Mr. McDonald usually ends his manuscripts with the claim that he has answered me point by point, and he did so again. The claim is completely false, and until now I have let it pass in order to concentrate on matters more important than his pathetic little vanity, which leads him to perceive himself as a great debater. This time, however, I have decided to call his hand on that claim. In reading my second manuscript and his response to it, I was able to identify the following items that he did not respond to point by point, except sometimes in passing mention, which is certainly not point-by point rebuttal:
My claim that abstract concepts of good and evil can exist independently of objective standards of good and bad (morality) just as abstract concepts of beauty, truth, fairness, sadness, etc. can exist independently of objective standards of beauty, truth, fairness, etc.
There were others that I could also list, but these are sufficient to put to rest his ridiculous claim of answering "point by point" everything that I say in my manuscripts. He does no such thing. In one or two cases, as I will try to notice later, he did make passing mention of items I have listed, but what he said was too superficial and sweeping to be considered by any stretch of the imagination "point by point" answers. On most of these matters, he is as elusive as "the butterfly of love" in the old song lyrics.
Number two in the list is an example of one of these points that he just waved at in passing and called that a "point-by-point" response. He simply said, "I have already dealt with 1 Kings 1 and 2, and I see no reason to go into it again" (second rebuttal, p. 8). Yes, sure, he has already dealt with that. I did an analysis of those chapters to show that if he is not willing to accept 1 Chronicles 23-29 as proof that David made Solomon king (presumably co-regent) in the 40th or final year of David's reign, then we have 1 Kings 1 and 2 to confirm that this was when it was done. Although this matter is really not relevant to what we are supposed to be debating, I am going to show just how wrong Mr. McDonald can be when he sets out to invent a how-it-could-have-been scenario to explain away a textual problem. He has done that in the case of Solomon and David in an effort to show that lengthy co-reigns did happen. However, he will never be able to prove a lengthy David-Solomon co-reign, because the Bible clearly teaches that Solomon was not made king until the final year of David's life.
In addition to what I have already pointed out about 1 Kings 1 and 2, I call McDonald's attention to 1 Kings 6:1, where it was said that construction on the temple began in the fourth year of Solomon's reign. He should be familiar with this verse, because he and I have exchanged articles on it in his paper Challenge in reference to another point of discrepancy in the Bible. If it was true that construction on the temple began in the fourth year of Solomon's reign--and the Bible plainly says that it did--then I can prove that Solomon was not made king until the final year of David's life. When David was "old and stricken in years" (1:1) and was bedridden under the care of the young virgin Abishag, David's son Adonijah declared himself king (1:5-10). Nathan the prophet and Solomon's mother Bathsheba then intervened to have David declare Solomon king (1:11-31). Under David's directions, Nathan and Zadok the priest put Solomon upon David's mule, led him down to Gihon to the fanfare of trumpets, and anointed him king, after which the people shouted, "Long live Solomon the king" (1:32-40). When word of this reached Adonijah, fearing for his life, he ran and seized the horns of the altar until Solomon swore that he would not be killed (1:41-53).
After this, it was said that "the days of David drew nigh that he should die" (2:1), so he delivered a charge to Solomon to keep the commandments of Yahweh and to avenge certain wrongs that had been done to him by Joab and others" (2:2-9). After delivering this charge to Solomon, David "slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David" (2:10). One of those that David mentioned in his charge to Solomon was Shemei the son of Gera, who had once cursed David as recorded in 2 Samuel 16:5-8. David in a moment of generosity had sworn not to kill Shemei, but evidently he had later regretted having made the vow, because on his deathbed, he asked Solomon to bring Shemei's "hoar head down to Sheol with blood" (2:8-9). David was indeed a man after Yahweh's own heart (1 Sam. 13:14) until the end.
After David was dead, Solomon sent for Shemei and ordered him to build himself a house in Jerusalem "and dwell there, and go not forth any whither" (2:36). Solomon warned him that on the day he went out of the house and passed over the Kidron, he would surely die (v:37). For a long period, Shemei accepted the terms of Solomon's clemency, but "it came to pass at the end of three years that two of the servants of Shemei ran away unto Achish" (2:39). Shemei foolishly went after the servants himself, and when Solomon heard about it, he called Shemei before him and ordered his execution (2:41-46). Shemei's execution occurred three years after Solomon had charged him not to cross the brook Kidron, and Solomon did not put this restriction on Shemei until after David was dead.
So now I will ask Mr. McDonald if he is capable of working simple math. Before his death, David declared Solomon king. "Blessed be the LORD God of Israel," David said after all the ceremony described above, "which hath given one to sit on my throne this day, mine eyes even seeing it" (1:48). After David was dead, Solomon ordered Shemei not to cross the brook Kidron. Three years later Shemei crossed the brook and was executed. After Shemei was executed, construction on the temple was begun in the fourth year of Solomon's reign (1 Kings 6:1). So tell us, Mr. McDonald, what does all of this do to your claim that the case of Solomon's and David's co-reign establishes the possibility that lengthy co-reigns did occur? The fact is that there was no lengthy David-Solomon co-reign, as the above analysis definitely proves. So that leaves McDonald with absolutely nothing to shore up his theory of a twenty-year co-reign of Jehoram and Ahaziah, and that is big trouble for a Church-of-Christ preacher who will insist upon a "thus saith the Lord" in all matters of faith and practice.
I have pressed him for a specific chapter and verse to show that Jehoram made Ahaziah king over Judah while Jehoram himself was still reigning, and he admits that he can't produce it. His defense is--and I couldn't believe it when I read it--that "there is no specific verse which said that David made Solomon a king over Israel while he [David] was reigning" (second rebuttal, p. 8). Well, just what does McDonald think all of the passages that I just cited in 1 Kings 1 and 2 were saying if not that David made Solomon king while David was still alive? What does he think David meant when he said, "Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, which hath given one to sit on my thone this day"? I fear that McDonald is so desperate that he really doesn't know what he is saying.
That 2 Kings 8:26 and 2 Chronicles 22:2 are obviously in disagreement over the age of Ahaziah when he began to reign should be so apparent by now that anyone except the most brazen-faced of fundamentalists should be able to see it. The two passages read the same, word for word, in English translations, except for the numbers 22 and 44; I have checked both passages in an interlinear Bible, and they are both the same, word for word, in Hebrew except for the numbers 22 and 44. That is the problem confronting McDonald, and he has tried just about every way possible to explain it away, except to cite as much as one little verse of scripture to give biblical precedent to his 20-year co-reign theory. Enough has been said on this point, so unless he can come up with something dramatically different, I see no need to waste any more time on his ridiculous, how-it-could-have-been scenarios.
Before I leave this matter, however, I do want to make the readers aware of what Mr. McDonald is doing. He is attempting to prove inerrancy by assuming inerrancy. He assumes that the Bible is inerrant, so if 2 Kings 8:26 says that Ahaziah was 22 when he began to reign and 2 Chronicles 22:2 says that Ahaziah was 44 when he began to reign, McDonald concludes that somehow they both have to me right. He then begins to look for some way to make the two statements appear to agree. That approach is about as dishonest as any method of interpretation could be, because it automatically excludes what is clearly a possibility, that at least one of the writers or maybe even both were wrong.
