Answering Critics
CORRECTING BART EHRMAN ON HARMONIZATION: A Risible Objection Refuted
© 2022, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction Dr. Bart Ehrman is a former evangelical who turned agnostic[1] and now spends his time trying to debunk the truth of Christianity. Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has written or edited thirty-three books and is a soi-disant “world-renowned New Testament expert.”[2] He is considered to be one of the …
ON THE HISTORICAL RELIABILITY OF THE GOSPEL BOOKS: A Response to Ijaz Ahmad’s Comments on the John Tors-Shabir Ally Debate
© 2020, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction On January 11 of this year, I debated Muslim scholar Dr. Shabir Ally; the debate topic was “Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?” Subsequently, the video of the debate was posted on YouTube,[1] and it elicited various comments from both Muslims and Christians. The lengthiest and most detailed were posted by one “Br. Ijaz” under the rubric “Calling Christians.” A quick …
WHY THERE IS AN ERROR IN MARK 1:2 IN YOUR BIBLE: Another Example of the Evangelical Betrayal of the Bible
The original reading of Mark 1:2 is not “in Isaiah the prophet”, which is an error that evangelical scholars who accept Griesbach’s canons unsuccessfully try to dodge. The reading “in the prophets” is found in the overwhelming majority of manuscripts and the earliest and best material, including the writings of Irenaeus.
THE RESURRECTION ACCOUNTS: “Incompatible Contradictions” or Coherent History?
And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up—if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have …
SHERMER’S ERROR AND THE MEANING OF LIFE: Another Failed Attempt to Find Meaning in an Atheistic Life
Every attempt by atheists to identify meaning in life ends up with them promoting views they personally prefer as if they were absolute and meaningful. Shermer utterly fails to show that evolution has bestowed morality or purpose-driven life on us.
IS CREATIONISM SUPPORT DROPPING? A Response to USA Today and a Warning to Creationists
Krattenmaker’s belief that a recent Gallup poll proves Americans are turning against young earth creationism is premature. He did not look at long-term data. Nevertheless, the poll results are significant for Christians. A wrong view of origins is a symptom of the real problem, erosion of belief in inerrancy.
DID JESUS DENY HIS OWN DEITY IN MARK 10:18? The Significance of Jesus’ Answers to the Rich Young Ruler
In telling the rich young ruler that there is only one "Good" Teacher who can give him the answer of how to inherit eternal life, God Himself, Jesus sets the stage for a revelation of His own Deity.
ARE THE EVENTS OF JESUS’ CAREER THE BEST ATTESTED FACTS OF ANCIENT HISTORY? A Comparison to the Attestation for Caesar’s Crossing of the Rubicon and for Spartacus
This article is a response to Richard Carrier’s claims that Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River as an event and Spartacus as a person are better attested than Jesus. We have far better and more certain documentation for the events of the career of Jesus than there is for any other ancient personage.
TIME OUT: Fifty Years Later, Answering Time Magazine’s Question, “Is God Dead?”
Fifty years ago today, Time, “the weekly newsmagazine,” published what some consider its most controversial cover story ever.[1] Inside the usual red border of the cover there was nothing but a stark black background with, under the Time banner, a question in three large red letters: “Is God Dead?”[2] The implication, of course, was not that God, a living being, had met with some misfortune or old age and had died; the question suggested that the world was coming to the …
YES, JESUS REALLY DID EXIST: Refuting Maclean’s Magazine’s Latest Madness
The article is the same farrago of unsubstantiated allegations, bald assertions, and refusal to consider relevant evidence that always characterized this sort of article.
THE MUSTARD SEED REVISITED: A Look at a Critical Review
Our solution to the problem that Jesus supposedly erred in calling the mustard seed the smallest of all seeds is that γῆ means a “limited area of ground for agricultural use”, which is an attested meaning. Brad Cooper argues that σπέρμα here means “agricultural seed,” but this is not an attested meaning.
