Biblical Reliability

What Are Students Learning At Yale? A Review of Dale Martin’s Introductory Lecture on the New Testament

Watching Dale Martin teach his introductory lecture raised a number of concerns for me — not primarily because I disagree profoundly with many of Dr. Martin’s conclusions but because a significant number of the ‘facts’ he delivers in his presentation are quite simply false on a factual level, or otherwise misleading.

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A Reply to Bart Ehrman’s Defense of Jesus, Interrupted on the MythVision Podcast

Multiple times throughout the podcast, Ehrman points out that it is possible to make nearly any two contradictory texts harmonize if you try hard enough. This is true, but it is likewise possible to make nearly any two complementary texts contradict if you try hard enough.

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On Matthew Hartke’s Five Reasons to Doubt the Resurrection

Matthew L. Hartke is a former Christian who hosts the blog “Resurrection Review,” on which he analyzes and discusses the origins of Christianity. A correspondent recently brought to my attention an article posted on Hartke’s site, provocatively titled “Five Reasons to Doubt the Resurrection” and asked me if I could respond to it.

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The Historicity of the Feeding of the Five Thousand: An Appraisal of the Evidence

It is one of the most iconic incidents in Jesus’ life. We are all familiar with the famous story of Jesus miraculously feeding the five thousand from five loaves and two fish, with no fewer than twelve basketfuls of leftovers. But just how historical is this story?

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Is the Bible Without Error? Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Christian Epistemology

A common litmus test for Christian orthodoxy is adherence to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, which maintains that the Biblical text, in the original autographs, is completely without error in all that it affirms.

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Should Christians Use the Argument from Martyrdom? A Reply to Bart Ehrman

It is a common misstep made by many atheists to think that if a particular piece of evidence fails to logically entail a conclusion, then that same piece of evidence also fails to support the said conclusion. However, this is poor epistemology. A piece of evidence may be confirmatory of a conclusion without establishing it.

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Did Jesus Exist? A Critical Appraisal of Richard Carrier’s Interpretation of the Pauline Corpus

Richard Carrier is an ancient historian who has risen to prominence as the lead advocate of Jesus Mythicism, a school of thought that entertains the idea that Jesus of Nazareth may never have existed at all.

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Hard Evidence the Book of Acts Was Written by an Eyewitness? A Reply to Bart Ehrman

All of the contradictions Ehrman alleges between Acts and Paul’s letters are the result of over-readings, tendentious interpretations, and arguments from silence. The forcefulness that Ehrman ascribes to those, combined with his dismissal of the difficult details Luke gets right concerning geography and other matters as “completely irrelevant” is astounding, and really reveals his unscholarly bias against the New Testament.

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The Resurrection of Jesus: The Evidential Contribution of Luke-Acts

Any discussion of the evidence for the resurrection must first ascertain what the original apostolic witnesses claimed and whether those claims are best explained by the resurrection, or by some alternative hypothesis.

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