This brings me to something that McDonald conveniently overlooked in his point-by-point rebuttal that I didn't mention earlier in my list of fourteen items, because I wanted to comment on it in the context of McDonald's far-fetched approach to resolving Bible discrepancies. I challenged him to cite an example of contradiction or discrepancy in any inspired book (second affirmative, p. 15) so that I could then use his how-it-could-have-been methods to prove that it was not a discrepancy. He mentioned something about not having his Book of Mormon files with him, so I am going to remove that problem. I am going to challenge him to cite any discrepant statements in any written work, religious or secular. If he will do that, I will then use his methods to show that there is no discrepancy. I will even make it easy on him. I will even permit him to make up two statements that appear to be discrepant. Let's hope that he doesn't forget to do that in his next point-by-point rebuttal.
Despite all that I have said to show that I am semantically correct in defining contradiction as "inconsistency" or "discrepancy," he continued to beat that dead horse. He evidently sees himself as some kind of linguistic expert when in reality he makes errors in diction all of the time in this debate and the paper he publishes. What difference does it make whether we call the issue of Ahaziah's age when he began to reign a contradiction or a discrepancy or an inconsistency? Any of the designations makes it an error, and the inerrancy doctrine that McDonald believes in leaves no room for errors whether they be contradictions (in the strict philosophical sense), inconsistencies, or discrepancies. This is simply another straw man that he wants to beat on to draw attention from his inability to explain the contradictions or inconsistencies or discrepancies (let him take his pick of which term he wants to apply to them) in the Bible.
I sat patiently during my oral debate with him and listened to him quibble over the definition I had assigned to real, and now I have to do the same in this debate concerning my definition of contradiction. He tried to find a contradiction in my saying that I did not absolutely know that the Midianite virgins (Num. 31:18) were raped but that I was "very, very sure that they were" (second rebuttal, p. 26). This is how he established the contradiction: "The dictionary says that the word 'very' means 'absolute' and the word 'know' means 'sure'" (p. 27). How does one deal with that kind of mentality? For one thing, the dictionary defines very to mean absolute but only when it is used as an adjective as in "at the very (absolute) end of his career" (American Heritage Dictionary), but I didn't use the word as an adjective in the statement he quoted. It is an adverb modifying the adjective sure, and the dictionary defines very as an adverb to mean "in a high degree; extremely; exceedingly," which was exactly what I meant. He said that the word know means sure, but to have a point, he will have to find where sure means know, because I didn't use know in the statement he quoted; I used sure. And even if he could find a dictionary that gives know as a definition of sure, that wouldn't prove anything, because sure also means "confident" or "certain," which was the sense that I had intended. When is he ever going to tire of wasting our time on this kind of drivel?
To show the absurdity of his quibbles, I am going to use his approach to prove that I am a Christian. The fifth definition of Christian in The Webster's Deluxe Illustrated Dictionary is "humane, decent, generous." According to McDonald's logic that would make me a Christian, because I have no doubt that the people who know me well would agree that I am "humane, decent, and generous." Furthermore, the same dictionary gives this as its first definition of the word church: "a building for public Christian worship," but I know that unless McDonald is an unusual Church-of-Christ preacher he will balk at that definition and say that the church is not a building but the people who have "obeyed the gospel." If I accused McDonald of believing that Jesus was born not of a sexually pure woman but merely an unmarried woman, he wouldn't like that, but I can use his logic and prove that this is what he believes. Dictionaries give "an unmarried girl or woman" as one of the definitions of virgin; hence, McDonald doesn't believe that Jesus was born of a sexually inexperienced mother. I could have a lot of fun with this, but I think I have made my point. Let's hope that McDonald will now cease his endless quibbling and devote himself to seriously discussing the issues.
Did the readers notice what he said about why Yahweh killed the son born as a result of David's adulterous relationship with Bathsheba? "Had the child been allowed to live, he would have been in line for the kingdom, and the law stated that 'a bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord' (Dt. 23:2). This is saying that an illegitimate person would not be able to hold an office in the kingdom of Israel. Had this child been allowed to live, there would have been a problem" (second rebuttal, p. 29). But the problem was not nearly so serious as the one that McDonald has just created for himself. He is apparently so ignorant of the Bible that he doesn't know that David was a tenth-generation bastard. Genesis 38:12-30 relates the story of Tamar's seduction of her father-in-law Judah, which resulted in the birth of twin sons, Perez and Zerah (vv:29-30). By the biblical definition, these twin sons were bastards, because Judah and Tamar were not married. David descended through Judah and was a ninth-generation descendant of his bastard son Perez. Jerry can read it and weep in Ruth 4:18-22, where the genealogy of Ruth's son Obed was given, beginning with Perez, and extended down to David: "Now these are the generations of Perez:(1) Perez begat (2) Hezron, and Hezron begat (3) Ram, and Ram begat (4) Amminadab, and Amminadab begat (5) Nahshon, and Nahshon begat (6) Salmon, and Salmon begat (7) Boaz, and Boaz begat (8) Obed, and Obed begat (9) Jesse, and Jesse began (10) David." The same genealogy is repeated in 1 Chronicles 2:5-14 and Matthew 1:3-6. So, according to three separate genealogical tables, David was a tenth-generation bastard, who according to Deuteronomy 23:2 should have been barred from entering into the assembly and, according to McDonald, from "hold[ing] an office in the kingdom of Israel," but David did hold an office in the kingdom of Israel, didn't he?
We will anxiously await McDonald's frantic effort to extricate himself from this predicament that he has gotten himself into. (Don't you know he wishes he could take that paragraph back?) I am going to warn him not to reach for the straw that Mac Deaver tried to grasp on this same issue in our debate in San Marcos, Texas. Deaver said that since David was a tenth generation bastard, the restrictions cited in Deuteronomy 23:2 had expired with David's father, but that was obviously not the intent of the statement. "Even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord," the restriction stated. McDonald likes to play around with dictionaries, so let him check the meaning of even as it was obviously used in this text. It mean "to a degree that extends to: loyal even unto death," says the American Heritage Dictionary on this particular usage of the word even. The Hebrew word was gam, and Strong defines it to mean "also, (so much) as (soon)." The obvious intention of the statement, then, was to exclude bastards up until and including the tenth generation and even beyond, as we will soon notice. So according to McDonald, David should never have been allowed to hold an office in the kingdom of Israel or to enter into the assembly. Perhaps Jerry will want to take this up with Yahweh and set him straight on it.
While we are on this, I may as well point out that the same passage that McDonald quoted in Deuteronomy 23 said that a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of Yahweh, "even to the tenth generation shall none of them enter into the assembly of Yahweh forever"! The word that I have emphasized should settle the matter of whether David qualified to enter the assembly. The wording of the passage is such to indicate that a permanent ban from the assembly was pronounced against bastards, Ammonites, and Moabites. The clear intention of the passage was to state that they were permanently banned forever that "even ten generations" wouldn't be long enough to remove the ban. Now here is another nail in the coffin of the inerrancy doctrine. David wasn't just a tenth-generation bastard, who should have been banned forever from the assembly, but he was also a fourth-generation Moabite, because, as any Bible student knows, his great-grandmother was the Moabitess Ruth, who came to Israel with her mother-in-law Naomi and later married Boaz and gave birth to Obed, David's grandfather. Now let's sit back and wait for McDonald to try to climb out of the hole he has dug himself into. Yahweh just couldn't permit David's bastard son to live, because there would have been a problem with what to do about the restrictions that Deuteronomy 23:2 placed on those who had been born illegitimately. Yet David was covered not by just one restriction in this passage but two, and he was a man after Yahweh's own heart (1 Sam. 13:14). Maybe McDonald can explain all this to us.
