Talking out of turn

After the affable and adaptable Patrick Chan, of the world renown http://merbc.invigorated.org/, did on post on Dr. White's recent debate with a Muslim apologist, another Muslim apologist (two, in fact), paid a visit to his combox.

Here, for what it's worth, is my own take on some of what "Rambo" had to say.

"However, I suppose that if a text is known to be textually uncertain,
whatever the percentage, then we would naturally have to study all of
its statements more carefully in order to ensure as best we can that
the text in question is "original" and not the product of adaptation
by a later scribe before we decide whether or not the claims are
historically plausible."

This is misleading. Transcriptional errors are not that randomized.
Rather, they follow a certain pattern in terms of the types of
inadvertent mistakes which a scribe is apt to make.

"Not a problem. According to Muslims, Muhammad was illiterate, he
could not read and write, and so he had scribes to whom he dictated
the surahs and they wrote them in his presence and then recited them
back to him for verification. Muhammad had over 30 or 40 scribes
(sorry I can't remember the exact figures right now), who were
basically his followers and companions. Thus Muslims believe that the
Quran is the verbatim word of God, revealed to Muhammad though the
angel Gibrael, which Muhammad then recited to the scribes for
transcription. If you are interested to pursue this topic in-depth, I
would suggest you take a look at the following book: M. M. Azami, The
History Of The Qur'anic Text From Revelation To Compilation: A
Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments, 2003, UK Islamic
Academy."

"Nonetheless, having said this, I will state that my confidence in the
general Quranic outline of Jesus and his mission was immensely raised
after I read a couple of books on the subject of the historical Jesus
by NON-MUSLIM scholars, books by scholars such as E. P. Sanders, Paula
Fredriksen, Geza Vermes, C. M. Tuckett and many other scholars."

"The following is a list of some of the leading scholars whose
writings I have read or am still reading: Bart D. Ehrman, David C.
Parker, Michael W. Holmes, William L. Petersen, Helmut Koester, Kim
Haines-Eitzen, James D. Miller, John J. Brogan, Eldon J. Epp, Harry Y.
Gamble."

Notice an emerging pattern. Rambo quotes conservative Muslim scholars
on Koranic textual criticism, but he generally quotes liberal
Christian or Jewish scholars on NT textual criticism and early church
history.

"You also enquire how do we know that the stories about Jesus within
the Quran are "authoritative"? I suppose you are trying to ask how do
we establish if the stories about Jesus within the Quran are
HISTORICALLY ACCURATE. Well, that's a different matter altogether. For
me personally, I cannot "prove" that the virgin birth is an historical
event even though I accept it as a real actual event. This acceptance
is based on my faith and belief in the Quran as God's word. Basically,
we cannot "prove" scientifically, historically or archaeologically
that miracles such as the virgin birth of Jesus did take place. It
takes faith to accept these stories."

It takes a lot more faith for a Muslim the absence of certain lines of
evidence available to the Christian with respect to the Bible, viz.
archeological confirmation, the argument from prophecy, the argument
from miracles.

"Correct me if I am wrong, but the last time I checked Christians were
in quite a disagreement over the issue whether or not the New
Testament is divinely revealed."

Yes, I'm more than happy to correct him. He is failing, no doubt
deliberately, to distinguish between the self-witness of the NT and
whether liberals are prepared to believe the self-witness.

"According to most Christians, the plenary verbal view of inspiration
is not a valid model. Hardly any Christian would be willing to state
that the New Testament was "revealed". Most Christians adopt a model
of inspiration according to which the New Testament are documents
composed by human authors, not "revealed" documents, but that somehow
the Holy Spirit "guided" these authors."

This is muddled. To speak precisely, all of Scripture (=the Bible) is
inspired, but not all of Scripture is revealed. Revelation is a
subcategory of inspiration. Revelation would involve direct
information from God, bypassing ordinary sources of information. There
are many examples of revelation in Scripture. However, God, by
inspiration, and can also make use of ordinary sources of information.
Apart from the author of Revelation, no author of the New Testament
claims to be writing "inspired" documents.

i)What we have in the NT are certain programmatic passages (e.g.  Jn
14; 16; 2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:19-21), as well as certain authoritarian
claims (e.g. Paul) which are applicable to the NT generally.

ii) Let's also remember that the NT takes the OT as its model of
inspiration and revelation. The NT didn't come out of the blue. It is
building on a prior foundation, as an extension of that inspired
cornerstone.

"Moreover, once we compare these writings, we note that the authors
occasionally make grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, sometimes
write in confused Greek as well. So, the documents do not appear to be
"special" on a prima facia level."

i) This trades on an equivocation of terms. Grammar and spelling have
no truth-value. They make no truth-claims. A misspelling or
grammatical error is neither true nor false. It is not a true or false
statement about something.

ii) Rambo is also assuming that there was a standardized form of
spelling in the Koine era.

iii) Grammar is a social convention, and it varies according to your
social class.

iv) Rambo has fallen into a trap. In order for him to assert that the
NT writers make these mistakes, he would have to admit that our extant
MSS give us access to the autographa. But if our MSS are as corrupt as
he would have it, then grammatical errors or misspellings in our
extant MSS are not directly traceable to the autographa.

"Why then should I start off with the presupposition that they are
"inspired" or "revealed" writings, especially when none of the authors
- apart from 1 - claimed to have been "inspired"? "

i) Because the Koran, in the Meccan surahs, commits Rambo to the
revelatory status of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures (e.g.
5:45-46,65-66; 10:94; 29:46).

ii) And if Rambo tries to weasel out of this dilemma by claiming that
the Meccan surahs are only applicable to Jews and Christians in the 7C
Hijaz, then he cannot turn around and appeal to the Medinan surahs to
prove that the corruption of the OT and NT extended beyond the
confines of the 7C Hijaz. So he has a choice between one dilemma and
another.

iii) It also won't do for him to suppose that the Christians of the 7C
Hijaz had a different canon of the Bible, for even if that were so,
the discrepancies between the NT and the Koran involve such doctrines
as the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Are we to suppose that
the NT canon of Christians from the 7C Hijaz had no books recording or
alluding to the crucifixion or resurrection of Christ? Think about
that for a moment.

"To me you seem to be giving the impression as if I "made up" or
"invented" the claim or idea of New Testament textual corruption. On
what basis would I claim that the New Testament documents underwent
corruptions during the course of their transmission? Well, the same
basis which has convinced all textual critics - the Greek manuscripts
of the New Testament, particularly the earliest ones. We look at
manuscripts, compare them and so know how texts were adapted at
times."

Do all textual critics say the earliest MSS are the most corrupt?
Rambo is obviously attempting to insinuate radical primitive error in
the course of transmission.

"No, I was arguing that, as you also stated, Muhammad, who lived
centuries and centuries after the composition of the New Testament and
Old Testament writings, who could not speak a word of Greek either,
and who was basically illiterate, could have been in no position to
conduct painstaking studies to know that the previous writings had
underwent corruption during the course of their transmission. Yet,
despite all these hurdles, his claim turns out to be rock solid…so,
this is just one indication for me personally that he was being
inspired by God. Of course, this isn't the only reason why I accept
him as a Prophet, but it does make me wonder how he could have gotten
so many facts right."

i) To my knowledge, Muhammad, in the Koran, never accuses the
Christians of corrupting the text of the NT. At must, he accuses the
(or some) Medinan Jews of corrupting the text of the OT.

ii) There is also an obvious tension between the view of the Bible in
the Meccan surahs and the view of the Bible in the Medinan surahs.

"As for the Jewish Bible, I would recommend the following reference by
one of the leading scholars on the Qumran scrolls: Eugene Ulrich, The
Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Studies in the Dead Sea
Scrolls and Related Literature), 1999, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company."

This is a little off the beaten track. Isn't Emanuel Tov the leading
OT textual critic?

"Metzger is without a doubt the "daddy" of textual criticism, second
to none, but, of course, some scholars would differ with some of his
views. Nonetheless, I would also recommend you the LATEST edition of
Metzger's book, particularly because it is co-authored with none other
than Prof. Bart Ehrman."

To call Ehrman a coauthor is an overstatement. This is the fourth
edition. Metzger is now a ninety-something, so he can't do it all
himself anymore. But this is a revision of his standard monograph. It
doesn't rewrite the whole thing. The main difference is that Ehrman
has interpolated some stuff into the third edition from his Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture.

"Again, Metzger agrees in the latest edition that there are many
variants in the New Testament mss tradition which are of immense
theological and historical significance, over which the entire meaning
of passages hinders, so that they cannot just be conveniently ignored.
Moreover, he has an interesting section on the "original text" as
well, together with information on the transmission of the New
Testament in the earliest period - when most of the corruptions
emerged."

i) We need to distinguish the sections penned by Metzger from the
stuff by Ehrman.

ii) In addition, certain variants do concern Christological verses. In
that sense they are more substantive that misspellings. Due, however,
to the redundancy of NT teaching, a high Christology doesn't depend on
any disputed verse.

iii) Moreover, the examples of intentional "corruption" to further a
high Christology come from later MSS in the Alexandrian tradition. But
we can still make our case, with plenty to spare, from earlier MSS.

The Hallucination Theory And Non-Pauline Sources

A lot has been said in recent articles here about the hallucination theory as it relates to the evidence we have from the writings of Paul. In this post, I want to focus more on non-Pauline sources.

In recent articles responding to material posted here, Matthew Green and Dawson Bethrick have raised objections to the resurrection accounts we have in the gospels and Acts. Green has suggested that Luke's gospel, for example, contains unhistorical details written in response to Docetism. Bethrick has gone even further, quoting Earl Doherty and suggesting that the Jesus of the gospels might be radically different from the Jesus Paul believed in.

Why is dismissing the data in non-Pauline sources so important for proponents of the hallucination theory? Because while some of the data from Paul is inconsistent with a hallucination theory, the data in non-Pauline sources is even more so. The non-Pauline accounts describe an empty tomb, the touching of Jesus' resurrection body, etc.

