They Keep Trying to Prove the Gospels Reliable (InspiringPhilosophy response to a response)

Mike and Than spent four and a half hours debunking my gospel reliability response... and admitted on stream they hadn't watched it. Three rounds in, the case for reliability still hasn't been made. 

original videos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_R7YNWOf1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO1Z0MrsJmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aacs0_E7Qdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=546BiYIATd8

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Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

Are you gonna make a response to the Elastic Apologies 2.5 hour rebuttal of your gospel series? Absolutely. It's awful. Yeah, we'll go through that uh because it it's really bad. I can't believe he even put it out. I was really, really shocked. That's how bad it was. That sounds very bad. How do you think Paulo's gonna respond?

SPEAKER_06 0:18

It's not that good.

SPEAKER_05 0:20

No, it's worse.

SPEAKER_07 0:28

Welcome to Paul Gia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians. And today we're doing one of those response to a response to a response videos, starring the team of Mike and Fan over at Inspiring Philosophy.

SPEAKER_05 0:41

On my channel, I just did a 15-part series on the reliability of the gospels. All in all, the 15 videos together about six hours of just data supporting the reliability of the gospels.

SPEAKER_07 0:49

I'm specifically responding to Mike's points, but ain't nobody got time for six hours. For the purpose of sanity, we're gonna try to dispatch this in much less time than that. Unfortunately, the video he actually made is you can't prove that the gospels are unreliable, so I can just keep assuming that they are reliable.

SPEAKER_05 1:05

So Paulo Gia did a uh two and a half hour response to our gospel reliability series, and we had a bunch of requests to go through it, so we are gonna go through it. I watched the whole thing, I watched parts of it twice now. Thoroughly unimpressed.

SPEAKER_06 1:17

My my biggest disappointment is this just felt like a bunch of cherry-picked objections to gospel reliability that together don't actually fit.

SPEAKER_07 1:26

Before we begin, it's only fair that I let Mike issue you a warning.

SPEAKER_05 1:30

This is Paul, he's got to misrepresent, try to like character assassinate to prime his audience to think, well, you can't trust this guy. Like this is really bad, man. This is just attempting to character assassinate to prime to gaslight his audience. It's it's kind of pathetic, and I'm not gonna stand for it. How is that not a little dishonest? Okay, don't ever call yourself a skeptic again. Paul, shut up. You're a hypocrite. Like, seriously, get a grip, man. Quite frankly, shut up if that's what you're gonna do.

SPEAKER_07 1:53

You have been warned, given that most of my audience had likely never heard of Mike's six hour series. It made sense for me to try to explain why this was a very important series to cover. It is an important brick, perhaps the most important prick in the entire inspiring philosophy of apologetics infrastructure. When trying to knock something down before an audience, you want to put it in the most formidable light, right? I don't know what to say. I like I was thoroughly unimpressed as I was just thoroughly unimpressed. But to each his own, I was sincerely attempting to convince my audience of the important gravitas of the series.

SPEAKER_05 2:24

When we did that 15-part series on gospel reliability, we went through like data point after data point after data point of what conservative these evangelical fundamentalist scholars have put out. And no one addresses their points.

SPEAKER_07 2:35

No one addresses their points?

SPEAKER_05 2:37

So he starts off by like citing me where I've been in like live streams citing my video, and he's like, Oh, he's just using this as a shortcut. Like, Paul, shut up. You're a hypocrite.

SPEAKER_07 2:44

Citing your own work is just fine. But to infer that simply because you created a long series that has not yet been publicly addressed, that therefore your point is valid, that's less fine.

SPEAKER_05 2:55

You do this all the time. You're constantly citing your other videos, and you're mad I'm doing that. Like, seriously, get a grip, man.

SPEAKER_07 3:01

Yes, I do this all the time. I literally did it in this video. I'd rather everyone watch my Who Really Wrote the Gospels video, but here we are. Why would this be bad? This is absolutely what creators should do.

SPEAKER_06 3:13

If that's a shortcut, then guess what? The whole entire academic enterprise of citing other relevant scholarship or citing previous work and articles or journal entries and anything like that that you've done before, that's a shortcut and that's bad.

SPEAKER_07 3:24

Why are you adding and that's bad? I didn't say it was bad. If you'd have bothered to watch the video, you'd have heard me say the video we're responding to leans very heavily on quotations from papers and books from scholars. I will be forgoing some of my usual visual tomfoolery and casual explanations in order to mirror this style so that scholarship will be met with scholarship. And surprisingly often, I'll be quoting the same books that Mike quotes. And indeed, my response displayed nearly 200 quotes from 87 different works. Why would I want to poison the well against my own video? So even this annoyed fan.

SPEAKER_06 3:59

Does Paul give evidence in this that for for what he's saying, or is he just quoting the scholars. The scholar. Oh yes. Okay. I'm a little annoyed that he's just. It's not that citing scholars is bad, but all he's doing is citing scholars. I'm not sure I can win here.

SPEAKER_03 4:13

Well, the Kobe Ashi Maroon. Exactly. Sometimes you can't win.

SPEAKER_05 4:17

Yeah, I hate it when I read a scholar. He's like, oh, by the way, I covered this topic in another book. So look how lazy he's being. My goodness. This is just this is just attempting to character assassinate to prime to gaslight his audience. It's it's kind of pathetic, and I'm not gonna stand for it.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

I think you're under more stress than you'd like to admit. Maybe you should get some rest.

SPEAKER_07 4:36

As usual, I endeavor to make my responses take less time than the video I'm responding to. Not everyone feels this way. We've been going for over four hours.

SPEAKER_05 4:44

I thought we were gonna go for five. I'm lucky we did it under five. I'm happy. Is this now the record for the longest live stream on this channel? Probably.

SPEAKER_07 4:51

Fortunately, we can cover a lot of ground by first looking at some of the general themes before drilling down on specifics.

SPEAKER_05 4:57

Um let me let me give you like some snapshots of what's sort of going on in this video and why there's so many problems.

SPEAKER_06 5:02

So the first theme is that fan is not offering informed critique. My biggest disappointment about this, so um, I did not like full disclosure, I did not have the time to watch everything. This is consistent with earlier videos where they were asked about me.

SPEAKER_05 5:16

Yeah, I've not had time to watch the whole thing. I'm gonna watch it and more than likely respond unless in the rest of it. He makes an amazing case. But so far, what I've seen, I'm thoroughly disappointed in his ability to respond. Have you seen any of it, Sam?

SPEAKER_06 5:29

I watched a little bit of it and then I got annoyed, so I stopped watching.

SPEAKER_07 5:34

But like I'm a comic book movie with a woman on the poster. Some people just can't help but express opinions without having seen it.

SPEAKER_06 5:41

Like my my biggest disappointment is this just felt like a bunch of cherry-picked objections to gospel reliability that together don't actually fit. And Paul's not building a model of the gospels. Paul's just pulling different pieces, and he's he's making a dessert. He's making like elevated hot dog in a gelatin, and it's like, this is disgusting. It doesn't even work.

SPEAKER_03 6:06

This is disgusting? Do you realize what you're saying?

SPEAKER_06 6:08

There's not a model, it's just here's an objection, here's an objection, here's an objection. But when you put all the objections together, you don't have a comprehensive or coherent like account of what the gospels are anymore.

SPEAKER_07 6:16

So obviously, one thing Fan didn't hear was me explicitly describing my video in those terms. I've attempted a speed run to show that these escape hatches are flawed or unsatisfactory to various degrees. To be clear, this wasn't my personal positive case for the non-reliability of the gospels. That would be a different video. I'm specifically responding to Mike's points. Fan repeatedly complains about me not providing a model.

SPEAKER_06 6:39

Whenever Paul talks, ask yourself this question: Is he presenting an alternative model that makes better sense of the observations that at hand? No alternative model. Just well, it's not as forceful as you think, because you know, here's a bunch of possibilities, but it's like okay, so then what what what what's the actual explanation of the total data at the end of the day? Right. Guess what? If you have a good hypothesis on the table and the and it makes sense of the data and the data just isn't as determinant of the hypothesis, but you still don't have a different model. Guess what? This model is still the most probable.

SPEAKER_07 7:12

But I very much did give my quick pitch for my gospel model for the record, because it seemed important, even though, as I said, the defense of it would be a topic for a very different video. Instead, we have documents that bear all the markings of Greek-speaking men who never met Jesus, or likely even met anyone who met Jesus, writing evangelistic propaganda, drawing upon decades of evolving oral tradition, manufactured allusions to the Hebrew Bible, influenced by the style and content of Greek composition, attempting to address the specific arguments of their day, all in an effort to win converts, not record history. I can't imagine not watching a video and then criticizing someone for leaving things out.

SPEAKER_06 7:47

I just don't know what I'm supposed to respond to half of the time here. Is he actually just not addressing the papers that you bring up later then at all? Paul Paul hasn't actually addressed how to fix this. He's just kind of gesturing at a problem and then not showing how the problem that can be gestured at actually applies to this particular example. I'm convinced he didn't do his homework. I probably would have had time to like actually watch this whole thing and make notes because there's like nothing to make notes about. I I know, I I like I sincerely was expecting more.

SPEAKER_02 8:14

I was expecting so much more from you.

SPEAKER_07 8:17

These accusations of omission would land more solidly if he'd have watched it and didn't seem to be relying on Mike's hand-picked clips to be representative of my presentation. Now I hope that everyone currently watching this is objecting that every video I've ever produced also features my hand-picked clips of the apologists. That's right, which is just one reason why no one should ever just take my word for it, and why I always include links in the description to the original sources I'm responding to so that viewers can easily fact-check me. In my initial response, I attempted to pull Mike away from the distraction of bias, because bias can always, in principle, be overcome by sufficient evidence. Even the most closed mind will be changed when confronted with sufficient opposing facts. Instead, I attempted to refocus the discussion on what was actually important in an argument, the burden of proof. Mike puts the burden of proof on the skeptic. One may think from Mike's title, Are the Gospels Historically Reliable, that he is accepting the burden of proof to make the positive case for reliability. Unfortunately, the video he actually made is, you can't prove that the gospels are unreliable, so I can just keep assuming that they are reliable. Whereas I am putting the burden of proof on the gospels to demonstrate reliability. The opposite view is sometimes called methodological skepticism or critical historiography, which advocates ancient claims are not automatically trustworthy and must earn credibility through independent corroboration, contextual plausibility, source criticism, and analysis of motive and genre. Now I spent Okay. This is a false dichotomy. It is not a false dichotomy because I'm specifically talking about burden of proof. For a given proposition, the burden rests with the person asserting the proposition, or it rests with the person disputing the claim. There is no meaningful third option when it comes to burden or proof.

SPEAKER_05 10:04

If you read Mike Lacona's book, he points out that Paul's missing a third category here. On page 95, he says there are three different ways a historian can approach a text: methodological credulity, methodological skepticism, and method methodological neutrality. Everyone knows I'm use Mike Lacona a lot. Licona advocates for methodological neutrality. We're not assuming credibility here, credulity, we're not assuming skepticism.

