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Is Bart Ehrman Right When He Says That Acts Contradicts Paul’s Letters?

4. Is the NT True?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

Agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman says, “the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul.” In his book, Jesus, Interrupted Dr. Ehrman provides five examples of contradictions that exist between Paul’s letters and Acts.

Ehrman writes, “These are just a few of the discrepancies that one can find when one reads Acts horizontally against Paul’s letters. Many more can be discovered. What they show is that Acts cannot be relied upon for completely accurate detail when it describes the mission of the early apostles such as Paul.”

Since these contradictions are the five he handpicked for his book, he must feel like they’re some of the best. If the strongest examples aren’t even really contradictions, then that gives us a good reason to doubt Ehrman, not Luke.

After Paul’s Conversion, Did He Go Directly To Jerusalem To Confer With Those Who Were Apostles Set Before Him?

Leading off, Ehrman quotes Galatians 1:16-20: “I was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him for fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother. (In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!)”

Ehrman then writes: “This emphatic statement that Paul is not lying should give us pause. He is completely clear. He did not consult with others after his conversion, did not see any of the apostles for three years, and even then, he did not see any except Cephas (Peter) and Jesus’ brother James. This makes the account found in the book of Acts very interesting indeed. For according to Acts 9, immediately after Paul converted he spent some time in Damascus “with the disciples”, and when he left the city, he headed directly to Jerusalem, where he met with the apostles of Jesus (Acts 9:19-30). On all counts, Acts seems to be at odds with Paul. Did he spend time with other Christians immediately (Acts) or not (Paul)?“

Let’s read Acts 9:23-25 thoughtfully for ourselves before we take a scholar’s word for it.

“When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul. They were watching the gates day and night in order to kill him, but his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket.“

Just how long of a period is ‘many days’? Looking elsewhere, we read that many days can be as long as 3 years! Take a look at 1 Kings 2:38-39: “And Shimei said to the king, “What you say is good; as my lord the king has said, so will your servant do.” So Shimei lived in Jerusalem many days. But it happened at the end of three years that two of Shimei’s servants ran away to Achish, son of Maacah, king of Gath…

So what about the journey to Arabia? Luke doesn’t mention it, but that doesn’t necessarily contradict Paul’s story in Galatians. This trip may have happened within Luke’s ‘many days’ in Acts 9:23, and Luke either didn’t know about it or didn’t mention it.

But let’s think about this for a moment. If Acts was written by someone with no access to the story of Paul’s conversion, why did he place it on the way to Damascus of all places? Damascus doesn’t even feature prominently in the rest of Acts.

But if Luke is using Galatians, he wouldn’t have put Damascus into his story while leaving out Paul’s trip to Arabia or to the passing of three years. Either Luke is carefully devious to include a small detail like Damascus while being a major blunderer at the same time by leaving out the trip to Arabia. Or, this casual correspondence about Damascus shows that Luke knew about Paul apart from his letter to the Galatians.

Did The Churches In Judea Know Paul?

Regarding Galatians 1:21-22, Ehrman writes: “Here again Paul is quite clear. Sometime after he converted, he went around to various churches in the regions of Syria and Cilicia, but he “was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea” (Galatians 1:21-22). This has struck some scholars as odd. According to the book of Acts, when Paul was earlier persecuting the churches in Christ, it was specifically the Christian churches in “Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1-3; 9:1-2). Why is it that Christians in the churches he had formerly persecuted didn’t know what he looked like? Wasn’t he physically present among them as their enemy earlier? According to Acts, yes, according to Paul, no.”

Acts 8:1-3 shows that Paul was persecuting the Jerusalem church, not the whole region of Judea. Acts 8:1 says that the believers in Jerusalem ‘were scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria.’

They very probably would have told the other Christians they met about Paul’s persecutions. That means the Judean Christians would’ve known Paul by his big, bad reputation but not necessarily by sight. This just isn’t all that hard to think through.

Did Paul Go To Athens Alone?

Here’s Ehrman again: “Luke again appears to have gotten some details wrong. When Paul writes his very first letter to the Thessalonians, he indicates that after he had brought them to faith and started a church among them, he traveled to Athens. But he felt concerned about the fledgling new church and so sent his companion Timothy back to see how the Thessalonians were doing. In other words, Timothy accompanied Paul to Athens and then returned to Thessalonica to help build them up in the faith (1 Thessalonians 3:1–2). The book of Acts, however, is equally clear. There we are told that after Paul established the church in Thessalonica, he and Silas and Timothy founded a church in the city of Boroea; the Christians there then “sent Paul away to the coast, but Silas and Timothy remained behind” (17:14–15). Paul proceeded to send instructions that Silas and Timothy should meet up with him when they could. He traveled to Athens alone and met up with his two companions only after leaving the city for Corinth (17:16–8:5). This is another discrepancy hard to resolve: either Timothy went to Athens with Paul (1 Thessalonians), or not (Acts).”

This so-called contradiction is pretty weak sauce. Let’s read 1 Thessalonians 3:1-2 for ourselves: “Therefore when we could bear it no longer, we were willing to be left behind at Athens alone, and we sent Timothy, our brother and God’s coworker in the gospel of Christ, to establish and exhort you in your faith.”

Paul doesn’t tell us how he arrived in Athens, all these verses say is that Timothy was with him in Athens at some point. It also suggests that Paul was in Athens for some time before he sent Timothy back. That’s why he writes, “when we could bear it no longer.”

Now let’s look at Acts 17:14-15. It reads, “Then the brothers immediately sent Paul off on his way to the sea, but Silas and Timothy remained there. Those who conducted Paul brought him as far as Athens, and after receiving a command for Silas and Timothy to come to him as soon as possible, they departed.”

The Book of Acts clearly reports that a word was sent back telling Timothy to join Paul as quickly as possible. 1 Thessalonians 3 says Timothy was in Athens shortly afterward. Um, where exactly is the contradiction here?

How Many Trips Did Paul Make To Jerusalem?

Here’s Bart again: “According to Paul’s account, [the Jerusalem council] was only the second time he had been to Jerusalem (Galatians 1:18; 2:1). According to Acts, it was his third, prolonged trip there (Acts 9, 11, 15). Once again, it appears that the author of Acts has confused some of Paul’s itinerary – possibly intentionally, for his own purposes.”

Here’s what Paul actually writes in Galatians: “Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother.” And here is Galatians 2:1: “Then after fourteen years, I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me.”

There’s debate among Pauline scholars about whether or not what’s described in Galatians 2 is the Jerusalem council that we read about in Acts 15. Bart seems to think this is the only possible interpretation. He could very well be correct that it is. But where exactly does Paul say that this was only his second visit?

Acts 11 says that between Paul’s two journeys, he did go to Jerusalem to bring aid to those harmed by the famine. But why would Paul have mentioned this trip to the Galatians? It had nothing to do with him meeting with the apostles about the Gospel message that he was preaching to the Gentiles.

I’m seeing little reason to think that Bart’s claim that Acts is unreliable is correct. But let’s give him one last shot.

Were The Congregations That Paul Established Made Up Of Both Jews And Gentiles?

Here’s Bart one last time: “According to the book of Acts, the answer is a clear yes. When Paul preaches in Thessalonica, Jews in the synagogue come to faith in Christ, as do non-Jewish Greeks (Acts 17:4). Paul indicates just the opposite. When he writes to this church in Thessalonica, he recalls how he converted them to faith in Christ and speaks of how they “turned to God from idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). Only pagans worshiped idols.”

Let’s again look at the actual texts in question. Here’s Acts 17:4: “And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.” And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.”

And here’s 1 Thessalonians 1:9: “For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.”

At first, it seems like Ehrman has a point, but there seems to be a bit over-reading going on here. Paul’s audience would understand that the ‘you’ that turned to God from idols is an exaggerated statement. In an epistle written to a group, Paul is referring to one portion of his audience rather than another. Paul tells the Corinthian church that “you are proud.” But he’s not referring to the entire church at Corinth as if they were all celebrating sin within the congregation! (1 Cor. 5:2)

As NT scholar Craig Keener points out, Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians has allusions to ideas that wouldn’t make sense to Gentiles lacking familiarity with Jewish eschatological thought. (1 Thessalonians 4:14-17) Paul also distinguishes believers from Gentiles, whose ways they shouldn’t copy, as if even the Gentile believers understand they’ve switched to a new lifestyle. (1 Thess 4:4-5) These points imply there where at least some Jewish believers in the church who could explain such elements to others.

Plus, when Acts says that Paul reasoned in the synagogues for three weeks, it doesn’t mean that Paul was only there for three weeks. You’ll see why that’s relevant in a moment. In her book Hidden in Plain View, Lydia McGrew points out that there’s a couple of interesting interlocking details in 1 Thessalonians that relate to these texts. In 1 Thessalonians 2:2, Paul says, “but though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict.”

We read in Acts 16:19-35 that Paul was mistreated in Philippi. He was beaten and put in jail even though Paul was a Roman citizen and wasn’t given a fair trial. Paul even had the officials from the city come and apologize to him and escort him out. According to Acts, where does Paul go next? Thessalonica. So this was all very fresh to Paul when he arrived there, and you can bet the Thessalonians heard all about it.

So while Luke focuses on the Jewish and God-fearing Greek converts, if he was just copying 1 Thessalonians, he would have made it clear that idol-worshipers were included in their number. And he would have made it more clear that Paul was in town long enough for the Thessalonians to know about his hard work ethic. (1 Thessalonians 2:9) It is interesting to note however that Paul reasoned with the Jews on the Sabbath, so he was probably working in the marketplace for the rest of the week, preaching the Gospel to whoever would have listened. (See Acts 17:17, 18:1-4.) I’m sure this would have included some idol worshipers.

Furthermore, Paul uncharacteristically rails against the Jews in his correspondence: “For you, brothers became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!” (1 Thess 2:14-16)

Elsewhere Paul prays fervently for his unbelieving Jewish kinsmen. (Rom 10:1) So what gives here?

The Thessalonians would have known the answer to this, as Acts 17:5-9 describes that the Jews spread a rumor that Paul was preaching against Caesar. They sparked a riot with the help of ‘the rabble’ and ran him out of town. They then followed Paul into Berea and used the same harmful tactics there. But as we’ve seen, the book of Acts is independent of 1 Thessalonians, but these details dovetail nicely with each other. The Thessalonians wouldn’t need an explanation of Paul’s indignation, they had witnessed his trouble up close, and one of their own — Jason — was dragged into it.

This goes against Bart’s earlier complaint that Luke’s account and Paul’s letters don’t mesh well. They seem to go together just fine being while remaining independent of each other. Luke perfectly explains why Paul would have spoken so strongly against the Jews to the Thessalonians, as well as why he spoke of his mistreatment in Phillipi.

Conclusion

With Bart’s top 5 examples of contradictions between Paul’s letters and the book of Acts, we’ve seen that his negative case simply is unsubstantiated and fails to give us a reason to distrust Luke as some sort of unreliable, blundering historian who is unconcerned with accuracy. In fact, historians acknowledge that Luke gets many nitty-gritty historical details right about Paul’s journeys, as I list out here.

