Christ and the Caveman

I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s fascinating, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.  It’s an eye-opening walk through humanity’s entire history. It’s a mini-course in anthropology, which lays before us insights about humanity’s rise that Aristotle, Newton, or even Einstein would have longed to have known.

One of Harari’s revelations is that most of what we consider “history” is surprisingly recent.  If you scan the whole sweep
of human experience, Jesus’ sitting down atop the Mount of Olives didn’t happen all that long ago.  Columbus’ stepped aboard the Santa Maria just yesterday.  Even the stone age use of fire isn’t a truly old happening.   What’s old are the thousands of generations of people who lived and died walking around in little groups, pulling berries off of bushes, and eating rodents.

Timeline of Human History Spread Over One Mile

Years Ago	Calendar Year	Event	Feet from End of Mile	Inches from End
2,500,000		rise of humans or genus Homo	5280
2,000,000		Humans leave Africa, evolution of different human species	4224
500,000		Neanderthals evolve in Europe and Middle East	1056
300,000		daily use of fire	634
200,000		Homo Sapiens evolve in East Africa	422
70,000		Homo Sapiens evolve in East Africa, cognitive revolution (rise of abstract thinking ability)	148
45,000		Homo Sapiens navigate to Australia	95
30,000		extinction of Neanderthals	63
16,000		Homo Sapiens settle in Americas	34
13,000		extinction of all non-Sapien humans, leaving only one species of humans	27
12,000		Domestication of plants and animals (Neolithic Revolution)	25
6022		Creation according to the Old Testament	13
5,000		first kingdoms, money, polytheistic religion	11
4,250		first empire, Akkadian under Sargon	9
2,500		Persian Empire, Buddhism,	5
2,000		Jesus Christ	4
1,400		rise of Islam	3
526	1492	Scientific Revolution, Europeans navigate to Americas		13.3
242	1776	American Revolution		6.1
153	1865	Civil War		3.9
100	1918	WWI		2.5
77	1941	WWII		2.0
67	1952	Doug DeCelle born		1.7

The 1925 Scopes Trial

In the steaming summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, a judge gaveled open the trial of a substitute teacher named John Thomas Scopes. The whole nation watched. What was Scopes’ crime? He taught the theory of evolution to public school kids. The defendant couldn’t recall if he’d actually taught a lesson about evolution. But he intended to. Obviously, this was not exactly a vile act.

Scopes wasn’t really on trial. The Bible was. And what everybody was fascinated with and nervous about was how the Bible’s Creation story squared with new evidence about humankind’s beginnings. Evolution is a disruptive idea. It seems to mock the Creation stories with a newfangled idea that maybe Adam and Eve weren’t the first people. 

What are Christians to do with evidence that they and all people are primates, and have been around way before the Creation as reported in the Word of God. 

What about the cavemen? 

The State of Tennessee had an answer, namely to  make it illegal to teach anything about human beginnings that contradicted the Book of Genesis.  God said it.  Tennessee believed it.  That settled the question. 

But the question was hardly settled. 

That’s why Americans from San Francisco to Hoboken had their noses in newspapers all week in that hot summer of 1925, keeping track of the proceedings in Dayton, Tennessee.  In truth, the Scopes Trial—the Monkey Trial—was more reality courtroom drama, designed to attract attention.  Attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were both attention hogs. 

John Scopes was found guilty, fined, and then exonerated because of a legal technicality.

And the clash between Bible and anthropology went unresolved.

Harari’s book, Sapiens, raises the conundrum of the caveman all over again. This time, it isn’t only our primate grandparents that are unsettling. Nearly 100 years of new anthropological discovery has given us much more to cringe at. Harari points out, for example, that for most of human history, different species of humans have been running around together. Homo sapiens may have encountered slightly different humans belonging to the Homo rudolfensis clan or the Homo neanderthalensis group.

