When we discussed the rules by which this debate would be conducted, Mr. Jackson and I both promised to answer all questions formally presented by the opposition. That was before the debate started, but now that it is a reality and Mr. Jackson finds himself in a terrible bind, he apparently feels no obligation to keep his end of the agreement. In my last affirmative manuscript, I asked him a direct question: "Would the existence of just one trivial mistake in the Bible be enough to exclude all possibility of verbal inspiration? If not, please explain why not." I searched all through Mr. Jackson's last rebuttal but couldn't find an answer to this question.
The reason why he didn't answer it should be obvious to everyone who has taken inventory of his "debating" tactics. He prefers playing to the gallery rather than dealing with issues. Of course, we can't really fault him for this. When one has no evidence on his side, he has to do something to detract attention from the weakness of his position. The inerrancy doctrine that he believes in leaves no room for errors of any kind in the Bible text-- not even trivial ones. He knows that as well as I, but he can't admit it. If he did, he wouldn't have much left to grandstand about.
In typical grandstanding fashion, he rages on and on about my claim to have evidence that will exclude all possibility of God's participation in the authorship of the Bible when, according to him, I have presented nothing but trivial matters concerning king Ahaziah's age when he began to reign, the absence or presence of armed companions when David was fleeing from Saul's wrath, and the time when Paul first went to Jerusalem after his conversion. He chides my triviality and constantly wonders when I will bring out my "big guns." In so doing he completely ignores an obvious fact: a contradiction in the Bible text, no matter how inconsequential it may be, is still a contradiction, and if there are contradictions--even trivial ones-- in the Bible, the inerrancy doctrine cannot be true. Perhaps, then, Mr. Jackson will enlighten us in his next rebuttal and let us know just how "big" a contradiction has to be before it will damage the inerrancy doctrine. If one "inspired" writer said that Ahaziah was twenty-two when he began to reign (2 Kings 8:26) and another "inspired" writer said that he was forty-two (2 Chron. 22:2) when he began to reign, that is a discrepancy that surely qualifies for at least a "semi-big" ranking, because if both writers were verbally inspired by the same omniscient, omnipotent deity, they couldn't possibly have contradicted each other as flagrantly as they did.
The best Mr. Jackson could do to "explain" this discrepancy was to scribble something about a "variance not necessarily" being "a contradiction." He tried to support the "explanation" with a fleeting, and as usual, unexplicated reference to Galatians 6:2,5, which in the one verse said, "Bear ye one another's burdens," but then in the other said, "For each man shall bear his own burden." Although Jackson referred to this as a "variance," a more proper designation would be antinomy. Variance suggests differences that cannot be reconciled, whereas antinomy, like paradox, denotes apparent contradiction between equally reasonable principles that can be satisfactorily resolved by logical explanation. The antinomy in the Galatian passage can be easily resolved. People who care about others, as Christians presumably do, will want to alleviate the pain of those in emotional crisis by helping to bear their burdens. Ultimately, however, personal grief, like that which accompanies a death in the family or permanent physical injury or emotional trauma must be borne by the bereaved individual himself. Viewed in this way, the "variance" that Mr. Jackson referred to in citing this passage easily vanishes.
Now I challenge him to make the "variance" between 2 Kings 8:26 and 2 Chronicles 22:2 vanish just as easily. To show the scope of the problem he faces, let's look at the two verses in juxtaposition:
Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign (2 Kings 8:26).
Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign (2 Chron. 22:2).
As any literate person can see, the wording of the two statements is identical except for the numbers, so until Jackson can explain to us how twenty-two and forty-two signify the same thing, he has a real problem on his hands. He has talked about speculative theories concerning "writing from a different basis, with differing methods of calculation," but he has yet to document a single concrete, verifiable example of when such far-fetched, speculative systems of record keeping as those that he has conjured up produced "variances" as flagrant as the one concerning Ahaziah when he began to reign. When will he give us a book, chapter, and verse that he and his Church-of-Christ cohorts are so quick to demand that "denominationalist" preachers give in support of their doctrines? When is he going to show us a "thus saith the Lord"?
In similar fashion, he has tried to explain the case of the father (Jehoram) who was two years younger than his son (Ahaziah) by claiming that "Jehoram co-reigned with his father for most of the father's reign, and... those years, during both reigns amount to the 42-year calculation--not the age of the man himself...." In so doing, he only demonstrated the utter state of confusion that he is in. The number 42 has nothing to do with either Jehoram's age or the length of his reign. The text under consideration says, "Thirty and two years old was he (Jehoram) when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years" (2 Chron. 21:20), so we know how old he was when he began his reign and how long he subsequently reigned. If the Bible is to be trusted, as Jackson insists that it is, and if plain language means anything at all, Jehoram was thirty-two when he began his reign, and he reigned for eight years. Then if basic math is to be trusted 32 + 8 = 40, so Jehoram was 40 years old when he died, yet somehow, if we are to believe the Bible text, he had a son--the youngest of his sons, incidentally--who was 42 years old at the time of Jehoram's death. I have repeatedly pressed Mr. Jackson to explain how this could be, but all he has done is speculate about co-reigns and "different methods of calculation," all of which are irrelevant to the issue. There was no mention in the text of a co-reign; it clearly says that he (Jehoram) was thirty-two years old when he (not they) began to reign. When, if ever, is Jackson going to stop dodging issues and explain how that this "variance" is not a contradiction? If the Bible is the perfect work of harmony that he claims it is, surely he can explain to us a simple thing like a 40-year-old man having a 42-year-old son.
