Holding's possible farce; an answer to "The Impossible Faith"

For reasons unknown, but likely due to the sin of pride, James Patrick Holding continues to hawk his "Impossible Faith" apologetic as if it was some sort of "smack-down" to atheists and anybody else who say Christianity is false.

I attacked Holding's impossible faith argument in formal debate with him years ago at theologyweb.
I am currently working on a point-by-point rebuttal to Holding's web-based Impossible faith article.  Check back spoon!

First, Holding has configured his website to be inaccessible to the ISP I use to surf the internet.  He knowingly did this soon after I sued him for libel.  If you are a follower of Holding, let me know when you found any legitimately credentialed Christian scholar taking similarly desperate steps to prevent a critic from accessing material.  Go ahead, email Habermas, Licona, Craig, etc, ask them whether they have acted to prevent certain people from accessing their web-based materials.

 The persons who uploaded an interview of Holding discussing his impossible faith, likewise disabled comments to that video:



That video was hosted by a Theology, Philosophy and Science, and by a Dr. Craig Johnson, both of whom have disabled comments to the video.  Even in Christianity, effective marketing is always more important than trusting in the Holy Spirit.

Holding's clamming up like this sounds more like genuine fright than it does any other bullshit excuse he gives for it.  Preventing a critic from accessing one's controversial materials and arguments runs afoul of the basic ethics of Christian scholarship.  But maybe this is just Holding's interpretation of Titus 3:9-11, who knows.

Second, soon after I asserted on this blog that I still access Holding's website through the Google cache, suddenly, the google cache no longer works.  I get paid to be suspicious when I don't have anything to be suspicious about. (Update, June 5, 2018---I verified with the ISP that they prevented all users from accessing google cache since it was being accessed to get around their filters, so I don't accuse Holding of doing something to prevent access through said cache...but that hardly erases the fact that he did take positive steps to prevent me from accessing his website).

Third, that Holding was wasting his time blocking my access to his website,  is seen from the fact that I easily access his website by simply connecting to the internet using any one from among 10 different wireless ISP's within range of my computer.  I hardly exclusively depend on my local library for internet access.  Apparently Holding is right: he does indeed get irrational when he perceives an inevitable smackdown headed his way.  

Fourth, being the fake Christian that he is, Holding accidentally allowed more of his true colors show by hiding his "impossible faith" arguments behind a paywall.  Somewhere along the way, he decided that selling Jesus for profit was more desirable than allowing free access to what he must consider "the gospel".  Despite Holding's claim to be on the cutting edge of apologetics research for the last 20 years, he shows no more spiritual maturity than a televangelist who first tells you how to properly write your check to him, before he starts "healing" anybody.  Money talks, even in Christianity.

Now then, onto more pressing matters...Holding argues that the claims of Jesus and Paul ran counter to what the people in their culture expected of true religion, therefore, if Christianity flourished enough in that context to become world-wide religion, it's survival was against incredible odds, and thus can only be explained on the basis that Jesus' miracles were genuinely supernatural and the first converts knew it.

There are 4 basic fuck-ups in Holding's argument:

1)  Jesus' mother and brothers thought him to be insane and put forth effort to prohibit his public preaching, despite their living in a collectivist society where such activity would bring about a shocking level of shame on themselves if the accusation of insanity was false. Mark 3:21-31.  Let's just say they likely had excellent probable cause to believe Jesus was nothing but a dramatic outspoken extroverted con man, long on surface appearance and short on actual substance.  We find the same in John 7:5, saying even Jesus' brothers were not believing in him. No source of dishonor in that culture was more profoundly shameful than when accusations of insanity come from your own immediate family,  since common sense dictated that the people most likely to know the truth about you, would be your own immediate family.  The point is that if Jesus' miracles were so positively undeniable as Holding alleges, the last people we'd expect to find writing off the miracle-worker as a fraud, would be his own mother and brothers.  Unless Holding suddenly discovers that Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 are mere textual corruptions,  he will have to concede their originality, and their inerrancy, and suffer accordingly from this bit of biblical bad news.

