Pearce’s Potshots #59: Fairy-Tale Atheist Eisegesis (1)

Last updated on: February 1, 2022 at 11:32 am By Dave Armstrong

Atheist anti-theist Jonathan M. S. Pearce is the main writer on the blog, A Tippling Philosopher. His “About” page from his former site states: “Pearce is a philosopher, author, blogger, public speaker and teacher from Hampshire in the UK. He specialises in philosophy of religion, but likes to turn his hand to science, psychology, politics and anything involved in investigating reality.”

He has encouraged me to visit his site and offer critiques. Before he departed his former site at Patheos, he wrote under a post dated 12-14-21: “I even need to thank the naysayers. Some of them have put up with a lot of robust pushback and still they come. Bravery or stupidity – it’s a fine line. But they are committed, and there is something to be said for taking that commitment into the lion’s den. Dave, you are welcome at my new place. Come challenge me. All the best to you and thanks for your critiques of my pieces. Sorry I couldn’t get to more of them.”

Again, at his new site (under a post dated 1-27-22), after a vicious attack by a commenter, calling for me and indeed all Christians to be banned, Jonathan offered an honorable and principled refusal: “I do welcome disagreements because I don’t want [my blog] to [be] just an echo chamber. As long as it is good faith . . . someone like Armstrong does give me ammunition for some of my pieces! As long as they aren’t trollish.”

His words below will be in blue.

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This is a reply to his post, Christian apologetics and defending Matthew’s guards (1-31-22), which in turn is a response to my articles, Pearce’s Potshots #57: Matthew & the Tomb Guards (1-28-22) and Pearce’s Potshots #58: Paul & Jesus’ “Empty” Tomb (1-29-22).

There’s something meta going on

Oooh! More conspiracies underfoot?

when a Christian apologist takes aim at a biblical account of mine with some typical apologetics, claiming I am making stuff up out of whole cloth when I myself accused the Gospel writers (or apologists) of making stuff up out of whole cloth to defend themselves against Jewish accusations 2,000 years ago.

Or perhaps this is not meta, but hypocrisy, as you will see.

Yes it is not only hypocrisy, but high irony, that Jonathan does what he falsely accuses Matthew of doing, or — to put it more mildly — offers no proof or evidence whatsoever that Matthew was doing what he accuses him of doing.

This all concerns a small section of narrative—a pericope—that is only found in one Gospel (Matthew) and looks very much like the author made it up to serve a purpose.

Where is the hard historical evidence that he did this? And lacking same, why is the hostile claim made in the first place? Does Jonathan claim to be able to read the mind and discern the interior motivations of a Jewish writer from 1900+ years ago? If so, I hope he explains to all of us how that works. Simply stating something and assuming it is compelling is not an intellectual argument.

I’m sure many — like myself — are waiting with baited breath to see this revelation of how Jonathan can read minds and motives at a distance. But don’t hold your breath, folks, because you’ll be waitin’ a long, LONG time.

Christians don’t like such claims because, of course, it all has to be true!

Merely silly and useless comment. He believes very strongly what he does; so do I. My view “has” to be true as long as I believe there is sufficient epistemological reason and reason in general (of many sorts) to believe it to be true (along with a reason for religious faith itself). That’s how I’ve always lived my life and how I have approached disputes of fact and clashing beliefs: which is why I’ve changed my mind in many major ways throughout my life.

First let me again present the thesis I am proposing which is, just to confirm, constructed from the Gospel data and is drawing on a lot of pre-existent biblical criticism,

. . . which is itself almost always arbitrary and pulled out of thin air. This is a major point I make throughout.

and not pulled out of thin air, my posterior, or constructed from whole cloth:

Yeah, he gets it from theologically liberal or skeptical or atheist academics. Atheist arguments are almost always recycled and regurgitated and parroted from others. Very few of them are brand new. But these arguments from the big-name, fashionable academics among atheists must be substantiated on their own, not just accepted because they have an axe to grind that Jonathan also happily wants to grind along with them.

Paul does not mention the empty tomb narrative at all in the passion sequence concerning Jesus’ death and resurrection. This is bizarre because we would have expected him to do so (perfect reasons for so doing to defend his arguments in 1 Corinthians, for example).

As I wrote at the end of my previous reply to Jonathan:

Paul is under no moral, logical, or “literary” obligation to replicate all that the Gospels have about the empty tomb. They already covered that. Paul did mostly systematic theology, not recounting of events.

Knocking him for that is yet more of the silly argument from silence. I say that Paul stated pretty much what he should have been expected to say, given his purpose in his writing. The epistles were written for theological instruction and exhortation, not to reiterate the facts of the life of Jesus that Christians were already well familiar with.

From this perspective, I don’t see why we should “expect” him to mention it. He referred to the “tomb” once, as I showed last time (Acts 13:29) and to Jesus’ “burial” three more times in his epistles. It’s much ado about nothing. He mentioned it. Because I dared to submit Acts 13:29 for Jonathan’s consideration, he immediately upped the rhetoric and polemics a thousand-fold and melted down in his combox:

Wow, you are being willfully disingenuous. Please show me where Paul mentions the empty tomb or any of the narrative the gospels include about the empty tomb. You are being really dishonest here and skating close to the mark.

Lacking any compelling reason to question to question the authenticity of Acts 13:29 and Luke’s record of what Paul preached in that instance, he immediately did what atheists almost always do when their particular claims are shown to be false: 1) make a huge fuss, and 2) arbitrarily and with no provided compelling reason, deny that Acts 13:29 is a truthful accurate record of Paul’s words. How do we know it’s not accurate? As I wrote in my second reply back to Jonathan:

Luke’s trustworthiness as an accurate reporter of all kinds of things in the book of Acts has been rather dramatically verified by archaeology, again and again. . . . This is the criterion for any other ancient historian: are the things they report independently verified or substantiated?

That’s objective, hard evidence: the opposite of what Jonathan is offering. One can quibble about how relatively strong each individual instance of this archaeological confirmation is, but it is evidence.

2. Mark, the first Gospel (written 40 years after the death of Jesus and some decades after Paul), mentions the empty tomb. But he adds an odd sequence at the end of his narrative that no other later Gospel writer adds. Indeed, they outright contradict the claim. He and his Gospel (later versions interpolate further details) with the women witnesses to the empty tomb leaving and specifically not telling anyone about the empty tomb and what they had seen. [five typos corrected]

3. This very much appears to act as an explanation as to why his audience has not heard about the empty tomb—because the women kept it a secret, of course! After all, we need to explain why he mentions this secret-keeping but all the other Gospels contradict this.

This is old ground that I have already covered. Word-search for the section “Jesus: Resurrection” in my Armstrong’s Refutations of Alleged Biblical “Contradictions” to find fifteen articles about all the alleged “difficulties” in the biblical accounts.

4. Matthew admits that Jews had been arguing that a better explanation of the empty tomb was that someone had stolen the body: “and this story was widely spread among the Jews and is to this day.” (Matthew 28:15)

Yes, it’s a perfectly plausible thing to believe actually happened. They didn’t believe in Jesus’ Resurrection and so they had to make up an alternate explanation for the empty tomb: precisely as atheists do today: including this very “stolen body” rationalization. We have Matthew’s report. Is it something that seems plausible or not? I think it clearly is. People hostile to one explanation of a purported event provide a contradictory one to explain the same thing. When folks didn’t like Jesus’ miracles, they tried to claim that they were done under the inspiration of the devil and not God (to which Jesus replied with his “a divided house cannot stand” discourse).

5. Matthew is the next Gospel after Mark, some 15+ years later, and is the only Gospel to include the narrative of their being guards at the door. This is odd, and is part of a slew of good evidence that it was made up by Matthew.

Saying there is “evidence” (hard, concrete, historical evidence) is not the same thing as demonstrating it. It remains the case that Jonathan has provided no such evidence that Matthew made up a whopper, save the conspiracy theories that emanate from his head and the heads of atheists whose ideas he parrots. The idea underlying this silliness seems to be, “if a nefarious plot to deceive readers is possible from the Evangelists, then it must be plausible or actual.” That doesn’t follow.

[An] eminent Catholic exegete admits that Matthew’s guards are “almost unintelligible” and that “there is neither internal nor external evidence to cause us to affirm historicity.” (The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown, 1994, p. 1311) [two typos corrected]

I’m delighted that Jonathan brought up Fr. Brown. I’ve been doing apologetics for 41 years: the last twenty as a full-time, published (11 books) Catholic apologist. I have observed a zillion times that the enemies of Christianity always bring up liberal or skeptical scholars who claim the name “Christian” in order to fight against various things in Christianity that they disbelieve. Atheists and cultists like Jehovah’s Witness, and Muslims, all use precisely this same technique. And I’ve debated them all.

But if a person cannot be said to accurately represent historical Christianity, then it is improper to cite them, and it should be noted that their views are heterodox, not orthodox, according to standard, historical Christian theological categories. Fr. Raymond Brown is one of these who is always brought up. He had some good things to say, like almost all scholars do. But he was a Catholic dissident, as I have documented:

Fr. Brown . . . cast doubt on the historical accuracy of numerous articles of the Catholic faith. These articles of faith, proclaimed by Popes and believed by the faithful over the centuries, include Jesus’ physical Resurrection; the Transfiguration; the fact that Jesus founded the one, true Catholic Church and instituted the priesthood and the episcopacy; the fact that 12 Apostles were missionaries and bishops; and the truth that Jesus was not “ignorant” on a number of matters.

Not least, though, was Fr. Brown’s exegesis concerning the infancy narratives of Saints Matthew and Luke that calls into question the virginal conception of Jesus and the accounts of our Lord’s birth and childhood.

In addition to Cardinal Shehan, such eminent peers of Fr. Brown as Msgr. George A. Kelly, Fr. William Most, Fr. Richard Gilsdorf, Fr. Rene Laurentin, and John J. Mulloy were highly critical of the Brown revisionism of the Catholic Church’s age-old theology of inspiration and inerrancy. (“Traditional Catholic Scholars Long Opposed Fr. Brown’s Theories,” Henry V. King, The Wanderer, 10 September 1998; reprinted at the Catholic Culture website)

This guy is supposed to represent historic Christianity? He does not! He’s skeptical of Matthew’s guards because he was skeptical even of all kinds of Catholic dogmas (things all Catholics are required to believe as a member of the faith). And I’m quite sure that if we examined Fr. Brown’s stated reason for doubting the veracity of the guards account, we would find nothing of any evidentiary value. It’ll be — so I confidently predict — like peeling an onion: no core. Just because he was famous and wrote a big 1000-page book that atheists like Jonathan are ecstatic about, doesn’t turn a non-argument (bald statements with no substantiation) into an actual argument.

Now Jonathan (with his oft-employed broad brush) will say that I am dismissing Christian scholarship per se, which is nonsense. I am dismissing those who masquerade as orthodox Catholics, but who are not at all: which is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. He himself does exactly the same thing from the opposite perspective. So, for example, Jonathan roundly mocks archaeologist and Egyptologist Kenneth A. Kitchen, who is a profound scholar, as if he were some uneducated troglodyte whose opinions are utterly worthless.

And why does he do that? Well, it’s because Kitchen is an archaeological “maximalist” who actually believes the Bible is trustworthy in matters of historical detail, and he is a practicing evangelical Protestant. That’s more than enough reason for Jonathan to immediately dismiss him out of hand. Here is an example of him sarcastically doing this:

He [yours truly!] then lists a bunch of Jewish and Christian conservatives, many from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, throwing in archaeologist Kenneth Kitchen for good measure. Always good to see an axiomatic biblical maximalist in there for fair and objective academia. (7-3-21)

Thus, if he is justified in dismissing a scholar like Kitchen because he actually believes in Christianity and the Bible, then by the same token I can dismiss the erroneous opinions of Fr. Brown: a man who was a Catholic priest, but who denied many Catholic dogmas. Goose and gander. Jonathan thinks Kitchen was intellectually dishonest and not a “true” archaeologist. I think Fr. Brown was intellectually dishonest and not a “true” Catholic (in the full sense of the words, including acceptance of dogmas). It doesn’t mean I would never cite him ever. In cases where he made a true observation, I certainly would.

Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy (which I read many years ago) made a statement to the effect that a Christian (even someone like Thomas Aquinas) cannot truly do philosophy. Jonathan seems to think (with no basis) that an orthodox Christian cannot do theology, either. He or she must disbelieve several required tenets of their Christian faith in order to be a “true scholar.” This is epistemological madness.

Therefore, because I am an orthodox Catholic apologist, Jonathan must accuse me of “being willfully disingenuous . . . being really dishonest” when I defend the notion that Paul mentioned the empty tomb. He seems to be unable to classify me any other way. I actually believe that which I am defending, and so my opinions must be dismissed out of hand.

6. This looks like a counter-argument against the Jewish counter-arguments that the body was stolen. Matthew even phrases it like it is. Matthew appears to be privy to a private conversation between the guards and the Sanhedrin (Matthew 28):

I recently dealt with this issue of how the Evangelists could know “hidden / secret things.” In this case, one scenario that could explain it would be that a member of the Sanhedrin privy to such discussions later became a Christian and reported what was talked about. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were two such men. There could have been others. In fact, it could very well have been one of these two men who gave Matthew the information. Note that I am simply speculating on possibilities: not making foolish “certain” proclamations of what Matthew must have done, with no evidence.

7. This Christian polemic counter-counter-argument evidences that Mark invented (or communicated a developed narrative)

Yes, the oral traditions were present right from the time of Christ’s death and could be drawn from.

that did not exist in Paul’s time because otherwise Mark would have had to be dealing with the Jewish counter-arguments.

Of course it existed before Paul’s time . . .

But he didn’t because those arguments did not exist because no one in the wider community knew about the narrative before Mark’s Gospel.

Jonathan makes yet another universal negative statement — he never tires of these! — for which he has no hard evidence. Did you notice that he gave none? He simply spouts his fantasies as if they should be received with the utmost seriousness as unarguable profundities.

8. This is also supported by the fact that later Gospels did not include the women keeping secret since everyone did know about the empty tomb as a result of the late (compared to Paul and the events) communication of this part of the story. They had no need to explain the to their audiences why they had not heard of the empty tomb as Mark had to do.

See my defenses of the scriptural Resurrection accounts, under that category in my collection. Much ado about nothing. Groundless tin foil hat conspiracy theories . . .

9. The later Luke and John did not include the guards polemic. Christians equally need to explain this. I surmise that they saw it for what it was: an obviously ahistorical polemic.

I am not compelled to enter into a conspiratorial mindset. It’s a non-issue. The four Gospels have different emphases and different intended audiences. The Christian observes that if one of them mentioned something that was unique, so what? It’s in the New Testament somewhere, and that’s all that matters. There is no obligation for all four Gospels to be absolutely identical. What would be the point?! So all of them have unique things, because that’s what happens when four human beings take up writing about particular historical events.

I did not literally construct anything out of thin air. That is, er, literally impossible.

Did I even metaphorically do this?

No. I used data that is in the Gospels, and Matthew even admits to the Jews having a prevailing counter-argument. You cannot make things up out of thin air in proposing a coherent causal theory connecting actual data (Gospel claims). This is how all theories are constructed. Can we test it? Yes, for coherence. No, since we cannot go back in time. Data can disconfirm the theory (but doesn’t), if it could be found to do so. And this is the same case for the Christian thesis.

The hypothesis of Matthew simply making it up for polemical purposes has no supporting historical evidence. Period. Zero, zilch, zip, nada, nuthin’. The fact that Jonathan thinks it has explanatory value and should be believed because of the NT we have is not such evidence. One could “prove” [choke] virtually anything by the ridiculous criteria that Jonathan is employing.

Secondly, the fact that it is a hostile interpretation of Matthew’s motives has no connection whatsoever to what can be historically known. There is certainly nothing in the Bible about that. When Evangelist Luke explains his motivation for writing his Gospel (1:1-4) it seems perfectly respectable, honest, and above board. We have no good reason to suspect his stated motivations. Likewise, with the other three.

But of course, in the conspiratorialist mentality (which always has a quick answer for everything), that is just a ruse to fool the folks, you see . . .

This part is pretty egregious: apparently I “constructed (literally out of thin air) an entire elaborate story of deceit and intent to deliberately lie about the events surrounding Jesus’ death.”

Yes! This is his view: Matthew made up a story and pretended that it was fact when he knew it to be fiction; a fairy-tale. As I noted today in his combox: that is serious immorality according to Christian ethics. It violates one of the Ten Commandments (not bearing false witness) and is an objectively mortal (grave) sin in Catholic teaching, and a serious sin according to all Christians.

