Once again, I must waste valuable space to deal with the irrelevant tangents that McDonald keeps leading us into. He seems more interested in proving me inconsistent (or even a liar) than in refuting my arguments and presenting information that might give some respectability to his inerrancy position. In an earlier rebuttal, he dragged out some articles that I wrote for The Firm Foundation thirty-four years ago, which I honestly can't even remember having written, and tried to twist their content into proving that I have been dishonest in stating my motives for leaving the Church of Christ. The best I can tell, he thinks he has found indications in those old articles that I had a grudge against the Church of Christ and that this was my real reason for quitting rather than the disillusionment that I claim to have experienced from having discovered discrepancies and inconsistencies in the Bible text.

In reviewing the articles, I saw absolutely nothing to justify the conclusion he has reached. So I criticized the Church of Christ for being lax in its attitude toward missionary work--was this an improper thing to do? Didn't the facts that I quoted in the article support my premise that there was a glaring inconsistency in the claim of the Church of Christ to be the church and its deplorable missionary record? I wonder if McDonald speaks out about the things that he sees wrong in the general affairs of the Church of Christ. If not, then what kind of "gospel preacher" does he purport to be?

[Editor's Note: An editorial insertion in Till's second affirmative points out that McDonald brought up these same articles in the Errancy forum but later had to admit that they did not support what he was claiming about Till's reason for quitting the ministry.]

Now McDonald wags in a quotation from a letter that I wrote to him in July 1989 in which he thought he had found me admitting that I do "nothing more than go to the Bible to find contradictions" (third rebuttal, p. 10). In reality, I said no such thing in the statement he quoted from the letter, which I will quote again for the convenience of the readers:

By September of 1963, I realized that textual inconsistencies and discrepancies I had begun to notice in my Bible studies would no longer allow me to continue preaching or even participate in worship services. I decided to "drop out" until I had found satisfactory answers to the problems that were bothering me (emphasis JM's).

How McDonald managed to interpret this as an admission that I was reading the Bible at that time just to try to find contradictions in it is beyond my ability to comprehend. Obviously, I intended no such meaning as this. I was merely saying that in my personal Bible studies I had found inconsistencies and discrepancies to such a degree that my conscience would no longer allow me to continue preaching. In the sentence that he underlined, I was merely saying that I decided to quit (drop out) until I had found satisfactory answers to the biblical inconsistencies that had been bothering me. That was not to say, however, that I was purposefully looking for inconsistencies. To the contrary, I was purposefully looking for ways to resolve the inconsistencies I had found, but the discovery of those inconsistencies had not resulted from an intentional search for them. One does not stand in a pulpit and preach that the Bible is God's inerrant word and then go home, open the Bible, and purposefully look for things that would contradict what he had preached. Surely McDonald can see that.

I really think that he can see it, that his distortion of what I said in the letter he quoted was simply a smoke screen he is trying to lay down to hide the obvious fact that he has no plausible explanations for the Bible discrepancies that I have identified in this debate. In typical fundamentalist fashion, McDonald stopped quoting my letter at a point where what I was saying wouldn't fit into the mold he was trying to cast me in. In the very next sentence, I went on to say this: "I devoted many hours to researching the pros and cons of the inerrancy doctrine, and eventually the only conclusion I could conscientiously reach was that the inerrancy doctrine was erroneous." If the readers will add that statement to the fragment of the paragraph quoted above, they will see that I didn't mean at all what McDonald tried to make me say. I said that I devoted many hours to researching the pros and cons of the inerrancy doctrine, so I was clearly saying that I looked at both sides, not just one. I might add that those "many hours" spanned over two decades, because I waited that long to go public with my position. That hardly sounds like someone intentionally looking to discredit the Bible.

So where is the lie that McDonald thinks he has caught me in? I clearly communicated to him that my personal Bible studies had uncovered what seemed to me to be discrepancies and contradictions. I didn't purposefully look for them; I simply noticed them while reading the Bible. The only thing that I have admitted to doing purposefully was to look for ways to explain the discrepancies, but, as I said in the quotation cited above,  I eventually came to realize that the inerrancy doctrine is patently erroneous. The reason why I could reach no other conclusion is one that McDonald is probably incapable of understanding: I was unwilling to accept ridiculously absurd, how-it-could-have-been explanations that are based on nothing but pure speculation. I couldn't conscientiously swallow flimsy arguments for the inspiration of the Bible that I would have laughed at had they been used to try to prove the inspiration of the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or any other allegedly inspired work. So if McDonald wants to find something ignominious in my letter that he quoted, then let him. He is good at finding what is not in written texts.

Space is valuable in this debate, so this is absolutely the last time that I will waste it responding to his personal quest to prove that I lied about my reasons for quitting the Church of Christ. If he wants to think that I have lied, then let him, for even if he could present undeniable evidence that I did lie, that would prove nothing one way or the other about the issues of this debate. The truth or falsity of a belief is always independent of its source. I could be the biggest liar who ever walked the face of the earth, but that would in no way affect the truth or falsity of anything I personally believe, including my belief that the Bible contains discrepancies and errors. Likewise, McDonald could be the most morally virtuous person who ever lived, and that would not prove the truth or falsity of anything that he personally believes, including his belief that the Bible is the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God. Morally despicable people may have beliefs that are true, and morally virtuous people may have beliefs that are false. I implore McDonald, then, to stop laying down smoke screens and deal with the issues. Why I left the Church of Christ has no relevance to those issues. Whether I studied the Bible with the avowed intention of trying to find errors in it does not prove that there are no errors in the Bible. The truth in this controversy can be demonstrated only by evidence and certainly not personality flaws.

In response to McDonald's boast that he always answers me point by point, I listed 14 examples of matters I had raised in my third affirmative manuscript "that he did not respond to point by point, except sometimes in passing mention, which is certainly not point-by-point rebuttal." (The statement enclosed in quotation marks has been copied directly from the computer file in which my third manuscript was saved.) Now McDonald has taken almost two pages in single-spaced, 17-point print to try to show that he did respond to all of these point by point. I will not impose on the readers' patience by discussing each of his "point-by-point" claims, but an analysis of some of them will be sufficient to show that he came nowhere close to answering all of these questions and arguments "point by point."

The  first one I listed was my request that he explain why he did not believe that Islam is Allah's true religion, since the Koran claims that it is the true religion: "Surely the true religion with Allah is Islam. And those who were given the Book differed only after knowledge had come to them, out of envy among themselves. And whoever disbelieves in the messages of Allah--Allah indeed is quick at reckoning (III.3.17-18).  McDonald's major premise in his "argument for the inerrancy of the Bible" (first  affirmative, p. 15) was this: If God wrote the Bible, and if it claims inerrancy, and if God cannot lie, then the Bible is free from error" (emphasis added). Inherent in this "argument" is an assumption that if the Bible claims something, i. e., that God wrote it, that it is inerrant, and that God cannot lie, then it has to be true. I have pressed him to explain why the Bible should be accorded privileged status and why, if a claim in the Bible is enough to establish its truth, a claim in any other book should not be enough to establish its truth. He has not given a plausible answer to that question.

He has quibbled that the Koran does not claim inspiration, and in this, he is disputing the conclusions of Islamic scholarship that far surpasses his superficial understanding of what the Koran teaches. On the pages he cited (second rebuttal, pp. 1-3), where he claimed to have explained why he does not believe that Islam is "the true religion with Allah," he didn't even attempt to explain why he doesn't believe this Koranic claim. This is what he said in reference to III.3.17-18:

Does this verse claim that the Quran is inspired of God? The messages of Allah could be anything. And the the book--well that is not real [sic] clear either. Produce a verse which says something like this: "The Quran is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteous"(second rebuttal, p. 3).

Now just where is the answer to the question I asked: "(I)f just the claim of a book is enough to prove the truth of whatever it claims, then why doesn't McDonald believe that 'the true religion with Allah [God] is Islam,' as the Koranic quotation above says?"  Can anyone find the answer in the statement quoted from the page on which McDonald claimed that he had answered this question? Certainly not, because no one can find that which doesn't exist. So I will ask him the question again. The Koran says, "Surely the true religion with Allah is Islam." This is obviously a Koranic statement, so if the mere claim of a book is enough to establish the truth of the claim, why doesn't McDonald believe that Islam is "the true religion with Allah [God]"? Let's hope for an answer in his next "point-by-point" rebuttal.

