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In this episode Trent sits down with Jimmy Akin to debrief his recent debate on the reliability of the Gospels with renowned scholar and critic Bart Ehrman.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And today, we have a special guest. We have senior apologist Jimmy Akin. He’s going to talk to us a little bit about his recent debate with Bart Ehrman, and they debated the question, are the gospels unreliable? And so that’s important, the exact prompt of the resolution that we’ll get to there.
Trent Horn:
So before we do that though, just a reminder, please consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. Also, I have a new course on the existence of God at our School of Apologetics. Go to schoolofapologetics.com. You can check out my course on the existence of God. Jimmy has a lot of great courses on there as well, you definitely want to check out. So Jimmy, welcome back.
Jimmy Akin:
Thank you, Trent. Nice to be here.
Trent Horn:
Well, let’s talk a little bit then about this debate. When I heard that you were going to be debating Bart Ehrman, I was stoked because I’ve read about Bart Ehrman, obviously for a very long time. He’s been writing on Christianity for a while. Why don’t you tell our audience a little bit more about who Ehrman is?
Trent Horn:
And then I really want to dig down into your debate prep, because I mean, I do debates a lot as well. And when I do prep, well, nevermind, I’m going to throw it out there, then you can just play with all this, that if I were debating Ehrman, I’d be excited and nervous, and I would think to myself, well, I’ve read a lot of his stuff in the past, but when I debate someone, I let them live in my head for about a month. I read their books, watch their videos. So I know his stuff, but I would just be going back, lock down, read his stuff, watch his videos, get him reacquainted in my head, because he’s a smart, ineffable guy. So tell us a little more about Bart and what went into your prep for this.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay. So Bart is a scholar of the New Testament. He was raised Anglican, but then when he was in, I gather, his teenage years, he had a conversion experience and became a born-again Christian. He went to the Moody Bible Institute, and later… Which is a very conservative school, often described as a fundamentalist school for people-
Trent Horn:
Where Bible is our middle name.
Jimmy Akin:
Indeed, at Moody Bible Institute. Yeah. And so he had a background as a conservative evangelical. He ended up going to some very prestigious universities and getting a doctorate, and became an expert, among other things, in textual criticism of the New Testament. That’s the science by which people look at manuscripts and try to figure out the original readings of the text.
Jimmy Akin:
He, over time, began to come to the view that there are errors in the Bible. And that didn’t initially destroy his Christian faith. There are Christians who are errantists, meaning they think the Bible contains errors, and he was one of those for many years, although he did ultimately lose his faith, and today he, I gather, describes himself as an atheist leaning agnostic.
Jimmy Akin:
He’s written a bunch of books with major publishers that have… I mean, he would say these are just bringing ideas from mainstream biblical scholarship to the people. A lot of others though, including various evangelicals and Catholics, have said, “Okay, you’re bringing a certain current from the scholarly world to public attention.” But there are other scholars who disagree, and so they would like to see a little bit more balance.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And when I see his books, and you can give your thoughts on this, what’s hard about Bart Ehrman is that a lot of his scholarly work is very nuanced and it can be very helpful in understanding the history of Christianity, his books like Forgery and Counterforgery. Or he did a book with Bruce Metzger on the textual transmission of the New Testament, and in there, he talks about how you could reconstruct it almost from the church fathers and that it was actually transmitted well.
Trent Horn:
But then when Ehrman writes his popular level books, things like Misquoting Jesus, they tend to have a much more alarming themes and proposals, or at least the way the books are marketed, to make it seem like things are more in doubt than they are, whereas with his scholarly stuff, it’s very nuanced, with his most famous book is probably Misquoting Jesus, which talks about textual criticism for a layperson to understand.
Trent Horn:
What’s funny is I believe that his publisher, he wanted to call it Lost in Transmission, about the corruption of biblical text, but his publisher thought that sound too much like a car book, so they called it Misquoting Jesus, even though these textual issues don’t have anything to do with what Jesus said. So it seems like… I don’t know if you have a comment on this. I feel like he has a lot of great scholarly stuff, but sometimes, it can be a bit overblown or alarmist in the things that he communicates to a popular audience.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So he’s definitely more careful in his scholarly work than in his popular work, which is to be expected. I mean, in a scholarly work, you’ve got to get in all the qualifications, whereas in a popular work, if you’ve got in all the qualifications, people’s eyes would glaze over and they’d stop reading you. So you have to be less nuanced in a popular work than you would be writing for scholars.
