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Joe Heschmeyer responds to Alex O’Connor’s claims about Biblical inconsistency in his debate with Dinesh D’Souza.
Transcription:
Joe Heschmeyer:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I finally got around to watching the debate between Alex O’Connor and Dinesh D’Souza. And let me tell you, as a Christian, it was somehow even worse than I thought it was going to be. For a guy who spends a lot of time complaining about genocides and massacre in the Bible, Alex O’Connor had no problem publicly murdering Dinesh dea. Now that might sound un charitable, that might sound unfair. So lemme tell you this. Number one, I normally do not do the, here’s what I would’ve said, kind of videos because it debate’s a funny thing. When you’re under pressure, there’s a time limit. You’ve got all that stress and pressure and people watching. You have no idea what you would say.
But in this case, I want to make an exception, not to say, here’s what I would say, but rather here answers to the arguments that Alex O’Connor was making for two hours that Dinesh Desa never responded to except to kind of shrug them off or sear at them. Here’s the thing, as Christians, if you look at one Peter chapter three, 15 to 16, it’s the foundational text for the idea of apologetics. Even the word apologetics comes from the Greek alogia or defense. It’s coming from right here, and which we’re told number one, to always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope in you. And number two, to do it in a way that’s gentle and reverent. So in other words, number one, be prepared. And number two, don’t be a jerk. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about Dinesh’s performance because there’s not a lot I can say constructively, but lemme just give you a sense of why everyone that I read, every commenter, every comment in the comments below everyone, Christian, atheist, whatever, who saw this agreed that Dineh lost this debate.
So here’s how he begins with this is literally his opening argument and we can judge it on the twofold test of are you prepared and are you being a jerk?
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
I’m standing up because I want to kind of neutralize Alex’s accent advantage. I mentioned this because it seems to me no accident that so many of the prominent so-called new atheists have British accents.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So that’s not a great opener. Your opponent spends 10 minutes laying on a pretty logical but answerable case against the reliability of the Bible, and you begin by sort of waving it all away and suggesting it’s just because he has a posh British accent and he actually goes on for a little bit of time explaining this really bizarre at hominin attack. If that’s not bad enough, the next thing he says is that he’s not really qualified to be debating in this area because he’s not a theologian, he’s not a Bible expert. This isn’t his normal area, but maybe the most telling interaction, the debate is the Bible true. Just watch this interaction and you can decide for yourself if he seemed like he came prepared for this conversation
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
And now imagine that the gospel writers had written what you just said. Imagine in the actual text, one of them said he was 33 when he died because of the number three in its significance, correct? And another said that he was 34 because of the number four. In its significance, that would be a contradiction. And in that instance, not just a historical contradiction, but a spiritual and theological one too. No, it actually wouldn’t. I’ll see it. Come on. It wouldn’t tell you why. You don’t think that’s a contradiction. No, it’s not a contradiction. All because the gospel writers are constantly contradicting each other, no drawing, not contradicting each other. If they were constantly contradicting each other, you wouldn’t have spent half an hour on a single event that frankly I haven’t even heard of. In fact, no one’s ever heard of. I’ve never ever heard anyone discuss this in any context.
Fish out which event this prophecy about Hosea, I’ll go back and look at all this, but what I’m trying to get at is if you had a plethora of contradictions, you wouldn’t be spending the entire debate on one that I’m sure no one in the audience has sort off either on, but oh, well, okay, you’ve heard of it probably because you’ve been listening to his YouTube channel. You don’t think that this, don’t think this is a highly discussed point of contention in the gospels, the flight to Egypt and its contradiction with the flight to Egypt local, the flight to Egypt is an important event. The gospel, I’m going to say finish also. So
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’m going to go ahead and say that on the twofold test of be prepared and don’t be a jerk. There’s room for improvement on both of those. Now, Alex O’Connor, if you’re watching this, I want to say number one, I thought you did a very good job being heroically patient in a debate that would be very frustrating for an ordinary person. And number two, I think you are raising perfectly reasonable questions and objections, and so I want to do you hopefully the service of number one telling you some areas where I think you’re right on the money getting things right, and number two, responding to some of the criticisms and contradictions that you point to or alleged contradictions that you point to. And I want to be really clear at the outset. I’m not going to try to do an entire recap of the whole two hours, rather, I want to draw out just the alleged contradictions and focus on those. But before we get there, let’s talk about three things that you get and that I think it’s really important for Christians and non-Christians to recognize because they’re things that we can kind of screw up. Number one, the Bible isn’t a book. Now that’s kind of counterintuitive, right? Because the word Bible literally comes from the word for book, but the Bible is, as you say, a library.