I don't wish to waste too much space on McDonald's quibbles, but since I have come this far on this point, I may as well comment on the rest of what he said. About the "book" that the Koran, in the above quotation, said was "given," McDonald said, "And the book--well, that is not real [sic] clear either." Of course it isn't "real clear" to McDonald, because he knows that his quibble is in deep trouble if he admits that this book was the Koran. I would just like to ask him what book he thinks the Koran would give such importance to if it isn't the Koran himself. Furthermore, right after referring to this book that was "given," the same passage says, "And whoever disbelieves in the messages of Allah--Allah indeed is quick at reckoning." To this, McDonald could only say, "The messages of Allah could be anything." However, anyone reading a statement like this would quite naturally interpret the "messages of Allah" to be the messages contained in the book that was given, which Moslems believe was the Koran, but McDonald can't make this obvious interpretation without surrendering his point.

Another major "argument" that McDonald made for the inspiration of the Bible is its claim that people will be judged by the Bible the last day (first affirmative, p. 17), a premise that he based on John 12:48, where Jesus allegedly said, "He that rejecteth  me, and receiveth not my saying, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I spake, the same shall judge him in the last day." Well, it's peculiar to me that someone who can't find the Koran in the book mentioned in the Koranic quotation cited above can so easily find the Bible in this quotation from John. The quotation says nothing at all about the Bible. To prove that it does include the Bible, McDonald would have to prove that (1) Jesus actually said this, that (2) even if he did say it, it was a true statement, and that (3) the rest of what the Bible says is in fact the words that Jesus spoke.  Since McDonald can prove none of these, his argument falls on its face. For the sake of argument, however, let's just concede that the mere statement attributed to Jesus in John 12:48 is sufficient to prove that the Bible is the inspired word of God. The Koranic statement quoted above says, "(W)hoever disbelieves in the messages of Allah--Allah indeed is quick at reckoning,"   and the essence of that statement is quite parallel to what Jesus allegedly said in John 12:48. So if the mere existence of a claim is enough to establish its truth, then let McDonald explain to us why he is not heeding the messages of Allah recorded in the Koran to avoid the reckoning of Allah.

In an earlier reference to a "book," the Koran said, "It is He who sent down to thee (step by step), in truth, the Book, confirming what went before it. And he sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind." To this, McDonald said, "Well, admittedly it does speak of a book which was supposed to be sent down from God, but this book was supposed to confirm the law of Moses and the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the Quran does neither." Oh, really? I suggest that McDonald review Part XIX.26.2-4; 27.1; 28.1-5. This section tells the story of Moses (with some variations from the biblical text, of course) and refers to Moses as a prophet who had been called by Allah. It refers to a "Book" that was given to Moses (XIX.28.5.43) and mentioned a prophet like Moses (44-45) who would come later, to which the Islamic translator of my version (Maulana Muhammad Ali) affixed a footnote that said, "Moses' prophecy about the advent of the Prophet--of a prophet like him from among the Ishmaelites, the brethren of the Israelites--was so clear that one would think that the Prophet was there at the side of the mountain and Moses saw him with his own eyes." Verses 48-49 in this section go on to say, "And they say: Surely we are disbelievers in both [books that these two prophets, Moses and Mohammed, gave]. Say: Then bring some (other) Book from Allah which is a better guide than these two, I will follow it--if you are truthful." To these verses, Maulana Muhammad Ali affixed this footnote:

The meaning is that, if you do not admit the truth of either revelation, you should show some other revelation existing in the world, which should offer better guidance. This statement only draws attention to the fact that the revelation granted to Moses and that granted to the Holy Prophet both occupy a higher position than any other revelation. And this is in fact true, for among all the sacred books of the world the Bible occupies a position second only to the Qur'an. The words, however, do not signify that the Bible occupies a position equal to the Holy Qur'an (sixth edition, 1973).

On the matter of whether the Koran "confirms the gospel of Jesus," I will simply say, without fear of McDonald successfully refuting it, that the Koran also recognizes that Jesus was a prophet, the last of the great Israelite prophets, and then leave McDonald to argue with what the Koran obviously says and what the best Islamic scholarship says that the Koran means. Very obviously, then, the Koran teaches that it was a book that Allah [God] gave to mankind as a moral guide, and most assuredly it flatly says that "(s)urely the true religion with Allah is Islam." Let McDonald deny the Koranic claim of divine origin all that he wants to, but he cannot deny that the Koran plainly says that Islam is the true religion with Allah. Now let's hope that he will answer my question and tell us why he does not believe that Islam is God's true religion. To deny that it is, he will have to admit that a claim is not proof of fact, and when he does that he will have kicked the props right out from under many of his so-called syllogisms, which have nothing to prove them but what the Bible claims.

In this section of his rebuttal, McDonald claimed that he had answered on pages 9-10 of his second rebuttal what I had said about outlandish myths in midrashic commentaries (where the works of Kimchi and Abarbinel appeared). The place he cited, however, merely says that (1) he didn't have the works of Kimchi and Abarbinel but only what Gill had said on the matter, and (2) the fact that K & A contributed writings to a collection that contained obvious myths doesn't necessarily mean that they believed in the myths. Now this is what McDonald calls a point-by-point rebuttal. I ask the readers to please notice that I introduced my list as items that McDonald had not addressed, "except sometimes in passing mention, which is certainly not point-by point rebuttal." This is one of the items he referred to in "passing mention," but it can't in any sense be considered a point-by-point rebuttal. In the first place, how much credence does he expect us to give to the resolution of a discrepancy offered by someone who said that Kimchi and Abarbinel said thus-and-so about the matter? As McDonald has ably demonstrated, anyone can dream up absurdly far-fetched senarios and offer them as "explanations" of "alleged" Bible discrepancies. However, to prove that they really are proper explanations is not so easy, as McDonald has also ably demonstrated. Secondly, McDonald must be pretty desperate for "proof" if all he can do is quote second-handed references to the midrashim, a collection of Jewish commentaries that refer to 450-foot giants roaming the earth, one of which waded after the ark as the flood water rose, and other equally ridiculous tales. His reference has about as much credibility as a quotation from The National Enquirer in an article trying to prove that alien beings are visiting our planet in flying saucers.

He claimed that he gave us biblical proof in his rejoinder (page 3 point 5) that "where the kings worshiped was where they reigned," but he did no such thing. The only proof for this that he can find in any of the passages he cited in his rejoinder is the far-fetched, speculative kind that he continually resorts to when he has no clearly stated biblical proof to support his how-it-could-have-been scenarios. He cited Jeroboam, the first king of Israel after the split with Judah, as an example that proves his case "by inference." Well, what was the important "inference" that McDonald saw in the record of Jeroboam's reign? To keep his subjects from going to Jerusalem to worship, Jeroboam made two golden calves and put one at Dan and one at Bethel and told the people to worship there (1 Kings 12:25-33). "Bethel is where he [Jeroboam] resided," McDonald  concluded, "and where he resided is where he reigned." My, my, I have learned not to be surprised at anything McDonald might say to try to salvage his precious inerrancy doctrine. Just before the verses (26-29) that tell of Jeroboam's designating Bethel and Dan as the sites where the golden calves would be put, we are told that Jeroboam "built Shechem and dwelt there" (v:25). Now we don't have to "infer" anything from this, because the verse clearly states that Jeroboam dwelt in Shechem.

Is there anything in the Bible text to indicate that Jeroboam also dwelt in Bethel? We are told that Jeroboam "went up to the altar which he had made in Bethel," and that is a rather clear indication that he wasn't living in Bethel. If I should say that "Jerry McDonald went up to Jefferson City to worship," that would be appropriate to say, because he doesn't live in Jefferson City; he lives several miles away in Sullivan. Since he lives in Sullivan, one would not say that he went up to Sullivan to worship, because he already lives in Sullivan.

