JoeWallack

Cherry Hell Park



JW:
The use of the word "witnesses" by Christian Apologists in this Context is dishonest. The priMary Source for "Matthew/Luke" was not Witness observation of History, it was "Mark". The extent of Copying by ""Matthew/Luke" indicates that not only was their primary source not Witness observation of History, for the most part, it wasn't even available to them. That "Matthew/Luke" had to use as a primary source a story with a primary objective of discrediting the very same Disciples that "Matthew/Luke" wanted to credit illustrates how desparate they were for a source, any source.

We see where "Matthew/Luke" did not have "Mark" to follow that when they try to describe the same time period the result is a Monty Python routine ("and now for somethings completely different"). This is what happens (Fiction) when either there is no History to use as a source or you have no access to it.

For example, see:

Carrier's Luke vs. Matthew on the Year of Christ's Birth Now Up At ErrancyWiki

and note all the Fiction in "Luke's" account:

1) No general Census by Augustus.

2) For Roman census Joseph would not go to Bethlehem.

3) For Roman census Mary would not go to Bethlehem.

4) No Roman census in Israel during Herod the Great's reign.

5) "Matthew/Luke" disagree on the date of Jesus' birth (by at least 10 years).



Joseph

BIRTH, n.
The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Aetna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Chili

Maybe it is time to abandon the literal interpretation Joseph and use it only to give birth to the myth wherein Joseph alone (Wordsworth) was called to give an account of himself right down to the state of mind he was at birth when he was still free from encumbrances. Kind of like he was pregnant with despair (Joyce) and had to give an account of himself (repent) when the son of man was reborn in him.

That he was pregnant kind of makes Mary the non-rational sinless woman he left behind when Joseph became a rational sinner to whom Mary was now making her presence known and finally give Joseph a life of his own. It is not that hard to understand, really, especially not if you consider that it is much easier to have a baby when you are pregnant then not to have one. (Golding).

The 10 year difference is needed because it is difficult to prosper and bloom in the desert if only a 40 day fast is needed to prosper and bloom. For you know,

We must live through the dreary winter
if we would value the spring;
And the woods must be cold and silent
before the robins sing.
The flowers must be buried in darkness
before they can bud and bloom,
And the sweetest warmest sunshine
comes after the storm and gloom.

Jerry McDonald

McDonald’s First Rebuttal

I don’t know what proposition that Mr. Gastrich was supposedly running from, I assume that it is the proposition that Mr. Till SAYS that he and I are debating. If so, then I don’t blame him for not wanting to debate it. Mr. Till says that we are debating the following proposition: “RESOLVED: The depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is inconsistent with her depiction in John 20:1-18.” Sorry Farrell, but that is not the proposition that I agreed to debate you on. Here is the following proposition that I agreed to debate you on: “RESOLVED: The depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is IRRECONCILABLY inconsistent with her depiction in John 20:1-18.” Here is the exact email that you sent me:

“TILL
Well, welcome back Jerry. This debate was supposed to take place at the IIDB forum, but Gastrich won't agree to deny my proposition, which is this.

RESOLVED: The depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is
irreconcilably inconsistent with her depiction in John 20:1-18.

Maybe you would like to take the negative position in a debate on this specific issue.
Farrell Till
The Skeptical Review Online”

Now my response follows:

“McDonald.
I will deny this proposition. I have been dealing
with these issues in my class lessons and bulletins
here at Belle. By the way what is IIDB?
Jerry”

