WinAce

Check this out. I'm debating whether the only explanation for Christianity's success in spite of inhibitory social factors is an "undeniable witness to the Resurrection", the subject of J.P. Holding's fallacy-filled article The Impossible Faith.

The really juicy stuff starts on page 2.

This guy adores Holding (of Tektonics.org) and is on record as stating "He's hilarious, blunt, writes in a scholarly (yet easy to understand) way, and he's a master at debating... yes... I mean a master."

Anyway, you can see I'm having fun. Kudos to Peter Kirby's work at EarlyChristianWritings.com, the TalkOrigins of the NT. This guy keeps bringing up irrelevant points--such as the dating of Mark, Acts, etc. I'm not overtly familiar with those issues, but I feel I'm holding my own for the time being.

However, the one thing that bugs me is that he keeps requoting this bizarre assertion from Holding, based on supposed interpretation of ancient society's codes, that skeptics would have been running around debunking all claims Christianity ever made at every turn. :banghead:

Holding writes:

I've pointed out:

1. That there are pretty much zero examples of debunked paranormal stories in the ancient world
2. That Christian claims at the start need not be the same as those later, after much time had passed and made falsification impossible
3. That the ancient view of "debunking" included attributing paranormal abilities to Satan and fair amount of satire, with such clever polemics as "she was actually impregnated by a Roman soldier".
4. That the obvious, uncorrected legendary development we see from gospel to gospel is good evidence that no one cared about the claims within.

Are there any other points to be brought up? In my view, this is one of the top 10 most ridiculous arguments for Christianity's correctness ever made.

It's so obviously wrong, as there's actual, positive evidence Christian claims such as Matthew's birth story and the increasingly amazing events at Jesus' crucifixion as time passes were made up, but how does this square with what Holding writes?

Is he misrepresenting his source like creationists misquote Gould, drawing conclusions stronger than the social data would warrant, not taking into account other factors, or...?

I think I've made some good points, but as always suggestions are welcome. Since he ran off to get help from Holding at TheologyWeb, I feel no qualms with asking for such here.

Kosh

Have you asked him to apply this assertion to Islam and explain how it gained such acceptance if it was false?

Or is he a Christuslim?

Toto

It's really stretching things to go from traditional societies where social control is everywhere and everyone pokes their nose in your business, to saying that claims about Jesus would have been checked out.

Those traditional societies are not skeptical. They may know who's sleeping with whom, but they pass on a lot of superstition. Charges of witchcraft flourish in those societies (when the crops fail, you pick out someone to blame.)

Besides, we have no record of detailed Jesus stories from before the destruction of the Temple, which would have obliterated the evidence. Paul (assuming his letters date to the mid first century and were not forged in the 2nd) does not give us any details that could be rebutted - no empty tomb, no virgin birth, nothing to investigate.

Infidelettante

There is an interesting story told in Acts 23 that can shed some light on the subject of Jewish reaction to Christianity. We are lead to believe the early church was active in evangelization and apology on the behalf of the new religion. This is most likely not so. In Acts 23 Paul goes to Jerusalem to quell the misgivings of the Jerusalem church regarding his teachings. To appease James, the leader of the Jerusalem church, Paul was required to take part in a ritual cleansing at the Temple to prove he ‘walkest orderly and keepest the law’ Acts 23:24. The leaders of the church in Jerusalem were deeply concerned that Paul was teaching his converts that they were no longer under the law as other Jews were. Other Jews such as themselves.

The correct interpretation of this passage is that for some years after the death of Jesus the members of the church in Jerusalem were indistinguishable from the multitude of devout Jews who kept the Law and offered sacrifice at the Temple. James didn’t take Paul to the empty tomb. Not to the garden of Gethsemane. And not to Golgotha. James took Paul to the only place that had any religious meaning to him and that was the Temple. The reason there was no attempt by nonbelievers to counter the claims of the early Christians is that no such claims were ever made. The followers of Jesus in Jerusalem were devout Jews who kept the law and revered the temple. They believed the Messiah had come and would return to raise Israel to rule the nations with God on the throne of David. But that does not mean they were Christians. It only says they were Jews. Not Christians. Jews.