If this is not enough to convince McDonald that his big inference has turned out to be just a big "bust," he might want to consider that Jeroboam was living in a city called Tirzah when his son died (presumably as a punishment from Yahweh), and this is clearly evident from 1 Kings 14:1-20. His son fell ill, and Jeroboam had his wife to disguise herself and go to Shiloh to ask the prophet Ahijah if the child would recover. While she was en route, Yahweh revealed to Ahijah that she was coming and told him what to say to her. When she arrived, Ahijah told her that the boy would die. "Arise thou therefore, and get thee to thy house: and when thy feet enter into the city, the child  shall die" (v:12). Later, the claim was made that "Jeroboam's wife arose, and departed, and came to Tirzah: and as she came to the threshold of the house, the child died" (v:17). Now McDonald has to believe that this story is true in every detail or else surrender his inerrancy position, and the story indicates that Jeroboam's house was in Tirzah at this time.

Here, then, are the facts (according to the Bible) about Jeroboam's place of residence:   (1) he dwelt in Shechem early in his reign, (2) he built worship sites in Bethel and Dan, (3) he went up to Bethel to worship on at least one occasion, and (3) he lived at Tirzah at the end of his reign. So just where is the big implication that tells us "where the kings worshiped was where they resided"? It just isn't there. Yet to "prove" his important inference, McDonald used only a short paragraph on the page he cited. I call that "passing mention," because to sustain his point about an assumed 20-year co-reign of Jehoram and Ahaziah, McDonald must prove that Jehoram reigned longer than the eight years "in Jerusalem" mentioned in 2 Kings 8:17 and 2 Chronicles 21:20. To do this is going to require much more than wishful thinking and one paragraph.

This matter of an imaginary Jehoram-Ahaziah co-reign has gone on long enough, so let me give it what should be its finishing touch. When Ahijah the prophet appeared to Jeroboam to tell him that Yahweh had chosen him to rule over the northern division of a divided kingdom, Ahijah told Jeroboam that he would be given only ten tribes. Why only ten rather than all twelve? The answer was that Yahweh would give unto David's son (Solomon) "one tribe, that David my servant may have a lamp always before me in Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen to put my name there" (1 Kings 11:36). This prophecy was frequently alluded to as the reason why Yahweh did not deliver the southern kingdom into enemy hands even when the Judean kings failed to respect Yahweh's law. It was said of Solomon (1 Kings 11:12), of Abijam (1 Kings 15:4), and it was also said of Jehoram. Even though Jehoram "walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as did the house  of Ahab" (2 Kings 8:18), "(h)owbeit Yahweh would not destroy Judah for David's sake, as he promised him to give unto him a lamp for his children ALWAYS" (v:19). Now if Jehoram reigned for twenty years in some place besides Jerusalem, as McDonald wants us to believe, then there were twenty years when David did not have the lamp in Jerusalem that Yahweh had promised he would always have. Of course, when the southern kingdom (Judah) fell to Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C., David's lamp went out permanently in Jerusalem anyway, but that is just another problem for McDonald to solve if he wants to salvage his inerrancy doctrine. At this point, all we need to notice is that there is absolutely no textual evidence of any kind in the Bible to support McDonald's fantasyland theory that Jehoram and Ahaziah co-reigned for twenty years in some place besides Jerusalem. Without this evidence, however, there is no way for him to explain away the discrepancy in the ages given for Ahaziah at the time he began to reign (2 Kings  8:26, 2 Chron. 22:2).

That issue is now dead, but he seems determined to stick to his claim that the biblical evidence for a David-Solomon co-reign makes possible a Jehoram-Ahaziah co-reign, so I will put the finishing touches to this matter as well. The mere fact that David made Solomon a co-regent wouldn't prove, in the absence of other evidence, that any other Judean king did the same in his reign. That is so patently obvious that anyone but a hopelessy naive inerrantist can see it. For one thing, David was "old and full of  years" when Solomon was made his co-regent, a clear suggestion that David was physically unable to discharge the duties of a king. Where is there even a hint that Jehoram had some illness or infirmity that made it expedient to appoint his son co-regent?  He was certainly never "old and full of years." Indeed, he began to reign when he was thirty-two, and he reigned for eight years in Jerusalem (2 Kings 8:17). So he was forty when he died (as Josephus agreed, Antiquities, 5.3). That is hardly "old and full of  years." [Editor's Note: In fairness to McDonald, we point out here that Jehoram did suffer a "disease of the bowels," which caused his death (2 Chron. 21:19), but the duration of this disease was just two years, not nearly the 20 that McDonald has claimed in his solution to this age discrepancy.] Even if McDonald adds an imaginary twenty years to this figure, that would increase Jehoram's age to only sixty, which again is hardly "old and full of years." Just what compelling reason can McDonald find in the Bible text to give plausibility to his co-reign theory? He can't say, "Well, I need it to avoid having a discrepancy in the Bible." That is exactly why he has conjured up the co-reign, but he can't openly admit that it is. To do so would show him guilty of trying to prove inerrancy by assuming inerrancy.

The only textual support he has been able to find for any co-regency in Israel was that of David and Solomon, and even then this was not a Judean reign.  David reigned over a united kingdom, and the split didn't occur until he was dead.  Furthermore, all evidence indicates that the co-reign was short, having begun some time in the final year of David's reign. So desperate is McDonald to find something to shore up his theory of a twenty-year co-reign of Jehoram and Ahaziah that he denies the obvious. He claimed that he had blown my theory on 1 Chronicles 23-29 "all to pieces," but this is just wishful thinking on his part. The pieces are all there for any reasonable person to see. Even McDonald cited the passage that says that the ceremony described from chapters 23 to 29 occurred in the final year of David's life. David reigned for 40 years (1 Kings 2:11; 1 Chron. 29:26-27). So if the Hebronites were called out "in the fortieth year of David's reign" (1 Chron. 26:31), then all of this elaborate ceremony was happening in the last year of David's life. Furthermore, close to the beginning of the ceremony, we read that "by the last words of David, the sons of Levi were numbered" (23:27). So the situation is clear enough to anyone who wants to see it. "David was old and full of years, and he made Solomon his son king over Israel" (23:1). He "gathered together all the princes of Israel, with the priests and the Levites" (v:2), and "the Levites were numbered from thirty years old and upward" (v:3). During the numbering of the Levites, the first order of  business after it was said that David made Solomon king, we read, as cited above, that "by the last words of David, the Levites were numbered." The ceremony continued, and after it was over David "died in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honor" (29:26-28). What can anyone possibly make of this but that David made Solomon king in the fortieth or last year of his reign? I trust that McDonald won't quibble about the meaning of "the last words of David" and say that they were not the last words, because other things said by David were recorded after this. Inerrantists like to talk about "phenomenal" or "accommodative" language when it suits their purpose. Indeed, McDonald pled that 1 Corinthians 7:12, which I cited as an indication that Paul sometimes admitted that he was not writing by inspiration, was just "an expression of speech that Paul would be allowed to use as... his style of writing" (third rebuttal, p. 19). We can apply this same principle to "the last words of David." They weren't literally the very last words that David spoke, but they were certainly the last words of David in the sense that they were spoken right at the end of his life. If McDonald objects to this interpretation, I would like for him to explain in what sense they were "the last words of David."

McDonald tried to make an important point from the fact that "David stood on his feet and addressed Israel and gave Solomon, who was already king in Israel, the charge to build the temple" (third rebuttal, p. 5). In 1 Kings 1 and 2, David was presented as an infirm man who was bedridden, so McDonald wanted to know how the two passages could have been referring to the same time in David's life. First of all, McDonald excludes the possibility that two different writers telling the same story could have presented discrepant views of the coronation. If he could undeniably establish that the Chronicle  writer(s) thought that David was physically fit all through the coronation ceremony, he would simply establish that there is a contradiction in this version of the story and its parallel recorded in 1 Kings 1 and 2. He doesn't want to admit that, but nevertheless it is a possibility.

