In "The Zigzagging Stripes of Bobby Turkel," I exposed Turkel's misrepresentation of the biblical philosophies of "scholars" whom Turkel had cited in support of his claim that commentators of all stripes shared his belief that Hosea 1:4 did not condemn Jehu's slaughter of the Israelite royal family (2 Kings 9-10). In these articles just linked to, I presented clear evidence that, rather than being a cross section of biblical scholars ranging from conservative to liberal, Turkel's "commentators of all stripes" were actually biblical inerrantists or authors who were committed to the traditional belief that the Bible is "the word of God." Several times in these articles, I also stated my reasons for suspecting that Turkel had presented as his primary sources works that he had not actually read but had seen cited in some of the books he was quoting or citing and had then passed along in his article as if they were works that he had actually consulted. I explained that this was a ploy that I had encountered many times in the 30 years that I had graded student papers when I was teaching college English. Turkel quoted below part of a paragraph where I had expressed my suspicion of his freshmanlike documentation and then later truncated another quotation from my article, but so that readers can see the full contexts of those abbreviated quotations, I will later link readers to the sections of my article where they can be read in their entireties.
That Turkel would demand an apology of me (for expressing what I still believe was a legitimate opinion of his "research" methods) would be funny if he were not so serious. As I will show in going through his article, if anyone needs to apologize that is Robert Turkel. As usual, I will reply to him point by point and use the headers Turkel and Till to help readers follow who is saying what. I do not expect him to reciprocate and reply to me in kind.
Turkel:
My years-long humiliations of Farrell Till began with a debate
concerning 2 Kings and Hosea,
and it is appropriate that it ought to end there.
Till:
His years-long humiliation of me? Those who have not done so yet should
read the three-part
Jehu debate, which begins
here
and then
"Commentators
of all
Stripes and "The
Zigzagging Stripes of Bobby Turkel." In these articles, Turkel got
his head handed to
him on a platter, as he did in many others, which I can't link readers
to without filling an
entire page with nothing but links. Although he has selectively quoted
parts of these
articles, he has not yet replied to them point by point as I have
replied to his evasive
attempts to defend an obvious discrepancy in the Bible. To see Turkel's
latest humiliations,
readers can go to
"Et Tu,
Bobby?" to
see my detailed, point-by-point rebuttal of his attempt to show that
there is no chronological
discrepancy between the
Exodus-6
genealogy and
Exodus
12:40, which claims
that the Israelites sojourned in Egypt for 40 years. Although he told
his sophomoric
sychopants on
TWeb,
without linking readers to my article, that he considers it "too stupid
to reply to," he later
tacked onto his article two brief
paragraphs to "reply" to the 234k in my rebuttal of his "solution"
of the
discrepancy. The more things change, the more they stay the same, n'est-ce
pas?
I will be replying to those tacked-on paragraphs later after I have, to borrow an expression from Turkel, hung him out to dry in the matter that I am now replying to.
Turkel:
Of course, it is unlikely that Till has the good sense, honor, decency,
or humility to quit
when he should;
Till:
Good sense, honor, decency, humility? These are character traits sorely
lacking in Turkel,
so if I have none of them, he has no room to talk. Anyway, why should
one quit while he is
ahead? The fact that Turkel doesn't reply to my rebuttal articles but
only waves at them in
passing should tell readers who has really humiliated whom. If there
were a chance in the
world that Turkel could really "humilate" me, he would grab it in a
minute and take my
articles apart paragraph by paragraph to show where I had erred in my
rebuttal arguments.
The fact that he doesn't do this and doesn't identify me by name or
link his readers to my
rebuttal articles when he selectively "answers" them should tell any
reasonable person that
he is avoiding that for which he has no satisfactory replies.
Turkel:
he is as of this date many years behind on replying to our material,
Till:
Within a week, I could easily reply to all of the articles he has
written about me if I did
no more than he does in his selectively quoted "replies" to mine. As I
have explained,
however, when I reply to an opponent, I reply to everything he
tried to argue. I use
a leave-no-stone-unturned approach to debating. Obviously, Turkel
doesn't, so "our material"
that he brags about is really nothing but a long list of evasive
nonreplies.
I will repeat here an offer that I have previously made to Turkel here and here and here. If he will identify specific points of his that he thinks I have evaded, I will immediately reply to them point by point, if he will agree to reply in kind to all points of mine that I think he has skipped and then post all of our exchanges on his website, and keep them there. Needless to say, I will gladly post everything on this website.
For some strange reason, Turkel has ignored this repeated challenge. I wonder why?
Turkel:
in the process having committed several enormous gaffes that would send
more honest men to
the confessional booth.
Till:
And just what are those "gaffes"? Were they more "enormous" than
Turkel's double-sided
claim that the gospels were
both
evangelical
and nonevangelical in their intents? Were they more "enormous" than
Turkel's claim that
"rise again" was expressed in
Greek
by using anestimi twice? Were they more "enormous" than his
use of
transliterate
when he meant translate and then turned around and repeated the
same mistake? Were
they more "enormous" than Turkel's foot-in-mouth gaffe when he defended
the authenticity of
the ossuary of "James
the brother of Jesus," which has turned out to be a proven fake and
brought about the
arrest of Oded Golan, who "discovered" it? Were they more "enormous"
than Turkel's biblically
ignorant claim that there are no cases recorded in the Bible of anyone
ever
using
a
restroom? Were they more "enormous" than Turkel's repeated attempts
to defend the
inerrancy of the Bible while at the same time chanting
"ma
besay-il" (it
doesn't matter) that inconsistencies are in the Bible? Were they more
"enormous" than the
ones that I identified in
"The
'Goofy Gaffe' Exchanges on
the Theology Web"? Again, I would have to fill an entire page with
nothing but links in
order to list all of the places where Turkel has put his foot into his
mouth. This has
required me many times to say in my replies to him that inconsistency
is about his only
consistency, as I did
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and...
well, you get the idea. Turkel has been so inconsistent in his articles
that I have made
this statement no telling how many times in winding down my exposures
of his
inconsistencies.
Turkel:
The purpose of this article is to highlight one of the latest of these
gaffes,
Till:
As we get into this alleged gaffe, please notice that Turkel offers no
real proof that it
was a gaffe. All we have is his mere word that he did not try to pass
off secondary
citations as primary ones, but I will show good reasons to believe
that... well, that he is
lying to try to save face.
