Embarassing Gospel Details
 Tacitus 3 years of Jesus ministry deleted!

Mark 12:29, where a reply of Jesus is reproduced in which he quoted Deuteronomy 6:4, the Greek singular ho Theos' is used. If a plurality of persons were meant, then we would think that the inspired NT writers would have translated the intensive 'elohim' as plural in Greek also. It is not.

If his plan was to incarnate himself as someone who appeared to be a secretive danger-avoiding family-resenting faith-healing slavery-tolerating unpublished schizophrenic bastard carpenter with unreliable powers, it worked.

the delusions of a resentful illegitimate schizophrenic carpenter who credulously accepted his tribe's primitive myths in a backwater province of a now-long-dead empire

in the rural outback of a peripheral province of a regional empire

When do souls bind to zygotes? stem cells?  Does the soul leave upon brain death?  Could I trap a soul by life-supporting a brain-dead person?  Could I mass-produce souls by creating zygotes or stem cells?  Are frozen zygotes trapped souls?  Does a chromosomally defective zygote have a soul?  Do early miscarriages have a soul?

Why not mandatory indoctrination of children? Why let unsaved parents send innocent children to hell?


background plausibility, external objective confirmation, internal consistency, spatiotemporal proximity to the reported events, evidence of contemporary skeptical cross-examination, absence of plausible alternative explanations, etc. All of these factors tend to argue against the complete veracity of the gospel accounts.

The argument of compositional space constraints is weak enough when aimed at its target of the Good Friday earthquake and zombies, but is utterly ineffectual in explaining why only Luke spares half a verse [22:51] to say that Jesus "healed" the ear with his "touch". Mark spares two verses [14:51-52] to report that a random young follower of Jesus fled the scene naked. Matthew spares two verses to quote Jesus' boasts [26:53-54] about how legions of angels could defend him. John takes care to identify [18:10] both the ear's owner and his assailant. That the other gospels made no room for the healing is a strong hint that it is an embellishment.

The Good Friday zombies and darkness each require only one verse in Matthew, and their absences in other gospels cannot be explained by hypothetical endings.  Mark has room for two sentences about unnamed women from Galilee who were present at Golgotha,  but he can't be bothered to spare one sentence about the zombies. John has room to describe the sewing of Jesus' clothing, and to repeat the words of prophecies that according to Turkel would already have been memorized by John's audience anyway, but John can't spare a verse to note a supernatural three-hour darkness "over all the earth".

The gospels are unanimous in reporting that the ear was severed and that this was the only (and thus quite noticeable) act of violence by Jesus' side.  Thus if the Johanine tradition knew enough to name him as Malchus rather than Malchus The One-Eared, then the healing's omission in John can be explained neither by ignorance nor by the desire to protect Malchus. It's simply fanciful (i.e. unparsimonious) to suggest that only the investigative reporter Luke could possibly dig up the fact of the ear having been severed and then healed.

nothing in [the Lazarus account] supports a firm diagnosis of death, as opposed to e.g. John the Baptist's beheading, or Judas's hanging himself." Jesus' diagnosis is indeed not quite as firm as that of John, but it is still firmer than that of Lazarus, since it is reported that

In France in August 2002, a 68-year-old man was mistakenly declared dead and refrigerated for five hours at a funeral parlor before a worker noticed that he was still alive. The man died two days later.

It was unclear whether the refrigeration played a role in the man's death. The head of the hospital's forensics department, Sophie Gromb, said such errors, while rare, are not improbable. "The law says you can't bury someone within 24 hours of his death, precisely to avoid burying people alive." Police [..] said the man was terminally ill with throat cancer but the cause of his death had not been determined. [Associated Press, 2002-08-12]
None of Jesus' resuscitation cases were said to be so old, or to have such a terminal disease, or to have suffered such intense hypothermia, so it's not surprising that they might have recovered instead of soon dying like this man.

a deity who is omnipotent and omniscient could easily work miracles that are not flashy or obvious.  Indeed, Jesus' danger avoidance needn't have ever appeared any more fearful than such instances as: These are not "all-too-obvious" miracles, and yet Jesus survives confrontation without having to be reported as avoiding the confrontation in the first place. There are myriad ways that an omnipotent omniscience could withdraw before danger is evident and without obvious miracles.