To get an idea of how significant a problem this non-Pauline data is for advocates of the hallucination theory, think about the number of people involved. The gospels and Acts were composed by four different authors, and one of those authors claims to have relied on multiple sources (Luke 1:1-3). When documents like Hebrews and 1 Peter appeal to apostolic authority, we're seeing, in part, an appeal to eyewitnesses of the resurrected Christ. We know that eyewitnessing the resurrected Jesus was necessary for apostleship (Acts 1:22, 1 Corinthians 9:1). Documents like Hebrews and 1 Peter reflect a widespread early concern for apostolic authority and, thus, eyewitnesses to the resurrection. And the evidence we have regarding what the early Jewish opponents of Christianity were arguing about the resurrection (Matthew 28:15, etc.) would be representative of many people in Judaism, not just one person. A lot of people were involved in producing the historical data we have related to Jesus' resurrection. Any theory that proposes some sort of deception or change in belief will have to account for widespread deception or widespread change of belief.

Paul wasn't the only early source concerned about the details of the resurrection. It's unlikely that we would see such a widespread acceptance of a physical view of the resurrection and the evidence for it in these non-Pauline sources if Paul and his contemporaries believed in a non-physical resurrection or believed in a physical resurrection without much concern for evidence supporting it. Those who suggest some sort of radical change from the time of Paul to the time of the writing of the rest of the New Testament are suggesting something highly unlikely.

We know, from 1 Corinthians 15 and other evidence, that the earliest Christians were concerned about eyewitness testimony and preserving information about Jesus' resurrection appearances. It would make sense in such a context for accounts like the ones we see in the gospels and Acts to be preserved. But since those accounts present so many problems for the hallucination theory, proponents of that theory will often suggest that these resurrection accounts were either entirely fabricated or altered around the time when the documents in question were composed. Thus, Luke or his sources, for example, either made up the resurrection accounts in Luke and Acts or took historical accounts and added unhistorical elements to them. What we're to conclude, then, is that the early Christians either didn't preserve any of the eyewitness accounts in documents like the gospels and Acts or preserved them in an altered form.

Given the value the early Christians placed on eyewitness testimony, and specifically on eyewitness testimony to the resurrection, it's unlikely that they would fail to preserve any detailed resurrection accounts. And given the fact that eyewitnesses and contemporaries of Jesus and the apostles were still alive when documents like the gospels and Acts were composed, theories like what's described in the paragraph above are unlikely to be true. The more radical an alteration of the historical accounts, the less likely those alterations are to gain widespread acceptance. Even on matters less significant than a resurrection, disciples of a teacher would tend to be more careful in preserving tradition than critics often suggest:

"The burden of proof thus rests with New Testament scholars who betray an unduly skeptical bias toward the Gospel accounts (on the question of the burden of proof, cf. Goetz and Blomberg 1981: 39-63); such scholars must imply that disciples who considered Jesus Lord were far more careless with his words in the earliest generations of Christianity than first- and second-generation students of most other ancient teachers were (see Davies 1966a: 115-16; Benoit 1973/1974: 1:33). Especially given how much of Jesus’ teaching was disseminated in public during his lifetime, the sort of ‘radical amnesia’ this skepticism requires of Jesus’ first followers (Witherington 1990: 14) is certainly not typical of schools of other early sages." (Craig Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999], p. 29)

The issue here isn't whether any mistakes could be made. Rather, the issue is whether it's likely that so many people could be misled into accepting such radically unhistorical accounts as we supposedly have in sources like the gospels and Acts. If two or three details in the resurrection narratives are unhistorical, that's one thing. But if critics want to suggest that every gospel is radically unhistorical in its resurrection accounts, and that Acts is radically unhistorical, and that the early enemies of Christianity who acknowledged the empty tomb were wrong about such a tomb even existing, and that the sort of early post-apostolic resurrection traditions we see in Ignatius of Antioch, for example, are highly inaccurate, then that's a different matter. Saying that people sometimes hallucinate or sometimes forget things doesn't justify a conclusion that widespread hallucinations, memory losses, apathy, etc. occurred every time skeptics need it in order to maintain their naturalistic theories.

In an article posted here last month, I discussed some of the evidence we have for the credibility and traditional authorship attributions of the gospels. We know that the early Christians wanted evidence for the authorship attributions of the books of the New Testament. Disputes occurred over books like Hebrews and 2 Peter, and the early Christians acknowledged the existence of those disputes. Yet, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were universally accepted, and John's gospel was almost universally accepted. (A small group opposed it on doctrinal grounds, but they had no significant historical case against Johannine authorship.) We have good reason to accept the traditional authorship attributions of all four gospels. And the early claim that Mark relied on Peter as his primary source is credible, for reasons such as the ones discussed here. Thus, the gospels can be said to represent the testimony of Matthew, Peter, and John, who would have been eyewitnesses of the resurrection events. Luke wasn't an eyewitness of those events, but he was an eyewitness of Paul, and he was in contact with James (Acts 21:18), so his testimony is significant, especially with regard to Paul.

Proponents of the hallucination theory therefore have a motive to look for reasons to dismiss what the early Christians reported about the origins of all four gospels and the book of Acts. If these documents were written by two eyewitnesses and two disciples of other eyewitnesses, then the claim that every one of these documents is radically unhistorical in its resurrection accounts becomes even more unlikely. But even if the early Christians were correct about the identity of just one of these four authors, there would be significant problems for the hallucination theory. Thus, the proponent of such a theory is put in the absurd position of either trying to dismiss every one of the authorship attributions of the gospels and Acts or suggesting that sources so close to the truth were somehow mistaken.

Think about what the gospels and Acts tell us. We know that expectations play a major role in hallucinations. And all four authors tell us that the resurrection witnesses weren't expecting to see Jesus resurrected (Matthew 28:1-6, Mark 9:10, 16:1-3, Luke 24:11, John 20:25, Acts 9:1, etc.). We also know that while there can be general similarities among the hallucinations of different people, higher levels of detail are unlikely to be shared. Hallucinations occur within the mind of the individual. Yet, all four gospel authors report that the resurrection witnesses shared detailed experiences at the same time (Matthew 28:1-7, 28:16-20, Mark 16:5-8, Luke 24:13-31, John 21:20-23, Acts 1:3-11, etc.). Hallucinations don't interact with the physical world, yet all four gospel authors refer to physical evidence produced by the resurrection (Matthew 28:9, Mark 16:4-6, Luke 24:42-43, John 21:9-13, etc.). Similarly, the early Jewish opponents of Christianity acknowledged the empty tomb, and Ignatius of Antioch reports a possible extra-Biblical tradition involving the disciples' touching Jesus resurrected body (Letter To The Smyrnaeans, 3).

Since the popular Jewish view of resurrection involved transformation of the physical body that died, and since the early Christians were claiming a physical resurrection, we would expect people who thought they saw a resurrected person to look for physical evidence. The physical evidence mentioned in the gospels and other early sources therefore makes sense in a Jewish and Christian context, so there's no need to speculate that the early Christians were fabricating physical evidence in response to Docetism. A concern for physical evidence would have existed all along. There wouldn't have been belief in a physical resurrection without it.

The problem for advocates of the hallucination theory isn't just that it's difficult to dismiss the traditional authorship attributions of the gospels and Acts. Even if we were to grant their dismissal of the traditional authorship attributions, why should we think that the gospels and Acts give us accounts radically different from what the eyewitnesses reported?

There are many details within the resurrection narratives that suggest historicity. See here, for example. Critics will often make much of something like the alleged contradictions in the accounts of Paul's conversion in the book of Acts. But if the author was Paul's companion Luke or anybody else who had early and reliable information on Paul, which seems probable, then how likely is it that the accounts of Paul's conversion would be wrong in every detail? Perhaps the element of Paul's conversion that critics most desire to dismiss is the report that Paul's companions shared Paul's experience in some manner. Such a shared experience is problematic for any hallucination theory. Yet, all three accounts in Acts mention the fact that Paul's companions shared in the experience (9:7, 22:9, 26:14). The three accounts can be reconciled, but even if we were to grant the claim that they're contradictory, why should we think that a first century author (apparently somebody who knew Paul) would three times refer to an element of Paul's experience that didn't actually occur? The author of Acts apparently was with Paul when he spoke about his conversion (Acts 26:12-27:2). The same author also reports that Paul's conversion was coordinated with a supernatural experience Ananias had, and the author claims to have seen Paul perform miracles. Did Ananias and Paul just happen to have independent hallucinations that brought them together? Was Luke (or some other author of Acts) mistaken about every one of the miracles he thought he saw?

The typical answer in some circles is to say that every one of these early Christian sources might have been mistaken, so it's reasonable to conclude that they were mistaken. That sort of failure to distinguish between the possible and the probable is a hallmark of modern skepticism.

Any hallucination theory that's proposed needs to account for non-Pauline data like what I've discussed in this article, and making a vague dismissal of the gospels and Acts isn't sufficient. Paul died in the 60s. Eyewitnesses and contemporaries of Jesus and the apostles lived as late as the second century. To say that a document like Mark or Luke postdates Paul is not equivalent to proving that it was written at a time when people could make up whatever they wanted to make up and gain widespread acceptance for their fabrications. The human faculty of memory didn't die with Paul.