Turkel:
and to demand from Till a public apology (our demand is for mostly
rhetorical effect, since
given his inclinations towards skilled rationalization,
Till:
My, my, look who is talking. Whenever Turkel is caught in a gaffe,
no one can equal him in
trying to rationalize it away. I noted above that Turkel, pretending to
be an expert in
biblical languages, once said that the word anestimi was used
twice in Greek, "for
emphasis," in order to convey the idea of "rising again." When I
pointed out that this was
not so, Turkel tried to put the blame for the mistake onto his version
of the software pack
Quickverse
and then
immediately revised his article to remove the error. I linked readers
above to an article
in which I replied to
Turkel's defense
of the now
discredited ossuary of "James the brother of Jesus" in which he took
the position that it was
authentic and, in an attempt at humor which has now come back to haunt
him, said, "It is
always possible that some bolt from the sky will prove any artifact to
be a fraud, but so
far, from the looks of things, Christ-mythers will be looking for
careers in plumbing before
too long on this one." When time proved that the ossuary was a fake,
Turkel began
backpedaling
and claimed that he had
given only a "mild endorsement" to a book that had reported the
"discovery" and had
expressed only a "cautious optimism that authenticity would be borne
out." Anyone who reads
his review of the book, linked to above, will see that there was
nothing at all "mild" about
his endorsement or "cautious" about his optimism that the "discovery"
would be proven
authentic. He obviously thought at the time that the ossuary would
prove to be a boon for
Christianity and an embarrassment to biblical skeptics. In his
backpedaling article, also
linked to above, Turkel went on to discuss reasons why there is still
reason to believe that
the ossuary will be proven authentic--and this from someone who had
only mildly endorsed
authenticity when the ossuary was a hot news item. Even in the face of
overwhelming
evidence against his position in this matter, the guy just wouldn't
give up.
What the writer of John meant by the "sixth hour" gives another example of Turkel's backpedaling when he is caught in an inconsistency. On July 13, 2002, Turkel posted "Wearing a Funny Skeptic Mask" in which he took as gospel truth a claim from Bruce Malina's and Robert Rohrbaugh's Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels that Jesus's sixth-hour conversation with the Samaritan woman at a well near Sychar happened at noon.
The Bible was written in what anthropologists call a "high-context" society, in which people assumed a broadly shared, "high" knowledge of the context of anything referred to in speech or writing. Readers were required and expected to "fill in the gap" because their background knowledge was a given. Extended explanations were unnecessary. As an example, note the story of the woman at the well in John 4. This story is full of background templates that John does not explain, but that make the story meaningful: For example, the time of the meeting (noon) shows that the woman is an outcast, for it is not the time when water is normally gathered and when socialization occurs among the village women, but John sees no need to explain why the time is unusual for he assumes his readers will know that it is just by that he says it is noon.
In "Who's Afraid of the Big Mouthed Wolf?" Turkel had previously made the same claim about the meaning of the 6th hour in John 4 and had also taken the same position in "Dear Abiathar," in "Hacking with Fluff in Your Mouth," and at least two other articles that seem to have vanished from his website. That, by the way, is one of Turkel's favorite backpedals when he is caught in an inconsistency; he simply deletes the material that creates the inconsistency. At any rate, Turkel, taking a cue from Bruce Malina's and Robert Rohrbaugh's Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, took the position that John's sixth hour was noon, but later he became involved in controversy about the time of the crucifixion. Mark (15:25) says that Jesus was crucified at the "third hour," but "John" (19:14) says that Pilate acquiesced at the "sixth hour" to the mob demanding his crucifixion. How did Turkel "resolve" this problem? He said, "The basic reply is that Mark and the other synoptics are using Jewish time (sunset to sunset; third hour = 9 AM); John is using Roman time, which is like ours (sixth hour = 6 AM...." He repeated this same "solution" in a reply of sorts to an article on the PTET website, which, of course, Turkel didn't link his readers to, but which would have been as easy to do as I just did. This position put him in direct conflict with the other times that he had claimed that the sixth hour in John 4:6 was noon, but before I show how Turkel went back and rewrote parts of his earlier articles to patch up his inconsistency, I want first to show that he was wrong in asserting, without supporting evidence, that the Romans counted hours from midnight, as we do in our system.
In History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, which is available here at Amazon.com, the author,Gerhard Dorn-van Rossum, noted that the Romans counted the hours as the Babylonians did, from sunrise to sunset.
This deliberate division of the day, a social convention in Greek and Roman civilization, was a Babylonian legacy. Babylonians had separated the day into daytime and nighttime, dividing each period--daylight from sunrise to sunset and nighttime--into 12 segments (hours) of equal length. The duration and temporal location of these hours varied with the length of daylight, with the "6th hour" always designating the midday point. Only twice a year, at the equinoxes, were the hours of the day and night equal (p.19, emphasis added).
Notice that Dorn-van Rossum clearly said that the sixth hour in the Greek/Roman system always designated the midday point, which would have been noon. In Sundials: History, Theory, and Practice, which is also available at Amazon, Rene R. J. Rohr explained that Roman farmers kept track of hours with a "gnonom," which was a vertical pole set into the ground. The shadows cast by it would be the longest at sunrise and sunset. As the sun climbed, the shadow would shorten until noon, at which time it would then gradually lengthen in the opposite direction until it became its longest at sunset. Rhor included a table on page 15, which was copied from Opus Agriculturae, as a guide that farmers could use to tell the hours of the day, by measuring the lengths of the shadow in distances called "pedas." Hora I and XI (Hours I and XI) were the longest at XXIX pedas, but the length was only XIX at Hora II and X, and still shorter at Hora III and IX, and so on. "How the Romans Measured Time" explains that prima hora was the first hour of daylight, which began with sunrise, midday or meridies was noon, and duodecima hora or the twelfth hour was the last of the 12 periods of daylight.
Because the length of daylight varies from season to season, the Roman practice of diving daylight into twelve "hours" made the hours longer in summer and shorter in winter. These variations were explained in "The Roman Calendar."
