Demolishing Triablogue: Skeptics are reasonable to complain that Matthew doesn't testify of his own faith

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled:

Why Doesn't Matthew Say More About His Conversion?

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

In another thread about Matthew's authorship of the gospel attributed to him, a commenter wrote:

Hi Jason, the first person I heard use Mt 9:9-13 to challenge Matthean authorship of The Gospel According to Matthew was Richard Bauckham. It has long troubled me. The external evidence highly favors the view that the apostle Matthew wrote the gospel attributed to him, but it seems so counterintuitive that Matthew would use Mark’s account of his own conversion rather than write his own. That is the one place you would expect him to pen his own unique account. You rightly point out that Matthew did not copy Mark verbatim, but the differences are so miniscule (no greater than in most other places where Matthew uses Mark) as to be relatively insignificant. Minor changes to Mark’s account of Matthew’s own conversion is not what we would expect at all. It’s the most personal element of his story. He adds lots of non-Markan material throughout the rest of His gospel on matters he may not have even witnessed Himself, so why use Mark’s version of his own conversion story rather than telling his own story in his own way with a lot more detail? It doesn’t seem probable and counts against Matthean authorship in my mind. How do you reconcile this?

You can find a collection of some of my material on Matthean authorship linked in a post here. Steve Hays has written some posts on the subject as well, like here. Here's my response to the commenter quoted above:

See my earlier article I linked above, the one here. If Matthew delegated the composition of his gospel to one or more other individuals, then it’s not a matter of what Matthew wrote. It's a matter of what others wrote on his behalf, with his approval of the final product.

Except that you have no fucking clue whether Matthew ever did "approve" of any such thing, or simply walked away, trusting his friends to 'get it right'.

That was a common practice in the ancient world, and it's common today (ghost writers, group authorship, editorial assistants, research assistants, etc.).
However, even if Matthew hadn't operated that way, where did Mark's account of Matthew's conversion come from?

You elsewhere accept as true the patristic accounts that say Mark is a record of Peter's preaching, so your own answer would (or should) be "Peter's preaching".

If it came from Matthew (with or without intermediaries), which is a reasonable scenario, then why think the account found in Matthew's gospel should differ more from the account found in the gospel of Mark?

Yes, IF IF IF he got the story from Matthew, we wouldn't expect significant changes.  That's a pretty big if.

But then maybe we would expect an apostolic author who was "amazingly transformed" by seeing the risen Christ, to wish to say something about his own personal experience...just like we rationally expect all serious Christians to testify.  So since nothing of the sort shows up in the gospel called "Matthew" that can be reasonably counted against Matthean authorship.  Especially if it was written in 55 a.d., which means Matthew still doesn't want to give his personal input even after 20 years of developing the Jesus-sayings and traditions.

You suggest that Matthew should have included "a lot more detail" about his conversion. Why?

Because most serious Christians have a personal testimony which they wish to tell, and this is consistent with most of the NT authors.

And because he would know that leaving his own personal details out might cause readers to wonder whether he was "amazingly transformed".  The reasonablenes of these concerns cannot be trashed merely because it's always going to be "possible" that an amazingly transformed person might have their own reasons for not giving their personal testimony. You don't win the historiography debate by positing mere possibilities.

He wasn't writing in a modern American context, in which individualism, writing lengthy accounts of your experiences, and such were as popular as they are in our culture.

But desire to write of one's own personal religious experience isn't limited to modern America.  Read acts and the pastorals.

Even the vast majority of liberal scholars think that Paul wrote several of the letters attributed to him, yet Paul didn't provide "a lot more detail" about his conversion in those letters, including the letters where his conversion is mentioned.

But Paul still provided some personalized details about his life and commission.  That's more than Matthew.

And Paul's conversion was in some ways more significant than Matthew's.

When you forget that Matthew allegedly was hand-picked by the real earthly Jesus and studied under him for three year of real-world time, yes.  But some people would insist that the sheer improbability and absurdity of Paul's "partially empirical" experience on the road to Damascus is completely unworthy of serious attention.  Paul has precisely nothing but a vision and his own desire to hold apostolic office independent of the original apostles.  At least Matthew allegedly had authority that wasn't this controversial.

If Matthew was asked to compose a gospel in response to the popularity of Mark's gospel, which I think is most likely what happened,

Sounds like Matthew denied Mark's sufficiency and inerrancy. 

then the people who approached Matthew about writing a gospel probably would have been people who already knew a lot about him, including his conversion. Besides, he was writing a biography of Jesus, not a biography of Matthew.

Paul wasn't writing a biography of Paul in any of his letters, but we still expect, and receive personal details from him.

For me the issue is less why Matthew follows Mark's version of Matthew's "calling", and more an issue of whether Matthew's lack of personal stories and lessons makes it reasonable to assume the author had no such stories to tell.

Demolishing Triablogue: The Jewish objection to the empty tomb is a reasonable justification for skepticism

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

Early Jewish Acknowledgment Of The Empty Tomb

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

A few early Christian sources tell us that their Jewish opponents acknowledged that Jesus' tomb was found empty after the body had been placed there. Were the later sources just repeating what the first one, Matthew, told them?
Even if so, there's no good reason to reject Matthew's report.

You are blindly assuming we are obligated to believe anything we read in ancient religious history unless somebody comes along and proves the source unreliable.  You are high on crack.  I have about as much intellectual obligation to believe Matthew's report as I have to believe 1st Enoch.  You couldn't demonstrate the unreasonableness of complete apathy toward the gospels if your life depended on it.  FUCK YOU.

The gospel seems to have been written by a Jew and seems to have been written for an audience with a lot of knowledge of Judaism, Israel, and other elements of Christianity's early Jewish context.

Which is precisely why Matthew's failure to say anything that might support apostle Paul is telling.  Matthew was a Judaizer.

R.T. France notes that the idea of non-Jewish authorship of the gospel "enjoyed quite a vogue" during the third quarter of the twentieth century, "but is now not widely supported" (The Gospel Of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2007], n. 26 on p. 15).

Ok, then you cannot complain if a skeptic bases some of their reasonableness-arguments on the fact that some belief is "widely accepted".

Grant Osborne comments that "One major consensus is that Matthew writes a Jewish gospel." (Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010], p. 31) Matthew comments that acknowledgment of the empty tomb by Jewish opponents of Christianity originated just after Jesus' death and existed "to this day" (Matthew 28:15), a claim that easily could have been falsified if untrue.

You are blindly assuming that the Christians made such a big spectacle of the resurrection preaching that opponents would have cared enough to "refute" it.  Since Acts is a combination of history and fiction, I don't really give a fuck if it presents the Jews as angry at Christian preaching.  And it is far from certain that the Jews would have known which exact tomb Jesus was buried in.  Must it be that Joseph of Arimathea told them where it was?  Must it be that the cemetery was crowded with people when Joe was putting Jesus inside the tomb?

And like so much else in Christian history, it remains possible that the Jews DID falsify the empty tomb theory, but accounts of this were suppressed or destroyed (at least one wasn't, Justin knew of such account).   Indeed, the Jews could have done such a thing in less than one day's time, and there's no reason to suppose a written record of that would have been made or would have survived.  So quit implying the impossibility of the skeptical theory.

And of course, Jesus' resurrection can be falsified on numerous grounds independent of your trifles about the empty tomb.  IMO, the only reason there was early tradition about Jesus being buried in a rich man's tomb was because this was a fiction invented to make his death conform more to Isaiah 53.  Under stupid apologist reasoning, skeptics have no reasonable choice except to believe anything that is "multiply attested"...such as Matthean priority.

William Lane Craig discusses some other evidence that Matthew's account is reliable.

Around the middle of the second century, Matthew's account is corroborated by a passage in Justin Martyr in which he seems to quote from a Jewish source on the subject.

Gee, 1st Enoch also "corroborates" Genesis 6.

In section 108 of his Dialogue With Trypho, Justin seems to cite a Jewish document or tradition, in which Jesus is referred to as a "deceiver" and reference is made to Jesus as Him "whom we crucified", apparently speaking from the perspective of non-Christian Jews ("we"). This passage in Justin contains multiple details not found in Matthew's gospel. For example, Michael Slusser's edition of Justin has him referring to how the Jews "chose certain men by vote and sent them throughout the whole civilized world" in order to argue against Christianity, including by accusing the disciples of stealing the body from the tomb (Dialogue With Trypho [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Of America Press, 2003], p. 162). It's not as though people would have been dependent solely on Matthew for information on such subjects. Justin had more than Matthew's account to go by. And he seems to be quoting some sort of Jewish document or tradition.

It may well have been that the Jews said the disciples stole the body.  I don't see the problem, as that's a very reasonable criticism, since Christians cannot deny that at least some of the original players knew where Jesus was originally buried (Matthew 27:61).  So you cannot deny their ability to steal the body.  Then we also have a motive to steal the body if we assume historicity of the accounts in Acts.  You will insist they were cowards without a motive at Jesus' crucifixion, but I don't believe everything in the gospels the way you do.  Such stories of cowards can easily be accounted for by the theory that by making them into cowards, their "transformation" upon seeing Jesus seems more dramatic.

You will say they wouldn't have stolen the body because they later died for their beliefs as martyrs.  But the best that can be gleaned from such legends is that the apostles were executed for being Christians.  I'm not aware of any reliable accounts that say any apostle was given a chance to deny Christ and live.  So the fact they were executed, if true, does not increase the probability that they endured such death willingly.  But since I say the original bodily resurrection story was rooted in nothing but visions, we are dealing with fanatics who could easily deceive themselves so much as to be willing to die for beliefs that had no external corroboration.

Are you willing to die for Jesus?

And yet you are not an eyewitness, right?  See how that works?  You CAN get to the point of having a martyrdom complex even when you have no first-hand knowledge.

Justin is familiar with many Jewish responses to Christianity, as his interactions with their scripture interpretations, for example, demonstrate. He "shows acquaintance with rabbinical discussions" (ibid., n. 9 on p. 33). Bruce Chilton writes that Justin "appears to adapt motifs of Judaism", and Rebecca Lyman comments that Justin "is aware of Samaritan customs as well as some patterns of rabbinic exegesis" (in Sara Parvis and Paul Foster, edd., Justin Martyr And His Worlds [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2007], pp. 83, 163). He wasn't just repeating what he read in the New Testament documents. He's aware of Jewish arguments outside of those reflected in the New Testament, and he's aware of post-apostolic developments in Judaism. His willingness to compose a work as lengthy as his Dialogue With Trypho tells us something about his interest in Jewish arguments against Christianity.
Though Justin wrote around the middle of the second century, he sets his dispute with Trypho earlier, around the year 135. And the Jewish tradition he's citing in the passage I mentioned above would date even earlier.

So?  I don't see anything unreasonable in accusing the disciples of stealing the body, as I take the gospel descriptions of the post-crucifixion disciples as cowards, to be mere hyperbole or straight up lying, since the gospels also expect us to believe they were obstinately stupid even after watching Jesus perform genuinely supernatural stunts for three years.

