Showing posts with label Engwer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Engwer. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Demolishing Triablogue: No, Steve Hays, a theology of secondary causes does not absolve God from being the author of evil

Steve Hays argues that Calvinists can consistently deny that God is the author of evil as long as they have a theology of secondary causes:
If actor was a synonym for auctor, then to deny that God is the "author" of sin means that God is not the agent, viz, God is not the doer or performer of sin. Rather, it's the human agent (or demonic agent) who commits sin. 

In that sense, it's perfectly coherent for Reformed theologians who deny that God is the author of sin–so long as they have a theology of second causes.
Several problems:

1 - Some bible texts claim God is directly responsible for causing people to sin, such as Ezekiel 38:4, the hook-in-jaws metaphor bringing to mind a sense of absolute force.

2 - Semantic quibbles about how God doesn't personally act in the human sin are theologically suspect, a god who is as omnipresent as Calvinists typically say he is, has more intimate association with a kidnapper's crime than the kidnapper.  Or are some classical theist doctrines resting upon hyperbolic biblical language?

3 - Semantic quibbles about how God doesn't personally act in the human sin do not imply that God is somehow not culpable.  God often orders others to sin:
 19 Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
 20 "The LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
 21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
 22 "The LORD said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
 23 "Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you."
 (1 Ki. 22:19-23 NAU)
Unless Calvinists say they would absolve the mob boss from the crime of murder because he only ordered the hit, but didn't himself actually pull the trigger, then the popular moral objection to the Calvinist god authoring evil is not refuted by observing that God doesn't personally commit the sins.

4 - Secondary causes are moot for the reason explained above:  If what God himself is doing is evil, the fact that secondary agents have their part to play in the overall scheme does not take away from his own culpability.
 
5 - God appears to have carefully distinguished the evil David did, from the evil that god himself would do, to wit, causing David's wives to leave him and have polygamous sex in public with another man:
  9 'Why have you despised the word of the LORD by doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon.
 10 'Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.'
 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 (2 Sam. 12:9-13 NAU)
 Whether the wives had freewill is immaterial; God is claiming all the credit for causing this instance of people engaging in polygamous sex in public.
 
V. 12 doesn't make sense if it doesn't mean God is declaring himself responsible for this particular bit of evil. 

There can be no doubting whatsoever that at the end of the day, consistent Calvinism teaches that people compare to God the way puppets relate to a ventriloquist.
 
Indeed, unless one accuses Paul of premising his Romans 9 theology on hyperbole, which would nuke Calvinism off the face of the planet, then when Paul tries to support his theology by arguing that God is potter and we are the pots, he really wasn't pushing the analogy too far.
 19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?"
 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it?
 21 Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?
 (Rom. 9:19-21 NAU)
If Paul wasn't pushing the pot/potter analogy too far, then we cannot be any more responsible for our sins, than pots can be responsible for being what they are. 

Why God paints himself as so wrathful against his pots turning out to be exactly what he wanted them to be, requires we conclude that God is as irrational as an intelligent being can possibly get:  He is angry and wrathful because his plans worked perfectly.

One has to seriously wonder at how Calvinists can go about seriously believing that God makes Christians feel guilty about doing his secret will.

If a Calvinist praised God's secret will in allowing children to be raped to death, would God accept or reject this theologically correct form of praise?  

If God is a God of truth, does that mean he accepts any and all praise that is based on actual truth, or does God require that praise of him not take into account certain actual truths?

These are questions that Calvinists, who think God secretly wills all human sin, cannot easily answer.

Demolishing Triablogue: Moses was not humble

Steve Hays takes on the old atheist canard about how Numbers 12:3, saying Moses was the most humble man on earth, wouldn't have been written by a truly humble man.

But some would argue that when you talk back to God and suggest a plan to him different than His own, this personality trait doesn't leave room for humility:
 9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
 10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."
 11 Then Moses entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
 12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people.
 13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people. (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU)
When apologists start hemming and hawwing about how God didn't "really" want Moses to leave Him alone (v. 10), we skeptics start hemming and hawwing about whether giving a false impression of one's intentions constitutes lying.
 lie2 noun     
1An intentionally false statement.     ‘they hint rather than tell outright lies’     ‘the whole thing is a pack of lies’     
1.1 Used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression.     ‘all their married life she had been living a lie’
 Steve says
"More humble than anyone else on the face of the earth" is simply hyperbole.
 ...making us wonder whether other statements in the bible, such as those describing God's wrath, are also hyperbole.  Do unbelievers really face the terrible wrath of God in the literal sense, or is this just hyperbole?

Also, doesn't matter if it was hyperbole, this would still have left an impression on the original readers even if they knew it was exaggeration.  When I tell a friend that my neighbor is the "nicest guy in the world", the fact that this is not technically true but exaggeration, does not mean the hearer just dismisses the comment outright.

She still receives the impression that in my view he is one of the nicest persons one can know.  The hyberbolic way of speaking still creates a strong literal impression, and likely would more so with pre-literate societies.

So you cannot get rid of the problem produced by literal interpretation, by classifying the speech as hyperbole.  The literal intent is still there even if the language is exaggerated.      

Monday, July 31, 2017

Demolishing Triablogue, part 5: The Virgin Birth and Mark 6:3

Jason Engwer argues that the failure to mention Joseph as Jesus father in Mark 6:3 is more consistent with the theory that there was something peculiar about Jesus' birth, than with any other theory.
NAU  Mark 6:1 Jesus went out from there and came into His hometown; and His disciples followed Him.
 2 When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue; and the many listeners were astonished, saying, "Where did this man get these things, and what is this wisdom given to Him, and such miracles as these performed by His hands?
 3 "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?" And they took offense at Him.
 4 Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household."
 5 And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. (Mk. 6:1-5 NAU)
Engwer's biggest oversight is Mark's failure to say anything explicit about the virgin birth, if indeed Mark says what he does in 6:3 because of a scandal that ultimately arises from Jesus being born of a virgin.

Engwer will say Mark didn't feel the need to repeat what his originally intended audience already believed or accepted, but on the contrary, early patristic testimony asserted that Mark's purpose was no less than to repeat for his church, at their request, what they heard Peter preach.  From Eusebius, H.E. 6:14, Schaff edition:
Again, in the same books, Clement gives the tradition of the earliest presbyters, as to the order of the Gospels, in the following manner: The Gospels containing the genealogies, he says, were written first. The Gospel according to Marks had this occasion. As Peter had preached the Word publicly at Rome, and declared the Gospel by the Spirit, many who were present requested that Mark, who had followed him for a long time and remembered his sayings, should write them out. And having composed the Gospel he gave it to those who had requested it.
So Engwer cannot explain Mark's failure to explicitly mention the virgin birth on the theory that Mark trusted that his readers already accepted this doctrine.  Because they were already converts and a church, they clearly had accepted all major teachings Peter gave them, yet Mark is precisely repeating for them in written form that which they previously heard and believed.  So Engwer's presumption that the author of Mark either knew about or accepted the virgin birth story, but for some mysterious reason never quite got around to mentioning it, is quite strange:  The virgin birth, if true, would certainly strongly support, at least for Christians, their belief that Jesus was the promised messiah.  Yet Engwer would have the reader believe that Mark never thought such a strong supporting bit of history/doctrine worthy to be explicitly mentioned?

Engwer wastes his readers time arguing for such a trifling thing, because Jesus, when presented with an opportunity to say something good about his mom or his birth, declined to do so:
27 While Jesus was saying these things, one of the women in the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, "Blessed is the womb that bore You and the breasts at which You nursed."
 28 But He said, "On the contrary (Greek: men), blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it." (Lk. 11:27-28 NAU)
Louw-Nida indicate that in the Greek, "contrary" signaled disagreement with the former speaker:
89.128  μενοῦν ; μενοῦνγε: relatively emphatic markers of contrast - 'but, on the contrary, on the other hand.' μενοῦν: μενοῦν μακάριοι οἱ ἀκούοντες τὸν λόγον τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ φυλάσσοντες 'on the contrary, those who hear the word of God and keep it are happy' or '... fortunate' Lk 11.28. For other interpretations of μενοῦν in Lk 11.28 , see 89.50 and 91.8. μενοῦνγε: μενοῦνγε σὺ τίς εἶ ὁ ἀνταποκρινόμενος τῷ θεῷ 'on the contrary, who are you to talk back to God?' Ro 9.20.
So Jesus was not simply reminding people of the higher priorities, he was disagreeing with the female speaker's assumption that the blessedness of his mother had any relevance to anything concerning the gospel.