As you can clearly see, we are not debating the proposition Till says we are debating, we are debating one that is totally different. “What is the difference?” you ask? The difference is in the word “irreconcilably.” Till has defined the word “inconsistent” as “’incompatible’ or ‘not in agreement or harmony’ or ‘lacking in logical relation’” (Till’s First Affirmative, p.1). Well…yeah, those definitions are there, but he cannot use them because he included the word “irreconcilably” which means: “that cannot be reconciled; that cannot be brought into agreement; incompatible, conflicting, inconsistent” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, p.745). Now how does that differ from what Till said? Simply this, the primary definition that he gives for the word inconsistent cannot work there because of the word “irreconcilably” which means basically the same thing. However, the secondary meaning for the word inconsistent can and must be used: “(b) not uniform, self-contradictory.” (Ibid, p.712). His proposition would be repetitious if he used the primary meaning on the word “inconsistent” because the word “irreconcilably” means the same thing. It would be says: “RESOLVED: The depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is inconsistent inconsistent with her depiction in John 20:1-18).” However, with the secondary meaning on the word “inconsistent” it would be taken this way: “RESOLVED: The depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is inconsistent, and self-contradictory with her depiction in John 20:1-10.” Now many of you may agree with that and say that the word “irreconcilably” only gives strength to Till’s affirmation, but Till knows better. Now let me tell you why he knows better.
This is not the first time that Farrell and I have met in debate (as he has already stated), and he knows that I rely, heavily, upon the rules of logic in my debates. He does not want to get into “real” or “objective” contradictions because he knows that in order to do so he is going to have to show that one statement is true while the other statement is false. The dictionary defines the word “contradictory” as “2 Logic either of two propositions so related to one another that if one is true, the other must be false” (Ibid, p. 309). Well, what if both are false? Good question! Copi said: “Two propositions are contradictories if one is the denial or negation of the other, that is, if they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false” (Introduction to Logic, p.173). So to answer the question, if they are both false, they cannot be contradictory because one false proposition cannot deny or negate another false proposition, neither can one true proposition negate or deny another true proposition. One of them has to be true and the other one has to be false if a contradiction exists. That is why Till does not want to admit that either of these accounts is true because to do so would force him to give credence to at least one of the resurrection accounts. However, the proposition he has agreed to debate me on forces him to do just that. Thus Till has shot his foot off and has, for all practical reasons, taken himself out of the debate before it ever got started.
If Farrell insists on leaving the word “contradictory” out of the word “inconsistent” and insists upon using the definition he has already given he still has to deal with the meaning of the word “irreconcilably” which means “that cannot be reconciled.” Why? Because two propositions which oppose one another to the point that, one must be true and the other must be false, are the only ones that can be irreconcilable. If both were true they could be reconciled. If both were false they could be reconciled. Only if one is true and the other is false can they not be reconciled. So whichever way he wants to go, he has been had in this debate. His hide has been nailed to the barn door.
I have been waiting for a long time to get him in the position in which I have him in this debate. In our oral debate in 91 on the alleged moral atrocities of the Bible because I didn’t insist on the word “objective” in parenthesis after the word “real” in his affirmative proposition he slithered and wiggled out of the weight of the meaning “absolute” of the word “real.” I will never forget the dodging that he did in that debate regardless of the times I showed him what the dictionary said. I was unable to nail him down to the meaning because of my mistake in not insisting on the word “objective”. However, I couldn’t believe that he was willing to agree on our current proposition with the word “irreconcilable.” I figured he would try to just get by on “inconsistent” but I am not going to allow it. He must show that one depiction is true while the other is false. When he does, he is going to give credence to the resurrection of Christ and this will logically cause him to surrender his entire atheistic position. Now let’s look at the rest of his article.
Let me say, up front, that there is a difference in Matthew’s account and in John’s account. This is something that no one denies. However, a difference does not necessarily mean “contradiction.” This is where Farrell is going to have to do much better than he did. I will agree that the two accounts are not identical on all points. The reason for this is that Matthew left out information that John included. This is a very common thing in the gospel accounts. For example Matthew and Mark have Jesus taking the fruit of the vine and giving thanks for it then taking the bread afterward (Mt. 26:27-29; Mk. 14:22-25). John’s account doesn’t even mention the Lord’s Supper. However, Luke has Jesus taking the bread, breaking it, giving it to them, then he Jesus giving a blessing for the cup (fruit of the vine) and then afterward the bread. Luke included some information that Matthew and Mark did not; Jesus taking the bread first and giving it to the disciples. There is no contradiction; it is just that there is more information in Luke’s account than there is in Matthew and Mark’s.
We have the same issue here. Matthew has Mary (and I am not going to quibble about how many Marys there were or who the Mary was, it is agreed that it was Mary Magdalene) coming to the tomb, speaking with the Angel and being told that Jesus is going to meet his disciples in Galilee and to tell them to meet him there. As they leave Jesus meets them himself and tells them again to tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee. That is all that Matthew recorded. He didn’t record about Peter being told or running to the tomb as Peter isn’t even mentioned in Matthew’s account.
John on the other hand included much more information. His account has Mary coming to the tomb and seeing the stone taken away from the entrance. She runs and meets Peter and John and said, “They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulcher, and we know not where they have laid him” (Jno. 20:2). Peter and John then run to the tomb and they found it empty and they went home because they did not know the scripture [Isa. 26:19] that said that he must rise again from the dead (Jno. 20:3-10). Even though Jesus had tried to prepare them for all this they still did not understand it. After they left Mary stood outside the tomb weeping and she stooped down and looked into the sepulcher and she saw two angels sitting at the feet of the place where Jesus had laid. They asked her why she was weeping and she told them she was crying because someone had taken Jesus’ body and she didn’t know where they had taken it (Jno. 20:12-13). She turned back and that is when she saw Jesus who then told her to go tell his disciples that he would ascend to his Father. She went and then found them and told them all that had happened (Jno. 20:14-19).
In logic there is something called a “sub-contrary.” That is where two propositions are such that both cannot be “false, though they might both be true” (Introduction to Logic, p.175). In these statements they have, “the same subject and predicate terms, agree in quality and differ only in quantity, there is opposition even though there is not disagreement implied. (Ibid). These two accounts, though they may differ, are not irreconcilably inconsistent. They can be reconciled.
