Christian Apologetics Template - Erick Nelson



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Notes

Chapter One: Critics

1. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, p 4-12, 19.

2. Ibid, p 22.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid, p 16.

5. Ibid, p 50-51.

6. Karl Marx (Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt Guddat, ed.) Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p 7.

7. Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity, p 140.

8. Ibid, p 130.

9. Ibid, p 131.

10. Ibid, p 198.

11. Ibid, p 200.

12. Walter Kauffman, The Faith of a Heretic, p 235, 247.

13. Ibid, p 215.

14. Ibid, p 219.

14a Ibid, p 406

15. Sigmund Freud. The Future of an Illusion, p 30, 52.

16. Ibid, p 63.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid, p 38-39.

20. Paramahansa Yogananda. Autobiography of a Yogi, p 135, 194-5, 198-9, 275, 278, 347, 371

21. Ibid, p 276.

22. Ibid, p 371-2.

23. Gandhi. The Message of Jesus Christ, p 6-7, 53

24. Ibid, p 48.

25. Ibid, p 40, 46.

26. Ibid, p 30, 46. Gandhi says (p 46), “From my youth upward, I learnt the art of estimating the value of scriptures on the basis of their ethical teaching. … you must not forget that we have started with the fundamental principle that all religions are true.”

27. Ibid, p 36.

28. Hugh Schonfield, The Passover Plot, p 13, 19, 26-27.

29. Ibid, p 14, 191-2.

30. Ibid, p 220.

31. Ibid, p 148-180.

32. Erich Von Daniken. Miracles of the Gods, p 84.

33. Ibid, through the book.

34. Ibid, p 99. He says, “The Bible does not contain a single religious or moral idea which was not already contained in some form in the holy scriptures of earlier or contemporary religions. … Practically everything that forms present-day Pauline Christianity is to be found in particular in the cults of Attis, Dionysius, Mithras, and Isis.” He quotes Dr. Robert Kehl.

35. Ibid, p 70, 75-7. On page 76, Von Daniken gives a table of comparisons; nowhere does he provide a list of differences.

36. Ibid, p 53-54.

37. Ibid, p 52-53.

38. Ibid, p 93.

39. Ibid, p 58+.

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Chapter Two: Epistemology

1. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, p 31.

2. Ibid, p 34-5.

3. Jn 14.6-7, Rom 1.25, Jn 17.3, Eph 1.17, Col 2.3, Gal 2.5, Eph 3.4

4. 2 Tim 1.12, Phil 3.10, Phil 3.8, Jn 17.3

5. Jn 18.37-8, Jn 8.14, Mt 9.6

6. Jn 19.35, Jn 21.24, 1 Jn 5.20

7. 2 Cor 6.6, Acts 26.27

8. 1 Tim 2.4, Acts 26.27

9. Col 4.6, Jn 7.17

10. Rom 1.25

11. 2 Tim 4.4

12. 2 Cor 11.6

13. Acts 26.25, 1 Jn 2.4

14. Jn 19.35, Jn 8.32

15. Jn 5.24, Jn 17.3

16. Jn 8.32

17. 1 Jn 3.2

18. 2 Thes 2.10

19. Acts 6.7, 13.8, 14.22, Gal 1.23, Eph 4.5, 1 Tim 4.1, 2 Tim 2.18, Jn 20.31

20. Acts 14.9, Rom 1.17, Rom 4.5 Rom 4.11-12

21. Heb 11

22. Jn 3.12, Jn 10.38, Jn 10.37

23. Jn 20.31, Jn 17.21

24. Rom 10.14-15

25. Jn 20.25

26. Mk 1.14-15, Jn 6.29, Jn 11.27, Acts 15.7

27. Acts 16.31, Rom 10.9

28. Jn 8.24

28a Mendelbaum (with Gramlich, Anderson, et al), Philosophical Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p 336. He quotes Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy): “If I believe that charles I died on the scaffold, I believe truly, not because of any intrinsic quality of my belief, which could be discovered by merely examining the belief, but because of an historical event which happened two and a half centuries ago. If I believe that Charles I died in his bed, I believe falsely: no degree of vividness in my belief, or of care in arriving at it, prevents it from being false, again because of what happened long ago, and not because of any intrinsic property of my belief. Hence, although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal quality of the beliefs.”

