Introduction
I have elsewhere described the story of a certain contestant on the television game show “Jeopardy!” He was doing very well, answering questions correctly one after the other, but then he missed an easy one about famous comedy teams. The correct answer was, “Who is Laurel and Hardy,” but he mistakenly said, “Who is Oliver and Hardy.” When the host, perhaps taken aback that a good contestant had missed such an easy question and did not immediately say it was wrong, the contestant glared at the host and repeated, more loudly and stridently this time, “Who is Oliver and Hardy?” The host then told him that answer was wrong.
The lesson from this story ought to be clear: A wrong answer does not become right simply by being reasserted more loudly and more stridently. And it certainly does not become right simply by reasserting it is more loudly and stridently, while adding bald appeals to authority and levying puerile insults against those who give the right answer. It is a lesson that James Patrick Holding, the librarian who maintains his own apologetics website, Tektonics.org, has obviously not learned. Claims are settled by actual facts, not by bald assertions, nor by insults.
Some time ago, we posted an article addressing the matter of a reading in Mark 1:2, viz.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the Prophets: “Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, Who will prepare Your way before You.” “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; Make His paths straight.’” (Mark 1:1-3)
The prophets referred to here are Malachi, who wrote, “Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You” (Malachi 3:1), and Isaiah, who wrote, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; Make His paths straight.’”
This is how the reading appears in 96.7% of the extant manuscripts of the Gospel According to Mark. However, a small number of manuscripts read, instead, “As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,” and this has been wrongly accepted by mainstream textual critics as the original reading.
If mainstream textual criticism were correct, it would mean, of course, that there is an error in the original, God-breathed Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16), as “Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You” is manifestly not “written in Isaiah the prophet.” This, in turn, would put paid to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.
Evangelical scholars who have foolishly accepted the claims of mainstream textual criticism, and so accept the reading “As it is written in the Prophets: ‘Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You’” and believe in inerrancy are in trouble. They must find some way to explain that this is, not, in fact, an error – though it manifestly is – and they have proffered a number of gambits to this end.
In September 2015, we posted in two parts an article called “Why There Is an Error in Mark 1:2 in Your Bible: Another Example of the Evangelical Betrayal of the Bible,” in which we showed two things: (1) that every attempt by evangelical scholars to explain that “As it is written in Isaiah the prophet” is not an error is a complete failure, and (2) that this does not matter, since the original reading of the verse is undoubtedly “As it is written in the prophets,” which is correct.
One of the gambits debunked in our article was the claim that “It was standard Jewish practice to string more than one prophet together and only cite the one that was making the main point,” which was shown to be not true, and not to solve the problem at any rate, since Mark 1:2 would still be saying something not true; it seems to be a strange argument to say that an untruth is not an untruth if people in the day had a standard practice of saying certain things that were not true.
One apologist who goes this hopeless route is James Patrick Holding, and his views were duly confuted in our original article. Sometime after we posted it, Holding came across it and posted a response in which he sought to refute what we had said.
Of course, no responsible apologist would want to say something incorrect, so it is incumbent upon us to consider Holding’s post, and assess our original claims against it. This is what we shall now do.
Holding’s Attempted Rebuttals
The claim that “It was standard Jewish practice to string more than one prophet together and only cite the one that was making the main point” seems to be the most common evangelical gambit in trying to deal with supposed problem, and it is this one that our librarian champions.
As shown in our original article, however, it is simply not a sustainable claim. While many evangelical apologists make the claim, their only basis is to cite another apologist making the same claim. One has to look long and hard before he can find any attempt to provide actual proof for the claim, and what is finally found does not even remotely constitute proof.
One attempt to do so is particularly risible, and that is to find such “misattributions” elsewhere in the Bible and claim that this proves that Jews had such a standard practice. It would prove nothing of the sort, of course, as it could just as easily prove that the writers had simply made mistakes. What is needed is objective evidence of such a practice, such as an ancient writing in which it is expressly stated that Jewish writers had such a practice.
