An Interview With A Police Officer Who Worked The Bridgeport Poltergeist Case

I've often cited the work of the late Roman Catholic patristic scholar Robert Eno. His younger brother, Paul, is a paranormal researcher. One of the cases he worked was the Bridgeport Poltergeist in the 1970s. It seems to be an authentic case and one that's highly evidential. You can read about it in depth in a book by William Hall, The World's Most Haunted House (Pompton Plains, New Jersey: New Page Books, 2014). Paul has discussed the case and his involvement in it in many places, including in some YouTube videos. He hosts a radio program with his son, Ben, and they recently interviewed Joe Tomek, a police officer who went to the house involved in the Bridgeport case and witnessed some of the paranormal events there.

Gospel titles in only a small number of early manuscripts?

Some recent skeptical treatments of the authorship of the gospels that I've come across have raised the objection that only a small number of our gospel manuscripts from the earliest centuries include a gospel title (e.g., "The Gospel According To John"). I want to address some problems with that objection.

Why forge three pastoral letters rather than one?

Tim Challies recently linked an article that discusses some of the reasons for accepting the Pauline authorship of the pastorals. I want to highlight one of those reasons here, one that I think has been especially neglected.

If the letters were forged by one individual, thus explaining their similarities, why forge three letters instead of one or two? There doesn't seem to be sufficient motive to forge any of them, given their contents and the time when they allegedly were forged, for example. But if somebody wanted to forge such content, why not put it in the form of a smaller number of letters? The more letters you forge, the harder it is to convince people that the letters are genuine despite a lack of the evidence you'd expect to accompany genuineness (the lack of previous discussion of the documents, the lack of the documents' presence in other locations, etc.). Why try to get away with forging so often when you can so easily do it less?

The Significance Of Referring To "The Sea Of Galilee"

Luke refers to "the Lake of Gennesaret", but Matthew, Mark, and John refer to it as "the Sea of Galilee". Luuk van de Weghe offers a potential explanation:

An Update To An Argument From The Names In The Gospels And Acts

Luuk van de Weghe is a New Testament scholar who's recently done some work on an argument for the historical reliability of the gospels and Acts based on the names that appear in the documents. I'll quote some of what Richard Bauckham has written about the argument, then quote some more recent comments from van de Weghe, updating Bauckham's material:

"Thus the names of Palestinian Jews in the Gospels and Acts coincide very closely with the names of the general population of Jewish Palestine in this period, but not to the names of Jews in the Diaspora. In this light it becomes very unlikely that the names in the Gospels are late accretions to the traditions. Outside Palestine the appropriate names simply could not have been chosen. Even within Palestine, it would be very surprising if random accretions of names to this or that tradition would fit the actual pattern of names in the general population....Onomastics (the study of names) is a significant resource for assessing the origins of Gospel traditions. The evidence in this chapter shows that the relative frequency of the various personal names in the Gospels corresponds well to the relative frequency in the full database of three thousand individual instances of names in the Palestinian Jewish sources of the period. This correspondence is very unlikely to have resulted from addition of names to the traditions, even within Palestinian Jewish Christianity, and could not possibly have resulted from the addition of names to the traditions outside Jewish Palestine, since the pattern of Jewish name usage in the Diaspora was very different. The usages of the Gospels also correspond closely to the variety of ways in which persons bearing the same very popular names could be distinguished in Palestinian Jewish usage. Again these features of the New Testament data would be difficult to explain as the result of random invention of names within Palestinian Jewish Christianity and impossible to explain as the result of such invention outside Jewish Palestine. All the evidence indicates the general authenticity of the personal names in the Gospels." (Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], 73-74, 84)