29. Roderick Chisholm (and others), Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p 138. Quotes Manley Thompson.

30. Rene Descartes, Philosophical Essays, p 82.

31. I. Copi, Readings on Logic, p 82 – quoting J.S. Mill (from System of Logic). On pages 55-6, Mill is quoted by Copi as saying “Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition, or Consciousness; the latter, of Inference. The truths known by intuition are the original premises from which all others are inferred. Our assent to the conclusion being grounded on the truth of the premises, we never could arrive at any knowledge by reasoning, unless something could be known antecedently to all reasoning. Examples of truths known to us by immediate consciousness, are our own bodily sensations and mental feelings. … Examples of truths which we know only be way of inference, are occurrences which took place while we were absent, the events recorded in history, or the theorems of mathematics. … Whatever we are capable of knowing must belong to the one class or to the other; must be in the number of the primitive data, or of the conclusions which can be drawn from these.”

31a C.S. Lewis, The Best of C.S. Lewis, p 270. In addition, Mendelaum, op cit p 131, quotes Russell concerning primary data and the inference of an objective world: “If we are to know of the existence of matter, of other people of the past before our individual memory begins, or of the future, we must know general principles of some kind by means of which such inferences can be drawn. It must be known to us that the existence of some one sort of thing, A, is a sign of the existence of some other sort of thing, B, either at the same time as A or at some earlier or later time, as, for example, thunder is a sign of the earlier existence of lightning. If this were not known to us, we could never extend our knowledge beyond the sphere of our private experience.

32. Mendelbaum, op cit, p 160-190.

33. Ibid, p 178.

34. Ibid, p 160-190.

35. Ibid, p 150.

36. Ibid, p 186.

36a Ibid, p 187

37. Ibid, p 153.

38. Tillich, op cit, p 33

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Chapter Three: Metaphysics

1. Descartes, op cit, p 94-109.

2. George Berkeley, Principles, Dialogues, and Correspondence (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p 23-35.

3. John Locke, Locke: Selections, p 271.

4. David Hume, The Essential David Hume, p 111.

5. Locke, op cit, p 112, 118, 135, 225, 228.

6. D.D. Runes, Dictionary of Philosophy, p 189.

7. Lewis, op cit, p 217-218.

8. Ibid, p 219. He says, “The whole disruptive power of Marxism and Freudianism against traditional beliefs has lain in their claim to expose irrational causes for them. If any Marxist is reading these lines at this moment, he is murmuring to himself, “All this argument really results from the fact that the author is a bourgeois” – in fact he is applying the rule I have just stated. Because he thinks that my thoughts result from an irrational cause he therefore discounts them.”

9. Ibid, p 219, 220, 218.

10. Immanual Kant, Critique of Pure Reasons, p 38.

11. Ibid, p 23+, 29+

12. Ibid, p 56, 62 (see Copleston, p 44-45). Kant gives a table of judgments and categories. Judgments = Quantity (universal, particular, singular), Quality (affirmative negative, infinite), Relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive). Categories (unity, plurality, totality), Quality (reality, negation, limitation), Relation (inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community).

13. Ibid, p 193.

14. Ibid, p 199.

15. William Frankena, Ethics; Chisholm op cit

16. Lewis, op cit, p 403.

17. Ibid. Lewis adds: “In actual fact Gaius and Titius [two debunkers] will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whol system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars. Their skepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people’s values, about the values current in their own set they are not nearly skeptical enough.”

18. Plato, The Republic, p 18+

19. Chisholm, op cit, p 358-9. Frankenna, although he confuses the term “naturalist” with a subjectivist theory, points out that subjectivist theories do not commit the naturalistic fallacy: “The need for definitions of ‘ethical’ and ‘factual’ is there readily apparent. Even if we put the contention by saying that a conclusion involving the word ‘ought’ cannot be logically deduced from premises, none of which contains this word, then, though it will be true, it will not serve to refute the naturalist. For he is not maintaining that such a deduction is possible; but only that “ought” can be defined in other terms. … The definition he is offering may not be correct, but this cannot be shown by citing the dogma about Ought and Is, for if his definition is correct, the ‘ought’-statements can be derived from ‘is’-statements in the only sense in which we he is concerned to hold that they can.

20. J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, p 44, 48-49.

21. Aristotle (ed. Wheelwright), Aristotle, p 167.

22. Mendelbaum, op cit, p 538. Notes Jeremy Bentham’s seven tests in judging between pleasures: intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent (for number of persons).