Furthermore, there are no examples of such a practice. The librarian risibly appealed to 2 Chronicles 36:21, although this verse does not contain any quotes at all. The information in the first part is from the Law, certainly, and is a penalty spelled out in Leviticus 26:34-35, but a reference to information in the law is not a quote; otherwise every mention of, say, the Sabbath in the Old Testament must be considered a “quote” of Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5.
The word that was added by Jeremiah, who is specifically mentioned, was the seventy years of captivity, but he was not quoted either. So this is not a composite quotation, and that was made clear in our article. It should be clear even to Holding that a quotation requires an introductory statement such as “It is written” or “Jeremiah says” or some such thing, as we always see in the Bible, and there is no such thing in 2 Chronicles 36:21.
How does our librarian respond? He says,
The example from 2 Chronicles is dispensed with no more professionally by Tors: He merely denies that the passages contains [sic] quotations, even as he admits that it contains elements from both. He is badly incorrect. 2 Chronicles contains a direct quote of a phrase from Leviticus.
No, Tors did not “merely den[y] that the passages contains [sic] quotations”; he actually showed why these are not quotations, as should be obvious to any fair-minded person, so Holding’s comment is simply not true.
Holding tries to defend his position by claiming that “2 Chronicles contains a direct quote of a phrase from Leviticus,” but this is demonstrably not true, as can be seen immediately:
Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest and enjoy its sabbaths. As long as it lies desolate it shall rest— for the time it did not rest on your sabbaths when you dwelt in it. (Leviticus 26:34-35)
And those who escaped from the sword he carried away to Babylon, where they became servants to him and his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths. As long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years. (2 Chronicles 36:20-21)
Notice that the tenses are different, the word order is different, and some of the word choices are different, so it is NOT A QUOTATION. The mistake, then, is Holding’s, not mine.
Holding’s other suggestion for a composite quotation is Matthew 27:9-10, which is claimed to be a quotation from Jeremiah 32:6-9 and Zechariah 11:12-13, and about this, the librarian asserts that
For Matthew 27:9-10, Tors merely denies any connection to anything in Jeremiah, which is nothing more thsn [sic] denial.
Here, too, Holding’s statement is false. Tors did not “merely deny any connection to anything in Jeremiah”; he showed that there is no way to get Matthew 27:9-10 out of those two passages. To make it clearer for our librarian, here they are:
Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the value of Him who was priced, whom they of the children of Israel priced, and gave them for the potter’s field, as the LORD directed me.” (Matthew 27:9-10)
Then I said to them, “If it is agreeable to you, give me my wages; and if not, refrain.” So they weighed out for my wages thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me, “Throw it to the potter”—that princely price they set on me. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the Lord for the potter. (Zechariah 11:12-13)
And Jeremiah said, “The word of the LORD came to me, saying, ‘Behold, Hanamel the son of Shallum your uncle will come to you, saying, “Buy my field which is in Anathoth, for the right of redemption is yours to buy it.”’ Then Hanamel my uncle’s son came to me in the court of the prison according to the word of the Lord, and said to me, ‘Please buy my field that is in Anathoth, which is in the country of Benjamin; for the right of inheritance is yours, and the redemption yours; buy it for yourself.’ Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD. So I bought the field from Hanamel, the son of my uncle who was in Anathoth, and weighed out to him the money—seventeen shekels of silver. (Jeremiah 32:6-9)
The first and obvious thing that should be noted is that neither passage is a predictive prophecy; both are instructions to prophets as to what they are to do, and they do it when told. So there is nothing to fulfill here.
The second thing to note is that according to Jeremiah, the field was (note: was, not will be) purchased by Jeremiah, not the chief priests (a good guy, not the bad guys); the field was in Anathoth, not Jerusalem; it was bought for seventeen shekels of silver, not thirty; it was a right of redemption, not a purchase necessitated because it was blood money; and it was an object lesson to show that the Israelites would return from captivity (Jeremiah 32:15, 25-43), not a prophecy of betrayal.