It also won't do to just assume naturalism from the outset:

"The problem here can best be understood, I think, as a disagreement over what sort of explanations constitute live options for a best explanation of the facts. According to the pattern of inductive reasoning known as inference to the best explanation, in explaining a body of data, we first assemble a pool of live options and then pick from the pool, on the basis of certain criteria, that explanation which, if true, would best explain the data. The problem at hand is that scientific naturalists will not permit supernatural explanations even to be in the pool of live options. By contrast, I am open to scientific naturalistic explanations in the sense that I include naturalistic explanations in the pool of live options, for I assess such a explanations using the standard criteria for being a best explanation rather than dismiss such hypotheses out of hand. But [atheistic scholar Gerd] Lüdemann is so sure that supernatural explanations are wrong that he thinks himself justified in no longer being open to them: they cannot even be permitted into the pool of live options. But, of course, if only naturalistic explanations are permitted into the pool of live options, then the claim or proof that the Hallucination Hypothesis is the best explanation is hollow. For I could happily admit that of all the naturalistic explanations on tap, the best naturalistic explanation is the Hallucination Hypothesis. But, of course, the question is not whether the Hallucination Hypothesis is the best naturalistic explanation, but whether it is true. After all, we are interested in veracity, not orthodoxy (whether naturalistic or supernaturalistic). So in order to be sure that he is not excluding the true theory from even being considered, Lüdemann had better have pretty good reasons for limiting the pool of live options to naturalistic explanations. So what justification does Dr. Lüdemann give for this crucial presupposition of the inadmissibility of miracles? All he offers is a couple of one–sentence allusions to Hume and Kant….Now Lüdemann's procedure here of merely dropping names of famous philosophers is sadly all too typical of theologians….Hume’s argument against miracles was already refuted in the 18th century by Paley, Less, and Campbell, and most contemporary philosophers also reject it as fallacious, including such prominent philosophers of science as Richard Swinburne and John Earman and analytic philosophers such as George Mavrodes and William Alston. Even the atheist philosopher Antony Flew, himself a Hume scholar, admits that Hume’s argument is defective as it stands. As for philosophical realism, this is in fact the dominant view among philosophers today, at least in the analytic tradition. So if Lüdemann wants to reject the historicity of miracles on the basis of Hume and Kant, then he’s got a lot of explaining to do. Otherwise, his rejection of the resurrection hypothesis is based on a groundless presupposition. Reject that presupposition, and it’s pretty hard to deny that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of the facts." (William Craig)

Bethrick's Blunders: Or, Up Dawson's Creek Without A Paddle

Steve Hays asks, "who is Dawson, anyway?" Well, Steve is not up to date on his pop culture. Dawson Bethrick is the man (who thinks with his own mind) who the WB based an entire series on. Dawson resembles his television doppelganger, except our Dawson is about a foot (or so) shorter than James Vanderbeek.

Growing up in Capeside was hard for poor Dawson. Trying to be the "good guy" never got him anywhere and so, out of subjective and selfish desires, he questioned meaning in life, this led him to reject God (Dawson claims to have been a Christian in his formative years). Dawson's buddy, Bob Reynolds (named "Pace" on the show), eventually taught Dawson about the world's greatest philosopher - Ayn Rand. Since then Dawson has found all of the answers to life by simply repeating a little mantra in times of need - "Existence exists!" Dawson also found stability back in the 90's by finding out that he does not need to prove or justify any of his beliefs as long as he calls them "axioms." Existence is axiomatic, the reliability of the senses is axiomatic, concepts are axiomatic, and, axioms are axiomatic.

These axioms, coupled with carrying around "The Fountainhead" wherever he goes, has led to some amazing philosophical advancements. For example, when Dawson wrote a post on one of the anonymous' comments we learned some pretty heavy-duty philosophical insights. Dawson writes,

If the question is as simple as “Where did life come from?” I have a simple and incontrovertible answer: life came from existence. Anyone who wants to claim that life came from non-existence, is free to present his case any time.

And don't you dare ask where "existence" came from, for "Existence Exists!" A problem here, though, is that "existence" doesn't "exist" on a materialist and nominalist understanding of the world. "Existence" is a universal that can be said to be exemplified by exisTENTS. Thus I can kick a rock, I can't kick "existence." Thus I can blow up a house, I can't blow up "existence." Therefore, "existence" doesn't "exist" on a materialist and nominalist understanding of the world (I've asked Bethrick to send me a picture of "existence" and not an "existent." His answer was, "I don't have a digital camera, or else I would." Needless to say, hardee har har). So, it looks as if, on Dawson's own terms, life came from something that does not exist, since "existence" does not exist (again, on materialist and nominalist understandings). To be technically correct, Dawson's position, then, is that life came from an existENT, or many existents. So, boiled down, Dawson's claim is that "life came from things:" "Hey' Dr. Smith, where did life come from?" "Well, don't you know, life came from stuff." "Oh, you're such a brilliant professor Dr. Smith. Why didn't I think of that?" "Well, maybe you would have if you were a man and you thought with your own mind." Now that is sophisticated.

Recently, Dawson has
written a post arguing against Steve Hays' and Jason Engwer's arguments against the hallucination theory of the resurrection. Dawson writes:

... there is an even larger concern here. While we are told that coincidental mass hallucination "seems unlikely," this is stated in the context of a defense of a belief system which tells us that "all things are possible" (Mt. 19:26), that the universe was created by an act of consciousness, that dead people rose from their graves (cf. Mt. 27:52-53), that serpents and donkeys and burning bushes speak in human languages, that water was turned into wine by a wish, etc. To assess the likelihood of some event or occurrence under consideration, a thinker, whether he realizes it or not, is making reference to fundamental premises that he holds about the world in general. As some apologists might say, he is "invoking his worldview presuppositions." Greg Bahnsen explains:
presuppositions have the greatest authority in one's thinking, being treated as your least negotiable belief and being granted the highest immunity to revision.(5)

What 'seems likely' to me is that the apologist is not mindfully conscious of his own worldview's basic premises and their implications as they concern the issues on which he makes such pronouncements. He is torn between the premises of the position he wants to defend, and premises he employs in that position's defense: on the one hand, the Christian's position affirms a fanciful, cartoon-like view of the universe where anything the ruling consciousness wishes is not only possible, but the very standard of reality as such; while on the other hand he seeks to dismiss alternatives to his paradigm on the basis that certain elements of those alternatives "seem unlikely." There's a fundamental inconsistency here, one that usually runs along undetected by the believer as he insists on a fantasy while illicitly borrowing from a reality-based worldview. On the basis of my worldview's fundamentals, I can consistently suppose that it is "highly unlikely" that a group of individuals will have the same hallucination, complete with shared uniform details, and for reasons not unlike those which Jason himself has mentioned. For instance, an hallucination is not only an individual and private experience, its distortion of what one perceives is most likely to be influenced by such an enormous number of imperceptible factors that it would be essentially unrepeatable. But if I held to the view that the universe is run by a magic spirit who choreographs all events in human history according to a divine "plan," on what grounds could I confidently say that uniform hallucinatory experiences shared by even enormous numbers of human beings is either "unlikely" or impossible? Blank out.

If one follows the above type of reasoning, one will usually wind up lost. I call this phenomena: Up Dawson's Creek Without A Paddle. Let's look at some of the problems:

1) Dawson's verse he uses to show that "anything can happen, willy-nilly" in a Christian theistic universe, is specifically talking about salvation.

2) Does that verse really mean that anything can happen, that anything is possible?

a) If so, Dawson's should provide an argument for it. He needs to because his case rests on this.

b) Just because it uses a word that is universal, does not mean that is how it is being used in this passage. There is such a thing, which philosophers of language recognize, as restricted quantification. Philosopher of language William Lycan, speaking on restricted quantification, writes that, "What logicians call the domains over which quantifiers range need not be universal, but are often particular cases roughly presupposed in context" (Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, p.24).

c) Is there more to the story? That is, should we assume that this is not to be taken universally because of other basic presuppositions? Well, the Bible tells us that, indeed, not everything is possible. For example, God cannot lie or deny Himself (Titus 1:2; 2 Timothy 2:13). Also, it was "impossible" that death should hold Jesus (Acts 2:24).

d) Therefore, Dawson's foundational premise has been refuted.

3) Since that premise has been cut off at the knees, Dawson's other points are nothing but hasty generalizations. God creating the world, talking animals and the like, does not imply that we should suspend belief on, say, the resurrection because since those things happened, maybe hallucinations happened. Maybe they did, but you're not going to get there from where Dawson starts.

4) Dawson mentions that the things we believe show our fundamental beliefs about the world as a whole. I agree with him on this. The problem, though, is that Dawson only gives half the Christian story. God is the determiner of what is possible and impossible. On the basis of God's revelation, I believe it was "impossible" that death should hold Jesus. Furthermore, the Bible reports these things as true. It reports the sightings as true sightings of the risen Jesus, not hallucinations. So, taking in to account the rest of the story, I have every right to believe that these things happened, and that they were not hallucinations. The Bible proclaims that these people witnessed the resurrected Lord, it proclaims this as fact. So, holding to my fundamental presuppositions, I do rule out the hallucination story (this is not to go against what Engwer has argued, but is a presuppositional approach to the matter). Thus, Dawson asks the believer to take only part of his story, while neglecting other crucial aspects. Christianity comes as a unit.

5) The mere fact that God could have deceived people, does not imply that He did. This is a modal fallacy.

6) Dawson makes reference to what the believer is "torn" over. As I illustrated above, the believer is only "torn" if he leaves out other parts of his worldview. Thus Dawson's critique looks like thus: RESTATED: "If the Christian only believes some parts of the Christian worldview, then he'll have problems believing other parts." Sorry, but this is not intellectually convincing, in the least. Thus Dawson's attempts at an internal critique is a completely abortive one.

7) Dawson makes mention of a cartoon universe. Well, if ours is a cartoon universe, his is a fairy-tale one: "Once upon a time (read: "billions and billions of years ago"), a frog turned in to a prince (read: "one species turned in to another species"). It's also an alchemists worldview. The alchemists tried to get qualities to turn in to their opposites, such as making gold from led. Well, in Dawson's fairy-tale universe we have: scales turning in to feathers, the non-flying acquiring flight, the non-moral becoming moral, the non-rational becoming rational, etc.

8) Dawson says we're inconsistent because we have fantasy intertwined with reality. Well, if all you need to do to win is label someone's view false, then Dawson has a problem, "one that usually runs along undetected by the believer as he insists on [fairy-tales and alchemy] while illicitly borrowing from a reality-based worldview."

9) An, last but not least, we find ourselves up Dawson's creek without a paddle. Dawson writes,

On the basis of my worldview's fundamentals, I can consistently suppose that it is "highly unlikely" that a group of individuals will have the same hallucination, complete with shared uniform details, and for reasons not unlike those which Jason himself has mentioned. For instance, an hallucination is not only an individual and private experience, its distortion of what one perceives is most likely to be influenced by such an enormous number of imperceptible factors that it would be essentially unrepeatable.