23. Mill, op cit, p 12, 14.

24. Lewis, op cit, p 406.

25. Mill, op cit, p 39. Aristotle (op cit, p 160-1, 184), gives us his reasons for the importance of education in learning what the highest good is: “what is the highest of all realizable good? … the majority of men, as well as the cultured few, speak of it as happiness (eudaimonia); and they would maintain that to live well and to do well are the same thing as to be happy. They differ, however, as to what happiness is, and the mass of mankind give a different account of it from philosophers. … Our own method, at any rate, must be to start with what is familiar to us. That is why a sound moral training is required before a man can listen intelligently to discussions about excellence and justice, and generally speaking, about statecraft … by abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and when temperance has been acquired we are best able to abstain. And in the vase of courage, similarly, it is by habituating ourselves to despise and stand up to danger that we become brave, and after we have become brave we are able to face dangers all the more readily … This is evident, first, from the fact that it is pleasure which prompts us to base deeds, and pain which deters us from noble ones; and therefore men ought, as Plato observes, to be trained from youth to find pleasure and pain in the right objectives – which is just what we mean by a sound education.”

26. Herman Shapiro (ed) Hellenistic Philosophy (new York: Random House, 1965), p 7-9.

27. Walter Kauffman, Nietzsche (New York: Random, 1950), p 279.

28. Mill, op cit, p 27.

29. Ibid, p 12, 15.

30. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Craig Press, 1973), Vol VI, p 115. See C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man, p 43.

31. Plato, op cit, p 227+

32. See Walter Kauffman, Nietzsche, p 102, and J.P. Sartre The Wall.

33. Runes, op cit, p 316, 319.

34. Ibid, p 316.

35. See C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain; J.W. Wenham, The Goodness of God; J.S. Mill op cit p 28+; Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, p 12; Copleston, op cit, p 122; C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, p 80; Norman Geisler, Philosophy of Religion, pare iv.

36. Rune, op cit, p 26.

37. J.P. Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Random House, 1965), p 22.

38. Rune op cit, p 223. Also see C.S. Lewis Best p 428+; Os Guiness, The Dust of Death, p 213+.

39. J.W. Montgomery (ed) Christianity for the Tough-Minded, p 22.

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Chapter Four: Verification

1. W.H. Halverson, A Concise Introduction to Philosophy, p 364-9; J.E. Barnhart, Religion and the Challenge of Philosophy, p 96-109; John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, p 16-20; Kant, op cit, p 398-403; Geisler, op cit, p 133-162; Descartes, op cit, p 100-103; B. Spinoza, Selections, p 45-48; Anselm as preserved in John Hick’s Classical and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy of Religion (Prentice-Hall, 1964), p 28-37.

2. Geisler, op cit, p 135.

3. Summary of the position is given in Geisler, op cit, p 134.

4. Barnhart, op cit, p 104-5, 108.

5. Kant, op cit, p 401-2

6. See Halverson, op cit, p 371-7; Barhard, op cit, p 80-95; John Hick, paperback , op cit, p 20-23; Kant, op cit, p 404-410; Geisler, op cit, p 163-228.

7. Hume, op cit, p 72-89

8. Geisler, op cit, p 182; Kant, op cit, p 407.

9. Geisler, op cit, p 182, 184; Bertrand Russell, , op cit, p 6-7; Barnhart, op cit, p 93.

10. Geisler, op cit, p 221-2.

11. Ibid, p 197-9.

12. Ibid, p 182-3.

13. Hume, op cit, p 122-3.

14. Malcolm A. Jeeves, Pyschology and Christianity (IVP, 1976), p 122-3. See C.S. Lewis, Best, p 300-3, for an explanation of induction relative to Miracles. Bertrand Russell, quoted by Mendelbaum, op cit, p 135-6, shows we must assume that events have causes, for this is derived from the principle of induction (assumed as the beginning of the paper): “All arguments which, on the basis of experience, argue as to the future or the unexperienced parts of the past or present, assume the inductive principle; hence we can never use experience to prove the inductive principle on the ground of its intrinsic evidence, or forego all justification of our expectations about the future. If the principle is unsound, we have no reason to expect the sun to rise tomorrow, to expect bread to be more nourishing than a stone, or to expect that if we throw ourselves off the roof we shall fall.” (See this paper, 2.9)

15. See C.S. Lewis, Best, p 255+ (billiard balls, and a person intervenes), and p 259 (fish tank affected by explosion in the distance).