"Simply put, these works [The Infancy Gospel Of Thomas, The Gospel Of Nicodemus, etc.] do not hold up to scrutiny based on naming patterns, and we can see the card player's bluff. From my survey of twenty-three sources in Appendix A, the only extra-biblical works that display onomastic congruence [alignment between a database of ancient name usage and the source it's being compared to] are the works of Plutarch, Suetonius, and Josephus….These authors' works are the very same ones that the biblical scholar Craig Keener suggests mark the height of historical sensitivity for the genre of Greco-Roman biography when expectations of historical reliability were at the highest. Onomastic congruence appears to be a byproduct, however unintentional, of the information-driven nature of these historiographical works.…In my 2022 PhD Dissertation (University of Aberdeen) as well as in my article, 'Name Recall in the Synoptic Gospels,' I discuss the problem that Ilan I [a database of ancient Jewish names gathered by Tal Ilan] does not provide an onomastic snapshot of Jesus' Palestine, since her database covers approximately five hundred years. This seems too broad to determine onomastic patterns. I refine Ilan's database to the years 30 BCE to 90 CE and confirm that onomastic congruence can still be demonstrated. Incidentally, Richard Bauckham is currently working on a new prosopography (50 BCE to 135 CE) with the aim of acquiring greater accuracy, correcting further errors discovered in Ilan I, and supplementing her data with new inscriptions being published by the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. My thanks to Dr. Bauckham for providing his unpublished material for me to review; it is apparent that the efforts of acquiring more precise data will lead toward the further justification of onomastic congruence in the Gospels and Acts." (The Historical Tell [Tampa, Florida: DeWard, 2023], 35-36, n. 42 on 146)

Jacob's Ladder

"in you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go" (Genesis 28:14-15)

"'they shall call His name Immanuel,' which translated means, 'God with us.'" (Matthew 1:23)

"The promise of an accompanying presence of God that would never fail, first given to Jacob, is now renewed and extended, by implication, to the nations that become Jacob's offspring through faith in the Messiah. This happens through a form of the divine presence that Jacob could never have anticipated: the presence of God in the midst of human life as the human Jesus, Jacob's own descendant, who thus brings blessing to the nations. Jesus himself is God-with-us." (Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2020], 23)

"you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man" (John 1:51)

"He had a dream, and behold, a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." (Genesis 28:12)

A Response To Religion For Breakfast On Jesus' Birthplace

The YouTube channel Religion For Breakfast recently put out a video about the birthplace of Jesus, arguing that he probably wasn't born in Bethlehem. Some of the claims in the video are inaccurate, but the problems with it are largely a matter of omission. There's a lot of relevant evidence that isn't discussed.

The Connections Between Christmas And Easter

They're connected in a lot of contexts, such as theology, but I want to focus here on what I addressed in my last post, prophecy. It's difficult in some ways to choose what Biblical passages to include in a post on a subject like Christmas prophecy. So much of what's primarily about Easter also has backward implications for Christmas. And Christmas prophecies have implications for Easter.

We can separate the two if we want, for organizational purposes, to be more concise, or for whatever other reason, but we need to be careful to not think of them in too much isolation. Prophecies fulfilled in Jesus' adulthood add credibility to his fulfilling prophecy in his childhood. And the reverse is true, of course. That's also true of other things, not just prophecy. The resurrection of Jesus makes the virgin birth more plausible and so on.

I've been arguing for many years now that the evidence for a traditional Christian view of Jesus' childhood is significantly better than people usually think. But the other evidence for Christianity is good as well, and Christians should guard against thinking of Christmas issues in too much isolation. It can simultaneously be true, and it is simultaneously true, that the direct evidence for a traditional Christian view of the childhood of Jesus is better than people usually think it is and that the evidence for other aspects of Christianity gives us reason to hold a high view of his childhood. People are sometimes quick to change the subject at Christmastime, trying to direct attention away from Jesus' childhood and to his adulthood, especially his resurrection. I don't have a problem with bringing up his adulthood and the resurrection in particular in the context of Christmas. But we should also argue for a high view of his childhood directly, discussing the evidence for the historicity of the infancy narratives and such. We can, and should, do both.