I also asked for a principle of literary interpretation that would justify concluding that David was telling the truth when he referred to a company of men that he had "appointed to such and such a place" (1 Sam. 21:2), but as usual when he finds himself painted into a corner, Jackson ignored the challenge. He admits that David lied in saying that he was on a secret mission for the king, but somehow he believes the reference to the young men, uttered in the same breath with the lie, had to be the truth. Yet he cannot give us any logical reason why the passage should be so interpreted. The best effort he could come up with was this: "I am also of the conviction that Jesus Christ knew what he was talking about in Mark 2:25-26." So, after all of this time, he still doesn't understand what begging the question is. If I should say that I am of the conviction that Jesus Christ was a liar, he would be outraged and demand that I produce reliable evidence to support my conviction. What he can't understand is that I and many others like me, who want to know the truth about the Bible's origin, don't care a snap about what his personal conviction is. We want to see proof, evidence, facts. His personal conviction isn't worth a pint of cold spit.
Jackson is so confused that he is now arguing against his own verbally inspired, inerrant word of God. Acts 9:26 plainly says that all the disciples in Jerusalem were afraid of Paul when he returned after his conversion, but Jackson says that this wasn't true, because Barnabas wasn't afraid of him. So what is Mr. Jackson trying to say, that there is a discrepancy in his inerrant scriptures? This, of course, is the extreme that one is pushed to when he tries to defend an untenable position. Because of Galatians 1:17-18, he has to believe that three years transpired before Paul returned to Jerusalem, but he can offer no sensible explanation for why word of Paul's conversion would not have reached the Jerusalem Christians within those three years, so he has to grab at any straw he can find. There is nothing in the text to exclude the possibility that Barnabas himself had been in Damascus to witness the events there and so was not even to be considered one of the Jerusalem disciples, but let's give Mr. Jackson every benefit of the doubt. If "all the disciples" didn't mean all, Jackson must surely admit it at least meant that a sizable number of the Jerusalem Christians, including the apostles (Acts 9:27), didn't know about Paul's conversion, so I'd like to see Jackson give a sensible explanation for why three years wasn't enough time for most of the Jerusalem Christians and the apostles to learn about their former persecutor's conversion. Readers are advised, however, not to hold their breaths until he does that.
To support my position in this matter, I even cited two references that Luke's Paul made to his early preaching itinerary (Acts 22:16-21; 26:19), and in both of them Luke had Paul claiming that he returned to Jerusalem after his conversion in Damascus. What did Mr. Jackson have to say about this? As usual, when he finds himself in trouble, he responded with silence. He is so confused he doesn't know what to say about much of anything. He is so confused, in fact, that he apparently can't even recognize that my use of upper case lettering and multiple exclamation points was a tongue-in-cheek mimicry of his amateurish writing methods. He can't even recognize obvious satire.
For some time now, Jackson has challenged me to bring out my "big gun" and deal with the issue of archaeology. I don't know why he would want to confront a "big gun" when he can't even give sensible responses to my "pop-gun" arguments, but he apparently wants a greater challenge, so I will happily accommodate him. In his first affirmative manuscript, he said that in "140 years of constant research in the lands of the Bible, archaeologists have yet to find a single fact in contradiction to what the Bible has said" (emphasis added, p. 3). This was just another of many unsupported claims he has made, but, unfortunately, the facts just do not agree with his claim.
Joshua 8 reports that the Israelite forces sacked and destroyed the city of Ai during their invasion of Canaan, an attack that according to Bible chronology (1 Kings 6:1) would have occurred around 1426 B.C. Joseph Callaway, a conservative Southern Baptist and former professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, excavated the Ai ruins and made discoveries that contradict the Bible record. His findings were reported in Biblical Archaeology Review:
The evidence from Ai was mainly negative. There was a great walled city there beginning about 3000 B.C., more than 1,800 years before Israel's emergence in Canaan. But this city was destroyed about 2400 B.C., after which the site was abandoned.
Despite extensive excavation, no evidence of a Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 B.C.) Canaanite city was found. In short, there was no Canaanite city here for Joshua to conquer ("Joseph A. Callaway: 1920-1988," November/December 1988, p. 24, emphasis added).
The same article quoted a statement that Callaway himself had made in announcing the results of his nine-year expedition to the Ai ruins:
Archaeology has wiped out the historical credibility of the conquest of Ai as reported in Joshua 7-8. The Joint Expedition to Ai worked nine seasons between 1964 and 1976..., only to eliminate the historical underpinning of the Ai account in the Bible (Ibid.,p. 24).
In addition to this archaeological discovery that clearly disputes Mr. Jackson's rash, unsupported claim, archaeologists have discovered other discrepancies in the Bible text. One more that I have time to mention is the anachronistic references to the Philistines, who did not occupy territory in Palestine until long after the earliest Bible references to them. The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, a reference book widely used by fundamentalist Christians, honestly admits that these references were "anachronistic" (1987, p. 829).
These are the facts as archaeology has documented them. Now we'll eagerly wait to see what Mr. Jackson will have, or not have, to say about them.
Go to Jackson's Fourth Rebuttal.