I assure him that such a discrepancy as this would not be the only inconsistency in the Chronicle writer's history of Israel and its parallels recorded in the books of Samuel and Kings. Is McDonald so uninformed on this subject that he has never noticed that the Chronicle writer(s) "cleaned up" David's life in telling of his exploits? The Chronicle accounts of David do not tell about his days as a guerrilla marauder (1 Sam. 27:8-12), his random massacre of Moabite captives (2 Sam. 8:2), his torture of the Ammonite captives (2 Sam. 12:29-31), his massacre of 200 Philistines in order to get their foreskins as a dowry for Saul's daughter (1 Sam. 18:27), his adultery with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), and several other unsavory incidents in David's life. Surely, all of this was not accidental oversight (something McDonald couldn't admit anyway); it was a deliberate attempt to rewrite Israelite history to present their heroic king in a more favorable light than his biography had been told in the earlier books. That being so, it is no big mystery why the Chronicle writer(s) would not have presented David as an old, bedridden man who had to sleep with a young virgin to keep warm. None of this, however, would dispute the obvious fact that the Chronicle story agrees with the account in 1 Kings 1 and 2 in that they both had David making Solomon king in the last year (40th) of David's reign. Besides this, the fact that someone is bedridden one day or one week doesn't mean that he won't have periods during which sufficient strength is recovered to stand up. I have personally witnessed this change of condition in my own aging relatives.

In view of what the verses cited above from 1 Chronicles say about the time when all the ceremony took place, my analysis of 1 Kings 1 and 2 still stands unimpreached. I will summarize my points again: (1) after David's son Adonijah had made an abortive attempt to declare himself king, David gave orders for Zadok the priest to anoint Solomon king (1:32-37), (2) when David received word that Zadok had executed the orders, David said, "Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel, who hath given one to sit on my throne this day, mine eyes even seeing it (1:43-48), (3) David urged Solomon to seek vengeance on his enemies, especially Shimei, who had earlier insulted David (2:1-9), (4) David died (2:10), (5) Solomon began executing his and David's enemies (2:13-35), (6) Solomon spared Shimei but restricted him, under penalty of death, not to go beyond the brook Kidron (2:36-38), (7) after three years, Shimei crossed the brook Kidron and was executed (2:39-46), and (8) Solomon began to build the temple in the fourth year and second month of his reign. Put all of these facts together, and you have to conclude that Solomon's co-reign with David was very short, beginning some time within the last year of David's life. There are, of course, discrepancies in the stories as told by the writer(s) of Kings and the writer(s) of Chronicles, but there is nothing in either account to indicate that Solomon was made king "some time before David died," as McDonald claimed in his last rebuttal (p. 6). This leaves him with exactly nothing to commend his Jehoram-Ahaziah co-reign.

For some reason that McDonald will have to explain, he thinks that I must show that "between 1 Kings 2:46 [the execution of Shemei] and 1 Kings 6:1 [the beginning of construction on the temple] there was no timespan" (third rebuttal, p. 8). He then went on to say that "(i)f one year lapsed between the two events, Mr. Till's whole argument is down the drain." I don't know how he arrived at that conclusion, but I thank him very much for the rest of the paragraph in which he presented ample evidence to show that at least one year had passed between Shemei's execution and the beginning of work to build the temple. This is exactly how I interpret the chronology too! It blends perfectly with my exegesis of the final years of David as told in 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles. In the 40th or final year of his reign, David made Solomon king (1 Chronicles 23:1,27; 26:31; 29:22-23; 1 Kings 1:32-46; 2:11). Immediately after David's death, Solomon purged the kingdom of his and David's enemies but spared Shemei's life (1 Kings 2:36-38). Three years later, Solomon ordered the execution of Shemei (1 Kings 2:39-46). One year later, work on the temple began in the fourth year and second month of Solomon's reign. The chronology matches perfectly. Wouldn't McDonald be delighted to have just a tenth as much "implication" to support his far-fetched attempts to explain Bible discrepancies?

All of this has been wagged into the debate, of course, because McDonald has asininely tried to argue that if David and Solomon shared a long co-reign, it could have been possible that Jehoram and Ahaziah also shared a long co-reign, which might show that there is no discrepancy in the listing of Ahaziah's ages as 22 and 42, respectively, when he began to reign (2 Kings 8:26; 2 Chron. 22:2). The complete bankruptcy of his position has been shown in his attempt to lay on me the obligation to prove that David and Solomon did not share a lengthy co-reign. This was his latest effort to put that responsibility on me:

There is a difference between the accounts of 2 Kings 8:26 and 2 Chronicles 22:2 in dealing with Ahaziah's age. I  have  never denied this. However, what I have asked Mr. Till to do is to prove that the difference constitutes a contradiction. All of us admit that there is a difference, but a difference does not necessitate a contradiction. He says that I have not given the verse of scripture to give Biblical precedent to the 20-year theory. Well, where is his specific passage specifically stating the 1-year co-reign theory between David and Solomon? He has none (third rebuttal, pp. 8-9).

In the first place, I have no obligation to show that David's and Solomon's co-reign was of short duration, because it doesn't matter how long their co-reign was. If they co-reigned for fifty years, that would not prove that Jehoram and Ahaziah co-reigned for one day. There is at least textual reason to believe that David and Solomon shared power for a time, and I believe I have given ample evidence to show that their co-reign was of short duration; however, there is absolutely no textual evidence, not even remote implication, that Jehoram and Ahaziah ever shared power. So if McDonald is going to offer a co-reign theory as a solution to the textual discrepancies in Ahaziah's age, he has the responsibility to produce the evidence that such a co-reign occurred or was even likely. He has done neither. The matter is as simple as the logical axiom that says, "He who asserts must prove." He has asserted that a co-reign occurred, so let him prove that it did. Indeed, why should I have to find a specific passage specifically stating that David's and Solomon's co-reign lasted only one year? I have wasted time on the issue only to show the readers that McDonald's far-fetched theories of reconciliation have no textual support in the Bible.

As for his claim that the differences in the ages given for Ahaziah do not constitute contradiction, I can only ask why the exact expressions in both Hebrew and English would not constitute contradiction when one says "(t)wo and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign" (2 Kings 8:26) and the other says "(f)orty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign" (2 Chron. 22:2). The only difference in wording in either passage is the numbers given for the ages, so if that is not a contradiction (in the sense of discrepancy or inconsistency), just what does it take to constitute contradiction? McDonald has offered his completely speculative theory of a twenty-year co-reign to explain it, but one could argue with equal validity that one writer was using a base-ten math and the other a base-five math. Since 42 in a base-five math would equal 22 in base ten-math, this could be a how-it-could-have-been explanation to the problem. To give credibility to such an explanation, however, the one who advances it would have to give textual evidence from the Bible that would prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Chronicle writer(s) sometimes used a base-five math.

This is enough said to put aside McDonald's rantings about how when I am in the negative, presenting a probable or likely alternative to my opponent's biblical interpretations is sufficient to impeach his arguments but when my opposition is in the negative, I will not allow probable or likely explanations. The key words are probable and likely. I submit that I present detailed information to establish the likeliness or probability of the alternative interpretations that I use in response to my opponent's arguments. McDonald doesn't; he simply waves at many of my arguments in passing and calls that impeaching them with "likely" or "probable" explanations. I have no fear that any fair-minded  person reading this debate will disagree with me about this. To prove my point, all I need to refer to is the space I have devoted to discussing the issue of Ahaziah's age and the theoretical 20-year co-reign as opposed to the effort McDonald has put into it. I still defy him to produce one--just one--biblical text that even implies that Jehoram and Ahaziah shared power for twenty years. The readers surely know that he would have produced the passage long ago if any existed.

Finally, he has accepted my challenge to produce two statements that he considers contradictory so that I can use the methods of Bible inerrantists to show that they aren't necessarily contradictory. He presented the following quotations from Adrian Swindler's rebuttals in the McDonald-Swindler debate on the resurrection:

He again refers to Tacitus and Josephus as having made reference to Jesus. Both were too far removed in time to have first-hand knowledge of the situation.... One cannot relate writers then with historical writers now, because there were no printing presses, newspapers, precious little records, none at all in many cases... (second rebuttal, p. 9).

As to records being kept back in the first century, he denies that there were not good records. I do want to thank him for that admission and this is exactly what I wanted him to say, because it is true that the Romans did keep very good records of official actions and there is not ONE about the existence of Jesus, let alone his resurrection" (third rebuttal, p. 9).