Now Jonathan is trying to make out that he didn’t do what he has stated repeatedly. If I call him on it, he is highly offended. It’s the first part of his recent article (1-27-22) on the Guards at the tomb and Matthew (my bolding):

I’ve written before on why the guards at the tomb of Jesus, included only in the Gospel of Matthew, are almost certainly invented by the author of that Gospel. . . .

Suffice to say that Matthew’s guards are a polemic created by the author to answer criticisms . . .

Mark made up the Empty Tomb claim. [i.e., this is the basis for the further conspiratorialist claim that Matthew made up the guards story]

Everyone loves a good fairy tale, but this is a bad fairy tale.

I am not sure if my claims are deceitful and if I am lying about the events, or whether I claim deceit and lying in the sources I am talking about.

The latter. I haven’t (and have never) accused Jonathan of being deliberately dishonest or disingenuous. He has accused me of that (see the citation above).

Either way, he needs to sort out his rhetoric and walk back the accusation or not mischaracterize or misinterpret my claims.

I don’t need to sort out or walk back anything. I have not misrepresented Jonathan. He thinks the Evangelists are (at least in some respects, not all) a pack of liars and that the ends justified the means for them. If they had to lie and deceive to get the story of Jesus Christ out, well, that’s just what they did! There’s not the slightest historical evidence for such an outrageous charge, but that won’t stop Jonathan from making it!

We’re back to the same old desperate Christian defenses that attack me rather than the substance of my arguments.

I have done no such thing. As always in my apologetics, I make a very vigorous “bulldog” argument against what I believe to be untrue and erroneous opinions. It’s ALL about the ideas, not persons. I think Jonathan is a nice guy who sincerely believes what he does, and that he is sincerely dead wrong on a zillion things, whenever he opines about the Bible and Christianity.

I have reiterated recently that I highly admire his allowing me to comment on his site. I have nothing whatever against him personally. I’m simply disagreeing with him. He’s said some nice things about me, too, but at times he becomes acerbic and makes it personal, and this is counter-productive in terms of good back-and-forth dialogue.

I think he may be too thin-skinned and oversensitive in this particular instance, causing him to “see” things in my critiques that simply aren’t there. He’s a human being. We’ve all done that at times.

Of course, it is worth noting that I didn’t pull the idea out of my posterior: the late Gospel invention of the empty tomb narrative has been around since Rudolf Bultmann proposed it in the early 20th century, and no doubt before.

Of course. See my comments about Fr. Raymond Brown above. All this does is send the process of how one manages to believe such conspiracy theories back to Bultmann, who has to explain where it came from; what actual evidence there is for it. As we see in the Wikipedia article on him, Bultmann was another radical skeptic:

[H]e argued for replacing supernatural biblical interpretations with temporal and existential categorizations . . . This approach led Bultmann to reject doctrines such as the pre-existence of Christ. [which is blasphemy and rank heresy according to Christianity because it denies the divinity of Christ and the Trinity] . . . Bultmann carried form criticism so far as to call the historical value of the gospels into serious question.

Why should I care what such a man thinks? He hasn’t even gotten to first base in Christianity, having rejected Jesus’ divinity. He has no credibility for any orthodox Christian on those grounds alone. So your pride in drawing from him gets a “ho hum” / “what else is new?” from me. Of course you will like a guy who has beliefs like that.

Armstrong continues in a way that makes me pretty angry:

First and foremost, arguments of this type are arguments from silence (the logical fallacy, argumentum ex silentio), and as anyone familiar with logic and/or philosophy, and/or debating strategies in general knows (and Jonathan calls himself “a philosopher”), they carry little or no force at all.

Considering he wants me to, I presume, exchange cordially and intellectually with him, he goes about this in a bizarre way. He is intellectually and existentially insulting me with passive-aggressive comments…

Really? I have no such passive-aggressiveness. I like Jonathan. I have nothing against him; tons of objections to his beliefs. Noting that someone used the notorious argument from silence is not attacking the person who did it. It’s pointing out a logical fallacy. He just doesn’t like having his views vigorously critiqued. Almost everyone is that way. He’s not alone, by any means. And many get angry when that happens, as he now admits he is. But there is not the slightest reason to be.

If anyone should be angry here, it would be me, seeing what Jonathan is saying, but I’m not, because I have a very even-tempered, easy-going personality and am well-used to people getting angry when their views are critiqued. His task is to prove that he has not used the fallacy of the argument from silence. It’s pretty clear that he has, in talking about various Gospel writers who didn’t mention things, and then poor old pitiful Matthew, who feels led to construct a lie as a result.

But he is also wrong. This is not an argument from silence, only a part of it is. The Paul claim is the only part that is, and it is valid, as I set out in an entire chapter on this in The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story. He can deal with that. This isn’t “pulled out of thin air” but he is certainly “skating on thin ice”.

I’m not referring to only Paul, but also the other Evangelists. He asserts their silence over and over in his previous related article (1-27-22):

Mark mentions nothing of the guards at the tomb because there is not yet a counter-argument. . . .

Yet Mark mentions nothing. There are no Jewish counter-claims, so Mark needs no counter-counter-claims. The lack of a pre-existing empty tomb narrative is the only thing that makes sense of the lack of guards in Mark, and their addition in Matthew. . . .

Luke and John don’t include them at all, which is a very good argument for their lack of authenticity. . . . Presumably, Luke and John omitted them because they saw it for what it was—an obvious polemic mechanism. . . .

So now Jonathan is objecting loudly to my characterization of his argument, while not even being aware of precisely what I am arguing.

He goes on to give three definitions of an argument from silence but does not in any way explain how the above entire claim is an argument from silence. Go figure.

Well, now I have! I thought it was so obvious that I didn’t need to spell it out.

Of course, as you will notice, mention of the tomb is in Luke/Acts, not Paul’s writing.

So what? It’s irrelevant. You claimed Paul never mentioned the empty tomb. Luke records a sermon where he in fact did do so.

And the rest, well, this is embarrassing stuff. This is taking the idea that he has died and been buried (well, yes…), and projecting his own ideas onto that. “Well, he was buried, so it must have been a tomb! And he left it, so it must have been empty! So Paul obviously mentions the empty tomb narrative!”

Nice try. This is so wearisome. I was projecting no ideas of my own. It was cross-referencing, which Bible students do all the time: interpreting one passage in light of another on the same topic and/or from the same person. So Paul states three times in the epistles that Jesus was “buried.” What should we think he meant by that? Buried in what? Well, Acts 13:29 fills that little information gap.

Now we know that Paul agreed that He was buried in a tomb, and so when he says “buried” in the epistles it’s reasonable to assume in light of this that he meant “buried in a tomb.” This is simple logic. Jonathan can fuss and protest and raise a big stink about it all he wants (much ado about nothing, and it would be at least entertaining and amusing if it weren’t so boorish), but it’s simple logic and common sense.

Yes: if a tomb is mentioned as the resting place of a dead person (Jesus, here), and then the narrative goes on to say that He was resurrected, then it follows inexorably that we have also an “empty tomb.” I didn’t invent logic. It is what it is. A=a.

Jonathan wasn’t talking in those instances (at least going by his words) the entire story of disciples seeing the empty tomb, entering it, etc., but whether Paul mentioned the tomb at all. Thus, he wrote on 1-31-21: “Paul has no mention of an empty tomb; Just Jesus was ‘buried’.” And on 11-10-21: “The phrase ‘he was buried’ is ambiguous, and does not necessarily imply an entombment.” Acts 13:29 resolves all this speculation.

Except no. Paul has a spiritual body resurrection that has no need for an empty tomb,

This is sheer nonsense, and I have refuted it several times:

Pearce’s Potshots #56: Paul & Jesus’ Resurrection [12-10-21]

Seidensticker Folly #26: Spiritual Bodies R Still Bodies! [10-9-18]

Seidensticker Folly #52: Spiritual Bodies R Physical [9-10-20]

and there is far, far greater likelihood that Jesus was dishonorably buried in a criminal’s necropolis. See my extensive chapter and writing in this in my Resurrection book.

I’ve dealt with this as well:

Pearce’s Potshots #49: Homer & the Gospels (Mythmaking Scholar Suggests the Story of Priam in the Iliad as the Model for a Fictional Joseph of Arimathea) [10-15-21]

Pearce’s Potshots #52: No Tomb for Jesus? (Skeptical Fairy Tales and Fables vs. the Physical Corroborating Evidence of Archaeology in Jerusalem) [11-10-21]

His claim that Jesus “was ‘buried’ (i.e., in a tomb, which is how they do it in Israel)” shows a real lack of knowledge of the subject matter. Criminals—especially ones accused of high treason and blasphemy—would never have been buried in a tomb, family or otherwise, at least until after a year of ritual purification in a criminal’s graveyard, or more likely in Jerusalem, necropolis. Such a place would have been the Graveyard for the Stoned and the Burned.

That’s simply not true (and there he goes with his irresponsible “never” statements again), as I showed in the above two papers (especially the second, which documents from actual relevant Roman law records regarding burials).

It is far more likely that Jesus was stoned, then hung upon a post, as this was literally the punishment for his crime. There are plenty of sources for all of this stuff if Armstrong wants to look:

Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 4.8.6.
Christian Byron R. McCane, in ‘“Where No One Had Yet Been Laid”: The Shame of Jesus’ Burial’.
Mishnah Sanhedrin 6.5 and 6.6.
Talmud Sanhedrin 47a (amongst also the Tosefta).
Midrash Rabbah Numbers XXIII:13 (877).
On stoning: Josephus Jewish Wares 4.202, 260; Leviticus 24:14; Acts 7; Mishnah Sanhedrin 6.4…
…and so on.

Yet somehow, the massive majority of historians and Bible scholars (Jonathan loves to count up academic heads) — conservative and liberal alike — believe He was crucified. I concur with them (and the Bible got it right, as always). Jonathan is free to adopt an eccentric opinion (drawn largely from “hostile witnesses”) if he likes. But he can’t present it as a mainstream opinion. See, for example, the “Crucifixion” sections of the article, “Punishments in Ancient Rome” (Facts and Details).

Now why is it that all of a sudden, Jonathan won’t cite Fr. Raymond Brown when it comes to whether Jesus was crucified? It’s probably because he wrote a book entitled, A Crucified Christ in Holy Week (1986). So he’s a font of wisdom when he agrees with Jonathan’s opinion, but alas, “Needs to [like me!] do his research” when it comes to the question of how Jesus was murdered.

Armstrong needs to do his research because, and even though he is providing merely inference based on his own projection, his inferences are wholly incorrect. If he can’t be bothered to read up about it, there is this:

Yeah, been there, done that, in installments #49 and #52 answering Jonathan, which he appears unaware of, seeing that he has ignored almost all of my recent critiques. Occasionally, — often when he gets teed off (as presently) — he will attempt an answer. But his mostly ignoring my replies makes him say silly things about what I have done or supposedly not done.

Paul would surely have made reference to some aspect of the entire empty tomb narrative given he is arguing with the Corinthians about certain elements of the Resurrection.

I don’t see any compelling reason why he “surely” must do so. Again, it’s mere empty speculation. That’s all Jonathan has been giving us with this particular argument of his.

Instead, he uses Old Testament quotes to buttress his arguments, which is bizarre.

Why is it at all “bizarre”? It was standard New Testament practice to cite the Old Testament, because before the NT was compiled, that was what they meant (almost always in the NT; a few exceptions) by “Scripture”: accepted by all observant Jews and Christians as God’s infallible revelation. Part and parcel of the Gospel is that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, Who fulfilled scores and scores of OT prophecies about the Messiah. It was regarded as evidence in support of His claims to be the Messiah and God in the flesh.

There is no reference to the women as first witnesses,

Yet another argument from silence . . .

nothing concerning Apostolic verification: “We know this, Corinthians, because X saw Y.”

This is untrue, as I have already shown:

1 Corinthians 15:5-7 (RSV) . . . he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. [7] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

GO TO PART TWO

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Photo credit: Saint Paul Writing His Epistles (c. 1620), attributed to Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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Summary: I critique atheist Jonathan MS Pearce’s relentless attack on the truthfulness of the Gospel texts & the honesty of the four Evangelists, i.e., fairy tale atheist eisegesis.

Pearce’s Potshots #58: Paul & Jesus’ “Empty” Tomb

Last updated on: January 30, 2022 at 3:03 pm By Dave Armstrong

His words below will be in blue.

*****

This is a reply to one statement in his post, “Why Matthew’s guards at Jesus’ tomb are so important” (1-27-22), and some related earlier comments.

Paul says absolutely nothing about the Empty Tomb even though he would have had good reason to do so.

This is untrue:

Acts 13:29-31 [RSV] [Paul preaching: see 13:16] And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb. [30] But God raised him from the dead; [31] and for many days he appeared to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people.

To summarize:

1. He was in the tomb (dead): Acts 13:29.

2. “But” [pregnant with meaning] God raised Him (13:30).

3. He appeared to His disciples for many days (13:31).

4. In order to appear to His disciples, He obviously had to depart the tomb.

5. Therefore, the tomb (His tomb) was empty, and Paul taught this, contrary to what Jonathan claimed.

Paul also stated three times that Jesus (by analogy to us in baptism) was “buried” (i.e., in a tomb, which is how they do it in Israel) and then raised again (thus implying — by simple logic — the empty tomb):

Romans 6:4-5 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. [5] For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

1 Corinthians 15:3-7 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, [4] that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, [5] and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. [7] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Colossians 2:12 and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.

So that is four times that Paul referred to the risen Jesus departing from His tomb (which then became “empty”), whereas Jonathan claimed “Paul says absolutely nothing about the Empty Tomb.”

Jonathan had written about 1 Corinthians 15 on 6-21-21:

Paul just said “buried” which is ambiguous; It could have been an earth burial, or burial in a tomb or communal mausoleum.

On 1-31-21 he opined:

It is generally agreed that Paul was the earliest writer in the NT (c. 50 CE, approx 20 years after the crucifixion). Paul has no mention of an empty tomb; Just Jesus was “buried”.

And on 6-8-21:

Paul never mentions a tomb, just saying Jesus was “buried” which is an ambiguous term (could be earth grave or tomb).

Again, on 11-10-21 he reiterated:

The phrase “he was buried” is ambiguous, and does not necessarily imply an entombment.

Well, we know that Paul meant “tomb” from Acts 13:29. Isn’t cross-referencing wonderful?

He elaborated on 12-9-21:

[T]he Gospels, . . . argue against Paul for a re-animated corpse resurrection. Of course, Paul’s claims from 1 Corinthians and elsewhere explain why he doesn’t mention an empty tomb anywhere – because there would be no empty tomb as the earthly body would remain in situ. The Gospels fundamentally contradict Paul precisely because they are an overt counter-argument against Paul’s theology . . .

See Acts 13:29.

Lots of revising to do! I’m sure Jonathan wouldn’t want to promulgate demonstrably false claims.

Um. Where is there mention of an empty tomb?

Acts 13:29-31.

A criminal, especially one accused of the highest form of crime as Jesus was, would never have been afforded an honourable burial in a tomb given that this was against Jewish law since the criminal could not be buried next to the righteous. I assume you must know all of this, of course. If not, don’t be afraid to read my book on the subject.

Now you move onto quibbling about Jesus in a tomb. I already dealt with this issue at length:

Pearce’s Potshots #52: No Tomb for Jesus? (Skeptical Fairy Tales and Fables vs. the Physical Corroborating Evidence of Archaeology in Jerusalem) [11-10-21]

Wow, you are being willfully disingenuous. Please show me where Paul mentions the empty tomb or any of the narrative the gospels include about the empty tomb. You are being really dishonest here and skating close to the mark.

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Contributor Lex Lata joined in the discussion in the combox:

Now Acts (a book Paul did not write) 13:29 does quote Paul as preaching that “ἔθηκαν εἰς μνημεῖον”—“they placed [JC] in a tomb”—before he was raised from the dead and seen by many. Putting aside the creative license we know authors of antiquity routinely and understandably employed when transcribing purported speeches, let’s assume Paul did in fact refer to entombment. Acts 13 is still devoid of the various and varying Empty Tomb details we see in the three Gospels that contain them.

Acts 13:31 (RSV) has a little detail: “for many days he appeared to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people.”

1 Corinthians 15:5-7 has more: “. . . he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. [7] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”

The “more than five hundred” aspect is not found in the Gospels, so he has added something to the narrative.

Paul is under no moral, logical, or “literary” obligation to replicate all that the Gospels have about the empty tomb. They already covered that. Paul did mostly systematic theology, not recounting of events.