In short, then, this is NOT a predictive prophecy, and it is pointless to argue that it is, since if it were God would have gotten everything wrong its fulfillment.
It is the same with Zechariah 11:12-13. It, too, describes an object lesson a prophet did in obedience to God’s command (in this case showing that God was giving up the Israelites). It was not a predictive prophecy. Furthermore, the money here was paid to the prophet (the good guy), not to a traitor (a bad guy); it was thrown by the prophet, not by a traitor; and it was thrown to a potter, not to chief priests who used it to buy a potter’s field.
This passage, too, then, is NOT a predictive prophecy, and it if were, God would have gotten most things wrong in its fulfillment.
It is regrettable that so much ink has to be spilled to point out what should be obvious to anyone who reads these passages and pays attention: Matthew 27:9-10 does not record the fulfillment of two prophecies, one by Jeremiah and the other by Zechariah, and ascribe them both to Jeremiah. There is no such prophecy as is recorded in Matthew 27:9-10, not in Zechariah, not in Jeremiah, and not in the two combined. It is quite clear that this is indeed a desperate attempt to solve a supposed problem, and Holding simply stultifies himself by pretending otherwise.
Holding stultifies himself further by saying,
Tors instead opts for an otherwise unevidenced oral prophecy of Jeremiah as the source, which is the only desperate move in evidence here.
This is not a “desperate move,” but a far more reasonable solution.
First, this solution is not bizarre, as is the idea of claiming that a prophecy written by one man is said to have been written in the book of another, simply because that man was more important or prominent; and this solution does not involve saying something untrue, as would saying that a prophecy written by one man is written in the book of another, where it is not, in fact, written – and it is not clear why we should so cavalierly discard 2 Samuel 7:28a:
“And now, O Lord GOD, You are God, and Your words are true …”
Second, while Holding and all other apologists fail to find even a single instance of the prophecies of two different men being combined and attributed to only one of them (which is not surprising, as that would indicate a mistake or a lie), I showed two clear examples (Matthew 2:23 and in 2 Kings 14:25) of the fulfillment of a prophecy being recorded in Scripture although the original prophecy was not recorded; it seems the librarian missed those, too. They provide the precedents and therefore the legitimacy for my proposed solution, in sharp contrast to Holding’s approach, which has been shown to be a nonstarter.
It is quite clear that Holding has offered nothing new here. Like the hapless Jeopardy contestant, he has simply repeated his discredited argument again, more stridently and more rudely, but it was vacuous before and it remains vacuous now.
The only attempt at any objective proof for the claim that “It was standard Jewish practice to string more than one prophet together and only cite the one that was making the main point” is, as we noted in our previous article, the appeal to Z.H. Chages’ book The Student’s Guide Through the Talmud. Yet, as we pointed out, this book gives no support whatsoever to that claim. What Chages tells is that ancient rabbis engaged in the bizarre practice of “calling different personages by one and the same name if they found them akin in any feature of their characters or activities or if they found a similarity between any of their actions.” Why did they do this?
The main reason for this method is to be found in the chief principle which the Rabbis laid down as a cornerstone or basis for their exegetical expositions, viz. that the lecturer may in all possible ways enhance the praise of righteous and pious men, and wherever the finds reference in Holy Writ to the worthiness of a particular righteous man he should attribute any other virtue to him which is found in any other outstanding personality, if only this can be given biblical support, however far-fetched.
But that is ALL they did – equate righteous men (or evil men) to each other; that is all the evidence shows. Neither Chages nor anyone else shows any evidence that rabbis ascribed the quotations of two men under the name of one. On the contrary, Chages shows only one example involving quotes, and in that case each man’s quote is attributed to himself, to show their similarity; indeed, the method would not work if each man’s quote were not attributed to himself.
So Chages gives no aid or comfort whatsoever to those who aver that “It was standard Jewish practice to string more than one prophet together and only cite the one that was making the main point,” and so the only actual attempt to find objective evidence for the claim is an abject failure.
