Holding rebutted on Trilemma

[Brian Holtz]

This article is a reply to James Holding's latest update to his web site's
Trilemma article at http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_01_03_01.html#resp1.
Holding still does not dare in his article to cite my rebuttal or even my
name. While it is understandable that he doesn't want his readers to see
the unedited text of my arguments, I have no such fear. I am posting the
entire debate to alt.atheism.moderated, and it is available through Google
Groups from a link at
http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/Trilemma.html.

Holding's Trilemma argument -- that Jesus was liar, lunatic, or lord --
ignores a fourth possibility: faith-healer and apocolyptic preacher whose
deluded belief in his importance was strengthened in the months leading up
to his anticipated execution and was misinterpreted and exaggerated
afterwards

This article has the following sections:

* Jesus' psychology
* Jesus' miracles
* Jesus avoiding danger
* Jesus' failed ministry
* Trilemma validity
* Standards of evidence
* Jesus' divinity claims
* Missing evidence for Christianity

JESUS' PSYCHOLOGY

Holding writes:

[I]n a second response, our critic argues that this article
"never discusses the possibility of Jesus' mental state evolving
over the course of his brief ministry." Of course it doesn't --
there is no evidence that a condition as serious as the "Christ
complex" is an evolving condition.

Holding continues his strawman assumption that the only way Jesus could
have not been lord or liar is to have suffered from the obsolete
psychiatric diagnosis called the "Messiah complex". In fact, delusional
grandiosity is common among schizophrenics -- see the references in Note 7
at http://www.virtualcity.com/youthsuicide/sathewo2.htm#9015.

Moreover, if it were, one would expect an increase in mental
derangement resulting in a sliding scale of claims; yet this is
not what we see at all -- the claims of Jesus are the same, and
just as clear, from the beginning of his minstry to the end. The
idea of a "growing delusion" is a fantasy that is unsupported by
any of the data in the Gospels

While any one gospel would have tried to show Jesus's claims as consistent
throughout his ministry, the fact remains that from the earliest gospel
(Mark) to the latest (John) there is a discernable progression in the
elaborateness of the gospel accounts of Jesus's divinity claims, miracles,
and resurrection appearances.

and is also not supported by our critic in terms of providing a
parallel in psychology.

From the Britannica article on schizophrenia:

"The simple or undifferentiated type of schizophrenic manifests an
insidious and gradual reduction in his external relations and interests.
[..] The paranoid type, which usually arises later in life than the other
types, is characterized primarily by delusions of persecution and grandeur
combined with unrealistic, illogical thinking, often accompanied by
hallucinations. These different types of schizophrenia are not mutually
exclusive, and schizophrenics may display a mixture of symptoms that defy
convenient classification. There may also be a mixture of schizophrenic
symptoms with those of other psychoses, notably those of the
manic-depressive group.

Hallucinations and delusions, although not invariably present, are often a
conspicuous symptom in schizophrenia. The most common hallucinations are
auditory: the patient hears (nonexistent) voices and believes in their
reality. Schizophrenics are subject to a wide variety of delusions,
including many that are characteristically bizarre or absurd."

Of particular interest is the variant of schizophrenia called paraphrenia.
"Kraepelin believed that paraphrenia was associated with paranoid
schizophrenia and was marked by persistent delusions and hallucinations
(1), but it did not show the characteristic deterioration of schizophrenia
or the full characteristics of delusional disorder (6). Personality decay
is minimal (7), and emotional rapport is well retained (8), but despite its
relatively benign features (9), paraphrenia is as chronic as schizophrenia
(10). Nowadays, a case like this is often diagnosed as “atypical
psychosis,” “psychosis not otherwise specified,” or even “schizoaffective
disorder” (11)." [From Ravindran, "Paraphrenia Redefined",
http://www.cpa-apc.org/Subscriptions/Archives/1999/Mar/munro.htm.]

An interesting published attempt to diagnose paraphrenia in Jesus is at
http://voi.org/books/pp/ch3.htm.

JESUS' MIRACLES

Most of the afflictions Jesus is said to have cured are
potentially psychological or psychosomatic (possession,
hysterical blindness or paralysis) [..] The three
people Jesus reanimates (Luke 7:15, Mark 5:39, John 11)
in the gospels were only recently deceased (if even
dead at all), and pronouncement of death was not an
exact science in ancient times. [..] Richard Carrier
notes: "Jesus heals the severed ear of a man who came
to arrest him (Lk. 22:51), but in all the other
accounts Jesus does not heal the ear (Mt. 26:51, Mk.
14:47; and the most detailed account, Jn. 18:10), which
any historian regards as sufficient grounds to reject a
story as an embellishment."

what's this nonsense about "hysterical" blindness or paralysis?
None of the subjects said to be blind or paralyzed show any
evidence in the texts of having been "hysterical"

Holding seems unaware of what hysterical blindness is, and seems to think
it must be accompanied by behavior that in ordinary English would be called
"hysterical". Hysterical blindness is a form of what in modern psychology
is called "conversion disorder", which "is characterized by the loss of a
bodily function, for example blindness, paralysis, or the inability to
speak . The loss of physical function is involuntary, but diagnostic
testing does not show a physical cause for the dysfunction".

they must also denigrate ancient people and insult their
intelligence (re the reanimations) and call a writer a liar
outright.

Holding here confuses ignorance with lack of intelligence, rather than
rebutting my assertion that pronouncement of death was not an exact science
in ancient times.

Calling an element of a written story an "embellishment" does not imply
that the person who wrote the story down is a "liar". Holding seems to
think that the entire process by which the gospel stories were developed,
repeated, and recorded can be certified as free of any possible
misunderstanding, misinterpretation, false assumption, exaggeration, or
deception.

(Again, if reportage in just one source of any detail -- no
matter how "spectacular" a critic thinks it is, based on their
own subjective judgments -- is "sufficient grounds to reject" an
element as an embellishment, then reams of material in parallel
accounts across the board must likewise be "rejected."

Holding seems to make the astonishing claim that the miraculous restoration
of a severed body part is "spectacular" only according to "subjective
judgment"!

In my parallels of Lincoln biographies, one in particular
contains much more detail that the other three bios do not
report; some of this material left unreported, even concerning
the same event, while not on the scale of a miracle, is of such
"importance" that one could easily construct plausible arguments
accusing the single writer of "embellishment."

The plausibility of those arguments would of course depend on the prior
plausibility of the story element in question, the possible motivations for
the one author to include it, and the likelihood that the remaining authors
would exclude it if they believed it. By these criteria, it is indeed
plausible that the ear-healing miracle is an embellishment, unless of
course one is otherwise convinced that Jesus could heal miraculously. Given
that all the other accounts of Jesus' healings -- even if taken at face
value -- are susceptible to naturalistic explanations, it's not
unreasonable to consider the isolated ear-healing detail as an
embellishment.

We have already agreed that certain healing miracles could fit a
"psychosomatic" explanation, and yet, one is constrained to ask
if it isn't rather too convenient to psychologize persons not
personally known and removed from us by such a distance.

Which is more "convenient": 1) assuming that a set of reported faith
healings of possibly psychosomatic afflictions were indeed no more than
faith healings, or 2) assuming they were miraculous?

At any rate I would not exclude the psychologically ill from
Jesus' care, and there is still a real problem to be cared for,
one which only the best-trained psychologists doing close
experiments have dealt with today. Was Jesus trained to the level
of these modern psychologists?

Conventional faith healers treat psychosomatic afflictions without any
psychological training. Indeed, similar to the placebo effect, the success
rate of faith healing is likely to be inversely correlated with the
psychological training of the patient and healer.

In the case of Lazarus, Carrier is desperate enough to suggest:
"...the witnesses anticipate a rotting smell (Jn. 11:39), but
there is no evidence that such a smell was confirmed after the
tomb was unsealed." Sure -- it was just the touch John needed to
record everyone yelling, "PAYEEEEEE-UUUUUU!"

Holding's glib response utterly fails to confront the fact that the Lazarus
account gives zero symptomatic evidence to support a diagnosis of death: no
mortal wound, no algor mortis (absence of body heat), no rigor mortis, no
livor mortis (discoloration due to blood settling), no adipocere (waxiness
due to fat hydrogenation), no bloating, no infestation, no putrefaction, no
decomposition, no mummification-- only that he was "sick", had "fallen
asleep", was presumed dead, and had been in a cave for four days.

Conclusion: the gospel accounts of Jesus' healing miracles are consistent
with him being a faith-healer and apocolyptic preacher whose deluded belief
in his divine specialness was strengthened in the months leading up to his
anticipated execution and was misinterpreted and exaggerated afterwards

JESUS AVOIDING DANGER

The gospels say that Jesus tended to consciously avoid
dangerous places to preach because it wasn't "his
time". When it *was* "his time", his "luck" didn't take
last very long at all.

[..] I find only one reference to Jesus hiding himself (John
8:59) [..] The critic [..] comes up with four other cites, not
one of them referring to "hiding":

Jn 7:1 "After this, Jesus went around in Galilee,
purposely staying away from Judea because the Jews
there were waiting to take his life."

Mt 12:14-15 "But the Pharisees went out and plotted how
they might kill Jesus. Aware of this, Jesus withdrew
from that place"

Mk 3:6-7 "Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot
with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus. Jesus
withdrew with his disciples to the lake"

Luke 13:31,33 "some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to
him, 'Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod
wants to kill you.' He replied, '[..] In any case, I
must keep going today and tomorrow and the next
day--for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!'

Our critic is either playing games here or still hasn't learned
how to read! The cites from Matthew and Mark describe the same
event

They are nonetheless both significant as mutually confirming reports that
Jesus sometimes chose discretion over valor.

Where did Jesus go? He left "that place" -- what place? Most
likely the synagogue; he went, where? Mark says to the lake, the
Sea of Galilee, which is what Capernaum (where the synagogue) is
right on the shore of. Matthew doesn't get this specific, but he
does have Jesus rapping with Pharisees in the very next set of
pericopes!

The Sea of Galilee is a big place, and Matthew gives no indication of how
soon Jesus was talking to the Pharisees or whether the reported danger was
still as grave. The fact remains that these are reports of withdrawal in
the face of danger, and tortured rationalizations based on other reported
actions of Jesus cannot change this fact.

If this is "hiding out" then it wasn't done very well!

Holding here employs a blatant strawman, as the "hiding out" criterion that
he quotes are his very own words, and not mine. My contention was (and
remains) that in all four of the (presumably biased) gospels, Jesus is
admitted to have avoided danger, and that this can explain Holding's
observation that Jesus was "lucky to get as far as the crucifixion".

The cite from Luke is rather silly: After saying this, Jesus
doesn't leave for Jerusalem until much later (17:11)! Either
Jesus wasn't running, or the threat wasn't real!

Holding seems to think that the teaching events from Lk 13 to 17 all
happened in the same place, but Lk 13:22 clearly says that "Jesus went
through the towns and villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem".
The escape that Jesus announces in Lk 13:33 presumably takes place
immediately, and the unnamed village he enters in 17:12 cannot be assumed
to be the very next leg of his travels.

That leaves John 7:1, but then in the very next few verses, Jesus
does go to Jerusalem!

John 7:1-10 says Jesus "went around" in Galilee to avoid the danger in
Judea, and didn't consider going to Judea until a feast some unspecified
amount of time later. He tells his brothers that his time "has not yet
come" and decides to stay in Galilee because he is "hated". He then
inexplicably changes his mind and goes to Jerusalem "not publicly, but in
secret" (Jn 7:10). The mere reciting of these facts is sufficient to rebut
Holding's attempt to discount this instance of Jesus avoiding danger.

So, zero for four on the new guesses, folks,

Despite Holding's bluster, the fact remains that each gospel reports a
clearcut case of Jesus avoiding danger, five reports in all. Someone with
the firm conviction of his own divine omnipotence should not have to avoid
danger so many times that his disciples can't help but report such
instances in gospels proclaiming his divinity.

and still no concrete pattern of avoidance -- to the contrary, an
overall tendency to defy the danger --

Jesus no doubt at other times faced dangers, and in the end he bravely
chose not to avoid his crucifixion. But given the evidence of Jesus'
discretion available *even* in gospels that argue for his divinity and
presumed omnipotence, it is quite plausible that discretion rather than
divinity is what kept Jesus alive in the months preceding his crucifixion.

and still no connection to a "time" when things would be right!

The connection is plainly obvious for two of the five reports of danger
avoidance:

"The right time for me has not yet come" Jn 7:6.
"surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem" Lk 13:33.

Holding of course knows that the gospels describe Jesus as acutely aware of
"his time", both for the beginning of his ministry (Jn 2:4) and its end
(e.g. Mt 26:18, Lk 9:51).

JESUS' FAILED MINISTRY

The prospective actions of a would-be Messiah would involve a
VERY high "attempt to failure ratio" if the claimant didn't
actually have the goods! Enough failed healings, enough teachings
offending the local Pharisees, enough of any risk, and you're
Messianic campaign is doomed to mass failure of the sort that
doesn't satisfy the problem of Christian origins!

The mere existence of Christianity hardly proves that Jesus was divine, and
we of course can hardly expect the gospels to record Jesus's failures. Even
so, the gospels do admit that Jesus "could not do any miracles" in his
hometown (Mk 6:5, Lk 4:24), at times was considered mad by his family (Mk
3:21) and other Jews (Jn 10:20), and often was reluctant or evasive when
asked to demonstrate his powers.

My "sound bite" reports the consensus of professional
secular scholarship [about the length of Jesus'
ministry]. Holding's "sound bite" simply assumes the
gospels are completely true. My point remains: Jesus's
ministry was relatively short, the reports of his feats
have plausible naturalistic explanations, he often
avoided danger, he "could not do any miracles" in his
hometown (Mk 6:5, Lk 4:24), and he at times was
considered mad by his family (Mk 3:21) and other Jews
(Jn 10:20). So even by the gospels' presumptively
biased accounts, Jesus' brief term of "divinity" was
fragile at best, and "the rug" was indeed "pulled out
from underneath" at Golgotha.

Concerning the "sound bite" above, our critic shows his mettle by
appealing yet again to "consensus of professional secular
scholarship." Oh well, no critical analysis yet again...

It's not in contention that at the end of his short ministry, Jesus was
executed, which is a prima facie case of "the rug [being] pulled out from
underneath" him. It *is* in contention whether Jesus was divine and whether
his execution ended his existence. Instead of rebutting any of the above
argument for Jesus' non-divinity, Holding instead clucks about my
acceptance of the consensus of professional secular scholarship concerning
the length of Jesus' ministry. This is a red herring, and a poor one at
that.

he was executed, and his predictions [Mt 16:28, Lk
9:27, Mk 13:30, Lk 21:32, Mt 24:34] of an imminent
Second Coming failed.

the passages referred to were fulfilled in 70 AD with the
destruction of Jerusalem. (We're developing a larger set of
articles on this subject at this time.

In Holding's long article he notes that of course "wars", "rumors of wars",
"famines", and "earthquakes" occurred between 30 and 70 AD. He claims the
prediction that "the gospel will be preached in the whole world" really
meant just in the Roman Empire. He claims the prediction that "the stars
will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken" was only
metaphorical. Though he prefaces his article by quoting Mt 24:34, Holding's
article makes no attempt to explain how the destruction of Jerusalem
equates with "see[ing] the the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power
and glory". He does manage, however, to call me "a particularly ignorant
skeptic with an inflated view of his own knowledge".

Richard Carrier writes "we know for a fact that many
individuals were claiming to be, or were proclaimed to
be, messiahs of one form or another in Jesus' day
(Josephus recounts several) [..]

Our critic doesn't provide examples in reply, but makes light of
my alleged "lack of knowledge" above on Jesus "hiding," then says
he's "not inclined to take [my] word for it that no passages in
Josephus can substantiate Carrier's statement."

Holding again shows an inability to be trusted with quotation marks. I
never said "lack of knowledge", but rather an "inability to find and report
all the relevant passages in his own sacred gospels". And again, it was
Holding who changed my "avoid danger" formulation to his own misquoted
strawman "hiding".

That's it, don't do your own research, but it's not Carrier vs.
Holding, it's Carrier vs. J. C. O'Neill, author of Who Did Jesus
Think He Was?, my source for the information.

When I cite Carrier I'm not "doing my own research", but just what is
Holding doing when he cites O'Neill?

Let is be stressed here that there is no doubt that there were
those who tried to instigate some eschatological sign, and may
well have claimed divine power was in the offing from them, but
the key words "I am Messiah!" are never recorded

When I noted the same absence in the oldest gospel Mark, Holding earlier
responded with tortured arguments why the claim should nevertheless be
imputed from Jesus' other alleged pretensions of divinity. Holding seems to
hold a double-standard here. At any rate, I trust Carrier's ability to read
Josephus more than I trust Holding's ability to read O'Neill.

I am also referring to Jesus' other divine claims, such as those
we list in Mark above, and the claim to be God's Wisdom. Does
Carrier have any candidates who made that claim?

In the logically possible world with no Jesus, Holding seems to think it
somehow contrary to the laws of physics that any carpenter from Nazareth
could utter words that could be remembered as the things the gospels report
Jesus saying. The recorded sayings of Jesus are certainly unique and
unparalleled in a certain sense, but not enough to justify the conclusion
that if they were not true then no human could have succeeded in uttering
them.

TRILEMMA VALIDITY

The gospels are probably the result of some combination
of misinterpretation, exaggeration, rationalization,
delusion, deception (of, if not by, the authors'
sources) -- i.e., the processes that typically drive
the development of myths."

Never mind proving any of these individually, or making critical
comparisons; just throw out enough uncertainties to make the
skeptical audience happy

This particular subdiscussion started with Holding asking "How could one be
mistaken about being God incarnate?" My answer concluded by saying "It is
possible that Jesus held a growing delusion of his own importance that
became a belief in his divinity only after (or shortly before) the time of
his (well-anticipated) execution.". Holding then threw out the red herring
complaint that my answer assumed fabrication. I pointed out that it did
not. Now Holding simply stamps his foot and demands to see some "proving",
without himself bothering to say why we should think my answer is wrong.

Asking for "proofs" is easy:

* How does Holding know that nothing in the gospels misinterprets what
the historical Jesus said?
* How does Holding know that nothing in the gospels is an exaggeration
or rationalization?
* How does Holding know that there could not possibly have been any
delusion or deception involved in the creation of the stories that
ended up being recorded in the gospels?

My mere asking for these proofs doesn't constitute an argument for my
assertion, and nor does Holding asking for proofs constitute a
counter-argument. In the real debate over how to explain the gospel
evidence, the burden of proof does not fall completely on any one side.

But Holding's article is not about the real debate -- it's about the
Trilemma. As a logical argument the Trilemma is simply invalid if there is
any unrebutted alternative to "liar, lunatic, or lord". When confronted
with such an alternative Holding merely complains that the alternative is
in summary form! He seems unwilling to deal with what is now a tetralemma:
liar, lunatic, lord, -- or faith-healer and apocolyptic preacher whose
deluded belief in his importance was strengthened in the months leading up
to his anticipated execution and was misinterpreted and exaggerated
afterwards.

Of course, the mere existence of this fourth alternative doesn't in itself
prove that this alternative is true. But it's unrebutted existence *does*
invalidate the trilemma argument, whose validity depends on there being no
non-lord options besides liar and lunatic. It may in fact be possible to
prove Jesus' lordship through other more-direct arguments, but the Trilemma
itself fails to do so if the fourth option is not actually *shown* to be
false. All this means is that the real debate is between "lord" and such a
fourth option. The invalidity of the Trilemma doesn't lend any weight to
either side of that real debate -- it's simply a fact of logic that is
inconvenient for those seeking an easier alternative to the real debate.

In his original essay Holding writes

Skeptics who continually say that the trilemma is 'refuted'
whenever another option is added miss the point. Only the 'tri'
part is refuted - the 'lemma' is still there.

Holding is simply wrong about his logic if he thinks that an N-lemma
argument for "lord" can be valid if any of the N-1 alternatives to "lord"
is unrefuted. Complaining that one alternative is a "thrown-out
uncertainty" is not a refutation. In the absence of an actual demonstration
of why the gospel claims of divinity could not have been due to a process
of delusion and exaggeration, the N-lemma argument is logically invalid.

STANDARDS OF EVIDENCE

Here's my little elephant: the Lincoln bios. Explain to me why
these works, inconsisent, second- and third-hand, attempts to
make Lincoln look like a great guy, should be taken as accurate,
or not, on that basis!

Which Lincoln biographies are touted as the divinely inspired word of a
deity? Which Lincoln biographies give contradictory geneologies in trying
to demonstrate his royal lineage? Which Lincoln biographies give
contradictory information for Lincoln's birth year? Which Lincoln
biographies seem to switch Lincoln's birthplace in a transparent attempt to
make Lincoln fulfill a prophecy? Which Lincoln biographies omit events as
spectacular and memorable as the resurrection appearances (missing in
original Mark), the Easter zombies swarming Jerusalem (only in Mat 27:53),
or the Easter darkness "over all the earth" (omitted in John)?

Secular works of history typically are not 'written
that you may believe' that somebody is divine 'and that
by believing you may have life in his name' [Jn 20:31].

No, but they are always written with some sort of point of view
to pose; John at least is straightforward in his intent!

Holding is careful here not to claim that secular histories, even those
with a "point of view", should be given precisely the same benefit of the
doubt as religious scriptures written to promote a brand of divine
salvation.

And may we ask, if indeed there was good news such as this to
report, how would our critic expect John or others to report it
without being accused of having an agenda to the point of
fabrication?!? I smell the circular reasoning of a skeptic behind
this complaint!)

Fabrication (and exaggeration and misinterpretation) should of course
*never* be assumed not to be possible, but instead should only be concluded
based on factors like background plausibility, external objective
confirmation, internal consistency, spatiotemporal proximity to the
reported events, evidence of contemporary skeptical cross-examination,
absence of plausible alternative explanations, etc. All of these factors
tend to argue against the complete veracity of the gospel accounts.

3. Regarding [the anonymity of ] Matthew and John above, [..o]ur
enterprising critic shows little propensity for engaging
specifics [..] I would be especially interested in any commentary
on how the Gospels would have to be dated late, and attributed to
other than their stated authors, in light of the criteria applied
to secular documents of the same period like Tacitus' Annals.

And I would be interested in apologist commentary on why it is that the
secular scholarly consensus is so univocal on things like the 2-source
theory and gospel anonymity. Why is it that only fundamentalist inerrantist
Christian scholars have gotten this right, while the overwhelming majority
of secular and non-fundamentalist Christian scholars have got it wrong? Is
Satan at work here? Is it a conspiracy? What other academic
misunderstanding in modern times (viz., roughly since Darwin) has persisted
so widely and for so long? (Hint: "evolution" is not a good answer. :-) In
how many decades or centuries, if ever, does Holding anticipate that the
secular scholarly consensus will see the light?

