November Sunday School lesson: The (too) many grandfathers of Jesus

On the intentional mismanagement of cognitive dissonance

Anyone who has ever performed an academic study of the Bible has been faced with countless contradictions. Psychologically, contradictions trigger cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the brain’s way of informing us that new, incoming sensory information or data does not map onto an existing worldview. The appropriate response to cognitive dissonance—and by appropriate, I mean the one that has allowed for scientific advancement and progress—is to more closely examine the new information for validity or more closely examine one’s worldview for accuracy. The end result of this process, if successful, is for the brain to have improved its version of reality in some way. The evolution of humankind from its hunter-gatherer roots to its modern technological state can be traced back along this path. Today’s Sunday School lesson examines what happens when incoming contradictory information sets off a barrage of warning flares of cognitive dissonance (which will ultimately have no effect because of a predetermined insistence on maintaining a worldview at all costs).

Let’s look at a modern example before going to the Scriptures: My paternal grandfather took up the genealogy of our family as a hobby during retirement. This was accomplished before the internet and stands as a fairly impressive feat of detective work. He was able to trace our roots to a mixture of northern European ancestors—primarily German and British, in a lineage fairly typical for white Americans. The result was a list of names tracing back through decades, ultimately spanning well over a century. What if, right before he passed away, instead of one list, he provided two lists of names—independent, non-overlapping lists of names that began diverging from his own father and beyond into the past—and claimed that each list was completely accurate and real? It’s not difficult to find something intellectually concerning about this, and cognitive dissonance ensures that something more needs to be done before I go around declaring that I have two valid sets of ancestors. The most obvious circumstance is that a mistake was made somewhere along the way and that one list, or perhaps even both, are wrong. A second possibility would be that my grandfather was experiencing some level of cognitive decline right before his death and was no longer able to use his rationality hardware effectively. If I wanted to actually believe that they were both correct, however, how might I go about accepting both as reality-based truths?

Speculative but logical answers would ultimately be the only possible way to tamp down the cognitive dissonance of a clear contradiction to a level that would satisfy the rational hardware ­of my brain. Even then, it’s difficult to imagine that a mistake would not outrank any speculation as the most likely reason for the differences in data. If, though, I did not want to dismiss the work of my grandfather and believed him to be in possession of his mental faculties when he prepared and provided the lists, I might find myself asking what answer might suffice as a logical reason for two separate lists of legacies. How about the possibility that my great-grandfather was adopted? Therefore, one list traces the adoptive family’s genealogy, whereas the other traces the biological family’s. This would seem a bit odd given that my grandfather never before mentioned the adoption of his father, but it at least provides a logical answer. How about the possibility that he had actually provided a list of his own ancestors as well as a list of my grandmother’s ancestors? This would make sense of the differences in the list but does not explain why both lists ended with my grandfather and not my grandmother. How about the possibility that both lists actually denote the same people, but the list of one includes only the names of the people that they preferred to use, kind of like nicknames—not their legal names? (Although, it would take quite some time to justify why “Robert DeStefano” is a nickname for “William Nix.”) Or what about the possibility that one list is of biological relations, while the other denotes an unrelated heritage that would allow me to inherit a certain status—say, royal—from my grandfather?

Let’s take this same story, change some characters, and look at it again. The Bible provides two separate lineages for Jesus, both found in the New Testament, one written by Matthew, the other by Luke. The lists actually both begin with Adam (yes—of Adam and Eve fame) and provide identical, overlapping names up until David, the Stone Age Israelite king, after which they converge nearly completely until ending with Joseph, the father of Jesus. Some additional differences are that between David and Joseph: Matthew provides 25 names in the direct lineage between the two, while Luke provides 40. There is essentially no overlap between these lists for the names between David and Joseph, even for the very father of Joseph, the paternal grandfather(s) of Jesus. As in the example story above, a variety of reasons have been postulated for these differences dating back over a thousand years. Even St. Augustine, the early Christian philosopher who specialized in providing pseudo-logical answers—many of which are still maintained today—for countless Biblical contradictions, struggled with this unavoidable challenge to rationality. The variety of speculative answers by Christian scholars to this dilemma was analogized in the preceding story: familial adoption, nicknames, or ‘royal’ vs biological bloodline being the most commonly proffered.

While most self-identified Christians today are not even aware of these Biblical passages, having never read the Bible, those that have read it and actually picked up on the differences in the genealogies have been faced with a glaring contradiction that must have caused some level of cognitive dissonance. Given a high likelihood that an actual reader of the Bible has some intellectual investment in a Christian worldview, many who were warned by their brains about this logical problem have undoubtedly been unable to accept the only reasonable answer: that two different writers with the same idea and same agenda thought they were providing appropriate information to justify Jesus as the King of the Jews, but either mistakes were made, or the agenda proved a more important motivation than accuracy for one of the writers. Rather, true believers—those that accept the Bible as being the direct word of God—are confined by the beliefs of their worldview and must make the claim that both lists are accurate and true, and thus they have to start the game of speculation which has led to the absurdities described above. Of course, many Christians are willing to accept that the contradictions in the Bible are fairly obvious proof of the errancy of the book, yet they continue to maintain beliefs in the invisible, the irrational, and the impossible claims of Christianity that have come directly from this book that they know are problematic. This, too, involves a purposeful avoidance of any legitimate attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance, even if it appears less obvious than the case of those who refuse to acknowledge the mistakes in the first place. As I aim to describe on this site, there are real-world costs to this mismanagement of cognitive faculties, and I hope that we can one day reach a point where ‘belief’ is finally recognized as a failure of our brains to deal appropriately with reality.

Thanks to Oliver Carter at Upwork for editing

https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/editing