16. C.S. Lewis said it, but I coulnd’t find it.

17. Tillich, op cit, p 49, 52.

18. C.S. Lewis, Best, p 266-78.

19. Ibid, p 272

20. Hick, op cit, p 69-71.

21. The principle of verification and falsification is explained relative to God’s existence by Antony Flew, whose essay appears in Hick, op cit, p 465-6: “A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches the death by a thousand qualifications. And in this, it seems to me, lies the peculiar danger, the endemic evil, of theological utterance. Take such utterances as “God has a plan”, “God created the world”, “God loves us as a father loves his children.” They look at first sight very much like assertions, vast cosmological assertions. … Now to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case. Suppose then that we are in doubt as to what someone who gives vent to an utterance is asserting, or suppose that, more radically, we are skeptical as to whether he is really asserting anything at all, one way of trying to understand (or perhaps it will be to expose) his utterance is to attempt to find what he would regard as counting against, or as being incompatible with, its truth. For if his utterance is indeed an assertion, it will necessarily be equivalent to a denial of the negation of that assertion. And anything which would count against the assertion or which would induce the speaker to withdraw it and to admit that it had been mistaken, must be part of (or the whole of) the meaning of the negation of that assertion. … Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding “There wasn’t a God after all” or “God does not really love us then.” Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. … I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?’”

22. J.M. Maguire, Common Sense and Common Law, p 17-18.

23. McCormick, McCormick on Evidence, p 584. Also wee J.W. Montgomery, The Law Above the Law (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1975), p 88; and Maguire, op cit, p 25. Norman Anderson, in A Lawyer Among the Theologians, p 21-22, adds to this: “The rule against hearsay evidence means that ‘assertions of persons other than the witness who is testifying are inadmissible as evidence of the truth of that which was asserted.’ … The further rule which insists that a witness must speak to facts which he has observed or are within his personal knowledge, not to his opinion about these facts, seems to have grown out of the rule about hearsay.”

24. Simon Greenleaf, included in Appendix of J.W. Montgomery’s Law, p 99.

25. Maguire, op cit, p 24; McCormick, op cit, p 29-30; Anderson, op cit, p 21-23.

26. Anderson, op cit, p 23.

27. Maguire, op cit, p 32.

28. McCormick, op cit, p 57-59.

29. Ibid, p 66, 97-98.

30. Ibid, p 78-79, 671-3, 680; Maguire, op cit, p 42; Greenleaf in Montgomery , op cit, p 118.

31. McCormick, op cit, p 66, 81, 90; Maguire, op cit, p 42; Greenleaf in Montgomery, op cit, p 118.

32. Greenleaf in Montgomery, op cit, p 118.

33. McCormick, op cit, p 66, 93-4; Greenleaf in Montgomery, op cit, p 118.

34. McCormick, op cit, p 66.

35. Maguire, op cit, p 42.

36. McCormick, op cit, p 784, 788

37. Ibid, 785-6; Maguire, op cit, p 179.

38. Ibid

39. Ibid

40. Greenleaf in Montgomery, op cit, p 114-116.

41. Ibid; McCormick, op cit, p 793-5; Anderson, op cit, p 23-24; Maguire, op cit, p 180

42. McCormick, op cit, p 798-9; Anderson, op cit, p 23-4; Maguire, op cit, p 180.

43. McCormick, op cit, p 796-8.

44. Anderson, op cit, p 24.

45. McCormick, op cit, p 45.

46. Maguire, op cit, p 133-4.

47. McCormick, op cit, p 559, 570.

48. Greenleaf in Montgomery, op cit, p 98. Also McCormick , op cit, p 549-51; Montgomery, op cit, p 87-8.

49. L.R. Gottschalk, Understanding History (New York: Knopf, 1950), p 48; G.J. Renier, History: its Purpose and Method (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p 96-100.

50. Renier, op cit, p 96-100; A. Nevins, The Gateway to History (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938), p 70; Renier, op cit, p 128, 132, 155.

51. Gottschalk, op cit, p 122, 125; Nevins, op cit, p 155; Renier, op cit, p 109.

52. Gottschalk, op cit, p 166.

53. Ibid, p 53-5; 150.

54. Ibid, p 165; Nevins, op cit, p 155.

55. Renier, op cit, p 101; Gottschalk, op cit, p 94-101, 161.

56. Gottschalk, op cit, p 138.

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Chapter Five: Materials

1. Justin Martyr, First Apology, 35.7-9, 48.3

2. Suetonius, Claudius, 25.4

3. Suetonius, Nero, 16.2

4. Tacitus, Annals, 15.44

5. Pliny, Epistles, 10.96

6. F.F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p 29-30.

7. Ibid, p 30-31

8. Josephus, Antiquities, 18.116-119.

9. Ibid, p 20.20.

10. Origen, Against Celsus, 1.47

11. Josephus, op cit, 18.63

12. W.D. Davies, Invitation to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p 66

13. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 43a

14. Geisler and Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, p 271-282; F.G. Kenyon, Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, p 129.

