Wednesday, December 20, 2017

My reply to Alisa Childer's interview of J. Warner Wallace

At Childers' blog I posted the following:
To my knowledge, Wallace, for all of his promotion of the idea that we can discover truth in the gospels if we guide our investigation into them with the same evidentiary rules American courts use, never explains how the gospels would pass the provenance-authentication requirement in the ancient documents test (Fed. R. Evid. 901(b)(8)(B), i.e., the documents were located in a place where, if authentic, [they] would likely be.)  
Our earliest copies of the gospels have unknown provenance outside general remarks about how they were found in some monastery or obtained from a chain of mostly unknown persons or otherwise procured through illegal antiquities sales. 
If Wallace knows what everybody else knows, that the provenance of the gospels is utterly unknown and even conservative Christian scholars disagree about where they originated, then he must either concede that the gospels can never pass muster in a court of law because they would be deemed inadmissible (which would invalidate his attempts to use other rules of evidence in investigating the gospels)...or...he should argue that there are aspects of the American courts' evidentiary rules that he thinks do more to hide the truth than enable its discovery. 
I explain why the gospels fail the ancient documents rule at my blog which has plenty of posts refuting articles Wallace has posted within the last year....https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/10/are-gospels-all-just-hearsay-yes-thanks.html 
Wallace also knows about my blog, but has shown no interest in interacting with my many well-founded criticisms of his arguments, his populist sensationalizing and his ceaseless relentless promotion of his imperfect commentaries on biblical matters (a sin Frank Turek and many other modern apologists are equally guilty of).


Jason Engwer doesn't appreciate the strong justification for skepticism found in John 7:5

Bart Ehrman, like thousands of other skeptics, uses Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 to argue that Jesus' virgin birth (VB) is fiction.  Jason Eng...