Challenge to atheists: I find your lack of faith disturbing!

[xpastor]

Why am I not surprised that Dallas Theological Seminary where Wallace teaches upholds the authority and inerrancy of the scriptures, in fact, puts it first on their list of doctrines to which students are required to adhere.

A commitment to inerrancy undermines biblical scholarship as the conclusions are predetermined in advance of any evidence. I know whereof I speak having emerged from the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, aka Misery Synod.

The upholder of inerrancy is a priori prevented from considering the possibility of multiple strands of authorship in a document and is required to come up with the most incredible bullshit to reconcile conflicting narratives of the same event. It ultimately leads to the dishonest translations of the NIV, which does not scruple to insert words in the translation which have absolutely no warrant in the original text.

If your point is that he's biased and his work isn't professional in its approach, based on where he teaches, then I'm afraid you've failed to raise a convincing concern. We have a college in Canberra called StMarks which has the exact opposite reputation, yet I know some of the teachers there are extremely evangelical. So don't stoop so low as to try and raise concerns about someone's character and more importantly the quality of their work, base on where they work.

As for that and NIV translation problems, you've just jumped a huge canyon to make that link. Evangelicals don't like the NIV because of the fact that it sways quite a way from a literal reading of the Greek in a number of places.

I did not impugn Professor Wallace's character. I daresay he sincerely believes in the inerrancy of the Bible as I once did 35 years ago. Nevertheless, it is a problem for scholarship. Confirmation bias creates enough difficulties in any discipline, but a presumption of inerrancy raises bias to the level of a methodological principle. I will come back to this point in a little while.

First, I will say that I found Wallace's argument lame. For those who did not watch the video, it turned on the correct text for one Bible verse, Matthew 24:36.

No one knows, however, when that day and hour will come—neither the angels in heaven nor the Son; the Father alone knows.

Many old manuscripts omit the phrase "nor the Son" but most modern translations include it. It is a principle of textual criticism that normally the more difficult reading is to be preferred. Many Christians who believe in the divine nature of Jesus Christ would have difficulty with the idea that he does not know everything; the tendency would be to assume the phrase was a mistake of an earlier copyist and to leave it out. Basically that's what Ehrman says in his book Misquoting Jesus: in many cases "proto-orthodox" scribes left out the phrase.

Now in the parallel passage in Mark only two manuscripts leave out the same phrase, so for Wallace that shoots down any idea of a "conspiracy" [his word] of the proto-orthodox trying to push their own views. He asks, if they took it out of Matthew, why did they not take it out of Mark. This introduces a false picture in two respects. First, Ehrman never said or implied that it was a conspiracy. It would be many cases of one lone scribe copying a manuscript and feeling his predecessor must have made a mistake. Second, the same scribe would not be going through the whole New Testament. He would only have a scroll with one of the gospels and would be unlikely to move on from Matthew to Mark. As to why Mark has fewer emendations here, my guess, only a guess, is that Mark was less popular than Matthew, so there were fewer manuscripts to begin with and those manuscripts would be less likely to wear out and need replacement—at least it is the case that for early papyrus fragments Matthew far outnumbers Mark by a ratio of 23:3.

As for the general issue of inerrancy I can only say that I have seen far too many otherwise intelligent people go through unbelievable intellectual contortions to argue that there is no difference in two incompatible accounts of the same incident. If you had an anthology of ancient Greek literature you would feel no compulsion to reconcile disparate accounts of the gods in Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylus. What reason can you give for the different treatment of another anthology of ancient writings?

This is getting tedious, but there are glaring inconsistencies and unhistorical details in the two birth narratives of Jesus.

In Luke's account Mary conceives in the reign of Herod the Great (latest date 4 BCE) but gives birth during the governorship of Quirinius (earliest date 6 CE) resulting in a 10 year pregnancy as mentioned in another thread. Historically speaking, the chances are virtually zero that Augustus ordered an empire-wide census and that we have no record of this in ancient historians or in official records. It is also very unlikely that the Romans who were only interested in collecting money would develop the impractical scheme of having everyone return to the locality his ancestors originally came from. The issue is that Jesus was known to come from Nazareth in Galilee, but Christians were claiming that Bible verses about a king born in Bethlehem were a prophecy of their messiah. So Matthew and Luke had to work Bethlehem and Nazareth into the story but they (or the traditions they represent) chose very different solutions.

Luke has a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, accommodation in a stable because there was no room at the inn, heavenly choirs, shepherds coming to visit the baby but no wise men and a fairly speedy return to Nazareth.

Matthew mentions no journey from Nazareth, the impression is that Mary and Joseph are residents of Bethlehem. No choirs of angels (how could he have missed that?), no shepherds, but there are wise men. Mary and Joseph seem to remain in Bethlehem a long time as Herod finds it necessary to order the death of all male children under the age of two years. They flee to Egypt, stay there an indeterminate length of time, come back to Judea, but fear the new ruler, and decide to settle in far-off Nazareth, described as if it were a new home for them.

Now I know the stock fundamentalist harmonization is that Matthew just didn't mention the original journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem and Luke didn't mention the wise men or the side-trip to Egypt, but it all really happened as related in both accounts. If you believe that, I have a lovely vacation property for you on Ellesmere Island.

Attempts to harmonize the two fall down on the different timetables for the return from Bethlehem to Nazareth. Luke has them go back right after Mary has completed the purification rites required after the birth of a male child, i.e., 41 days after the birth of Jesus. No time for a trip to Egypt. No hope of reconciling the two accounts in all their details.