The chapter focuses on three remaining pillars that appeared to be derived from reasoning about who Jesus must have been and his origins. They represent an explanation of his actions and their own experiences that was vigorously contested in the first few hundred years of the Church and then later during the 17th and 18th centuries. It is argued here they are unnecessary and/or incoherent. They are the Dual Natures and Incarnation Pillars, The Trinitarian Pillar, and the Virgin Birth Pillar.
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Chapter 2 focused on eight pillars that were central to Jesus’s message: Mercy, Forgiveness, and Love They Neighbor; God the Father; Kingdom of God; Rejection of Mammon; Service and Deny Yourself, Humility and Avoidance of Hypocrisy, Inclusivity and Who am I to Judge, and Revelation pillars. Chapter 3 focused on pillars that derived from the experiences of his earliest followers: Miracles; Resurrection and Appearances; Messiah; Atonement, Original Sin, and Theodicy; Jesus is Lord and Parousia; Jesus is Still with Us and Eternal Life; and Pentecost and Holy Spirit pillars. Whereas it was argued in Chapter 2 that those pillars that were central to his message should be retained in essentially their original form, it was argued in Chapter 3 that those pillars related to the experiences of his earliest followers differed in terms of whether they should be retained, revised, or dropped. In making such arguments in Chapter 3, the stance presented in this book began to deviate from the stance of advocates of the Traditional Paradigm who would argue that all of the Pillars in Chapters 2 and 3 should be retained in their original form, and from the Jesus Seminar who would argue that all pillars related to the experiences of the disciples in Chapter 3 should be dropped because of this emphasis on supernatural phenomena.
In what follows in this chapter, we shall see further deviations from the Traditional paradigm. The Jesus Seminar would also argue for the elimination of the pillars in this chapter since these pillars cannot be linked to sayings or deeds that Seminar judges to be historical.
It should be noted from the outset that the three pillars to be discussed next are of a different kind than the 15 pillars discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. The pillars of Chapters 2 and 3 could be linked to eyewitness testimony as to what the closest followers observed and experienced both before and after the crucifixion. The Jesus Seminar worked to sort the claims of the eyewitnesses into those that had some certainty of occurring and those that probably were not historical. In the present chapter, the key pillar derives from how some, but not all, of the earliest followers and later theologians interpreted what they observed and experienced. That is, it represented their Christological interpretation of who, and what kind of being, Jesus was.
In Chapter 1, I argued that there are two ways to apply critical thinking to claims: evidentiary and argumentative. Most of the critical thinking applied to the first 15 pillars was evidentiary (how credible is the evidence for the pillar?) though there clearly was considerable argumentation was well. In present chapter, the critical thinking is much more argumentative: are the inferences, interpretations, explanations, and categorizations of his earliest followers warranted and reasonable?
Before proceeding to this line of argumentation regarding the final three pillars, however, I should note that I will be arguing against retaining these three pillars that are central to the Traditional paradigm and were the source so-called heresies. While this conclusion is clearly consequential and likely to be upsetting to readers who favor the Traditional Paradigm, these three pillars have very little bearing on the arguments of all remaining chapters (with the exception of Chapter 7 on the liturgy). So, readers who prefer to draw different conclusions than those drawn here could simply move onto Chapter 5.