Ehrman is still citing passages like Mark 3:21-35 and John 7:1-10 as evidence against the virgin birth. See here for a post I wrote a couple of years ago that responds to Ehrman's use of that argument. Remarkably, he claimed in his webinar today that Jesus' brothers didn't know Jesus was "anything special" in John 7 (first presentation, 47:00). That passage comes just after Jesus' miraculous feeding of thousands of people and other highly public miracles, including ones done when his brothers were nearby (John 2:1-12). The "works" Jesus' brothers refer to in John 7:3-4 surely at least included miracles, given the immediate surrounding context and the nature of Jesus' public ministry in general up to that point. So, the brothers (like Mary in Mark 3) weren't objecting to a lack of miracles.
One wonders why Jason is not a presuppositionalist, after all, the bible tells him Jesus did miracles, so that launches Jason all the way past any possibility of suggesting that John lied about some things and told the truth about others. Well, for numerous reasons we over here in skeptical-land do not accept biblical inerrancy. Nor do we presume that the testimony of a single witness will always be either lies or truth, instead, we remain open to the possibility that the testimony contains some truth and some lies.
The skeptical position is that the reason Jesus' brothers don't believe in him is because they think his miracles are purely naturalistic stunts, i.e., John is telling the truth about their unbelief, but he is lying about Jesus' miracles. Incidentally, Jesus himself reluctantly admits that his followers were not following because of his miracles, but only because of the free food (John 6:26), which justifies us to suppose those followers did not think the miracles were genuinely supernatural. There is nothing unreasonable in alleging that some "facts" in the gospels are less consistent with Christian theories and more consistent with skeptical theories. There is no rule obligating anybody to assume that ancient writers with a theological agenda told only truth, so that the only theories to account for their statements must be limited to theories that uphold them as honest authors. Engwer continues;
As my response to Ehrman linked above explains, the Mark 3 passage likewise explicitly refers to Jesus' performance of miracles, even his enemies' acknowledgement of some of his miracles.
But again, when we skeptics say the reason Jesus' brothers thought him insane (Mark 3:21) was because they thought his 'miracles' were total bullshit, we are not violating any normative canon of historiography or hermeneutics. Jason's defense seems to be that because other things in Mark 3 say Jesus' enemies acknowledged the miracles, today's unbeliever is forced to discard any explanatory theory of 3:21 that says the miracles were fake.
Sorry, we don't live in Jason's head. We readily acknowledge that a theory that Jesus' miracles were purely naturalistic would not harmonize with the Pharisees "acknowledging" that Jesus does miracles by the demonic power. But we don't assume that Mark always tells the truth, and in this we break no established rule of historiography or hermeneutics. My view is that Mark is simply creating fiction by having Jesus' enemies 'acknowledge' his employment of supernatural power.
We can also go at this from the other direction and ask how absurd it would be to trifle that in 3:21, the brothers merely think Jesus is insane because he is misusing supernatural power. In other words, Engwer thinks the brothers' attitude was something like "god has given you the ability to work genuinely supernatural miracles, but you are abusing that gift". Several reasons justify the skeptical rejection of that transparently ad hoc theory:
First, 1st century Judaism was an honor/shame culture, in which personal slurs were taken far more seriously than they are in modern America. To accuse another of insanity is to accuse them of being possessed by a demon (John 10:20). If Engwer's theory is correct, then Jesus' brothers and thus somebody whom Engwer thinks later became apostle James, committed the unpardonable sin before Jesus died (Mark 3:29-30). Nice going.
Second, for them to acknowledge that Jesus' miracles were genuinely supernatural, but to also refuse to believe in him, sounds a lot like the brothers' knowledge of Deut. 13, which says even false prophets could sometimes do genuinely supernatural miracles. This means the brothers, under pressure to avoid dishonoring Jesus, had decided that because Jesus was teaching contrary to Mosaic law, his doing of miracles either meant nothing, or meant demon possession. Did Jesus' brothers think Jesus was a false prophet?
Third, it was Jesus himself who clarified that his own relatives refused to properly honor him (Mark 6:4). So they were probably feeling constrained in that honor/shame culture to defend Jesus against such accusations, but they found the evidence of his dishonesty too overwhelming and decided that interests of honor required that they denounce him.