I never said that Jesus' belief in his own divinity was
an 'invention' by the gospel authors or their sources.

Then what is the point of specifying that we only have
second-hand word, and Jesus left no writings of his own?

There is an immense difference between contemporary first-hand quotes and
the oral tradition of a Jesus movement struggling after the crucifixion to
recollect and interpret his words. If a text were discovered that repeated
the gospels' quotes of Jesus but were written during his ministry or by
Jesus himself, would Holding really claim that it gives us no more
confidence that we know what Jesus really said?

JESUS' DIVINITY CLAIMS

Our critic backpedals mightily to avoid a collision with
specifics: "On the contrary, Jesus probably held a growing
delusion of his own importance that led to a belief in his
outright divinity only after (or shortly before) the time of his
(well-anticipated) execution."

In floating his strawman argument about divinity "claims being invented",
Holding merely confuses himself and thinks that to make a word-for-word
restatement of my position is to "backpedal mightily". Holding's strawman
claim that I charge "invention" is simply not justified by my statement
that "we only have the second-hand word of evangelical Christian authors
that Jesus fully held this conviction". When I think something is an
invention (as opposed to a misinterpretation or exaggeration), I'll call it
an invention. A good example of an outright invention in the gospel
tradition (if not by the gospel writers themselves) is Matthew's Easter
swarm of zombies in Jerusalem.

This is a fanciful interpretation, but it finds no evidence in
the consistent portrait across the board in the Gospels,

Despite the presumed best efforts of the gospel writers to remove any hint
of growing delusion, the following hints remain. In the earliest gospel
(Mark), Jesus never calls himself Christ/Messiah, is reluctant for his
special nature to be known, and (as he does in Matthew) despairs on the
cross. Jesus "could not do any miracles" in his hometown (Mk 6:5, Lk 4:24),
and he at times was considered mad by his family (Mk 3:21) and other Jews
(Jn 10:20).

much less is any relevant evidence given from the psychological
field. I have my Rokeach; where is the reply?

Holding seems quite proud of his research into the obsolete diagnosis of
"Messiah complex", but he would be better served investigating the current
clinical understanding of schizophrenia and conversion disorders.

It also seems likely that after the crucifixion,
everything the disciples could remember Jesus saying
was interpreted as supporting his divinity. Such
misinterpretation and exaggeration are not the same
thing as 'invention'.

If that is the case, then our critic needs to do a systematic
study of all of the claims of Jesus (as I analyze them
[elsewhere]), and explain their "non-divinity" interpretation
plausibly within the proper socio-religious context, and then
explain how the misunderstandings came about.

In a separate article Holding cites several different kinds of divinity
claims.

1. Jesus "associated himself with the Wisdom of God". Holding makes
tortured arguments that this implies divinity, but it is easy to imagine
that a carpenter unsure of his outright divinity might choose instead to
emphasize his special divinely-inspired knowledge of God's Wisdom.

2. Jesus called himself the "son of man". Holding admits that this "title
was intended to be mysterious", and thus it cannot confirm that the
carpenter from Nazareth believed himself to be an omnipotent omniscient
deity.

3. Jesus called God "abba" (father). Christian theology notwithstanding,
this could simply have been a claim to be a child of God.

4. Jesus assumed the authority to contradict or modify prior revelation.
That could simply mean Jesus believed he had new superceding revelation.

5. Various passages in the synoptic gospels:

* Jesus says (Mt 7:21ff) he will be addressed in heaven as "Lord".
* Jesus indicated (Mt 11:27) an exclusive father-son relationship with
God.
* Jesus claimed (Mt 9:2) the ability to forgive sins.
* Jesus affirmed to the high priest that he is the Christ. (The hours
before his impending death would indeed have been the culmination of
Jesus' delusion, but this does not necessarily mean that Jesus was
equally deluded througout his life.)
* Jesus said (Mt 23:34) he sends prophets.

These and Holding's other cited passages are all consistent both with being
God *and* with being a uniquely special prophet of God. All we can know for
sure from this body of evidence is that the historical Jesus claimed for
himself unprecedented authority and importance stemming from his unique
relationship with God. However, his reluctance to call himself a deity, and
his apparent inability to act like one, makes it plausible that he did not
always (or perhaps ever) fully believe himself to be God.

Does Holding really think that the Mark's reciting of
such a fantastic claim should convince a skeptic that
the historical Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth,
believed at any point in his life that he was divine?

So the critic is indeed claiming bald fabrication, and as before,
begging the very question at issue.

It would indeed be "begging the question" for me to say that the gospel
accounts of Jesus' miracles are all false, and that therefore Jesus must
have known he wasn't divine. Of course, I make no such argument. Rather, it
is Holding himself who is "begging the question" by assuming the truth of
the miracle reports in order to argue that Jesus should have known from his
miraculous powers that he was divine!

Jesus' water-walking is indeed one of the better candidates for being an
egregious exaggeration. But note that water can appear to be walked on if
one misapprehends its depth, as seems possible given that it was night and
Jesus was initially mistaken for a ghost.

(Indeed, this is rather odd in light of complaints that Jesus
nowehere says something like, "I am God/Messiah"! What's to stop
our critic saying in such cases, "Does Holding really think that
the Mark's reciting of such a fantastic statement should convince
a skeptic that the historical Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth,
believed at any point in his life that he was divine?"

Holding here appears to seriously think a skeptic should take as equally
plausible 1) a report that a carpenter walked on water and 2) a report that
a carpenter said the words "I am God".

Holding obviously wishes he had the problem of defending the authenticity
of such an explicit divinity claim. Unfortunately for him, he instead has
the problem of explaining its absence in texts written to convince people
that the missing claim is true.

The fact that there is so much debate over how firmly
Jesus claimed divinity makes it at least plausible that
a) Jesus was not always convinced of his divinity, and
b) some of his stronger claims of divinity in the
gospels are later misinterpretations and
interpolations.

Ha ha! No, let's not study that data and weigh the arguments;
let's just argue that the controversy and discussion equates with
uncertainty!

Holding's separate essay on divinity claims says that "the direct claim 'I
am God' [..] would have been a little too confusing to Jesus' hearers" (as
opposed to the non-confusing notion of the Trinity, Jesus' dual nature,
etc.!). Holding tries to have it both ways -- he says that a clear claim to
divinity would confuse Jesus' hearers, and then he presents tortured
arguments to show that Jesus' enigmatic sayings constitute a clear claim to
divinity.

Holding says "the concept of Jesus as divine quite definitely existed
within, at the very least, a decade of the crucifixion, and therefore, was
likely to have been asserted before His death by Jesus Himself". But was it
asserted by Jesus equally firmly throughout his ministry? Was it in no way
strengthened by post-crucifixion events like Paul's vision on the road to
Damascus?

Why would an omniscient omnipotent deity be as reluctant as Jesus,
especially early in his ministry and in the earliest gospel Mark, for his
nature to be known? Why would an omniscient omnipotent deity be unable to
"do any miracles" in his hometown (Mk 6:5, Lk 4:24)? Why would an
omniscient omnipotent deity need to avoid danger so often that *five*
reports of his doing so made it into the accounts trying to convince us of
his godhood? Why would the disciples, who allegedly saw Jesus claim and
*demonstrate* his divinity and predict his own resurrection, abandon him at
his well-anticipated execution? The overall pattern of evidence is not
consistent with a being who had total confidence in his divine omnipotence.

Apparently for Holding, the crucified Jesus is somehow
unable to use in its literal sense any phrase that
begins a Psalm (or perhaps any phrase from the entire
Old Testament!). It's more plausible that the crucified
Jesus was a mortal ex-carpenter whose shattered
delusion of divine favor led him to despair.

This is the entirety of the critique! This is ignoring the data,
not dealing with it!

Holding doesn't even try to explain what alternative words a crucified
Jewish carpenter could have used to actually indicate despair. Perhaps
Holding thinks a truly despairing Jesus would have said "why have you
forsaken me -- and no, I'm not just quoting a psalm".

If Psalm 22 has any relation to Jesus' cry of despair, it's more likely
that Jesus' imprecisely-remembered words were put into the familiar form of
the Psalm. Holding's essay never considers this possibility, and instead
treats the gospel's quote of Jesus as if it were an audiotape transcript.

[Perhaps] Jesus really thought Lazarus was dead until
it was later discovered that the historical Lazarus was
in fact not dead.

This is no more than that skeptical circular reasoning at work
again, explaining things within the assumed paradigm without
bothering with the details or issues that come as a result.)

Holding here identifies no "details or issues", and calls my naturalistic
explanation "circular reasoning" simply because it encompasses all of the
relevant evidence. Consistency is not the same thing as circularity.

Our critic [..] plays the bigot about
"gaining a few thousand followers in an age
of superstition and ignorance" [..]

Holding seeks to rule out of bounds any
characterization of ancient times as more superstitious
and ignorant than our own -- without daring to deny the
characterization.

Our critic makes much of my not "denying the characterization" of
the ancients -- to which I say, there is no more need to deny it
than there is to deny the characterization of Jews as usurers or
the characterization of African-Americans as lazy and slothful!

Holding again seems unable to read me correctly. I didn't characterize "the
ancients", I characterized "ancient times". Holding dares not to assert
that there is now as much superstition and ignorance as there was in
ancient times. He instead tries to equate "ignorance" with something like
congenital stupidity in vain effort to justify his ad hominem attack on me
as a "bigot".

MISSING EVIDENCE FOR CHRISTIANITY

what kind of proof would be acceptable, not shrugged off as
fabrication and not taken as too miraculous to be believed?!?)

For starters, the gospel accounts could

* be more first-hand and contemporanous to the events;
* be more internally consistent, especially about Jesus' geneology,
birth, ministry chronology, and resurrection appearances;
* describe a Jesus who never avoids danger;
* describe a Jesus able to work hometown miracles;
* describe a Jesus whose family never thought him "mad", and who were
his most ardent believers instead of the object of his apparent
resentment;
* describe a Jesus more self-differentiated from the primitive tribal
deity of the Hebrew Torah;
* describe a Jesus more interested in universal salvation than unjust
eternal punishment; and
* describe miracles that an omniscient deity would know were not subject
to naturalistic explanations.

But gospel internals would in isolation probably not be sufficient. There
would still need to be some external objective confirmation (e.g. by
precise prophecies of scientific or historical developments, or through
physical evidence of Easter miracles), and overall background plausibility
that a omniscient omnibenevolent deity would be so concerned with ancient
Palestine and with the fertility problems of the nomad Abraham.

--
br...@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net

[Brian Holtz]

James Holding continues our Trilemma debate in an article at
http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_01_03_01_CC1.html
Here (again) I post in full Holding's new material.
I will reply in a subsequent posting.

------------- The following text is by James Holding -------------

Scratching the Cat Post
Our Critic Continues on the Trilemma
James Patrick Holding

Yes, our critic is still at it, and still floundering around in the paste
trying to make a respectful collage. As the level of response has become a
bit ungainly, we're now putting it in a separate article.

I noted that the idea of an evolving state of mental deterioration by Jesus
is flummoxed in that "there is no evidence that a condition as serious as
the 'Christ complex' is an evolving condition." Our critic calls refer to
this as an "obsolete psychiatric diagnosis" and argues that "delusional
grandiosity is common among schizophrenics," referring the reader to an
item at http://www.virtualcity.com/youthsuicide/sathewo2.htm#9015. This is
quite an interesting item, but it does not even address the Christ complex,
and despite the fluff, our critic offers no proof that the diagnosis of
this condition is "obsolete." The note referenced states: "The patient's
attitude towards others is one of superiority. he exhibits fixed beliefs
that he possesses unusual powers. He reports divine missions and may
identify himself with well-known historical personalities (p. 88)."
Superiority, unusual powers, divine missions, and identification with
hisorical personalities -- but no reference at all to identification with
divinity. Moreover, the article provides absolutely no evidence of this or
any condition as something that slowly evolves; it identifies the potential
condition of Jesus as a "save the world" mentality with no apparent idea
regarding claims to be divine (it refers to Jesus in terms of a
"super-entity," which is not up to the needed level of specificity); notes,
in agreement with my comments on the Christ complex, that persons so
afflicted "are generally devoid of empathy for others" (Jesus is not shown
in the Gospels to fit this condition; he hobnobbed with the poor, the
oppressed, and the destitute; the skeptic may think he "lacked empathy" for
the likes of the Pharisees, but socially, the ruling class didn't get a lot
of empathy as a whole!) and that the condition will "result in behaviors
neurotically/delusionally believed to be altruistic when the opposite
applies as was the case for Christians during the Inquisition." (Where's an
example of this for Jesus?).

The article also provides this helpful outline. It reports the work of a
scholar of psycholohgy who identified:

...three major forms of grandiosity associated with "paranoid
psychoses:" (1) "grandiose identity" (such as claiming "that they
were God or Jesus Christ," more rarely "the Holy Ghost,"
including other famous individuals, and hallucinations and/or
hearing voices may be present. (2) "grandiose role" (such a
believing that one has a "save the world" mission or mandate),
and (3) "grandiose ability" (such as someone having a "high
opinion of his abilities and wisdom" or " believes he has some
special talent or genius," which may be manifested by "I can
control people's minds" as "X" somewhat claimed to do.

Of course, as I noted long ago, and have noted time and time again, a
person with such delusions would inevitably suffer failure to a
considerable extent, long before it came time to be crucified. As we have
seen and will see, the only way to hammer the Jesus square peg into this
round hole is to pick and choose what we like from the Gospels and fill in
the gaps with unevidenced speculation for the rest.

I next noted:

Moreover, if it were, one would expect an increase in mental
derangement resulting in a sliding scale of claims; yet this is
not what we see at all -- the claims of Jesus are the same, and
just as clear, from the beginning of his minstry to the end. The
idea of a "growing delusion" is a fantasy that is unsupported by

any of the data in the Gospels.

Our critic responds by appealing yet again to previous elephants hurled:

While any one gospel would have tried to show Jesus's claims as
consistent throughout his ministry, the fact remains that from
the earliest gospel (Mark) to the latest (John) there is a
discernable progression in the elaborateness of the gospel
accounts of Jesus's divinity claims, miracles, and resurrection
appearances.

There are three hurled elephants here: 1) the implication that the
consistency is a fabrication of the Gospel writers, supported by nothing
other than the begged question that that is what must have happened; 2) the
idea that Mark's gospel offers a Jesus with a lesser degree of claim to
divinity, which we have already shown to be untrue, and which our critic
makes no effort to refute (though see more on divine claims below; for a
bit more on John and Mark's respective Christologies, see here); 3) the
idea that Mark was the first gospel, and John the latest; this point I
addressed by giving a link to my study on the Q/Marcan priority thesis
(which, as predicted, our critic ignored). Moreover, our critic has now
added a claim of "discernible progression" with regards to miracles and
resurrection appearances, also a claim entirely without basis and given no
support. Again I repeat:

The idea that "Jesus never calls himself Christ/Messiah"
flounders on a few considerations: there are plenty of places
where Jesus takes a prerogative indicating such a position, even
prior to the triumphal entry, which is clearly a messianic act --
claming to forgive sins (2:5); enacting the role of divine Wisdom
by eating with sinners (2:15), claiming to be the Son of Man
(2:28, 8:31, 9:9, etc.), walking on water, which the OT says that
only God can do (4:35ff; cf. Job 9:8, Ps. 77:19); implicitly
acknowldging Peter's identification by not rebuking it (8:29ff),
saying that one's soul is dependent on one's reaction to him
(8:35) and that God is his Father, and that he will come with
God's angels (8:38), a self-reference to the Messiah (9:41),
again saying belief in him is paramount to eternal life (9:42).
Even in Mark's "action" gospel wher Jesus says comparatively
little about anything, let alone about himself, there are ample
indications that he knew and proclaimed his own position.

Again, there will be more on this later; for now, in response to my note
that our critic's arguments are "not supported by our critic in terms of
providing a parallel in psychology," our critic pulls up -- hold your
breath! -- and article from the Britannica encyclopedia (that all-around
great source for third-grade papers on penguins and wildebeests) which says
about schizophrenia:

"The simple or undifferentiated type of schizophrenic manifests
an insidious and gradual reduction in his external relations and
interests. [..] The paranoid type, which usually arises later in
life than the other types, is characterized primarily by
delusions of persecution and grandeur combined with unrealistic,
illogical thinking, often accompanied by hallucinations. These
different types of schizophrenia are not mutually exclusive, and
schizophrenics may display a mixture of symptoms that defy
convenient classification. There may also be a mixture of
schizophrenic symptoms with those of other psychoses, notably
those of the manic-depressive group.

More is to come, but presumably, they want to put Jesus in the "paranoid"
category -- if so we want some proof of "delusions of persecution" (as
opposed to cases of actual persecution -- like a case where Jesus thought
Peter was out to get him!) and "unrealistic, illogical thinking" as well as
hallucinations. But as we say, there is more; this is not where our critic
stops:

Hallucinations and delusions, although not invariably present,
are often a conspicuous symptom in schizophrenia. The most common
hallucinations are auditory: the patient hears (nonexistent)
voices and believes in their reality. Schizophrenics are subject
to a wide variety of delusions, including many that are
characteristically bizarre or absurd."

No record of this appears in the Gospels, of course; we do have places
where the voice of God is heard, but there, others hear the voice too.
Presumably skeptics would posit the usual convenient "group hallucination"
theory for that one. Anyways down to a specific:

Of particular interest is the variant of schizophrenia called
paraphrenia. "Kraepelin believed that paraphrenia was associated
with paranoid schizophrenia and was marked by persistent
delusions and hallucinations (1), but it did not show the
characteristic deterioration of schizophrenia or the full
characteristics of delusional disorder (6). Personality decay is
minimal (7), and emotional rapport is well retained (8), but
despite its relatively benign features (9), paraphrenia is as
chronic as schizophrenia (10). Nowadays, a case like this is
often diagnosed as "atypical psychosis," "psychosis not otherwise
specified," or even "schizoaffective disorder" (11)." [From
Ravindran, "Paraphrenia Redefined",
http://www.cpa-apc.org/Subscriptions/Archives/1999/Mar/munro.htm.]

This is another intersting article, and it is just as interesting that our
critic fails to quote the next sentence: "These vague categories do not
lend themselves well to research."(!) The article also advises that more
research is needed in this area -- our critic would do well to take care in
using such works definitively! But more than that, let's look at some of
what else this article says, but which our critic ignores in preference for
a sound bite. Under the heading of diagnostic criteria, it reads (these
criteria are evaluated as the article progresses):

Associated Features: The illness is associated with distress and
agitation, and irrational behaviour may appear as delusions
become more vivid and judgement lessens. Patients may accuse
others of persecution, complain to the authorities, or
occasionally show aggression to imagined pursuers.

One would of course want to define "distress, agitation, and irrational
behavior" here, and ask where this is shown with Jesus (the article finds
this in 81.3% of cases). Critics sometimes appeal to the cleansing of the
Temple; if this prophetic demonstration reflects mental disorder of this
sort, then protestors in front of nuclear power plants and members of PETA
also need help. There is no scale of what critics would call Jesus'
delusions becoming more vivid, and his judgment becoming less; Jesus is
reported to be just as rational and calm (if not calmer) from one end of
the Gospels to the other. Jesus accused no one of persecuting him (the
article associates this with 96.9% of cases); the closest we get to this is
"Many good works have I showed you from my Father; for which of those works
do ye stone me?" -- and that was to people who were actually persecuting
him, not by his imagination. Jesus didn't complain to the authorities; he
was victimized by them, and kept silent before his accusers -- this is the
opposite condition! Finally there is no indication of aggression to
"imagined pursuers".

Age of Onset: Traditionally thought to be middle or old age, but
this is unproven.

Course: A chronic illness, ameliorated but not cured by
treatment.

The first criteria eventually was found not to be indicative at all. The
second is of no measure here since Jesus obviously was never subject to
psychological analysis or treatment.

Impairment: Intellectual functioning is unimpaired. Daily living,
occupational activity, social functioning, and quality of
marriage are likely to deteriorate during exacerbations.

Challenge here: Show that there was deterioration in Jesus' daily living,
etc. activities that would match this. Good luck!

Complications: Some paraphrenia cases appear to deteriorate to
schizophrenia. In elderly patients, dementia may sometimes
supervene.

Obviously the critic would say that Jesus was one of the "didn't
deteriorate" cases.

Predisposing Factors: Deafness, social isolation, migrant status,
and other severe stressors may play a part. It is possible,
though evidence is uncertain, that premorbid paranoid and
schizoid personality disorders occur more commonly with
paraphrenia than by chance. Celibacy, lower-than-normal marital
rates, and reduced fertility have been mentioned, possibly
indicating abnormal personality traits.

We know of no data indicating that Jesus suffered any of these things
(other than celibacy, which was also practiced by the Qumranites and by
John the Baptist), though I do not doubt that desperate skeptics will fill
in gaps as needed.

Sex Ratio: Uncertain, but seems to become more common in females
with advancing age.

Skeptics would of course put Jesus in the "less common" category, which is
fine in context.

Familial Pattern: There is a low frequency of schizophrenia in
families of paraphrenia patients, suggesting that there is little
or no genetic link between the 2 disorders.

This is fine as well; either side will take it that there was no sign of
disorder in Jesus' family.

Among further relevant delineations made:

Many of these patients show a degree of personality and
interpersonal incompetence, since more than one-half of the group
live alone and well over one-half (average age 47.6 years) are
single, separated, or divorced; 57.1% reported themselves as
socially isolated prior to the onset of the current episode

Interpersonal incompetence? Jesus had an assemblage of disciples, taught
publicly to large crowds, and showed no sign at all of interpersonal
incompetence or social isolation. The closest we get to this is going off
at untimed intervals to the mountains to pray, which is the sort of thing
"normal" people do also (is your next vacation a sign of mental disorder?).
It's compatible with disorder, but not proof of it, especially in light of
contrary evidence.