Oh, did I mention?  Jesus also never brought up the subject of his birth.

I answer Engwer in point by point fashion here, since he or somebody at Triablogue is apparently too frightened of my scholarly answers to them and have banned me, while dishonestly leaving up their replies to me. 
Thursday, December 05, 2013
Posted by Jason Engwer at 5:31 AM
Jesus' Childhood Outside The Infancy Narratives (Part 5): Mark
Mark's gospel, like Matthew and Luke, has John anticipating Jesus' ministry before it begins (1:2-8).

As in the other gospels, Mark has John popularly received early on (1:5). See my comments earlier about the significance of John's reception.

Mark's accounts of the calling of the disciples (e.g., 1:16-20) are similar to what we find in Matthew. See my earlier comments in my post about Matthew's gospel.

The infancy theme of Jesus' background in Nazareth is mentioned by Mark (1:24).
Mark 1:24 neither expresses nor implies the least little bit about Jesus' infancy, it merely indicates that somebody believed Jesus to have been from Nazarteth, whether he was actually born there is hardly at issue:
 23 Just then there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit; and he cried out,
 24 saying, "What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have You come to destroy us? I know who You are-- the Holy One of God!"
 25 And Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Be quiet, and come out of him!" (Mk. 1:23-25 NAU)
 Conservative Inerrantist Evangelical scholar J.A. Brooks says absolutely nothing about Jesus' infancy in his commentary on Mark 1:24:
1:24 The questions sought to put Jesus on the defensive and force him to justify his action (cf. Judg 11:12; 2 Sam 16:10; 1 Kgs 17:18; 2 Kgs 3:13; 2 Chr 35:21). The second sentence, however, could be an assertion rather than a question: “You have come to destroy us!” The demon tried unsuccessfully to oppose Jesus by employing his name. Note how the demon spoke through the man, sometimes for himself and sometimes for demons in general. “Holy One of God” probably is a messianic title, although there is very little attestation for that. In the Old Testament God is usually the Holy One. Here the title implies that Jesus has a special relationship with God. In v. 24 the demon acknowledged the true identity of Jesus (cf. v. 34)—something the disciples were slow to do. In fact, only at the crucifixion did a human being confess Jesus as the Son of God, and he was not one of the disciples (15:39).
Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.). Logos Library System;
The New American Commentary (Page 51). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
 Asserting that the demon spoke the true identity of Jesus, does not constitute evidence either way on Jesus' infancy.  And it doesn't matter if the reference shows somebody thought Jesus was "born" there, Jason's purpose in the article is not to establish that Jesus was born in Nazareth, but that Jesus was virgin-born.  Nothing in Mark 1:24 supports any concept of virgin birth.

Other Christian scholars see nothing about Jesus infancy in this passage:
“The Holy One of God” (ὁ ἃγιος τοῦ Θεοῦ). The demon addresses Jesus as “Jesus, the Nazarene.” After asking about the purpose of Jesus’ coming, the spirit then demonstrates his knowledge of Jesus’ true identity, “The Holy One of God.”
Guelich, R. A. (2002). Vol. 34A: Word Biblical Commentary : Mark 1-8:26.
Word Biblical Commentary (Page 57). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.
 Engwer continues:
The theme of Davidic ancestry is present as well (10:47-48, 11:10, 12:35-37). Again, keep in mind the implication of a Bethlehem birthplace.
Even granting Jesus was born in Bethlehem, this does nothing to speak to his being born of a virgin.  Do you  believe Josephus when he says a cow gave birth to a lamb, merely because he correctly mentions Jerusalem and the Temple?  Probably not.
And a high estimate of Jesus' character, with its implications for Jesus' childhood, is present in Mark (1:24), as in the other gospels.
Correction, the story has a story character that gave a high estimate of Jesus.  Trying to establish the historicity of such high estimate by blindly buh-leeving the account is about as stupid as arguing that Donald Trump is a good politician because one of his enemies once said something good about him.

The belief of Jesus' own family that he was crazy, and their refusal to believe his miraculous claims, have more weight than Mark's hearsay quotation of a demon-possessed man:
 20 And He came home, and the crowd gathered again, to such an extent that they could not even eat a meal.
 21 When His own people heard of this, they went out to take custody of Him; for they were saying, "He has lost His senses." (Mk. 3:20-21 NAU)

 5 For not even His brothers were believing in Him. (Jn. 7:5 NAU)
 Inerrantist Brooks is quite explicit that "his own people" in Mark 3:21 means "family" and that they thought Jesus was acting like a crazy person to the point that they intended to take him by force:
3:21 In the Greek text the subject of the first two clauses is literally “those with him.” The KJV and RSV (1st ed.) interpret this to mean “his friends,” the NASB and NKJV “his own people,” and the RSV (2nd ed.), NRSV, NEB, REB, and NIV “his family.” In view of vv. 31–32 the last of these is certainly correct. The idea that Jesus’ family opposed him troubled some ancient copyists who changed the text to read, “When the scribes and the rest heard.” The concern of Jesus’ family was not likely limited to his physical needs (v. 20); they probably were more concerned about the family’s reputation because in their estimation Jesus was acting in a fanatical and even insane way. The same verb is used in Acts 26:24 and 2 Cor 5:13 and means literally to stand outside of oneself. The verb translated “to take charge” means to arrest in 6:17; 12:12; 14:1, etc. Evidently they intended to seize Jesus and force him to return to Nazareth with them.
Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic).
Engwer continues:
Jesus' mother, as in the infancy narratives, is named Mary (6:3).
I don't see how the infancy narratives getting the name of the mother right is supposed to lend any credence to their mythical elements.  There is nothing about getting somebody's name correct that suggests the author is intending to assert only historical facts.  1st John was written in part to combat a proto-gnosticism in which some heretics got the name of Jesus right, but got the theology wrong.  Thousands of Christian Jews got Paul's name correct, but apparently trusted in an allegedly false rumor about him, Acts 21:18-24.
Jesus has siblings (6:3), and Mark describes them in a way that corroborates the infancy narratives, as I explained when I discussed Matthew's gospel.
All that need prove is that the infancy narratives have expanded upon less mythical facts in the earlier Markan gospel.   And the fact that most scholars agree that Luke and Matthew are borrowing material from Mark anyway, means the "corroboration" is useless because it isn't independent.
The people of Nazareth in Mark 6:1-6 seem to be aware of some unusual circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth. Joel Marcus writes:
   
In Jewish sources the father's name is normally used to identify the son even when the father is dead (see e.g. Do'eg son of Joseph in b. Yoma 38b and Jesus son of Jesus in the Babatha archive; cf. Ilan, "Man," 23 n. 3). Contrary to this custom, Jesus is designated [in Mark 6:3] by his mother's name rather than his father's. Both Matthew and Luke revert to the usual pattern, Luke 4:22 reading "the son of Joseph" (cf. John 6:42) and Matt 13:55 "the son of the carpenter."…
Sure is funny that when inerrantists can find some support for their theory in the Talmud, they reference the Talmud as if the support is beyond question.  But when others point to statements in the Talmud to the effect that, say, children as young as 3 are suitable for sexual relations, then suddenly, the inerrantists remind us of what an unreliable grab bag of contradictory convoluted traditions the Talmud is.

