Challenge to James Patrick Holding

Mr. Holding seems to specialize in red herrings.

For the last few months, he has been posting videos to his YouTube account wherein he refutes this or that hideously inconclusive skeptical objection to some aspect of the resurrection of Jesus.

Unfortunately, he has chosen to make Christianity look good by batting down the more stupid and uninformed skeptical objections, that any fool with access to Google could tell are false or likely false.

Holding apparently needs a refresher course in common sense:  The historicity of the resurrection of Jesus depends on the extent to which the testimony to that effect in the NT passes standard tests of credibility.  Telling your yammering children that the ancient Jews didn't believe in resurrected ghosts, might get rid of a couple of skeptics, but then again, me telling my own readers how stupid it is to play with live rattlesnakes might get rid of a few churches, but hardly does anything to hurt Christianity proper.

Holding needs to do videos on issues that actually matter, such as:

• Whether unbelievers can be reasonable to refuse to use bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic.  Bible inerrancy is hotly debated by inerrantists themselves, and is denied by most Christian scholars.  It has nowhere near the universal acclaim that other hermeneutics have, such as "grammar", "immediate context", "genre", etc, therefore, there is no justification to view an otherwise contextually and grammatically justified interpretation of a bible verse as wrong, merely because it would conflict with something the bible or the human author himself said elsewhere.  So something more than "that would make the bible contradict itself!" needs to be whimpered before an otherwise contextually and grammatically justified charge of contradiction in the resurrection accounts need be rejected.
• Why god doesn't use his disposition-changing magically coercive telepathic ability to make even the most pagan unbelievers change their minds and believe whatever he wants them to believe (Ezra 1:1, Daniel 4:33), to help today's unbelievers see the light, since God's use of such methods leaves him no excuse to bitch about how closed-minded unbelievers are.  Nothing is preventing God from using such ability except his own desire that unbelievers remain obstinate.
• Why most bible scholars are wrong to claim modern canonical Greek Matthew is anonymous.
• What we should infer from the fact that every church father who wanted to tell the reader what language Matthew wrote in, says it was Hebrew, while none of them declare that Matthew composed or translated in Greek, and why the obvious inference "Matthew likely didn't author or translate any Greek language gospel" should be viewed highly improbable despite its obvious merit.
• Whether the bible provides enough information about the gospel authors themselves, aside from the question-begging assumption of their alleged gospels, so that we can reach reasonable confidence in forming a conclusion about their levels of general credibility
• Why unbelievers should bother with the question of Matthew's authorship, when not even staunchly conservative apologists for the eyewitness authorship of the gospels, such as Dr. Richard Bauckham, are willing to say Matthew wrote it.
• Whether, assuming Matthew saw the risen Christ and heard more teaching about the kingdom of God for a 40 day period (Acts 1:3), he would be likely to knowingly exclude such from his gospel (Matthew 28).
• Why we should believe Mark wrote a resurrection appearance narrative that was later lost, when common sense says his requesting church would have recognized the fragile preciousness of the single autograph, and would likely have guarded against possible loss by making copies at the very earliest period before the repeated use of the original scroll or codex would cause the resurrection appearance narrative at the end to be lost.
   
• Why we should believe Mark wrote a resurrection appearance narrative that was later lost, when common sense says the resurrection appearance story, being the most joyful part of the Christian story, would be the part most likely to be enthusiastically memorized by Mark's requesting church, so that losses through corruption of the text itself could be overcome by simply writing a new copy from memory.
• Whether the Mary mother of Jesus in Mark 3:21 who concludes her son is insane and tries to put a stop to his public ministry (i.e., "take custody"), is the same Mary the mother of Jesus who somewhere between 30 a.d. and 65 a.d., allegedly told Matthew and Luke her prior experiences of God and angels back when she was pregnant with Jesus, and how these confirmed in various ways to her full satisfaction that Jesus was truly divine.  Since Mary thus wasn't forgetful, she was either apostate or lying.  Or Mark speaks of Mary in 3:21 as having thoughts so contrary to the nativity stories because Mark himself knew nothing about nativity stories, despite his source, Peter, being within Jesus' "inner circle", being thus especially likely to have more access to Mary and her testimony than most of the other apostles.
• What exactly is wrong with concluding that a person as interested in the divinity of Jesus as Mark, would not likely "choose to exclude" nativity stories that strongly support his theological agenda, and therefore, Mark excludes the nativity stories probably because he doesn't know about them or thinks them false.
• If Holding doesn't like the "Jesus couldn't do real miracles" conclusion we skeptics draw from Mark 3:21 and John 7:5, can Holding show that his own explanation for the unbelief of Jesus' immediate family is more likely true?  What?  Were Jesus' mother and brothers just brick-stupid recluses?  or maybe Holding never discovered, until about two seconds ago, that the vast majority of Christian translations of Mark 3:21 are wrong?
• Why unbelievers should bother with John's gospel, when conservative scholars like Licona and Craig Evans admit John was not above putting words in Jesus' mouth which Jesus never spoke, and was not above allowing his theological agenda to relax his concern for historical accuracy.
• Why apostle Paul should have shit to do with the discussion of resurrection eyewitnesses, when not even the most explicit NT accounts of Paul's interaction with the risen Christ, justify classifying Paul as an 'eyewitness'.
•  Paul claimed that he took a trip to heaven, and that 14 years later, he still couldn't tell whether that trip was physical or spiritual (2nd Cor. 12:1-4).  If Holding were being prosecuted for a crime on the basis of the testimony of a witness whose history included such similarly wildl esoteric claims, he would surely scream his head off that the witness doesn't have enough credibility to sustain the charge.  Why then does Holding expect unbelievers to think such indecisive mystics like Paul are the least bit credible?  How can we know when a person's shockingly bizarre claims of taking nearly indescribable trips to heaven does or doesn't justify viewing their credibility as fully impeached?
• Why unbelievers should be impressed with the "eyewitness" testimony to the resurrection, when the only such testimony that comes down to us today in first-hand form, are, at best, Matthew, John and Paul, that is, forgetting about the fatal problems of gospel authorship and the equally fatal problem of whether the resurrection stories of Matthew and John actually come from these individual men.
• How unbelievers can be expected to give a shit about any tyrant, real or unreal, who causes men to rape women and beat children to death (Isaiah 13).  Don't forget that God also claims he will take just as much "delight" to inflict such horrors on people, as he delights to bless them (Deuteronomy 28:63).
• Why unbelievers should think the bible god "loves" them, when in fact god's refusal to do his best to convince them the gospel is true, necessarily implies a rather shockingly limited "love" at best, and more likely implies a genuine hatred, since any parent who solely by choice did less than their best to rescue a drowning child is not exhibiting "limited" love, but "no" love.

I thus suspect that the reason Holding fucks around with the more stupid trifling skeptical objections is for the same reason any skeptic would try to refute Christianity by exposing the errors of snake-handling and the prosperity gospel.  In both cases, you can make your own beliefs look better if you choose only the most dumbshit idiots as representative of the opposition.


Go ahead, Holding, remind your readers that yes, you already had all these relevant video-topics in mind, you just didn't get around to getting serious until an atheist complained that you are spending too much time in the sandbox.  Perhaps God is telling you to stop using other people's hard earned cash merely to give you another reason to sit on your fat ass.