If you think "multiple attestation" proves me wrong, then apparently you are a dipshit who is not aware of how a single false belief can take root and become repeated by thousands of others.  See Acts 21:18-24.  Multiple attestation is not a worthless criteria, but you push it too god-damn hard and act as if skeptics have nowhere to run as soon as one report is "corroborated".

And since most Christian scholars posit a theory of literary interdependence between the Synoptics, it is less likely these are three independent witnesses to disciple cowardice and only one report that is merely being repeated with fictional modification by the later gospels.

  You also don't acknowledge that two contrary positions can be equally reasonable, probably because you have no objective criteria for reasonableness.  Probably because if you did, you'd eventually have to explain why most professional historians don't find the gospel narratives particularly believable.

Late in the second century, Tertullian summarizes Jewish arguments concerning the empty tomb:
"This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away, that it might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted, that his lettuces might come to no harm from the crowds of visitants!" (The Shows, 30)
Notice that Tertullian mentions something that neither Matthew nor Justin had reported.

Which means we have no choice but to accept it as gospel truth.

Apparently, the argument that the disciples stole the body was still the primary Jewish response.

Which is reason enough to take the Jewish response seriously, instead of dismissing it with "the Jews sure did care about Christianity immediately after Jesus died!  Wouldn't they have exhumed the body and put forth all that effort to suppress the resurrection message!?!"

But some Jews had argued that the body was moved by a gardener, perhaps because of how implausible the argument for theft by the disciples had become in light of the suffering and martyrdom of the disciples.

No, you cannot historically justify saying the disciples were "martyred".  It could very well be that in addition to the correct theory, another theory to explain the empty tomb became popular.  1st century Palestine was a hotbed of false rumor.  Read Josephus.  Early Christianity was a hot-bed of fictional claims that attracted ignorant converts.  Read the pastorals.

Keep in mind that the argument that the disciples stole the body originated before any of the disciples died as martyrs and before they had suffered much. The argument was better early on than it would become later.

No, you find the Jews declaring the "disciples stole the body" argument in Matthew, then you blindly assume the Jews were saying such things in 34 a.d.  But most scholars date Matthew to 70 a.d., which is right when most of the apostles would have already died.  That is, the author safely delayed his accusations of what Jews were saying in 34 a.d. until the actual Jews that would know better, were likely dead.

Now what are you going to do?  Suddenly discover that Matthew was  published in 34 a.d.?

It should also be noted that Tertullian, like Justin, wrote an entire treatise against Judaism (An Answer To The Jews). The idea that he would have been dependent solely on Matthew for his knowledge of the Jewish response to the Christian claim about the empty tomb is unlikely.

So?  Once again, I think accusing the disciples of stealing the body is reasonable, and so would anybody else who is objective and doesn't blindly insist on biblical inerrancy, or misunderstand rules of historiography as infallible guides.

All three of these early Christian sources include information not mentioned by the others. All three would have had easy access to the Judaism of their day, and they all show interest in interacting with Jewish arguments against Christianity. Matthew and Justin are making highly public claims that could easily have been discerned to be false if they had been false (e.g., "to this day" in Matthew, men "sent throughout the whole civilized world" in Justin).

And since most scholars date Matthew to 70 .a.d., we are reasonable to say the earliest date Matthew publicized such story of Jewish scheming was 70 a.d.  You have no fucking clue the extent to which Matthew's oral preaching repeated anything in his written gospel.  But I'm sure you will pretend that the only reasonable conclusion is that he would have preached every bit of the written form....something that would identify him as a Judaizer and opponent of Paul.

And once again, you continue pretending that the the earliest Christian resurrection preaching would have bothered the Jews enough for them to desire to go exhume Jesus' body, when in fact it is likely they would not wish to rob such grave, it was illegal, and they'd need Roman permission which likely wouldn't be granted.

 I also believe the original resurrection belief was "visionary", so that the Jews would be even less worried to "refute" such mindless bullshit.

All three include information unlikely to have been made up by a Christian (see Craig's article about Matthew; Justin seems to be citing a Jewish source; Tertullian or a Christian source he relied on probably wouldn't have made up an alternate argument about the removal of Jesus' body that avoids the main problem with the theft argument). For reasons like these, and because there isn't any good argument to the contrary, it seems likely that there was early and widespread Jewish acknowledgment of the empty tomb.

Except that the earliest gospel, Mark, candidly acknowledges that an anonymous "man" wearing a "white robe" was at the open tomb and had been there for some time before the first witnesses, the women, got there.   You'll kindly pardon me if

a) I don't get "angel" out of "white robe" or "man", and
b) I have an alternative theory that this man moved the body, and Mark has simply morphed a grave-robbery story into a resurrection story.

The pastorals and Acts 21 make it clear that the earliest Christians had a habit of making up false claims and successfully hoodwinking thousands of others about what the apostles did.

Demolishing Triablogue: Significant Resurrection Narratives Did Not Come From Sources Who Were Named And Known

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

The Resurrection Narratives Came From Sources Who Were Named And Known

"All four Gospels are anonymous in the formal sense that the author's name does not appear in the text of the work itself, only in the title (which we will discuss below).

Which is a problem since most NT authors and 1st century historians did include their names in the text of their writings despite in most cases their intended audiences already knowing who they were.  So you can kiss your predictable "they didn't mention their names because they already knew their audiences" excuse goodbye.

Therefore, we can be reasonable to conclude that the gospel authors intentionally broke with standard practice, therefore, we can be reasonable to conclude they didn't want to be identified, therefore, we can be reasonable to conclude that desire to identify them only started with later generations.  We can therefore be reasonable to conclude that we cannot possibly go wrong in fulfilliing the author's desires, and refusing to discuss their identifies, if we so choose.

And if god inspired the gospel authors, then god also didn't want them to include their names in those works, which means God is less interested in proving the human authorship of the gospels than today's apologists are.  Hence it can be reasonable for the atheist to conclude that any "god" that might exist, wanted the written testimony to Jesus' resurrection to be of more dubious origin than as wished by today's apologists.  Whose wishes are more important to respect?

But this does not mean that they were intentionally anonymous. Many ancient works were anonymous in the same formal sense, and the name may not even appear in the surviving title of the work. For example, this is true of Lucian's Life of Demonax (Demonactos bios), which as a bios (ancient biography) is generically comparable with the Gospels. Yet Lucian speaks throughout in the first person and obviously expects his readers to know who he is.

And by speaking in the first person, that much is clear.  Unfortunately for you, none of the 4 gospels speaks in the first person.  They always characterize the apostles in the third-person. It doesn't matter how you can spin that, and it doesn't matter that eyewitnesses "can" use third person, this doesn't automatically mean "eyewitness who is choosing to use the third-person".  Third-person narrative usually automatically implies "the author was not one of the story characters", and the burden is rightfully on the fundie to overcome such presumption.  You certainly cannot seriously say skeptics are unreasonable to infer anonymous authorship from the third-person writing style.  Especially in light of the fact that we naturally and justifiably expect honest eyewitnesses to make it clear to the listeners that what they have to say is their own story, instead of asking the listeners to make imperfect judgment calls about how much tesitmony is "eyewitness" and how much is "later redactor modified this and modified that".

Such works would often have been circulated in the first instance among friends or acquaintances of the author who would know who the author was from the oral context in which the work was first read.

But that didn't stop apostle Paul and most other NT authors from identifying themselves.  You may not like the fact that the gospel authors bucked the trend, because of the skeptical inferences that can be justified therefrom, but that's tough shit.

Knowledge of authorship would be passed on when copies were made for other readers, and the name would be noted, with a brief title, on the outside of the scroll or on a label affixed to the scroll.

That would also be true even if the belief about the author were merely the earlier copyist's best guess.

In denying that the Gospels were originally anonymous, our intention is to deny that they were first presented as works without authors.

Then you aren't combating my specific type of gospel skepticism. I can allow for apostles authoring originals without putting myself under intellectual obligation to credit the final canonical form entirely to said apostles.  But if it is reasonable to say that various portions of the gospels originally came from later redactors, that is sufficient to justify skepticism toward their resurrection narratives, especially in light of the fact that scholars cannot agree on which portions of the gospels reveal redactional activity.

This idea that we have to show absolute anonymity before we can be reasonable to deny apostolic authorship, is total bullshit.  Life is far more complex than what you get walking into a church...or a preschool.

The clearest case is Luke because of the dedication of the work to Theophilus (1:3), probably a patron.

Which is also a point of unending debate, since Theophilus could also be a mere metaphor for the entire church.

But even assuming it was a real individual person, the reasonable assumption is that Luke intended to write for that guy, and the burden is on YOU to show that Luke intended for anybody else to read that work (by which argument scumbag apologists suddenly discover the infallibility of saying Theophilus was a metaphor for a large group of people).  As I've argued elsewhere, when you say the gospels were inspired by God, you are making reasonable those who attribute to god's own will any of the human author's discernible intent.  Unless you are a Calvinist and insist that just whatever happens is surely within the will of God, you cannot leap from "popular!" to "intended for the world!".  Luke appears intended for the church, as it makes no effort to rebut the kind of objections skeptics would have made in the 1st century (i.e., Jesus' miracles are just tricks employed by hundreds of other "faith-healers", sometimes involving dishonest assistants and third persons).

It is inconceivable that a work with a named dedicatee should have been anonymous.

Not "inconceivable" if the author already knew the dedicatee.

The author's name may have featured in an original title, but in any case would have been known to the dedicatee and other first readers because the author would have presented the book to the dedicatee....In the first century CE, most authors gave their books titles, but the practice was not universal....

In the first century, most authors also identified themselves in the text of their work, and most NT authors do so, therefore, we are reasonable to conclude that the gospel authors made a deliberate choice to avoid associating their names with their stories.  Not exactly the definition of "reliable".

Whether or not any of these titles originate from the authors themselves, the need for titles that distinguished one Gospel from another would arise as soon as any Christian community had copies of more than one in its library and was reading more than one in its worship meetings....In the case of codices, 'labels appeared on all possible surfaces: edges, covers, and spines.' In this sense also, therefore, Gospels would not have been anonymous when they first circulated around the churches.

Even if you are correct, the very fact that Jerome says "many" in the early church thought the Gospel to the Hebrews was "authentic Matthew" shows how little usefulness there was in the original gospels naming their authors...unless you wish to credit Matthew as the author of that heretical work?

A church receiving its first copy of one such would have received with it information, at least in oral form, about its authorship and then used its author's name when labeling the book and when reading from it in worship....no evidence exists that these Gospels were ever known by other names." (Richard Bauckham, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], pp. 300-301, 303)

But you don't know if they ever did so "label", you don't know how long they waited before producing the copies that might motivate them to attach labels, and yet it is equally reasonable to suppose that the oral tradition about the author is all the individual church community thought was necessary for several decades.