Jimmy Akin:
But I do think that he does, in his popular work, have more of a “glass is half empty” approach where he sounds more skeptical of things than he does in his scholarly work. And that’s something that others have pointed out as well. But these days, he teaches in North Carolina, and that’s a basic sketch of who Bart is.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Well, let’s talk then about the debate and your preparation that was involved in it. So how did that come about? Tell us why the particular resolution was selected? And I just love nerding out about debate prep, like what you did for all that.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, in terms of how the debate came about, years ago, Jon Sorensen, our director of operations, and I were talking about it and he asked if I’d be willing to debate Bart. And I said, “Sure. Someday. That’d be fine.” And he brought it up again a number of months ago and wondered if I was still interested, and I was, and so he checked with Bart and we worked out the format and the resolution. And the resolution was resolved the gospels are historically unreliable.
Jimmy Akin:
And the reason that we proposed that was because normally, it’s the other way around. Normally, so in a conversation, I guess I should talk about the burden of proof first, in a conversation, the person who shoulders the burden of proof is the person who wants you to change your opinion. If I want you to change your opinion, then I need to give you evidence for why you should do that. So I have the burden of proof. On the other hand, if you want to convince me to change my opinion, then you need to give me evidence for why I should do that, and you have the burden of proof.
Jimmy Akin:
In a debate though, the burden of proof is a matter of form and it’s assigned to whoever agrees with the debate resolution. And normally, in debates on the reliability of the gospels, the burden of proof is assigned to the believer. The believer has to prove these documents are historically reliable.
Jimmy Akin:
But that’s only looking at the question from one side, and every question needs to be looked at from both sides. And so I think it’s healthy, once in a while, for the skeptic to have the burden of proof. I mean, I already believe in the gospels. If you think I shouldn’t, well, then tell me why. You get the burden of proof this time.
Jimmy Akin:
And I know Bart was a somewhat reluctant to do that resolution, but to his credit, he was willing to do it, and so I think it was a productive, healthy exchange.
Trent Horn:
Do you think though… And I think this came up in the debate, which is helpful. It is a little bit difficult though, and you covered this well in the debate about defining terms. It really does come down to what you mean by reliable. And you made a good job of contrasting that with being inerrant, that something could be reliable, even if it did not meet the definition of inerrant. Maybe you could explain that more.
Jimmy Akin:
Sure. So inerrancy means not having any errors, and a document would be inerrant if it contains no errors. Like if you score 100% on a math test, you have an inerrant math test. And as a matter of faith, Christians believe that the gospels, or many Christians believe that the gospels are inerrant. There are less nuanced views of how inerrancy works, and then there are more nuanced views of how it works. And the Catholic church has a more nuanced view.
Jimmy Akin:
But reliability is not the same thing as inerrancy. We have people we know, let’s say friends, that we consider reliable friends, we can count on them, but if they make just one mistake, they’re not inerrant. And yet, we wouldn’t say that our friend who makes a tiny handful of mistakes is fundamentally unreliable. He is reliable the vast majority of the time.
Jimmy Akin:
And really, reliability is a spectrum that goes between a 100% and 0%, but we don’t have a way, without a time machine, of going back to the first century and checking out what percentage of the time are the gospels reliable. And so if we’re going to make a judgment about are they reliable and we’re going to make that on historical grounds, we can’t just use a percentage. We need to do something else.
Jimmy Akin:
And so what I proposed in my opening remarks was that we can look at the major claims that a document makes, the intermediate claims that it makes, and then the minor-detailed claims that it makes. And if we can show that it’s regularly reliable on those, we can verify a bunch of major intermediate and minor claims that a document makes, and we can judge that it’s historically until such time as we’re shown that it has enough errors in it to counterbalance that. And so that was sort of the first half of my opening statement, framing the issue in terms of, look, we’re not talking about inerrancy. We’re talking about reliability, and here’s what I propose as a test for reliability.