I must say that I am disappointed. I had hoped for at least a little challenge, but McDonald has made my task absurdly easy. To show that Swindler did not contradict himself in these two statements, all I must do is use the same methods that Bible inerrantists resort to when they are explaining away "alleged discrepancies" in the Bible. So to begin the analysis of Swindler's statements, we start first with the assumption that there is no contradiction, that no matter how great the difficulty appears to be, a way can be found to harmonize the "apparent" discrepancy. Secondly, McDonald must concede that as long as I can show what Swindler could have meant and in doing so arrive at interpretations that remove the "alleged discrepancy," then I will have proven that Swindler did not contradict himself. McDonald must concede that these are legitimate methods or else surrender his position in this debate, because I can point to example after example where he has used these same methods to "explain" Bible discrepancies.

In the first quotation, Swindler was simply saying that the reliability of what Tacitus and Josephus may have written about events and persons removed from their time period and first-hand experience cannot be compared to the reliability of modern historical writers, because the number and quality of records available to writers in the time of Tacitus and Josephus were greatly inferior to those that modern historians have access to as a result of printing presses, newspapers, etc. Back then, the records were few, possibly no more than the copy that the record keeper wrote by hand; today, printing equipment, newspapers, copy machines, faxes, electronic transmitters, etc. result in multiple copies of the same records being available in various towns and cities. To gain access to records back then, Tacitus and Josephus would have had to travel miles to get to where they were kept. Today, any historian can plug in his computer or go to his local library and find what he is looking for.

In the second quotation, Swindler was saying that the Romans "did keep very good records of official actions," but by this he meant "very good records" in the sense of the quality of records that were kept back then. Compared to today's records, they were not as extensive and certainly not as objective. (One only has to read the bitter sarcasm of Tacitus and his flagrant editorializing in his works to see that he wasn't objective in the sense that we assign to the word objective today.) Furthermore, Swindler said in the second quotation that the Romans kept very good "official records." It is possible that his first quotation referred to records in general, which would have been few in number compared to today, whereas his second quotation was addressing the matter of "official records." Better yet, I could even say that the "alleged" discrepancy was not in Swindler's "original autographs." What McDonald received was only a copy that had been done when a secretary at Swindler's newspaper office typed the manuscript from Swindler's handwritten original. She thought it needed punching up, so she added the statement in the second rebuttal to make the paragraph more consistent with what she thought Swindler really wanted to say. Swindler himself, however, never made the statement in his "original  autographs." Since Swindler's "original autographs" were thrown away and no longer exist, McDonald must prove that the mistake was in the original.

I submit that any of these resolutions of the "alleged contradiction" in Swindler's statements is every bit as logical as the ones that Bible inerrantists offer as explanations to Bible discrepancies. When they are confronted with numerical discrepancies, they argue that "different writers" were using "different methods of calculation" or that the discrepancies  resulted from copyist errors that were not in "the original autographs." When confronted with different details in the synoptic gospels, they talk about the different audiences that the different writers were addressing, or they claim that one writer was narrating chronologically and the others weren't, and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. All of it is pure speculation that they rarely have any supporting evidence for.

To explain away a problem in Luke's gospel, for example, McDonald pled that "Luke was writing to the Greeks, people who demanded detail and chronology, and he was telling them  that his account was such an account" (third rebuttal, pp. 19-20). That's interesting, because I had one taker on The Skeptical Review's offer of $2,000 to anyone who can write a single narrative that consistently includes all details from all of the resurrection accounts, and this gentleman argued that Luke 23:55 did not contradict Mark 16:1, because Luke did not write chronologically. I will present the problem to McDonald and challenge him to resolve it while at the same time he sticks to his premise that "Luke was writing to Greeks who demanded detail and chronology":

LUKE 23:55 And the women, who had come with him out of Galilee, followed after, and beheld the tomb, and how his body was laid. And they returned and prepared spices and ointments. AND ON THE SABBATH DAY THEY RESTED.

MARK  16:1  And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices that they might come and anoint him.

One passage says that the women obtained spices and then rested on the sabbath day, and the other says that the women bought the spices when the sabbath was past. I will now wait to see McDonald harmonize these two statements without surrendering his claim that Luke wrote chronologically. Whatever he says--and I assure you he will dream up something--he will demonstrate that my methods of harmonizing Swindler's statements are just as legitimate as his methods of harmonizing "alleged contradictions" in the Bible.

What this all means is simply that the inerrantist methods that McDonald and his cohorts use to "explain" Bible discrepancies make the concept of discrepancy itself impossible. In other words, when their methods are applied, there can never be discrepancies in any documents, secular or biblical, because there will always be some how-it-could-have-been or what-was-really-intended interpretation to apply to the passages that appear to be discrepant. If inerrantists can apply this approach  to biblical interpretation, anyone else is entitled to apply it to any other documents. If not, why  not? So the consequence of inerrantist hermeneutics is the complete elimination of even the possibility of discrepancy, and no rational-minded person can accept a philosophy as utterly ridiculous as this.

McDonald, of course, will deny that his methods produce this consequence, because he wants to eat his cake and have it too. He wants the freedom to apply his far-fetched hermeneutics to the Bible but at the same time wants the right to declare arbitrarily that he has discovered discrepancies and contradictions in the writings of Farrell Till, Adrian Swindler, Dennis McKinsey, or anyone else who writes unfavorably about the Bible. The readers have surely noticed that he has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to "prove" that I have been inconsistent and contradictory. No matter how much I explain that the contradictions he imagines in my writings are not really contradictions, because I really meant thus and so instead of what he has twisted my statements into meaning, he still persists in claiming that he knows better than I what my own statements and comments meant. I wrote the statements and should therefore know what I meant, but McDonald insists on denying me that right, because he sees himself more qualified to explain what the statements of someone else really meant.

In doing this, he has used ploys that are utterly ridiculous. I use a particular word like real, and he finds dictionaries that give absolute as just one of the  definitions of real, and insists that I therefore had to mean absolute, even though I declare that I did not mean absolute and am supported in my claim by dictionaries that give other definitions for real that are compatible with what I say that I actually meant. That should be enough to settle the matter for any reasonable person but not Jerry McDonald. He countered with this astonishing statement: "Even his own dictionary, which he handed me in that  debate, defined it [real] 'authentic,' 'genuine,' and according to  my  thesaurus, the  word 'absolute' is a synonym for both 'genuine' and 'authentic'" (third  rebuttal, p. 11, emphasis added). I am going to speak very bluntly at this point and ask, "How does one deal with stupidity like this?" He apparently doesn't know that a thesaurus doesn't list just exact synonyms but also words that are only vaguely related in  meaning.  For one thing, many linguists question if there is really any such thing as a  true synonym for  any  given word, but certainly one makes a serious mistake if he assumes that all words listed under the same heading in a thesaurus have exactly the same meaning. Using his method, I can establish that McDonald is a pastor, a title that he wouldn't dare apply to himself, because my thesaurus lists pastor as a synonym for preacher. The same entry lists clergyman, man of the cloth, pulpiteer, friar, and circuit rider as other synonyms for preacher. I suspect, however, that these are all titles that McDonald would not want applied to him.

When I earlier exposed the fallacy in his reasoning by showing that the dictionary makes me a Christian, the church a building, and virgin a young unmarried woman, he protested that I was using the English dictionary to define Greek words, butI beg to differ with him. When he finds the words Christian, church, and virgin in a Greek dictionary, I will admit that I am wrong, but he will never be able to do that, because they are not Greek words. He went on to say that the word virgin comes from the Greek word parthenos (p.12), but there is no connection at all between the words. Virgin was derived from the Old French word virgine, which in turn came from the Latin virgo.  Of course, the Greek word parthenos meant virgin, but virgin is in no sense a "Greek word," as McDonald claimed. Why then did he accuse me of using an English dictionary to define Greek words? I wasn't defining Greek words; I was defining English words to illustrate the absurdities in his reasoning

That is enough said to put this quibble of his to rest, but I just have to comment on his claim that ‘alma "was the Hebrew word for the maid who had never known man by lying with him" (p. 12). He said this, of course, because ‘alma was the word used in Isaiah 7:14 in reference to a "virgin" who would bear a son and call his name Emmanuel. The Septuagint, which Matthew quoted in Matthew 1:23, translated ‘alma with parthenos, a Greek word that meant virgin, so inerrantists struggle and struggle to try to find the meaning  of virginity in the Hebrew word ‘alma. Strong defines this word as "a lass... damsel, maid, virgin." Now did Strong give the last word as a definition because the word actually meant that, or was he bowing to the Septuagint version and the virgin-birth tradition that this translation subsequently spawned? Well, it is curious to notice that Strong's Concordance lists 26 instances where the word virgin appears in the King James Old Testament. Only two of them are places where the Hebrew text used the word ‘alma. The other place besides Isaiah 7:14 was Genesis 24:43, where reference was made to a "virgin" who, as a sign to Isaac, would come to a well to draw water. There is nothing in the text to demand that the word meant anything more than maiden or young woman. Indeed, the ASV used maiden rather than virgin in the translation of this verse.