So it seems that Jesus was a poor candidate for paraphrenia, but our critic
refers his fans to a "published attempt to diagnose paraphrenia in
Jesus...at http://voi.org/books/pp/ch3.htm." Very interesting indeed. This
item appears on the "Voice of India" website and is part of a book authored
by someone named Koenraad Elst, who is not a psychologist or a psychiatrist
but holds degrees in Indian Studies, Chinese Studies, and philosophy. Elst
has a thing for Hinduism, and is not a dummy by any means, but also by no
means is qualified to make psychological assessments, and his article
starts with a reciting of the perception of Nietzsche of Paul, a case of
minsuderstandings galore (i.e., Paul invented a new religion; in fact, as
E. P. Sanders and W. D. Davies among others have shown, the only difference
between Paul and rabbinic Judaism is that he thinks the Messiah has come in
Jesus; gross misunderstanding of how faith relates to works (see here); it
offers a psychological explanation for Paul's conversion which sounds
pretty to skeptics but is far short on proof, as we would expect
long-distance attempts to psycholanalyze to be (and later, an attempt to
psychoanalyze Israel's history as well!); plays the selectivity game with
the text ("These passages [from the Sermon on the Mount] are of disputed
historicity, while many reliably historical passages show us a very
different Christ, short-tempered, defiant, and a Doomsday prophet. The
gentle Jesus, who was in Nietzsche’s view the original Jesus whose teaching
and example were later deformed by Pauline Christianity, was himself just
as much a creation of his second-generation disciples." -- funny how people
like Crossan, and now the Jesus Seminar, prefer to say that if anything,
the nice stuff was said by Jesus, but the Doomsday stuff was an invention
of the church!; and how's "short-tempered" and "defiant" for unsupported,
vague generalization, to say nothing of being a description of half to
two-thirds of the population!), before it finally does get to an analysis
of Jesus.

The analysis actually offers mostly summary information about opinions of
mental disorder in Jesus, including opinions from authors of books of
psychology whose hermenutical skills were on the level of kindergartners. A
Dr. Lange-Eichbaum is quoted:

The personality during the psychosis (we only know Jesus during
this life stage) is characterized by quick-tempered soreness and
a remarkable egocentrism. What is not with him, is cursed. He
loves everything that is below him and does not diminish his Ego:
the simple followers, the children, the weak, the poor in spirit,
the sick, the publicans and sinners, the murderers and the
prostitutes. By contrast, he utters threats against everyone who
is established, powerful and rich, which points to a condition of
resentment.

Our writer does not provide any details Lange-Eichbaum presumably (?) used
in backing up this thesis, but as a whole and as it stands the analysis
clearly begs the question. (Note especially the grossly begged question
implied in, "we only know Jesus during this life stage"!) "Egocentrism" is
a value judgment; one is usually accused of ego when overestimating or
bragging about their own importance; one must thus assume that Jesus'
claims about himself were actually false for this statement to stand.
Loving those "below" and non-diminishing to ego is a characteristic of
relief workers and many charitable souls worldwide and througout time who
would be surprised to hear that this is evidence of mental disorder. (How
is it that hatred of others is also a proof of disorder? Isn't it nice to
be able to cite contradictory evidence as proof of the same thesis?)
Overall this is little more than negative spin-doctoring; one may ask why
the love for children, et al. and threats against those in power can't be
reflective of the pursuit of a just cause in a society that was
fundamentally unfair to the lower classes. If Jesus hated and threatened
the poor and loved the rich, then what would we say? Either way it seems he
can't win for losing. The good Doctor continues:

In this, all is puerile-autistic, naive, dreamy. In this basic
picture of his personality, there is one more trait that is
clearly distinguishable: Jesus was a sexually abnormal man. Apart
from his entire life-story, what speaks for this is the
quotations of Mt. 19:12 (the eunuch ideal), Mk. 12:25 (no sex in
heaven, asexuality as ideal) and also Mt. 5:29 (removing the body
parts that cause sin: intended are certainly not hand and eye).
The cause may have been a certain weakness of libido, as is
common among paranoia sufferers…

We wonder whether our critic would agree with such an evaluation; certainly
the "eunuch ideal" hasn't led anyone to condemn the likes of Mother Teresa
as mentally ill. The idea of "asexuality as ideal" is also found, albeit in
different forms, in a number of religious traditions, including the
Gnostics; I do not know what our critic would say, but our Doctor's
arrogant "what I strongly disagree with equates with mental illness"
approach seems all too obvious. (As does his lack of hermeneutical
expertise: The Jews did not think that angels were incapable of having sex
-- many after all believed that the "sons of God" of Gen. 6 were angels who
had sex with women! -- and Jesus' point is that men will be like the angels
in the sense of never dying, not sexlessness, which makes the question of
the Saducees irrelevant [Witherington, Mark commentary, 328]. The referral
to Matt. 5:29 is curious; presumably we are to believe that "hand and eye"
are euphemisms for sexual organs, and that this advice is to be taken
literally, but those with relevant scholarship on their mind, rather than
dirt, recognize this as rhetorical hyperbole of the sort found in Seneca,
who for example advised that one who cannot rid one's heart of vice should
rip their heart out; similar words are found in Philo and the work of the
rabbis, and other ancient writers offer expressions regarding willingness
to undergo amputation for the sake of a greater good (see Keener, Matthew
commentary, 188n). Today we even speak of giving an arm or a leg and no one
takes us literally. Our critic doesn't select very authoritative sources --
one might as well suggest that Lange-Eichbaum shows an immense egotism of
his own; and if he loved whatever children he had and expressed any
compassion, we can call in the men in the white coats.)

There is a lack of joy in reality, extreme seriousness, lack of
humour, a predominantly depressed, disturbed, tense condition;
coldness towards others insofar as they don’t flatter his ego,
towards his mother and siblings, lack of balance: now weak and
fearful, now with violent outbursts of anger and affective lack
of proportion… According to both modern and ancient standards, he
was intellectually undeveloped, as Binet has extensively proven;
but he had a good memory and was, as is apparent from the
parables, a visual type. Binet also emphasizes the lack of
creativity. A certain giftedness in imagination, eloquence and
imaginative-symbolic thought and expression cannot be denied. He
was certainly not a ‘genius’ in the strict modem sense. The later
psychosis is however in no way in contradiction with his original
giftedness which was above average: in paranoia this is quite
common…

As before this generally assumes what is yet to be proved, and involves in
the main bigoted value judgments, and interpretations of events (i.e.,
"lack of joy in reality") by presumption. "Coldness" to mother and siblings
is an interesting one; as I showed against Tulbure this coldness likely did
not originate with Jesus; and actually there is some question as to whether
in a Semitic context this would be considered coldness at all, since the
expression could mean that Jesus' family members "are such not merely by
human bonds, but especially because they obey the Father." Jewish
synagogues of the first century, and many movements today, use familial
terminology; there is nothing extraordinary in Jesus' words. The data from
Binet is not offered, but in light of what has been let out so far the
evaluations most likely rest on the same sort of "read it like a newspaper"
hermeneutic we have so far seen.

Analysis follows that reads the triumphal entry as evidence of being
"psychotic" and says:

The exact diagnosis is not that important for us. A paranoid
psychosis: that may be enough. Maybe real paranoia, maybe
schizophrenia but without irreversible decay, in the form of a
paraphrenia. Or a paranoia based on an earlier slightly
schizophrenic shift. Anyone checking with the extant scientific
literature is struck by the remarkable similarity of the
symptoms.

Indeed, as similar as a St. Bernard and a French poodle. To his credit,
Elst admits:

Dr. Lange-Eichbaum’s diagnosis belongs to an earlier stage in the
development of psychopathology, when all kinds of explanations
were read into symptoms, without using strict criteria. Freud’s
psycho-analysis is so notoriously full of unfalsifiable
statements (i.e. impossible to prove wrong, escaping every cold
test) that Karl Popper classifies it among the pseudo-sciences
along with astrology. Dr. Lange-Eichbaum stays closer to factual
reality in his description of symptoms, but is hazy in the
formulation of a final diagnosis. Moreover, his knowledge of the
Biblical backgrounds and the Roman-Hellenistic cultural milieu
are limited, so that many possibly pertinent facts escape his
attention. We would have to wait for Dr. Somers’
multidisciplinary competence to formulate a truly comprehensive
diagnosis.

Ha ha! Couldn't have said it much better myself. Not that Elst does better;
in the next section on Jesus' miracles, aside from the usual
anti-supernatural bias, he commits hermeneutical homicide again: "With
regard to the exorcisms it is very dear that Jesus, as the Gospel attests,
cannot prevent the devil from coming back (Mt 12: 43-45)." The reference is
not to an exorcism of Jesus; it is a parabolic representation of the
effects of rejecting Jesus' reign as Messiah, meaning that the condition of
those who do so will be that they will be worse off than they were before.
It is like the shallow ground in the parable of the soils. Elst then says,
"We should also study the cases where Jesus refuses to do a miracle: e.g.
in Nazareth (where everybody knows him); before the Syro-Phoenician woman;
when the Pharisees ask for one." Funny thing -- see below on the first; in
the second case, the refusal was very temporary; in the third, the
Pharisees didn't want a miracle but a "sign from heaven", a miraculous act
from God, not from Jesus. We are told: "Further, one can suppose that some
miracles were simply declarations of Jesus that somebody was healed. Thus,
from the ten leper-patients declared cured, only one came back. The nine
others, sent to the priests for verification, had obviously not been
declared cured." One can "suppose" no such thing; this miracle occurred in
a wilderness area, and the priests were miles off; the other nine were
still on their way to the priests. Shall we have expected Jesus to wait out
in the wilderness? Shall we have expected all ten to be grateful enough to
make the return journey? Elst in locked in a box of two dimensions, just
like many skeptics. (On moving a mountain, see here; this is more
hermenuetical homicide by Elst. I think at any rate the sick would be far
more impressed by being healed than by having mountains moved, and it also
be a lot less disturbing to human society. "There goes Mt. Carmel!"
"Thanks, I needed that for my croup.")

Elst next does his evidence-sifting, ruling out parts of the Gospels based
on contrived and badly informed arguments: the behavior of Pilate, the
usual misapprehension of Matt. 27:34, the false idea that a "soon" Second
Coming and end of the world was expected (see here). Many of Jesus'
teachings Elst deigns to erase from the record by means of a tactical
precursor of the Jesus Seminar's "if it was said by someone else, or was
common lore, Jesus didn't say it" routine. (By comparison Elst notes --
without documentation -- that in Communist books he found sayings of
Voltaire attributed to Marx; how exact the alleged reproductions were is
not noted, but what was to stop a messaive egotist like Marx from quoting
Voltaire and not giving the old man credit? -- quoting of common lore has
been done by every great sage in every society; this is a meaningless
methodology), or erase events by means of the old "oh they just made it up"
routine, with the fallacious "it only appears in one source so it can't be
true" excuse that is never made with other parallel accounts. Elst's
accounts of Jesus' baptism can't even get the quotes straight and takes
Markan priority for granted. With what is left from this raping of the
text, Elst finally goes on to make a case for Jesus as a victim of
paraphrenia, overwhelmingly doing so by spackling liberal doses of
speculative history and interpretive assumption upon the girders of the
text. With such genius have I also seen cases made that Jesus spent his
lost years in India or came originally from Mars. Thus on the episode of
teaching in the Temple as a child: "By itself, the temple episode need not
be pathological, it could have been a fairly ordinary event in the
difficult puberty process of self-discovery. But it does betray a
psychological setting in which a deeper mental disease can develop." Thus
when necessary, Elst draws upon late apocryphal texts like the Gospel of
the Hebrews. Thus a psychologist is quoted as somehow thinking that the
Temptation in the wilderness reveals "the desire to fly" and all revelation
is dismissed as hallucination. Thus again hermeneutical homicide, and
perhaps bad reading:

The next hallucinatory crisis is on Mount Tabor. He goes up on
the mountain with his disciples Peter, James and John. There, in
a sea of white light, he meets with Elijah and Moses. Again, a
voice from the clouds speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved.
Listen to Him.” According to Luke (9:28-36), Jesus spoke with
Moses and Elijah about ‘his going-out which he would perform in
Jerusalem. Then, the scene stops and Jesus is alone with his
disciples, who have not seen Moses and Elijah: they merely wake
up when they hear Jesus talk to somebody. In the testimony of
Mark (9:2-10) there is the same revealing contradiction: while it
is contended that Elijah and Moses appeared, only Jesus is
described and it is said that finally the apostles saw nobody but
Jesus.

What ho? Luke 9:32: "But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with
sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that
stood with him." Mark 9:4: "And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses:
and they were talking with Jesus." They haven't seen Moses and Elijah? Does
our critic expect us to take Elst seriously when he can't even read the
text in front of him? And more:

A third report of a hallucinatory crisis is only given by John
(12:20-36). During the entry in Jerusalem he hears the voice of
the Father saying: “I have glorified him and will glorify him
again.” The people said it had thundered, some said an angel had
spoken to him, i.e. to Jesus. So it was only Jesus who had heard
the words.

What ho? "The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it
thundered: others said, An angel spake to him." Our critic is only digging
himself deeper into incompetence by citing this nonsense as authoritative,
and while I expect skeptics to add their own spin ("John is just lying") it
tells enough of Elst as a source that he can't even report the text
correctly. One may wonder how, if he fouls up a source as simple as the
Gospels, he managed detailed texts of psychology without injury.

Elst's source, Dr. Somers, isn't too bright either: "Contemporary
theologians like E. Schillebeeckx ascribe these stories to the imagination
of the primitive Church, which wanted to glorify Jesus. But, asks Dr.
Somers: 'Why should the Church invent a number of stories which caused
nothing but difficulties? Why should the son of God be baptized? [Hint: See
here; this is no "difficulty" at all!] Why should he be tempted by the
devil, and that with such extravagant temptations? [Extravagant? Temptation
to carnal desire, temptation to power and glory, what's extravagant about
that?] Why should he fast during 40 days? [Why shouldn't he? Fasting is
seen by religious types in many faiths as a way to sharpen spiritual
awareness, and 40 days would have been programmatically symbolic of
Israel's Exodus, just the sort of prophetic act we would expect in a Jewish
paradigm.] Why should he see wild beasts? [Hint: Because wild beasts lived
in the wilderness, Dr. Somers! If you're in the woods and you see a bear,
does that prove you're psychotic? Note though that it nowhere says that
Jesus saw, or interacted with, wild beasts, just that he was where they
were usually found.] It is quite inconceivable that the primitive Church
invented these strange stories for the glorification of Jesus." What's
really inconceivable is that people like Somers spout off at the mouth
without knowing diddly about their subject matter. And skeptics wonder why
they don't get respect from me.

We got plenty more heremeutical homicide from Elst's quarter. Our critic
may get lonely, but he'll have to answer all of this if he wants to make
the grade:

The paraphrenic patient has some marked characteristics, other
than the rare hallucinations and the delusional state, e.g.: a
great hostility against those who contradict him, often also a
familial rage, as the family usually contradicts him; autistic
behaviour, in the sense that the criterion for judgment and
action is not reality, but his subjective will; an interpretative
delirium, i.e. interpreting events and utterances as pointing to
him and to his delusion; concealing his conviction and
temporizing as long as circumstances seem unfriendly. All these
typical features can be found in the Gospel.

Really? Let's look at the examples from Elst the Expert Exegete:

Jesus threatens Bethsaida, Kapharnaum, Jerusalem, because they
did not believe him. If the Son of Man comes with heavenly power,
all those who did not believe will be killed, along with all
kings and mighty men.

Wow, I can smell the begged question from here! Question: If Jesus really
was the Messiah, then wouldn't this be a real threat? And presumably (in
fact, it is so!) Elst will say that all other Jewish prophets were nuts as
well.

Jesus insults the Pharisees, because they disbelieve and
criticize him.

Hokey smokes, that means that the Qumranites, the rabbis, and Celsus were
also mentally off, to name a few! If you think Jesus' insults are bad, you
should read some Juvenal or Lucian!

Jesus is especially angry with his family which tried to prevent
his preaching. A number of logia (= sayings of Jesus) are
directed against the family, and in the Gospel one cannot find
any friendly word to the family and especially to his mother.

We've made brief note of this above; Elst pulls up a parallel (Mark 3:5)
and (insert laughter here) Luke 14:26. Elst then says, "the true enemies of
man are his family members (Mt 10:35; see also Mk 11:30; Mt 10:35; Mk
13:11)." Haw haw! Matt. 10:35 twice? He's got it as wrong as Acharya S (and
same for Mark 13:11) -- Jesus is predicting that the family will be the
miscreants, not himself or the believers. Mark 11:30 is, "The baptism of
John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me." Really bad family manners,
huh?

A highly irrational act is Jesus’ cursing of the fig tree when,
out of season, it is not bearing fruit (Mk 16:20-25; Mt
21:18-22). The tree is behaving normally, but Jesus punishes it:
never again will it bear fruit.

Read it and weep.

Jesus is also violently sensitive to things relating to his
supposed Father. The violent scene he makes against the traders
in the temple (Mk 11:15-17; Mt 21:12-13; Lk 19:45-46), where he
objects against the transportation of any object, is motivated by
what he perceives as their dishonouring his Father’s house.

Oh, wow, strong religious sentiment, right or wrong, is sign of mental
disorder! See here. No? "Those traders were not doing anything unethical or
irreligious. They had an important function in temple life, where
sacrifices were the normal and statutory practice." And they were ripping
off the poor, as later rabbis attested.

Another, more specific detail is that he attempts to keep his
status as Son of Man secret: “Do not talk about this with
anyone”, he says several times. Only when his disciples, and
later the priests during his trial, ask him straight if he is
God’s son, he consents, saying that they have said it. But to
theologians, it has always remained a riddle why Jesus should be
so secretive about his glorious mission.

Maybe the theologians need to read this. And so does Elst, along with the
notes that in spite of Jesus' warnings, the word spread about him anyway!

Paraphrenia patients are very aware of the attitude (and possible
lack of understanding) of their fellow men. That is why Jesus
temporizes, in expectation of more auspicious circumstances.

Wow, we're always told to watch our attitude and work for understanding;
now we're told to do so is a sign of mental illness! No example is given of
this, though, so we'll just shove it aside as one more of Elst's homicidal
efforts.

A final symptom is the anti-sexual attitude. As the studies of
Bultmann have shown, the primitive church has cleansed, adapted a
number of logia. A relevant example is provided by the logia
about the children and the reign of God: unless you become like
children, you cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. In the
apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, some logia have been preserved which
explain the periscopes of the Gospels: to be a child is to be
asexual and free of sexual shame (log. 12, 21; cfr. also log. 37,
114: if you make masculine and feminine one). In the canonical
Gospels it is also said that in heaven there is no marriage, and
virginity is exalted, as it is in the Apocalypse. The theme is
constant: virginity, inhibition of sexual activity, as well in
the canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas as in the
Apocalypse.

Little wonder, since GThom is a document heavily influenced by Gnosticism,
which believed that matter was evil. Maybe the Gnostys were paraphrenics
too, huh? See also above on "sexual" references.

Elst is wrong about the charge against Jesus; see the piece above with
reference to Pilate. On the birth narratives, which Elst spends a great
deal of time on under the assumption that they are contradictory, see here.
On allegedly contradictory locations of the Ascension see here -- Elst
doesn't even know basic Bible geography! Despite Elst Luke does not put the
ascension in Jerusalem.

Is it credible that a witness of such a wonderful and glorious
event could say nothing more than “he disappeared”? It sounds
like a very simple goodbye. Why did they not invite a number of
witnesses to this ultimate glorification? Even the high priest?

Oh, yes, that would have been an intelligent decision: And have the high
priest try and kill Jesus all over again? Elst seems to have the naive idea
that spectacular revelation is a cure for all moral ills!

It should be noted that angels appear at all difficult moments:
the conception, the birth of Jesus, the resurrection, the
ascension. The Holy Ghost explains both the conception of Jesus
and the conception of the Church. The structural analysis reveals
a systematic trend, a thematic thinking: when there is a
difficult situation, a myth with angels or Holy Ghost is masking
the truth. So there is a constant “mythologic” activity, why not
say “mythomanic” (not in a truly pathological, but in a larger
sense).

That's a connection with logic overflowing from the bowl. I'll wait and see
if our critic wants to play with this psychological tinkertoy building. One
wonders why it makes any difference to have angels showing up at these
"difficult moments" since it doesn't clearly solve anything and indeed
might be supposed to make the situation even more "difficult".

Jesus is sentenced to crucifixion. This was a Roman, not a Jewish
punishment, and Bible scholars have debated a lot about this
seemingly unnecessary hand-over of Jesus by the Jewish
authorities to the Roman governor Pilate, who proceeded to
implement the death penalty which Jesus had deserved according to
the Jewish law.

Unnecessary handover? Again see the piece linked above re Pilate --
"handing over" was normal! But here's where Elst gets really wild:

Crucified convicts were tied (not nailed) to a cross, and their
death was brought about by torture and by breaking their bones.
Interestingly, the Roman soldiers refrained from breaking Jesus’
bones, no doubt because they had orders to do so. Having heard of
the prediction that Jesus would rise on the third day, Pilate
must have thought it quite an interesting practical joke to
arrange for the effective re-appearance of this weird godman. So,
he ordered a servant to look after Jesus after he had been taken
down from the cross, and to get him back on his feet by the third
day.

Yes, another conspiracy theory to add to the list! Elst is just plain wrong
about the tying/nailing bit. Not the disciples stealing the body, not
Joseph moving the body, but Pilate risking his career as a Roman procurator
to play a joke on everyone. I'll bet he also liked to stick whoopee
cushions under Caiaphas' seat. I could say more, but I'm just wondering if
our critic wishes to defend any of this nonsense from his authoritative
source.

One can suppose that Pilate ordered the centurion to spare Jesus,
so that he would not die but “resurrect”. After three days, Jesus
was sufficiently healed, and a few days later he paid a nightly
visit to his disciples in Jerusalem. But he had to be careful,
because if he was caught, he would have been stoned or
decapitated.

Not only that, he had to fool everyone into thinking that a bruised and
beaten body was actually a glorified resurrection body. Not just first aid,
but first class aid.

What did Saint Paul go to Arabia for? Could it be that that is
where Jesus was staying, safely just outside the Roman Empire?

Overall I see no need to do more than laugh at this -- all that is missing
is the little green men from the Secular Web. We are told other interesting
things, like that Jesus authored the book of Revelation, that "Ezekiel,
Daniel and Henoch were mental patients, schizophrenics and paraphrenics,
showing all typical symptoms of these diseases: receiving revelations,
seeing visions, believing they are the elected ones, predicting
catastrophes" (the same bigotry shown by McKinsey and other critics of
apocalyptic literature, which Jews of the first century had a respect for!)
and that Elst has provided "the first-ever coherent explanation of the
Apocalypse, a text with which the theologians have never come to terms."
Sounds like symptoms of ego to me! You don't suppose Elst is a paraphrenic,
do you?

