. Instead, once Christ lives inside us, we live for God so that we live even more purely than the law would have demanded. We fulfill God’s will now because we want to, because God has given us a new heart. Paul’s point about the fruit of the Spirit is that God gets the credit, because it is his work in us that makes us into what he wants us to be. If we believe God to save us from sin’s penalty, we can also believe him to save us from its power. Christ completed that work (5:24); we now learn to appropriate it by faith.
(Adapted from my article originally for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer; see further discussion in my book, Gift & Giver, published by Baker)

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All things for good — Romans 8:28

“We know that all things work for good to those who love God, who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28)

Sometimes people can quote this verse glibly to those who are suffering, but Paul did not mean it glibly. When Paul wrote that God works all things for the good of those who love him, he wrote to people experiencing the anguish of suffering. Many Christians in Rome had been expelled from their homes less than a decade earlier, and had returned only a few years before Paul wrote. A few years after Paul wrote Romans, the evil emperor Nero killed many of his readers due to false accusations against Christians. Certainly God often works things for our good when we are alive (as in the case of Joseph’s sufferings, for the good of many people, Gen 50:20). But does God work things for our good even when we face apparently good-ending sufferings such as death?

Those who love God have a greater good to look forward to. While God often does work things for our good while we are alive, He uses our sufferings also and always for our eternal good. In Romans 8 Paul says that all things work for the good of those “called according to God’s purpose” (Rom 8:28). What is God’s purpose for us? Paul goes on to seek of how we will ultimately be “conformed to the image of His Son” (8:29) and “glorified” (8:30). When Christ returns, our bodies will be transformed to be like His own glorious body (Phil 3:21). Our present sufferings are related to our future glory. Paul says earlier that the present sufferings are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us (Rom 8:18; cf. 2 Cor 4:17). In some sense, these sufferings help to shape us toward the image of Christ, as we share Christ’s sufferings that we may also participate in His glory.

Paul even says that all creation is eager for our glorification (8:19-21). When people sinned in the beginning, we marred God’s glory and image in us (Gen 1:26-27), but in Christ, that glory and image are being restored (2 Cor 3:18). It will be fully restored in us when our Lord returns. Yet our glorification is just part of the new creation; as humanity’s sin marred creation, so humanity’s restoration will mark all of creation’s restoration to the purposes for which God designed it. That is why, he says, creation groans in childbirth (8:22).

Paul recognized that believers would often suffer before that full restoration takes place. But he understood these sufferings as a sort of birth pangs for the coming new world. Creation “groans” and “travails” for the future (Rom 8:22). We ourselves also groan, eager for the transformation of our bodies, strengthened by God’s Spirit who already lives in us (8:23). Not only this, but God’s own Spirit groans (8:26), because He Himself is eager for the new creation and helps us as we persevere. Right now we face much hardship on the outside; but God’s own presence within us equips us on the inside. Someday the Spirit who already works in us will raise us and transform all of creation, so that the grace we have on the inside is just a foretaste of the blessings of the future world on the outside as well.

Our sufferings play a part in God’s plan, just as did our Lord Jesus’ suffering. When on the new earth we look back, we will recognize that He was with us even in the times when it was so difficult to imagine that He was there. The one who gave His own Son for us will not abandon us, but will bestow on us all the world to come (8:32). No suffering can ever separate us from His love for us (8:35-39).

(This is adapted from an article written for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Missionary Seer. Craig has also authored a short commentary on Romans.)

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Suffering and exploitation in Revelation

Does Revelation have any relevance for today? Among the points where the book’s message might help people today is its challenge to the security people often feel going about their own lives while neglecting the suffering of others. Revelation originally addressed seven churches; two or three of them were facing significant suffering, while many of the others felt comfortable as part of a social and economic system that ignored and sometimes inflicted suffering. They all lived in a society that honored the wealthy, the powerful and aristocratic celebrities while neglecting or despising the weak.

