From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2004 8:53 AM
To: Gootee, Joseph
Subject: RE: Is this a Joke?

Is this a serious challenge I can't quite tell.  But I will give it a go.

The challenge is serious; your attempted response is another matter. But if you're not too embarrassed by your response, and aren't simply trying to make me look like a bully by teeing up for me such a feeble rebuttal, I'll be happy to post your email as an attempted response to my challenge.

BH: Jesus' endorsement of the murderous immorality of Yahweh in the Torah;
Reply : What murderous immorality are you referring to?  No body can retort this until you define that.

My charges against Yahweh are detailed in my document. You apparently have no answer for them.

BH: Jesus' doctrine of "eternal punishment" in the "eternal fire" of Hell;
Reply : How does Jesus' metaphorical depiction of hell disprove his divinity?

Obviously, eternal punishment is prima facie unjust.

BH: Jesus' failure to claim actual divinity;
Reply : You have got to be kidding!  Jesus was asked publicly in front of the temple priests if he was the some of man and Jesus said yes.  Is this not Jesus claiming to be divine, if the Jewish definition of the son of man is in fact the Messiah?

The OT does not define the Messiah as divine.  In the gospels Jesus never claims identity with God or even explicit divinity, but rather a divinely special status as "the Son of God" and the "Anointed One" (Hebrew: messiah; Greek: christos). Jesus repeatedly distinguishes himself from God:

When Jesus' opponents say his assumption of authority could be interpreted as a claim of divinity, all three synoptics agree [Mk 2:10, Mt 9:6, Lk 5:24] that Jesus merely asserted "authority on earth", and none intimates that his accusers concluded he was affirming their accusation.

Jn 8:58-59 Jesus claimed to be the "I Am", just like God told Moses He was in Ex 3:14, the Jews knew what Jesus was saying and took up stones to kill Him for blasphemy.

Jesus was not claiming to be Yahweh. In the same speech he says "If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me."

Jn 10:30-33, same basic thing, Jesus claimed to be God and the Jews knew it and wanted to stone Him for it.

In the one instance in the gospels [Jn 10:33ff] in which Jesus' identity with God is explicitly discussed, Jesus cites a Psalm [82:6] as a precedent for his metaphor, and hastily retreats to his formulation of being "God's Son", adding vaguely that "the Father is in me, and I in the Father". However, 1 Jn 2:15 says this is true of anyone who acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, and Jesus used the same mutual inclusion poetry about him and his disciples [Jn 14:20].  When at another time [Jn 5:18ff] the Jews characterized the "Son of Man" title as "making himself equal with God",  Jesus answered not by claiming identity but by drawing distinctions:

Thus Jesus retreats the only two times he is accused of claiming identity or equality with God.

The scripture claims throughout that Jesus was God...

The title of 'God' is never reliably applied to Jesus anywhere in the New Testament. (In many translations of 2 Pet 1:1 and Titus 2:13, the description "God and Saviour" is seemingly applied to Jesus, but the scholarly consensus regards these two letters as late and pseudoepigraphic.) Acts quotes [2:22, 2:36, 3:13, 10:38, 17:31] Peter and Paul describing Jesus in terms of a man appointed to an office, but never calling him God.  The gospel authors never explicitly claim Jesus to be God, and the closest they come is the vague language of Jn 1: "the Word was God" and "became flesh". John quotes Thomas exclaiming [Jn 20] "my Lord and my God", but immediately states [20:31] as a creed merely "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God". The "mystery" of Jesus' nature was hardly clarified by the Apostles [e.g. Phil 2:6, Rom 1:4, Col 1:15, Col 2:9], whose epistles never claim Jesus has any kind of identity with God. (Christian scribes tried to change that; cf. the differing manuscripts for Rom 9:5, Acts 20:28, and 1 Tim 3:16.) Even the alleged angelic annunciation of Jesus to his parents omitted [Lk 1:32, Mt 1:20, Mt 2:13, Mt 2:20] the claim that Jesus was Yahweh incarnate.

BH: Jesus' failed prophecy of his imminent return;
Reply:  Jesus prophesied many things including his resurrection which was witnessed by about 500 people,

You here do not even attempt to address my point about the failed Olivet prophecy. Over his alleged forty days of resurrection appearances, the gospels record not a single sighting of Jesus by anyone other than his disciples. This statement can in fact be expanded to the entire New Testament, since Paul's listing [1 Cor 15] of an appearance to "more than 500 of the brothers at the same time" is suspect:

You continue:
that changed hateful Jews into messianic Jews, which  motivated already unfaithful disciples to walk into certain crucifixion to whiteness the account of his resurrection. 
No, all we know is that they were firm believers in something.  The mere fact of their martyrdom does not tell us what they specifically were martyred for. In particular, there is zero evidence that they died for a specific belief in a physical resurrection, as opposed to a spiritual manifestation and vindication.
These are not the acts of men creating a hoax. 
Most or all of the apostles would themselves have been dupes of the person(s) who emptied the tomb. 
They do not walk into certain death willingly and without fear.
We have enough evidence to suggest that Jesus himself willingly faced near-certain death, but even he is quoted as despairing, and we simply don't have any reliable evidence of the alleged fearlessness of his followers.
Furthermore If they where going to create a cover up story they surely would not leave the first account of the missing body of Jesus to women.  At that time demon where not trusted at all.  FOR ANYTHING. Why would such an intricate scheme, as you would lead people to believe, hinge on the testimony of females?. 
If a female was the instigator of the plot, then there would no other choice. Mary Magdalene was a longtime disciple [Lk 8:2] "out of whom [Jesus] had driven seven demons" [Mk 16:9, Lk 8:2] and who (unlike any apostle) attended both the crucifixion and entombment. She was the first to visit the tomb on Easter [Mt 28:1, Jn 20:1], and the possibility of removal [Jn 20:2,14,15] was not unimaginable to her. She weepingly lingered [Jn 20:11] after the apostles left the empty tomb, and thereupon was the first [Mk 16:9, Mt 28:9, Jn 20:14] to claim seeing an appearance.
BH: Jesus' failure to competently reveal his doctrines (concerning e.g. salvation, hell, divorce, circumcision, and diet) in his own written account or that of an eyewitness;
Reply : I am not sure which book you are referring to but I could show you countless examples of Jesus covering all of the above topics. For example Salvation :  You must understand that Jesus is God.  Therefore all doctrine in the bible referring to salvation was divinely inspired by Jesus or God, so why don't you just look up salvation in any concordance and you will find all kinds of salvation.
"All kinds of salvation" is indeed the problem. There are famously conflicting Christian doctrines on the above topics, because Jesus was incompetent in providing clear revelation.
BH: Jesus' failure to perform miracles the accounts of which cannot be so easily explained as faith-healing, misinterpretation, exaggeration, and embellishment;
Reply:  This is your argument?
No, that's a bullet point referring to my argument -- which you ignored, so I'll just paste: In the gospels Jesus heals the sick (possession, blindness, skin disorder, bleeding, fever, paralysis, withered hand), revives the recently deceased, calms a storm, multiplies food, and walks on water. The miracles ascribed to Jesus seem not to have been very convincing [Mt 11:20, Lk 10:13, Jn 6:66, 10:32, 12:37, 15:24], and seem explainable by a combination of conventional faith healing, exaggeration, and mythologizing. The three people Jesus allegedly reanimates [Mk 5/Lk 8; Lk 7; Jn 11] might not actually have been clinically dead, and the gospels report not a single indication supporting such a diagnosis. Any cases of blindness, paralysis, or demonic possession cured by Jesus could have been psychogenic. Jesus apparently admits [Lk 11:24-26] that his cures for demonic possession are often not permanent, and in the synoptic gospels there is only one mention [Mt 21:14] of a cure being performed in Jerusalem. The one case of congenital blindness is recorded as disputed, and only in the latest gospel [Jn 9].
 
