Usually, I publish letters in the mailbag column, but Mr. Conklin has registered certain unwarranted complaints that win him a page of his own. First, I must apologize to him, because I somehow neglected to take him off the mailing list, so he received another issue after requesting that his name be removed. Evidently, my oversight didn't disturb him too much, because he read the other issue and wrote an article that I will publish later.
In his letter above, he complained that the front-page article of the May/June issue said that three articles were being published in that issue in defense of the 430-year sojourn in Egypt, but in reality there was only one. I have to wonder if Mr. Conklin can understand plain language, because no such promise was made. As anyone can see by checking this article, the paragraph he was referring to was merely summarizing what had so far been published in TSR on this subject. It pointed out that articles on this subject by Jerry Moffitt and Roger Hutchinson had already been published and that the current issue was presenting another one by Wilhelm Schmitt. Mr. Conklin is either a careless reader or else he was just looking for something to complain about. If he will read that paragraph again, I think he will see that it reads exactly as I have just summarized it.
The second column of Mr. Conklin's letter left me thoroughly confused. He said that "if you deny the inerrancy of the Bible their [errantists] argument falls flat," but I fail to see that this is true. Many subscribers to TSR deny the inerrancy of the Bible, but I'm pretty sure they do this because they see the validity of the arguments against inerrancy. How could denial of biblical inerrancy possibly make an argument against inerrancy invalid? Does he mean by this that he denies inerrancy? If so, why the burr under his saddle? Why would someone who denies biblical inerrancy object to arguments that demonstrate errancy?
In this same confusing paragraph, he said that when critics are asked to "define [their] terms according to Scripture, they never return or respond." Was he implying that I have done this? If so, when? I can hardly respond to a complaint as ambiguous as this. If he will cite a specific case of when I have been asked to define my terms "according to scripture," I will be glad to address his complaint.
He complained that I had quoted the KJV on page 9 when I referred to Paul's speech at Antioch of Pisidia [to show a discrepancy in Paul's math and the claim in 1 Kings 6:1 that construction on the temple had begun 480 years after the exodus], but if he had looked at the passage carefully, he would surely have seen that the language in the quotation is too modern to be from the KJV. It is, in fact, from the New King James Version. I certainly don't think that the KJV is the only "reliable" translation. As a matter of fact, I am aware of many flaws in this translation, and Conklin may be surprised to learn that even when I was a fundamentalist preacher in the '50s, I didn't use the KJV. My preferred version was the ASV. Conklin said that if I had "checked out the text in some scholarly commentaries," I would have found that the judges had come "some time after, not during, the 450 years." Well, first of all, I wonder if Mr. Conklin thinks that I just got up one morning and decided that I would start publishing The Skeptical Review, not having given any time at all to researching the subject. The truth is that I put about 25 years into seriously researching biblical inerrancy before I began publishing The Skeptical Review. That research involved reading the apologetic works of such "scholars" as Josh McDowell, Gleason Archer, William Arndt, John Haley, and others, so I am well aware that there is no such thing as a biblical discrepancy that confirmed inerrantists have not "explained" with some kind of how-it-could-have-been hypothesis. The discrepancy between Paul's speech and 1 Kings 6:1 is no exception. I know what the experts have said, but I know too that their "explanations" are unsatisfactory.
I'm not so sure that Mr. Conklin knows what the apologists have said about this particular discrepancy, because he contends that the rule of the judges "came some time after, not during, the 450 years." If that is so, then the discrepancy is even greater than if we include the rule of the judges in the 450 years. I'll leave it to him to think about it and try to figure out how that his explanation makes the discrepancy even greater.
Finally, he complained that I had used the number 40 in
calculating
how long Saul had reigned, but I used it only because Paul said in his
speech that Saul had reigned 40 years (Acts.
13:21). Is it my fault that
the Bible says what it says? I really suspect that the real problem
here
is that Mr. Conklin is just another frustrated inerrantist who can't
refute
arguments against inerrancy, and so he chooses to complain and quibble.
If he has reasonable evidence that the Bible is inerrant, why doesn't
he
let us see it. I will gladly publish it.