------------------------------

In case anyone's forgotten -- we still have a prior critic to take care of.
Next up on Jesus' miracles. I asked, "...what's this nonsense about

"hysterical" blindness or paralysis? None of the subjects said to be blind

or paralyzed show any evidence in the texts of having been 'hysterical'."
Our critics says:

Holding seems unaware of what hysterical blindness is, and seems
to think it must be accompanied by behavior that in ordinary
English would be called "hysterical". Hysterical blindness is a
form of what in modern psychology is called "conversion
disorder", which "is characterized by the loss of a bodily
function, for example blindness, paralysis, or the inability to
speak.

I am unaware of no such thing. I have stated that there is, indeed, no
evidence of that sort of behavior; but that is not the point! Without such
evidence, there is no evidence of hysteria, and it's just more skeptical
fill-in-the-gap speculation! This doesn't do anything for our critics' case
and if anything makes it look even more makeshift.

I say the critics "also denigrate ancient people and insult their
intelligence (re the reanimations) and call a writer a liar outright." Our
critic replies:

Holding here confuses ignorance with lack of intelligence, rather
than rebutting my assertion that pronouncement of death was not
an exact science in ancient times.

I'm glad that our skeptic made this point, because he puts his foot in his
mouth just a few paragraphs below on this subject. We'll get to that below.

Calling an element of a written story an "embellishment" does not
imply that the person who wrote the story down is a "liar".
Holding seems to think that the entire process by which the
gospel stories were developed, repeated, and recorded can be
certified as free of any possible misunderstanding,
misinterpretation, false assumption, exaggeration, or deception.

If an embellishment is not something false, then what the heck is it? Our
critic is backpedalling again, and producing a torrent of mumbo-jumbo in
defense and to obscure the issue isn't going to do the job. I do think that
the process can be critically examined; we have literary evidence, we have
oral tradition evidence, we have social evidence. What we don't have is any
application of the evidence, especially from a comparative point of view,
from our critic, who can only pull up statements of astonishment like this
one. I say:

(Again, if reportage in just one source of any detail -- no
matter how "spectacular" a critic thinks it is, based on their
own subjective judgments -- is "sufficient grounds to reject" an
element as an embellishment, then reams of material in parallel
accounts across the board must likewise be "rejected."

Our critic says:

Holding seems to make the astonishing claim that the miraculous
restoration of a severed body part is "spectacular" only
according to "subjective judgment"!

Piling one "astonished" on another isn't an answer -- yes, it is a
subjective judgment; it is based on the completely subjective opinion that
miracles have not and never will have happened, merely because "I haven't
seen one"! Within the paradigm of a non-naturalistic worldview, repairing
an ear is peanuts!

I write:

In my parallels of Lincoln biographies, one in particular
contains much more detail that the other three bios do not
report; some of this material left unreported, even concerning
the same event, while not on the scale of a miracle, is of such
"importance" that one could easily construct plausible arguments
accusing the single writer of "embellishment."

Our critic answers:

The plausibility of those arguments would of course depend on the
prior plausibility of the story element in question, the possible
motivations for the one author to include it, and the likelihood
that the remaining authors would exclude it if they believed it.
By these criteria, it is indeed plausible that the ear-healing
miracle is an embellishment, unless of course one is otherwise
convinced that Jesus could heal miraculously. Given that all the
other accounts of Jesus' healings -- even if taken at face value
-- are susceptible to naturalistic explanations, it's not
unreasonable to consider the isolated ear-healing detail as an
embellishment.

And thus he as much admits that I am right! It has already been decided
that a healing is implausible, based on a subjective worldview! If our
critic were honest, he would admit that he is plugging the gaps with his
own faith-paradigm of "naturalistic explanations"! The "only one guy
reported it" throw-out is merely an excuse -- as with the Lincoln bios,
there could be any number of reasons why it would not be reported by
others: Was Luke alone, perhaps, of the opinion that there was adequate
reason to make a stylistic diversion and report a miracle that was no
different than, and indeed less spectacular than, other miracles? (I.e.,
not life-threatening, and not an essential organ for manipulation or
function? Losing an ear doesn't make you deaf!) Was Malchus now a
Christian, and would bringing up this incident have endangered him if it
had been reported in Matthew and Mark's earlier works, whereas in the later
or geographically removed works of John and Luke, it would not? (Remember
that the chief priests also wanted to put Lazarus to death -- John 12:10!
But even if they couldn't do that legally, they sure could make his life
miserable or arrange a nasty "accident" for him or his sisters!) Did
Malchus perhaps begin by denying the healing, in order to stay out of
trouble? What was the reaction to Malchus' claim to have been healed, and
how obvious was the act of healing, and how many people noticed it in the
melee and darkness of the arrest? (It is conceivable that only Malchus knew
exactly what had happened, and that Luke is reporting something known now
only through his investigations!) Bottom line as usual: Skeptical and
critical arguments tends to have a serious case of one-dimensional
thinking!

I ask:

At any rate I would not exclude the psychologically ill from
Jesus' care, and there is still a real problem to be cared for,
one which only the best-trained psychologists doing close
experiments have dealt with today. Was Jesus trained to the level
of these modern psychologists?

It is replied:

Conventional faith healers treat psychosomatic afflictions
without any psychological training. Indeed, similar to the
placebo effect, the success rate of faith healing is likely to be
inversely correlated with the psychological training of the
patient and healer.

No examples of this comparable to Jesus are offered; the critic gets no
credit without exemples! Are these faith-healers able to induce a permanent
cure? (Obviously not; and if the parallel were to hold, then Jesus and his
movement, like the faith-healers, ought to have had a minimum following of
loyalists and practically no new converts! Do you think Peter Popoff could
start a worldwide movement that people would suffer and die for? Do you
think Ernest Angley will get out of Dayton and buy himself a new toupee?
Again, it doesn't take many complaints of false healing -- especially when
you are not a member of the controlling and priviliged ruling class, which
also happens to dislike you -- to flush the whole effort down the toilet!)

I promised to return to a point made above; first this. I said:

In the case of Lazarus, Carrier is desperate enough to suggest:
"...the witnesses anticipate a rotting smell (Jn. 11:39), but
there is no evidence that such a smell was confirmed after the
tomb was unsealed." Sure -- it was just the touch John needed to
record everyone yelling, "PAYEEEEEE-UUUUUU!"

Our critic replies:

Holding's glib response utterly fails to confront the fact that
the Lazarus account gives zero symptomatic evidence to support a
diagnosis of death: no mortal wound, no algor mortis (absence of
body heat), no rigor mortis, no livor mortis (discoloration due
to blood settling), no adipocere (waxiness due to fat
hydrogenation), no bloating, no infestation, no putrefaction, no
decomposition, no mummification-- only that he was "sick", had
"fallen asleep", was presumed dead, and had been in a cave for
four days.

Our critic fails to realize that my "glib response" makes a point: That it
is asburd and silly to expect any writer to write with the anticipation of
our own doubt and report such details in the first place! And indeed what
stops our critic, if these things were mentioned, from dismissing them as
"embellishment"? It's just the skeptical paradigm being assumed yet again!
But let's hold on for a moment, because our skeptic has done us a good turn
and inflicted himself with a bad case of athlete's mouth. Let's recall a
line above:

Holding here confuses ignorance with lack of intelligence, rather
than rebutting my assertion that pronouncement of death was not
an exact science in ancient times.

Our critic doesn't define what he means by "pronouncement of death," but if
by this he means that the ancients had no way of determining that fine
point when a person crossed the line from "alive" to "dead," then I agree.
However, in each of the three cases in question -- Jairus' daughter, the
widow's son, and Lazarus -- this is of absolutely no proven relevance, and
if anything, would be contradicted by elements of our critic's list of
"death signs" above! Let's have a look at these; we'll collect the info
first:

1. mortal wound -- this is not relevant or known to be relevant to any
case, as all would agree
2. algor mortis (absence of body heat) -- the info for this and the next
two items comes from this site by a forensic pathologist, and from a
site maintained by the Lincoln Land Community College in Illinois and
their forensics department. "Algor mortis refers to change in body
temperature after the heart stops pumping and cellular oxidation,
which keeps our body temperatures at 98.6¡ F, stops; the body
temperature falls to room temperature (about 70¡ F) at about 1.5¡ F
per hour."
3. rigor mortis -- "Rigor mortis refers to the hardening of muscle cells
that begins shortly after death and causes board-like stiffness in
about 12 hours, lasts about 12 hours and then disappears in about 12
hours." Our college site adds, "Rigor mortis is a rigidity of the body
caused by muscles contracting after death from chemical changes within
muscle tissue. It starts in all muscles at the same time. But it is
first noticed in the small muscles of the face, neck, lower jaw,
hands, and feet. Its time of onset and completion depends on
environmental conditions and the onset of decomposition. The rigor can
be broken. For example, a leg may be straightened out, but it takes a
lot of effort. If the rigor is broken after it has fully set, it will
not return."
4. livor mortis (discoloration due to blood settling) -- "Livor mortis
refers to the maroon color that develops after the heart stops and no
longer churns the blood; heavier red blood cells settle downward from
the serum by gravity as occurs in the plastic container when giving
blood." Our college site adds, "It is often seen within one-half to
two hours after death. The hue of the liver mortis may give some sign
of the cause of death. For example, a bright cherry-red hue may
suggest carbon monoxide or cyanide poisoning. Inconsistent
distribution of the liver mortis may suggest that the body has been
disturbed. For four to six hours after death, slight pressure to the
skin stops the flow of blood settling in nearby vessels."
5. adipocere (waxiness due to fat hydrogenation) -- our college site
says, "Adipocere is a yellowish-white substance composed of fatty
acids and soaps developed in post mortem changes of the fatty parts of
the body like cheeks, abdomen wall, and buttocks. The chemical process
is induced by enzymes and water in moist anaerobic conditions in which
bacteria need no oxygen to survive. Adipocere has a greasy feel and a
strong and musty odor. Although adipocere may cover wounds, the wounds
can be seen in a close examination even when the process has
advanced." Various sites note that this condition is associated with
humid environments. In the dry climate of Palestine, this condition
may not have occurred anyway, so we will leave this one aside, other
than to note that the fact that our critic brings this up at all
suggests a lamentable lack of ability to analyze and process data for
relevancy, and that he has merely copied this material uncritically
from someplace hoping to strike a target.
6. bloating -- this is a general term associated with several more
specific conditions
7. infestation -- presumably our critic refers to this: "Insects and
animals may begin to consume a body soon after death. Flies, maggots,
and beetles attack open areas of the body. They gather on soft body
tissues. Sometimes an entomologist's study of insect larvae on a body
can help estimate time of death." Of course in all of our cases we
would think that the relatives would take care to ensure, as best they
could, that this would not happen, so this is probably not a factor
anyway; and we know well enough from despairing pictures of starving
nations that flies will even attack open areas on living persons.
8. putrefaction -- "One of the first signs of putrefaction is a greenish
staining in the lower abdomen. The change slowly spreads and takes on
a brownish look. Sometimes the skin gets so dark, it may be hard to
determine race. The condition called marbling comes from bacterial
action on blood in the veins. They become dark red or purple and stand
out lightly on the skin. And as bacteria acts on inner organs, gases
form. They bloat the body, and facial features become vague.
Putrefaction goes on until the body is consumed, unless adipocere or
mummification begins." This process begins at death.
9. decomposition -- this is also a general term associated with more
specific conditions
10. mummification -- our college site says, "Mummification occurs when
body tissue dehydrates. The skin takes on a leathery look. The process
only occurs in hot, dry climates, free from the moisture needed by
bacteria. Mummification is more likely to occur in infancy than at
later ages. The bodies of infants who die soon afterbirth are sterile.
They do not have internal bacteria. Thus bacterial action is slowed
because all bacteria must enter the body from outside. And, because of
their size, the drying process can be completed faster in infants than
in adults." This occurs in dry climates in contrast to adipocere. In
the dry climate of Palestine, this was possible, but would take a
while; more likely to be seen was dessication, in which moist areas
like the eyes became dried out and moist membranes took on a "burnt"
look.

Now let's recall our critic's comment again: "Holding here confuses

ignorance with lack of intelligence, rather than rebutting my assertion
that pronouncement of death was not an exact science in ancient times."

Question: As we look over this list, how many of these things would a) have
been noticed by the ancients, even if they didn't have all the science
knowledge behind them?; b) be confounded by "ignorance" of the exactness
with which death could be pronounced? The answer to a) is that several of
these factors would have come into play (as we will see shortly) and that
b) the precision of being able to pronounce death has no relevance in any
of these cases as to whether or not the people present were competent to
decide whether or not a bona fide healing or raising had occurred!

Let's look at each of these, from most "spectacular" to least, starting
with Lazarus. Our critic says we know "only that he was 'sick', had 'fallen
asleep', was presumed dead, and had been in a cave for four days." "Fallen
asleep" was a euphemism for death; but we have it recorded (if it is not an
"embellishment," which we expect will be the next excuse) that he was in
the grave four days; Jewish burial and funereal procedures weren't done
zippity-do-da, so we may assume that Lazarus was dead for some part of at
least a fifth day as well. Now it would defy common sense to suggest that
Lazarus' family and/or friends did nothing to ascertain death before taking
steps for ritual observance and burying; at the very least they would shake
the person, ask "Are you all right?", throw cold water, ring bells, slam
doors, play rock music, or take similar measures. But more to the point,
even if they didn't know the precise moment of death, they would easily
know and recognize (even in this age before most people could hire an
embalmer, and the dead were attended to within their own villages by family
members) several of the signs above -- notably the three "mortises", but
also putrefaction (which was expected to have happened by Lazarus' sister)
and possibly dessication. Do you think the family and friends didn't know
Lazarus was dead?

The widow's son (Luke 7) is a story offering less detail -- we don't know
how long the man had been dead or thought be dead, but as before, funeral
arrangements took time, and it is quite unlikely that the family would not
take note of these signs!

Finally there is Jairus' daughter. Here the death likely occurred just a
few minutes before Jesus' arrival, if at all; there is no time for any of
the signs above. But what this all boils down to is the same issue of
assuming the ancients were too stupid to recognize serious illness and
death when they saw it. Moreover, it is asking us to believe, not in a
miracle, but that in three separate cases, obvious signs of illness and/or
death were not present, or misinterpreted, yet death/sickness was supposed
to be there anyway; in two cases, such that funereal procedures had been
implemented, and then all three just happened to come out of their
unperceived, not-actually-dead-or-sick stupor as Jesus spoke to them. Yes,
our critic is insulting the intelligence of the ancients -- and that of
modern readers as well, in expecting them to accept this amazing triple
coincidence on behalf of skepticism while rejecting any idea of miraculous
intervention! There are anecdotes of people being taken for dead today, but
if our critic wants to find three of these in such a limited time and in
such limited geographical context, he has as much faith as any religious
zealot in that which is left unevidenced!

------------------------------

Now our next section, on Jesus avoiding danger. Our critic bypasses the
fact that he tried to push off parallel accounts in Matthew and Mark as two
different events, and whines that even though he found only four instances,

"They are nonetheless both significant as mutually confirming reports that

Jesus sometimes chose discretion over valor." Well, let's get to an even
more basic question: What normal person or being doesn't? More on this in a
moment. But let's get to those examples again. I say of the first:

Where did Jesus go? He left "that place" -- what place? Most
likely the synagogue; he went, where? Mark says to the lake, the
Sea of Galilee, which is what Capernaum (where the synagogue) is
right on the shore of. Matthew doesn't get this specific, but he
does have Jesus rapping with Pharisees in the very next set of
pericopes!

Our critic resorts to this desperate ploy:

The Sea of Galilee is a big place, and Matthew gives no
indication of how soon Jesus was talking to the Pharisees or
whether the reported danger was still as grave. The fact remains
that these are reports of withdrawal in the face of danger, and
tortured rationalizations based on other reported actions of
Jesus cannot change this fact.

Ha ha! The Sea of Galilee a big place? It's seven miles long and four miles
wide; that's a big place, all right! Maybe Jesus got a sippy-straw and
ducked under the water? I don't think our critic here actually had any idea
how "big" a place the Sea of Galilee was, and moreover, is trying to pile
more speculation upon his original over-interpretation in an effort to save
it. Not that it matters: Mark 3:6 says, "And the Pharisees went forth, and
straightway took counsel with the Herodians against him, how they might
destroy him." The threat wasn't immediate in the first place; the Pharisees
were consulting with the ruling party -- the guys who had Rome's authority
over life and death -- to see about bringing a charge. There wasn't
anything for Jesus to run from yet, and no danger as yet to be avoided,
because "due process" was taking place!

I note:

The cite from Luke is rather silly: After saying this, Jesus
doesn't leave for Jerusalem until much later (17:11)! Either
Jesus wasn't running, or the threat wasn't real!

Our critic replies:

Holding seems to think that the teaching events from Lk 13 to 17
all happened in the same place, but Lk 13:22 clearly says that
"Jesus went through the towns and villages, teaching as he made
his way to Jerusalem". The escape that Jesus announces in Lk
13:33 presumably takes place immediately, and the unnamed village
he enters in 17:12 cannot be assumed to be the very next leg of
his travels.

Our critic is trying to save his behind again: Luke 13:22 is of no use in
this context, referring to a time chronologically before the events of
13:30 and beyond. This "presumably" is a construct of the critic to save
his bacon, and a natural reading of the text does make this indeed the very
next leg of Jesus' travels. For one who mumbles about "embellishing" to
shore up faith, this is a remarkable hypocrisy!

I say, "That leaves John 7:1, but then in the very next few verses, Jesus
does go to Jerusalem!" Our critic replies:

John 7:1-10 says Jesus "went around" in Galilee to avoid the
danger in Judea, and didn't consider going to Judea until a feast
some unspecified amount of time later. He tells his brothers that
his time "has not yet come" and decides to stay in Galilee
because he is "hated". He then inexplicably changes his mind and
goes to Jerusalem "not publicly, but in secret" (Jn 7:10). The
mere reciting of these facts is sufficient to rebut Holding's
attempt to discount this instance of Jesus avoiding danger.

The "went around" reference is in verse 1, but it is still of no worth to
our critic -- Jesus still goes to Jerusalem ("inexplicably" or otherwise),
and though he indeed begins by going up in secret, "Now about the midst of
the feast Jesus went up into the temple, and taught."! If this is
danger-avoidance, I suppose Osama bin Laden would have done better to
escape detection by waiting a bit in Tora Bora, taking a boat to the US,
then sitting on the steps of the Capitol in Washington!

Now here's a funny comment:

Someone with the firm conviction of his own divine omnipotence
should not have to avoid danger so many times that his disciples
can't help but report such instances in gospels proclaiming his
divinity.

Indeed! Well, so let's say we have a firm conviction of divinity; what does
our critic want Jesus to do? Wait until the bad guys show up, then
teleport? (Isn't that running too?) Zap them into ashes? (I can hear the
"arguments by outrage" now; and more reasons given for not believing the
gospels because they report miracles; and more hostility from the ruling
priesthood; and hey, isn't that just another form of running away?! Jesus'
departure in such situations is just as much taken for the good of his
enemies!) Freeze them in the space-time continuum? Perform a magic show? If
we're going to play this game, let's at least come up with rational
alternatives!

Our critic admits that "Jesus no doubt at other times faced dangers, and in
the end he bravely chose not to avoid his crucifixion." And in a real sense
we do agree that discretion kept Jesus alive in a few cases, as indeed it
keeps all people alive and safe even today. But again, what is the
alternative, other than blasting people to ashes or making an
all-to-obvious miraculous effort that would have drawn even more
intervention?

I note that the critic still offered no connection to a "time" when things
would be right. The critic quotes John 7:6 and Luke 13:33, and notes Matt.
26:18 and Luke 9:51, but these again are instances where, immediately
after, Jesus went to place himself in the "danger zone" or already was in
the zone. There is no connection with Jesus "hiding" because it is not his
time, and citing places where Jesus' refers to his "time" in other,
non-threatening contexts (at the wedding in Cana, which likely refers to
the "time" when ministry would begin, not when Jesus would face death)
doesn't make the case.

On the subject of Jesus' ministry being a failure, I noted:

The prospective actions of a would-be Messiah would involve a
VERY high "attempt to failure ratio" if the claimant didn't
actually have the goods! Enough failed healings, enough teachings
offending the local Pharisees, enough of any risk, and you're
Messianic campaign is doomed to mass failure of the sort that
doesn't satisfy the problem of Christian origins!

To this our critic simply replies:

The mere existence of Christianity hardly proves that Jesus was
divine, and we of course can hardly expect the gospels to record
Jesus's failures. Even so, the gospels do admit that Jesus "could
not do any miracles" in his hometown (Mk 6:5, Lk 4:24), at times
was considered mad by his family (Mk 3:21) and other Jews (Jn
10:20), and often was reluctant or evasive when asked to
demonstrate his powers.

This is apparently the best that can be done: just dismiss the complex
social factors involved; just fill in the gaps by supposing that failures
weren't recorded (and that no opponents made light of this, and that it
managed to be something that wasn't recorded in the polemical record; when,
to the contrary, all polemical responses to Christianity assume that Jesus
was capable of and proficient with miraculous power); pull the old Mark 6:5
cite (of which, as I noted against Jeff Lowder recently, "But does the
passage mean he couldn't do miracles, or that he wouldn't because of the
lack of people's faith? The word used here for 'could' (dunamai) offers no
clues, and the passage does not explain the 'why' of the issue, other than
the hint of unbelief -- no cause-effect is offered, and nowhere else is
there a possibility of unbelief being an effective cause of Jesus'
miraculous power not being expressed. There is an obvious connection
between faith and healing (cf. Mark 9:24) but it would seem more likely to
be one in which "lack of faith limits the reception of help readily
available from Jesus." [Witherington, Mark commentary, 195]; and Luke 4:24
doesn't say anything about not doing miracles!); pull out polemical
evaluations of madness by others who aren't trained psychologists or
psychiatrists (while also ignoring the overwhelmingly contrary opinion; cf.
John 10:21!); and vaguely generalize (OK, let's name all those places where
Jesus "often was reluctant or evasive when asked to demonstrate his powers"
-- the only place like this that might work, where Jesus did not indeed go
on to use his powers, is the "sign from heaven" thing above, which we have
already noted does not apply!)

Our critic next tries to excuse away his inability to defend his positions
by appealing yet again to "professional secular scholarship." In other
words, I'll stay ignorant and dependent on others and you'll live with it!

On my piece on the Olivet discourse, our critic merely states, in extremely
brief summary, what I argue (as if by mere description of three sentences,
and exposure, it is shown to be ridiculous), and complains that I didn't
explain Matt. 24:34, obviously not wanting his readers to know that I
stated quite clearly that the project was in progress. Matt. 24:30, where
the "Son of Man in the clouds" image first appears, is now covered in the
essay and we encourage our critic to read it and offer no response as with
these others.

