The Carpenter (ImmanuEl Book 1)

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A book review may seem like an odd item to include in a collection of essays, but the book being reviewed made many claims that I commonly hear from Christians. And this book is fairly popular. So, this book review makes for a good, brief way to look at popular claims actually being put forward by Christians. Not too long ago, a friend of mine was in a place of business that had a waiting room for anonymity, I'm leaving out details of the exact type of business. It's basically an evangelical Christian book, purportedly to convince skeptics of the truth of Christianity. Being a bit cantankerous on religious issues, my friend got into a conversation with the lady behind the counter about the book.

She ended up offering the book to him so that he could take it home and read it and presumably save his soul. Not long after, her boss sent my friend another book, Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ , along with a note explaining that he thought it was better than McDowell's book. My friend, knowing my interests, offered to loan me the books, and I, being the glutton for punishment that I am, took them.

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To summarize, the book was bad. Practically every chapter relied on the Gospels being more or less reliable accounts, and then went off defending Jesus's divinity from there. As I've written elsewhere, if non-believers accepted that the Bible was true, we'd already be Christians. But we don't, so citing scripture as proof is nearly pointless. It would be like trying to prove Mormonism by quoting the Book of Mormon, or Buddhism by quoting the Buddhavacana.

McDowell only spent one chapter Chapter 6 trying to make a case for the Gospels being reliable, and didn't really succeed. And without that base, the rest of his book just falls flat. I can't fault him on that, since many people do that in books like these I even have a brief background in the book that I wrote [2]. But his description revealed a shallow, unexamined life. In college, he continued this insincere sounding search for answers by pestering his professors after classes and in their offices.

He even said that professors would close their doors and shut the blinds to hide from him. I hope that was just exaggeration, because I know how open my professors were when I was a student. It would have taken a particularly obtuse or arrogant student to get them to actually hide. He also mentioned the obligatory hedonistic partying during his college years. Josh finally found a Bible study group that showed him the light. But even his description of the group seems strange. He mentioned that one of the girls was attractive, which surprised him, because prior to that he didn't think Christian girls were pretty [3].

Frankly, this is a little unbelievable considering that he already said he went to church in high school. Was there not a single attractive girl there? He certainly didn't offer anything but shallow reasons for why he was an atheist in the first place. It was his attempt to show that Christ was unique. McDowell argued that only Christ claimed to be God, while Mohammed, the Buddha, and Confucius never made any such claims. He then backed this up with more than 15 pages citing passages from the Bible showing that Jesus did claim to be God and the son of God.

First of all, every religion has some unique aspect differentiating it from other religions. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a separate religion.

So, it seems a bit silly to point out a unique aspect of Christianity as if that's proof that Christianity is true [4]. Second, as I mentioned in the introduction, he was relying on scripture to back up his arguments, before even trying to establish the Bible as reliable. The biggest problem for this chapter is that McDowell ignored many, many other religions and examples. Children of gods and mortals demigods [5] are quite common - Perseus, Heracles, Theseus, Hanuman, and Garuda, to name just a few.

Children of gods who are themselves gods are also common. In fact, pretty much every god or goddess in a religion with a pantheon was born of another god and goddess. The Olympian gods and goddesses were all descended from Cronus and Rhea. Osiris was the son of Geb and Nut [6]. And there's no shortage of people who claimed to be gods [7] or even people who claimed to be Jesus [8]. Just consider the many such kings or emperors, like those of Egypt, Rome, China, or Japan, or cults of personality like those around Jim Jones [9] or Father Divine [10]. It's also worth mentioning the hints of anti-Semitism in this chapter.

Numerous times, McDowell mentioned how 'the Jews' killed Jesus. He could have easily written the Pharisees, or the Jewish leaders, but many places it was simply 'the Jews'. Or Something Else [11]. The biggest problem is that people ignore whether or not Jesus was a myth. There may or may not have been an actual historical figure that Jesus of the Bible is based on, but just like Robin Hood or King Arthur, it's entirely possible that much of the story we have now is embellishment.

In the Wikipedia era, I feel like saying, "Citation needed. To quote part of that study:. This was a very short chapter 4 pages , that did little more than reveal that McDowell has a very muddled understanding of science. He seems to think that science requires experiments in a lab, which would exclude astronomy, or any study of the past, from the realm of science. I've seen this type of argument before, and covered it in my essay, Confidence in Historical Knowledge [13].

This chapter was written by the son, Sean. It started off bad, criticizing the 'New Atheists' for not really offering any new arguments, when in reality, so called New Atheists never claimed to have any new ground breaking arguments. They thought of themselves as merely carrying on in the tradition of previous atheists like Bertrand Russell or Mark Twain. The term 'New Atheism' was coined in an article in Wired magazine, not invented by the New Atheists themselves.

As a small point, he also used an expression that I find especially irksome, describing the New Atheists as 'militant'. Now, I realize that modern atheists may not be as deferential as those from the past, now that religion is losing some of its influence over society. But when Christians actually attack abortion clinics [14] and plot to kill police officers [15] , while Muslims fly planes into buildings [16] and riot over the burning of a book [17] , it seems a bit hyperbolic to call atheists 'militant' who merely write books and speak bluntly.

In this chapter, Sean showed that he didn't accept evolution. I guess that's not much of a surprise, but it always hurts someone's credibility when they refuse to accept something with so much evidence backing it up.