Steven Carr

There is a huge difference between a society where people gossip about each other and a society where people debunk miracle claims.


One wonders why Pilate had no idea of what Jesus was supposed to have done, if the governor had all these thousands of people spying on everybody else.

Paul warns in his letters of false letters supposedly by him, so rumours could abound and spread without being debunked.

Steven Carr

'The ancients would not have worried about not having adequate measures in place to stop a terrorist attack -- because such measures of surveillance were already present. Control comes not from indiviuals controlling themselves, but from the group controlling the individual. '

Gosh, there were whole groups of sicarii terrorists (I think sicarii is the right word).


As an aside, I wonder why the people who though Jesus was Jeremiah returned or Elijah returned or John the Baptist returned ever got that belief, when we all know outrageous claims were debunked rapidly by all these thousands of thought police Turkel
claims were roaming the ancient world.


Josephus's 'Wars of the Jews' says that a heifer gave birth to a lamb in the middle of the Temple.
This was written within ten years of the events by a participant in the Wars.

Why was it not debunked?


Pliny the Elder writes in Book 7 of 'Natural History' that Cicero knew of a copy of Homer's Iliad written on a piece of paper small enough to fit in a nutshell. Pliny describes a model of a four-horse chariot made out a piece of ivory smaller than a fly's wing. He mentions a boy of eight who ran 75 miles in just a few hours. Pliny reports a man who could see for 135 miles. Book 7 Section 174 has a tale of someone who could leave his body and report things thousands of miles away.


And this is from a person Turkel/Holding calls a sceptic.

Why were these claims not debunked?

If such an intelligent man as Pliny the Elder, somebody who took pains to check sources, could believe such rubbish, why not peasant fisherman from a backwater of the Roman Empire, a world where (according the the NT) people expected to meet gods in the street?



Why wa sth

Steven Carr

Turkel is an apologist who will say anything, anwhere , anytime, even if totally contradicts what he says anywhere else.

Take

http://www.tektonics.org/JPH_FICF.html

Robert (No Link) Turkel write about John 20:22 'Helsm incorrectly sees Jesus imparting the Holy Spirit to the disciples in John 20:22 -- this was not an impartation but a symbolic enactment of the Pentecost event.'

So Turkel is adamant that the disciples did NOT receive the Holy Spirit in John 20:22


http://www.tektonics.org/TK-LK.html

Acts 2:4
How is this reconciled with John 20:22, where they Spirit was received? The Apostles, and believers, could and can be filled with Holy Spirit again and again. One never loses the Holy Spirit, but the intensity varies. (The Greek word here, pletho, carries the implication of a fulness in the sense of accomplishment of completion: Hence

in Luke 4:28 -- "And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath". It does not imply that before there was necessarily none of what one was filled with before.)

So here Turkel writes that the Spirit WAS received in John 20:22!!!

Turkel cannot even keep his stories straight, and he is a master debater?

Kosh

BTW Winace,

I read a few of the links that Tarmac provided under "Christian Theism" post. All of them were the most pathetic fallacies and bad reasoning, it's disgusting. IF this is the kind of stuff he holds up as good evidence, he's a moron.

Peter Kirby

Re: the stuff by Michael Bumbulis, refer to this discussion of 7Q5 by Daniel Wallace of the Dallas Theological Seminary:

7Q5: The Earliest NT Papyrus?

best,
Peter Kirby

WinAce

Interesting. Is there scholarly precedent for this? If the church back home at Jerusalem made few extravagant claims, and those were borne out of evangelization efforts and missionary embellishment 500 miles away instead, there would be no reason for anyone to take issue with the church at large.

Best point yet made. It seems he's drawing unwarranted conclusions from the sociological data.

What else could he use as evidence? It's not like he has a choice between William Lane Craig or actual argument. Feel free to debunk some of them if you want.

As luck would have it, I remembered that link from a previous discussion here and already referenced it. Daniel Wallace is one of my favorite conservative scholars. His article on the two-source hypothesis was sheer 0wnage.

More suggestions would be appreciated, of course. I think I ripped him adequately on Christianity's "falsifiability" and the numerous begged questions made...