I've commented before about the fact that the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus' birth, Augustus, didn't think much of the Jewish people or their Messianic hopes. Like other politicians, he would sometimes cooperate with the Jewish people or pay homage to the Jewish deity as one god among others, but "he revered the ancient and approved [foreign cults], like the mysteries of Eleusis in Attica, but despised the rest, taking no notice in Egypt of the bull-cult of Apis, and congratulating his grandson for passing by the temple in Jerusalem" (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius [London, England: Bristol Classical Press, 2004], 189-90). But Jesus would visit that temple, both as a child (Luke 2:22-38, 2:46-50) and as an adult. The Lord came to his temple (Malachi 3:1), and he established a kingdom that would overcome and far exceed the kingdom of Augustus. And Augustus would unknowingly prepare the way for Jesus' adulthood, including his fulfillment of other prophecies. See my post here for a brief overview of how the Roman empire was involved in the fulfillment of prophecies closely associated with Jesus.

There wouldn't be a death of Jesus in line with Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy without a birth at the right time. There wouldn't have been a great light shining in Zebulun and Naphtali if a child hadn't been born in the line of David. The penal practices anticipated in Isaiah 50 and Psalm 22 had to be invented and developed over the course of time leading up to their application to Jesus in his adulthood. "I will also hold You by the hand and watch over You, and I will appoint You as a covenant to the people, as a light to the nations…Truly I have spoken; truly I will bring it to pass. I have planned it, surely I will do it….The LORD called Me from the womb; from the body of My mother He named Me.…It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant To raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved ones of Israel; I will also make You a light of the nations so that My salvation may reach to the end of the earth." (Isaiah 42:6, 46:11, 49:1, 49:6)

The Hopes And Fears Of All The Years

I want to have a post that collects some links to our articles on prophecy fulfillment related to Christmas, so that they can be found in one place. I'm not trying to be exhaustive. For example, Steve Hays wrote many posts on prophecy over the years, including prophecies related to Christmas, and I can't link all of them here. Anybody who's interested can search our archives for more material. But some of the relevant posts are linked below. I expect to supplement the list when warranted. You may want to periodically check for updates.

Many of the posts include responses to objections to Jesus' fulfillment of the passages. For other responses to objections, see our collection of posts on prophecy here.

Genesis 49:8-12
Ruth 4
2 Samuel 7:8-16
Psalm 22
Psalm 89
Isaiah 7:14, 8:8
Isaiah 9:1-7
Isaiah 42:1-13
Isaiah 49:1-13
Isaiah 50:4-11
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Daniel 2:34-35, 2:44
Daniel 9:24-27
Micah 4-5
Malachi 3:1

Another Reason Why The Nazareth Location Of Jesus' Conception Wouldn't Have Been Fabricated

I've written a lot about the evidence for Jesus' residence in Nazareth, going back to the time of his early childhood, such as here and here. Bart Ehrman has gone as far as to refer to Jesus' upbringing in Nazareth as "certain": "Little can be known about Jesus' early life, but one thing that can be said for certain is that he was raised in Nazareth, the home village of Joseph and Mary." (The New Testament [New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 269) What I want to do here is bring up another line of evidence for both the Nazareth residence and its earliness.

I've argued elsewhere that Micah 5:2 likely refers to the figure there as being born in Bethlehem. But somebody could take it to mean that the figure predicted in the passage is supposed to come from Bethlehem in the sense of being conceived there. The placement of Jesus in Nazareth at the time of his conception opens the door to doubting his fulfillment of Micah 5 under that reading of the passage. Even for those who think Micah 5 only requires a birth in Bethlehem or some other association with Bethlehem later in life, not conception there, the ability for others to disagree and raise the objection under consideration is significant. The easiest way for the early Christians to have handled this issue and others, if they weren't constrained much by what actually happened in history, would have been to place both the conception and the birth in Bethlehem. You don't have to get Jesus to Bethlehem if you place him there to begin with.