SPEAKER_07 10:27

Well, Mike, maybe you should read Licona a little more carefully. You put up page 95, but Licona tells us what this means on page 96. We may speak of a third view, methodical neutrality, where the one making the claim bears the burden of proof. Then we continue to page 97. Upon a second look, we discover that the view bears the marks of methodical skepticism. The historian promoting a particular historical hypothesis bears the full burden of proof for supporting that hypothesis, which he assumes to be false until finding sufficient evidence to the contrary. By Licona's own definition, the methodical neutrality view Mike claims to be advocating for continues to put the burden of proof on the one making the historical claim. The one real distinction Licona draws is that under neutrality, if I go beyond criticizing the reliability claim and propose my own alternative, hallucination, legendary development, whatever, that alternative also has to earn its keep. That's a fair standard. I'm happy to be held to it. But that doesn't shift the burden on the initial reliability claim itself back onto me, to different propositions, to different burdens. Mike elaborated in a pre-stream interview.

SPEAKER_05 11:36

Let's be clear, he's not just being agnostic here. He is making a positive claim. I'm making a positive claim. The gospel authors are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He is making the positive claim. Those titles were added in the second century. That gives me the right to say, what is your evidence for that? It's not just you be allowed to be skeptic and posit that. Because he's putting a very high standard on me to present evidence for my position. But he's got a very low standard of what he has to present in terms of evidence. He didn't give it in that video.

SPEAKER_07 12:01

Sticking to methodology here, as the authorship details will be covered later, Mike is right. When I go beyond doubting his claim and assert that the titles were added later, that's a positive claim, and I carry the burden, as just discussed, straight out of Lacona. So we agree on the rule. If I accept Mike's characterization of my evidence presentation, which I don't, but let's grant for a second, Mike's complaining about my burden doesn't help him meet his. As clearly expressed, Mike took on the reliability burden of proof, and my response was intended to examine if he met it. This is a whataboutism, which we'll talk about more in a minute. So Mike reaches for a courtroom analogy.

SPEAKER_05 12:37

That is not what innocent means. When you assume someone is innocent, uh you don't assume things are true. You assume they're innocent. For example, if detectives are interviewing suspects, they're supposed to have the presumption of innocence. Not that everything they're saying is accurate. It's perfectly fine to be skeptical of someone and assume innocence.

SPEAKER_07 12:55

Good news. We agree that presumption of innocence doesn't mean believing everything a suspect says. The legal presumption of innocence exists to allocate the burden of proof, not to evaluate testimony. The prosecution bears the burden. The defendant need not prove innocence. In fact, judges and juries don't even rule on innocence, but instead rule guilty or not guilty, a true dichotomy, based on how well the prosecution established their case. Not guilty is not the same as innocent. Innocent is a separate question that itself would bear the burden of proof.

SPEAKER_05 13:28

Like, for example, give another historical example. When I read the stories of Tut Moses III going into Canaan and campaigning there and him c him claiming that the god Amun Ra appeared to him, I believe, I presume innocence. Okay, that's what was reported. I believe those people thought that. I believe Tut Moses III thought that. That doesn't mean I assume it's true. There's a huge difference here.

SPEAKER_07 13:47

Mike accepts that the report was made. He accepts that the people believed it, and he refuses to assume it's true until something more than the inscription says so. That approach has a name, it's methodological skepticism, the very thing he called a false dichotomy a minute ago. Mike already treats every other ancient text on earth exactly the way I treat the gospels. In a courtroom, the accused gets the presumption. But testimony never does. Witnesses get cross-examined, weighed, and believed only where they hold up. The gospels aren't the defendant in this trial, they're the witnesses in the analogy. The proposition on trial is that these events actually happened, and the side advocating that proposition carries the burden of proof. Presuming the authors aren't liars costs mean nothing. Presuming their testimony is accurate is the actual question.

SPEAKER_05 14:35

Sam, did I ever say that, imply that, state that?

SPEAKER_07 14:38

I don't know. Did you? Did you advocate for just taking the text at face value? Unless someone else takes on a burden of proof?

SPEAKER_05 14:45

First, trust the words of others, then doubt if there are any good reasons for doing so. Luke should be considered innocent until proven guilty. At the end of the day, what reason do we have to deny the traditional authorship of the gospels?

SPEAKER_07 14:57

None of this burden shift is appropriate if you're gladly taking on the burden of proof. I'm sure Mike will stay consistent during this response.

SPEAKER_05 15:04

If we start with innocence and we see there's no good argument against traditional authorship and we got a lot of good evidence for traditional authorship, yeah, then we move into that idea that they are accurate, the traditional authorship.

SPEAKER_07 15:15

Why is no good arguments against traditional authorship in this equation for the Gospels? When Mike evaluates the Egyptian inscription, he doesn't advocate for Ram and Ra because of a lack of arguments against. Absence of disproof just leaves any report exactly where it started. The evidence for needs to carry the weight on its own, if it can. And the innocence doesn't need to enter into it. The moment nobody proved otherwise becomes load-bearing, accuracy is being assumed rather than shown. Another thing to be explored is the notion that my video is replete with whataboutisms.

SPEAKER_05 15:48

None of that actually that that's whataboutism. None of that actually addresses the point about the multiple attestation issue. Whataboutism? That's his argument. Oh, oh yeah, you found some good reliable data and mark. Well, I'm not going to accept that. I'm just going to resort to whataboutism. Are you kidding me? It's just whataboutism. Look, we give evidence that he may get something accurate and what does Paul go to? Oh, oh, oh, yeah. Okay, I'll give you that point. No. Oh no. Raymond Brown said you're wrong. That's it. Whataboutism? That's the argument. He doesn't go over any of the actual issues I brought up on this issue. How Matthew gets coinage right so much, amounts correct. Like I have a whole section on this about him using correct coin terms. Oh, well, what about this? Oh, what about that? What about if you resort to whataboutism, that doesn't tell me you're actually evaluating the data. You're just looking for excuses to throw against the wall so you can reject reliability.

SPEAKER_07 16:34

Mike's original video series purports to be putting forth a positive case for the reliability of the gospels. It's true that on a variety of topics like knowledge of Jewish customs, precise use of monetary terms, or so-called undesigned coincidences, and other places, Mike is advocating that the gospels have kernels of accurate information. And in some cases, my responses weren't denials of those individual data points. But rather, example where the gospel also contains inaccurate information in the same category. For example, sure, Matthew uses some correct names of coins, but at the same time, he gives very unrealistic numbers of those coins. So is that reliable or unreliable? Imagine if Mike offered you a smoothie and you asked if it was a healthy smoothie. Mike demonstrated how fresh the berries were, and that the yogurt is high quality, and there's even some protein powder in there. There are some nutritious ingredients in there, for sure. But then I come along and warn you that along with those, there are secretly two whole cups of sugar in the smoothie being offered. Oh, and a tablespoon of rat poison. All in the smoothie. Would I be engaging in whataboutism? Do not talk about Mike's farm fresh berries. Or am I instead informing the potential consumer that despite some positive ingredients, whether something is nutritious or not is a blend, and that the inclusion of rat poison ruins the drink. Of course, reliability of a document isn't all or nothing. The first sentence can be correct, the next sentence can be completely incorrect, and the third sentence can be partially correct. This is the models historians use. They evaluate claim by claim, not document by document. One verified claim means little when evaluating the next claim. Of course, like the bad smoothie, sometimes individual problems are so egregious that it can taint the whole document. And like the smoothie, there's no possible strawberry, so delicious that it absolves the other ingredients. It's not symmetrical. But that doesn't stop Mike from trying.

SPEAKER_05 18:29

What about all the uh Lee McGrew points out there's a ton of undesigned coincidences between Paul and Axe?

SPEAKER_07 18:34

So, like, what are you doing here? That's how trust works. Someone can spend years building a reputation for honesty, but getting caught in one intentional lie is enough to make every future claim deserve a little more scrutiny. Again, what historians do is evaluate historical documents claim by claim, allowing for some to be true, some to be false, and most to be somewhere in between. Apologists can't have that though, because the miracles don't survive. They need to prop them up with a special ad hoc methodology not used elsewhere. The next big theme is what Mike calls.

SPEAKER_05 19:07

Okay, so now we have a double standard again. Again, double standards. Like it's a double standard. It's just a double standard. Again, it's a double standard. But we just, again, skeptics have double standards. And again, notice the double standard. Double standards, man.

SPEAKER_07 19:17

With this many double standards, we're gonna need subcategories.

SPEAKER_05 19:20

There's labeling of scholarship. Like he constantly is changing his standards in response to gospel reliability. In one segment, he'll he'll he'll he'll say, like, oh, I'm arguing for this position because that's what majority of scholars are will say. And then, like, in other segments, he'll cite these fringe views. They're rejected by the majority of scholars. Like, so like he'll cite the majority when it's convenient for him and then completely ignore it when it's not convenient for him.

SPEAKER_07 19:43

Well, that sounds very bad. I'm sure that Mike's original video wouldn't also sometimes appeal to scholarly consensus.

SPEAKER_05 19:49

But most scholars today reject this position. They classify the gospels as Greco-Roman biographies. The scholarly community has shifted to agree the gospels are in fact Greco-Roman biographies. There is a general consensus that Romans 14-14 alludes to a saying found in Mark 7-15. Many scholars believe Jesus did predict the destruction of the temple, and this is in fact what most scholars believe. Numerous scholars are in agreement that the author of the gospel could read Hebrew. The overwhelming majority of scholars note the Gospels have a far more prominent connection to Jewish texts than to Greek texts, while other times challenging consensus to advocate for a more fringe view. Many scholars have been pushing back against this consensus. Most scholars date the Gospels to after 70 AD. But is this accurate? Despite the prominence of this position in modern scholarship, there is a ton of evidence that confirms the reliability of Mark. When evaluated, their arguments seem to hold little weight. Oh wait, he did do that.

SPEAKER_07 20:48

This is a strange criticism. I've learned to use scholarly consensus never as the justification, but just as a measure of how much defense one needs to put forth in order to allocate the most time on more disputed topics.

SPEAKER_03 21:00

So for those audience members who haven't spent their lives working in and around academia, could you just explain what the scholarly consensus is? It's the kind of thing that we typically don't have to defend when we're giving a a paper before other experts. This is something that everybody says, yes, that's right, and we move along.

SPEAKER_07 21:22

And of course, like Mike, I too am convinced that the evidence goes against some consensus views at many points. He's a strong advocate for this.

SPEAKER_05 21:30

Right after this, I go on to say, now that still seems to be the consensus, especially among critical scholars for sure. Then I make a different claim. I say, but the evidence overwhelmingly supports an historical conquest. Next up, I'm accused of misusing arguments from silence.

SPEAKER_07 21:52

While technically correct, remember that 180 AD date. The 180 date is going to matter all video. So here it is once. The gospels were written. Somewhere around 70 to 100 AD. Justin Marder quotes them heavily around 150 with no names attached. The first surviving source to attach the four familiar names is Irenaeus, around 180. Every time I say 180, that's the gap I mean. There is no surviving discussion about authorship before 180, denying or affirming. Mike is calling this early, hoping the audience will forget or not know how late this is. We have no idea what debates were happening in person, or even written speculation that didn't get copied. Many works were written that did not survive, so that everyone followed suit after 180 serves as no guarantee for the anonymous years when people were using other phrases for the titles of these books. See, I told you his argument is silence, fan. Convinced? Before we go further, we should clarify that there are two kinds of arguments, both called arguments from silence. What Mike will later refer to as good arguments from silence, and there's bad arguments from silence. The bad version says nobody mentioned X, therefore X didn't happen. I do my best to avoid this kind. The good version has a specific structure. If X had happened, this particular source is the kind of source that almost certainly would have mentioned X. It doesn't. So that silence counts as evidence. Modest evidence, but evidence. The key is the expectation of mention. Keep that distinction in your mind. Now, careful listeners will note that in this last clip of Mike's original video, made a clear argument from silence.