But again, so what?  The fact that all church fathers never testify to a Greek Matthew but only Hebrew until Jerome makes it reasonable to assume they did not have any tradition that Matthew authored anything in Greek.  You don't make that reasonableness disappear merely by trifling that maybe they just miraculously chose to focus only on the Hebrew original.  Those were mostly Gentile churches, where the Greek Matthew would be used more had it been believed authored by Matthew.

"Nevertheless the fact remains that it is utterly improbable that in this dark period, at a particular place or through a person or through the decision of a group or institution unknown to us, the four superscriptions of the Gospels, which had hitherto been circulating anonymously, suddenly came into being and, without leaving behind traces of earlier divergent titles, became established throughout the church.

I'm not one of those who say the gospel titles suddenly came into being at a late stage.  And once again, Matthew likely authored a less detailed "sayings-source", and this + anonymous scribe creating a Greek edition is why Matthew's name now appears on canonical Greek Matthew.

None of these trifles increase the probability that the gospel resurrection narratives escaped scribal modification, and if they didn't, then the gospel resurrection narratives lose significant historical value, since we are forced to conclude that at least some resurrection testimony has also been modified by later scribes.

Nevermind that more and more conservative inerrantists are admitting to Matthew mingling history and fiction in his resurrection narrative (i.e. "fiction" = "apocalyptic imagery").

Let those who deny the great age and therefore basically the originality of the Gospel superscriptions in order to preserve their 'good' critical conscience, give a better explanation of the completely unanimous and relatively early attestation of these titles, their origin and the names of authors associated with them.

I accept your challenge.  As far as Matthew, he likely authored a Hebrew sayings-source that was later reworked into Greek by a redactor who added substantial blocks of "narrative", so that Matthew's resurrection testimony is infected with hearsay of unknown extent, rendering the skeptic reasonable, if they choose, to disregard it.

As far as Mark, I can allow that a guy named Mark wrote it, and Mark's tendency to abandon the ministry to the point that Paul didn't deem him a worthy missionary (Acts 15:38) might help explain why he deserted his own gospel and made Jesus' resurrection one of the least important aspects.  The more Mark copied from Peter's preaching, the more "hearsay" it is, and since we cannot reasonably determine Mark's relation to Peter beyond debateable references in the NT, we have no reasonable way to gauge the reliability of such hearsay, thus justifying a skeptic, if they choose, to disregard it.

As far as Luke, if most Christian scholars are correct that Luke copies off Mark, then Luke was lying by omission in saying he consulted with eyewitnesses, since he leaves the impression that everything in his gospel about Jesus draws from eyewitness sources.  Mark was not an eyewitness of Jesus' ministry, especially if the fundies are correct that Mark is just a record of Peter's later preaching in Rome.

As far as John, enough Christian scholars admit much of what he puts in Jesus mouth was never actually mouthed by Jesus, to render reasonable the skeptic who says apostle John's authorship only hurts that gospel's reliability.

Such an explanation has yet to be given, and it never will be.

Bang on the pulpit, and yell "bless ma soul".

New Testament scholars persistently overlook basic facts and questions on the basis of old habits." (Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels And The One Gospel Of Jesus Christ [Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000], p. 55)

Wow, if even NT scholars "persistently" get things wrong, one reasonable option for a skeptic to exercise is to simply toss all NT scholarship in the trash as too complicated and convoluted for them to reasonably believe they will ever be able to draw reasonably certain conclusions beyond what Jesus' gender was.

And since Triablogue says a lifetime of neutrality toward Jesus cannot protect the unbeliever from hell,  the skeptic who exercise the above-stated option may as well avoid neutrality and tell himself David Hume already proved that miracles are impossible. Life is more fun if you go around thinking you'll never be held accountable by an invisible man living in the sky.  It's also easier to sleep at night when you don't think there is a monster living under your bed.

Demolishing Triablogue: Matthew did not write the gospel attributed to him

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue, entitled

Did Matthew Write The Gospel Attributed To Him?

Saturday, May 25, 2013

This is a typical way of downplaying the significance of Matthew's gospel:

The arguments for such downlplaying that you now cite to, are often made by Christian scholars.  Just wanted to make sure your readers didn't get the false impression that its only atheists who argue that way.

When the reader is told that Matthew likely authored a Hebrew original and the Hebrew is the only one the church fathers refer to until 4th century Jerome, many of the "evidences" for "Matthean authorship" of canonical Greek Matthew lose force.  After all, its a bit more complex than just whether Matthew wrote something in Greek.  We can relate Matthew to canonical Greek Matthew in a way that does reasonable justice to the external evidence, but without thereby showing Matthew was the sole author.  If there is more than one person involved in the authorship of canonical Greek Matthew, then the historical value of 'Matthew's' resurrection testimony wanes somewhat accordingly.  You don't just say "some parts of my affidavit were updated and modified by anonymous third-parties and translated into a different language" and yet expect others to think the document correctly represents everything you alleged in your original.

"We do not know the name of its author: the title found in our English versions ('The Gospel according to Matthew') was added long after the document's original composition.

 The author's failure to do what most NT authors and 1st century historians did, and include his name despite his audience already knowing it, is significant, and justifies the skeptic to say such authorial intent likely also expresses the allegeldy 'divine' intent...which means you might be acting contrary to the will of God in pushing Matthew's authorship.

It is true that according to an old tradition the author was none other than Matthew, the tax collector mentioned in Matt 9:9. This tradition, however, arose some decades after the Gospel itself had been published, and scholars today have reasons to doubt its accuracy.

Exactly how "early" that gospel was attributed to Matthew, cannot be known.  All you can do is find an earliest church father from around 125 a.d. mentioning a gospel of Matthew or "memoirs of the apostles" and triumphantly conclude that an interval of 80 years between Jesus' crucifixion and such early patristic reference is too trivial to justify fear of the gospel titles being the result of rumors.  The more you speak that foolishly, the more you justify apostolic authorship of the earliest non-canonical gospels.

For one thing, the author never identifies himself as Matthew, either in 9:9 or anywhere else.

So that under your own theory that this gospel was inspired by God, the best theory to expalin why the author didn't identify himself is beause god didn't want him to. Wow, I guess it never occurred to you that pushing Matthew's authorship might be contrary to the will of god.

Also, certain features of this Gospel make it difficult to believe that this Matthew could have been the author. Why, for example, would someone who had spent so much time with Jesus rely on another author (Mark) for nearly two-thirds of his stories, often repeating them word for word (including the story of his own call to discipleship; 9:9-13)?

That's called the Markan priority theory, one that I adopt, along with the majority of Christian scholars, and that alone is sufficient to justify concluding that such theory is "reasonable" even if not "guaranteed truth".  That is, your trifles against Markan priority do not foist any intellectual obligation upon a skeptic to either refute your objections or admit Markan priority loses.  Under your stupid trifling demeanor, nobody could ever be reasonable to write a book defending any bible scholarly opinion, because the necessarily limit to the size of the book necessarily means they'd have to avoid dealing with certain objections.

And why would he never authenticate his account by indicating that he himself had seen these things take place?

Maybe because, like many Christian scholars explain about Paul's anonymous authorship of Hebrews...he was scared that putting his name on something would cause his intended audience to turn away?  It's what we call "provide things honest in the sight of all men" and "it is not you but god who giveth the increase".

…Since he produced his Gospel in Greek, presumably for a Greek-speaking community, he was probably located somewhere outside Palestine…

That's weak since Greek was spoken also in Palestine.

Matthew, an anonymous Jewish leader of the Christian community (assuming that his strong literary skills, indicative of a higher education, gave him a place of prominence there), penned a Gospel narrative to show that Jesus was in fact the Jewish messiah, who like Moses gave the law of God to his people." (Bart Ehrman, The New Testament [New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 114-115, 132) 

Ehrman doesn't know that the title of the gospel wasn't added until "long after" the document's composition. See, for example, Martin Hengel's discussion of the gospel titles in The Four Gospels And The One Gospel Of Jesus Christ (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000). Hengel gives a series of reasons why the titles probably would have been included early on.

Except that even conservative inerrantist Christian scholars, despite how they could profit from such trifling, nevertheless stick with saying the gospel titles were probably added later.  For example, Craig Blomberg argues:

Strictly speaking, this Gospel, like all four canonical Gospels, is anonymous. The titles, “The Gospel according to X,” are almost certainly not original. It is doubtful that four early Christians would all choose this identical wording and far more probable that the documents were given these headings in order to distinguish one from the other only when they were first combined into a fourfold collection. The diversity of ways in which these titles are phrased among the existing manuscripts (“According to Matthew,” “The Gospel according to Matthew,” “The Gospel according to Matthew beginning with God,” “The Holy Gospel according to Matthew,” “From the [Gospel] according to Matthew”) reinforces this supposition.⁶¹ Probably these headings were first added some time in the late first or early second century. But apart from these ascriptions, nothing in the actual text of the Gospel ever specifically discloses its author.

61 For the Greek titles and manuscripts in which they occur, see Allison and Davies, Matthew, 1:129, n. 90.

Blomberg, C. (2001, c1992). Vol. 22: Matthew (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 43). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

If Engwer chooses to disagree with Blomberg, that's fine but then the skeptic could correctly trivilaize Christianity by observing that NOT EVEN WHEN YOU ACCEPT JESUS, ADOPT INERRANCY AND EVENTUALLY BECOME A LEGITIMATELY CREDENTIALED RESPECTABLE CHRISTIAN SCHOLAR WHO SPECIALIZES IN THE HISTORICAL RELIABILITY OF THE GOSPELS, WILL YOU BE ABLE TO SEE GOSPEL TRUTH.

For example, after more than one gospel was circulating, the gospels would need to be distinguished from one another.

Not if they were originally written for separate communities, as most scholars believe was the case.  What you are talking about wouldn't be a concern until the church began to collectively desire to canonize several gospels.

When critics like Ehrman suggest that Matthew used Mark as a source, they don't seem to realize that their argument in that context works against their argument that Matthew wouldn't have had a title until "long after" its composition. If the author of Matthew knew of Mark and thought so highly of the document as to use so much of it, then he and his earliest readers would have wanted a way, probably multiple ways, to quickly and easily distinguish each gospel from other documents in general and from other gospels in particular.

Or maybe Matthew was intended to 'correct' Mark (which I've shown he usually does) and produce something better so as to allow for tossing Mark in the trash, in which case there can be no rational motive to carefully distinguish the authors.

A title would allow people to quickly and easily distinguish one gospel from another.

In the later period when some of the gospels started gaining authority beyond their originally intended audiences, yes.

That would be important, for instance, in church services in which gospels were being read, a context in which quickly and easily distinguishing among the gospels would be desirable.

Only by assuming the Matthew author intended for his people to use Mark alongside his own production, when in fact his corrections to Mark make it reasonable to suppose he intended to supplant Mark.  The church Matthew intended to write for is thus left with one single updated gospel.

Furthermore, both private and public libraries used titles to distinguish one work from another.

Yes.

And so on. If you read Hengel's book, you'll see that there are multiple reasons why the gospels probably would have had titles applied to them early, most likely during the first century, when apostles and their contemporaries were still alive.