Like us, the Romans divided each day into 24 hours, and they assigned 12 to the daytime and 12 to the night. These did not run from midnight to midnight as our modern method of timekeeping does, but from sunrise to sunrise. This effectively means that the length of the Roman hour varied according to the season, so that during the summer solstice around June 21st when the period of daylight is considerably longer than the night, the twelve hours assigned to the daytime would each have to be 1 hour and 16 minutes long, while conversely, during the short days of the winter solstice around December 21st, each daylight hour would be only 44 minutes long (emphasis added).
This same article contains tables that gave the approximate duration of the prima through duodecima hours at both solstices (summer and winter). These tables can also be found in Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino, pages 167-68. I could cite other authorities that clearly show that Roman hours did not begin with midnight as Turkel claimed. If he would get off his lazy butt and do a little research instead of just accepting uncritically a claim that has been made and remade by biblical inerrantists desperately trying to defend the doctrine of inerrancy, he would not have made this mistake. He did make it, however, and when he realized that it contradicted what he had previously said about the time of the "sixth hour" in Jesus's encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:6), he had to resort to backpedaling again.
Three months later, on October 19, 2002, Turkel posted a typically sarcastic article written in reply to Doug Kreuger's divorce argument, in which he made an almost verbatim statement about the time of the encounter with the Samaritan woman, except that this time, he disavowed claiming that the sixth hour was noon and put the blame on Malina and Rohrbaugh for fixing this as the time.
Here we bring in, more or less verbatim, a note we have now used several times. Malina and Rohrbaugh note in their Social-Science Commentary on John [16ff] that the NT was written in what anthropologists call a "high-context" society. In such societies people "presume a broadly shared, well-understood, or 'high' knowledge of the context of anything referred to in conversation or in writing." Readers were required and expected to "fill in the gap" because their background knowledge was a given. Extended explanations were unnecessary. As an example, they note the story of the woman at the well in John 4. This story is full of background templates that John does not explain, but that make the story meaningful: For example, the time of the meeting (noon, as they read it) shows that the woman is an outcast, for it is not the time when water is normally gathered and when socialization occurs among the village women, but John sees no need to explain that the time is unusual for he assumes his readers will know that it is.
The change is apparent. He had originally said, "(T)he time of the meeting (noon) shows that the woman is an outcast," but in the article just quoted, he said, "(T)he time of the meeting (noon, as they [M & R] read it) shows that the woman is an outcast." In the final sentence, Turkel had originally said, "John sees no need to explain that the time is unusual for he assumes his readers will know that it is just by that he says it is noon." As you can see, he left off the last part of this sentence in his revision to make it appear that Malina and Rohrbaugh and not he had said that the sixth hour was noon. The remarkable thing about this revision of the paragraph is that it negated the entire "high-context" point that he was claiming about this passage. He was saying that readers in the time of "John" lived in a "high-context" society in which writers assumed that their readers would have "background knowledge" that would enable them to "fill in gaps." Hence, it wasn't necessary for John to mention specifically that the woman was a "social outcast," because readers would know this by the fact that the woman was at the well at noon, a time different from when the village women would go there to get water, but if the sixth hour was early in the morning rather than noon, as Turkel had originally claimed, then the woman was at the well at the very time when village women would have gone there to get water. This change makes his whole "high-context" claim about the woman's social status collapse, but apparently he didn't have the insight to see this. The guy often writes without thinking. My main point in quoting these variations of the same paragraph in his articles, however, was to show that Turkel has no room to accuse me or anyone else of "rationalizing," because few can equal him in rationalization when he is trying to weasel out of inconsistencies in his articles.
Turkel has used his "high-context" quibble to try to justify various ambiguities in the Bible, so as an added feature here, I will inform readers who may not have read them that I have exposed here and here and here and in other articles too that Turkel is quite ignorant of the concept of "high context" as it applies to linguistic communications. Among other things, I have had to point out to him that this concept applies more to oral than to written communications. In the former, those listening have the advantage of hearing voice tones and inflections and seeing facial expressions and other gestures that can communicate as well as what is actually being said, but in the latter, one must decide meaning solely on the basis of the words that have been written. In the last article linked to above, I gave several examples of biblical passages that clearly dispute Turkel's claim that people in biblical times lived in "high-context" societies in which "extended explanations" were unnecessary. I cited biblical examples where despite specific, detailed information, those involved in the situations didn't understand some rather clear statements, such as when Jesus told his disciples that he would "be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again," but his disciples "did not understand what he was saying" (Mark 9:31-32). His disciples must have flunked High-Context Communications 101.
So much for the pot calling the kettle black!
Turkel:
we obviously don't expect one to be forthcoming),
Till:
Then "we" won't be disappointed, will "we"?
Turkel:
and to offer this up as the latest and most clear evidence that Till is
an incompetent whose
only working skill on a resume' is a mouth that runs faster than his
brain.
Till:
Well, I am competent enough to know that if I want to use the French
word resumé, I
can use the "special-character" option in Microsoft Word to copy an
acutely accented "e" into
the text instead of putting an apostrophe after it, which doesn't even
approximate what the
"é" in French looks like. As I will soon explain, I am also
competent enough to recognize
phony research in papers, and that is what I have done in the case of
the secondary sources
that Turkel tried to pass off as primary ones in an article in which he
claimed that
"commentators of all stripes" agree with his spin on
Hosea 1:4,
which is that
this text didn't mean that the house of Jehu would be punished "for the
blood of Jezreel but
punished by it." That turned out to be his ambiguous way of saying that
the house of Jehu
would be punished in the same way that Jehu had punished the royal
house of Israel. As I
explained in "Commentators
of All Stripes," I took the time through interlibrary loan to
borrow most of the books and
sources that Turkel had cited and, in going through them, determined
that (1) the authors
were really biblical inerrantists or traditionalists in their views of
the Bible rather than
the mixture of conservatives, moderates, and liberals suggested by
Turkel's description of
them as "commentators of all stripes," (2) only one of Turkel's
commentators [Thomas
McComiskey] thought that Hosea 1:4 was not condemning Jehu's massacre
at Jezreel, whereas in
citing five other authors listed by Turkel as his primary sources,
McComiskey had acknowledged
that they all thought that Hosea 1:4 connoted the idea of punishment,
and (3) the books that
Turkel had actually quoted instead of just citing contained brief
citations of other works,
which Turkel then passed along as primary references to leave the
impression that he had
consulted them too. I will explain further along how I arrived at my
conclusion that Turkel
had listed as primary sources books and periodicals that he didn't
actually consult but had
only seen cited in some of the books he had looked through.