SPEAKER_05 23:26

He said, All agree the gospels came from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There are none that dissent and attribute them to other authors.

SPEAKER_07 23:34

And I gently explained that pointing out a lack of dissenters is, in fact, the very definition of an argument from silence. But Mike interpreted my explanation of his argument from silence as my own argument from silence, which it was clearly not. In the clip Mike played, I specifically said that the silence is ambiguous, favoring neither position. There is no surviving discussion about authorship before 180, denying or affirming. But he doubled down on his uncareful listening as he went. It's true. We can't use the silence to conclude that Paul didn't know about the life of Jesus. But what it can and should tell us is that Paul didn't consider the life and ministry of Jesus to be particularly important for his ministry. So now he's saying we can't use silence. I was also saying that you can't use silence in the prior clip. I'm pretty consistent on this.

SPEAKER_05 24:20

But that's literally his argument against traditional authorship. We have silence in the first 100 years in our the sources that have survived, therefore, this is evidence against traditional authorship.

SPEAKER_07 24:29

It is not. The silence in the first hundred years is merely the necessary condition that allows the debate. It delineates what is unknown and to be discussed. I often have to present it to establish the playing field because the average Christian is generally unaware of this silence gap. But the silence by itself is not my argument. The times during that period, when church fathers like Justin Martyr quoted the canonical gospels, but generically call them memoirs of the apostles, is more something that I consider to be evidence against traditional knowledge. Not definitive, to be sure, but positive evidence. So can you use silence or not?

SPEAKER_05 25:02

This is what I mean he contradicts himself.

SPEAKER_07 25:04

I I my goodness. I did not contradict myself. As in both clips, if you actually bother to listen, I'm condemning arguments from silence. Sharp viewers are probably objecting that there are exceptions where arguments from silence can have some weight, and we'll return to that. It's a creative argument. It's also built almost entirely on silence.

SPEAKER_05 25:21

So again, we don't like silence now, but we like silence when we're coming to the traditional authorship. Again, Paul's principles here are inconsistent.

SPEAKER_07 25:27

And here's a third clip of me doing the same thing, condemning arguments from silence. And somehow that's an example of me being inconsistent. The reason we know those are nicknames is because Mark tells us the stories of the nicknames and loves calling out labels like Simon the Zealot. If Mark knew Matthew was Levi, the call to Levi would have been an obvious place to make that connection. But he doesn't. Argument from silence. Like why why is that a good argument from silence? So I said specifically, Mark frequently tells us the stories behind nicknames. Loves calling out labels like Simon the Zealot, which was laying the necessary groundwork that this is the sort of source that very likely would have mentioned a disciple nickname, yet doesn't. That's the good kind. Expectation of mention met with silence. Next up, a hero so unpopular they've somehow been left out of the upcoming Avengers movie, The Super Forger. So, okay.

SPEAKER_05 26:18

Now we are positing the clever forger myth.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

They're a common fortune. Your licensey, I swear I'm not.

SPEAKER_05 26:23

Okay, so now we have a double standard again. Paul can bring up alleged errors in the Gospels as evidence they're not from eyewitnesses, but if we bring up stuff they get right, well that's exactly what a forger would do, guys. Don't you get it? Again, how do we how would we falsify this then? Like if it you're just saying everything it shows a forger.

SPEAKER_06 26:40

Do their pieces of literature have all of those things happening at the same time 84 times?

SPEAKER_05 26:46

No, they don't.

SPEAKER_06 26:48

So that means that means that that means that the author of Acts isn't just a forger. He's a super forger.

SPEAKER_05 26:54

This forger was so clever.

SPEAKER_06 26:55

Everything is evidence of a forger.

SPEAKER_07 26:57

Yes. Because forgers can do anything. It's fun to say super forger, which helps to distract from the misrepresentation and mischaracterization. Nobody is arguing that Luke sat in a cave, inventing a religion to fool the world. It's way more boring than that. The person who wrote Luke was an educated author, writing decades after the events he describes, drawing on sources, following the literary conventions of his day, arranging material for theological and evangelical purposes, and filling in speeches and scenes where he lacked first-hand information. If you've read Mike Lacona's new book, Jesus Contradicted Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently, you'll know that's how ancient historiography worked. They routinely composed speeches for their subjects, compressed timelines, rearranged events, and shaped narratives around a given theme. Mike's video series advocates that the author of Luke was highly educated, used sources, wrote skillfully, and knew the geography of the regions he described. It's undeniable that he composed speeches and shaped his narrative for theological ends. In short, he's doing nothing more than a regular, boring, competent author. Setting aside whether this fellow personally knew Paul, Mike and I agree on a lot of his attributes. You can't hold this guy up as a sophisticated writer and then scoff at the notion that he might use some of those same skills to assemble scenes to further his evangelical purposes, or that a researcher might have access to 84 port names and civic titles from people who were not in Jesus' inner circle, might keep slipping back into the same false dichotomy from his original series. Either Luke is an eyewitness historian, or he's some kind of literary superhero out to fool everyone. Historians expect neither. They expect exactly what we find throughout ancient literature: real geography, real officials, real travel, mixed together with literary shaping, theological agendas, composed speeches, and occasional invention. So yeah, both correct details and incorrect details are consistent with this mundane picture. I'm not sure why you're upset with a hypothesis that accounts for the data. Falsifiability comes in other areas, which is why we continue to mention Spider-Man in New York, and why I didn't bother talking about each and every mundane detail that Mike decided to spend hours listing off in checklist fashion.

SPEAKER_05 29:13

What Paul does in this is he just finds a couple and cherry picks them out and just responds. Without really addressing the cumulative case.

SPEAKER_07 29:19

Because as Stan pointed out, no accumulation of modest positives would falsify the mundane idea that the authors of the Gospels were just like every author in history, getting some things right and some things wrong. Apparently, I'm all over the map on harmonizing things. Didn't the Gospels just copy Paul's appearance list from 1 Corinthians 15? Probably because they weren't trying to harmonize facts.

SPEAKER_05 29:42

They're not trying to harmonize facts. Okay. Remember that point, Than. Remember, the Gospel authors don't care about harmonizing facts. Now remember that point when we get to the section on undesigned coincidences. Because I bet we'll have a different standard at that point.

SPEAKER_07 29:57

I'll take that bet. Except the author of John knew the book of Luke. Hugo Mendez's 2025 study shows John presupposes Lucan characters and events he never bothers introducing.

SPEAKER_05 30:07

Then why doesn't John include that line from Luke in order to explain it?

SPEAKER_06 30:10

Same problem. Same problem that is what we said in the beginning.

SPEAKER_05 30:14

Yeah, to him knowing about a source does not mean he is everything he writes is attempting to explain everything in the source. And by the way, didn't remember what I said earlier when we were talking about the video of the hidden gospel in Paul's response, and he said, like, well, they're not trying to harmonize stuff. Here he's just saying, Oh, yeah, they're trying to harmonize this stuff.

SPEAKER_07 30:28

Mike and Vance's problem here will be more apparent if the original video got to finish that thought. Except the author of John knew the book of Luke. Hugo Mendez's 2025 study shows John presupposes Lucan characters and events he never bothers introducing, because he expected readers to already know them from Luke. Rudolf Boltman, Michael Goulder, Dennis MacDonald, and Harold Latridge all agree the Johannine Last Supper dramatizes the Lucan saying. He dropped the embarrassing squabble and replaced it with footwashing. Conservative apologist Mike Lacona concedes that Luke probably lifted the whole dispute from Mark X, or it happens a week earlier in a completely different context, and relocated it to the Last Supper. If Luke moved the scene, it wasn't historically at the supper. And if it wasn't historically there, it can't be the real explanation for the footwashing. You'll notice that nowhere in this section am I talking about, let alone advocating harmonizing. I've talked about John not bothering to reintroduce characters and concepts already in Luke. That's not harmonizing, that's omission. I've talked about John embellishing and changing the Last Supper narrative from Luke. That's the opposite of harmonizing. Dishharmonizing? I talk about Luke taking a dispute from a different context and inserting it into the Last Supper. Again, that's the opposite of harmonizing. It's creating contradictions. Unlike the author of John, who knew his gospel would stand alongside other gospels. It appears to me that the author of Luke and Matthew were attempting to make Mark obsolete. They were making Mark 2.0, fixing what they saw as problems. Quick definition, because this phrase keeps coming up, an undesigned coincidence is when one Bible book casually explains the detail another Bible book leaves hanging. And apologists argue this interlocking proves independent eyewitness memory. It gets a full section later.

SPEAKER_05 32:08

Get your methodology right because you're you're contradicting yourself. Were they trying to harmonize or not? Because when we talk about undesigned coincidences, they are. We talk about them not trying to use stuff in Paul, which you think they were using. Oh, well, they weren't trying to harmonize. You had no consistent methodology here. This is insane.

SPEAKER_07 32:23

This is maybe why Mike and Fam think I don't understand undesigned coincidences. Because they're imagining that my argument is deliberate harmonization. No, my argument is literary dependence. Literary dependence is a later author knowing about and using an earlier text. Fact harmonization is an author reconciling factual discrepancies between two accounts to make them agree. These are not the same claim, and they coexist without any tension. As I said, at least three of the four gospel writers didn't write thinking they'd be part of a library. But John, being familiar with Matthew, Mark, and Luke as background knowledge, necessarily breeds conscious or subconscious story expansion and interpretation, which comes across as new details in the telling. This is not dissimilar to what modern audiences call headcanon, a fan's personal interpretation of a fictional universe that is not explicitly confirmed by the official source material. As a famous example, in Iron Man 2, this dark expo scene takes place in Queens, New York. Now, because Queens is where Peter Parker grew up, and Spider-Man's MCU debut was years away. Some fans declared their own personal headcanon that the boy in this scene is actually young Peter Parker. The writers of Iron Man 2 intended no such notion. In fact, the legal agreements between Marvel and Sony at the time would have strictly prohibited it. It's just a detail made up by people consuming the content. Fast forward to 2017, and Tom Holland is on a press tour, and a reporter from the Huffington Post asked the author about this. Holland said, I can confirm that as of today. I literally had a conversation with Kevin Feige only 20 minutes ago. Maybe I've just done a big ol' spoiler, but it's out there now. It's cool. I like the idea that Peter Parker has been in the universe since the beginning. So both Iron Man 2 and Spider-Man Homecoming were made and completed without this detail in the writers' minds, but now future works are treating it like the official backstory. This is the power of literary dependence. Responding to six hours in two and a half hours obviously involved some editing. But that doesn't mean Mike and Fan have to like how I did it. You saw the jump there, didn't you? That he cut my video. The first editing complaint comes from well before their response livestream. Mike immediately took to Twitter to call me out. Justin Martyr, writing around 150 AD in Rome, extensively quoted the texts, but referred to them only collectively as the memoirs of the apostles. Mike will not mention this.

SPEAKER_05 35:23

I definitely did. I definitely brought up what Justin Martyr said. He says I didn't. And that's just one of the mistakes I've found.

SPEAKER_07 35:30

So let's take a look at how I've either completely lost it or outright lied. Justin Martyr, writing around 150 AD in Rome, extensively quoted the texts, but referred to them only collectively as the memoirs of the apostles. Mike will not mention this.

SPEAKER_05 35:44

Mike will not mention this.

