Turkel:
Apparently seeking at all costs to
avoid engaging us on the issue of preterism and the "Olivet
Discourse," Farrell Till has decided to try to keep us busy
with some distractions. For example, this time, a reply to our reply
to his article, "What Men with David?"
Till:
When Turkel posted
this, he knew that I had asked for his permission to reprint his
"Olivet Discourse" in the September/October 2002 issue of
The Skeptical Review with my simultaneous reply. He knew
too that I had promised to have my reply ready for press the first
week of August, at which time I would submit it to my associate Rob
Miles for posting on this site. Hence, we see nothing has
changed in Turkel's approach. He still sets up straw men
and beats on them to detract attention from his inability to reply to
my rebuttal arguments. My second-round rebuttals to his
Abiathar quibbles, which are a part of this debate, have already been
posted, so I am now ready to expose the ducking and dodging and
bobbing and weaving he has put himself through to try to find men
with David in the Old Testament account of David's flight from
Saul recorded in 1 Samuel 20-21.
As I will show later, my original article on this subject ("What Men with David?") was written to set bait for any inerrantist who would attempt to resolve the problem I identified in the article, and Turkel has swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. I will explain what the bait was when I come to the point where Turkel took it.
Turkel:
Since we didn't
agree to debate this one,
Till:
Turkel may not have
agreed to debate this subject, but he was the one who brought up the
matter by replying to my original article. Apparently, he
thinks that I should just sit still and let his simplistic rebuttal
attempts go unanswered so that readers of his website will think that
he is the new king of biblical apologetics. I'm sure he
would prefer that I never say anything in response to his "replies"
to my articles, but that isn't going to happen as long as he
keeps his agreement to link his readers to my rebuttals.
Anyway, if Turkel didn't agree to debate this issue, that makes
us even, because I never agreed to debate the preterist issue with
him. As I have explained elsewhere, Turkel, in his inimitable way of
bragging about "projects" that he would be working on,
mentioned in a personal message to me a preterist interpretation of
Revelation that he would be posting soon. I said to him that I
disagreed with the preterist view and asked him to notify me when he
had finished his project. I did not say, "I challenge you
to defend preterism in a debate," or, "When you finish
this article, I want to debate you on the subject," but Turkel
has ever since insinuated that I presented a debate challenge to him
that I am now trying to wiggle out of.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I have written my initial reply to his "Olivet Discourse," which was nothing more than a string of arbitrary, unsupported interpretations of passages in Matthew 24, which he had cut and pasted or summarized from the works of preterists like Gary DeMar, and my reply is now being readied for posting on this site. Turkel's article consisted of 10 pages of strung-together citations from DeMar et al, so I had only five pages left in TSR to reply to it. I will, as my schedule allows, write an additional article to rebut "points," i. e., plagiarized ideas, that I didn't have the space to answer in my first article. Anyone who examines the articles on this website can easily see that I am certainly not ignoring Turkel. Over a period of years, he obviously targeted me for "replies" directed to his choir in a closed forum, in which he gave his readers no links to my articles that would let them conveniently see the full extent of my arguments, so they received only a myopic view of my positions, which they were receiving through Turkel's selective quoting that allowed them to see only what he wanted them to see. Now that he has agreed to link his readers to my articles, I am taking advantage of that mistake to reply to his backlog of Till-bashing articles, so he has by no means seen the last of me unless he retreats to his closed forum and stops linking his readers to my rebuttals.
I fully expect that to happen, because his website shows that he still needs contributors so that he can become a "full-time" apologist, so I don't think he will want readers to see how poorly he performs when he has to confront face-to-face an informed opposition.
For some reason Turkel seems to think that he is entitled to call the shots and arbitrarily declare that he and I will debate preterism (which I am perfectly willing to debate) or whatever issue he chooses, so I wonder why this should not be a two-way street that entitles me to pick at least some of the issues that we will debate. I wonder why, for example, Turkel won't agree to debate such issues as the historicity of the exodus and the wilderness-wandering tales, the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy against Egypt, the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy against Tyre, the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy against Babylon, the historicity of the virgin birth, the historicity of the resurrection, and other issues I have proposed. He won't touch these issues, but he seems to think that I should drop everything I have to do and come running when he says, "I want to debate preterism."