2) There is nearly universal consensus among conservative Christian scholars that James, the Lord's brother, did not believe in Jesus' claims before Jesus died. In other words, during the three or so years that Jesus went around raising people from the dead, walking on water, healing people of diseases, etc., somehow, his own brother saw no reason to conclude Jesus was the Son of God:

Inerrantist G.L. Borchert finds that Jesus’ brothers remained ‘unbelievers’ throughout Jesus earthly ministry:

It is apparent from the text that Jesus’ brothers were not yet to be numbered among the believers. Several writers have seen a confirmation in the similar lack of belief on the part of the brothers in the Markan account at 3:21, 31–35.7 The brothers’ failure to believe in him (John 7:5) was accompanied by a challenge to make evident his messiahship by some public display (7:3–4). In John the demand for signs or public display is an evidence that such persons have an inadequate relation to Jesus, and as a result they are to be reckoned among those who stand condemned (3:18). There is little middle ground in this Gospel for fence-sitters. As far as any believing on the brothers’ part is concerned, it is clear that such would have to await the post-resurrection period when, for example, James, the brother of the Lord, became a leader in the Jerusalem church (cf. Gal 1:19 particularly and also Acts 12:17; 15:13; 21:8).  New American Commentary, Borchert, G. L. (2001, c1996). Vol. 25A: John 1-11 p. 280[3]

From the cd-rom game in Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, paperback 352 pages, Kregal Publishers, Grand Rapids, MI. © 2004 (with cd-rom), quiz 1, under the category “Skeptics”, one of the questions was “True or False: Jesus had a brother named James who did not believe in Him before the resurrection”.  The correct answer was “yes”. So Habermas and Licona intend for Christians who are new to apologetics, to believe that Jesus' own brother James somehow didn't find any of Jesus' miracles to be particularly persuasive before Jesus was crucified.

Apologist Norman Geisler agrees:

Finally in addition to appearing to his unbelieving disciples, Jesus also appeared to some who were not his disciples at all. He appeared to his brother James (1 Cor. 15:7), who, with his other brothers, was not a believer before the Resurrection (John 7:5).  When Critics Ask, p. 461[1]

Apologist Josh McDowell is surprisingly specific that James didn't merely maintain unbelief, but "despised" all that Jesus stood for:

Look at the changed life of James, the brother of Jesus.  Before the resurrection he despised all that his brother stood for.  He thought Christ’s claims were blatant pretention [sic] and served only to ruin the family name.]ETDAV, p. 227, par. 4D.

The question that gives apologists nightmares is:  Assuming Jesus’ miracles were genuinely supernatural, what theory best explains his own family rejecting his claims throughout the duration of the earthly ministry?   If your brother began claiming himself to be an angel of the Lord sent to strengthen Christians, and went around gaining fame in your city as somebody who performs real healings, resurrections and other miracles, wouldn't you first have to confirm he was a con artist with sorely deluded followers before you could maintain unbelief toward his claims?  How likely is it that by some quirk, you would just never be in the proper circumstance to watch his miracles or hear testimony of eyewitnesses who claimed healing from him?

Will somebody seriously set forth the trifle that maybe Jesus’ brothers were, for the full 3 years of Jesus’ earthly ministry, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, and never got lucky enough to actually be present when Jesus did any of his miracles?  Perhaps they stayed shut up in their houses so much that they never got around to having a conversation with any of Jesus 12 disciples (Luke 6:13 ff) and never managed to hear anything significant from any of his 70 disciples (Luke 10:1), nor from the entire cities crowded with his supporters who stampeded each other just to get to him (Mark 1:45)?

Maybe his brothers were so unlucky that they never managed to hear testimony from any of the “many” whom Jesus healed of various diseases (Matthew 4:24, etc)?

  Do a search in your NT for "crowds".  There are numerous references to Jesus being found entirely convincing by "large crowds"  (I develop the point in my blog article in rebuttal to Tim Chaffey's "Defense of Easter" book.

Or maybe Jesus’ brothers saw plenty of Jesus’ miracles, but were more obstinately stupid than today’s atheists, and refused to believe their own eyes because they were so intent on assisting the devil in opposing the gospel? 

Can any excuse be too stupid if it favors bible inerrancy?  Not when the bullshit conspiracy scenario comes from the bible:

 19 We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. (1 Jn. 5:19 NAU)

Yup, if yer gonna be a Christian, you have to believe in invisible people who can cause you much trouble without being detected, thus not much different from the toddler who still believes there is monster under her bed and it just turns invisible whenever anybody looks.

  8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (1 Pet. 5:8 NAU)

Anyway...

3) the NT records many instances of apostasy that indicate that the type of faith many of Jesus' followers had, was superficial; not what we'd expect if they had concluded, during conversion to the faith, that the miracles of Jesus were genuinely supernatural.  The bible's devil-verse, John 6:66, provides much truth by declaring that, all because of a statement about eating his flesh, which most people would naturally discern to be figurative, "many" of Jesus' disciples nevertheless stopped following him:  

  57 "As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me.
 58 "This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever."
 59 These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.
 60 Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this said, "This is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?"
 61 But Jesus, conscious that His disciples grumbled at this, said to them, "Does this cause you to stumble?
 62 "What then if you see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before?
 63 "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.
 64 "But there are some of you who do not believe." For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him.
 65 And He was saying, "For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father."
 66 As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore.
 67 So Jesus said to the twelve, "You do not want to go away also, do you?"
 (Jn. 6:57-67 NAU)

 If they converted on the basis that Jesus' miracles were undeniably supernatural, how could their faith be disturbed by what was obviously a figurative statement from Jesus, to the point that they actually fall away?  And isn't it rather easy to imagine that those disciples would have asked "when you say we must eat your flesh, are you speaking literally or figuratively?", and Jesus' answer "figuratively" would have preempted the apostasy?