McDonald accused me of evading the "negative arguments" that he presented, but I clearly explained why I would not waste time on them. They are completely irrelevant to the proposition we are debating. If he will kindly take the time to show how that proving the authenticity of questionable passages like Mark 16:9-20 would in any way prove the inspiration of the Bible, I will gladly respond to his comments. If he could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that "Mark" really did include the Marcan Appendix in his original autograph, the only thing he would establish is that Mark 16:9-20 was an authentic passage. Proving authenticity, however, does not prove inspiration and inerrancy. What is there about Mark 16:9-20 that would constitute proof that the passage was inspired of God? I know that he dearly loves the passage, because it contains a favorite Church-of-Christ quotation, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved," but there is nothing in the passage even to suggest inspiration. There is plenty in it that contradicts statements in the other three resurrection accounts, but I can't think of a thing in it that even implies that "Mark" was inspired of God when and if he wrote it. So if McDonald will explain what his proof of inspiration and inerrancy is that is based on this text and the others he cited, I will gladly answer him.
The same is true of McDonald's silly "negative argument" about Moses' rod. What is there in all that he said that constitutes proof that the Bible or even this particular story was divinely inspired? Well, he said, "There is nothing in either Moses' or Aaron's recorded history to show that either one of them were snake charmers." No, and there is nothing in this story that constitutes proof that any such thing as this ever actually happened, but there is much in it to suggest that it is crass myth and pure poppycock. So what was his point? He is going to have to do more than just arbitrarily declare that pharaoh's magicians had obviously gotten their power from Satan. Is there no end to this man's lack of common sense?
McDonald just won't give up on his good-men/bad-men argument. It has been ripped to shreds, but he still tries to hold onto it. To do so, he has had to resort to absolute absurdity. He quibbled that his argument was that "bad men would not write a book which [sic] condemns their evil, as if there is somehow a difference in evil and "their evil." Jimmy Swaggart and other bad men may "condemn evil (generally), but they would not write a book which [sic] would condemn them and their evil books" (second rebuttal, p. 5). Oh? If Jimmy Swaggart condemned pornography and adultery, as I have heard him do on TV, and then watched pornography and committed adultery himself, he would not stand condemned by his own preaching? How did McDonald arrive at a conclusion like that? He asked if I would write a book that taught men to believe in the Bible and avoid skepticism, and the answer is that I wouldn't. I think I understand myself enough to know that I have too much personal integrity to do that. That doesn't mean, however, that it would be impossible to find a skeptic who would write a book to teach men to believe in the Bible and to avoid skepticism. If there is money to be made, some people will do just about anything. If McDonald could get them to admit the truth, he could find men right in his own profession who agree with me yet stand in their pulpits on Sunday morning to preach what they know their congregations want to hear. His good-men/bad-men argument is a stupid one. It was stupid when Thomas B. Warren used it, and it is still stupid. It would be easy to find men who preach against the very things that they themselves do in their private lives. How many preachers commit adultery? How many preachers lie? How many preachers steal? A subscriber to The Skeptical Review recently sent me a clipping from a St. Petersburg, Florida, newspaper about a Catholic priest who had publicly crusaded against homosexual rights, and then guess what? He was arrested by a male undercover agent for soliciting sex. Bad men wouldn't write a book in which they condemned their evildoings? Pardon me while I laugh.
To expose his duplicity, I must juxtapose the parallel passages that told of Ahaziah's death:
But when Ahaziah king of Judah saw this [the murder of Joram], he fled by the road to Beth Haggan. So Jehu pursued him, and said, "Shoot him also in the chariot." And they shot him at the Ascent of Gur, which is by Ibleam. Then he fled to Megiddo, and died there. And his servants carried him in the chariot to Jerusalem, and buried him in the tomb with his fathers in the City of David (2 Kings 9:27-28, NKJV).
His going to Joram was God's occasion for Ahaziah's downfall; for when he arrived, he went out with Jehoram [Joram] against Jehu the son of Nimshi, whom the LORD had anointed to cut off the house of Ahab. And it happened, when Jehu was executing judgment on the house of Ahab, and found the princes of Judah and the sons of Ahaziah's brothers who served Ahaziah, that he killed them. Then he searched for Ahaziah; and they caught him (he was hiding in Samaria), and brought him to Jehu. When they had killed him, they buried him, "because," they said, "he is the son of Jehoshaphat, who sought the LORD with all his heart" (2 Chron. 22:7-9).
Now is McDonald going to tell us with a straight face that there are no discrepancies in these versions of the story? He said that "(b)oth instances state that he [Ahaziah] was slain and brought back and buried in Jerusalem," but just where do both versions state that? The account in 2 Kings says that Ahaziah fled to Megiddo "and died there." So where did he die in this version? He died "there," in Megiddo. The 2 Chronicles version, however, says that "they" caught Ahaziah hiding in Samaria (where Megiddo was) and brought him to Jehu and then killed him. Jehu didn't go to Megiddo; he was having too much fun back in Jezreel slaughtering anyone who had had any kind of role in Joram's government. Furthermore, both accounts do not say that Ahaziah was "brought back and buried in Jerusalem." The 2 Kings version says this, but the 2 Chronicles account says only that "they" (identified in some translations as "Jehu's men") brought Ahaziah to Jehu, and "(w)hen they had killed him, they buried him." Where does it say here that Ahaziah was buried in Jerusalem? Since the "they" who killed him were the "they" who buried him, we could hardly expect that foreign killers of a reigning king would have been stupid enough to take the body back to his capital and bury him. McDonald likes to talk about implication, so, to say the least, we have a definite implication in this account that the writer thought that the killers of Ahaziah buried him somewhere besides Jerusalem, probably in the city of Jezreel where Jehu's blood bath was taking place.
He charged me with saying that Ahaziah's servants buried him in the 2 Kings version, but, no, I didn't say that; 2 Kings 9:28 says that his servants buried him. After saying that "he [Ahaziah] fled to Megiddo and died there," the very next sentence said, "And his servants carried him in the chariot to Jerusalem, and buried him in his tomb with his fathers." The antecedent of his has to be he in the sentence before it. If not, the passage was very carelessly written, and, as I have repeatedly pointed out, that would pose as serious a problem for the inerrancy doctrine as discrepancy or contradiction.
He contended that the pronoun they in both places refers to Jehu's men. This, of course, is just another arbitrary assertion, but we aren't talking about they in both places. We are talking about a passage that says, "(H)e [Ahaziah] fled to Megiddo and died there. And his servants carried him in the chariot to Jerusalem." Now, as I said, if the antecedent of his in that sentence was not Ahaziah, then McDonald needs to explain why someone writing by the verbal inspiration of an omniscient, omnipotent deity couldn't do a better job of expressing himself than that. So obviously there is a problem here. Furthermore, the 2 Kings account says that Ahaziah's servants carried him in the chariot to Jerusalem and buried him there, but 2 Chronicles 22:8 states that, before Ahaziah was killed, Jehu "found the princes of Judah, and the sons of the brethren of Ahaziah, that ministered to Ahaziah, and slew them." So just who were the "servants" of Ahaziah in the 2 Kings version who carried Ahaziah's body back to Jerusalem in his chariot? The 2 Kings account has Jehu killing these servants in the 10th chapter long after Ahaziah had been killed. All of this and McDonald has the gall to say that there are no inconsistencies in the Bible text!