I will be commenting more in detail on these three points later, but in a nutshell this is what has raised Turkel's hackles to the point of demanding an apology from me, which he isn't going to get until I get more than his mere word that he had studied all of the books and periodicals that he cited in his article and did not list as his primary sources any works that he had merely seen cited in his other "sources." The irony of his demand is that he is known far and wide for his constant hurling of insults and sarcasms at those whose articles he is "replying" to. In referring to me, he has used such derogatory terms as Foo-Foo, McTill, Baloney King, Weasel, and others and has devoted pages to running caricatures obviously intended to insult me (but which failed to do so; I just consider the source and let them go). On the page just linked to, for example, there is a very obese, shirtless man sitting at a computer, which Turkel captioned "McTill at Work." And he wants an apology from me! Get real, Bobby.
By the way, I hate to disappoint him, but I am 5'11' (used to be 6'), and I weigh 180 pounds soaking wet. Weight has never been a problem for me. On the other hand, I was sent a picture purporting to be Turkel holding the dog that he sometimes talks about--which unfortunately for him isn't a dachshund--and if this is really Turkel, he looks a bit on the pudgy side. At any rate, whoever the obese man was in the picture, he is a real person somewhere, who probably isn't at all pleased with his weight, and Turkel was using him to poke fun at me. I wonder if any of the stuff like this that Turkel routinely puts onto his website ever grieves "the Holy Spirit of God" (Eph. 4:30).
In the November/December 2002 issue of The Skeptical Review, I published "Seasoned with Salt?" to show just how inconsistent the sarcasms and insults in Turkel's articles are with what the New Testament teaches about attitudes and personal conduct that Christians should show toward others. Although the link is above, I will quote the section particularly pertinent to how he conducts himself towards non-Christians.
I wanted TSR readers to see this part of Turkel’s reply to my rebuttal of his preterist article, because it effectively illustrates a characteristic of Turkel that is widely known by internet users who access materials that he posts on his website. His stock in trade is sarcasm and insults. I have said before that Turkel's work produces the opposite effect of the apostle Paul’s speech before king Agrippa. After Paul had finished an impassioned speech, which he ended with an appeal to the prophets, Agrippa said, “You almost persuade me to become a Christian” (Acts 26:28). I have tried the Christian route, of course, but almost every time I read one of Turkel’s articles, I experience a feeling that is the exact opposite of Agrippa’s. If becoming a Christian again would make me anything at all like Turkel, then I want no part of it. I enjoy occasional sarcasm myself, and I have written my share of it, but when such language completely dominates, as it does in Turkel’s articles, people are going to wonder what advantage there would be to converting to Christianity if it is going to make them like Turkel.
Can anyone who has read no more than the excerpt above from a longer article by Turkel think that he would be willing to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, or give his cloak to someone who takes his coat (Matt. 5:38-41)? Does Turkel really consider himself “the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13) and “the light of the world” (v:13)? When he publishes an article riddled with sarcasm and insults, does he do so thinking, “In this article, I am really letting my light shine before men so that I can glorify God by letting others see my good works” (v:16)? Does anyone really believe that Turkel loves others as he loves himself (Matt. 19:19)? That Turkel loves himself is obvious, but it isn’t at all obvious that he loves others as he loves himself.
Speaking of salt, I am reminded of something the apostle Paul said in Colossians 4:5-6:
Walk in wisdom toward those who are outside, redeeming the time. Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one.
I quoted verse five to show that Paul was giving instructions about the attitude that the Colossian Christians should show to those who “are outside.” Although on occasion the apostle Paul did speak bluntly, I find it hard to imagine that the writer of the text above would have approved of the habitual sarcasm and insults that permeate Turkel’s website when he refers to those who “are outside.”
I point this out not because Turkel’s personal insults bother me. I have often said that I have a thick skin, and, believe it or not, what Turkel has said about me above and in many of his other articles doesn’t even compare to what others have said. I just find it appalling that someone who pleads for money on his website so that he can be a full-time “apologist” could conduct himself so hypocritically in public displays of temper that are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christianity, which he presumably wishes to defend. Personally, I don’t think that is his desire at all. I honestly believe that his interest is in getting money so that he won’t have to work for a living, and what better way to do it than by fleecing the sheep? In my debating and internet activities, I have found that those who see themselves as “defenders of the faith” have few equals when it comes to spite and hate. Like the Muslim radicals who ignore fundamental Islamic doctrines to become terrorists dedicated to hating and killing, these would-be Christian apologists will resort to lying and hatred with no apparent regard for the high standards of moral conduct that their religion expects of them. How they can preach their religion while ignoring the major tenets that it imposes on them is one of the mysteries of religion, but history is filled with examples of people who committed every conceivable atrocity in the name of their religion. Someone has said that there is no hatred like Christian love, and these types are living proof of that.
If there really is a heaven, can anyone imagine these types going there? After all, if the gate is narrow and the way is strait and if few are able to find it (Matt. 7:14), what chance do these types have? One thing I do know is that if heaven is going to be filled with Turkel clones, I prefer not to go there. If someone tried to convince Turkel that his tactics influence no one except those who are already predisposed to believe the Bible come what may, the words would be like water on the proverbial duck’s back. Besides that, he wouldn’t really care. All he wants is the m-o-n-e-y so that he can sit at home and play with his computer instead of working at a real job. As long as the money comes in, he really won’t care how much damage he may be doing to the cause that he is asking others to pay him to defend.
No doubt some will say, “Well, Till, you have been known to hurl a few insults yourself, and what you have said above about Turkel makes you look sort of like the pot calling the kettle black.” I have never denied that I sling a little mud myself. As I have said, a bit of sarcasm here and there can liven a debate and keep it from bogging down in tedious seriousness, but I don’t publicly proclaim faith in a religious system that requires high standards of conduct. If I did, I would season my speech with salt and not speak evil of any man (Titus 3:2), because I would try to practice what my religion required of me. I am speaking from the experience of having once tried Turkel’s religion, and, believe me, when I was completely wrapped up in it, I wasn’t anything like him.
