CADRE Comments

J. Warner Wallace (the popular "Cold-Case Christianity" apologist, who converted from atheism pretty late in his life), put out a Christmas post a few days ago: "Christmas is Christmas Because Jesus is God" , which among other things serves as a quick link gathering to prior articles of his on how the Gospels report Jesus talking about himself (or about Himself, to put it in divine caps in English). Those are fine, although from a sceptical standpoint (as JWW is well aware, but not everything can be covered in a short internet post, or even in multi-volume tomes!) the more salient way to put it would be: "Even if the Gospel authors weren't, in various ways, just making up what Jesus said and did concerning himself, and those reports are accurate to that extent," which of course most sceptics are going to be highly sceptical about, JWW included once upon a time, "Christmas is Christmas because Jesus did a good enough job convincing enough p...

A few days ago, Bill posted an article here on the Cadre (or just beneath this one if you're reading this on the index page) discussing the claim announced by some archaeologists earlier in June this year that they may have found the site of Dalmanutha on the shore of Lake Galilee, one of the few remaining Biblical references for the region that doesn't have at least a plausible archaeological identification. Bill (BK's) article wasn't mostly about the details of this tentative possible identification, but about the subsequent rejection by a radical hypersceptic who thinks GosMark was merely literary fiction so there's no reason to go looking for Dalmanutha to begin with. Details of all this can be found (with further links) in Bill's article. While we're on the topic, I thought I'd write up a slightly expanded (and corrected) version of a couple of footnotes I supplied to that scene in my "To The Puppies!" harmonzation entry in March of 2...

I have been reading Literary Texts and the Greek Historian , by Christopher Pelling, President of the Hellenistic Society and Professor of Greek at Oxford. I was interested in how he resolved an apparent discrepancy between Thucydides' and Apollodorus' (as recorded by Demosthenes) accounts of whether a vote was required to bestow citizenship on Plataean refugees. It reminded me of one of my articles, " Harmonizing" The Gospels: Some Principles for Dealing with Purported Contradictions in the Gospels ," where I quote R.T. France: It should be clearly understood that a serious attempt to harmonize what purport to be historical accounts of the same event is not simply a perverse concern of Christian apologists. Any student of history, especially ancient history, is familiar with the problem, and any responsible historian confronted by apparently discrepant accounts in his sources will look first for a reasonable, realistic way of harmonizing them. R.T. France, The...

Please see here for Round Four material (and links tracing all the way back to Round One). Absolutely nothing in the preceding four appeals to suspicious innuendo (or “easily identifiable, documentable facts” as Bishop Spong prefers to call them) could be even distantly supposable as amounting to some kind of “rise of anti-Semitism”. (As if anti-Semitism wasn’t around before canonical Christianity but Christians somehow invented it. And as if anti-Semitism, a racial prejudice typically connected in modern days to a secular theory of evolution, is supposed to be the same as anti-Judaism, a religious prejudice. And as if anti-Judaism wasn’t around before canonical Christianity either, but Christians somehow invented it. Etc.) By the power of deduction, then, one could reasonably (and, as it happens, correctly) expect: if it wasn’t in the first four points it’ll be in this one. “My fifth and final source of suspicion is the name of the traitor itself.” Well, at least he gets some credit...

Please see here for Round Three material (and links tracing all the way back to Round One). We’re now down three out of five pieces of speculative innuendo (or as Bishop Spong calls them, “easily identifiable, documentable facts”); we’re at the next to last one now. “The fourth reason for my suspicion is that the story of the act of betrayal is set very dramatically at midnight.” And there’s number four. I’ll try to make it better by quoting the full extent of his argument on this point. “It is just too neat a detail to have what the gospel writers believed was the darkest deed in human history occur at the darkest moment of the night. That looks more like a liturgical drama than it does a fact of history.” That’s it. The end. Apparently he thinks we won’t remember (or maybe he himself doesn’t remember) what he himself stated, not three minutes ago (when he was desperately trying to make GosLuke details look like legendary accretion): that the Sanhedrin could have followed Jesus back ...

I ended Part 3 of this Round with the conclusion: "When the only clear development in a proposed series of accretion, across three (not even four) sets of the data, is something this minor, legendary accretion theory as a primary explanation for the material is toast." So why does Bishop Spong think otherwise? Briefly put: he focuses pretty simply on some (not all) apparent things, without really going into the details, and without considering alternate hypotheses. His case, as might be expected, looks 'strongest' (in a simplistically uncritical fashion) when moving 'from' GosMark 'to' GosMatt, simply because there's obviously more 'stuff' in GosMatt. He lists the data in these two texts well enough (though still not quite as extensively as I did in Part 2), but he doesn't bother to talk about differences in any detail (as I did). If any reader, unfamiliar with the material, happens to wonder just how presenting Iscariot in a pitiably...