Knocking him for that is yet more of the silly argument from silence. I say that Paul stated pretty much what he should have been expected to say, given his purpose in his writing. The epistles were written for theological instruction and exhortation, not to reiterate the facts of the life of Jesus that Christians were already well familiar with.

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Photo credit: Ulrich Berens (5-24-16) [Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license]

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Summary: Atheist Jonathan MS Pearce has claimed five times in print that St. Paul never mentions Jesus’ “empty” tomb. Wrong!: as I prove, with four Bible passages from Paul.

Pearce’s Potshots #56: Paul & Jesus’ Resurrection

Last updated on: December 11, 2021 at 10:33 am By Dave Armstrong

Atheist anti-theist Jonathan M. S. Pearce is the main writer on the blog, A Tippling Philosopher. His “About” page states: “Pearce is a philosopher, author, blogger, public speaker and teacher from Hampshire in the UK. He specialises in philosophy of religion, but likes to turn his hand to science, psychology, politics and anything involved in investigating reality.”

This is a reply to his post, A Spiritual Body Resurrection vs Corporeal Resurrection (12-9-21). His words will be in blue.

*****

I have had another interview with Derek Lambert of MythVision in the series where we are working through my book The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story [UK]. This latest episode (8) concentrated on the conflict between Paul, who believed in a two-body spiritual resurrection thesis, as opposed to the Gospels, who argue against Paul for a re-animated corpse resurrection. Of course, Paul’s claims from 1 Corinthians and elsewhere explain why he doesn’t mention an empty tomb anywhere – because there would be no empty tomb as the earthly body would remain in situ.

The Gospels fundamentally contradict Paul precisely because they are an overt counter-argument against Paul’s theology, and the related Gnostic position of a full-on spiritual resurrection.

Jonathan seems to maintain (from what I can tell in his brief statements) that Paul’s reference to a “spiritual body” is to a pure spirit, with no physical body. This is immediately absurd, since “spirit” cannot have an additional description of “body”. A “body” is physical, and spirits aren’t physical; they are immaterial.

Evangelical G. Shane Morris gives a good refutation of this Gnostic-influenced thinking in his article, “Jesus Has a Physical Body Forever (And So Will We)”:

There’s a common misconception in the Christian rank and file that Jesus’ resurrected body was something other than a real, physical body with flesh and bones, and that our resurrected bodies will likewise be something other than or somehow less solid than our bodies are now. . . .

Christians’ enduring hope has always been what Paul said the creation itself groans for: “the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8:23) This is what it means to swallow up death in victory. A “spiritual resurrection” of any kind isn’t resurrection. It’s a euphemistic redescription of death.

Second, the term “spiritual body” in 1 Corinthians 15:44 does not, in Paul’s original use, mean what the phrase seems to imply in English. [N. T.] Wright points out that to the original audience, a “spiritual body” understood as an “immaterial body” would be a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing. You might as well talk about solid mist or dry water. What Paul is doing, in context, is contrasting a body of flesh (which is the most common New Testament metonym for fallen humanity) with the body of the Spirit—that is, a body empowered and animated by the Holy Spirit. The Jews and Greeks had words for immaterial beings.

If Paul had meant for us to expect a non-physical resurrection, he could have spoken of “ghosts,” or “spirits.” He did not. For a man of his background, “resurrection” meant only one thing: To get up out of the grave, body and all, and walk again. Jesus left behind an empty grave devoid of flesh and bones. He took them with Him. And so will we. (1 John 3:2)

James Bishop adds:

Paul was, prior to his conversion, a Pharisee. Pharisees held to a physical resurrection (see: Jewish War 3.374, 2.163; 4Q521; 1QH 14.34; 4Q 385-391; Genesis Rabbah 14.5; Leviticus Rabbah 14.9). For instance, one leading scholar by the name of NT Wright, in his 700 page volume, argues that the resurrection in pagan, Jewish, and Christian cultures meant a physical and bodily resurrection (2). Paul held the same view (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:14; Romans 8:11; Philippians 3:20-21). . . .

As [N. T.] Wright articulates: “Until second century Christianity, the language of ‘resurrection’ had been thought by pagan, Jew, and Christian as some kind of return to bodily and this-worldly life” [The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003, p. 83].

The context of 1 Corinthians 15 further bolsters this view:

1 Corinthians 15:35-44 (RSV) But some one will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” [36] You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. [37] And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. [38] But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. [39] For not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. [40] There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. [41] There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. [42] So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. [43] It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. [44] It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

1 Corinthians 15:53-54 For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. [54] When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”

Does Jonathan think that Paul thought the moon was a spirit and not physical? It’s absurd. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul uses the Greek word egiro (usually “raised” in English) 19 times, referring to resurrection, either of Jesus (15:4, 12-17, 20) or of the general resurrection of human beings (15:29, 32, 35, 42-44, 52). The same word is used in the gospels of the raising of the young girl who had died. She remained human, with her body, after being raised. Jesus held her hand when she was raised:

Matthew 9:18, 23-25 While he was thus speaking to them, behold, a ruler came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” . . . [23] And when Jesus came to the ruler’s house, and saw the flute players, and the crowd making a tumult, [24] he said, “Depart; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. [25] But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl arose [egiro].

In John 12, the word is applied to Lazarus three times (12:1, 9, 17: “raised from the dead” and “raised him from the dead”: RSV). In John 12:2, the risen Lazarus is referred to, sitting at the table, eating supper with Jesus: obviously a physical being. This is what the word means: “a body being physically raised and restored after it had died.”

Jesus was obviously also still in a physical body after He was resurrected, but it was a spiritual body, and so He could “walk through walls” (which modern physics tells us is actually physically possible, in additional dimensions and what-not). He ate fish with His disciples, told Thomas to put his hand in His wounds, which were still visible; was touched by Mary Magdalene, broke bread with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, etc.

Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe offer further explanation in the following excerpt their book, When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties (Wheaton, Illinois: Victor Books, 1992):

[N]otice the parallelism mentioned by Paul:

The complete context indicates that “spiritual” (pneumatikos) could be translated “supernatural” in contrast to “natural.” This is made clear by the parallels of perishable and imperishable and corruptible and incorruptible. In fact, this same Greek word (pneumatikos) is translated “supernatural” in 1 Corinthians 10:4 when it speaks of the “supernatural rock that followed them in the wilderness” (RSV).

Second, the word “spiritual” (pneumatikos) in 1 Corinthians refers to material objects. Paul spoke of the “spiritual rock” that followed Israel in the wilderness from which they got “spiritual drink” (1 Cor. 10:4). But the OT story (Ex. 17; Num. 20) reveals that it was a physical rock from which they got literal water to drink. But the actual water they drank from that material rock was produced supernaturally. When Jesus supernaturally made bread for the five thousand (John 6), He made literal bread. However, this literal, material bread could have been called “spiritual” bread (because of its supernatural source) in the same way that the literal manna given to Israel is called “spiritual food” (1 Cor. 10:3).

Further, when Paul spoke about a “spiritual man” (1 Cor. 2:15) he obviously did not mean an invisible, immaterial man with no corporeal body. He was, as a matter of fact, speaking of a flesh and blood human being whose life was lived by the supernatural power of God. He was referring to a literal person whose life was Spirit directed. A spiritual man is one who is taught by the Spirit and who receives the things that come from the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:13–14).

To summarize Paul’s doctrine of the general resurrection, I cite the section on that topic in the entry, “Resurrection” in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia:

As the believer then passes into a condition of glory, his body must be altered for the new conditions (1 Corinthians 15:50; Philippians 3:21); it becomes a “spiritual” body, belonging to the realm of the spirit (not “spiritual” in opposition to “material”). Nature shows us how different “bodies” can be–from the “body” of the sun to the bodies of the lowest animals the kind depends merely on the creative will of God (1 Corinthians 15:38-41). Nor is the idea of a change in the body of the same thing unfamiliar: look at the difference in the “body” of a grain of wheat at its sowing and after it is grown! (1 Corinthians 15:37).

Just so, I am “sown” or sent into the world (probably not “buried”) with one kind of body, but my resurrection will see me with a body adapted to my life with Christ and God (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). If I am still alive at the Parousia, this new body shall be clothed upon my present body (1 Corinthians 15:53,54; 2 Corinthians 5:2-4) otherwise I shall be raised in it (1 Corinthians 15:52). This body exists already in the heavens (2 Corinthians 5:1,2), and when it is clothed upon me the natural functions of the present body will be abolished (1 Corinthians 6:13). Yet a motive for refraining from impurity is to keep undefiled the body that is to rise (1 Corinthians 6:13,14).

Moreover, Paul describes our own resurrected bodies as like that of Jesus:

Romans 6:5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

Philippians 3:20-21 . . . a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, [21] who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.

Paul talks about our resurrection bodies, which we “put on” being “imperishable.” In other words, he’s saying that according to natural law, physical bodies perish and die, but spiritual, resurrected bodies do not. He’s not talking about spirits. If it were a transformation of a physical body into a spirit, he wouldn’t use the terminology of “raised” either: because that refers to physical bodies, which died, and are now “raised”.

Nor would he refer to a “spiritual body”: he would have simply referred to a “spirit” (which the New Testament does many times). The two are not at all identical. The whole point was Jesus conquering physical death, which applies to physical bodies, not spirits. The Gospel of Matthew exhibits the same understanding of resurrected bodies of the dead:

Matthew 27:52 the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised,

Here is another passage from Paul that plainly refer to bodily resurrection:

Romans 8:22-23 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; [23] and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Case closed. Jonathan is wrong yet again about what the Bible (agree or disagree) teaches. It’s amazing how often that happens.

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ADDENDUM: Jonathan Clarifies

You literally got it wrong from the outset: . . .

You are suggesting more of a “Gnostic” approach that Paul was similar to. There are three approaches: Gnostic, Paul’s two body transformation (psychikos to pneumatikos), and the Gospel’s resuscitation resurrection. The Gospels do a really explicit job in arguing against Paul and the gnostics. I mean, it’s really overt. The contradictions couldn’t be more obvious. Plus, the early church fathers carry this on very explicitly (Justin Martyr etc). Why would they be so forceful and arguing these points if there was no one claiming otherwise?

Go read 1 Corinthians 15 and get back to me. I mean, really read it, not with “I must cohere this with the Gospels” glasses on. Read it as it is written.

What do you mean by “two body transformation”? If you are saying that Paul’s view of Jesus’ resurrection still involves a physical (“glorified”) body, then we agree. We disagree that this is supposedly a blatant and “obvious” contradiction over against the Gospels.

[After telling me I should watch a three-hour video or buy one of his books, he finally wrote]

Or read [Richard] Carrier’s FAQ on the topic.

[His basic idea is that Paul thought Jesus had a completely new body, unrelated to the one He had before He was crucified, which is contradictory to the Gospel’s teachings that His resurrected body was one and the same as His previous one; just transformed. I read it and replied]:

Thank you. I have rarely read such ridiculous sophistry as Carrier’s analysis there. He believes that he can explain or rationalize away anything, no matter how obviously it is stating the opposite of Carrier’s anti-Christian agenda.

Carrier’s (and your) view is contradicted by the following statement of Paul:

Romans 8:11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.

If indeed a resurrected body was a brand new one, with no relation to our bodies on this earth, then it makes no sense that Paul would say, in the context of our resurrection, “he . . . will give life to your mortal bodies.” That is clearly teaching a transformation of our earthly bodies rather than a completely new body with no relation to our earthly ones, because it’s saying that the bodies that could die and that were mortal will be given “life” and power and be glorified. Therefore, it has to be the same body, by virtue of the reference to “mortal bodies” being given “life” so that our bodies can be glorified as Christ’s was.

Jonathan cited Carrier in reply:

Q: In Romans 8:11 Paul says God “will also give life to your mortal bodies” just as he did to Jesus, and then he says in 8:23 that we await “the redemption of our body.” Don’t these passages clearly indicate the same body that dies is the body that will be raised?

A: Not necessarily. I already challenge this interpretation of both verses in the book (pp. 149-50). I say a lot there that must be read. Here I will only note three of the facts that I discuss further there: the “also” in Romans 8:11 does not grammatically correlate with the resurrection of Jesus (bad translations have falsely given that impression); Paul does not say “our mortal bodies will be raised” (in fact, he never connects our “mortal bodies” with resurrection at all, not even in 8:23, which is a whole twelve verses away from 8:11 and does not speak of a “mortal” body); the context of 8:11 appears to be about our current state of grace, not our future resurrection (as in 2 Cor. 4:10), while Paul only gets to the resurrection in later verses; and 8:23 actually says we expect “the release of our body,” without specifying which body he means, or in what way it will be released. Close examination suggests he more likely meant the release of our “inner man,” which is our new spiritual body, which we are already growing inside us (pp. 144-45, 150, and related notes; see my answer to a related question below).

Cross-referencing the word for “give life” in Romans 8:11:

Thayer’s Greek Lexicon
STRONGS NT 2227: ζοωποιέω

. . . of the dead, to reanimate, restore to life: 1 Corinthians 15:45; τινα, John 5:21; Romans 4:17; Romans 8:11; passive 1 Corinthians 15:22;

HELPS Word-studies

2227 zōopoiéō (from 2221 /zōgréō, “alive” and 4160 /poiéō, “make”) – properly, make alive (zōos); i.e. “quicken,” vivify (“animate”); (figuratively) cause what is dead (inoperative) to have life; empower with divine life. . . .

(1 Cor 15:36,38) seed, come to life – The resurrection-body of the believer will be characterized by continuity with diversity – i.e. reflecting the physical-spiritual life we lived here on earth in a supra-physical fashion (Phil 3:11-21). Both of these aspects of glorification are illustrated in 1 Cor 15 by the metaphor of seeds.

Other verses where it appears in the same sense:

John 5:21 V-PIA-3S
GRK: οὓς θέλει ζωοποιεῖ
NAS: the dead and gives them life, even so
KJV: so the Son quickeneth whom he will.
INT: to whom he will gives life

John 6:63 V-PPA-NNS
GRK: ἐστιν τὸ ζωοποιοῦν ἡ σὰρξ
NAS: It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh
KJV: the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh
INT: it is who gives life the flesh

Romans 4:17 V-PPA-GMS
GRK: θεοῦ τοῦ ζωοποιοῦντος τοὺς νεκροὺς
NAS: [even] God, who gives life to the dead
KJV: [even] God, who quickeneth the dead
INT: God who gives life the dead

1 Corinthians 15:36 V-PIM/P-3S
GRK: σπείρεις οὐ ζωοποιεῖται ἐὰν μὴ
NAS: you sow does not come to life unless
KJV: is not quickened, except it die:
INT: you sow not is come to life if not

Seidensticker Folly #76: Resurrection Eyewitnesses

Last updated on: January 21, 2022 at 10:59 am By Dave Armstrong

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He added in June 2017 in a combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.”

For over three years, we have had (shall we say) rather difficult relations, with mutual bannings, but when Bob moved to his new location online at the OnlySky super-site, he (surprisingly to me) decided to allow me to comment. As a conciliatory gesture in return, I removed his ban on my blog. He even stated on 1-21-22 in the same combox thread, replying to me: “There are a few new posts here. (Or, if you haven’t been to my blog for a while, lots of new posts here.) Have at ’em. Let me know what you think.”

Delighted to oblige his wishes . . . Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

I am responding to Bob’s post entitled, The Bible defeats its own Resurrection story (12-2-21; update of a post from 8-16-17).

Many Christian apologists insist that the resurrection was documented by eyewitnesses.

Yes they do, because that is the biblical claim.

Their motivation makes sense—the resurrection is the punch line of the Jesus story, and the authors can’t simply be passing along a popular yarn. Only eyewitness authors could be credible.

Indeed. I would just add that the person documenting need not be an eyewitness. Having talked to a credible eyewitness is sufficient to pass along what that eyewitness saw: just as we see regarding eyewitness testimony in court cases, which is judged to be credible (based on the person’s character) or not. It’s sufficient to convict persons of having committed a crime, based on the criterion of “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

We must start by agreeing on what it means to witness a man’s resurrection from the dead. You must (1) see him alive, then (2) see him dead, then (3) see him alive again. This is obvious, I realize, but you’ll soon see where this is missing in the gospels.

This reasoning is not “obvious.” One need not either see a person alive (not having yet died) or see the same person lying dead, in order to witness the same person in a resurrected state. One need only know that a given person X 1) existed, and 2) died; yet said person X is now somehow alive again (resurrected). One could also have known person X, but happened not to see X dead (before burial), or vice versa. So, for example, I know that there was a person named Abraham Lincoln, who lived on the earth, became the President of the United States, and was killed in 1865.