DID JESUS ERR ABOUT THE SIZE OF MUSTARD SEEDS? A Case Study in How to Do Serious Evangelical Apologetics
In Mark 4:31, Jesus apparently makes a scientific error by asserting that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. But in the original Greek, He did not say that. He said that a mustard seed, when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on the ground, not smaller than all seeds on earth.
IS LUKE WRONG ABOUT THE DATE OF JESUS’ BIRTH? A Case Study in How to Do Serious Evangelical Apologetics (Part 3)
Luke says Jesus was born while Quirinius was governing Syria, but Matthew says Jesus was born before Herod’s death. There is no contradiction. Herod died in 1 BC, not 4 BC. The only testimony that Quirinius began to govern Syria in AD 6 is from Josephus. Luke is by far the superior historian to Josephus.
IS LUKE WRONG ABOUT THE DATE OF JESUS’ BIRTH? A Case Study in How to Do Serious Evangelical Apologetics (Part 2)
Luke says Jesus was born while Quirinius was governing Syria, but Matthew says Jesus was born before Herod’s death. There is no contradiction. Herod died in 1 BC, not 4 BC. The only testimony that Quirinius began to govern Syria in AD 6 is from Josephus. Luke is by far the superior historian to Josephus.
IS LUKE WRONG ABOUT THE DATE OF JESUS’ BIRTH? A Case Study in How to Do Serious Evangelical Apologetics (Part 1)
Luke says Jesus was born while Quirinius was governing Syria, but Matthew says Jesus was born before Herod’s death. There is no contradiction. Herod died in 1 BC, not 4 BC. The only testimony that Quirinius began to govern Syria in AD 6 is from Josephus. Luke is by far the superior historian to Josephus.
IS IT UNJUST OF GOD TO SEND PEOPLE TO HELL?
It is not unjust of God to send people to hell. God gives us life as a gift and has the right to end it. Jesus is the ticket of admission to heaven. Those who refuse this ticket cannot get into heaven. They cannot build their own eternal house and so can only live in a house God provides. “His house, his rules.”
THE TESTIMONY OF JOSEPHUS: Powerful Evidence for the Truth of Christianity, or an Interpolated Fraud?
The Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews is an extra-biblical testimony to Jesus’ ministry, miracles, death, and resurrection. It is not a later interpolation. None of the arguments against its authenticity stands the test.
EXAMINING THE CLAIM THAT THE WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS OF JOHN 7:53-8:11 ARE MORE LUKAN THAN JOHANNINE
One of the best known stories about Jesus is His encounter with an adulteress whom He refused to condemn. The story, known in academic circles as the Pericope Adulterae, or Pericope de Adultera.
CONTRADICTIONS IN THE GOSPEL BOOKS? Lessons from the World Junior Hockey Championships
There are a number of events in the ministry of Jesus that are documented by more than one Gospel author. Events that are documented by two authors (Matthew and Mark, Matthew and Luke, or Mark and Luke) are called the “double tradition.” Events that are described by three Gospel writers (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are called the “triple tradition.”[1] One of the ways in which liberal skeptics attack the historical reliability of the Gospel books is to point out that there are differences in the double and triple tradition. Matthew’s description of …
GIGO: Unearthing a Decisive New Tipping Point for Textual Criticism
The earliest New Testament manuscripts available to us are corrupt and clearly not the best. Scholars have ignored the key issue of provenance. Virtually all the earliest papyri we have came out of a garbage dump, discarded by the Christians at Oxyrhynchus, because they thought them too corrupt to keep.
ECHOES IN THE MATH: More Non-Evidence for the Big Bang
An article in the 24 January 2015 issue of New Scientist has the misleading headline, “Ancient echoes speak to us from the big bang.” The echoes are just an idea from a from a calculation, and not something that has actually been found in the real world.
NOT COUSINS: The Genetic Dissimilarity between Chimps and Men
The claim that we share almost 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees was made before the chimpanzee genome was sequenced. After this was done, it was found that humans and chimps may share less than 70% of their DNA.