He keeps preaching that if he shows "likeliness" or "plausibility" that my conclusions are wrong, then he will have impeached my arguments as much as I impeach his arguments by showing the likeliness or plausibility of different conclusions, and I don't deny that. I have never denied it. What I deny is that he is showing likeliness or plausibility, because he isn't. He has never established likeliness or plausibility for any of his harebrained interpretations. He seems to think that arbitrarily declaring that a how-it-could-have-been scenario probably happened constitutes showing plausibility. Let's take the matter of Ahaziah's death and burial that I just discussed. He simply declared arbitrarily that the "servants" who took Ahaziah's body back to Jerusalem and buried him were Jehu's men. What proof did he present to show that this was a plausible interpretation? He presented no proof at all; he just said that this was the way it was. Well, is there anything that would make his claim "likely" or "plausible"? No, but there is plenty to make it unlikely and implausible. First, there is the principle of pronoun-antecedent agreement, which I carefully analyzed, that makes it implausible. Secondly, there is the unlikeliness that a nation of people would allow the foreign assassins of their king to accompany his body back to the nation's capital and bury him. So where is the "likeliness" or "plausibility" of McDonald's interpretation of this passage?
He has said that it is "likely" that Jehoram and Ahaziah conducted a lengthy co-reign, but he has not cited a single passage of scripture that even hints that this happened. He has simply declared that a co-reign of that duration was "likely," because David and Solomon had shared power for an extended period of time. However, my analysis of 1 Kings 1-2 earlier in this manuscript established that their co-reign began only in the last year of David's life. So where is McDonald's proof to show likeliness or plausibility that his conclusion adequately explains the discrepant statements of Ahaziah's age when he began to reign? There is none.
On the matter of the discrepancy in the two accounts of what the prophet Gad said to David, McDonald is still insisting that there can be variations in two written accounts of what a person said and both accounts still be inerrant. He said, "If Y told his boss that he missed work for three days because he was sick, it would be acceptable for his boss to write in a memo to the plant supervisor that Y said he was sick for seven days, three of which he missed work" (second rebuttal, p. 29-30). However, we are not talking about what is acceptable or unacceptable; we are talking about what constitutes inerrancy. If Y returned to work and said to his boss, "I was sick for three days," it would not be an inerrant account of what Y said if the boss wrote a memo that said, "Y returned to work today and said, 'I was sick for seven days.'" Such a memo would not be an inerrant account, because Y did not say, "I was sick for seven days"; he said, "I was sick for three days." This is exactly why 2 Samuel 24:13 and 1 Chronicles 21:10-12 constitute an irreconcilable discrepancy in the Bible text. They both purport to record what Gad said, and he could not have simultaneously said both three and seven. The problem is still there, and McDonald hasn't even come close to showing that his explanation of the discrepancy is "plausible."
I may have overlooked some other quibbles in McDonald's latest "rebuttal," but I need to go on to other matters. Besides, I have never made any claims of point-by-point responses. Quite frankly, much of what he says isn't worth responding to. He has committed himself on the issue of inerrancy in the epistles of the Apostle Paul, so I can now address matters that were put on hold until he had stated his position. That position is now a matter of record. He has declared that every single verse in the original autographs of Paul's epistles was inerrant. This, however, is a position that cannot survive logical scrutiny. For one thing, the Apostle Paul wrote at times as if he were everything but inspired of God. As a case in point, let's consider the marital advice that Paul gave to the Corinthians. Before specifying that the wife should not depart from her husband, he took care to say that this was a charge from the Lord, not from him (1 Cor. 7:10), but immediately thereafter he said, "But to the rest say I, not the Lord: If any brother hath an unbelieving wife, and she be content to dwell with him, let him not leave her" (v:12). The implications of this passage should be quite obvious: (1) Paul at times deemed it advisable to emphasize that what he was writing had come from "the Lord," as if he knew that some of his readers would question whether he was inspired, and (2) he at times did insert information into his epistles that even he admitted had not come from "the Lord." Sometimes he even seemed to be saying that he didn't know whether he was inspired or not. For example, after saying that the widow whose husband had died was free to marry whom she will, he said, "But she is happier if she abide as she is, after my judgment: and I think that I also have the Spirit of God" (1 Cor. 7:40). This is the language of a man being infallibly guided to write fundamental truths to guide mankind from then until the end of time? Under the guise of apostolic authority, he presumed to give advice after his judgment on an issue as important as the marital status that a recently bereaved widow should strive to maintain and then to justify it by simply saying, "And I think that I also have the spirit of God"! This gives a totally different picture from the one that fundamentalist preachers try to paint by constantly quoting 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21. Furthermore, if some people of Paul's generation who knew him personally questioned whether what he preached and wrote were truly inspired of God, as was certainly implied here and elsewhere in the New Testament (Gal. 1:11-20), why is it that the Jerry McDonalds of the world can be so cocksurely certain that everything the Apostle Paul wrote was inspired of God and was, therefore, completely inerrant?
As we shall soon see, whether Paul was inspired of God or not, he wrote at least one thing that no one can deny was erroneous, but first I want to call McDonald's attention to the obvious fact that some Bible writers did not claim inspiration for what they were writing. As already noticed, Paul at times pointed out that some things he was writing were his own personal opinions that had not come from "the Lord," so if that was so in some cases and even if we concede to McDonald that inspiration did occur in biblical times, how are we to know that Paul (and others) didn't at other times inject his (their) own opinions into his (their) epistles without telling us? As we shall soon see, Paul could be a forgetful sort at times, a very human characteristic that would make such an oversight highly possible.
Like Paul, Luke sometimes disclaimed inspiration. This was very apparent in the introduction to his gospel account:
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus; that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed (1:1-4).
Luke said very clearly in this statement that he was writing his gospel because "it seemed good" to him to do so, not because he was under the influence of some irresistible divine spell that was moving him to write. Furthermore, Luke indicated, in complete antithesis to the requirements of inspiration, that he had researched his subject before he had begun to write. After deciding that it would be "good" for him too to "draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us," he "traced the course of all things accurately from the first." To apply the principles of inspiration enunciated in 2 Peter 1:20-21, if the things that Luke wrote in his gospel were not matters of "private interpretation" and if he "spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit," why would it have been necessary for him to "trace the course of all things accurately from the first"? He was being guided by the Holy Spirit, but still it was necessary for him to research his subject. Does that make any sense?
If we are to believe plain biblical language, guidance of the Holy Spirit would have made research or even forethought and planning completely unnecessary on the part of the inspired ones. Luke himself confirmed this: "And when they bring you before the synagogues, and the rulers, and the authorities, be not anxious how or what ye shall answer, or what ye shall say: for the Holy Spirit shall teach you in that very hour what ye ought to say" (12:11-12). Parallels to this statement are recorded in Matthew 10:19 and Mark 13:11, so the New Testament position on inspiration is perfectly clear. Inspired ones didn't need to be anxious or concerned about what to say, because whatever the need or occasion might have been, the Holy Spirit would tell them on the spot what they should say. Luke wrote this, yet he had previously admitted that he had researched his subject before he himself sat down to write. Maybe McDonald can sort through all of this confusion and make some sense from it.