In the second place Farrell is in the affirmative in this debate. He says that I have to solve the Mary Magdalene problem. Although I have shown where they are not irreconcilably inconsistent or self-contradictory I have no obligation to solve anything at all. As the affirmative Farrell has the obligation to prove (according to the proposition he and I agreed upon, not the one he started off his first affirmative with) that the accounts of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 and John 20:1-18 are irreconcilably inconsistent. That is he must show that they are self-contradictory. He has not done this. All he has done is shown that there is a difference between the two accounts. He has spend a lot of space repeating himself (which is par for the course for Farrell—oh…yeah…he did explain that he did that for the purpose of not leaving any doubt about the major points that needed to be satisfactorily explained—right. Actually he did this to take up space and to make you [the reader] think that he is really covering the subject. He calls it “explication.” I call it wasting space so he won’t have to do what he is supposed to do.), and has said nothing to show that there is an irreconcilable inconsistency or contradiction between the two accounts. Let him show that these two accounts are irreconcilably inconsistent; that they are self-contradictory. I theorize that he won’t do that. I also theorize that he isn’t going to want to have that word “irreconcilably” included in the proposition, though that is the real proposition that we are discussing. I am in the negative position in this debate and my job is to negate which is defined as “to deny the existence or truth of” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, p. 951). The word negative, in the context of this debate means: “3. to prove false, disprove” (Ibid). My job is to disprove what he says is truth. He says that these two accounts are irreconcilably inconsistent and I have shown the error of that affirmation. Now let him try again.
Now let us look Farrell’s panic theory. He has stated that Gleason Archer took this position and theorized that if I took it I would have to be prepared to convince you all that a person as bewildered and confused as Archer claimed that Mary was could be considered a reliable witness to the resurrection. Well…after reading Archer’s statement I don’t see where he said that she had panicked although he did say that she was confused and it is true that she was running when she met Peter and John. I don’t agree with Archer’s solution to this so-called problem, but if Farrell has a problem with Archer’s solution…let him go see Archer. Gleason’s a big boy and I’m quite sure he can hold his own with Farrell. At any rate, I don’t take the position that Mary panicked. I do think that she came to the tomb and found Jesus’ body missing and she wanted to know what had happened to it. However, this doesn’t mean that Matthew’s account is irreconcilably inconsistent or contradictory with John’s account. All it means, as previously stated, that John gave information that Matthew did not.
He tells us that this debate centers on what Matthew said about Mary Magdalene because the early Christians didn’t have the bound volumes as we have them and that many of them just had Matthew’s account. No this debate centers on whole of Biblical teaching on this matter. It matters not that many of the early Christians did not have John until it was circulated to them. This fact does not mean that there would have been a problem when they did receive John’s account. The four accounts of the gospel were circulated long before the bound volumes came into existence and one would think that if there had been a problem with these two accounts that the early church fathers would have had something to say about them, but I have found nothing to indicate that there was a problem between them in their writings. Maybe Farrell can produce evidence from the early church fathers that there was a problem with these accounts on this matter. After researching the matter I have been unable to find such.
Farrell believes that inspiration had to be by the “dictation” method. In other words, the Holy Spirit would say “kia” (Greek for “and”) and the writer would write down that word and then on to the next. It wasn’t just that the writings were inspired, but that the writer himself was inspired. Though the Holy Spirit selected and approved the words written the writers were allowed to use their own styles of writing, their own experiences if they had been eyewitnesses. Since Matthew was not an eyewitness of the meeting of Mary with Peter and John, he would not have mentioned it and as long as John did mention it that is sufficient. Every account is not going to be identical, there are going to be differences. Each writer would write from a different viewpoint and tell a different part of the incident. That is all that is being done here. Farrell’s objection fails because he doesn’t understand the right method of “inspiration.”
Now for his “two visit theory.” I do not take the position that there were two visits made by Mary Magdalene. There was just one! John gave more information than Matthew did. When Mary ran from the tomb she ran into Peter and John (the disciple whom Jesus loved) and they ran to the tomb. John outran Peter and Mary went to the tomb with them. Maybe this is what he thinks is the “two visit” theory. The Bible said that she was running when she met Peter and John, but there is nothing to indicate that she was breathless or out of breathe. We don’t know how far she ran before she met Peter and John, it might have not been far at all. She might have simply returned (a short distance) with them to the opening of the tomb. After they left she stayed behind to look in herself. There is nothing to indicate that she had looked in before Peter and John did. The scriptures simply state that she saw the stone removed, she ran and came to Peter and John and told them that the body of the Lord had been taken away. This would be a reasonable assumption with the stone being rolled away from the tomb. However, it wasn’t until after Peter and John looked in and then left that Mary looked in and saw the two angels.
Unless I have missed something I believe that covers Farrell’s first affirmative and then some. Let me remind you that he is in the affirmative in this debate, not me. I don’t have the obligation to prove anything at all. That’s his job! Let me remind you that he must show that these two accounts are irreconcilably inconsistent therefore self-contradictory. In order to do that he is going to have to show that one of the two positions is true, while the other is false. He cannot logically get out of this obligation. Let me remind you that if he takes the position that one of the two accounts is true, he gives credence to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If Jesus’ resurrection is true, then He is the Son of God and God did create the world and he did inspire men to write the Bible. If this is true there is contradiction between the two accounts.
Let’s put it this way: Farrell is in this prison. In this prison there are several walls that he must go through before he can break out. The prison is that “the depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is irreconcilably inconsistent with her depiction in John 20:1-18”. The first wall is the word “irreconcilably” in the proposition. He must get through this wall before he can get to the next. However, he can’t even get through this wall. The second wall is the definition of “inconsistent” which is “self-contradictory” which means that one of the accounts has to be true while the other has to be false. The third wall follows which is if one of the accounts is true then credence is given to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The fourth wall is that if credence is given to the resurrection of Jesus Christ then He was raised and is the Son of God. The fifth wall is that there is a God. The sixth wall is that he did inspire (at least part of the Bible). The seventh wall is that since God cannot lie or be wrong then not only is part of the Bible inspired, but also all of it is inspired. The final wall is that there is no contradiction or irreconcilable inconsistency in the two accounts pertaining to Mary Magdalene, just different information. Farrell, he must stay in his prison because he cannot even get through the first wall. Well…let’s see how he does in his next. Hopefully he will do better than he did in this one. Jerry McDonald