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
The Bible is not a book, it’s a library. And unlike any good library, it contains an amalgamation of different genres. And so asking if the Bible is true, you might as well ask if the corpus of Shakespeare is true. It’s sort of betrays a misunderstanding of how people interact with the text. So I thought, will Dinesh argue that the Bible is literally true historically true allegorically, true morally true, theologically true, metaphorically
Joe Heschmeyer:
True? That’s brilliantly put. The Bible is a library of different books and those books are written in different genres. Sometimes within one book you have different modes of speech. So take the story of the Exodus. Most of the story of the exodus is written in a fairly straightforward, apparently literal account, but then you have interspersed what are obviously not meant to be literal expressions. For instance, in Exodus 19 verse four, God says, you’ve seen what I did to the Egyptians at I bore you on Eagle’s wings and brought you to myself. To my knowledge, no one in history has ever taken that verse literally, even though it’s in a book about history. So when we’re trying to analyze is the Bible true, it helps to know what is it trying to say and how is it trying to say it? Is this something where it’s trying to be literal historical?
Is it trying to be allegorical or so for instance, if you took the question, are Jesus’s parables true? That’s a different question than did Jesus’s parables historically happen? You see what I mean there, that it’s not just as many modern people. We imagine that true and historical mean the same or true and testable in a lab mean the same thing. So this raises the second thing that I want to laud you for, which is highlighting that things can be true in different ways. Historical truth is one form of truth, but some people hearing that are going to imagine, well, that’s just this kind of postmodern sort of idea. What does that even mean? Well, this is what’s sometimes called the correspondence theory of truth. So I want to highlight the kind of what is truth. There’s a famous passage in the 19th chapter of the gospel of John where Jesus is before Pilate, and he declares that he’s come into the world to bear witness to the truth, and Pilate responds What is truth?
And for thousands of years we’ve struggled to give a good answer to that question. It seems really easy to define and describe. It’s a little trickier than that. So in a pretty famous 1944 article, Alfred Ky lays out different ways of trying to define what we mean by true. I want to just highlight three. The first one he gets from Aristotle to say of what is that it is not or of what is not that it is is false while to say of what is that it is or what is not that it is not is true, a little cumbersome, but you get the gist. If something exists and you claim it doesn’t exist, that’s not true. And if it exists and you say it exists, that is true. Okay? We kind of have a sense of what that means. The second definition or the second proposed definition tars gives us is that the truth of a sentence consists in its agreement with or correspondence to reality.
Tars Ski doesn’t love that one. That’s actually my favorite one, that when we say something is true, we mean that it is real. We mean it corresponds to reality. Now things can correspond to reality in different ways. So the parable of the prodigal son is true. It is describing reality, but it’s not describing reality in a historical sense. It’s describing reality in this kind of masistic sense in a parable. The third definition that he gives is maybe the dorkiest. He says a sentence is true if it designates an existing state of affairs. Now, Tosky acknowledges there are potential problems with all three of those definitions of truth. So to modify one of the examples he gives, what about the statement snow is white? Is that true even during the summer when there’s no snow or because there’s no current existing state of affairs, do we have to say snow would be white?
Those kind of questions. Philosophers spend a lot of time debating the semantics of this, but it actually matters because a lot of modern people hear things like, well, Jesus speaks in parables and some of the parts of the Old Testament aren’t literal and they hear, okay, therefore they’re not true because they’ve conflated literal and true, and that’s not what is true. The reality is truth is a correspondence to reality. Now there are other models of truth. Coherence is the major kind of counter. I’m not going to get into all that because that’s way too nerdy, way too much in the rabbit hole. But it’s only to say the coherence theory of truth is wrong. The correspondence one I displayed out is the true one. I’m not going to defend it, I’m just going to assert it and move on. The third thing that I want to praise you for getting right, Alex is recognizing that trivial differences, even trivial discrepancies or minor contradictions in the Bible are consistent with saying the Bible is true and consistent with the Christian self-understanding of divine revelation in scripture. Well, first I’m going to give a brief kind of back and forth where I think this becomes clear in the way you and Danesh Jesusa talk about the issue, and then I want to talk about what that reveals.
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
Lemme ask you this very straightforwardly then. Okay, Luke says that after the birth of Jesus, the family fled to Egypt. Matthew says that they went to the Jerusalem temple. Are they both correct or is one of them wrong? Who the heck cares? Look, I do. The people who listening to the debate about, well, lemme say why. Let me say why. What you care about is not only trivial, but indicates a kind of unwillingness to try to get what the text is trying to convey. I’ll tell you why I don’t think it’s trivial.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So I’m going to get back to that alleged contradiction. Also, the passage he’s describing is from Matthew and not from Luke. The flight into Egypt is only found in the gospel of Matthew. But what I don’t want to do is simply wave it away and say, oh, if there’s a contradiction, who cares? Because that obviously undermines the premise that the Bible is true. If you say it’s true, and I don’t care if it contradicts all over the place, you got to do a lot more work than just kind of hotly shrugging your shoulders. But what notice the actual debate is on is whether any alleged discrepancies are trivial. Now, I’m going to argue that there’s not even a discrepancy there, but they are right to recognize that a discrepancy that’s trivial is not something that matters. So for instance, Matthew, mark, and Luke, even though they’re called the synoptics, they’re telling basically the same events in the same order.
They have disparities in the order. This is immediately observable to anyone who compares them. They may tell the same events, but they put them in different orders. They have different details that they include and exclude, and there are times when the details don’t seem to match up. Okay, what do we make of that? Right? That’s an important question and a good standard I want to suggest is the one the Second Vatican Council lays out that everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit. Not everything mentioned but asserted. What are the things they’re trying to get across as opposed to things that are, we would say in the field of law, dicta, just things that you mention along the way and we need to believe as Christians that God has faithfully and without error revealed his truth in the sacred writings, everything that he wanted put in there for the sake of salvation.
