Holding Skeptics Accountable For Their Claims

One of the implications of what I discussed in my last post is that critics have to pay a price for something like assigning a late date to a gospel. For example, though I've argued elsewhere that Luke and Acts were written no later than the mid 60s, it's possible that a companion of Paul, like Luke, lived until later and published his work later than the mid 60s. If a skeptic assigns Luke/Acts to the 80s, let's say, he still has to allow for the possibility of Lukan authorship (or authorship by some other companion of Paul), and pushing the documents a couple of decades later pushes them that much closer to the later sources who comment on authorship in one way or another. That closer chronology adds credibility to those later sources. (And that's also true for other matters, like genre and historicity, not just authorship.) Skeptics are often schizophrenic about this kind of thing. They'll disregard the implications of what they said in a particular context when acknowledging the implications would be unfavorable to their conclusions in another context. I've written elsewhere about how they sometimes do that with certain Christmas issues, for instance, like the virgin birth and the Bethlehem birthplace.