Fourth, we can be reasonable so assume that in such honor/shame culture, the starting presumption of the family was that Jesus was an honorable person. So if they took a position that he wasn't honorable, they probably did not merely give in to echos of rumors from enemies...they would have attended a few of his magic shows to verify for themselves whether Jesus 'miracles' were genuinely supernatural or merely staged tricks. In light of Mark 6:4 and his family becoming his 'enemies', we can reasonably conclude that they only became his enemies because they thought Jesus' miracles were purely naturalistic (i.e., he was a first century Benny Hinn).
I now respond to Engwer's longer article on the subject:
Michael Shermer And Bart Ehrman On Christmas And Christianity
Michael Shermer recently had Bart Ehrman on his YouTube channel. There are too many problems with the comments made by both of them for me to interact with everything.
Then Jason forfeits the right to complain if counter-apologists think his articles raise too many points so that they won't interact with the majority of such points.
After acknowledging that the absence of any mention of the virgin birth in Mark's gospel isn't a persuasive argument that Mark was unaware of the concept,
Then I disagree with Ehrman. Jesus did not teach about his birth to his disciples, so if Peter is the inspiration behind Mark's gospel, we would not expect Peter to talk about the VB. But if the VB is true, we would expect that Mark, likely not writing earlier than 63 a.d. or 30 years after Jesus died, would have heard the VB stories. The VB would certainly have supported Mark's theory that Jesus is the divine Son of God. The notion that Mark knew about the VB, thought it true, but merely "chose to exclude it", is transparently founded on a blind presumption of bible inerrancy, in which Engwer simply cannot allow that two biblical authors disagreed on any bit of Jesus' history. Sorry, Engwer's committment to bible inerrancy does not obligate non-Christians to first exhaust all inerrancy-favoring explanations of Mark's omission of the VB story before we can become reasonable to employ a skeptical explanation for this omission. It isn't like bible inerrancy is a major tenant of historiography, or demanded by historians. And i show elsewhere that Josh McDowell and John Warwick Montgomery lied about "Aristotle's Dictum". So no, there's not even any requirement that we presume the ancient witness is telling the truth until we can prove them wrong. The more objective procedure when dealing with third-party testimony is to neither believe it nor reject it, but suspend judgment until the veracity of their statements can be evaluated. Exactly how much evidence that should be, is not up to Engwer.
Ehrman appeals to Mark 3:21-35 to argue that Jesus' family shouldn't have reacted to him as they did in that passage if the virgin birth had occurred. (Ehrman refers to Mark 2, but the passage he has in mind is actually the one I just referenced in chapter 3.) That's a bad argument that's been circulating among critics of the infancy narratives for a long time. It ought to be abandoned. Earlier in Mark's gospel, we read about Jesus' performance of miracles as an adult, and the verse just after the opening one in the passage under consideration refers to those miracles again (Mark 3:22). The passage just cited not only refers to miracles, but also refers to the acknowledgment of those miracles by Jesus' opponents.
In light of 3:21, I hold that Mark's report about the Jews acknowledging the supernatural character of his miracles to be fiction. If I wrote in a letter to my church that even the barbarians down here in South America acknowledge that I employ genuinely supernatural power, what fool would pretend that this must stand as true until proven wrong? Answer: Engwer and other dolts who think Josh McDowell's "Aristotle's Dictum" is a bit of historiographical objectivity. They are high on crack too.
So, it wasn't a situation in which they didn't think there were any miracles occurring in association with Jesus.
And there you go again, blindly pretending that the only plausible explanations for a comment by Mark are those that presuppose his accuracy and honesty, when in fact we are outsiders who don't know jack shit about Mark's actual level of honesty or credibility, and no rule of historiography obligates anybody to presume truth until something Mark said is refuted. Does Engwer believe every statement ever made by a stranger, a person whose history of honesty or dishonesty is totally unknown to him? If the checkable parts of a stranger's story square up with history, does that obligate us to believe the non-checkable parts? Gee, I didn't know it would be so easy to find a murder suspect innocent in a circumstantial case: the checkable parts of his story proved true (he was near the store at the time of the robbery), so we are obligated to trust in the non-checkable parts (like his statement that he did not kill the store clerk).