This raises a disturbing thought. If God created people in God’s own image then which human species is included in that affirmation? Homo sapiens, people like us, eventually out-survived our cousins leaving only one species of human beings in the world today. But were the now-extinct slightly-more-monkey-like humans included in the image and likeness of God description?

Questions abound. How can a Jesus-follower, someone who reveres the Bible, sees people as made in God’s image, and looks forward to a world where Christ reigns in love, manage the huge vista of human history that Harari opens up?  How can Jesus’ crucifixion bring transforming grace, not only to people who know about and embace it, but also to the generations of humanity who have lived and died before the invention of religion?  Does the Bible deal with this?  Did the Bible’s human writers  even realize that this problem even existed?

To put the question sharply, who is Christianity for? 

Harari’s sweeping history raises the question whether Christianity, coming alarmingly close to the present end of the human drama, applies retroactively to people who lived and died tens of thousands years before Christ. 

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Is Christianity for them?  How does that work?  Christians gather in their churches every year on Easter and thank God that Jesus lives so that his people may also live.  But what about the people who never heard because they lived thousands of years Jesus?

Happily, the question of who Christianity is for isn’t new.  In the decades following Jesus’ ascension, his Jewish followers assumed that their faith was only for their Jewish compatriots.  Christian faith at first appeared to be a messianic sect within Judaism.  So it’s for Jews. 

Credit goes to the Apostle Paul who argued vigorously with the mother church in Jerusalem that non-Jews could also be Christians.  This seems like an unexceptional truth nowadays.  But it was a radical idea 20 years after Jesus ascended.  Non-Jews  could be baptized into Christ without first receiving circumcision, the Jewish rite of initiation into the fellowship.  Put simply, Christian faith was for not only Jews but the rest of humanity as well.  Once this idea became okay with the original disciples, the circle of potential converts got a whole lot bigger.

Little Christian house churches, in cities around the Mediterranean world, began to attract an alarming assortment of folks.   Those little worship gatherings in people’s homes must have felt like the bar scene in the first Star Wars movie.  Jews were present who had for generations worshiped the God of Jesus.  There were the highbrow wives of Roman officials. There were recovering polytheists.  The poor were baptized in the same waters as the rich.  Aristocrats broke bread with the homeless. 

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that biblical scholars are unearthing evidence that managing conflict and cliques within the fellowship groups was a big job.

How did Frederick Faber put it in the second verse of his hymn, “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy?”  

For the love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind.
And the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

Here’s how I’m working on an answer to the puzzle of those primitive peoples who lived long before Israel or Jesus.   What I’m noticing is that God’s love tends to spread like ripples in a quiet pond.  It doesn’t stay in the place where the little divine splash happens.  It tends instead to roll out and wash over people in times and places that we never would predict. 

The ripple effect is noticeable in the Bible itself.  For example, there was a man, a bandit named Barabbas, who played a bit part in the Gospel’s Passion Narrative.  Barabbas languished in Pontius Pilate’s dungeon on the day when the governor asked the mob what they wanted done with Jesus.  Screaming like football fans, the mob demanded that Barabbas be freed and Jesus be killed.  Shoved out of his cell, squinting in the bright sunlight, Barabbas was the luckiest man in Jerusalem on Good Friday.  In a quirky way, Barabbas was saved while three others hanged.  Jesus probably carried the very cross that was intended for him. 

Barabbas’ escape from death, of course, was a fluke.  It happened because he was in the right dungeon at the right time when the governor was out of ideas on what to do with Jesus on a holiday when the crowd was in a religious froth, and a little known provision was remembered at just the right moment that permitted the door on that particular cell to swing open.  Barabbas was indeed the luckiest man in Jerusalem. 

But how many Christians since have felt similarly delivered by Jesus’ crucifixion?  Barabbas’ amazing good luck looks amazingly like the amazing grace that millions of Christians have celebrated long after Barabbas.