15. Geisler and Nix, op cit, p 268-71; A.T. Robertson, Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, p 76.

16. Geisler and Nix, op cit, p 282-84; Lake, Text of the New Testament, p 19.

17. Geisler and Nix, op cit, p 316-43.

17a Ibid, p 344-57.

18. Charles Leach, Our Bible: How We Got It (Bible Institute Colportage Ass., Chicago, 1898), p 35-6.

19. F.G. Kenyon, op cit; Geisler and Nix, op cit, p 294-6.

20. Geisler and Nix, op cit, p 271-84, 316-43; F.G. Kenyon, op cit, p 129; A.T. Robertson, op cit, p 76; Lake, op cit, p 19.

21. Robertson, op cit, p 150+; Geisler and Nix, op cit, p 361-5.

22. Ibid

23. Geisler and Nix, op cit, p 365-6; taken from Philip Schaff Companion to the Greek New Testament and the English Version, 3rd edition, p 177

24. F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, p 16-17.

25. F.G. Kenyon, The Bible and Archeology, (new York and London: Harper, 1940), p 288+

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Chapter Six: the Claim

1. Amos 9:8b-12

2. 2 Samuel 7:11-16

3. -

4. G.E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p 137-8; F.F. Bruce, New Testament History (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p 125-7; R. Martin, New Testament Foundations (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1975), p 115-116, 108, and see 109-14 for text, translation, and notes. Also used: for Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament, C.A. Briggs, Messianic Prophecy (New York: Scribner, 1893). For intertestamental literature, James Drummand, The Jewish Messiah (Longdon: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1877). Also A.W. Kac, The Messianic Hope (Grand Rapids; Baker, 1975) for later messianic concepts.

5. Ladd, op cit, p 147.

6. F.F. Bruce, New Testament History, p 130; Ladd, op cit, p 148.

7. Bruce, op cit, p 131-2; Ladd, op cit, p 148-9. For a chart containing scriptural indications in the N.T. of the earthly, heavenly, and suffering Messiah, see Ladd, op cit, p 149-151.

8. Bruce, op cit, p 93-100.

9. Bruce, op cit, p 82-92, 101-21; Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, p 210.

10. Klausner, op cit, p 211

11. F.F. Bruce, Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, p 134.

12. Bruce, op cit, p 80-91, esp p 89. On page 152, Bruce summarizes the messianic expectations at Qumran: “The men of Qumran, like the pious community into which Jesus was born, looked for ‘the consolation of Israel’, and expected its consolation to be brought about by the Messiah of David’s line. This Messiah, in Qumran expectation would arise in the last days to deliver Israel, born from the travail of the righteous community. He would be the victorious captain of the sons of light in the last conflict with the sons of darkness, and in the new age following that victory he would enjoy a position as prince, second only to the anointed priest. In its essentials this expectation of a militant Davidic Messiah was shared by many other Israelites (probably by the vast majority). And Jesus repudiated this kind of Messiahship as wholeheartedly as He could, from the days of the wilderness temptation right on to His death.

13. Bruce, Second Thoughts, p 140.

14. Ibid, p

15. W.S. LaSor, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (Grand Rapids; Eerdmans, 1972), p 232.

16. Ibid, p 227-8.

17. Ibid, p 228.

18. Ibid, p 229 (1 QH 4:35, 1:22).

19. I. Howard Marshall, The Origins of the New Testament Christology (IVP, 1976), p 63.

20. Ibid, p 64.

21. Ibid; see also G. Vermes Jesus the Jew, p 164-8, 189.

22. Ladd, op cit

23. Joseph Klausner, Jesus to Paul, p 103-5.

24. Ibid, p 106

25. Ibid, p 108-12.

26. It is noted by scholars that “You have said” is not evasive, but rather equivalent to an affirmative reply; in case there is any controversy, Mark’s gospel, the earliest, records “I am.”

27. Ladd, op cit, p 168.

28. Marshall, op cit, p 46.

29. G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York: Dodd, 1926), p 240-1.

30. Edwin Yamauchi, Jesus, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Muhammad (IVP, 1972), p 5-6.

31. Ibid, p 31

32. Ibid, p 6-7

33. Ibid, p 31

34. Ibid, p 33

35. Ibid, p 8-9

36. Ibid, p 34 (Qur’an 7:188, 17:95)

37. Ibid, (Qur’an, Surah 80)

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Chapter Seven: Alternatives

1. Eusebius, Epistle of the Church in Smyrna, quoted in Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict (Campus Crusade, 1972 and 1975) Vol I, p 204.