How does Holding respond to this? He carps that,
Tors denies that [sic] ‘applicability of Chages’ comments because it is not an example of two quotations from different sources being attributed to one person.
So Tors rejects Chages’ comments as proof for the claim that quotations from two different people can be attributed to one man because he gives no example – or proof of any kind – that the rabbis did such a thing (nor does he claim they did). I have news for Holding: not just Tors but any thinking person would reject Chages’ comments as proof for something he neither claims or tries to prove! One wonders why the librarian does not understand that assertions are not to be considered true simply because they are made; they require proof, and comments that do not provide proof nor claim to do so should indeed be rejected as proof.
Holding continues:
Tors, as a western fundamentalist, is oblivious to the point made by Chages: The practice of subsuming multiple identities under one name is a much broader phenomenon, of which the practice of quotation attribution is but one expression. Nor is the example of Malachi and Ezra meant to be an example of such quotation; it is an illustration of the broader phenomenon which leads to the practice of subsuming quotations.
Why anyone should think that a “western librarian” is better equipped to understand Chages than a “western fundamentalist” is not clear, but never mind; the main point here is that Chages never made the claim that the practice of equating people “is a much broader phenomenon of which the practice of quotation attribution is but one expression.” Again, Chages never claimed that this ancient rabbinic practice was part of a broader phenomenon, let alone attempted to prove it.
It is impossible, therefore, not to conclude that Holding is simply making stuff up out of whole cloth to maintain his view, and an apologist who does that has forfeited any right to be taken seriously. By anyone. Ever.
Holding should probably leave badly enough alone now, but he seems determined to bury himself, and proceeds to do so. He returns to a story passed on by Noel Weeks who tells of an incident in which Jewish scholar Nathan Sarna opined that at one time Jeremiah must have been the first book of the Prophets, the proof being that,
you have a quote from Zechariah quoted as being from Jeremiah because in the Jewish way of labelling things you call a book by its first few words, and you call a collection of books by the first book in that collection. Thus one of the evidences that we have of Jeremiah being the first book of the prophets in the first century is the New Testament.
As I pointed out in our previous article, this gambit disintegrates almost immediately upon careful scrutiny. Holding huffs that,
Tors … arrogantly declares that myself and Sarna are wrong, and he reaches this conclusion through no means that would impress anyone who was not also a fundamentalist.
Yet Sarna’s argument is indeed so weak that anyone who is willing and able to think will dismiss it almost immediately, whether or not he is a fundamentalist. This is easy to show, as we will now do.
Sarna claims that,
there was a period in which Jeremiah was regarded as the first book of the prophets.
And what is the evidence that Sarna gives for this claim?
One proof is that you have a quote from Zechariah quoted as being from Jeremiah because in the Jewish way of labelling things you call a book by its first few words, and you call a collection of books by the first book in that collection. Thus one of the evidences that we have of Jeremiah being the first book of the prophets in the first century is the New Testament.
So Sarna says that Matthew attributed the quote from Zechariah to Jeremiah because the Prophets were collectively called Jeremiah (the first book in that corpus), and we know that it was the first book of that corpus because Matthew attributed the quote from Zechariah to Jeremiah. That is textbook example of a circular argument (a.k.a. begging the question, a.k.a. petitio principii); it is a logical fallacy and a clumsy one, at that. It is surprising that even Holding is taken in by it. Be that as it may, though, the fact is that Sarna’s argument is utter nonsense.
Furthermore, it is also easy to show that Holding’s appeal to this argument is actually self defeating: If such “dual prophecies” were attributed to the prophets who are designated by the name of the man whose book is first in the Prophets corpus, and that man is Jeremiah, as Sarna and Holding claim, then the supposed “dual prophecy” in Mark 1:2 should also be attributed to the prophets designated by the name “Jeremiah”! So if Sarna and Holding are correct, Mark 1:2 should read, “As it is written in Jeremiah the prophet,” not “As it is written in Isaiah the prophet.”