Now, if I witness him walking around my back yard with his distinctive face and beard, top hat, and 6’4″ height, and I go shake his hand, and talk about how he wrote the Gettysburg Address, and eat lunch with him, I am a witness to his resurrection. It is irrelevant whether I saw him alive (before he died) or saw him lying in state. I only have to know that he existed and died, from credible and reasonable information of various types. Thus, Bible-Basher Bob starts his argument with a demonstrably false premise.

We’ll start with the crucifixion story in Matthew. For this to be an eyewitness account, one of the disciples must author Matthew. This requires that the author personally experience the three elements of any resurrection above.

Again, it does not require that, as just argued. It requires the author having consulted credible eyewitnesses to the crucifixion. The author didn’t claim to be a witness to the crucifixion. He does claim that Mary Magdalene and Mary wife of Clopas saw the risen Jesus (Mt 28:1-10) and that the eleven disciples, minus Judas, later did as well (Mt 28:16-20). What’s actually required is that Matthew (if not there himself) reports credible eyewitness testimony.

That could have come from a number of sources: Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary, wife of Clopas, the disciple John, and possibly many other followers of Jesus (by then numbering in the multiple thousands) who were present. As for the traditional Christian view that the disciple Matthew wrote the Gospel that bears his name, see:

“Who Wrote the Gospel of Matthew?” (Brian Chilton, 6-11-17)

“Did Matthew Really Write the Gospel Attributed to Him?” (Erik Manning, 3-25-19)

“Who Wrote the Gospel of Matthew?” (John Sanidopoulos, 11-16-09)

“Was Matthew Written Before A.D. 70?” (Jimmy Akin, 11-29-18)

“Who Wrote the Gospel according to Matthew?” (Aaron Mead, 8-10-18)

“Authoritative Testimony in Matthew’s Gospel” (James M. Arlandson, 4-21-08)

Regarding the authorship and reliability of all four Gospels, see:

“Historical Reliability of the Gospels” (James M. Arlandson, 2-2-09)

“Who Wrote the Gospels, and How Do We Know for Sure?” (Mark Strauss, 9-20-17)

“Apologetics: Who Wrote the Gospels?” (Timothy Paul Jones, 7-17-20)

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses : The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (book by Richard Bauckham, Eerdmans, 2006)

Next we read, “Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56b). The next day Jesus was crucified, and “Many women were there, watching from a distance” (Matt. 27:55) including Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph. There were men present—Roman guards and passersby who insulted Jesus—but no disciples.

We don’t know for sure that there were “no disciples at all.” Matthew doesn’t mention it one way or another. But if the word “disciples” is viewed in its larger sense (Jn 6:66: “many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him” / Lk 10:1, 17: “seventy” / Mt 27:57: “Joseph [of Arimathea], who also was a disciple of Jesus”), then it’s possible that some of those disciples were there; and the book of John records that John himself was present.

Since Matthew doesn’t deny any of those possibilities, it’s not a contradiction. Moreover, Luke 8:1-3 implies that Jesus had several women disciples, too, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, “and many others”.

With no male disciples to observe the crucifixion,

This hasn’t been definitively established, per the above argumentation.

this eyewitness claim fails in point 2 above: you must see him dead if you want to later claim a resurrection.

This is erroneous and a false premise, as also explained above.

Matthew doesn’t even claim any disciples at the empty tomb.

Nor does he deny it.

Note also that it’s modern Christians who claim that Matthew was an eyewitness; that gospel never makes that claim.

Protestant apologist Greg Koukl accurately observed:

Matthew makes no direct claim in his narrative to being an eyewitness. However, he establishes himself as an eyewitness based on the internal evidence of his account. Though he doesn’t name himself, the author reports in the first person about events that he sees and participates in.

John does make direct claims of being an eyewitness (Jn 21:24; 1 Jn 1:1-3).

But what about the women? They were there. The two Marys saw the crucifixion, they saw Jesus die, they saw the burial in the stone tomb, they saw the empty tomb, and they saw the risen Jesus. They were part of the inner circle, and surely their word was good enough.

Yes, surely it was. They often showed themselves more faithful, loyal, and courageous than the male disciples.

The first problem is that the author of Matthew is still not an eyewitness. At best, he simply reported a story he’d been told.

So what? In most criminal court cases, there is only one or two eyewitnesses. Conviction depends on whether their testimony is credible, and whether their character suggests a truthful report, and no known motivations to lie about what they claim to have seen.

[A]pologists insist that women were seen as unreliable witnesses. This means that they can’t argue that while the author of Matthew wasn’t technically an eyewitness, that’s unimportant because he trusted the women’s report. They’ve left Matthew with no authority from which to document the most important (and least believable) part of the gospel.

How the ancient world may have regarded women’s testimony is irrelevant to whether their reports were true or not (this would be an instance of the genetic fallacy). I agree with the apologists cited, that the Gospels (in a highly patriarchal culture and time) would almost certainly not have recorded that women first saw the risen Jesus (and saw the crucifixion) if they were deliberately lying / making up a story out of whole cloth. Therefore, this element is a strong indication of the truthfulness of the Gospel accounts. It can’t be breezily dismissed.

Another reason to discount Matthew as an eyewitness is that that book liberally copies from Mark, the first gospel. More than half of Matthew comes from Mark. Why would an eyewitness account copy from someone else rather than give his own version . . . unless it wasn’t an eyewitness account?

Well, it’s not nearly so simple as this. Seidensticker is wading into the extraordinarily complex “synoptic problem”, which has to do with the precise relationship of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But first I should note that a rather free borrowing from other written works was a very common feature of ancient literature. Hence, the entry: “Plagiarism, Greek” from the Oxford Classical Dictionary explains:

The more sophisticated ancient critics distinguished ‘imitation’ of earlier writers (Gk. mimēsis, Lat. *imitatio) from ‘theft’ (Gk. klopē, Lat. furtum). ‘Theft’ involves derivative copying and is condemned: this, and only this, is plagiarism. ‘Imitation’ is an acceptable, even normal, re-use (in part, relatable to the modern structuralist’s notion of ‘intertextuality’; see literary theory and classical studies), such that the ‘borrowed’ material is recreated as the borrower’s ‘own property’ (‘privati iuris’, Hor.Ars. 131) and (perhaps because the original is well known and informs the new context) the relationship between new and old is acknowledged rather than concealed. When L. *Annaeus Seneca (1) suggests that *Ovid imitates *Virgil ‘not as pilferer but as open appropriator’ (‘non subripiendi causa sed palam mutuandi’, Suas. 3. 7), the distinction is clear; so too when ‘Longinus’ (Subl. 13) praises a whole tradition of writers, from *Archilochus to *Plato (1), for their re-use of *Homer. [italics added]

While it is true that 56% of Matthew’s content is shared with Mark, it is also true that 20% of the Gospel of Matthew is unique to itself, and another 24% is shared with Luke but not with Mark (see the helpful chart near the top on this web page). So although it shares a lot with Mark, it is a unique presentation in its own right. This is true of Luke to a greater extent, as it has 35% unique material and 23% shared with Matthew, which is almost three-fifths of the book (42% shared with Mark.

The predominant theory of origins of the Gospels have Matthew and Luke derived from jointly from Mark and “Q”: a possibly oral and undocumented source. But this is not certain, and there are other theories, which have recently (especially since the 1990s) attained a growing consensus among Bible scholars. One of these is the Griesbach Hypothesis, explained by Wikipedia:

According to Griesbach, the historical order of the gospels was, first, Matthew; second, Luke, making use of Matthew and other non-Matthaean tradition; and third, Mark, making use of both Matthew and Luke. In proposing this hypothesis, Griesbach maintained Matthaean priority, as had Augustine before him, along with every other scholar in the church prior to the late eighteenth century. Griesbach’s main support for his thesis lies in passages where Matthew and Luke agree over and against Mark (e.g. Matthew 26:68; Luke 22:64; Mark 14:65), the so-called Minor Agreements.

The Orchard Hypothesis is a more recent variation of the Greisbach Hypothesis. But in any event, no one can claim to know for sure who borrowed from whom, who did so first, who wrote first, etc. It’s all (fascinating but non-definitive) speculation. Seidensticker, with his pathetic record of pathetic disinformation and deliberate ignorance and refusal to be corrected (as seen in my 75 previous critiques of his abysmal polemics) is almost the last person on earth who is qualified to make the sweeping claims that he — undaunted and blissfully free of fact and logic alike –, constantly makes, posing as some sort of (relentlessly cynical and skeptical) biblical expert. It’s a joke.

Mark also shares the problems of Matthew. The author wasn’t an eyewitness to the death or resurrection, . . .

That’s correct. But according to a position held by many throughout the centuries (which if correct, would overcome this objection), he drew from Peter, who was an eyewitness. This view came originally from Papias, who lived from c. 60 – c. 130. That is actual objective historical evidence, as opposed to largely abstract, subjective theories made up in the minds of men 18-20 centuries after Christ. See:

“Mark’s Gospel Through the Eyes of St. Peter” (Thomas L. McDonald, 4-25-19)

“Eyewitness Testimony in Mark’s Gospel” (James M. Arlandson, 5-13-08)

“Is Peter Really Behind Mark’s Gospel?” (Dr. Fred Baltz, 7-23-21)

“Did Mark base his Gospel on Matthew and Luke?” (Jimmy Akin, 4-25-15)

“Is Mark a Transcript of Peter’s Lectures on Matthew and Luke?” (Jimmy Akin, 9-16-16)

[T]he book itself makes clear that neither Peter nor any disciple was an eyewitness to the death, so no disciple could claim to be an eyewitness to the resurrection.

This is the same old canard again, presented as if mere repetition makes a falsehood magically become true. Mark doesn’t say, “John was not present at the crucifixion.” Therefore, The Gospel of John’s report that he was (Jn 19:26), is not contradicted. And there is also the issue of a larger category of disciples, already noted above.

Luke doesn’t have the disciples run away at the arrest of Jesus.

He neither affirms nor denies it, so it’s not contradictory compared to other Gospels.

At the crucifixion, “All those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching,” so the men were presumably there.

“All” in the Bible often means merely “many” and not literally “absolutely every one, without exception”, as I have written about elsewhere. It’s like how we refer to a big party or family reunion by saying, “everyone was there!” It’s understood that this is not an absolute statement with no exceptions. So this is not a contradiction to Matthew’s and Mark’s descriptions of disciples having fled in terror (Mt 26:31-35, 56; Mk 14:50), and not being present (with the exception of John) at the crucifixion.

With Luke and John, Christians have a better argument for disciples witnessing Jesus alive, then dead, then alive again,

Which is not required . . .

but they can only do so after admitting a worse problem, that the gospel stories are contradictory.

Nonsense. No contradiction between the Gospels has been established beyond all doubt in this slanted, twisted presentation. As usual, anti-theist atheists invent (with utter disdain of logic) various pseudo- and mythical so-called “contradictions” that in fact are not ones at all.

According to John, when Jesus is on the cross, he sees his mother and “the disciple whom he loved.” [i.e., John] Presumably concerned about who would care for Mary after his death, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26–7). But Mary already had another son! Why would Jesus do this when James the Just was his brother?

James is specifically said to be the son of (by deductive cross-referencing) Mary, wife of Clopas (Mt 27:56; Mk 15:40; 16:1). For more on this, and the persons named James in the NT see my papers, Were Simon & Jude Jesus’ Literal Siblings, or Cousins? and James the Lord’s “Brother” (i.e., Cousin) + Who Wrote the Book of James? Jesus had no siblings.

The resurrection is a ridiculous claim that needs a mountain of evidence to support it.

There were plenty of eyewitnesses to it and the evidence is strong. My present purpose is not to present all that (others have done so far better than I ever could). I am strictly showing, I think, that none of Bible-Basher Bob’s “arguments” have the slightest force (defeating alleged “defeaters” of the Gospels). Nothing here refutes the notion of Jesus rising from the dead, and many people seeing Him risen. None of his individual arguments succeed or prove that they are beyond serious dispute.

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ADDENDUM: Clarifications of My Positions

“OverlappingMagisteria” offered some criticisms in my combox, which afforded me an excellent opportunity to clarify in more depth my own expressed opinions on these matters.

I’ll agree that if someone writes down an account from another person who was an eyewitness, then this is close enough. But it seems that you are just assuming that the author of Matthew is reporting an eyewitness account. Nowhere does it say that he talked to the women, or to any apostles that were present. It just tells the story. Perhaps he interviewed eyewitnesses, but perhaps he did not.

And if you’re going to ding Bob for using the Two-source hypothesis (that Matt is based off of Mark and Q) because it is not certain, then I gotta ding you for saying that St. Matthew is the author of the Gospel of Matthew. The two-source hypothesis at least has the majority view among scholars, while Matthean authorship is very much the minority view. Same with Luke using Pete as a source. This is a very much contested view.

We are not 100% sure of who wrote the four gospels. I believe we can conclude with virtually 100% certainty that Luke wrote Luke and that John wrote John. Even these cannot ever be “proven.” As for Matthew and Mark, these two gospels have been attributed to the apostle Matthew and the disciple Mark (John Mark of Acts and of Paul’s letters) since the very earliest time in the history of the church. The church fathers unanimously attributed these books to Matthew and to Mark from the earliest time. Does this prove that these two wrote the books? The answer is that it does not. However, it is far more likely that early church fathers such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus would know who wrote these books than scholars writing today. These faithful disciples, both of whom knew disciples of Jesus who actually met the Apostle John, would be in an excellent position to tell us who wrote these books. Is this proof? I would say that we can be virtually certain that Luke wrote Luke and John wrote John, and fairly confident (but not certain) that Matthew wrote Matthew and Mark wrote Mark. (John Oakes)

You need to be accurate, first of all, as to what I have argued and what I have not asserted. Nowhere did I say that it was my opinion that Matthew wrote the Gospel of Matthew. In fact, in two places I referred to the “author” of Matthew, thus implying that it is not a settled issue. I provided articles that took this view, but I introduced them with: “As for the traditional Christian view that the disciple Matthew wrote the Gospel that bears his name, see: . . .”. Note that I didn’t say it was necessarily my view.

My opinion would be precisely what Oakes expressed above: we can be “fairly confident (but not certain)” that he was the author (a view that presupposes a high view of the testimony of early Church fathers: which I would be expected to have as a Catholic who holds sacred tradition and apostolic succession in high regard). But this is not claimed certainty, and I am not asserting with no doubt whatever that he was the author. I still hold it provisionally (though it is my view that it is more likely than not).

It’s also perfectly possible that some unknown scribe wrote Matthew utilizing either firsthand accounts from Matthew himself or oral traditions purported to be largely from him (+ possibly Peter, etc.). That would be no different from what Luke expressly states that he did, and from the view held by many that Mark (or whomever wrote that Gospel) drew largely from Peter. The bottom line is that these documents are inspired revelation, which we believe in faith (and which cannot be proven under a microscope).

You also greatly misunderstand my argumentation regarding the synoptic problem. I never “ding[ed]” Bob for taking the two-source view. I never took any position at all on that whole issue. What I was specifically objecting to was his usual ignorant, dogmatic, cynical view:

Another reason to discount Matthew as an eyewitness is that that book liberally copies from Mark, the first gospel. More than half of Matthew comes from Mark. Why would an eyewitness account copy from someone else rather than give his own version . . . unless it wasn’t an eyewitness account?

This is just stupid, and doesn’t follow at all. Not taking any particular view myself on the synoptic problem, I merely presented different options and opinions (including the ancient common practice of liberally borrowing from earlier literature), stating that it was “not nearly so simple” and “extraordinarily complex”; that the standard two-source theory was “not certain, and [that] there are other theories.” I stated very clearly: “no one can claim to know for sure who borrowed from whom, who did so first, who wrote first, etc. It’s all (fascinating but non-definitive) speculation.” The upshot of all that is that Bob’s take is ignorant and clueless, not that one theory is true and the others manifestly false. It’s Bob’s brain-dead skeptical dogmatism and faux-certainty (which I have observed over and over in my 75 unanswered critiques of his “work”) that I went after.

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Photo credit: Cadetgray (3-7-11). The Resurrected Jesus and the Two Marys window in St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, Charleston, South Carolina. Attributed to the Quaker City Glass Company of Philadelphia, 1912. [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license]

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Summary: Anti-theist polemicist Bob Seidensticker vainly tries to prove that the Gospel writers were not Resurrection eyewitnesses, but rather, a bunch of mythmaking liars.