2. Frederick Farrar, The Life of Christ, p 440, quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 205.

3. Michael Green, Man Alive, p 33, quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 207.

4. Merrill Tenney, The Reality of the Resurrection, p 117, quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 214.

5. Alfred Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p 622.

6. A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament, p 239; quotes by McDowell, op cit, p 219.

7. George Currie, The Military Discipline of the Romans, p 41-3; quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 221.

8. Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament, p 147; quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 218.

9. One reconstruction of the resurrection appearances may be as follows (done by the researcher, but anticipated by Simon Greenleaf in the 19th century). The key is to allow Mary Magdalene to leave “the women” as soon as she saw the stone rolled away.

• Sunday morning, daybreak: The women go to the tomb to anoint the body: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, Salome (mother of James and John), and Joanna. Magdalene is probably the youngest.

• The stone is found to be rolled back (they don’t see this event, rather it is recorded by Matthew editorially).

• Magdalene runs back immediately to tell the disciples. The other women investigate, see two angels that tell them Jesus is risen, and instruct them to tell the disciples that he is going before them to Galilee.

• They go to tell the disciples, and meet Jesus on the way.

• Meanwhile, Peter and John (informed by Mary Magdalene) runs with Magdalene to the tomb (outdistancing her); they see the grave-clothes, and return. Magdalene remains, crying; Jesus appears to her; says to tell the disciples.

• Jesus appears to men on the road to Emmaus; they go to tell the disciples. Meanwhile, he has appeared to Peter; then to the disciples without Thomas; then to the disciples including Thomas.

• He appears to the disciples in Galilee; he appears to five hundred at a time; then to James.

• He ascends to heaven after forty days, ending the appearances abruptly.

10. Wilbur Smith, Therefore Stand (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1945), p 403-4, quoting Bishop Headlam, Christian Theology: the Doctrine of God. Norman Anderson, op cit, p 11, expounds: “I find the ‘preliminary exploration’ by John Wnham of the way in which the records could be harmonized – with admirable logic and cogency, although admittedly on the basis of numerous suggestions and assumptions that only an interview with the witnesses themselves could possibly sustain – considerably more persuasive that the dogmatic assertions made by many of those who seem to approach the records with a marked bias (whether conscious or unconscious) in the opposite direction, and who do not hesitate to make bland assumptions which are not only equally incapable of substantiation, but which often see to me to fly in the face of reason.”

11. Smith, op cit, p 385.

12. Schonfield, op cit, p 164.

13. Frank Morison, Who Moved the Stone, p 125-44; J.W. Montgomery Where is History Going?, p 41

14. Smith, op cit, p 378-80.

15. Ibid, p 381-2.

16. Smith, op cit, p 383, quotes David Strauss, The Life of Jesus for the People (London, 1879). Note that the exact same evidence is available for Jesus’ death as for his crucifixion. It is strange to accept one and not the other; perhaps it would be more logical to question them both, or accept them both!

17. Smith, op cit, p 387-97; Anderson, op cit, p 11; Henry Morris, Many Infallible Proofs, p 215-17.

18. Montgomery, Where is History Going?, p 63-4.

19. G.K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, p 246

20. Ibid, p 248. J.W. Montgomery adds to this: “The fact is that we simply cannot avoid the conclusion that Jesus was deranged if He thought of Himself as God incarnate and yet was not. Moyes and Kolb, in the latest (5th) edition of their standard medical text, Modern Clinical Psychiatry (Philadelphia and London: Saunders, 1958, p 401), characterize the schizophrenic as one whose behavior becomes autistic rather than realistic, one who allows himself to “retreat from the world of reality.” What greater retreat from reality than a belief in one’s divinity if one is not in fact God? I know that this audience would immediately summon the “men in the white coats” if I – or anyone else – seriously made the claims for himself that Jesus did! Yet, in view of the eminent soundness of Jesus’ teachings, few have been able to give credence to the idea of mental aberration in Him.”

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Chapter Eight: The Legend Hypothesis

1. W.D. Davies, op cit, p 98, 100, 103.

2. R.H. Lightfoot, History and Interpretation in the Gospels, p 30-1, quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 185. (Vol II)

3. M. Dibelius, Gospel Criticism and Christiology, p 27, quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 211; also see Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition, p 38.