Trent Horn:
And what was helpful here is that you showed… Because that would be very hard. One reason I would be hesitant to want to take on a burden, like showing the gospels are reliable, is that you have a very large target area. You’ve got lots of evidence you’d have to muster in a short 15 minutes. But I thought you brilliantly did this in an efficient way by pointing out all of the facts the gospels propose that Ehrman agrees are true. And so that was just a quick and easy way to do that. And maybe that tied in a little bit with how you prepared for this debate. So you can tell us more about that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So anytime I’m preparing to debate someone, I do my homework. In Bart’s case, I already had a number of his books and I got a few more, and I watched multiple debates that he did, because he’s debated this subject before. And so I watched all of his gospel reliability debates that I could find, and I learned the arguments that he uses and the objections that he brings up.I also watched some related debates that were not exactly on gospel reliability, but were kind of adjacent to that. And so I studied his thought very carefully.
Jimmy Akin:
And one of the things that… I noticed certain things about the debates that he did, and they were with evangelicals, for the most part, on gospel reliability. And I tried to learn from what the other debaters were doing and looking for ways to improve the situation.
Jimmy Akin:
One of the things I would see other debaters doing is they would try to defend the historical reliability of the gospels from the ground up. And what I mean by that is they would make the case sort of from scratch, like, “Well, who wrote the gospels? How long after the events were they written? What evidence do we have that they were in a position to have this information about Jesus?” They would take this sort of external approach.
Jimmy Akin:
And the problem is that would chew up all their time in talking about who wrote what and when, and how accurate are they, and what confirmatory evidence do we have. They’re getting into the weeds on trying to prove the reliability of the gospels. And it’s great, if you’re writing a book, to do that. That’s wonderful. But if you’ve got a 20-minute opening statement, that’s going to just consume your time and you’re not going to make an effective case in that amount of time. And Bart can then just rely on the fact that you’ve only sketched a very general case that he can then object to and say, “Well, I don’t think this person wrote it, and I don’t think it was this early,” and things like that, although he’s generally pretty good about letting someone have the dates they prefer.
Jimmy Akin:
But I realized, well, look, Bart agrees that the gospels are right about a bunch of stuff, and so let’s use that. So I did research, and I identified around… I used 62 of them in the debate itself. There was a 63rd that I eliminated at the last minute, because he could quibble with it, but I actually had around 70 things that he agrees the gospels are right about, and I divided them into major, intermediate, and minor claims.
Jimmy Akin:
And so in the second half of my opening statement, I said, “Well, here are a bunch of major, intermediate, and minor claims that the gospels make. I don’t have time to give you detailed evidence for each one of them, but fortunately, we’ve got Bart here and Bart agrees.” And so I had to make it visual for the audience. I had green check marks that I would add. I would read through the propositions and say, “Bart agrees with this. Bart agrees with this. He thinks this is right. He thinks this is right.”
Jimmy Akin:
And after going through all 62 items, I put up a slide with all these green check marks, big ones for major claims, slightly smaller ones for intermediate claims, and small green check marks for minor claims. And I say, “So we’ve seen that the gospels are frequently right. Bart himself admits the gospels are frequently right about major, intermediate, and minor things that they say. So we are entitled to view the gospels as historically reliable until such time as we’ve been shown enough errors to counterbalance that.”
Jimmy Akin:
And I then had another slide with a few red Xs on it, representing errors that Bart had proposed. Now, he hadn’t proposed very many, and actually, I had more red check marks than he had proposed errors, but it was still a small number, and I pointed out, “This is a small number of errors Bart has proposed, and they aren’t major. None of them are major. At most, they’re intermediate, and many of them are on minor details, like did this happen on Passover or the day after Passover or the day before Passover? It’s a difference of a day. That’s a minor matter of detail.”
Jimmy Akin:
And I said, “Well, even if you grant that these errors are errors, and I don’t think they are, and we can talk about that, but even if you grant them all, this small number of red Xs does not counterbalance this massive collection of green check marks, and so Bart hasn’t met the burden of proof.”
Trent Horn:
What do you think? I didn’t notice this come up a lot in the debate. Maybe I missed that part. I was watching it on my phone, and my kids were running around when it was streaming live. But I guess one element I might have added in if I were up there, and it’s always not great to speculate too much what would you do. How useful do you think it is to compare the gospels to other ancient documents that people like Ehrman would say are reliable? I don’t know, like the histories of Josephus or Tacitus or other ancient biographies, which when you read them, they do get minor things wrong. They do get things wrong or have contradictions, but we still use them to figure out what happened in that time period, so we call them reliable. Do you think that’s a useful argument to make those kind of parallels?
Jimmy Akin:
In general, yes, but not with Bart, because what Bart will say is, “Oh, those aren’t reliable either.”