Well gee, then why did Jerome say "many" in the early church thought Gospel to the Hebrews was "authentic Matthew"?

“There is a Gospel,” he says, “which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use, which I lately translated from the Hebrew tongue into Greek and which is called by many the authentic Gospel of Matthew”. [1]

[1] Commentary on Matthew 12:13, from Orr, J., M.A., D.D. (1999). The International standard Bible encyclopedia : 1915 edition (J. Orr, Ed.). Albany, OR: Ages Software.

Does the presence of the word "authentic" reasonably imply that those "many" knew of inauthentic gospels being credited to Matthew?  Does the word "authentic" reasonably imply those "many" did some type of investigation and concluded GoH was more likely authored by Matthew?  Or do your common-sense sounding arguments suddenly become Stupid of the Year whenever they can be used to support apostolic authorship of gospels that aren't in your favorite collection?

See my quotations of Richard Bauckham and Martin Hengel here, and read their books for further information.
How does Ehrman allegedly know that the tradition of Matthean authorship "arose some decades after the Gospel itself had been published"? The earliest extant report of that tradition is in Papias, writing in the early second century about information he attained at an unknown earlier date. But the timing of the earliest tradition report extant today need not be equivalent to the timing of the earliest tradition.

True, but that kind of trifle doesn't foist an intellectual obligation upon a skeptic.  All you are doing is bleating about possibiltiies.  If a skeptic doesn't accuse you of taking an illogical position, you have no business citing to bare possibilities.  You either show that your own preferred possibility has more probability than the skeptical theory, or you lose the debate.  FUCK YOU.

Think of the absurdity of the situation implied by Ehrman. Not only did people wait until "long after" Matthew's composition to give the work a title, but they also waited until "some decades" later to start claiming that Matthew wrote it.

There's nothing absurd about that under the other Christian theory that the Matthew-author wrote for a specific congregation.  We would expect such congregation to use his gospel for at least two decades, never seeing any need to place a title on it.

 Yet, attribution of the document to Matthew was universal and was corroborated by a diverse series of non-Christian sources from the second century onward.

It was also "universal" that Matthew wrote first, a theory now discredited by most Christian scholars, who hold to Markan priority.  It would also be reasonable for a skeptic to conclude the "universal" attribution to Matthew was little more than later church fathers blindly following Papias.

Is that sort of early and widespread acceptance of Matthean authorship better explained by Ehrman's scenario or a traditional Christian view?

Gee, what best explains the fact that "many" in the early church took GoH to be "authentic" Matthew?  Was it possible for "many" in the early church to be deceived about gospel authorship?  If so, how many wrongful opinions had to be held by "many" before one opinion wrongfully achieved the status of orthodoxy?

Why would a document that circulated anonymously for decades become universally accepted as Matthean, with corroboration from non-Christian sources, leaving no trace of dispute?

Fallacy of loaded question, Jerome documents the dispute by saying "many" viewed GoH as "authentic" Matthew.

To make matters worse for Ehrman, he claims that the author of the gospel was a "leader" with "prominence". But this prominent leader's work circulated anonymously? Why?

I don't have to answer that question, as I don't agree with Ehrman on the point.

And his identity was universally forgotten and universally replaced with Matthew's identity so early?

No, most likely Matthew wrote a sayings-source in Hebrew, and an anonymous scribe was later responsible for translating it into Greek and adding narrative.  That way, the work is called "Matthew", but only because Matthew had limited relation to the contents.

I'm reminded of Donald Guthrie's reference to "those modern schools of criticism which have peopled early Christian history with a whole army of unknown writers, whose works attained as great a prominence as their authors obtained obscurity." (The Logos Library System: Deluxe Collection [Oak Harbor, Washington: Logos Research Systems, 1997], New Testament Introduction)
Ehrman asks us to solve problems of his own creation. Reject his dubious assumptions, and you won't have to face his contrived problems.

I've done rather well justifying skepticism in light of your defense, even assuming Ehrman was wrong.

He suggests that if the apostle Matthew wrote the gospel, he would have identified himself as an eyewitness. Why think Matthew didn't identify himself by a document title or an oral report of authorship that accompanied the book's circulation, for example?

Because skeptics try to prioritize any theory that can be based on evidence, instead of on a theory that requires manufacturing evidence out of thin air.  There is no historical evidence that Matthew identified himself by document or "oral report" (gospel preaching doesn't require the preacher to give his name, only the gospel), nor that any such thing accompanied the book's circulation.

I've addressed the issue of Matthew's use of Mark's gospel here. Under my view, a "word for word" (as Ehrman puts it) repetition of Mark wouldn't be a problem.

But it remains reasonable to say we don't expect a person with their own first-hand experiences, to depend so heavily upon a non-eyewitness source for documenting these.

And I don't see how skepticism suffers in the least by admitting Matthew authored an original in Hebrew.  We can agree on that, except that I think the Hebrew original was mostly "sayings", not narrative, and I agree with inerrantist Christian scholar Craig Blomberg that an anonymous scribe later reworked the entire thing in Greek.

But if he wrote only an Aramaic precursor to the Gospel, then any Gentile Christian could have been responsible for Greek Matthew as well, though interestingly the tide of scholarship is again strongly returning to a Jewish Christian as the author of the final form of this Gospel, even if many remain reluctant to identify the apostle as the specific Jewish Christian, Matthew.

...When all the evidence is amassed, there appears no conclusive proof for the apostle Matthew as author but no particularly cogent reason to deny this uniform early church tradition. Were the Gospel not written by him, the church surely chose a rather strange individual (in light of his unscrupulous past by Jewish standards) as a candidate for authorship. Without any ancient traditions to the contrary, Matthew remains the most plausible choice for author. This author, at least of an original draft of this book (or one of its major sources), seems quite probably to have been the converted toll collector, also named Levi, who became one of Jesus’ twelve apostles (cf. 10:3; 9:9–13; Mark 2:14–17).
But again we present these conclusions tentatively.

Blomberg, C. (2001, c1992). Vol. 22: Matthew (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 44). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Engwer continues:

But is Matthew 9:9-13, a passage Ehrman singles out, actually a word for word repetition of Mark 2:14-17? No.

Doesn't have to be word-for-word.  Under Markan priority, they are similarly worded because the Matthew author is copying off of Mark.  Since it would be absurd to suppose Matthew himself wished to depend upon a non-eyewitness to tell the reader about Matthew's own calling to discipleship, it's reasonable, even if not infallible, to say the Matthew-author is not Matthew himself.

In fact, scholars often point to differences among the parallel Synoptic accounts as evidence for Matthean authorship or as a potential explanation for how a mistaken Christian belief in authorship by Matthew arose. (E.g., Matthew 9:9 refers to "Matthew", whereas Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27 refer to "Levi".

Some church fathers thought Levi and Matthew were separate apostles, so it might be reasonable to conclude that Mark's "Levi" was originally supposed to be somebody different than "Matthew", despite the tendency of most Christains to automatically equate them.

Matthew 9:9 humanizes the individual by referring to him as "a man" rather than more formally referring to his ancestry [Mark 2:14] or referring to his despised employment as a tax collector [Luke 5:27].

I'm not seeing the point.

Matthew 9:10 refers to "the house" rather than "his house" [Mark 2:15, Luke 5:29], and "the house" is more natural coming from the house's owner.)

Bauckham doesn't think the switch to "the house" implies Matthew is the author:

Mark sets this scene in “his house,” which some scholars take to mean Jesus’ house, but could certainly appropriately refer to Levi’s house. In Matthew’s Gospel, the same passage follows the narrative of the call of Matthew, but the scene is set simply in “the house” (Matt 9:10). Thus this Evangelist has appropriated Mark’s story of the call of Levi, making it a story of Matthew’s call instead, but has not continued this appropriation by setting the following story in Matthew’s house. He has appropriated for Matthew only as much as Mark’s story of Levi as he needed.
...If this explanation of the name Matthew in Matt 9:9 is correct, it has one significant implication: that the author of Matthew’s Gospel intended to associate the Gospel with the apostle Matthew but was not himself the apostle Matthew. Matthew himself could have described his own call without having to take over the way Mark described Levi’s call.

Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p. 108-109

If conservatives of Dr. Bauckham’s caliber are not convinced by the way fundamentalists spin the evidence to make Matthew into a gospel author, it’s a pretty good argument that the evidence for Matthean authorship is weak at best. If there was any legitimate way to spin the evidence to favor authorship by an apostle, somebody with Dr. Bauckham’s great learning and fundamentalist assumptions about the gospels as eyewitness testimony would surely have done it.  This doesn't prove Bauckham is correct, only that the skeptics who choose to adopt his point here are not unreasonable to do so.

Engwer continues:

If Matthew 9 is distinctive enough to be part of the explanation of the authorship attribution of the document, as seems to be the case, then so much the worse for Ehrman's claim that Matthew just repeated Mark.

Nah, Markan priority is pretty solid, especially if Eta Lineman and W. Farmer are the best the fundies can offer in rebuttal.

And so much the worse for Ehrman's claim that the author of the document didn’t make any effort to identify himself.

Just not the level of effort we'd expect of a person who was "amazingly transformed" by viewing the resurrected Jesus.

The author makes a lot of references to financial matters, including some unique to his gospel (e.g., 17:24-27, 18:23-35). In a passage about taxes that the Synoptics have in common (Matthew 22:19, Mark 12:15, Luke 20:24), Matthew uses more precise terminology than what's used by Mark and Luke. Those characteristics would make sense if the author were a tax collector.

Correction, if the author OF THE HEBREW ORIGINAL were a tax-collector.  I'm more dangerous to fundies than the average skeptic, because I avoid the extreme position that Matthew is completely detached from the gospel and allow that his influence likely appears in the canonical greek version, being based as it was on the earlier shorter Hebrew version.

And a tax collector's work would give him reason to know Greek.

It would also give him a reason to know why it is important to state his name and testify to what he himself observed, something the Matthew author never does.

So would various cultural factors involved with living in first-century Israel and various factors involved with being a prominent leader in a messianic movement.

Yes, apostle Matthew had something to do with the canonical Greek version.  But that hardly justifies automatically insisting that denial of Matthew's authorship is unreasonable.  There were two authors, and Matthew had the least influence on the Greek version.

As an apostle, Matthew would have had good reason to travel outside of Israel, so his presence outside of the nation wouldn't be a significant problem for Matthean authorship.

Except that according to Paul, the original Jewish apostles wished to disobey the Great Commission and limit their evangelism efforts to Jews alone:

 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. (Gal. 2:9 NAU)

Engwer continues:

Along with those who hold a traditional view of Matthean authorship, Ehrman acknowledges that the author probably was a Jew and that his gospel is of a highly Jewish character. Whether the author was outside of Israel at the time when he wrote doesn't have much significance in the context of authorship. The author was a Jew, and a Jewish apostle would have had reason to travel outside of Israel.

A position that can be reasonably disputed on the basis of Galatians 2:9.