I say:

Our critic doesn't provide examples in reply, but makes light of
my alleged "lack of knowledge" above on Jesus "hiding," then says
he's "not inclined to take [my] word for it that no passages in
Josephus can substantiate Carrier's statement."

Our critic replies first:

Holding again shows an inability to be trusted with quotation
marks. I never said "lack of knowledge", but rather an "inability
to find and report all the relevant passages in his own sacred
gospels". And again, it was Holding who changed my "avoid danger"
formulation to his own misquoted strawman "hiding".

Well, when you can't argue facts, nitpick. The quote marks are not used to
indicate quotes; they are used to indicate that the phrase in question is
taken to be a false assumption; i.e., it is the same as saying "supposed
lack of knowledge" -- and trying to spin out the phrases so that they say
something different isn't going to work.

I say:

That's it, don't do your own research, but it's not Carrier vs.
Holding, it's Carrier vs. J. C. O'Neill, author of Who Did Jesus
Think He Was?, my source for the information.

The nitpick replies:

When I cite Carrier I'm not "doing my own research", but just
what is Holding doing when he cites O'Neill?

What I'm doing is citing someone who says that there are no references in
Josephus of this sort, vs. someone who claims that there are, and gives no
quotations to prove it. My original challenge was against our critic
quoting Carrier, and my reply was that nothing in Josephus backs Carrier
up. Our critic should take this as a signal to either a) get Carrier to
provide quotes or b) get Josephus himself and look them up. He did neither;
instead he just engaged in a non-response by throwing in his lot with
Carrier. This is what I mean by "not doing your own research" -- it is in
the context of a challenge to put up or shut up. But I have the works of
Josephus sitting at my feet as I type this -- let's hear some of those
cites, then, where Josephus records someone saying he is the Messiah!

But I doubt if this will happen. Our critic again bows the knee to Carrier,
even over O'Neill, and says, "When I noted the same absence in the oldest

gospel Mark, Holding earlier responded with tortured arguments why the
claim should nevertheless be imputed from Jesus' other alleged pretensions

of divinity. Holding seems to hold a double-standard here." There is no
such thing; each of the claims and actions were clear, and none of them
match anything found in Josephus. It's easier to throw sound bites than
analyze in-depth and read the source material, isn't it?

I write:

I am also referring to Jesus' other divine claims, such as those
we list in Mark above, and the claim to be God's Wisdom. Does
Carrier have any candidates who made that claim?

Response:

In the logically possible world with no Jesus, Holding seems to
think it somehow contrary to the laws of physics that any
carpenter from Nazareth could utter words that could be
remembered as the things the gospels report Jesus saying. The
recorded sayings of Jesus are certainly unique and unparalleled
in a certain sense, but not enough to justify the conclusion that
if they were not true then no human could have succeeded in
uttering them.

Well, it looks mainly like a non-answer, but also perhaps another desperate
and uninformed appeal. It's really too short on specifics for comment, but
if it is being suggested that people would not remember sayings or claims
of Jesus, our critic needs to study ancient oral tradiiton and memorization
processes, another surd in his social equation he hasn't accounted for, and
explain why someone claiming to be Wisdom, Messiah, etc. would not be
remembered adequately as this would be the sort of offensive and startling
event that would transfix itself in a Jewish memory for perpetuity,
especially in the context of miraculous acts and a group of disciples
following. It would be akin, if I may use the scumbag example, to Osama bin
Laden standing in the middle of Washington and yelling that he was guilty
of all charges and that all non-Muslims were a bunch of %^$*$^*s. For
anyone present, it would be profoundly offensive, deeply distressing,
difficult to swallow, and impossible to forget. The bit about "no human
could have succeeded in uttering them" is gobbledygook as it is written and
needs an application to make sense. Let's concentrate, folks.

------------------------------

On the validity of the Trilemma, I made the point that our critic does
little more than throw out uncertainties to make a skeptical audience
happy. In reply our critic simply pours on the assurance: "Now Holding

simply stamps his foot and demands to see some 'proving', without himself

bothering to say why we should think my answer is wrong." He wants "proofs"
on these issues:

* How does Holding know that nothing in the gospels misinterprets what
the historical Jesus said?
* How does Holding know that nothing in the gospels is an exaggeration
or rationalization?
* How does Holding know that there could not possibly have been any
delusion or deception involved in the creation of the stories that
ended up being recorded in the gospels?

This is all very nice, but the same questions, and those of lesser scale
expressing doubt, could be said of any historical record at all and permit
any critic with an agenda to spin-doctor any historical personage into any
mold desired. Critics who come up with inventive theories to explain why
Shakespeare didn't write his plays, or Marco Polo didn't go to China, are
certainly capable of spinning elaborate fantasies about why they are right
and documents should not be given the benefit of the doubt, but what it all
comes down to is, "I assume I am right and everyone else is wrong, and if I
want to go against what is written, I don't have to prove anything!" It is
wrong to say that "the burden of proof does not fall completely on any one
side." -- it falls not completely, no, but very heavily on the critic
claiming doubt. And our critic is far from fulfilling his pledge in this
matter, offering only begged questions and hurled elephants, and has indeed
bungled so much data and refused to answer so many issues that it is
doubtful if he ever will, or can.

So it is that the critic is left trying to spin out a victory, claiming
that I am "unwilling to deal with" his alleged case for Jesus as a
moderately deluded faith-healer and that he thinks I haven't done the job.
I may as well be unwilling to deal with the case for Jesus making a trip to
India as a child or being a former sandal salesman. As the saying goes, if
you stop beating a dead horse, he'll eventually get up and claim to have
crossed the finish ahead of you! And as I have noted, skeptics are like the
knight in Monty Python who, shorn of his limbs, avers, "Tis only a flesh
wound!"

------------------------------

On standards of evidence, I pointed to the Lincoln bios, and our critic
pulls out the expected irrelevancies, of which we have responses:

* "Which Lincoln biographies are touted as the divinely inspired word of
a deity?" It doesn't matter what they are "touted as"; even treating
them as human records is enough.
* "Which Lincoln biographies give contradictory geneologies in trying to
demonstrate his royal lineage?" This old canard has been answered by
Glenn Miller here -- as if our critic doesn't know this -- and we
would add the observation of Wilson, "In any given society,
genealogies may function in more than one of the three spheres...it
would be possible for a society to have a number of apparently
conflicting genealogies, each of which could be considered accurate in
terms of its function." [I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood,
213] If as seems likely from it's pedagogical structure, Matthew's
list was offered for a reason different from that of Luke's,
contradiction between the two is of no moment in terms of this
discussion.
* "Which Lincoln biographies give contradictory information for
Lincoln's birth year?" The Gospels don't do this; let's have our
critic explain how this is so. I have a suspicion that it rests in the
old census canard.
* "Which Lincoln biographies seem to switch Lincoln's birthplace in a
transparent attempt to make Lincoln fulfill a prophecy?" This "seem
to" is nonsense; this is our critic going back to elephant-hurling
again because he can't answer the argument. However, if he has a good
look at the Lincoln bios, he will see plenty of "glaring
contradictions" just as serious and as painful as those alleged in the
Gospels.
* "Which Lincoln biographies omit events as spectacular and memorable as

the resurrection appearances (missing in original Mark), the Easter
zombies swarming Jerusalem (only in Mat 27:53), or the Easter darkness

"over all the earth" (omitted in John)?" "Spectacular and memorable,"
again, is in the eye of the beholder, and also has to do with how many
beholders there were, what kind of literary constraints they were
under (scroll length, for example; in the case of Mark, the evidence
is that the ending is lost; see here), their audience (Only Matthew's
audience would appreciate the risen saints, not a "swarm" by any
description, since no number is given; those outside of Jerusalem and
Judaism would find additional resurrections a stumbling-block; see
also here); the one about John is funny, since it is a case of three
saying "yes" and one offering no comment -- the problem was supposed
to be that only one did mention something, but if, as evidence
indicates, John was written to complement Mark anyway, he doesn't need
to rehash all of that unless he has a specific purpose!). The
elephants trumpet loudly, but they are no bigger than mice. It's no
more than the same old assumption against the miraculous, combined
with the usual ignorance of the relevant scholarly literature.

I say of secular histories, "they are always written with some sort of
point of view to pose; John at least is straightforward in his intent!" Our
critic trumpets back:

Holding is careful here not to claim that secular histories, even
those with a "point of view", should be given precisely the same
benefit of the doubt as religious scriptures written to promote a
brand of divine salvation.

Am I that careful? Let me get "careless" (quotes of supposition) then:
Secular histories, even those with a "point of view", should be given

precisely the same benefit of the doubt as religious scriptures written to

promote a brand of divine salvation. They deserve to be weighed,
considered, compared and factored. Satisfied? Now our critic needs to stop
taking victories from silences, badly though he needs them; it is hard to
drink the champagne with egg on your face. If he'd like to start with
examples, I suggest some of the events recorded in Suetonius' Twelve
Caesars.

I asked:

And may we ask, if indeed there was good news such as this to
report, how would our critic expect John or others to report it
without being accused of having an agenda to the point of
fabrication?!? I smell the circular reasoning of a skeptic behind
this complaint!)

In response our critic releases another torrent of mumbo-jumbo to impress
readers into thinking he knows more than he does:

Fabrication (and exaggeration and misinterpretation) should of
course *never* be assumed not to be possible, but instead should
only be concluded based on factors like background plausibility,
external objective confirmation, internal consistency,
spatiotemporal proximity to the reported events, evidence of
contemporary skeptical cross-examination, absence of plausible
alternative explanations, etc. All of these factors tend to argue
against the complete veracity of the gospel accounts.

Well, we'll wait then for our critic to stick his other foot in his mouth
explaining how "all of these factors" apply to the Gospels, and we'll
expect him to do it in an informed way and do it right, with full
comparisons to secular literature, from the same period if possible. Get on
it! I have yet to see any skeptic do this, but maybe there will be a first
time!

But maybe not. Regarding my request to offer a datihg of the Gospels, based
on crieria applied also to a secular document like Tacitus' Annals, our
critic merely appeals yet again to "secular scholarly consensus" and leaves
it alone. No, there will be no legwork from this skeptic: There must be a
Scooby Doo marathon on the Cartoon Network!

Our critic then naively saus, "There is an immense difference between

contemporary first-hand quotes and the oral tradition of a Jesus movement
struggling after the crucifixion to recollect and interpret his words."

Struggling to recollect? Our critic needs, again, that item on oral
tradition linked above. There would be neither struggles nor problems in
recollection, and misinterpretation is an extreme unlikelihood that our
critic will need to argue on a case basis, not just throw in the air. We
are asked, "If a text were discovered that repeated the gospels' quotes of

Jesus but were written during his ministry or by Jesus himself, would
Holding really claim that it gives us no more confidence that we know what

Jesus really said?" I would claim that it gives us more confidence, yes --
but that does not mean that the present confidence is not sufficient in
itself. It would be like having a second bucket of chicken when you now
have one, and are only hungry for a leg and a thigh.

------------------------------

On the divinity claims of Jesus. Other than picking nits and alluding again
to Matthew's "swarm of zombies" (actual quote), and repeating and
summarizing previous arguments already refuted or refuted above, we get to
a place where our critic replies to my request for "a systematic study of
all of the claims of Jesus...and explain[ing] their "non-divinity"

interpretation plausibly within the proper socio-religious context, and

then explain[ing] how the misunderstandings came about." Don't expect it.
In order:

* Jesus "associated himself with the Wisdom of God". Our critic replies
to my enormous article on this subject (or has he even read it?) by
saying, "Holding makes tortured arguments that this implies divinity,

but it is easy to imagine that a carpenter unsure of his outright
divinity might choose instead to emphasize his special

divinely-inspired knowledge of God's Wisdom." Apparently my article
was indeed unread; the claims made by Jesus equate with being God's
Wisdom -- a divine figure which was an effulgence of the Almighty God
-- not merely having knowledge of God's Wisdom. This is merely hayseed
thrown in the air by someone either not competent to, or unwilling to,
deal with the texts.
* Jesus called himself the "son of man". Our critics says only, "Holding

admits that this 'title was intended to be mysterious', and thus it
cannot confirm that the carpenter from Nazareth believed himself to be

an omnipotent omniscient deity." The "admission" (supposed quotes) is
that the title was meant to be mysterious during the ministry of
Jesus, but as anyone who bothers to read the entire article will see,
it was still used in coordination with other claims to divinity, and
received its consummation at the trial of Jesus where explicit
identification was made with the divine figure in Daniel 7. Our critic
fails utterly with this sound bite to explain, then, how this title
was misunderstood.
* Jesus called God "abba" (father). We are told: "Christian theology

notwithstanding, this could simply have been a claim to be a child of

God." "Could have been" is not enough! There is no evidence of abba
being used by Jews to address God; our critic needs to put up or else
shut up, not throw around unsubstantiated speculations to shore up his
predetermined view!
* Jesus assumed the authority to contradict or modify prior revelation.

"That could simply mean Jesus believed he had new superceding

revelation." Same thing -- "could simply mean" is not enough! This
needs to be addressed within the proper socio-historial context, in
which the ability to contradict or modify existing revelation from God
required, from a human, a "thus sayeth the Lord" -- not merely an "I
say unto you"!

* Misc. claims -- in this category, "Jesus says (Mt 7:21ff) he will be
addressed in heaven as "Lord"; Jesus indicated (Mt 11:27) an exclusive
father-son relationship with God; Jesus claimed (Mt 9:2) the ability
to forgive sins; Jesus affirmed to the high priest that he is the
Christ; Jesus said (Mt 23:34) he sends prophets. I would now regard
the second as not as strong, but the rest remain, and all our critic
can do is play the same "could be" game without any critical
examination of the relevant Jewish contexts. Our critic has tried and
failed with extensive misery attached.
* And now, I'm going to add one more social surd to our critics'
equation to make his homework harder. All along it has been presumed
by our critic that we can evaluate Jesus in terms of Western society
and psychology. This is countermanded by the vast difference in
perceptions concerning relationships in the ancient world (see here
for relevant material). The ancient world was not individualistic, but
group-oriented. Malina and Neyrey explain in Portraits of Paul that
group-oriented persons:

...internalize and make their own what others say, do, and
think about them because they deem it necessary , if they
are to be human beings, to live out the expectations of
others. Such persons need to test this interrelatedness,
which draws attention away from their own egos and toward
the demands and expectations of others who can grant or
withhold reputation or honor. Group-oriented persons rely on
others to tell them who they are ("Who do people say that I
am?" Mark 8:27). Consequently, from this perspective, modern
questions of "consciousness" (did Jesus know he was God? did
Jesus have faith?...) make no sense. For such questions are
posited with the freight of the individualistically oriented
persons in mind, and not in terms of the group-oriented
persons of antiquity, who depend on others to tell them who
they are, what is expected of them, and where they fit.

What this means is that suggestions of "growing delusions of godhood"
are insufficient from the get-go. If Jesus was delusional, it would
not matter in the least because in a group-oriented society, you
needed the support and endorsement of others to support your identity.
A merely human Jesus could not have fostered these delusions on his
own, and kept going; those around him had to believe it as well, and
by extension, had to have reason to believe it or else appear to
believe it. What this means is that we have further proof that Jesus
must have provided convincing proofs of his power and authority to
maintain a following, and for a movement to have started and survived
well beyond him. A delusional Jesus would have had to live up to the
expectations of others and would have been abandoned at the first sign
of failure.

It's close to wrap-up time. In response to my point that our critic begs
the question of there being no miracles, it is said rather, it "is Holding

himself who is 'begging the question' by assuming the truth of the miracle
reports in order to argue that Jesus should have known from his miraculous

powers that he was divine!" As noted above, such proof is not my burden; it
is that of the doubter. Next our critic tries to explain away Jesus walking
on water by saying:

But note that water can appear to be walked on if one
misapprehends its depth, as seems possible given that it was
night and Jesus was initially mistaken for a ghost.

The old "Jesus was walking in the shallows" gig is a popular one with
skeptics, but there are a few problems with it (unless we resort, as I am
sure they will, to further supposition of "embellishment"):

Matthew 14:24 But the ship was now in the midst of the sea,
tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth
watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And
when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were
troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.
But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer;
it is I; be not afraid.

Mark 6:47 And when even was come, the ship was in the midst of
the sea, and he alone on the land.

As noted, the Sea of Galilee is a relative puddle, but it is 4 by 7 miles,
and it does get as deep as 150 feet. Not much, but also not much room for
misapprehending depth when one is in the midst of this sea (not near the
shoreline), where the water is at least deep enough to be worried about a
ship being swamped, night or no night. The skeptics will have to embellish
this one a lot more for us to even think about buying this thesis.

No, I don't expect skeptics to take the Biblical claims as plausible in any

event. Our critic then says:

Holding's separate essay on divinity claims says that "the direct
claim 'I am God' [..] would have been a little too confusing to
Jesus' hearers" (as opposed to the non-confusing notion of the
Trinity, Jesus' dual nature, etc.!). Holding tries to have it
both ways -- he says that a clear claim to divinity would confuse
Jesus' hearers, and then he presents tortured arguments to show
that Jesus' enigmatic sayings constitute a clear claim to
divinity.

These are a few more elephants from the herd -- there is nothing
"confusing" (real quote) about the Trinity, or about the dual nature,
except to uneducated skeptics. I have said nothing about a "clear claim"; I
have referred to a direct claim, and as shown in the item on Wisdom (which
our critic refuses to, or can't, read), a claim like "I am God!" would have
been techinically inaccurate and imprecise.

Holding says "the concept of Jesus as divine quite definitely
existed within, at the very least, a decade of the crucifixion,
and therefore, was likely to have been asserted before His death
by Jesus Himself". But was it asserted by Jesus equally firmly
throughout his ministry? Was it in no way strengthened by
post-crucifixion events like Paul's vision on the road to
Damascus?

Not at all, and if anything, one finds a lesser variety of Christological
titles in the works of Paul and the rest of the NT. Of course, one way or
another, we expect skeptics will spin this into some sort of evolutionary
scenario, but that's no more than we would expect.

Our critic then repeats earlier questions, and adds one more:

Why would the disciples, who allegedly saw Jesus claim and
*demonstrate* his divinity and predict his own resurrection,
abandon him at his well-anticipated execution?

What this has to do with proof related to Jesus, I cannot say. Presumably
our critic, like Farrell Till, thinks with perfect hindsight that he,
unlike the disciples, would have stuck around to be arrested and beaten by
the goon squad from the high priest and crucified by the Romans. Few people
have ever been so dedicated to a principle enough to risk their skin; at
the least we would argue that it took much more before Peter and Co. were
ready for that. As for our critic, talk is cheap!

On my matter of Jesus quoting Ps. 22, and thereby alluding to the whole of
it, including the triumphant ending, our critic again has no answer other
than the makeshift game:

Holding doesn't even try to explain what alternative words a
crucified Jewish carpenter could have used to actually indicate
despair. Perhaps Holding thinks a truly despairing Jesus would
have said "why have you forsaken me -- and no, I'm not just
quoting a psalm".

Okay, how about these (translated from the Aramaic):

* "God, you're a moron! Get me off this cross!"
* "I knew I shouldn't have trusted in you, Yahweh!"
* "&%**$@#(&!"

I'm being facetious, but the point is made: There were more than enough
exclamative options for Jesus without quoting and alluding to Ps. 22, a
portion of the sacred scriptures recited in the synaogue and well known to
end on a note of triumph. Our skeptic is desperate and trying to fudge
himself out of an embarrassing argument. The best he can do otherwise is
suggest that Jesus' "imprecisely-remembered words" were cast into the form
of the Psalm, which begs the question of what on earth he did say that
could have been mistakenly remembered as the distinctive first line of Ps.
22. But again, this is the best the skeptic can do. If needed they will say
that Jesus actually said, "Red Rover, Red Rover, let Pilate come over."

Our critic wants "details or issues" on Lazarus; he has some of them above.
Beyond that he can explain to us why there is no evidence that such
fantastic claims were never disputed, and why instead the indication in all
relevant records is that yes, Jesus was a worker of miracles; they were
just attributable to him being a trained sorceror. Ancient people, despite
our critic's bigotry, were no more ready to accept wild claims that we are;
and the degree of acceptance was, by every evidence, proportionate to the
outlandishness and demand quotient of the claim. Richard Carrier is fond of
making comparisons to fortune tellers and the like, but this is miles away
from asking someone to believe that a man (from a people highly regarded as
superstitious, no less) raised someone who had been dead for four days or
more, and then asking you to trust this same man with your eternal fate. If
we did not live beyond the time when detailed investigation was possible,
and had any sort of interest one way or the other and not a bias dismissing
the story out of hand, we would look into it too.

But our critic does think ancient people were stupid, certainly not as
smart as he is, and tries to backpedal, saying, "I didn't characterize 'the
ancients', I characterized 'ancient times'." ("I didn't characterize people
who lived in the ghetto, I characterized the ghetto!") He adds: "Holding

dares not to assert that there is now as much superstition and ignorance as

there was in ancient times." Don't I? Silence is golden: I hereby assert

that there is now as much superstition and ignorance as there was in

ancient times. Of course we prefer horoscopes and wearing lucky socks to
going to the temple of Asclepius, but what we lack in scale we make up for
in volume. The bigot remains at large and the white sheet still fits.

In closing, our critic responds to my question, "what kind of proof would

be acceptable, not shrugged off as fabrication and not taken as too

miraculous to be believed?!?", with this list. The Gospels he says could:

* "be more first-hand and contemporanous to the events" -- we have shown
elsewhere that there is absolutely no reason why Matthew and John
don't qualify here, and there is no reason why Luke and Mark should be
dissed on these grounds. Let the critic apply this rather to other
ancient documents and treat the Gospels fairly.

* "be more internally consistent, especially about Jesus' geneology,

birth, ministry chronology, and resurrection appearances" -- we have
addressed this matter above, with references to essays linked --
again, how about a comparison to parallel accounts in Josephus, or
elsewhere? Will our critic also place more stringent demands on those
in order not to shrug them off?
* "describe a Jesus who never avoids danger" -- as noted above, this
really doesn't happen much if at all, and it first needs to be
explained what the alternative would be. Pharisee ashes?
Teleportation?
* "describe a Jesus able to work hometown miracles" -- see above

* "describe a Jesus whose family never thought him 'mad', and who were
his most ardent believers instead of the object of his apparent

resentment" -- well, that's what they became after the resurrection,
what more does this man want?!?