I remind Turkel of his "Chicken Challenge," which I have met, so maybe Turkel will keep his word and join an internet forum like II Errancy or alt.bible.errancy, where some of these issues can be debated, or maybe he will agree to debate them in this forum with links supplied to his readers on his website.
And maybe pigs will fly someday too.
Turkel:
we will not follow
Till's obsessive stricture that we quote EVERYTHING he writes,
Till:
What would Turkel do
without this straw man to pound on? He knows that I have
insisted only that he should give his readers access to what his
opponents write, and I have explained several times in the
land-promise debate that he knew
before the debate began that I had
tried to negotiate with him a written agreement on guidelines that
would have given the debate structure. Three of the guidelines
that I proposed to him on 5/20/02 were these:
4. Each participant agrees to include all links that the participants refer to in their exchanges.
5. Each participant agrees to reply to all arguments and rebuttals made by the other.
6. If a participant overlooks an opponent's argument or rebuttal, he will reply to it after receiving notification that the argument/rebuttal was not answered.
Now why would he conclude from this that I was demanding that in his replies he quote everything that I had said? As I have previously explained, if an original affirmative presentation in a debate contains 10,000 words, if the respondent quoted everything in his rebuttal and took no more space to reply to the points than the affirmant's 10,000 words, the respondent's reply would be 20,000 words long. Then the affirmant's second-round presentation would have 40,000 words, which the respondent would need 80,000 words to reply to, and so on.
I really can't believe that Turkel is so ignorant that he cannot see that the guidelines that I proposed above called only for a reply to all points and arguments and not for a quotation of everything I had said, so I have to assume that Turkel has been beating on this straw man in all of his "replies" to me so that (1) he can detract attention from his inability to reply to my arguments and (2) he will have an excuse to sabotage the debates by cutting and pasting evasive comments about "fluff," "irrelevant distractions," and "superfluous commentary" as he did repeatedly in the land-promise debate.
Turkel:
though we will
provide a link to his material (above) just for the amusement of our
readers.
Till:
Good! If he keeps
it up, I will keep replying to the articles that Turkel has posted in
"reply" to mine. However, I have to wonder why he
decided only recently to "amuse" his readers. Why
didn't he provide links before so that his readers could have
gone to my articles and doubled over with laughter?
Turkel:
As we have shown both
here
and now here,
and will also show here,
such complaints as these about quoting EVERYTHING are a
smokescreen or else an attempt by Till to cover his lack of real
argumentation.
Till:
As I just explained
above and in the land-promise debate, I never made any such
demand.
I was demanding only that Turkel's readers be given access to
my articles, so the only smoke screen I see is the one that Turkel is
laying down.
Turkel:
If he has any
complaints, he should think them over, write them down on a clean
sheet of paper, and then take a comb, hold it up to the paper's
edge, and play a tune with the Country Bear Jamboree.
Till:
Poor Turkel! As I
have explained in some of my other replies, especially in his attempt
to patch up his Abiathar explanation, when he can't answer an
opponent's arguments he tries to joke his way out of the corner
he is in. Some things never change.
Turkel:
Let us begin with
this note. We find it of no surprise that Till should select this
item to respond to -- first of all, as noted, because it buys him
time to avoid dealing with our more detailed articles.
Till:
Well, was Turkel's
"Olivet Discourse," a "detailed" article?
If so, I haven't avoided it. Was his reply to "Yahweh's
Failed Land Promise," a "detailed" article?
If so, I haven't avoided it, and I am now in the process of
replying to his "1 meg" second-round reply in the
land-promise debate, which was "detailed" only in the
sense that it cut and pasted over and over and over about six or
seven evasive comments to draw attention from the fact that he
obviously wasn't answering my arguments. Over the
entirety of the debate, those cut-and-pasted evasions have totaled
thousands of wasted words that served no purpose at all except to
detract attention from the key issues of the debate.
I replied to his "response" to "What Men with David?" specifically because it illustrated exactly what Turkel had been doing for years, i.e., selectively quoting the articles of skeptics without linking his readers to what the skeptics had said in their articles. In his "reply" to my article about David, which had almost 5,500 words, he quoted fewer than 500 words from the original article, so I selected this "item" specifically for the purpose of giving his readers an example of the type of thing Turkel had been doing over the years.