People weren't opposing him because of a lack of miracles.They were opposing him for other reasons (his failing to be the sort of Messiah they wanted, the problems he was causing with the Jewish authorities, etc.).
But as I already explained, in such honor/shame culture, the brothers would have felt compelled to investigate the spectacle Jesus was creating, they would not have simply heard that he did miracles, and then dismissed it as mere misuse of divine power.
It would be absurd to suggest that Jesus' miracles as an adult didn't persuade these people, but that they would have been persuaded if a virgin birth or some other miracle had occurred a few decades earlier. After verse 22, the passage goes on to refer to Jesus' response to the charge that he's empowered by Satan and some comments he made about the blasphemous nature of what his opponents were doing in dismissing his miracles as demonic. That's the context in which his relatives behaved the way Ehrman mentioned.
Correct: And Mark was lying when putting the "demonic miracles" excuse in the mouth of the Jews, for all the reasons I've listed, and there was never any legitimate rule of historiography, still less one universally accepted among historians, that says I'm stuck with presuming the truth of an ancient story unless I can prove it wrong. So if a skeptic chose to completely ignore the bible as opposed to trifling with Engwer about details of Mark's wording, they would be perfectly justified.
You could argue that the relatives were unaware of the miracles the other people in the same passage were aware of (even as far away as Jerusalem, as verse 22 tells us), but that's an unlikely scenario. It wouldn't make sense to claim that people other than Jesus' relatives could oppose him in spite of his miracles, yet his relatives wouldn't. We have reason to think it's likely that the relatives opposing Jesus knew of his recent miracles as an adult, but even if we didn't have reason to believe that, the possibility that they would behave as they did in Mark 3 while knowing of miracles associated with Jesus is more plausible than Ehrman suggests.
That is total bullshit. They were obligated in the honor/shame culture to personally check out Jesus' miracles, so when they call him insane, it's likely after they've conducted an examination, and drawn the conclusion that his miracles were purely naturalistic tricks. That's a good explanation for why his relatives would call him insane...doing non-supernatural tricks to convince people you are the messiah, would have been sufficiently dishonorable so as to explain the specter of Jesus' own family thinking him insane and refusing to believe in him.
If you want to read more on this subject, I've responded to Ehrman's objection at length, as it was formulated by Raymond Brown, here and here. Shortly after the segment just mentioned, Ehrman goes on to cite John 8:41 as evidence that Jesus' opponents were implying that he was conceived out of wedlock, which allegedly suggests that the author of the fourth gospel wasn't aware of the concept of the virgin birth or rejected it. Actually, if John 8:41 is meant to imply Jesus' illegitimate conception, that would be corroboration of the infancy narratives, which report that the pregnancy was premarital.
No, the Jews in John 8:41 by implying Jesus was concieved outside of wedlock would not have left open an option that maybe his father was God. They would have meant Jesus was sired by a human being out of wedlock. But no, Engwer grasps at any straw he can possible trifle with to make it seem like disagreement with his fundamentalist view doesn't leave the skeptic any other option except intentional stupidity.
You'd expect at least some of Jesus' enemies to accuse him of being illegitimate under such circumstances.
And we don't expect limited stories about Jesus to include every possible accusation that his enemies would have hurled at him.
It doesn't follow that the author of the fourth gospel was unaware of the virgin birth or opposed the concept.
That's right, and nobody is saying "it follows", rather we argue that our conclusion is reasonable. It is a very popular mistake in Christian apologetics to misrepresent the skeptic as pretending that his conclusions necessarily follow from the evidence. Nobody seriously thinks their theory necessarily follows from the evidence...except apologists who live inside their own heads, like Jason Engwer, who thinks his being wrong in his working presuppositions is equally as intolerably foolish as the possibility that God might become an atheist.
Ehrman is interpreting John 8:41 in a way that supports a traditional Christian view of the infancy narratives, yet he's acting as though his interpretation is evidence against such a view. (I'm agnostic about whether John 8:41 is alluding to an illegitimate conception of Jesus. I think the evidence is ambiguous.)
Then you cannot balk if somebody else interprets the evidence differently than you. But yes, I'd expect you to post 1000 articles about it since you worship the inerrancy of your own mind. All anybody has to do is Google triablogue and Einfield Poltergeist to see just how fanatically trifling you can get in your eternal quest to always have the upper hand in an argument. We would be justified to say Jason Engwer deliberately violates Paul's word-wrangling prohibition in 2nd Tim. 2:14.