Jesus was "purposely staying away from [people] waiting to take his life" [Jn 7:1] because "the right time for me has not yet come" [Jn 7:8],


If a person lacks faith and then Jesus does not heal them, that could  be because 1) the divine Jesus declines to miraculously heal the faithless, or 2) the non-divine Jesus cannot faith-heal someone who lacks faith.  That is, the faithless ending up not being healed by Jesus is entirely consistent with Jesus being a non-divine faith-healer. If Jesus were a mere faith-healer, we would expect that those who knew him longest -- his family members and hometown neighbors -- would be least impressed by his act. If by contrast Jesus always had miraculous powers, we would expect that those who knew him longest would his most faithful followers.  They weren't.

Jesus' family watched him grow up a perfectly sinless person. And yet when Jesus began preaching and prophesying and allegedly performing miracles, they thought him delusional. Their verdict against Jesus' divinity is resounding and definitive.

Jesus' family supposedly started off believing in the divine conception and destiny of Jesus, but after raising a supposedly perfect and sinless child, ended up opposing his ministry. The obvious explanation is that there never was anything divine about Jesus, and that his family knew this all along. The Christian thesis of a divine Jesus offers no explanation whatsoever for the behavior of Jesus' family.

The the city of Rome is not the same thing as the "whole world", and being in "heaven" is not the same thing as "appear[ing] in the sky" and being "see[n as] coming on the clouds of the sky". The prophesied things plainly didn't happen during "this generation", and the prophecy is plainly false.

It seems dubious to say that, for example, a man calling himself a Jewish "prophet," leading "multitudes," and claiming he would miraculously "fell the walls of Jerusalem" and take the city was not claiming to be a messiah "of one form or another" (Jewish Antiquities, 20.167-70; Jewish War, 2.261-4), especially when such men claimed they would liberate Israel with God's support, the very thing only the messiah was predicted to do (Jewish War, 2.259). Josephus indeed talks about "imposters and deceivers" who "pretended that they would exhibit manifest wonders and signs, that should be performed by the providence of God" and who promised to liberate Jerusalem from the Romans [Antiquities 20:8:6]. Thus the text of Josephus shows that there were in fact messiah-like pretenders who made claimed to be saviors.

the accuracy of the gospel accounts is no different from that of "any historical record", despite their extraordinary differences in identity of authorship, first-handedness, identification of sources, contemporaneousness to the events, author motivation, and extraordinariness of claims.

doesn't identify a single gospel quote of Jesus' actual words that ontologically equates Jesus with "Wisdom". He only cites two quotes of Jesus, Mat 11:19 and 11:30.  The latter does not even mention Wisdom, but simply borrows language (about yokes and burdens) from an OT passage about Wisdom.  In the former Jesus is simply making a point that his generation does not appreciate him.  Turkel's conclusion that Jesus thus "associat[ed] himself with Wisdom" is hopelessly vague, and his assertion of "ontological equality" between Jesus and Wisdom is utterly unsupported by any actual words of Jesus. No amount of Turkel's OT "Wisdom" obfuscations can put the words into Jesus' mouth that Turkel wishes the gospel "texts" had quoted him saying

passages are consistent with Jesus merely being a uniquely special child of God, and none of them strictly implies that Jesus has ontological equality with God.  that Jesus considered his authority greater than any previous human's is simply not the same thing as Jesus clearly considering himself to be God.