Sven

Paragraphs are your friend. :wave:

JoeWallack

JW:
Mr. Till, would you be so kind as to list the Key Points of your argument? A Formal listing of Key Points will make it easier for the objective Reader to determine the extent to which you have demonstrated error as well as the extent to which your opponent has addressed your Key Points. Thank you.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

JoeWallack

JW:
Someone needs to explain to you that "Matthew/Luke" largely Copied from "Mark" and made Editorial Changes. The Significance therefore is the Opposite of what you claim. The incentive to Edit a Primary Source is to Emphasize a difference rather than offer complimentary information. "John" on the other hand didn't copy from "Mark". Not a good analogy.


JW:
So when it suits you Implications can disappear to wherever the hell Jesus has been for the last 2,000 years.


JW:
So Logically you can prove that there are no errors in the details without examining the details.


JW:
Why do I get the feeling that even in his present state Archer could do a better job than you here Defending.


JW:
In an Irony that I think the author of "Mark" would really appreciate, the above are your best arguments here (just not for the reason you think).



Joseph

FAITH, n.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Farrell Till

Having mentioned on the Errancy list the difficulty that I had had in trying to negotiate a proposition in the Mary Magdalene issue that Jason Gastrich would find acceptable, I would have thought that Jerry McDonald would have gone to IIDB to read the exchanges between Gastrich and me, which begin here http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...78#post3642178 at post #1, but I apparently assumed too much. McDonald wrote his “reply” in a way that indicates his unawareness of the difficulty that I had in getting Gastrich to agree to anything. The posts just linked to, however, will show that I first proposed this proposition to Gastrich.

Gastrich rejected this, and so I compromised several times until he finally indicated that he might accept this proposition:

That proposition was stated in post #30 in the same thread linked to above. When I posted this proposition to the Errancy list http://iierrancy.com, I unintentionally inserted the word irreconcilably into it, probably because the word accurately represented my view of the Mary-Magdalene problem. I hate to disappoint McDonald after all the space that he wasted talking about his expertise in logic, but I am going to take care of the wording of the proposition by agreeing that irreconcilably should be in it. Hence, the proposition that I am affirming in the Mary Magdalene debate is this: Resolved: The depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is irreconcilably inconsistent with her depiction in John 20:1-18. I trust, then, that McDonald will waste no more of our time on lessons in pseudologic, which take time away from the central issue, i. e., the Mary Magdalene problem, which he managed to evade almost entirely in his first “reply.”

Now that I have put irreconcilably into my proposition, I should take the time to define it as I will be applying it in this debate. Reconcile means “to make consistent or compatible” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary) or “to make or show to be consistent” (New Webster‘s Dictionary and Thesaurus) or “to make (arguments, ideas, texts, etc.) consistent, compatible, etc.; to bring into harmony” (Webster‘s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary). The English prefix ir- when affixed to a root word will make it mean the opposite; hence, irregular would have the opposite meaning of regular, irrational the opposite meaning of rational, and so on. This means that the adverb irreconcilably denotes the inability to make something consistent or harmonious.