Now that means that there’s plenty of unimportant incidental details that can go wrong. For instance, many times when you see the rendering of Nonis Israelite names, they’re kind of butchered this way that English speakers originally called Beijing PE King. That doesn’t matter. That’s not God making a mistake. That’s God working through human authors who are going to get some incidental details kind of screwy and certain modes of inspiration wouldn’t allow that. If you imagine that divine inspiration works by God dictating word for word what needs to go in the scriptures, then yeah, that would disprove it. Even getting a misspelled name, or for instance in one Corinthians, when St. Paul begins to list all of the people that he did or didn’t baptize, he originally says he didn’t baptize anyone and then he corrects himself in the next verse and says, oh, right, well did the Holy Spirit dictate a mistake that he just, no rather, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is such that as the Second Vatican Council puts it, God speaks in sacred scripture through men in human fashion.
Therefore, the interpreter of sacred scripture, in order to clearly see what God wanted to communicate to us should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended and what God wanted manifest by means of their word. So what are they trying to say rather than what are some things that they’re not trying to say that you could just grab onto? So for instance, if you said there was a huge fight on my lawn at sunrise, it’s clear what you’re asserting there. Someone could say, oh, you said sunrise. You think that the earth or the sun goes around the earth and that’s why it’s rising ridiculous, you fool. But of course that’s not what you’re trying to assert. You’re not trying to make a point about centrism or helio centrism, you’re trying to assert something about a fight that happened on your lawn. Sounds crazy. I’m really sorry for you.
But that’s the difference between mentioning and asserting and assertions are related to those things that are necessary for salvation. So those are the two things we should be looking for. Is this something the author is asserting as opposed to mentioning? And does this seem to have kind of salvific implications in some sense? And if it doesn’t, it’s just a detail that’s getting mentioned in the story that’s way less important. Now people hearing that might think, oh, that sounds so modernist, that sounds so like 21st century. You’ve just now that scientists have come along and disprove so much of the Bible, now you got to move the goalposts. Not at all. In fact, when you read how the earliest Christians understood scripture, you’ll find things like this. So to give just one example, Papus is a historian from very early on like first century. He’s born in about the year 60.
He dies in about the year one 30. His writings are now lost to accept through the fourth century historian UUs Pap. I called him a historian, chronicler may be a better word. In any case, he recounts a presbyter by the name of John who’s talking about the gospel of Mark, and he says, mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately though not in order whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. Notice that so his details are correct, they’re accurate, but they may not be chronologically accurate because that just wasn’t considered important by Mark or John the Presbyter or Papus or other early Christians. Getting the details of the order aren’t super important and Papus even explains why he neither heard the Lord nor followed him. He was not an eyewitness, but came afterwards following Peter who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving them a connected account of the Lord’s discourses.
So you’ve got this, you’ve got the Apostle Peter preaching, but he’s preaching on particular subjects to particular audiences. He’s not just giving an A to Z, here’s everything Jesus did in chronological order. Of course he’s not. Mark is trying to build something like that from these various pieces that he’s hearing. And so we’re told Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them, right? So he’s writing down the events that he’s hearing and putting them in a coherent order that may or may not be the order they actually happened in. And Papus says for he was careful of one thing not to omit any of the things that she had heard and not to state any of them falsely. So you have even in the first and early second century, this clear distinction between are you telling me the truth and are you worried about the details?
And so we want to make that distinction ourselves as we’re evaluating claims like, well, is the Bible true? We’re not asking can you find minor details? At one point Dinesh D’Souza made that I think was a good one is that you have four gospel writers, and so almost by definition you’re going to get different versions of the event, otherwise you would just presumably have one. Now, maybe that doesn’t logically follow, but it certainly seems consistent. Alright, so with that said, I agree with everything Alex is saying there except I don’t think the contradiction he cites is actually a contradiction. So let’s talk about those. Does the Bible contradict itself? So Alex, if you’re watching, I want to focus on some of your bigger points. If you think I’ve missed some really important ones, I’m happy to do a follow up video on this because I am aware I’m not covering every argument made in those two hours, but I want to focus number one on this claim that you made three times in the debate that never got a good response. This idea that Matthew or one point you said Luke, but Matthew creates a sort of set of prophecies. He invents the flight into Egypt and then he invents a whole passage about Jesus being called a Nazarene.