If John 6:66 is historically accurate, it is highly unlikely these disciples had converted to the faith on the basis of Jesus' miracles...in which case it seems more plausible to conclude that the reason they could so easily fall away over such a stupid failure to recognize figurative language, is because they converted to the faith for reasons other than Jesus' miracles.  That makes it sound like not even Jesus' disciples thought his miracles quite as genuinely supernatural as Holding thinks.  This is the part where Holding suddenly discovers that eyewitness testimony doesn't mean shit and never did.  It sounds as if Jesus' popularity had more in common with dramatic extroverted televangelists and their ability to whip up religious zealots into a frenzy of stupidity, and less to do with performing actual miracles.

(by the way, one particularly acute argument against Jesus' miracles is the fact that he could have prevented disease and thus any need to do miracles by simply instructing the people in the realities of germs and disinfecting, truths we recognize today...but he never did.  Wanna watch an apologist squirm with insane gyrations?  Ask him or her how Jesus can be so concerned to go around "healing", but never concerned to give people truth about sanitation? What was Jesus saying in his mind?  "I love you so much I'll heal you of all your sicknesses and diseases....but you 'aren't ready' to learn basic sanitation." (!?)  You will find yourself suddenly in the company of paralyzed idiots who can do nothing more than utter "God's ways are mysterious".  You'll excuse me if I explain this flaw in Jesus' approach on the basis of my presupposition that Jesus didn't know any more about germs than dogs do.  FUCK YOU.)

 4)  Apostle Paul infamously expresses not the slightest interest in the things Jesus did before being crucified.  We have no reason to think Paul's Gentile churches would have more interest in that aspect of Jesus, than their founder Paul did.    So to whatever degree Paul's converts contribute to the flourishing of 1st century Christanity, it was that many people who found reasons other than "miracles" to join the cause.  Maybe you should ask yourself "if the reality of the miracles Jesus performed before he died, was such a powerful argument, why doesn't Paul use that argument?"

 5)  The truth is that Christianity was wiped out by the 5th century and ceased to exist thereafter.  Holding will jump out of his skin and yell "what the fuck!" (when he is sure nobody else is listening; hypocrites have to be aware of their surroundings with great alarm), but it's true:  the gospel Jesus preached contradicts the gospel Paul preached.  Generalizations about how "Christianity survived and flourished" are bullshit, a new form of Christianity that arbitrarily relaxed some rules Jesus had insisted on, to make the religion more palatable to Gentiles, is what "survived".   

 In light of these problems, it is highly unlikely that the 1st generation of Christians found Jesus' miracles to be undeniably genuine.  It is more likely that these early conversions had no more significance than the "conversions" achieved by Billy Graham or other evangelist who manages to attract and convince large crowds despite the bullshit nature of the message.  Therefore, any explanation for Christianity's flourishing, other than "the miracles were real!", must be more probable than Holding's hypothesis.

This page will be regularly updated with quotes from Christian scholars who credit Christianity's survival to causes other than the miraculous.

For now, one such scholar would be Luke:

 28 One of them named Agabus stood up and began to indicate by the Spirit that there would certainly be a great famine all over the world. And this took place in the reign of Claudius. (Acts 11:28 NAU)

Inerrantist scholars believe this occured around 44 a.d.:

In Antioch Agabus predicted that there would be a worldwide famine.131 Luke added the “aside” that this famine did indeed occur during the time of Claudius, who was Roman emperor from A.D. 41–54.132

The reign of Claudius was in fact marked by a long series of crop failures in various parts of the empire—in Judea, in Rome, in Egypt, and in Greece. The Judean famine seems to have taken place during the procuratorship of Tiberius Alexander (A.D. 46–48), and Egyptian documents reveal a major famine there in A.D. 45–46 due to flooding. The most likely time for the Judean famine would thus seem to have been around A.D. 46. In any event, the Antioch church decided to gather a collection to relieve their fellow Christians in Judea, each setting something aside according to his or her ability.135 Eventually, when the famine struck, the collection was delivered to the elders in Jerusalem by Paul and Barnabas. Actually, v. 30 does not mention Jerusalem, but 12:25 does in speaking of Paul and Barnabas’s return from this visit.