A corporate embodiment of evil in Revelation is often called “Babylon.” The name made sense to Revelation’s first audience, who knew that an earlier Babylon had destroyed the temple and enslaved God’s people. Most scholars see “Babylon” in Revelation as a transparent analogy for the empire reigning when Revelation was written — Rome. After all, Rome had also destroyed the temple and enslaved God’s people less than three decades before when Revelation was probably written. Some Jewish people had long envisioned Rome as an evil empire, a successor to oppressive Babylon. Although Rome fits the description for John’s day, the same spirit or ethos lives on in other oppressive regimes and economically exploitive systems today.

Revelation climaxes with Babylon’s fall just before narrating the return of Jesus. Scholars often observe that the list of imports to Babylon in Revelation 18:12-13 closely resembles the known imports into Rome. Much of the list depicts luxury goods, such as pearls for which divers in the Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf had to risk their safety; gold and silver taken from slave-worked mines seized from Spain; the ivory trade that had already nearly driven extinct Syrian and north African elephants; and the like.

At least one item suggests exploitation even without being a luxury good: Rome imported massive quantities of wheat to feed its large population. To maintain stability in the capital, Rome distributed wheat free to its residents, but at the expense of the overtaxed peasants in Egypt who had to raise the grain. Although Egypt was itself once a mighty Empire, Egypt’s peasants around the fertile Nile now had to send a large amount of their produce to Rome. Yet these peasants suffered from lack of resources themselves. Possibly up to one-third of their own children died within a year of birth; most families crowded into small dwellings. So oppressive was the exploitation that on some occasions when harvests were bad and a village heard that a tax collector was coming, the entire village skipped town and started a new village somewhere else. The climax of Revelation’s list, however, is the most directly exploitive practice of all: “the bodies and lives of people” — Rome’s notorious slave trade.

In contrast to inequitable trade patterns in the Roman empire, international trade can raise living standards when carried out justly and with cross-cultural wisdom. Yet one needs little knowledge of economics to recognize that some systems contain elements that unjustly profit some peoples while others are exploited. To take one commonly cited example: much of the coltan used in electronic devices is mined by impoverished workers in Congo-DRC under unsafe conditions; natural resources in the same nation help fuel civil conflicts and degrade the ecosystem on which people depend. Likewise, it is common knowledge that an international slave trade continues, often forcing women and children from poorer regions into sexual service for more economically endowed regions.

Revelation suggested that the empire’s economy, built on injustice, was ultimately doomed to collapse, taking with it the economic systems too dependent on it. On the one hand, Revelation offered comfort and hope of a better future for the suffering churches. To those churches that were complacent about others’ sufferings, however, the book sounded a stark warning: there is a God of justice, and those who unjustly indulge their comforts at the expense of others will one day have to face reality. Perhaps Revelation still has something to teach us today.

(Note: this post is a condensed version of an article originally published as part of Craig’s ongoing blogging on the Huffington Post website. See more of his articles here.)

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A personal perspective on immigration

Debates about immigration policy are back in the news. At such times, it’s helpful to remember the other side of policy: hundreds of thousands of individual stories. Immigration has always involved hardship, but unfortunately I never fully came to grips with that reality until it became part of my own reality. Ours was supposed to be an open-and-shut case: a fiancée visa. Our timing, however, was admittedly unhelpful: right after 9/11.

Médine and I had long been friends and had even discussed marriage. One day, however, I received a letter from her that a relative had carried out of the country. Civil war had come to Congo-Brazzaville, and she didn’t know whether she would live or die. By the time her letter reached me, her town had been abandoned and burned. For the next eighteen, anguished months I could do nothing but pray for her safety. Meanwhile, she was often traveling miles through snake-infested swamps and fields of army ants to get food for her family.

When the war ended and we were able to resume communication, we decided to marry, but were very naïve about international politics and policies. At the time, because of the recent war, her country lacked a functioning U.S. consulate, so she and her 3-year-old son would have to travel to Cameroon. It took awhile in the postwar situation to get all the papers that the U.S. government understandably required. For example, even though she had kept her passport while she was a refugee, the new government required new passports. For another, she had to get documents regarding her marital status. (She had been married briefly in Congo, but the husband had strangled her while she was pregnant and turned out to be a bigamist.)