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
Then we have for example, the flight to Egypt, which is only recorded in Luke, which is difficult to reconcile with Matthew’s account that they went to the temple in Jerusalem instead. But more importantly, Matthew then says that the family traveled to Nazareth and he says, so was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that he shall be called in Nazarene quoting the prophets. Now you’ll notice if you read an online Bible that where the Old Testament prophets are quoted, there’s a little footnote telling you what the prophet of what the prophecy is. In this case, you won’t find one because the prophecy simply doesn’t exist. It’s not there. There’s no such thing. So there are two options here. Either Matthew made up this prophecy or got it wrong, in which case the New Testament is mistaken or the prophecy does exist, but for some reason fell out of our scriptural tradition and now no longer exists, which makes the accuracy and at least the completeness of the Old Testament suspect. So again, I’d like to ask directly which it is,
Joe Heschmeyer:
Let’s talk about the first of those two claims. First, the idea that it’s very difficult to harmonize the presentation in the temple and the flight into Egypt. I don’t think that’s true in the gospel of Luke, we’re told the purification of the temple happens when the time for purification came under the law of Moses, which under the law in Leviticus is at 40 days. In contrast, the Magi are on this journey from the east. We don’t know where they originally go to Jerusalem. They then go and are told to search diligently in Bethlehem to try to find the child. By the time Herod hears that they’ve, once he realizes they’ve tricked him, he sends out the order to have any boys to and under in the area killed. Now if Jesus is a newborn, that presumably wouldn’t happen. So we don’t know exactly how old Jesus is, but he’s old enough that he could look like he’s two.
So it seems pretty clear the way you harmonize that is that the events of them going into the temple for the purification happened before the events of the flight into Egypt. It is not particularly strong as like a look at this contradiction. No, there’s no contradiction between saying I went here 40 days after I was born. I went there maybe a year after. But the second thing is this passage in Matthew two, it says he went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth. This is after they’ve returned from the flight into Egypt that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled. He shall be called a Nazarene. And so the argument here is it looks like he’s just completely invented an Old Testament prophecy and he’s done. So he basically, it shows either a total scrupulosity on Matthew’s part, right? He’s willing to just make up evidence or it shows we don’t have the right Old Testament, or at least it would seem to show a certain level of sloppiness.
And I want to suggest it’s none of those three things and we’ve had an answer for a very long time to this question, but it turns on an area scholars are a little unsure of which is the etymology of the word Nazareth. But one popular theory seemingly then and now is that the word Nazareth came from the word for branch not sir. And this makes sense that if the word Nazareth does come from the word for branch, there is an Old Testament prophecy about the branch that the Messiah shall be the branch from the stump of Jesse. This is Isaiah 11 and it’s one that Matthew in particular is fond of applying to Jesus. So in the prophecy it’s about the spirit of the Lord coming to rest upon him. And Matthew pretty explicitly cites this in regards to Jesus at his baptism in Matthew chapter three, where the spirit of God descends like a dove and rests on Jesus.
All that’s to say that he shall be called the Nazarene is seemingly playing upon the etymological origins of the word Nazarene branch. He’s not claiming the city of Nazareth is even mentioned in the Old Testament. It’s not. He’s rather saying Nazareth branch comes from the same word as this messianic prophecy in Isaiah 11. It’s kind of cool that the branch of Jesse that shows up, shows up in a town seemingly called branch. Alright? That’s the first alleged contradiction I want to suggest, not a contradiction. Second, the alleged contradictions about the dating of Passover and this one gets a lot murkier.
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
For example, I mentioned the date of Jesus’ death. The synoptic gospels specifically place this after the Passover meal. They have the last Supper as the Passover meal. John uniquely sets it before the Passover because he has the theological purpose of wanting to depict Jesus as the Passover lamb. Now this is a contradiction if the gospels are supposed to be historical accounts of what happened to Jesus.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So here I want turn to a book actually written by a former professor of mine, father Bernard Blankenhorn called Bread from Heaven in which he addresses this and he puts the problem like this. He says, crucial to the question of whether the last supper was a Passover meal is the date on which it took place. These synoptic gospels affirm that it was a Passover meal. We find that in Mark and Luke explicitly, whereas the gospel of John apparently places Jesus’s crucifixion on the day of preparation for the Passover in John 19. In other words, John seems to place Jesus’s last meal with his disciples on a Thursday, but seems to present Friday evening as a vigil of Passover and Saturday as the day of Passover. So that’s the apparent problem. Now, before I tell you how I would harmonize that, I will just point out that as Blankenhorn points out, and as Brent Petri points out, there are four major scholarly hypotheses about how to harmonize this evidence because this is the kind of thing that wouldn’t be an incidental mistake.
This is a pretty important point and John seems pretty intentionally to be making a different point than Matthew, mark and Luke are making. So something’s going on here. The first theory, what’s called the synoptic hypothesis, that the synoptic gospels, Matthew, mark, and Luke are just giving you literal history. And John in describing Good Friday as preparation day is not trying to give you a literal historical event. There he’s doing something more like I brought you out of Egypt on eagle swings. He’s making a spiritual point when John the Baptist in the gospel of John calls Jesus the Lamb of God. We’re not meant to take that to mean that Jesus was an animal, we’re meant to understand the Passover significance of that. So likewise, in describing Good Friday’s preparation date, this theory goes, that’s the same thing happening. Number two, the Joe and I hypothesis people like Raymond Brown would say no, John is actually the one who gets it right.