Trent Horn:
Yeah. You could [inaudible 00:17:52] and just say that none of them are reliable.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, and he does something very much like that. In the debate that I did with him, he talks at one point in either the discussion or the question period. He asserts that ancient biographies, in general, are unreliable. And he’s using a definition of reliability that’s either identical to or close to inerrant. So he doesn’t mean we can’t get useful historical information or that we shouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to a particular document, but if I brought up Josephus or Tacitus or Plutarch or anybody like that and said, “Well, these guys are reliable,” he would say, “No, they’re not.”
Trent Horn:
But then I feel like he’s sawing off his own tree branch if he would end up doing that, because it seems like you could make this kind of argument that, let’s say for subject X, if all primary sources for X are unreliable, it seems like all the secondary sources would also be unreliable, if all the primary sources are unreliable. And that would mean that, is all modern scholarship of ancient history unreliable if the sources are? It seems like you would poison the whole well.
Jimmy Akin:
I think Bart would say we can know some things about history with great confidence, but others, because of the state of the sources, we really can’t know with confidence. And as long as a… From Bart’s point of view, if we can’t know something with confidence a substantial amount of the time, then we shouldn’t call it reliable. And so I think he would probably say that a lot of our knowledge of ancient history is unreliable. And-
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think that gets back to the definition of reliable then.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. And because we have these very limited amounts of time to discuss the issue together, I chose to keep the focus exclusively on the gospels rather than broaden it. It’s not my job in the debate to defend all of anciently literature, just the gospels.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So we’ll talk because where you’ve set yourself up is okay, we agree lots of stuff is reliable. The only way you could refute my case is if you show on, imagine a seesaw, basically, it’s like, you’ve got to-
Jimmy Akin:
Or scales.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Or scales. I always like to think of two guys on a seesaw. You got a big guy sitting over here, 62 major facts, pushing the Seesaw down. It’s like a 6,200-pound man or something that I’m going to need to get at least another 6,200-pound man over here. What are the errors you’re going to propose? And it seems like he focused primarily on the infancy narratives of Jesus and the resurrection appearances of Jesus but-
Jimmy Akin:
He also had a little bit on the preaching of Jesus.
Trent Horn:
A little bit there, too. So maybe you could say a little bit about how you engage those subjects. Let’s start with the infancy narratives, because I think a lot of people, when they bring up Bible contradictions, they’ll often point to this issue. Maybe you can talk about that. And then probably the most interesting part of that discussion is the question of, where did Mary and Joseph travel to, and where were their homes? And you’ve written an article about that as well. I think that was a big part in talking about the infancy narratives.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So people will variously try to accuse the infancy narratives of having contradictions, and I’ve never found this plausible. If you look carefully, if you read them carefully, they fit together remarkably well.
Jimmy Akin:
And so years ago, I wrote a post about how the accounts of Jesus’s childhood or the infancy narratives, how they fit together, where I take the data from Matthew and Luke, where we have accounts of Jesus’ childhood in the first two chapters, and I just sequence the material and show you how all this goes together.
Jimmy Akin:
In the debate, in the cross-examination period, Bart posed a particular challenge to me and said, “Well, Luke depicts Joseph as living in Nazareth, and then he goes to Bethlehem for the census. But in Matthew… And then he returns to Nazareth. In Matthew, it depicts Joseph as living in Bethlehem and only later flying to Egypt and then coming back, and apparently he’s going to resume residence in Nazareth, but because he learns who the new ruler is, he’s afraid of the new ruler, so he goes up to Nazareth instead. And how do you put those together, because it sounds like the evangelists are saying Joseph lived in these two different places?”
Jimmy Akin:
And so in responding to that, I said, “Well, he did. He had two homes.” And Bart said, “That’s an interesting thought. That hadn’t occurred to me.” And he then began to think about, well, what would that involve and how plausible is it? Would a working class guy, like Joseph, actually be able to afford two homes? And how common was that in the ancient world, and so forth. And unfortunately, we didn’t have time to explore it further because Bart had only 10 minutes to cross-examine me and I couldn’t, in fairness, chew up all of his time. I need to let him ask me multiple questions.
Jimmy Akin:
But a lot of people were very interested in that hypothesis after the debate. And so I wrote an article on it that you can find… In fact, before the debate, I wrote a whole bunch of articles to deal with the different objections that Bart commonly brings up in these debates, because I knew there’d be no way I could answer everything in detail.