Are water-walking (and taking credit for the weather) the nature miracles that an omnipotent omniscient omnibenevolent deity would rationally choose to demonstrate his divinity? Obviously not. The miracles of Jesus (and of El/Yahweh) are obviously constrained by the limited imaginations of ancient peoples, and by the requirement that no such miracle be allowed to leave credible physical evidence that it occurred.

I am divine.
I am omniscient and omnipotent.
I am ontologically equal to God.
I am God incarnate.
I am El/Yahweh made flesh.

The gospel "sources" only quote Jesus uttering the word "wisdom" four times:
"The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners." ' But wisdom is proved right by her actions." Mat 11:19, Luk 7:35

The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here. Mat 12:42, Luk 11:31

God in his wisdom said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute.' Luk 11:49

For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict. Luk 21:15

None of these even approaches a clear or direct claim to divinity.

My point was clearly that Jesus might have said something with similar meaning to Ps 22:1 but with DIFFERENT words." If the quote of Jesus is a paraphrase of what he actually said, then what he actually said wouldn't necessarily start with precisely the same two words as the paraphrase. that Ps 22 (if relevant at all) would have been a dramatic and easily-composed way to paraphrase whatever Jesus actually said to express his despair
One example is the 1679 bits that comprise the Arecibo interstellar message (http://www.seti-inst.edu/science/a-message.html). I defy Turkel to extract from those bits a message that is plausibly and significantly different than the one its authors intended.

Turkel's ominipotent god(s) could use a similar technique to encode an arbitrary message which they embed in (say) every stream of random quantum fluctuations (or in the digits of pi, as suggested by Carl Sagan). The content of the divine message is of course the problem of Turkel's omniscient omnipotent god(s). They could encode the Hebrew Torah, or the exact text of the KJV, or a thirty-year-long documentary video of the life of Jesus.  If Turkel claims that no god(s) could create a reasonably unambiguous revelation, then it's inconsistent for him to believe in the gospel's revelations.

It is of course logically possible to define "space aliens" so broadly as to potentially include an agency that is in principle indistinguishable from Turkel's El/Yahweh. I could cite as a potential message a regularly appearing -- and eternally scientifically unexplainable -- voice in each person's head that interactively affirms Turkel's revelations and answers any questions just as Jesus would have. Turkel could then question-beggingly say that aliens could accomplish the same thing, but in doing so he would be blatantly admitting that his evidence does not -- and indeed CANNOT -- distinguish El/Yahweh from a space alien sociology project (or a demonic deception, or a Matrix-style simulation, etc.).

Thus the only way Turkel can deny that his god's revelation could have been more competent is to admit that the revelation as it stands simply underdetermines his thesis. Either way, Turkel loses.

If Divine Shyness were not necessary in the ancient near east when Abraham was having fertility problems and Jesus was having paternity issues, then it's certainly not necessary now.

Socrates isn't believed to have been omnipotent and omniscient, and Turkel evidently doesn't believe this of Jesus either. An omniscient Jesus wouldn't have been constrained by "ancient sentiment", and an omnipotent Jesus wouldn't have needed even a nanosecond to accomplish "the laborious task" of writing. Turkel's argument here hilariously ignores his own premise of Jesus' divinity.

why apologists don't need to write essays explaining

Turkel gives no answer to why an omniscient omnipotent deity should bequeath a revelation that botches the job of clearly identifying the name of Jesus' father's father, the town of Jesus' birth, and the number of years of Jesus' ministry.
Carrier: All literature to my knowledge on the term "Son of Man" contradicts Turkel's assertion here. The phrase was routinely used of mortal men, in fact it seems to have been only so used (see, e.g., the Catholic Encyclopedia; Protestant and all other reference works I have ever consulted here agree on this point). The only exceptions are works like Daniel, who uses "like a son of man" in reference to the messiah, not "son of man." In fact, all the early Church Fathers who remark on the phrase call it a reference to the humanity of Jesus, not his divinity. This is yet another example of how Turkel doesn't even read the most basic and fundamental references in his field, and then makes assertions exactly opposite the known facts.