 Indeed, the relevant portion from the Talmud says the saying was uttered by a Rabbi "Rabina"
Rabina raised an objection: The story of Doeg b. Joseph whom his father left to his mother when he was a young child:
It was this same "Rabina" who asserted that Gentile girls become "suitable for sexual relations" at 3 years of age:
  Said Rabina, “Therefore a gentile girl who is three years and one day old, since she is then suitable to have sexual relations, also imparts uncleanness of the flux variety.”     From Abodah Zarah 36B-37A:
Will somebody trifle that Rabina was faithful to the historical truth about the Jewish custom of calling sons after their fathers even after the father died, but was conveniently not faith to the truth about Jewish customs in his pedophilia?
    Ilan ("Man") has shown that a matronymic could be used when the mother's pedigree was superior to the father's, but that can scarcely be the case here, since Davidic descent was the most important of all, and Jesus was a Davidide on his father's side…
Jesus was Davidic because of his mothers' side too according to most scholars:
The problem would have been insoluble had it not been for the wisdom of God. The solution lay in the genealogy of Mary, recorded in Luke 3 (vv. 23–38), which goes back through Nathan to David. Through Mary Jesus is physically an heir of David, and through Joseph He receives the legal right to the throne (while sidestepping the physical curse upon that line). “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” (Rom. 11:33). Because of His miraculous conception our Lord receives title to the throne of David in the Kingdom of God. Dying without a son (cf. Isa. 53:8), He carried that title to the right hand of God. It is most interesting to note that since the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70 it has been impossible to reconstruct the Davidic genealogy. The only reliable genealogies we have are those in Matthew and Luke, and they point incontrovertibly to Jesus of Nazareth as the virgin’s son—the divinely promised King of the Jews.
"The Virginal Conception of Our Lord  in Matthew 1:18-25  —  David J. MacLeod*  
The Emmaus Journal. 1999 (electronic ed.). 
EMJ—V8 #1—Sum 99—30.  Garland, TX: Galaxie Software.
 That Luke records Mary's genealogy was a position taken by many in the early church.  See Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan.  Paul David Younan says the genealogy of Matthew traces Mary back to David.  So let's not get too cocky about how Joseph is so important to establishing that Jesus descended from David.

Calvin thought Luke was tracing Mary's ancestry back to David:
But we have not yet replied to their objection, that the ancestry of Joseph has nothing to do with Christ. The common and well-known reply is, that in the person of Joseph the genealogy of Mary also is included, because the law enjoined every man to marry from his own tribe. It is objected, on the other hand, that at almost no period had that law been observed: but the arguments on which that assertion rests are frivolous.
Calvin, J. (2000). Calvin's Commentaries (electronic ed.). 
electronic ed. (Mt 1:18). Garland, TX: Galaxie Software.

R.A. Torrey agreed:
1. The genealogy given in Matthew is the genealogy of Joseph, the reputed father of Jesus, his father in the eyes of the law. The genealogy given in Luke is the genealogy of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and is the human genealogy of Jesus Christ in actual fact.
Torrey, R. (1998, c1996). Difficulties in the Bible : Alleged errors and contradictions
Willow Grove: Woodlawn Electronic Publishing.
Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book 4:
Isaiah He says: “Hear me, and ye shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you,” adding “the sure mercies of David,” in order that He might show that that covenant was to run its course in Christ. That He was of the family of David, according to the genealogy of Mary, He declared in a figurative way even by the rod which was to proceed out of the stem of Jesse.
Schaff, P. (2000). The Ante-Nicene Fathers (electronic ed.). Garland, TX: Galaxie Software.
  Engwer continues:
    These alternate theories being found wanting, and given the hostile nature of the confrontation, it is likely that the use of Jesus' mother's name is a slur against his legitimacy, as Stauffer ("Jeschu") and S. Wilson (Strangers, 188) among others argue. This aspersion would correspond to the tendency in later Jewish traditions to portray Jesus as a bastard (see e.g. Origen Against Celsus 1:28-32, 39, 69; b. Sanh. 67a), a pattern that may already be reflected in John 8:41. Ilan, though disagreeing with this exegesis, cites an interesting parallel, the derogatory designation of Titus as "the son of Vespasian's wife" in 'Abot R. Nat. 7 (B), which implies that he is illegitimate (see Ilan, "Man," 42-43 n. 86, and cf. Saldarini, Fathers, 68 n. 15). McArthur ("Son of Mary") argues against the implication of illegitimacy in Mark 6:3 that "son of Mary" is an informal reference, not a formal genealogical expression, and that there is nothing necessarily unusual or derogatory about an identification by the mother's name in such informal contexts (cf. e.g. 1 Kgs 17:17; Acts 16:1). But Mark 6:3 comes closer to being a genealogical formula than the parallels cited because of the extensive list of other male family members. McArthur's theory, moreover, does not explain the apparent embarrassment of Matthew and Luke at Mark's term
You don't know that it was embarrassment that led Matthew or Luke to read a bit different.  Matthew says:
 54 He came to His hometown and began teaching them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, "Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?
 55 "Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?
 56 "And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man get all these things?"
 57 And they took offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household."
 58 And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief. (Matt. 13:54-58 NAU)
 If indeed it is true that Matthew is here showing "apparent embarrassment" over Mark's more terse "son of Mary reading, then we have to ask why Matthew felt embarrassed by this reading.  Did he think he discovered a slur in the crowd's quoted language that Peter's interpreter Mark had missed? 

Does that sound like Matthew thought Mark wrote inerrantly?  Indeed, why else do Matthew and Luke change Mark's wording, if they thought Mark's choice of wording was inerrant?

Why should the teller of the virgin birth story feel the last bit embarrassed by an earlier gospel author reporting that Jesus was merely "son of Mary"?  Did Matthew perceive that this was not a mere sign that the people perceived something peculiar about Jesus' birth, but that they had good reason to believe Jesus was an authentic naturalistic bastard fathered by somebody other Joseph?

Furthermore, Metzger holds that there are early and wide textual variants in which the crowd in Mark 6:3 does mention Jesus' father Joseph, so apparently even early scribes felt Mark's choice of wording would likely be taken as contrary to the similar statement in Matthew 13:35:

6.3 te,ktwn( o` ui`o,j {A}
All uncials, many minuscules, and important early versions read, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary …?” Objection was very early felt to this description of Jesus as carpenter,11 and several witnesses (including p45) assimilate the text to Mt 13.55 and read, “Is not this the son of the carpenter, the son of Mary …?” The Palestinian Syriac achieves the same result by omitting o` te,ktwn.
 There is no reason why the emphasis on Jesus' mother throughout the gospels cannot simply imply that Joseph was dead by the time Jesus began his ministry.  Engwer is crazy to try to squeeze so much out of one phrase in Mark 6:3

Engwer continues his rebuttal to MacArthur:
or reckon with the hostile context of our passage
Maybe he doesn't, but there is hostile context in Matthew 13:55 too.

In my post on Matthew's gospel, I mentioned that we should take note of how themes in the infancy narratives are connected to other concepts.
Yeah, like themes in Greek mythology are connected to other concepts.  Big deal. But thanks for making clear that you aren't talking to skeptics.  You are clearly addressing only those who already believe and therefore need far less argument to cross the line and assert the historicity of Jesus' virgin birth.
If an early Christian source applies passages like Isaiah 11 and 52-53 to Jesus, how likely is it that he didn't also think Jesus fulfilled a Christmas passage like Isaiah 9?
Isaiah 9 was allegedly a prediction of Christ's ministry to the Gentiles.  If the gospels are historically reliable when they assert Jesus had a significant ministry to Gentiles:
  45 But he went out and began to proclaim it freely and to spread the news around, to such an extent that Jesus could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas; and they were coming to Him from everywhere. (Mk. 1:45 NAU)

12 Now when Jesus heard that John had been taken into custody, He withdrew into Galilee;
 13 and leaving Nazareth, He came and settled in Capernaum, which is by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.
 14 This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet:
 15 "THE LAND OF ZEBULUN AND THE LAND OF NAPHTALI, BY THE WAY OF THE SEA, BEYOND THE JORDAN, GALILEE OF THE GENTILES--
 16 "THE PEOPLE WHO WERE SITTING IN DARKNESS SAW A GREAT LIGHT, AND THOSE WHO WERE SITTING IN THE LAND AND SHADOW OF DEATH, UPON THEM A LIGHT DAWNED."
 17 From that time Jesus began to preach and say, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." (Matt. 4:12-17 NAU)
 15 But Jesus, aware of this, withdrew from there. Many followed Him, and He healed them all,
 16 and warned them not to tell who He was.
 17 This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet:
 18 "BEHOLD, MY SERVANT WHOM I HAVE CHOSEN; MY BELOVED IN WHOM MY SOUL is WELL-PLEASED; I WILL PUT MY SPIRIT UPON HIM, AND HE SHALL PROCLAIM JUSTICE TO THE GENTILES.
 19 "HE WILL NOT QUARREL, NOR CRY OUT; NOR WILL ANYONE HEAR HIS VOICE IN THE STREETS.
 20 "A BATTERED REED HE WILL NOT BREAK OFF, AND A SMOLDERING WICK HE WILL NOT PUT OUT, UNTIL HE LEADS JUSTICE TO VICTORY.
 21 "AND IN HIS NAME THE GENTILES WILL HOPE."
 (Matt. 12:15-21 NAU)

...and if the apostles really heard the resurrected Jesus commission THEM to preach to Gentiles (Great Commission, Matthew 28:19), then what are the odds that Peter and the church would, shortly after Jesus ascended, regard the salvation of Gentiles as some shocking unexpected theological development they'd never have guessed without a special divine revelation to Peter, as they do in Acts 11:18?