Jimmy Akin:
And so if you go to jimmyakin.com/bart, so jimmyakin.com/bart, you’ll find all these resources, including the newly written one, where I show the evidence for why Joseph had two residences and why that’s not at all uncommon, even among lower-class people. In fact, in some parts of the world, especially among lower-class people, they will have two homes because they have a family home where they were born or raised, and then they have to migrate in order to get work. And wherever you migrate, you got to sleep somewhere, so you end up with a secondary residence.
Trent Horn:
And you made a good point in the debate. You made an offhand comment. You said, “Well, they wouldn’t be palatial. You wouldn’t have these two…” And it’s hard because when we think today of homes, they’re quite expensive because of regulations and other things requiring them to be a certain way, whereas in the ancient world, many homes were a bit more makeshift and would be more occupied. And so that makes sense to me that if you are someone who is a migrant or a worker, itinerant, and you travel, especially if you have two separate areas, you have families somewhere.
Trent Horn:
And you’re right. We see this today among migrants. Maybe they’ll go to an agricultural community for work and there’s another home there, but they share it with other people. It’s like a kind of flophouse. That way, they have a roof over their head when they’re working, then they make their wages and they come back to their family. So I agree with you. And some of people were kind of, “Oh, two homes.” I’m like, well, you got to stop and think things through a little bit. When people work and travel and live, they just need a roof over their heads, and it makes sense people would work together to do that.
Jimmy Akin:
Well. And in addition, now, Joseph wasn’t necessarily, per se, what we would think of as a migrant, but I do think he moved from Bethlehem to Nazareth for work.
Trent Horn:
Like a commuter.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, not like… I think he was in Nazareth on a regular basis. And I mean, he may have gone a few miles over to Sepphoris or something to do a contracting job, but I think in the period immediately before Jesus’ birth, he was principally living in Nazareth and only maybe made short journeys to do different day jobs.
Jimmy Akin:
But people also, when they think of two homes, they’re thinking in terms of the way people end up… The way rich people buy two homes today, which is they take out mortgages on both of them. And so they’re paying a mortgage every month on two different properties. And of course, that requires money. But that’s not the way this would’ve worked, because Joseph would’ve inherited the property in Bethlehem. So that would’ve already been paid for. And as far as I know, they didn’t really have mortgages on real estate in first century Palestine. You just paid the money up front.
Jimmy Akin:
But I realized in writing the article, and I talk about this, that this actually reflects my situation because I was born in Texas. My parents moved to Arkansas for work. And then when I became a professional Catholic apologist, I had to move to California for work because Catholic Answers didn’t have a branch office in Arkansas. So I moved out to California. And then later, when my parents passed, I inherited their property.
Jimmy Akin:
And so here I am in California. I’ve got a residence here, but I also have a residence back in Arkansas that I got free of charge because it was an inherited property. I didn’t have to take out a mortgage on it. The mortgage was already paid. And so I only needed the one income to support my California residence, and I had this other property that I was co-owner with my siblings, and it’s quite economically feasible for people to have more than one residence. The second one could be rental. They could be flopping with someone or staying free of charge, or they may have the resources to purchase something modest for their second residence. But it’s not at all implausible, and it actually happens loads today.
Trent Horn:
Let’s move to then the other source of the contradictions that this is one that Ehrman is very famous for and a lot of atheists will bring up, claiming there are contradictions in the resurrection appearances, and so that is why the gospels are unreliable. But I do think, in this case, he tried to bring up examples, like, “Yeah, you get New York City, in general, right, but then you get all these other major facts wrong.” I don’t think that’s what’s happening in the gospels though. The differences that are picked are all quite minor. It’s not like one gospel says, Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, and another one says, he was crucified in Ephesus, or something like that.
Trent Horn:
Now, I think that it’s a lot of mountains out of molehills, and you’ll probably get into this more, about how we understand the different resurrection appearances and why we need to be careful. Many of the alleged contradictions, I think, not just here, but in the infancy narratives or other places, I think they only arise because we impose upon the text our assumptions about what happened based on what we heard in Sunday school, things like that, and we actually don’t let the text tell us the more simpler thing that might have happened. So maybe we can move to the resurrection appearances and the allegation of contradictions there.
