Reading Time: 6 minutes I had the dubious pleasure of debating a number of different aspects of the Nativity with a Christian apologist (a Cambridge astrophysics graduate and vicar) whom I had been linked to on Facebook after he had posted this: Time for my annual Christmas challenge. Skeptics say that there are contradictions in and amongst the Gospels […]
Herod
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My Nativity Debate with Lydia McGrew: Post-Match Analysis
Reading Time: 8 minutes I had a debate over whether the Nativity in Luke and Mark was fact or fairytale on Friday night for the Unbelievable? show on Premier Christian radio. I was warned that McGrew might try the Gish-gallup approach so I should get it in myself. I ended up being indeed fairly scattergun, though not out of […]
Posted inHistory
The Nativity Census Challenge: Update
Reading Time: 3 minutes For any of you who haven’t been reading the threads on the census, a challenge that I set to See Noevo to answer, I would like to update you on what he has delivered by way of riposte: For longtime readers here, you might be surprised to learn that JohnM has returned to the fray. […]
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When Your Everyday Catholic Doesn’t Get It
Reading Time: 4 minutes See Noevo is no doubt a committed Catholic, but what he said recently really illustrated much of the problem in debating laymen. I don’t mean this to be a personal attack on him and to use “laymen” pejoratively, but my point is important. My piece in question was about the ten-year gap between the death […]
Posted inHistory
Responding to Criticism on the Herod/Census Problem
Reading Time: 4 minutes This is my second rebuttal to the efforts Dave Armstrong is putting in to trying to debunk my claims of contradictions in the Bible. The first rebuttal, completed yesterday, looked at his criticisms of my case that there are contradictions involved in the accounts of Jesus alighting on the shore of the Sea of Galilee […]
Posted inBooks
Herod Has Problems
Reading Time: 9 minutes Over on a previous post and thread from a long time ago, one (Christian) commenter declared that the likes of JP Holding and Jason Engwer had basically dealt with all of the harmonisation issues within the context of the historical problems in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew and their infancy accounts. I will now, as Randal […]
Posted inHistory
Quote of the Day, epicurus on Herod
Reading Time: 2 minutes In my post on Herod, epicurus brought up a great point with regard to the news of the Messianic prophecy which shook Jerusalem at the arrival of the MAgi:
In the same way that the resurrection story tosses out a verse that should cause a revolution, then moves on as if no big deal (the dead coming out of their graves and walking around the city -Matt 27:52-3), the assertion that Herod and all of Jerusalem being “troubled” at the wise men following a star to come worship the new King of The Jews (Matt 2:3) doesn’t seem to mean much for a fair size city.
Posted inBooks, The Secular
Herod would never have slaughtered the innocents
Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s that time of year when those nativity accounts get brought up. And summarily debunked. My book, The Nativity: A Critical Examination, hopefully does a good job of dealing with the many attempts to harmonise the contradictory accounts in Matthew and Luke.
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The Star of Bethlehem Documentary – Textual Criticism and Josephus
Reading Time: 7 minutes This is Part 2 of a critical examination of the MMEL hypothesis of the Star of Bethlehem. Go to the index here.
In Part 1 of this critical overview of the Star of Bethlehem film and its version of history (which I have called the MMEL hypothesis), I looked at the reasons scholars can say we know Herod died no later than 4 BCE given the information we have from Josephus as well as what we can connect with other accounts. The information from Josephus seemed to be overwhelmingly in favor of a 5/4 BCE date for Herod’s death, which would then contradict the time frame needed for the conjunctions of Jupiter and Venus as the MMEL hypothesis requires. However, there is another argument that is focused on, though not detailed, in the documentary, and it concerns the text that we have of Josephus.
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The Star of Bethlehem Documentary–The Death of Herod and Josephus’ Account
Reading Time: 8 minutes This is Part 1 of a critical examination of the MMEL hypothesis of the Star of Bethlehem. Go to the index here. In order to make the theory presented in the Star of Bethlehem documentary work, a major premise concerns the date when Herod the Great, a king of Judea, died. This is because the Gospel of Matthew […]