So Holding’s “solution” cannot work for both Matthew 27:9-10 and Mark 1:2, and that should be obvious even to our librarian. Inexplicably, this was made clear in our original article, yet the librarian seems to have ignored it. Either he was very careless in reading our article, or he has dodged this problem. Neither of these possibilities enhances his already shaky credibility.
In light of this, Holding’s charge that Tors “merely denies Sarna’s point that Jeremiah was once regarded as the first book of the prophets” is truly incredible. Any person with even an average intelligence can see that I did not “merely den[y]” Sarna’s point; I showed that it was based on no evidence but instead on a logically fallacious circular argument, and that it is opposed by the wording of Mark 1:2. Why the librarian cannot see this is entirely unclear.
Yet Holding has the chutzpah to say that,
Such a bare denial from a relative nobody like Tors, against a seasoned scholar like Sarna, does not deserve to be taken seriously.
Again, it was not a bare denial, and, again, claims are vindicated by facts, not by logical fallacies, even if they are made by “a seasoned scholar.” The only one here, then, who “does not deserve to be taken seriously” is surely Holding himself.
But our librarian is not finished demonstrating his complete incompetence to deal with such issues. He says,
Tors misuses references from Josephus and the New Testament to say that “in the 1st century AD the second division of the OT was referred to by the title ‘the prophets,’ and not by the name of the first book in the collection,” which is utterly irrelevant: Tors fails to distinguish between referring to the books as a topical collection, and referring to them in terms of personal attribution.
Now, Holding might find logical fallacies more persuasive than actual evidence, but reasoning people would not agree; evidence from Josephus and the New Testament as to what the Prophets corpus was called in those days is most certainly relevant in examining whether they were called “Jeremiah” or not, and this evidence shows that they were not; they were called “the prophets.” That is certainly relevant.
But what is truly riotous here is that the librarian actually says,
Tors fails to distinguish between referring to the books as a topical collection, and referring to them in terms of personal attribution.
He actually says that – even though Sarna’s entire claim was that the TOPICAL COLLECTION was referred to by the “personal attribution” of “Jeremiah”! There was no separate “topical collection” name and “personal attribution” name. Holding apparently doesn’t even understand the arguments he himself is adducing! This cannot be taken seriously, folks.
It really isn’t necessary at this point for Holding to put another nail into his coffin, but he does so, saying, “Tors notes that Matthew clearly quotes other OT figures like Isaiah, but these are beside the point: None is a composite quotation where Matthew was referring to material from two different persons in the same collections of books.”
Yet again, our librarian does not seem to understand how evidence works; observing Matthew’s attribution habits certainly helps us determine what he is doing in Matthew 27:9-10. On the other hand, Holding’s bald assertion that this is a composite quotation is nonsense in light of the evidence we have seen, which decisively debunks any such possibility.
And thus ends Holding’s Grand Guignol.
Conclusions
In our original article, we looked at the wording of Mark 1:2. We showed that the original reading is “as it is written in the prophets,” which is completely accurate, and the reading, “as it is written in Isaiah the prophet” is an erroneous textual variant.
Those who believe in inerrancy and also wrongly accept “as it is written in Isaiah the prophet” as the original reading find themselves in a dilemma, as they must explain away an obvious mistake Mark made if that is the original reading, viz. saying that “Behold I send My messenger before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You” is written in Isaiah the prophet when it is not, in fact, written anywhere in that book, but is written in Malachi. We looked at every gambit designed to solve this problem and found that none of them is tenable, so if the erroneous variant is wrongly taken as the original reading, then the doctrine of inerrancy cannot stand.
Herein we have revisited the matter in response to a brief writing by James Patrick Holding in which he challenged our arguments; we considered it incumbent upon us inasmuch as we do not wish to say something incorrect. However, we found that none of Holding’s objections is correct or even sensible, but each is utterly absurd. He has offered no new arguments, but, like that unfortunate Jeopardy contestant, he has only repeated the same vacuous claims that have long since been debunked, doing so more loudly and more vociferously, and, unlike the contestant, replete with insults, as if that would change things. It doesn’t. He was wrong before, and he remains wrong now.