There is a good reason a renowned classicist like EM Blaiklock remarked that “for accuracy of detail, and for the evocation of atmosphere, Luke stands, in fact, with Thucydides. The Acts of the Apostles is not a shoddy product of pious imagining, but a trustworthy record.”

Was Jesus a Jerk? A Response to the Friendly Atheist

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

A few weeks ago, CNN Tonight host Don Lemon said: “But here’s the thing, Jesus Christ, if that’s who you believe in Jesus Christ, admittedly was not perfect when he was here on the Earth. So why are we deifying the Founders?”

As you can imagine, this caused quite a stir over social media and on the blogs, since the Bible clearly teaches Christ’s sinless perfection. While a few right-wing Christian leaders went a little overboard in their denouncements of Lemon, “The Friendly Atheist” took it as an opportunity to take some jabs at Jesus.

Hemant Mehta, the author of the blog, writes:

“Let’s talk about what Jesus did.

* Jesus once got so angry he flipped over tables and benches.

* Jesus cursed a fig tree because it didn’t have anything to eat — because figs weren’t in season — and then the tree died. Jesus killed a tree because He was hangry.

* Jesus admitted to speaking in parables that were difficult for people to understand… and then got mad when people didn’t understand them.

* Jesus got snippy when people asked Him why He didn’t wash His hands.

* Jesus’ actions led to the deaths of a whole bunch of pigs, angering an entire town.

So… either we have to acknowledge Jesus could be a jerk at times despite whatever other redeeming qualities we want to assign Him. Or, like the conservative Christians are doing, we can pretend Jesus was perfect because our faith requires it… even when the Bible itself has plenty of evidence to the contrary.”

So according to Mehta, Jesus was a jerk. But is he really being fair to the texts?

Jesus the table flipper?

Was Jesus just throwing an unjustified temper tantrum when he cleansed the Temple? To answer that, we need to give a little background. The temple market was established after the Babylonian captivity. JB Lightfoot says “There was always a constant market in the temple in that place, which was called ‘the shops;’ where, every day, was sold wine, salt, oil, and other requisites to sacrifices; as also oxen and sheep in the spacious Court of the Gentiles”

Josephus estimated there would be up to 3 million Jews traveling to Jerusalem for the Passover. Seeing their devotion, the money-changers saw an opportunity to get rich. They made a business of accommodating those who didn’t have the half-shekel temple tax. (See Mt 17:24)

Everyone was expected to pay it, rich or poor, in the month of Adar. So it became necessary to change a shekel into two halves, or exchange foreign money for the Jewish half-shekel. (Money that bore the image of “Divine Caesar”, in some cases) These men made a nice profit by charging a percentage for the exchange. The animals were in the courts to be sold as a sacrifice since people traveling from afar weren’t usually able to bring them.

Jesus was upset that in the Court of the Gentiles, the place where non-Jews were designated to worship, people were being deprived of the opportunity to pray because of greedy, irreverent people and this happened under the watch Jerusalem’s religious leaders. Jesus quotes Isaiah 56:7 that the temple was to be a place of prayer for all nations.

This would be like trying to have worship in the middle of Walmart on a normal Black Friday. The Gentiles were pushed out of participation with the Passover. Matthew previously writes “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt. 8:11)

This event is called “The Cleansing of the Temple” for good reason. Jesus was purifying the temple from defilement. Nearly 200 years before, Judas Maccabeus cleansed the Temple after it was defiled by Antiochus Epiphanes. By cleaning out the Temple, Jesus is saying that the present Jewish leadership had defiled the Temple in the same way the Greeks did when the sacrificed a pig inside of it. Talk about an act of defiant protest! Shortly afterward, Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple and the coming judgment upon the nation for their lack of response to Jesus’ Gospel. (Mark 13, Matthew 24)

So to sum up, you have noisy people who care nothing for God there to make an easy buck in the place where Gentiles were to worship, exploiting the poor in the process. Jesus taught that we can’t serve both God and money, and to him, this was both oppression, greed, and idolatry blatantly in his Father’s own house. Jesus said that this was to be a place of prayer, not a den of robbers. (Jeremiah 7:11) He was rightfully ticked off.

Not only that, but there’s not a hint that Jesus harmed any human or any animal. He flipped some tables. He fashioned a whip and gave it a good crack or two, but this would sort of like firing a gun in the air in a crowd. It would clear the people and the animals out in a hurry.

Was Jesus angry when he cursed the fig tree?

So what’s going on with the cursing of the fig tree? Jesus and his audience knew the writings of the prophets. They would’ve picked up on what Jesus was laying down. The Old Testament prophets used fig trees and vineyards to typify spiritual fruitfulness (or a lack thereof). Just see Isaiah 28:4, Jeremiah 24:1-10, Hosea 9:16-17, Micah 7:1. Let’s read Micah 7:1 to illustrate.

Woe is me! For I have become as when the summer fruit has been gathered, as when the grapes have been gleaned: there is no cluster to eat, no first-ripe fig that my soul desires.

Jesus cursing the fig tree was allegorical of judgment on fruitless Israel. How do we know that? Just look at the story. First, Jesus curses the fig tree. Then he cleanses the Temple, itself a symbolic judgment of the religious leaders. Then the disciples come back and notice the tree is withered. Shortly after that in Mark 12:1-12 and Matthew 21:33-46, Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard.

This parable tells of Israel’s unfaithfulness, their rejection of God’s prophets and ultimately God’s Son, and their impending judgment. Sandwiched between this is the cursing of the fig tree.

Now you might think this is me stretching things, but I’m not. Here are just a few examples of God’s prophets acting strangely to drive home a serious point:

The prophet Ahijah ripped his clothes in twelve pieces, symbolizing that God was going to tear the kingdom from Solomon and give Jeroboam 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel. (1 Kings 11:29-31)
Isaiah walked around basically naked for three years to warn the Egyptians and Cushites of impending doom against Assyria. (Isaiah 20:1-6)
Ezekiel publicly cooked his food over cow poop (!), warning Jerusalem of impending judgment and famine. (Ezekiel 4:1-15)
And who could forget God commanding Hosea to marry a prostitute as a symbol of Israel’s unfaithfulness? (Hosea 1:2)

Jesus cursing a fig tree is pretty tame in comparison. You might not like that God commanded his prophets to do weird stuff, but extraordinary incoming judgments call for unusual warnings to get people’s attention. God isn’t willing that any should perish and apparently is willing to go to great lengths to shake up the complacent so they would repent and be saved. Last I checked, a nation is more important than a single tree that lacks a nervous system.

So what about the pigs?

Was Jesus a pig-killer? If this incident with the demoniac and the pigs happened today, I can just imagine the headlines: NAZARETH PASTOR CAUSES DEATH OF 2000 PIGS, PETA LAUNCHES PROTEST. Does this put Jesus in the same category as Michael Vick?

For starters, the demons asked if Jesus was going to torment them now, meaning that their time hadn’t yet come to be judged, so he couldn’t make them just go away. (Mark 5:7) While Jesus is omnipotent, he chose not to fully operate that way as a man. For instance in Mark 6:1-6, we read that Jesus could do no mighty work in Nazareth due to their unbelief. So asking why Jesus didn’t just get rid of the demons is like saying, “why didn’t Jesus get rid of all evil people, evil spirits and every disease and affliction while he was here?”

Not only was Jesus not functioning in full-omnipotence, but he also wasn’t operating in omniscience, either. In the same chapter, he asks, “who touched me?” when the woman with the issue of blood is healed. (Mark 5:31) How can we be sure that Jesus knew what was going to happen to the pigs? That seems unclear.

There’s also nothing in these passages that show that Jesus drove the pigs into the sea and caused them to drown. Satan is the killer, not Jesus. (Jn 8:44) And it doesn’t make a lot of sense to say the demons caused the pigs to commit suicide since they just pleaded with Jesus to use them as their new hosts. One answer that Greg Boyd offers is that the demons just drove the pigs crazy, just the same way that parasites can drive animals crazy and cause them to hurt themselves.

I mean, these demons already drove two men into living naked in tombs, screaming and cutting themselves, and they couldn’t be restrained by chains. This is pretty freaky stuff. If Jesus felt like he had a better option, we can see from his character elsewhere in the Gospels that he would’ve taken it.

What stands out is that after seeing the destructive power of Satan and the delivering power of Jesus, the townspeople ask Jesus to leave. They could see the man now clothed and in his right mind, but they seem to care more about the pigs than the people!

In Matthew 10:31, Jesus says that human lives are worth more than many sparrows, and the same can be said for the pigs. While the man delivered begged to follow Jesus, the townspeople urged him to leave. They valued their unclean livestock more than Jesus and the man.

This shouldn’t need to be said but people are more important than pigs. You see this animals-first attitude in our day with groups like PETA, who’ve said tons of outrageously weird things.

This isn’t a case of Jesus acting carelessly. The man went from cutting himself to testifying throughout the region about what Jesus had done for him. This is an epic battle scene in the spiritual war that was being fought for the souls of people in the city. Don’t miss the deliverance for the pigs.

Was Jesus getting snippy over hand-washing?

There’s a lot more going on here than sanitary issues here, but Mehta conveniently leaves that out. Let’s look at the hand-washing passage in question:

“Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, “What you would have gained from me is given to God,” he need not honor his father.’ So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites!” (Matthew 15-1-7)

The concern has little to do with the spread of disease, it’s regarding Jewish laws about uncleanness. If you ate something wrong, you were ritually defiled. These hand-washing traditions of the Pharisees went beyond what the Law actually prescribed — as if accidentally eating something microscopically unclean is sinful.

The Pharisees were constantly criticizing Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. Jesus called them out for their hypocrisy of adding traditions on top of the word of God, which ended up negating the point of the law, which was loving their neighbor ⁠— including their mother and father. He saw people as more important than religious traditions.

I saved this example for last because I find some irony here. Mehta’s blog is chock full of posts dedicated to calling out religious hypocrisy. He should find that Jesus hated phony religious hypocrisy as an admirable trait, not as a character flaw.

Calling Jesus a jerk isn’t a real friendly thing to do, especially when you take a more “friendly” way to look at these texts. I’d argue that it’s probably more of a jerk move to dump a list of gripes against Jesus’ character with no explanation of the context. Contrary to Mehta, we don’t have “plenty of evidence” contrary to the traditional understanding of Jesus’ sinless perfection.

Busting One Of Bart Ehrman’s Favorite Bible Contradictions

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

Skeptics say that the gospels are riddled with contradictions and therefore are not reliable historical sources. And these same skeptics say that some of these contradictions are downright absurd. For example, agnostic NT scholar Bart Ehrman points out one of his favorite Bible contradictions in his book best-selling book, Jesus, Interrupted.

One of my favorite apparent discrepancies—I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is—comes in Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples, at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the Gospel according to John. In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” A few verses later Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going” (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, “Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” (John 16:5). Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect.

Jesus, Interrupted, pp. 9

So there you have it. Either Jesus or John were having a ‘brain fart’. Take your pick.