Jimmy Akin:
So one of the things that Bart will commonly point out is that we don’t have resurrection appearances in Mark because of the way Mark ends. And there’s a debate about why Mark ends that way. Some people think that the original ending of mark was lost and had to be replaced. Others think that Mark wanted to end his gospel in this kind of avant-garde way, where the women hear that Jesus is raised, and then they rush out of the tomb, and they’re terrified, and they don’t tell anybody. The end. And so the question from a really kind of postmodern view is, so mark is asking the audience, what are you going to do? Are you going to tell anybody about Jesus? And I think that’s a little too clever by half.
Jimmy Akin:
I actually think that Mark is a known form of ancient literature called hypomnemata, which is basically a collection of notes that were not in final polished literary form. They were meant as a background document to help other people write about Jesus, and so they’re not meant to be complete. And that would also explain Mark’s literary style not being as polished as Luke or Matthew, because Luke and Matthew used the hypomnemata Mark produced, but then they did what they were supposed to with them, which was polish them and complete them.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. When you’re reading Mark, for people who are listening, when you read the gospel Mark, notice how many times it starts with the conjunction “and”. It feels very run on when you go through Mark, “And this happened. Oh, and this happened. And this happened, too.” It’s very string of pearls in its construction.
Jimmy Akin:
Also, look for the word immediately because-
Trent Horn:
Euthus, yes.
Jimmy Akin:
Euthus, yeah, in Greek. Mark is like, that’s his pet word. He uses immediately all the time. And then it gets dropped in Matthew and Luke because it’s repetitive. But Bart will point out, in Matthew, the disciples go to Galilee to see Jesus, and in Luke, they stay in Jerusalem and see Jesus. And in fact, in Luke, Jesus tells them not to leave Jerusalem. So he’ll say, “Well, which was it? Did they see Jesus in Galilee or in Jerusalem?” And I said, “Both. They saw him in both places. And that’s confirmed by the Gospel of John, because if you look in John 20, immediately after the resurrection, he appears to them in Jerusalem, more than once. And then in John 21, he appears to them in Galilee.” And so you have Johannine or John-based confirmation that, yeah, it was both places. And Matthew simply chooses to focus on the Galilee appearances, whereas Luke chooses to focus on the Jerusalem appearances.
Trent Horn:
Well, what do you do with… I think Ehrman was really adamant in the debate that Luke was saying that all of these events in his resurrection appearance narrative took place in a single day, and that would seem to contradict Matthew on that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So this is a point in the debate where Bart and I were a little bit stymied with each other, because our memories of the passage were different. He said that he had, an hour before the debate, looked it up to make sure he was right. And so he’s talking about resurrection appearances that occur in Luke 24. And he’s right that the account of what’s happening in Luke 24 starts on the day of the resurrection. It starts on the first day of the week or Sunday. And then as we proceed through the events, like the encounter on the road to Emmaus, we have these timestamps in Luke saying, and that same day, this happened, and so forth. And as you work your way down, the timestamps become more vague and eventually drop out. And Luke, they drop out, for example, by verse 45.
Jimmy Akin:
But Bart would say, “Well, look,” and did say, “Look, these are all timestamped as occurring on this day, and Jesus says, stay in Jerusalem. And so he’s telling them, this day, stay in Jerusalem and do that until after Pentecost. So they would never have gone to Galilee.” But my memory of the passage, which I subsequently verified, is that Luke does not give us that same day all the way through. He does vary it. He does vary the time cues he’s using, and they become vaguer. And after a certain point, they’re so vague that you can’t say Luke is claiming this all happened that day anymore.
Jimmy Akin:
In fact, just before the command to stay in Jerusalem… Because the alternative theory that I was advocating is, well, they saw Jesus in Jerusalem, and then they went and they saw him in Galilee. And then at some point, they’re back in Jerusalem, getting ready for Pentecost, and Jesus tells because you were supposed to go to Jerusalem for Pentecost, so they’re back down there again. And it’s at that point, Jesus says, “Stay in the city until you’ve received the holy spirit.” And so that would be one of the last things that Jesus would’ve told them over this 40-day period that Luke describes at the beginning of Acts.
Jimmy Akin:
But if you look late in Luke 24, Luke, even at one point, uses the term tote, which in Greek, it means then or thereafter. So it could mean either at that time or after that time he said stay in Jerusalem. And that’s the last thing that Jesus says in Luke 24 before the Ascension. So that would tell us that, around the Ascension, they were in the Jerusalem area, and at least the way Luke 24 reads, that’s when he gave them this command. It was 10 days before Pentecost, not the day of the resurrection.