NOTHING FROM NOTHING (Response to the National Post, Nov. 19, 2014)
Lawrence Krauss suggests that the universe might have arisen from Nothing as a spontaneous quantum fluctuation. But this requires a quantum field, which is not “Nothing.” Something coming out of nothing violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, which is on much firmer ground than “Hawking radiation.”
DOES AN ANCIENT TEXT PROVE THAT JESUS WAS MARRIED TO MARY MAGDALENE AND HAD CHILDREN? A Response to “The Lost Gospel” by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson
The claims of The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary Magdalene are a non-starter. The document is from the late 6th century AD, far too late to have credibility. It is a fictional story of Joseph and Asenath and says nothing about Jesus or Mary Magdalene.
FANTASIA 2014: A Response to Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”
Fantasia is, after all, a compendium of fairy tales, which is what the theory of evolution is. It has the same claim to reality as an anthropomorphic rodent casting magic spells, and a good deal less than dancing hippos.
JESUS OR THE BIBLE: Which is the “Word of God”?
If one asks an Evangelical Christian whether Jesus is “the Word of God,” the answer is usually an unqualified “yes.” If one then asks whether the Bible is “the Word of God,” the answer is also an unqualified “yes.”
THE IRREFUTABLE CASE FOR THE RESURRECTION: How David K. Clark’s Risible “Betting on Jesus: The Vanishing of the Christ” (Free Inquiry, April/May 2014) Strengthens the Case for the Resurrection of Jesus
David K. Clark’s Super New Argument Attempts to disprove the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ date back all the way to the very day of the resurrection itself, when the tomb guards who reported this event to the chief priests were told...
THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD JESUS AND THE TESTIMONY OF GOD IN OUR DAYS
Fact 1: Today the reader is a witness to the fact that a Christian Church exists Fact II: The Lord’s Day / The Christian Day of Worship – First Day of the Week (Sunday)Fact III: NT writings, over 5,800 Greek Manuscripts, Tens of Thousands of NT Manuscripts Other than Greek and …
DO APPARITIONS OF MARY UNDERMINE THE CASE FOR JESUS’ RESURRECTION? Debunking Hector Avalos’ “Living Laboratory”
Avalos tells us that he is “always looking for good living examples from around the world of phenomena that apologists for the resurrection deem to be not credible or comparable” and believes he has found such an example in the “Marian apparitions” from Medjugorje.
“A PLACE FOR THE CAMELS” (Genesis 24:31b): Refuting the Claim That There Were No Domesticated Camels in the Holy Land at the Time of the Patriarchs
Archaeologists claim radiocarbon dating shows camels were not in Israel until after the time of the patriarchs, meaning the Bible is not reliable as history. However, they have not disproven the account of a small number of camels in Canaan owned for a brief time by one family, Abraham and his descendants.
“NATIVITY LEGENDS” OR HISTORICAL FACTS? A Response to Free Inquiry
It’s that time of year again. Christmas is approaching, and with it a bevy of annual traditions: Christmas carols, decorations, coloured lights on houses, shopping for gifts – and, of course, the farrago of assaults by atheists and liberal scholars on the historical truth of the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus. The …
“THEY TOOK THE WORDS RIGHT OUT OF MY MOUTH”: Does John 3:16-17 Record the Words of Jesus or of John the Evangelist?
One sometimes has to wonder if the raison d’être of Bible scholars is to “spen[d] their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21). How else can we account for the bizarre idea championed by some of them that Jesus did not speak the words recorded in John 3:16-17 in His conversation with Nicodemus? How does one look at what seems to be a continuous speech of Jesus from John 3:10b-21 and conclude that vv.16-17 are not, in fact, part of this speech but …
AN IMPOSSIBLE ENTITY: A Refutation of “The Thinking Atheist’s” Unthinking Attack on Creationism
Simple logic shows that if there are two, and only two, possible explanations for a phenomenon then proving one false necessarily proves the other true.
EVIDENCE OF DIVINE AUTHORSHIP IN THE BIBLE: Job 26
An example of advanced scientific knowledge in the Bible is in Job 26, which states in verse 7, “He hangs the earth on nothing.” Job’s contemporaries all thought the earth must be resting on something. The “pillars of heaven” in verse 11 may refer to gas pillars such as the Cone Nebula or in the Eagle Nebula.
