Over the decades that I've been involved in apologetics, I've read a lot of material from skeptics. I study them because when I reply, I want to be sure I'm replying to their arguments – not straw men representations of skeptics' arguments presented by other apologists. I also try to respond with original arguments, spoken in my own words, and not simply parrot (or worse, cut-and-paste) rebuttals given by other apologists. Of course, I don't mean to say I never study arguments made by other apologists. No one can be an expert in everything and, since apologetics touches on a lot of different subjects, I like to see what the Christians who are experts in each area have to say about the matter.
One expert to whom I've turned often is J. Warner Wallace. There's a funny story behind how I happened across him. I've only ever blogged part-time and when I would write a new post, it usually received only 200-300 views over the next couple of weeks. In a month, my blog usually had only around 5,000 visitors. Some years back, I had written a post titled, Textual criticism made amazingly easy. I thought it was a good post. I'll probably polish it up and republish it sometime, by the way. As is my practice, I tweeted a link to the post to sort of advertise it on social media. Much to my surprise, the post started receiving hundreds of views. In no time at all, it had racked up a couple of thousand views.
I wasn't sure where these views were coming from. My stat counter said the views were coming from Twitter but Twitter showed my tweet had very few clicks. I searched Twitter for my blog's title and found that Wallace apparently had read the article and tweeted a link to it from his own account! He has a much wider reach on social media than I do and the clicks were all coming from his audience. Over the next few years, he would tweet my articles from time to time. It was a great boon to my blog and it literally tripled the amount of traffic I received.
I don't want to give the wrong impression. It's not like he and I talk, text, or hang out together. Even though he's shared my blog on his social media, I've only met him once. A couple of years ago, I saw that Wallace was going to be in Louisville where I happen to live. I was free that weekend so I planned to attend. I don't believe there was a charge for admission but I honestly can't remember. There was a pretty good-sized crowd there, and his presentation was interesting. I'll talk more about it in a moment but I remember him mentioning that, as part of his ministry, he regularly posted articles published by other Christian apologists. When I met him afterward, I mentioned I was one of the bloggers he would occasionally cite. I told him the name of the most recent post I'd written that he republished and he seemed to remember it. But then again, maybe he was being polite. Anyway, I had my picture taken with him and he signed one of his books that I had bought, Cold Case Christianity.
For anyone not familiar with J. Warner Wallace, we can read the following from his bio:
J. Warner Wallace is a Dateline featured cold-case homicide detective, popular national speaker and best-selling author. He continues to consult on cold-case investigations while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He is also an adjunct professor of apologetics at Talbot School of Theology (Biola University) and Southern Evangelical Seminary, and a faculty member at Summit Ministries. J. Warner became a Christ-follower at the age of thirty-five after investigating the claims of the New Testament gospels using his skill set as a detective. He eventually earned a Master’s Degree in Theological Studies from Gateway Seminary.
Evolutionists often brag that their theory is supported by so many different sciences. It's rather hilarious because not only is evolution not true, neither is the theory relevant to any other area of science. In an article by Dr. Jerry Bergman: a survey of college text books showed that most barely discuss evolution. The anatomy and physiology text books examined didn't mention evolution at all. Of the colleges surveyed in Ohio and Michigan, biology majors were required to only take one class in evolution. Also from the article, National Academy of Science Member and renown carbene chemist, Professor emeritus Dr. Philip Skell of Pennsylvania State University (see Lewis, 1992), did a survey of his colleagues that were “engaged in non-historical biology research, related to their ongoing research projects.” He found that the “Darwinist researchers” he interviewed, in answer to the question, “Would you have done the work any differently if you believed Darwin's theory was wrong?” that “for the large number” of persons he questioned, “differing only in the amount of hemming and hawing” was “in my work it would have made no difference.”
I say all that to say this: Christianity is not only true, it can and has been examined in many different ways. Being a detective, Wallace uses modern investigative techniques to examine the veracity of the eyewitness accounts recorded in the gospels. He made an appearance in the movie, God's Not Dead 2, where he played himself as an expert witness in a trial. I've included the clip so you can understand his work in his own words.
In his presentation here in Louisville, Wallace greatly expounded many of the points he discussed in the video and in his book. He also included a lot of additional material, most of which was from his perspective of a cold-case detective. Wallace is a valuable resource to apologists and I encourage everyone to visit his website and following him on social media. His is a unique approach to apologetics and yet another affirmation that the Bible is the revealed word of God.
I've seen Wallace's books in bookstores, and run across mentions of him on the web before, but I'm not very familiar with his work. Still, I have a problem with his treating Luke's account of the soldiers mocking Jesus as "unintentional support" of Matthew's account. It's generally accepted that the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, represent one original source and two adaptions of that source (due to the immense amount of Mark that appears verbatim in both other gospels -- you don't see the minor differences that Wallace notes you would expect from independent accounts). The common version has Mark first, then Matthew and Luke as expansions, though arguments have been made for Matthew's priority, with Mark as a condensation. The point is, no one regards Luke as independent of the other synoptics. At least one commentator has sought to do away with "Q," the supposed common source used by Luke and Matthew to supplement Mark, by simply having Luke directly use Matthew's gospel, modifying it according to his own preferences. If this is so, then Luke may very well have intentionally supported Matthew's account by inserting an explanation for a seeming plot hole in Matthew.
ReplyDeleteAgain, none of the gospels identify their authors, and none of them claims to be an eyewitness account. The gospel, Luke, that claims to have used eyewitness accounts obviously relies heavily on either Matthew, or Mark, or both.
Evolutionists often brag that their theory is supported by so many different sciences. It's rather hilarious because not only is evolution not true, neither is the theory relevant to any other area of science.
ReplyDeleteThe taxonomic philosophy known as "cladism" originally assumed the truth of common descent. Colin Patterson and other "pattern cladists" noted that you don't actually need to assume common descent to practice cladistic analysis of species, and indeed by not making any assumptions about why particular patterns of similarities and differences exist, one can use the resultant consistent taxonomic tree as evidence for common descent.
I mention this because the same principle applies to many fields: one need not assume that evolution is true to practice, e.g. developmental biology or ecology or entomology, never mind stratigraphy or radiometric dating. It is nonetheless possible, and indeed true, that all of these fields lend support to evolutionary theory. A detective doesn't need to assume, when collecting fingerprints at a crime scene, that the fingerprints came from any particular suspect, for them to point to a particular suspect.
Another, unrelated (except for referring to the same blog post) point: Wallace, in the video, states that the authors of the gospels (or at any rate, the originators of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead) faced torture and martyrdom rather than recant their claims. But the Neronian persecution doesn't seem to have taken much interest in the particular doctrines of Christianity: Nero blamed the Christians for setting fire to Rome, and didn't seem to much care what theological reasons they might have had for doing so, or whether they were willing to recant them. That was a later stage of persecution, under Domitian and later, when many of the people who'd originally known Jesus were dead anyway. Since we don't know who actually wrote the gospels, it cannot be demonstrated that they actually were martyred (claims about both their identities and fates arose centuries later and are of little historical value).