The 24 other places where the KJV used virgin, the original Hebrew word was bethulah, and it was the word used in the Old Testament when obvious references to sexual purity were intended. One passage will be enough to prove this point:

Deuteronomy 22:13-19 If  any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, and lay shameful things to her charge, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came nigh to her, I found not in her the tokens of virginity [bethulim]; then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity [bethulim] unto the elders of the city in the gate; and the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; and, lo, he hath laid shameful things to her charge, saying, I found not in thy daughter the tokens of virginity [bethulim]; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity [bethulim]. And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take the man and chastise him; and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin [bethulah] of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days.

If McDonald wants to find how ‘alma was used in the Old Testament, he should look up maiden in Strong's Concordance. He will find it there several times when references to young women were made with no intention to signify sexual purity. An example would be Proverbs 30:18-20: "There are three things which are too wonderful for me, Yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; The way of a serpent upon a rock; The way of a ship in the midst of the sea; And the way of a man with a maiden [‘alma]. So is the way of an adulterous woman; She eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness." Now I will ask McDonald to tell us if ‘alma was being used in this passage in the sense of a "virgin woman."

McDonald has tried to justify the exclusion of David from the restrictions in Deuteronomy 23:1-3, which banned bastards from the assembly "even to the tenth  generation," on the grounds that David was the tenth generation descendant of the bastard Perez, so therefore the ban did not apply to him. His reasoning is that the restriction extended to the tenth generation but did not include the tenth generation. I don't at all agree with this interpretation, because the obvious intention of the language was to ban all descendants of bastards forever regardless of what generations they may have been. However, to shoot down McDonald's theory and assign it to the trash heap where it belongs, all I have to do is accept the challenge he presented to me:

He [Till] would have a point if the word "to" was not there. Mr. Till wants it to read this way: "A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord even the tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord." This would forbid David from holding office in Israel. However, the only way Mr. Till can get this is to delete the word "to" (third rebuttal, p. 13, emphasis added).

My, my, I just love debating McDonald. He puts his foot into his mouth so many times that he makes my job as easy as taking candy from a baby. So let me set him straight on a matter here. I don't have to delete the word to in this passage, because the word to was not in the Hebrew original (that no doubt includes the "original autograph" too.) To is a word that has been added by the English translators. Hendrickson's Interlinear Bible gives this word-for-word translation of the statement: "Not shall enter a bastard into the assembly of Jehovah; even [to] the generation tenth none shall enter of his into the assembly of Jehovah." The word to is enclosed in parentheses to signify that it is an addition that was not in the Hebrew text. So by McDonald's own admission, I "have a  point" and David should have been forbidden "from holding office in Israel." Young's Literal Translation of the Holy Bible (this is the same Young who compiled Young's Analytical Concordance) gives this word-for-word translation of the verse: "a bastard doth not enter into the assembly of Jehovah; even a tenth generation of him doth not enter into the assembly of Jehovah." Robert Young can hardly be considered a liberal "higher  critic" who is bent on destroying the integrity of the Bible, so his opinion should carry some weight even with Jerry McDonald.

The meaning of the statement is made very clear in the Good News Bible: "No one born  out of wedlock or any descendant of such a person, even in the tenth generation, may be included among the Lord's people." McDonald, of course, will disdain this translation, because it is not the KJV, but his own precious KJV is what got him into trouble. He relied on it and assumed that the word to was in the original Hebrew, but it isn't. So I have a point. Let him now explain to us why David was not excluded from the "assembly of Yahweh."

Can you imagine the gall of McDonald? He chided me for wanting the ban on bastards to read "even the tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord" (which is exactly how it does read in Hebrew), and then immediately afterward he said that the ban on Moabites (v:3) "forbade full-blood [sic] Moabites from holding office in the kingdom of Israel for ten generations." Well, now, it seems to me that McDonald wants the verse to read, "(A) full-blooded Moabite shall not enter into the  assembly of Yahweh; even (to) the tenth generation shall none belonging to them enter into the assembly of Yahweh forever." But where is the expression "full-blooded" in this  verse?  It isn't there. If I may borrow an expression from McDonald, he "would have a point" if the expression full-blooded were there. But it isn't! I have demonstrated that to was not in the original of verse 2, so let's see him prove that "full-blooded" was in the original of verse 3.

What is more amazing than anything McDonald has said on this repugnant passage in Deuteronomy 23:1-3 is not that he would quibble about whether "even to the tenth generation" included or excluded those of the tenth generation but that he would defend such a disgusting system of discrimination that Judaism represented. Really, what difference does it make whether his "infinitely benevolent" god banned particular ethnic groups and descendants of "bastards" for one or ten generations? The fact that such a ban was pronounced on even one generation is more than enough to condemn the Bible to the trash heap that it belongs in. From the beginning of this debate McDonald has defended the deplorable morality of a book that depicts God as one who commanded and/or sanctioned the massacre of children and infants (Num. 31:1-2,17; 1 Sam. 15:2-3), the degradation of women (Num. 5:11-31; Dt. 21:1-14; Ecc. 7:25-28), discrimination against the physically handicapped (Dt. 23:1; Lev. 21:16-23), slavery (Ex. 21:2-6), racism (Dt. 7:1-6; Dt. 23:3-4), and other offenses too numerous to list. McDonald and his inerrantist cohorts have defended these atrocities with such lame excuses as "if God can give life, he can take it," "the children that God ordered massacred were better off, because they went to heaven instead of growing up to be corrupt pagans," and "God in his infinite wisdom knows more about what was right than we do," etc., etc., etc. All of these excuses are not only lame; they are ridiculous and as theoretical and arbitrary as the far-fetched, how-it-could-have-been scenarios that inerrantists dream up to "explain" flagrant textual discrepancies in the Bible. What is the matter with people like McDonald who will not only defend a book like this but will hold it forth to the world as the book of books and the noblest, loftiest moral guide that ever existed?

When he was the affirmant, the subject of the Septuagint version of Jeremiah was brought up. This version of Jeremiah is significantly shorter than the Masoretic version, from which most English versions have been translated, and also organized differently. A manuscript of Jeremiah discovered in the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran paralleled the Septuagint version, which was translated in the 3rd century B.C., a fact that indicated that the book of Jeremiah was very different then from the version that has come down to us through the Masoretic text. The only sensible conclusion is that someone edited the earlier version to make additions and reorganize the materials, but, of course, McDonald can't admit the obvious without surrendering his inerrancy position. Apparently realizing that he made a poor showing the first time around, he brought this matter up again in his latest rebuttal as a "negative argument." On his first attempt to "explain" this problem away, McDonald quoted none other than Gleason Archer himself (fifth affirmative, pp. 5-6):

There is good evidence to believe that even apart from the original edition of Jeremiah's prophecy, which was destroyed by Jehoiakim, there was a later edition which preceded the final form of the text as we have it in the Masoretic tradition. At least this is a reasonable deduction to draw from the LXX (Septuagint), since it appears to be about one-eighth shorter than that of the MT. It differs also in arrangement of the chapters, for chapters 46-51 of the MT are placed after chapter 25 in the LXX, and they are arranged in a somewhat different sequence. Jeremiah 33:14-26 of the MT is altogether missing in the LXX. It would seem that this earlier edition was published in the prophet's own lifetime and first disseminated in Egypt. Later, after Jeremiah's death, it appears that Baruch made a more comprehensive collection of his master's sermons and rearranged the material in more logical order. The MT undoubtedly preserves this posthumous edition of Baruch. In this connection, note that 36:32 indicates that a second preliminary edition was published in the reign of Jehoiakim, and it is therefore reasonable to assume that Jeremiah kept adding to these earlier sermons the messages the Lord gave him in the reign of Zedekiah and in the period subsequent to the fall of Jerusalem" (A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, pp. 361-362, emphasis added).