The appearances were suspiciously exclusive: "He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen" [Acts 10:40-41] "Why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?" [Jn 14:22]. Many of the "appearances" seem to have been unimpressive to the disciples who heard about them (and should have been expecting them) and even to those who witnessed them:
The gospels themselves give precedent for the idea of a dead person being “raised from the dead” [Mk 16:14] by inhabiting the body of some other person currently living. When some [Mk 6:14, Mk 8:28, Mt 16:14, Lk 9:19] -- including Herod [Mk 6:16, Mt 14:2] -- thought  that John the Baptist had been "raised from the dead", at least a few of these people would have known that Jesus' body had (like the Easter gardener's) been animate before the Baptist's death. There is no record that anyone ever considered checking the Baptist's body (the grave of which was known his disciples [Mk 6:29, Mt 14:13]), and there is no record that anyone wondered why Jesus' neck did not show signs of John's earlier beheading.
Even Jews whom persecuted Jesus admitted to him being a profit and having preformed the works of God.  Several of them witnessed him performing miracles as well as Jesus' disciples. 
False. There is no evidence that any opponents of Christianity ever made a reliable admission of actual miracles:
Continuing:
BH: Jesus' failure to attract significant notice (much less endorsement) in the only detailed contemporaneous history of first-century Palestine;
Mr... Holtz with all due respect not only is this statement not true, you just proved your historical and biblical ignorance.  That was the first century, they did not have Fox and CNN to spread word about things that fast.  Things took a lot longer to set in,
Despite your laughable charge of "historical and biblical ignorance", you have no answer to my wide-ranging evidence: The 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus is hard to count as anti-Christian, even after discounting his affirmation (unnoticed by all of his earliest Christian commentators) of the resurrection as an interpolation. Josephus devotes more space each to John the Baptist and James, and while reporting much minutiae over the entire period during which Jesus lived, does not mention:
  • the Christmas Star that disturbed Herod and "all Jerusalem" [Mt 2:3],
  • Herod's massacre [Mt 2:16],
  • Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem [Mt 21:8-11],
  • the Good Friday earthquake [Mt 27:51],
  • the Good Friday resurrectees that "appeared to many people" in Jerusalem [Mt 27:53], or
  • the Good Friday 3-hour darkness "over all the land" [Mk 15:33, Lk 23:44, Mt 27:45].
    • These events in fact went unnoticed by every non-Christian writer, including the historians Seneca and Pliny the Elder. Contrast this with the supernova of 1006CE that was noted in China, Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland. (Syncellus quotes a lost text of the Christian historian Julius Africanus which itself cites a lost text by Thallus: "Thallus calls this darkness an eclipse". The identification of Thallus' eclipse with "this darkness" might just be in the mind of Julius Africanus, and Thallus at any rate cannot be reliably dated as writing independently of the gospels.) The Alexandrian philosopher and commentator Philo outlived Jesus by 15 or 20 years, and as a visitor to Jerusalem should have met witnesses to the Easter miracles. His silence suggests that Jesus and his followers did not make the early impression that they should have if the gospels were true.
    however  he did successfully convert the biggest pagan empire of the time to Christianity, but hey lets not give him to much credit. 
    Jesus wasn't a Christian -- he was a Jewish prophet who affirmed Jewish law [Mt 5:17-18; Lk 2:27,39; Jn 10:35], observed the Jewish calendar [Lk 4:16, Mt 24:20], and preached about the God of Israel [e.g. Mk 12:29] in Jewish synagogues [Mk 1:21, 1:39, 6:2; Mt 4:23, 9:35, 13:54; Lk 4:15, 4:44, 6:6, 13:10, 19:47; Jn 6:59, 18:20] exclusively for Jews [Mt 10:5, Mt 15:24]. Jesus no doubt echoed the Torah theme that "all nations" would witness the majesty of Israel's God, but his only command to actually convert and baptize "all nations" is in a post-Easter speech alleged only in one gospel [Mt 28:19] (and in an appendix later added to Mark [16:15]).
     
    Jesus failed in his attempt to reform Judaism, but his followers did indeed succeed in salvaging a new religion from the rubble of Jesus' failed ministry.
    BH: Jesus' failure to recruit anyone from his family,
    Reply : Mary and Joseph/ if you are referring to his disciples he did not try to recruit any family for those tasks for very good reason.
    Not surprisingly, you give no answer to the devastating point that Jesus' family should have believed but did not.
    BH: any acquaintance from before his baptism,
    Reply : Obviously the bible does not document his life in detail before his encounter with John the Baptist
    That doesn't explain the fact that during his ministry, no follower is ever identified as a long-time acquaintance.
    BH: a majority of Palestinian Jews, and even some of those who heard his words and witnessed his alleged miracles.
    Reply : Mr... Holtz human nature is completely against acts of faith.  There has always been skeptics and always will.
    What "faith"? Jesus was allegedly performing dozens of miracles, but your own sacred scrolls admit that even eyewitnesses and family members were not impressed..
    Bottom Line:  Your arguments are not only unoriginal and regurgitated,
    Where did you see me claim my arguments are original?  They are indeed almost entirely non-original, because the evidentiary problems with Christianity have been obvious for centuries.
    they are vague and reflect biblical ignorance.
    My document cites around 100 scriptural passages. You ignore all but the introduction to my document, and cite only 3 scriptural passages. Your characterizations are laughable.
    You need to stick to programming and bow out of theological debates.  Even my close atheist friends would laugh at this website.  This is a disgrace to your cause.  You only give skeptics a bad rep.
    For you to blurt out such ridiculous hyperbole suggests that my writings have seriously shaken the foundations of your worldview. If you really know any atheists who would laugh at my body of writings,  I invite you to have them send me feedback.
    There now that I have taken some of my precious time to entertain your elementary easily falsifiable arguments,
    LOL. You didn't even address 95% of my arguments, which is why I'm able to rebut your meager response merely by pasting (as blue text above) from the parts of my document that you ignored.
    here is my counter challenge for you!  If the hopes that are a Macro evolutionist/naturalist/humanist (meaning you believe we all evolved from a common awns ester) I will give you a real challenge.  I will give you $10,000 if you can offer ANY empirical evidence proving macro evolution. 
    I challenge you to put your $10,000 in an escrow account controlled by neutral judges that we both approve. You of course will not, so your challenge is hilariously worthless. At any rate, I don't bother debating basic truths that can be found in any textbook or reference work. If you want to debate creationism or the flatness of the Earth, you'll have to waste somebody else's time.