Or does Engwer think such questions as his beg too many presuppositions to be answered?  If Engwer can safely assume the first-century Christian knows doctrine B because he knows doctrine A, why can't skeptics similarly argue that Acts 10-11 is false history, on the ground that Peter surely knew doctrine B (Gentiles could be saved) because he knew doctrine A (Jesus taught Gentile salvation)?
Mark often refers to the theme of Messianic prophecy fulfillment, even opening his gospel with it (1:2-3). Since Isaiah 9 and Micah 5 are two of the most explicitly Messianic passages in the Old Testament, how likely is it that Mark didn't think Jesus fulfilled those passages?
About as likely as Matthew thinking Mark's language was inaccurate.  Compare "could" do no miracle (Mark 6:5) with Matthew's theologically easier "did not" do any miracle there (13:58).

You apologists think Daniel 9 is an exceptionally powerful apologetic since it allegedly shows somebody in 600 b.c. predicting something about Jesus with amazing precision, but despite NT authors liking the idea of the OT predicting Jesus, nobody in the NT makes anywhere near the big deal out of it that you do.
One of the problems with critics of the infancy narratives is that they're too focused on what a source like Mark explicitly tells us.
That's because you enter dangerous territory when you try to draw conclusions from an author's alleged inferences or silence.  Mark's failure to explicitly mention the virgin birth, however, is so significantly unexpected that it screams out for an explanation other than his alleged acceptance of it.
Much of the relevant evidence is of an implicit nature.
Which might explain why your arguments are shockingly unpersuasive to any except inerrantist fundamentalists.
Mark doesn't say much directly about Jesus' childhood.
Probably because he didn't think anything about Jesus' childhood had significant relevance to the gospel message.  Again, Jesus replies in opposition to the women who brings up the subject of his mother, Luke 11, supra.
His gospel is derived from what Peter taught, and Peter's apostolic work was focused on what occurred from the ministry of John the Baptist onward (Acts 1:21-22).
Which is precisely why there's no need to assume Peter believed anything about the virgin birth story.
Peter would typically begin his public teaching with John and Jesus in their adulthood,
No, Peter's sermon in Acts 2:14 ff neither expresses nor implies anything about John the Baptist.  You are asserting patterns merely because, by your own admission, you detected Peter doing something in a single bible passage.  Peter's doing something once does not establish a pattern.
so Mark started his gospel there. But there are some implications for Jesus' childhood in what Mark tells us, even though he wasn't focused on the subject.
And what you overlook is that if Mark himself believed what you think he did (i.e., Jesus was born of a virgin, this is why there was a scandal about Jesus father or childhood), then Mark's failure to explicitly assert something in favor of the virgin birth is a screaming silence that suggests the assumption is wrong, and it is for another reason that he fails to explicitly assert any virgin birth matter.
Something else should be said here about the gospels and other early sources in general. Once Jesus begins publicly teaching and performing so many miracles, his adulthood overshadows his childhood.
No it doesn't, there was a lady who directed his attention to the blessedness of his mother, giving him the perfect opportunity to explicitly assert something about how his mother possessed any type of special uniqueness, yet Jesus opposes this female speaker and directs her away from the subject of his mother.  Luke 11:27-28, supra.
When Jesus was standing before people, teaching them and performing such a large number and variety of miracles in their midst, why would he spend much time pointing them to a far smaller number of miracles that occurred a few decades earlier, when he was a child?
Maybe for the same reason Matthew and Luke did when they did their preaching on the virgin birth?
Why would the New Testament authors and others involved give much attention to his childhood?
Ask Matthew and Luke, they can explain how it is that something in Jesus' childhood retained its historical importance despite Jesus himself becoming the center of attention.
Just as Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah's childhood are far outnumbered by predictions about his adulthood,
Yup, you aren't talking to skeptics.  There are no OT prophecies about Jesus' childhood, unless you are talking in the useless-for-apologetics sense of typology.
it makes sense for matters pertaining to Jesus' childhood to only occasionally come up during his adult ministry.
On the contrary, it makes sense to assert that the virgin birth stories of Jesus are late inventions, and we normally expect the earlier account to be less encumbered with embellishments, which appears to be exactly what happened here.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Demolishing Triablogue, part 3: Engwer's fallacy of using bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic

Jason Engwer makes an unexpected admission that he cannot defend the historicity of the virgin birth without engaging in eisogesis.  This is my reply to


(snip)

...I'm not denying that terminology such as we find in Romans 1:3 and John 1:45 is favorable to Lincoln's position. What I'm saying is that we need to be careful in discerning the degree to which such evidence favors his view. If all we had to go by were the letters most commonly attributed to Paul, would we conclude that Jesus was born of a virgin? No. We'd conclude that he most likely was a natural son of a man who was a descendant of David. The same goes for Mark's gospel. And the Johannine literature. And Hebrews. Similarly, 2 Peter 3:15-16 implies agreement with the Pauline literature on this subject, and James, 1 Peter, and Jude don't discuss a virgin birth. But there's a lot of other evidence to consider, including much that Lincoln doesn't address.
Jason, for what reason(s) do you refuse to interpret Paul's statement about Jesus being "seed of David" apart from the gospels of Matthew and Luke?  Is it true that you use the doctrine of bible inerrancy as a tool of interpretation (i.e., no interpretation of a bible verse can be correct, except one that harmonizes it with the rest of the bible)?

Is the case for bible inerrancy so good that it deserves to be exalted in the mind of the investigator to the status of governing hermeneutic?  My investigation into that doctrine leads me to conclude that because so many Christian scholars deny it, and they all disagree with each other about its scope and extent, bible inerrancy has nowhere near the universal acclaim that other tools of interpretation have, such as "grammar", "immediate context", and "genre".  The latter are affirmed as objective tools of interpretation by all serious bible scholars, the former is a hotly contested doctrine that not all spiritually alive people are convinced even exists.

I therefore conclude that bible inerrancy does not deserve to be exalted in our minds to the status of governing hermeneutic.  Consequently,  it does not make sense for you to assert or imply that an interpretation of a Pauline phrase that puts  him in conflict with other biblical authors, is surely an incorrect interpretation.

Therefore, you will have to do something more to falsify  the naturalistic interpretation of "seed of David" in Romans 1:3, than simply complain that such interpretation would contradict what Matthew and Luke have to say about Jesus' link to humanity.  Running afoul of bible inerrancy is about as frightful as running afoul of Benny Hinn.

It would appear that, in light of your admission quoted above, you are obligated to show that no understanding of Paul's meaning in Romans 1:3 can be correct except one that harmonizes it with the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

With other conservative apologists such as Licona admitting that the zombie resurrection in Matthew 27:52 is non-literal "special effects", and that John's preference for artistry over historical truth causes him to conflict with Mark, you will likely never close the door on the possibility that Matthew's virgin birth narrative is, like the zombie resurrection story, a case of pure fiction with no textual indicators to allow the reader to tell where the history ends and the wishful thinking begins.  The fact that other conservatives insist Licona's view amounts to a denial of inerrancy, means when we atheists see it the same way, this is not due to our being spiritually dead.  Indeed, Matthew leaves no clues in the text that the zombie resurrection story in 27:51 ff is any less literal than the crucifixion he mentioned in v. 50, so if he really was going from the historical to the non-historical, he did so in a way that was misleading at best and deceptive at worst.