As I did before, I have underlined certain parts of Archer's statement (which McDonald thought enough of before to quote in evidence) to emphasize the damage that it does to McDonald's position. Please notice that Archer said that "the original edition of Jeremiah's prophecy" was destroyed by Jehoiakim, but in his latest, McDonald made a play on the expression "original edition." "Nothing was said about the 'original autographs' being destroyed," McDonald quibbled (p. 30); it was just the original "edition" that was destroyed. Well, let him explain why, in a time when there were no printing presses, the copy that Jeremiah dictated to Baruch would not have been the "first edition."

McDonald went on to say that "(h)ad the original autographs been destroyed there would have been nothing from which they could have made the second edition." My, my, my, the quibbles that these inerrantists will resort to when they are in trouble! The book of Jeremiah clearly indicates that Jehoiakim destroyed the original "roll" on which Baruch wrote the words Jeremiah had dictated to him. Notice these facts as recorded in Jeremiah 36: (1) God ordered Jeremiah to take a roll of a book and write on it the words that God had spoken to him concerning Israel [vv:1-3], (2) Jeremiah called unto him Baruch the  scribe and dictated to him "all the words of Jehovah" [v:4], (3) Jeremiah commanded Baruch to take the roll and read "the words of Jehovah in the ears of the people in Jehovah's house" [vv:5-6], (4) Baruch read the book of the words of Jehovah in the ears of all the people [vv:9-10], (5) the princes of Judah called for Baruch to bring the roll and read it to them [vv:11-14] (6) Baruch came and read the roll to the princes [v:15], and (7) the princes told Baruch that they would tell the king "all these words." At this point in the narrative, we read this:

And they [the princes] went in to the king into the court; but they had laid up the roll in the chamber of Elishama the scribe; and they told all the words in the ears of the king. So the king sent Jehudi to fetch the roll; and he took it out of the chamber of Elishama the scribe. And Jehudi read it in the ears of the king, and in the ears of all the princes that stood beside the king. Now the king was sitting in the winter-house in the ninth month: and there was a fire in the brazier burning before him. And it came to pass when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, that the king cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier, until ALL the roll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier.

Now that seems clear enough for anyone to understand except, of course, a die-hard bibliolater desperate to salvage his precious inerrancy doctrine. The text indicates that the very roll that Baruch wrote Jeremiah's words on was destroyed by Jehoiakim. However, to remove any doubt that the "original autographs" were destroyed, I submit this quotation from the following verses in Jeremiah 36:

Then the word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned.... Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire; and there were added besides unto them many like words (vv:27,32).

This is clear enough that anyone who wants to see the truth can see it. Jeremiah didn't prepare the "second edition" from a copy of the "original autographs"; he dictated the words to Baruch again, because the original roll "and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah" (v:27) had been destroyed by Jehoiakim. To argue that Jehoiakim had burned only a copy and not the "original autographs" is to deny what was plainly said and to argue that even though the original was still intact, Jeremiah went through the process of dictating the "words of Jehovah" to Baruch again when he could have just taken the "original autographs" and made a copy from them. Obviously, such a lame defense as this is nothing but a desperation tactic on McDonald's part.

He argued further that the different structure of the Masoretic text is due to an editing job that Baruch performed after Jeremiah's death to put the materials in "a more logical order" (p. 31). I assume that McDonald wrote that with a straight face, completely unaware of the damage it does to his verbal inspiration theory. If Baruch put the materials into a more logical order, then they must not have been logically organized when Yahweh verbally inspired Jeremiah as he was dictating them to Baruch. Furthermore, the last statement in the above quotation from Jeremiah 36:32 declares that the second edition that was dictated to Baruch added "many like words" that were not in the original. Perhaps McDonald will want to explain this to us. If anything verbally inspired by Yahweh is necessarily inerrant, why would "many like words" have been added to the second edition? Which edition was "inerrant," the first or the second? As I said, I just love debating this subject with McDonald.

He listed (in single-spaced, 17-point type) a full page of points that he claims I have not responded to. Well, in the first place, I have honestly admitted that I lay no claim to having done a point-by-point rebuttal of everything he has said. Secondly, no debater can address every trifling issue that his opponent may mention, and McDonald is good at making unsupported assertions. My style is to respond in detail to as many of them as I can in the space available, and it is clearly evident that I respond in detail while he asserts and goes on. Now if he wants to see this as a concession, let him. In fact, if it will make him happy, I will just concede the matters that he thinks I have not responded to. That will do him no good, because the issues that I have presented in detail and responded to in detail are enough to prove that discrepancies are in the Bible, and to prove that the Bible is not inerrant, all that I must do is show that there is just one error in the Bible. Readers who don't have their minds completely paralyzed by fundamentalist fanaticism will have no difficulty seeing that I have exposed discrepancies in the Bible that McDonald has not and cannot explain. So let him think that he has shellacked me on his list of 33 points. I must go on to other matters.

I warned him that I would not answer his questions if he continued to preface them with his theatrical warning of what he would assume if I didn't answer. He ignored the warning, so I will now ignore his questions. If he will present them to me in  his next rebuttal without  his grandstand theatrics, I will gladly answer them. For now, I will simply say that I have retracted nothing that I said in The Jackson-Till Debate, so that should give him a good idea of what my answers will be if he does resubmit them.  Why should I retract anything from a debate in which I obviously exposed the utter stupidity of my opponent's position?

I  don't intend to let his quibbles go unanswered on the matters of Paul's lapse of memory in 1 Corinthians 1:14-16 and the discrepancy between Paul's and Luke's accounts of when Paul first visited Jerusalem after his conversion, as well as a few other matters, but I want to drive at least one more nail into the coffin of the inerrancy doctrine this time around to give him at least two shots at explaining it, so I will reserve my comments on those matters until my final affirmative. At that time, I will address first the matters I am skipping now and then go on to whatever he may lead me into in his next rebuttal.

My next affirmative argument, then, concerns a chronological mistake in the book of Genesis. According to a list of names recorded in Genesis 46, sixty-six members of Jacob's family accompanied him into Egypt (v:26) during the world famine that his son Joseph had predicted in interpreting Pharaoh's dream (Gen. 41:1-45). Joseph and his two sons were already in Egypt, so these three, with Jacob and the sixty-six others, constituted a total of seventy (v:27). All of these people were individually listed in verses 8-25, and among them were Hezron and Hamul (v:12), the great-grandsons of Jacob through Perez, one of his twin grandsons born to Tamar, who had tricked Jacob's son Judah into impregnating her (Gen. 38:12-30). The problem is that if Judah actually did have two grandsons who had already been born to Perez at the time of Jacob's descent into Egypt, then other sections of the biblical narrative cannot be historically correct.

We can determine this from certain chronological information given about Joseph, Jacob's son who was sold into Egypt by his jealous brothers. Joseph was seventeen years old when his brothers betrayed him (Gen. 37:2). Immediately after the events of the betrayal were related, the Genesis writer said, "And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite,  whose name was Hirah. And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua; and he took her and went in unto her" (38:1-2). Now if this happened "at that time," what else can we believe except that the writer meant that Judah married the Canaanite woman at the time following the selling of Joseph? To argue otherwise is to render meaningless a transitional expression ("at that time") that the writer was obviously using to let his readers know when Judah's marriage had occurred. It had occurred  at that time, when Joseph was sold into Egypt.

According to the story, Judah's Canaanite wife conceived and bore a son named Er, then conceived again and bore a son named Onan, and finally conceived and bore a third son named Shelah (vv:2-5). Er grew up and married Tamar, but before the marriage had produced children, Er did something to offend the petulant Yahweh, who then killed him. Under the requirements of Levirate law, Judah told Er's brother Onan to "go in unto [his] brother's wife... and raise up seed to [his] brother." Onan went in to his brother's wife, but, knowing that the child produced would not be his, he "spilled [his seed] on the ground." This so angered Yahweh that he killed Onan too (Gen. 38:6-10). Judah, fearful that tragedy would befall his last son Shelah, urged Tamar to "remain a widow in [her] father's house till Shelah [his] son be grown up... lest he also die like his brethren" (v:11).