I actually find it amusing when I see Turkel calling me “McTill” and slinging other like comments. I have found that when an opponent gets frustrated when he can’t answer an argument or rebuttal, he will start calling me “Tilly” or “Tilly-Willy” or some such. They seem to think that such antics can hide their inability to answer arguments. Whenever I see this, I know that my opponent is licking his wounds and trying to put forth an air of confidence.
This is a good place to renew a proposal that I have previously presented to Turkel here and here and here. If he should ever decide to debate just issues and not personalities, he will find me willing to reciprocate. All he has to do is let me know that he will cease the insults and sarcasms so that we can focus on issues, and I will be ready to give him my full cooperation. He, however, is not about to do this, because he depends on sarcasm and insults in order to camouflage his inability to reply to arguments and rebuttals.
Now finally we come to the reason why Turkel wants me to apologize.
Turkel:
To set the background: Till had accused me some time ago in the Hosea-2
Kings exchange of a
tactic which he describes in general as follows:
Citations from periodicals in student papers would immediately set off an alarm in my head, because a popular student ploy was to cite in their papers titles of periodical articles that they had found cited in books they had consulted. The books would usually be in the library, but, as often as not, the periodicals weren't in the library's inventory. I didn't have to be a genius to figure out what had been done, because—and I will admit it—I had done the same thing when I was a college student.
Till:
As usual Turkel truncated my paragraph without linking his readers to
it, so those who
go to this
section
of "The Zigzagging Stripes of Bobby Turkel" will see the statement
quoted above in its
full context, where I explained my reasons--based on 30 years of
experience identifying the
same phony research tactics--for suspecting him of fudging on his
"primary" sources. I can
explain how this type of fudging works by illustrating with an actual
example of how easily
it can be done. The following lines are from Daniel by Stephen
R. Miller in The
New American Commentary series, where he commented on the sorcery
that Daniel and his
cohorts were exposed to in their training with young men who had been
selected for education
in the "learning of the Chaldeans." After describing what they had
probably been exposed
to, Miller said the following.
Yet sorcery of any kind is demonic and severely condemned in Scripture (e. g., Lev. 19:26).
"Enchanter (also NRSV; "astrologers," KJV; "conjurers," NASB) is a translation of Hebrew ’aššap (1:20; 2:2) and of Aramaic ’ašap (2:10,27; 4:7[4]; 5:7,11,15), both terms meaning "conjurer, necromancer."80 The Hebrew and Aramaic words are derived from Akkadian ašipu, "incantation priest."81 According to Leupold, the Akkadian root means "to conjure."82 Thus "enchanters" with their magic spells and incantations were believed to be able to communicate with the spirit world [73].
Footnotes 81 and 82 in this paragraph were as follows.
81 Hartman and Di Lella, Daniel, 131.
82 Leupold, Daniel, 76.
Now suppose I wanted to write a paper or an article in which I would try to mislead my readers into thinking that I had put more research into it than I actually had. I could write a paragraph something like this.
Miller correctly pointed out that sorcery of any kind is demonic and contrary to the teachings of the scriptures (Lev. 19:26), but this was what the young Judeans had been exposed to [Daniel 73]. At the end of their three-year training period, Nebuchadnezzar found Daniel and his three friends to be ten times wiser than his magicians and enchanters. The word enchanter here (in the KJV) was translated from the Hebrew ’aššap. Hartman and Di Lella define this word to mean "conjurer" or "necromancer" [Daniel 131]. This word was derived from the Akkadian ašipu, which according to Leupold, meant "incantation priest" [Daniel 76].
With a book's cited sources almost always listed in a bibliography at the end, I could list the following "endnotes" to my article.
Hartman, Louis F. & Alexander A. Di Lella. The Book of Daniel. Anchor Bible, 1978.
Leupold, H. C. Exposition of Daniel. Baker, 1989.
Now just like that, I have taken one source and turned it into three. In a longer article, I could easily turn three or four sources into a list of fifteen or twenty. Readers who know no better would think, "Wow! Look at the work he has put into researching this!" As I proceed through Turkel's whinings, I will explain my reasons for thinking that he did exactly what I illustrated in my example above.
Turkel:
I insisted that all 17 of my sources for the matter had been found at
the Reformed
Theological Seminary library here in Orlando.
Till:
The fact that all 17 "sources" that Turkel listed can be "found" in the
Reformed Theological
Seminary library does not prove that he actually dug through them to
find information that he
thought was suitable for his article. Even if he checked out all 17 of
them, that wouldn't
prove it either. As I explained
here
in "The
Zigzagging Stripes of Bobby Turkel," my examination of Turkel's
"sources" showed that he
actually relied primarily on three of them: Thomas McComiskey's The
Minor Prophets,
vol. 1, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1992; McComiskey's
"Prophetic Irony in Hosea
1.4: A Study of the Collocation [
Although I won't know until I have been able to look through all of the books that Turkel cited, I suspect that he pulled a ploy that was very familiar to me from my days of teaching college writing. It was quite common for students to find two or three primary references that contained within them quotations or references to other works and then try to present the secondary references as works that they had consulted in researching their papers. In such cases, a bibliography of 20 entries may represent only two or three books that were consulted during "research." McComiskey, for example, referred to the opinions of Francis Andersen and David Noel Freedman, and so in Turkel's "rebuttal" of my article, he mentioned the same opinions of Andersen and Freedman that McComiskey had cited, and then Andersen and Freedman were listed in Turkel's endnotes.
This finding left me with two possible conclusions: (1) Turkel had consulted the works of Francis Andersen and David Noel Freedman and had by coincidence cited their same opinions that McComiskey had referenced, or (2) Turkel had used the same ploy that college students use to try to con their teachers into thinking that they had engaged in heavy research before writing their papers. I decided that the latter was more likely, because it provided a better explanation for something else I had discovered in checking Turkel's "sources." I had to obtain them through interlibrary loan, so, as I explained in a section of my article that Turkel has truncated below, I used the library of the college where I had been a writing instructor and, as explained in the truncated quotation below, learned that some of Turkel's sources were unavailable at the RTS library.