My honest opinion of Turkel is that his "apologetic" articles are about as deep as a birdbath. They consist of cutting and pasting the works of others, as if it takes some kind of profound thinking to be able to find books and articles that agree with a given religious view, but when he finds himself in situations where he must try to think his own way to answering his opponents' rebuttals, he can do little more than try to joke his way around them with comments about a "Country Bear Jamboree" or imaginary Till/McKinsey conversations. I have debated a lot of biblical inerrantists, and I am sincere when I say that Turkel has turned out to be one of the weakest of them--not the weakest but certainly one of the weakest. As I will show below, for example, he immediately swallowed bait that I set out for any inerrantist who would try to solve the men-with-David problem, so we can expect to see him spending a lot of time in any follow-ups in this thread to trying to joke his way out of the predicament that he has gotten himself into.
Turkel:
Second, Till undoubtedly whooped loud enough for the neighbors in the next state to hear when he discovered that I had made some typographical errors and one particularly poignant concentration gaffe (in which I refer to the "king of Achish" when Achish was the king of Gath)
Till:
If I whooped like this
every time I caught Turkel in gaffes like these, the police would
have to come and cart me away. He is so interested in quantity
rather than quality that he sends his stuff out without taking time
to revise and edit, which all responsible editors will do if they
care anything about the impression they leave with readers.
I think that my constant reminders of Turkel's carelessness in writing has had at least some effect on him, because I noticed that this article I am now replying to had fewer of these problems than usual. Maybe he is at least taking the time to send his articles through a spell checker.
Now if I could just to do something to improve Turkel's thinking....
Turkel:
-- which he dutifully
pointed out in detail to impress his skeptical readers; but which, in
form, he imitated within his reply, giving new meaning to the words
"divine justice."
Till:
Turkel will have to
explain more specifically what he meant by alleging that I had
"imitated" his Achish gaffe "in form,"
because I looked through my reply and could see no place where I had
made this same mistake or any like it. I called reader
attention to his reference to the "king of Achish," which
he actually did twice in his article, because I thought it
appropriate to point out that someone who was, in typical Turkel
fashion, explaining to us exactly what the biblical text meant in
this part of the story of David's flight apparently didn't
know that Gath was the name of the place David had fled to and Achish
was the name of its king. I'm sure that if I had actually
made the same mistake "in form" Turkel would have quoted
it just as he quoted where I had put 1 Samuel 20 for 1 Samuel 21.
Turkel:
Third, we know well
enough that Till wants to keep the skeptics happy and keep it out of
their mind that he is being taken to the cleaners with respect to
issues we cover in more detail, and have challenged him on, like the
Land Promise.
Till:
It's strange how
perspectives differ. I think that Turkel is the one who has
been taken to the cleaners in issues that he and I have discussed in
detail, and the land-promise debate is a good example. My
second-round replies are in progress and are very detailed,
and the record will show that I have made detailed point after
detailed point that Turkel has answered only with cut-and-pasted
evasive comments. At any rate, I am willing to let readers see
which one of us is doing the better job of defending his position, so
I urge readers who have not done so yet to begin
reading my replies to Turkel's attempt to explain away
inconsistencies in biblical texts related to Yahweh's land
promise to the descendants of Abraham. It will be a massive
reading project because of hundreds of evasive comments that Turkel
cut and pasted into the debate, but it will give readers the
opportunity to compare the substance that went into my replies with
the emptiness of Turkel's repeated cut-and-and pasted jobs: "I
have answered this in detail below," "it isn't
necessary to quote this, and ‘our' opponent cannot, and
never will be able to, explain why such superfluous commentary
requires quotation and/or reference from a respondent, other than to
score debate points with a skeptical readership," and so on ad
infinitum. He wasted literally thousands of words on such
repetitions as this, but the record will show that I repeated myself
only when he denied that I had replied to certain points of his.
On those occasions, I would quote verbatim rebuttals where I had
answered in detail what he was claiming I had evaded so that my
specific replies would be inserted into the debate at the very places
where he had accused me of not answering his arguments.