4. W.E. Barnes, Gospel Criticism and Form Criticism, p 52, quoted by McDowell, op cit, p 213 Vol II.

5. Vincent Taylor, op cit, p 36.

6. M. Dibelius, op cit, p 30.

7. W.D. Davies, op cit, p 115. Davies says, “Consider the alternatives placed before a student of the tradition about Jesus. The first alternative is to believe that for some time after his death and resurrection what Jesus did and said was neglected and so forgotten … The other alternative is to recognize that what Jesus actually taught was remembered by his followers and adapted by the Churches as the need arose.”

8. R. Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, p 2-3. Also see McDowell, op cit, p 187.

9. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, p 173.

10. See H. Riesenfeld and B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, cited by McDowell, op cit, p 214; Anderson, op cit, p 53; W.D. Davies, op cit, p 128.

11. Davies, op cit, p 128.

11a Taylor, op cit, p 41.

12. F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, p 45-6.

13. C.S. Lewis, Best, p 311-14. He comments (p 313-314), “Now if there is such a God and if He descends to rise again, then we can understand why Christ is at once so like the corn-king and so silent about him. He is like the corn-king because the corn-king is a portrait of Him. The similarity is not in the least unreal or accidental. For the corn-king is derived (through human imagination) from the facts of Nature, and the facts of Nature from her Creator; the Death and Re-birth pattern is in her because it was first in Him. On the other hand, elements of Nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teaching of Jesus and from the Judaic preparation which led up to it precisely because in them Nature’s Original is manifesting Itself. In them you have from the very outset got in behind Nature-religion and behind Nature herself. Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear; that which the shadows resembled does. The Hebrews throughout their history were being constantly headed off from the worship of nature-gods; not because the nature-gods were in all respects unlike the God of Nature but because, at best, they were merely like, and it was the destiny of that nation to be turned away from likeness to the thing itself.”

14. Davies, op cit, p 120-1.

15. R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, p 16-17.[

16. Edwin Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), p 180.

17. Ibid. He elaborates: “Sometimes an appeal is made to authorities who in turn appeal ultimately to the earlier works of Reitzenstein for evidence of pre-Christian Gnostic concepts. For example, Martin appeals to S. Mowinckel to support the position that “a widespread myth of the Primal Man in the pre-Christian Near East seems very possible.” But when one examines Mowinckel’s work one discovers that he in turn relies for his support on the works of Bousset and Reitzenstein.”

18. Ibid, p 174: “It is somewhat of an ironic situation that a ‘circular’ appeal for support with respect to pre-Christian Gnosticism exists in the relationship between New Testament scholars and Mandaean scholars – though no-one seems to have noticed this. We have seen that New Testament scholars like Bultmann, Schmitals, Schlier, Bornkamm, Robinson, etc., have appealed to the Mandaean evidence. What is not so well know is that Mandaean scholars have in turn appealed to the studies of Bultmannian scholars for a major source of their conviction that the Mandaean texts represent an early Gnosticism.”

19. W.F. Albright, Archeology of Palestine and the Bible, p 40, quotes by McDowell, op cit, p 285 Vol II. Also see the article by F.F. Bruce in Colin Brown (ed) History, Criticism, and Faith (IVP, 1976), p 90-92.

20. Brown, op cit, p 108-112, article by R.T. France.

21. Ibid, p 112, article by R.T. France.

22. C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, p 154.

23. Ibid, p 157-8.

24. Ibid, p 161.

25. Ibid, p 158.

26. R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, p 15.

27. Ibid, p 46, 54-5.

28. Taylor, op cit, p 168.

29. A.H.N. Green-Armytage, John Who Saw, po 12+, quoted in J.A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament, p 356.

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Chapter Eight: The Legend Hypothesis

1. F.F. Bruce, Documents, p 27. Geisler and Nix, From God to Us (Chicago, Moody, 1974), p 107, add to this: “Thus, the process of canonization was at work from the very beginning. The first churches were exhorted to select only the authentic apostolic writings. When a book was verified as authentic either by signature or by apostolic envoy, it was officially read to the church and then circulated amoung other churches. Collections of these apostolic writings began to take form in apostolic times. By the end of the first century all twenty-seven New Testament books were written and received by the churches. The canon was complete and all the books were recognized by believers somewhere. Because of the multiplicity of false writings and the lack of immediate access to the conditions related in the initial acceptance of a book, the debate about the canon continued for several centuries, until the church universal finally recognized the canonicity of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.”