Therefore we see that if Dawson is to be consistent with his "worldview's fundamentals" then he should believe in the resurrection and deny that it was hallucination (note that the hallucination approach does not have more explanatory scope in that it fails to address the empty tomb)! Dawson's "worldview fundamentals" lead him to affirm fundamentals of a "cartoon universe!"

At the end of the day, though, no argument of this sort is going to convince a man who loves his sin. We are told that even in the presence of the resurrected Lord, "some doubted" (Matt. 28:17).

Engwer points out:

Here we see another example of how Dawson Bethrick doesn't understand the issues he's discussing. Christians don't argue that hallucinations would be supernaturally impossible. What Christian ever denied that God could produce mass hallucinations? That's not the issue. Rather, the issue is the unlikelihood of these hallucinations occurring naturalistically. If Bethrick wants to argue that God made these people hallucinate, then we can interact with that argument. Until then, our focus will be on naturalistic theories, since Bethrick and other critics aren't arguing for supernatural theories.

But Dawson's got bigger problems than showing how the resurrection could happen naturally. Dawson needs to show now naturalism can do anything. Taking naturalistic presuppositions, why trust our reasoning (cf. Reppert's "C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea;" Plantinga's "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism," etc). Why trust our senses? Dawson will tell us that those things are axiomatic, but he must admit that the senses do, sometimes, deceive us. How does he tell when they do and when they don't? Why trust the chemical reactions in your grey matter? Why assume a real order to the universe? You see, at the end of the day, on Dawson's "reality based worldview" everything is a miracle.

The Heterodox Corruption of Bart Ehrman

Muslims have been seizing upon Bart Ehrman’s work to justify their case against the textual integrity of the NT.

But Ehrman’s work has come in for sustained criticism. Here are just a few of the many mounting examples:

The Gospel According to Bart

Misquoting Jesus and Misinforming Readers

Misinformation About ‘Misquoting’ the Bible

Denver Journal review of Misquoting Jesus

The Bible, the Qur’an, Bart Ehrman, and the Words of God

Review by Michael Kruger

Misanalyzing Text Criticism–Bart Ehrman’s ‘Misquoting Jesus’

Review by Roger Pearse

Reinventing Jesus

Beckthrick in his little box

***QUOTE***

My attention is often piqued when a Christian apologist insinuates that a proposal under consideration is deemed "unlikely."

Of course, we should not expect any New Testament writer to have come forward to correct the record if in fact any of these alleged eyewitnesses did discover that they were mistaken. But there is an even larger concern here. While we are told that coincidental mass hallucination "seems unlikely," this is stated in the context of a defense of a belief system which tells us that "all things are possible" (Mt. 19:26), that the universe was created by an act of consciousness, that dead people rose from their graves (cf. Mt. 27:52-53), that serpents and donkeys and burning bushes speak in human languages, that water was turned into wine by a wish, etc. To assess the likelihood of some event or occurrence under consideration, a thinker, whether he realizes it or not, is making reference to fundamental premises that he holds about the world in general. As some apologists might say, he is "invoking his worldview presuppositions." Greg Bahnsen explains:
presuppositions have the greatest authority in one's thinking, being treated as your least negotiable belief and being granted the highest immunity to revision.(5)

What 'seems likely' to me is that the apologist is not mindfully conscious of his own worldview's basic premises and their implications as they concern the issues on which he makes such pronouncements. He is torn between the premises of the position he wants to defend, and premises he employs in that position's defense: on the one hand, the Christian's position affirms a fanciful, cartoon-like view of the universe where anything the ruling consciousness wishes is not only possible, but the very standard of reality as such; while on the other hand he seeks to dismiss alternatives to his paradigm on the basis that certain elements of those alternatives "seem unlikely." There's a fundamental inconsistency here, one that usually runs along undetected by the believer as he insists on a fantasy while illicitly borrowing from a reality-based worldview. On the basis of my worldview's fundamentals, I can consistently suppose that it is "highly unlikely" that a group of individuals will have the same hallucination, complete with shared uniform details, and for reasons not unlike those which Jason himself has mentioned. For instance, an hallucination is not only an individual and private experience, its distortion of what one perceives is most likely to be influenced by such an enormous number of imperceptible factors that it would be essentially unrepeatable. But if I held to the view that the universe is run by a magic spirit who choreographs all events in human history according to a divine "plan," on what grounds could I confidently say that uniform hallucinatory experiences shared by even enormous numbers of human beings is either "unlikely" or impossible? Blank out.

http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2006/05/jason-and-halluci-nots.html

***END-QUOTE***

Although this comment is directed at Jason, it’s also given a general application.

But Dawson’s objection is a cute rather than acute argument.

i) He is confounding psychological probability with metaphysical probability. Whether miracles are likely are not is a metaphysical question.

To draw inferences from metaphysical probability to psychological probability is a category mistake.

Whether inanimate water can turn into inanimate wine is irrelevant to whether the Apostles would die for a lie.

Whether an angel can speak from a burning bush is irrelevant to the implausibility of mass hallucination.

Indeed, to elaborate on that very illustration, which Bethrick brought up, Moses reacts to the burning bush with a very “natural” curiosity.

And his reluctant reaction to the summons of God is amusing to readers precisely because it’s so recognizably realistic, as he flails about for any excuse to escape his calling.

In his initial amazement and subsequence evasiveness we can all see ourselves.

ii) It is also utterly sophistical to accept, for the sake of argument, the God of the Bible, only to turn such a God against his own designs by proposing that he would deceive his own people.

If he would deceive his own people, then we couldn’t trust the depiction of God on which Dawson’s hypothetical is predicated.

The fundamental inconsistency belongs to Dawson, when he cynically floats the trustworthy self-revelation of an untrustworthy God.

If God is untrustworthy, then his self-revelation is untrustworthy, in which case the depiction of a God who can do anything, on which Bethrick bases his hypothetical, is untrustworthy as well. For such a God would be devious in what he says as well as what he does.

So Dawson’s attempt at a clever refutation proves to be self-refuting.

iii) Dawson’s appeal to a “reality-based” worldview is question-begging. What is real? How do we know what is real? There are only two or three ways: by intuition, or observation, or revelation.

Rupert Sheldrake has made a career of investigating natural phenomena which the scientific establishment studiously ignores because such ordinary phenomena are far too extraordinary to slip through its preconceived filter of reality.

Although the parapsychological literature contains a fair amount of fraud, there also remain a fair number of case studies involving hauntings, healings, possession, precognition and the like which are quite resistant to naturalistic analysis.

This sort of thing is routinely ignored or round-filed, not for lack of evidence, but because it cannot be squeezed into the naturalistic little box of secular scientism.

Dawson Bethrick's "Not Impossible" Speculations

Dawson Bethrick has written a response to the material posted at this blog in recent days on the subject of Jesus' resurrection. Bethrick's article addresses a large number of issues, makes many assertions it doesn't even attempt to support, and ignores much of what Steve and I have already said. Bethrick interacts with some portions of the material I linked to in my earlier articles, but he often ignores other portions that are relevant to the claims he's making.

Though he quotes me saying that historical judgments about Jesus' resurrection involve probability, not certainty, Bethrick often acts as if the issue is certainty. He refers to how it's "not impossible" that people experienced a subjective vision, as if the issue at hand is what's possible. Near the end of his article, he comments:

"In the final analysis, the proposal that hallucinations or other subjective factors played a role in the development of early Christian accounts, is not as implausible or 'unlikely' as these apologists would like to believe."

If the subjective vision theory is unlikely, then we should reject it, even if it's not as unlikely as some people think. Historical judgments, including a historical judgment about Jesus' resurrection, are matters of probability. It's not enough for Bethrick to argue that subjective visions are a possible explanation, and it's not enough for him to say that such visions and other "subjective factors" may have "played a role". If an objective appearance of Jesus to Paul better explains the evidence, then the fact that a subjective vision is possible doesn't overturn the probability of an objective appearance, and the involvement of "other subjective factors" can't overturn that probability unless Bethrick can show that it's probable that those factors produced the data we have.

Bethrick writes:

"Throughout his rejoinder to such proposals, Jason's approach to the matter rests on the assumption that the elements of the New Testament's stories are accurate and historical to begin with, and that a theory attributing the experience of the risen Jesus to hallucination would have to come to grips with these stories on their own terms."

I didn't just make an assumption. I linked to a Tektonics article that argues at length for the historicity of the resurrection accounts. In other articles at Triablogue and elsewhere, I've argued for the historicity of the gospels, the traditional authorship attributions of the gospels, etc.

"Given the scant details that can be adduced from the New Testament on the psychological stability of the characters mentioned in its stories and chronicles, it is unclear where defenders of Christianity think they get their certainty about the supposed truthfulness of the incredible claims found in the New Testament."

Notice that Bethrick once again poisons the well by making "certainty" the standard. I don't claim that historical conclusions are matters of certainty.

However, we do have much material from which to reach some conclusions about the psychology of the relevant historical figures. For example, we know what common Jewish belief about the resurrection involved. Whatever some minority sources believed, we know that the popular view of resurrection was a view that involved transformation of the physical body that died, as we see reflected in the Old Testament (Isaiah 26:19, Daniel 12:2). We also know that Saul of Tarsus, for example, was an enemy of Christianity. We know that the early Christians were significantly persecuted, as we see reflected in Jesus' crucifixion, Paul's testimony about how he persecuted Christians, etc. We also have information on the beliefs of Jesus' disciples in the gospels, Acts, etc. From these factors and others, we can determine what a claim of resurrection would have normally meant in the context of first century Israel. We can also determine whether men like Saul of Tarsus, James, and Peter would be likely to have had the sort of expectation of a resurrection appearance that would be involved in a hallucination, since expectation is such a major factor in such psychological disorders. We don't know every detail of the psychology of the early Christians, but we do know a lot about their society, their circumstances, and their beliefs. And some of that information we have is contrary to the hallucination theory.