SPEAKER_07 35:45

Yeah, this part was egregious. Yeah, I did mention Justin Martyr. I said that you did not tell your audience that Justin Martyr extensively quoted the actual canonical gospels while referring to them only collectively as memoirs of the apostles. Your response was, I mentioned Justin Martyr. Mentioning the man's name is not the same as informing your audience about what he did.

SPEAKER_05 36:09

But you had a yada over the best part. Now, to be fair, he me he mentions other things I didn't mention, but if I'm making a positive case, I'm gonna focus on the positive evidence. But I did bring up Justin Martyr.

SPEAKER_07 36:20

Yes, to be fair, I accurately indicated that you did not inform your audience of a specific fact, and you told the public that I he either just completely lost it or outright lied. Because you said the same person's name.

SPEAKER_05 36:35

Play the clip again. Even Justin Martyr suggests the gospels were known to be attributed to evangelists, not that they were anonymous works.

SPEAKER_07 36:41

See, I missed that the first time. This is so much worse than not mentioning anything about it. You very much misrepresented this situation. Martyr attributed the gospels to apostles, but you've switched that to attributed to evangelists. That may sound innocent to an average pew sitter, but Mike has read too many books to not know that in any conversation about gospel authorship, the evangelists is shorthand for exactly four men Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Yes, the New Testament uses evangelists for any preacher, but that's not the register Mike is speaking in, and he knows it. In authorship discussion, attributed to the evangelists means attributed to those four names, as surely as the twelve means the list of disciples, in any remotely academic setting, saying attributed to the evangelists means attributed them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which is decidedly not what Justin does. Justin attributes them to generic unnamed apostles, the word broadly used in the early church for those who are sent. Sloppy or strategic, the vocabulary carries the conclusion that the evidence doesn't. Facts not in evidence. I wish that I'd noticed that for the first response. In my opinion, he'd have been better off not drawing attention to this. But by all means, he either just completely lost it or outright lied. Full disclosure, I should note that Mike briefly mentions Justin's phrase memoirs of Peter in a later chapter in the series, in a different context. Still, my claim was specific. Mike did not tell his audience that Justin quotes these books extensively while only ever using a collective, nameless label for them. Apparently, there was also an epidemic of me not addressing the things that Mike deemed to be his best points.

SPEAKER_05 38:22

I wanted to put that in there to try to be charitable to Paul. I get that he's not gonna have time to do everything, but again, there's just some places he just misses entire overall points. It's just, you know, kind of disappointing. My biggest problem with his overall video, he ignores a lot of the main points. He ignores some of the main points I make in that. So it's like, dude, are you really responding to the series if you're ignoring a lot of the biggest points I'm trying to bring up? I'm not saying he ignores every point, but he ignores some of the biggest points.

SPEAKER_07 38:48

Did you label your main points as the main points? There were six hours presented, in my opinion, very flatly from start to finish, without visual or inflectional distinction between side points and main points. Even now that you've expressed which points you think are the main ones, I've rewatched and I don't see it.

SPEAKER_05 39:06

Yeah, I mean, like, okay, if you're not going to hit the main points, I guess you're agreeing that, yeah, the memories could have been reliable by the time they were writing them.

SPEAKER_07 39:12

Honestly, yeah. But let me be precise about what I'm agreeing to. If eyewitnesses wrote these books, which I don't grant, and which is the entire question, then memory in broad strokes isn't where the case fails. That's why I spent five minutes on it. It's downstream of the real dispute.

SPEAKER_05 39:28

This isn't even addressing the main points of those videos. So, like for the first video, what are the gospels? He didn't address the main point. Uh the second video, he addressed some of the main points, I'll give on that. But again, had to do in doing so it'd make the most convoluted alternative theory that it's just violate Tokam's razor.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Haven't you ever heard of Occam's razor? The simplest explanation is probably the correct one. So, what's the simplest explanation? I don't know. Maybe they're all reverse vampires and they have to get home before dark.

SPEAKER_05 39:55

And in the third video, again, doesn't address the main points. So, what was the point?

SPEAKER_07 40:00

I found myself asking that often. Maybe I'm not good at learning. Maybe you're not good at communicating. Maybe some of each.

SPEAKER_05 40:06

He cut out nine minutes of me listing facts for the reliability of John. The stuff that he's not going to do. I get it, don't have enough time to address everything. We're not doing that either.

SPEAKER_07 40:14

But you're not. By a very rough count, you played about half of my video. Not bad. But guess what? I also think you left out many of my main points. But I understand that Mike didn't find these to be the main points from his perspective. He wanted to address what he wanted to address. That's fine. As for those nine minutes, I found them all to be redundant examples of the same type of thing. So I dealt with it all at once in the context of a broader category.

SPEAKER_05 40:40

It's just kind of odd. So all those facts, they're good to go, I'm assuming.

SPEAKER_07 40:45

I don't know. Like, what where are we supposed to go with that? Get a more persuasive category of facts rather than just more examples of the non-persuasive category? Up to you. But here's an important section where Mike has a good point. In the 19th century, Cadbury K.

SPEAKER_05 40:59

Hobart documented numerous instances of medical terms throughout both works and used this to argue the author was a physician.

SPEAKER_07 41:04

Henry Cadbury decided to check this medical vocabulary claim and looked at where else those terms appeared. They showed up in Josephus, Lucian, Plutarch, and frequently in the Greek Septuagint. None of those authors were physicians. Cadbury concluded the style of Luke bears no more evidence of medical training and interest than does the language of other writers who were not physicians.

SPEAKER_05 41:23

Why is Paul citing an argument I directly addressed in my video? Here's the slide. Let's see where Paul cut it off of medical terms throughout both works, and used this to argue the author was a physician. But in 1919, Henry Cadbury responded to Hobart and argued many of the terms that Luke used, which Hobart classified as medical, could be found throughout other ancient works, like the Septuagint, the writings of Josephus, the Lives of Plutarch, or the works of Lucian. Paul Ogia cut me off to say the very thing I go on to say. In a response to me. How is that not a little dishonest? Like I totally agree, Cadbury's response to Hobart was good. It was sufficient. He made his point.

SPEAKER_07 42:01

In looking at this critique, I've gone over the original 15-part series, my response, and this response, and I'd say Mike is absolutely correct on this point. My response made it seem as if Mike was unaware of this refutation, when in fact he clearly is. As Mike points out, I wasn't actively hiding this fact, since I did include his slide.

SPEAKER_05 42:22

The closest he gets is he just shows this slide that I put up there later on in his video. But like at least acknowledge that, yeah, I went over all of Cadbury's stuff, Paul. Why are you cutting like this is very weird. You cut me off to say the very thing I go on to say.

SPEAKER_07 42:34

Like So, yes, I will acknowledge here that Mike Jones was aware of the Cadbury refutation, and my editing obfuscated that awareness. I can assure you that there was no malicious intent, but I strive for better diligence than that and welcome being held to higher standards. So please accept my sincere apologies for this slip. At the same time, at the end of the day, Mike is not saying I made a bad point. So we ultimately agree here.

SPEAKER_05 42:59

Are you responding to me or are you just trying to show your audience that you did something when you really did it? Like, why did you cut off right there and not at least play another 10 seconds? The video's over two hours. You could have played another 10 seconds and said and just said, Michael did acknowledge Cadbert.

SPEAKER_07 43:13

I will say that even in the review, find it strange that you bothered spending time presenting a common but flawed argument for a physician writing the third gospel. If you ultimately agree with me that it's a bad argument, I do still hear this one often from lesser apologists. So it seems my counterapologist reflex jumped the gun. I would still bolster your brief retraction.

SPEAKER_05 43:34

Cadbury was correct to say that Hobart overextended his claim that the mere presence of terms found in medical treatises is enough to demonstrate the author was a physician.

SPEAKER_07 43:44

With my stronger one, if only as a rare opportunity to use one of my favorite quotes in biblical studies. Humorously, Cadbury also showed that much of the supposed medical vocabulary in Luke Acts also appeared in ancient manuals for treating horses. Maybe the author was a veterinarian, but I will not take Board the rest of the complaint.

SPEAKER_05 44:01

My argument for the medical terminology was not Hobart from the 1800s. I literally cite a bunch of works after Cadbury, after this, that he doesn't go into great length on. He just spends a lot of time talking about how Cadbury debunked Hobart, as if that's the place I was arguing. Like, quite frankly, shut up if that's what you're gonna do.

SPEAKER_07 44:17

In the context of a two and a half hour video, I spent 77 seconds on the Hobart argumentation and 126 seconds on Mike's post-Hobart argumentation. I understand that you think your points were worthy of more, but I did not. And what I did is counter to the proportionality being characterized. Mike's plotting enumeration of similar examples didn't add up to additional points. We're back again to 15 parts, six hours, move over argument from page count, Gary Habermass. No one reads anymore. Inspired philosophy is bringing in the argument from video length. Time spent is not always proportional to points made.

SPEAKER_05 44:54

Is this now the record for the longest live stream on this channel? Probably.

SPEAKER_04 44:58

We never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.

SPEAKER_07 45:10

A long time. The argument is that these words were never clinical terminology to begin with. Baylor Moore Cybok commentary notes that the medical vocabulary argument doesn't account for the fact that Luke also endeavors to use a correct professional terminology idiom in other spheres, including the legal system. Maybe the author was a doctor, a lawyer, and a veterinarian, or just an author educated across multiple domains. His response to the fact that Luke uses a bunch of medical terminology is to show that Luke was even more educated. No, you heard me say that my argument is that these words aren't medical specialty, just words that a person with a general education would know without specialized medical training, and therefore doesn't require postulating that a physician was involved any more than imagining that a gospel was written by a lawyer based on a handful of legal terms. There were also a few unintentional themes in Mike and Fan's livestream, the first of which I'll call own goals.

SPEAKER_02 46:03

Great work from Monet. Oh, and it's an own goal.

SPEAKER_07 46:07

What a gift for Liverpool! On the matter of undesigned coincidences, two examples were discussed that are meant to show the interlocking of Luke and John, the Last Supper serving detail, and Pilot's threefold, I find no guilt usage. Now it is my contention that, given that we've shown that Matthew, Luke, and John are all literarily dependent on Mark, John is dependent on Matthew and Luke as well, and Matthew and Luke boring from each other or a Q source, what you have here is collusion, not corroboration. These are a single source, and I can't believe it's taken me all this time to play it, but the undesigned coincidences argument requires that the Gospel authors wrote independently of each other. They didn't, as is both the Scholarly Consensus, and demonstrated repeatedly throughout this video. This detail alone makes this entire line of argument fake. Now, Mike doesn't like the well-evidenced notion that the Gospel of John is dependent on the Gospel of Luke. So instead, he advocates for the opposite.

SPEAKER_05 46:59

Paul ignored a very big section in my video on John, didn't even address it, which is that Luke Vanderway has shown that one of Luke's sources was John, showing he was an eyewitness. So that can also explain that data that he's bringing up here. And again, this can just be explained with Luke Vanderway's argument that for Luke, John was a source.