Trent Horn:
How helpful is it for us, in trying to explain these alleged contradictions, to talk about rhetorical devices and ways of the evangelist describing details and allowing them to vary? Because I think one quick way, if I talked about this with someone, is I might say that Luke is using a narrative device called telescoping, where, as you describe events, you make it seem like they’re all in a specific period, that you make it seem like they are closer together than they really are for your narrative uniformity, just like how a telescope make something seem closer than it really is. And your point is just to do that without providing strict chronology. Is that helpful to talk about these rhetorical devices?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. That’s what I largely did during my rebuttal period, during my second statement. I wanted to give people tools, intellectual tools, for evaluating the kind of claims that people will make when they charge the gospels with error.
Jimmy Akin:
And so in the original draft of my second statement, I talked about four literary practices that were used by ancient writers: selection, which means choosing to include some material and some details rather than others that you could have mentioned, paraphrase, which is communicating the same meaning as what someone said, but in different words, and sequencing, which is, do you choose to sequence your material in chronological order or in some other kind of order, like topical order, where you put material on the same topic together, even though it may have occurred in different periods. And then also, the fourth one was going to be telescoping, where you compress stuff in a way… Like for example, when you say Solomon built the temple, you don’t mean he personally picked up a hammer. There were workmen who built the temple, but it was on Solomon’s behalf. And so you just omit the workmen and talk about Solomon, because he was the principal agent.
Trent Horn:
Like we say, Pilate flogged Jesus. He didn’t do it himself.
Jimmy Akin:
I’m sorry, what was that?
Trent Horn:
It’s like, if we say, Pilate flogged Jesus. He didn’t do it himself. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. That’s also telescoping. Unfortunately, my statement was running a little too long, so I had to cut the telescoping, but I agree. I think what’s happening in Luke 24 is we have a topical ordering. I think that’s the main literary practice that’s happening here. He is selecting resurrection account that he knows occurred over this 40-day period, or resurrection appearance accounts that he knows occurred over this 40-day period, and he’s putting them all together in chapter 24 because they’re all on the same topic. They’re all resurrection appearances.
Jimmy Akin:
And he does have time cues telling us when some of them happened, but I think that if you read carefully, you’ll see the time cues eventually drop out, and at a certain point, like when he says, “And Jesus said.” Well, anytime you’ve got “And Jesus said,” you don’t know when that happened. It just means he said it at some point. But that by reintroducing the “And Jesus said,” that tells you, it’s a separate saying than the one you were just reading. So there’s a break in the sayings, and he doesn’t tell you when the new saying was given. It could have been some other time.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Overall, wrapping up talking about the debate then, I want to ask you about encountering gospel difficulties in general. How do you think, overall, it went? Just your thoughts now, now that it’s over and you got to engage Ehrman.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, I was very pleased with it. I think that the fundamental strategy that I used of let’s focus on common ground, what even Bart agrees with, I think that was very effective for people. I mean, of course, debates usually don’t change people’s minds, but I think in terms of how the strategy worked, I think it worked very well. I think I was able to improve on what I’ve seen other debaters do with Bart on this subject.
Jimmy Akin:
I also met a couple of other goals, which I was determined to do. One of them was to be super friendly to Bart and to just be as nice as I possibly could. I still had a little good-natured kidding in there, but I really tried to be consistently friendly, and I even had pre-planned things that I was going to do. At one point, I was talking about the fact that Bart has written a whole book on the existence of Jesus, where he refutes Jesus mythicist. And so I said, “You deserve credit for that. Let’s all give him a big round of applause.” And people did. And then I said, “And Bart and I agree on this.” And I walked over to him because we weren’t very far apart on the stage, and I said, “Jesus exists. High five.” And he gave me a high five. And as far as I know, I’m the only person ever to high-five Bart during a debate. But it was another trying to be nice, because I-
Trent Horn:
I think that’s very important. Yeah. I mean, debates are not just arguments.
Jimmy Akin:
Right. And so I wanted to set a positive tone, both to be nice to Bart and to show the audience that I’m not some mean-spirited fundamentalist, whatever. I don’t fit that stereotype. I’m trying to be a genial guy. And also, I wanted to project confidence in cross-examination because in other debates, I would see people, even people who are really brilliant scholars, they may not be debaters and Bart would get them rattled, and they would project a lack of confidence. And I wanted to project confidence. And so even though Bart and I disagreed and the temperature went up slightly during some of the cross-examination, I still think I was able to come across as confident in the answers I’m giving.