Tamar obligingly retired to her father's house, and "in the process of time" (v:12) Judah's Canaanite wife died, at which time Judah went up to his sheepshearers at Timnah to be comforted. Meanwhile, realizing that Judah's son Shelah was grown but that she had not yet been given to him in Levirate marriage, Tamar posed as a prostitute and conspired to trick Judah into impregnating her. The plan worked, and Tamar subsequently gave birth to twin sons, Perez and Zerah (vv:13-30). It was this Perez who fathered Hezron and Hamul, who were listed in Genesis 46:12 as two of the sixty-six members of Jacob's family who accompanied him into Egypt.

So what is the point of all this? To see the significance of it, we have to think in reasonable terms of how many years would have had to pass for all the events in Genesis 38 to happen. If we assume that Judah married his Canaanite wife the day after he and his brothers had sold Joseph into Egypt, and if we further assume that Judah's wife became pregnant the very night of their wedding, and then if we further assume that Judah's second son, Onan, was conceived immediately after Er's birth, this would have made the brothers about a year apart in their ages. Now, if we suppose that Er married Tamar immediately upon reaching puberty, say, when he was a mere 12 years old and immediately, within a matter of days, committed whatever offense it was that caused Yahweh to kill him, and if we further suppose that Onan went into Tamar when he too was only 12 years old, then Onan's death would have occurred about fourteen years after the selling of Joseph into Egypt, because Onan's puberty (at age twelve) could not have occurred until about fourteen years after Judah's marriage to his Canaanite wife.

There is a clear indication that more than just one year separated Onan and Shelah, because Judah entreated Tamar to remain a widow in her father's house "till Shelah [his] son be grown up" (v:11). Exactly how many years separated them we don't know, but the Genesis writer certainly implied that more than just a short while passed between Onan's death and Tamar's conspiracy to trick Judah into impregnating her, because the writer bridged the interval by saying that "in the process of time" Judah's wife died. Surely, this is not an expression he would have used if only a few weeks or even a few months had passed. Furthermore, the writer said that Tamar had seen that "Shelah was grown up" (v:14). Both of these statements imply the passage of a considerable period of time, for certainly Tamar would not have had to see that Shelah was grown up if he had been only a year or so younger than Onan. She would have known without "seeing" that he was grown. There is even a textual implication that many years separated Onan and Shelah, for the writer said that Judah's wife bore Shelah "at Chezib" (v:5). This place is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible, and some scholars think that this is because it was not a place. They think that the Hebrew word kezib was actually derived from kazab, meaning "to stop flowing." If so, the implication is that Judah's wife gave birth to Shelah and then ceased having her menstrual cycle or in other words experienced menopause, and this is exactly what the NEB understands the word to mean. Lamsa's translation from the Peshitta text renders the verse, "(A)nd after she bore him [Shelah] she stopped bearing." These translations are consistent with Judah's request that Tamar return to her father's house and wait until his son Shelah "be grown up" (v:11), a definite implication that Shelah at the time was considerably younger than Onan.

To make my point, however, it isn't necessary to assume that Shelah was "considerably younger" than Onan. Let's just assume that only two years had passed between Onan's death and Tamar's realization that "Shelah was grown up" (v:14). Let's further assume that Tamar, after realizing that "Shelah was grown up," immediately tricked Judah into impregnating her. Even at that, her twin sons, Perez and Zerah, could not have been born until about seventeen years after Judah's marriage to his Canaanite wife, whom he had married "at that time" (the selling of Joseph into Egypt). Let's now be generous to Mr. McDonald and his inerrantist colleagues and assume that Perez, like his half-brothers Er and Onan, had married immediately upon reaching puberty at the improbably early age of twelve. Let's further assume that he immediately impregnated his wife, whoever she was, and that she also gave birth to twin sons, Hezron and Hamul, who only days after their birth accompanied their great-grandfather Jacob into Egypt with sixty-four other members of the family clan. Even this would put the births of Hezron and Hamul at least thirty years after the selling of Joseph into Egypt. This figure is arrived at by the following formula: 2 (the time it took Judah's wife to give birth to both Er and Onan) + 11 (the time required after Onan's birth for Er to attain puberty) + 1 (the time needed after Er's death for Onan to attain puberty) + 2 (the time for Shelah to "grow up" and Tamar to realize that Judah did not intend to give her to Shelah in marriage) + 1 (the time for Tamar to trick Judah and then carry her twins to term) + 12 (the time for Hezron to attain puberty and marry) +1 (the time for Hezron's wife to carry her assumed twins to term). The numbers add up to thirty, and surely no one would seriously argue that all of this could have occurred within a time frame shorter than thirty years. Reasonable people (which will exclude Bible fundamentalists), who have no pet theories to protect, would even agree that a much longer period of time would have passed. To add ten or even fifteen years to our hypothetical thirty would not be at all unreasonable, because the thirty-year figure is predicated on the assumptions that (1) all events happened in rapid succession, that (2) three brothers all attained puberty at twelve and became sexually active at that age, that (3) one of the twelve year olds was sophisticated enough sexually to know how to prevent pregnancy by coitus interruptus, and that (4) one of the three boys immediately impregnated his mate. That any one of these happened is very unlikely, but to believe that they all happened, one would have to be naively credulous.

With the chronology in this period of Judah's life agreed upon, let's now return to Joseph. As previously noted, he was seventeen when his brothers sold him into Egypt (Gen. 37:2). Through a series of events that I will be as brief as possible in relating, Joseph found favor with Pharaoh and was made food administrator. If the Bible record is historically correct--and McDonald claims that it is--Joseph was in Egypt thirteen years before this promotion occurred, because he was "thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh king of Egypt" (Gen. 41:46). Joseph was put into this administrative position as a result of his dream interpretations in which he had predicted seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. That the events foreseen by  Pharaoh began soon after Joseph's interpretation of his dream is evident from Genesis 41:32, where Joseph said to Pharaoh that "God will shortly bring it to pass." McDonald must accept this or else concede his position on inerrancy. Furthermore, as the story was told by the Genesis writer, Pharaoh, on the spot, made Joseph second in command in Egypt, and "Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went through all the land of Egypt" (41:46) to supervise the gathering of food during the seven years of plenty. At this time, as noted in the same verse, Joseph was "thirty years old."

When Joseph made himself known to his brothers, who had come into Egypt to find food during the famine, Joseph said in identifying himself, "For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and there are yet five years, in which there shall be neither plowing nor harvest"  (45:6). So if Joseph was 30 years old when he "stood before Pharaoh" and "went throughout all the land of Egypt" and if seven years of plenty and two years of famine had passed when he revealed his identity to his brothers, then he was only thirty-nine at this time. In other words, Joseph's reunion with his brothers occurred only twenty-two years after he was sold into Egypt. He then sent his brothers back into Canaan to bring his father and family into Egypt where there would be food to sustain them during the famine (Gen. 45:19-28; 46:1-27).

The problem for McDonald should be apparent by now. Between the selling of Joseph into Egypt and his reunion with his brothers, certain events had allegedly transpired in Judah's life that required at least thirty years, and, as I indicated, we must stretch every detail of the story to confine those events to just thirty years. Yet during all of this time only twenty-two years had passed in the life of Joseph. How could that be?

The conclusion is inescapable: either the events that the Genesis writer recorded in the life of Joseph are not historically and chronologically accurate or else the events he recorded in Judah's life are not historically and chronologically accurate. It is impossible for his chronology of both lives to be historically accurate. No doubt, McDonald will have some far-fetched, how-it-could-have-been way to reconcile the discrepancy, perhaps one involving "different methods of calculating time." I can't wait to read it.

[Editor's Note: The rest of the debate cannot be posted until either Till locates the remaining manuscripts that have been lost among the hundreds of copies of back issues of The Skeptical Review stored in an auxiliary shed at his home or McDonald agrees to send copies of the remaining exchanges, which he has said that he has among his papers. So far, McDonald has not shown any willingness to cooperate in seeing the debate posted in its entirety. Eager to see all of the debate posted, Till spends some time each day looking for the missing manuscripts.]

within All text Title Keywords Descriptions File name   using All words Any words Exact phrase