I apologize for taking so much time on this word, but as readers have now seen, McDonald will scour dictionaries to try to find some definition of a key word that he thinks is unfriendly to his opponent’s position and insist that this meaning be applied to it, so I wanted to cover as many bases as possible. My position in this debate, then, is that the depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 was such that the grammar of the text requires readers to understand that she was present throughout the angel’s announcement that Jesus had risen and during the women’s encounter of Jesus after they had left the tomb, and so her depiction in Matthew’s text is irreconcilably inconsistent with John’s depiction of her as a woman who went to the tomb, found the stone taken away, and then went to tell John and the “other disciple” that the body had been stolen. If McDonald thinks that the depictions of her in the two narratives are not irreconcilably inconsistent, he must show us how a woman who had seen an angel at the tomb, heard him announce that Jesus had risen, heard him invite her and the other Mary to come into the tomb to see where he had lain, had run from the tomb and encountered Jesus, touched him, and worshiped him, could have then continued on her way and told Peter and the other disciple that the body had been stolen. I will have much more to say about this, but first I want to address McDonald’s lesson in logic, which is almost too farcical to deserve comment.

Having had past experiences debating McDonald, I wasn’t at all surprised to see him try to attribute the meaning of contradiction, as it is defined in formal logic, to the word inconsistent, because he has, as long as I have known him, fancied himself as a master logician. However, if he had bothered to read my exchanges with Gastrich in the IIDB forum, he would have noted that after Gastrich had tried to get me to agree to affirm that the depiction of Mary Magdalene in the gospels was contradictory, I specifically stated that I wanted the word inconsistent in my proposition rather than contradictory.

McDonald seems to have difficulty understanding that an inconsistency, even though it is not a contradiction in the strict sense of the word as used in formal logic, can, nevertheless, be a mistake or discrepancy. Although he didn’t specially use the terms, McDonald tried the old P and ~P meaning of logical contradiction when he cited Copi’s strict definition of contradiction: “[In] (l)ogic either of two propositions so related to one another that if one is true, the other must be false.” McDonald is so far out in left field that he just can’t seem to recognize that errors, mistakes, discrepancies, inconsistencies--whatever one may choose to call them--don’t have to be contradictions in the strictest meaning of the word when used in formal logic. I didn’t see his post until late at night, but while I slept, I noticed that Andre Artus, a member of the Errancy forum, who lives in South Africa, had already posted the following comment to McDonald’s lesson in pseudologic.

Actually, I could make no more comments on McDonald’s pseudologic and go directly to his evasion of the Mary Magdalene problem, but I want to bury his lesson in logic so deep that he won’t want to dig it up again in this debate. My wife has a 2000 Park Avenue Buick sedan, so which of the following statements about her car is true and which is false?

I submit to McDonald that these two statements are irreconcilably inconsistent, because if my wife’s car is all red, it cannot simultaneously be all black, and vice versa. Does this mean, then, that if my wife’s car is not red, then the other statement is necessarily true? Well, I see my wife’s car every day, so I can say with certitude that it is neither red nor black. It is white. Hence, neither of the statements was true, and so it is entirely possible for irreconcilable inconsistencies to be both false. This seems to be a common-sense point of logic that McDonald just can‘t see.

That was fun, so let’s do it again. Suppose McDonald encountered these two statements.

These are certainly not statements that would require one to be true if the other were false, because if I were not born on February 28, 1932, it wouldn’t necessarily be true that I was born on August 7, 1934. However, they are obviously statements that are irreconcilably inconsistent in that both of them cannot be true. As it turns out, they are both false statements, because I was born on April 26, 1933. Again, this is an elementary point of logic that McDonald must not be able to see.

Let’s look at one more example.

I do not have a beagle, so is it necessarily true that I have a basset hound named Buddy? No, it isn’t. I have a dog, but he is a dachshund, and his name is Tuffy. So much, then, for McDonald’s lesson in logic. I never have claimed, at any time, that in the strictest sense of the word in logic, Matthew’s depiction of Mary Magdalene in 28:1-10 contradicts John’s depiction of her in 20:1-18. I have simply said that the two depictions are irreconcilably inconsistent, and irreconcilable inconsistencies in written documents are discrepancies.

At the end of his so-called reply, McDonald used what is apparently his favorite way to conclude his “rebuttal” speeches or articles. I had seen him use it before, and if memory serves me correctly, he appropriated it from Roy Deaver, who was one of McDonald’s teachers at the “school of preaching” that he attended. It works like this: McDonald imagines that I am in a prison surrounded by “several walls” that I must break through in order to escape. The first wall “is the word irreconcilably in the proposition” that I am affirming,” and McDonald claims that I must get through this wall in order to get to the next one, but I showed above that this wall is entirely imaginary, because irreconcilable statements do not require one of them to be true. It is entirely possible, then, for Matthew’s and John’s resurrection narratives to be irreconcilable without one of them having to be true. They can both be simultaneously irreconcilable and false.

