From Vic Reppert:
I talked about this in an earlier thread. With Islam, you have to take Muhammad’s word for it that he was touched by an angel. Same with Mormonism and Joseph Smith. With Christianity, you have a pre-crucifixion story where Jesus is supposed to have performed miracles in public. Did these miracles happen? The disciples, at least, are convinced by them, and that’s why we find them dropping their nets and following. You also have Jesus making remarkable claims about himself. Trilemma considerations come into play here. Even if there are possible alternatives to liar, lunatic, or Lord, are the plausible ones? Then, you have the death and resurrection events, again, a public execution, and a resurrection claimed to have been seen by lots of people. Hallucination? Theft? Swoon? Wrong tomb? Evil twin? What happened? And then you have such things as the preaching of Peter and the missionary journeys of Paul. With the missionary journeys you have a story of a series of encounters with government officials in those localities, and at least the facts about local government have been verified by archaeology. So what was Paul doing that got him hauled up before government officials on a regular basis? Just preaching peace and love, brother? The Book of Acts says that there were miracles at this stage, too. And then he appeals to Caesar, when failure to do so would have gotten him released?
Ah, things like this make me feel like I’m 19 again and just discovering the dumb things people will say in defense of their religion.
Vic may as well have defended Mormonism by saying that with Islam, you have to take Muhammad’s word for it, but with Mormonism you have to explain where the miraculous golden plates came from. Vic is of course right that with Christianity, you have a story about miracles, but stories aren’t facts. And pace Victor, what we don’t have is any hard evidence of people following Jesus because they were convinced. What we don’t have is any hard evidence regarding anything Jesus said during his lifetime. What we don’t have are “death and resurrection” events. What we don’t have is the original testimony of the “lots of people” who supposedly claimed to have seen Jesus risen from the dead. That Christian apologists still pretend we have these things tells me apologetics hasn’t really progressed since Josh McDowell.
Any informed and honest person has to admit that with Christianity, you just have to take the word of Paul and a small handful of other guys, and the identity of the other guys isn’t certain–to put it in a way that’s actually very generous to Victor’s case. It may be possible and that their stories are based on actual events but the evidence is pretty sketchy. And everything I’ve just said is information that’s readily available to anyone who’s make a small effort to read up on the issues. I’d like to think that with my book I put together a particularly good one-stop guide to these issues, but the basics of Biblical scholarship I lay out there aren’t anything you couldn’t learn by reading Bart Ehrman or Raymond Brown or even some evangelical scholars, even though none of those people set out to rebut Christian apologists.
I understand why people with no knowledge of the issues would find the sorts of arguments Vic makes appealing, but Vic has been interacting with critics of Christianity for years. I also agree with Richard Carrier’s assessment that, unlike say William Lane Craig, he comes off as honest. I can only conclude, then, that he’s repeatedly failed to understand the most basic points of Biblical scholarship and the post basic points made by people he’s arguing with. That he’s fuzzy on the distinction between a fact and a story someone told once.
Unfortunately, all of this is too typical. The only way to present many of the arguments Christian apologists have in their arsenal is to be dishonest, too lazy to check your facts, or incapable of understanding what you do read.
‘With Islam, you have to take Muhammad’s word for it that he was touched by an angel’
Gosh, what sort of religion is it where you have to take the word of eyewitnesses!
Christianity wouldn’t be seen dead claiming it had eyewitnesses whose word could be trusted.
Actually you have to be very stupid indeed to be a hand-picked disciple of Jesus.
http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5786&Itemid=100
Christians boast about how stupid the disciples were.
Those guys were just idiots!
‘They show us a group of men whose chagrined honesty compelled them to carefully incorporate into the public record the fact that they were snobbish, spiteful, cowardly, factional nitwits who were slow on the uptake, ambitious, blind, selfish, and, when the supreme test came, quite willing to bolt and run in the hour of their Master’s terrible trial. ‘
Gosh , Christianity must be true!
It was founded by a bunch of idiots!
What other religion can boast about how dumb, slow on the uptake and downright stupid their leaders are?
My claim is that there is more to explain for Christianity than for Mormonism or Islam. Unlike Craig or McDowell, I don’t say that the only rational conclusion is that Christianity is true. The “verdict” that the evidence demands depends on your antecedent probability. Still, I think you have some facts that are more likely to have occurred if Christianity is true than if Christianity is not true.
A critical point is that Luke, who also wrote his gospel and Acts, (both of which contain miracle claims throughout) has been shown to be exceedingly accurate about governmental systems before whom Paul appeared. This may seem trivial, but it makes it implausible that a long time passed between Paul’s journey’s and Luke’s writing. And his is not the first gospel written, Mark’s was. Maybe the miracles didn’t happen, but the journeys almost certainly did. So you have it written down within a third of a century of the crucifixion, if that.