McDonald asserts that every verse that the Apostle Paul wrote in his epistles was inerrant (implying of course that he was divinely guided by the Holy Spirit to protect him from error), yet some of the epistles he wrote have been lost. In what is now called First Corinthians, Paul referred to a prior epistle that he had written to the Corinthian church: "I wrote unto you in my epistle to have no company with fornicators" (5:9). In reality, then, what we call First Corinthians wasn't really First Corinthians. It was actually Second Corinthians, and this would mean that Second Corinthians was in reality Third Corinthians. The Holy Spirit inspired him to write infallible truth in this first letter to the Corinthians, and then the Holy Spirit allowed whatever great truths were written in it to be lost forever. Does that make any sense? It makes about as much sense as the absurd claim that God meticulously protected all Bible writers from all errors of any kind as they were writing the "original autographs" but then allowed those "inerrant originals" to be lost forever so that we now have to glean eternal truth from copies that have been corrupted by scribal errors and mistranslations. Such a position as this can make sense only to the Jerry McDonalds of the world.
The missing letter to the Corinthians isn't the only lost Pauline manuscript. In writing to the Colossians (if one wants to believe that Paul really wrote this epistle), he said, "And when this epistle hath been read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and that ye also read the epistle from Laodicea" (4:16). Perhaps I have erred in calling the epistle to the Laodiceans a lost manuscript. As a matter of fact, it still exists; it just isn't accepted as a canonical document. Maybe McDonald can explain why it wasn't included in the New Testament canon. Paul commanded the Colossians to read it; the content is obviously harmonious with Paul's other epistles; the early church fathers held it in high esteem; yet it isn't in the New Testament canon. Why? McDonald has asserted that every verse that Paul wrote in his epistles was inerrant, but he won't accept Paul's epistle to the Laodiceans as inerrant scripture. We want to know why.
All of these facts are more than enough to discredit the claim that the Bible was inspired of God, but when textual analysis is added to the clearly worded statements in the Bible that disavow inspiration, only one intelligent conclusion can be reached: the Bible is a collection of uninspired, errant documents. As I said earlier, the Apostle Paul, despite what Mr. McDonald thinks, wrote at least one statement that was obviously erroneous. First Corinthians 1:14 was where he made the mistake: "I thank God that I baptized none of you save Crispus and Gaius."
The statement is short and to the point, and it is grammatically simple enough that no one can misunderstand the intended meaning of it. He clearly said that he had baptized none of the Corinthian Christians except Crispus and Gaius. After saying this, he stated why he was glad that he had baptized no one at Corinth except Crispus and Gaius: "Lest any man should say that ye were baptized into my name" (v:15). Is the following statement true or false: "Paul baptized none of the Corinthians except Crispus and Gaius"? If I asked Mr. McDonald to answer this question, for reasons we will soon notice, he would have to say that it is false, yet if he says it is false, then he will be saying that a clearly worded statement made by the Apostle Paul was erroneous. Paul said, "I thank God that I baptized none of you (Corinthians), save Crispus and Gaius," but McDonald will have to say that this was an erroneous statement.
Why will McDonald have to say that the statement in verse 14 was erroneous? He will have to because he surely knows that after Paul made this statement and gave his reason for saying it, he remembered as an apparent afterthought that he had actually baptized others at Corinth besides Crispus and Gaius and quickly corrected his mistake. "And I baptized also the household of Stephanas," he added, "besides, I know not whether I baptized any other" (v:16). If this statement was true, then the statement he made in verse 14 was false. If the statement in verse 14 was true, then the statement in verse 16 was false. The inerrantists simply cannot have it both ways. If Paul had baptized no one at Corinth except Crispus and Gaius, then it would be logically impossible that he had also baptized the household of Stephanas. The first possibility excludes the second, and the second excludes the first. Surely even Mr. McDonald can see that.
Major Premise: If the Bible is the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God, then 1 Corinthians 1:14 must be true and accurate in all details.
Major Premise: If the Bible is the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God, then 1 Corinthians 1:16 must be true and accurate in all details.
Minor (Disjunctive) Premise: Either 1 Corinthians 1:14 or 1 Corinthians 1:16 is not true and accurate in all details.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Bible is not the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God.
This syllogism catches Mr. McDonald on the horns of a dilemma. He has said and written much too much on the subject of Bible inerrancy for him to deny the truth of the two major syllogisms (unless he now wants to recant his previously stated position), so the only way he can escape between the horns of the dilemma is to prove that the minor or disjunctive premise is untrue. And how is he going to do that? How could it possibly be that Paul had baptized none of the Corinthians except Crispus and Gaius but at the same time had also baptized the household of Stephanas? Let's hope that Mr. McDonald can explain this to us.
No doubt he will accuse me of quibbling, but let him accuse. He is the one who has taken the position that the Bible in its entirety was inspired word for word by Yahweh of the Hebrews, an omniscient, omnipotent deity, and is therefore inerrant in every detail whether scientific, historical, chronological, geographic, or what have you. Now let him deal with the consequences of that position. He has come face to face with facts that clearly dispute his position.
Perhaps he will even opt for a Gleason Archerlike circumlocution. In a paper presented to the Southeastern Section of the Society of Biblical Literature (Atlanta, March 18, 1983), Dr. Robert H. Countess, who was in attendance at the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (Chicago, October 26-28, 1978), analyzed this same passage in 1 Corinthians and quoted correspondence that he had exchanged with Gleason Archer on the subject. In the fashion that he is now famous for, Dr. Archer tried to tiptoe around the problem:
He (Paul) imparts this information in an informal manner, to be sure, but by the time he has finished this item he has given all of the information, and done so with accuracy (unpublished letter to Dr. Countess).
Informal manner or not, Paul made a mistake that he later had to correct, and this fact flies in the face of everything the Bible inerrancy doctrine stands for. To protect the Bible writers from error, the doctrine proclaims, God guided them in everything they wrote, word-for-word, so that no mistakes of any kind would be made. Mr. McDonald did not challenge or dispute my quotations from George DeHoff's book (Alleged Bible Contradictions Explained): "(T)he Holy Spirit so guided and directed these men that they wrote exactly what God wanted them to write without any errors or mistakes.... The writers did not use one word unless God wanted that word used. They put in every word which God wanted them to put into the Bible" (First Affirmative, pp. 8-9). Article VI (in the statement issued after the summit of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy had adjourned) declared that "the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration." Is Mr. McDonald now going to deny these fundamental tenets of Bible inerrancy?
If McDonald intends to stick to the requirements of the inerrancy doctrine as they have been clearly explained in the above quotations from reputable inerrancy spokesmen, he is obligated to answer some very relevant questions about 1 Corinthians 1:14-16. Did Paul write in this passage exactly what God wanted him to write? If so, did God want Paul to make a mistake that would have to be corrected later? If this was what God wanted, why would he have wanted it? Wouldn't the whole purpose of inspiration be to prevent error rather than to cause error that must afterwards be corrected? Why did God have Paul say that he had baptized no one at Corinth except Crispus and Gaius when in fact he had baptized others? Does this mean that divine inspiration did not protect writers from momentary mistakes, oversights, and lapses of memory? If not, what assurances can McDonald and his inerrancy colleagues give us that no momentary errors like these went uncorrected in the Bible text? These are questions that he owes us answers to.
Obviously, a momentary oversight was made in 1 Corinthians 1:14. It was corrected two verses later, and no doubt that will be the foundation of McDonald's defense, but the fact that a correction was made--even immediately made--does not remove the fact that a mistake was made. The inerrancy doctrine, however, leaves no room for "corrected errors." God is supposed to be both omniscient and omnipotent, and an omniscient, omnipotent deity would not need to correct errors, because he would make no errors to correct.