Why Triablogue's endlessly trifling bullshit cannot possibly matter

Triablogue's Jason Engwer puts a shitload of effort into trying to prove that the Enfield Poltergeist was real.

He does this so that he can then prove atheism wrong.

But as I've noted before, my skepticism of Jesus' resurrection renders the alleged wrongness of atheism irrelevant.

Even supposing atheism is wrong, that doesn't mean "atheist is in trouble with the Christian god".

All it means is that a god exists.

Since 

a) the apostle Paul said Jesus' failure to rise from the dead would turn Christians into false witnesses who are still in their sins (1st Cor. 15:15), and

b) I continue beating down the way Engwer, Hays, Licona, Habermas and W.L. Craig interpret the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, 

it really doesn't matter if a god exists, the fact that I am reasonable to deduce this god is not the Christian god creates the stark possibility that the Christians are in just as much trouble with this god for misrepresenting him, as they think atheists are for denying his basic existence.

Before you can leap from "you are wrong" to "you are unreasonable", you have to show that the being wrong is more likely to lead to some type of disaster.  But if the evidence for Jesus' resurrection is as unpersuasive and weak as I claim, the best the apologists could possibly be left with is that there is some "god" out there, so that atheists remain wrong even if it be reasonable to deny Jesus rose from the dead.

At that point, whether that god even cares whether anybody misrepresents him or denies him, would be forever open to blind speculation, except for trifling Christians who would automatically default to the OT god upon discovery that the NT is bullshit.

But according to Deut. 13, even when the prophet does a real miracle, he STILL might be leading people into error, and therefore, such miracle-worker would STILL suffer the wrath of this god.  

That is, according to the OT principle, Jesus' miracle of rising from the dead does NOT end the discussion of whether the OT god approves of him.  But I have yet to see any Christian argument that the OT YHWH approves of Jesus, they rather think his resurrection miracle is the end of the debate.

They also blindly insist that because Jesus uses the divine title, he IS YHWH, a contention that has kept the church divided since even before the Council of Nicaea.

Therefore, the Christians are getting precisely nowhere by wasting such enormous amounts of time trying to prove atheism wrong, or that a spiritual dimension exists, or that physicalism is false.  Atheists don't start becoming unreasonable unless their being in the wrong can be proven to have likely disastrous consequences.  Sure, I might be wrong to say Japan is located in Australia, but unless you could show that this wrongness will likely lead to harmful effects on myself, you are never going to "prove" that I "should" care about being wrong.  

I'm pretty sure that Bigfoot is a hoax and was never anything more than a fairy tale and a man in a monkey suit...but why should I care if that is wrong and the creature is a genuine cryptid?    Does Bigfoot denial have a history of causing skeptics to get the flu more often than the average person?

Because the evidence for Jesus' resurrection is poor, and because the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment in the afterworld contradicts the OT concept of god's justice, the atheist has no reason to 'worry' about atheism being 'wrong', at worst they will experience nothing more than permanent extinction of consciousness, a fate they already accept.  Pissing off god is about as fearful as pissing off a puppy.

Therefore, trying to prove atheism is wrong is a fruitlessly and purely academic waste of time (i.e., has no serious application to anybody's actual life beyond mere idle intellectual curiosity, and is equal to trying to prove somebody else wrong about whether the Trojan War ever happened).

There's a possibility that angry space aliens will zap you...but how much effort should an atheist put into protecting herself from such disaster?  Maybe always wear a radar-deflecting hat?

There's a possibility that a wild animal will kill the atheist after they walk in the front door of their house, but how much effort should the atheist put into protecting herself from such possible disaster?  Maybe peek in every window before going in the house, or installing motion detectors?  FUCK YOU.

There's a possibility some "god" will roast atheists alive in hell forever, but how much effort should the atheist put into protecting herself from such disaster?  Maybe spend the next 50 years trying to figure out which view of God is correct so they don't end up joining the wrong cult and end up making things worse for themselves by adding the sin of heresy to their existing sin of unbelief?  FUCK YOU.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:  in light of god's hiddenness on the one hand, and the Christian apologist's mouthiness on the other, it appears Christian apologists love atheists more than their own god does.  Irony never sucked quite as much as that.

How NOT to concisely argue for a Traditional view of Jesus' childhood, a reply to Jason Engwer

This is my reply to a Triablogue article by Jason Engwer entitled

How To Concisely Argue For A Traditional View Of Jesus' Childhood

Monday, December 09, 2019

Engwer, true to form, once again choose to pay attention to meaningless trifles.

Engwer is forced to agree with his apostle Paul that to disprove the resurrection of Jesus is to turn Christians into false witnesses who are still in their sins, 1st Corinthians 15:15 (which then means they deserve the death penalty even if they do real miracles in support of their theology, Deut. 13).  Since I have demolished Jesus' resurrection by showing that the naturalistic theory has more explanatory scope and power, I must conclude that arguing about Jesus' childhood can never be sufficient to fix the wormwood infecting Christianity's linchpin doctrine.

I therefore only answer Engwer point by point on Jesus' childhood solely out of my preference to demolish fundamentalist Christianity in all its forms, not because of any stupid worry that justifying the canonical Nativity stories somehow makes Christianity worthy of the slightest credence. 

There are a lot of ways to argue for a traditional view of the childhood of Jesus, and we've been making those arguments for a long time. But it's often helpful to be able to argue concisely for what you believe. That can be hard to do when a subject is as large and complicated as the earliest years of Jesus' life.

Actually, its not complicated at all.  The gospel authors say nearly nothing about Jesus' childhood, likely because they knew that trying to convince the public that some infant crapping his diaper was the creator of the universe just sounded a bit too stupid even for pre-literate religious fanatics, and most people would more readily accept divine-man claims if the person at issue was at least an adult.  By limiting Jesus' miracles to some life-point past his infancy, stupid shit questions about how a baby could be god and yet still not have control of his own bowel movements are conveniently avoided.

For example, to say that Jesus was the creator is to imply that he never sinned.  A child who never disobeys his parents?   How believable is that?  Since people who believe in miracles don't always think the most outlandish things, it appears the gospel authors, despite willingness to tell miracle stories, still recognize that some miracle stories can go too far.  The mark of a good professional liar is that they know where employing circumspection will cause their story to "ring" more true.

We are addressing years of his life, after all, unlike the narrower focus of Easter, for example. But here are a few summary arguments I recommend using:

If you paid more attention to what Jesus actually told you to do, you would have no time to engage in the sin of word-wrangling (2nd Timothy 2:14).  The very fact that Paul showed zero interest in Jesus' childhood should be enough to prove that Paul doesn't think anything is missing by simply leaving Jesus' childhood completely alone.  So your desire to engage in such debate anyway is reasonably construed to signify your lack of satisfaction with Paul's gospel.  But again, if you spent more time doing what Jesus and Paul demanded of their followers, not only would you have no time to spend on debatable pionts, but your obedience to clear commands would make it more likely your efforts would reap spirtiual reward.  you cannot really say whether God gives a fuck whether you say anything about Jesus' childhood or not.  Clearly, you have a morbid interest in controversial questions, the trait that apostle Paul said renders you a stupid heretic (1st Timothy 6:4).

The NT authors never made Jesus' childhood that big of a deal, so you run a significant risk of trying to do better than your god by attempting to satisfy public curiosity about a subject that your god did not see fit to provide any answers to.

Furthermore, if you believe Matthew was written to non-Christian as well as Christian Jews, you get in more trouble, since that would mean that Matthew, the alleged apostle and author, seriously thought that a mere story about Jesus' childhood should "suffice" to "convince" non-Christain Jews, showing your Matthew to be far more anti-intellectual than you'd ever dare credit to him.

You cannot say Matthew would have been there to explain the story, as the patristic evidence, that you treat as infallible without honestly admitting it, says Matthew wrote the gospel to make up for his absence given his intent to leave Jerusalem and travel abroad:

Eusebius, Hist.Eccl. 3:24
Nevertheless, of all the disciples of the Lord, only Matthew and John have left us written memorials, and they, tradition says, were led to write only under the pressure of necessity. For Matthew, who had at first preached to the Hebrews, when he was about to go to other peoples, committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and thus compensated those whom he was obliged to leave for the loss of his presence. 

 [1] Schaff, Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew 1

Of Matthew again it is said, that when those who from amongst the Jews had believed came to him, and besought him to leave to them in writing those same things, which he had spoken to them by word, he also composed his Gospel in the language of the Hebrews. And Mark too, in Egypt, is said to have done this self-same thing at the entreaty of the disciples.

This is quite sufficient to allege that what we find in Matthew's Nativity story is what Matthew preached.  It is also likely that beacuse the gospel followed Matthew's preaching, the written nativity story is likely a polished form of that preaching, so that the written form provides more details than Matthew's oral preaching did.  he was an anti-intellectual.  John was the same way, he expected faith to just magically materialize in the hearts of his readers merely because they read his words (Matthew 20:31).

- Reliable sources on Jesus' childhood were available to the early Christians and their opponents for a long time.

Mary allegedly had visions.  So since Christian apologists never attempt to justify visionary material in the NT, even they agree that when a source is a 'vision', it can be safely discounted.

Close relatives of Jesus lived for more than half a century after his birth.

Which only hurts your cause, as those relatives found nothing in Jesus' public ministry to convince them Jesus was a truly divine person, see Mark 3:21, Mark 6:4 and John 7:5.  You have no interest whatsoever in evaluating the testimony of these alleged eyewitnesses to Jesus' alleged "miracles".  Your other comments that perhaps they were too overcome with jealousy, or they "just didn't understand" are too foolish to deserve comment.  What the fuck would even a stupid person do, if their brother was going around town raising the dead and curing diseases science still deemed incurable?

For a discussion of the credibility of the early reports about Jesus' relatives in general, see here. Regarding how long individuals like Mary and James lived, see here and here.

In the first linked article, you say "He had siblings, and they were initially unbelievers." That's an understatement.  Those siblings committed the unpardonable sin (Mark 3:21, to say somebody was insane was to accuse them of demon possession, see John 8:52, 10:20) and even after a full year into Jesus' public ministry, his brothers were refusing to believe in him and mocking his ability to do miracles (John 7:1-5).  Worse, Jesus himself testified after coming home from his first preaching tour that his own relatives did not properly honor him (Mark 6:4).  In all fairness, though, in the first linked article you admit:

Furthermore, some of the gospel accounts are particularly unlikely to have been fabricated, because of their embarrassing nature. Jesus' mother and brothers refer to Him as insane (Mark 3:20-35), Jesus considers His unbelieving brothers (future church leaders) incompetent to care for His mother (John 19:26-27), etc. John 19:27 tells us that Mary lived past Jesus' death for some unspecified period of time as well, which is corroborated by Acts 1:14 (which, like John 19, has Mary in the region of Jerusalem around the time of Jesus' death).