Saturday, July 8, 2017

Demolishing Triablogue, part 2: Yes, Steve Hays, the virgin birth is poorly attested, Mark's silence screams

Less than a week after I showed up at Triablogue to challenge Engwer and others on their Christian claims, somebody there banned me, but did so in a way that caused my posts to disappear while leaving up the reply posts made by Engwer and others, so that the only part of my posts that survived was the part they chose to quote in their replies.

This is akin to a Christian who posts his unedited video recording of a live atheist-Christian debate to youtube, but after deciding he doesn't wish to interact with the atheist debator's remarks, removes it and posts an edited version of the video that removes all the atheist's speaker's remarks, except for a few that the Christian doesn't feel threatened by.

 Anyway, what follows is my direct point-by point reply to Steve Hays's post, followed by a justification for the argument from silence and why it is powerful in light of Mark's silence on the virgin birth.

1. A stereotypical objection to the virgin birth is that it's only attested in two of the four Gospels. Likewise, Paul is silent on the subject.
The more detailed form of the objection is that if the virgin birth was believed to be historical truth by any NT writers beyond Matthew and Luke, those other authors would surely have mentioned it, since they clearly intend to exactly "repeat" truths that their originally intended addressees were presumed to already trust in.
A potential problem with stereotypical objections is how they condition people who view an issue. If an issue is routinely framed in a particular way, it may not occur to people to think outside that framework.
It's not that complicated, Steve.  All that needs to be done is to show the proper criteria for justifying an argument from silence, and then showing that the silence of the NT authors outside of Matthew and Luke on the virgin birth, fulfills that criteria.
2. Before getting to my main point, Paul's silence is to be expected. He was an adult living in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's public ministry. It's hardly surprising that he talks about events so close to his own time and place, in the life of Christ. By contrast, the birth of Christ probably took place several years before Paul was born.
That is not biblically sound.  Yes, the birth of Christ took place several years before Paul was born, but Paul  refers to the birth of Jesus nonetheless in Galatians 4:4.  Since Paul here refers to an event in Jesus life preceding Paul's life by a few years, then, contrary to your argument, Paul cannot be presumed to stay silent about things in Jesus' life merely because they happened a few years before Paul was born.   You'll have to find something other than "it's old news!" to explain Paul's silence.
3 Apropos (1), I'd recast the issue. If anything, what's striking is not that the virgin birth wasn't recorded in more than two Gospels, but that's recorded at all. Reporting the circumstances of his conception poses a dilemma.
It also provides "reason" to believe Jesus is the son of God, so there's clearly more than mere "concern to tell the historical truth" in the motives of Matthew and Luke to tell this story.
In the nature of the case, a NT author can't mention the virgin birth without simultaneously informing his readers that Mary was pregnant out of wedlock. After all, you can't have one without the other.
I don't see your point, Matthew and Luke make it clear that this particular out-of-wedlock pregnancy was the will of God.  They solved the dilemma before it had a chance to exist. 
But the moment he says Mary was pregnant out of wedlock, that opens a can of worms. Only people who are already Christian believe the story of the virgin birth.
And as you'll find out later in my post, Matthew's likely intended readership was not unbelievers or unbelieving Jews, but Jews who already had a Christian faith.  If that theory is more likely than the theory that he wrote for unbelieving Jews, then Matthew was telling the virgin birth story only to Christians, and as such, your attempt to create a dilemma so you can argue Mathtew and Luke only mention the story because it is true, fails.
By contrast, people who aren't Christian are inclined to view the virgin birth as a cover story for a prenuptial scandal.
And since Matthew didn't write the virgin birth story for the purpose of convincing unbelievers, there is no potentially embarassing situation to speak of, and hence, no basis for an argument that Matthew and Luke wrote solely out of concern for historical truth.
Indeed, that was Joseph's initial reaction. When he discovered that she was pregnant, he was planning to divorce her, on the assumption that she had a child by another man.
Ok, so are you writing this solely for Christian readers of your blog?  Apparently so, since you know perfectly well a skeptic is not going to presume the historical accuracy of anything in the virgin birth story, as you just did.
So why would Matthew and Luke record the virgin birth unless they thought it happened?
Maybe for the same reason Pindar wrote 450 years previously that Zeus took the form of a golden mist at the time he got the virgin Danae pregnant?
You might say the reported the virgin birth despite the virgin birth. For surely they knew that by recording that story, their account invited a contrary interpretation.
So by your logic, surely Pindar knew that by recording Zeus getting Danae pregnant without taking away her virginity, he invited a contrary interpretation, hence he only told the story by constraint of the historical truth?  Either way, Matthew only "invites" a contrary interpretation if he intended his story to be used to evangelize unbelievers.  He didn't, and you offer no compelling evidence that he did.
By narrating the virginal conception of Christ, they were starting a fire they couldn't extinguish. Enemies of the faith will seize on that to discredit Jesus.
 A first century orthodox Jew would have to be a fool to think the virgin birth is true because the Christians say it's true.  Matthew surely knew the Jews, who hated Christ more particularly than anybody else, surely wouldn't be persuaded by his simply putting down in writing the kind of miracle story the Jews would surely balk at.  Luke writes for a Theophilus so that he may be sure of the things he has been previously taught about Jesus.  Matthew and Luke intended no other original audience except Christian believers.  Since there is no scandal to be inferred from the original audience of these two gospels, your scandal-based argument falls flat.
They will say this is a transparent alibi to camouflage the fact that Mary had premarital sex. Not only would that stigmatize the mother, but stigmatize the illegitimate child.
Perhaps so, but again, you need to worry about who Matthew and Luke intended as their original target audience.  First argue that Matthew and Luke were intended by the authors to be used to evangelize unbelievers. Until you do that, you are seeing potential scandals where no such potential exists.
So, if you think about it, NT writers had to overcome a disincentive to report it at all, since the very mention of it would play into the hands of their enemies.
The risk of ridicule is counterbalanced by the edifying nature of the story for existing Christians.  Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith also had to overcome a disincentive to publicly proclaim himself finder of additional inspired scripture, but without more, that argument hardly gets near suggesting his motives were honest. False prophets are often willing to suffer greatly because they are so deluded and obstinate.
They only record it because that's what happened, even though it hands enemies of the faith a propaganda coup. Sometimes you have to tell a true story knowing that people will twist the truth.
Thank you for confirming, by how quickly you draw your conclusion that the story is true, that you didn't write this for skeptics.  If you wish to re-write it for the purpose of refuting skeptics, let me know, and I'll respond to that too.
4. Now, a critic might object that my explanation misses the point. Given the rumors of a prenuptial scandal, they had to say something to squelch the rumors.
I don't know any skeptics who seriously believe the purpose of Christians concocting the virgin birth fiction was to persuade non-Christian Jews that the rumors of Mary's out-of-wedlock pregnancy was nevertheless from god.   That just makes first-century Christians more gullible than most skeptics assert.
But there are problems with that objection. For instance:
 i) That would be a counterproductive alibi. Rather than draw attention away from the specter of a prenuptial scandal, it would draw attention to the specter of a prenuptial scandal. Hostile readers will view this as a coverup.
Which only has force if you assume, as you appear to be doing, that Matthew and Luke intended their stories to be used to evangelize or refute non-Christians.  The minute you try to defeat this objection by saying "yeah, that was some of their purpose" then you make Matthew and Luke equally as gullible as the rest of the first-century laity.  Paul apparently had great difficulties persuading many Jews despite his doing so involving heated lengthy arguments.  It doesn't make much sense to assume Matthew and Luke thought their writing down a miracle story would suffice to evangelize unbelievers.  Therefore, it is more than likely that these two NT authors did not intend any other original audience, except Christians.  In that case, they were not writing to squelch rumors.  Again, your "they-wouldn't-say-such-scandalous-thing-if-it-weren't-true!" theory is largely unpersuasive, primarily because it blindly assumes, without any evidence or argument, that unbelievers were part of Matthew's and Luke's originally intended target audience.
ii) If the Gospel writers were attempting to conceal a prenuptial scandal, and if they felt free to invent a cover story, why not just say Jesus was conceived after Mary and Joseph got married? After all, the Incarnation doesn't require a virgin birth. The sinlessness of Jesus doesn't require a virgin birth.
Why didn't Pindar just say Zeus took a form "different than human" when he got Danae pregnant?  After all, the conception of Perseus doesn't require Zeus take the form of a golden mist. And again, since I deny the gospel authors were trying to invent a cover story, your questions here don't threaten my own basis for unbelief toward the virgin birth story.
If some people find the story of the virgin birth fishy, there's nothing suspicious about saying he was born to married parents. So that would be a better cover story.
But the motive of Matthew and Luke involved more than merely inventing a cover story.  Their details in the virgin birth narratives also strongly "support" the idea that Jesus is God, the Son of God, and Savior.
5. But a critic might say that misses the point. If Mary was known to be pregnant out of wedlock, then it's too late for Matthew and Luke to fabricate a cover story that denies that fact. The best they can do is to spray paint it with miraculous whitewash. But there are problems with that objection, even on its own grounds:
i) People who deny the virgin birth typically think Matthew and Luke were written about a century after the birth of Christ.
Then count me out.  My objections are persuasive even assuming Matthew and Luke finished the currently canonical form of their gospels 41 days after Jesus died.
They don't think Matthew or Luke had access to firsthand information about the circumstances surrounding his conception and birth. So what, exactly, is there to rationalize or cover up? By that late date, who knews any better what really happened?
Again, the virgin birth story doesn't just "cover" a sex scandal, it's details also "support" important doctrinal themes like Jesus being God, Son of God and Savior.
ii) Likewise, even if we take the historicity of Matthew and Luke far more seriously, how many people were really privy to the timing of Mary's pregnancy in relation to her engagement and marriage?
Again, I don't think the virgin birth narrative is a cover story.  I think it is mere fiction invented to "support" other gospel themes like Jesus being God, Son of God and Savior.  Good writers back then didn't just provide a bulleted list of factoids, they weaved romance and drama and scandal and unexpected stupidity and moral lessons around their "facts".  The later authors of the Christian pseudopigrapha must have learned the technique of embellishment from somewhere.
Other than some relatives and villagers, who else would know about it?
That depends on how much effort Christians in the first 20 years after Jesus death, went around advertising Jesus as Savior.  Acts contains a mixture of embellishment and fact., it does not suffice to explain any of these missing years.
Mary wasn't born famous. She was a nobody. She's one of those people who becomes retroactively famous in association with a famous person. Jesus himself only became relatively famous towards the end of his short life, and even then he was just a local celebrity at the time of his death.
What is this now, your third or fourth indication that you aren't writing to refute skeptics, but writing to people who presume the biblical facts about Mary and Jesus are true?
Had anyone heard of him outside some pockets in Palestine?
You have a knack for asking questions that you know no biblical or other history provides answers to.   It's called a question-framing fallacy, "First, a proper historical question must be operational-which is
merely to say that it must be resolvable in empirical terms."  Fischer at 38. Your question is not resolvable in empirical terms, unless you equate conjecture and speculation with "empirical terms", so it is a fallacious question.
So why assume, decades later–when Matthew and Luke were written–that there'd be a widespread rumor about the illegitimacy of Jesus?
I don't assume the virgin birth narrative was a cover story, because even as a skeptic, for the sake of argument, I think Matthew and Luke weren't quite that dumb.   Regardless, it could just as easily be that yes, there was some scandal going on about Mary being pregnant out of wedlock, and Matthew and Luke responded by limiting the story of the miraculous truth solely to Christian believers.  So the scandal interpretation can be true yet without implying that the story was told because it was true.  No, the Christians invented a miracle-story to explain the scandal, and their original intent was not to provide that explanation to anybody except other Christians.  You act as if Matthew was just screaming the virgin birth of Jesus in the Temple through a bullhorn in 34 a.d., but you have done exactly nothing to substantiate your view that either gospel author ever intended the story to convince the gainsayers.
iii) Presumably, the target audience for Matthew and Luke are people who don't already know about the life of Christ.
Then your presumption is false.  Only by assuming first-century people were embarrassingly more gullible than we are today, could we think Matthew seriously believed his writing down miracle stories about Jesus would be the least bit persuasive to non-Christians.  Then again, today's Christianity has some treacherously gullible people in it, as testified by the Pentecostals and TBN and KJV Onlyism and others.  So it remains at least a possibility that yes, Matthew and Luke, like gullible Christians today, seriously thought that publishing miracle stories about Jesus would convince non-Christians to believe.  And we have direct evidence, assuming apostolic authorship, that at least one apostle seriously thought mere storytelling was sufficient to compel faith.  See John 20:31.  Paul similarly thinks his written words would be sufficient to overcome the Judaizer arguments that caused his Galatian churches to abandon his gospel, Gal. 1:8-9.
So what would possess Matthew and Luke to introduce a cover story about the circumstances of his conception? That would create a problem that hadn't existed before in the mind of the reader. For the average reader would never have reason to suspect anything untoward unless Matthew and Luke gratuitously interject this subterfuge.
 I don't have a problem with gratuitous interjection.  That's what's happening every single time a gospel author says Jesus did a miracle.
Left to their druthers, I wouldn't expect any NT writer to mention the circumstances of Christ's conception if they could avoid it, since the story of the virgin birth will be used against them.