CAN A CHRISTIAN VOTE FOR A MORMON?
God has appointed governing authorities, who may or may not be Christians, for specific tasks. Citizens, including Christians, have the right and duty to vote for the best possible candidate to lead their nation, which could be a Mormon such as Mitt Romney.
“HENDERSON HAS SCORED FOR CANADA!” What the 40th Anniversary of the Canada/USSR Summit Series Can Tell Us about the Gospel Books
Today, September 28, 2012, is the fortieth anniversary of Game 8, the final and deciding game of the 1972 Canada/USSR hockey “Summit Series.” It was an event that captured the attention of Canadians as very few other things ever have. Hockey was our game, the one thing we did better than anyone else in the world, and the one thing that touched the lives of all Canadians from coast to coast. We were the best, no question. For a long time, other nations were no match even for our lowly amateurs[1]. But …
IS CREATIONISM NOT APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN? Exposing the Muddled Thinking of Bill Nye “the Science Guy”
Bill Nye, the mechanical engineer and well known host of the 1990s Disney/PBS educational show “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” is an ardent advocate of the theory of evolution. On August 23, a video was posted on YouTube titled “Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children.” It was designed to persuade people to stop teaching creationism to children and embrace evolution, yet for the thinking individual the video simply exposed the muddled thinking of Darwin’s disciples[1]. The purpose of this article is not to “reinvent the wheel” by again arguing the …
CHEATING THEMSELVES THROUGH PHILOSOPHY: A Demolition of “The Rights and Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz” in Claremont Review of Books (Fall, 2005)
As a salvo in the debate over natural law versus revelation, the article “The Rights and Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz” by Hadley Arkes, published in the Fall 2005 issue of Claremont Review of Books[1], is a noteworthy contribution. It is noteworthy, however, because it does such a good job of destroying its own argument for natural law. And it does it so thoroughly, albeit unintentionally, that it would seem to make it difficult to take such arguments seriously henceforth. There are two main parts to this article. The first, which takes up …
DO YOU HAVE TO STOP THINKING TO BE A CHRISTIAN? A Response to Charles Lewis (National Post, January 26, 2011)
In an opinion piece titled “Less God, more excuses” in this day’s National Post newspaper (p. A15), Charles Lewis writes the following: The most popular objection to religion is that it replaces thinking with sets of unproveable truths – and that the rules flowing out of those truths turn adherents into robots. Those who leave religion behind, we are led to understand, will begin to think for themselves and thereby exercise real freedom as responsible citizens. Lewis goes on to lament that this latter theory has not been fulfilled, but has instead …
WHAT IS FAITH?
We all have to have faith in many ways, including your atheist friend. The wise man will base his faith on facts and evidence. Faith in the Christian understanding is not believing Jesus blindly, but putting “complete trust and confidence” in Him because He has proven that He is God.
ATHEISM
Some atheists think that religious language, for example, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", doesn't mean anything at all; therefore, there is no point in determining whether God exists
A PRIMER ON ENTROPY (THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS)
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an insurmountable obstacle to the spontaneous formation of highly complex organic molecules. Evolutionists cannot explain away the problem by appealing to the earth being an open system. Inputting free energy into a system speeds up the rate of entropy increase.
PROBABILITY AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
Evolution is fundamentally dependent on chance. The probability of the simplest theoretical cell forming by chance is beyond the Universal Probability Bound, the absolute limit beyond which an event becomes impossible. Random chance, then, cannot explain the origin of life.
DEBUNKING SKY & TELESCOPE MAGAZINE’S ATTEMPT TO GET AROUND EVOLUTION’S THERMODYNAMIC PROBLEM
Evolutionists claim that the theory of chemical evolution does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, appealing to the effects of energy. But the earth being an open system simply means free energy is being inputted into it, which makes the increase in entropy faster; it does not reverse it.