A week after she finally reached Cameroon my teaching semester ended and I flew there to be with her while seeking the visa. We had been advised that, for some reason, a marriage visa took twice as long as a fiancée visa at that time, so we should wait and then marry in the U.S.

The requirement, though, was for me to return to the U.S. and file. A contact also informed us that one of her needed documents was inadequate, unknown to us, so she had to return to Congo while I fretted further for her safety — and her son cried that she might never come back. When I finally had the documents in hand and my lawyer was preparing to submit them, 9/11 happened — and immigration policy changed virtually overnight. On top of that, the Vermont Service Center was shut down due to an anthrax scare, and petitions became backlogged.

My fiancée had spent 18 months displaced from her home in Congo. Now she spent months displaced in a country not her own, waiting for a visa to my country. Conditions were better and the family hosting her was gracious, but now she was far from family and friends and lonelier than she had been as a refugee. As a professor I had an unusual gift in that I did not need to report for work during summer and winter breaks. Apart from those periods, however, I could not be with her or her son.

Through a senator’s intervention, the fiancée visa was expedited after I returned to Cameroon. We happily took our copy of the form to the consulate, only to discover that the consulate needed the form directly by diplomatic pouch from the United States; our copy of the document was not adequate. The consulate kept expecting the form by diplomatic pouch at any time, but it never arrived.

After more than two months back in Cameroon, I had to return to the U.S. because my next semester was starting. We had already missed our first wedding date. What broke my heart most was the sincere pleas of the boy, David, now 4. “I will come to Philadelphia with you tomorrow,” he kept promising. When I finally had to leave without him he cried. “Who will play with me?” A friend took us all to the airport; afterward Médine found a place alone and sobbed.

“The consulate must have lost the file,” the woman at the immigration service assured me. The consulate, however, insisted that the immigration service must have lost the file. Similar stories from friends suggested that the fault likelier lay with the overworked immigration service, but it didn’t matter. The woman on the phone warned me that whoever lost the file, I would have to start over with a new petition, and that could take six more months. We were devastated, and it could have really been six more months had the consulate not had mercy on us in view of the evidence already provided. (I should mention that once Médine and David were in the United States, immigration officials here were very courteous to them.)

Our experience was painful, but we watched even more painful experiences among friends who did not have such established legal grounds to have family members with them. Of course there are many factors to consider when debating the logistical details of immigration policy. But debates about policy should never lose sight of what immigration involves in the lives of the real people that immigration rules affect. When my wife and I think about immigration, our first thoughts are about the concrete pain of real families separated by international borders.

(Note: this article was originally published as part of Craig’s ongoing blogging on the Huffington Post website. See more of his articles here.)

 

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Historical evidence for the existence of Jesus

Contrary to some circles on the Internet, very few scholars doubt that Jesus existed, preached and led a movement. Scholars’ confidence has nothing to do with theology but much to do with historiographic common sense. What movement would make up a recent leader, executed by a Roman governor for treason, and then declare, “We’re his followers”? If they wanted to commit suicide, there were simpler ways to do it.

One popular objection is that only Christians wrote anything about Jesus. This objection is neither entirely true nor does it reckon with the nature of ancient sources. It usually comes from people who have not worked much with ancient history. Only a small proportion of information from antiquity survives, yet it is often sufficient.

We recognize that most people write only about what they care about. The only substantive early works about Socrates derive from his followers. The Dead Sea Scrolls extol their community’s founder, but no other reports of him survive. The Jewish historian Josephus claims to be a Pharisee, yet never mentions Hillel, who is famous in Pharisees’ traditions. Israeli scholar David Flusser correctly observes that it is usually followers who preserve what is most meaningful about their teachers, whether the leaders were Buddha, Muhammad, Mormon leader Joseph Smith or African prophet Simon Kimbangu.