So much, then, for the prison that McDonald thinks that he has locked me into. As I continue, I will show that the other walls in McDonald’s prison don’t exist either, but first I want to show that he has completely evaded the Mary-Magdalene problem, which is that Matthew 28:1-10 grammatically requires the understanding that Mary Magdalene was present throughout this part of Matthew’s narrative. After quoting this passage to show that [1] Matthew named only two women in his narrative, i. e., Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, [2] number 1 requires the women to be the antecedent of the pronouns they and them in the verses where the angel spoke to the women and the women ran from the tomb, and [3] since Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were the only women mentioned in this passage, Mary Magdalene was necessarily a part of the antecedent of the pronouns they and them. I then explained that this being the case, readers are grammatically required to understand that, as far as Matthew’s narrative is concerned, Mary Magdalene [1] went to the tomb, [2] encountered an angel who [a] announced that Jesus had risen, [b] invited Mary M and the other Mary to come into the tomb to see where Jesus had lain, and [c] told Mary M and the other Mary to go tell the disciples of Jesus that he had risen and would meet them again in Galilee, [3] ran from the tomb with the other Mary, [4] encountered Jesus, [5] touched Jesus, and [6] worshiped Jesus, who told Mary M and the other Mary [a] not to be afraid, and [b] go tell his brethren to depart into Galilee.

In support of this analysis of Matthew 28:1-10, after explaining that the substitution of antecedents for pronouns within a text will help clarify its meaning, I then presented the following rewritten version of Matthew’s narrative.

This narrative claims that Mary Magdalene had had experiences at the tomb that are completely irreconcilable with John’s claim that Mary M left the tomb site, after finding the stone rolled away, and ran to tell Peter and the other disciple that the body had been stolen. The Mary Magdalene problem, then, is that McDonald must explain why Mary M would have said what John claimed if she had had all of the experiences with the angel and Jesus himself, which Matthew said in his narrative that she had had. He has not done that. He, in fact, completely ignored my grammatical analysis of Matthew 28:1-10. I can only assume that he ignored it, because he knows that there is no sensible way for him to explain why Mary Magdalene, after she had seen and experienced all of the things that Matthew clearly reported that she had been involved in at the tomb site, would have told the disciples that the body had been stolen.

So that McDonald can’t evade the Mary-Magdalene problem analyzed above without his evasion becoming painfully obvious to our readers, I will put him on the spot by asking him to answer the following questions.

1. By names, who were “the women” who went to the tomb in Matthew’s narrative?

2. What is your textual basis for this answer?

3. If you excluded Mary Magdalene from your answer to number 1, what was your textual basis for this exclusion.

4. By names, who were “the women” whom the angel told that Jesus had risen (v:5)?

5. If you excluded Mary Magdalene from your answer to number 4, what was your textual basis for this exclusion?

6. By names, who were “the women” who ran from the tomb and encountered the resurrected Jesus (vs:8-10).

7. If you excluded Mary Magdalene from your answer to number 6. what was your textual basis for this exclusion?

8. If you included Mary Magdalene in your answers, how do you explain Mary Magdalene’s telling Peter and John that the body of Jesus had been stolen if she had by this time encountered both the angel and the risen Jesus?

If McDonald evades these questions, we will assume that he did so because he knows that there is no sensible way to reconcile Matthew’s depiction of Mary Magdalene with her depiction in John’s narrative. In his “reply” to my first defense, McDonald eliminated from consideration Gleason Archer’s “explanation.” Archer said that Mary M was so confused and bewildered by her experiences with the angel and the resurrected Jesus that she “apparently had not yet taken in the full import of what the angel meant when he told her that the Lord had risen again and that He was alive,” but McDonald said that he doesn’t “agree with Archer’s solution to this so-called problem,” so he has removed from the debate the possibility that Mary M was so bewildered by the experiences that Matthew attributed to her that she just didn’t understand what had happened to her. How, then, is McDonald going to explain the inconsistencies in Matthew’s and John’s depictions of her?

He can’t even claim that John’s account was of an early visit that Mary M made to the tomb, whereas Matthew’s was of a second visit she made to the tomb, because McDonald said in his “reply” that he “[does] not take the position that there were two visits made by Mary Magdalene.” If he rejects the two-visit explanation, then he must believe that Matthew and John both wrote about the same visit that Mary M made to the tomb. How, then, does McDonald explain that even though Mary M had encountered the angel, heard the angel announce that Jesus had risen, heard the angel invite her to come in and see where Jesus had lain, and then had met, touched, and worshiped Jesus after running from the tomb, she nevertheless ran to Peter and John and told them that the body had been stolen?

That is the Mary-Magdalene problem, and McDonald has yet even to try to explain it. If he evades the problem again, we will assume that he knows that he is really the one who is locked in a prison.

As I expected him to, McDonald took the position that “differences” in the two resurrection accounts under consideration don’t necessarily mean “contradiction,” but as I explained above, I am not claiming contradiction in the strict definition of this word in formal logic. I am claiming inconsistency and that inconsistency can be a discrepancy, error, or mistake if the differences are irreconcilable inconsistency. I certainly agree that differences in narratives of the same events don’t necessary mean inconsistency. If, for example, Matthew had said that Mary Magdalene was wearing sandals when she went to the tomb but John said nothing at all about her footwear, this difference would not be a discrepancy; however, if Matthew had said that Mary Magdalene was wearing sandals when the went to the tomb but John had said that she was barefooted when she went, this difference would be an irreconcilable inconsistency. As Charles Bailey pointed out to McDonald in the Errancy forum, the Mary-Magdalene problem doesn’t arise from simple differences in the narratives but from “incompatible information.” He then identified exactly what the incompatible information is.

