To posts of note at Christian CADRE.
1) Layman links to an article arguing "The Gospels Were Chock Full of Eyewitness Accounts". He's excited. I can't help but note that hs excitement only makes sense if you conceed that the early church, along with apologists like Craig Blomberg, are wrong to insist that two of the gospels were actually written by eyewitnesses. The actual arguments also point to a sort of "friend of a friend" mentality working in the early church, which everyone familiar with urban legends recognizes as worthless.
2) BK argues that John must come from an eyewitness because of irrelevant details. Again, complete ignorance of how urban legends work. Pick up Jan Harold Bruvand's works on urban legends, you'll realize that legends get mangled in ways that leave them with useless, even nonsensical bits.
If recent apologists have improved on McDowell, they haven't improved much.
5 comments:
Hal,
Why do you treat the issue as either/or? Would not an accout by an eyewitness contain evidence that it is based on eyewitness accounts?
There's no reason to expect an eyewitness account to contain evidence of being based on other eyewitness accounts, simply because that's not how most eyewitness accounts are usually written. It happens, I suppose, but that's a fairly small minority of eyewitness accounts.
Relevant theological details = proof the text is divine!
Irrelevant details which make no theological sense = proof the text is an eyewitness account!
Geez apologetics is EASY!
Simplistic yet somehow arcane argument = atheism is true!!
You just have to read through Acts to see that it's an eyewitness account.
1) This post was never intended as an argument for atheism.
2) Acts is not a gospel.
3) It is only a few passages from Acts that use the word "we," so there is no basis for arguing it is an eyewitness acount in its entirety. Even those passages are a touch ambiguous--the author never explains anything about these passages. He never says something like "at this point I met up with Paul." He just drops the word "we" out of nowhere. And of course, claiming to be an eyewitness account is not the same as actually being an eyewitness account.
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