Again, you unreasonably place too much stock in the theory that Matthew and Luke were originally intended to evangelize unbelievers, when in fact you make no argument to that effect (you admit said presupposition is a "presumably"), and other evidence indicates it makes more sense to say they originally intended their gospels to do nothing more than edify and instruct those already in the Christian faith.
It's one of those dilemmas where doing the right thing looks like doing the wrong thing. What's striking, therefore, is that we have even one, much less two Gospels, that record the virgin birth. For they must do that despite the derision which that will provoke.
Why should be think telling the story was so compelling on Matthew and Luke, but not compelling for any other NT author?

You also ignore the fact that Jesus made clear that discipleship consists of future followers obeying all that HE had taught the original disciples, see that part of the Great Commission most people forget, Matthew 28:20.  Jesus never expressed or implied that his birth was in any way supernatural or that it had the slightest thing to do with the gospel, and when given the perfect opportunity to highlight his birth (Luke 11:27) he disagreed and insisted that things outside the issue of his mother's blessedness in giving birth to him, were the key to true blessedness (v. 28).  Skeptics can be confident that the virgin birth story is irrelevant to the gospel, they have god's word on it.

==================

That concludes my point-by-point reply to Hays, and I finish up with argument based on Mark's silence:

First, the main players at Triablogue are not free to say arguments from silence are automatically fallacious, for example, Engwer argues from the early patristic silence about Peter that Catholics are wrong to view Peter so highly.