The answer is twofold. First, natural selection will favor organisms that have brains that form relatively accurate models of reality. But second, we know we can't entirely trust our brains. They're prone to cognitive biases [18] , illusions, faulty reasoning, etc. Recognizing and working around the faults of our brains is one of the unsung victories of science you can read more about this in the article, The Double-Blind Gaze: The chapter trotted out plenty of stale arguments that atheists are used to hearing by now. There were some arguments from consequences, such as saying that atheism leads to worse morality again, see the study by Gregory S.

A few of the other 'standard' arguments and complaints from this chapter are listed below, followed by my response. This was the chapter I was most looking forward to. After more than a third of the book leading up to it, I wanted to see what arguments McDowell had for the Bible being reliable. Because, as I said before, so many of his other arguments rely on it, that this book just falls flat without some justification for accepting the Gospels as more or less true.

Unfortunately, this chapter was long on generalizations and arguments from authority, but short on actual evidence. The truth of the matter is that there are no contemporary accounts of Christ. The most we have now are the Gospels and other books of the New Testament, but none of those were written in Christ's time. The oldest Gospel, Mark, was probably written between 65 and 72 AD, while the other three canonical Gospels were written a few years later, with Mathew and Luke borrowing heavily from Mark's account McDowell quoted one scholar as placing the Gospels between 50 and 75 AD - a little early, but still not contemporary to Christ.

Some of the other books of the New Testament were written earlier such as Paul's letters , but these weren't written by eyewitnesses and are lacking in actual biographical details. Rather, they thought Jesus was a heavenly being who struggled in a supernatural realm. McDowell mentioned textual variants [22] , and rightly pointed out that most are of little consequence to the meaning of passages. However, the sheer number of variants shows that the surviving manuscripts are works of people, prone to making mistakes. McDowell also failed to discuss at all some of the more significant variants, such as the story of not casting the first stone, or the final 11 verses of Mark, both of which are widely considered to be later additions to those gospels, and not original to them [23] , [24].

He also mentioned that "In the Jewish culture it was important that a teacher's actual words were carefully preserved and passed down", but completely ignored that the Gospels produce at least two sets of last words for Jesus [25] , or possibly three, depending on your interpretation "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

McDowell did mention that we have limited manuscripts of other ancient writings, which is true. However, I'm not sure I follow his argument. For example, he wrote:. Is his point that we have to question The Conquest of Gaul because of the late date of the manuscripts? If so, I'd agree. There are doubtless mistakes that have been made during the copying process.

Is his point that we should question whether or not Caesar actually conquered Gaul? In that case, I would disagree.

There are other contemporary accounts besides Caesar's. There is archaeological evidence. If one discards the Bible as unreliable historically, then he or she must discard all literature of antiquity. Recalling Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul , we have to keep in mind that this wasn't just an unbiased historical document.

It was a bit of political propaganda to make Caesar look good back in Rome. Modern readers would do well to remember that and question Caesar's reliability when reading the book. When it came time to list sources of external evidence, he cited Eusebius [26] quoting Papias of Hierapolos [27]. Unfortunately, Eusebius wasn't writing until the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, and even Papias wasn't writing until the early 2nd century. He also used Iranaeus as an example, but Iranaeus wasn't writing until the late 2nd century. So, none of his examples were contemporaries of Jesus.

When he discussed archaeology, he didn't give any examples of evidence unique to Christianity, only a little general geography. Going back to my Robin Hood example, the existence of Sherwood Forest doesn't lend credence to the myth that the Merry Men lived there. McDowell also operated under the assumption that early Christianity was more or less uniform. He discussed the books of the New Testament as if they were part of a larger narrative. He just never considered that the different authors might themselves have had different beliefs, nor that there could have been other competing beliefs in early Christianity.

Keep in mind the old saying, that history is written by the victors. A remarkable view into the life of Jesus and His family in the early years. Humanity fully revealed without the religious trappings that have been layered onto this family throughout the centuries. Did God really need Joseph to accomplish the Christ event? Without a doubt, and this book helps us understand why. Jesus already had a Father. What He needed was a Daddy, one who could help him learn to be human. God doesn't choose perfect people to work through, just good people with the potential to be better, like you and me.

Maynard does a nice job with the Hebrew language, also, stripping away the Anglicization we have all become too familiar with and helping us to come to grips with the fact that Jesus and His family did not speak in formal Elizabethan English but in the relaxed common vernacular of their time and place. Meet the family of Jesus as they more likely really were and set the halos aside.

You will come closer to knowing the real Jesus through His family and contemporaries.

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Maynard fills in the missing years in a far more credible way than the Medieval writers and their followers and helps to reveal "God With Us. This book is downloaded on my KIndle from Amazon and initally I had difficulty reading it due to the spelling of names and places like from the Bible. I got into the book finally and started puttting it together with what I knew from Bible stories and it became a GIANT Bible story that spoke to my heart. The carpenter in case you have not figured out is Joseph the story of how he became the earthly father of Jesus.

There is a real family story with travels, work , more babies and keeping Jesus secret so he would not be murdered. Jesus went to school and was tormented as the rabbi though he was an illegimate child and should not attend; Joseph could not tell the rabbi the true story. Could not tell Jesus the true story in fact when he asked about his birth and parentage.

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Jesus finally came to realization himself as to his true idenity. I could not put the book down after getting used to the names, places and Jewish phrasing. Truly a good read! I don't like leaving books unfinished because,who knows, they may actually turn out good. This one, I am leaving unfinished. I just can't believe in it enough to want to know what happens.

It's a turn off that the author has Jesus as a slightly rebellious teen. The author doesn't even have Jesus believing in his father's God while he is a teen. The Bible specifically says that at the age of 12 Jesus was teaching in the Synagogue. If he didn't believe in his father's God how could that be? Nope, this book annoys me and actually gets to go in the unfinished pile