Our respective performances in the land-promise debate are a matter of record, so I'm willing to let readers decide who has been taken to the cleaners in this matter. The Abiathar issue is another matter of record. I have rubbed Turkel's nose in a ludicrously indefensible explanation of this problem, and I have done so in great detail while Turkel tried to joke his way out of the corners I backed him into. That debate is also a matter of record, which can be accessed on this website, and it will show that Turkel's main line of "defense" was imaginary Till/McKinsey conversations and phone calls from "Hyper the Literalist." I present arguments, and Turkel tries to joke his way around them. That's his way of replying "in detail."
Turkel:
Finally, Till
undoubtedly likes this topic because it is an "easy pick"
in his view
Till:
No, I have already
explained why I picked this subject: (1) Turkel had replied to my
original article on the subject, and in so doing he gutted about
5,000 of the 5,500 words and gave his readers no link so that they
could easily access my article to judge how effectively Turkel had
answered my arguments. Now that he is linking his readers to my
articles, I wanted them to see just how much Turkel skips when he
"replies" to a skeptic. (2) My original article was
written so that it would set a trap for any inerrantist who attempted
to answer it, so if someone should take the bait, I would certainly
want to reply.
Turkel took the bait as I will be showing very soon now, so he has turned out to be just like several other amateur "apologists" to whom I presented this same example of discrepancy. They have all, without exception fallen into the same trap, by taking a position that conflicts with something said in Mark 2:26 that I intentionally left unmentioned--or that is, unemphasized--in my analysis of the verse.
Turkel:
-- it is far harder
to argue against silence than with it; indeed, my one goal in the
initial reply was (and it still is) to show that Till's reasons for
thinking there were no men with David are insufficient, leaving the
matter open as to whether there were men with David at all.
Till:
Now we are going to see
very quickly how Turkel will be forced to argue against what was
specifically said in Mark 2:26. I'm predicting that he
will argue against it, because I think I know Turkel well enough to
predict that he will never admit that he fell into a trap that turns
his own "explanation" of the men-with-David problem into
a fiasco that he can‘t escape from without admitting that his
first "solution" was wrong.
Readers should be prepared to see him resorting to a lot of imaginary phone-call scenarios from "Hyper the Literalist," at which time I will simply ask if it is my fault that the Bible says what it says.
Turkel:
Giving positive
evidence for the presence of the men amounts to citing Jesus,
Till:
Oh, I'm so glad
that Turkel said this. I didn't expect him to be quite so
cooperative in taking the bait that I had put out for him, but now
that he has said that "positive evidence" for the
presence of men with David "amounts to citing Jesus," so
much the better. In effect, Turkel was saying here that if
Jesus said that men were with David, then we can know that men were
with David. In other words, whatever Jesus said has to be
true. That, of course, is not a premise that I accept, but
Turkel apparently does, and so I now have this statement to turn
against him.
Turkel:
citing David's own
words,
Till:
Well, as I have shown
in analyzing 1 Samuel 21:1-6, the "words of David," which
I am sure Turkel was referring to, were part of an elaborate lie that
David told Ahimelech in order to better his chances of getting help
from the priest. I'll say more about this in Part Two
when I come to Turkel's attempt to show that even though
everything else that David said to Ahimelech was a lie, his reference
to men waiting in an appointed place was the truth.
Turkel:
noting that it was
unusual for an ancient travel alone --
Till:
Oh, it was? This
is a good example of how Turkel thinks that he can say just anything
that pops into his head and it should be accepted as gospel
truth.
Who was with Jacob when he left Canaan and went to Paddanaram (Gen.
28:5)? Who was with Joseph when he left his father's
house in the "vale of Hebron" to go to Shechem and then
on to Dothan to find his brothers, who were shepherding Jacob's
sheep (Gen. 37:12-17)? Who was with Judah when he departed from
his brothers in Dothan and went down to Adullam (Gen. 38:1)?
Who was with Moses when he fled from Egypt to Midian (Ex. 2:15)?
Who was with Jephthah when he fled from his brothers and dwelt in the
land of Tob (Judges 11:3)? Who was with the Levite who left
Bethlehem-judah and traveled to the hill country of Ephraim (Judges
17:8)? Who was with the Levite who left the far side of the
hill country of Ephraim to go after his concubine, who had gone back
to her father's house in Bethlehem-judah (Judges 19:2-3)?
Who was with Samuel when he went to Carmel and then to Gilgal in his
search for Saul on his return from the Amalekite massacre (1 Sam.