Even Peter himself isn’t referred to as having papal authority among the early post-apostolic sources. Terence Smith explains:  “there is an astonishing lack of reference to Peter among ecclesiastical authors of the first half of the second century. He is barely mentioned in the Apostolic Fathers, nor by Justin and the other Apologists” (cited in Robert Eno, The Rise of the Papacy [Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, 1990], p. 15)   
Again we see Mr. Engwer engaging in an argument from silence...
Second, historians disagree on what exact criteria must be met for the argument from silence to be forceful.
Howell/:Prevenier assert the person creating the silence must a) have intended to give a full account and b) the author had no compelling reasons to leave a known fact out of his report:


Of course, an argument from silence can serve as presumptive evidence of the "silenced" event only if, as in this case, the person suppressing the information was in a position to have the information, and was purporting to give a full account of the story from which he omitted the crucial information, and if there were no compelling reasons why he should have omitted the information (other than the wish to conceal). Hence, it is usually a considerably greater leap to conclude that "silence" means "con¬cealment" than it was in the case of Shamir's selective omissions during his interview. In most cases, historians have to guess a bit more. They must presume that a suspected fact was an integral part of the story being re¬ported and so central a part of such a story that the reporter would auto¬matically have included it. That he did not becomes, then, presumptive proof that he was deliberately suppressing this piece of information.
the person suppressing the information was in a position to have the information
Under the fundamentalist assumption that Peter believed in the virgin birth story as true, and the other assumption that Mark wrote Peter's preaching, yes, Mark was in a position to "have" the virgin birth information, but because he is described as a "young man" (Mark 14:51), it is unlikely he knew of the virgin birth first-hand, but would only have known it second-hand. 

was purporting to give a full account of the story from which he omitted the crucial information
There are several reasons to characterize Mark as intending to provide a "full account" of Jesus:

First, Mark 1:1 characterizes its opening as the "beginning"  (Greek: ἀρχή) of the gospel.  Why would Mark characterize his opening as the "beginning" of the gospel?  Probably because where exactly in Jesus life the gospel "starts" was in dispute or could be misunderstood, and Mark's clarification helps end that dispute:  the gospel begins with John the Baptist baptizing Jesus in fulfillment of OT prophecy.

Second, according to standard lexicons, this Greek word means the first or first part.  Mark uses the same word in 13:8 to say that certain disasters will merely be the first of many, which means those initial disasters are to be considered the very first in the chain of disasters spoken of there.  In ἀρχή, God created people as male and female (Matthew 19:4), meaning, the very first persons were male/female. The only reason an apologist would deny the implications of cognate usage here is their prior commitment to biblical inerrancy, forcing them to insert a bit of wiggle room in the ἀρχή to allow legitimizing other gospels who start their beginning points earlier in Jesus' life than Mark did.  If they had no theological axe to grind, they would have no trouble believing the cognate usage is consistent and determinant.

Third, Mark 1:1 says it is the beginning of "the" gospel (Greek: τοῦ εὐαγγελίου, NA28, τοῦ is the definite article, its not just "a" gospel, but "the" gospel.  That is, if you want to know what "the" gospel of Jesus is, you get it by reading Mark's account of it). Again, Mark knew he could characterize his version as the beginning of "my" gospel, so why does he choose to employ the more dogmatic sounding definite article (i.e., he is giving "the" gospel)?  Most likely because he wants the reader to believe what he has written will sufficiently instruct them in gospel basics.  In other words, Mark didn't omit anything that was essential to the gospel.

Fourth, under the fundamentalist assumption that Papias is telling the truth about Mark's relation to Peter, then because Papias says Mark omitted from his gospel nothing that he heard Peter preach, a fundamentalist would be compelled to agree that Mark was intending to give a full account.  Richard Bauckham, sadly aware of what "omitted nothing" implies, weakly argues that this phrase was nothing more than literary convention, thus not literal, but a) to clarify, Papias doesn't say Mark omitted nothing from his gospel, he says Mark didn't omit from his gospel anything he heard Peter preach, , b) the literal interpretation of "omitted nothing" is supported by Papias' prior statement that Mark wrote down "whatever" he remembered of Peter's preaching;  c) the context in which Papias wrote "omitted nothing" is highly defensive of Mark's integrity and accuracy, so that the statement that he "omitted nothing", was likely intended to be taken as more significant than mere literary convention.

Sixth, Eusebius at H.E.6.14 says, on authority of 2nd century Clement of Alexandria, Peter's original audience requested that Mark write down Peter's preaching, and there is nothing in the context to suggest they only wanted a few, or certain specific subjects.  Those who have no theological axe to grind would take the statement to mean that Mark wrote down whatever he could remember of Peter's preaching.   Indeed, had you been one of the Roman citizens who heard and converted at Peter's preaching, how comprehensive would you want the written record of said preaching to be?

Seventh, yes, it's possible that Peter preached the virgin birth, but if so, questions are raised that fundies cannot easily answer:  If Peter preached the virgin birth, how could it be that Mark either didn't remember it, or remembered it but felt it wasn't as important as other gospel material Peter preached?  Are we to believe that Mark, whose theme was "Jesus is the Son of God", felt that other stories like the feeding of the crowds were more important than the shockingly unprecedented (so fundies say) circumstances of Christ's birth, which in Matthew and Luke strongly support the Markan theme that Jesus is the Son of God?

Eighth, some apologist will try to duck these problems by saying it is more likely Peter's preaching didn't preach the virgin birth in the first place, but a) you don't know of any statement in historical sources to that effect, you like the theory for no other reason than that it is the type of speculation that can get your ass out of a theological jam, nothing more; b) the consequence of employing the "Peter-didn't-preach-the-virgin-birth" is severe:  Mark's gospel is filled with gospel BASICS.  Peter was not preaching to seasoned theologians, but unbelievers who needed salvation.  So if Peter believed the virgin birth to be true, but didn't preach it to unbelievers, it is most likely because he didn't think the doctrine was a legitimate part of the gospel...which then puts him in disagreement with Matthew and Luke, who apparently think the virgin birth IS a part of the gospel.

Some apologist will say "no, Peter's silence only implies he didn't think the virgin birth to be essential doctrine", but again, Matthew's and Luke's details on the virgin birth provide strong "support" for the essential doctrine that Jesus was truly divine and the Son of God.  The idea that Peter knew and believed these strong supports for his doctrine that Jesus was the Son of God, but "chose to avoid" employing them when making his case that Jesus was the Son of God, is absurdly unlikely.  Peter was faced with unbelieving pagans in Rome, if Clement and Papias are correct about where said preaching took place.  If the fundies are correct to say there is no pre-Christiain pagan parallel to Jesus' virgin birth, that is yet another reason to say Peter would have employed this unprecedented historical fact in his preaching for the same reason apologists so violently oppose the pagan copycat thesis today: the uniqueness of Jesus' birth story argues for its truth.  Sure, you can have Peter choosing to avoid using the most powerful tools at his disposal, but the person who wins the historiography debate is the one who shows his theory is more likely than the others, not the one whose runs to the corner and simply carps "but my theory is always possible!"

Ninth, most fundies unreasonably argue that Mark omits the virgin birth because he saw no need to repeat what his audience already believed.  But this is foolish for two reasons:  a) the patristic sources linked above assert that Mark's motive in writing was exactly to repeat in writing, what the church, who had requested his writing, had already heard and believed in Peter's oral preaching, they obviously weren't asking to hear new things; b) Mark's alleged unwillingness to repeat what his intended audience already believed, is an excuse conjured up out of thin air, it is not based on any biblical, patristic or historical statement.  IF apologists be allowed to rest on crass speculation, doesn't fairness and academic integrity require that benefit be extended to skeptics?

So under the criteria of Howell, et al, for the argument from silence, Mark's and Peter's desire to convince unbelievers that Jesus was the Son of God necessarily implies, absent sheer stupidity on their part, that they would have found the virgin birth story particularly useful to their preaching purpose, and therefore, Mark's silence on Jesus' birth is explained better by the theory that he either didn't know about, or disapproved of, the virgin birth story, either of which does violence to the fundie position.

Historian Gilbert Garraghan has slightly different criteria:


 To be valid, the argument from silence must fulfill two conditions: the writer[s] whose silence is invoked in proof of the non-reality of an alleged fact, would certainly have known about it had it been a fact; [and] knowing it, he would under the circumstances certainly have made mention of it. When these two conditions are fulfilled, the argument from silence proves its point with moral certainty. (§ 149a)

 would certainly have known about it had it been a fact
 No problem: if as most fundies believe, Mark was the naked man in Mark 14:51, he was in a position to have known, before authoring a gospel, that Jesus was born of a virgin.  It is unlikely, if the doctrine be true, that the apostles somehow never heard of it or didn't discuss it enough to keep it in memory.

he would under the circumstances certainly have made mention of it
 That has already been established by the prior arguments in this post.  The virgin birth details strongly "support" Jesus being the Son of God, which most scholars say was Mark's intended theme.  Here's what one scholar says in the inerrantist-driven New American Commentary:
 

8.  Occasion and Purposes
..Mark clearly was not content merely to give an account of the life and teaching of Jesus. He wanted to set forth his own understanding of Jesus and thus develop his Christology. He wanted to do so in such a way as to minister to the needs of his own church. He used and applied the accounts at his disposal—something Christian teachers and preachers have been doing ever since. Mark’s concept of Jesus was that he was fully human and fully divine, both Son of Man and Son of God. Furthermore he was both the Jewish Messiah (Christ, Son of David) and the Lord of the Gentiles. Such a balanced Christology as Mark’s weighs against the theory that he was battling a heresy. Mark was especially concerned to emphasize the suffering and death of Jesus as a ransom for sinners.
Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.).
Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 29).
Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers
Gee...how well does the virgin birth story support Mark's intended theme of Jesus being Son of God and the Jewish Messiah?   Mark wanted to show Jesus was Son of Man and Son of God, so having God come down to earth via virgin birth from a typical female virgin without the aid of human seed, would have underscored his points very strongly.
 