This “difference” in Matthew’s and John’s account, then, is radically different from McDonald’s comments about differences in the gospel accounts of the last supper, even though McDonald was a bit confused about the order of events in the narratives of the last supper. The accounts are really the opposite of what McDonald claimed. Matthew and Mark both had Jesus breaking the bread first and then passing the cup, whereas Luke was the one who reversed the sequence and had Jesus passing the cup before breaking the bread.

Whether this “difference” is a discrepancy or not is really very debatable, because the word then in Luke’s account implies chronological sequence. According to Luke, Jesus took the cup, passed it among his disciples, and then he took a loaf of bread and gave it to his disciples. If I should say that I went to the post office this morning and then I went to K-Mart, readers would understand that I was saying that the order in which I went to these places was the post office first and then K-Mart. If, in reality, I had gone to K-Mart first and then the post office, my account of where I went would be discrepant? If not, why not?

To avoid getting bogged down in a discussion that is really not relevant to the Mary-Magdalene problem, let’s assume that the gospel accounts of the last supper don’t contain irreconcilable differences. That is a defendable position, because the word translated then in verse 19 of Luke’s account was kai in Greek, which conveys the English sense of and. Although it was common in Greek--as is also true in English--for chronological sequence to be implied by the conjunction and, I will just agree for the sake of argument that Luke meant nothing more than that Jesus had some time during the last supper taken a cup and taken a loaf of bread but not necessarily in that order. This would be entirely different from the Mary-Magdalene problem which has her in John’s account saying that the body of Jesus had been stolen, whereas Matthew’s account has her encountering an angel, hearing the angel announce the resurrection, seeing the place where the body of Jesus had lain, and then encountering, touching, and worshiping Jesus. What John claimed that she said to Peter and John is therefore irreconcilably incompatible with Matthew’s descriptions of what she had seen and heard before her encounter with Peter and John.

The Mary-Magdalene problem has been presented and represented and represented to McDonald, so we will wait to see if he will address the problem and present a solution to it. I predict that he won’t, because the two narratives are, as my proposition states, “irreconcilably inconsistent” in their depictions of Mary Magdalene’s conduct on resurrection morning.

To post this on IIDB, I must not exceed 5,000 words, so I will devote the rest of my space to showing how I have dismantled McDonald’s imaginary prison.

I showed above that this wall exists only in McDonald’s imagination, because to say that two narratives of an event contain irreconcilable inconsistencies is to state an entirely possible premise. It is possible for both of them to be false, and the fact that McDonald apparently can’t see this speaks volumes about his knowledge of logic.

I also showed that it is possible for irreconcilably inconsistent narratives to be both false, and the fact that McDonald apparently can’t see this speaks volumes about his knowledge of logic. There is no second wall.

This wall crumbles too, because I have shown that it doesn’t necessarily follow that if I say that two gospel accounts of the resurrection are irreconcilably inconsistent, I must say that one of them has to be true. If I am not required to take that position, then I am giving no credence at all to the resurrection of Jesus.

Since the first, second, and third walls don’t exist, except in McDonald’s imagination, then there is no fourth, fifth, or sixth wall to break through. I won't bother to comment on the non sequitur in his statement above, because I don't want to give him room to wiggle any more than he already has.

We see a bit of question begging in McDonald’s seventh wall, because he can say that “God cannot lie or be wrong” only by assuming the inerrancy of the Bible, which makes those claims--even though the Bible contradicts itself on them. Furthermore, it doesn’t follow that if part of the Bible is inspired, all of it is inspired, because such a claim ignores the possibility that a deity could have inspired some documents to which uninspired documents were later added. I am not going to get into these matters, however, because I don’t want to give McDonald any excuses to evade the issue in this debate, i. e., the Mary-Magdalene problem, any more than he already has.

I showed above that McDonald is apparently unable to recognize the difference in merely different information that isn’t inconsistent with another account and in different information that is irreconcilably inconsistent. If McDonald says that Matthew’s and John’s depictions of Mary Magdalene involve only different information that isn’t inconsistent information, then let him explain to us why she told Peter and John that the body of Jesus had been stolen after she had seen an angel, heard the angel announce that Jesus had risen, and had then met, touched, and worshiped the risen Jesus.

If McDonald doesn’t address this problem in his next rebuttal, we will know then that he doesn’t intend to address it.

Chili

So why is it the Matthew did not know the who the "other Mary" was and Magdalene did not know who the "other disciple" was?