2. Geisler and Nix, General Introduction, p 184-6.

3. Ibid, p 193, taken fro his chart.

4. Bruce, Documents, p 24.

5. Geisler and Nix, From God to Us, p 107.

6. Davies, op cit, p 234, 237.

7. Montgomery, Where?, p 41.

8. Ibid, p ?

9. Bruce, Documents.

10. R. Martin, op cit, p 203.

11. Ibid

12. Ibid

13. Ibid

14. Papias, recorded in Eusebius, Ecclestical History, iii.39, found in J.B. Lightfoot (ed), The Apostolic Fathers, p 263-4.

15. Ibid, Lightfoot p 265.

16. R. Martin, op cit, p 211.

17. Phillip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol II (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1910), p 746-56.

18. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. iii.1, found in Bergen, p 80-3.

19. Irenaeus, Letter to Florinus, found in Bergen, p 80-3.

20. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer iii.1.1, found in Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, p 72n.

21. Schaff, op cit, p 781-4.

22. Clement of Alexandria, recorded in Eusebius, H.E., vi.14.6+, found in Guthrie, op cit, p 72n.

23. R. Martin, op cit, p 210-11.

24. Ibid, p 210-13.

25. Montgomery, Where?, p 49. J.A.T. Robinson, op cit, entire book, for a presentation of the arguments for a pre-70 date on the gospels, epistles, and others. He summarizes the need for a critical, scholarly approach – as opposed to subjective methods – in this study: “Those who press on to the more constructive work of building theologies of the New Testament tend to be content to assume and incorporate the foundations laid by others. It is noticeable as one visits the literature of the past hundred years how much more thoroughly grounded in these questions was the work of the older generation – most of whom were brought up on the classics – and how much more rigorous in the dating of the evidence, as well as attentive to the evidence of dating, than some of their successors. This, one has to say it, has been true of many, though not all (R.H. Lightfoot was an honourable exception), of the form critics and redaction critics. Their world has been a world without fences, where words and ideas, myths and movements, Hermetic, Gnostic, Mandaean and the rest, have floated freely with no very noticeable tethering to time or place. Many of the circles and communities of the early church with their tensions and tendencies are frankly creations of the critics or highly subjective reconstructions.”

26. Guthrie, op cit, p 73.

27. Ibid.

28. Bruce, Documents, p 12; Davies, op cit, p 198, Montgomery, Where?, p 42.

29. Guthrie, op cit, p 74.

30. Ibid, p 98-102.

31. The “we” sections are in Acts chapters 16, 20, 21, and 27.

32. Guthrie, op cit, p 100-102.

33. Ibid, p 115-116.

34. Ibid, p 354.

35. See Sir William Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trust-worthiness of the New Testatment (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1911).

36. Guthrie, op cit, p 160.

37. Bruce, Documents, p 42.

38. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. iii.1, found in Bergen, p 80-3.

39. F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953), p 230.

40. Guthrie, op cit, p 99.

41. Davies, op cit, p 219; Bruce, Documents, p 12-13; Montgomery, Where?, p 49.

42. Guthrie, op cit, p 110-12, 347-8.

43. Ibid, p 112-13, 345-6.

44. Ibid, p 340.

45. Ibid, p 343-5.

46. Ibid, p 44.

47. Papias, recorded in Eusebius, H.E. iii.39; found in Lightfoot, op cit, p 265.

48. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer iii.1; found in Bergen, p 80-3.

49. Bruce, Documents, p 38.

50. Ibid.

51. Guthrie, op cit, p 34.

52. Ibid

53. Ibid

54. R.H. Gundry, A Survey of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970), p 235; Guthrie, op cit, p 38, 46.

55. Ibid

56. Ibid

57. Guthrie, op cit, p 42.

58. Montgomery, Where?, p 48; Guthrie, op cit, p 41-4.

59. Davies, op cit, p 209-11.

60. Guthrie, op cit, p 45-46.

61. Bruce, Documents, p 12.

62. Guthrie, op cit, p 246.

63. Ibid, p 244, 249; Bruce, Documents, p 57.

64. Papias, recorded in Eusebius, H.E. iii.39, found in Lightfoot, op cit, p 263-4.

65. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. iii.1, found in Bergen, p 80-3.

66. Bruce, Spreading Flame, p 52.

67. Ibid

68. Guthrie, op cit, p 260.

69. Davies, op cit, p 376.

70. Ibid

71. Guthrie, op cit, p 285.

72. Ibid

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