The Scandal of Particularity

Late in the 20^th century, theologians began using an expression that has proven useful in describing the ripple effect or the wideness I’m thinking about.  The expression is the “scandal of particularity.”   Simply defined, the scandal of particularity refers to the way specific details can, under God’s guidance, become powerful general truths. 

Particularity in the Bible refers to the way that God can work with everyday happenings and transform them into something amazing.  Consider the religion leaders’ heckling and trick questions that were aimed at tricking Jesus.  His resonant responses not only avoided the traps, they formed the backbone of his teaching ministry and have guided generations of Christians ever since.  “Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s.”   “There was a man who had two sons…”

Take another example of the way particular situations have become a general pattern. Ancient Israel was an unexceptional people that lived in rocky strip of land on the edges of a great empire.  But Israel’s significance as God’s instrument is a drama still unfolding.   

Take Jesus. He was painfully ordinary.  Unlettered, unpublished,  unarmed, poor, not well-traveled, nor a big name in the cities.  He was born in a stable and executed by the state.  His resume, if he had one, had no standout features.  Yet the life he lived was quickly seen as the very presence of God in the world.  No figure in history has commanded the respect and fascination that his did.

Anyone could easily ask, why God didn’t come as a woman, so to better represent women and girls?  Latter Day Saints founder, Joseph Smith, was certain that Christ needed to come to North America and redo his public ministry in the landmass that became the United States.  Apparently, Smith, not confident in the power of particularity in God’s hands, felt that a Palestinian setting for the drama of the Christ event was insufficient for people from Maryland and Alabama.  The problem with Jesus bringing his ministry to the Americas is that it suggests that his work in Palestine was not sufficient for the entire world.  Amazingly, the particularity of Jesus’ circumstances opens the door to the universality of his work.

So to state our core question once again–who is Christianity for?  It increasingly looks like the answer is: everybody.

Here’s something else.  The ripples in the pond not only radiate out horizontally, they also seem to get greater and greater.  It’s as if the Christ event is a pebble dropped in the water.  The little waves roll out.  And those ripples get bigger.  This doesn’t happen in nature, but imaging that the waves get larger the further they get from the original pebble splash.

The Resurrection of Jesus is a prime example of what I’m trying to bring to light.  When Jesus came back from the dead, none of the witnesses, all of whom were women, imagined that Jesus alive had secured their own personal resurrection. 

No one ran from the Empty Tomb yelling, “Whoopi, I get to live forever!”   That hope for the believer’s eternal life needed time to gestate.  The news of Jesus’ rising was obviously exhilarating.  It erased the disciples’ grief.  It certified all of the secret hopes that the disciples may have cherished as they were first getting to know their teacher.   Easter vindicated Jesus’ teachings and his ministry. 

Amazingly, the power of the Resurrection didn’t fade in the days that followed.  Easter’s power increased.  And spread.  One of the implications that came later was the hope it held for the believer’s personal survival after his or her death.  Even later, after the ripples had gathered more power and reach, believers realized that Jesus’ rising presaged the rising of all of creation. 

Conclusion

Let’s gather together what we’ve said so far.  There’s a sublime quality about God’s works in the world—especially in Israel and in Jesus Christ.   What started in far-away Palestine, a lesser territory in the Roman Empire, has not diminished though the ancient world is long collapsed.  The power of the Gospel has continued through the Renaissance, the Modern World, and now the Post Modern world. 

Biblical faith still possesses power to transform civilizations, a power that is on vivid display on the African continent at present.  The modest particulars of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the little boy growing up in Nazareth, his Galilean ministry, and the appalling tragedy on Golgotha has continued now for 2000 years to radiate outwards, gathering power.

So what about those primitive peoples who lived and died invisibility for thousands of generations?  Is Christianity for them?  In view of the fact that our own faith is attributable to the miracle of the wideness in God’s mercy, it is completely reasonable that the same wideness also rolled backwards in time. The ripples may somehow still be radiating out, overtaking generations yet to be born, gathering energy,  and possibly even washing over distant  ancestors whose names and styles of living only God knows.