You don’t have maybe one or two central miracles claimed, (the Qu’ran or the gold plates) you have a lot of them, and they are placed in public places. And there is no argument against them saying “We never heard of this guy.” In fact, the early Jewish anti-Christian polemic attempts to explain an empty tomb, not deny it. You have people engaging in very high-risk behavior on behalf of this upstart Jewish cult. You have them meeting on a day not the Sabbath, you have them saying the Jewish God was incarnate, and you have them getting martyred at least as far back as James the brother of Jesus (if not the stoning of Stephen–do skeptics think that that was fiction?). Something has happened to these people, and all I am claiming is that it takes a lot more explaining to figure that out than to explain the growth of the Mormon church.
I had someone on my site, Ken Pulliam, agree with me that the case for Christianity is better than the case for Islam or Mormonism historically, but that he found it more reasonable to suppose that Christianity was also not true.
So I guess I differ from Craig and McDowell in that I set the bar a whole lot lower for myself than they do. But I think I did clear it (or perhaps, can do so with a bit more explanation).
‘A critical point is that Luke, who also wrote his gospel and Acts, (both of which contain miracle claims throughout) has been shown to be exceedingly accurate about governmental systems before whom Paul appeared.’
In other words, some of what he wrote has been confirmed, but not everything.
I like the way Victor simply reposted this from his site,proving he learned nothing from my take-down of it.
Notice that even Bruce could not confirm what Luke wrote ‘The magistrates of Philippi, which was a Roman colony, are called ‘praetors’ in Acts, and they are attended by ‘lictors’ (the ‘serjeants’ of the AV), by whose rods Paul and Silas had so many stripes inflicted on them (Acts xvi. 12, 20 ff., 35 ff.). The strict title of these colonial magistrates was ‘duumvirs’; but they affected the more grandiloquent title of praetors” like the magistrates of another Roman colony, Capua, of whom Cicero says: ‘Although they are called duumvirs in the other colonies, these men wished to be called praetors.”‘
So Bruce admits that it was a DIFFERENT colony where ‘these men wished to be called praetors’, and Luke was just plain wrong when he described another colony as having ‘praetors’.
Sorry, if you want to be ‘strict’, the ‘strict’ title was ‘duumvirs’, but who wants to be so ‘strict’ about accuracy…
The main thing is that Luke was always right, unless you want to be a stickler for accuracy, and even then he would have been right if he had been talking about Capua.
I wonder if ‘Luke’ could read Cicero,like FF Bruce could….
Gosh, where could Luke have got his information from, information confirmed by Cicero, if not from Paul himself?
Luke must have got his information from Paul, because the information is confirmed by Cicero….
.
For anyone interested, my reply is at Vic’s blog: http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2010/06/reply-to-hallquist-on-historical.html
‘Similarly the governors of Achaia and Asia are proconsuls, as both these provinces were senatorial. Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia (Acts xviii. 12), is known to us the brother of Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher and tutor of Nero.’
Luke got right , wait for it, the tutor of Nero and brother of Seneca.
How could he have known that? That would be like me knowing which of the Kennedy brothers became President. I could only know that if I lived in America in the 1960s.
Look what else Luke got right!
‘The city of Ephesus itself is given the title Neokoros, ‘Warden of the Temple’ of Artemis (Acts xix. 35). This word literally means ‘temple-sweeper’, but came to be given as a title of honor, first to individuals, and then to cities as well. (Similarly in our own day, the George Cross, instituted as an honor for individuals, has been conferred on the island of Malta.)
Luke’s ascription of the title to Ephesus is corroborated by a Greek inscription which describes this city as’TempleWarden of Artemis’.’
The best analogy is , wait for it, Malta getting the George Cross.
I could I know that Malta got the George Cross, apart from the films about it , and TV history programmes?
I know Malta got the George Cross,which proves I was alive in 1945.
After all, if Luke knew about something analogous to Malta getting the George Cross, proving Luke was just after, then me knowing Malta got the George Cross proves I was alive then.
Bruce claims that if Luke got something right, then he was amazingly accurate.
And if the other NT authors say something different to Luke, then they must be amazingly accurate as well!
‘Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee in the time of our Lord, seems to have. been given the courtesy title of ‘king’ by his Galilaan subjects (cf. Mt. xiv. 9; Mk. vi. 14), but unlike his father Herod the Great and hi’ nephew Herod Agrippa I he was not promoted to royal status by the emperor, and had to be content with the lesser title ‘tetrarch’. Luke therefore never calls him king, but always tetrarch (e.g. Lk. iii r, 19).’
So if Luke never calls him king, because that was wrong, then why was Luke using inaccurate sources?
Why could Matthew and Mark use the title ‘king’, when that was so wrong that Luke never used it?
Is it because they….. made a mistake?
A mistake in the Gospels? Of course not!
Matthew and Mark used the title king because that was accurate, but Luke never used the title king because tetrach was accurate, not king.
Can you imagine Victor howling with laughter if Mormons tried to use such reasoning about the Book of Mormon?
I wrote my response here and then posted it on my site. Can’t you read timestamps, Steven?