* "describe a Jesus more self-differentiated from the primitive tribal

deity of the Hebrew Torah" -- there's that white sheet flying around
again; and this is the first time this is pulled up -- why is this a
reason for disbelief, other than a begged question concerning, now,
the Old Testament?

* "describe a Jesus more interested in universal salvation than unjust

eternal punishment" -- this is a weird one; of course it should be
noted that our critic has this "thing" about eternal punishment being
unjust; when I made the point elsewhere that eternal punishment wasn't
unjust at all, as the reward for offense against infinite holiness,
all he could do was call that position names. But anyways, how about a
chart showing that Jesus' interests were tipped that way, and
explaining why the percentages are skewed?

* "describe miracles that an omniscient deity would know were not

subject to naturalistic explanations." -- "An evil and adulterous
generation seeketh after a sign!" It's hard to see how this would
help, since the skeptics have a litany of ready-made excuses for us:
"It was an embellishment," "that's not what actually happened," "there
was an elephant behind the curtain," etc. Find me a miracle that can't
be explained away by our skeptic in the 21st century.

But our critic proves that will never happen, as he goes on to pile even
more absurd demands on the Gospels and expresses yet more bigotry: "There

would still need to be some external objective confirmation (e.g. by
precise prophecies of scientific or historical developments, or through
physical evidence of Easter miracles), and overall background plausibility
that a omniscient omnibenevolent deity would be so concerned with ancient

Palestine and with the fertility problems of the nomad Abraham." As for the
latter, our critic lacks scale: Little things like the fertility of one man
can be of concern in a larger picture. One may as well suggest that there
would have been no concern had there been infertility suffered by the
parents of Martin Luther King, Ludwig van Beethoven, or Karl Marx. As for
the former, the evidence is more than sufficient as it stands -- and our
critic's desperate attempts to get around it prove well enough that the
problem is not just one of the head, but also the heart!

[Brian Holtz]

Holding's Trilemma argument -- that Jesus was liar, lunatic, or lord --

ignores a fourth possibility: faith-healer and apocalyptic preacher whose

deluded belief in his importance was strengthened in the months leading up
to his anticipated execution and was misinterpreted and exaggerated
afterwards.

[Holding, the issuer of his so-called "chicken challenge", is again
apparently too "chicken" to dare name me or let his readers see my unedited
arguments. I by contrast have no fear of anyone reading him in all his
tedious and ineffectual detail. I am continuing to post our entire debate
to Usenet, and it is available through Google Groups from links at
http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/Trilemma.html.]

This article has the following sections:

* Jesus' psychology
* Jesus' miracles
* Jesus avoiding danger
* Jesus' failed ministry
* Trilemma validity
* Standards of evidence
* Jesus' divinity claims
* Missing evidence for Christianity

JESUS' PSYCHOLOGY

Holding writes:

our critic offers no proof that the diagnosis of ["the Christ
complex"] is "obsolete."

It's worse than obsolete. A tenured psychology professor assures me it is
not in the APA's DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders) and that it was never in any previous edition either.

[Schizophrenics exhibit] superiority, unusual powers, divine
missions, and identification with historical personalities -- but

no reference at all to identification with divinity.

As demonstrated earlier (and below), the gospel evidence makes it plausible
that Jesus did not always (or perhaps ever) fully believe himself to be
God. Holding here desperately grasps at the straw of "identification with
divinity" as a differential diagnosis against schizophrenia. No such
differential diagnosis is recognized by the American Psychiatric
Association. Indeed, Holding here simply ignores (but later quotes!) my
source article listing claims "that they were God or Jesus Christ" (i.e.
divine) as one of the relevant major forms of delusional grandiosity.

Moreover, the article provides absolutely no evidence of this or
any condition as something that slowly evolves

Holding here ignores (while later quoting!) the Britannica statement that
the schizophrenic "manifests an insidious and gradual reduction in his
external relations and interests". I challenge Holding to cite any
authority saying schizophrenia is more likely to have sudden onset than to
develop over time.

persons so afflicted "are generally devoid of empathy for others"

(Jesus is not shown in the Gospels to fit this condition[...] the

condition will "result in behaviors neurotically/delusionally
believed to be altruistic when the opposite applies as was the
case for Christians during the Inquisition." (Where's an example
of this for Jesus?)

Holding here exhibits an inability to cite source material in context. The
article says these grandiosities

may range from being associated with highly altruistic save the
world attributes (including the belief that one is a save the
world individual such as Jesus) to being egocentric or
narcissistic, and therefore self-serving. The latter
grandiosities are usually socially defined and relativistic in
nature, as was the murderous high self-esteem producing
psychopathic grandiosity delusion manifested by the Nazis and by
most white people over the last 500 years. These grandiosities
are generally devoid of empathy for others [..] In this section,
however, only the altruistic related grandiosities will be
addressed [..]

Thus, "devoid of empathy" and "when the opposite applies" clearly refer not
to altruistic grandiosity but narcissistic grandiosity.

...three major forms of grandiosity associated with
"paranoid psychoses:" (1) "grandiose identity" (such as

claiming "that they were God or Jesus Christ," [..] and

hallucinations and/or hearing voices may be present.
(2) "grandiose role" (such a believing that one has a
"save the world" mission or mandate), and (3)

"grandiose ability" [..]

Of course, as I noted long ago, and have noted time and time
again, a person with such delusions would inevitably suffer
failure to a considerable extent

So, when presented with a psychological disorder whose diagnostic criteria
match so well the reported behaviors of Jesus, Holding does not try to
dispute the diagnostic match, but instead merely retreats to his earlier
claim that Jesus if truly delusional would have suffered failures. I of
course have already shown that Jesus indeed did suffer failures (see the
section on miracles, below).

one would expect an increase in mental
derangement resulting in a sliding scale of
claims; yet this is not what we see at all --
the claims of Jesus are the same, and just as

clear, from the beginning of his ministry to

the end. The idea of a "growing delusion" is
a fantasy that is unsupported by any of the
data in the Gospels.

While any one gospel would have tried to show Jesus's

claims as consistent throughout his ministry, the fact
remains that from the earliest gospel (Mark) to the

latest (John) there is a discernible progression in the

elaborateness of the gospel accounts of Jesus's
divinity claims, miracles, and resurrection
appearances.

1) the implication that the consistency is a fabrication of the
Gospel writers

As Holding here simply repeats his strawman "fabrication" argument, it
suffices to repeat my earlier refutation of it: the gospels are probably
the result of not necessarily fabrication, but of some combination of
misinterpretation, exaggeration, rationalization, delusion, and deception
(of, if not by, the authors' sources).

2) the idea that Mark's gospel offers a Jesus with a lesser
degree of claim to divinity, which we have already shown to be
untrue,

On the contrary, Holding earlier agreed with me that Jesus in Mark "is
reluctant for his special nature to be known" when he went on to say "in
spite of this, the special nature did get known".

and which our critic makes no effort to refute (though see more
on divine claims below

In other words, I make "no effort" except for the point-by-point rebuttal
"below"! Holding's parenthetical comment is a transparent fig leaf over a
lie that he was too lazy to edit out of his essay.

3) the idea that Mark was the first gospel, and John the latest;
this point I addressed by giving a link to my study on the
Q/Marcan priority thesis (which, as predicted, our critic
ignored)

The idea that Mark is not earlier than John is a dead meme. As Holding says
on his web site: "Typically, there is no way to withdraw gracefully from
any conversation with them, without it being assumed that your withdrawal
means victory for their side. You have given up because you have lost - not
because you have realized that you are beating a dead horse." If Holding
thinks that this meme isn't dead, he should explain why it's considered
dead by reference works like the Britannica and Columbia encyclopedias,
which are notoriously hesitant to take sides in any live controversy.

our critic has now added a claim of "discernible progression"
with regards to miracles and resurrection appearances, also a
claim entirely without basis and given no support.

Several examples are in section 1.2.2. (Philosophy / Metaphysics /
Theology) of my book:

In order of writing, the gospel accounts of Jesus' resurrected appearances
become increasingly elaborate. Original Mark claims an empty tomb but
describes no appearances. Matthew says simply that the two Marys and later
the Eleven "saw him" but "some were dubious". The Longer Ending of Mark
says Jesus appeared "in a different form" to two disciples, and simply
"appeared" to the Eleven. Luke elaborates on both of these episodes,
building the latter into an account that approaches the full Doubting
Thomas story finally told in John.

In the earliest gospel (Mark), Jesus never calls himself Christ/Messiah
("anointed"), is reluctant for his special nature to be known, and (as he
does in Matthew) despairs on the cross. (By contrast, in the later Luke and
John, Jesus asserts he is Christ, and confidently assures a co-crucified
criminal of their impending ascension.)

in response to my note that our critic's arguments are "not
supported by our critic in terms of providing a parallel in
psychology," our critic pulls up -- hold your breath! -- and
article from the Britannica encyclopedia (that all-around great
source for third-grade papers

(Holding's desperation is revealed by his use of ad hominem.)

we want some proof of "delusions of persecution" [..] and

"unrealistic, illogical thinking" as well as hallucinations.

Jesus obviously was persecuted, but actual persecution is of course no
guarantee that one does not suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. Holding has
my argument backwards. I'm not saying that some separate evidence for
Jesus' being unrealistic and hallucinatory therefore establishes him as a
schizophrenic. Rather, I'm saying that if we reserve judgment about the
truth of the reports about Jesus, and instead can show that they are
consistent with paranoid schizophrenia, then it becomes a simple matter of
asking which explanation is more parsimonious: divine incarnation or mental
illness? Since mental illness is obviously more parsimonious than divine
incarnation, Holding's burden is to show that the reports about Jesus are
*inconsistent* with paranoid schizophrenia. Holding does not meet his
burden simply by asserting that the reports about Jesus are true!

Hallucinations and delusions, although not invariably
present, are often a conspicuous symptom in
schizophrenia. The most common hallucinations are
auditory: the patient hears (nonexistent) voices and
believes in their reality. Schizophrenics are subject
to a wide variety of delusions, including many that are
characteristically bizarre or absurd."

No record of this appears in the Gospels

Holding seems to think we are looking for gospel admissions that Jesus
hallucinated or was deluded. We are instead looking for gospel reports that
are consistent with Jesus hallucinating or being deluded. Hallucinations:
Jesus hears or sees God, Satan, demons, and angels. Delusions: Jesus
believes he is sent by God, believes he has apocalyptic foreknowledge, etc.

Jesus is reported to be just as rational and calm (if not calmer)
from one end of the Gospels to the other.

On the contrary, at the end of his ministry Jesus helped precipitate his
own execution by attacking the money-changers and their customers in the
Temple.

Critics sometimes appeal to the cleansing of the Temple; if this
prophetic demonstration reflects mental disorder of this sort,
then protestors in front of nuclear power plants and members of
PETA also need help.

This analogy fails utterly, as such protests do not get the protester
killed.

Impairment: Intellectual functioning is unimpaired.
Daily living, occupational activity, social
functioning, and quality of marriage are likely to
deteriorate during exacerbations.

Challenge here: Show that there was deterioration in Jesus' daily
living, etc. activities that would match this.

Easy. Jesus abandoned his profession of carpentry for a life of wandering
asceticism. His ministry caused strained relations with his family that
even the gospels felt obliged to report.

Predisposing Factors: [..] Celibacy, lower-than-normal
marital rates [..]

We know of no data indicating that Jesus suffered any of these
things (other than celibacy, which was also practiced by the
Qumranites and by John the Baptist)

I.e. cave-hiding fanatics and a similarly delusional preacher.

Interpersonal incompetence? Jesus had an assemblage of disciples,
taught publicly to large crowds, and showed no sign at all of
interpersonal incompetence or social isolation. The closest we
get to this is going off at untimed intervals to the mountains to
pray

In addition to his episodes of homeless hallucinatory isolation in deserts
and on mountains, the gospels report that Jesus was sometimes socially
ostracized for his unconventional associations and was at times was
considered mad by his family (Mk 3:21) and other Jews (Jn 10:20).

"Egocentrism" is a value judgment; one is usually accused of ego
when overestimating or bragging about their own importance; one
must thus assume that Jesus' claims about himself were actually
false for this statement to stand.

Holding again forgets that the Trilemma argument fails if the reports of
Jesus are consistent with mental illness.

If the Son of Man comes with heavenly power, all those
who did not believe will be killed, along with all
kings and mighty men.

If Jesus really was the Messiah, then wouldn't this be a real
threat?

Holding again forgets that the Trilemma argument fails if the reports of
Jesus are consistent with mental illness.

[Elst writes] Jesus is especially angry with his family

which tried to prevent his preaching. A number of logia
(= sayings of Jesus) are directed against the family,
and in the Gospel one cannot find any friendly word to
the family and especially to his mother.

[,,] (insert laughter here) [.. linked article ..] Haw haw! [..]

In a linked article Holding points out that Luk 14:26 should be interpreted
less harshly and more like Mat 10:37, but says nothing to contradict 1)
Elst's implication that Jesus was angry with his family and 2) Elst's
statement that Jesus has no friendly words for his family or mother.

(and same for Mark 13:11) -- Jesus is predicting that the family
will be the miscreants, not himself or the believers.

Right -- because he is bitter at his own family, who would have been his
earliest and most devoted disciples if Jesus were really divine. But they
weren't, because he wasn't.

JESUS' MIRACLES

Holding seems unaware of what hysterical blindness is,
and seems to think it must be accompanied by behavior
that in ordinary English would be called "hysterical".
Hysterical blindness is a form of what in modern
psychology is called "conversion disorder", which "is
characterized by the loss of a bodily function, for
example blindness, paralysis, or the inability to
speak.

I am unaware of no such thing. I have stated that there is,
indeed, no evidence of that sort of behavior; but that is not the
point! Without such evidence, there is no evidence of hysteria

Holding here inexplicably misses the point that conversion disorders are
not characterized by "hysteria". Rather, they are "characterized by the

loss of a bodily function, for example blindness, paralysis, or the

inability to speak". Does Holding claim "there is no evidence" of such loss
of bodily function in the gospels?

the critics also denigrate ancient people and
insult their intelligence (re the
reanimations) and call a writer a liar
outright.

Holding here confuses ignorance with lack of

intelligence, rather than rebutting my assertion that
pronouncement of death was not an exact science in
ancient times.

I'm glad that our skeptic made this point, because he puts his
foot in his mouth just a few paragraphs below

The foot and mouth here are Holding's, since below he demonstrably
mis-states my position. (The demonstration is prefaced by "Quite wrong"
below.)

Calling an element of a written story an
"embellishment" does not imply that the person who
wrote the story down is a "liar". Holding seems to
think that the entire process by which the gospel
stories were developed, repeated, and recorded can be
certified as free of any possible misunderstanding,
misinterpretation, false assumption, exaggeration, or
deception.

If an embellishment is not something false, then what the heck is
it?

Embellishment implies falsehood, but falsehood alone does not imply lying.
The scholar Holding evidently needs to look up "lie" in the dictionary.

Our critic is backpedalling again, and producing a torrent of
mumbo-jumbo in defense and to obscure the issue isn't going to do
the job.

The issue is clear: Holding made an incorrect implication from
"embellishment" to "liar". Any dictionary can show this implication to be
incorrect, and yet Holding calls it "backpedalling" to decline to subscribe
to his invalid conclusion! Hilarious.

(Again, if reportage in just one source of
any detail -- no matter how "spectacular" a
critic thinks it is, based on their own
subjective judgments -- is "sufficient
grounds to reject" an element as an
embellishment, then reams of material in
parallel accounts across the board must
likewise be "rejected."

Holding seems to make the astonishing claim that the

miraculous restoration of a severed body part is
"spectacular" only according to "subjective judgment"!

yes, it is a subjective judgment; it is based on the completely

subjective opinion that miracles have not and never will have
happened, merely because "I haven't seen one"!

If Holding calls it "completely subjective" to say that reports of miracles
are any more notable than reports of non-miracles, then he has abandoned
all pretense of trying to convince anyone except other Bible inerrantists.
Even theist philosophers acknowledge that miracles are by definition
unusual and out of the ordinary. Holding's "I haven't seen one" standard is
another of his hopeless strawmen. Holding doesn't dare enunciate the
*actual* justification: I haven't seen one, and I haven't seen a credible
report of one, and I've seen many reports of them that are non-credible,
and everything I have seen can better be explained without miracles and
miracle-workers.

The plausibility of those arguments would of course
depend on the prior plausibility of the story element
in question, the possible motivations for the one
author to include it, and the likelihood that the
remaining authors would exclude it if they believed it.
By these criteria, it is indeed plausible that the
ear-healing miracle is an embellishment, unless of
course one is otherwise convinced that Jesus could heal
miraculously. Given that all the other accounts of
Jesus' healings -- even if taken at face value -- are
susceptible to naturalistic explanations, it's not
unreasonable to consider the isolated ear-healing
detail as an embellishment.

And thus he as much admits that I am right! It has already been
decided that a healing is implausible, based on a subjective
worldview!

Judgments of improbability are *always* based on some background or prior
notion of probability -- this insight has been known since Bayes. Calling
naturalism "subjective" is just begging the question. Holding *again*
forgets that the Trilemma argument fails if the reports about Jesus can
have a self-consistent naturalistic explanation. (Such a possible
explanation does not necessarily make it the most convincing, but its very
existence invalidates the Trilemma premise that no such self-consistent
explanation is even possible.)

If our critic were honest, he would admit that he is plugging the
gaps with his own faith-paradigm of "naturalistic explanations"!

Holding here stoops to an ad hominem charge of dishonesty, and seeks to
defend what he seems to acknowledge is his epistemic crime of faith, by
fatuously saying that I too am guilty of it. He is of course flat wrong, as
he is unable to name a single proposition that I believe based on authority
and hold exempt from doubt.

Holding dares not answer or even quote my related question: "Which is more

'convenient': 1) assuming that a set of reported faith healings of possibly
psychosomatic afflictions were indeed no more than faith healings, or 2)
assuming they were miraculous?"

Was Luke alone, perhaps, of the opinion that there was adequate

reason to make a stylistic diversion and report a miracle that
was no different than, and indeed less spectacular than, other
miracles?

Since all four gospels report the ear being severed and only one reports it
being healed, saying Luke alone might have had "adequate reason" for this
"stylistic diversion" is to simply rehearse the difference rather than
explain it.

Was Malchus now a Christian, and would bringing up this incident
have endangered him if it had been reported in Matthew and Mark's
earlier works, whereas in the later or geographically removed
works of John and Luke, it would not?

This proposed explanation fails on its own account, since John does *not*
mention the miracle.

how obvious was the act of healing, and how many people noticed
it in the melee and darkness of the arrest? (It is conceivable
that only Malchus knew exactly what had happened, and that Luke
is reporting something known now only through his investigations!

The gospels are unanimous in reporting that the ear was severed and that
this was the only (and thus quite noticeable) act of violence by Jesus's
side. Holding seems to consider it "conceivable" that Malchus wore a hat
pulled down over his restored ear for the rest of his life.

Conventional faith healers treat psychosomatic
afflictions without any psychological training. Indeed,
similar to the placebo effect, the success rate of
faith healing is likely to be inversely correlated with
the psychological training of the patient and healer.

No examples of this comparable to Jesus are offered; the critic
gets no credit without exemples!

Holding is here not so bold as to deny the existence or comparability of
the treatment of psychosomatic affliction through placebo effects and
conventional faith-healing. Instead, he desperately strikes a pose of being
in some position to "deny credit" without "exemples" [sic].

Are these faith-healers able to induce a permanent cure?
(Obviously not

If Holding has any evidence that placebo effects (such as conventional
faith-healing) cannot be indefinite, he should present that evidence rather
than baldly asserting it to be obvious.

and if the parallel were to hold, then Jesus and his movement,
like the faith-healers, ought to have had a minimum following of
loyalists and practically no new converts! Do you think Peter
Popoff could start a worldwide movement that people would suffer
and die for? Do you think Ernest Angley will get out of Dayton
and buy himself a new toupee?

Holding here cites no faith-healer who claimed divine specialness and then
martyred himself, and thus his "parallel" does not "hold".

Again, it doesn't take many complaints of false healing

Again: Jesus was an incompetent-enough miracle-worker that a) the gospels
report he "could not do any miracles" in his hometown [Mk 6:5, Lk 4:24],
and b) his own family was somewhat estranged from him and considered him
mad (Mk 3:21), as opposed to being his earliest and most devout followers.

the Lazarus account gives zero symptomatic evidence to
support a diagnosis of death: no mortal wound, no algor
mortis (absence of body heat), no rigor mortis, no
livor mortis (discoloration due to blood settling), no
adipocere (waxiness due to fat hydrogenation), no
bloating, no infestation, no putrefaction, no
decomposition, no mummification-- only that he was
"sick", had "fallen asleep", was presumed dead, and had
been in a cave for four days.

it is asburd and silly to expect any writer to write with the

anticipation of our own doubt and report such details in the
first place!

I of course do not expect the gospel authors to write with the anticipation
of justifying a modern clinical pronouncement of death. But that does not
change the fact that nothing in this gospel account supports a firm
diagnosis of death, as opposed to e.g. John the Baptist's beheading, or
Judas's hanging himself.

And indeed what stops our critic, if these things were mentioned,
from dismissing them as "embellishment"?

The same thing that stops me from dismissing the severing of Malchus' ear
as embellishment: the prior plausibility of the story element in question,

the possible motivations for the one author to include it, and the
likelihood that the remaining authors would exclude it if they believed it.

Our critic doesn't define what he means by "pronouncement of

death," but if by this he means that the ancients had no way of
determining that fine point when a person crossed the line from
"alive" to "dead," then I agree. However, in each of the three
cases in question -- Jairus' daughter, the widow's son, and
Lazarus -- this is of absolutely no proven relevance

The relevance is obvious: if the ancients who created the gospel tradition
prematurely and incorrectly considered these non-dead people to be dead,
and these people later recovered from their illness, then their recoveries
are not the miraculous resurrections that the gospels say they are.

the precision of being able to pronounce death has no relevance
in any of these cases as to whether or not the people present
were competent to decide whether or not a bona fide healing or
raising had occurred!

This is obviously false, for the reason just stated above.

it would defy common sense to suggest that Lazarus' family and/or
friends did nothing to ascertain death before taking steps for
ritual observance and burying

I of course don't suggest they "did nothing"; I merely suggest that
whatever they did may have led them to an incorrectly premature diagnosis
of death.

they would easily know and recognize [..] several of the signs

above -- notably the three "mortises", but also putrefaction
(which was expected to have happened by Lazarus' sister) and
possibly dessication.