Trent Horn:
Let’s talk about gospel contradictions in general. What would be your advice then for Christians? Or you’re reading the gospels and come across these differences, and maybe you feel rattled a bit about it. What do you think is a general strategy and then some resources you would recommend?
Jimmy Akin:
So as far as a general strategy, I would recognize that we have to read the gospels as the kind of literature they are. They are not written by the same rules that we use today when we are writing literature in the ancient world. And this deals with the practices that I brought up, in the ancient literary practices that I brought up in my second statement, like a paraphrase, because in the ancient world, people did not have tape recorders or video recorders. And as a result, they usually did not have exact transcripts of what someone had said. And so ancient audiences knew that. They knew that an author didn’t have an exact transcript in front of him, and so he wasn’t giving you the exact words that someone used necessarily, but he is trying to give you the gist of what someone said. In other words, he’s paraphrasing. He’s giving you the same basic meaning, but in different words.
Jimmy Akin:
And so when you recognize that, it’ll solve a bunch of the supposed contradictions that some people might bring up. Now, Bart was not one of these people. Bart acknowledges that paraphrase does not result in contradiction, but there are people who will say that. So like here, Jesus uses this word, but in this other gospel, Jesus uses another word that has the same meaning, but it’s different. So it’s a contradiction. Well, no, it’s not. That’s just paraphrase.
Jimmy Akin:
Same thing with selection, and I wish I’d had time to explain this a little further in the debate, but I didn’t, so I had to cut this. But in the ancient world, because books had to be copied by hand and every piece of paper had to be made by hand, they didn’t have machines making papyrus or parchment, that all had to be handmade, books were fantastically expensive. A single copy, just one copy of the gospel of Matthew would cost around $2,000, and so the equivalent of $2,000.
Jimmy Akin:
And so there was enormous price pressure for authors to keep their books short. And that means they had… I mean, if you spent three years with Jesus, you’d have all kinds of stories you could tell, but you need to fit them into that one $2,000 scroll. So you’ve got to leave out a lot of material. And so different authors make different choices. They make different selections of the material they’re going to include. So for example, if you read Mark, you’ll find an account where Jesus heals a blind man, and he only mentions the one blind man. But if you read Matthew, oh, there were actually two on that occasion. And I’ve seen people say, “Oh, that’s a contradiction.” Well, no, it’s not. And Bart would agree that it’s not. That’s just a difference of what are they selecting for inclusion.
Jimmy Akin:
And then we mentioned telescoping as another literary device that’s used, and also topical sequencing rather than chronological sequencing. All of those are… As you become aware of these literary devices, you understand what you can and cannot expect from the gospels. You cannot expect them to be written according to modern rules, but you can expect them to communicate the gist of what happened, which you can recognize once you know these different rules and can say, okay, well, this is an example of selection difference, this is an example of paraphrasing, this is an example of sequencing topically rather than chronologically, and so forth. In terms of resources, well, you got a book on this.
Trent Horn:
Yes. Well, before we get to the resources, is it also important for people to know, think about what they do agree on and how important is that? If they all agree basic life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, well, we have a firm foundation there on what they all agree on that what there’s disagreement shouldn’t frighten us as much.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. I would certainly agree with that.
Trent Horn:
And then yeah, so the… Yeah, yeah. I do have my book, Hard Sayings, and you’ve got some other stuff.
Jimmy Akin:
I have A Daily Defense, which includes a lot of material. It’s a 365-day book, so it’s one page a day, although you can binge-read, and most people do, because it’s so compelling. But I take on lots of alleged contradictions and resolve them in less than a page. Also, I taught a Bible difficulties course for the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. It’s called Bible Difficulties 1. It’s the first in a series, and it’s already available. So you can check that out.
Trent Horn:
All right. Very good. I would also definitely recommend resource on this, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig Blomberg. He also has one on John. That’s another good resource.
Jimmy Akin:
And he’s got a New Testament one now that covers the whole thing, if I’m not mistaken.
Trent Horn:
Good stuff. All right. Well, Jimmy, thank you so much. And then also, definitely recommend people check out Jimmy’s website, jimmyakin.com, and his podcast, Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. So Jimmy, thanks for being here today.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Trent Horn:
All right. Thank you so much, and thank you guys for watching, and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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