Did Jesus Or John Have A Painfully Short Attention Span?

If you look at the Bible in a wooden fashion, this contradiction does seem to be absurd on the face of it. So how should we understand this so-called discrepancy?

It seems to me that the writer of John is dealing with the disciples’ immediate reaction to Jesus’ words. The thought of him leaving fills them with sorrow, but if they had asked where he was going and grasped that it was to the Father, they would have recognized it was for Jesus’ advantage and theirs. Just look at the next verse: “But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you.” (Jn 16:6-7)

Looking back at the previous times Jesus was questioned that Ehrman points out, Peter had a bit of a bodyguard complex and didn’t want to hear about Jesus taking off by himself. So when he asks the question in John 13:36 about where Jesus is going, he doesn’t get it.

And in John 14:1-5, Jesus talks about going to his Father to prepare places for them. Thomas asks a question, but it’s because he’s not picking up what Jesus is laying down. He doesn’t ask what Jesus means by any of these things. And we know Thomas is a bit slow on the uptake, as we find out later in John’s Gospel. Thomas and Peter were both thinking naturally.

The Disciples’ Silence Became Deafening

We see that Jesus is disrupted with another question in John 14 but isn’t asked another question in John 15. Jesus so far has mentioned his departure, but then in John 15:22-16:4, he talks about persecution headed their way. You know, some heavy stuff. Now their hearts are sorrowful. They fall silent with sadness after being so inquisitive earlier.

It’s at 16:5 that Jesus is saying, “guys…you still don’t get it. You went quiet on me with all these hard sayings of persecution and me leaving. But I’m not leaving you alone. I’m sending the Spirit in my place. Now is the time to be asking questions again, but this time let’s be a little sharper and ditch the gloomy pessimism.”

After this, they interrupt Jesus again twice more in John 16, showing they still don’t understand what he’s talking about. Read John 16:17-19:

So some of his disciples said to one another, “What is this that he says to us, ‘A little while, and you will not see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’; and, ‘because I am going to the Father’?” So they were saying, “What does he mean by ‘a little while’? We do not know what he is talking about.” Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Is this what you are asking yourselves, what I meant by saying, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me’?

The Disciples Finally Get It, But Does Ehrman?

Jesus then answers their questions, and finishes by saying “I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.”

The light bulb finally seems to turn on. They quit looking at earthly things and start to see the spiritual realities Jesus is talking about. In John 16:28-30 the disciples exclaim, his disciples said, “Ah, now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech! Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you; this is why we believe that you came from God.” Jesus answered them, “Do you now believe?“

The metaphors are over in their minds. Jesus is now speaking clearly. They fell silent after some heavy sayings from Jesus, but now it’s dawning on them after Jesus prompts them to probe further. This interpretation doesn’t just come from me but is also supported by commentators and exegetes like CK Barrett, RCH Lenski, Craig Blomberg, John Gill, Christian Kuinoel, and Hermann Olshausen.

Only when we leave no room for conversational nuance would we have to conclude Jesus had a mental lapse or that something strange is going on with the writer of John. It seems like Bart’s reading is pretty wooden, and dare I say, fundamentalist. Many of his examples of alleged discrepancies in Jesus, Interrupted that are much more worth investigating and wrestling with. But this isn’t a golden moment for Ehrman here. And unfortunately, there are more bad ones like this. There’s nothing all that strange here.

We Know Moral Truths Better Than We Know Many Scientific Claims

Philosophy of Science, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

I recently came across this article “10 Things You Should Know About Scientism” by Christian philosopher JP Moreland, and he dropped a truth-bomb that is too good to not share. But let me give you a trigger-warning. This is sure to rankle a lot of atheists who seem to unquestionably accept the philosophy of scientism.

Contrary to scientism, there are things we know with greater certainty in theology or ethics than certain claims in science. Consider these two claims:

1. Electrons exist.

2. It is wrong to torture babies for the fun of it.

Which do we know with greater certainty? The second claim is the correct answer. Why? The history of the electron has gone through various changes in what an electron is supposed to be. No one today believes that Thompsonian electrons (J. J. Thompson was the discoverer of electrons) exist because our views have changed so much. It is not unreasonable to believe that in fifty to one hundred years, scientific depictions of the electron will change so much that scientists will no longer believe in electrons as we depict them today.

Regarding the second claim, someone may not know how they know it is true, but nevertheless, we all, in fact, know it is true. If someone denies that, he needs therapy, not an argument. Now it is not hard to believe that in fifty to one hundred years, most people will no longer believe the second claim. But it is hard to see what kind of rational considerations could be discovered that would render the second claim an irrational belief. Thus, we have more certainty in the second claim than in the first. And the same is true for certain theological assertions—like that God exists.

When I shared this quote on social media immediately, I was met with a lot of guffawing from certain atheists. I have to wonder if it’s’s because it strikes a nerve against one of their most dearly held doctrines — that science can answer everything.

The Virtues Of Science?

If you think about it for a minute, what Moreland is saying is hardly controversial. One of the things that skeptics will often say is that one of the differences between science and faith is that science is humble. This is because science is provisional – it’s constantly willing to be wrong and revise its theories in the face of new evidence. Popular astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson speaks of the virtues in the scientific method:

“This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: Test ideas by experiment and observation, build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail, follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything.”

Faith, or so the argument goes, is the opposite. It’s often dogmatic in its assertions and not willing to change its stance in the teeth of evidence. It’s more of a “because I said so” vs. a “let me show you” type of thing. All of its arguments are appeals to authority, according to some skeptics.

So it should not be arguable that science, with all of its promises to give us knowledge, is something that should be held with a certain degree of tentativeness and a willingness to change its mind. The existence of gravity or the truth of quantum mechanics are empirical facts, but our understanding of the theories behind them is subject to change.

Right now, science doesn’t have a strong and confident answer for why there is consciousness or how life originated. And the answers in science regarding how human beings and animals evolved is constantly being revised in light of new discoveries. There are things that are unknown or are held with a lesser degree of certainty.

Moral Values: Not Scientifically Discovered And Not Created By Man

The statement “there is a vast moral difference between protecting the lives of defenseless, orphans, and using them for target practice” is not something that is going to ever be subject to revision. And here’s the kicker — science can’t begin to tell us why we should value one over the other, at best it can tell us about the brain states of the tortured versus the nurtured. It can’t tell us why we ought to care for the orphan and why we ought not torture them.

Ironically, science also can’t tell us why the humility of the scientific method is more virtuous than the dogmatism and exclusivism of religion! These are moral conclusions, not conclusions of science.

“If It Can’t Be Verified By My Physical Senses, I Can’t Know It.”

Some might argue that science gives us empirical knowledge — that which we can actually verify with our five physical senses. For example, we can verify with our eyes that spiders start having eight legs unless they lose a leg. That’s a scientific fact. But moral statements can’t be verified that way, so they’re not actually factual. We need to keep our moral jelly away from their scientific peanut butter.

But this is just the old, debunked philosophy of verificationism rearing it’s ugly head again. Verificationism had it’s heyday nearly a hundred years ago in philosophy departments, but it died out shortly after critics pointed out a fatal flaw: We can’t actually verify verificationism with our five physical senses. There’s no scientific experiment that you can run that shows that factual statements can’t be moral. Therefore, verificationism is self-defeating. And to say that there’s a difference between empirical facts and moral opinions just begs the question for verificationism. Somehow this flawed epistemology lives on among many modern skeptics.

But What About Moral Diversity?

Some might argue that morality is different in other cultures, and so, therefore, it’s’s relative and makes no truth claims. Science can at least tell us the facts eventually, while morality is just emotive. So, for example, in India, cows roam free because they’re considered to be sacred. But here in America, there’s a hamburger spot within driving distance for almost everyone.

But both cultures agree that it is wrong to eat other human beings. In America, when Grandma dies, we don’t eat her; we bury her. Hindus don’t eat beef because they think the cow could be Grandma reincarnated! So the moral difference doesn’t arise because of conflicting values but facts related to common values.

Every culture that has devalued innocent, human life has done so by dehumanizing the other side. Just look at our modern abortion debate — one side stridently says that the unborn are not human, so it’s’s permissible to kill them. The other side holds that life begins at conception and will argue from science, theology, and philosophy for their position. But neither side will explicitly say it’s’s morally permissible to murder babies because they’re inconvenient to us, because both camps consider them to be human.

On the subject of moral disagreement, C.S. Lewis wrote: “Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.”

Just because some objects in the moral landscape are harder to see than others, it doesn’t mean that we don’t see many moral facts very clearly. We clearly see that justice is to be preferred to injustice, kindness is to be preferred to cruelty, courage is better than cowardice, and that intellectual dishonesty is never going to be a virtue.

Ethical Truths Are More Certain Than Many Scientific Claims

If morality is just a matter of preference or expressions of our emotions, it becomes unclear why we should work to solve any moral “problems.” We could simply say, “Hey, this sense of distaste you have for genocide, kidnapping, sexually abusing children, rape, murder is just that — distaste. Let’s just agree that no moral problems exist and move on!” Obviously, that’s crazy.

The point is that there are universal moral values; they’re often glaringly self-evident and need no argument to support them any more than we need to argue for the laws of mathematics or logic. And science will never be able to tell us what they are.

Peter Singer, an atheist philosopher, says, “No science is ever going to discover ethical premises inherent in our biological nature, because ethical premises are not the kind of thing discovered by human investigation. We do not find our ethical premises in our biological nature, or under cabbages either.”

We come to science with this background belief as a properly basic foundation. And importantly, science depends on people acting ethically – like conducting their investigations safely and honestly. We take this for granted, just as much as take for granted the existence of the external world that we study in science. And ethics and science often intersect, like in questions about gene editing, population control, animal rights, and so forth.

To doubt the existence of the moral world is no more justifiable than to doubt the existence of the physical world. Many atheist philosophers agree with this — for example, Michael Martin, Russ Schafer-Landau, Erik Weilenberg, Louise Antony, GE Moore, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and many more, even if I and many philosophers think they run into a “grounding” problem. And because of that, Moreland is absolutely correct. The notion that the assertions of the hard sciences are greatly superior to claims outside science is false.

“A wise man scales the city of the mighty and brings down the stronghold in which they trust.” (Proverbs 21:22)

Does Paul’s Silence About Jesus Prove That He Didn’t Exist?

Jesus Christ, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

Over 99% of historical scholarship acknowledges that Jesus was a real person. It doesn’t matter if that scholar is liberal or conservative, or Christian, atheist, agnostic or Jewish. The <1% of historians that believe Jesus is a myth are mostly atheists or agnostics. And it’s only the ‘internet infidel’ crowd that takes their arguments seriously.

One of the arguments that Jesus mythicists will often push is that Paul was mostly silent about the historical Jesus. Here’s GA Wells, one of the minority voices, who writes:

“Paul’s letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth…. They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter’s denial of his master…. These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, a particularly striking omission, since, according to the gospels he worked so many.” (The Historical Evidence for Jesus, 22)

And why didn’t Paul quote Jesus’ praise of celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7? Or why not quote the Sermon on the Mount when Paul was teaching the Romans to bless their persecutors to give his message more authority? (Romans 12:14) Or why did Paul say, “we don’t know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26-27) when Jesus taught his followers how to pray in Matthew 6:8-13?