The synoptics are just wrong. They’ve made a mistake, and the last supper isn’t a Passover. Number three is what’s called the anticipatory Passover hypothesis. Jesus and his disciples are simply celebrating the Passover early. A really clear way to think about this. Imagine you’re on death row and you know that you are slated to be executed a couple days before your birthday. What are you going to do? Well, you’re probably going to have a birthday party. Well, unless you’re too sad about it, you’re probably going to have your birthday party early. You’re going to celebrate it on a different day than it would fall on the calendar. This is a normal human way of doing things. And so the idea goes Jesus is celebrating his Passover the night before his execution, both because he’s not going to be around to do it and because he’s fulfilling the Passover.
And then the fourth theory is what’s called the ene hypothesis. This theory speculates that you’ve got different groups in first century Judea and Israel that use different calendars. We know the Enes use a different liturgical calendar and they have a different lunar calendar than is used in Jerusalem in the temple. So of those four theories, the two I find the most interesting persuasive are the first and the third. The synoptic hypothesis that John is not meaning to be taken literally on these points and the anticipatory Passover hypothesis that Jesus is celebrating Passover early. I’m going to give you an argument for both of those, all of this to say I am not qualified to tell you which scholars are right and which ones are wrong, but at the very least I don’t see this as a slam dunk argument in terms of a contradiction. It is an apparent discrepancy that’s true, but I don’t think it’s a contradiction.
So I’m going to go back to Blankenhorn here as he kind of introduces us to the different camps. The first group of interpreters say John’s chronology is theological. He wants to show Jesus as the true Passover lamb who is sentenced since at the same time the lambs are being slaughtered in the temple in preparation for the evening of Passover. This theory says that chronologically Friday was the day of Passover. So that means Thursday night begins the Passover meal. The synoptic gospels are historically accurate in making the Last Supper Passover meal. John’s not trying to give us a historical chronology. And so you’ve got people like EP Sanders and Craig Keener and Blankenhorn himself who lean that way. There’s some good data on this. The first is that John regularly includes these details that he intends for us to understand is dramatic as something more than just literal.
And the classic example I always go to is in John 13 at the Last Supper, when Judas goes out, we’re told after receiving the morsel, he immediately went out and it was night. Why does he say it was night? He knows that the last supper is eaten at night and he knows, you know that he’s making a spiritual point, a theological point if you will, in calling it night. There’s a darkness that has now set in the soul of Judas and that’s how we’re meant to read those kind of passages. Well, likewise in John 19, he’s really heavily leaning on the fact that Jesus is the Passover lamb. So for instance, when the sight of Christ is pierced, we’re told these things took life that the scripture might be fulfilled, not a bone of him shall be broken. The two thieves next to Jesus had their bones broken, not Jesus, but you say, well, what is this prophecy, not a bone of him shall be broken.
Well, originally it’s not a bone of it shall be broken about the Passover lamb in Exodus 1246. So there John’s just directly telling you, Jesus is the Passover lamb, and in fact, this happens over and over again in the scripture, but particularly in the gospel of John. So I want to turn here to Brent Petrie’s excellent book, Jesus in the Last Supper in which he addresses some of the objections to that position. So everything I’ve just said there I found personally convincing, but I had some questions about it and the first question I had is, well, what about the fact that he just says it was the day of preparation for the Passover? Now you could say He just means that metaphorically and theologically, that kind of makes sense. I get that, but Brent Petri makes the point that actually preparation is the Jewish term for Friday at this time.
And so you actually see that really clearly in Mark 1542 where it says Evening it comes since it was the day of preparation, that is the day before the Sabbath. So when we find the term preparation used to refer to a day, it means Friday. In other words, many people, myself included, read preparation day as meaning the day before Passover. And Brent, Petri is saying, I think it actually just means the day before the Sabbath because that’s what Mark defines it as. So then the day of preparation or preparation day of the Passover just means the Friday of Passover time, not the day before Passover. That’s an important difference because if it’s just a Friday of Passover time, that matches up with what Matthew, mark and Luke are saying pretty nicely. The second objection is one that seemed like more of a slam dunk to me, okay, well, that the Jewish leaders who are leading Jesus away to be executed won’t go into the Praetorium, so they might not be defiled, so they might eat the Passover.
Okay, then it sounds like this is very clearly before Passover. Well, there’s a problem with this as well as brand Petri points out Deuteronomy 16 refers to the Passover sacrifice, not just as the first day but is a seven day long festival and refers to it as the entire thing. So Deuteronomy 16, verse two to three, it says, you shall offer the Passover sacrifice to the Lord. Dear God, you shall eat no leave bread with it seven days. You shall eat it with unleavened bread. Well eat what? Eat the Passover sacrifice. So even though you only ate the Passover lamb on the first of those days, eating the Passover sacrifice was all of those days. And so had this happened even on day two of Passover, as seems to be clear from Matthew, mark and Luke, John is still right that they can’t become ritually defiled by going into a pagan house like the Praetorium or they won’t be able to continue the celebration on day two of eating the Passover sacrifice.