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Farrell has posed an interesting question on the Mary Magdalene resurrection accounts and I thank him for bringing the fascinating Bible sections to my attention.

And these questions remind me a bit of another resurrection harmony I recently studied where understanding the issues about -

'he goeth before you into Galilee'

was simple once one saw how Luke had telescoped his narrative with a time gap, a pause, before Luke 24:44. Hmmm .. I do not know if that one is in Farrell's contradiction arsenal.

On that Galilee question modern versions like the NAS, Holman, ESV and NetBible are errant (mistaken translations .. although grammatically feasible) .. while the King James Bible and the line of historic Bibles (Tyndale, Geneva and Wycliffe as well) are accurate. Accurate in the sense of sound, translated properly, and without either translational or internal error. My belief is that God has His hand upon the historic English Bible, the King James Bible (the inspired and preserved word of God) no less than any particular Greek or Hebrew/Aramaic manuscripts, manuscripts that are unintelligible to most folks, and are in mostly unused dialects of ancient languages. God's hand is not shortened, and we have His word today available for the ploughman.

And the fullest and finest apologetics and faith needs be built on the Bible of the ploughman .. readable, universal, accurate in the language best known and understood throughout the world and with an unmatched majesty of language and translational precision.

There is a common theme in apologetics that if you do not use the historic Bible apologetics is crippled, a shell. Sometimes simply absurd as in the swine marathon from Gerash or the synagogues of Judea. I touched on this in response to the Matthew 1:7 supposed error 'Asaphe' on Peter Kirby's errancy wiki and it is a point that comes up time and again.

The modern versions (as I pointed out in other threads here) are created under textual paradigms that must produce an errant text. Those ever-changing versions, built on the base of a couple of scribally-corrupt manuscripts, are simply incompatible with the Biblical concepts of tangible inspiration and preservation. (And the inspiration and preservation verses themselves are watered down in the hundreds of modern version mistranslations). And that helps explain why some errantists actually insist on using those 'duck-shoot' texts. However I believe Farrell is a commendable exception in this regard.

Now I have not yet checked whether this is a factor on the issues raised by Farrell here, perhaps the harmony works with the modern versions as well. However before engaging I do want to make it clear that I will be working with the King James Bible and not the alexandrian modern versions in any apologetics discussions. This is fundamental.

For the rest of this post I have simply
shortened Farrell's post to cover the parts that will be germane.

Much of the original post had to do with non-functional apologetic attempts, irrelevant to me here. Like that of Gleason Archer. Attempts like Mary Magdalene 'panicking' or being in 'confusion' in regards to the amazing events of that fateful day. Attempts that create discomfiting and even insoluble conceptual and NT-integrity and harmonistic problems.

The OP had a lot of debate-originating context and some posturing,
which I have also omitted below.

There is an unusual section from Farrell discussing -
'the NT in bound volumes'
On that paragraph I disagree with Farrell's conclusions. Since in the OP he only uses that section to identity Mary Magdalene in two gospel accounts (with which I agree) I will not object.

However Farrell might attempt to expand his concepts there as a wedge to use against a valid harmonization of the gospel accounts -

(how could Luke, or Matthew, or Mark, or John have written a/b/c
for the readership that did not have such another gospel).

Such an expansion would be a radical adjustment of his claims of errancy than that given in the OP and it is possible that Farrell could use the groundwork laid in the OP section 'NT in bound volumes' as a fallback postion to critique a true harmony.

In that case I would discuss how NT harmonizations legitimately use all of the NT. And it is invalid to claim error because an individual book gives a picture that is incomplete or, viewed from the eyes of Farrell or another skeptic, unsatisfactory. By looking at the book individually, separate from the full NT, and conjecturing as to the response of the 1st century reader.

The NT must be addressed as a full cohesive unit and the various gospels can in fact interweave in ways that would be surprising in secular literature.

Accepting
'The Divine Unity of Scripture' (Adolph Saphir)
is a fundamental tenet of consistent Messianic faith.

Ok,- here is the condensed, straightforward version of Farrell's OP.
Later we will discuss the harmony.


Excellent questions

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

FatherMithras

If by accurate you mean "in accordance with the original texts" I'd have to differ. But since you seem to mean "in accordance with itself, because I believe based only on faith that it was guided by god." I suppose we could agree. However, i'd have to call your definition of "accurate" inaccurate.

Exactly, unfortunately, as the newer, more accurate translations show, the KJV isn't one of these.

Except that they aren't as corrupt as the translations you prefer. They are more accurate, in that the translation more closely resembles what was actually originally written to be translated from. The fact we can more accurately translate now isn't a weakness. The fact these translations are "ever changing" is a strength, not a weakness. As in science, the more we know the closer we get. For some reason, you've asserted keeping an innaccute text is preferrable because without evidenc eyou believe god helped it be translated. Nothing indicates newer text must be "flawed" due to a new "paradigm" (which I suppose must be the paradigm of getting as close to the original as possible.