And I couldn't agree more.  The embarrassing nature of these admissions gives them slightly more historical likelihood than statements that Jesus did real miracles or was the son of god.  Engwer continues:

And those relatives held some prominent positions in the early church, as we see in Acts,

I'm not seeing anything in Acts that definitively puts a relative of Jesus in a prominent place.  Two Jameses were original apostles (Mark 3:17-18), so when two Jameses appear in Acts 1, the more likely truth is that these were the same exact men, and since neither of them can possibly have been the James the brother of the Lord (i.e., he was son of Joseph and thus not a son of 'Zebedee' or son of 'Alphaeus'), and most Christian apologists say the specific brother of Jesus named James was among the relatives in Mark 3:21 who rejected Jesus' message before the crucifixion, therefore, neither James in Acts 1 can be James the brother of Jesus.

Yes, there is an unqualified James in Acts 15, but since there were two different Jameses who were original apostles (supra), saying the James of Acts 15 was one of the original apostles with the same name requires less ad hoc speculation than the hopeful theory that the James of Acts 15 was specifically Jesus' brother.

Galatians 1:19, 2:9-12,

No, inerrantist Christian scholar George, T. admitted that Galatians 1:19 is ambiguous as to whether Paul was saying James the Lord's brother was one of the apostles.  George says:

1:19 Paul claimed that he saw none of the other apostles except James, the brother of Jesus. The expression is ambiguous in Greek, so we cannot be sure whether Paul meant to include James among the other apostles.  Did he mean: “The only other apostle I saw was James,” or “I saw no other apostle, although I did see James”? Probably he meant something like this: “During my sojourn with Peter, I saw none of the other apostles, unless you count James, the Lord’s brother.”

(2001, c1994). New American Commentary, Vol. 30: Galatians,  p. 74)

The James of Galatians 2:9 ff is at least 15 verses away from 1:19, so it clearly isn't close enough to justify pretending that Paul was talking about the same exact person, he could just as likely have been referring simply to another apostle James whose headship of the Jerusalem church did not need to be specified.  But I would argue that because Paul refers to Peter (Cephas) James and John (2:9), it is most reasonable to assume these men achieved leadership in the Jerusalem church because they were previously among Jesus' inner circle, the precise type of apostles most likely to attain a high leadership position. See Mark 5:37, 13:3 and Matthew 17:1, 9).  The reasonableness of this interpretation is not going to disappear merely because there are other bare possibilities.  However,

Engwer continues:

1 Corinthians 9:5,

First, the mere fact that early church fathers debated whether Jesus had multiple brothers is itself enough to justify the person who says 1st Cor. 9:5 is too ambiguous to think it can yield conclusions of reasonable certainty.  See here.

Second, Paul distinguishes the "rest of the apostles" from the "brothers of the Lord".  This is naturally expected if Paul felt Jesus' brothers did not qualify as apostles, and merely sometimes accompanied the apostles during missions.

Third, Mark 6:3 lists 4 brothers of Jesus, James being one, so that the plural "brothers" in 1st Corinthians 9:5 would still be accurate even if we asserted one specifc brother, James, never converted to Christian faith.

Fourth, the mere fact that the head apostles gave Paul the 'right hand of fellowship' (Galatians 2:9) need not imply those apostles agreed with Paul's gospel, so that even if 1st Cor. 9:5 proves that James the brother of Christ sometimes accompanied other apostles on missions, his presence in such context doesn't demand that he was a convert to Christianity.  In the mid-40's there was a terrible famine in and around Palestine, and the Jerusalem apostles could very well have viewed Paul as a meal-ticket and that's the only reason they pretended to support his version of the gospel (though it is weird that in Gal. 2:9, they allocate the entire Gentile mission field to Paul and confine themselves solely to Jews,  when in fact the risen Christ allegedly said THEY were to evangelize the Gentiles (Matthew 28:19).

Fifth, other historical "facts" about James the Lord's brother show that he did not agree with Paul's theology, he was a Judaizer and likely for that reason was held in high esteem among non-Christian law-observant Jews, which would hardly be the case if this exact James preached the same message Jesus did, you know, the one that incurred the wrath of the Jewish people (Matthew 12:14, 27:25).

the letters of James and Jude, etc.

There is nothing about the authorship of James' epistle that suggests he was specifically a brother of Jesus, and there were two original apostles of Christ named James whose authorship could just as easily account for that epistle's echoing some of Christ's alleged sayings.  I would argue their aurthorship is ore likely than by James the brother of Christ since they spent three years with Jesus before he died, whereas the brother of Jesus name James was a late-comer, so that naturally either of the two original apostles of the same name are more likely to have more familiarity with Jesus' sayings.

For both epistle of James and epistle of Jude, it is quite difficult to believe, in light of Jesus granting specific authority to certain apostles (Matthew 16:18), and in light of Paul's admission that the early Christian laity recognized certain apostles as authoritative (Galatians 2:6), and in light of Peter's belief that only TWELEVE men could possibly be legitimate apostles (Acts 1, his seeing a need to replace Judas with Matthias), that the authors, if they are true apostles, would fail, as they do, to specify their authority and position.  1st Peter starts out with the author declaring he is an "apostle", 2nd Peter doesn't matter because it is reasonably construed a forgery despite the trifles of fundamentalists otherwise, and Paul is always identifying himself as an apostle and authority.   Yet James and Jude place themselves at the level of other Christians by declaring themselves "bond-servants" of Christ (James 1:1, Jude 1:1).  The reasonableness of saying the true authors were not the leaders bearing those names, but lesser persons who either had the same names, or wrote what they thought such leaders would have written, is not going to disappear merely because other authorship theories are also within the realm of viable possibility.

Keep in mind that Jesus' relatives were critical of him at times, so his enemies would have had an interest in and ability to get information about his background from those relatives.

Agreed.  Which probably accounts for why we have no surviving records from the 1st century of those hostile to Jesus.  When the enemies can use Jesus' family against him, us Christians must "destroy the memory of Amalek from under heaven..."  Paul wanted to 'stop' the mouths of Jewish Christians who were teachings things he didn't approve of, see Titus 1:11.  That's not calling for democratic debate, and its not asking those listening to the jewish Christians to "check out" Paul's competing claims, that's asking for the Jewish Christian assertions to cease circulation altogether.

Some of Jesus' neighbors, coworkers, and contemporaries in places like Bethlehem and Nazareth also would have lived past the time of his death, even for decades in some cases. The same is true of the religious authorities and others who opposed him and had him executed. Just as the early Christians passed on information from generation to generation, so did their enemies. The early Christians and their opponents produced many documents in the earliest decades of Christianity, not just the ones we possess today, as I argue here.

 Except that it is also reasonable to conclude that the Judaizers wrote letters critical of Paul (their ability to convince Peter and "even Barnabas" (Galatians 2) might suggest the case for the Judaizer gospel is more powerful than what you can tell from mirror-reading Galatians and Acts 15), yet we have no such thing from the 1st century.

And see here for some comments from Larry Hurtado about how the literacy of the early Christians is often underestimated.

Many of Paul's converts were illiterate (1st Corinthians 1:26).  perhaps you will argue that the Greek word for "many" need only mean "two".

- We have a lot of evidence for a traditional view of Jesus' childhood.

The significance of which is completely debunked by Jesus' own complete apathy toward and silence on his own childhood, as if he was of the belief that what happened in his childhood had no significant bearing on his claim to the Messiah.  Add to this the fact that 25 of the 27 NT books show zero concern for events in Jesus' childhood, and you are a fool to insist that skeptics are somehow intellectually obligated to give two shits about these speculations that you just cannot resist wasting your time with.  Then again, Jason Engwer thinks it is proper use of God's money to help digitize and preserve the audiotapes of the Enfield Poltergeist, which according to his bible constitutes using god's money to preserve records of the manifestations of demon activity.  We can safely assume Engwer is so fanatical in his desire to prove bible inerrancy and apologetics, he ends up often contradicting the bible.

I don't think the evidence supporting a traditional view of Jesus' childhood is consistent, for example, Luke 2:52 doesn't say Jesus' human nature increased in wisdom, it says "Jesus" increased in wisdom, and it is eisogesis to read the orthodox resolution to the Arian and Nestorian "heresies" back into the earlier text, when it is more objective to prioritize the author's own context.  If that requires that Luke was saying all parts of Jesus (i.e., both divine and human) grew in wisdom, that will only bother fundamentalist Christians, skeptics will not worry too much that this makes for a bad day in classical theism-land.  Let's just say that the average person of the first century appears to have believed, in rather uncritical unquestioning way, that the gods could take on human form, Acts 14:11.  The point is that these kinds of statements make the historical Jesus so utterly unbelievable that what one might "prove" from his childhood is absurdly irrelevant.

Much of what the early Christians report about the childhood of Jesus meets modern historical standards, like multiple attestation,

First, multiple attestation is a weak criteria, it assumes that if you have at least two witnesses who agree on a fact, the jury has no choice but to consider the fact established.  That's just stupid, especially in the first century where thousands of Christians testified in favor of the "fact" that Paul was hypocritical in his preaching (Acts 21:20) and is therefore an example of how even today's Christian apologists will quickly dismiss multiply-attested "facts".  How many thousands of witnesses testify to Roman Catholic miracles at Fatima and elsewhere?  Engwer will trifle that he doesn't deny their miraculous nature but only the conclusion that God approves of Roman Catholicism, but that misses the point:  God's approval of Roman Catholicism is ALSO what's multiply attested in such modern-day miracles.  That is, Engwer will find it impossibly difficult to continue parading multiple attestation as the final nail in the skeptic's conffin.  If he dares attempt to look objective by pretending he doesn't necessarily always believe miracles merely because they are multiply attested, then he cannot blame skeptics who, like him, cite other evidentiary shortcomings in a claim and its evidence which they feel are greater than its "multiple attestation".

Second, Matthean priority is also meets multiple attestation in the church fathers, but most Christian scholars insist in Markan priority.  Matthew's authorship of the gospel now bearing his name is also multiply attested in the patristic literature, but because it appears the latter fathers are basically all merely echoing the Papias-tradition, such multiple attestation is more correctly characterized is mere echoing, not independent corroboration.

Third, multiple attestation barely operates here in the debate about Jesus' childhood:  you only have two accounts.  You are not going to place intellectual compulsion on skeptics by trifling about John 1:13 and Mark 6:3.  The very fact that no other NT author finds Jesus-childhood- stories edifying enough to warrant mention would justify the view that the earliest apostles were not in agreement on whether the virgin birth story was true (they would have to agree that if true, it would certainly do as much to support their claims about Jesus as do their own unique claims about the miracles he did in adulthood).   So the silence of most NT authors on the virgin birth remains significant.  That's not going to disappear merely because you can always posit some other possibility to explain such silence such as "maybe they knew their audience accepted it so it didn't need to be repeated".

the criterion of embarrassment,

Which justifies skepticism in the case of Mark 3:21, 6:4 and John 7:5.  Then again, Matthew and Luke obviously weren't "apologetics" by any stretch, and their fallacy of argument by assertion (i.e., preaching to the choir) might warrant the conclusion they were written only for believers, in which case, the authors would not think their tales of Jesus' nativity were "embarrassing", so that such tales do not "pass" the criteria of embarrassment.

and the criterion of coherence.