SPEAKER_07 47:16

That's why there's similarity there. Why is this an own goal? Because, as I expressed, undesigned coincidences lose all power when there's dependence, be it literary dependence or other common source. So Mike is not only conceding, but advocating that John was a source for Luke. Switching from John used Luke to Luke used John doesn't undermine the contention. And a source, but not literary dependence, is not a distinction that matters for this purpose. Any source relationship in either direction explains the interlock without needing two independent eyewitness memories. So I appreciate you conceding this one. Another infamous so-called undesigned coincidence is the green grass detail in the feeding of the five thousand. Dale Allison and Joel Marcus have argued this is more Hebrew Bible illusion and typography than weather reports. Mark 634 compares the crowd to sheep without a shepherd. Jesus then, as the good shepherd, makes the flock lie down on the greengrass. That's Psalm 23, deliberately invoked. Now don't take my word for it, because apparently this topic is too advanced for me to understand. Paul just cherry picks a couple undesigned coincidences he doesn't understand and then tries to respond to them. But it seems to me that undesigned coincidence advocates want a skeptic to be convinced that the best explanation for these details is a grounding in real eyewitnesses who were there. Now for green grass, the scholarly take of Hebrew Bible illusion provides a very plausible explanation that isn't eyewitnesses.

SPEAKER_06 48:42

Fan protests like two things can be true at the same time, by the way, right? Matthew can be making an allusion to Psalm 23 and reporting on something historical.

SPEAKER_07 48:51

But in conceding this, he puts in a known goal. If a vivid narrative detail is equally consistent with both an eyewitness genuinely remembering a scene and a writer deliberately echoing a scriptural allusion, then the detail cannot be used as evidence for either explanation over the other, because it's consistent with both.

SPEAKER_06 49:11

It's not about the fact that the accounts interlock with each other, it's about the casualness of the interlocking. Oh yes, don't forget the casualness. Keep your distance, though, Chewy.

SPEAKER_07 49:22

But don't look like you're trying to keep your distance.

SPEAKER_00 49:25

I don't know. Fly casual.

SPEAKER_06 49:28

Like that is the main point of undesigned coincidences. It's the type of casualness and a dovetailing between testimonies that is more consistent with honest reportage than somebody making something up or somebody trying to use another literary source uh and try to harmonize it or anything like this. Forced harmonizations are gonna be like obvious. There's gonna be things that stand out to you, but just completely by but incidental, like accidental corroborations that are about casual details, like um where Philip is from, that that's not something that you just go out of your way to make up. That is like this is the point of undesigned coincidences.

SPEAKER_07 50:06

Ah yes. What could be more casual than thinking about a story enough that you incorporate literary illusion in the casual details? So casual. Again, I don't think Paul G understands the argument from undesigned coincidences. No, he doesn't. If you say so, another theme is the need for fact-checking of Mike and Fan. Starting with whether the author of the fourth gospel, allegedly a fisherman, correctly uses Greek words for fish. In John 6, Opsarion refers to preserved fish, which matches its classical meaning. But in John 21, the same author uses it for freshly caught fish still sitting in a net. Specifically, John 21 10.

SPEAKER_05 50:43

So this isn't actually accurate. I think Paul made an error here. We just go to the interlinear here. I'm just gonna type in fish. Paul uh John uses different words for fish. When it's caught, when it's when it's caught in the net, it's ichthian.

SPEAKER_07 50:55

When it's cooked, it's upsarian. The text on the screen agrees with me and is the opposite of what Mike just said. You can see highlighted in orange, fish you have caught, not fish that is cooked. And it's upsarian. As I said, not ichtheon, as Mike said it should be. I'll play it again so that you can see that the words Mike is saying are not the same as the words on the screen. So this isn't actually accurate.

SPEAKER_05 51:17

I think Paul made an error here. We just go to the interlinear here. I'm just gonna type in fish. Paul, uh John uses different words for fish. When it's caught, when it's when it's caught in the net, it's ichthian. When it's cooked, it's upsarian.

SPEAKER_07 51:30

You know what? I'll just remember that it's the opposite of what they say. Now, there are times when the author of John does get it right, which Mike will distract us with, but on screen now is the author of John getting it wrong, which is what I said. I don't think Paul checked this thoroughly here. I don't read Greek, which is exactly why I cited Raymond Brown, instead of my own eyeballs. Next up, I'm accused of manufacturing contradictions. Yet another problematic example. The first written version of the story cannot be in Bethsaida, because in Mark 6.45, immediately following the miracle, they get into a boat to go to Bethsaida. Luke relocated the event to Betheda, which created a problem he didn't fully clean up. His disciples asked Jesus to send the crowd to the surrounding villages for food because they're in a desolate place. Except in Luke, they're in a city. Mark Goodacre calls this editorial fatigue. Luke moved the story but forgot to update all the language. Lest that was unclear, the problem Mark Goodacre is pointing out is that Luke appears to be expressing two conflicting statements in a pattern coherently explainable by editorial fatigue. Mike?

SPEAKER_05 52:28

Luke 9, 10 and 17. On their return, the apostles told them all they had done, and he took them and withdrew them apart to the town called Besseda. So it says apart, not in.

SPEAKER_07 52:36

Rather than apart, almost every other English translation says privately, which I think gives a clearer picture of what's happening here. And pretty much every translation, including the ESV, still says to a town called Beseda.

SPEAKER_05 52:48

When the crowds learned, it they followed him and they welcomed him and spoke to them, and he spoke to them of the kingdom of God and cured those who had need of healing. Now the day began to wear away, and the twelve came and said to him, Send the crowds away to go to the surrounding villages and countryside to find lodging and get provisions, for we are in a desolate place. That's in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 9. I thought Paul just said they were in a city. Luke says they're in a desolate place, ladies and gentlemen. Did Paul bother to check the Gospel of Luke?

SPEAKER_07 53:17

So yes, this is exactly what Marco Daker talked about and what I repeated. The problem is precisely that Luke says both things. They were in a city, they were in a desolate place. You read aloud the evidence for my very claim.

SPEAKER_02 53:29

You just proved my point.

SPEAKER_05 53:32

Oops! Hey, I'll just put it up. We are in a desolate place. So I thought they were in a city. This is this is the big response to debunk the Gospel Reliability series, ladies and gentlemen. I'm so, so impressed. I don't know what to do anymore. Just manufacturing contradictions, man.

SPEAKER_07 53:48

If you don't think calling the same location a city in one verse and a desolate place two verses later, is at least a tension in the text, then you're operating under very different standards than scholars like aforementioned Mark Goodacre and Michael Goulder, Michael Walter, Joseph Fitzmeier, John Noland, Howard Marshall, and John Carroll. Not manufactured by me, to be sure. Whether you think it's a contradiction or not, it's factually accurate for me to point out that Luke says both in a city and in a desolate place. There's denial of cause and effect, because when Jesus cries out in Aramaic, Eloy, Eloi, Lama Sobacthany, the author of Mark has characters mistaking this for calling for Elijah. But in Aramaic, Eloy sounds nothing like Elijah. The confusion is linguistically impossible. The author of Matthew once again catches and fixes Mark's error by switching to a different language.

SPEAKER_05 54:36

That's not what Matthew does. Matthew includes the idea. But well then why does it why does Matthew include the fact that they think he's calling out to Elijah? Matthew 27, we pull that up.

SPEAKER_07 54:45

You can pull up Matthew, but Matthew is the fixed version. The problematic version is Mark. And at three in the afternoon, Jesus called out in a loud voice, Eloy, Eloy, Lama Sabacthani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? When some of those standing there heard this, they said, Listen, he's calling Elijah. You can say it's merely chronological if you want, but it sure looks like cause and effect to me and most scholars.

SPEAKER_05 55:12

Now, from the sixth hour there was darkness over the land till the ninth hour, and about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out uh with a loud voice, Eli Eli Lama Tabaknia. That is my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Some of the bystanders here and you said, This man is calling you Elijah.

SPEAKER_07 55:23

The NIV and most other English translations are more straightforward. When some of those standing there heard this, they said, He's calling Elijah. The point stands in either translation. When people heard X, they did Y, is an inference of causation, because we're talking about the explicit reactions of agents. It can be purely temporal, but that's not the natural reading. Also, he's calling Elijah is clearly meant to be an explanation of what Jesus said. What makes no sense would be to posit Jesus saying something, a crowd immediately saying something that sounds like an interpretation, and those two things not being connected at all.

SPEAKER_05 56:00

What where where on earth do we get this idea that this that the authors, the gospel authors, think they're confusing these? Just because they think he's calling out to Elijah, the authors are not saying the people think he's calling out to Elijah because he said this phrase up here. That's a conjecture not supported by the text anywhere. So, like, this is just something invented. Where are you getting that idea?

SPEAKER_07 56:20

Personally, I got that idea from every commentary I've ever referenced, affirmed by scholars you like, Craig Evans, Mike Lacona, Adela Collins, Craig Keener, Dale Allison, along with Randall Helms, WD Davies, Joel Marcus, Clifton Black, just the name of you. Go take it up with them.

SPEAKER_05 56:36

This is this is a false cause and effect. There's nothing in the text that suggests the reason they thought he was calling out to Elijah just because he said Eli Eli.

SPEAKER_07 56:43

You're welcome to your pet interpretation, but there absolutely is something in the text to at least suggest cause and effect of what Jesus said and the crowd's interpretation of those words. And one final example where Mike was factually incorrect in his original video, and for unclear reasons, replayed me explaining that he was wrong.

SPEAKER_05 57:04

Additionally, in John, which was likely written after 70 AD, we see a lack of passages painting Romans in a positive light. Yeah, which we would expect if the Christians no longer wish to betray Roman authority figure as well.

SPEAKER_07 57:13

This is just factually wrong. John has the most extended Pilate scene of any gospel, with Pilate repeatedly declaring Jesus was not guilty and the Jewish leaders manipulating him into execution. Craig Keener says John goes to great lengths to emphasize that Pilate cooperated with Jesus' execution against his own preference. And this emphasis is understandable for apologetic reasons.

SPEAKER_05 57:33

Or maybe he was just reporting what actually happened. Mike, why is that not even an option on the table?

SPEAKER_07 57:38

That can be on the table, which seems to me an admission that there are. Indeed, passages in John showing Romans in a positive light contra to your initial claim. All right, with the broad themes out of the way, let's zip through some of the remaining commentary in chronological fashion.

SPEAKER_05 57:55

It's it's basically Paul and Gia basically had a long-winded response of just saying, I'm not convinced. That was really much it. Why would it need to be any more than that, according to Mike? What what would be the point of me doing the six-hour series if I thought this?

SPEAKER_07 58:09

Like I'm clearly trying to show the reliable. If Mike is trying to show that the gospels are reliable and I'm not convinced, then he hasn't succeeded. At least not with me. And that would be entirely fair and sufficient commentary. So here's the first video, ladies and gentlemen.

SPEAKER_05 58:24

What are the gospels? I'm not gonna spend too much time on this because I think Paul is kind of missing the point of this video.

SPEAKER_07 58:31

Was the point that I'm right and the genre is unrelated to truth value.

SPEAKER_05 58:35

I agree with some of the criticisms as I kind of like strongly implied in the video. When I say, like, look, I talked to you about this thing. When I say they're Greco-Roman biographies, and you you go, well, I hold a Lydia McGru's reportage model. Yes.

SPEAKER_07 58:48

I enjoyed being able to quote Lydia McGrew so extensively disagreeing with you.

SPEAKER_05 58:53

When I when I talk about ancient genres, I'm using them pretty loosely. Like, yeah, because there wasn't like these weren't catalogued in the ancient world. Like this is these are modern categories from scholars. So obviously, if someone's writing a biography, they're gonna be loosely in that genre, but that doesn't mean they stuck to that so strictly.