Interestingly, however, once ancient writers had reasons to care about Jesus, they did mention him.

Josephus, the only extant first-century historian focused on Judea, mentions both Jesus and John the Baptist as major prophetic figures, as well as subsequently noting Jesus’ brother, James. Later scribes added to the Jesus passage, but the majority of specialists agree on the basic substance of the original, a substance now confirmed by a manuscript that apparently reflects the pre-tampering reading. Josephus describes Jesus as a sage and worker of wonders, and notes that the Roman governor Pilate had him crucified. On the cause of crucifixion Josephus remains discreet, but mass leaders were often executed for sedition — especially for being potential kings. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jesus’ followers also insisted, even after his death, that he was a king. Josephus was not a Christian and does not elaborate, but his summary matches other sources.

Writing even earlier than Josephus, Syrian philosopher Mara bar Sarapion claimed that Jesus was a wise Jewish king. Tacitus later reports on events from 31-34 years after Jesus’ ministry, associating Roman Christians with him and noting that he was executed under Pontius Pilate. These and other sources provide only snippets, but they address what these sources cared about. By comparison, Tacitus mentions only in passing a Jewish king on whom Josephus focused (Agrippa I); nor was Tacitus interested even in Judea’s Roman governors. Tacitus’s mention of Pilate in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion is Roman literature’s only mention of Pilate (though Pilate appears in Josephus and an inscription).

From Jesus’ followers, who were interested, we naturally learn much more. Fifteen to 30 years after Jesus’ ministry, Paul wrote much about Jesus, including an encounter that Paul believed he had with the risen Jesus probably within a few years of Jesus’ execution. Rightly or wrongly, Paul staked the rest of his life on this experience. Other early Christians also preserved information; some 30-40 years after Jesus’ ministry, Mark’s Gospel circulated. Luke reports that “many” had already written accounts by the time Luke writes. Luke shares with Matthew some common material that most scholars think is even earlier than Mark. Only a small minority of figures in antiquity had surviving works written about them so soon after their deaths.

What can the first-century Gospels tell us? Certainly at the least they indicate that Jesus was a historical figure. Myths and even legends normally involved characters placed centuries in the distant past. People wrote novels, but not novels claiming that a fictitious character actually lived a generation or two before they wrote. Ancient readers would most likely approach the Gospels as biographies, as a majority of scholars today suggest. Biographies of recent figures were not only about real figures, but they typically preserved much information. One can demonstrate this preservation by simply comparing the works of biographers and historians about then-recent figures, say Tacitus and Suetonius writing about Otho.

What was true of biographies in general could be even more true of biographies about sages. Members of sages’ schools in this period typically preserved their masters’ teachings, which became foundational for their communities. Memorization and passing on teachings were central. Oral societies were much better at this than most of us in the West today imagine; indeed, even illiterate bards could often recite all of Homer from heart. None of this means that the Gospels preserve Jesus’ teaching verbatim, but by normal standards for ancient history, we should assume that at the least many key themes (e.g., God’s “kingdom”) were preserved. Indeed, many of the eyewitnesses (such as Peter) remained in key leadership positions in the movement’s earliest decades.

One significant feature of these first-century Gospels is the amount of material in them that fits a first-century Galilean setting. That setting differs from the Gospel writers’ own setting. The Gospel writers updated language to apply it to their own audiences, but they also preserved a vast amount of information. This is merely a sample; specialists devote their lives to the details.

Yet, valuable as examining such historical evidence is, we must return to where we started. Logically, why would Jesus’ followers make up a Jesus to live and die for? Why not glorify real founders (as movements normally did)? Why make up a leader and have him executed on a Roman cross? To follow one executed for treason was itself treason. To follow a crucified leader was to court persecution. Some people do give their lives for their beliefs, but for beliefs, not normally for what they know to be fabricated. Jesus’ first movement would not have made up his execution or his existence. How much they actually remembered about him is a subject for a future post.

(Note: this article was originally published as part of Craig’s ongoing blogging on the Huffington Post website. See more of his articles here.)