Polhill, J. B. (2001, c1992). Vol. 26: Acts (electronic ed.). Logos Library System;

The New American Commentary (Page 274).

Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

My theory is that this famine was the prime motive for most unbelievers in Judea choosing to join a religious group such as the Christians, who apparently advocated the communal lifestyle anyway (Acts 4:34).  During a famine, unless you are rich, the people who stock the market with food begin to clam up, charge high prices, and reserve the increasingly scarce food commodities for themselves and their friends more and more.  You are either rich, or lucky, or you join some religious group, or you die of starvation.

Indeed, apostle Paul admits that the leaders of the Jerusalem church told him to "remember the poor" which most commentators take to mean he should give the Jerusalem church a gift of money:

 9 and recognizing the grace that had been given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, so that we might go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.
 10 They only asked us to remember the poor-- the very thing I also was eager to do. (Gal. 2:9-10 NAU)

Inerrantist schholar T. George, writing for the inerrancy-driven New American Commentary:

Paul and Barnabas were asked to remember “the poor,” a shorthand expression for “the poor among the saints in Jerusalem” (Rom 15:26). From its earliest days the Jerusalem church faced a condition of grinding poverty, as can be seen from the dispute over widows receiving sufficient food and the practice of sharing all things in common to care for the needy (Acts 4:32–35; 6:1–4). A land of soil deprivation and poor irrigation, Judea was also hard hit in this period of history by famine, war, and overpopulation. To all this must be added the ravishing of the church in the persecutions directed by Paul and other leaders of the Jewish religious community. So chronic was the economic deprivation of the Judean Christians that they became known collectively as “the Poor.”

    Paul indicated that the request to remember the poor was not received as an onerous burden but rather as an activity he had already begun and was eager to carry forward. We know from his later writings that Paul devoted much time and energy to the collection of a special offering for the Jerusalem Christians (Rom 15:25–33; 1 Cor 16:1–4; 2 Cor 8:9). The churches of Galatia were among the Pauline congregations who contributed to this relief effort. For Paul this effort was an important witness for Christian unity, a tangible way for Gentile Christians to express materially their appreciation for the great blessing in which they had shared spiritually with their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. Paul himself carried this love gift to Jerusalem on his last visit to that city, during the course of which he was arrested and began the long journey to Rome that ended with his execution.

George, T. (2001, c1994). Vol. 30: Galatians (electronic ed.). Logos Library System;

The New American Commentary (Page 165).

Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

If inerrantists are correct that in Paul's day the Jerusalem church was constantly poor and in need of charity, it really isn't that much of a stretch to envision unbelievers, half-starved, arriving at the church, confessing their sins and doing whatever was required in order to reap the benefits of the group, in this case, food. (by the way, why was the Jerusalem church poor?  Didn't Jesus assure his followers that their need would be supplied by God as long as they put the kingdom first in their lives?

 30 "But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!
 31 "Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?'
 32 "For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
 33 "But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matt. 6:30-33 NAU)

Or did Jesus presume that the people listening to him were experts in systematic theology, and thus aware that God's sovereign will always dictated whether or not they would live or die?

The point is if James Patrick Holding thinks the 1st century unbelievers converted to the church because there was just no denying that the miracles of Jesus and his resurrection, its probably because he never noticed, until an atheist pointed it out to him, that severe hunger has a tendency to motivate dying people to suddenly convert to the views of whatever religious group that happens along and can give them food.

Suppose you think Mormonism is a false form of Christianity.  Suppose you were left stranded in the desert and were dying of thirst.  The only people you've seen in 3 days are Mormon missionaries driving across the desert carrying food and water. You flag them down and they stop...but they are assholes; they are willing to help, but only if you agree that Mormonism is true.  How great would be the temptation to feign agreement with whatever they say just so you can save your life?

So unless Holding magically locates some scholar who disagrees with inerrantist scholars, and says the famine referenced in Acts 11 was a small thing, despite the biblical evidence that it savaged the nascent church, he will have to agree that plenty of people who joined the church in the early period, would likely have done so purely to gain food, and without giving two shits whether or not this religion's miracle claims were true.

And when we remember that Jesus' "miracles" were not even enough to convince his own family, and not enough to retain "many" of his own disciples, it's a pretty powerful case that Christianity's flourishing in the 1st century likely occurred for purely naturalistic reasons.

And lord knows, we have plenty of evidence, historically and contemporary, of how easily religious-minded people can be swayed to believe false things.  Methinks a purely naturalistic explanation for Christianity's rise to fame is far more likely to be the correct one, than Holding's hypothesis "the miracles must have been real!"

FUCK YOU, updated regularly
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