Turkel Rebutted on Trilemma

by Brian Holtz updated 2004-11-21

In "On the Trail of the Trilemma", Robert Turkel (aka James Holding, aka J.P. Holding) defends the "liar, lunatic, or lord" Trilemma of Christian apologetics. I have demonstrated that Turkel's Trilemma argument fails to refute a fourth possibility: that Jesus was a faith-healer and apocalyptic preacher whose deluded belief in his importance was strengthened in the months leading up to his anticipated martyrdom and was misinterpreted and exaggerated afterwards. Turkel has been responding selectively to my criticisms, and for almost a year was apparently afraid to let his readers see my unedited arguments. I by contrast have no fear of anyone reading him in all his tedious and ineffectual detail. I am continuing to post our entire debate on the web:

My 2001-11-01 response to Turkel's original essay.
Turkel's update to his essay as of 2001-11-07
My 2001-11-08 response to Turkel's update
Turkel's update to his essay as of 2001-12-11
My 2001-12-12 response emailed to Turkel (and later posted to a.a.m)
Turkel's new essay as of Jan 2002
My Mar 2002 response to Turkel's new essay
Turkel's update to his essay as of 2002-04-05
My 2002-05-20 response to Turkel's update
Turkel's updated essay (c. 2002-06) [available here as of Nov 2004]
Turkel's 2nd attempt (c. 2003-01) to rebut my 2002-05 response, in which he finally has been shamed into linking to this page. [As of Nov 2004, Turkel seems to have taken his 2nd effort down from his site, but it is archived here. Apparently he couldn't stomach the thought of his readers easily viewing his humiliation by me.]
My response (already completed for his 2002-06 effort, and now being extended to address his later 2nd effort)

A rebuttal of Turkel's Impossible Faith essay is among my other writings.

An up-to-date summary of my arguments against Christianity are available in my hypertext Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits. Warning: if you are a Christian and want to remain one, do not read the entirety of these arguments. If the gospels are true and demons exist, then it is possible that demons influenced me to compose these arguments, and that God in turn influenced me to place this warning here to save your soul from this demonic trap. If you nevertheless read my entire seven-page argument and then we someday meet in Hell, don't say I didn't warn you.

What I've Learned

As tedious as this debate has been, I have learned a lot -- almost all of it strengthening my beliefs. The only new primary evidence or argument for Christianity that I've encountered during this debate came (ironically) not from Turkel, but from my own research against Turkel's claim about the early non-Christian literature. As weak as it is, the possible mention by Thallus of an eclipse is an interesting piece of evidence.

The only claim I have modified during this debate is the that of a progression over time across the four gospels in Jesus' non-reluctance for his special nature to be known. I see now that the evidence of reluctance is spread almost equally across the Synoptics, and isn't even entirely absent in John. This doesn't substantively weaken my progression argument concerning miracles, Calvary confidence, and Easter appearances, but it does constitute the first of many ways that my arguments have been strengthened by this debate. I hadn't realized or fully appreciated before

how weak is the textual evidence that Jesus ever claimed identity with God;
how striking it is that Jesus' siblings and parents weren't believers, despite alleged angelic revelations to them;
how likely it was that Mary conceived Jesus with some man other than Joseph;
how likely it was that Jesus' awareness that Joseph wasn't his father led Jesus to adopt Yahweh as his father;
how much the early Jewish polemical reaction to Jesus disputed the gospel stories;
that the New Testament contains no reliably first-hand testimony to the physical resurrection of Jesus;
how ambiguous and suspicious are the NT accounts of the resurrection;
how exclusive Jesus was as a practicing Jew preaching to the Jews;
how deafening is the silence about Jesus and his miracles in early non-Christian writings; and
how trivial it would have been for a competent deity to arrange evidence much more convincing than Christianity's.

Interestingly, Turkel too has made at least one change in his position. Despite being so allegedly well-versed in biblical scholarship, and despite an aching need to read Jesus as actually claiming divinity, Turkel had argued that Jesus' "Son of Man" claim "was intended to be mysterious". But now he "no longer hold[s]" that position, as Turkel has had the recent revelation that SOM was instead a "clear indication of divinity, at all times it is used by Jesus".