Blake
AS AN academic exercise, Canadian educator, Ronald Blake, set out three years ago to prove that Jesus was a fraud and that the Biblical witness of his life was fictitious. Having weighed the evidence, Ronald Blake believes, as he did at the outset, that Jesus is indeed all that He said he was.
Mr. Blake has chronicled that investigation in The Testimony of the Greater Witnesss: a Scientific Inquiry into the claims of Jesus, which was launched last year in Canada and which is due to be launched in Jamaica on April 27 at the Ridgemount United Church in Mandeville.
Mr. Blake, 65, was born and raised in Jamaica. He left the island for Canada in 1965. There, he studied education. He holds a Master of Science degree in Extension Education from the University of Guelph. In his early years, he was very intimate with poverty - and at 10 years he taught himself how to read and write.
Later, he attended Kingston Senior School, in central Kingston, and worked in the civil service before migrating to Canada. On arrival in that North American country, he worked initially with the highway engineering department, then he went to study education. In 1979 he founded the Higher Marks Educational Institute, which has an enrolment of 300. The school was designed for secondary and post-secondary students needing help in a variety of subjects.
A born-again Christian since he was 19-years old, he has been in active church service ever since. He became interested in investigating the validity of Jesus' ministry after coming under the influence of renown theologian Robert Funk, author of Honest to Jesus, and founder of the Jesus Seminar - the group of writers, philosophers, and theologians spearheading new research into the historical Jesus and the authenticity of the gospels. The group is viewed with suspicion by many orthodox Christians.
Many of its leading lights, such as retired New Jersey Episcopal Bishop, John Shelby Spong, would be regarded by most conservative Christians as no small heretic.
Funk, Mr. Blake said, has turned his back on the traditional evangelical faith he seemed to have embraced at one time. Funk, he said, regarded Jesus as a fraud. This sparked Blake's curiosity and he set out on his own pilgrimage to discover if the identity of Jesus could be validated by an inductive study of the King James Version.
Mr. Blake's inquiry was underpinned by the view "that if the Bible is the Word of God, it had better put up or shut up."
He believed that the Bible should not depend on archaeology, theology and other disciplines to prove its authenticity and that of Jesus. Accordingly, he began his quest to verify if Jesus Christ is really God. His interest was to see if the Bible could yield a body of data that did not require faith. So he set out, as an academic exercise, to prove that Jesus was not the Son of God.
In his book, he said, he looked at the miracles, parables and works of Jesus devised using his skills as a mathematician - a system that would allow for statistical analysis that would speak to the probability that Jesus' works were true or false. He used as his pass mark 95 per cent. He said, Jesus more than exceeded his pass mark. He concludes that there was a mathematical equation which informed how Jesus did His miracles. This, equation, he explained is detailed in his book.
He found a 50 per cent contradiction between the gospels. The contradictions led him to the conclusion that each gospel writer was writing from a perspective that suggests there is a core story of truth."
Nevertheless, he said the Bible, after his scrutiny, still comes out to be the Word of God.
His mathematical inquiry has yielded untraditional interpretations of New Testament events. For example, he said, when Jesus wept in St. John 11 - it was not for Lazarus who had been dead, but for Lazarus's sister Mary. Jesus wept, Mr. Blake said, because he was grieved at the spiritual condition of Mary.
Much of his investigations, he said, revolved around Jesus' references to himself being the Son and the Father at the same time. He concludes that Jesus was a clone of God. "It is the only criterion that could be used to establish two things in two different places, which is one thing--all of the ingredients of His claims converge into one thing - He is the clone of the master stock."
- Mark Dawes