Nah, that's just another way for you to say "bible inerrancy".  Plenty of scholars find real discrepancies between the gospels, including Mike Licona, who remains unimpressed with Lydia McGrew's sin of word-wrangling.

For some examples, see here and here.
 - There's a significant lack of support in the ancient sources for skeptical alternatives to a traditional Christian view of the childhood of Jesus.

First, not if common sense is allowed in.  If Jesus' human vocal cords necessarily implicated his divine nature when he spoke a phrase that many conservative Christian scholars don't think he actually spoke (John 8:58), then there is nothing necessarily fallacious in saying Jesus' human acts implicated his divine nature, in which case it follows with equal logic that when the baby Jesus' mouth was spilling slobber, his was also implicating his divine nature (i.e., the creator of the universe slobbered).  The logic of the incarnate logos does not allow desperate Trinintarians to decree which acts of the human Jesus implicated his divine nature and which didn't.  Any such attempt would be necessarily arbitrary.  Jesus' human nature never implicates his divine nature, where doing so would overturn your cherished doctrine of classical theism.

Second, thanks for indicating that you don't think the argument from silence is always fallacious.

Third, you are assuming that the Christian claims in the early period would have so interested skeptics as to not only prompt them to research Jesus' childhood, but to publish the results in a way that would have survived the next few centuries in which Christian leaders insisted on burning "heretical" books which disagreed with orthodox doctrine.  In truth Jesus was at best a local miscreant whom history would have nearly completely forgotten had it not been for the efforts of his fanatics to keep his memory alive.  Jesus was not such a big deal in his own lifetime nor in the lifetime of Paul for anybody outside that religion to give two fucks about documenting facts about Jesus' childhood in a way likely to survive the burn barrels of the next 4 centuries.  25 of the 27 NT books make absolutely zero effort to preserving Jesus' childhood events for posterity.  The fundamentalist is going to spin that silence in a way that foists any intellectual obligation on a skeptic to either agree or admit being unreasonable.

Fourth, our knowledge of the early Christian sects that denied Jesus' divinity and virgin birth are limited to church fathers who always embellished their descriptions of the sects with hateful vitriol, justifying a degree of hesitancy before blindly accepting all negative slurs therein as objective unbiased historical truth.

Justin Martyr describes some such Christians.  Dialogue, Chapter XLVIII

For there are some, my friends,” I said, “of our race,150 who admit that He is Christ, while holding Him to be man of men; with whom I do not agree, nor would I,151 even though most of those who have [now] the same opinions as myself should say so; since we were enjoined by Christ Himself to put no faith in human doctrines,152 but in those proclaimed by the blessed prophets and taught by Himself.
150 Some read, “of your race,” referring to the Ebionites. Maranus believes the reference is to the Ebionites, and supports in a long note the reading “our,” inasmuch as Justin would be more likely to associate these Ebionites with Christians than with Jews, even though they were heretics.
151 Langus translates: “Nor would, indeed, many who are of the same opinion as myself say so.”
152 [Note this emphatic testimony of primitive faith.]
Roberts, A., Donaldson, J., & Coxe, A. C. (1997). The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol.I : Translations of the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. The apostolic fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems.

Irenaeus A.H. Book 3, ch. XI:

For the Ebionites, who use Matthew’s Gospel¹⁴¹ only, are confuted out of this very same, making false suppositions with regard to the Lord.

141 Harvey thinks that this is the Hebrew Gospel of which Irenaeus speaks in the opening of this book; but comp. Dr. Robert’s Discussions on the Gospels, part ii. chap. iv.Roberts, A., Donaldson, J., & Coxe, A. C. (1997). The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol.I : Translations of the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. The apostolic fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems.

Obviously Engwer has forgotten that the views of the Ebionites count as "ancient".  Engwer will trifle that the Ebiontes are not as early as the the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but he doesn't actually know that.  All he knows is that references to the Ebionites are later than the gospels, he cannot establish that they originated in the 2nd century.  Furthermore, most Christian scholars date Matthew and Luke to about to 80 a.d. or even later, which means those who denied the virgin birth wouldn't be doing so until late 1st century.  Gene Bridges from Triablogue apparently thinks the Ebionites of the 2nd century were the outgrowth of the Judaizers present at the Council of Jerusalem:

And as matter of fact, we can see that the Judaizers of the First Century are the very ones who turn into Ebionites of the second order later on. That's what the conflict that the Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts was meant to address. (link here).

So it remains reasonable, even if not infallible, to infer that the Judaizers of the Council of Jerusalem were not merely demanding Gentile circumcision, but were also denying Jesus' divinity and virgin birth. I defy anyone to dare attempt to show that the specifically Jewish Christians believed Jesus to be god manifest in the flesh.

Dr. James Tabor, Professor of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, thinks the Ebionites were the original followers of Jesus, see here, so the position adopted in responsible scholarship must remain reasonable despite Engwer's ceaseless trifles otherwise.

Eusebius significantly says that while Ebionites could not get some Christians to agree with all they believed, they were successful in getting such Christians to adopt other forms of "heresy", so that the Ebionites position, could be sustained against rebuttal to some degree, that is, the "heresy" had some teeth to it and wasn't just the casual unthinking uncritical happenstance conjuring up of doctrine that Engwer seems to think characterizes everything christian alternative he doesn't agree with:

Eusebius, church history, Book 3, ch. 27

The Heresy of the Ebionites 

The evil demon, however, being unable to tear certain others from their allegiance to the Christ of God, yet found them susceptible in a different direction, and so brought them over to his own purposes. The ancients quite properly called these men Ebionites, because they held poor and mean opinions concerning Christ. For they considered him a plain and common man, who was justified only because of his superior virtue, and who was the fruit of the intercourse of a man with Mary. In their opinion the observance of the ceremonial law was altogether necessary, on the ground that they could not be saved by faith in Christ alone and by a corresponding life. There were others, however, besides them, that were of the same name, but avoided the strange and absurd beliefs of the former, and did not deny that the Lord was born of a virgin and of the Holy Spirit. But nevertheless, inasmuch as they also refused to acknowledge that he pre-existed, being God, Word, and Wisdom, they turned aside into the impiety of the former, especially when they, like them, endeavored to observe strictly the bodily worship of the law. These men, moreover, thought that it was necessary to reject all the epistles of the apostle, whom they called an apostate from the law; and they used only the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews and made small account of the rest. The Sabbath and the rest of the discipline of the Jews they observed just like them, but at the same time, like us, they celebrated the Lord's days as a memorial of the resurrection of the Saviour. Wherefore, in consequence of such a course they received the name of Ebionites, which signified the poverty of their understanding. For this is the name by which a poor man is called among the Hebrews.  

Engwer continues:

For example, the early opponents of Christianity not only don't seem to have opposed the Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus, but even corroborated it.

The evidence that Jesus stayed dead is overwhelming, whether he was "really" born in Bethlehem is something I couldn't give a shit about.

Not only does Celsus not agree with the popular modern notion that the virgin birth claim didn't arise until decades after Jesus' death, but he even attributes the claim of a virgin birth to Jesus himself (in Origen, Against Celsus, 1:28). See here for a further discussion of how inconsistent many modern skeptical views of the virgin birth are with ancient non-Christian sources.

Well gee, apostle Paul was "inconsistent" with the Judaizer gospel.  How ancient is the Judaizer gospel, and do you personally give a fuck? No.  Then quit being a hypocrite and pretending the ancient Christian sources YOU favor are somehow more deserving of credence.

Secondly, if Justin attributes the virgin birth claim to Jesus himself, sounds like your star church father had a nasty habit of drawing inferences from the canonical NT that it could not logically support.  Sure is funny that you don't really care how "heretical" your own church fathers were when they say something that supports your particular view.

For more examples of what ancient non-Christian sources said about Jesus' childhood, see here.

I believe there is basic historicity to the nativity stories (when Jesus was born, the family had to move around), I simply assert that they do indeed justify the charge of tension or contradiction, and of course I always use Mark 3:21, Mark 6:4, John 7:5 and other arguments to justify the conclusion that the miraculous portions of the nativity stories are total bullshit.  For example:  most Christian scholars understand Mary to be among the family members who in Mark 3:21 conclude Jesus is "insane" and try to publicly arrest him.    Minority scholars who trifle that Mark 3:21 isn't talking about Jesus family might exist, but do not render unreasonable the skeptics who side with the majority of Christian scholars and apologists on the matter.  And even if we forget Mark 3:21, the hatred Jesus' family had toward him during his alleged "miracle ministry' is still clear from Mark 6:4 and John 7:5, texts that apologists cannot get rid of with trifles about errant translation.

Engwer himself sees James being skeptical of Jesus in Mark 3:21, see here, so I'm not seeing what explosion of exegetical dishonesty anybody would allege is involved in my seeing Jesus' mother in the same verse, a conclusion held by most Christian scholars, including conservatives.

It doesn't matter if excuses can be made to "explain" how Mark 3:21 can be harmonized with the Nativity stories (i.e., maybe Mary experienced amnesia after the visions, etc), it is reasonable to conclude that any woman who experienced the divine confirmations alleged in the Nativity stories would not likely ever conclude that her son was "insane" unless she saw later proof that he prior visions were mere delusion.  Such is not probable, and probability is the key to historicity.  Unless apologists can show that Mary's later becoming forgetful, dismissive or apathetic toward her prior alleged visionary experience is MORE LIKELY than her continuing to trust that it was real, the skeptical position derived from Mark 3:21 will continue being reasonable.

And since they lived in an honor/shame society, the fact that Jesus' immediate family intended to publicly "arrest" him (Mark 3:21) reasonably implies that they had inquired diligently into his claims to make sure they were not basing their shaming behavior on a mistaken notion.  So if they intended to actually arrest him, they more than likely didn't reach that conclusion willy-nilly but only after robust discussion they decided that lesser means would be insufficient.  That is, apologists cannot reasonably charge Jesus' family with impulsiveness or stupidity, as that would then have consequences when such apologists later assert that some of Jesus' stupid impulsive family became leaders in the early church.  Once again, Mary's desire to arrest a son she concluded was "insane" is reasonably viewed as irreconcilable with her having experienced real divine visions while pregnant with Jesus that allegedly confirmed he was the son of God.  "Maybe she just forgot about those when she wanted to arrest Jesus" does not foist an intellectual compulsion on a skeptic, whatsoever, and of course, the paucity of NT evidence on Mary makes it impossible to "argue" that Mary's skepticism of Jesus in Mark 3:21 resulted from some type of mental or psychological imperfection.