"The earliest of these documents are a series of letters written mostly by one man, known to us as the apostle Paul, and his accounts put Jesus in some unspecified past in an unspecified setting, for the most part giving no time, location or other details one could confidently call historical....Later, some time after Paul's life and missionizing campaign, a new series of texts starts to be written. These texts also speak of a man named Jesus who was divine, and who was also crucified by the Roman state, and who was later resurrected from the dead. But these texts, known as gospels, place this Jesus into a historical context that is absent from Paul's many letters."

Why would Paul include the sort of detail we see in the gospels? Paul did know some details, such as that Jesus had a brother named James (Galatians 1:19), what Jesus said on some occasions (1 Corinthians 11:24-25), that He was betrayed (1 Corinthians 11:23), that the betrayal occurred at night (1 Corinthians 11:23), etc. The fact that Paul doesn't go into more detail doesn't prove that he was unaware of more details, nor would ignorance on Paul's part prove that later sources are fabricating the details they give.

It seems that Bethrick is largely relying on the erroneous arguments of Earl Doherty, who argues against Jesus' existence. Doherty's position was unknown to the earliest enemies of Christianity, who acknowledged Jesus' historicity. And Doherty's position is rejected by the large majority of modern scholarship. See the list of articles responding to him here, at J.P. Holding's web site.

If Christian contemporaries of Paul and Christianity's earliest enemies refer to Jesus as a historical figure of the early first century, and Paul's writings are consistent with that view, why should we conclude that it's probable that Paul believed in some significantly different Jesus? Why do men like Luke, Clement of Rome, and Polycarp speak so highly of Paul, if Paul was teaching about another Jesus who was radically different from the Jesus they believed in? Paul repeatedly said that the other church leaders were in agreement with him on the foundational issues of Christianity (1 Corinthians 15:11, Galatians 2:7-10). So, does Bethrick want us to believe that Paul's Jesus was universally forgotten, then replaced with the Jesus of traditional Christianity at a time when Paul's disciples and contemporaries were still alive? Wouldn't somebody like Luke be in a better position to know Paul's view of Jesus than Dawson Bethrick is? Are we to conclude that Paul believed in a radically different Jesus than Luke, because Paul's letters don't go into as much detail as Luke's Greco-Roman biography does? What does Bethrick expect? A discussion of Jesus' infancy in Paul's letter to Philemon? Paul was writing letters, not Greco-Roman biographies, and he was writing those letters to people and communities that were already Christian.

"What's more is that the gospel texts essentially repeat the same story (suggesting that later narratives were derived from the earliest account to produce new versions), and - significantly - that the gospel story grows more elaborate and impressive with each telling. For instance, the earliest account, found in the book of Mark, begins with Jesus as an adult getting baptized under the supervision of John the Baptist. This detail is nowhere mentioned in any of Paul's letters."

Where would we expect Paul to discuss Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist? Was the Corinthian church asking Paul questions about John the Baptist's relationship with Jesus? No, they were asking Paul questions about other issues, like marriage and resurrection. When Paul wrote to the Galatians about the doctrine of justification, would we expect him to include a discussion of Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist? No.

As far as development is concerned, the fact is that there is no universal pattern of increasing complexity. John's gospel probably was the last one written, yet it contains fewer resurrection witnesses than 1 Corinthians 15 and fewer miracles than the previous gospels, for example. Matthew and Luke address Jesus' infancy in some depth, whereas John doesn't. Why, then, should we think of John's gospel as more developed? It was more developed in some ways, but not in others. Nothing in the development of the gospels makes it likely that the gospels are radically unhistorical or even unhistorical at all. See David Wood's extensive refutation of the sort of development argument Dawson Bethrick is advocating.

"Thus the gospel accounts themselves are unhelpful in uncovering any truths in the earliest testimony, for the narrative accounts that we find in the gospels bear the signs of literary invention rather than historical reporting."

The Tektonics article I linked to earlier discusses some of the evidence we have for the resurrection narratives. And we know what sort of literature the gospels are. They're Greco-Roman biographies. The New Testament scholar Craig Keener writes:

"Readers throughout most of history understood the Gospels as biographies (Stanton 1989a: 15-17), but after 1915 scholars tried to find some other classification for them, mainly because these scholars compared ancient and modern biography and noticed that the Gospels differed from the latter (Talbert 1977: 2-3; cf. Mack 1988: 16n.6). The current trend, however, is again to recognize the Gospels as ancient biographies. The most complete statement of the question to date comes from a Cambridge monograph by Richard A. Burridge. After carefully defining the criteria for evaluating genre (1992: 109-27) and establishing the characteristic features of Greco-Roman ‘lives’ (128-90), he demonstrates how the canonical Gospels fit this genre (191-239). The trend to regard the Gospels as ancient biography is currently strong enough for British Matthew scholar Graham Stanton to characterize the skepticism of Bultmann and others about the biographical character of the Gospels as ‘surprisingly inaccurate’ (1993: 63; idem 1995: 137)….But though such [ancient] historians did not always write the way we write history today, they were clearly concerned to write history as well as their resources allowed (Jos. Ant. 20.156-57’ Arist. Poetics 9.2-3, 1451b; Diod. Sic. 21.17.1; Dion. Hal. 1.1.2-4; 1.2.1; 1.4.2; cf. Mosley 1965). Although the historical accuracy of biographers varied from one biographer to another, biographers intended biographies to be essentially historical works (see Aune 1988: 125; Witherington 1994:339; cf. Polyb. 8.8)….There apparently were bad historians and biographers who made up stories, but they became objects of criticism for violating accepted standards (cf. Lucian History 12, 24-25)….Matthew and Luke, whose fidelity we can test against some of their sources, rank high among ancient works….Like most Greek-speaking Jewish biographers, Matthew is more interested in interpreting tradition than in creating it….A Gospel writer like Luke was among the most accurate of ancient historians, if we may judge from his use of Mark (see Marshall 1978; idem 1991) and his historiography in Acts (cf., e.g., Sherwin-White 1978; Gill and Gempf 1994). Luke clearly had both written (Lk 1:1) and oral (1:2) sources available, and his literary patron Theophilus already knew much of this Christian tradition (1:4), which would exclude Luke’s widespread invention of new material. Luke undoubtedly researched this material (1:3) during his (on my view) probable sojourn with Paul in Palestine (Acts 21:17; 27:1; on the ‘we-narratives,’ cf., e.g., Maddox 1982: 7). Although Luke writes more in the Greco-Roman historiographic tradition than Matthew does, Matthew’s normally relatively conservative use of Mark likewise suggests a high degree of historical trustworthiness behind his accounts….only historical works, not novels, had historical prologues like that of Luke [Luke 1:1-4] (Aune 1987: 124)…A central character’s ‘great deeds’ generally comprise the bulk of an ancient biographical narrative, and the Gospels fit this prediction (Burridge 1992: 208). In other words, biographies were about someone in particular. Aside from the 42.5 percent of Matthew’s verbs that appear directly in Jesus’ teaching, Jesus himself is the subject of 17.2 percent of Matthew’s verbs; the disciples, 8.8 percent; those to whom Jesus ministers, 4.4 percent; and the religious establishment, 4.4 percent. Even in his absence he often remains the subject of others’ discussions (14:1-2; 26:3-5). Thus, as was common in ancient biographies (and no other genre), at least half of Matthew’s verbs involve the central figure’s ‘words and deeds’ (Burridge 1992: 196-97, 202). The entire point of using this genre is that it focuses on Jesus himself, not simply on early Christian experience (Burridge 1992: 256-58)." (A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999], pp. 17-18, 21-23, 51)

See also the further discussion in the Introduction in the first volume of Keener’s commentary on the gospel of John (The Gospel of John: A Commentary [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003]). Keener goes into much more detail than what I outline above, far too much to quote here. For example:

"The lengths of the canonical gospels suggest not only intention to publish but also the nature of their genre. All four gospels fit the medium-range length (10,000-25,000 words) found in ancient biographies as distinct from many other kinds of works….all four canonical gospels are a far cry from the fanciful metamorphosis stories, divine rapes, and so forth in a compilation like Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Gospels plainly have more historical intention and fewer literary pretensions than such works….Works with a historical prologue like Luke’s (Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-2) were historical works; novels lacked such fixtures, although occasionally they could include a proem telling why the author made up the story (Longus proem 1-2). In contrast to novels, the Gospels do not present themselves as texts composed primarily for entertainment, but as true accounts of Jesus’ ministry. The excesses of some forms of earlier source and redaction criticism notwithstanding, one would also be hard pressed to find a novel so clearly tied to its sources as Matthew or Luke is! Even John, whose sources are difficult to discern, overlaps enough with the Synoptics in some accounts and clearly in purpose to defy the category of novel….The Gospels are, however, too long for dramas, which maintained a particular length in Mediterranean antiquity. They also include far too much prose narrative for ancient drama….Richard Burridge, after carefully defining the criteria for identifying genre and establishing the characteristic features of Greco-Roman bioi, or lives, shows how both the Synoptics and John fit this genre. So forceful is his work on Gospel genre as biography that one knowledgeable reviewer [Charles Talbert] concludes, ‘This volume ought to end any legitimate denial of the canonical Gospels’ biographical character.’ Arguments concerning the biographical character of the Gospels have thus come full circle: the Gospels, long viewed as biographies until the early twentieth century, now again are widely viewed as biographies….Biographies were essentially historical works; thus the Gospels would have an essentially historical as well as a propagandistic function….[quoting David Aune] ’while biography tended to emphasize encomium, or the one-sided praise of the subject, it was still firmly rooted in historical fact rather than literary fiction. Thus while the Evangelists clearly had an important theological agenda, the very fact that they chose to adapt Greco-Roman biographical conventions to tell the story of Jesus indicates that they were centrally concerned to communicate what they thought really happened.’…had the Gospel writers wished to communicate solely later Christian doctrine and not history, they could have used simpler forms than biography….As readers of the OT, which most Jews viewed as historically true, they must have believed that history itself communicated theology….the Paraclete [in John’s gospel] recalls and interprets history, aiding the witnesses (14:26; 15:26-27).…the features that Acts shares with OT historical works confirms that Luke intended to write history…History [in antiquity] was supposed to be truthful, and [ancient] historians harshly criticized other historians whom they accused of promoting falsehood, especially when they exhibited self-serving agendas." (pp. 7-13, 17, n. 143 on p. 17, 18)

See also the large amount of evidence we have for Luke's historical reliability here and here.

