Round 6 - From Johnny 

In my last post I wrote:

How can we be reasonably certain that Papias was “the hearer of John?”

Brady responded:

Well, we are back at the same question we always come back to and you always run away from: What methodology do we use to do history? You have none and you and Tobin reject what he calls the “modern critical, scientific” methodologies. So, how can you say anything about history? It seems that you believe if you just stay ignorant enough about these methods, you won’t have to accept the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead or anything about ancient times that you don’t like.

Regarding proper methodologies, the sizeable consensus of modern historians and sociologists who disagree with you employ a methodology (whatever that methodology is) that is accepted by the majority of the American people.

Brady wrote:

You ask, “How can we be reasonably certain?” I ask how are we to measure “reasonably certain”? How can we be reasonably certain that Caesar fought the Gallic wars, or any other event of history? Without a criteria and a baseline there is no way to objectively measure such a concept.

We have been through this before. In a previous post, I told that while whether or not Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River has no eternal significance whatsoever, if Christians are correct that heaven and hell are at stake regarding the claim that Jesus physically rose from the dead, that claim, if true, would have great eternal significance. I now add to that that such being the case, Christians need to present a case so strong that it would make it more difficult not to accept Christianity than to accept it.

I also mentioned that an author claims that it was the Chinese who first discovered the New World. I asked you if it would bother you if he was correct. You never responded to that question.

Brady wrote:

But we have covered this all before. You want to talk about history and events of history, while all the time rejecting modern, critical, scientific methods of investigating history.

Modern, critical, scientific methods? What are you talking about? I’ve already told you on a number of occasions that a sizeable consensus of modern historians and sociologists, utilizing the best available critical, scientific methods, flatly reject your presuppositions. You may ask me how many is a sizeable consensus. If I produced credible evidence of a sizeable consensus, would you change your position? Of course not. 

In my last post I stated:

My objection is the same as in my paragraph that began with “Regarding conversed with many.”

 Brady replied:

Johnny, a real objection is based on contrary evidence or a demonstrable problem with how the methodology is used. You have no contrary evidence, nor do you have a demonstrable problem with how the methodology is used, because you don’t have a methodology. “I don’t like it” is not a real objection, but that is all you have.

Regarding “a real objection is based upon contrary evidence,” you are attempting to change the burden of proof into the burden of disproof. No, I can’t travel throughout the universe in order to prove that the God of the Bible is not there. The Bible is the initial claimant here. It is full of unsupported claims from cover to cover, beginning with the very first verse in the book of Genesis, which says “In the beginning God (implying the God of the Bible and no other God) created the heavens and the earth.” In a court trial, while it is up to the initial claimant (the Bible) to present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant (skeptics) is guilty, a defendant does not need to prove his innocent beyond a reasonable doubt. Court trials are properly weighted in favor of defendants (skeptics).

Since who you refer to as being the primary sources are the foundation for your entire case, I’ve been working on a somewhat different approach as follows:

Consider the following six references:

Papias - late 1^st century, mid-2^nd century

Irenaeus - c 130 - 200

Clement of Alexandria - c 150 - 215

Origen - c 185 - 254

Eusebuis - c 260 - c 340

Jerome - c 342 - 420 

I listed those sources chronologically in order to prove a certain point. I know that you have heard of the game where say 25 people are sitting in a room and a 10 minute story is told to the first person, the first person tells it to the second person and so on until all 25 people have heard the story. When such a game is played, the version of the story as told by the 25^th person is usually different in many ways from the story that the first person told to the second person. 

By the time Irenaus may have read Papias’ writings, and Clement of Alexandria may have read Irenaeus’ writings, and Origen may have read Clement of Alexandria’s writngs, and Eusebius may have read Origen’s writings, and Jerome may have read Eusebius’ writings, who knows what alterations may have occurred from Papias through Jerome? 

Regarding your claim that some of your sources knew one or more of the apostles, I found the following on a Roman Catholic Church web site: “Saint Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis (close to Laodicea and Colossae in the valley of the Lycus in Phrygia) and Apostolic Father, called by St. Irenaeus ‘a hearer of John, and companion of Polycarp, a man of old time.’ He wrote a work in five books, logion kyriakon exegesis, of which all but some fragments is lost. We learn something of the contents from the preface, part of which has been preserved by Eusebius.”  

Now please tell me why any rational person should believe Irenaeus’ claim that Papias was “a hearer of John.” In my previous post I quoted Paul Tobin as saying “Even the major church historian, Eusebius – as shifty a writer as one could imagine, according to Edward Gibbon – gloated over the fact that he managed (in his account) to ‘make everything right’ for the Church.’”