Turkel:
Lately Till has replied with yet more affirmation of his slander, and
purported to justify
it with fact, as follows:
....what Turkel says here doesn't agree with my own research. He had mentioned some time ago that he uses the Reformed Theological Seminary Library in Orlando, so when I was trying to locate his "sources" to check their content, I used interlibrary loan at the college where I used to teach. Its system lists all locations of where books requested can be borrowed, and I specifically asked the operator of the computer to check for availability in Orlando, Florida. Some of Turkel's "sources" were not listed there. Anyway, Turkel needs to be careful about what he claims, because the electronic age makes it too easy to check claims. There is a website where all books in the catalogs of the RTS Libraries in Orlando, Charlotte (NC), and Jackson (MS) are listed. That search has shown that none of the libraries have Mordecai Coogan's book 2 Kings, but I guess that this was one of the "couple" that Turkel bought at Long's Christian bookstore. None of the articles in journals like Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Journal of Biblical Literature, and Journal for the Study of the Old Testament were available in these libraries. Two articles from The Journal of Biblical Literature were inventoried, but neither of them was Mullen's article cited by Turkel. Of course, he was probably able to run down to Long's and grab these off the shelf too. All three of these journals in the issues needed just happened to be on sale. This website search revealed another interesting thing. In addition to being an expert in Hebrew, Turkel must also be able to read German, because he cited the commentary on Hosea by Hans Walter Wolff, and it was available only in the original German version. How was he able to cite a book written in German? Well, that is easy to do. If McComiskey or Stuart cited it, Turkel could cite it too and pass it off in his endnotes as a primary source.
Till went on to suggest that I "bluffed" my way through college with the same tactics.
Till:
I have seen nothing yet from Turkel that would eliminate what I said
above as a distinct
possibility. I know from years of experience in exposing phony research
that I had found
in student writing that when a paper "cites" the same sources that were
cited in other works
listed in the endnotes, the probability is high that secondary sources
were being passed off
as primary ones. I wouldn't even try to estimate the number of times
that I caught students
using this ploy, which carried the penalty of an automatic failing
grade for the papers in
which it was found, and I can remember only one student who tried to
deny it when the
evidence was presented. The others all seemed surprised that they had
been caught. Now it
seems that Turkel is like the one student just mentioned, who denied
that she had cheated on
the "sources" listed in her endnotes. I kept my eye on her and caught
her doing it again
and tossing in plagiarized sections for good measure. She received a
failing grade for the
course, which she appealed only to have her appeal denied by the
academic committee after
the members had seen the evidence of obvious plagiarism.
I have taken the time to relate all this only to let readers see that I have background experience that qualifies me to make judgments in matters like this one. I may be wrong, but I don't think I am. In fact, I am very sure that I have not wrongly accused Turkel.
Turkel:
In reply to this, we will now present rationally indisputable
evidence that Till is
in error on two of these points (the ones highlighted) to start. He is
in error on others as
well, but because these two points are the easiest to deal with, we
will address them here
and now, and anyone wishing for similar proof on other such points, I
will gladly provide
them with verification on request.
Till:
While he is working to send "verification on request," he might also
want to answer the
questions that I presented
here,
which he didn't even refer to.
Did you lift a cited [secondary] reference from any of these books or periodicals and present it as a primary reference?
Now if Turkel is as innocent in this matter as he pretends, why wouldn't he answer these questions?
Turkel:
Below are the title pages of Cogan's commentary, as well as Wolff's
commentary -- in
English, with a note about the translation -- with the stamp of Reformed
Theological
Seminary's library on them:
Till:
Even by using the html coding from the source page of Turkel's article,
I couldn't get these
title pages to print; however, they can be seen in Turkel's article
linked to
here and in
the title headers above.
Both copies are just dimly legible in some parts parts, but they are
clear enough to see the
stamp of the RTS library on them. I will save my comments on them until
we have seen
Turkel's comments below.
Turkel:
As for searching the RTS catalog, I have no idea what Till's problem
is, but incompetence
is the most likely root of it. Cogan's commentary is in the catalog,
plain as day, under
this listing:
Orlando
* Main
o BS1335.3 .C63 1988 [Available]
So likewise Wolff's -- 2 copies, in fact, though one is checked out at this moment:
Orlando
* Main
o BS1565.3 .W64213 c.2 [Checked Out]
o BS1565.3 .W64213 [Available]
Till:
The library catalog of The Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando can
be accessed
here.
I have taken the time to go there again to search for Turkel's sources.
I selected
authors from a field of six options: any field, titles,
authors, subjects, notes,
publisher, series, and I selected Orlando from the location
choices: Orlando,
All Branches, Charlotte, and Jackson. I then typed Mordecai
Coogan into the
search [contain] window and received the following response in red.
I have admitted many times that my computer skills are limited, but for someone who never saw a computer until he was in his 50s, I think I do fairly well. I do the coding for all of my articles now, including the insertion of links that take readers to specific locations where relevant materials can be quickly found rather than filling my articles with "heres" that take readers only to articles that they will have to read through in order to find what Turkel had in mind by referring readers there. If the responses that I get when I use RTS's own search windows are due to my incompetence, I would appreciate Turkel's telling me what else should be done to locate specific sources.
Turkel:
I think no more needs to be said, including no more at this time about
the article of Till's
I took this from. This is manifest proof of Till's incompetence,
Till:
Yeah, right! This is Turkel's way of trying to hide the fact that I
presented rebuttal
arguments in my article that he can't reply to. Hence, he dismisses the
entire article by
calling its author incompetent.
In addition to the search by author described above, I also did a search by title for Coogan's commentary 2 Kings. This search turned up the same titles by Donald J. Wiseman, Gwilym H. Jones, Paul R. House, Burke O. Long, T. R. Hobbs, Don Kistler, Jeremiah Burroughs, and R. N. Whybray, but nothing by Mordecai Coogan. If my incompetence is the reason why the TRS website catalog will not show Coogan's commentary, even though it is in its inventory, perhaps Turkel can help me out by explaining what else can be done in the search options to find it. While he is doing this, he may also explain to us why the librarian at my local college, who operated the interlibrary loan computer to locate Turkel's "sources" for me, received a "not available" response for some of the titles when she requested them from the Reformed Theological Library.
Turkel:
and of his willingness to engage in slander and/or deception.
Till:
For Turkel to talk about the "willingness [of others] to engage in
slander and/or deception"
has to be the height of hypocrisy. He fills his articles with insults,
sarcasm, and slander,
but then cries if anyone replies to him in kind. I showed
above the extremes that
Turkel will go to in order to hide--or at least try to--a mistake, and
that is flagrant deception. We have again a case of the pot calling the
kettle black.