One of those famous internet atheists, Dan Barker, sides with the Wells, writing: “The earliest Christian writings, the letters of Paul, are silent about the man Jesus: Paul, who never met Jesus, fails to mention a single deed or saying of Jesus…and sometimes contradicts what Jesus supposedly said. To Paul, Jesus was a heavenly disembodied Christ figure, not a man of flesh and blood.”

At first glance, the mythicists seem like they have a point. But there are a few problems here.

Arguing From Silence Is Usually A Poor Way To Prove Your Point

For starters, arguing from silence is usually a terrible way to argue. For example, Union General Ulysses S Grant says nothing about the Emancipation Proclamation. The famous explorer Marco Polo traveled to China but never mentions the Great Wall. The archives of Portugal do not allude to the travels of Amerigo Vespucci.

An estimated 16,000-60,000 people died in 79 AD due to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. But we only hear about this event in a personal letter of Pliny’s. The relative silence of historians we’d expect to mention these events doesn’t cause scholars to doubt their occurrence.

Regarding arguments from silence, philosopher Tim McGrew writes: “Such arguments from silence are pervasive in New Testament scholarship, but they are tenuous at best….it is a risky business to speculate upon the motives of authors for including or omitting various facts. To create an appearance of inconsistency by this device…is methodologically unsound.” (Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology)

Paul’s Letters Were Occasional

There’s also the fact that most of Paul’s letters were occasional. Paul often wrote to combat error, or to provide specific guidance to churches. So, for example, Paul writes his entire letter to the Galatians to fight the doctrine of the Judaizers. Or there are the specific answers Paul gives about marriage, meat sacrificed to idols, spiritual gifts, and public worship in 1 Corinthians.

And think about it for a minute. If there weren’t some false teachers in Corinth saying there’s no resurrection, the great resurrection teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 would be missing from our Bibles! Jesus’ miracles, parables, virgin birth, arguments with the Pharisees, and so forth weren’t relevant to Paul’s purposes in writing those particular letters.

The Silence Of Paul…About Paul

In his book Did Jesus Exist?, agnostic Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman points out that Paul wasn’t just silent about some historical facts about Jesus, he also didn’t tell us a lot about himself. Like for instance: Who taught Paul? Where did he grow up? What did he do for a living? What did he do during his three years in Arabia or Damascus before meeting with Peter and James in Jerusalem? Or in the following fourteen years? Where did he go? Paul doesn’t tell us in his letters. We only learn about a few of these things from reading Acts.

Wells mentions that we don’t learn about Jesus’ miracles from Paul. But Paul said he had miracles in his ministry, and that was proof he was an apostle. (Romans 15:19, 2 Corinthians 12:12) Does Wells expect us to believe that Paul believed he and the other apostles had miracles, but Jesus didn’t?

The Silence Of Other Early Christians

But we can take it a step further. We have three letters from John, or at least attributed to him. Scholars believe he was writing to combat the proto-gnostics who were saying that sin wasn’t really a thing, and Jesus wasn’t a physical being. (1 John 1:1-3, 8) But the writer of these epistles, who wrote just like the writer of John’s Gospel, (I think they are both written by John, but scholars debate that) doesn’t mention Jesus turning water into wine, healing a man born blind, feeding the 5,000, walking on water or raising Lazarus from the dead. He doesn’t even quote the words of Jesus from that gospel. Why was the writer of 1-3 John silent about these things? Because they didn’t suit his purposes, not because he didn’t think that they happened.

Furthermore, most scholars believe that the author of Luke’s Gospel is the same author of Acts. Acts is Luke’s sequel. But in Acts, Lukes makes little use of the Jesus tradition he’s obviously familiar with. Clearly the lack of references to Jesus’ teachings in Acts doesn’t show that Luke was ignorant about what Jesus taught!

And what about the writings of some of the early church fathers? 1 Clement, Barnabas, and Polycarp’s letters to the Philippians. These letters fail to mention:

Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.
His parables.
That he healed the sick and cast out demons.
That he was transfigured on the mountain.
That he got into arguments with the Pharisees.
That he cleansed the temple.
That Judas betrayed him.
That Pilate had him crucified.

Do we conclude that these writers didn’t think Jesus existed? No, we don’t. In the case of Polycarp, he quotes Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but these other traditions were not relevant to why he was writing, so he fails to mention them.

Paul’s “Silence” Doesn’t Prove What The Mythicists Claim

Finally, Paul wasn’t silent about the historical Jesus. As I’ve written elsewhere, Paul knows a lot about Jesus. He knows that Jesus was a descendant of David, that he had a mother, a brother named James and other siblings, a disciple named Peter, 12 disciples, that he shared the last supper with his followers, was betrayed, abused, crucified, and he alludes to several of Jesus’ teachings. (Rom 1:3-4, Gal 1:18-19, 1 Cor 9:5, 1 Cor 15:5, 1 Cor 11:22-24, Rom 15:3, 1 Cor 1:23, 1 Cor 7:10-12, 1 Cor 9:14, 11:22-24, 1 Thess 4:15)

But Paul’s main focus was Christ and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2) It is what the cross and resurrection accomplish for the believer is what Paul is obsessed with. He’s interested in unpacking that teaching to the young churches. But his alleged silence isn’t a good argument to think that Jesus didn’t really exist. Bart Ehrman, no friend of traditional Christianity concludes that the so-called silence of Paul is a really bad way to argue, writing:

“What do these silences show? They do not show that these authors did not know about the historical Jesus because they clearly did. If anything, the silences simply show that these traditions about Jesus were not relevant to their purposes…What we can know is that Paul certainly thought that Jesus existed. He had a clear knowledge of important aspects of Jesus’s life—a completely human life, in which he was born as a Jew to a Jewish woman and became a minister to the Jews before they rejected him, leading to his death. He knew some of Jesus’s teachings. And he knew how Jesus died by crucifixion. For whatever reason, that was the most important aspect of Jesus’s life: his death. And Paul could scarcely have thought that Jesus died if he hadn’t lived”. (Did Jesus Exist? p. 145)

While I’ve disagreed with Dr. Ehrman many, many times, I have to offer a hearty amen here.

No, Dan Barker. Covid-19 Doesn’t Disprove God

Atheism, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

Not one to let a good crisis go to waste, former minister and atheist activist Dan Barker tells us that the coronavirus proves that the Christian God doesn’t exist. Why? Because God promises to answer prayer. People have prayed for COVID-19 to stop. The virus continues to spread and people continue to die. Therefore Christianity must be false. Here’s Barker in his own words:

The Christian god makes a crystal-clear pledge: “I will answer your prayers.”

Jesus stated boldly: “All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”(Matthew 21:22) There is no ambiguity here. “All things” means “all things.” He even clarified: “Even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done.”

Jesus, who said “I and the Father are one,” confirmed this in many other passages: “So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” — Mark 11:24

Barker multiplies many other prayer promises from the Four Gospels. Then he goes on:

The claim is indisputable. The omnipotent and omnibenevolent Christian god promises to answer “everyone who asks,” “all things,” “whatever you ask for in prayer.” If a believing Christian prays, then “it will be done for you,” “you shall receive,” “it will be yours,” “I will do it.”

There is no more solid promise in scripture.

The Christian god vows to answer prayer not with “Yes, No, or Wait,” as some apologists claim. He promises an unequivocal “Yes.”

Can Prayer Alone Fix Everything?

Barker is right about one thing. No passage in Scripture says ‘yes’ ‘no’ or ‘wait.’ But notice that Barker only emphasizes the ‘whatever you ask’ part in these verses. But he conveniently says nothing about the ‘believe that you receive it’ portions.

According to Barker’s strange reading of these texts, if we ask God for anything, it should immediately be performed. But that’s not how any of this works. Jesus didn’t indiscriminately heal anyone and everyone in the Gospels. We read in Mark 6:1-6 that Jesus could barely heal anyone in his hometown, Nazareth. Why? Mark says it was because of their unbelief. While in Nazareth, he went on to say in Luke 4:23-27 that there were plenty of lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha, but it was only Naaman the Syrian who was healed.

Repeatedly throughout the Gospels, Jesus healed individuals in response to their faith. See Mark 5:34, Luke 17:19, Luke 18:42, Matthew 8:13, Matthew 15:28 for just a few samples. Faith then must play a major factor. No one in the Gospels approached Jesus and said, “Hey Jesus. While you’re healing people, why not heal Israel of all their sicknesses?”

This would’ve convinced the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the High Priest, Pilate, Herod, and so forth. But that’s not the way God chose to operate. It is unlikely to have turned them into true worshipers but opportunists. And he’s not going to override his own word or his own divine nature. He expects people to respond in persistent, heartfelt faith.

It’s interesting that repeatedly in the Gospels, Jesus would command people to not tell of the miracles they experienced. (Mark 7:31-37, 9:2-9, Luke 5:12-15, 8:49-56). He also didn’t perform signs when the Pharisees and scribes demanded one. (Matthew 12:38-41) God gives enough evidence for those who want to believe can, but leaves enough ambiguity for those who want to go their own way can do so.

Barker continues:

Multitudes of Christians have been fervently praying. The Jesuits have asked Jesus to “Heal those who are sick with the virus.” The Christian relief organization World Vision is asking Almighty God to “keep this new coronavirus from continuing to spread.” The Southern Baptists are entreating “Lord, you are the Great Physician, so we pray for healing for the victims of COVID-19.” President Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White said: “I believe in the same way if we call on God Almighty to divinely intervene just as He does so many times, that the plague can be stopped.”

So why are thousands continuing to succumb indiscriminately to the coronavirus? The tragic deaths include devout believers, as well as ministers, priests, and bishops. They are beseeching their Lord for protection, but the impudent virus, no respecter of persons, is recklessly cavorting around the planet oblivious to their beliefs.

Prayer Isn’t A Cure-All And Jesus Never Said That It Was

All this shows is that, at best, the Jesuits, World Vision, the Southern Baptists, etc. are praying unscripturally. Receiving answers to prayer, more often than not, is a matter between the individual and God. There’s nothing wrong with asking God to intervene for others, but I don’t think these leaders are expecting this pandemic to miraculously stop in its tracks, independently from God using people.

I can’t pray for God to keep my entire city free from COVID-19 anymore than I can pray for God to stop every traffic accident, cure every cancer, every heart disease, every stroke, every influenza, and every case of diabetes. You get the idea.

If God allowed that, we would live in a consequence-free world where God was orchestrating tens of thousands of miracles each day. My prayers cannot necessarily sober up every drunk driver, cause every person to make healthy choices, or keep college students from congregating on Florida beaches during spring break, or prevent some Chinese people from eating bats (or acting irresponsibly in a lab) or prevent the World Health Organization from initially advising against closing Chinese borders.