Now re adds to this that if you look to the Babylonian Talmud, it also uses his kind of language for the peace offerings being offered throughout every day of Passover or every day of what we would now call the feast of unleavened bread, the multi-day celebration, not just the first night with the Passover meal that all of the meals can be described as the Passover sacrifice, all that’s to say that does seemingly harmonize all of the apparent discrepancies. Then pretty clearly Passover begins Thursday evening, which is Friday on the Jewish calendar, and you still can’t become ritually defiled there and Jesus is still fulfilling the execution of the Passover lamb during Passover time. Okay, so that’s the first of the major theories that blank and horn identifies. The second one, which I don’t find persuasive is the idea of the synoptics. Just get it wrong.
I think that’s kind of a silly theory, I just acknowledge it for the sake of thoroughness. The third int Wright and Joseph Ratzinger slash bene the 16th lean towards is that this is an anticipatory Passover that what Matthew, mark and Luke are recording is not the Passover everybody else is celebrating but is the Passover Jesus and his disciples are celebrating because they can’t celebrate with everybody else because Jesus is going to be in the tomb by the time the Passover meal comes around. So this is the other way of reading the same evidence, and there may be a hint towards this way as well. In Matthew chapter 26, Jesus we’re told on the first day of unleavened bread, so very clearly we know when in the Passover cycle, this is day one, on the first day of unleavened bread, they come to Jesus saying, where will you have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?
And he sends them with instructions to tell someone. The teacher says, my time is at hand. I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples. Now you could take the first day of unleavened bread to mean this is when everybody else is celebrating the Passover, which is why I still prefer the first theory over this third one. But the other way to read that is when Jesus is saying, my time is at hand, he’s acknowledging that he’s going to be celebrating Passover tonight because he’s about to be executed, that may or may not be a hint that it is an anticipated Passover. All that’s to say I don’t find this to be a slam dunk discrepancy. On the one hand, I also don’t think it’s a slam dunk in terms of this is the only way to read the evidence on the other.
There are plenty of times where four different people tell you details and nobody puts them all together for you. And you say, okay, well it seems like the pieces should go in this order or in that order. That’s the inherent difficulty in having four accounts instead of one. But that doesn’t make them a contradiction. It’s not an argument against the veracity of the Bible. And then finally there’s that fourth approach, which I’ll just acknowledge that there is what’s called the Kuron community. If you’re familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls, they use a different calendar. And so one view says that Jesus would’ve instead celebrated the Passover on that calendar. The problem is that would put the last supper on Tuesday and then the arrest on Wednesday. It doesn’t seem like that works chronologically. The best evidence for it is really that there’s a third century document that seems to suggest Jesus’s Passover was on Tuesday. I think that and the second theory are weak, but I think the first and third theory make pretty good sense of the evidence. Okay, with that said, let’s go to the next objection way simpler. When Jesus sends out his followers, are they to take a staff or not?
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
Second, Jesus is sending out his disciples to teach in Mark. He tells ’em to take nothing with them except a staff in Matthew and Luke. He says, take nothing with them including no staff. So do they take a staff or do they, not a pedantic contradiction but a contradiction nonetheless?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I would agree with him actually. I do think it’s a pedantic contradiction. I do think that there is a discrepancy between the two accounts. I also don’t think the discrepancy particularly matters. I might even add to it two things. Number one, it’s actually two discrepancies there because in Matthew’s account it says take no sandals. And in Mark’s account it says to wear sandals. But the point of both texts is actually the same to go out and radical poverty relying simply upon God, whether you’re to literally wear shoes or not, actually does miss the point, and I think he’s right to recognize the kind of poetic nature of this. So the second thing I’d say is Saint Jerome acknowledges this. Alex, you point out Augustine tries to find a way of harmonizing this. Jerome just sort of shrugs it off and says, the essence of the scriptures is not the letter but the meaning.
If you become hyper fixated on the letter of the text, you’ll end up with all sorts of weird dogmas. I mean, think about Bible alone, Christianity, how many different dogmas people invent from their personal reading of scripture and he gives us an example, the idea that you cannot come to church if you wear sandals because one of the versions of this says no sandals. And you can imagine another denomination down the road saying, no, you have to wear sandals. That’s what it says. The solution to that is to just say what is the point? What is actually being asserted in the text and what’s being asserted through these illustrations is not a rigorous description of how many things are allowed to be in your wardrobe. It’s showing what it is to live in radical reliance upon God. Whether you wear shoes or not is not even secondary. It’s not even tertiary, it’s just not relevant. It’s an example, right? Okay. Now what about the cleansing in the temple? This is a bigger event and I think this is a much stronger kind of potential objection.
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
Third, Jesus flipping the tables at the temple, a famous story, but did you know that in the gospel of John, this takes place at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in the Synoptics, it takes place near the end. So when did that occur?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I did know that Jimmy Aiken actually puts forward three theories about how to harmonize that, and I think these are the three you could reasonably conclude to. Number one, that this literally happened chronologically at the end of Jesus’ ministry and John is just choosing to move it to the beginning, telling it out of order for theological reasons. Number two is the way around John is right to put it at the beginning, and Matthew, mark and Luke have put it later for theological reasons, or number three, that Jesus actually performed the cleansing of the temple twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of his ministry. Now I want to say a couple things. Number one, there’s no reason in principle either of those first two couldn’t be correct. We already saw from the way Papist speaks of the gospel of Mark, that the early Christians were fine with the fact that things might be presented out of order.