Thus we conclude that the statements of our original article remain correct, and we also conclude that Holding is not a man who can be taken seriously as an apologist or commentator on anything related to the Bible. His writings should henceforth be avoided by all serious Christians.
Appendix: Holding’s Insults
The fact that Holding liberally sprinkled his response to our article with insults comes as no surprise. We have elsewhere commented on his vicious verbal attacks on Dr. Norman Geisler and Dr. Paige Patterson for rightly objecting to the idea of non-historical additions in the historical narratives of the Gospel books (and Dr. Patterson for having the temerity to agree with the Bible on the proper role for women in the church). The sight of this academically underqualified apologist rudely attacking his betters is quite repugnant, but it certainly makes it inevitable that he would insult me. We may as well look at his insults and see if there is any substance to them.
“I was recently alerted to a rather pathetic attempt to respond to the above by a wannabe fundamentalist apologist named John Tors.”
I will leave it to fair-minded readers of my original article, Holding’s response, and the current article to decide whose attempt is pathetic. I do not think they will agree with Holding about this. (And I certainly am an apologist, whether the librarian likes it or not.)
“After an insulting and rather bigoted description of the Jewish practice above as ‘bizarre’”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “bizarre” means “very strange or unusual.” Now, Holding is free to consider a practice in which, for example, “the Rabbis state that Hirah and Hiram are one man, and that he lived almost 1,200 years” to be quotidian if he wishes, but I think most people would agree that it is bizarre, and that this is a fair description, and not “insulting.”
The librarian’s claim that it is “rather bigoted” is reprehensible, however. If a practice is bizarre, then it is bizarre regardless of who does it, whether Jew or Gentile. Describing it as such is therefore not “bigoted,” and to hint that I did so because it was a Jewish practice is shameful. On the other hand, to suggest that nothing done by any minority group should ever be described as “bizarre” no matter how bizarre it may be is sheer lunacy.
“Tors — who has no discernible credentials — arrogantly declares that myself and Sarna are wrong … a bare denial from a relative nobody like Tors, against a seasoned scholar like Sarna”
I do not think academic training in Biblical studies is necessary to be an apologist (though I think knowledge of Koine Greek and Hebrew is extremely important) so I do not usually bring up such matters. However, since Holding has brought it up, I will point out that my academic qualifications for apologetics are rather better than his own. I hold a M.Div. (in addition to a B.A.Sc. in chemical engineering) and learned both Koine Greek and Hebrew at seminary.
Holding, on the other hand, has no relevant training; he describes his own qualifications thus:
I have a Masters’ Degree in Library Science. What the [sic] runs down to is, I’m trained in looking things up and answering questions.
Alas, “looking things up” is not nearly enough; critical thinking about what one looks up, based on the proper view of the inerrant Bible, is what is needed from a serious apologist. (And, again, knowledge of the languages is certainly important.)
It is also passing strange that Holding should fault a “relative nobody” [sic] for challenging a “seasoned scholar” such as Sarna when our master of library science who can look up things himself not only challenges but foully insults Dr. Norman Geisler, B.A., M.A. (in theology), Th.B, Ph.D, author or editor of ninety-one books on Biblical topics, and accords the same treatment to Dr. Paige Patterson, B.A., Th.M, Ph.D. The hypocrisy of this librarian is truly breathtaking.
“Frankly, Tors should leave apologetics and scholarship to the professionals and cease embarrassing Christians with his poor answers.”
I am not sure what Holding means by a “professional” apologist, but I do not see why a librarian with a website should be considered one. And inasmuch as his apologetic attempts have been shown to be risible, it seems clear that he is the one with the poor answers. But we will let the readers decide.