So this brings us to the matter of Paul's first visit to Jerusalem following his conversion in Jerusalem. As explained in my first affirmative, Luke indicated that Paul went to Jerusalem immediately after his conversion, so immediately in fact that he arrived there before word of his conversion had had time to reach the Jerusalem Christians (Acts 9:26-27; 22:17-21), but Paul told the Galatians that he had neither gone to Jerusalem nor conferred with the other apostles until three years after his conversion (1:15-19). In this passage, he claimed that he had gone to Arabia after he left Damascus. McDonald argued that Luke did not say that the apostles and Christians at Jerusalem had not heard of Paul's conversion. "Where is that found?" he asked. "All Luke said was 'but they were afraid of him, and believed not that he was a disciple (Acts 9:26)." By this, I assume that McDonald is arguing that the apostles and Christians in Jerusalem had heard of Paul's conversion but just didn't believe what they were hearing. He wanted to know where my proof was that they had not heard. Well, the proof is there clearly by implication. He likes to talk about implication, so I suggest that he take a look at Acts 9:27. After saying that the disciples at Jerusalem did not believe that Paul was now a disciple, Luke wrote, "But Barnabas took him [Paul], and brought him to the apostles, and declared unto them how he [Paul] had seen the Lord in the way, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus." Now what are we supposed to conclude from this, that Barnabas was just telling the apostles what they had already heard? If they didn't believe what they had already heard about Paul's conversion, why would hearing it one more time make them believe it? Actually, this is nothing but another of McDonald's desperate quibbles, for even if the disciples at Jerusalem had already heard of Paul's conversation, the fact that they did not believe he had been converted just as forcefully proclaims a short period of time between Paul's conversion and his return to Jerusalem. Does McDonald expect us to believe Paul had been actively preaching for three years but in all of that time, the Jerusalem disciples didn't believe that he had been converted?
Perhaps the easiest way to put this point aside and go on to other matters would be to let the apostle Paul settled it. McDonald has asserted that every single verse that Paul wrote was inerrant, so I ask him to show "likeliness" or "plausibility" that Paul was saying in the following statement that the disciples in Judea had heard of his conversion but just didn't believe it. After telling the Galatians of his first trip to Jerusalem three years after his conversion, Paul said this:
I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report: "The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." And they praised God because of me (Gal. 1:22-24, NIV).
I know that McDonald doesn't like quotations from any version but the KJV, but I have quoted the NIV, because it, like many other translations, makes the passage easier to understand. So now we have Luke and McDonald vs. the Apostle Paul. According to Luke, the disciples at Jerusalem hadn't heard of Paul's conversion when he first returned to Jerusalem. According to McDonald, they had heard about the conversion but just didn't believe it. But according to Paul the churches in Judea (where Jerusalem was located) had both heard of his conversion and believed it. If not, then why were they "praising God" because of Paul? Or if McDonald insists upon the KJV version, why were they "glorifying God" because of Paul?
About the only alternative left to McDonald now is the "gapped-itinerary" theory that his friend Bill Jackson relied on as an explanation for this "apparent" discrepancy. (To inerrantists, discrepancies, no matter how obvious, are always just "apparent" discrepancies.) So I will head him off on this before he has the chance to try it. According to this theory, if one should leave St. Louis, go to Denver for six months, then to Phoenix for two years, and finally to Los Angeles, he would not be in error if he said that he left St. Louis and went to Los Angeles. This matter was addressed in detail in my first affirmative (p. 27), so I won't rehash it here. Suffice it to say that the "gapped-itinerary" theory might be acceptable if it provided a reasonable explanation for other important factors in the story of Paul's first trip back to Jerusalem following his conversion, but it doesn't explain them. It creates more problems than it solves.
The chief problem that the theory cannot resolve is the fact that Luke (in the passages cited above) clearly indicated that the Jerusalem Christians did not know of--or in deference to McDonald's quibble, didn't believe in--Paul's conversion when he first returned to the city. In my debate with Bill Jackson, I pressed for a reasonable explanation for why three years would not have been enough time for news of their great persecutor's conversion to reach Christians who lived less than 200 miles from where Paul had been converted. The only attempt that Jackson made to address this problem was a sarcastic comment about Till's thinking "that the communications of the day was [sic] such that they (Jerusalem Christians) surely would have seen it on the 6:00 newscast" (Jackson-Till Debate, p. 44). Let's hope that McDonald can beat this. Let him give us a sensible explanation for why three years had not been enough time for convincing news of Paul's conversion to get back to Jerusalem. Word of his persecution of the church had preceded him to Damascus (Acts 9:21), but three years wasn't enough time for news of his conversion to get back to Jerusalem. Is this what McDonald expects us to believe?
The matter of whether the Jerusalem Christians knew about Paul's conversion on his first return to the city is a crucial one. Luke clearly indicated that the local Christians knew nothing about it: "And when he was come to Jerusalem, he assayed to join himself to the disciples: and they were all afraid of him, not believing that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and declared unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way, and that he had spoken to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus" (Acts 9: 26-27). In a sermon that Luke attributed to Paul, it was also claimed that Paul's return to Jerusalem from Damascus had preceded news of his conversion:
And it came to pass, that, when I had returned to Jerusalem, and while I prayed in the temple, I fell into a trance, and saw him saying unto me, Make haste, and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem; because they will not receive of thee testimony concerning me. And I said, Lord, they themselves know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them that believed on thee: and when the blood of Stephen thy witness was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting, and keeping the garments of them that slew him. And he said unto me, Depart: for I will send thee forth far hence unto the Gentiles (Acts 22:17-21).
So if we are able to understand plain language, Luke's record is perfectly clear. At the time of Paul's return to Jerusalem from Damascus, the local Christians had not yet heard of his conversion.
As just noted, however, Paul's own account of his first trip back to Jerusalem, differed dramatically:
But when it was the good pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles; straightway I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them that were apostles before me: but I went away into Arabia; and again I returned unto Damascus.
Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and tarried with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother. Now touching the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not. Then I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. And I was still unknown by face unto the churches of Judea which were in Christ: but they only heard say, He that once persecuted us now preacheth the faith of which he once made havoc; and they glorified God in me (Gal. 1:15-24).
The discrepancies between what Paul said here and what Luke said in the passages I have cited in Acts are so obvious that even Jerry McDonald should be able to see them. Paul said that he didn't confer with the apostles after his conversion; Luke said that he did (Acts 9:27-28). Luke said that Barnabas took Paul and brought him to the apostles (plural); Paul said the only apostles he saw on his first trip back to Jerusalem were Cephas (Peter) and James the Lord's brother. Paul said that three years transpired before he returned to Jerusalem; Luke clearly implied that he went directly from Damascus to Jerusalem (Acts 9:25-26). Luke said that the Jerusalem Christians did not know about (or did not "believe" in) Paul's conversion at the time of his first trip back to Jerusalem, but Paul said--and let's hope that McDonald takes careful notice of this as I run it by him a second time--that on his first trip back to Jerusalem "he was still unknown by face unto the churches of Judea which were in Christ, but they only heard say, He that once persecuted us now preacheth the faith of which he once made havoc. And they glorified god in me" (Gal. 1:22-23). This statement is devastating to the often heralded inerrantist claim that the Bible is perfectly harmonious from cover to cover.
To further illustrate the precarious ground on which the inerrancy doctrine rests, let's juxtapose 1 Corinthians 1:14 with a statement Paul made in the passage quoted above from his epistle to the Galatians:
I thank God that I baptized none of you, save crispus and Gaius (1 Cor. 1:14).