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“Pope Francis is SO Confusing!”: A Spirited Reply

Last updated on: September 7, 2021 at 2:39 pm By Dave Armstrong

The Sad and Slanderous Promotion of a “False Narrative” Concerning Pope Francis’ Supposedly Massive Errors

[originally posted on my Facebook page on 9-6-21. You can see some further discussion there. I’ve expanded it presently.]

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One of my Facebook friends wrote: “Pope Francis is a cause of a lot of confusion! That’s why you are writing about it!”

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This is my reply:

The confusion arises because he is 1) massively lied about, and 2) massively misunderstood. And those things happen because many people won’t take the time to be fair and open-minded and read two sides of any given “controversy”. It’s very much like President Trump in that respect . . . It’s groupthink: sheep jumping on the bandwagon; clones . . . There is also the problem of the “false narrative” that has been created. I wrote on 3-5-21:

The problem, then, seems to be that folks . . . aren’t willing in charity to withhold scathing judgment of the pope, until the full story of any given [almost always trumped-up] “incident” is heard. They’re lightning quick to judge. . . .

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As with so many people today, otherwise good Catholics . . . have bought a cynical, hostile, outrageously false narrative regarding Pope Francis: against which mere facts and reason — within this mentality — are oblivious and irrelevant, almost disallowed.

And I wrote on 1-22-15:

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If someone doesn’t like my (or anyone else’s) defenses of the pope (and to me the defenses are perfectly plausible and sensible), they can go and knock themselves out showing that they are invalid, point-by-point. But no one ever wants to do that, because that takes work and actual thinking, rather than the easy way out of the quick accusation, moaning and groaning, simply parroting the gossip of others, and furthering the false narrative about the Holy Father. Anything but actual rational analysis and interacting with different points of view.
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And on 4-26-16:
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More and more people have jumped onto the narrative and bandwagon of “Pope Francis as a liberal and loose cannon” and they interpret accordingly. But the foundational premise is wrong. . . .

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I’m saying that they are the ones (for varying reasons) who are beginning to increasingly buy into the narrative that there is something fundamentally, seriously wrong with Pope Francis, whether he is (at best) maddeningly inarticulate (the mildest form) or ignorant of basic tenets of theology and moral theology (more severe criticism) or flat-out heterodox / modernist (the strongest bashing).

And on 4-24-20:

I can understand someone being confused. There are many reasons for it. They might listen to the liberal media, or the radical reactionaries, or liberal Catholics who think the pope is one of them, or the increasing bandwagon chorus (among orthodox Catholics) of the pope’s detractors (what I have called “the [false] narrative”). They don’t study or don’t have time to.

Lots of folks are confused about Catholicism itself, and believe many lies about it. Is that Catholicism‘s fault, too?
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Lots of folks are confused about — and sometimes even downright distort and twist — the Bible. Is that the inspired, infallible Bible‘s fault (God’s revelation) or theirs? The cults don’t get it right. They can’t even grasp the obvious biblical teachings of the divinity of Christ and the Holy Trinity.

Atheists play the game of coming up with “700” bogus so-called “contradictions” in the Bible and sit there and say, “there just so many of ’em; how can I believe this Bible?” Someone like me comes along and systematically debunks scores and scores of those (just as I do with slanderous lies against this pope), but it has no effect. They simply say “there are still 601 left that you haven’t solved.” It’s a game; it’s intellectual dishonesty and special pleading (richly fed — let no one doubt it — with an obstinate, relentless ignorance) so that they don’t have to be accountable to God or anyone.

Lots of folks didn’t grasp what Jesus said, either. . . . They didn’t have “ears to hear.” “No one is so blind as he who will not see.”

1 Corinthians 2:6-8, 12-14 (RSV) Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. [7] But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. [8] None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. . . . [12] Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. [13] And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. [14] The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

In other words, the mere presence of “confusion” does not prove that Pope Francis is responsible for it. It may very well be coming from the other “end”: his innumerable loudmouthed critics. I say it flows from their hostility and bias (not to mention intellectual laziness) far more than it does from the things themselves. Simply saying, “I have heard about 39 things where Pope Francis said or did something stupid / heretical / incomprehensible” [take your pick] doesn’t prove diddly squat and doesn’t cut it. It’s rumormongering, gossip, and slander. Each accusation has to be specifically examined.
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I save people the work of doing that by spending my time as a professional apologist, either showing, myself, that they are groundless charges, or providing almost 300 articles from others that explain all of these supposedly “incomprehensible” or “confusing” things. But if people aren’t fair-minded or honest with themselves enough to read them, then I am helpless to dissuade them from their illusions and delusions.

The attainment of truth and wisdom takes work (“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”: Philippians 2:12 / “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own”: 3:12 / “for every one who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. [14] But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil”: Hebrews 5:13-14.).
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One doesn’t achieve that by simply following what is fashionable at any given moment. We need to stop being afraid to death of what other people think, and start seriously worrying about what God thinks of our behavior and our words, with regard to the Supreme Head of the Catholic Church, protected from ever binding the faithful to heresy (so said Vatican I in 1870, with the highest authority).

Jeremiad on Stupefied Anti-Francis Mentalities (w Paul Hoffer) [1-22-15]

Forcing Pope Francis Into Our Own Image [9-18-15]

On the Endless Second-Guessing of Pope Francis [2-25-16]

The Real & the Imaginary Pope Francis [6-27-16]

Dialogues with Karl Keating Regarding Pope Francis [12-29-17]

Am I a “Pope Francis Defender”? (Statement of Intent & Purpose) [11-5-19]

Fr. Z Asks for Pro-Francis “Compendium”. I Provide It [3-9-21]

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Photo credit: geralt (5-22-18) [Pixabay / Pixabay License]

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Summary: I take on the boorish canard that “Pope Francis is so confusing!” It’s automatically assumed that he is to blame, not the critic. I show in many ways how this is a lie & shoddy thinking.
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Reply to Engwer’s Alleged “Absence of a Papacy”

Last updated on: August 25, 2021 at 3:23 pm By Dave Armstrong

Protestant anti-Catholic apologist Jason Engwer has attempted several of these sorts of arguments against the papacy. I have (I think) refuted him many times along these lines, especially after he sought to overthrow some of my own arguments in favor of the papacy:

Dialogue on Development of Doctrine (Esp. the Papacy) [2000]

Dialogue on Doctrinal Development (Papacy & NT Canon) [2-26-02]
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Reply to Critique of “50 NT Proofs for the Papacy” [3-14-02]

Refutation of a Satirical “Pauline Papacy” Argument [9-30-03]

Papal Passages Lk 22:31-34 & Jn 21:15-17 [5-12-20]

St. Peter Listed First in Lists of Disciples: A Debate [10-12-20]

Peter’s Primacy is Disproved By His Personality? (Protestant Apologist Jason Engwer Continues His All-Out War on St. Peter & the Papacy) [10-18-20]

My own basic biblical defenses of the papacy can be found (most concisely) in the following papers:

50 New Testament Proofs for Petrine Primacy & the Papacy [1994]

Primacy of St. Peter Verified by Protestant Scholars [1994]

Bible on Papal & Church Infallibility [2007]

Infallible Individuals: Scriptural Examples & Analogies [2009]

Peter the “Rock”: Protestant Contra-Catholic Exegetical Bias [7-7-09]

The Biblical Argument for Papal Succession [12-12-15]

Papal Succession: A Straightforward Biblical Argument [4-28-17]
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See many many more related articles on my Papacy web page.

Jason Engwer has been so soundly refuted over and over in these matters, that it’s difficult to come up with anything fresh and new that hasn’t already been presented, but I’ll give it the old college try. His recent attack is entitled “The Widespread Absence Of A Papacy” (Tribalblogue, 8-8-21). His words below will be in blue. I reproduce his entire article.

One of the reasons for rejecting the papacy is the lack of justification for it. There are apparent contradictions of the concept of the papacy in some New Testament documents and other early sources, but the lack of evidence for the office would be enough reason to not accept it, even if such contradictions didn’t exist.

Funny; I see evidence all over the place, per my various biblical and patristic / historical arguments along these lines.

However, Protestants often focus on too narrow a range of contexts in which the papacy is absent in the early sources. A lot of attention is given to passages about Peter in the gospels and Acts and material about church government in the early sources, for example, but we ought to think more broadly about where a papacy could have been mentioned if it existed. A papacy wouldn’t have to be mentioned at every conceivable opportunity. But the larger the number and variety of contexts in which a papacy could have been mentioned, but wasn’t, the more likely it is that the office didn’t exist. What I want to do in this post is provide a few examples of contexts that are often neglected.

Jason is great at producing skeptical summary statements like the above (where he can create his own little thought-world, disconnected from biblical and Christian reality). When he actually attempts to make arguments to establish his erroneous cases, however, he does far less well. Here is basically presenting arguments from silence over and over again, and they never hold much weight. As the Wikipedia article on this form of argument bluntly states: “arguments from silence themselves are also generally viewed as rather weak in many cases; or considered as fallacies.”

The apostles sometimes discussed their upcoming death, what was being done to preserve their teachings, and how Christians should conduct themselves going forward (e.g., Acts 20:17-38, 2 Timothy 3:10-4:8, 2 Peter 1:12-21). If the papacy was considered the foundation of the church, the infallible center of Christian unity throughout church history, the absence of any mention of such an resource in passages like these is significant.

Acts 20 is from St. Paul: the same Paul who submitted to Church authority, including Peter: “James and Cephas [Peter] and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship” (Gal 2:9, RSV). Paul was no “lone ranger.” He had been commissioned by the Church at Antioch as well:

Acts 13:1-3 (RSV) Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyre’ne, Man’a-en a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. [2] While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” [3] Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

Paul was again sent by the Church at Antioch (Acts 14:26-28) — “appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question” [of who was required to be circumcised]: Acts 15:2. This was the Jerusalem Council. All that Paul and Barnabas did there: that we know from the record, in any event, was give a “praise report” of their missionary activities (15:4, 12). St. Peter: obviously of much more authority, gave the primary address (15:7-12). He quelled the debate (15:7), resulting in “silence” in the assembly (15:12). James, the bishop of Jerusalem, stated: “Simeon [i.e., Simon Peter] has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name.
And with this the words of the prophets agree . . .” (15:14-15).
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After all, it was St. Peter who had already received a revelation from God about all foods being clean (Acts 10:9-16). For some reason God thought it was more important to give him this vision rather than St. Paul. Then in the same chapter, St. Peter’s encounter with the righteous Gentile Cornelius, shows him that non-Jews were to be fully accepted into the Christian community, with the implication that they were not bound to keep the entire Mosaic Law (10:17-43).

The Jerusalem Council then commissioned Paul and Barnabas and Silas (15:22, 25, 27, 30), who made “their way through the cities” and “delivered to them for observance the decisions which had been reached by the apostles and elders who were at Jerusalem” (16:4).

In sum, then, Paul is receiving an awful lot of Church and papal (Petrine) guidance, as we see above. Just because he may not have mentioned Peter in one discourse (argument from silence) does not wipe out all of this relevant information. The same applies to his discourse in 2 Timothy 3:10 ff. All that is, is an example of apostolic succession: from Paul to Timothy. It has no implications for papal succession, which is based on other biblical grounds. A fallacious argument from silence cannot overcome that.

Jason gives us also the example 2 Peter 1:12-21. This was written by St. Peter. Protestant scholars D. A. Carson et al, in their Introduction to the New Testament (first edition, 1992, pp. 434-435, 437) state:

Generally speaking, conservative authors have held to the Petrine authorship . . .

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The letter plainly indicates that Peter was the author. . . .

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Church Tradition [subtitle] Such tradition uniformly ascribes the letter to Peter. There is no other name linked with it in the tradition. . . .

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No conclusive reason has been given for denying that the letter is by the author it claims as its writer. None of the objections can be sustained, and it seems better to accept it at face value, as a genuine writing of the apostle Peter.

Very well, then; this question of authorship out of the way, does the letter read like something a self-understood “pope” would have written? Yes. St. Paul’s letters are to local churches of individuals. But this one is to all Christians (“To those who have obtained a faith . .”: 1:1). He continues to write to all Christians, in asserting: “Therefore, brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall” (1:10). It makes perfect sense for Peter to exhort all Christians, since, after all, our Lord Jesus told him specifically (and no other disciple) to “Feed my lambs . . . Tend my sheep . . . feed my sheep” (Jn 21:15-17).

So here (in 2 Peter) is Peter doing just that, as he was shown doing all through the first half of the book of Acts: the primary account of the very earliest Church. He states: “I intend always to remind you [all Christians!] of these things . . . to arouse you by way of reminder” (1:12-13). Likewise, Jesus had also said to him, specifically: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Lk 22:32). Once again, St. Peter is commissioned as the indefectible leader of the Christian Church: whose faith would never again fail as it did when he denied his Lord three times. Nor does (importantly) Holy Scripture record Jesus praying for any other of the disciples, individually, as it does in this passage. And when He does so, it is regarding the pastoral office of the papacy: strengthening the Christian brethren with an unfailing faith. These passages have been defended and explained to Jason in the past.

In the very passage that Jason thinks indicates a lack of a papacy, Peter expressly says: “we have the prophetic word made more sure. You will do well to pay attention to this” (1:19). What more does he require? All agree that the Bible must be interpreted by considering it as a whole, and especially all passages on a theme, so as to get the whole picture. This is the Petrine picture. He’s the leader of the Church, and he knows it and acts like it, as my 50 NT Petrine Proofs shows over and over and over.

Another group of relevant contexts is the imagery used to refer to relevant entities, such as what imagery is used to refer to the apostles or the church. We get twelve thrones without Peter’s throne being differentiated (Matthew 19:28), three pillars without Peter’s being differentiated (Galatians 2:9), twelve foundation stones without Peter’s being differentiated (Ephesians 2:20, Revelation 21:14), etc.

This is absolutely classic Jason Engwer pseudo-“argumentation”: which means that it is a classic instance of fallacy and taking things entirely out of context. The essential problem is the typically Protestant “either/or” outlook; whereas the biblical and Hebrew worldview is “both/and.” Not everything has to be mentioned every time. There is more than enough biblical indication of the papacy (see my papers on that; I need not repeat everything), without it having to be noted in every remotely “ecclesiological” context.

The Bible massively teaches that Peter was the leader of the twelve disciples and the early Church. I just showed two passages where Jesus clearly treated him as preeminent. Two more famous ones are Jesus building His Church upon Peter, whom He renamed “the Rock” (Mt 16:18), and His giving Peter (and him only) the “keys to the kingdom” (16:19). The above considerations do not nullify all this. It’s “both/and.” Then there is the aspect of peter being singled out in lists of the disciples and apostles, which I have already dealt with, directly in reply to Jason.

Jesus had just conferred these extraordinary responsibilities and the office of papacy on St. Peter in Matthew 16, but says that twelve disciples will sit on twelve thrones in Matthew 19:28, just three chapters later; and Jason concludes, therefore, that Petr is not a white different from the other twelve. It simply doesn’t follow. Jesus Himself elsewhere refers to “the twelve” (Mk 14:20; Jn 6:70) without singling out Peter; yet in other passages He does precisely that. “Both/and.” In fact, Judas is included in “the twelve”: and sometimes mentioned by name as included in their number (Mt 26:14, 47; Mk 14:10, 43; Lk 22:3, 47; Jn 6:71), including by Jesus Himself (Mk 14:20; Jn 6:70).

Therefore, if Jesus and the Bible can repeatedly refer to “the twelve” [disciples], yet this number can include an evil betrayer, Judas; then by the same token and logic it can include the leader of the twelve, who is often differentiated or singled out in other lists of the disciples (Mk 1:36; Lk 9:28, 32; Acts 2:37; 5:29; 1 Cor 9:5). The same goes for the list of foundation stones. It’s not a “contradiction.” It’s biblical “either/or” thinking.

If Jason wants to press the point of a supposed “egalitarianism” and lack of hierarchy, we can also point to examples of Jesus making Himself “equal” to His own disciples, even though we know He was God and infinitely higher than they were. He calls them “friends” (Jn 15:15) and notes that to be “first” is to be “be last of all and servant of all” (Mk 9:35); He washes their feet (Jn 13:3-16). He submits Himself as a child to Joseph and Mary (“obedient to them”: 2:51). Even in one of Jason’s examples (Eph 2:20), Jesus includes Himself with the disciples as of the foundation stones: “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,”. Obviously, He is not lesser than they are; yet He includes Himself.

