The physicist believer Dr. Aron Wall

[Jehanne]

I first encountered the writings of Dr. Wall in his critique of Professor Lawrence Krauss' work some years ago.  A year or so ago, I got curious about Dr. Wall, a theoretical physicist, and also a Christian believer, and after a quick Google search found this article:

Breakthrough Prize winner Aron Wall on faith and science 

I posted a comment to the above article a year ago, and perhaps this is a bit of an annual thing for me, was curious if anyone (perhaps, Dr. Wall himself) had responded to my comment, but was amazed to have found my comment to no longer be available on The Mercury News website.  Fortunately, Disqus had saved it for me, and so, I am posting it here on the board, and hopefully, it will find its way back into the indexable public Internet search engines (I would, of course, encourage everyone to read the above article before reading my comment, minus your ad blocker):

Professor Wall is a fine example of a scholar being eminently knowledgeable in one area while being ignorant in other areas. As for the "historical data" on Jesus, Professor Wall would do well to read the works of Professor Bart D. Ehrman, who, like him, is a distinguished scholar, but of the New Testament. Professor Wall might want to begin with Professor Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (available on Amazon), or, if pressed for time, listen to Professor Ehrman's Great Courses series available on Audible. As all physicists of any stripe will tell you, physicists often demand a 6-sigma signal in their datasets before accepting a theory as being provisionally true, but, as I am sure that Professor Wall would agree, scientific truth is contingent truth. As all New Testament and classical scholars of ancient antiquity would argue, the canonical Gospels were not eyewitness accounts of the life of the historical Jesus, instead, being written 35 to 65 years after his execution. They were, rather, based upon oral traditions that were in circulation about Jesus, which were undergoing embellishment after embellishment after being told and retold over the span of a generation; and, after these stories were recast to suit the theological slant of their author, the Gospels themselves would undergo revisions in the subsequent decades and centuries thereafter. In the end, the proto-Catholic Church, during the 4th century, began to formulate the Christian canon, selecting the 4 canonical Gospels from nearly 40 or so that were in existence, based, in part, on Saint Irenaeus' insistence that there had to be Four Gospels, as the World, being flat, had 4 winds (see Revelation 7:1). The Acts of Peter recounts the story of a talking dog (available on the Early Christian Writings website). I wonder if Professor Wall, being an eminent theoretical physicist, regards that account as constituting "historical data"? In short, there is much doubt about the historical Jesus, what he said and what he did. All that scholars know is that he was born in Northern Galilee, that he, around age 30, began a public ministry, went to Jerusalem at the time of Passover, caused trouble and got executed by the Romans. Whatever Jesus probably did say or do is well below the 6-sigma threshold. One might as well believe that there was a talking Great Dane who lived in Palestine during the first century whose name was Scooby. As for me, I do believe that Hanna & Barbera were inspired, just not divinely so.