SPEAKER_07 59:09

So you agree with my conclusion. This is a major reason why genre identification is not very informative. And from the same book from Keener that Mike has been quoting throughout, genres are useful for classifying similar works. They are not templates to which the writers must adhere. That is, they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. An observation that immediately limits the degree to which we can project our expectations onto a given work, including any of the gospels. And the many variables already noted preclude us from using the gospel genre to pronounce decisions on the historical authenticity of all the reports a priori. Such an approach would run far beyond the evidence, given how far you're backtracking here.

SPEAKER_05 59:47

I don't even think they're pure Greco-Roman biographies, because they clearly were Jewish, also. Right. Like, so I'm just saying they generally fit in that category. So when you bring up stuff like, but they have more parallels to things in the Old Testament. I'm like, of course they would. Like I'm not saying this is so rigid. I'm indeed wondering what your point of this chapter was. There were two main points of this video that Paul seemed to miss, which is that if you look at the argument Craig Keener makes, it's that we don't have any examples of biographies written about sages or persons within the lifetime of eyewitnesses that were fictional or intended to be fictional.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:21

Yeah, I'm not a mythicist, and I don't think the gospels are pure fiction. This point means nothing to me. Why would I address it?

SPEAKER_05 1:00:28

And the second point was that uh how strictly the gospels use their sources. Paul skipped over that entire section. This whole video was really a buildup to that point.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:37

That was your point? That has nothing to do with identifying genre. But okay, well, I agree that Matthew and Luke strictly use Mark. I'm even stronger than you on this point, because I think John also used these other gospels as sources. This shapes my view on literary dependence, which comes up often. Why would I fight you on this? It doesn't help you.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:57

Okay, so in this video, we're talking about who wrote the gospels. And but again, he ignores them the main argument we use for traditional authorship, which is that there's multiple attestation across the entire empire. And it's not the idea they're all copying one another. Actually, he noted, he gets to this in a minute. I'll correct myself. Indeed, I did. You have multiple attestation, and it's clear they're not just copying the same tradition because they disagree about the order the gospels were written in. Clement of Alexandria thinks Matthew and Luke were written before Mark, but Irenaeus seems to order them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They disagree, they disagree about where the gospels were written. That's the live stream version.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:26

I think he expressed it more strongly in the pre-stream interview.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:29

Now here's my here's an argument I want to make, and I've made it before. They all disagree about when the gospels were written, the order they were written in, who was present there. It's always, but they all agree on one fact. It was Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Given the fact that they have different origin stories, but they still agree on that key fact, that's corroborating evidence. So they're not all just copying each other, like they're not all just copying Papias for example. They're getting it from different lines that all agree on that core fact. If a detective comes along and he comes to um comes to a murder scene and they say, well, the the suspect had a knife and then he stabbed the guy, and I don't remember what he looked like, but he had a beard and a red hat. And then you come to somebody else and they go, yes, I saw him. He had a beard and a blue hat. Okay, you can probably be assured that the guy probably had a beard because you have corroborating evidence from different witnesses. Probably so when it comes to the gospel authors across the Roman world, you have Erinus up in France, you've got Papius, you've got the Moratorian fragment in Rome, you got Tertullian down in North Africa, Clement over in Egypt. This tradition is spreading far and wide. Yeah. And they're disagreeing on things, like the order, who was there, the timing, but they still think it's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That's good corroborating evidence.

SPEAKER_07 1:02:39

The detective analogy works only if the witnesses independently saw the event. Does that apply to gospel authorship? It simply doesn't follow that because there were disputes on ordering and location, that they can't have agreed on a shared tradition for the names. Mike's own source lays it out. As Mike's oft-cited Richard Bachman admits, later references to Mark's gospel as a record of Peter's teaching, such as those by the Miratorian canon, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and the so-called anti-Marcionite prologue to Mark, are probably dependent on Papius and do not provide independent testimony to a tradition more widespread than Papius' own writing. Then why do they have different traditions?

SPEAKER_05 1:03:16

Why are they all not just saying the same thing? Where the gospels were written, the order the gospels were written in.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:21

As far as we know, none of the church fathers watched anyone write a gospel. They're not witnesses to authorship. They're repeating a naming tradition. And Mike's own favorite scholar just told you that later sources probably all drank from the same well. A rumor that travels to five cities is still one rumor. These questions are answered no differently if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really wrote the gospels than if their names were simply added later. There was a consensus on names and not a consensus on when and where. And as you noted earlier, consensus can be wrong. So this is the third video. He spends less than five minutes on it. As I've already mentioned, for my taste, the specific aspects of memory brought up in this chapter are relevant only after one is convinced that the authors were connected to eyewitnesses. So very cart before the horse.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:09

He doesn't even hit my main points in this video here. I I think for the most part.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:15

I just didn't know which one it is. So our memory is memory unreliable.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:18

Yeah, memory. The early Christians were subject to every cognitive bias and memory failure that modern psychology has documented. Ian Hunter surveyed studies of oral cultures across multiple continents, Slavic epic poetry, oral African history, even Icelandic sagas, and found no examples of what he defined as lengthy verbatim recall, meaning word-for-word correspondence of fifty or more words. He concludes that literate people I didn't even argue for that, I argued just. And I argued against gist, which you didn't play. The Lord's Prayer appears in different forms in Matthew, Luke, and the Didicate. The words of institution at the Last Supper vary across Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. These are among the most liturgically central texts in early Christians had. If anything was going to get memorized precisely, it was those. And yet they weren't.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:00

I But I didn't argue for that. My goodness. And there's two videos basically on, well, could they have had accurate memories when they were written down? Nowhere do I argue that that has to be word for word. In fact, I'm pretty sure I argue against that.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:12

It's a little funny that it's in the section on memory where you forget what you said and what I'm responding to.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:18

They're training in verbatim memorization in a text-supported environment, gave them tools for exact or semi-exact repetition that allowed them to produce works that feature remarkably precise parallels.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:26

Go check the video for full context. But yeah, verbata memory is disgust, which is why I was talking about it. The temporal gap and the cultural disanalogies alone are disqualifying. But Theodore Whedon went ahead and compared Bailey's own story examples against a 1914 written account of the same tales, and found substantial differences, meaning Bailey's data didn't demonstrate preservation at all. And this whole enterprise conflates stability across retellings with evidence for historical authenticity that the events described happened. Bailey's own primary examples demonstrate stable retellings of fabrications, like the tale. So the problem is.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:00

This has been addressed by James DG Dunn. And I had thought about including this in the original video, but I thought it was getting a little bit too uh it was gonna get too much into the weeds here.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:10

My bad for addressing the scholar you presented instead of the one you thought about including.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:14

But I mean, like if you go through this paper, he just points out, yeah, you you don't we're not gonna use we're not gonna use uh Bailey's data set, but that doesn't mean his model is is unuseful. And this is why James D.G. Jen is still using it and defending it.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:27

He shouldn't still use and defend it. After the alleged data behind it collapsed, Dunn just shifted the goalposts to a rhetorically weaker model of an informally controlled tradition, one without evidential backing. Instead of preserving events, Dunn says the traditions preserved the impacts Jesus made on people. Some warm impression passed down through generation of retelling. Not exactly a foundation of reliability. Scholars aren't impressed. Alan Kirk and Eric Eve separately came to the conclusion that Dunn is ignoring how memory changes with each access. This whole model was supposed to protect the reliability of eyewitness testimony. But Richard Bachum and Samuel Burzcog, scholars used by Mike in this series, point out that Dunn can't actually explain what the eyewitnesses are doing inside his own system. Control gets handed down to the community as a whole, not to the people who are actually there. Firescog asked Dunn directly how an eyewitness' authority is even supposed to show up in a model built around anonymous corporate remembering. And Dunn's answer was to retreat to eyewitnesses being just the spark that lit the fire before the community took over. Sounds like minimal witnesses. So a theory built to rescue the eyewitnesses ends up writing them out of the story. We're about to get to one of my favorite lines in the video. The whole video, that is. Mark does gesture toward Paul's appearance list. The young man at the tomb tells the women to go tell Peter specifically that Jesus will meet him in Galilee. Taber's read is that Mark knows no details of that appearance beyond the few words that Paul provides in 1 Corinthians 15, where Jesus appears first to Cephas. So Mark points at it without narrating it. Everything Mark knows, he gets from Paul.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:00

Everything Mark knows, he gets from Paul.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:07

Wasn't he just arguing that Paul is like too thin for the gospel? Like he literally just said, Well, why didn't they use Paul? Because they're not interested in corrobor uh, what do you say, um reconciling and stuff like that, right? So there's something about Paul that's not good enough for Mark to use, but now Paul's thick enough for Mark to use.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:32

Well, I mean, like, again, I don't want to hear these guys call themselves skeptics anymore because they will be so skeptical of what Christians believe, but then they'll believe things that there's just no evidence for. What do you mean, everything Mark knows he got from Paul? How do you know that? What is your what is the data? Let's use your if you use your own skepticism on your own theory, you would reject it immediately.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:50

Once again, we're gonna need to go back further into my video to get the context for what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:55

Now, some may try to argue that later Christians borrowed from Paul's letters to construct the gospels, and that is why we find similar teachings in them. But once again, if that is what occurred, why did the gospel authors not invent stories based on the appearances Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 15?

SPEAKER_07 1:09:07

So Mike asks specifically about post-resurrection appearances in the Gospels and their connection to post-resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians. Got it? The topic at hand is post-resurrection appearances. So why didn't the Gospels just copy Paul's appearance list from 1 Corinthians 15? Probably because they weren't trying to harmonize facts. They were making arguments to address the specific theological disputes of their own communities. Mark has no post-resurrection appearances at all, ending with the women fleeing in silence. Mark does gesture toward Paul's appearance list. The young man at the tomb tells the women to go tell Peter specifically that Jesus will meet him in Galilee. Tabor's read is that Mark knows no details of that appearance beyond the few words that Paul provides in 1 Corinthians 15, where Jesus appears first to Cephas. So Mark points at it without narrating it. Everything Mark knows, he gets from Paul. To be clear, everything Matthew knows about post-resurrection appearances, Mark gets from Paul. If you follow James Tabor's logic, the scholar whose reading I was walking through. The sentence is in that context. Given Tabor's interpretation, Paul's passage in 1 Corinthians does contain all of the post-resurrection appearance information needed by the author of Mark, which is admittedly almost none. This is undeniably correct. If you want to take that in isolation and pretend that I think that Mark's full 16 chapters of Jesus' biography is pulled from the letters of Paul when I've spent a decade saying the opposite, including in this very video, as Dan points out. Or if you want to pretend that I've made a positive case that this is what happened, rather than simply quoting a scholar and putting his possibility on the table, then so be it.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:41

I don't even think Bart Ehrman goes so far as to say everything Mark knows he gets from Paul. Because he clearly doesn't. I mean, he's just like, wow.

SPEAKER_07 1:10:48

Wow. That claim I didn't make sure is silly, right? To be clear, the observation is that Mark reveals nothing about post-resurrection appearances that Paul's letters hadn't already revealed. Which is interesting, at least to me. But this actual point will not be addressed, possibly because ridiculing a specific individual line was clearly pre-planned and highly anticipated.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:10

We're about to get to one of my favorite lines in the video. The whole video, that is. The video, I argued why the gospels are early. I refute the idea of the claim that, oh, well, Jesus predicted the temple, therefore it has to be written after 70 AD. Paul agrees. Good on him. Good on me. Mentioning the importance of the temple tax after 70 AD would have been problematic, as it would have been going to a pagan temple.