You may group together different things that are thematically related rather than putting the things that are chronologically next to each other. That’s not the way you and I would write a history in the 21st century. But there are plenty of examples in the ancient world of thematically organized historical documents. So the second thing is, despite this, I actually lean towards the third theory, and I think Jimmy Aiken might as well because he cites to Joel McDermott. Now, I want to say I realize two things. You have a bias against doublets among scholars. So sometimes this goes to these really kind of radical extremes. So in Matthew and in Luke, you have the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and you have the sermon on the plane in Luke and scholars will someone pointed that as a contradiction like, oh, here are two similar but somewhat different sermons given in apparently two different places.
And it’s like that’s not a contradiction at all, right? I’m a public speaker. I give variations of similar talks at different locations around the country. That is a regular part of my ministry. So it is not shocking to me to hear that Jesus who was an itinerant preacher might have a core message he regularly preached on with some variations based on his audience or any number of events and that he did it in different places, sometimes elevated, sometimes not elevated, not a contradiction at all. But the fact that scholars want to read Matthew and Lucas telling the exact same event and just disagreeing on details shows a bias against doublets that there might be just two events. On the other hand, sometimes Christians who try to explain away biblical will take what are clearly the same event and imagine it as two different events. So for instance, there is a man who Jesus encounters and heals and one version says it happens on his way into Jericho and the other says it happens on his way out of Jericho.
It’s clearly the same men. It’s clearly the same conversation. Whether Jesus had gone to Jericho before or after encountering and healing the man is an incidental chronological discrepancy. Someone trying to say, oh, those are two different healings would be just as ridiculous in my view as someone trying to insist that the sermon on the mountain, the sermon on the plane must be the same. So there are times where we should treat two apparently similar events as the same event, and other times we should treat them as two different events. Neither of those is obviously clear in the case of the cleansing of the temple, but I’m inclined to think it’s two different events that Matthew, mark, and Luke are actually describing a different event than Jesus is. And the reason is because of the work of people like Joel McDermott. He talks about how in Leviticus 14 when you have an infestation, now this is in our translations leprosy, but it means like a pollution in your house.
What you were told to do was call the high priest. The high priest would inspect and try to purify the house and if it wasn’t successful, then he would come back and he would decree the total destruction of the house. So we can see this in Leviticus 14 itself in verse 35. It’s actually a much longer passage, but I’m going to give you relevant portions. The homeowner comes and tells the priest, there seems to me to be some sort of disease in my house. The priest then commands that they empty the house. So there’s a cleansing of the house, an emptying of the house before the priest goes to examine the disease, let all that is in the house be declared unclean, and afterward the priest shall go in to see the house. So the priest orders the cleansing of the house and then assesses the situation.
There’s hopefully a purification that happens, but we’re told in verse 43, if disease breaks out again in the house, well now he takes the stones and well now I should say it’s declared a malignant leprosy. The house is just unclean. You cannot safely reside in a house where whatever is infecting, the house has returned. And so you break down the house, the stones and timber and all the plaster of the house and you carry them out of the city to an unclean place. The point that McDermott is making and I think is a good one, is that appears to be the way Jesus is treating the temple. He’s treating it as a house where pollution has set in, and he speaks of it in this way in John chapter two, when Jesus arrives at the beginning of his ministry, he says to those who are money changers in the temple, take these things away.
You shall not make my father’s house a house of trade. His disciples then remember how it was written, zeal for thy house will consume me. In other words, we’re told to read John two through the motif of cleansing of a house, in this case the house of God, the house of the Father of Jesus. But when Jesus comes back at the end of his ministry, it’s still polluted. It’s gotten worse. So now he enters the temple and began to drive out those who sold saying to them, it is written my house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a denin of robbers. So the house has been polluted. What do you do if you are the priest and the house is polluted all in the second visitation will you order it to be destroyed? And so in Luke 21, that was Luke 19, we just heard from in Luke 21, Jesus tells his disciples how that one stone will be left upon another.
It’ll be thrown down. In other words, the destruction of stone and timber prophesied of the house or prescribed, I should say, of the house that’s got an uncles, Jesus is applying that to the cleanliness of the temple. It’ll be destroyed and it was in the year 70. If that feels like a stretch, I don’t actually think it is a stretch, but if it feels like a stretch, you should also know that in Luke 13, there’s a very similar kind of motif used about a fig tree that’s not bearing any fruit. And so a man decides he’s going to cut it down and then he’s told, let it alone, sir, this year also till I dig about it and put on manure, and if it bears fruit next year, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down. There’s this theme of checking on the fruitfulness and then if you return and it’s still unfruitful, cut it down, that appears to be what’s going on as well with the temple. It’s not just spiritually unfruitful, it’s actually become polluted by sin and avarice and corruption. So I think that’s the way to harmonize those. I think you could also just say one of them moved the event chronologically for thematic reasons and that would be fine. It’s not a contradiction to put things in non chronological order just like a filmmaker isn’t lying if they have a flashback or something. Alright, let’s move on to Easter. This is a big one. What did Mary Magdalene say and do on Easter morning? Here’s the objection, Alex’s own words.
CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza
Mary Magdalene, after the resurrection of Jesus runs to the disciples in John’s gospel and says they’ve taken the Lord and we do not know where they have put him. Strange thing for her to say, if as the gospel of Matthew accounts, she’s visited by an angel at the tomb who tells her exactly where Jesus is going, and then she’s met by Jesus herself on the way to the disciples to bring them the news strange for her to then say that they’ve taken the Lord and we do not know where they’ve put him.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Great. So let’s talk about that in particularly looking at the gospel of John and the gospel of Matthew because those are the two that Alex highlights in the gospel of John. Mary Magdalene. We’re only told Mary Magdalene here, but she’s going to use they and so we know she’s not alone. So Mary Magdalene and some others go to the tomb early while it’s still dark and they first see the tomb that the stone has been taken away from the tomb. She then goes and runs the Simon feeder and then their disciple, this is John, and tells him they’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him. Then the events follow Peter and John for a few verses. Well, from verse three until verse 10, we are not told what happens to Mary for a few verses when we next encounter her.
It’s in verse 11, and Mary stands weeping outside the tomb. So we know just by process of deduction that she’s returned to the tomb. John hasn’t explicitly said that just like he hasn’t explicitly said other women are with her, but those are both still clear from the text. So Mary’s gone to the tomb, she’s gone to the apostles, she’s gone back to the tomb, and then she sees angels and she’s weeping and they ask her why she’s weeping. They say, because they’ve taken my Lord, I don’t know where they’ve laid. She then we’re not told what if anything’s the angels say back to her. We are told saying that she turns around and sees Jesus does not initially know that it’s him. This is back and forth. He says her name, she says Rabbi, rabbi, and she realizes that it’s Jesus. Then in verse 18, Mary Magdalene goes and tells the disciples, I have seen the Lord.
So we get this proclamation from Mary Magdalene. I’ve seen the Lord, and she told them that he’s said these things to her. Now, John is a little sparse on the details of what it is that she’s relaying to the apostles, but we can still construct a pretty basic timeline. Number one, Mary goes to the tomb. Number two, there’s an initial confusion. She tells the apostles and returns. Number three, at the tomb she sees angels. Number four, she then sees Jesus. And number five, she’s then sent to and successfully does announce the good news to the apostles. Now, compare and contrast that with Matthew’s gospel. There’s going to be a difference in some details, but I don’t actually think you get a different timeline. In Matthew’s gospel after the Sabbath toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the slicker, meaning the tomb and behold there was a great earthquake for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat upon it.
His appearance was like lightning and his ray min white as snow. Now you might think from the way Matthew has introduced this detail that this is what the women are seeing, but it is not because we’re told in the next verse, and for fear of him, the guards trembled and became like dead men. So we are not told the women see this. We’re told this happens. So that’s an important, so you’ve got two events that I think should be understood as happening at seemingly the same time. You’ve got the women going to the tomb and you have the angel rolling away the stone and stunning the guards. Mary Magdalene and the other woman are not struck like dead men or dead women because they seemingly don’t see this. What they do see instead is an angel who tells him, do not be afraid. I know that you seek Jesus.
He was crucified. He is not here for he has risen as he set, come see the place relay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead and behold he’s going before you to Galilee. There. You’ll see him low, I have told you. So at this point, they depart quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and they run to tell the disciples, but they don’t seemingly get there yet because in the next verse, we’re told and behold Jesus met them, seemingly met them on the way and said Hail, and they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, do not be afraid. Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee and there they will see me. And so of course this is what they do. So Matthew’s timeline looks roughly like this.
Mary goes to the tomb. At the tomb, Mary sees angels, then Mary sees Jesus. Then Mary announces the good news to the apostles timeline wise. Now there’s plenty of differences in details, things that are included in one gospel and not the other. But in terms of just the major sequence of events, the only difference I really see is that John includes an initial confusion, which she goes and tells the apostles and then returns to the tomb. So what looks like a conversation Mary’s having at the first encounter at the tomb in Matthew’s gospel. If John’s account is correct, all of that happened, but Mary’s actually gone to the apostles confused and then come back, which is not a contradiction, it’s just a difference in details. The same events are happening in the same order. John just includes the initial events of her going and telling Peter and John where Matthew doesn’t include that.
But a difference of omission and inclusion is not a contradiction because if it were, then the fact that you have three different, four different accounts total, the fact that any one gospel has three other gospels, if you’re not saying verbatim the exact same thing in the exact same order, you could always be accused of contradiction. So omission and inclusion are not the things we’re hopefully worried about. So Alex, if you’re watching this, I appreciate your patience again, and I would just say you may have other objections. There’s major issues you’ve raised, things like the alleged genocide of the acolytes and all of this stuff that I’ve not even touched on my focus because we’re looking at the historical truth of the Bible. That is one of the kind of ways you laid out and the way you seem to be the most interested in debating. I wanted to hopefully give you the answers I wish you would’ve gotten when you debated Dinesh D’Souza. Anyone watching Alex or anybody would love to hear your thoughts. Comments below for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.