Tenth, courts of law are concerned with making sure juries get the straight admissible and relevant facts as much as possible, and therefore, the "rules of evidence" American Courts use, are a reliable guide for determining whether evidence is admissible.  As luck would have it, American jurisprudence lays out the rules juries must use to evaluate arguments based on silence.  It says, quoting the undisputed authority of Wigmore, that American common law has always allowed juries to take a witness's failure to assert a fact, when it would have been natural for the witness to mention it, to be the functional equivalent of a positive statement that the alleged fact is false:


Common law traditionally has allowed witnesses to be impeached by their previous failure to state a fact in circumstances in which that fact naturally would have been asserted. 3A J. Wigmore, Evidence § 1042, p. 1056 (Chadbourn rev. 1970). Each jurisdiction may formulate its own rules of evidence to determine when prior silence is so inconsistent with present statements that impeachment by reference to such silence is probative.
Cunningham v. Commonwealth, 501 SW 3d 414, 418 - Ky: Supreme Court 2016
quoting v. Anderson, 447 U.S. 231, 100 S.Ct. 2124, 65 L.Ed.2d 86 (1980).


If Courts of law are always applying their rules of evidence to help fact-finders decide what actually happened, then it would seem only a foolish Christian apologist would trifle that court is "too different" from historical analysis.  We just saw that historians agree there are times when the argument from silence is valid, so that's something historiography has in common with Wigmore's above-cited rule.  Court proceedings might be "formal", but it is only for the good goal of getting to the the actual truth, that court rules instruct the judge on what should be admissible and relevant.

Well then...did Mark write "in circumstances in which that fact [of the virgin birth of Jesus] naturally would have been asserted..."?

Hays did his best to argue that we shouldn't expect Mark to have mentioned the virgin birth, but his arguments are unconvincing, here's a recap:

Hays' reason for Paul's silence is that "the birth of Christ probably took place over several years before Paul was born", but this is nonsense, Paul says what he does about Jesus because he considers himself divinely inspired and an apostle (1st Cor. 9:1).  Paul also curiously uses the OT to support his notion that the gospel has already gone out into the world, despite the fact that he cites such OT text a few years after the public earthly ministry of Jesus (Romans 10), Paul mentions Abe and David too (Romans 4), so Paul cannot be presumed to avoid mentioning something merely because it happened before he was born.  If he can quote Abe and David to support his theology, what in blazes could have possessed him to think that the commentary by God himself, coming to earth as Jesus just a few years before Paul wrote, was less reliable for supporting theological points, than the more obscure OT?  Isn't the word of Jesus the "later light" that tells the world the "true" meaning of the OT?

Hays' next argument is that it is astounding that the virgin birth would have been recorded at all if indeed it be false, since it opened up Christians to a charge that this is a mere cover story for Mary getting pregnant out of wedlock, therefore, to record the story at all is to testify to it's historical veracity.  This too is foolish, since he assumes Luke and Matthew were intended to evangelize unbelievers, when in fact Hays doesn't want skeptics to say first century people were excessively gullible.  If that is the case, then Matthew and Luke can hardly have believed they could break down unbeliever-resistance by simply publishing their written versions of Jesus' life.  Jerome, writing in the 4th century and thus with a solid 200 + years of history behind him on which to draw, asserts Matthew wrote "for the sake of those of the circumcision who believed" (Live of Illustrious Men at 3)

Inerrantist scholar Craig Blomberg asserts in the NAC that the larger context of that quote seems to indicate Jerome was there talking about a Gospel to the Hebrews, which was a corrupt form of Matthew Jerome errantly attributed to Matthew.  I think Blomberg is really stretching here.  First, Jerome plainly talks about the gospel he thinks Matthew wrote.  What are the odds he only means the heretical gospel so controversially connected to Matthew, and not the genuine gospel?  Second, yes, in ch. 2, Jerome mentions the GoH, but he qualifies that it was a thing he recently translated into Greek, and a document Origin sometimes makes use of.  These qualifications make clear that Jerome thinks the GoH's authenticity is uncertain at best.  Therefore, when in ch. 3 he candidly asserts that Matthew wrote a gospel, he likely isn't still talking about the GoH, but rather the Matthian gospel that was non-controversial in the churches.  Therefore, when he says there that Matthew wrote for those Jews "who believed", he is saying apostle Matthew wrote the authentic gospel for Christian Jews.

 If this be so, then Hays' problem with the idea of gospel authors mentioning a scandal, disappears.  If Matthew was writing to Christians, then saying Jesus was born of a virgin  would cause no more scandal than the writing down of any other oral tradition would.  In fact, the Christians for whom Matthew wrote would likely know the Jews would mock such a story as an invention, and therefore the Christians would likely guard the story and only permit it to be taught to serious converts.

Matthew cannot be credited with an authorial purpose merely because of how the gospel happened to be used later, anymore than a modern author can be credited with a purpose to use his book as a coaster simply because that's how somebody else outside his intended readership put it to use.


Hays also says he wouldn't expect Paul to mention the virgin birth, but here again, Paul is willing to mention the resurrection of Jesus and repeat it over and over, was this not scandalous to the Jews, as Matthew alleges (27:63 ff)?  Apparently then, fear that the Jews would find the story scandalous, is, alone, insufficient to justify saying a NT author would avoid mentioning a subject.  On the other hand, Paul repeatedly asserts what he thinks the gospel consists of, and it's always the two things that scandalize non-believing Jews far more than a virgin birth story:  Christ died to pay for sin, and rose from the dead three days later (1st Cor. 15).  Paul scandalized unbelievers so much, the last half of the book of Acts primarily consists of how this got Paul arrested and sent to Rome to face Caesar.  Paul would constantly go to the synagogues (places of worship for orthodox Jews) and debate long and loud that Jesus was the Christ.  Acts 17:17, 18:4, 19:8-9.

More controversially, Paul disagrees with modern-day Calvinists and asserts the OT is sufficient to prepare the Christian minister to preach the gospel (2nd Timothy 3:16-17), i.e., that is, the OT as interpreted by Paul.  But even with that caveat, Paul is not just being silent with respect to the earthly ministry of Jesus.  His claim that the OT as interpreted by him is sufficient to equip Christian ministers for every good work, logically excludes any need to use anything beyond Paul's understanding of the OT to so equip, and that means logically excluding whatever Matthew or Luke have to say, thus logically having Paul exclude any need to equip Christian ministers with the virgin birth doctrine.

But Paul's silence on the life of Jesus and other such issues go beyond the scope of this already-long post.

In short, Hays' attempt to provide objective reasons consistent with his fundamentalist view of the bible, for why most NT authors are silent on the virgin birth, fails. Jesus positively asserted that it is what HE teaches, that is what his disciples must follow (Luke 11:27-28, Matthew 28:20), Jesus never taught that his birth had anything to do with the gospel, and when put into a circumstance where it would have been natural for him to affirm the blessedness of his mother giving him birth, he rebukes the lady who calls him blessed, and reminds the hearers that blessedness is rather what anybody has when they hear the word of God and do it (Luke 11:27-28).  This fulfills Wigmore's rule that the silence should be taken as a positive statement that the alleged fact is false.

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...