SPEAKER_07 1:11:36

After 70 CE, every Jew, including Jewish Christians, had to pay that specific tax to fund a pagan cult. Matthew's story of Jesus and Peter choosing to pay the tax voluntarily, even though they're technically exempt as children of the king, is directly applicable pastoral advice for a community deciding whether to pay an offensive Roman tribute.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:55

But that's not what the story is about. That's the story about render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. That wouldn't be the point of this story.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:01

No, we're both talking about the doesn't your teacher pay the temple tax story in Matthew 17. This the point of this story is about the temple tax.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:10

Not a pagan temple tax. Like that has nothing to do with the story. Why would you import context that's not about this?

SPEAKER_07 1:12:19

Like you said mentioning the temple tax after 70 AD would have been problematic. I provided a reason why the author might have done so. The pre-70 Jewish temple tax was called the Dydrachum. The post-70 tax to Jupiter's temple was set at the same Dydrachum amount. So it's very plausible that someone paying this post-70 tax might write a story where Jesus affirms that they should be exempt from the tax from the false kings, but pragmatically, pay it anyway so you don't offend anyone. A later narrator is no longer problematic under this perspective. As a direct parallel, the Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, presents laws governing temple sacrifices and priestly duties in the present tense, as though the temple were still standing. But the temple had been gone for over a century by then. Schurer notes that Jews continue to study temple law, debate proper temple piety, and transmit it as living Torah because they expected the temple to be rebuilt. Matthew's doing exactly what the other Jewish authors did. Alright, hold on one second. I'm gonna pull up paper.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:18

Again, this was something I thought about going more into when I was making this video. But Charles Corals wrote a whole paper on this. Yeah, there's a stuff he uses the Mishnah. Uh the point he says is that the Mishnah sayings actually represent pre-7080 uh traditions that wound up in the Mishnah.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:32

Once again, I wouldn't be able to respond to scholarship not presented. But this one was new to me and sounded genuinely interesting. So I downloaded the free copy and read it.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:42

Yeah, because he makes the case that no, they didn't they they were they were not doing that kind of stuff. The stuff that shows up in the Mishnah represents pre-7080 traditions. And he does this by evaluating a lot of the things with regarding those sayings.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:53

So this actually works against Paul. I think Mike misinterprets what my analogy is meant to show. Charles Quarles, which is fun to say, argues that the oath traditions in the Mishnah go back to before 70 AD. But that timing is not in dispute and was never the point. Of course, those traditions predate the temple's destruction, otherwise they wouldn't matter here. The relevant fact is that later Jews kept preserving, teaching, and discussing temple material long after the temple itself was gone. Quarles does not actually disagree with that. His claim is narrower. He suggests that one specific kind of oath may have dropped out of common use over time. That is a reasonable possibility worth considering, though it rests on thin evidence, and Quarles himself treats it only as offering some support for an early date rather than proving one. The survival of a pre-70 temple controversy tells us much more about the world Jesus operated in than about how it was when Matthew sat down to write his gospel. Nevertheless, an interesting paper I didn't know about before.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:50

So let's move on to the next video here. Paul, this was um part seven of the series, did Jesus Speak Greek. Paul didn't really address a lot of this, if at all. So I didn't really write anything down. Maybe my feelings should be hurt, but if he didn't write anything down, then I don't have to address anything. The point of this video was uh to show that Jesus, many of the words that Jesus spoke were probably spoken in Greek. What do you mean probably?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:16

If you mean mathematically, yes, the probability is not zero.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:20

I'm just gonna move ahead to the the part fan is mainly here for, which is the onomax to congruence section. Oh, that's why fan's here.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:27

Which low-key a little bit sucks because there's only so much I can say. Um so I'll just skip this out of the way right now. Luke Van Derwei, Jason Wilson, and I, we actually had a have a paper that we did a bunch of stuff that responds to everything Paul's about to say. And now that paper has turned into a peer-reviewed book that's going to be coming out. Um, so there's only so much I can say about all this stuff we'll cover, but I'll say what I can.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:52

That's relatable, understandable, and acceptable, given what I said in my section of the video. While Gregor and Blaze have not yet published a formal response to Van Douway and Wilson, peer-reviewed work takes time and they are busy people with many projects on the go. I have had the privilege to preview some of their observations and continuing work. Sadly, I'm not yet allowed to share the most interesting development until their work is published, hopefully by fall. So you can't talk about it and I can't talk about it. Maybe we should all just meet back here in a year, once everything's published, and see who wins. And in the meantime, we'll all agree to take 12 months off of claiming that naming frequencies are an argument for or against the gospels. Everyone just put a pin in this one.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:32

We agreed to put a pin in it, all right? What agreement?

SPEAKER_05 1:16:37

Anyway, let's uh moving on to the uh the next one, which is uh this video is Mark and I witness account. Which one is this in the series? This is video nine of the of the series that Paul's gonna try to address.

SPEAKER_07 1:16:48

In this section, Mike is arguing that Mark is leaving off people's names because he doesn't want them to get in trouble, which is therefore evidence that the book is written very early. And I replied, there are innumerable reasons that characters in the text could be unnamed. So it's impossible to draw a firm dating conclusion based on one of many plausible interpretations.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:08

No one's denying there's other ways to explain it, but we're just saying it's part of a cumulative case.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:12

The trouble with a cumulative case is that you eventually have to accumulate something. Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero is zero.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:20

It makes more sense as an eyewitness report.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:22

You heard it here first. We expect witnesses to leave off names and the non-witnesses to use names.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:29

That's what you'd expect, apparently. I I also want to point out a lot of what I'm doing in the videos, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, eyewitness account. I totally agree internal evidence is not enough to establish the truth of traditional authorship.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:39

We agree. Internal evidence is not enough to establish traditional authorship, which is the point of my response, right? That all these things are insufficient to establish reliability, particularly for someone who isn't assuming reliability to start with. It's meant to support the external data, which we've already defended at length now. By external data, you mean the people who agree after 180, because you don't have anyone connecting a name to words we can identify from these gospels before that. Papius drops names with no quotes we can check, just in quotes at length, but with no names.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:12

We're now onto the video of Matthew, Matthew's reliability. Now, you and I agree, Than that of the four gospels, Matthew's probably the hardest to argue for.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:20

For traditional authorship or for for what specific authorship, I'd say. Yeah, for yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:25

Yeah. We don't think that means it's bad. We just say of the of the four, there's better points to be made for Mark, Luke, and John than Matthew.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:34

But still, we'll acknowledge that. I respect that. Third, and this shouldn't be the argument. Matthew copies his own conversion story from Mark. It's the first day he personally met his savior Jesus, and he lifts it word for word from someone who wasn't there, changing only the name Levi to Matthew. Nope. The big problem is using the words of someone who wasn't there to describe the day you met God incarnate. But those so-called details and accuracy aren't the kind that require the author to be an eyewitness. Just someone who understands Jewish culture better. As a typical example, in Mark, Jesus tells the disciples to pray that their apocalyptic flight not be in winter. Matthew adds, nor on a Sabbath, a natural concern for Torah observant Jews.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:09

No one is saying this pro I say in the video, Paul, this doesn't prove eyewitness testimony. About that, you are correct. I'm saying these are consistent facts with what the external evidence shows us.

SPEAKER_07 1:19:18

Again, by this, you mean the hundred years of no one quoting the gospels with those names, and a few examples of someone quoting them differently, but then at some point after 180, everyone agreed. If that's the important part, and the rest is just frosting, you should have made a whole six-hour video about this external evidence, since it's doing all the heavy lifting.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:39

You're attacking a stroman here as if I'm saying this proves I witnessed testimony. I never said that. Okay. So we're moving on to Luke now. And guess what? We are two-thirds of the way through this uh the series, because this is uh video 11, I believe. But he didn't really address the main point there. And again, I did say in that video on the Gospel of Matthew, the internal evidence isn't enough to establish traditional authorship. Agree. That bears repeating. Yeah, you gotta believe that some anonymous nobody had super impressive power over the church to put the titles on, convince everyone, somehow hide all uh debate about it for posterity reasons. Uh, and then but was too stupid to do that for Hebrews, added stuff into Matthew, but had to figure out through, go through Luke's gospel to figure out, or go through Paul's letters to find out an author for that.

SPEAKER_07 1:20:29

Then I mean it's just like invents a supervillain to replace my argument. I have never proposed that some single mastermind impose the titles on the entire church, nor do critical scholars think the names of the gospels were handed down by a single ruling body like a church council. No institution or person in the early to mid-second century had the power to enforce such a decision across the Mediterranean world. What many skeptics do believe is that an influential standardized edition of the four gospels was published in the mid to late second century, likely in Rome or Asia Minor. Since Rome sat at the theological center of Christendom, this collection, titles included, would have spread quickly through Christian communities everywhere. As for how such a volume may have received such names?

SPEAKER_05 1:21:11

How is that just not evidence that it actually was Luke? What's the difference? Explain to me the difference. How this is not evidence that actually Luke was the author versus later Christians using this evidence to say it was Luke. How if they're doing that, is that not evidence if they were doing that? How is it not evidence for Luke and for Lucan authorship? I don't see a difference here. Yeah, it was a traveling companion of Paul. Let's go to the traveling companions. This work seems to have been written like a physician. Luke was a physician. That just seems like it's actually evidence for Lucan authorship here. My goodness, how does this help him? But again, notice actual evidence for Lucan authorship is now evidence of the forgery theory, which again doesn't work.

SPEAKER_07 1:21:53

During the second century, competing Christian groups began circulating their own alternative gospels, crediting them to famous figures like Peter, Thomas, and Philip, hoping to win an audience. The Proto-Orthodox Christians, holding preferred texts that were still anonymous, needed a way to defend them against these rivals. A text could settle doctrinal dispute only if it could be traced back to an apostle or someone close to one. So establishing that kind of pedigree became essential. As Mike seems to admit, second century Christians combed the gospels and early church traditions for internal glues. And many scholars today think the resulting names were educated guesses built from those details rather than being names pulled out of thin air.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:31

We got 30 minutes left. We're going to go through the gospel. The last, the last, this last stuff is going to be on John and undesigned coincidences. The first thing to note is the author directly claims to be an eyewitness. He records that the beloved disciple has witnessed these events. And in the last chapter, we read he is the one who has written these things.

SPEAKER_07 1:22:46

No, the text actually differentiates the writer from the eyewitness source. In John 21, 24, the author states concerning the beloved disciple, this is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them down, and we know that his testimony is true. This verse shifts from a third person, his testimony, to the first person plural, we, indicating that the author of the gospel is not the beloved disciple himself, but rather someone claiming to base his account on the disciple's testimony.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:10

So this was thoroughly addressed. It's clearly that at least I don't I don't get why we can't at least agree that the author of the Gospel of John is claiming to be an eyewitness. I I like I cannot believe Paul even denied that. And when he read the verse out loud, he is the one who's written these things down, is what it says.