If He can be described in such terms, and talk in such terms, then all the more so can St. Peter as one of the twelve disciples. It’s much ado about nothing, as always in Jason’s anti-Catholic polemics and sophistry.

St. Paul wrote:

Philippians 4:2-3 I entreat Eu-o’dia and I entreat Syn’tyche to agree in the Lord. [3] And I ask you also, true yokefellow, help these women, for they have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers,

Note that Paul commanded Eu-o’dia and Syn’tyche “to agree in the Lord.” So he was higher in authority than them. Yet he calls them (along with Clement) “fellow workers”. Doe this “prove” then, that Eu-o’dia, Syn’tyche, St. Paul, and St. Clement are all “on the same level”: because they are “fellow workers”? No, of course not.

The early Christians often interact with the objections of their opponents. The gospels respond to the charge that Jesus performed miracles by the power of Satan, Paul responds to his critics in his letters, Justin Martyr wrote a response to Jewish arguments against Christianity, Origen wrote a response to Celsus’ anti-Christian treatise, and so on. See here regarding the lack of reference to a papacy in such contexts.

It’s important for Protestants (and other opponents of the papacy) to bring up considerations like these, since the absence of early references to a papacy becomes more significant when the absence occurs across a broader range of contexts. If only two pages of early Christian literature were extant, the absence of a papacy (or whatever other concept) would be much less significant than its absence across two million pages. The number of pages matters (assuming the usual diversity of topics you’d get with an increase in such a page number).

One of the reasons why it’s become so popular for Catholics to argue for the papacy by an appeal to something like typology or Old Testament precedent is that there’s such a lack of evidence in the New Testament and the early patristic literature. So, there’s a turn to other sources to try to find what isn’t present where we’d most expect to see it.

Jason acts as if there is nothing to indicate the papacy in early patristics. But in fact we have a fabulous, clear example of St. Clement of Rome, the fourth pope, who reigned from approximately 88-99 AD. The Corinthian church wrote to him for advice and guidance. It so happens that I wrote about this just about a month ago, and discovered some very striking facts:

Why is it that Clement is speaking with authority from Rome, settling the disputes of other regions? Why don’t the Corinthians solve it themselves, if they have a proclaimed bishop or even if they didn’t claim one at the time? Why do they appeal to the bishop of Rome? These are questions that I think [a Protestant] needs to seriously consider and offer some sort of answer for.

St. Clement writes (I use the standard Schaff translation: no Catholic “bias” there!):

You therefore, who laid the foundation of this sedition, submit yourselves to the presbyters, and receive correction so as to repent, bending the knees of your hearts. Learn to be subject, laying aside the proud and arrogant self-confidence of your tongue. For it is better for you that you should occupy a humble but honourable place in the flock of Christ, than that, being highly exalted, you should be cast out from the hope of His people. (57)

If, however, any shall disobey the words spoken by Him through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and serious danger; . . . (59, my bolding and italics)

Joy and gladness will you afford us, if you become obedient to the words written by us and through the Holy Spirit root out the lawless wrath of your jealousy according to the intercession which we have made for peace and unity in this letter. (63, my bolding and italics)

Clement definitely asserts his authority over the Corinthian church far away. Again, the question is: “why?” What sense does that make in a Protestant-type ecclesiology where every region is autonomous and there is supposedly no hierarchical authority in the Christian Church? Why must they “obey” the bishop from another region (sections 59, 63)? Not only does Clement assert strong authority; he also claims that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are speaking “through” him.

That is extraordinary, and very similar to what we see in the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15:28 (“For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things”: RSV) and in Scripture itself. It’s not strictly inspiration but it is sure something akin to infallibility (divine protection from error and the pope as a unique mouthpiece of, or representative of God).

The Jerusalem Council was an example of a pope presiding over but acting jointly in concert with bishops and even regular elders (much like ecumenical councils function). But Pope St. Clement was acting unilaterally, which popes can also do. The Jerusalem Council claimed divine guidance and de facto infallibility for the collective group. St. Clement, however, applies it to himself as an individual. If that’s not the papacy in action I don’t know what it would look like. What else could Jason possibly demand as proof? Here we have the papacy in full color and authority even before the first century was over with, and part of the Bible (Revelation) was possibly still being written.

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Photo credit: Lawrence OP (8-10-09). 19th-century depiction of St Peter holding the keys of the kingdom of heaven. This window is in the crypt of a chapel of the Upper Basilica in Lourdes [Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license]

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Summary: Protestant anti-Catholic apologist Jason Engwer attempts to establish the “absence of a papacy” in the NT & in early patristic literature. He’s dead wrong on both counts, as I demonstrate.

Pearce’s Potshots #44: Jairus’ Daughter “Contradiction”?

Last updated on: August 17, 2021 at 1:49 pm By Dave Armstrong

This particular post was written by guest contributor David Austin. But since Pearce clearly endorses its contents, I’ll include it as #44 of his never-ending potshots against the Bible and Christianity. Austin’s words will be in blue.

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Mark 5:22-23, 35-36 (RSV) Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Ja’irus by name; and seeing him, he fell at his feet, [23] and besought him, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” . . . [35] While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” [36] But ignoring what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.”

Luke 8:41-42, 49-50 And there came a man named Ja’irus, who was a ruler of the synagogue; and falling at Jesus’ feet he besought him to come to his house, [42] for he had an only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she was dying. . . . [49] While he was still speaking, a man from the ruler’s house came and said, “Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the Teacher any more.” [50] But Jesus on hearing this answered him, “Do not fear; only believe, and she shall be well.”

Matthew 9:18 While he was thus speaking to them, behold, a ruler came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.”

It is note-worthy, that Mark’s account says “My little daughter is dying” contrasting with Matthew’s account which says “My daughter has just died”. So which is it, was Jairus’s daughter dead or dying when Jairus first approached Jesus? You may think this is a trivial matter, but both statements cannot be correct; there is a contradiction.

This is rather simple to solve. It’s untrue that every Gospel “must” give every detail of every incident or someone’s words. According to whom? Where is this “requirement” written in stone? As in real life, people report different things; some highlight or concentrate exclusively on one element, another does differently.

This factor alone explains away perhaps 40% of all of atheists’ alleged biblical “contradictions”. I know, because I’ve dealt with scores and scores of them, myself, and this silliness and logical foolishness is a constant theme. They momentarily lose comprehension of — in their zeal to mock and deride the Bible — the fairly simple laws of logic.

The solution of the supposed conundrum is in the texts themselves. Austin cited Mark at length (including 5:35) and noted that “Luke’s account is substantially the same.” Note what occurs in the two parallel accounts of Mark and Luke:

1) Jairus approaches Jesus and says, “My little daughter is at the point of death” (Mk 5:23); Luke (as narrator) reports that “she was dying.”

2) [Seemingly] immediately afterwards in both accounts (Mk 5:24-34; Lk 8:43-48), Jesus heals the woman who had a “hemorrhage” (Mk 5:29) or “flow of blood” (Lk 8:43).

3) Then a man from Jairus’ house comes and reports that his daughter is “dead” (Mk 5:35; Lk 8:49).

4) Thus, there is a gap between the time when Jairus’ a) knew his daughter was dying, until the time that b) reports came that she had indeed died.

Matthew, possibly — but not necessarily — using the well-known and established literary technique of compression (which I have addressed elsewhere: including reference to this incident), simply records 4b (his daughter’s death) rather than 4a (his despair in knowing his daughter was dying, and his seeking a healing from Jesus). Matthew uses about 176 words in writing about this event, whereas Mark utilizes around 481 words (2.7 times more than Matthew).

It’s not a contradiction. We know from Mark and Luke that he learned of her death while he was still pleading with Jesus to heal her. So where is the problem here? There is none, for anyone who looks fairly at the texts and employs simple common sense.

Note that Matthew also includes a section (9:20-22) on the woman with a “hemorrhage” (9:20). It’s a different chronology or order than in the other two accounts, but this is completely normal in 1st century Jewish writing, since that culture had a different conception of chronology than we do today.

See, for example, Jacques Doukhan’s book, Hebrew for Theologians: A Textbook for the Study of Biblical Hebrew in Relation to Hebrew Thinking (University Press of America, 1993). He noted that in the Hebrew mind, “the content of time prevails over chronology. Events which are distant in time can, if their content is similar, be regarded as simultaneous.” (p. 206)

Likewise, Thorleif Boman, in his book, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1960), devotes 61 pages to the topic of “Time and Space.” He explained that for the Hebrews, “time is determined by its content, and since light is authoritative and decisive, the light was called day and the darkness night even before the creation of the heavenly luminaries (Gen. 1.5).” (p. 131)

He observed also:

[W]e, too, characterize time by its content. We speak of wartime, peacetime, hard times, time of mourning, feast time, favourable time, office hours, bad year, etc. . . .

Thus, in part, the chronological times were named and characterized in accordance with their content in the Old Testament; day is the time of light and night is darkness (Gen. 1.5; Ps. 104.20). (p. 140)

Mark devotes ten verses to the same incident of the woman with a hemorrhage (5:24-34), or 3.3 times more than Matthew does, and Luke provides six verses to it (8:43-48), or twice as many as Matthew. Thus, this supports the belief that Matthew is again (?) employing compression (as he is thought by many commentators to habitually do).

All three accounts, however, have Jairus — and Jesus — being aware of his daughter’s death (Mt 9:18; Mk 5:35; Lk 8:49), before Jesus goes to heal her (Mt 9:23; Mk 5:37-38; Lk 8:50-51).

Problem entirely solved! Matthew merely didn’t mention the part where Jairus told Jesus that his daughter was dying. He gets right to the point and has him telling Jesus (after being informed by a person of his house) that she was already dead (just as Mark and Luke also report the fact of her death). Then Jesus goes (after that report) to heal her, in all three accounts.

After becoming aware of all this, only a person relentlessly, irrationally, and obstinately hostile to the Bible and/or Christianity could possibly still think a “contradiction” was present.

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Photo credit: Jesus and Jairus’ Daughter; etching after Gabriel Cornelius von Max (1840–1915) [Look and Learn / Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license]

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Summary: Jonathan MS Pearce (by endorsing a guest writer) believes that a contradiction exists in the report in three Gospels of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead. He’s wrong, as usual.

Pearce’s Potshots #42: 12th c. BC Moabite & Ammonite Kings

Last updated on: July 19, 2021 at 12:56 pm By Dave Armstrong

The Broad Definition of “King” in the Ancient Near East, + Biblical Use of “Chiefs of Edom”

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I am responding to a portion of Pearce’s article, Exodus Sidebar: Replying to Armstrong about Camels (5-24-21). Pearce cites Donald B. Redford, whom he describes as an “eminent Canadian Egyptologist and archaeologist” as an ally of his relentless, irrational biblical skepticism:

The author knows of kings in Moab (Jud. 2:12-30 [typo: should be 3:12-30]; 11:25) and Ammon (Jud. 11:13, 28), although these monarchies did not take shape until well into the first millennium B.C. [Egypt, Canaan, and Israel In Ancient Times, Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 277]

Here are the supposedly anachronistic biblical passages in question:

Judges 3:12 (RSV) . . . and the LORD strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel . . .

Judges 3:14 . . . Eglon the king of Moab . . . [same in 3:15, 17]

Judges 11:13 . . . the king of the Ammonites . . . [same in 11:14, 28]

Judges 11:25 . . . Balak the son of Zippor, king of Moab . . . [cf. 11:17; Num 22:4, 10]

The web page, “Ancient Moabites of Jordan” states:

Origin: The Moabites were likely pastoral nomads settling in the trans-Jordanian highlands. They may have been among the raiders referred to as Habiru in the Amarna letters. Whether they were among the nations referred to in the Ancient Egyptian language as Shutu or Shasu is a matter of some debate among scholars. The existence of Moab prior to the rise of the Israelite polity can be seen from the colossal statues erected at Luxor by Pharaoh Ramesses II [r. 1279-1213 BC]. On the base of the second statue in front of the northern pylon of Rameses’ temple [the word] Mu’ab is listed among a series of nations conquered by the pharaoh.

The time-period of Ramesses II is right before the time of the book of Judges [c. 1200- c. 1037 BC]. Thus, we have archaeological evidence of some nation called Moab or Mu-ab in existence, when the book of Judges refers to it. The Luxor statue referencing Moab was written about in Journal of Near Eastern Studies (Vol. 52, No. 4. Oct., 1993).

Precursors of forerunners of the Moabites may have been the Shasu. Wikipedia describes them:

The Shasu . . . were Semitic-speaking cattle nomads in the Southern Levant from the late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age or the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt. They were organized in clans under a tribal chieftain, and were described as brigands active from the Jezreel Valley to Ashkelon and the Sinai. . . . [source given for this claim: Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries BC, Robert D. Miller II, Wipf and Stock; Reprint edition, 2012, p. 95]

The earliest known reference to the Shasu occurs in a 15th-century BCE list of peoples in the Transjordan region. The name appears in a list of Egypt’s enemies inscribed on column bases at the temple of Soleb built by Amenhotep III. Copied later in the 13th century BCE either by Seti I or by Ramesses II at Amarah-West, the list mentions six groups of Shasu: the Shasu of S’rr, the Shasu of Rbn, the Shasu of Sm’t, the Shasu of Wrbr, the Shasu of Yhw, and the Shasu of Pysps.

Two Egyptian texts, one dated to the period of Amenhotep III (14th century BCE), the other to the age of Ramesses II (13th century BCE), refer to t3 š3św yhw, i.e. “Yahu in the land of the Šosū-nomads”, in which yhw[3]/Yahu is a toponym.

Øystein Sakala LaBianca (Ph.D. Brandeis University 1987) is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Associate Director of the Institute of Archaeology at Andrews University. Randall W. Younker is Professor of Archaeology and History of Antiquity at the same university. Together, they wrote the book chapter, “The Kingdoms of Ammon, Moab, and Edom: The Archaeology of Society in Late Bronze/Iron Age Transjordan (Ca. 1400-500 BCE)” which is part of the book, The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (edited by Thomas E. Levy, London: Leicester University Press, 1995). Here are their opinions as to possible “kings” in the 11th and 12th c. BC in Moab and Ammon (present-day Jordan):

[T]he Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites were not true nation-states, but rather, are better described as ‘tribal kingdoms’. . . .

Nelson Glueck . . . define[d] the territories of their respective kingdoms from a string of border forts which he believed had already been built to protect their boundaries by the end of the thirteenth century BCE. Glueck’s conclusions were generally accepted by the scholars of his day . . .

When the authors discuss the Edomites (from the same general region), we see that their political situation was similar to the Moabites and Edomites and that the biblical accounts accurately reflect it:

Interestingly, the greater emphasis on network generating range-tied tribalism in the environmentally more severe territory of Edom may receive support from the ‘Edomite king list’ in Gen. 36. Scholars have long noted that none of the kings in this list was the son of his predecessor, and that each king is attributed to a different city. Moreover, these kings are introduced as ‘the kings who reigned in Edom, not kings of Edom’ . . . Regardless of when one would date this text . . . , it accurately reflects the proliferation of tribes and tribal chieftains which is typical of an ecologically hazardous region such as Edom.

Here are the relevant biblical passages:

Genesis 36:15-19, 21 These are the chiefs of the sons of Esau. The sons of El’iphaz the first-born of Esau: the chiefs Teman, Omar, Zepho, Kenaz, [16] Korah, Gatam, and Am’alek; these are the chiefs of El’iphaz in the land of Edom; they are the sons of Adah. [17] These are the sons of Reu’el, Esau’s son: the chiefs Nahath, Zerah, Shammah, and Mizzah; these are the chiefs of Reu’el in the land of Edom; they are the sons of Bas’emath, Esau’s wife. [18] These are the sons of Oholiba’mah, Esau’s wife: the chiefs Je’ush, Jalam, and Korah; these are the chiefs born of Oholiba’mah the daughter of Anah, Esau’s wife. [19] These are the sons of Esau (that is, Edom), and these are their chiefs. . . . [21] Dishon, Ezer, and Dishan; these are the chiefs of the Horites, the sons of Se’ir in the land of Edom.

Genesis 36:29-31, 40, 43 These are the chiefs of the Horites: the chiefs Lotan, Shobal, Zib’eon, Anah, [30] Dishon, Ezer, and Dishan; these are the chiefs of the Horites, according to their clans in the land of Se’ir. [31] These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites. . . . [40] These are the names of the chiefs of Esau, . . . [43] Mag’diel, and Iram; these are the chiefs of Edom (that is, Esau, the father of Edom), according to their dwelling places in the land of their possession. [“reigned” also appears ten times in Genesis 36: obviously referring to either a chief or king: 36:31 [2]; 32-39]

Exodus 15:15 Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed; the leaders of Moab, trembling seizes them; . . .