Their ability to recognize a definitely dead person as dead simply does not
imply their inability to ever consider a barely-alive person to be dead.

what this all boils down to is the same issue of assuming the
ancients were too stupid to recognize serious illness and death
when they saw it.

Quite wrong. What I instead assume is that the ancients were not always
correct in distinguishing someone barely alive from someone who has just
died.

Moreover, it is asking us to believe, not in a miracle, but that
in three separate cases, obvious signs of illness and/or death
were not present, or misinterpreted, yet death/sickness was
supposed to be there anyway; in two cases, such that funereal
procedures had been implemented,

Obviously, funereal procedures could be the very reason why nobody noticed
1) any faint signs of life, or 2) that the indications of death were
failing to develop.

and then all three just happened to come out of their
unperceived, not-actually-dead-or-sick stupor as Jesus spoke to
them.

We are told Lazarus was stuck behind a stone in a cave, and we have no
reason to believe anybody checked on him before Jesus did. It's not hard to
imagine how similar circumstances could have led to the other resurrection
stories -- if they even happened. As Carrier notes, "the scene described in
Luke 7:15 is actually identical to various stories told about famous
doctors to justify their renowned skill (Pliny Natural History 7.124,
Apuleius Metamorphoses 2.28, 3.24, 10.12 and Florida 19)".

JESUS AVOIDING DANGER

Our critic bypasses the fact that he tried to push off parallel
accounts in Matthew and Mark as two different events

I described these parallel accounts as "references to Jesus hiding himself"
and "mutually confirming reports", but it's a lie to say I ever called
those two accounts "different events".

They are nonetheless both significant as mutually
confirming reports that Jesus sometimes chose
discretion over valor.

Well, let's get to an even more basic question: What normal
person or being doesn't?

Normal persons do; omnipotent omniscient deities need not. Hence these
reports tend to support the conclusion that Jesus was (in Holding's words)
a "normal person" and not an omnipotent omniscient deity.

The Sea of Galilee is a big place, and Matthew gives no
indication of how soon Jesus was talking to the
Pharisees or whether the reported danger was still as
grave. The fact remains that these are reports of
withdrawal in the face of danger, and tortured
rationalizations based on other reported actions of
Jesus cannot change this fact.

Ha ha! The Sea of Galilee a big place? It's seven miles long and
four miles wide; that's a big place, all right! Maybe Jesus got a
sippy-straw and ducked under the water? I don't think our critic
here actually had any idea how "big" a place the Sea of Galilee
was, and moreover, is trying to pile more speculation upon his
original over-interpretation in an effort to save it.

Holding's bluster here includes nothing of substance to contradict my
assertion that a) there was danger and b) Jesus withdrew from it. Instead,
he repeats his odd motif that an effective defense of my position should
somehow be an embarrassment to me instead of to him. Holding can't even
bring himself to rebut or quote my point that in all four of the gospels,

"Jesus is admitted to have avoided danger, and that this can explain
Holding's observation that Jesus was 'lucky to get as far as the
crucifixion'."

Not that it matters: Mark 3:6 says, "And the Pharisees went

forth, and straightway took counsel with the Herodians against
him, how they might destroy him." The threat wasn't immediate in
the first place

Holding here doesn't dare quote Mark 3:7, which continues: "But Jesus
withdrew himself and his disciples to the sea" and to the (presumably
protective) midst of "a great multitude" of his followers.

After saying this, Jesus doesn't leave for
Jerusalem until much later (17:11)! Either
Jesus wasn't running, or the threat wasn't
real!

Holding seems to think that the teaching events from Lk

13 to 17 all happened in the same place, but Lk 13:22
clearly says that "Jesus went through the towns and
villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem".
The escape that Jesus announces in Lk 13:33 presumably
takes place immediately, and the unnamed village he
enters in 17:12 cannot be assumed to be the very next
leg of his travels.

Our critic is trying to save his behind again [..] This
"presumably" is a construct of the critic to save his bacon [..]

Holding here reiterates his bizarre rhetorical tactic of saying that
arguments demonstrating the correctness of my position should for some
reason be embarrassing to *me* instead of to *him*.

Luke 13:22 is of no use in this context, referring to a time

chronologically before the events of 13:30 and beyond. [..] a

natural reading of the text does make this indeed the very next
leg of Jesus' travels.

The text reads:

13:22 "Then Jesus went through the towns and villages, teaching as he made
his way to Jerusalem."
13:31-33 "At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, 'leave
this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.' He replied 'Go
tell [Herod....]. In any case, I must keep going today and tomorrow and the
next day..."
14:1 "One Sabbath, when Jesus ..."
14:25 "Large crowds were traveling with Jesus ..."
16:1 "Jesus told his disciples: ..."
17:1 "Jesus told his disciples: ..."
17:11-12 "Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border
between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village..."

It's quite clear that 14, 16, and 17 are episodes from the teaching journey
described in 13:22 as going "through the towns and villages". It's
indisputable that when Jesus was told of the threat, he admitted he would
be withdrawing "today" in the face of this danger and apparently was
embarrassed enough to try to make an excuse for his retreat. Holding's only
reply is to note that no further travel is explicitly mentioned "until much
later (17:11)", and ignore the fact that Jesus is quoted as saying he would
indeed be withdrawing "today".

John 7:1-10 says Jesus "went around" in Galilee to
avoid the danger in Judea, and didn't consider going to
Judea until a feast some unspecified amount of time
later. He tells his brothers that his time "has not yet
come" and decides to stay in Galilee because he is
"hated". He then inexplicably changes his mind and goes
to Jerusalem "not publicly, but in secret" (Jn 7:10).
The mere reciting of these facts is sufficient to rebut
Holding's attempt to discount this instance of Jesus
avoiding danger.

The "went around" reference is in verse 1, but it is still of no
worth to our critic -- Jesus still goes to Jerusalem
("inexplicably" or otherwise), and though he indeed begins by
going up in secret, "Now about the midst of the feast Jesus went
up into the temple, and taught."! If this is danger-avoidance, I

suppose Osama bin Laden [..]

Holding here does not deny the occurrence of any of the events that are
prima facie danger-avoidance. His only reply is to note that Jesus later
did not avoid danger. Not only is that fact obvious to anyone who knows the
story of Jesus' demise, but it does utterly nothing to refute my claim that
the gospels contain multiple reports of Jesus avoiding danger.

Someone with the firm conviction of his own divine
omnipotence should not have to avoid danger so many
times that his disciples can't help but report such
instances in gospels proclaiming his divinity.

what does our critic want Jesus to do? Wait until the bad guys

show up, then teleport? (Isn't that running too?) Zap them into
ashes?

There are myriad ways other than "teleporting" and "zapping" that an
omniscient omnipotent being could arrange to never have to retreat from
danger. For example, he could have arranged that at key moments of danger
he always just happened to be in a crowd of followers who would be
understood by "the bad guys" as preventing harm to Jesus.

Jesus no doubt at other times faced dangers, and in the
end he bravely chose not to avoid his crucifixion.

And in a real sense we do agree that discretion kept Jesus alive

in a few cases [..] But again, what is the alternative, than

blasting people to ashes or making an all-to-obvious miraculous
effort that would have drawn even more intervention?

Holding here finally abandons all pretense that Jesus never withdrew in the
face of danger. It simply escapes Holding's imagination that, for example
in the case of Luke 13:31, a truly omniscient Jesus could have continued
his journey five minutes before being told of Herod's threat, and thus
avoided embarrassment without any "all-too-obvious miracle".

I note that the critic still offered no connection to a "time"
when things would be right. The critic quotes John 7:6 and Luke
13:33, and notes Matt. 26:18 and Luke 9:51, but these again are
instances where, immediately after, Jesus went to place himself
in the "danger zone" or already was in the zone. There is no
connection with Jesus "hiding" because it is not his time

The connection is so obvious that Holding dares not repeat my quoting of
the relevant verses:

Jn 7:1 "After this, Jesus went around in Galilee, purposely
staying away from Judea because the Jews there were waiting to

take his life." Jn 7:6 "The right time for me has not yet come."
Jn 7:8 "I am not [yet?] going up to this Feast, because for me
the right time has not yet come."

That the increasingly deluded Jesus soon changed his mind simply does not
erase the indisputable fact that Jesus was "purposely staying away from
[people] waiting to take his life" because "the right time for me has not
yet come".

JESUS' FAILED MINISTRY

The mere existence of Christianity hardly proves that
Jesus was divine, and we of course can hardly expect
the gospels to record Jesus's failures. Even so, the
gospels do admit that Jesus "could not do any miracles"
in his hometown (Mk 6:5, Lk 4:24), at times was
considered mad by his family (Mk 3:21) and other Jews
(Jn 10:20), and often was reluctant or evasive when
asked to demonstrate his powers.

This is apparently the best that can be done: just dismiss the
complex social factors involved;

Holding here doesn't dare deny my statement that "the mere existence of
Christianity hardly proves that Jesus was divine".

just fill in the gaps by supposing that failures weren't recorded
(and that no opponents made light of this, and that it managed to
be something that wasn't recorded in the polemical record; when,
to the contrary, all polemical responses to Christianity assume
that Jesus was capable of and proficient with miraculous power);

What reason do we have to believe that this so-called "polemical record"
represents anything approaching a thorough and contemporaneous effort of
skeptical journalism? And note that miraculous power was ascribed to many
people in ancient times.

pull the old Mark 6:5 cite (of which, as I noted against Jeff
Lowder recently, "But does the passage mean he couldn't do
miracles, or that he wouldn't because of the lack of people's
faith? The word used here for 'could' (dunamai) offers no clues,
and the passage does not explain the 'why' of the issue

Holding here is careful not to claim that 'would' would be rendered
differently in Greek than 'could'. It surely would not, since
differentiating between subjunctives and possibilities is an elementary
feature of language. Holding doesn't even realize that a "lack of people's
faith" is for a mere faith-healer PRECISELY THE SAME THING as the
faith-healer not being able to do the faith-healing. Thus his proposed
explanation only confirms mine.

pull out polemical evaluations of madness by others who aren't
trained psychologists or psychiatrists (while also ignoring the
overwhelmingly contrary opinion; cf. John 10:21!)

Holding dares not address my point that the opinion of Jesus' madness was
rendered by those who knew him best: his family (Mk 3:21). Holding instead
can merely pretend a) that Jesus' family's opinion was "polemical", b) that
any allegation of madness is worthless if not made by a trained
professional, and c) that "but others said" is in John 10:21 an indication
of "overwhelmingly contrary opinion". Holding's claims here are
self-refuting.

and vaguely generalize (OK, let's name all those places where
Jesus "often was reluctant or evasive when asked to demonstrate
his powers" -- the only place like this that might work, where

Jesus did not indeed go on to use his powers [..]

Holding again dares not deny that Jesus "often was reluctant or evasive
when asked to demonstrate his powers".

Our critic next tries to excuse away his inability to defend his
positions by appealing yet again to "professional secular
scholarship." In other words, I'll stay ignorant and dependent on
others and you'll live with it!

Holding continues his red herring attempt to attract attention away from
his indefensible comparison of my "sound bite" reporting the consensus of
professional secular scholarship [about the length of Jesus' ministry] and
his "sound bite" that simply assumes the gospels are completely true. The
two simply are not comparable, and so Holding vainly tries to change the
subject.

Holding ludicrously equates "ignorance" with my unwillingness to rehearse
at his whim any issue of settled professional secular scholarship that he
decides to contest. He mistakenly assumes that my purpose here is to refute
any unconventional contention that he could possibly formulate. He's simply
wrong. My purpose here is that of a meme hunter, and killing dead memes is
pointless. The idea that Jesus' ministry was three years long and that he
cleansed the temple twice etc. is a dead meme. That Holding will never
admit this cannot revoke its death certificate.

Though he prefaces his article by quoting Mt 24:34,
Holding's article makes no attempt to explain how the

destruction of Jerusalem equates with "see[ing] the the

Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory"

Matt. 24:30, where the "Son of Man in the clouds" image first
appears, is now covered in the essay. [The essay says] Bottom
line: The scene fits the placement of heaven better than it fits
a placement on earth. [..] The scene is one of a victorious
enthronement and vindication over enemies.

None of Holding's obfuscations can make it plausible that some preaching in
Rome and the destruction of the Temple makes the Olivet prophecy true. It's
false on its face, and needs merely to be repeated:

"Tell us," they said, "when will this happen, and what will be
the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" Jesus
answered: "[..] you will be hated by all nations because of me.
[..] this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole
world [..] At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in
the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will
see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power
and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet
call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds [..]
this generation will certainly not pass away until all these
things have happened."

The the city of Rome is not the same thing as the "whole world", and being
in "heaven" is not the same thing as "appear[ing] in the sky" and being
"see[n as] coming on the clouds of the sky". The prophesied things plainly
didn't happen during "this generation", and the prophecy is plainly false.

Our critic doesn't provide examples in reply,
but makes light of my alleged "lack of
knowledge" above on Jesus "hiding," then says
he's "not inclined to take [my] word for it
that no passages in Josephus can substantiate
Carrier's statement."

Holding again shows an inability to be trusted with

quotation marks. I never said "lack of knowledge", but
rather an "inability to find and report all the
relevant passages in his own sacred gospels". And
again, it was Holding who changed my "avoid danger"
formulation to his own misquoted strawman "hiding".

Well, when you can't argue facts, nitpick. The quote marks are

not used to indicate quotes, they are used to indicate that the

phrase in question is taken to be a false assumption

Holding's ex post facto alleged intentions behind the quote marks cannot
change the fact that they are blatantly misleading. The last set of quote
marks are indeed a word-for-word quotation of my text, even carefully
including a bracketed change of possessive pronoun from third-person to
first-person. Thus the context is not of scare-quotes but of quoting my
text. If Holding cannot be trusted with quotation marks, why should we
credit his alleged ability to interpret biblical scholarship?

That's it, don't do your own research, but
it's not Carrier vs. Holding, it's Carrier
vs. J. C. O'Neill, author of Who Did Jesus
Think He Was?, my source for the information.

When I cite Carrier I'm not "doing my own research",

but just what is Holding doing when he cites O'Neill?

What I'm doing is citing someone who says that there are no
references in Josephus of this sort

In other words, Holding is repeating the report of someone who read
Josephus. Well, so am I. QED.

either a) get Carrier to provide quotes or b) get Josephus
himself and look them up

I've quoted Carrier, but we have only Holding's word that O'Neill
contradicts Carrier. Given Holding's past scholarship errors (e.g.
misquoting me above, distorting the context of the psychology article
earlier, being unable to find and report all the gospel passages relevant
to withdrawal in the face of danger), I'm not going to recapitulate
anyone's published research on the basis of Holding's hand-waving
non-quoting claim that some other research contradicts it.

let's hear some of those cites, then, where Josephus records
someone saying he is the Messiah!

Carrier's claim was that "many individuals were claiming to be, or were

proclaimed to be, messiahs of one form or another in Jesus' day (Josephus

recounts several)". Since Holding cannot even precisely state the contested
issue, his non-quoting citation of O'Neill to the contrary is even more
suspect.

When I noted the same absence in the oldest gospel
Mark, Holding earlier responded with tortured arguments
why the claim should nevertheless be imputed from
Jesus' other alleged pretensions of divinity. Holding
seems to hold a double-standard here.

There is no such thing; each of the claims and actions were
clear,

I already demonstrated (and Holding even admitted) that none of the claims
and actions were a direct statement of Jesus' own personal divinity.

and none of them match anything found in Josephus.

Again: I trust Carrier's ability to read Josephus more than I trust

Holding's ability to read O'Neill.

In the logically possible world with no Jesus, Holding

seems to think it somehow contrary to the laws of
physics that any carpenter from Nazareth could utter
words that could be remembered as the things the
gospels report Jesus saying. The recorded sayings of
Jesus are certainly unique and unparalleled in a
certain sense, but not enough to justify the conclusion
that if they were not true then no human could have
succeeded in uttering them.

It's really too short on specifics for comment, but if it is

being suggested that people would not remember sayings or claims
of Jesus

No, it's being suggested that people could not be guaranteed not to
misinterpret, misunderstand, exaggerate, or selectively forget the sayings
or claims of Jesus. More importantly, it's being suggested that Holding has
not demonstrated that if these recorded sayings were not true then no human
could have done anything that could later lead to these recordings.

The bit about "no human could have succeeded in uttering them" is
gobbledygook as it is written and needs an application to make
sense.

I'm simply pointing out that for the Trilemma to be a valid argument, one
has to rule out the other possibilities. Holding hasn't, and so his
argument is not valid.

TRILEMMA VALIDITY

On the validity of the Trilemma, I made the point that our critic
does little more than throw out uncertainties to make a skeptical
audience happy. In reply our critic simply pours on the
assurance: "Now Holding simply stamps his foot and demands to see
some 'proving', without himself bothering to say why we should
think my answer is wrong."

Holding describes this section as "on the validity of the Trilemma", but he
completely ignores my actual argument that "the Trilemma is simply invalid

if there is any unrebutted alternative to 'liar, lunatic, or lord'".

He wants "proofs" on these issues:

How does Holding know that nothing in the gospels

misinterprets what the historical Jesus said?

How does Holding know that nothing in the gospels is an
exaggeration or rationalization?

How does Holding know that there could not possibly have

been any delusion or deception involved in the creation of
the stories that ended up being recorded in the gospels?

This is all very nice, but the same questions, and those of
lesser scale expressing doubt, could be said of any historical
record at all

Holding simply ignores the fact that these doubts are especially
significant for the case at hand, and that their existence invalidates the
Trilemma. (Again: their existence does not prove that Jesus was not divine;
they merely invalidate the Trilemma's proof that he was.)

and permit any critic with an agenda to spin-doctor any
historical personage into any mold desired.

Obviously false.

what it all comes down to is, "I assume I am right and everyone
else is wrong, and if I want to go against what is written, I
don't have to prove anything!"

Laughable strawman histrionics.

It is wrong to say that "the burden of proof does not fall
completely on any one side." -- it falls not completely, no, but
very heavily on the critic claiming doubt.

Wishful thinking.

And our critic is far from fulfilling his pledge in this matter,
offering only begged questions and hurled elephants, and has
indeed bungled so much data and refused to answer so many issues
that it is doubtful if he ever will, or can.

Sputtering insubstantive ad hominem generalities.

claiming that I am "unwilling to deal with" his alleged case for
Jesus as a moderately deluded faith-healer and that he thinks I
haven't done the job. I may as well be unwilling to deal with the
case for Jesus making a trip to India as a child or being a
former sandal salesman.

Holding here gives two obviously worthless analogies, while essentially
admitting he is unwilling to deal with what is now a tetralemma: liar,
lunatic, lord, -- or faith-healer and apocalyptic preacher whose deluded

belief in his importance was strengthened in the months leading up to his
anticipated execution and was misinterpreted and exaggerated afterwards.

As the saying goes, if you stop beating a dead horse, he'll

eventually get up and claim to have crossed the finish ahead of
you! And as I have noted, skeptics are like the knight in Monty
Python who, shorn of his limbs, avers, "Tis only a flesh wound!"

The normally indefatigable Holding is here simply out of steam (but not out
of gas!). He cannot bring himself to rebut or even quote my argument, which
was:

The mere existence of this fourth alternative doesn't in itself

prove that this alternative is true. But it's unrebutted
existence *does* invalidate the trilemma argument, whose validity
depends on there being no non-lord options besides liar and
lunatic. It may in fact be possible to prove Jesus' lordship
through other more-direct arguments, but the Trilemma itself
fails to do so if the fourth option is not actually *shown* to be
false. All this means is that the real debate is between "lord"
and such a fourth option. The invalidity of the Trilemma doesn't
lend any weight to either side of that real debate -- it's simply
a fact of logic that is inconvenient for those seeking an easier
alternative to the real debate.

How ironic that when it comes to this point about the very heart of the
Trilemma argument, Holding the Trilemmist has nothing substantive to say in
response.

STANDARDS OF EVIDENCE

Explain to me why [the Lincoln bios],
inconsistent, second- and third-hand,

attempts to make Lincoln look like a great
guy, should be taken as accurate, or not

Which Lincoln biographies are touted as the divinely

inspired word of a deity?

It doesn't matter what they are "touted as"; even treating them
as human records is enough.

In other words, not a single Lincoln biography is touted as divinely
inspired. Holding asked why the Lincoln bios are different; now he simply
doesn't like the answer.

Which Lincoln biographies give contradictory

genealogies in trying to demonstrate his royal lineage?

This old canard has been answered by Glenn Miller [..] Matthew's
list was offered for a reason different from that of Luke's [..]

In other words, not a single Lincoln biography gives a genealogy that
necessitates anything like the laughable contortions to which inerrantists
resort in trying to reconcile Matthew and Luke.

Which Lincoln biographies give contradictory
information for Lincoln's birth year?

The Gospels don't do this; let's have our critic explain how this
is so. I have a suspicion that it rests in the old census canard.

As Carrier writes in
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html: "It
is beyond reasonable dispute that Luke dates the birth of Jesus to 6 A.D.
It is equally indisputable that Matthew dates the birth of Jesus to 6 B.C.
(or some year before 4 B.C.). This becomes an irreconcilable contradiction
after an examination of all the relevant facts."

Note that Holding names not a single Lincoln biography that supports even a
hint of controversy regarding Lincoln's birth year.

Which Lincoln biographies seem to switch Lincoln's
birthplace in a transparent attempt to make Lincoln
fulfill a prophecy?

if he has a good look at the Lincoln bios, he will see plenty of

"glaring contradictions" just as serious and as painful as those
alleged in the Gospels.

Holding does not here name a single such Lincoln biographical
"contradiction" that is "just as serious and as painful" as the ambiguity
of Jesus's birthplace.

Which Lincoln biographies omit events as spectacular
and memorable as the resurrection appearances (missing
in original Mark), the Easter zombies swarming
Jerusalem (only in Mat 27:53), or the Easter darkness
"over all the earth" (omitted in John)?

"Spectacular and memorable," again, is in the eye of the beholder

Holding here repeats his refrain that miracles (such as multiple
resurrections) are only subjectively spectacular, a notion that I
demolished earlier in this article.

Only Matthew's audience would appreciate the risen saints, not a
"swarm" by any description, since no number is given; those
outside of Jerusalem and Judaism would find additional
resurrections a stumbling-block

"Many" resurrected bodies "appear[ing] to many people" sure sounds like a
"swarm" to me. It's laughable to say that some audiences would not have
been impressed by such a miracle, or that miracles so spectacular were
consciously downplayed for fear of straining anyone's credulity.

the one about John is funny, since it is a case of three saying

"yes" and one offering no comment [..] if, as evidence indicates,

John was written to complement Mark anyway, he doesn't need to
rehash all of that unless he has a specific purpose!