There are many other reasons for accepting the historicity of Jesus' residence in Nazareth and the timing of the residence early in his life, such as the evidence discussed in my posts linked above. The line of evidence I'm focused on in this post is just one among others. There's a lot of weight to the cumulative effect of all of these considerations.

More Evidence For The Historicity Of Matthew 2:16

I wrote about some evidence for the passage's historicity in a thread several years ago (including in the comments section). In a post last year, I discussed a recent book by Sabine Huebner that addresses some issues related to the infancy narratives, including Matthew 2:16. People in the ancient world had a lot of reasons to discern, remember, and keep records of how long it took to travel from one location to another (e.g., people operating businesses whose success depended on issues of timing). One of the chapters in Huebner's book is about travel in the ancient world. Though she isn't focused on Matthew 2:16, she provides some examples of how issues of how long a journey takes would come up in a variety of contexts, such as letters sent between relatives arranging a meeting with one another (e.g., approximate Kindle locations 2838 and 3163 in Papyri And The Social World Of The New Testament [New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019]). Knowledge about how long journeys should take was somewhat common in the ancient world, including among people of lower social status. In fact, Huebner's chapter is focused on the lower classes. So, it seems that the fact that the magi's journey should have taken much less than two years was easily accessible to Matthew and his original audience. For a discussion of the significance of that situation, see the first thread linked above.

A Response To Bart Ehrman's Webinar Against The Virgin Birth

It aired at 2:00 P.M. Eastern time today. It consisted of three segments, two presentations that were a little over an hour each and one session of questions and answers that lasted a little under an hour. I saw all of it other than about the first seven minutes of the first presentation, which I missed due to technical problems. The video isn't available for replay yet, but should be later this week. I plan to watch those first seven minutes at that point, then post any further comments that are warranted. But given the small amount of time involved and the nature of the webinar as a whole, I doubt that I missed much in those first several minutes.

When I provide documentation of something said during the webinar, I'll refer to the section involved and the approximate minute within that section. I don't have a video to play back at this point to get more precise numbers. So, "(second presentation, 21:00)" refers to something at roughly 21 minutes into the second presentation, "(questions and answers, 3:00)" refers to something about 3 minutes into the segment with questions and answers, etc.

Tovia Singer Is Wrong About The Origins Of Belief In The Virgin Birth

His YouTube channel recently put out a video on the virgin birth. He repeats a lot of claims I've addressed before. See here for resources on how much Matthew and Luke agree concerning Jesus' childhood, what they say about the timing of the family's residence in Bethlehem, etc. There are too many false claims in Singer's video for me to interact with all of them here. He refers, for example, to how "many" Evangelical scholars say that the infancy narratives are "hopelessly unreconcilable". He provides no documentation. I've reconciled the narratives, and so have other people. And I can cite non-Evangelicals acknowledging that the material can be reconciled. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, two very liberal Jesus Seminar scholars, acknowledged, "It is not impossible to harmonize them." (The First Christmas [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007], 23) But the subject I want to focus on here is what Singer claimed about the origins of the virgin birth belief.

Does Luke 1:34 suggest that Mary took a vow of perpetual virginity?

Roman Catholics and other advocates of Mary's perpetual virginity often claim that Luke 1:34 implies that Mary had taken a vow of perpetual virginity. Why else would she ask Gabriel how she was to conceive? These same Catholics (and others) often cite the second-century apocryphal work The Protevangelium Of James to support their view that Mary was a perpetual virgin. Go here and do a Ctrl F search for "apocryphal document" to read about some of the problems with that sort of appeal to the document. The Protevangelium has Mary needing to be corrected by Gabriel about becoming pregnant the same way other women do (11). It doesn't seem that the author of the Protevangelium interpreted Luke 1:34 the way these modern Catholics interpret the passage. Here are some other observations on Luke 1:34, which I wrote in correspondence with a friend on Facebook last year:

How The Names Of Jesus And His Brothers Corroborate The Infancy Narratives

I've written about how Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus' name was given by revelation and how easily they could have disagreed on the subject if they or their sources were independently fabricating accounts, for example. The name given, Jesus, means "Yahweh is salvation" or "Yahweh saves". And notice something about the names of Jesus' brothers (Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3, Acts 21:17-18, Galatians 1:18-19, James 1:1, Jude 1):

Early Christian Orations On Christmas

I don't remember how I came across it, but here's a link to a doctoral dissertation featuring new English translations of a few ancient orations on Christmas (Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Amphilochius of Iconium).

Bart Ehrman's Upcoming Webinar Against The Virgin Birth

It's going to air on December 10. I plan to watch it, and I'll probably post about it again after doing so, but I want to make some preliminary comments.

I doubt he'll go much beyond the book Andrew Lincoln published on the topic a decade ago. Go here to read my review of Lincoln's work. Everything I've read about Ehrman's webinar to this point suggests that it's going to largely, if not entirely, be a reformulation of Lincoln's approach.

Since I was going to post an article about how to argue for the virgin birth this Christmas season, I'll go ahead and include that material here. After I address that subject, I'll add some further comments about interacting with Ehrman in particular.

Ephesian Sources On Jesus' Childhood

We're often told that the early Christians don't show much interest in Jesus' childhood outside the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke. Actually, there's more material on the subject elsewhere than is typically suggested. Some of those other sources are affiliated with Ephesus in one way or another, so we can summarize much of that evidence by referring to Ephesian sources. There's reason to think the Ephesian church was well informed about Jesus' childhood and was expected by other Christians to be well informed about the subject. What the sources writing to and from Ephesus tell us suggests that there was some interest in Jesus' childhood in Ephesus, and what's said about the subject corroborates and supplements what Matthew and Luke reported.

Christmas Resources 2023

For suggestions about how to begin the process of arguing for a traditional Christian view of Jesus' childhood, see the collection of approaches that can be taken here.

One of the most important issues to inform yourself about is how much Matthew and Luke agree concerning Jesus' childhood. They agree much more than people typically suggest. See here for a discussion of forty examples of the agreements between Matthew and Luke. For a collection of posts on agreement about Jesus' childhood among other early sources, see here.

Isaiah 9:1-7 is important not only in the context of prophecy fulfillment, but also for other reasons, such as understanding Jesus' self-perception, demonstrating continuity between the accounts of his childhood and the accounts of his adulthood, and understanding why he carried out his public ministry as he did. Here's a collection of posts addressing the passage and its significance across many contexts.

And we've addressed a lot of other Christmas issues over the years. Here are some examples:

Thank God For Scripture

Last Thursday I gave a lecture on William Tyndale to a group in Washington, D. C. Tyndale translated the New Testament for the first time from the original languages into English in 1526. He paid for this with his life. He was strangled and then burned at the stake at age forty-two. There was one point where I did not expect to be moved as deeply as I was. I was listing passages in the English Standard Version that we use here at Bethlehem which trace their origin back through the Revised Standard Version to the American Revised Version to the King James Version to the Geneva Bible to the Coverdale Bible to William Tyndale.

And when I got to the blessing of Numbers 6:24-26, I realized that I use these words almost every weekend to close our services. “The Lord bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” And it hit me, I am using the very words that William Tyndale chose five hundred years ago to translate these verses (with two tiny changes, thee to you, and merciful to gracious), and he paid for this translation with his life. He died to put these words in English….

So I will say to you what I said to those folks: Let’s not play with these precious words. These are the words of God. Christ died to confirm them and make it possible for sinners to understand them and embrace them. And thousands have died to preserve them for us to this day. Thank God this Thanksgiving for the inspired Bible.

(John Piper)