But what about the photocopied title pages that Turkel put into his article? They may be real. The problem may be in the computer system of RTS. However, it is just as possible that they aren't real. I could obtain a copy of Coogan's commentary, photocopy it, and then take a book with a stamp from my local library on the title page, photocopy its title page, and with a little splicing together make a copy that would appear to "prove" that my local library had Coogan's commentary available. Only Turkel knows whether he did something like this to try to save face, but in view of his past lies and deceptions, I wouldn't put it past him. What I do know is that each time I have used RTS's own website catalog, I could not locate some of the references that he originally cited.
Once again, I have gone through Turkel's "sources," listed at the end of his original article, to check them against RTS's online catalog, and this is what I found.
Achtemeier, Elizabeth. Minor Prophets: there is a work entitled Preaching from the Minor Prophets but not one entitled just Minor Prophets, as Turkel indicated in his source list.
Andersen, Francis I. and David Noel Freedman, Hosea: this book is listed in the RTS catalog.
Coogan, Mordechai and H. Tadmor. 2 Kings: this book is not listed.
Craigie, Peter. Twelve Prophets: this book is listed.
Garrett, Duane A. Hosea, Joel: four books by this author are listed, but Hosea, Joel is not one of them.
Hobbs, T. R. 2 Kings: this book is listed.
House, Paul R. 2 Kings: this book is listed.
Irvine, Stuart. "The Threat of Jezreel." Catholic Biblical Quarterly, July 1995: Typing Stuart Irvine's name into the search window will receive a big, red, "No Authors were found for this search." After receiving this response, I typed Catholic Biblical Quarterly and received a red, "Nothing was found for your search."
Jones, Gwilym. 1 and 2 Kings: this book is listed.
Mays, James Luther. Hosea: this book is listed.
McComiskey, Thomas Edward. The Minor Prophets: this book is listed.
McComiskey, Thomas Edward. "Prophetic Irony in Hosea 1:4." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: I searched by the title of the article and by the title of the journal, and for both searches, I received a red, "No titles were found for this search."
Morris, Gerald. Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea: a book by this author entitled Hosea is listed, so maybe this is the one Turkel meant.
Mullen, E. Theodore. "The Royal Dynastic Grant to Jehu and the Structure of the Book of Kings." Journal of Biblical Literature: A book by this author entitled The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature is listed, but searches by both the article title and the journal title received red responses, "No Titles were found for this search."
Provan, Iaian W. 1 and 2 Kings: this book is listed.
Stuart, Douglas. Hosea-Jonah: this book is listed.
Wolff, Hans Walter. Hosea: this book is listed in a translation by Gary Stansell, but when I did the search before writing "Commentators of All Stripes," only a German version was listed.
At any rate, other searches conducted as I was writing this article confirm what I said before: some of Turkel's sources are listed in the RTS website catalog, but some of them aren't. Turkel included three journal articles in his "source" list, but the TRS catalog doesn't list any of them. In his demand for an apology from me, he said above, "I insisted that all 17 of my sources for the matter had been found at the Reformed Theological Seminary library here in Orlando." If that is so, why do some of them show up in a search of TRS catalog but others don't?
[Addendum, May 10, 2006: I have learned that Turkel misspelled Mordecai Cogan's name in his original article by adding another "o" to make it Coogan. A recheck of the RTS library catalog shows that his book is in the inventory. The person who called this to my attention pointed out that Turkel himself had spelled the name as Coogan three times in "Jehu: White Hat or Black Hat?" and then repeated the error in "Wrapping Skeptic X in His Own Burial Shroud. This is rather ironic, because in a context where he was questioning my competence, his own incompetence kept him from recognizing that his error had caused me to repeat the error. At any rate, Cogan's book can be added to the ones in Turkel's "sources" that are in the RTS library.]
The on-line catalog of TRS indicates that Turkel did exactly what I said: he saw some works cited in the books that he referred to and then tried to pass these secondary sources off as primary ones. I would ask everyone to take notice of the absence of the three journal articles from TRS's catalog, even though Turkel listed them as primary sources and then insisted that he had "found" all 17 of his sources in the RTS library in Orlando. The key word here may be found. The fact that he "found" all of them doesn't necessarily mean that he consulted all of them. Furthermore, if he "found" all 17 of them in the RTS library, why are they not listed when the search option is used?
Another question also arises. Why did Turkel say above that he "insisted that all 17 of [his] sources had been found at the Reformed Theological Seminary library here in Orlando," when he had earlier made a different statement about these sources in "Farris McTill Wears Horizontal Stripes," his original reply to my "Commentators of All Stripes." To try to hide the fact that he had once clearly said that "commentators of all stripes" agreed with his position on Hosea 1:4, Turkel has deleted his "Horizontal Stripes" article from his website, but I was able to locate it in the internet archives. Notice the statement emphasized in bold print, which I am quoting directly from his original article.
Every one of my 17 sources for that work was at the Reformed Theological Seminary library in Orlando, except for a couple I found at the Long's Christian bookstore in Orlando. McTill is just hauling a cheap bale of slander because he can't answer the actual argument.
So which was it? Did Turkel find all 17 of [his] sources at the RTS library in Orlando, or did he find all 17 of them except for a couple that he found at Long's Bookstore in Orlando? The problem with lying is that one has to remember everything he has said about the lie in order to keep his story straight. Obviously, Turkel was not able to do that.
These journal articles missing from the RTS catalog were what confirmed my suspicion that Turkel had padded his list of sources, because I had so often found this same kind of deception in student papers. In their endnotes, they would list as primary sources journal articles that they hadn't actually consulted but had seen referred to in books that they had at least looked through. I am still convinced that Tukel did the same thing so that he would have an impressive list of "sources" to put at the end of his article. Notice, for example, that one of Turkel's sources--which was actually one that he quoted the most--was Thomas McComiskey's book The Minor Prophets, and another was a journal article by the same author ("Prophetic Irony in Hosea 1:4" in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament). The RTS website catalog shows that the book is in its inventory but the journal isn't. I will give anyone who cares to accept the wager ten to one odds that McComiskey cited in his book the journal article that he had written on the same subject. If he did, Turkel could have easily put some of the citations from the journal into his article and then listed McComiskey's journal article as one of the "sources" that he had consulted during his "research."