The family's desire to arrest Jesus also reasonably justifies the assumption that they didn't experience anything about Jesus in his childhood that would have tipped them off that he is a divine being.  Yet if we are to believe Jesus was god, that necessarily implies that Jesus never, between birth and age 30, sinned.  How many Jews in the first century believed that a regular human being could avoid committing sin for the first 30 years of their life?  So if the Nativity stories were true, the mother of Jesus in Mark 3:21 wasn't just desiring to dishonor her son, but desiring to dishonor that son despite her having noticed that Jesus never sinned in his 30 years.  Now what, Engwer?  Was Mary just high on crack when she concluded Jesus was insane and tried to have him arrested? 

The brothers continuing to persist in unbelief toward Jesus as late as the completion of the first third of his public ministry (John 7:5) is also reasonably interpreted to mean that those brothers did not see anything in Jesus' alleged "miracles" that justified drawing the conclusion that he was the true son of god.  And since John 7:5 passes the criteria of embarrassment, it has greater likelihood of being true, than the laudatory statements in the gospel that Jesus performed miracles.

On the modern skeptical assertion that Luke's census account is radically inaccurate, see this post.

Nothing about my skepticism is affected in the least by admitting that Luke got this right.  Only fools who see so much non-existence relevance to biblical inerrancy would waste their time trifling about this bullshit.

On modern skeptical claims about the authorship of the gospels, see here.

That link goes to a defense of Matthew's authorship of a gospel.  Your arguments are largely irrelevant to my skepticism of his authorship:  you cannot accuse a skeptic of being unreasonable to adopt the position that most Christian scholars adopt:  markan priority (Mark was the first gospel written, and Matthew extensively copies off of Mark).  Yet, I'm sure that as Christian apologists, you will blindly insist that any Christian scholarly theory that happens to also help the skeptical case, is "unreasonable".

Mark was not an eyewitness, Matthew allegedly was, so that's the first problem:  Matthew's use of mark is so extensive that it implies Matthew's author was far more ignorant about the details of Jesus life than Mark was, making it reasonable to conclude Matthew's author was not an eyewitness.  The reasonableness of that theory is not going to disappear merely because you can conjure up another reason, such as Matthew experiencing amnesia (unlikely given your completely gratuitous and unprovable theory that Matthew was inspired by God).  There are no other examples from the 1st century of an eyewitness relying this extensively on a non-eyewitness version of events.  Mike Licona also says apostolic authorship is the "fuzziest" in the case of Matthew and John, which thus prevents you from saying denial of Matthean authorship is "unreasonable".  Your ability to trifle about the patristic details does not suddenly convert Licona's position over to "unreasonable".  You are the one calling the Matthean authorship denial "unreasonable" so YOU have the burden to demonstrate that the denier's interpretation of the internal and external evidence is "unreasonable", and you are never going to do that, and you know it.  The more you condemn such Christian scholarly majority view, the more rational justification I have to conclude, as a skeptic, that serious study of the gospels does precisely nothing to increase the chances that my views of such matters will be reasonable, justifying the further conclusion that atheists who choose to disregard the gospels completely, are not doing anything except protecting themselves from plaguing their lives with ultimately pointless complexities and uncertainties.

Most Christian scholars think authentic Mark ends at 16:8, which makes it reasonable to conclude the earliest form of the gospel did not say a risen Christ actually appeared to anybody, making Matthew's resurrection appearance narrative less likely an "addition" and more likely an "embellishment", as most scholars agree Matthew was published after Mark, and embellishment is more normally found in the later accounts, not the earlier accounts.  Engwer will trifle like N.T. Wright that the various resurrection predictions in Mark scream out for the reader to insist on a resurrection appearance narrative ending that simply got lost.  Unfortunately, apologists never explain where they get this idea that if a gospel story character predicted something,  we are obligated to believe the gospel author added a fulfillment story about it to the gospel, even if the present canonical form of the gospel lacks such addendum.

Acts 1:3 says the risen Jesus spoke to the disciples things concerning the kingdom of God over a period of 40 days, which is reasonably construed to signify speech slightly more extensive than a 15-seconds worth of talking, even if it doesn't mean Jesus spoke like an auctioneer from 9 to 5 for each of those 40 days.  Yet in Matthew, the risen Christ's total words to the apostles take less than 15 seconds to speak.  

You will automatically say "compression!", but because the author of Matthew has such an extensive interest in both sayings of Christ in general, and "kingdom of God" Christ-sayings in particular, it is highly unlikely that such author would have knowingly "chosen to exclude" most of the kingdom-of-God statements which Acts 1:3 alleges the risen Christ uttered, and to instead compress it all down into a 15 second summary that does precisely nothing to guide the nascent church through the Judaizer controversy, despite the fact that even conservative dates for Matthew (50 a.d.) still place it after the Council of Jerusalem (49 a.d.).

There are many examples where Matthew expands on Mark in circumstances that increase the probability that Matthew is simply fabricating Christ sayings.  According to Mark, Peter's confession of Christ consisted of "thou art the Christ" and nothing more from Jesus on that occasion...but in the undeniably parallel account in Matthew, which is obviously talking about the same exact occasion, Peter's confession is longer and more theologically sophisticated, and is followed by what must have been a very important teaching from Christ about Peter's authority, Christ sayings that Mark's account also lacks.  See here.  Since inerrantists and fundies insist that Matthew is reporting what really happened, they are thrown into a dilemma because of Mark's shorter version:  If we must assume Mark's source was Peter, how likely is it that Peter would have said the fuller form of the confession now confined to Matthew, but only gave the shorter form to Mark?  How likely is it that Peter didn't tell Mark about Jesus' important authority-establishing statement, or that Mark knew about it but "chose to exclude" it?  What exact rule of hermeneutics or historiography is the skeptic violating by saying a person like Mark would not likely have "chosen to abbreviate" this kind of information?

All of this makes it reasonable to conclude that the reason the risen Christ in Matthew only gives 15 seconds worth of speech is because that's all the author thought this risen Christ had to say, not because the author is knowingly excluding such words through the artifice of "compression,  thus contradicting the 40-day period of risen Christ speeches alleged in Acts 1:3...a book that comes along LATER and is therefore the logical choice to blame for embellishment.

You will say Mark was based on Peter's preaching so Matthew was actually borrowing text from another apostle, but since it was already shown that Mark's version of Peter's confession is shorter than Matthew's, Matthew's dependence is more upon Mark than on Peter...who surely would have given to Mark all those extra details now confined to Matthew's account.

Finally, patristic accounts allege that Mark was writing for a Roman audience, so that if all else be true, Matthew was not merely relying on "Mark" or "Peter", he was relying on a version of Christ's sayings that Peter had adapted to his Roman audience...which is highly unlikely for the Matthew-author, whose gospel all scholars agree is the most intensely "Jewish" of the 4 canonical gospels.  What, did eyewitness Matthew RE-adapt the secondary Roman form of the the Christ-sayings for his Jewish audience?  Does that sound like somebody who was in a good position to have first-hand knowledge of Jesus' teachings?  Of course not, so then authorship of Matthew by the apostle of the same name, highly unlikely and profoundly irrelevant regardless.

And so on. As with the other two points above, you'd have to be selective in choosing one or more examples to illustrate the point, but we've provided many to choose from.
 To summarize these three points even further:
 1. the presence of reliable sources
2. the presence of evidence for a traditional Christian view
3. the absence of support for skeptical alternatives among the ancient sources
 And you could make it even easier to remember as: presence, presence, absence.
 The importance of these three points can be seen by thinking about how easily the relevant circumstances could have been different than they are and what implications would follow if they were different. What if individuals like Mary and James hadn't lived as long as they did, the earliest Christians hadn't shown so much interest in writing, etc.? What if there wasn't so much information about Jesus' childhood that meets the evidential standards for historically reliable material?

In light of the admissions of Christian scholars like Licona that Matthew wasn't as concerned about historical accuracy as inerrantists are, and in light of the fact that you don't have the first fucking clue how Matthew came up with the Nativity story material (if "how-it-could-have-been" scenarios work for you, you must accord that luxury to skepics also, to avoid charges of hypocrisy).

I'm not aware of any rule of historiography that says a person is intellectually compelled to give the benefit of the doubt to just whatever ancient document he looks at, until somebody comes along to prove it false.  That crap only started with Josh McDowell's dishonest reference to "Aristotle's dictum", but even if such initial trust is legitimate rule of historigraphy, so what?  How many historians say this benefit of the doubt must be given?  Mike Licona's admissions about how historians cannot even agree on methodology, reasonably justifies the conclusion that unless ancient words can be demonstrated to have relevance to the skeptic today, the skeptic cannot be unreasonable if they choose to completely ignore all things from ancient history...which is what the vast majority of people do their whole lives, except for religious fanatics and historians.

Refusing to give the benefit of the doubt to the document isn't like denying a law of physics, as historiography is an art, not a science.  Refusing to waste time learning what ancient authors had to say, can never be shown to result in the same level of disaster that looms over the person who chooses to disagree with the laws of logic, physics or math.  You'd have to show that a skeptic's disagreement with what most historians care about, makes the skeptic unreasonable, but then again, you don't think the skeptic unreasonable to dismiss from consideration the vast majority of ancient religious material.  It's only when we tell YOU to fuck off, that suddenly the only rational people in the world are those who give a fuck about ancient religious sources.

So if skeptics simply laugh at the NT and dismiss it, they aren't committing any academic "error", they are merely making life very hard for a few dipshits at Triablogue who themselves cannot even agree on what the bible teaches (Hays is a Calvinist, Engwer is not, etc).

Nevermind that there is no evidence, whatsoever, that anything stated in ancient history has any significance to modern-day people beyond one's personal preferences and intellectual curiosity.  If we were as objective about ancient history as christian apologists require, we'd never have time to investigate Christianity, because there are so many other possibly true religious claims from the ancient world, whose veracity we'd have to kindly presume true until they were proved false, an enterprise that would take a lifetime.

Gee, what rule of common sense, historiography or literary analysis dictates how long the skeptic should study a religious rooted in ancient claims, before the skeptic can be justified to start drawing ultimate conclusions about it?  Christian apologists will necessarily have to insist that it should take less than a lifetime, so that the skeptic can free up some time to bother with Christianity, but since there is no such rule, the amount of time the skeptic deems sufficient is a highly subjective affair and hence cannot be dicated by worried apologists at Triablogue who are guilty of the sin of ceaseless word-wrangling (2nd Timothy 2:14).

What if the early opponents of Christianity had made significantly different claims about Jesus' childhood, such as by corroborating the Christian claims much less than they did?

What if they did, and those records were destroyed just like thousands of other ancient christian writings?

What if most of the Arian bishops had shown up at the Council of Nicaea?  What if Constantine hadn't bribed anybody but bade them attend at their own expense?

What if the gospel alleged that Jesus sinned a few times during childhood?

 This approach I've outlined doesn't cover every issue, and you still have to address whatever objections are raised. It's a good way to start a discussion and summarize your view, even if it doesn't end the discussion.

And my rebuttal to you is a good way to show that skeptics are not being "unreasonable" in alleging that Jesus was an imperfect child whose history was embellished more than 50 years later, in a way that most NT authors did not seem sufficiently edifying to justify repeating, despite their willingness to repeat most of their issues.