The Pollen Problem

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My interest in such arguments is, at best, tenuous and tepid (though I will admit to an ongoing morbid curiosity about the Quirinius Census – it seems such an absurd oddity, and defenses of it create amusement in their creativity, if not their plausibility).

A more interesting question, to me at least, is whether there is such a thing as good apologetics, including in that term the “confessional scholarship”[1] that Peter J. Williams indulges in. Are we wrong to, in @nathanlong’s words, “paint all ‘apologists’ with the same brush”?

Regardless of its label, apologetics, by definition, consists of taking a fixed conclusion and tailoring the evidence and the analysis to fit it. This generally results in the evidence being cherry-picked and/or selectively emphasised and de-emphasised, bare possibilities (and even stacked bare possibilities) presented as plausible, and steps in the argument skipped or assumed.

This creates two problems for the skeptical observer.

Is the putative ‘better’ apologetics more valid, or simply more sophisticated in how it obfuscates its flaws?

Even if, by happenstance, an apologist makes a valid argument for a true conclusion, how would a skeptical observer know this? It will be presented with the exact same level of confidence and certitude as an invalid argument for a false conclusion.

This does not render apologists’ arguments inherently wrong, but it does render them inherently untrustworthy. For this reason I think it is legitimate to “paint all ‘apologists’ with the same brush.”

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So far as I can tell GAE is an example of good apologetics. But it seems to be a rarity in that, at least by my experience. But then I’m hardly claiming that absolutely all apologetics are bad - only that there are a lot of bad apologetics about.

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Fair question. It looks like I didn’t describe that exactly right.

Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate with Bart Ehrman | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Ehrman said the disciples expected so much of Jesus, but instead he was humiliated and crucified. Then, starting around 1h10m he said (my transcription, excuse any errors):

I think it’s absolutely the case that some of his disciples afterwards thought that he had been raised from the dead.
My sense is that some of them thought they saw him alive afterwards.
I don’t know how many people had the visions.
I don’t know whether there were groups, whether a few individuals.
Eventually they convince the others, and people came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead.
They started proclaiming that, and they convinced people of it.
And that’s the beginning of Christianity.

Now, if you’re a Christian, that’s perfectly fine, because you can just say, well, yes, he did appear to people.
If you’re not a Christian, it’s also perfectly fine.
You can say they thought they had visions of Jesus.
You don’t have to have an explanation.
It could be a mistaken identity.
It could be a dream.

So Ehrman didn’t say there was a group hallucination. But to me, what he’s saying doesn’t add up, because the disciples themselves say they saw him together, as a group.

The disciples spent several years traveling with Jesus, listening to him talk, eating with him, etc. In places like Luke 24 and John 21 they describe seeing him after his resurrection, in a group, up close, eating and talking and touching. People don’t just imagine stuff like that.

There are various ways of explaining away the resurrection, and personally I don’t think any of them work. You can make up your own mind, but to me, “they thought they saw him” seems unbelievable. And there’s no evidence of earlier, less supernatural accounts morphing into supernatural ones.

This looks like exactly what I was speaking of. Apologists cannot be trusted.

@Paul_King I’m not sure if you’re referring to me here, but I did not intend to misrepresent Ehrman.

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I admit that I don’t know what to make of the Quirinius Census. I see that various solutions have been proposed, and all are a bit of a stretch but some seem at least possible.

Luke has been vindicated on some questions before. For me it seems reasonable to trust him on questionable points.

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Like you, I mistrust people who present all their claims with equally perfect confidence. But not all apologists do this. Gavin Ortlund is a good example in my opinion.

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Many people thought that Trump won the 2020 election, And they thought that strongly enough to fight for it on Jan 6th. It seems that group-think can be very persuasive for some people.

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To “vindicate” Luke on this, one would have to render three points plausible:

  1. That Quirinius performed a second census before his documented one. This is the least implausible of the points.

  2. That Roman authorities performed a census of Judea while it was a client kingdom. The only known case of this occuring (AFAIK) was Cilicia Trachea in 36AD. In that year the client king, Archelaus II attempted his own census, which led to a stubborn revolt, which led the Roman governor of Syria to intervene, put down the revolt, and enforce a census. These extraordinary circumstances however would not seem to be a precedent for a Roman intervention in a client kingdom under more settled circumstances, nor for such a census to occur without considerable upheaval and notice. This point therefore seems implausible to the point that it stretches credibility to breaking point.

  3. That the Roman authorities sent Joseph from Nazareth to the town of his millennium-before ancestor. I’ve seen a variety of attempted explanations of this, none of them have seemed remotely plausible. The most common seems to be that Joseph retained property there due to his descent from David. This is implausible in the extreme. It would be equivalent to a modern-day working-class man having somehow retained property in Normandy, due to his descent from William the Conqueror. Also, Roman practice seems to be that absentee landlords would have the property’s manager register it on their behalf, rather than force magnates to wander the Empire registering each of their properties in person.

Does Ortlund’s level of certitude vary by the strength of the evidence, or by the level of theological importance he places on a claim?

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What he is saying doesn’t fit with your beliefs in the matter, but Ehrman doesn’t share those beliefs. Ehrman is clearly talking about the appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 (as I said) and not the Gospels. Given that the appearance stories in the Gospels are an area of significant disagreement it’s clear that they cannot be considered reliable sources for that, They don’t even seem to roughly follow the list of 1 Corinthians 15 - the events underlying those appearances seem to be lost.

Luke, of course, was not written by a disciple. So there’s another significant falsehood. I - like Ehrman - do not agree with the idea that John - especially the tacked-on chapter 21 - were written by a disciple either. The more so as 21:47 appears to suggest - to me anyway - that a large number of stories had grown up over the decades and that the author is giving us a few selections from those.

I was referring to the originator of the claim, whoever it was. That you did not intend to misrepresent Ehrman does not change the fact that you did. And ridiculed him on the basis of that misrepresentation. Intent is not relevant to my point - the falsehood is.

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Which disciples say that? How many of them say that?

At best you have two disciples saying he appeared to them all.

That’s not “the disciples themselves say”, that’s ‘a couple of the disciples say’.

This is overstating the case. It’s bad apologetics. It’s an example of why apologists cannot be trusted.