But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother (Gal. 1:19).
As we have already noticed, Paul's subsequent correction of his first statement proves that, inspiration or no inspiration, he was subject to memory lapses that could and did result in the writing of errant information. To argue that he or the Holy Spirit or God or whoever immediately caught the mistake and corrected it neither (1) removes the fact that an error was made nor (2) guarantees that memory lapses did not occur elsewhere in the Bible and go undetected and, therefore, uncorrected.
Is it at all possible that Paul suffered memory lapses when he said that he did not go to Jerusalem until three years after his conversion and that when he did go there for the express purpose of visiting Cephas he saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord's brother? Well, Luke said that Barnabas took Paul to the apostles (Acts 9:27) and that afterwards he (Paul) was "with them going in and out at Jerusalem" (v:28). I suppose McDonald could argue that if Barnabas took Paul to see only Peter and James, it could correctly be said that he took Paul to see "the apostles," and he probably will argue something as ridiculous as this (after all, he will have to say something); the apostles, however, was an expression that unless restricted as it was in Acts 14:14 (But when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of it, they rent their garments) referred to the whole group that had been designated apostles. So if we are going to trust Luke's word when he reported that Barnabas took Paul to the apostles, what are we to do with Paul's claim that he saw no apostles on his first trip back to Jerusalem except Cephas (Peter) and James, the Lord's brother? Is it at all possible that Paul suffered another memory lapse that this time he left uncorrected? If we consider the fact that we are talking about a man who couldn't even remember whom he had baptized at Corinth, this possibility seems more than just remote. "I know not whether I baptized any other," he said (1 Cor. 1:16). And it is on testimony such as this that the Jerry McDonalds of the world have rested their faith in Bible inerrancy.
We should consider also that Galatians 1:19 is the only place in the New Testament where James, the Lord's brother, was called an apostle. Other passages assign him a position of leadership and prominence (Acts 15:13; 21:18) in the Jerusalem church, but none of them identifies him as an apostle. Acts 21:18 implies that he was an elder in the Jerusalem church. So could it be that Paul's memory had lapsed in Galatians 1:19 to the extent that he couldn't even remember who was and who wasn't an apostle? Whether we can determine that or not, one thing should be clear: the testimony of the Apostle Paul is a questionable peg to hang the inerrancy doctrine on. He made at least one mistake in his epistles, and that one mistake is enough to disprove the Bible inerrancy doctrine.
In my first affirmative manuscript, I raised an issue related to all this that McDonald has yet to explain satisfactorily. At the very least, inerrantists must admit that confusing situations can be found in the Bible, especially in the variations found in parallel passages such as those that I identified in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21. Even if McDonald and his colleagues can unequivocally prove (and they can't) that these were not contradictions, they still must admit that the variations cause confusion. They themselves speak about "alleged" and "apparent" Bible contradictions and write apologetic books such as Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties and Haley's Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. Why speak about "difficulties" and "alleged discrepancies" in the Bible, if these "difficulties" and "alleged discrepancies" are not real? So the related issue is the one I have already asked McDonald to explain. Why would an omniscient, omnipotent deity write a book as confusing as time has proven the Bible to be? Shouldn't we have the right to expect omniscience and omnipotence to beat what we find in the Bible as far as clarity of meaning is concerned? If not, why not? McDonald has yet to give satisfactory answers to these questions.
In my first affirmative manuscript, I put the problem of "alleged Bible discrepancies" like this:
(F)or the Bible to have been inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent deity, it would have to be completely free of errors of any kind. To say otherwise would be to say that omniscience and omnipotence did not know enough and did not have enough power to avoid making mistakes. So far so good, but what the inerrantists refuse to admit is a second consequence of the doctrine, and that would be that a book inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent deity would have to have been written with such skill and clarity as to make misunderstanding and confusion impossible. To say otherwise is to say that omniscience did not know enough and did not have enough ability to avoid creating confusion (p. 13).
I'm still waiting for McDonald to deal with this issue, and now in particular I would like for him to confront the issue and the implications that it has for Paul's memory lapse in 1 Corinthians 1:14. How could such a thing happen in a case of divine inspiration as Bible fundamentalists define inspiration? Whatever is being written, wouldn't omniscience and omnipotence (if they were guiding and directing the writing) get it right the first time? If not, why not? What would be the good of divine inspiration if the Holy Spirit now and then went to sleep on the job?
Furthermore, if the Holy Spirit is guiding and directing the writing of a document, why wouldn't one effort at recording an event or telling a story be sufficient? In other words, if the Bible were truly inspired by God, why does it have parallel passages such as those that we find in the books of Samuel and the Chronicles, the books of Kings and the Chronicles, and the synoptic gospels? As we have noted, for example, 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 relate the same incidents surrounding a census that David conducted but with significant variations, yet we are supposed to believe that God inspired both writers as they recorded this story. If this is so, why did God deem it necessary to "inspire" a second version of the story after he had had the writer of 2 Samuel to record it? After all, can omniscient, omnipotent inspiration be improved on? In other words, did God decide, after inspiring the writer of 2 Samuel to record the story, that there were imperfections in it that needed improvement? Is that the reason for the variations in the two accounts? But if God inspired the first account, why wouldn't that account have been perfect? And if it was perfect, why would there have been a need for a second version? Wouldn't the inspiration of a second account of the story be an admission on God's part that there were imperfections in the first account? Or maybe God just likes to repeat himself. Perhaps so, because he inspired Isaiah (chapter 37) and the writer of 2 Kings (chapter 19) to write the same thing twice.
The four gospel accounts illustrate the damage that parallel accounts do to the inerrancy doctrine probably even better than OT parallel passages. The premise that inerrantists want us to believe is that the Holy Spirit inspired Mark to write a biography of God's son. Well, okay, if this was the way it was done, why didn't the Holy Spirit make Mark's gospel complete enough so that it would tell all that needed to be told about the life of Jesus in order for us to believe on him and through believing on him have eternal life? But apparently it didn't work that way. After Mark had completed his gospel, the Holy Spirit (we are told) inspired Matthew to write another biography of Jesus to which a significant amount of information was added that Mark didn't include in his version. Why? After inspiring Mark to write his gospel, did the Holy Spirit decide that he had goofed and left out information that we needed to know, so he called on Matthew to write another inspired biography of Jesus to correct omissions that he had let slip by when he was inspiring Mark to write? Before McDonald ridicules this suggestion, he should remember that the Holy Spirit let the household of Stephanas elude Paul's memory for a moment and then had to have him correct a previously written inaccurate statement. In my oral debate with McDonald, he used the fallacy of the heap to justify eternal punishment in hell. "Would it be all right for God to punish a disobedient person in hell for one second?" he wanted to know. Well, if it would be okay to punish such a person in hell for one second, would it be all right to punish him for two seconds? For three? For four? For five? And so on up until eternity? That was the way his argument went. In our oral debate, McDonald wouldn't admit that this was a fallacy, so now I will ask him a form of the same question. If the Holy Spirit could let an error slip by him for just a moment, as he did in the case of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:14, couldn't it be possible that an error could slip by him for, say, one minute? And if one could go by for one minute, why not two? Or three? Or four? Or a day? Or a week? A month? A year?
