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Thursday, January 04, 2024
An Interview With A Police Officer Who Worked The Bridgeport Poltergeist Case
I've often cited the work of the late Roman Catholic patristic scholar Robert Eno. His younger brother, Paul, is a paranormal researcher. One of the cases he worked was the Bridgeport Poltergeist in the 1970s. It seems to be an authentic case and one that's highly evidential. You can read about it in depth in a book by William Hall, The World's Most Haunted House (Pompton Plains, New Jersey: New Page Books, 2014). Paul has discussed the case and his involvement in it in many places, including in some YouTube videos. He hosts a radio program with his son, Ben, and they recently interviewed Joe Tomek, a police officer who went to the house involved in the Bridgeport case and witnessed some of the paranormal events there.
Tuesday, January 02, 2024
Gospel titles in only a small number of early manuscripts?
Some recent skeptical treatments of the authorship of the gospels that I've come across have raised the objection that only a small number of our gospel manuscripts from the earliest centuries include a gospel title (e.g., "The Gospel According To John"). I want to address some problems with that objection.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Why forge three pastoral letters rather than one?
Tim Challies recently linked an article that discusses some of the reasons for accepting the Pauline authorship of the pastorals. I want to highlight one of those reasons here, one that I think has been especially neglected.
If the letters were forged by one individual, thus explaining their similarities, why forge three letters instead of one or two? There doesn't seem to be sufficient motive to forge any of them, given their contents and the time when they allegedly were forged, for example. But if somebody wanted to forge such content, why not put it in the form of a smaller number of letters? The more letters you forge, the harder it is to convince people that the letters are genuine despite a lack of the evidence you'd expect to accompany genuineness (the lack of previous discussion of the documents, the lack of the documents' presence in other locations, etc.). Why try to get away with forging so often when you can so easily do it less?
If the letters were forged by one individual, thus explaining their similarities, why forge three letters instead of one or two? There doesn't seem to be sufficient motive to forge any of them, given their contents and the time when they allegedly were forged, for example. But if somebody wanted to forge such content, why not put it in the form of a smaller number of letters? The more letters you forge, the harder it is to convince people that the letters are genuine despite a lack of the evidence you'd expect to accompany genuineness (the lack of previous discussion of the documents, the lack of the documents' presence in other locations, etc.). Why try to get away with forging so often when you can so easily do it less?