I always assumed that it came as part and parcel of being an apologist – the view that, if you’re ‘winning souls for Jesus’, you need have no shame in “lying for Jesus” to achieve that aim. That the divinely ordained end justifies any means.
After all, compared with Christianity’s long history of Conversion by the Sword, what does a bit of dishonesty here and there matter?
There is a famous passage at Romans 3:7 written by Paul: “For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner?”
This passage has been interpreted by many scholars as Paul justifying “lying for Jesus” as you put it. In fairness, it has also been interpreted to mean the opposite, but that’s one of the perennial problems with the bible–it can serve any master. With enough “exegesis” black is white and day is night…
Has it? In context it’s pretty clear that is NOT the message - it’s condemning such behaviour.
Rubbish. Name some of those alleged “many scholars.” Take your time. I’ll wait. (And a crackpot writer or two somewhere outside the academy is not “many scholars.”)
I’m retired and no longer a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion—secular organizations comprised of thousands of scholars throughout the world, including virtually all of the major universities religious studies professors—but I can’t think of even one who fits your description as to their position on Roman 3:7. (I can say the same for ETS, the Evangelical Theological Society, which includes over a thousand professors from countless denominational/evangelical/fundamentalist schools, mostly seminaries, Bible colleges, and theological graduate schools and some independent institutes.) Indeed, in a quick Google search I couldn’t find any scholar viewing Romans 3:7 in that way. So I also asked a few A.I. engines and those resources could not name any. Zip. Zero.
In fairness? It is interpreted to mean the opposite because that’s how the Greek text reads. (The text says the opposite of the position you are attempting to place on it.) Note the use of the optative mood verb in the preceding verse. (ME GENOITO.) It emphasizes the outrageousness of the hypothetical argument. Even first semester Koine Greek students learn the May it never be! “catchphrase” of its English rendering. (Occasionally a scholar will playfully render it as “Hell no!”) Indeed, the optative verbal mood was dying out by the first century but ME GENOITO was one of the “relics” from Attic Greek that was keeping it around.
Romans 3:7 is a rhetorical argument where the author is, just for the sake of argument, playing along with an absurd and illogical argument. (I used the word “argument” three times for good reason as central to my argument.)
My criticisms of the Discovery Institute are legion and date from the mid-1990’s when it transitioned from a focus on being a regional transportation thinktank and advocacy group to promoting ID and “defeating scientific materialism.” I find their “associate scholars” to be chronically guilty of misrepresentation of all sorts of science—but Romans 3:7 is irrelevant to their conduct. That includes the topic of comparing human DNA with other species.
Well, that one touched a nerve, my bad. I should have simply written that the passage has been interpreted in that fashion by many people rather than many “scholars.” I apologize for this. But the issue is apparently a big deal: All you have to do is Google “Paul the Apostle and lying” or some similar variation and you get numerous entries not just referencing Romans 3:7 as an example of Paul’s alleged prevarications but also 1 Cor. 9:19-22 and 2 Cor. 12:1. I say alleged prevarications because don’t have a dog in the fight whether Paul was a liar or rationalized lying for the “greater good” of Christianity. I am merely pointing out that those allegations have been leveled at him based on his, what you call, rhetorical style. People can believe whatever they want in that regard. The amount of ink spilled on the subject alone, especially by Christian apologists is pretty significant though.
Having said that, I do think in one respect that Paul did invent stuff, i.e. his claims regarding the resurrection. Most obvious is his claim in 1 Cor. 15 that 500 people witnessed Jesus postmortem. Paul provides not one scintilla of evidence for this claim, not a single name, not a single detail of where, when or what actually happened, despite the fact that he, by his own admission, had numerous witnesses available to document his claim. As outlandish as the claim is, I think that any reasonable person, would have gone out of his or her way to provide competent evidence of this claimed occurrence. I think Paul simply made it up. But, ultimately that is a different debate…
You need to find some Christian apologists claiming that lying for Jesus is OK and citing Paul in support of that. Anything else is sealioning.
I’m by no means a Biblical scholar. However, my reading of that passage is that Paul is speaking to a group of people to whom he has already spoken about the 500 witnesses, or who already hold this belief for some other reason. So he has no need to provide extensive evidence to support his claim,
Bingo. The mention of 500 witnesses is found in 1Cor 15:6, the second of four letters to the churches of Corinth. It is not an apologetic textbook to non-Christians. In evangelical scholarship it is considered a letter to a church where the Apostle Paul had taught for about a year and a half (four or five years previous.)
And considering that the structure of the epistle is apparently built around a series of questions (flagged by the “PERI DE . . .” markers) which the Corinthians had sent to the apostle—questions we can only infer as to the wording—Paul was answering them one by one. Accordingly, there is no reason to believe the Corinthians would complain and ask, “Can you make a list for us? When you were preaching here for a year and a half, you never told us the names of all of the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, so it is time that you buy some more papyri and make your amanuensis earn his keep as you dictate a detailed catalog of witnesses.”
To be clear, while there is no need for Paul to provide that evidence for his purposes, the use of the passage by Christian apologists often requires that he did. And I do not think we can tell that - it’s not even clear to me that Paul knew who the surviving witnesses were, let alone where they might be found. This is a criticism of the apologists, though, not Paul or the Bible.
That aside I see no reason to believe that Paul invented the claim.
Bible scholar Dale Allison, who is Christan, discusses the supposed 500 witnesses:
(I particularly when he asks if there was a receiving line for the 500 to meet Jesus.)
I’ve always seen the “500 witnesses” bit as simply being an example of the kind of thing one sees on fraudulent memes on Facebook: “This has been checked out on Snopes!” (when, in fact, it hasn’t). It’s likely not original with Paul, though; it really does sound like he is appealing to some body of what “everybody knows” happened. But what everybody knows ain’t necessarily so.
He’s repeating what he’s been told - he says as much. Which might or might not include the bit about some of the 500 still being alive - but almost certainly includes the bit about the 500 seeing Jesus.
I see no reason to believe that evangelicals know that they are stretching the truth when they proselytize about the One True Path to salvation. I think that most are being entirely honest and sincere in their claims that there was a historical Jesus, that the man performed miracles, and that he provided a way for eternal life in paradise. The power of mental partitioning and motivated reasoning should never be underestimated.
To quote Medawar in his scathing review of someone’s book): "…its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. "