...Given how much Jesus differed from what many ancient Jews wanted the Messiah to be,
No, how much Jesus differed from the messiah the OT predicted, a military messiah.
how Jesus and the early Christians were treated by the Jewish and Roman authorities, etc., it's easy to see why many people would prefer to reject Christianity. The same Jews who opposed Christianity in the ancient world also acknowledged Jesus' performance of miracles (which they often dismissed as demonic),
No, we can be reasonable to say Mark was putting fiction in the mouths of the Jews when pretending they acknowledged the supernatural character of his works.
acknowledged his empty tomb,
Because the bible tells you so. But the original empty tomb story was nothing more than the women noticing an unidentified man near the open tomb, then running away when the stranger said Jesus is risen and continues on toward Galilee. So the later 3 gospels with their more detailed resurrection appearance narratives are merely embellishing the earlier and simpler form of the story.
The fact that the disciples considered the women's story bullshit (Luke 24:11) is a case of first century eyewitnesses who find the story of an empty tomb to be bullshit. Luke was probably including some truth in that verse, but lying about nearly everything else because there is no rule of historiography that obligates anybody to first believe everything in testimony until some of it can be proved wrong.
Though Shermer and Ehrman make much of Jewish rejection of Christianity, they don't address the fact that the Jewish rejection was anticipated in the Old Testament and predicted again in the New Testament, such as when Paul wrote that "a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in" (Romans 11:25). And that's what's unfolded in the history of the world. There's been an ongoing rejection of Jesus among the Jewish people as the kingdom he established has gradually grown in the Gentile world (Psalm 110:1, Daniel 2:35, Matthew 13:31-32).
There you have it folks, Jason Engwer, apologist extraordinaire, knows that something about Jesus is true because the bible tells him so. But the fact that plenty of Jews rejected Christianity in the first century sufficiently explains why they did later. How hard would it be for even a stupid ancient historian to predict that a religion that was attacked in his own day would be attacked in the future? LOL.
So, we've got a couple of skeptics talking about a Jewish Messianic figure who's had a major influence on their culture, and they're having that conversation during a month-long season of celebrating his birth that billions of Gentiles participate in every year.
And the vast majority of those Gentiles couldn't give a fuck less about the Jesus-component of Christmas unless it happens to be connected to their child's school-play, or a story that somebody reads them.
They're objecting that this Jewish Messianic figure has been rejected by the Jewish people, something both the Old Testament and Jesus' earliest followers predicted.
And a prediction that even a stupid person could make.
4 comments:
TheFlyingCouch12/09/2021 9:46 AM☍
"Ehrman goes on to cite John 8:41 as evidence that Jesus' opponents were implying that he was conceived out of wedlock, which allegedly suggests that the author of the fourth gospel wasn't aware of the concept of the virgin birth or rejected it."
And Ehrman's a scholar, right? Is John really not thought to be capable of writing down what opponents thought?
Yes he was, and we are reasonable to assume he doesn't mention the VB because he thought it false. It would have served his purposes to allege that the Holy Spirit caused the logos to become human. But Christian scholars cannot even agree on whether John was aware of the Synoptic traditions before he wrote.
Is stating what opponents thought only capable of being what John thinks himself, but in someone else's mouth?
No, but again, we have reasons to say John created fictional dialogue. And that's after I've read everything in Lydia McGrew's "Eye of the Beholder".
Jason Engwer12/09/2021 10:42 AM☍
There's a lot of bad reasoning during the program on a lot of topics. And Shermer and Ehrman have been prominent skeptics, often interacting with Christianity in the process, for decades.
And because Engwer is demonstrably too chickenshit to debate those men live Engwer happily confines himself to the backwaters of "posted blog piece" despite knowing that the vast majority of people prefer a living voice over written argument.
Jason Engwer12/20/2021 1:02 PM☍
Erik Manning has produced a good video overview of the issues surrounding Mark 3 and the virgin birth. It's less than five minutes long, but covers a lot of ground.
So if the skeptic says he covers too many points, you forfeit the right to balk, since your yourself refuse to answer videos that make a lot of points.