"We do not have the benefit of seeing what Paul identified as Jesus when he tells us things such as that he received his gospel story by means of revelation (Gal. 1:12) and that 'it pleased God… to reveal his Son in me' (Gal. 1:15-16). So again, it's unclear how believers can conclusively rule out at least the possibility that what Paul experienced was hallucinatory in nature, or at least subjective."

Notice that Bethrick yet again poisons the well with a reference to whether we can "conclusively rule out at least the possibility". The issue is what's probable, not what's possible.

"The record we have nowhere rules out later private visitations by Jesus; in fact Paul's frequent appeals to having knowledge by means of divine revelation suggests that he enjoyed repeated visits by Jesus, or that he was in regular contact with the risen deity."

The article at Tektonics that I linked to earlier addresses that issue. Paul and the early Christians in general believed that Jesus' resurrection appearances ended shortly after Jesus' death. Paul refers to himself as the last witness. The early Christians distinguished between resurrection appearances and later visions. And they described the resurrection appearances differently than they described the visions. Thus, Paul's later experiences can't be equated with the resurrection appearance he witnessed. Paul himself distinguishes between the two. That's why the earliest generations believed that apostolic authority ended with the death of the apostles. Visions of Jesus continued, but resurrection appearances did not. The early Christians believed that God had revealed to them that the resurrection appearances were over, and the later experiences lacked the physicality of the resurrection appearances.

"Of course, at this point, one might raise the question: why doesn't Jesus do for everyone he wants to save what the New Testament says he did for the apostle Paul (i.e., pay a miraculous personal visit), rather than just for one man who lived upwards of 2,000 years ago, whose writings are the only record of these private deliverances from a divine source, and whose ideas have been hotly debated throughout the centuries? It's larger questions like this that serve to put these disputes about whether hallucinations et al. played a part in the development of the early Christian testimony. As it is now, with a private message hand-delivered to one individual who died centuries ago and penned into texts which read like legend and myth, the result that reaches us in the modern era tends to raise more questions than it can hope to answer, and to cause more problems than it can hope to resolve. Apparently the all-wise, all-knowing creator of the universe finds the present method of disseminating its word to be preferable to a direct approach, but for reasons that we will likely never know."

Christians don't claim that Jesus' resurrection is the only evidence that exists for Christianity. The Bible discusses prophecy fulfillment, the miracles of the apostles, and other evidence as well. The Bible also refers to the convicting work of the Holy Spirit and other means of leading people to the truth.

Even if the resurrection were the only evidence Christianity offered, the fact that Bethrick and other critics are capable of raising objections doesn't prove that the objections are reasonable. For example, if you're aware of something as easy to understand as the fact that eyewitnesses and contemporaries of Jesus and the apostles were still alive when the New Testament was written, then much of what Bethrick claims about the New Testament shouldn't seem credible to an honest and reasonable person. Some people will agree with what Bethrick asserts anyway, but the problem isn't with God supplying too little evidence. Rather, the problem is with people either not being honest or not making sufficient effort to discern what's reasonable and what isn't.

If Bethrick wants to argue that all of the resurrection witnesses were hallucinating or mistaken in some other way, that the early Christians were repeatedly mistaken about who wrote the documents of the New Testament, that the early enemies of Christianity were too undiscerning or apathetic to do more to make such facts known, etc., then he ought to think about the difficulties involved in accepting his view of things. Christians do, after all, have first century documents they can cite supporting their position. The positions of people like Dawson Bethrick and Earl Doherty, on the other hand, are unknown to the early sources (Christian and non-Christian) and widely contradicted by the data we have. Bethrick's theories require an unprecedented amount of hallucination, forgetfulness, apathy, and other unusual characteristics to be combined within one community and its opponents during a short period of time. It's not just that Bethrick does this with the resurrection appearances. He also does it with the empty tomb, the pre-resurrection miracles of Jesus, the miracles of the apostles, prophecy fulfillment, etc. He keeps telling us that his speculations are "not impossible". That's true. But they're highly unlikely.

"Since the details of what Paul's 500 witnesses actually experienced are nowhere given, it is possible that the individuals he had in mind underwent a kind of mass trance-like episode."

We know that Paul is referring to a physical resurrection. That's why he refers to the transformation of mortal bodies (Romans 8:11) and the continuity between the planted seed and the object that grows from it (1 Corinthians 15:43), for example. See Christopher Price's extensive documentation of Paul's belief in a physical resurrection.

Thus, if the more than 500 people Paul refers to were witnesses of a purported physical resurrection, some implications follow. Anybody who believed in a physical resurrection would expect physical evidence, as we see reflected in the gospels. We know that the early Christians distinguished between the resurrection appearances and later visions and other experiences. We would expect, then, that both the group of more than 500 people and the people who preserved the account would be interested in discerning whether the experience was a physical sighting, not something non-physical. Bethrick can speculate that all of the people involved might have been mistaken, but the issue here is probability, not certainty. While it would be possible for more than 500 people to have a hallucination on the same subject at the same time, such an occurrence is unlikely. (And, remember, Bethrick or any other defender of a hallucination theory would have to argue that such group hallucinations, or group experiences of other psychological disorders, occurred repeatedly and in a short period of time.) The normal human desire when seeing Jesus would have been to speak with Him, as we see reflected in the gospel accounts. It seems unlikely that they would just look at Jesus, without any attempt to interact with Him. How would more than 500 people not only hallucinate at the same time and hallucinate the same general object (Jesus), but also not notice that they were seeing Him in different places, were hearing Him say different things, etc.? It's unlikely that more than 500 individual hallucinations are going to be accidentally coordinated or be mistaken for something coordinated later on.

Bethrick might try to minimize the difficulties involved in his theory by suggesting that perhaps all of these more than 500 people thought that Jesus only appeared at a distance briefly, then left. But how likely is it that more than 500 people would hallucinate at the same time, would hallucinate on the same subject, and all of them would hallucinate something as unusual as Jesus only appearing at a distance, then leaving soon after? Is Bethrick going to propose this sort of unlikely scenario to explain every one of the reported group appearances?

Part of the significance of 1 Corinthians 15:6 is that Paul refers to a majority of these people still being alive. How would Paul know such a detail, and why would he mention it? Apparently, even more than 20 years after the resurrection appearances, Paul continued to follow the lives of these people. It doesn't seem that Paul was being careless. He goes on, later in the same chapter, to refer to how Christian faith is worthless if Jesus wasn't resurrected. He knows that the issue is highly significant. It doesn't seem that Paul was so careless that he would have a hallucination, not realize that it was just a hallucination, then join a group with hundreds of other people who had the same sort of hallucination around the same time, without any of them realizing it either. 1 Corinthians 15:6 isn't just significant because of what it tells us about a group of more than 500 people. It's also significant because of what it suggests about Paul's carefulness and his concern for evidence.

"Was Marshall Applewhite hallucinating? I don't know, but I tend to doubt that he was since his devotion to his nonsense was sustained over a long period of time."

What did Marshall Applewhite claim to see? Believing that a spaceship exists in outer space isn't equivalent to claiming to have seen a man risen from the dead. Applewhite's claim was of a different nature, his social context was radically different, he didn't have the sort of corroboration a source like Paul had, etc. The fact that Bethrick makes such a comparison doesn't hurt Christianity's credibility as much as it hurts Bethrick's. Does he understand the relevant issues so poorly that he thinks that Heaven's Gate is comparable to early Christianity?

"Of course, we should not expect any New Testament writer to have come forward to correct the record if in fact any of these alleged eyewitnesses did discover that they were mistaken."

See my article on a related subject here. If any of the apostles or other resurrection witnesses had renounced the faith, we would expect there to be many ripples in the historical record, as we see with Judas and Demas in non-resurrection contexts. The early enemies of Christianity show no knowledge of anybody like Paul, Peter, or John having denied the resurrection, and the earliest post-apostolic sources speak of all of these men having died within the faith. Bethrick is speculating that something may have happened that doesn't appear anywhere in the historical record and is widely contradicted by the data we do have. Once again, we see how Bethrick proposes highly unlikely possibilities as alternatives to the probable.

"But there is an even larger concern here. While we are told that coincidental mass hallucination 'seems unlikely,' this is stated in the context of a defense of a belief system which tells us that 'all things are possible' (Mt. 19:26), that the universe was created by an act of consciousness, that dead people rose from their graves (cf. Mt. 27:52-53), that serpents and donkeys and burning bushes speak in human languages, that water was turned into wine by a wish, etc."

Men like Paul, his travel companions, and James weren't Christians. They were initially skeptical of the Christian claim. Even as far as Christians like Peter and John are concerned, the fact that a person is a supernaturalist doesn't mean that he'll believe any supernatural claim that's made by anybody. And the fact that people are Christians doesn't prove that they'll believe any claim that's made by anybody in the name of Christianity. That's why Muslims don't believe in Jesus' resurrection, Presbyterians question the miracle claims of Pentecostals, etc. The early Christian sources tell us - multiple sources and on multiple occasions and in multiple ways - that Jesus' disciples and other resurrection witnesses weren't expecting to see Jesus risen from the dead. Whatever supernatural views they held, an expectation of Jesus' resurrection wasn't one of them. And we know that expectation plays a major role in hallucinations. That's why I said, earlier, that people like the women who went to the tomb, Thomas, Saul of Tarsus, etc. were poor candidates for a hallucination. They weren't expecting to see Jesus.

If Bethrick wants to speculate that all of the early sources are mistaken about this fact, then he needs to give us more than just the possibility that all of the sources were mistaken. He needs to explain why they would collectively make up such a thing, and he needs to explain why he thinks that men like Paul and James were expecting to see the risen Jesus. And, remember, the issue here is probability, not possibility.