Your last comment is interesting. It suggests that Luke spoke more accurately than Matthew or Mark concerning the title of Herod Antipas.
No skin off my nose. Go ahead and turn me in to the Inerrancy Police for acknowledging that.
Victor believes in Christianity because Acts is amazingly accurate.
And if Matthew and Mark are not accurate, then Victor believes in it anyway.
So what is the point of crowing about accuracy and then scoffing that only the Inerrancy Police care about accuracy?
It’s the Christian double-standards that get you. I don’t care in the least about Christianity. But I was brought up to hate hypocrisy and double-standards. Christianity just happens to be the place where you find it piled up and shoved down people’s throats….
Any historian is only as good as his sources. And Victor thinks Mark is not as accurate as Luke….
So Luke’s sources were not very good. Which makes him a worthless historian , as he just uses Mark without any attempt to say which stories are true and which are false.
‘I wrote my response here and then posted it on my site. Can’t you read timestamps, Steven?’
I posted my take-down of your apologetic double-standards long before Sun 27th….
Luke had a higher standard of exactitude when if comes to referring to people’s positions than Matthew or Mark. The word “king” was in use at the time, so it wasn’t completely wrong to call Herod Antipas king. But it was not the most precise title.
Steve Nash is the best free-throw shooter in the NBA. His Suns teammate, Grant Hill, is not quite as accurate, but he’s close. Just because Hill isn’t quite as good a free-throw shooter as Nash, doesn’t mean he’s a bad free-throw shooter. Just that he isn’t as accurate as Nash.
Chris, what do you think we have hard evidence for with respect to the life of Jesus? The crucifixion? The teaching ministry? The existence of Jesus?
I see.
So Matthew and Mark were not in error, they just did not have ‘as high a standard of exactitude’ as Luke.
Luke, of course, being a wonderful historian never managed to work out how old Jesus was, when he was born or when he died.
Luke knew about the titles of the tutor of Nero.
But he was so ignorant about Judaism.
Luke 3:27 says that Rhesa was the son of Zerubabbel. But Rhesa is an Aramaic word meaning ‘Prince’ and was Zerubabbel’s title, not the name of his son.
Guess Reppert did not tell people that when he was boasting about how Luke always got titles right, and kept quiet about how Luke screwed up more the closer he got to Jesus, and the further he got away from Josephus.
Hello All (people still reading this thread),
I’ve replied at this post on Vic’s blog, but for the record, does anybody else find it weird the way he moves from talking point to talking point without addressing anything his critics say?
First, I posed two questions, one had to do with what you thought we did have hard evidence for. The second had to do with how you would regard the evidence if it was presented about the life of Rabbi Hillel, a person about whom no supernatural claims are made that I know of. I don’t think I’m just jumping from talking point to talking point, I am first, trying to get a sense of what will count as evidence here, and second, how the supernatural character of Jesus’ claims is affecting the rules of evidence. If this were about Hillel, it seems to me that most of us would be happy with the amount of evidence provided, as opposed to discounting it all because it came from supporters. I would have thought that testimony in the Gospels is at least some evidence, even if that evidence is defeasible.
Nor does skepticism about the sources solve the explanatory problems. There is hard evidence for the Persecution of Nero, and there is also hard evidence (Josephus) for the martyrdom of James the Lord’s brother. Martyrdom doesn’t prove the truth of the beliefs in question, but it does prove a high likelihood for the sincerity of those beliefs. So something had to have convinced those people that Jesus was Lord. What could that be? If nothing like the Jesus story was true, and they were all just making it up as they went along, why wouldn’t they head for the exits when Nero started rounding Christians up and killing them? As for James, what would convince you that your brother was the Lord. Why go on missionary journeys where you get arrested time after time unless there was something to convince you that the truth about God was to be found in Christ crucified and resurrected? If we impugn all the sources, then you’re left with a bunch of people butting heads with Jewish leaders, and ultimately with the Roman emperor, but why?
The entry by Victor Reppert saying Christianity cannot be a fraud because Peter and James were killed is a good example of sheer dumbness.
I rarely call people dumb, but that is dumb, so has to be called what it is.
It shows you though that Christians do not have real evidence as that is what they are forced to dredge up as an argument.
If only they had a named person who claimed to have seen an empty tomb.
That would at least be feeble evidence. It would be pathetic evidence, but at least it would be a real piece of pathetic evidence.
But they have nothing! They are sitting there with an 8-high and pretending they have a Royal Flush.
If what you mean by “fraud” is just that it is false, then, of course, martyrdom or martyrdom risk behavior proves no such thing. If what you mean is that Christianity was known to be false by the adherents who first promulgated it, claiming to be witnesses of the Resurrection, then even Chris Hallquist, in his book, thinks that the willingness of the founders of Christianity to be martyred counts strongly against deliberate fraud theories. Even Richard Carrier, who thinks that fraud theses are too easily dismissed, doesn’t advocate a fraud theory as the most likely account of what happened at the founding of Christianity.