Thursday, December 22, 2022

Peter Williams Responding To Tom Holland On Some Christmas Issues

Peter Williams recently appeared on Glen Scrivener's podcast to respond to another podcast on which Tom Holland discussed Jesus' childhood. I added some comments of my own on the page for Glen's podcast. But YouTube often doesn't put up posts that you submit or will put a post up, then remove it. Here's something I posted that went up initially, but seems to have disappeared since then:

To build on what Glen said about the fulfillment of the parable of the mustard seed, a good reason for taking Christianity seriously is the evidence we have for fulfilled prophecy. Some significant examples are provided by what the Roman empire fulfilled. You can't accuse the Romans of having a Jewish or Christian bias during the earliest decades of Christianity. Yet, the Roman empire was the fourth great empire predicted by Daniel, had the unusual penal practices anticipated in Psalm 22 and the third Servant Song in Isaiah 50, executed Jesus in line with the timing of Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy, and destroyed both Jerusalem and the temple in line with that prophecy. That's not comparable to something Jesus and the early Christians had more control over, like Jesus' riding into Jerusalem on a donkey in fulfillment of Zechariah 9. Rather, the prophecies fulfilled through the Roman empire were fulfilled through a hostile source.

Regarding Holland's comments, he just repeats a lot of popular misconceptions about the infancy narratives. See here for a collection of resources responding to that sort of argumentation.

For example, Holland brought up the common objection to the alleged ancestral nature of Luke's census, and Peter Williams didn't make some of the points that should have been made on the subject, but see the article here that addresses it. Holland acted as if it's obvious that Nazareth was Jesus' birthplace. I have a large collection of articles addressing his birthplace, here, such as this one discussing how early and widespread the reports of the Bethlehem birthplace were. Keep in mind that when people like Holland deny the Bethlehem birthplace, they're disagreeing not only with the ancient Christian sources, but also the ancient non-Christian ones. And my collection of articles linked above addresses the weakness of appealing to Jesus' "of Nazareth" description as evidence that he was born in that city (see here, for example). The early Christians are highly unlikely to have had Jesus conceived outside of marriage and in Nazareth, only to have the birth occur in Bethlehem later, if they were writing on a blank slate, free to make up whatever they wanted to, or were highly dishonest or careless about such issues. See here for a discussion of how likely it is that both the earliest Christians and their earliest opponents had reliable means of discerning where Jesus was born. In an article here, I expand upon the role of Jesus' relatives in particular, including their initial skepticism and how that skepticism would have made it easy to discern if Jesus wasn't born in Bethlehem if he wasn't born there.

1 comment:

  1. The argument from "Jesus of Nazareth" is particularly weak when we consider that the "of Nazareth" is just there as a disambiguator. As both Williams and Bauckham have pointed out, when a name was sufficiently popular, a disambiguator was needed. "Jesus of Nazareth" needn't mean that Jesus was born in Nazareth any more than "Mary of Magdala" mean that she was born in Magdala rather than in some other town. As long as a person spent enough of his life in a town for "of ______" to do the work of a disambiguator, that was all that was needed "Yeshua" like "Miriam" was a popular name in that place and time. If Jesus grew up in Nazareth from early childhood, it was quite natural that he would be referred to as "of Nazareth" merely to distinguish him from other people named "Yeshua." It's surprising that a historian of Holland's stature would make such a weak argument.

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