"But if I held to the view that the universe is run by a magic spirit who choreographs all events in human history according to a divine 'plan,' on what grounds could I confidently say that uniform hallucinatory experiences shared by even enormous numbers of human beings is either 'unlikely' or impossible?"

Here we see another example of how Dawson Bethrick doesn't understand the issues he's discussing. Christians don't argue that hallucinations would be supernaturally impossible. What Christian ever denied that God could produce mass hallucinations? That's not the issue. Rather, the issue is the unlikelihood of these hallucinations occurring naturalistically. If Bethrick wants to argue that God made these people hallucinate, then we can interact with that argument. Until then, our focus will be on naturalistic theories, since Bethrick and other critics aren't arguing for supernatural theories.

But, since Bethrick brought it up, why do Christians believe that God produced a resurrection rather than hallucinations? Because it wouldn't make sense for God to produce such hallucinations, yet have the hallucinated Jesus tell people that He had been resurrected and have all of the witnesses mistakenly think that a resurrection had occurred. If God is going to produce hallucinations, why would He have those hallucinations communicate misinformation and be misunderstood by all of the people who had the hallucinations?

I want to close this response to Bethrick by addressing the issue of alleged errors in the New Testament, which is a subject Bethrick mentions in his article. Such claims of error have been answered for centuries, and anybody interested in more information on specific passages or subjects can consult a resource like J.P. Holding's web site.

However, we should keep in mind that claiming that there are errors in the New Testament doesn't justify a rejection of the general historicity of the documents. Even if an author like Luke would be wrong on two, five, or fifteen incidents he reports, the fact would remain that he was right about hundreds of other details and remains a highly credible source. (See, for example, here and here.) Craig Keener writes:

"But the divergent details [in the accounts of the resurrection appearances] suggest independent traditions, thereby underlining the likelihood of details the accounts share in common (e.g., Boyd 1995: 277-78). This fits what we should expect of eyewitness traditions. (Thus, for example, though two eyewitnesses who accompanied Alexander agreed that Callisthenes was indicted, publicly scorned, and died, and though their accounts could be called entirely trustworthy [pany pistoi], they differ even on whether he died by sickness or hanging – Arrian Alex. 4.14.3. The variation in the Gospel accounts is far less significant than this.)" (A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999], pp. 697-698)

That's one of the reasons why modern scholarship, including much non-conservative scholarship, rejects a lot of the arguments put forward by people like Dawson Bethrick and Earl Doherty. The New Testament documents give too many details about the resurrection appearances, and give those details too early and in too credible a context, for it to be plausible to dismiss as many of the details as people like Dawson Bethrick do. The more he suggests that the New Testament authors were mistaken, and the more he does so without any direct evidence to that effect and without any of Christianity's early enemies supporting Bethrick's speculations, the less plausible his case becomes. It seems that Dawson Bethrick's conclusions have more to do with his desires than with the historical data.

I will say one thing favorable about his conclusions, though. They're "not impossible". You can't say much more than that in support of them.

Hillbilly atheism

Dawson Bethrick has responded to Jason and I. For now I’ll confine my remarks to what he says about me.

Who, exactly, is this Bethrick anyway?

He makes the following claim about himself: “I am a Man, and I think with my own mind.”

May I say that I find this patriarchal and homophobic usage deeply offense. As a San Franciscan he ought to understand that by assigning himself to a specific gender, this will make transgender readers feel excluded from the dialogue.

Such usage borders on hate-speech. He clearly needs to attend a sensitivity seminar to elevate his social consciousness.

In addition, his appeal to “thinking” with his own “mind” represents a throwback to folk psychology. Any astute, card-carrying materialist would know better.

So I apologize to my enlightened Christian readers for subjecting them to yet another hillbilly atheist.

“We must not forget that the book of Acts itself puts the words ‘heavenly vision’ into Paul's mouth when it portrays him as recounting his conversion experience to King Agrippa (Acts 26:19). Thus it is up to the author of Acts to clarify whether his story's purported experience by Paul was ‘an objective vision or appearance’ or ‘a subjective vision or appearance.’ The details given in Acts are too scant and inconsistent with themselves to allow us to make this clarification with much confidence.”

Keep in mind that I was originally responding to Dagood, whose case is based on the subjective interpretation.

So, assuming for the sake of argument that Dawson is right on this point, he has just hamstrung Dagood’s whole case. His argument is with Dagood, not me.

Let me thank my cobelligerent for joining forces with me in our common cause to disprove Dagood.

“Naturally the apologist does not want it to be considered subjective, but in the cartoon universe of theism, everything is ultimately subjective anyway.”

I haven’t see any cartoons since I was a little boy. So, to judge by his standard of comparison, Dawson must either be a precocious four-year old or a retarded adult.

“Steve may say to me that, since I am persuaded that, like the gospels, Acts is more legend than history in the first place, that I therefore cannot rely on Acts 26:19 to support the visionary proposal. But if Acts is more legend than history, then the stories of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus are brought into serious doubt anyway.”

This is a dilemma for Dawson, not for me.

Continuing:

***QUOTE***

As Earl Doherty points out in response to Gary Habermas' statements to Lee Strobel on page 234 of The Case for Christ, we actually have in the New Testament "a wealth of invention" (Doherty) where Habermas chooses to see "a wealth of sightings of Jesus."

Each writer sat down to provide 'proofs' of Jesus' rising in the flesh," explains Doherty, "and they all quite naturally come up with anecdotes of their own, which best explains their incompatible variety. (3)

***END-QUOTE***

All he’s done here is to give us Doherty’s opinion. No supporting argument or corroborating evidence is brought forward to substantiate this claim.

“Anxious to dispel the subjective implications of phrases such as "heavenly vision" used by Acts to describe Paul's sighting of Jesus, Steve exclaims…”

This is a prejudicial and tendentious characterization of the phrase.

It’s “heavenly” because Jesus ascended to heaven. So, in order for him to appear to Paul on earth, he must leave heaven. That would actually imply the objective character of the “vision.”

Likewise, the Greek word doesn’t carry any specialized sense of a “subjective” vision as over against an “objective” vision. We could easily use another synonym, like “sighting.”

“But does Paul ever distinguish between the nature of his sighting of Jesus and the sighting of Jesus he says these others enjoyed?”

As I said before, he describes his encounter as a public event.

“On the contrary, it remains ambiguous and unspecified, thus allowing believers to uncritically read gospel details into what they read in Paul.”

i) Again, if true, this undercuts Dagood.

ii) In addition, the reasoning is reversible. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is what Christians do, dubitantes do the exact same thing, only in reverse order. They (mis-) interpret Paul as reducing the Resurrection to a spiritual (i.e. ethereal body), and classify his Damascus Road encounter as a subjective vision, then they uncritically read the “Pauline” details back into Luke and John.

“Apologists need to understand that, while they want to put the onus on the New Testament's critics, the onus is really on the New Testament itself to shore up the very areas where they claim its critics habitually default.”

No, both sides assume a burden of proof.

“The whole point of this chapter is to repeatedly stress the physicality of the glorified body even though the chapter nowhere uses the word 'physical' (at least not in any of my translations)”

i) So Bethrick is dependent on English translations. He can’t read 1 Cor 15 in the original?

ii) He is also confusing words with concepts. A concept can be present without a particular word to designate the concept.

1 Cor 15 has been extensively exegeted by the likes of Thiselton and Wright. It isn’t necessary for an apologist to reinvent the wheel each time.

“ Not to mention the fact that this position needs to be reconciled with what we read in I Peter 3:18, which speaks of Jesus as "being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit." It is hard to read this statement as coming from one of Jesus' own disciples who, according to the gospels, met face to face with a physically resurrected Jesus.”

If he spent anytime with the standard commentaries he’d see that this verse has reference to the fact that the corpse of Christ was reanimated by the Holy Spirit.

It refers to the agent of the Resurrection, not the composition of the body.

“Steve may counter that Paul spoke of Jesus having been resurrected in the flesh, but Paul himself indicates that there are different kinds of flesh, that "all flesh is not the same flesh" (I Cor. 15:39), which leaves open the possibility that Paul may have reserved the use of the term 'flesh' in some circumstances to refer to some spiritual, non-physical "substance" which is to be distinguished from the tissue, bone and organs of living organisms. So this is at best inconclusive.”

i) And the examples given by Paul are all of material entities.

ii) Moreover, Paul is not saying that one kind of flesh is another kind of flesh. Just the opposite.

He merely draws our attention to both the continuities and discontinuities between the mortal body and the glorified body—the chief of which being that the glorified body is immortal.

“Moreover, Paul insists that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (I Cor. 15:50), which suggests that the physical bodies we have are not analogous to the resurrected bodies that believers should expect to awaken in once they are resurrected.”

This is an oft-refuted canard. Only someone wholly ignorant of the exegetical and apologetic literature would continue to exhume this objection.

Paul is merely using a Hebraic idiom to express the fact that mortality cannot inherit immortality.

“All these issues point to just some of the many serious ambiguities that plague the New Testament record, thus inviting endless contests between conflicting interpretations and wide-ranging speculations. (I'm glad these aren't my problems.)”

They’re only ambiguous if, like Bethrick, you don’t know NT Greek or basic linguistics or the standard exegetical literature.

“To be sure, there have been many efforts over the centuries to codify an authorized interpretation, but this endeavor is about as effective as trying to harvest wheat on the dark side of the moon; and no matter how much effort is applied to this ambition, the early record is still what it is: laden with incompatible variances and unyielding ambiguities.”

This is a backhanded admission of defeat on Dawson’s part. He attempts a preemptory dismissal of the existing answers to his objections without bothering to actually argue them down. Not a one.

“Concerning reported sightings of the Virgin Mary, Steve hedges when considering the question "Do we reject Marian sightings?" giving no firm answer one way or another.”

“Hedging” is another prejudicial and tendentious characterization. I don’t go beyond the evidence I have. That’s a rational precaution.