1 Chronicles 1:43, 51-54 These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites: . . . [51] And Hadad died. The chiefs of Edom were: chiefs Timna, Al’iah, Jetheth, [52] Oholiba’mah, Elah, Pinon, [53] Kenaz, Teman, Mibzar, [54] Mag’di-el, and Iram; these are the chiefs of Edom.

Everything here strikingly fits what we know from archaeology. The texts refer to “chiefs” (i.e., chieftains) of tribes “in” Edom (“chiefs of El’iphaz”; “chiefs of Reu’el”; “chiefs of the Horites”; “chiefs of Edom . . . according to their dwelling places in the land of their possession”). This fits with the understanding of Edom at this time being a collection of “tribal kingdoms.” In the two times they are referred to as “kings” (Gen 36:31; 1 Chr 1:43) the text says “kings who reigned in the land of Edom”: which is clearly synonymous in context to “chiefs” rather than a king of all of Edom. I think this gives us a clue as to the meaning of “king of Moab” and “king of the Ammonites” a little later in the book of Judges. Exodus 15:15 in an earlier period refers to “leaders of Moab” rather than kings, which is perhaps referring to chieftains also. But our authors have more to say about these matters:

Although it is true that an ancient Near Eastern ‘king’ (milk, malik, malk, sharru) could include the head of an empire, state or tribe . . . there is evidence that the individuals who appropriated the title generally laid claim to power and influence that surpassed that of mere local bedouin shiekhs or village headmen. To see more precisely what the nature of this difference in power was, we shall take a closer look at the ninth century BCE polity of Mesha of Moab.

According to the Mesha inscription . . . Mesha identified himself as Dayboni, that is, a Dibonite. His people were called Dibonites and his place of residence was the city of Dibon . . . . However, he clearly claimed authority beyond the boundaries of his home city and people, for he was not merely the ruler of Dibon or the Dibonites; rather, he was the ‘king of Moab’. During times of external threat he could call upon ‘men from Moab’, that is, individuals from beyond his kin circle of ‘obedient’ or ‘loyal’ Dibonites. His ability to call up the ‘men from Moab’ clearly elevated him beyond the level of a local Dibonite sheikh or chief. Even Mesha’s enemies, the Israelites, who knew Mesha primarily as a ‘cattle magnate’ (noged, 2 Kgs 3:4), also recognized him as ‘king of Moab’ [“Now Mesha king of Moab was a sheep breeder . . .”: RSV]. . . . Mesha does not appear to have had jurisdiction over all land that was traditionally considered to be the land of Moab.

We see, then (assuming the correctness of the above anthropological / archaeological analysis), that the biblical use of “king of Moab” and “king of the Ammonites” is perfectly in keeping with what we know of those places at that time. It is not a biblical anachronism.

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Bible & Archaeology / Bible & Science (A Collection)

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Photo credit: Mesha Stele: stele of Mesha, king of Moab, recording his victories against the Kingdom of Israel. Basalt, ca. 800 BCE. From Dhiban, now in Jordan [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license]

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Summary: Atheist anti-theist Jonathan MS Pearce thinks that the book of Judges referring to Moabite & Ammonite kings is historical anachronism. I enlist archaeology to disprove this.

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Tags: alleged Bible contradictions, alleged biblical anachronisms, Ammonite kings, Ammonites, ancient Hebrews, ancient Israelites, ancient Jews, anti-theism, archaeology & the Bible, archaeology & the Old Testament, atheists & the Bible, Bible “contradictions”, Bible “difficulties”, Bible & History, biblical accuracy, biblical anachronisms, biblical archaeology, Bronze Age, Hebrews, Holy Bible, infallibility, Iron Age, Late Bronze Age, Moabite & Ammonite Kings, Moabite kings, Moabites, Old Testament & history

Pearce’s Potshots #41: 13th c. BC Canaanite Iron Chariots

Last updated on: July 16, 2021 at 11:40 am By Dave Armstrong

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I am responding to a portion of Pearce’s article, Exodus Sidebar: Replying to Armstrong about Camels (5-24-21). Pearce enlists Donald B. Redford, whom he describes as an “eminent Canadian Egyptologist and archaeologist” for his cause of biblical skepticism:

[A]nachronisms do indeed abound, robbing the book [Judges] of the credence one might have placed in it. Iron is common for chariots and implements (cf. Jud. 1:19; 4:3 13; cf. 1 Sam. 13:19-21), although historically it did not replace bronze until well into the monarchy. [Egypt, Canaan, and Israel In Ancient Times, Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 277]

Let’s look at those Bible passages (and another related one):

Joshua 17:16 (RSV) The tribe of Joseph said, “The hill country is not enough for us; yet all the Canaanites who dwell in the plain have chariots of iron, both those in Beth-she’an and its villages and those in the Valley of Jezreel.”

Judges 1:19 And the LORD was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.

Judges 4:2-3 And the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor; the commander of his army was Sis’era, who dwelt in Haro’sheth-ha-goiim. [3] Then the people of Israel cried to the LORD for help; for he had nine hundred chariots of iron, and oppressed the people of Israel cruelly for twenty years.

Judges 4:13 Sis’era called out all his chariots, nine hundred chariots of iron, . . .

1 Samuel 13:19 . . . Now there was no smith to be found throughout all the land of Israel . . .

Redford seems to assume that “smith” in the latter passage presupposes work with iron, but historically, blacksmiths were not confined to working with iron. Wikipedia (“Blacksmith”; section, “Before the Iron Age”) noted that “During the Chalcolithic era and the Bronze Age, humans in the Mideast learned how to smelt, melt, cast, rivet, and (to a limited extent) forge copper and bronze.” So it’s not a foregone conclusion that “smiths” here is referring to a blacksmith who worked with iron; and even if this was the intent, note that it said there was no such person in Israel; the Philistines dominated the trade in the area (1 Sam 13:20). In 1 Samuel, in RSV, “iron” appears only once, referring to shekels (coins): in 17:7. The Hebrew word here, charash (Strong’s word #2796) is defined by the Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon as “worker in metal.”

Joshua, the successor of Moses, is thought by many to have lived in the 13th century BC, and this is the time of the “conquest” of Canaan by Israel. Judges 1:1 announces his death. I gave evidences from archaeology for these events in my papers, No Evidence for Joshua’s Conquest? (5-28-21), and Joshua’s Altar on Mt. Ebal: Findings of Recent Archaeology (7-22-14). This period is right at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age (1200 BC). I shall argue that iron chariots, or at least, iron-plated chariots, were indeed historically plausible in Canaan at this time. And this is the claim: that Israel’s enemies possessed them and were, therefore, difficult to defeat in battle.

The book of Judges (whether compiled later or not) deals with the historical period from approximately 1200 BC (again, the beginning of the Iron Age) to the appearance of Saul as Israel’s first king, around 1037-1010 BC: which event is dealt with in 1 Samuel. Thus, the first thing to recognize is that we are already in the Iron Age; thus, use of iron in chariots would seem to be at least possible, though perhaps not prevalent. Remember, the skeptical claim is that iron chariots in these passages are anachronisms, that ought not be there at all. They are supposed to be historically inaccurate.

But let’s examine this question a bit more detail, shall we? Is what Judges reports so far-fetched, and some kind of myth? Wikipedia (“Blacksmith”) noted:

The Hittites of Anatolia first discovered or developed the smelting of iron ores around 1500 BC. They seem to have maintained a near monopoly on the knowledge of iron production for several hundred years, but when their empire collapsed during the Eastern Mediterranean upheavals around 1200 BC, the knowledge seems to have escaped in all directions.

The empire of the Hittites (c. 1600-c. 1180 BC), as one educational article devoted to it explained, took up roughly the eastern half of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) and extended into the Levant, down to the city of Byblos (present-day Lebanon / ancient Phoenicia), as a map of the empire illustrates. The same article stated:

The Hittite military made successful use of chariots. Although their civilization thrived during the Bronze Age, the Hittites were the forerunners of the Iron Age and were manufacturing iron artifacts from as early as the 14th century BCE. Correspondence with rulers from other empires reveal a foreign demand for iron goods.

Wikipedia (“Canaan”) is clear that the Hittites played a key role among the Canaanites. It observes:

Canaan had significant geopolitical importance in the Late Bronze Age Amarna period (14th century BC) as the area where the spheres of interest of the Egyptian, Hittite, Mitanni and Assyrian Empires converged.

This article mentions the Hittites 13 times. The book of Judges mentions them twice (1:26; 3:5). Its map of ancient Canaan overlaps the map of the Hittite Empire, with three cities north of Byblos.

Nathaniel L. Erb-Satullo, an archaeologist who specializes in ancient metallurgy, wrote the article, “The Innovation and Adoption of Iron in the Ancient Near East” (Journal of Archaeological Research volume 27, pp. 557–607 [2019]). He wrote in the Abstract:

Current evidence supports an Anatolian origin for extractive iron metallurgy on a limited scale sometime in the early 2nd millennium BC. However, the first major expansion of iron, both in Anatolia and across the wider Near East, occurred in the late second and early first millennium BC.

This exactly corresponds to the Hittites being in the forefront of iron production. We know that they had chariots (very good ones), and that they were part of the Canaanites. Everything fits into the scenario that the Bible describes. There is no anachronism here!

The Biblical Archaeology Society’s Bible Review (April 1990) included a fascinating little snippet: “Did the Canaanites Really Have Iron Chariots?” It noted:

As recently as 1983, one commentator [J. F. A. Sawyer] has told us, “It is historically highly improbable… that the Canaanites were equipped with iron chariots before the end of the second millennium B.C.”

But the archaeological evidence is clearly to the contrary. The biblical text does not require us to suppose that the Canaanite chariots were wholly iron, but only that they were strengthened with it, as several commentators have realized. But as the evidence in the accompanying article [link] shows, iron was sufficiently available in the Late Bronze Age to make iron-plated chariots plausible. . . .

It is noteworthy that after the Book of Judges, the Hebrew writers never again describe chariots of “iron.” Either the metal was later a normal component of a chariot and so did not deserve mention, or “iron chariots” were in fashion only for a short period, perhaps as an experimental weapon. In any event, the evidence indicates that there is no reason to conclude that the Canaanite chariots of iron are an anachronism inserted by a later editor.

Dr. Alan Millard, Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic languages, and Honorary Senior Fellow (Ancient Near East), at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology (SACE) in the University of Liverpool, wrote a book chapter in 1992 entitled, “Back to the Iron Bed: Og’s or Procrustes’?” In it, he contends:

Chariots wholly of iron are unlikely; a form of iron plating is the commonly accepted understanding of the Hebrew words in Joshua and Judges (Josh. xvii 16,18; Judg. i 19, iv 3,13). After noting the very lightweight construction of Late Bronze Age chariots found in Egypt, Drews asserted, “iron plating would have immediately collapsed the fragile and flimsy frame” and “an ‘iron plated’ chariot is thus technological nonsense”. Moreover, “nowhere in the ancient world, at any period, are iron plated chariots attested” ([n. 2], p. 18). Initially, the impracticality of iron-plated chariots seems a major objection, but it depends upon the amounts and the application of the iron. Small-scale fittings, holding the axles or hubs, would be insufficient to give a distinctive name to the chariots, so a visible covering of some sort is best envisaged. That it was wholesale plating is not so certain, or necessary. In the Late Bronze Age bronze scales were commonly sewn on to cloth or leather garments to protect men and horses, they even covered helmets, and there are administrative ac counts of “hides for the storehouses for the coats of mail (to equip) 20 war chariots”. Although iron scale armour is not attested until much later, in neo-Assyrian times, the possibility of an experiment with iron in the 13th or 12th centuries B.C. cannot be ruled out. Whether in plates or scales, the iron would add greatly to the weight of the chariots, as Drews emphasized, yet only in proportion to the amount applied. Three or four thin plates hung over the front to protect the charioteer’s legs, which his hauberk did not cover, might have been thought worth the extra load. Once the heavier chariots were moving, they would be hard for opponents, especially foot-soldiers, to withstand. In the relatively rough and uneven terrain of much of Canaan, even in the plains where the iron chariots were stationed, the opportunity for long, fast runs would be limited, unlike Egypt and parts of Syria. Thus iron chariots become intelligible in the contexts where Joshua and Judges place them, and the threat they would pose to the Israelites is seen to be great.

Moreover, we have the evidence of chariot use by the Hittites (against the Egyptians) from the Battle of Kadesh (at a site in present-day Syria, in the Levant), from 1274 BC, or some 74 years or so before the time under consideration, referred to in the book of Judges. According to the Wikipedia article on the topic:

[It] is the earliest pitched battle in recorded history for which details of tactics and formations are known. It is believed to have been the largest chariot battle ever fought, involving between 5,000 and 6,000 chariots in total. As a result of discovery of multiple Kadesh inscriptions and the Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty, it is the best documented battle in all of ancient history.

I couldn’t find anything specifically referencing iron or iron-plated chariots in this battle, but it is a quite reasonable surmise that it was involved, seeing that the Hittites were probably the foremost practitioners of the use of iron in the world at the time.

Lord Edwin E. Hitti’s article, “Hittite Chariots” adds additional fascinating insights, as to how iron might have created a better chariot:

The Hittites were not inventors of the chariot, but did make major modifications, developed and produced chariots in huge quantities. Specifically, by creating the six-spoke wheels for the chariots to make them lighter and faster, yet still durable . . .

The Hittite chariots had a box serving as a cab, with an axle passing beneath it, which held 2 six-spoke wheels. The six-spoke wheel was an innovation developed by them. Other contemporary chariots of the Hittites had eight spoke[s], . . . The six-spoke[s] allowed the chariots to move faster because the wheels were light. Thus, with speed and light wheels, it became maneuverable.

The Egyptian chariot placed the wheels in the back of the box, and only held two men, a charioteer and a warrior. The limitation was weight; with the wheels so far back, leverage placed most of the weight on the horses, thereby slowing them down.

The Hittite chariot, in contrast, placed the wheels farther forward under the center of the box, which put the weight of the warriors over the axle and took the strain off of the horses, This allowed three men to ride, the charioteer and two warriors, which in effect doubled the number of fighting men that could be deployed with the same number of chariots.

The Hittite war chariot was made with iron hub wheels; this made their war chariot stronger, faster, and longer lasting. Also, the warriors in the chariot were armed with superior weapons. Their iron tipped arrows had much greater penetrating power that the copper and bronze arrows of the Egyptians, who were the Hittites main rivals. The war chariot was sometimes equipped with iron swords on the hubs to cut opposing infantry units [Ben Hur-style!].

Likewise, James D. Muhly, Emeritus Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in his article, “How Iron Technology Changed the Ancient World and Gave the Philistines a Military Edge” (Biblical Archaeology Review, vol. 8:6, Nov/Dec 1982), states:

The actual use of iron must have been confined to fittings, such as the hubs of the chariot’s wheels, perhaps even parts of the wheel itself. (The same explanation probably applies to the iron bedstead of Og, king of Bashan, in Deuteronomy 3:11.) Such iron chariot fittings have been recovered at Taanach, but unfortunately in an uncertain archaeological context.

Thus, it looks like we have two viable theories as to the use of iron in Hittite chariots: either as plating and/or in parts of the wheels only. In both cases, the extra weight wouldn’t be so great as to be a hindrance to performance, but the iron would provide a distinct advantage. This would explain why the Israelites had trouble defeating their opponents with chariots that included iron in some capacity.

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Habitually “Lying” Christian Apologists?: 19th Century “Hittites Didn’t Exist” Radical Skepticism and Examination of Atheist DagoodS’ Replies and Charges [1-15-11, at Internet Archive]

Hittite Skeptics Chronicles, Part III: Specific Citations of Denial (Budge, Sumner, & Conder) and Biblical Historical Accuracy (in the Time of Elisha) [1-19-11, at Internet Archive]

Great Hittite Wars, Part IV: Lying Christian Egyptologist M. G. Kyle?: Atheist DagoodS Disputes Sir A. E. Wallis Budge’s Reported Hittite Skepticism [1-21-11, at Internet Archive]

“Higher” Hapless Haranguing of Hypothetical Hittites (19th C.) [7-7-20; abridgement of the four posts above]

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Photo credit: Frank K. (8-12-08). Orthostat relief in basalt; battle chariot, Carchemish, 9th century BC; Late Hittite style with Assyrian influence. Reconstructed panel on the left, original on the right [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license]

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Summary: Critics of the Bible have attacked the mention of Canaanite iron chariots in Judges and Joshua, as alleged proof of historical inaccuracy and anachronism. I show how they are wrong.