For more information about the nature and quality of Holding's Apologetics, please see our article “The Three-Headed Monster and the Evangelical Betrayal of the Bible: Exposing the Major Weapons Levied against the Trustworthiness of the Bible.”
Sources
1. Tors, John. “Oliver and Hardy and Hahn: Debunking Greg Hahn’s Attempt to Salvage His Attack on Complementarianism”
2. For details about Holding’s approach to the Bible, see Tors, John. “The Three-Headed Monster and the Evangelical Betrayal of the Bible: Exposing the Major Weapons Levied against the Trustworthiness of the Bible”
3. Pickering, Wilbur. The Greek New Testament According to Family 35. Lexington, KY, 2014, p. 57
4. For details on the problems with mainstream textual criticism, see Tors, John. “A Primer on New Testament Textual Criticism (in Manageable, Bite-sized Chunks)” at https://truthinmydays.com/a-primer-on-new-testament-textual-criticism-in-manageable-bite-sized-chunks/.
5. As shown in ibid., the canons of textual criticism, which were created by a German rationalist in 1796, are designed to ensure that variants that introduce errors into the text are proclaimed to be the original, so the doctrine of inerrancy will be destroyed as long as these canons are uncritically accepted. Why almost all evangelical scholars do is exceedingly difficult to comprehend. (For a detailed discussion, see Footnote 6.)
6. Tors, John. “Why There Is an Error in Mark 1:2 in Your Bible: Another Example of the Evangelical Betrayal of the Bible” at https://truthinmydays.com/why-there-is-an-error-in-mark-12-in-your-bible-another-example-of-the-evangelical-betrayal-of-the-bible/
7. It does not matter as far as inerrancy goes. It does matter as far as the credibility of evangelical scholars is concerned, for these attempts certainly diminish their credibility.
8. Cosner, Lita in “Errors in the Bible?” Posted on March 13, 2010, at http://creation.com/claimed-bible-errors.
9. ibid.
10. Holding, James Patrick. “Attribution Errors in the New Testament?” Posted at http://www.tektonics.org/lp/mkone2.php
11. ibid.
12. ibid.
13. ibid.
14. Cosner, op. cit.
15. Chages, Z.H. The Student’s Guide Through the Talmud. Second, revised Edition. Translated and Edited by Jacob Schachter. New York: Philipp Feldheim, Inc., 1960, pp. 172-175.
16. ibid., p. 172
17. ibid., pp. 173-174. Malachi and Ezra, for example, are equated in (Meg. 15a) because they both complained that the children of Israel had married foreign women (ibid., p. 172). In the same way and for the same reason, they equated evil men to each other (ibid., p. 174).
18. Cosner, op. cit.
19. Holding, op. cit.
20. ibid.
21. ibid.
22. Noel Weeks in Australian Presbyterian (February, 2009), cited in ibid.
23. ibid.
24. ibid. It should be noted that Sarna calls this “one proof” and “one of the evidences.” If he has any other proof, he has certainly not given it here, nor am I aware of any other such alleged proof.
25. Holding, op. cit.
26. ibid.
27. ibid.
28. ibid.
29. See Tors, “The Three-Headed Monster and the Evangelical Betrayal of the Bible,” op.cit. You can read these insults in their own words at http://tektonticker.blogspot.ca/search/label/Norman%20Geisler%3B%20inerrancy%3B%20Defending%20Inerrancy and https://deeperwaters.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/paige-patterson-is-on-the-wrong-page/.
30. ibid. Holding’s insults are in bold type.
31. ibid.
33. Chages, p. 173
34. Holding, op. cit.
35. “About James Patrick Holding” at http://www.tektonics.org/JP-Holding.html
36. For a demonstration of how Holding tries to deal with Biblical languages, see http://the-anointed-one.com/blunder.html. Note that “Robert Terkel” is James Patrick Holding (http://www.tektonics.org/JP-Holding.html).
37. Holding, op. cit.
38. Tors, “The Three-Headed Monster and the Evangelical Betrayal Of The Bible,” op.cit.