SPEAKER_07 1:23:30

My goodness. You can't believe it. Here's a quick list of scholars who generally agree with me on this point, which conspicuously includes scholars cited by Mike in his reliability video, like David Litwa, Maurice Casey, and Raymond Brown. No scholarls helped demonstrate that this or any view is correct, but it makes me surprised that Mike is surprised that one might hold this interpretation.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:52

Um I quoted Paul Anderson saying that John didn't use Mark as a source, and Paul responds by saying, But John knew about Mark. I agree. That's not the point. Saying that John didn't use Mark as a source is not the same as saying that John didn't know about Mark's gospel. So again, straw man there. He never entertains the possibility that contact between John and the Synoptics could be because they're talking about the same events.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:13

I entertained that possibility. I whined and dined that possibility. That possibility, and I were married for several decades. I don't deny that could be the case. I just don't think that's the best explanation of all the evidence. And your six-hour opus didn't change my mind.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:27

Apologia basically had a long-winded response of just saying I'm not convinced. Indeed. We're moving on to undesigned coincidence at this point. Paul didn't do a lot of addressing the facts. He cherry picks some stuff out. Uh I think he made an interesting point on the whole broken broken legs thing. I'm gonna I need to look more into that. I made an interesting point. But I mean for the rest of it, I was just thoroughly unimpressed.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:47

Of course, the undesigned coincidences argument requires that the gospel authors wrote independently of each other. They didn't, as is both the scholarly consensus and demonstrated repeatedly throughout this video.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:56

This doesn't understand the design coincidences.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:00

No, he doesn't. No, it does not require their writing independent. My goodness. No, that has never been the argument. This is a straw man again. Guys, the argument from undesigned coincidences is that one gospel author will explain something else in another gospel unintentionally.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:12

You're putting all the weight of the arguments on authorial intention, which is obviously something we can't verify. But I argue that intentionality or non-intentionality makes no difference when there's literary dependence, particularly when those examples involve overlapping narrative. When you retell someone else's story, you will alter the details slightly and even fill in details from your own head, how you imagined it, even if it's subconscious, and you would sincerely deny that you had changed a single thing. Mike knows this in other contexts.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:42

Each telling starts with the same subject and theme, but retellings are different. Each telling is a performance of the tradition itself, not of the first or third or twenty-third edition of the tradition. Our expectation, accordingly, should be of the oral transmission of Jesus' tradition. As a sequence of retellings, each starting with the same storehouse of communally remembered events and teaching, and each weaving the common stock together in different patterns for different contexts. So we try to avoid times where Mark is uh clearly being used by Matthew or Luke. But like sometimes Mark is talking about something like Matthew's talking about something entirely different, and Mark is talking about something entirely different, and somehow they explain something accidentally, even though there's dependence there. It does not require interdependen independence, excuse me.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:27

Yeah, it's not complete independence, it's factual independence. One gospel author is filling in a fact that is independent from another gospel. Factual independence, not literary independence.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:39

Calling it factually independent doesn't make it so. That's the conclusion you're trying to reach, not the premise you're allowed to start with. And with obvious literary dependence in play, I see no path to demonstrating this beyond a mere possibility on the table. Let me sharpen my wording from the first video. It needs literary independence to point exclusively or even convincingly toward your conclusion.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:02

There are no examples where fictional accounts of people making stuff up develop the amount of undesigned coincidences we see in the gospels. It just doesn't happen. So if Paul thinks that could be the case, show your proof. There isn't any.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:13

I mean, I already gave the Peter Parker and Iron Man 2 example, but you're begging the question by insisting that fictional parallels must contain undesigned coincidences. Whether the gospel interlockings are actually undesigned is precisely what's at issue. The relevant comparison is whether authors of fictional narratives ever create the same kinds of explanatory interconnections between stories. They absolutely do. During the writing of Star Wars Episode 3, it was literally my job to identify apparent continuity puzzles from the later films and devise details that would naturally account for them. We weren't discovering historical facts independently, we were deliberately creating narrative interlocks. Obi Wan ending up with Anakin's lightsaber, C3PO's memory wipe. Those are exactly the kinds of cross reference explanatory connections that undesigned coincidence proponents point to. The fact that ours were intentionally engineered shows that this pattern is not unique to independent historical testimony.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:06

Now we're moving on to the appendix. And the first appendix on is this John 21 added later after John 20.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:11

We referenced this a few times already. The well-accepted notion that John 21 looks like an appendix after the natural ending with John 20. Mike would agree with a lot of the observations that make scholars think it was added later.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:23

So we can agree that John 20, 31 is the ending of the main body, whereas the final chapter is an epilogue.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:28

But in order to salvage his gospel reliability narrative, he has to advocate that it was definitely the same author adding an addendum.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:36

It is not yeah, this is called gaslighting, ladies and gentlemen. You're not, he's not actually addressing the evidence that gave that it was the same author as an appendix. He just is like, well, look at him trying to rescue this issue. Why don't you actually address the arguments, man?

SPEAKER_07 1:28:47

I didn't spend time picking aside because I don't need to. You need to, but I don't. If chapter 21 was added later, then the gospel was edited after the fact. And the eyewitness claim living in that chapter is an editor's endorsement, not a witness's signature. If chapter 21 was always there, you still have an author who writes about the beloved disciple in the third person and vouches for him with the word we. Either Dora leads to a book that is vouching for an eyewitness rather than being written by one.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:13

McDonald claims that Mark directly imitated parts of the Odyssey in Iliad. Luke built on this and imitated more throughout his works. As noted, this was intentional. McDonald's view is these New Testament authors were purposely reworking. Now the video he's he's he's um responding to now is a 40-minute video responding to Dennis McDonald. There's like what, four minutes left in this video? How much of it do you think he's gonna address? Given he has quoted McDonald a ton throughout his video.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:38

Probably not much. He probably I don't know. I my expectations are very low right now. That's good.

SPEAKER_07 1:29:44

I don't, because again, my argument doesn't require McDonald's full thesis. Mike himself allows that Mark shows Homeric flavoring.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:52

To be clear, we're not saying there was no influence from Homer on the New Testament. Homer saturated the culture of the ancient world, and it would be hard to find any text that didn't have some influence from Homer, merely from the fact that his epics greatly shape the culture of that day.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:03

But flavoring is my point. If the author of Mark is seasoning his scenes with the conventions of Greek literature, then vivid details in those scenes are evidence of literary craft. They stopped being evidence of courtroom memory. I never needed this wrong version. The version Mike concedes does the work.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:20

Did Paulogia convince you that gospels are not reliable? Um I'm gonna start the poll, we'll go through super chats and then I'll check it after.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:30

In the end, Mike brought the whole thing full circle. So we'll need to briefly return to the beginning so we can appreciate both sides of the bookends.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:37

Just uploaded a six-hour video on detail on um gospel reliability. Yeah, it's a lot, a lot of stuff. But you will you watch that video with an open mind, I guarantee you'll come away thinking the gospel's reliable.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:46

Ah, that brings up the first strange point. The openness of my mind is for some reason a factor here. Yes, everyone with an open mind agrees with Mike, and everyone who disagrees with Mike has a closed mind. That is the guarantee. It can't be some.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:57

Again, are we just trying to like play the victim here? Like again, this is this is how he sets up the video. It's such it's in such bad taste, Paul. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:22

But lost their faith upon learning new things and seeking evidence in good faith to bolster their faith. I am I guess we'll see if that's what you do, Paul. I guess we'll see. I'm in that camp. And each and every one of us had open minds to gospel reliability. That was our starting assumption. Eventually, even the most closed mind will be changed when confronted with sufficient opposing facts. I was pulled kicking and screaming from my confidence in the gospels, very much against my will.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:46

All right, I'm let that's that's what he's saying. He has an open mind. He was looked at all the evidence fair. I guess we'll put that to the test today, ladies and gentlemen, as we go through this.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:54

Problem solved. Mike will be the arbiter of whether I have an open mind. This is apparently a power Mike has to read my mind from afar and pass judgments on my attitude and motivation. I wonder how I did after this four-hour marathon.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:07

Don't don't give me the sob story that you started the video off with when your actions speak louder than your words. Sorry, that hurts. Don't care at this point.

SPEAKER_07 1:32:14

At some point, answering Paul Gius, throwing pearls at Swan, he's This is a call back to Jesus' words near the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Do not give dogs what is sacred. Do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet and turn and tear you to pieces. I am a pig in this scenario. He's not going to repent.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:31

I mean, listen, I'm not convinced after going through that video now twice that he wants to be a Christian and he's just he was dragged away kicking and screaming. I I know he says that. Guess what? I'm not convinced. I've not seen enough evidence that's the case. Because if this is the kind of stuff you say when someone gives you a good reason to believe in the gospels, so in the end, this prophecy came true. You watch that video with an open mind, I guarantee you'll come away thinking the gospels are reliable.

SPEAKER_07 1:32:55

Everyone with an open mind agrees with Mike, and everyone who disagrees with Mike has a closed mind. That is the guarantee. Because Mike's agreements did not convince me, good to his word, he has declared me to have had a closed mind and bad motive. Undoubtedly, had I been convinced by Mike's video, I would have been declared to have an open mind with pure motives. This seems to be the dichotomy of his world. Everyone with an open mind agrees with Mike, and everyone who disagrees with Mike has a closed mind. That is the guarantee. But it's nice to see prophecy fulfilled for once. So where does this leave us after three rounds? Mike set out to show us that the gospels are reliable. My job was simpler. Show that his case doesn't get there. Reliability is earned claim by claim. And a document that mixes verified geography with impossible linguistics and relocated miracles has not earned a blank check for its biggest claims. Nothing in four and a half hours of live streaming changed that. And you still shouldn't take my word for it. Everything I responded to is linked in the description. Watch their six-hour production. Watch their four and a half hour livestream. Watch my responses and decide for yourself. You'll notice that invitation flows only in one direction. Speaking of invitations, Mike offered to move me to the front of the line on his call-in shows.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:07

No chance Paul would agree to debate. Listen, we do several streams weekly now. Not always on his line. We've done a bunch on just why are you not a Christian? If Paul wants to call in, we will put him to the front of the line. No problem with that.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:19

Yeah, we've put invitations out to every skep to Paul. I can't think of one skeptic that we've not responded that we have responded to that we haven't said, hey, just come talk to us.

SPEAKER_07 1:34:29

I'd rather have a dedicated conversation time, like I've done with Mike before, and many other apologists on Apology Alive, Unbelievable, and other channels. I also offer an open invitation to move fan or mic to the top of the queue when I'm hosting call-in shows on the line. Would love to have you. But here's the thing a claim takes 10 seconds to make and 15 minutes to check. And checking is the entire job. This format is where the checking happens.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:54

Is this now the record for the longest live stream on this channel? Probably. I don't think we've done it.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:59

We should go for another record.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:01

Alright, Paul, respond. We'll do six hours. Watch it.

SPEAKER_07 1:35:05

Yes. I'm pleased to have made another video that the team of Inspiring Philosophy won't watch. But maybe you should do this one solo, Mike. You shouldn't put poor fam through this again.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:15

What I'm I have I have I have no desire to respond. This sounds bad. I have no desire to respond to this. I I my motivation is dwindling, Mike. I'm tired, boss.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:28

I'm tired, boss.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:29

Not because of how long this is going.

SPEAKER_07 1:35:31

It's just it's like a war of attrition. If you do respond, Microthan, please include the code phrase whippoorwill to demonstrate that you made it all the way this far.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:39

I'm the whippoorwill that cries in the night.

SPEAKER_07 1:35:42

We've been reminded recently that it's relatively easy to get Christians to financially support YouTube apologists. But sadly, the same isn't as true in the skeptical space. In part because, you know, we're also skeptical. But if you value what I do and you're willing and able to help, please consider a one time super thanks, becoming a member here on YouTube, or joining me as a patron. Links in the description. Thank you so much for watching. And if you've not had enough of this former Christian, taking a look at the claims of Christians, tap on the thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you over there. Until next time. Later.