As many skeptic Bible scholars have often said, there were numerous opportunities for the possibilities of interpolations, innocent but inaccurate revelations, propaganda and outright fraud.

You scoff at my case as being shoddy, but the simple truth is that you have no intelligent case to make whatsoever. You naively assume that interpolations, innocent but inaccurate revelations, propaganda and outright fraud are not even reasonable possibilities. Of course, since you believe that heaven and hell are at stake, what else could you believe? If you questioned the Bible, you believe that you would be at risk. Well, you are at much greater risk that you think you are. One of my essay topics at www.askepticalapproach.com is titled ‘Risks that Christians face if it one day turns out that Christianity is a false religion?’ When I was a Christian I assumed that there were only two alternatives, that the Bible was true or that we would all become dust in the ground. That’s what most Christians believe. However, the universe is vast and complex, and it is full of possibilities. We haven’t even found a cure for the common cold, and yet Christians attempt to tell us how the universe got here, having no problem entering the incredibly complex world of quantum physics. 

You will have to do much better than claim that one primary source told another primary source who told another primary source who told another primary source who told another primary source who told another primary source over a period of hundreds of years that Papias was called by Irenaeus ‘a hearer of John.’ Let’s not get ridiculous. You call that a methodology?

Can you produce credible evidence that estimates the dates that the writings of the primary sources were first recorded?  Unless you can produce such evidence, you have no case at all. The truth is, all you can produce is copies of the originals, not the dates of the recordings of the originals. Such being the case, the originals could have been recorded at various times over a period of centuries, and yet you presuppose that you know approximately when the originals were produced.  

Round 6 - From Brady

In my last post I wrote:

Well, we are back at the same question we always come back to and you always run away from: What methodology do we use to do history? You have none and you and Tobin reject what he calls the “modern critical, scientific” methodologies. So, how can you say anything about history? It seems that you believe if you just stay ignorant enough about these methods, you won’t have to accept the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead or anything about ancient times that you don’t like.

Johnny responded:

Regarding proper methodologies, the sizeable consensus of modern historians and sociologists who disagree with you employ a methodology (whatever that methodology is) that is accepted by the majority of the American people.

I have decided to focus only on this point in this post, since this is the foundation for all parts of our debate.

We have discussed in previous post that your answer now and previously is nothing more than the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam, the false appeal to authority and secondarily argumentum ad populum, an appeal to popularity. I refer you back to the post that goes into this at detail. My question now is, do you have an argument that is not based on a logical fallacy? If not, I don’t know how much further we can go in this debate. In fact we haven’t really gone anywhere. As you can see we keep coming back to this point.

Allow me to break down the main points of our little discussion for you:

Johnny: Jesus didn’t rise from the dead!

Brady: How do you know that?

Johnny: Because a sizeable consensus of modern historians and sociologists who disagree with you employ a methodology (whatever that methodology is) that is accepted by the majority of the American people.

Brady: How do you know that?

Johnny: Someone told me so.

Brady: what is your source for this?

Johnny: I don’t know.

Brady: What is the methodology that these historians and sociologists used for doing historical investigation?

Johnny: I don’t know.

Brady: Who are these historians and sociologists that agree with you?

Johnny: I don’t know.

Brady: How many historians and sociologists are there in total and what is the percentage that agrees with you?

Johnny: I don’t know.

Brady: Then how do you know that a sizeable consensus of modern historians and sociologists agree with you.

Johnny: Someone said so.

Brady: Do you understand that your statement is based on logical fallacy?

Johnny: I don’t care.

Johnny, you are the one who asked for a debate. You are the one who wanted to debate the resurrection as a historical event. If you are so completely unprepared and un-tooled for such a debate, why in the world did you pick this topic? If the totality of your argument against the resurrection is, “A bunch of other people said so, but I don’t know who they are or why they said it”, you really aren’t in a position to debate the issue. If you don’t have a real argument and what you do say is based on fallacy, what are we to do? Where are we to go?

I don’t expect you to have a PhD in the subject to be able to debate. But I do expect that you would have an argument before you challenge someone to a debate on a subject or at least that you would go, read some material and get an argument during the debate, but you have done neither. Why don’t you find one of those so-called historians or sociologists and send him or her in to have this debate? Although I don’t see how a sociologist is going to have much to say on the subject, but you seem to, so let’s not exclude them.