Because we live in a world where natural laws work in predictable ways, diseases can spread, and accidents can happen. Solomon was right when he wrote, “When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the LORD.” (Proverbs 19:3)

Is The Coronavirus A Judgment From God?

So is this virus a judgment from God? Barker points out that some Christian ministers have said that it is.

Rev. Ralph Drollinger, the evangelical pastor who conducts bible study at the White House for President Trump’s cabinet, blames the coronavirus on sin: “Whenever an individual or corporate group of individuals violate the inviolate precepts of God’s Word, he, she, they or the institution will suffer the respective consequences,” he wrote. “Most assuredly America is facing this form of God’s judgment.”

Some Christians preach that prayer is contingent. Natural disasters are actually punishments from God, they proclaim. He doesn’t answer prayer at the moment because America has turned its back on him.

Now, I haven’t looked into Drollinger said in context. But we all have seen ministers get on TV and blame people for disasters. And these Christian leaders are an embarrassment to me and many other believers. Barker would be rightly appalled. Notice that Jesus dealt with a similar situation in the Gospels:

Now there was some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.

(Luke 13:1-5)

Jesus And The Problem Of Suffering

I’m sure this isn’t going to be popular, but Jesus didn’t say that tragedies befall people because they were worse sinners than anyone. But He said they were sinners nonetheless and unless we repent, we’ll likewise perish. The wages of sin is death, but God’s gift is eternal life for those who trust in Jesus. (Romans 6:23)

DA Carson’s commentary on Luke 13:1-5 is so insightful that I’ll quote it here at length:

First, Jesus does not assume that those who suffered under Pilate, or those who were killed in the collapse of the tower, did not deserve their fate. Indeed, the fact that he can tell those contemporaries that unless they repent they too will perish shows that Jesus assumes that all death is in one way or another the result of sin, and therefore deserved.

Second, Jesus does insist that death by such means is no evidence whatsoever that those who suffer in this way are any more wicked than those who escape such a fate. The assumption seems to be that all deserve to die. If some die under a barbarous governor, and others in a tragic accident, it is not more than they deserve. But that does not mean that others deserve any less. Rather, the implication is that it is only God’s mercy that has kept them alive. There is certainly no moral superiority on their part.

Third, Jesus treats wars and natural disasters not as agenda items in a discussion of the mysterious ways of God, but as incentives to repentance. It is as if he is saying that God uses disaster as a megaphone to call attention to our guilt and destination, to the imminence of his righteous judgment if he sees no repentance. This is an argument developed at great length in Amos 4. Disaster is a call to repentance. Jesus might have added (as he does elsewhere) that peace and tranquility, which we do not deserve, show us God’s goodness and forbearance.

It is a mark of our lostness that we invert these two. We think we deserve the times of blessing and prosperity, and that the times of war and disaster are not only unfair but come perilously close to calling into question God’s goodness or his power—even, perhaps, his very existence. Jesus simply did not see it that way.

Bingo. Barker goes on to say that God is the ‘most unpleasant character in all fiction’ but it seems like Barker is upset that God judges sin. It’s as if Barker thinks God should wink at people living like Canaanites and never punish anyone. But according to Barker, God should prove himself by instantaneously healing every person on the planet on demand, or else we should conclude He isn’t real!

CS Lewis right when he wrote, “What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.”

Jesus Is Still In The Healing Business

No, suffering and death are in the world because of sin. Jesus said disasters are a reminder of this, and unless we repent, we’ll also perish. And yet, Jesus still goes about “doing good and healing all those that are oppressed by the devil” in response to faith. (Acts 10:38) Barker says God isn’t healing anyone during this pandemic. But just ask this Georgia man, who claims God healed him of COVID-19. Or this woman that was given up for dead. Even the doctors remarked that something miraculous happened.

I personally know a person in my congregation whose 80-year father was in a nursing home that contracted the disease. Their dad was made completely well within a short time after prayer was made. Or what would Barker say to all the healings documented by Craig Keener’s scholarly two-volume work Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts?

So no, Barker is wrong. The coronavirus isn’t “virulent enough to single-handedly kill the Christian God.” As a former pastor, he should know that he is twisting scripture and using the tragedy to stand on his favorite soapbox.

Don’t the Resurrection Narratives Contradict?

3. Are Miracles Possible?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

The apostle Paul said that if Christ hasn’t risen, Christianity is a sham. (1 Corinthians 15:17) Many atheists agree and will happily point to the gospel accounts. Just how seriously should they take the claim of the resurrection? After all, aren’t the accounts riddled with contradictions? How can they possibly be trusted?

Historians don’t normally conclude that just because individual accounts have apparent contradictions that the event in question didn’t occur. But let’s allow that to pass for now. I think the majority of the discrepancies that critics bring up can be easily resolved. Here’s a list of four of the most popular contradictions in the resurrection account that skeptics like to point to.

#1. HOW MANY WOMEN WERE AT THE TOMB OF JESUS?

How many women came to the tomb Easter morning? Was it one, as told in John? Two (Matthew)? Three (Mark)? Or more (Luke)?…

Atheist blogger Bob Seidensticker

LET’S LOOK AT THE TEXTS

“On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark. She saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.” (John 20:1)

“After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to view the tomb.” (Matthew 28:1)

“When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they could go and anoint him.” (Mark 16:1)

“On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the tomb, bringing the spices they had prepared…Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them were telling the apostles these things.” (Luke 24:1,10)

Whoa there! On the face of it, you can see why skeptics would point to these passages to discredit the gospels. It seems like they can’t get their details straight. But are these accounts really so contradictory? Not really.

“NEVER READ ONE BIBLE VERSE”

It’s a bit amusing that Bob thinks that because John said that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, he’s implying that others were not present. All we need to do is to keep reading to see that isn’t the case at all. In the very next verse, John says: “So she went running to Simon Peter and to the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said to them, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him!” (John 20:2)

Wait a second. Where did this we come from? In passing, Mary Magdelene’s own words clearly show that there were other women. John reporting this implies that he’s well aware that there were other women at the tomb. No bludgeoning required. As Greg Koukl has famously said, “never read a Bible verse.” You have to keep reading and get the context before making assumptions about the text. Otherwise, it would seem that you’re either looking for a negative verdict or you’re just trying to fleece someone.

THE SKEPTIC’S BAD ASSUMPTIONS

As for the other accounts, why assume that each gospel account is supposed to give us a complete, detailed list of the women? Luke explicitly says that there were others that he didn’t name. In no gospel did it say these were the women who came to the tomb and there was no one else.

There’s no contradiction here unless you bring that assumption to the text. Selecting to name some women is not an automatic denial that there were no others. If I say I went to the store with my wife last night, I’m not automatically excluding the fact that I brought my four kids with me. I just left out a detail. So what?

#2 WAS THE TOMB OPENED OR CLOSED WHEN THE WOMEN ARRIVED?

“Was the stone already rolled away when they arrived at the tomb (Mark, Luke, and John), or explicitly not (Matthew)?”

Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God

LET’S LOOK AT THE TEXTS OURSELVES

And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. (Mark 16:3-4)

And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb…(Luke 24:2)

Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. (John 20:1)

So far all Mark, Luke, and John say that the tomb was open when the women found it. Now here’s Matthew’s version:

At the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulcher. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. (Matthew 28:1-4)

So far it looks like Bart and the critics have a good point.

GETTING A GRIP ON THE GREEK

So what’s going on here? Is Matthew signifying that the women saw the angel coming down and rolling the stone away? If Matthew comes after Mark, then it feels like he’s adding an extra layer of supernatural ad hoc. While it makes the account sound more impressive, we now get this contradiction.

But let’s reconsider what Matthew says. We’re introduced to the passage about the angel by the Greek participle γὰρ (gar). Strong’s Greek Concordance defines it as: “For. A primary participle; properly assigning a reason.” In other words, it exists to explain the earthquake and set of circumstances as the women found them.

As philosopher Tim McGrew points out, “Matthew uses an aorist participle, which could be (and in some versions is) translated with the English past perfect: “… for an angel of the Lord had descended …”

One such translation is Weymouth, who phrases Matthew 28:2 as follows: “But to their amazement, there had been a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord had descended from Heaven, and had come and rolled back the stone, and was sitting upon it.”

And here’s Young’s Literal Translation, which is about as a word-for-word Greek translation you can get: “and lo, there came a great earthquake, for a messenger of the Lord, having come down out of heaven, having come, did roll away the stone from the door, and was sitting upon it”

So Matthew isn’t claiming that the women saw the angel descend or that they saw the guards get knocked out. It’s not in the text. It seems like the critics are looking for fault here.

OK, BUT WHERE IS MATTHEW GETTING HIS INFO FROM?

But now a question arises. If the women didn’t tell them this story about the stone’s rolling away and the guards falling out, who did? That’s a fair question.

While can’t say for sure, we can venture a safe guess here. In Matthew 28:11-15 we find out that the author had some info about the guards. What happened to them could have come from the same source — perhaps one of the guards themselves.

Matthew 28:2-4 gives us an explanation for the women at the tomb found when they got there. And that is the stone rolled away and no guards. This just isn’t meant to be a description of what the women saw. The stone moved before they got there, and that seems to be what Matthew is communicating when properly read.

#3. DID THE WOMEN AT THE TOMB OF JESUS SEE A MAN AT THE TOMB, TWO MEN, OR TWO ANGELS?

“Did they see a man, did they see two men, or did they see an angel? It depends on which gospel you read.“

Bart Ehrman (The Craig-Ehrman debate)

AGAIN, LET’S LOOK AT THE TEXTS IN QUESTION:

Mark 16:5-6: “And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, …”

Matthew 28:5: “But the angel said to the women…”

Luke 24:4: “While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel…”

John 20:11-13: “But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet.”

So is this a major difference like Bart and other skeptics claim? Nah. Not if you’ve read the rest of the Bible. Angels often appear to humans as men. Let’s look at just a few texts to prove this out:

6 TIMES IN THE BIBLE WHERE ANGELS APPEAR AS MEN

When Abraham was sitting by the oaks of Mamre, “he lifted up his eyes and looked, behold, three men were standing opposite him” (Genesis 18:1-2). These visitors in the very next chapter are called angels. (Genesis 19:1)
Jacob wrestled with the man until daybreak in Genesis 32:22-32. We read in Hosea 12:4 that he wrestled with the Angel of the Lord.
Joshua encountered the “captain of the host of the LORD” who was called “a man” (Joshua 5:13-15).
Here again, we see the same thing in Judges: “And God listened to the voice of Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman as she sat in the field. But Manoah her husband was not with her. So the woman ran quickly and told her husband, “Behold, the man who came to me the other day has appeared to me.” (Judges 13:9-10)
Daniel had visionary experiences where he describes his angelic visitor as “one in the likeness of the children of man”. (Daniel 10:16-18)
And finally, Hebrews 13:2 tells us that “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

Because of medieval, we picture angels as babies or women with wings on their back floating on white clouds. But if it’s possible to entertain angels unawares as the writer of Hebrews says, then they can look just like a human being.

HOW MANY ANGELS WERE THERE?

This shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. Wherever there are two angels, there is always at least one. That’s just an unfailing principle of math. It’s Matthew and Mark who focus on the one who spoke. They don’t mention the other. But omission itself doesn’t equal denial. There is no account saying that there was one and no other.

I mean, we’ve all experienced this before, haven’t we? I’m thinking of my own life for certain job interviews I had. There were two managers in the room interviewing me for a promotion, but my focus was only on the one who was asking me questions. When talking about the interview later with others, me describing the questions and body language of manager Steve wouldn’t mean that manager Suzy wasn’t also in the room with her head down, taking notes.

#4. THE WOMEN SPREAD THE WORD OF THE EMPTY TOMB (OR DID THEY?)

In the other gospels, women discovered the empty tomb of Jesus and returned to tell the others:

“The women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” (Matthew 28:8).

“When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others” (Luke 24:9).

Mark tells us the women kept it hush-hush:

“Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8)

That’s how the original version of the gospel of Mark ended.

BUT DOESN’T MARK 16 HAVE TWENTY VERSES?

Now some of you might be thinking to yourself: “Whoa. Hold up! Doesn’t Mark 16 have more than 8 verses? What about “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature,” and that strange stuff about drinking poison and handling snakes that we find in the ending of Mark?

Seemingly strange statements aside, I’m not at all here to argue against the inspiration of Mark 16:9-20. But most scholars believe that the original ending of Mark ends at verse 8. Unless you’re reading from the King James Version, most translations alert us to the fact that verses 9-20 are not in the earliest manuscripts. Here’s a sampling:

ESV : [Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9–20.]

NIV : [The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9–20.]

CSB : [Some of the earliest mss conclude with 16:8.]

NLT : [The most ancient manuscripts of Mark conclude with verse 16:8. Later manuscripts add one or both of the following endings.]

These are all fairly conservative versions of the Bible. There’s no liberal conspiracy happening here. You can still believe verses 9-20 are historically reliable and even inspired. But nearly all textual specialists agree that the long ending of Mark wasn’t part of the original text. This gives us an apparent contradiction about what the women said after discovering the empty tomb.

LETTING THE SKEPTICS SPEAK

“One point, in particular, seems to be irreconcilable. In Mark’s account, the women are instructed to tell the disciples to go meet Jesus in Galilee, but out of fear, they don’t say a word to anyone about it.”

Jesus Interrupted. Page 49

Bart wants to create a contradiction by reading Mark as saying they never said a word to anyone. But is this the right reading of the passages?

IS MARK’S GOSPEL INCOMPLETE?

While the general scholarly consensus is that the long ending of Mark wasn’t originally there, what we’re not being told by the skeptics is that there’s debate regarding whether or not Mark meant to end it there or if the original text was cut off or left incomplete.

The late Bruce Metzger was a biblical scholar and longtime Princeton professor. He thought the original ending was cut off. Why did he believe that? Mark has a pattern of making blanket statements before adding an exception. Just take a look:

“He did not let anyone accompany him except Peter, James, and John, James’s brother.” (Mark 5:37)
“Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus.” (Mark 9:8)
“As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” (Mark 9:9)
“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked him. “No one is good except God alone.” (Mark 10:18)
“Now concerning that day or hour no one knows—neither the angels in heaven nor the Son —but only the Father.” (Mark 13:32)

This is a clear pattern in Mark. So how would we expect Mark to continue if Metzger is right and the text is broken off? It would probably look a lot like what we read in Matthew 28:8. Let’s combine the two passages: They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid, but departing quickly from the tomb…, they ran to tell his disciples the news.”

Ehrman did his doctoral dissertation under Metzger, so he has no justification in keeping his audience in the dark.

BUT WHAT IF MARK REALLY INTENDED ON STOPPING AT VERSE 8?

If you read Mark carefully in one sitting, you’ll find a common thread. After Jesus reveals himself in some way, he asks the witnesses to keep it on the down-low.

“Then a man with leprosy came to him and, on his knees, begged him: “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched him. “I am willing,” he told him. “Be made clean.” Immediately leprosy left him, and he was made clean. Then he sternly warned him and sent him away at once, telling him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go and show yourself to the priest, and offer what Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” Yet he went out and began to proclaim it widely and to spread the news, with the result that Jesus could no longer enter a town openly.” (Mark 1:40-45)
“They brought to him a deaf man who had difficulty speaking and begged Jesus to lay his hand on him. So he took him away from the crowd in private. After putting his fingers in the man’s ears and spitting, he touched his tongue. Looking up to heaven, he sighed deeply and said to him, “Ephphatha!” (that is, “Be opened!”). Immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was loosened, and he began to speak clearly. He ordered them to tell no one, but the more he ordered them, the more they proclaimed it.” (Mark 7:32-36)
“But you,” he asked them, “who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he strictly warned them to tell no one about him.” (Mark 8:29-30)

Reading this, we see that there’s a pattern silence, or requested silence, followed by proclamation. The silence never sticks. The whole punchline of Mark is that Jesus is the Messiah. Why we’d expect this pattern to stop seems silly. Just think about Mark’s Gospel as a whole for a minute:

In the first half of Mark, everyone questions who Jesus is.
In the middle, Jesus questions the disciples’ belief about Him.
The second half tells how Jesus became the Messiah.

Mark is making a point about Jesus’ identity. Many Jews hoped that the Messiah would overthrow the Romans and rule as king, but as we read his gospel, we see that Jesus came to set up a kingdom different than their expectations. He came not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for sin. (Mark 10:45) His kingdom would start small but gradually become great, like a mustard seed. (Mark 4:26-29)

With that in mind, it’s possible that the gospel’s abrupt ending is there to intentionally challenge us to decide if we believe Jesus is the Messiah. Mark could be making the understood assumption that of course, the women eventually said something, that’s why you’re reading about this – but what do you think? Who do you think Jesus is?

THE RESURRECTION ACCOUNTS AREN’T HOPELESSLY CONTRADICTORY

“[T]he sources [regarding Jesus’ resurrection] are hopelessly contradictory, as we can see by doing a detailed comparison of the accounts in the Gospels.”

Bart Ehrman, The Historical Jesus (2000), p. 90

Bart’s claim is a strong one, but we’ve seen from this quick review that this claim just isn’t true. These accounts can all rather easily be reconciled. There are other alleged discrepancies in the accounts, and so this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive rebuttal to every objection that could be made. But in examining a handful of the skeptics’ toughest objections, we’ve seen that the narratives are very far from being hopelessly contradictory. Don’t let the critics ruin your Easter.

How Investigating Paul’s Conversion Turned A Skeptic Into A Christian Apologist

Jesus Christ, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

Here’s a very simple proof for Christianity. I’m warning you though, you’re going to be tempted to dismiss it because it’s sneakily uncomplicated. Are you ready for it? OK, here goes:

Premise 1: Paul converted.

Premise 2: Therefore Christianity is true.

OK, I’m kidding. Sort of. But I think that we sometimes fail to appreciate the evidential power of Paul’s conversion. Investigating Paul’s story is what turned a formerly self-proclaimed infidel into a believer and Christian apologist. His name is George Lyttleton.

Who was George Lyttleton?

Born in the small-town of Hagley, England in 1709, George Lyttleton was a prolific poet, Oxford graduate, and statesman who served as a member of Parliament. He had a friend by the name of Gilbert West.

Living in the “Age of Reason” when deism was all the rage, West and Lyttleton were both critical of Christianity. (For those of you who don’t know, deism rejects divine revelation and miracle claims. God created the world but doesn’t intervene.)

Together the two set out to disprove Christianity. They both agreed that the two strongest proofs for the faith were the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the conversion of Paul. So Lyttleton offered to disprove Paul’s conversion, and West set out to discount the resurrection. After doing so, to their own shock, both became Christians.

West said, “As I have investigated the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, I have come to believe that there is something to it, and I am going to write my book from that perspective.” Lyttleton wrote, “The same thing has happened to me. I have come to see that there was something to the conversion of Saint Paul, and I am going to write my book from that perspective.” So they did. Lyttleton’s book was titled The Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of Saint Paul.

Now obviously Lyttleton’s argument was a little more complicated than “Paul, therefore Christianity is true”. He looked at Paul’s life in Acts and his epistles and concluded that there were four possible explanations for his conversion:

Either Paul was “an impostor who said what he knew to be false, with an intent to deceive;” or
He was an enthusiast who imposed on himself by the force of “an overheated imagination;” or
He was “deceived by the fraud of others;” or
What he declared to be the cause of his conversion did all really happen; “and, therefore the Christian religion is a divine revelation.”

Lyttleton’s book is only about 70 or so pages, so it makes for some light reading. Let me give you a brief synopsis of his arguments.

Was Paul a deceiver?

Virtually no critic today thinks that Paul’s faith wasn’t genuine for the reasons Lyttleton lays out in about 40 pages of the book. The evidence for Paul’s sincerity is overwhelming. Lyttleton runs through some possible motives that Paul could have had for deceiving the church and finds them wanting.

Wealth

Paul wasn’t in it for the money. He worked with his own hands making tents in order to finance his missionary journeys. He said that while he had the right to financial support, he opted to forego this privilege so no one could question his motives.

We see plenty of evidence for this in Paul’s letters and in Acts. (Acts 18:3, 20:33-35, 1 Cor 4:11-12, 9:6-14, 2 Cor 11:7, 1 Thess 4:11, 2 Thess 3:8) If Paul was in it for the Benjamins he would’ve found a different line of work within his own tribe. (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist making a lame pun.)

Honor of Men

It’s hard to imagine that Paul was in it for his own personal reputation. Consider why he persecuted the church in the first place. A band of fishermen was saying that the Jewish Messiah was executed on a cross and that this Jesus was the Lord of all. He went from being schooled under Gamaliel and considered a reputable Pharisee to joining a band of illiterate preachers. (Acts 4:13) He said that the preaching of the cross was foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. (1 Cor. 1:23)

He was persecuted in public and treated like a criminal, being repeatedly imprisoned. Paul obviously wasn’t in it for praises of men.

Power

What about power? Was Paul like so many modern-day “apostles”, lording over the churches? Nope. Paul said he wasn’t even worthy to be called an apostle because he persecuted the church. (1 Tim. 1:13-16, 1 Cor. 15:9)

Even when people were proclaiming the gospel from wrong motives where he was imprisoned, he rejoiced. (Phil 1:18) And when the Corinthians were arguing over who their favorite preacher was, he drew attention off himself and put it onto Jesus (1 Cor. 1:13) When the people of Lystra tried to worship him as a god, he quickly put a stop to it. (Acts 14:11-16)

Passion

Paul clearly didn’t convert to serve his own passions. He lived a celibate life. (1 Cor. 7:7, 9:5) He appealed to his own conduct as an example of what a holy life looks like. (2 Cor 7:2, 1 Thess 2:10) Cult leaders like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Mohammed had power and married multiple wives. In comparison, Paul clearly wasn’t in it for sex or otherworldly passions.

