It seems the warriors are Triablogue are so confident that bible skepticism is utterly irrational, they think blocking posts from those who offer legitimate challenges, constitutes overcoming the devil.
Apologist Jonathan McLatchie hosted a webinar in which Dr. Lydia McGrew, wife of New Testament scholar Timothy McGrew, described what she thinks were
Six Bad Habits of New Testament Scholars (and how to avoid them)
McLatchie, you'll recall, is one of those fearsome spiritual warriors (calls himself one of the world's leading apologists) who, when confronted by my challenge to debate any biblical or Christian issue he pleased,
dishonestly ducked the challenge by pretending that my having filed civil lawsuits in the past somehow indicated any such debate would be unprofitable.
Steve Hays of Triablogue (he is an inerrantist, Lydia is not)
commented on Lydia's webinar speech, and Lydia replied to Steve.
Today, January 10, 2018, I tried to post the following at Triablogue:
Steve, Lydia,
What is your opinion of Dr.Craig Evans, an otherwise "orthodox" Christian, not a liberal or heretic, who says in his debates with Bart Ehrman that Jesus didn't ever say many of the things John's gospel puts in Jesus' mouth?
For example, Evans says stuff like "before Abraham was, i am" was never uttered by the historical Jesus. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0zkTTNGJLQ, Evans gives his answer at time-code 1:00 ff
Sure, John might be a different "genre" from the Synoptics, but I don't think you can blame a skeptic or atheist for feeling confident about the theory that the gospels often lie to us about what really happened, when you have conservative Christian scholars like Evans admitting that the historical Jesus never said many statements now credited to him by the author of John's gospel.
If as most apologists say, the atheist bible critic is unreasonable and irrational for crediting John with fiction, then must such apologists not also, to be consistent, charge Evans with being irrational and unreasonable?
The only way I see out of this is for one of you to assert
a) Evans isn't qualified to make such statements, or
b) Evans is just plain wrong, implying you can demonstrate such, implying you actually will, or
c) argue that gospel statements crediting Jesus with speech he never spoke, can nevertheless be legitimately characterized as "historically reliable".
I'm not sure if "historically reliable" can be stretched so far that it also covers cases where real life people are credited with speaking words they never actually spoke.
I look forward to your replies.
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After clicking "post", I received the following reply, telling me in contradictory fashion that my comment was "blocked" but also "posted", thus giving the smartest inerrantists in the world one more "apparent" contradiction to "reconcile":
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I have trounced apologists before with my resurrection challenge, namely, that there are only 3 resurrection accounts in the NT which come down to us today in first-hand form, the others are hearsay, vision, or otherwise; Matthew, John, and Paul, and that's generously granting assumptions of traditional gospel authorship which I'm otherwise well-prepared to attack.
Unless somebody is willing to rebut conservative Christian scholar Craig Evans and his theory that John often attributes to Jesus words Jesus never actually spoke, it would appear that under Evans' own view, the gospel of John puts words in Jesus' mouth which Jesus never actually spoke, and thus disqualifies himself as a resurrection eyewitness.
With John gone, now there's only two first-hand witnesses left, Matthew and Paul.
I'm just
pissing myself with worry about the
overwhelming evidence for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.