15:12)? Who was with the "man of God" who went from
Judah to Bethel to rebuke Jeroboam at the altar of the golden calf (1
Kings 13:1-2)? Who was with this same "man of God"
when he was killed by the lion on his return trip home (1 Kings
13:24)? Who was with Elijah when he left Samaria and traveled
eastward to brook Cherith by the Jordan, where he was fed by the
ravens (1 Kings 17:1-7)?
I can cite other examples if Turkel would care to see them.
Turkel:
and one other point
which we will present in the latter portion of this essay, which Till
misses though he quotes the relevant portion.
Till:
Well, when I find out
what that "one other point" is, I'll reply to it,
but as Turkel will soon see, he overlooked a very important point
that had been quoted but not emphasized.
Turkel:
The simple fact is
that neither side has a strong case -- no formal contradiction
exists, because the OT text does not specifically say that there were
no men with David. The presence of the men, or the lack thereof, can
only be determined by inference.
Till:
And here was where the
trap slammed shut on Turkel. He didn‘t recognize the
bait, and so he took it. I want everyone to notice what he just
said: (T)he OT text does NOT specifically say that there were no
men with David, so the presence of the men or "the lack
thereof" can only be determined by inference. Now Turkel
has the task of explaining a part of Jesus's statement in Mark
2:26 that I intentionally left unemphasized until Turkel had taken
the position, as inerrantists will invariably do in trying to resolve
this discrepancy, that the OT text does not specifically say that men
were with David but that it implies that men were with him.
Jesus, on the other hand, told the accusers of his disciples that
they could have read about the men with David.
Mark 2:26 But He [Jesus] said to them, "Have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry, he and those with him: 26how he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the showbread, which is not lawful to eat except for the priests, and also gave some to those who were with him?"
Notice that this text does not say that Jesus simply said to the accusers that David had gone into the house of God, eaten the showbread, and had given some of it to those who were with him. He asked the accusers if they had never read these things. The question shows that, as this tale was told, Jesus thought that it was possible for the accusers of his disciples to have read that these things had happened. Turkel, however, has just admitted that the Old Testament account of the incident at Nob does not specifically say that men were with David, and so the presence of the men can be determined only by inference. Jesus, however, did not say to the accusers of his disciples, "Have you never determined by inference in your reading of the scriptures that David ate the showbread that was lawful for only priests to eat and also gave some of it to those who were with him?" He asked if they had never read that these things had happened. The question shows that whoever wrote this passage thought that the story as written in the scriptures told of David's eating the showbread and giving some of it to men who were with him.
Let's
tie
all this in with Turkel's statement above, which amounted to
claiming that if Jesus said something, it had to be true, so if Jesus
said that men were with David, then we can know that men were with
David. I'll now ask Turkel to evaluate this claim in
terms of Jesus's claim that the accusers of his disciples could
have read that David ate the showbread and gave some of it to
his disciples. According to Turkel, if Jesus said this, it must
be true, so now let him quote the specific language in the OT account
that the accusers could have read and thereby known that David
gave showbread to men who were with him. He can quote the
specific language in the blank space after his ID marker that I am
typing below for his convenience.
Turkel:
The problem is rather obvious. If Jesus asked the accusers of his disciples if they had never read that David had eaten the showbread and given some of it to those who were with him, then he--or at least the writer of this tale--understood that in reading the OT account, the accusers should have read that men were with David and ate some of the showbread too. The OT account, however, says absolutely nothing about David's giving showbread to men who were with him, so this was not something that he accusers could have read.
Let's suppose that someone should say, "Did you read in today's paper that the mayor has been accused of taking bribes?" If upon hearing this, you should read the newspaper through and through and not find any mention at all about the mayor and bribes, you would naturally assume that the person who told you this had made a mistake. That is the case with the statement in Mark 2:26. Jesus asked the accusers of his disciples if they had never read something they could not have read, because no mention had been made of it. Hence, this has to be considered a mistake.
I still insist
that the
references to Abiathar and to men who were with David are both
errors, which neither Turkel nor any other inerrantist can
satisfactorily resolve, but the principal mistake in Mark 2:26 was
that Jesus said that something could have been read that was not even
mentioned in the Old Testament scriptures. My focus will be on
this point as I proceed to answer the rest of Turkel's
quibbles, which I will do in Part Two.