Pious Lies

Here Lyttleton appeals to the story of Paul’s conversion found in Acts. While no one else on the Road to Damascus saw Jesus, his traveling companions had some sensory experience of Paul’s encounter. Paul was also blinded and subsequently healed by the prayers of Ananias. (Acts 9:8-19) Before King Agrippa, Paul appealed to public facts that the king would be aware of. (Acts 26:23- 26)

Furthermore, if Paul was a liar then all of his miracles were tricks. Paul wrote of his own miracles to an audience that easily could have called him out. (Rom 15:19, 2 Cor 12:12, 1 Thess 1:5, 1 Cor 2:4-5)

So for these five reasons, Lyttleton concludes that the weight of the evidence is that Paul wasn’t a liar.

Paul Wasn’t an Enthusiast (He wasn’t crazy)

In modern times, this is where most critics land on Paul. He just must’ve had a moment and snapped somehow. But according to Lyttleton, Paul wasn’t ‘cuckoo for cocoa puffs’. Paul, by all accounts, was a pretty cool-tempered guy. Says Lyttleton:

“In indifferent matters be became “all things to all men;” to the Jews, he became a Jew, to them that are without law as without law, to the weak he became weak-all, that he might gain some (1 Cor. 9:19-23). His zeal was eager and warm, but tempered with prudence, and even with the civilities and decorums of life, as appears by his behavior to Agrippa, Festus and Felix; not the blind, inconsiderate, indecent zeal of an enthusiast.”

Paul also doesn’t seem to be depressed. Even when he despaired of life given the nature of his persecutions, he didn’t give up. 2 Cor 1:7-9, Phil 1:21-23. Lyttleton also points out that Paul obviously was a learned man, as we can tell just by reading his letters.

Moreover, Paul certainly wasn’t credulous. As someone who lived in Jerusalem for a time, there’s no way that Paul was a stranger to hearing about the miracles of Jesus. He had the facts of the resurrection and presumably would have heard the arguments against them. He had heard what happened at Pentecost and of all the miracles worked by Peter and the other apostles up until the death of Stephen. Far from being credulous, Paul had closed his mind against every proof and refused to believe. Says Lyttleton: “Nothing less than the irresistible evidence of his own senses, clear from all possibility of doubt, could have overcome his unbelief.”

Finally, Paul doesn’t fit the bill of someone who suffered some sort of guilt-induced conversion disorder. We have some access to the science of psychology that Lyttleton didn’t have.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, women are 5:1 more likely to experience conversion psychosis. Adolescents, military persons in battle, people of low economic status and those with a low IQ are also more likely prone to experience this phenomenon. Paul just doesn’t fit the bill.

Also, we see no evidence that Paul felt any guilt regarding his actions. He seemed more than content with his lifestyle. (Phil 3:5-6) Paul was a sane and rational person.

Paul Wasn’t Duped

This third possible explanation Lyttelton dismisses in one page. The other apostles or early Christians couldn’t have deceived him. Why?

It was impossible that the disciples of Christ could have thought of such a fraud given Paul’s persecution. They were against liars (note Ananias and Sapphira) and also were terrified of him.
It was physically impossible for them to do it. Could they produce a light brighter than the noonday sun? Could they cause him to hear a voice speaking out of that light? Could they make him blind for three days and then return his sight with a word? These kinds of special effects didn’t exist yet.
No fraud could have produced those subsequent miracles which Paul worked (Acts 14:7-9, 19:11-12, 28:8, 2 Cor 12:12, Rom 15:19).

Paul’s conversion was legit and Christianity is a Divine Revelation

Lyttleton concludes that unless we’re going to set aside the normal rules of evidence by which facts are determined, we should accept the whole story of Paul’s conversion as historically true. Therefore, the Christian faith is proved to be a revelation from God. Note that this argument is not dependent on the Gospels.

With that said, there is the dicey issue of arguing for the historical reliability of Acts. Lyttleton’s arguments assume it. He could be accused of begging the question, but proving Acts wasn’t his goal. One would surmise that his audience could find those arguments elsewhere.

For good modern arguments in favor of the historicity of Acts, I recommend Colin Hemer’s The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, Craig Keener’s commentaries on Acts and Lydia McGrew’s Hidden in Plain Sight.

For a good rundown of the arguments for and against Acts – both old and new- here’s an excellent discussion with Dr. Tim McGrew:

Caveats aside, I think Lyttleton’s points are on the money. Paul was either a liar, a lunatic, a dupe or a genuine eyewitness to the resurrected Jesus. The most reasonable option is #4.

YOU CAN READ LYTTLETON’S BOOK IN FULL HERE.

13 Good Historical Reasons For The Early Dating Of The Gospels

4. Is the NT True?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

Skeptics like Bart Ehrman will use Apollonius of Tyana as a challenge to Jesus’ uniqueness. Apollonius lived in the first century. His birth was supernatural. He also performed miracles and appeared to people after his death. Sounds familiar, right? Critics will then conclude that the story of Jesus isn’t special.

Apologists will then retort that the Apollonius’ biography was written long after his death. It isn’t until about 100 years later that Philostratus wrote his biography. Therefore, the story we have about his life couldn’t be based on eyewitness testimony. But the Gospels are based on the accounts of witnesses.

And this is where critics will say “Oh really? The Gospels came long after Jesus’ death too!” For example, here’s Bart Ehrman:

“The very first surviving account of Jesus’ life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our last canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. That’s obviously a lot of time.”

How Jesus Became God, pp 90

We know that Jesus died around 30-33 AD. But most contemporary scholars date Mark roughly around 70 AD. Matthew and Luke date to 80-90 AD. And John dates to 95-100 AD. We have this long chain of storytellers circulating stories about Jesus for decades. The tales grew in the telling. While the problem isn’t as bad as Philostratus’ bio of Apollonius, 40-75 years is a long enough time for legends to creep in.

The Main Reason Why Critics Give The Gospels A Later Date

So why do scholars date the gospels so late? There’s one big reason: Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. That happened in 70 AD. And we know predictive prophecy isn’t a real thing, so the Gospel authors must have put these words like these in Jesus’ mouth:

“…as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” (Mark 13:1-2)

“…when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” (Luke 19:41-44)

Scholars call this ‘vaticinium ex eventu’. That means that the text is written so as to appear that the prophecy had taken place before the event, when in fact it was written after the events supposedly predicted.

Well, pardon me, Mr. Skeptic. It seems like your anti-supernatural bias is showing. While real examples of this exist in history, there are a few problems with this view in regard to the Olivet Discourse.

The Olivet Discourse Does Not = Late Dating

For starters, if the Gospels are late, why is there no emphasis on the fulfillment of Jesus’ predictions? Luke actually does this in Acts. Here’s a noteworthy example:

“Now in these days, prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius).” (Acts 11:27-28)

It’s odd that Luke went out of his way to emphasize a prophecy by such an obscure figure. Why would Luke capitalize on that, but not highlight a fulfilled prophecy about the main character of his story?

Furthermore, several of Jesus’ warnings about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple make no sense if Jesus gave them after the event. This is true of all three synoptic gospels.

“But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where he ought not to be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains…Pray that it may not happen in winter.” (Mark 13:14, 18)

Matthew adds: “Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath.” (Mt. 24:10)

And Luke writes: “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it...” (Luke 21:21)

The Romans destroyed the Temple in the Summer of 70 AD. It makes no sense for Luke to add a warning about not entering into Jerusalem if the city was already destroyed.

The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem, by David Roberts (1850).

It is also baffling why Matthew or Mark would add commands to pray about something that didn’t take place at the particular time that it happened. New Testament scholar Dale Allison writes “What would be the point of inserting an imperative to pray about a past event, that does not take place at a particular time?”

13 Good Historical For The Early Dating Of The Gospels:

What about early dating? Are there any arguments that are in favor of it? Yep, there sure are. There’s a lot of things that are conspicuous by their absence when we look at Acts.

Luke was the first church historian. And Acts is the sequel to his own gospel, which he says he was careful to interview eyewitnesses about. (Luke 1:1-4) There’s a lot of interesting details we find out about life and (hard) times of the early church.

We read about the martyrdom of James the brother of John. (See Acts 12:1-3) We find out about the martyrdom of Stephen. (See Acts 7:56-60) We hear about the early church persecution of Peter and Paul. We follow Peter in the first half of the book, and then we get up close with Paul in the last half of the book.

There are some big events that are missing from Acts that you’d expect to find from such a thorough storyteller like Luke. We’ll now look at 13 reasons why scholars — even some non-conservative ones — date the Gospels earlier.

1. The Death Of Paul

At the end of Acts, Paul is under house arrest in Malta while having his own healing revival. Paul’s execution was in 62-64. After being Paul’s biographer for a huge portion of the book, this seems like a huge event for Luke to fail to mention. Luke has been keenly interested in what is going to happen to Paul. It’s unlikely that he’d cut his book’s narrative off without telling what happened in Paul’s hearing if he were writing much later.

Adolf von Harnack was a prominent German NT scholar who changed his mind on the late dating of the Gospels and Acts. His turnabout came precisely because of the ending of Acts and that Paul is still in Rome alive and preaching. Says Harnack: “we are accordingly left with the result: that the concluding verses of the Acts of the Apostles, taken in conjunction with the absence of any reference in the book to the result of the trial of St. Paul and to his martyrdom, make it to the highest degree possible that the work was written at a time when St. Paul’s trial had not yet come to an end.”

The Beheading of Saint Paul by Enrique Simonet, 1887

2. The Death Of Peter

Luke was also up close with Peter in Acts, so it’s also weird that he doesn’t mention Peter’s martyrdom in 65 AD. Again, we see Stephen and James the son of Zebedee’s deaths. Yet he fails to mention the death of the towering figure who preached on Pentecost and was such a pivotal figure in his gospel? It doesn’t add up.

3. The Death Of James The Brother Of Jesus

James was a huge figure in the church of Jerusalem. He looms large in Acts. He’s also Jesus’ brother. We know from the Jewish historian Josephus that James’ martyrdom took place in 62 AD. Josephus thought it was a big enough deal to describe this event, and he was no Christian.

4. The Severe Persecutions Of Nero

Nero himself was probably to blame for a large fire that broke out in Rome. What’s an emperor to do when his capital city is in flames and it’s his own fault? Blame those weird Christians, of course.

This happened around 64 AD. We can read about it in some detail in Tacitus. It’s a strange thing for Luke not to mention this. Luke mentions the church’s persecution in other places, like Jerusalem, Phillipi, Ephesus and more places. Luke also at length discusses relief efforts for the impoverished saints in Jerusalem during a famine.

But he doesn’t mention one of the more gruesome persecutions of the time?

5. The Destruction Of The Temple And The Second Coming

This might be the most convincing proof of them all. The passages in Matthew that describe the destruction of Jerusalem and Jesus’ second coming seemingly leave no time between the two events. Reading Mark and Luke, the interval between the two events is brief. Skeptics like Bertrand Russell and Bart Ehrman have been quick to pounce on this as if Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet.