So let McDonald tell us if this is why we were given four inspired gospel accounts. The Holy Spirit inspired Mark's version, then decided that he hadn't been at his best as he was guiding Mark's hand, so he selected Matthew to do an improved version. Then as time went by the Holy Spirit realized that neither Mark's nor Matthew's version had been quite up to snuff, so he called on Luke to do a third version. Afterwards, deciding that none of the first three versions had made Jesus divine enough, he enlisted John to do a fourth and final biography of Jesus. Is this how it happened? If not, why were four gospel accounts written? Let McDonald explain to us why. The mere existence of four "inspired" biographies of God's son is all the proof we need that the inerrancy doctrine is more baloney than anything else. If an omniscient, omnipotent deity were inspiring a biography of anyone, he would be able to make a perfect one the first time around.
I now come to my favorite part of the debate, answering McDonald's questions. As usual, he has warned of what he will assume, if I do not answer his questions. I have stated that my failure to answer his questions, whether from negligence or flagrant evasion, would not give him the right to assume anything. Why would my failure to answer a specific question in any way indicate what my belief on the issue might be? I have asked him that before, but he has not bothered in his point-by-point rebuttals to answer it. So why does he continue to do it? Well, it was Thomas B. Warren's style of debating, and McDonald sees himself as sort of a new Thomas B. Warren. So I am going to tell him to stop his Thomas B. Warren tactics and warn him that if his next set of questions includes statements about what he will assume if I don't answer, then I will not answer his questions. If he will ask his questions without all this I-see-myself-as-a-great-debater-in-the-Thomas-Warren-tradition, he will not have to worry about whether I will answer his questions, because I will. Why should I worry about answering questions posed by an intellectual midget of McDonald's caliber?
One: Is the following statement true or false? (If you do not answer we will assume that your answer is true.) "Absolute truth is impossible to obtain."
Answer: The answer depends upon what category of truth he means. Although some would disagree, I believe that absolute truth can be achieved in some areas but not others. In a base-ten math, for example, one could argue that it is possible absolutely to know that 2 + 2 will equal four, but to determine absolute truth in some matters of science, philosophy, and morality appears impossible. For example, a woman in this country recently gave birth to twins who were genetically her grandchildren. Ova from her daughter's ovaries were surgically removed, fertilized in a laboratory by sperm from the daughter's husband, and then transplanted into the grandmother's womb. Was this morally right? I challenge McDonald to tell us what absolute moral truth is in this matter and to explain how he arrived at that truth. Maybe he can quote us a book, chapter, and verse that would resolve the matter.
Two: Is the following statement true or false? (If you do not answer, blah, blah, blah.) "Ethics is autonomous and situational."
Answer: True. Even McDonald must agree to my answer, because he believes that killing babies is normally immoral, yet he argued in our oral debate that a "special situation" justified God's ordering the massacre of the Amalekite children.
[Editor's Note: In additional to McDonald's belief that there is a "situation" in which killing babies would not be immoral (if God did it or ordered it), he also thought that David's lying to king Achish was morally right because David was in a "situation" that made it right for him to lie.]
Three: Is the following statement true or false? (If you do not answer....) "I have proven that the Bible is not inerrant. Therefore, I am absolutely sure that it is not the verbally inspired word of God. It can't be."
Answer: I made this statement in my debate with Bill Jackson, and I will not retract it. It was a true statement in the sense of the customary way that people use language, an area that McDonald obviously has no expertise in. He will want to make an issue over the expression "absolutely sure" as I used it. Probably he will trot to the dictionary to make a big point over what absolutely means. If, however, I handed a test back to my students with the comment, "The results of this test were an absolute disaster," would anyone, except McDonald possibly, understand me to mean that it would be impossible for any students ever to perform more disastrously? Certainly not! McDonald likes legalism until it backfires in his face as it has on several occasions in this debate. He is an absolute joke!
Four: Whose moral code was God guilty of violating when he had Saul utterly destroy the Amalekites?
Answer: First, I want to know what he is going to assume if I don't answer that question. I am not one to evade issues, however, so I will answer it. If morality is objective, as he claims it is, then morality is something that is self-existing. It exists independently of mind. (If he doubts this, then let him check his dictionaries.) Objective morality, then, would be a morality that exists simply because it exists. If morality is absolute, as McDonald claims it is, then whatever is immoral is always, without exception, immoral. So if objective morality exists, then, assuming that the event happened as recorded, God was guilty of violating the objective moral code when he had Saul massacre the Amalekites, because if morality is objective and absolute, then even God himself would have to be subject to it. If he isn't, then there is no such thing as objective morality. On the other hand, if objective morality does not exist, then God simply violated the nonobjective moral code that tells every reasonable thinking person (which excludes Bible fundamentalists) that killing babies is wrong.
Five: Is the following statement true or false? (If you do not answer....) "Since there is no objective moral code, one person's moral code is just as good as another and everyone is to set his own standard for what is moral and what is not."
Answer: False. How could the moral code of an idiot or an insane person be "just as good" as the moral code of a competently intelligence person? How could the moral code of a child be "just as good" as the moral code of a mature person experienced in the social interactions of life?
To move the debate along, I will close with a new affirmative argument briefly stated. If McDonald rejects it, I will expand it later. That argument concerns a flaw in the nature of God. Theists believe that God is infinite in all of his characteristics, and I have personally heard McDonald make this claim. However, if God is "infinite" in justice, then there is a serious discrepancy in the Bible. To demonstrate this, I must first call attention to a biblical doctrine that says people who do not know the difference in good and evil will not be held accountable for their actions. This doctrine is clearly taught in such passages as Deuteronomy 1:39 and Jonah 4:11. There is no need for me to explicate these passages to support my statement, because McDonald will agree. He even stated agreement with this principle in his second rebuttal (p. 5).
Very well, if this is an absolute truth, then Yahweh perpetrated a terrible injustice in his punishment of Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit. A simple logical process is all we need to establish that. Yahweh commanded Adam and Eve concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die" (Gen. 3:3, NKJV). We all know what happened. The serpent tempted Eve, and she ate of the forbidden fruit. She then persuaded Adam to eat of it too, and Yahweh punished them by banishing them from the Garden of Eden and pronouncing a sentence of death upon mankind.
The flaw in this story is that the infinitely just Yahweh punished Adam and Eve for having done something at a time when they did not know the difference in good and evil. In persuading the woman to eat of the tree, the serpent [Satan] said to her, "For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good from evil" (Gen. 3:5). The statement clearly indicates that at the time the serpent was speaking to Eve, she didn't know the difference in good and evil and would not know it until she had eaten of the forbidden fruit. McDonald might say, "Well, that was only Satan speaking, and Satan is the father of all lies" (Jn. 8:44), but later, after the act of disobedience had become a fait accompli, Yahweh himself said that Satan was right: "Then Yahweh God said, 'Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever'--therefore Yahweh God sent him out of the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken" (Gen. 3:22-23).
The conclusion is inescapable. The Bible teaches that Yahweh gave a commandment to a man and woman who at the time did not know the difference in good and evil. That being true, it was not possible for them to know that they were doing wrong when they disobeyed the command. They were, therefore, no more guilty of "sin" than were the children of the Israelites who on that day, when their parents sinned in the wilderness, had "no knowledge of good and evil" or the 120,000 in Nineveh who didn't know their right hand from their left. For Yahweh to have punished Adam and Eve as he did was a poor commentary on his infinitely perfect justice.
That, of course, is no surprise. The Bible is riddled with examples of poor commentary on the infinitely perfect character of God. McDonald will deny that, but he cannot successfully refute it.
Go to McDonald's Third Rebuttal