“I agree: some reports are more credible than others, and some reporters are more credible than others. But here we might inquire as to what criteria Steve consults in determining whether a report is "more credible than others," or in determining when one reporter is "more credible than others." Obviously the writers of the New Testament meet his criteria, while what he has written strongly suggests that his contemporaries (or near contemporaries) who have claimed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary, do not meet his criteria. What are those criteria? Heaven knows! But he does give some indication here:”

He devotes several sentences to the claim that I offer no criteria, only to admit, in the concluding sentence, that I do. Apparently, Bethrick doesn’t know where he’s going. He sits down at his keyboard and starts writing and keeps on writing without thinking through what he’s going to say before he says it.

“If it is valid to ask how those who claim to have experienced a visit from the Virgin Mary "know what Mary looks like," we should also ask: How did Saul of Tarsus know what Jesus looked like?”

Several problems with this question:

i) It does nothing to validate Marian apparitions.

ii) Even if it were valid, it would do nothing to invalidate Luke or John.

iii) Odds are, Paul did know what Jesus looked like. On a standard chronology of the NT they were probably in Jerusalem at the same time of year. Jesus and Paul were contemporaries. Paul studied in Jerusalem. His sister lived in Jerusalem. Even if he wasn’t living in Jerusalem year round, he would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for all the major feast days. And Jesus came to Jerusalem for major feasts days as well.

Jerusalem was a small town, centered on the Temple. Jesus was a public speaker and a celebrity. His visits to Jerusalem were centered on the Temple. If Paul was living in Jerusalem at the time, he’d visited the Temple at least daily. If he was in town for a feast day, he’d visit the Temple at least daily.

Jesus drew a crowd. Jesus was controversial. It’s almost inevitable that Paul would have seen and heard Jesus preach.

iv) This is reinforced by that fact that Paul was involved with the initial persecution of the Jerusalem church.

v) Of course, at the time, Paul thought that Jesus was a Messianic pretender. It took a Christophany to turn him around.

“Steve says that "Jesus was seen by his contemporaries," but this may be read as saying far too much. That one is a contemporary of another, does not indicate that either has seen the other or knows what the other looks like.”

The historical record of Christ contained in the NT consists of either eyewitness observation or eyewitness testimony. That’s the point.

This assumes, of course, the traditional authorship and dating of the NT documents. Others have made that case, and I’ve made it myself in other venues, so I needn’t repeat myself here.

“For instance, both Steve and I are contemporaries, but I would never be able to pick him out from a crowd. Nor would he be able to do the same with me. Today we have cameras which record faithful images of our physical features, such that I could pass my picture to Steve via e-mail, and then he very well might be able to pick me out of a crowd. But cameras were not around in 1st century Palestine, so Jesus' "contemporaries" (an expression which takes the gospels as history) didn't even have this benefit.”

i) Photography is beneficial if you haven’t seen someone for yourself. But that overlooks my point.

ii) In addition, we will often accept someone else’s testimony. The police will have a friend or relative ID a body for them.

Or a detective will show the photo of a missing person to various individuals, to see if they recognize the picture.

Here a second party takes the word of a witness for purposes of identification.

“ The ‘no one knows what she used to loo like’ approach is certainly applicable in considering claims involving inanimate objects, such as that the burnt markings on a tortilla are the image of Mary. But a sighting of the Virgin Mary is usually claimed to involve an encounter with the real McCoy, though perhaps only in spirit form, which can enable direct communication, sometimes even dialogue (such as we find in Acts' versions of Paul's firsthand encounter with Jesus). And if the apparition identifies itself as the Virgin Mary (just as whatever it was that appeared to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus allegedly identified itself as Jesus), then there's no need for face recognition based on prior knowledge of "what she used to look like when she was walking the earth two thousand years ago" in the first place. The apparition could very well have introduced itself as the Virgin Mary, and the person experiencing the vision, whether subjective or otherwise, might very well be prone to believing it.”

This line of argument poses a dilemma for Bethrick. If he uses one objection, he can’t use another, for they cancel each other out.

i) If it’s sufficient for the apparition to identify itself to the eyewitness, then this will suffice for the Damascus Road encounter.

If) If facial recognition is needed, then this will also suffice for the Damascus Road encounter (for reasons given above), but not for Marian apparitions.

iii) Let us also remember that while the absence of genuine dominical apparitions is a defeater for Christianity, the presence of genuine Marian apparitions is not a defeater for Christianity.

So these are not symmetrical propositions. If Mary did appear to Bernadette or Lucia Santos, that does not falsify the Christian faith.

iv) At the same time, the lack of facial recognition is not the only undercutter for Marian apparitions. I mentioned others, which he conveniently ignores.

“Regardless, Steve makes it clear that he is committed to taking the New Testament - including significantly the gospels - as historically accurate on its say so…How these apologists' belief in the bible amounts to anything better than ‘it's true because I want it to be true,’ is not at all clear.”

i) To begin with, I, like many other Christians, am an adult converts to the faith. We don’t believe it’s true because we want it to be true.

a) Many of us did not want to be true.

b) And if wishful thinking were the operative motive, then many of us would have converted at a much earlier age.

ii) Wanting something to be true and believing it to be true are two very different things.

I want it to be true that I’ll see my dead father again. This doesn’t make me believe that I’ll be seeing him again.

I want it to be true that I have a Swiss bank account with a few billion dollars tucked away for a rainy day. That doesn’t make me believe it.

I want it to be true that my favorite movie star will show up at my doorstep tomorrow with a marriage proposal. That doesn’t make me believe it.

iii) There are many considerations which evidence the Bible. Part of this is psychological realism. All writing has an autobiographical dimension, even biographical writing. A biographer reveals a good deal about himself in the course of writing about others.

That’s at the narrator’s level. Then there’s also the narrative level. Do the figures within the narrative speak and act in a way that’s realistic?

This is not something we can quantify, but we have no need of doing so. If you’re a good judge of character, you can size someone up. We are human. So we know what it means to be human. We understand human motives and passions from the inside out.

We can detect their bias, as well as the source of their bias.

The capacity to identify with another, to relate to his situation, to sniff out blinding bias or mendacity, is something without which a social life would be impossible.

iv) If we assume Markan priority, then there’s also the exceedingly conservative use made of him by Matthew and Luke, which shows their highly reliable handling of dominical tradition.

And if you’re a Matthean prioritist, you can easily adapt the very same argument.

v) There’s also the way in which an account does or does not dovetail with our other sources of information about that time and place—although those sources are subject to the same assessments and adjustments.

“But what the witnesses that Paul speaks about in I Cor. 15? For instance, what "biographical material" do we have in the case of the 500 who Paul claims saw the risen Jesus? Even though this is among the earliest post-resurrection sightings of Jesus reported in the New Testament, Paul mentions it only in passing, not even telling us who any of these 500 might have been or where the sighting may have occurred. Apparently this doesn't matter, because the gospel details are read into the accounts we read in Paul's and other early letters, such that "by the time we arrive at the Resurrection, we know a good deal about the character and quality of the reporters." Were I to take so much for granted in my criticism of Christianity, apologists would try to make a field day of me.”

This is a model of confused reasoning:

i) Dawson is the one who’s reading into my statement certain things I never said or implied. I made no attempt to correlate the 500 witnesses in 1 Cor 15 with the Gospels. There’s a way to do that, but that’s hardly germane to my immediate point.

ii) Dawson is also reading into my statement a popular apologetic strategy which begins with 1 Cor 15:5-8, plus a redacted pre-Markan passion narrative.

I never used that argument.

iii) As far as Paul’s appeal is concerned, the salient point is not whether we are in a position to know who the 500 were, but whether the Corinthians were. Paul is deliberately staking out a claim which would leave himself exposed to falsification if untrue.

iv) Then there’s the matter of Paul himself. Is he a credible character?

For reasons summarized by Cranfield, I’d answer in the affirmative, and firmly in the affirmative.

Cf. C. E. B. Cranfield, On Romans and Other New Testament Essays (T&T Clark 1998), 144.

“Indeed, the sighting of Mary at Fatima is so better documented than the unattested and conflicting reports that we find in the New Testament's epistolary record, that the two are essentially incomparable.”

i) My case was never limited to the epistolary record.

ii) Bethrick offers no evidence of conflicting reports.

iii) Is Fatima “so much better documented”? Actually, there are conflicting reports of what was seen. Cf. S. Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary (Princeton 1991; reprint 1992), 82-83.

“This merely puts the onus to prove a negative squarely on Steve's shoulders. Otherwise he risks asserting from his own ignorance while standing on New Testament invention.”

i) I am under no standing duty to prove that Mary never appeared to Bernadette or Lucia Santos or anyone else. Since she never appeared to me, the onus is hardly on me to disprove anyone else’s experience.

ii) Due to the brevity of life, we prioritize our beliefs. Some beliefs are far more important than others. So we invest our time in proving or disproving our priority-beliefs.

iii) Does the onus fall on Bethrick to disprove every UFO?

iv) The Resurrection is infinitely more important than Marian apparitions. And the Resurrection is logically independent of Marian apparitions. Their truth would not falsify the Resurrection.

“ It is not difficult to suppose that the individual(s) who saw Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich would agree that their sighting was not a purposeful event. If one can suppose that turning water into wine or causing a fig tree to wither is sufficiently purposeful for an incarnated deity to take trouble to effect, one can with as much imagination consider that an apparition in burn marks, water stains, tree knots, etc., to be just as purposeful.”

i) It’s no trouble for an omnipotent deity to effect a miracle.

ii) If Bethrick spent anytime with the standard exegetical literature, he’d see that cursing the fig tree and turning water into wine were, indeed, significant events.

“A mind inebriated on religious faith has already stepped onto the wild-card grounds of make-believe. Surely if apologists had something more substantial than special pleading and rash dismissals, they'd be screaming it instead of these paltry offerings.”

A mind inebriated on irreligious faith has already stepped onto the wild-card grounds of make-believe. Surely if unbelievers had something more substantial than special pleading and rash dismissals, they'd be screaming it instead of these paltry offerings.