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Tags: alleged Bible contradictions, alleged biblical anachronisms, ancient Hebrews, ancient Israelites, ancient Jews, anti-theism, archaeology & the Bible, archaeology & the Old Testament, atheists & the Bible, Bible “contradictions”, Bible “difficulties”, Bible & History, biblical accuracy, biblical anachronisms, biblical archaelogy, Bronze Age, Canaanite iron chariots, Canaanites, Hebrews, Hittites, Holy Bible, infallibility, Iron Age, iron chariots, Judges & iron chariots, Late Bronze Age, Old Testament & history

Pearce’s Potshots #39: Ignoring Chiastic Literary Genre in Genesis

Last updated on: July 7, 2021 at 1:52 pm By Dave Armstrong

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I am responding to portions of Pearce’s article, “Ruddy Flood Thing Again. And Armstrong.” (7-3-21). I recently explained the nature and widespread use of chiasmus. Readers will want to at least briefly peruse the main points of that because this paper will presuppose that knowledge (it’s new to me, too, having just discovered this aspect).

Here I will simply note the occurrence over and over of chiasmus in texts that are being blasted by Pearce’s atheist or skeptical (or — probably largely — theologically liberal) sources. He refers to The Oxford Handbook of the Pentateuch (edited by Joel S. Baden and Jeffrey Stackert); hot off the press and less than a week old as I write. I did a search via the “Look Inside” function of Amazon and discovered that there was not a single mention of chiasmus or chiastic in the entire 592-page work.

One contributor did, however, mention chiasms once on page 122, though it was confined to “poetic portions of the Pentateuch.” As I just showed in my paper published yesterday, chiasmus is massively utilized throughout the Torah, with 283 instances; 100 of these, or 35% in Genesis alone.

Pearce cites Baruch Schwartz, one of the contributors, opining — we see the lead that Pearce has been following and parroting — about repetition in Genesis and Exodus (that he assumes is the result of multiple authors):

In all these cases and innumerable others, the individual passages provide no recognition that the event itself has already transpired or that it might not be the only such event. Every such narrative, and every similarly duplicated subsection of a repetitive narrative text, presents itself as the one and only account of the event described, as does its counterpart.

Dr. Schwartz is a highly credentialed scholar, yet he doesn’t seem to be aware of chiasmus at all, which is a bit of a puzzle. Let’s analyze his comments (cited by Pearce) about some of these “repetitive” texts in Genesis and Exodus:

we read twice that Yahweh informed Noah of his decision (6:17 and 7:4); . . .

Yes, because it’s part of a chiasm. In Wenham’s construction, see D (Gen 6:17) and H (7:45), which are coupled in the
literary “pyramid” with H’ (8:12-13) and D’ (9:11-17). Gordon Wenham is quite a biblical scholar, too.

twice we learn that he conveyed his instructions to Noah (6:18–21 and 7:1–3) . . .

Yes, because it’s part of a chiasm. In Wenham’s construction, see E+F and G, which are parallel to G’ (8:15-17), F’ (9:1-4), and E’ (9:8-10).

Yahweh twice mentions that he has seen the affliction of his people and has decided to act (3:7–8 and 3:9) . . .

Yes, because it’s part of a chiasm related to Exodus 3:1 to 4:5; see B and E, which are parallel to E’ (3:16-17a) and B’ (3:18-22).

Moses twice expresses his objections to having the task imposed upon him (3:11, 13 and 4:1, 10, 13); twice Yahweh responds to his reservations (3:12, 14–15 and 4:2–9, 11–12, 14–16), and so forth.

Yes, because it’s part of the same chiasm (Exodus 3:1 to 4:5) — do we detect a pattern by now? — ; see E (3:11), H (3:13c), and A’ (4:1) with E (3:12), I + J + I’ + H’ + G’ (3:14), F’ (3:15), and A’ (4:2-4).

Pearce then cites Professor of Old Testament Jakob Wohrle from the same volume. His citation will be fun for our present purposes, because he separates the text according to two supposed writers: “priestly” and “non-priestly.” Thus, if we show that a chiasm incorporates portions from both, then I submit that the supposition of it being composed by one writer becomes stronger.

his command to enter the ark (6:18b–21 [P]; 7:1–3 [non-P]), . . .

Schwartz mentioned the same couplet above, and I showed how it is part of a grand chiasm in Genesis, laid out by Wenham.

Even more clear is the chiastic structure of Genesis 6-9. Pearce cites Wohrle’s chapter in the 2016 book, The Formation of the Pentateuch:

Within the primeval history it is possible to reconstruct two parallel flood stories (Gen 6–9), a completely preserved Priestly version and a nearly completely preserved non-Priestly version.

Everyone’s entitled to their scholarly opinions. Wohrle thinks that the text wildly jumps back and forth between the “priestly” and “non-priestly” writers: as Pearce’s previous citation from him testifies in abundance. Those of us who are skeptical of DH think there is another, more plausible explanation for “two parallel flood stories”: a deliberate application of chiasmus by one writer, to help readers master and memorize the text (which may have also been — in terms of final formulation — oral for some time before it was written down). Thus, one can see the structure of this in Wenham’s 1978 hypothesis, and simpler versions by Anderson (also 1978) and Bullinger (1922). There is also a chiasm based on the observations of all three of the foregoing.

The same applies in the book of Exodus for the stories of the plagues (Exod 7–12) . . .

Again, the repetition is adequately accounted for by at least six chiasms (rather than multiple authors). See how they work for the following portions of Holy Scripture

and the crossing of the sea (Exod 14).

See the three chiasms involved there:

Remarkably, in these parts of the Pentateuch even the smallest narrative details are preserved twice.

It’s not “remarkable”; it’s simply chiasmus, or one of the many other sorts of biblical repetition. As I noted last time, Bible scholar E. W. Bullinger catalogued “over 200 distinct figures [in the Bible], several of them with from 30 to 40 varieties” in his 1104-page volume, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (London: 1898; see the online complete book link too, and the paginated Internet Archive version).

He devotes 31 wonderful pages to a slightly larger category of literary devices (in relation to chiasmus) that he calls “Correspondence” (pp. 363-393). In addition to that, he also devotes a remarkable 202 pages (pp. 171-262, 294-403) to 44 more forms of deliberate literary repetition (with massive biblical examples provided, as always). I list them, to give readers an idea of the extraordinary research involved in compiling all of this (all linked in the page numbers):

Homoeopropheron; or Alliteration: The Repetition of the same Letter or Syllable at the commencement of Successive Words (pp. 171-175)

Homoeoteleuton; or Like Endings: The Repetition of the same Letters or Syllables at the end of Successive Words (p. 176)

Homoeoptoton; or Like Inflections: The Repetition of Inflections (p. 177)

Paromoeosis; or Like-Sounding Inflections: The Repetition of Inflections similar in Sound (pp. 178-179)

Acrostichion; or Acrostic: Repetition of the same or successive Letters at the beginnings of Words or Clauses (pp. 180-188)

Epizeuxis; or Duplication: The Repetition of the Same Word in the Same Sense (pp. 189-198)

Anaphora; or Like Sentence-Beginnings: The Repetition of the same Word at the beginning of successive Sentences (pp. 199-205)

Epanalepsis; or Resumption: The Repetition of the same word after a break, or parenthesis (pp. 206-207)

Polysyndeton; or Many-Ands: The repetition of the word “and” at the beginning of successive clauses (pp. 208-237)

Paradiastole; or Neithers and Nors: The Repetition of the Disjunctives Neither and Nor, or, Either and Or (pp. 238-240)

Epistrophe; or Like Sentence-Endings: The Repetition of the same Word or Words at the end of successive Sentences (pp. 241-243)

Epiphoza; or Epistrophe in Argument: The Repetition of the same Word or Words at the end of successive Sentences: used in Argument (p. 244)

Epanadiplosis; or Encircling: The Repetition of the same Word or Words at the beginning and end of a Sentence (pp. 245-249)

Epadiplosis; or Double Encircling: Repeated Epanadiplosis (p. 250)

Anadiplosis; or Like Sentence Endings and Beginnings: The Repetition of the same Word or Words at the end of one Sentence and at the beginning of another (pp. 251-255)

Climax: or Gradation: Repeated Anadiplosis (pp. 256-259)

[omitted three short sections]

Repetitio; or Repetition: Repetition of the same Word or Words irregularly in the same Passage (pp. 263-266)

Polyptoton; or Many Inflections: The Repetition of the same Part of Speech in different Inflections (pp. 267-285)

Antanaclasis: or Word-Clashing: Repetition of the same Word in the same Sentence, with Different Meanings (pp. 286-293)

[omitted two sections]

Symploce; or Intertwining: The Repetition of different Words in successive Sentences in the same Order and the same Sense (pp. 297-298)

Epanodos; or Inversion: The Repetition of the same Words in an inverse Order (but same Sense) (pp. 299-300)

Antimetabole; or Counterchange: Epanodos, with Contrast or Opposition (pp. 301-303)

Paregmenon; or Derivation: The Repetition of Words derived from the same Root (pp. 304-306)

Paronomasia; or Rhyming-Words: The Repetition of Words similar in Sound, but not necessarily in Sense (pp. 307-320)

Parechesis; or Foreign Paronomasia: The Repetition of Words similar in Sound, but different in Language (pp. 321-323)

Synonymia; or Synonymous Words: The Repetition of Words similar in Sense, but different in Sound and Origin (pp. 324-338)

Repeated Negation; or Many Noes: The Repetition of divers Negatives (pp. 339-341)

[omitted five short sections]

Parallelism; or Parallel Lines: The Repetition of similar, synonymous, or opposite Thoughts or Words in parallel or successive Lines (pp. 349-362)

Prosapodosis; or Detailing: A Returning for Repetition and Explanation (pp. 394-396)

[omitted two sections]

Exergasia: or Working Out: A Repetition, so as to work out or illustrate what has already been said (pp. 399-400)

[omitted two sections]

So here we are with 45 forms of biblical repetition: deliberately employed as literary technique: so complex that it takes 233 pages in a book to describe them and provide many biblical examples. But Pearce thinks the “only” reasonable, plausible explanation of such repetition is multiple authors and the Documentary Hypothesis:

The Pentateuch contains some irreconcilable issues that fall into four categories: repetition (redundancy), contradictions, discontinuity, terminology and style. The basic principle is that these four issues demand an explanation. The only thing that makes sense of this is that there are multiple sources (over multiple time periods) that have been redacted to produce the finished document. (7-2-21)

Pearce continues citing Jakob Wohrle:

To give just one more example, within the story about the crossing of the sea in Exod 14, the notice that the waters of the sea came back appears twice:

Exodus 14:27 (P) [. . .] The sea returned to its bed when the morning appeared [. . .]
Exodus 14:28 (non-P) The waters of the sea returned [. . .]

Such doublets of the smallest details strongly speak against the assumption that the Priestly passages can be understood as a redactional layer. There is no plausible explanation for why a Priestly redactor should have added to the flood story a second request to enter the ark or why he should have added to the story about the crossing of the sea a second notice about the returning waters.

And this is another example of a chiasm, involving Exodus 14:21-31. Once one sees the two passages in the overall structure, it makes perfect sense, since it’s a technique used hundreds of times in the Old Testament.

Pearce likes Oxford Handbooks. He accepts their scholarship. Very well, then, The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible (2018) mentions the concept of chiasmus 13 times, as can be found on a page for it, by searching “chias”. They appear on pages 120 [2], 129, 135 [2], 144, 291 [2], 292 [3], and 427 [2].

It’s also referenced in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, published by Oxford University Press in 2001, and was mentioned in A Dictionary of the Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

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ADDENDUM:

Jonathan directed me to an author who combines a chiastic analysis with belief in the Documentary Hypothesis: “Chiastic Structuring of the Genesis Flood Story: The Art of Using Chiasm as an Effective Compositional Tool for Combining Earlier Chiastic Narratives” (Steve R. Scott, BYU Studies Quarterly — 59:2 Supplement, 2020). Agree or disagree, it is a comprehensive and fascinating analysis. This issue of the journal is devoted to chiasmus (follow the link for the journal). I’m not sure if all writers accept the Documentary Hypothesis or not.

Jonathan then wrote a long, frequently insulting reply-paper (dated 7-7-21). I have no interest in tackling it, per my explanation on his blog:

You say you can’t deal with my replies due to lack of energy, time, your condition, competing responsibilities. That’s fine; just ignore me. You do for the most part, anyway. Just make it total.

Instead, you write this humungous post directed towards me (with my name in the title again): far longer than my recent ones. You didn’t have to. You chose to (lousy recent health and lack of energy and all). And your choices are not my fault (if you later moan and groan about having made them).

I don’t have the patience to deal with all the misrepresentations of my own views, let alone the grandiose claims made. And so I won’t. I’m not all that interested in DH anyway.

As I have noted recently, I prefer to deal with particular concrete, more objective issues (rather than grand sweeping theories like DH). That’s why I picked up on your claim that Genesis supposedly contradicted itself as to a 150-day or 40-day Flood. It does not. But you blew that off by concentrating on Documentary Hypothesis 24-7. Earlier, I was picking away at several of your claims about Genesis, including the notorious “pitch” debates, the domestication of camels and several other items. I’m like a termite: eating away at false atheist presuppositions, until one day the whole house built upon the weak foundation falls down.

As I have made clear, the question of DH is of little interest to me (we all have various interests. Isn’t it great that we’re not all clones?), nor do I care if someone holds it or not. I wrote on this blog on 7-3-21:

Catholics are free to accept or reject DH / Mosaic authorship as they please, and at least one pope (St. John Paul II) believed in it. You seem to worship DH as the Holy Grail. To me it’s something I don’t believe in, based on what I have seen. I’m free to do so as an orthodox Catholic. There is no requirement that I must believe it. If someone else does (up to and including great heroes of mine, like Pope John Paul II) that’s fine. Live and let live. It’s a big ho hum and a yawner.

Then I wrote in an article of mine on 7-4-21:

Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin, writing about the Documentary Hypothesis (1-1-13) stated: “It is . . . possible for a Catholic to hold a number of positions, from full Mosaic authorship, to the documentary hypothesis, to intermediate positions, depending on how one sees the evidence.” . . .

Pope St. John Paul II referred to the “Yahwist” source (the “J” in “JEPD”) in 16 of his addresses or writings: 15 of these were general audiences (1979-1980), and the other usage was in his papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995). He referred to “Elohist” in three general audiences (1979-1980). But Pope Benedict XVI never did so. Nor did Pope St. Paul VI, Pope St. John XXIII, Ven. Pope Pius XII, or Pope Francis. Benedict XVI was certainly as good of a Bible scholar (if not better) than John Paul II. I note also that he did refer to DH before he was pope (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) in his book, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall: a book that I have in my library and which I have cited several times.

I’ve also reiterated that my criticisms of your errors have nothing directly to do with DH. They can exist with it or without it.

Last night, I commended you on your blog for finding an article you directed me to:

Fascinating and interesting stuff! I made a link to it at the end of my 2nd paper on the topic. This was a real find for you. :-)

You make a big deal again about how I am supposedly demanding that you immediately answer every jot and tittle of my paper, as if I am a selfish, self-centered moron and utterly indifferent to your health condition. This is, of course, untrue. I have wished you well with your health several times, including last night on your blog. I am well-acquainted with chronic health conditions. My brother Gerry died of leukemia at age 49 (when I was 39). My father died of lung cancer, and my sister (last year) of kidney failure. I have no living siblings as a result.

I have simply objected to your picking-and-choosing very carefully what you will respond to in my responses to you. I objected to you saying that you would read one paragraph of an article of mine and then simply stop.

You don’t have to read anything of mine if you think it is so worthless. Just completely ignore it. Don’t even read one paragraph. But you haven’t made that choice, as this post again proves with flying colors. That’s the disconnect. You keep becoming more personally harsh and insulting. I’m an imbecile, idiot, and ignoramus, yet you keep responding. Why? is the question . . .

I seek out the most articulate and intelligent opponents in debate that I can find, not the ones I consider fools and ignoramuses.

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Photo credit: The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible (edited by Donn F. Morgan, Oxford University Press, 2018) [listing page for ABE Books]

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Summary: Atheist Jonathan MS Pearce, in his unlimited & dogmatic zeal for the Documentary Hypothesis, completely overlooks massive use of the chiastic literary genre in the book of Genesis.