Guilty of anything more than exaggeration, leaps in logic, fallacious arguments, canonical bias, being uncritical of ideas you like, confirmation bias, etc.? I’m not morally condemning them. I don’t think the Mcdowells are liars or dishonest (I have no way of evaluating that) but you are putting their intellectual crimes very charitably. Yes those are extremely common when Christian apologists attempt history. Bad science is also extremely common when YECS do science. I am sure when many Christians listen to YEC preachers they think their teaching is reliable, accurate and scripturally sound. They, not being scientists, don’t know any better. It is the same with many Christians reading historical apologetics like NETDAV or The Case for Christ. It feeds their beliefs, tends to their insecurities and tells them what they want or even need to hear. I wonder how many young Christians–vibrant with faith, and eager to share the facts of the gospel–marched off to university, fully ready to buck the system, armed with NETDAV or Strobel’s The Case for Christ, only to be slapped silly with actual history? I was one of those who took the apologetical bait and fell hard because of it. The low blow is necessary and its why I try to write for those who have staggered out of this camp, feeling pretty lost. Truth is its hard to conduct legitimate research for anyone, myself included, in a polarized field when you aren’t a trained professional. Even then, professionals in Biblical criticism can’t hope to keep up with all the ideas, books and opinions circulating today.
For me the bias in conservative works is obvious. Look at all the conservative scholars in seminaries who think every (and that is the key word) NT book was penned by its namesake. Every miracle recorded about Jesus happened as written. Do you ever wonder why they always reach a positive historical judgment about ALL critical NT issues? If every judgment you ever make always favors tradition and historicity of Biblical works, regardless of whether your judgment is correct or not, you clearly have some bias guiding you. All this while they deny virtually deny tradition about every book outside the canon. Clearly faith is driving or masquerading itself as history.
NETDAV spends a good deal of time on textual criticism from what I remember. The simple fact is we have extremely scant textual evidence the first hundred or so years for all NT works and nothing for the OT for centuries IIRC.
[1] Take each book of the Bible (or just NT) and write them in a list.
[2] Next write down all that we know about their text from the first 100-150 years.
[3] How many verses do we actually have?
The idea that if we can’t trust the Bible textually we can’t trust the rest of classical history is nonsense that only preaches to the choir. Who cares? Who bases their life on a reconstruction of the text of Josephus or Tacitus? And why would anyone want to do this or base faith in the Bible on human ability to reconstruct it? The fact is that any rational historian is going to trust where the evidence leads them. If they cannot be certain of the textual stability and authorship of classical literature then they will tell you so. They do discuss these issues but Christian apologists are often not interested in reading what they actually write. You know how scientists in real studies always give probabilities or error bars or list limitations of their studies? In high academic research, historians always discussant vet their source material. That is what history is. Ken Sparks mentioned this. How conservative exegetes almost always caricature what critical scholars actually believe! It is a defense mechanism. Do Christian apologists actually think scholars don/t question the textual stability of a non-biblical work 10 centuries removed from its putative origin? I can assure you they do or simply work with the document because its all they have adding necessary caveats.
Comparing the Bible to ancient works is itself done in a misleading fashion. The fact that we have more evidence for the Bible than some other ancient works does’t mean much. A person with a net worth of $3,000 has more money than a person with a net worth of $10 but I would classify both as “broke.”
So what about the dark period when these texts were first written? Before they became authoritative and circulated widely, they would have been the most vulnerable to alteration? How can a complete paucity of evidence actually demand any verdict besides non liquet?
Its extremely disingenuous not to point out we have very little information for the actual, specific compositional history, transmission and dissemination of any NT work for 100 or more years after they were all thought to be written. A credit-card sized fragment of John (ca 100-200 AD and not 125 AD) showed up in Egypt? Wow.
Another simple fact is that a bazillion copies from the middle ages do not get us to the autographs. Copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies hundreds of years later do not get us there. Nor do they mean we should trust the book with our lives. And good textual critics know earlier is not even always better. A manuscript from the 11th century could be more accurate than one from the 2nd.
The idea that we can reconstruct the whole bible from church citations is also a nice party punch line of Mcdowell types. But ask yourself, is this from church fathers of the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh centuries? How diverse are the earliest citations when the texts would be the most fluid? When you dig deeper and examine the claim it loses its force.
We certainly do have almost an embarrassing wealth of Biblical manuscripts and that is a good thing, but the evidence is always uncritically exaggerated and overstated. Especially for what the evidence is pushing towards. The field of textual criticism is also notorious in my opinion for drawing the most conservative of Christians. When you go for a phd into other programs much fewer remain conservative at the end.
I raised a good look into critical textual issues on this site also hosted here. These all show variable composition histories that should serve as a warning to textual critics.
And this is the most boring of all the subjects in the book. Even if we have an accurately transmitted bible from the autographs, this says nothing about the accuracy of its contents which I am sure the author would agree. An accurate copy of Shakespeare copies extremely well over the centuries is only that. It means nothing aside from the uncritical false sense of security some believers obtain from it. Only that the book was copied well enough to retain its message over time. If you were worried about that it could placate some doubts but it says nothing of the message in the book or the accuracy of its contents. There is also nothing remarkable or supernatural about the preservation of the Bible textually. A careful and unbiased assessment reveals the very human processed involved and many expected alterations and corruption.
If apologists exaggerate a rather docile textual criticism, imagine what happens when they try to convince us a man rose from the dead based on 2,000 year old hearsay? Or, if my memory serves me well, when Mcdowell regurgitates the horrifically bad “trilemma” which only has a footing if you assume Jesus actually said and did all the things the Gospel records and also that the later church’s interpretation of them is correct (full God full man). AKA, if you assume all the tenets of conservative Christianity are already true, then the trilemma has force. Plenty of people read the Gospels and do not immediately think Jesus claimed to be identical with God (who is God but God alone? oh he must have said it with a twinkle in his eye because we don’t like it otherwise)… Which Jesus? The contradictory historical Jesus of John and the Synoptics? The canonical Jesus of faith? We read all verses through the lens of 2,000 years of Christian history where clearly the trinity won. Jesus pronounced sins forgiven? Didn’t the Jewish high priest do that as well. Many things we take for granted do not necessarily have to be taken as “Jesus = full God” in scripture. The trilemma is meh. A fourth option is available. The church exaggerated the self claims of Jesus after believing he rose from the dead. I believe this happened. The record shows it in my opinion but at the same time, I believe it is true. For me the church came to understand the fullness of Jesus only after His death and the Gospels are not as interested in factual history or chronological narration as we are. It an open question to me how much the lowered and fully human Jesus even knew about himself.
But anyways, NETDAV is misleading. A decent INTRO to the NT like Raymon Brown’s or the New Jerome Biblical commentary would be better books to read for Christians interested in history. Both are mainline critical works very much sympathetic to Christian faith.
Vinnie