Thus Holding here does not name a single Lincoln biography that omits any
events so spectacular and memorable.

The elephants trumpet loudly, but they are no bigger than mice.

So, having asked "why the Lincoln biographies [..] should be taken as
accurate", and having identified not a single one that is comparable to the
gospels in any of the five ways I asked about, Holding finally repeats his
lame analogy about elephants. A more apt analogy is that Holding is
whistling past the graveyard.

Secular histories, even those with a "point of view", should be
given precisely the same benefit of the doubt as religious
scriptures written to promote a brand of divine salvation. They
deserve to be weighed, considered, compared and factored.

Nobody is claiming they should not be weighed, considered, compared, or
factored. On the contrary, the difference that indeed needs to be
weighed/considered/compared/factored is that evangelists want their readers
to repent and save themselves from eternal damnation, whereas secular
historians at most want to influence their readers' political opinions. It
would be absurd to say this difference is insignificant.

Fabrication (and exaggeration and misinterpretation)
should of course *never* be assumed not to be possible,
but instead should only be concluded based on factors
like background plausibility, external objective
confirmation, internal consistency, spatiotemporal
proximity to the reported events, evidence of
contemporary skeptical cross-examination, absence of
plausible alternative explanations, etc. All of these
factors tend to argue against the complete veracity of
the gospel accounts.

explain[] how "all of these factors" apply to the Gospels, and

we'll expect him to do it in an informed way and do it right

Already done. My book discusses five of these six factors in explicit
detail.

Regarding my request to offer a datihg of the Gospels, based on
crieria applied also to a secular document like Tacitus' Annals,
our critic merely appeals yet again to "secular scholarly
consensus" and leaves it alone. No, there will be no legwork from
this skeptic: There must be a Scooby Doo marathon on the Cartoon
Network!

Holding's frustration here in defending dead memes evidences itself in the
form of amateurish insults. He throws out challenges to rehearse the
settled scholarly consensus, but doesn't dare quote my counter-challenge:

"I would be interested in apologist commentary on why it is that the
secular scholarly consensus is so univocal on things like the 2-source
theory and gospel anonymity. Why is it that only fundamentalist inerrantist
Christian scholars have gotten this right, while the overwhelming majority
of secular and non-fundamentalist Christian scholars have got it wrong? Is
Satan at work here? Is it a conspiracy? What other academic
misunderstanding in modern times (viz., roughly since Darwin) has persisted
so widely and for so long? (Hint: "evolution" is not a good answer. :-) In
how many decades or centuries, if ever, does Holding anticipate that the
secular scholarly consensus will see the light?"

If a text were discovered that repeated the gospels'

quotes of Jesus but were written during his ministry or
by Jesus himself, would Holding really claim that it
gives us no more confidence that we know what Jesus
really said?

I would claim that it gives us more confidence, yes -- but that
does not mean that the present confidence is not sufficient in
itself.

Holding thus admits that the evidence of Jesus' words is suboptimal. At any
rate, his typically obfuscatory tactics do not in the least support the
strawman supposition he made earlier that started this particular
discussion: "If these claims were invented, why would they be invented?" My
unrebutted answer remains: I never said that Jesus' belief in his own

divinity was an "invention" by the gospel authors or their sources.

JESUS' DIVINITY CLAIMS

Other than picking nits and alluding again to Matthew's "swarm of
zombies" (actual quote), and repeating and summarizing previous
arguments already refuted or refuted above

Holding again doesn't dare quote the alleged "nit", which was yet another
example of his poor scholarly judgment. I repeat:

In floating his strawman argument about divinity "claims being
invented", Holding merely confuses himself and thinks that to
make a word-for-word restatement of my position is to "backpedal
mightily". Holding's strawman claim that I charge "invention" is
simply not justified by my statement that "we only have the
second-hand word of evangelical Christian authors that Jesus
fully held this conviction".

I indeed then summarized the evidence in the gospels of Jesus' growing
delusion. Holding claims the evidence is "refuted", but I've systematically
answered his every attempt to discount this evidence. Holding then simply
ignores my other point that his self-impressing research into the obsolete
diagnosis of "Messiah complex" should be replaced by an investigation of

the current clinical understanding of schizophrenia and conversion
disorders.

1. Jesus "associated himself with the Wisdom of God".

Holding makes tortured arguments that this implies
divinity, but it is easy to imagine that a carpenter
unsure of his outright divinity might choose instead to
emphasize his special divinely-inspired knowledge of
God's Wisdom.

Apparently my article was indeed unread; the claims made by Jesus
equate with being God's Wisdom -- a divine figure which was an
effulgence of the Almighty God -- not merely having knowledge of
God's Wisdom.

I of course read the article. It asserts "ontological equality" of Jesus
and Wisdom and God, but does not support this assertion with actual gospel
quotes that cannot also be interpreted as metaphor. The best of these is
John writing that "the Word was made flesh" -- a very pretty metaphor, but
simply not evidence that Jesus claimed to be an omnipotent deity. The
article also quotes Paul, but it can't quote Paul quoting Jesus, since Paul
never met Jesus.

2. Jesus called himself the "son of man". Holding

admits that this 'title was intended to be mysterious',
and thus it cannot confirm that the carpenter from
Nazareth believed himself to be an omnipotent
omniscient deity.

the title was meant to be mysterious during the ministry of
Jesus, but [..] at the trial of Jesus [] explicit identification

was made with the divine figure in Daniel 7.

Holding here simply forgets what he is arguing against. My thesis is that
Jesus was a faith-healer and apocalyptic preacher whose deluded belief in

his importance was strengthened in the months leading up to his anticipated

execution. As I've already said, I claim Jesus did not always fully believe
himself to be God. I do not dispute that Jesus' growing delusion reached
its peak in the days and hours preceding his well-anticipated martyrdom.

3. Jesus called God "abba" (father). Christian theology

notwithstanding, this could simply have been a claim to
be a child of God.

"Could have been" is not enough!

Holding is confused, perhaps because he ignored my entire lesson about
Trilemma validity. Again: for the Trilemma to be valid, he has to show that
Jesus could not have been a misinterpreted schizophrenic. "Could have been"
is PRECISELY "enough" to invalidate the Trilemma's proof that Jesus was
Lord instead of liar, lunatic, or misinterpreted schizophrenic.

There is no evidence of abba being used by Jews to address God

This does not imply that Jesus calling God "abba" is the same thing as
Jesus calling himself God.

4. Jesus assumed the authority to contradict or modify

prior revelation. That could simply mean Jesus believed

he had new superseding revelation.

"Same thing -- "could simply mean" is not enough!

It's enough to invalidate the Trilemma proof -- as I've shown above and
repeatedly.

5. Various passages in the synoptic gospels: [..]

all our critic can do is play the same "could be" game without
any critical examination of the relevant Jewish contexts.

Holding again misunderstands the Trilemma validity issue, and does not
refute (or even dare quote) my claim: "These and Holding's other cited

passages are all consistent both with being God *and* with being a uniquely
special prophet of God. All we can know for sure from this body of evidence
is that the historical Jesus claimed for himself unprecedented authority
and importance stemming from his unique relationship with God. However, his
reluctance to call himself a deity, and his apparent inability to act like
one, makes it plausible that he did not always (or perhaps ever) fully
believe himself to be God."

And now, I'm going to add one more social surd to our critics'

equation to make his homework harder.

Holding here again vainly attempts to strike a pose of being in a position
to assign "homework".

All along it has been presumed by our critic that we can evaluate

Jesus in terms of Western society and psychology. Malina and

Neyrey explain in Portraits of Paul that group-oriented persons:

[..] rely on others to tell them who they are ("Who do

people say that I am?" Mark 8:27). Consequently, from
this perspective, modern questions of "consciousness"
(did Jesus know he was God? did Jesus have faith?...)
make no sense.

Malina et al.'s conclusion is plainly not warranted by their vague
generalities. (Mark 8:27 is simply Jesus being evasive.)

What this means is that suggestions of "growing delusions of
godhood" are insufficient from the get-go.

It's ludicrous to claim that delusions were impossible in the ancient
world.

If Jesus was delusional, it would not matter in the least because
in a group-oriented society, you needed the support and
endorsement of others to support your identity. A merely human
Jesus could not have fostered these delusions on his own, and
kept going; those around him had to believe it as well, and by
extension, had to have reason to believe it or else appear to
believe it

That Jesus' delusions were mutually reinforcing with the beliefs of his
followers does not contradict my thesis. That Jesus could not have been
delusional because his culture was "group-oriented" is simply laughable.

A delusional Jesus would have had to live up to the expectations
of others and would have been abandoned at the first sign of
failure.

It's simply not the case that followers of deluded people always act
rationally and skeptically.

It is Holding himself who is 'begging the question' by

assuming the truth of the miracle reports in order to
argue that Jesus should have known from his miraculous
powers that he was divine!

As noted above, such proof is not my burden; it is that of the
doubter.

Holding does not even engage the issue of whether he begged the question
(in our earlier discussion of Jesus' divinity belief) by citing "walking on
water, which the OT says that only God can do". He evidently wants us to
forget that he argued that Jesus should have known from his
miraculous powers that he was divine.

But note that water can appear to be walked on if one
misapprehends its depth, as seems possible given that
it was night and Jesus was initially mistaken for a
ghost.

not much room for misapprehending depth when one is in the midst

of this sea (not near the shoreline)

Holding here blatantly deletes the context: my previous sentence that
"Jesus' water-walking is indeed one of the better candidates for being an
egregious exaggeration." Instead, Holding tries to show that the text is
not exaggerated by -- wait for it -- quoting from the text itself! This
again demonstrates Holding's clumsiness with the contextual subtleties that
are so critical to good scholarship. Episodes like this are no doubt the
reason why Holding is too chicken to give his readers any way to see my
undoctored writings in this debate.

Holding's separate essay on divinity claims says that
"the direct claim 'I am God' [..] would have been a
little too confusing to Jesus' hearers" (as opposed to
the non-confusing notion of the Trinity, Jesus' dual
nature, etc.!). Holding tries to have it both ways --
he says that a clear claim to divinity would confuse
Jesus' hearers, and then he presents tortured arguments
to show that Jesus' enigmatic sayings constitute a
clear claim to divinity.

there is nothing "confusing" (real quote) about the Trinity, or

about the dual nature, except to uneducated skeptics.

Argument by (laughable) assertion.

I have said nothing about a "clear claim"; I have referred to a
direct claim,

I did not quote 'clear' as Holding's word, and he does not explain how it
is different here from its common synonym 'direct'.

and as shown in the item on Wisdom (which our critic refuses to,
or can't, read), a claim like "I am God!" would have been

technically inaccurate and imprecise.

As shown above, Holding's item on Wisdom does not demonstrate Jesus to be
claiming divinity. Nothing in Holding's Wisdom item demonstrates that it
would have been "technically inaccurate and imprecise" for Jesus to say at
least one of:

I am divine.
I am omniscient and omnipotent.
I am ontologically equal to God.
I am God incarnate.
I am El/Yahweh made flesh.
etc.

the concept of Jesus as divine quite
definitely existed within, at the very least,
a decade of the crucifixion, and therefore,
was likely to have been asserted before His
death by Jesus Himself.

But was it asserted by Jesus equally firmly throughout
his ministry? Was it in no way strengthened by
post-crucifixion events like Paul's vision on the road
to Damascus?

Not at all, and if anything, one finds a lesser variety of
Christological titles in the works of Paul and the rest of the
NT.

Lesser in variety, and no doubt more consistent in claiming Jesus'
divinity. This is precisely what my thesis would predict.

Of course, one way or another, we expect skeptics will spin this
into some sort of evolutionary scenario, but that's no more than
we would expect.

Holding here tries to pretend that his foreknowledge of his refutation
somehow makes it less efficacious!

Our critic then repeats earlier questions,

Indeed, questions that Holding has not answered satisfactorily.

and adds one more: "Why would the disciples, who
allegedly saw Jesus claim and *demonstrate* his
divinity and predict his own resurrection, abandon him
at his well-anticipated execution?"

What this has to do with proof related to Jesus, I cannot say.
Presumably our critic, like Farrell Till, thinks with perfect
hindsight that he, unlike the disciples, would have stuck around
to be arrested and beaten by the goon squad from the high priest
and crucified by the Romans. Few people have ever been so
dedicated to a principle enough to risk their skin;

As Holding admits, he simply misses the point. I didn't ask about
"dedicat[ion] to a principle"; I asked about being witness to
*demonstrated* divinity.

it took much more before Peter and Co. were ready for that.

Yes, it took seeing their hero die and feeling guilty and traumatized by
it. If instead they had really already seen Jesus demonstrate his
unambiguous divinity, then one could presume that they would already have
approached their peak of commitment.

Holding doesn't even try to explain what alternative
words a crucified Jewish carpenter could have used to
actually indicate despair. Perhaps Holding thinks a
truly despairing Jesus would have said "why have you
forsaken me -- and no, I'm not just quoting a psalm".

How about: "I knew I shouldn't have trusted in you, Yahweh!" [..]

There were more than enough exclamative options for Jesus without
quoting and alluding to Ps. 22

It's more plausible that the crucified Jesus was a mortal ex-carpenter
whose shattered delusion of divine favor led him to despair, and that
whatever words of despair he actually used (even if the same as the Psalm)
are just being conveniently re-interpreted. It's silly to claim that the
crucified Jesus would necessarily have been unable to use in its literal

sense any phrase that begins a Psalm (or perhaps any phrase from the entire
Old Testament!).

Our skeptic [..] suggest[s] that Jesus' "imprecisely-remembered

words" were cast into the form of the Psalm, which begs the
question of what on earth he did say that could have been
mistakenly remembered as the distinctive first line of Ps. 22.

The answer is obviously: anything else indicating despair at abandonment or
betrayal.

But again, this is the best the skeptic can do. If needed they
will say that Jesus actually said, "Red Rover, Red Rover, let
Pilate come over."

Puerile non sequitor.

Our critic wants "details or issues" on Lazarus; he has some of
them above.

Holding does not rebut or even dare quote my demonstration that his charge
of "circular reasoning" is groundless.

Beyond that he can explain to us why there is no evidence that
such fantastic claims were never disputed,

1) Christianity took decades and centuries to become a significant force,
and so not many people would have cared until the evidence was gone. 2) The
Christian side of the story had a better chance of being preserved than the
anti-Christian side. 3) Nevertheless, Matthew 28 *does* report (and of
course denies) a widespread story that the empty tomb was faked.

and why instead the indication in all relevant records is that
yes, Jesus was a worker of miracles; they were just attributable

to him being a trained sorcerer. Ancient people, despite our
critic's bigotry, were no more ready to accept wild claims tha[n]
we are

Holding here contradicts himself, by noting that the ancients were
credulous about people (not just Jesus) being "trained sorcerers", and then
asserting the ancients "were no more ready to accept wild claims than we
are". His repeated ad hominem of "bigotry" was already refuted in the
article he quotes, and again above (cf. "Quite wrong. [..]").

If we did not live beyond the time when detailed investigation
was possible, and had any sort of interest one way or the other
and not a bias dismissing the story out of hand, we would look
into it too.

If we believed in "trained sorcerers", we wouldn't necessarily be
interested in disproving the alleged miracles of an alleged sorcerer.

But our critic does think ancient people were stupid, certainly
not as smart as he is, and tries to backpedal, saying, "I didn't
characterize 'the ancients', I characterized 'ancient times'."

Holding once again ludicrously calls it "backpedal[ing]" to deny his
admittedly inaccurate mis-statement of my position. He dares not answer or
even quote my point that he is trying to equate "ignorance" -- i.e. not
having certain information -- with something like congenital stupidity, in

vain effort to justify his ad hominem attack on me as a "bigot".

there is now as much superstition and ignorance as there was in

ancient times. Of course we prefer horoscopes and wearing lucky
socks to going to the temple of Asclepius, but what we lack in
scale we make up for in volume.

Holding's claim about ignorance and superstition can be demonstrated as
false merely by citing the major phenomena that the ancients believed were
supernaturally caused:

* the daily cycle of the Sun; the motions of the Moon and planets;
* the seasons; rivers, currents, winds, thunder, lightning,
precipitation and drought;
* the genesis, design, and diversity of life; success in farming and
hunting;
* the human mind; evil, misfortune, disease, pestilence, war, and death.

Of course, Holding is at something of a disadvantage here, as he presumably
still believes that some of the above are supernaturally caused.

The bigot remains at large and the white sheet still fits.

Ludicrous ad hominem.

MISSING EVIDENCE FOR CHRISTIANITY

what kind of proof would be acceptable, not

shrugged off as fabrication [..]?

The gospel accounts could: be more first-hand and
contemporaneous to the events

there is absolutely no reason why Matthew and John don't qualify
here, and there is no reason why Luke and Mark should be dissed
on these grounds. Let the critic apply this rather to other
ancient documents and treat the Gospels fairly.

1) The lack of reference in Paul's letters (c. 58CE) to the gospels, and
their allusions to Rome's fall in 70CE, date them to decades after the
events. 2) The gospels are generally considered anonymous, and even
apologists admit that only two could have been first-hand. 3) Unlike e.g.
Caesar, Jesus himself left no known writings.

be more internally consistent, especially about Jesus'

genealogy, birth, ministry chronology, and resurrection
appearances

we have addressed this matter above, with references to essays
linked

The point Holding misses here is that the gospels shouldn't need convoluted
essays to try to obfuscate or explain away their internal prima facie
inconsistencies. For example, no "essay" is needed to defend the claim that
Jesus died at Jerusalem, or that his mother was Mary, or that he followed
John the Baptist, etc., because the gospels are in fact consistent on those
matters.

describe a Jesus who never avoids danger

as noted above, this really doesn't happen much

As noted above, an omnipotent omniscient deity could have arranged it not
to have happened at all.

"describe a Jesus able to work hometown miracles" -- see above

Again, an omnipotent omniscient deity could have arranged that we not hear
of any town in which Jesus could not work miracles.

describe a Jesus whose family never thought him 'mad',
and who were his most ardent believers instead of the
object of his apparent resentment

well, that's what they became after the resurrection, what more
does this man want?!?

Holding here seems unable to read. I wrote precisely what I "want": "a
Jesus whose family never thought him 'mad'" etc.

describe a Jesus more self-differentiated from the
primitive tribal deity of the Hebrew Torah

there's that white sheet flying around again; and this is the

first time this is pulled up -- why is this a reason for
disbelief, other than a begged question concerning, now, the Old
Testament?

Holding's tiresome and baseless charge of bigotry is again no substitute
for argument. Holding mistakenly assumes that a *new* question counts as a
"begged" question. My indictment of Yahweh is detailed in my book, if
Holding dares read it. It suffices here to note that overwhelmingly more
Christians take the gospels literally than take the Torah literally.

describe a Jesus more interested in universal salvation
than unjust eternal punishment

when I made the point elsewhere that eternal punishment wasn't

unjust at all, as the reward for offense against infinite
holiness, all he could do was call that position names.

That's a lie. Against his essay defending eternal punishment I sent him
this (AFAIK unrebutted) argument:

-------------------------------
I don't see the issue of the justness of hell substantively addressed in
your essay. You outline the beginning of an argument:

God is infinitely good.

All sin and evil are therefore, morally, an infinite
distance from God.

Any who commit sin/evil, therefore, are an infinite distance
from God's standard of goodness. There is an infinite gulf
between God and the sinner.

Our finiteness means that we are unable, ourselves, to pay
for/atone for our sins, for we cannot cover by any means
that infinite distance with finite human works.

I was expecting you to then state that only infinite punishment is
appropriate for this infinite distance, and proceed to give justifications
for these statements. But instead, the rest of the article is not about the
justness of the infinite price, but rather about the doctrine that Jesus'
self-sacrifice paid this price.

This leaves an argument that hardly needs rebutting. You make the startling
claim that a life with only 1 sin is somehow an "infinite distance" on some
moral dimension from 100% sinlessness. Unfortunately, you give no
justification for this curious claim that on the spectrum of sinfulness,
one endpoint is somehow "infinitely" far from every other possible point.
While it is obviously true that any amount of sin is qualitatively
different from the complete absence of sin, it is by no means obvious (and
in fact quite counter-intuitive) that any amount of sin is in effect an
infinite amount, and that all amounts of sin are thus equivalent. Your
argument thus provides no rebuttal to the prima facie absurdity that a
single white lie in an otherwise sinless life could warrant an eternity of
torment.
-------------------------------

describe miracles that an omniscient deity would know
were not subject to naturalistic explanations.

"An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign!"

This points out yet another kind of missing evidence for Christianity.
Namely, the gospel accounts could portray a Jesus/Yahweh/El who is not so
petulantly defensive about his anemic inability to provide convincing
evidence of his existence.

Find me a miracle that can't be explained away by our skeptic in
the 21st century.

Easily. As I say in my book: Any god could trivially inscribe or
authenticate its revealed message through supernatural patterns (in
cosmological or quantum phenomena) or ongoing miracles (such as prophecy or
communication with a spirit world). There is no credible evidence that any
such revelation has been competently attempted by any god(s).

But our critic proves that will never happen,

On the contrary, I've described exactly how a truly omnipotent omniscient
Jesus could make it happen by tomorrow.

as he goes on to pile even more absurd demands on the Gospels and
expresses yet more bigotry:

Another feeble and baseless ad hominem.

There would still need to be some external objective
confirmation (e.g. by precise prophecies of scientific
or historical developments, or through physical
evidence of Easter miracles), and overall background
plausibility that a omniscient omnibenevolent deity
would be so concerned with ancient Palestine and with
the fertility problems of the nomad Abraham.

As for the latter, our critic lacks scale: Little things like the
fertility of one man can be of concern in a larger picture. One
may as well suggest that there would have been no concern had
there been infertility suffered by the parents of Martin Luther
King, Ludwig van Beethoven, or Karl Marx.

Holding's reasoning here is circular. These figures were important
*without* anyone having appealed to the vanity of any local tribal deities.
By contrast, Abraham's descendants were (unjustly) given "the whole land of
Canaan" only because Abraham agreed to genitally mutilate them in a cynical
appeal to the sick fetish of the local tribal deity.

As for the former, the evidence is more than sufficient as it
stands

Argument by assertion. Holding has not dared answer my repeated question to
him why everyone isn't a biblical inerrantist if (as he says here) "the
evidence is more than sufficient as it stands".

the problem is not just one of the head, but also the heart!

In light of Holding's incessant and un-Christian insults, this mention of
"the heart" is an ironic self-parody.
--
br...@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net