I’m not here to give a theological explanation, although many have been offered throughout the centuries. The association of the destruction of Jerusalem with the return of Jesus wouldn’t exist if the composition of the Gospels was after the destruction of the Temple. Surely there would’ve been some explanation or indication that the two events were not to stand in so close juxtaposition.

6. Luke Was True To His Times

Luke has a lot to say about issues of the day that wouldn’t have been relevant after the destruction of Jerusalem. For instance, there was the brouhaha about how to deal with Gentiles now being members of the church. There’s also mention of the division between the Palestinian and Hellenistic Jews. These would not be relevant after Jerusalem’s destruction. Disputes like these are absent in the writings of early church fathers.

7. Paul Quotes Luke As Scripture

The letters to Timothy proceeded Paul’s death. Paul writes:

The elders who rule well are to be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing,” and “The laborer is worthy of his wages.” (1 Tim. 5:17–18)

Paul quotes Deuteronomy alongside Luke. This saying is in Luke 10:7. Scriptures refer to something written down, so this goes beyond oral tradition. This takes for granted that they had familiarity with what Scriptures Paul was talking about.

I understand some critics say Paul didn’t write 1 Timothy. But I’d humbly argue that they are incorrect in their assessment. The main reasons to reject Pauline authorship are thin, as I cover here.

8. Jesus Approves Of The Temple Tax

NT scholar Robert Gundry tells why this is so significant:

“The distinctive passage [of Matthew 17:24–27] teaches that Jewish Christians should not contribute to their fellow Jews’ rejection of the gospel by refusing to pay the Temple tax. This exhortation not only shows Matthew’s concern to win Jews. It specifically favors a date of writing before AD 70; for after the destruction of God’s temple in Jerusalem the Romans shifted the tax to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome (Josephus J.W. 7.6.6 §218; Dio Cassius 65.7; Suetonius Dom. 12), and m. Šeqal. 8.8 says that the laws concerning “the Shekel dues…apply only such time as the Temple stands...

Surely Matthew does not include this passage to support the upkeep of a pagan temple, for then the argument implies that the disciples are sons of the pagan god! Nor can we suppose that Matthew is urging Jewish Christians to support the school of pharisaical rabbis that formed in Jamnia yet during the aftermath of the Jewish rebellion, for he excoriates the Pharisees throughout his Gospel. The argument from 17:24–27 for an early date gains further cogency from the evidence that Matthew himself composed the passage.“

9. Swearing By The Temple

In Matthew 23:16-22, Jesus is excoriating the scribes and Pharisees. He says:

“Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by Him who dwells in it. And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits upon it.“

This text makes as much sense as me talking to a Gen Z audience about slide projectors or phone booths. Unless the temple still stood, all of these practices would be antiquated.

10 Gift At The Altar

In Matthew 5:23-24 we read “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

It could be the case that Matthew was faithfully passing on a saying of Jesus, but it doesn’t make as much sense for Matthew to relay it for the very important reason that no one could obey it if the temple was no longer standing!

11. Jewish Persecution

If Matt 23:34 is reflecting current Jewish persecution of Christians by the synagogue, the verse implies an authority to punish that Jewish leaders did not likely have after the temple destruction.

12. Patristic Evidence

Irenaeus was a student of Polycarp. Polycarp was a student of John. Therefore Irenaeus was in a position to know about the composition of the Gospels. In his book Against Heresies, he writes: “Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church.” (3.1)

That’s interesting. The internal evidence we have for the early dating of the Gospels now matches the external dating.

13. Who Was The Unnamed Disciple Who Was “Famous In The Gospel?”

2 Corinthians 8:18-19 speaks of a famous unnamed disciple that several church fathers (Origen, Jerome) and some commentators believe is referring to Luke.

“We have sent along with him the brother whose fame in the things of the gospel has spread through all the churches and not only this, but he has also been appointed by the churches to travel with us in this gracious work…”

The commentator Barnes observes

“…Luke was the companion and intimate friend of Paul and attended him in his travels. From Acts 16:10-11, where Luke uses the term “we,” it appears that he was with Paul when he first went into Macedonia, and from Acts 16:15 it is clear that he went with Paul to Philippi. From Acts 17:1, where Luke alters his style and uses the term “they,” it is evident that he did not accompany Paul and Silas when they went to Thessalonica, but either remained at Philippi or departed to some other place.

He did not join them again until they went to Troas on the way to Jerusalem; Acts 20:5. In what manner Luke spent the interval is not known…it seems probable that Luke is the person referred to by the phrase “whose praise is in the gospel throughout all the churches.” This would be more likely to be applied to one who had written a gospel, or a life of the Redeemer that had been extensively circulated, than to any other person.“

While this is admittedly speculative, it does make sense of Paul quoting Luke’s gospel.

The Gospels Were Written Early

NT scholar EP Sanders writes that “there is no material in Mark which must be dated after 70.” If that’s true of Mark, it’s true of Matthew and Luke as well. And if Acts was written before Paul’s death, that means the Gospel of Luke was written when Paul was still alive and kicking. We’ve seen that Paul quotes Luke as scripture. And history tells us Paul died in 62 AD.

There are also several indicators that Matthew’s Gospel was written before 70 AD as well. If both Gospel writers used Mark as a source, then Mark has to be dated even earlier than 62 AD. That means this alleged time-gap has been greatly shortened 40-60 years to 20-30 years. If Paul refers to Luke in 2 Corinthians, then his Gospel was being circulated before 55 AD.

Furthermore, if Paul quotes Luke’s Gospel as scripture, and Paul has met with Peter and James — who were living eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus — then it’s not difficult to imagine the other apostles were aware of the written Gospels as well. They could have policed and addressed necessary correctives if they were inaccurate, and they also could have been sources for the Gospels. We know that the church father Papias (125-130 AD) tells us that Mark’s Gospel was based on Peter’s preaching.

This doesn’t compare to the legend of Apollonius after all. They are close to the events.

The Death of Judas: A Hopeless Bible Contradiction?

4. Is the NT True?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Erik Manning

Skeptics accuse Christians of not paying attention while they’re reading their Bible. If they didn’t rush through their daily devotional, they’d catch some obvious contradictions. One of the more famous of these contradictions is the two accounts of the death of Judas. Here’s Biblical scholar and critic Bart Ehrman:

“The two reports give different accounts of how Judas died. However mysterious it may be to say he fell headlong and burst open, at least that is not “hanging” oneself. And they are flat out contradictory on two other points: who purchased the field (the priests, as per Matthew, or Judas, as per Acts?) and why the field was called the field of blood (because it was purchased with blood money, as Matthew says, or because Judas bled all over it, as Acts says?”

Jesus, Interrupted p. 53

Ouch. Both of these accounts can’t be reconciled. Or can they?

Reading the Texts

Let’s read the passages for ourselves. Here’s Matthew’s account:

“Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” They said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.

But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury since it is blood money.” So, they took counsel and bought with them the potter’s field as a burial place for strangers. Therefore, that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.” –Matthew 27:3-8

And here’s Luke’s version:

“Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness and falling headlong he burst open in the middle, and all his bowels gushed out. And it became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem so that the field was called in their own language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.” — Acts 1:18-19

One Proposed Solution from A Scholar

Noted New Testament Scholar I. Howard Marshall suggests the following solution:

Judas hanged himself (Matthew.), but the rope broke, and his body was ruptured by the fall (possibly after he was already dead and beginning to decompose).
What the priests bought with Judas’ money (Matt.) could be regarded as his purchase by their agency. (Acts)
The field bought by the priests (Matt.) was the one where Judas died. (Acts)

Now you might say that this scenario smacks of harmonization, but is it really all that implausible? Let’s think about it for a sec.

Dealing with Judas’ Death

Judging by the text, Matthew seems to focus on Judas’ suicide. Luke’s focus is on the final state of Judas’ body. According to Jewish laws and customs, the Jews would not have wanted to go near a dead body. (Numbers 19.11) This would be especially true when that dead body belonged to a traitor.

But how would someone who hanged himself have their guts burst out? This gruesome story doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Or does it? The Textbook of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology says:

“Between 3 and 7 days, ever-increasing pressure of the putrefying gases associated with colliquative changes in the soft tissues may lead to softening of the abnormal parietes resulting in bursting open the abdomen and thorax.”

P. 91

So, we actually do have some medical data that fits with what we read in Matthew and Luke. Someone eventually cutting Judas’ corpse down, or the rope giving out, would explain how his body would have burst on the ground. Therefore, Matthew and Luke aren’t contradictory; they’re better viewed as complimentary. Each account ties up a loose end of the other.

There are also cliffs that overlook the valley of Hinnom. Those cliffs could very well be the place where Judas hanged himself, and his dead body fell. Falling against the rocks, this could explain why he fell facedown.

But What About the Field Bought by The Priests?

Jewish law says that it was wrong for the priests to keep Judas’ blood money. (Numbers 35:31) Why then was it OK for them to buy a field with it? Luke’s story gives us a possible answer: it wasn’t. That’s why the priest bought the field in Judas’s name.

The priests were acting as intermediaries. Them purchasing the field in Judas’ name was as if Judas bought it himself. You might say this is special pleading, but we see this elsewhere throughout the Gospels. See for yourself:

Matthew 27:59-60 “And Joseph (of Arimathea) took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away.”

Did Joseph, a rich man and a member of the Sanhedrin, bury Jesus himself? No, he had his servants do it.

Mark 15:15“So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.”

Did Pilate, a Roman prefect, grab a whip and get himself bloody scourging Jesus by himself? Again, the answer is obviously no. He sent his soldiers to do it.

John 4:1-2“Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples)”

Here John says that Jesus was baptizing more disciples than John but then stops to clarify that Jesus didn’t himself baptize; it was the disciples. This type of “representation” speech is also found in the alleged contradiction of the healing of the Roman Centurion’s servant, which I wrote about here.

Plus, the priests had the motivation to do this. It avoids the paper trail that ties them to buying a field with blood money. This would have been a ritual impurity for all the public to have seen.

The Death of Judas: Not A Hopeless Bible Contradiction.

You might say this is all conjecture. But it’s impossible to avoid conjecture if you want to suggest what may have happened. But a classical historian wouldn’t see these discrepancies and be troubled by them. We have a strong historical tradition of the death of Jesus’ betrayer. And we have an event associated with a specific field named. These differences don’t undermine their historical value.

Notice also that each Gospel writer’s account is consistent with their profession. As a tax collector, Matthew is interested in legal and financial details that are involved with Judas’ death. He’s the only gospel writer that talks about the thirty pieces of silver. Luke’s a physician. He gives us more of an autopsy report.

These accounts aren’t hopelessly contradictory. In fact, they complement each other quite nicely.

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#1. HOW MANY WOMEN WERE AT THE TOMB OF JESUS?

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#2 WAS THE TOMB OPENED OR CLOSED WHEN THE WOMEN ARRIVED?

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6 TIMES IN THE BIBLE WHERE ANGELS APPEAR AS MEN

HOW MANY ANGELS WERE THERE?

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5. The Destruction Of The Temple And The Second Coming

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10 Gift At The Altar

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