As for Turkel's claim that I was "just hauling a cheap bale of slander" because I couldn't answer his "actual argument," I enter into evidence my three-part reply to his Jehu quibbles, which answered them all in detail, my article "Commentators of All Stripes" and "The Zigzagging Stripes of Bobby Turkel." If he thinks that he presented some "argument" that I didn't answer, I will make the same proposal again: If he will identify the "argument" that he thinks I have evaded, I will immediately reply to it in detail, if he will agree to reply in kind to all points of mine that I think he has skipped in the Jehu debate, and then post all of our exchanges on his website, and keep them there. Needless to say, I will gladly post everything on this website.
How many think that he will agree to do this? Those who do should contact me, because I have some prime lake-front property in the Sahara Desert that I will sell for a dollar an acre.
Turkel:
We hereby demand that Till issue a public apology for this
error and for his
slander.
Till:
When I was a kid, we had a cute retort for those who wished for or
asked for the unlikely:
Try wishing in one hand and spitting in the other to see which one
gets filled quicker.
I have shown above that I have good reasons to believe that Turkel
padded his "source" list
at the end of his article, as I think he has done in other cases too.
Until he can give me
more evidence than his mere word that I have wrongly accused him, I am
not about to apologize
for stating what was probably the truth.
Speaking of apologies, I wonder when Turkel is going to apologize for having repeatedly insulted the academic reputation of the university that I graduated from. Obviously unaware of the logical axion that says that the truth or falsity of a claim is always independent of its source, when he has been unable to reply to my arguments or rebuttals, he has often resorted to calling my alma mater "Bam Bam Bible College," as this Google search shows that he has done in at least 14 different articles. As one who attended Harding University and obtained two degrees from it, however, I knew that it maintained high academic standards. I have often said that of the ten universities at which I have completed courses, only the two in France had stiffer academic standards than Harding's. I no longer agree with its religious stance, of course, but that is not to say that it didn't have high standards even in those courses. When he took another pot shot at Harding University in his "Horizontal Stripes" article, I finally decided to shove his foot farther down his throat. In this section of "The Zigzagging Stripes of Bobby Turkel," I did exactly that by showing that Harding has been selected by U. S. News and Word Report for eleven consecutive years as one of the top universities in the South. The link will take readers to that section, but I am going to quote the best part of it to show that Turkel, unless he has even less common sense than I think, has been silenced for good about "Bam Bam Bible College."
Just how does a Ph. D. in one's field guarantee that he is a "scholar" who will objectively follow the evidence wherever it leads? I spent 30 years in academia, so I know that a Ph. D. degree is no guarantee of scholarship. Bobby often refers to Harding University, my alma mater, as Bam Bam Bible College, but if he will check the website of its department of Bible and Religion, he will find that 15 of its faculty members have their Ph. D. degrees and two their Th. D. degrees from institutions such as Virginia Tech, the University of Nebraska, Boston College, University of St. Andrews, Baylor, Duke, Hebrew Union College, University of Arizona, Emory, University of Illinois--long recognized as one of the nation's finest--and, believe it or not, even Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Besides these, there are several others with doctor's degrees in ministry and education. With an impressive array of Ph. D. professors like these on its religion staff, I guess Bobby will now speak about Bam Bam Bible College with a little more respect. I suppose too that he will no longer ridicule the Church of Christ and will begin to teach that baptism is essential for salvation, that instrumental music in worship is unscriptural, that loss of salvation after conversion is very possible, that preterism and premillennialism are heresies, and that the Church of Christ is... well, the church of Christ, because all of these views have been published in articles by Harding professors who have Ph. D. degrees.
I found something else on another page of Harding's website that I just can't resist passing along to Bobby. I had noticed before that Bam Bam Bible College was often rated by U. S. News and World Report among the top universities in the South, but I had no idea of just how many consecutive years, it had received that honor.
SEARCY, Ark. - For the 11th consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report magazine has ranked Harding University as one of the South’s best universities. The rankings are in the magazine’s 18th annual America’s Best Colleges issue, which hits newsstands Aug. 23.
The report also named Harding one of the “best values” among universities in the South.
Harding was ranked in the top 25 among regional universities of the South, behind such notable schools as the University of Richmond, James Madison University, Stetson University, Loyola University and The Citadel. This year the University ranked 22nd - compared to 26th last year.
This kind of recognition doesn't surprise me at all, because I have often said that except for the screwball religious ideas that it teaches, Harding was the academically best of the 10 colleges and universities that I attended with the exception of two European universities. I wonder how many years Florida State University has received the kind of recognition that Harding can boast about. At any rate, the fact that a university that Bobby openly ridicules is loaded with faculty members with their Ph. D. degrees, one of whom even received his from McComiskey's school of divinity, clearly obligates him to admit that a Ph. D. degree is no guarantee that one's position in religion is right. One can find professors with Ph. D. degrees in Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Seven-Day Adventist, Mormon, and all other kinds of religious institutions, so what does having a Ph. D. degree have to do with whether one's doctrinal beliefs are correct?
If anyone needs to apologize, that would be Turkel, because he has repeatedly insulted one of the South's top universities, but I expect that we will see pigs flying before he will ever admit that he runs his mouth in high gear before he thinks.
Turkel:
Don't hold your breath, though.
Till:
My claim was that Turkel padded his list of "sources" by including
works that he had not
personally consulted but were cited in sources he did consult. He
claims that this is not
so but that he obtained all 17 of [his] sources from the
Reformed Theological Seminary
library in Orlando, although, as I just showed above, he had earlier
claimed that he had
found all but "a couple of his sources," which he had gotten from a
local bookstore. His own
claim then is contradictory, and he has not yet explained why the
website catalog of the
Reformed Theological Seminary does not list some of the sources that he
says he had found
there. I will ask him again two questions that he has, in typical
fashion, evaded.
Did you lift a cited [secondary] reference from any of these books or periodicals and present it as a primary reference?
Until he at least answers these questions and gives a satisfactory explanation for why some sources, which he claims to have "found" in the RTS library, are not listed in its website catalog, what is there to apologize for? He needs to apologize, however, for insulting repeatedly one of the top universities in the South.
Don't hold your breath until he does it.
